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THE ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part I
On Tuesday night, I was putzing around with Neriad doing some of the new quests in the Western Plaguelands, and I got the usual spams that priests get, asking if I'd like to join various instance groups. (Rogues, hunters, and pre-talent warlocks never seem to sympathize when I describe this burden of being a priest). I turned down most such invitations. Did I want to run BRD? Aw, come on, I farmed that place into the ground a couple patches ago. Did I want to run Stratholme? Maybe after I see some more of the newer content, but definitely not in the 10-15 person raid groups that most people want to run the place in. Did I want to run BRS? Not a chance. It's boring, I've done all the quests, and there aren't any drops in the entire instance that would interest a priest. (One person spent 10 minutes trying to convince me that BRS had good drops for priests by linking all the cloth drops he and his friends had found there. Every one of them were equaled or beat by BRD drops or by green items I had found elsewhere).
Ah, an invitation for a Scholomance group. Now that sounds interesting. I had run Scholomance in an 8-person party on the first evening of the patch, and it seemed like a fun instance. I had picked up a few Scholomance quests by this point, and I was itching to see what those quests were like and to see what kind of followup quests they had. Plus, the way our 8-person group had cut through Scholomance like a hot knife through butter, it looked like Scholomance was well balanced for a five-character party. Three times, however, I received invitations to Scholomance and had conversations like this one:
JoeSchmo: Want to run Scholomance?
Neriad: Maybe, how many people are going to be in the group?
JoeSchmo: We have 9 now, you'd be the 10th.
Neriad: Ah, no, sorry. I just want to do a 5-man run.
JoeSchmo: I just talked to our group, and they think you're nuts. No way can you run Scholomance with five people.
Neriad: I ran Scholomance in an 8-person party on the first night, and it was so easy that it looks like Scholomance could be done with a 5-person party.
JoeSchmo: We still think you're nuts.
Neriad: Possibly, but I don't like doing raiding parties if I don't have to. They're not as intense and you don't get as much loot from them anyway.
JoeSchmo: Just quest items. You still get boss loot.
Neriad: I want to do the quests. Besides, in raids, you have to split up loot you find more ways and end you end up with less.
JoeSchmo: Quests are lame. Boss loot rewls.
Neriad: This is a beta. I like items as much as anyone else, but there's no sense obsessing about items that are going to be deleted in the not too distant future when the game is released. Besides, how can we find out if the quests are "lame" if we don't do them in the first place? Some quests now lead to epic rewards, you know.
JoeSchmo: Nah, I just want boss lewt, and you can go faster in a big party.
Neriad: If you count all the time it takes to organize the party and all the extra downtime as people squabble over loot, go afk, buff extra people, etc., big groups only go a little bit faster than smaller groups. And then you have to divide what decent items do drop among a bigger group of people. Plus, each person gets a smaller share of "junk" vendor items to sell. When I come back from a 10-15 person raid on Stratholme or BRS, I usually find that after a several hour run I end up with no items and hardly any cash. They're just not worth it.
JoeSchmo: So, are you coming?
Neriad: No.
JoeSchmo: @$%$%^#*@R#%!
I sighed and kept on doing some quest stuff in Anderhol. (Most of the mobs in Anderhol have been changed to non-elites, by the way). Then, I got a message from Kronos, a level 60 warlock with whom I had done a lot of instance runs in the past.
Kronos: Want to join a Scholomance group?
Neriad: How many people in the group?
Kronos: We have eight now, you'd be the ninth.
I stopped and thought for a few moments. I had adventured with Kronos many times and have found him to be a great instance group member. He was only one of three regularly played PvP server level-capped alliance warlocks before warlocks got their talents. I respect a guy who's willing to buck the trend by sticking with a "gimped" character to a high level and is willing to experiment to find ways of getting the most out of his underpowered character. Now that warlocks have talents and are no longer so gimped, Kronos is even better for his experiences. He's also shown a willingness to take on challenges. He was in a 5-man Stratholme group with me that made it pretty far into the instance before wiping. I figured it might be worth it to join his group and then convince he and others in the raid to join a 5-person run later.
Neriad: Sure, I'll join. I'd like to do a 5-person group at some point, though. I did Scholomance with an 8-person party on the first day and it was really easy. I think a 5-person group is doable.
Kronos: Yeah, I agree. It's been hard finding people who want to run Scholomance with only five people. (pause) Hey, a paladin friend of mine wants to come. If we can get a warrior and a mage, want do a 5-person party now?
Neriad: Yeah!
Kronos: Got a mage!
Neriad: Got a warrior!
