NEFARIUS

After celebrating our victory over Chromaggus, the raid raced upstairs and came out onto a wide outdoor balcony.  I guess that we are supposed to be at the summit of Blackrock Mountain.

Here, Nefarius sits on his throne, and we posed for a group screenshot.  We then set ourselves up to make a "just for fun" attempt at killing Nefarius.  We had only the basic idea of what was going to happen -- we only knew that a lot of stuff was about to appear on top of us.

(We also had to yell at a few warriors to put their gear on.  I can't wait for the next patch so that warriors will stop whining about their repair bills).

When we were all ready, I spoke with Lord Victor Nefarius, and this is the conversation that transpired:

And then Nefarius yells, "Let the games begin!"

Several Chromatic Drakonids spawned and attacked the party.

We ran some experiments.  It turns out that the spawns are fearable.  What's more, they only have a modest amount of health, so you definitely can kill at least some of them.

Like the Razorgore encounter at the start of Blackwing Lair, the spawns keep coming and they come out in different color shades, which I'm sure is somehow important but at the moment, I don't know how the blue and green ones are different.

However, one funny thing was found.  They are Mind Controlable!  I died before I got a chance to test if you can Mind Control them over the balcony, though.

When we realized how similar this was to the Razorgore encounter, there were calls for the shaman to set up a kiting circle.  However, by this time, it was too late and the spawns were already overrunning the raiding party.

Also, during the fight, Nefarius himself runs around and shoots ice bolts at random players.  You can see him as a shadowy figure in the upper right hand part of the above screenshot.  You can't target him, so he's there just to provide a little extra randomness to the fight.

So ends this Adventures of Neriad tale.  Both The Core's and Easy Company's instances have reset, so both groups will need to burn through the whole instance again before they have a chance to make some real attempts on Nefarius.  The Chromaggus fight is so easy that I'm confident that Easy Company will take him down without any difficulty.  The race to be the first on the server to kill Nefarius is definitely on.  What's more, while no Tichondrius guild has beaten Nefarius on yet, there are about a dozen guilds who are Blackwing Lair capable on the server who are definitely in the running.  This race is going to be close.  Stay tuned.