The Secrets of Foror's Compendium of Dragonslaying

[TheDragoon]

About a month ago I found myself in a very, very lucky situation. I had been getting frustrated at how expensive the Dire Maul books for the Priest trinket quest, Holy Bologna: What the Light Won't Tell You, were on the auction house so I decided that I should see if I could solo-farm the Dire Maul books from Dire Maul West to get Silverflail her trinket.

Thus, I ended up taking my Warlock, Dragoon, into DM West and reset the instance a couple times until the book I was looking for spawned. Then I sent in my Voidwalker to distract the mobs and ran up to loot the book. Usually, looting a book yields the ever-popular URL=http://www.thottbot.com/index.cgi?i=35609]A Thoroughly Read Copy of "Nat Pagle's Extreme' Anglin."[/URL]. However, the fates seemed to be on my side that day as, on my first book, I got Foror's Compendium of Dragonslaying.



I was absolutely stunned and just about mis-clicked when I went to loot the book from the shock of getting such an unbelievably rare drop on my first try. Needless to say, I stuck the book in the mail and sent it to my Warrior, Skybreak, who had just recently hit level 60. There, she started the quest.



"Well," I thought, "this looks like an easy enough quest," and so I set out for the Dire Maul library to turn in the book.



I sneaked into the Athenaeum through Dire Maul North and went to turn in the book to one of the librarians there.





In hindsight, Lydros is right, I could have sold this book for a fortune. I saw one up on the auction house the other day for 5,000 gold. I really liked how Blizzard threw that bit in about the black market, it was a nice show of humor for those few that are lucky enough to get their hands on this book. :)

Lydros continued...



Here, I think one of my screenshots might not have worked since I think a page of text was missing when I went back to look through it. The page talked about how the book details that Elven Blades can be enchanted to make very powerful weapons. Hence, Lydros continues...



Here, Lydros gave me the basic Elven blade that could be used for this process.




Continued in the next post...

[TheDragoon]

Lydros continued, telling me about how the blade would need to be worked in order to create one of the swords as they were made in the past.















So here begins the "epic" part of this quest. :)





Whew! That's no small task! So you have to take the sword and throw it down in front of Onyxia and have her breath on it. THEN you have to kill her and plunge the blade into her corpse. Definitely an epic quest.

[TheDragoon]

At this point, the avarice alliance on Stormrage had only downed Onyxia once. Similarly, Skybreak was not keyed for Onyxia. Therefore, there was quite a few things that had to go right in order to do this part of the quest. I went through the whole questline to get her a key for Onyxia. Also, at this time a number of things prevented me from attending the Onyxia raids that we had scheduled so I had to wait a while. On a positive note, this gave me time to find some better gear for Skybreak so that when she eventually did find her way into an Onyxia raid, she was fully decked out in +defense gear, had some good weapons, and a decent amount of fire resistance.

Once I finally got into a raid, the actual execution of this quest isn't much more difficult than what you normally do for Onyxia. I waited until Onyxia was at 10% life (when we were almost assured of taking her out since you would have to run back to Dire Maul to get another sword in order to try it a second time if you had already thrown the sword down and then wipe), ran up to the main tank and dropped the sword. Onyxia breathed on the sword, I picked it up out of the ground and plunged it into her corpse when she died.



This gave me the Treated Ancient Blade.





With this done, I had completed the quest and once again set out toward Dire Maul to turn in the sword.



Once I got there, I sneaked in through Dire Maul to the northern entrance and ran down to the Library. Once there, I turned in the quest...







...and got my reward!



Quel'Serrar is one heck of a sword for tanking. First off, it has +12 stamina on it which beats out most one-handed weapons. Secondly, it is a fast attacking weapon with a high dps. It has a comparable damage to the slow blue end-game weapons but is a faster attacking sword so it evens out rage generation very nicely. Finally, the sword has an awesome ability called "Sanctuary" which increases defense and armor for 15 seconds. This ability procs very, very often so I generally notice that I have more armor and defense about half the time that I use the sword or so. Definitely nice.

But above all else, it's one of the coolest-looking weapons I've seen with its awesome green glow and gigantic blade. It's very distinctive which is as it should be, in my opinion, for a weapon of such epic proportions. :)

[TheLuminaire]

Very cool! I've always liked the way that sword looks. It's enough to make me want to start a Warrior. :)

Now all you need to do is get the rest of the Might set, and you'll look totally badass.

[oldmandennis]

Nice thread.

As a member of a guild that is gearing up for Rag, I am most interested in that book farming. Can you provide more details on how you did it?

Are there any other classes who can do it? Maybe priest with mindvision and psychic scream? How many mobs guard it? How long did it take you to get to each dust tome?

[Tuftears]

Congratulations! That sword is shiiiineeee...

[castille]

There needs to be one of these for the Benediction staff ;)

Awesome work, Dragoon

[The Gnu]

We had the fortune to see Foror's Compendium drop from the Ogre King a number of weeks ago, in a 5-man group of only guild members. Guess if our main tank Eagle was surprised to find it in his mail when he logged on the next time. :D

Until that point though, we had never managed to take down Onyxia, with a 12% wipe as best attempt. When we went for the next attempt though, everything worked smoothly. No deep breaths and quick aggro for the main tank at the start of phase 3. Eagle, who was tanking, was so focused that he completly forgot about the blade until Onyxia was at 2% health.

The cry for "HOLD YOUR FIRE!" in ventrilo made the windows tremble, but there's no stopping a 40-man raid that close to victory. Fortunatly, he managed to get it from his inventory in the last moment, and complete the quest. ;)

Now we're just looking for another copy of the book, to get our primary offtank (and MT reserve) equipped. :)

[Sword_of_Doom]

It was truly a pleasure to be your healer for that run on Onyxia. The amazing thing that run was we had 3 Warriors, yes 3 Warriors get there Quel'Serrar's that night. So it truly was a momentous and special night for many people.

Congratulations!