Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Sanctum of Domination, First Half

The new raid, Sanctum of Domination, came out last week. We only had one raid day last week, since a large number of people went on vacation. As is our tradition we went in on Normal.

First, it must be said that this is the most annoying raid entrance in a long while. It's surrounded by elites, and there doesn't seem to be an easy path. I switch to tank spec and ride through. DPS players have started using [Comfortable Rider's Barding].

The instance itself is pretty nice. It's a bit drab with the Maw and Torghast colour scheme and architecture, but Blizzard has made the layout interesting as you wander through the different sections.

We killed the first five bosses in Normal. The Tarragrue was interesting with anima powers before hand. We had two accidental pulls and wipes because people took the power that makes you jump far distances. Personally I think it's better if you just stick with straightforward defensive and offensive powers, and avoid the unusual ones.

The Eye of the Jailer was a pretty good fight, especially with the jump behind the eye. Not very difficult.

The Nine was an interesting fight. The first phase was pretty fun, but it didn't last very long. It seemed like the majority of the fight was fighting the last Valkyr alone. As long as you handle the Fragment mechanic decently, the fight is straightforward.

Soulrender Dormazain wasn't too bad easier. It was a little hard at first to see which slice of the platform was clear, but after a while you got used to it. I did like the mechanic where you want people with the debuff to overlap the adds to make killing them easier.

There was a cutscene with Garrosh afterwards which was pretty neat. It's kind of funny, but it was pretty popular online. Garrosh was totally unrepentant, and I think the playerbase found that attitude refreshing compared to whatever is going on the main story.

The final fight we did was Remanent of Ner'zhul. As long as you don't get knocked off the platform, this fight is straightforward. Stay in the center area, and time the knockback so it happens after the Orb of Torment has its armor broken by the boss.

There is a big cutscene after the Sylvanas fight at the end. I haven't actually watched it yet, but it was all over the WoW community. I've been trying to avoid spoilers, but I'm not really sure it's worth the effort.

5 comments:

  1. If you can handle falls from high places, there's a path going over the.... hmmm.... "mountains"? From the easternmost door, instead of entering the zone with the elites, climb up from the left. You can then walk from one top to the next almost to the raid entrance. Quick reminder before you jump: the feather toy does NOT work, so plan accordingly :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of trouble. I'll stick to riding through in Protection spec.

      Delete
  2. Yeah, 5 seems to be the most common, my old guild apparently did 5 and with my new guild we also killed 5 with 3 more tries on Painsmith, because we also only did one short night.

    I'm not loving the looks in any way, someone described it as more colorful than ICC or Torghast, but I'm lost on such nuances. it's annoyingly bluish grey, it reminds me of Torghast and I even preferred Castle Nathria from a visual perspective.

    I found the first five to be a little too easy, we hardly had any casualties and a few people hadn't even looked at tactics for boss 3+ because they hadn't thought we'd clear 5 of them in 90 minutes (I was 9/10 HC, they had AOTC).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, the difficulty ramps up with the later bosses, so everything seems good. Hit enrage on Guardian and Fatescribe Normal.

      Delete