Scholomance: Take 1
The five of us got together and started running Scholomance. I'm not going to lie to you. We ran into many problems and wiped several times. The instance was still very new to us. Two people had never been inside Scholomance at all and the rest of the party had only been there a couple times each. However, each wipe or near wipe taught us something new about the instance, and each time we came up with new tactics to get past difficult challenges. This dynamic is another reason why I prefer smaller groups to larger ones. People who adventure in small groups seem more willing to take responsibility for their actions and are more willing to accept that they can improve their play. It's a lot harder for people to hide from their mistakes, and therefore there's a better chance that people will change their play and become better players. People who play in raids a lot, or as I diplomatically call them "raid lamers," rarely accept personal responsibility for a group wipe. The typical response of a raid lamer to a wipe is that the instance is badly designed, that there's "no way" it can be done with a small group, and that even more raid lamers need to be summoned in.
The final wipe of our first five-person group came in the "room from hell" that houses Jandice Barov. It's a room that requires a lot of skill to pull correctly, as you'll see later. The thing that pissed us off the most about this wipe was that we did everything right. Kupeludo, our warrior, did an excellent job of pulling, while the rest of the group waited patiently in the back corner to safely kill everything Kupe pulled to us. So, how did we wipe? Respawns, of course. That room, and indeed the whole first section of Scholomance has an incredibly fast respawn timer. I am one of those weird people who actually like the idea of respawns in instances as a "death penalty" on groups who wipe too much. But the respawn timers in the first section of Scholomance are too short even for my taste. I submitted a /suggest that Blizzard increase the respawn times by about 15 minutes. That would allow there to be a death penalty while not punishing groups who are careful as they move through the instance.
This wipe was the final straw. It probably didn't help that we realized afterward that we shouldn't have been down in that room in the first place. Jandice Barov is a quest related boss and therefore doesn't drop anything of value as a random drop, and none of us in the group were at the point in our quest series where we needed to kill her. Our paladin had to leave, and the rest of us needed a break. However, after talking things over, the remaining four decided that after a 15 minute break, we would be ready to start again. I decided that at this point, we had a special group and that we had learned enough along the way to be of interest to others who were adventuring in Scholomance. I decided that this time I would take screenshots and would write up the adventures.
ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part II, Beginning
After our first abortive attempt at clearing Scholomance with a 5-player party, we reassembled after a break. While many players might get discouraged by the failure of the first run, it was refreshing to see that confidence was quite high for our next run. Each time that we had wiped or had nearly wiped in the first run, we had found ways to handle the problem and continue forward. It was becoming clear that the instance was definitely doable with a 5-player party. All we needed was practice.
We found a replacement for our paladin, so our group ended up looking like this:
It would be difficult to find a better combination of character classes for this instance.
Scholomance starts adventurers off on a wooden entryway with a railing that overlooks some of the later parts of the instance. It has four guards that can be pulled in pairs. Shackle one of the pair, kill the other, kill the shackled one, pull the other pair, shackle one mob, kill the other, kill the shackled one. No problems.
At this point, one is supposed to open the iron gate in front of you and continue. However, I'd like to point out again how this entrance area overlooks some of the later parts of the instance. If you jump down, you'll die almost instantly from mobs that will surround you. However, this ability to jump down is a nice little piece of instance design on Blizzard's part. If the party has already opened the door to the Viewing Room and then wipes at some later stage of the instance, the party can come back to the instance, jump down, run into the viewing room, and get back on its feet. (More details on this technique will be described later). If you're wondering what some of this stuff I've said means, don't worry. You'll see. The bottom line is that the entrance hallway seems to be designed to allow a party that wipes deep inside of Scholomance to recover without having to clear all of the massive number of respawns in the first portion of Scholomance.
Also, the design of the entrance hallway seems to allow for some tricks to "skip content" and get to the rich miniboss area of the Viewing Room quickly, making Scholomance the most farmable high-level instance for a 5-player party. But for now, let's pretend that we don't know this information and proceed the way the instance was designed.
Through the iron gate is the first real room of the instance, The Reliquary. It has various bookshelves and tables, and the mobs are a mix of skeleton guards and humanoid spellcasters. I and others in my party consider this room to be the second most difficult room of the entire instance. (Second only to the room with Jandice Barov). It has two things that make it difficult. First, the spellcasters like to fear players into other mob groups. Second, the respawn timer is wickedly fast. The first problem can be handled fairly simply. Have the puller pull mobs back into the entrance hallway. That way, when people are feared, they won't run into other mob groups and wake them up.
