Molten Core: Baron Geddon
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[Image: baronwipe.jpg]

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.

[Image: baronaoe.jpg]

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.

[Image: baronignitemana.jpg]

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.

[Image: baronbomb.jpg]

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.

[Image: baronfight.jpg]

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.
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#2
[Image: baronfight3.jpg]

Early in the fight (I'd guess when the Baron's health was at 90%), I got hit with The Bomb, and because I had moved forward to get some heals on Sabik, I ended up not being able to make it back to an overhang in time before I exploded. This left the druid in my party, Phyra, in a lurch, because she now wasn't covered by a priest dispelling her. She combat rezed me and we both counted every second of my four minute resurrection timer. Whenever she got affected by Ignite Mana, both she and I would yell on Teamspeak for another priest to dispel her.

[Image: baronfight4.jpg]

Finally, the timer ran out when the Baron's life was down to 46%, and I was able to get up, drink, and get back into the dispelling and healing routine. In addition to Phyra's combat resurrection on me, one of our shamans, Mikku, stayed out of the fight as long as he could and managed to resurrect several people. Those reinforcements halfway through the fight really helped, because the raid had been gradually depleted by that point due to losses from The Bomb.

[Image: baronfight5.jpg]

Sometime after I resurrected, our main tank, Sabik, got affected by The Bomb and died. This could have meant a wipe, but after a few scary moments, our backup tank, Ephedra, managed to establish aggro on the Baron and the healing battery took up where it left off by keeping the new main tank alive.

[Image: barondead.jpg]

And after a ten minute battle (and about five hours worth of attempts), Baron Geddon was defeated.

[Image: baronbelt.jpg]

One of the items that Baron Geddon dropped was the Belt of Transcendence, the epic priest set belt. My jaw dropped when I saw it linked, and I almost fainted when I rolled a 99 on it and won. As I told the raid, I was glad that Teamspeak wasn't a video service, because I didn't want them to see how I was dancing after I picked up the belt. Also, when the server crashed five minutes later, I fretted nervously until I could log back in and make sure that there wasn't any kind of rollback that would cause the belt to disappear. Luckily, there hadn't been. Ah, my preciousss...

[Image: barongauntlets.jpg]

The Baron also dropped the Gauntlets of Wrath, the epic warrior gauntlets. Prior to the run, five warriors agreed that if any Wrath items dropped, they would go to Sabik, the group's primary tank (Sabik would pass -- and has passed on previous occasions -- on any other warrior drops). The idea is that the better equipped our main tank is, the farther and faster the entire group will go. This is an ambitious group, and its goal is to kill all of the bosses in Molten Core (and beyond?), even if it takes months of practice and preparation. Other loot can be spread around the raid party, but the only way we're going to have a prayer of beating Ragnaros and other high level bosses is to have our main tank decked out with the best gear possible. Also, the better decked out the main tank, the easier it will be to beat the lesser bosses, resulting in more and better loot for everyone. It's a selfless and far-sighted agreement that these warriors made -- not all of whom are members of The Offenders, by the way -- and the entire group will be better for it. Sabik picked up the gauntlets.

Unfortunately, we had a sixth warrior with us. I don't know the whole story, but I understand that he had been in the Molten Core raid the day before. Either he hadn't been told of the agreement, or he had rejected it. Either way, the warrior started shouting "Ninja!" and has been outspoken about the situation on the official forums and in Orgrimmar ever since. It's too bad that this happened, because it marred what was otherwise a fun and great achievement.

My take on this is that neither Sabik nor The Offenders are ninja looters. It was just a very bad case of miscommunication. I've partied with many of these guys in the past and have never seen any ninja lootings or unfair treatment of anyone. I've also been on three Offenders Molten Core runs and have always seen loot distributed fairly. Obviously, I got my belt today. Also, a mage I knew got a very nice epic necklace off Lucifron a couple weeks ago on an Offenders raid, and a non-guild person won an epic bow that dropped off Magmadar in that same run. At the same time, I can sympathize with the feelings of the warrior who didn't get a chance to roll on the gauntlets. If someone had picked up the belt before I got a chance to roll on it, I probably would've screamed bloody murder in Orgrimmar and on the forums myself.

