The Ahn'Qiraj Gate Opening Event

[MongoJerry]

THE ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: The Ahn'Qiraj Gate Opening Event

The gates of Ahn'Qiraj finally opened on Tichondrius last night. (They could have opened five days earlier if it weren't for the lazy Alliance players who couldn't get off their collective duffs to farm linen. The Horde finally had to farm a lot of the linen for them). In the days leading up to the big event, an army made up of both factions assembled near Cenarian Hold in Silithus.



Inside one of the buildings in Cenarian Hold, a command center was set up with the commanders of each race involved in the war gazing at a map in the center. The dwarf commander had to stand on a crate to see the map. Interestingly, no members of the gnomes, trolls, or undead were present, and their absence could be seen in the armies surrounding Cenarian Hold. Inside the command center, a conversation could be overheard where High Overlord Saurfang insisted that he be the overall commander of the war effort.



In the hours leading up to the gong ringing event, the server crashed repeatedly. Because of that, people feared what the server would be like during the gate opening event. The gong was scheduled to be rung at 8:48pm, and the server promptly crashed at 8:40pm for about fifteen minutes. When it finally restarted, the gong was promptly rung, and the event began. (Two of my guildmates had scepters and got their legendary mounts -- I'll get screenshots of them when I get a chance).

Because the server was being so laggy and crashy before the event, I wasn't able to get a summon to Silithus. So I was still on the windrider flying down from Orgrimmar to Gadgetzan, when the event started. I flew over the Field of Giants in the Barrens, where I briefly glimpsed some lower level anubisaths (big walking Egyptian dog-people thingies) walking around. Apparently, the event occurs wherever any sort of silithid hive is -- in the Barrens, Tanaris, Shimmering Flats, Ferales, Un'Goro Crater, and of course in Silithus itself. The event mobs in the Barrens are only level 20 elites, I understand.

I landed in Gadgetzan and due to the lag, I couldn't get away from the Gadgetzan bruisers and promptly died (the pirate hat is still worth it!). Once I rezed and got away from town, however, I finally got my first long look at what was happening in all the nearby zones. Broken crystals had spawned in various areas and silithids and anubisaths spawned around them. The goal was to kill the mobs, of course, and in return get some treasure and most importantly, get reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu.



Because of the lag and earlier crashing, a healthy chunk of The Core decided to go inside AQ40 and check it out, the theory being that they'd get away from the lag by being inside an instance and what was the point of seeing the outdoor event if the server was just going to keep crashing? I thought they were fools, however. This was a one time event never to be seen again, while we have months to experiment with and get bored with AQ40. Why miss out on a one time event just to bring the day of boredom one day sooner? Plus, as it turns out, the server stabilized and didn't crash a single time from the moment the gong rang to the moment the server was taken down for server maintenance at 5am.

I and about half a dozen members of The Core stayed outside and ended up hooking up with a pick-up group. Unfortunately, the group was badly organized, and it took us a while to get set up. The group's first idea was to avoid the crowded areas of Silithus and instead hit Tanaris and Un'Goro crater. It turned out, however, that both these areas only had a few crystals and they didn't respawn their mobs fast enough. So, we ended up going to Silithus anyway.



The pick-up group got a big boost when Ephedra joined. Not only did that give us a real tank to work with, but it also turned out that Ephedra had seen this event before with a character on another server. He lead the group around from crystal to crystal to pick off random silithids, anubisaths and occasionally a lieutenant general. Periodically, we would return to the Ahn'Qiraj gate and battle the anubisaths there.



On one of our circuits, we came upon this scene.

Holy #@%^!

Every half hour, a set of eight Anubisath Warbringers would spawn near the gate and would walk up the road to attack Cenarian Hold. We had no idea what to do at this point. Some ideas to split up the pack and pick off individual warbringers failed. We watched as the warbringers closed in on Cenarian Hold, and since at this point in the evening, Silithus had more Alliance in the area than Horde, our straggling pick-up group got slaughtered as we closed in on the town, but we got to see the big battle at least, even if it was in ghost form.



Finally, at about midnight, the main TC raid in AQ40 decided to come outside. I'd been waiting all evening for this moment (and probably didn't endear myself to my guildmates with my periodic mentions of the events going on outside or the reputation gains that various bugs gave), and the first thing I wanted to tackle was one of the big Colossus bugs that spawn in each of the hives in Silithus. Our pick-up group had made a half-hearted attempt to attack the Colossus bug in Ashii and got our collective butts whooped, so I looked forward to taking on one of these bugs with a real organized raid group.

