The View From Down Here

Let’s do the Time Warp again…

The Black Temple was for the longest time, the end-game raid dungeon of the Burning Crusade. It was a place I thought I’d probably never see, and with reasonably good grounds – attunement to the instance meant completing almost all the previous 25-man raids and downing the first boss in Mount Hyjal. Of course, with these attunements lifted, almost all the guilds in the game who were runnning Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep are now in for a look at the former dungeons, too.

Mount Hyjal has a lot in common with the other Caverns of Time events in that for the majority of it you’re fighting off several waves of creatures followed by a boss. In some ways it’s a breath of fresh air – progression revolves around  keeping the waves at bay. When the boss comes, his tactics are several orders of magnitude simpler than the events in the previous instances – a lot of the difficulty comes from withstanding the trash waves.

Fun as going back in time and aiding a battle is, though, I have to say that I prefer Black Temple of the two instances. The encounters there seem to be more about teamwork and the  ability to know your role and perform it than withstanding wave after wave of nasties. The variation between bosses is nice, too – so far at least I’ve seen Naga in the sewers, various fel orcs on dragons in the Training Grounds, to demons in the temple itself.

The bosses have been fun and varied – from the frantic healing on High Warlord Naj’entus, to the sheer scale of Supremus, the lore of Shade of Akama and the simple difference in the fight with Teron Gorefiend.

Of the encounters so far, they’ve all been suitably epic, except the Akama fight, which has a definite air of anticlimax about it. The BigWigs boss mod doesn’t even bother to tell you when you’ve beaten the event.

Teron Gorefiend, though, is something else entirely. Having just seen the event once it looks like it’ll be a lot of fun, and his trash is almost like a level 70 version of Blackrock Spire, a place I no doubt spent too much time in at level 60.  It’s nice to reminisce while at the same time doing new and interesting versions of old instances. Given Wrath of the Lich King will be moving toward more low-fantasy type art, it’s a almost shame there won’t be anything at level 80 that will hark back to things like Tempest Keep. Dalaran for me seems like it’ll be low-tech magic rather than high.