For my part, though, I'm glad for the opportunity to have raided with this group, and I'd like to thank The Offenders guild in general and the people there who organized and ran the run. I look forward to making even more progress in Molten Core with them in the future. I just hope that in the future the loot rules will be more explicitly stated at the start of the run so that there won't be any more ill feelings created from future misunderstandings.
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#3
Another great write-up, mouth-watering stuff for those of us on our way up

The disagreement over the loot seems all too common throughout the game. I guess the only sensible tactic is to exclude people you fall out with over such issues from your player pool by ignore listing them

It's a shame though because clearly a huge part of what makes the game tick is the grouping and raiding - it really is nonsense to get yourself excluded from people's groups and raids because you HAD to have that item

Out of interest how many Offenders type raiding guilds are there on your server?
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#4
Brista,Mar 21 2005, 07:01 AM Wrote:Another great write-up, mouth-watering stuff for those of us on our way up

The disagreement over the loot seems all too common throughout the game. I guess the only sensible tactic is to exclude people you fall out with over such issues from your player pool by ignore listing them[right][snapback]71380[/snapback][/right]
Here's an awesome quote from a friend of mine when I told him about guild and loot drama that was currently happening

"i never paid much attention to the drama stuff because i was a lowly newb. now that i'm 60 i look forward to getting really angry over stuff"



Neriad, congratulations on your kill and item. Baron Geddon is an awesome fight. I've never successfully tanked him yet, he always nails me with nasty fire crits even when I'm packing about 150 resist.

The nice thing is that another warrior can easily take over, then a druid can ressurect me and I can become a damage dealer, and then tank again if the other warrior dies.

Being the bomb is incredibly fun. Getting 3 or 4 tells and then running to the wall to explode is just glorious.
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#5
Isn't that just like a woman? Lusting and lusting after the one pair of shoes or belt that she had her eye on (see the LBRS write up), and then dropping it instantly when it goes out of style :P

Obviously someone needs to change the text in the bomb mod to

"Somebody set up Neriad the bomb" :shuriken:
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#6
wow reading about that drama sooo reminds me of early EQ before raid guilds became the norm=/ sorry to hear you went through that.
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#7
It's pretty amazing to think that a year from now, this will all be old hat - that guilds will run these raid instances on a regular basis, and that some may dare think it "easy."

Really impressive, Mongo!

-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.
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#8
Cool write-up. The battle sounds like chaotic fun (I'm just picturing all these people being flung into the air). Sounds like the Blizzard designers outdid themselves in thinking up nasty special attacks for their bosses.

Chris
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#9
yeah blizzard did do a good job on some of the encounters.

others like shazzrah are more like, wtf are you punishing certain classes for. Basicaly the fight goes, person pulls the naga main tank engages, and keeps it at a set position. Shazzrah has two ae's.

1: an arcane explosion move that does about 1100 base. she spams about 3 seconds apart a few times, then turns it off for like 15-20 seconds then spams a burst out again

2: increase magic dmg taken by 100%

combine the two, you get everyone standing back and just shooting arrows/gun's/spells for about 10 minutes. Yeah some of rogues have fun and try to in out, but basicaly the fight is 7-8 minutes of arrow flinging, baron is MUCH more fun
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#10
Hahahaha, was that what you were doing the other day, when my puny level 7 self started bothering you for a guild invite?

I can just imagine, eight wipes in or something, you're all focusing your will on making the evil bastard die.... and I'm all, "Hey! I'm gonna take up your time and chat-log space!"

Also, thanks for the tabard. It's actually the first time I've ever had one.
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#11
I know there probably aren't many warlocks in that party, but... seems to me here's where Felhunter would shine. Devour Magic debuff removal every 8 seconds. Soul linking the Felhunter to share his +120% resistences seems fun too.

Did grounding totems help remove debuffs at all?

Seems to me mages should carry the featherfall reagent & priests that levitate reagent :)

So where there any lockes there? and what did they do? What about Mages?
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#12
Drasca,Mar 22 2005, 10:31 PM Wrote:I know there probably aren't many warlocks in that party, but... seems to me here's where Felhunter would shine. Devour Magic debuff removal every 8 seconds. Soul linking the Felhunter to share his +120% resistences seems fun too.

We had a couple of warlocks in the party, and I remember some mention of using felhunters to remove debuffs. I don't recall the reason it was decided not to use them, but I suspect it was the fear that if the felhunters got The Bomb cast on them, it'd be difficult to get them out of the way in time before they blew up other people.

