Visiting The Obsidian Sanctum
Up until last week I had never really tried a real Raid instance before with the exception of the Vault of Archavon, which I’ve cleared half a dozen times in 10 and 25-man versions. In order to rectify this glaring omission on my WoW resume, before going on vacation, I hopped into a 10-man Obsidian Sanctum PUG to see what all of the fuss was about.
This particular PUG had a hard time getting its last few members so the pre-Raid chatter was 15 minutes of inane bickering between two tanks about armor mitigation and defense cap ratings and other things that make me sleepy. In between arguments, the Raid leader kept asking for everyone to post their DPS on the channel for either public humiliation or ego boosting. I decided to not partake in either.
Once our tenth man was found things became very serious as a Ventrillo server was offered up for everyone to use. Again, I decided not to partake. It was stressed to those of us that hadn’t been here before that this was a very difficult undertaking we were about to go through together. We needed to listen to instructions at all times and blah, blah, blah… It felt like I was in a guild and being told by an Internet stranger how I should behave and act. So far this wasn’t very much fun.
We finally went inside and after two trash pulls we had reached the first boss. Oh boy, I thought, now things get tough. The Raid leader explained that we were to shoot the drake and when a portal opened up go inside and shoot the guy there. Then resume shooting the drake. My initial reaction was “That sounds easy.” and I was right. Big scary drake was dead in no time.
A few more trash pulls and we were at the second drake. The strategy this time? Shoot the drake. There was to be no portal action for this fight. Bing-bang-boom and the drake was dead. The third, and final drake, on our circular tour of Lava Town was the same as the last one. Shoot him until he was dead. At this point I was pretty let down by the whole experience but I had hopes that the final boss, Sartharion, would really deliver the goods.
Again, as we stood before the last boss of the Raid, our fine leader went on and on about the strategy. There were going to be HUGE walls of fire that we had to avoid in order to succeed. Positions on the ground were marked with Elune Stones and the promise of hair-raising Raid warnings instructing the idiots when to run were made. Once everyone assured each other we were ready for this onslaught of dragons, elemental adds and, good Lord, walls of fire we started the fight.
Guess what? The reality is that all we did was shoot the dragon. Every once in awhile these really big walls of fire showed up with equally big gaps in them that you had to run to. Raid warnings pounded my screen telling me when to run but, honestly, you would have to be pretty dumb to not see them coming and find the hole to stand in.
My final thought on my first 10-man Raid is this: big deal. I can’t believe I waited so long to try this out. Since this encounter I’ve gone on to do the 25-man version of Obsidian Sanctum and that was even easier than this. I think we had that run done in about ten minutes. I know it’s harder with the more drakes you leave up and I that I should give that a go before I get all huffy about how easy WoW is. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.
The point of this post isn’t to complain about WoW difficulty as much as it is a way to tell people who might be gun shy about giving their first Raid a try that they shouldn’t be worried. There’s a weird intimidation factor that a lot of WoW players like to push on people and if you ignore that and give things a try you’ll have a lot more fun playing the game. If you’re worried you’ll look dumb in a particular instance than read up details on the boss fights on Wowhead first. A few minutes of comment reading over there and you’ll be prepared for just about anything.
2 Comments
Chawa on March 4th, 2009
This particular blog entry hits home for me and your final paragraph sums it up quite nicely! I feel that “intimidation” hovering around every so often – it’s important to ignore it and those post your dps requests in such raids. Thanks for giving us your complete impression, from the intial raid chat to the end!
eresin on February 9th, 2009
I agree, I was pretty surprised when I ran 10man OS at how straightforward it was, I then rant he 25man not long after.
I see people in trade chat LFM and theya re all like ‘must have achievement’. But really?! you don’t need it. It’s probably the best raid to have as your first raid.