[nitpick]That was Blackrock Caverns, the entrance to Blackwind Descent is at the top of the mountain, you have to fly to get there.[/nitpick] Make sure you check it(the entrance, the raid itself may be a bit much to solo) out after you complete BWL.
Funny thing is, while it may not be obvious, as long as you don’t go jumping off any ledges, then both Upper and Lower BRS are both pretty linear.
Level 80 actually, depending on your gear you should have no trouble soloing her if you do it on 10man. The key thing as melee is to burst her through her air phase before she takes off. To do that you need to tank her as far from the entrance as possible, when she reaches around 65% she will start walking towards the entrance, at this point you should use all your dps cooldowns and hopefully get her down below 35-40% before she takes off.
BRC was added in Cataclysm; it ties into the Twilight’s Hammer story lines.
It was fun, and had a few very interesting heroic achievements, some of which can’t even be soloed now (because their mechanic makes them impossible unless you have at least a couple of folks).
Missed the edit window (bigtime!), but I wanted to mention that the questlines in the Mount Hyjal region included a cookie crumb/advertising quest to show you the entrance to BRC. While you’re killing Twilight Hammer cultists and fire elementals in the Circle of Cinders, there’s a gnome tucked away in the south edge of the zone (behind some ruins) with a Mole Machine. He offers a little quest to hop into the mole machine and emerge in the alcove next to the BRC portal. You have to go into the portal and talk to a friendly NPC near its entrance to complete the quest and pick up the next in the chain (which involves actually running the instance, preferably in a group :D) before you can go back out to the mole machine and return to Mount Hyjal. If you don’t know about that last bit, you wind up with a one-way trip and have to hearth out or something.
Wouldn’t be surprising to have missed the quest, though. It was pretty obviously tangential.
Oh yeah, I remember that gnome! I talked to him, back when, but didn’t take him up on his offer since I pretty much play solo. But your description explains why, after I came back out through the portal, there was a level 80 player coming in (and right back out again), and a mole machine parked nearby.
Today I took my rogue into BWL … yeah, that didn’t work. I think I actually managed to have Razorgore destroy all of the eggs (as far as I could see), but the last one either came a split second before I died, or I died a split second before he destroyed it. Oh well.
Today I got an e-mail purporting to be from Blizzard:
“Congratulations, you’ve been selected to participate in the beta test of World of Warcraft®: Warlords of Draenor™!”
PPPPPHHT, right.
Then I glanced at the “To:” line and saw that this e-mail had been sent to the unique e-mail address that I use only for my Battle.net account, NOT to my main e-mail address where the phishing e-mails always arrive.
Fired up my Battle.net client, clicked on the REGION/ACCOUNT menu, and …
And … yeah. Got it installed on my Mac, and after a bit of that I’m going to wait and install it on my Windows laptop. Two minutes of Draenor was enough to convince me that my 2008 iMac is not going to handle WoD. And I probably only got into the beta because I changed my beta opt-in settings to reflect my laptop instead of my Mac.
It probably didn’t help that, in beta, they give you access to all 455 mounts available. Unsurpisingly, once I got to Draenor there were 2000 people AFKing on top of Khadgar, the initial questgiver, and all of them were mounted up on the most FPS-sucking mounts, like frostdrakes and Ashes of A’lar.
So I’ll get it installed on my laptop and try again later. I’ll have to do the download overnight, though. Thanks to this new Battle.net client, I can’t have both computers logged into Battle.net at the same time, and I want to get some stuff done on live.
Grats! Have fun and don’t forget to spill the beans here and violate any NDA you sign!
I have come to similar conclusion about performance just looking at the marketing material about how they’ve improved the graphics. I will probably only have two desktop machines and my wife’s laptop that will be able to do a reasonable job with the new-and-improved models and such.
Geez. New frontiers in trolling FTW. Still, the trick of “/target”-ing your intended target by name and then using the kebound “interact with target” action defeats that silliness.
ETA: In case my explanation in the last sentence is as incoherent to you as it seems to be to me, here’s what I mean, courtesy of Wow Insider.
Actually, some time during MoP (I think) they made it so that you can actually click right through other players to click on questgivers/vendors, so people parking on NPCs isn’t the problem it used to be. In the case I described above, it was simply a matter of my outdated Mac combined with swarms of NPCs and FPS-sucking mounts. It’s just next to impossible to accurately click on anything when you’re getting 2 FPS.
So I ended up getting it installed on my Windows laptop, and played for a couple hours. The opening quest/story sequence was pretty fun. Once I got through the opening storyline, it was off to Shadowmoon, and they got me right to work establishing my Garrison. I didn’t get any farther than that.
One big environmental change is that quest objectives no longer sparkle - they now have a glow around them. I’m indifferent to this change overall, but I did see one small problem with it. did the “Digging for Worms” fishing daily in Stormwind, and without the sparkles it was virtually impossible to find where to dig up that worm. A subtle glow doesn’t help when it’s buried underground! I had to just randomly wave my mouse around the ground until I saw the “gear” cursor.
I’ve been in the beta for a while, top tip if you create a character on mechatorque (sorry for the spelling) it’s immediately boosted to level 100. Though this is from an EU perspective I think the three test realms are the same EU/US. Anyway it’s worth it to play around with the talents etc, though I have chars on the other realms just to try the levelling out.
So far it’s looking like a good expansion, though I’ve found Garrisons to be not quite how I thought they would be sadly.
So I took my paladin through Black Temple, and had the good fortune to get all three of the paladin armor tokens that drop in there, so I dont have to go back.
I haven’t really paid any attention to the WoD preview press, so I don’t have any preconceived notions. But I’m curious what your expectations were, and how the implementation differed?
Finally got my main through the “Secrets of the Empire” stage. Thank God for the “Gaze of the Black Prince” buff, because the required boss drop was giving me extreme RNG hate before the buff took effect. I had 1 drop the week before the buff came around again (out of 20 needed), and I had the other 19 drop in the 1 1/2 weeks since the buff turned on.
The little scenario afterwards (defend Wrathion at the Thunder Forge from various elite mobs) was pretty easy too. I guess I outgear the encounter, thanks to doing it so late in the xpac and having pretty much max upgraded Timeless Isle gimme epics.
And the next phase ("stick Nalak with the spear, survive, run away kiting a spawn that will kill you if it catches you but dies slowly if you live long enough) was stupid easy on a hunter; Nalak despawns if you feign death but the kite-add necessary for the quest doesn’t, so you pretty much win if you feign death for 3 seconds and then get up and run away for another 15.
Really, that’s a hunter’s dream fight: “I damage you, you never touch me, I win.”
Now for Titan Runestones. I hope I can get at least a couple in the time remaining on the Gaze buff, assuming it ends before next week.
I finished grinding the Netherwing drake in Outland. Imagine my annoyance when after weeks of doing dailies the reward is…one mount. I thought I’d be able to get all of them. Not that I’d use them, but, you know, mounts. Damn. After I ground the Kurenai rep (ie, killing Nagrand ogres over and over and over, and elbowing other players out of the way to get to the ogres first) I got 8 Talbuk mounts.
So what are the easiest mounts to go for? I’m not up for grinding the Mana Tombs over and over every day in hope of the Raven Lord.
I’m also going to try the Celestial battlepet tournament. But I need to level all my rare mechanicals up to 25 first. Turns out 3 lvl 25 mechanical pets can crush Li’l Oondasta easy, but there are lots of beasts in the tournament and you know, no healing.
I thought you can buy the others for 200g each. Is the guy not in Shattrath anymore? I know you used to be able to to do it, but that was a long time ago. Maybe they changed it.