Quote:Did grounding totems help remove debuffs at all?

No, grounding totems don't work that way, and Barron Geddon casts it on whole swaths of people. It's basically an aoe debuff.

Quote:Seems to me mages should carry the featherfall reagent & priests that levitate reagent :)

I tried levitate a couple of times, and I didn't see anything conclusive. I still died even though I managed to cast it on myself prior to being blown up one time. More testing would need to be made to be sure if it'd help. I had much more success shielding myself and getting under ledges. That death in the final battle was one of the few times I actually died from the The Bomb. Far more often, I managed to live, and I was quite proud of my ability to keep not only myself but my partymates alive even as others were dying left and right. It helped that my party did a good job of staying within my casting range so I could shield them and heal them to full when they got The Bomb.
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#13
MongoJerry,Mar 23 2005, 02:02 AM Wrote:but I suspect it was the fear that if the felhunters got The Bomb cast on them, it'd be difficult to get them out of the way in time before they blew up other people.

That's very very strange. Its very easy to dismiss pet. Takes about 2 seconds. Probably don't want us killing everyone in AH again :lol:
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#14
Also, wasn't there a fix implemented that made minions untargetable by the bomb, shortly after the AH affair?
Nothing is impossible if you believe in it enough.

Median 2008 mod for Diablo II
<span style="color:gray">New skills, new AIs, new items, new challenges...
06.dec.2006: Median 2008 1.44
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#15
Brother Laz,Mar 23 2005, 06:18 AM Wrote:Also, wasn't there a fix implemented that made minions untargetable by the bomb, shortly after the AH affair?
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The fix for the AH bombing was to Living Bomb. It no longer detonates if its duration expires outside of Molten Core. Minions are still targetable.
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#16
Bolty,Mar 21 2005, 05:46 PM Wrote:It's pretty amazing to think that a year from now, this will all be old hat - that guilds will run these raid instances on a regular basis, and that some may dare think it "easy."

Really impressive, Mongo!

-Bolty
[right][snapback]71414[/snapback][/right]


Indeed. ;)
~Not all who wander are lost...~
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#17
MongoJerry,Mar 23 2005, 12:02 AM Wrote:I tried levitate a couple of times, and I didn't see anything conclusive.  I still died even though I managed to cast it on myself prior to being blown up one time.  More testing would need to be made to be sure if it'd help.  I had much more success shielding myself and getting under ledges.  That death in the final battle was one of the few times I actually died from the The Bomb.  Far more often, I managed to live, and I was quite proud of my ability to keep not only myself but my partymates alive even as others were dying left and right.  It helped that my party did a good job of staying within my casting range so I could shield them and heal them to full when they got The Bomb.

An addendum to this: Levitate works wonders. What I must not have realized at the time of this writing is that Levitate breaks when the priest receives damage. Obviously, the priest takes damage when The Bomb first explodes, so that would have canceled the Levitate. However, after you explode, you can cast Levitate at that point and live quite easily.

Also, in addition to pre-shielding a victim of The Bomb, you can heal them while they're still in the air. I've saved many people by having a renew ticking on them and casting a Flash Heal on them while they're flying or falling through the air.
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#18
MongoJerry,Jan 15 2006, 05:21 AM Wrote:Also, in addition to pre-shielding a victim of The Bomb, you can heal them while they're still in the air.&nbsp; I've saved many people by having a renew ticking on them and casting a Flash Heal on them while they're flying or falling through the air.
[right][snapback]99420[/snapback][/right]

Bolty has saved my ass in exactly this manner on more than one occasion. ;)
Darian Redwin - just some dude now
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#19
Mirajj,Jan 15 2006, 03:07 AM Wrote:Indeed. ;)[right][snapback]99416[/snapback][/right]
It's pretty amazing to think that a year from now, AQ will all be old hat - that guilds will run AQ on a regular basis, and that some may dare think it "easy."

*giggle*

Vael goes down this week! 5% last time!

-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.
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#20
MongoJerry,Jan 15 2006, 09:21 AM Wrote:Also, in addition to pre-shielding a victim of The Bomb, you can heal them while they're still in the air.
Speaking of "casting in the air", it's incredibly fun to cast i.e. Earth Shock with a Shaman on a Gordunni Brute Ogre while you're still in the air (after an uppercut), especially when that Earth Shock results in a killing blow :)
"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays." -- Friedrich von Schiller
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