About the only thing we knew about these Colossus bugs was that it was best to fight them in one of the caves. So, we got into one of the hive caves and pulled the Colossus of Regal bug to the cave opening. We damaged it for a while and then got an emote saying something like, "Colossus of Regal lets out a massive attack" whereupon most of the raid died in a massive aoe attack. OK, that didn't work. We wiped, rezzed, and got set up again.

One thing we did learn from this was that the Colossus bugs don't regenerate their health. So, the bug was sitting at 94% health after that first fight. Mind you, that's 94% of 5 million health, but still at least the first fight wasn't a total loss. One person in the raid mentioned that they thought the whole cave idea was merely designed for one of the Colossus bugs and might not be for the Colossus of Regal bug we were fighting. So, maybe that massive attack we got hit with was a frontal cone attack and that fighting in the cave was a bad idea. So we set up to fight the Colossus outside. Hannibal would tank the bug and the rest of us would fight at maximum range to the back and sides of the bug. We did this and when the "massive attack" happened, everyone in the raid got punted clear out of the hive area, about a quarter of the zone away. Thank God for Levitate. Alright, that wasn't such a good idea after all.

At this point, a TAO raid that was farming reputation in the area stopped by to take a crack at the Colossus. They just charged in their with their warriors and started healing them with no pre-planning or placement of their members. I'm sure they felt great. Here, they were beating those "dragon slaying" The Core members to a big bug kill. We watched from the hills above the hive. 5...4...3...2...1... "Colossus of Regal lets out a massive attack." TAO raid members went flying everywhere and were never seen in Hive Regal again.



But Jakeer noticed something during our fight. He stood under one of the big silithid vine formations and when the attack came, he didn't get punted at all. Since the Colossus doesn't seem to have any aoe attacks like a cleave, the idea was to have everyone hang out under that formation, including the main tank. We would still take damage from the massive attack, but we wouldn't be punted. We tried it, and although our main tank died quickly due to lack of heals, one of our druids, Xypher, ended up bear tanking the bug for quite a while and the idea seemed pretty good. However, the massive attack was still devastating, even if we didn't get punted. The bug at this point was down to like 83% health.

We finally decided to try the cave idea again. This time, the thought was that if the emote gave us any warning of the attack that perhaps we could all run down the side passages in the caves to avoid the massive attack. Unfortunately, we found that there is no warning. The emote happens at the same time as the attack, so we all bought the farm. The Colossus of Regal's life was down to 80%..

It seems to me that there are three ways to take down a Colossus:

1. Kite it to Cenarian Hold and have the NPC's kill it. This was how the Colossus of Ashii was taken down by another group earlier in the evening. Unfortunately, the other Colossuses are much farther away from CH, and they move as fast as an epic mount. It would take a massive kiting relay to kite them all the way to CH.

2. Use a very patient group of hunters. One of our hunters, Cragb, figured out that he could aimed shot, viper sting, and feign death to repeatedly damage the Colossus. The Colossus's life doesn't regenerate, so a group of hunters doing this over the course of a few hours could slowly but surely take down a Colossus's life.

3. Zerg the mother out of it. This seems like the strategy that Blizzard had intended to be used. It's not a tankable encounter. Bringing everybody in the zone to deal damage and constantly graveyard rush the Colossus seems like the fastest and surest way to bring the bug down. This method would be more realistic if everyone involved in the zerg could get the 2,000 reputation gain for bringing the bug down. Unfortunately, only the tapping raid gets credit for it, so it's tough to get hundreds of people to help with the event.

At this point, it was already well past midnight, and some people left to go to sleep and others complained that they wanted to see the rest of the outdoor event and farm for reputation. I was disappointed that we weren't determined enough to take down the Colossus, but I understood. This was exactly why I wished that most of the guild hadn't gone into AQ40 right after the gong had been rung. If we had had a fresh 40-man raid doing outdoor events at 9pm, I have no doubt that we would have taken down at least one of the Colossus bugs. But at least we'd made some good attempts at it. I would have been even more disappointed if we hadn't even tried to fight it.