Monday, September 15, 2008

Duo Ramps Normal - possible

After an almost traditional bout of levelling alts we decided it would be interesting to see how far we would get with 2 players in Ramparts normal instead of the traditional 5.

As a result my warlock and our happy go-lucky priest threw ourselves into the fray expecting little other than a massive fail (we're optimists).

Since we were without reliable CC we were dependant on my voidwalker to do a spot of off-tanking, with most of the tanking load going to my affliction warlock who was merrily drain-tanking away most of the instance.

Our heal-specced priest (incidentally also the guild's only useful rogue) was tasked with keeping the crazy warlock and his blue bubble alive.

We were surprised, nay... amazed at how easy we cleared right up to the first boss. The hounds that plague the instance easily went down under a heavy load of dots, the more melee intense mobs were fairy straight forward to tank and the casters practically had no impact due to a combination of shadow protection spells that both the priest and the warlock can sport (shadow ward is good stuff).

Even the occasional double pull resulting in having about 5-10 lvl 60 elites beating on us didn't really put heavy strain on us. Healing went well and watching our priest's mana bar indicated that even the strain on the mana was way lower than could be expected.
With all the space behind us cleared it was easy enough to pull mobs way back and then just use the combined fearing powers of the priest and the warlock to keep the mobs scattered long enough for the dots to do their work. Two full dot rotations (excluding UA) was seemingly enough to tackle even the hardiest mobs.

The first boss turned out to be as much of a pushover as most of the trash before it. The priests were quickly loaded up with available dots while the voidwalker tanked the boss quite effectively.

I can't remember what the loot was (we consistently DE'd everything to keep things moving) but the first boss hit the dirt in no time.

Moving on even the dreaded 4 pack casters + 1 melee, that had caused me so many wipes back when I was a wee lvl 60 warlock, standing at the top of a circular stairway (is it a stairway? more of a ramp really) proved to be an easy pull. With lots of space behind us and a fair bit of LOS pulling most of the caster mobs died from the dots before being able to do any damage.

We cleared easily up to the dragon boss and once again went with the voidwalker tanking tactic and slowly ramping up the dots. It took less than a minute for the dragon to come and the actual boss to die which left me tanking the dragon (the void couldn't hold aggro anymore).

The only real thing of note was that the fire attacks of the dragon itself did do a decent amount of damage so it would've been nice to have an imp out for the fire shield.

Still, the dragon boss went down eventually (a few minutes) with about 1k mana to spare on the priest side (I don't think a mana pot was used) and a full stack of health on the warlock side.

We decided to skip the rest of the instance because it was getting late and because we suspected that mana draining felhounds on the other boss would've probably been a bigger challenge since dots don't kill all that fast.

In the end I'd say duo-ing ramps normal is very much possible with two players in part merciless gear and part karazhan and lower gear (including a few blues and greens) without too much trouble.

Hopefully we'll get to redo the run and try on the felhound boss but something inside me tells me we had better swap out the warlock for a non-mana user (or maybe a pally tank).

Still in a way this is good motivation to try on some other stuff, I am not grasping for the heroics right away but I'd be very happy with doing partial clears of some other normal instances in outland.

If you're bored and looking for something entertaining to do then give it a shot, it's a lot of fun and you can really go all-out (which is great fun on a warlock).

No comments: