9
Jan 12
Let the face clawing begin
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!
As the great dragon crashed down, I turned and began padding toward the entrance to the shrine. The padding quickly became walking as I assumed my elven form, feeling the familiar weight of armor settle around my body. Brushing the sand out of my cloak, I turned to the figure who had silently watched us battle.
“Now that we’ve killed you,” I began, “You can help us?”
“Yes. The path to the Dragon Soul is open. It must be retrieved if we are to have any chance of stopping Deathwing and saving our world. I will now take you there.” He gestured, and a portal coalesced into existence.
I couldn’t help myself. “Um, I know you’re the Aspect of Time and everything, but wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to just go warn the other Aspects about Neltharion before he betrays them? This seems rather roundabout.”
He stared back at me, expressionlessly.
“Right. I’ll just … take the portal, and Shred something. Sounds good.”
The Well of Eternity
Well of Eternity is the second of the new 5-man instances released with Patch 4.3, and it is full of Burning Crusade lore. (In my subjective opinion, it’s the best of the three, which further proves that Blizzard needs to go ahead and release The Burning Crusade 2: They’re Really On Fire Now.) After a quick intro fight with a demon, you’ll meet Illidan, who will promptly enlist you, cloak you, and then lead you around as you kill demons and break things. After a short while, you’ll meet Peroth’arn.
The first phase is quite simple. You will enter with 30 stacks of Shadow Walk, which will turn into 30 seconds of Shadow Ambusher, which will grant you some crazy damage. Just dodge the obvious void zones and do your thing. Assuming the other DPSers in your group are reasonable, you’ll likely push him below 60% before the buff wears off, which triggers the “run away” part of the fight.
At this point, everyone gets re-stealthed and has to dodge some floating eyes for a while. With your feral movement abilities, this is pretty simple, but many groups just let themselves be found immediately to get it over with. Either way, he doesn’t do anything new, so just finish him off and proceed to Queen Azshara.
Of course, you don’t actually get to fight Azshara yourself (yay, lore), so this is a battle against her magi, who will spawn in twos. They fling quite a few spells around, but their damage output is mostly trivial for a good healer to handle. If your healer needs help, though, all the magi are stunnable with Maim, and most of the spells can be interrupted (but don’t; you want to save your interrupt).
More important, however, are Azshara’s spells. First will be Hand of the Queen — a ghostly hand that will mind-control one of the players in your group. It has very little health, so just kill it quickly (or rage at your group when you get MCed and everyone ignores it … seen that, too). Second will be Total Obedience, an AoE MC that thankfully has an 8-second cast time. You’ll get a very obvious warning message, so just run over, Skull Bash her, and get back to what you’re doing. Some groups will attempt to assign someone, but that usually ends in disaster, I find.