Molten Core: Baron Geddon

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD -- MOLTEN CORE: BARON GEDDON

This won't be an epic writeup like the other Adventures of Neriad journals (yes, I know I need to finish the LBRS journal), but I thought I'd share some of my experiences from today, when I joined a raid on Molten Core led by The Offenders on the Tichondrius server.

Molten Core is a raid instance that lies at the bottom of the Blackrock Depths. (For those of you who have been in BRD, you can see the Molten Core portal to the right of you when you leave the Seven Dwarfs' chamber). Unlike normal dungeon instances, a Molten Core instance will "save" for seven days. This allows a group to adventure partway through it, call it a night, come back sometime in the days ahead, and continue where it left off -- possibly including new people to fill out the raid, if needed. In my case, The Offenders and a group of unaffiliated players had raided Molten Core the previous two days, so I was in effect joining a raid on the Molten Core already in progress. The group had already killed Lucifron, Magmadar, and a couple other bosses (I'm still a relative newbie to Molten Core, so I don't know this branch of the Molten Core well), so the next item on the agenda was to kill Baron Geddon.

Baron Geddon is *tough*. I'm not going to lie to you. We wiped at least ten times over a span of five hours. Although I am not a member of The Offenders guild, I had killed Magmadar and Lucifron with them a couple weeks prior, and one of the things that has impressed me about their raids is how they're able to hold a group together after a wipe, while the group discusses tactics and strategies for further attempts. I've been on a couple of pickup raids where people bicker and hearth out of the instance after just the first or second wipe, but the members of The Offenders and the people they've found to fill out their raids have been really good about sticking with it, even when things go wrong the first, oh, dozen times.

We tried a lot of tactics against Baron Geddon, and while a litany of all the things we tried might be educational, for the interests of brevity, I'll simply discuss what actually worked.



Baron Geddon's first and easiest attack to deal with is his pulsing area-of-effect fire attack. Those who have fought the Princess in Maraudon will see a similarity between it and the Princess's "farting attack." The Baron stands still and pulses the aoe fire attack ten times (I think once every second). He then moves around and attacks normally for twenty seconds before predictably starting his pulsing again. So, it's incumbent on the melee attackers to wait for the pulsing to stop, run in and damage the Baron as much as possible, and then run out when the pulsing is set to begin again. If the melee attackers get hit by some pulses, they can bandage themselves outside the range of the fire pulses, sparing the healers' mana and attentions. Other than dealing with The Bomb, that pretty much describes the jobs of the rogues and spare warriors in the group.



The Baron's second attack is more insidious. It's a debuff that he casts on swaths of players called Ignite Mana which acts as a mana burn. Every three seconds, it will burn up to four hundred mana from an afflicted player and will take the same amount of health away from the burned player. The buff lasts for five minutes. Since rogues and warriors don't have mana, they're not affected by it, but everyone else will be eaten alive by this debuff if it's not dispelled promptly.

Dealing with Ignite Mana is where Alliance raid groups have an advantage over Horde raid groups, because paladins have the ability to remove magic debuffs from party members, whereas only priests can dispel magic debuffs in Horde parties. In alliance raid groups, paladins can play their traditional role as secondary healers while also dispelling Ignite Mana, whereas in Horde raid groups, priests end up having to play double duty by trying to keep the raid's main tank healed while simultaneously trying to keep Ignite Mana off themselves and any other mana-using character in their parties. Our raid group wiped several times because of momentary lapses in the healing of the main tank due to priests trying to dispel Ignite Mana on their parties, and we had to do something untraditional to compensate for it.



But Baron Geddon's greatest threat is simply named The Bomb. Yes, this is the famous Bomb that was used to destroy the Ironforge auction house a while back, and here's how it works. The Baron will randomly select a player and cast The Bomb on them. The afflicted person has eight seconds to get as far away from other people as possible before the bomb explodes. When it explodes, it will do 3200 damage to the person who is the bomb and to anyone in a roughly twenty yard radius. The explosion will then shoot the affected people into the air, causing them to take fall damage upon landing to the tune of over 1k additional damage. The bomb cannot be dispelled in any way. Our raid party concluded that the Blizzard designer who came up with The Bomb is a psychopath.

If you are affected with The Bomb, your job is to first run away from everyone else so that you will be the only one affected when the Bomb goes off. The Bomb often kills players by itself, but there are some ways to try to live through it. First, obviously, you want to have maximum health before the Bomb goes off, so if you're damaged, try to quaff potions or heal yourself in any way you can. Priests should shield people who are affected with the Bomb if they're in casting range and try to heal an afflicted person to full health. Second, while there's nothing one can do about the explosion damage, there are lots of overhang areas along the wall that one can run under to prevent oneself from being launched too high in the air. This can mitigate the fall damage one takes and will often be the difference between dying and not dying.

The Bomb can be such a devastating attack that a guild, Conquest, has developed a user interface add-on that automatically sends an announcement to a raid whenever someone gets affected by The Bomb and can even automatically send a whisper message the afflicted player to make sure that the person starts running. You can see in the screenshot above that both Sabik and Ephedra have it installed. Those messages seem unnecessary to me, since the first thing I always noticed whenever I got affected by The Bomb was the mass of flames surrounding my avatar, but I guess it doesn't hurt to make doubly and triply sure that people realize they have The Bomb cast on them.



And so we began. The Baron likes to start off early with a cast of The Bomb on someone, and it's really disruptive to a group to have the main tank be affected by The Bomb. So rather than risking losing our main tank, Sabik, early in the initial phase while he's building aggro, we instead assigned another warrior, Orth, to be our sacrificial lamb. When Baron Geddon was pulled into the room (by a hunter using his pet), Orth charged him and made sure to absorb the first Bomb attack before Sabik charged forward and began his process of gaining aggro. Since the healers couldn't heal Orth without gaining aggro themselves, Orth always died in the process, and I made sure to rez him as quickly as I could before getting hit by any Baron attacks. (By the last attempt, Orth had a four minute resurrection timer, but since fights with the Baron last around ten minutes, that still meant he could help during the second half of the battle).

As I mentioned before, we had had trouble in previous attempts with priests trying to pull double duty as primary healers on the main tank and as dispellers of Ignite Mana on their parties. The main and backup tanks kept getting killed during moments when priests were busy dispelling their parties. So, we switched the traditional class roles by creating a healer rotation made of shamans and druids and assigned the priests to be secondary healers who would dispel Ignite Mana from their partymembers and provide random heals on the main tank. This also had the added benefit of allowing priests to save some of their partymembers who got afflicted by The Bomb with shields and last second top-off heals.