THE GREAT OSSUARY

Past the "Safe Room" is the Great Ossuary.  Looking through my screenshots, I'm disappointed that I didn't get any good pictures to illustrate what the Great Ossuary is like in it's full glory.  The main hall that you see in the screenshot below starts off with several dozen dragon whelps along with some humanoid dragon handlers.  About half a dozen whelps seem to be linked to each dragon handler.  The good news is that the whelps are non-elites and are therefore vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks.  The bad news is that they don't like to get close enough together to make area-of-effect attacks effective and even though they're non-elite, their attacks still hurt like heck.  In addition, the dragon handlers have a knock-back attack that can knock players into other groups of whelps, something that can cause wipes very quickly.

The easiest way to handle this room is to use line-of-sight pulls.  The puller shoots a whelp and then runs back into the "Safe Room" and around the corner.  Once the whelps lose line-of-sight on the puller, they'll fly through the door and bunch up at the entrance to the Safe Room.  The party can then AoE attack them and then kill the dragon handler.  Note that dragon handlers also have a nasty AoE attack, so even with this kind of pull, the fight isn't easy.  As our party's priestess, I found myself casting Prayer of Healing a lot (PoH is a group heal).

I suggest using line-of-sight pulls for almost the entire room.  It's tempting to move into the room after a good portion of the room has been cleared, but as you can see from the chaos in the screenshot above, which was taken after 2/3rds of the room had already been cleared, that's not a good idea.  We should have continued to use LoS pulls.  If you don't use LoS pulls, then the whelps will stay far apart, making them very difficult to kill using AoE attacks.

At the far end of the hall is a stairway leading down to Rattlegore's lair.  Along the way, you have to defeat a new mob type called a Risen Construct.  These guys are tough mothers.  They hit hard, have an area-of-effect swiping attack, and have a boatload of health.  Just be glad that for the most part you get to fight them only one at a time, and if by some chance or mistake two of them get aggroed, one of them can be shackled.  I wouldn't want to have to fight two of them at once in a 5-player party.

The first time I came through Scholomance, I and my partymates congratulated Blizzard on introducing a new mob model.  Risen Constructs are pretty cool looking and are nasty to fight.  But on a later run, my friend Lem spoiled the fun, as he likes to do.  He observed, "They act like those trogg guys from Gnomeregan."  Once he made that observation, the connection was obvious.  The constructs have that same loping gate that troggs have, and when they stop or get stunned, they scratch their behinds like troggs do.  Risen Constructs aren't a new mob model at all.  They're just undead troggs.  I guess trogg behinds get itchy even when they don't have any sweat glands, skin or hair on them.

Rattlegore himself waits in the middle of a large chamber with about a dozen of these Risen Constructs.  Luckily, he doesn't call for help when he's aggroed, so you don't have the clear the chamber before you fight him.  I think that with some patience one could actually pull him alone, but there often seems to be one construct who stays just a bit too close to him and gets aggroed along with Rattlegore.  That's not a big issue if you have a priest in the party who can shackle the add.  If you don't, I really don't know what a party should do.  Maybe you could have someone kite the add around, perhaps back in the now cleared Great Ossuary main hall?  I can't imagine a 5-player party trying to directly fight Rattlegore and a risen construct at the same time.  Those guys are nasty enough alone.

Assuming one skips Jandice Barov, Rattlegore is the first miniboss parties will fight in the instance, and it's quite time consuming for a party to make its way to this first instance miniboss.  Luckily, from this point on, the minibosses come fast and thick.

So what does Rattlegore drop?  The answer is: a key.  Rather, he drops a special key to the door of the Viewing Room through which one must go to meet all of the other minibosses in the instance.  He also dropped some random vendor loot item of no consequence.

All that was left to do in this first stage of the instance was to make our way to the Viewing Room door.

After getting the key to the Viewing Room off Rattlegore, we headed back to the Safe Room and proceeded to clear the room containing the Viewing Room door.  Incidentally, this is also the same room one would land in if one were to jump off the platform at the beginning of the instance.

Like the Great Ossuary, the easiest way to clear this room is to pull mob groups back to the Safe Room and dispatch them there.  Mobs in this final room like to wander around at different speeds, so the puller has to be careful.  It can be easy to pull too many mobs, if one isn't paying attention.

The most difficult mobs in that final room are the diseased ghouls.  When they die, they release a large poison cloud plume, much like the zombies in Diablo II.  Unlike the poison clouds released by the zombies in Diablo II, this poison cloud plume hurts like crazy -- as in 700+ damage per tick crazy.  The above screenshot illustrates the proper technique for dealing with the ghouls.  When the ghoul is about to die, it should be stunned and the melee attackers should back off and let the spellcasters finish off the ghoul.  Anyone who stays within range of the poison cloud after the ghoul dies should be summarily ridiculed for being a newbie.  This whole problem with the poison cloud illustrates why ghouls should be shackled and saved for last when a mob group is pulled.

This room before the Viewing Room is small and can be quickly cleared.  There is one other feature of this room besides the Viewing Room door, however.  An iron gate blocks the way to some sort of chest.  Some people had heard that clearing that final room opens the gate, but that didn't work for us.  Others speculated that one had to also clear the entire Safe Room, too.  Since it was around 6am at this point, however, we weren't in the mood to experiment, so we left the chest alone.  I have a feeling, though, that that chest could have something pretty valuable in it, like the chest in the Seven Dwarfs room in Blackrock Depths.  If someone reading this has concrete information on what specifically opens the gate to that chest, I'd like to hear about it.  My guess at this point is that it involves opening up the Viewing Room door and hitting a switch somewhere.  If someone can give me concrete information about this, I'll post an update.

UP NEXT:  The Viewing Room