The second problem, the respawn timer, is the more difficult one to deal with. The Respawn Monster is an ever present insidious mob that can mess groups up long before respawns actually start appearing. Knowing that the Respawn Monster exists causes so many groups to do stupid things like not waiting for roaming mobs to get out of the way to make pulls safer, not taking out patrols when they could have killed them easily, or trying stupid stuff like Mind Soothing or stealthing past stuff. Or non-pullers get anxious, move out of the entrance hallway into the Reliquary, and end up getting feared into extra mobs, wiping the whole party.
The nice thing about the Reliquary, however, is that typically you don't have to deal with most of it. The door to get out of the room is right next to the entrance stairway, so one only has to pull 3-4 mob groups to move out of the room. Unfortunately, there is one not-so-minor item way in the back of the Reliquary: The Deed the Southshore, a quest item. One Scholomance quest is to get four deeds that are scattered throughout the instance, and this quest leads to a very fun followup quest that has a fun quest reward item (more on this later). If you still have to do that quest, you don't want to skip getting that deed.
So how does one handle this room? My advice: very carefully. Don't let the Respawn Monster psych you out. Remember this: If you do not wipe, you have enough time to carefully pull and kill enough mob groups in the entrance hallway to allow people to get to the Deed to Southshore. The problem isn't necessarily the Respawn Monster itself. The problem is that people get psyched out so much by the Respawn Monster that they end up doing stupid stuff.
However, there is a catch. If your group has just one full wipe or two partial wipes along the way, it's game over. Do not attempt to beat the Respawn Monster, because you will lose. After one wipe occurs, so many additional wipes get added on top of the first one because people try to "beat the respawns" and end up doing stupid stuff. My advice: accept the loss and reset the instance. You're right at the start of the instance. It'll cost you at most 10 minutes to recover. If you wipe once, it's better to just reset and start over carefully than experience another two or three more wipes as you battle the Respawn Monster.
Good luck on obtaining your Deed to Southshore. It's the most difficult of the deeds to get.
ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part III, The Chamber of Summoning and the "Safe Room"
After the Reliquary comes the Chamber of Summoning. I have been told outright that it the obvious place that demonstrates that Scholomance cannot be done with a 5-person party. Indeed, I would have to agree that if one has no clue about some of the specialty skills of some classes that this room would probably rank as the third most difficult room of the instance. If one does remember some of those specialty skills, however, then this room becomes a joke.
The first feature one sees in this room are the many roaming undead patrols made up of either skeleton warriors or "necrofiend" spiders. A poorly timed patrol add can cause problems, but the patrollers do wander around singly and can generally be pulled alone. In addition, if a solo patrol does add during a fight, the group's priest can shackle it and the group can keep right on doing what it's doing. So for the most part, the patrols aren't a major issue. The patrols in the Chamber of Summoning seem to have a fast respawn timer, though, so the group's priest should keep an extra eye out for the occasional patrol add.
The primary challenge in this room are six camps of mobs -- each of which consists of one Scholomance Dark Summoner and two Scholomance Necromancers. The Necromancers are merely distractions who cast shadowbolts. If the group's priest buffs everyone with shadow resistance, they can largely be ignored. The Dark Summoners, however, are nasty nasty nasty. Upon being aggroed, Dark Summoners will stand where they are and proceed to summon skeletons one after another in quick succession. This leads some groups to use some bad tactics:
Bad tactic #1: Charge the Summoner. Instead of pulling the summoner, the group charges forward to kill it. This means the fight is taking place right at the little camp which is near the other little camps. One mob runner or one player taking a bad angle to the camp can wake up other camps, and multiple patrols will add during the fight. This is a recipe for almost certain wipeage.
Bad tactic #2: Use only ranged attacks against the Summoner. Unfortunately, even spellcasters have limits on their dps and the Summoner will have plenty of time to summon lots and lots of skeletons before dying. What's more, one can't take advantage of the many stunning skills that melee classes have, so there's nothing to slow down the Summoner's rate of spawning. (Note: Curse of Tongues may help). This tactic could only work if one were in a large 10+ player raid with a battery of high dps ranged attackers. I suspect that this is why people think that one must have a raid party to get through this room.
So how should one deal with the Summoners?
Good tactic #1: Counterspell. After the tank aggros the camp, a mage should wait for the Summoner to go into its summoning animation (which looks like a warlock's summoning animation) and then cast Counterspell on it. Since the Summoner won't be able to summon for several seconds, it will charge the group and try to melee. The party can then safely focus all of its power on the Summoner, and use various stunning skills to make sure the Summoner can't summon any skeletons while it's being killed.
Good tactic #2: Shield Bash. If the party doesn't have a mage (such groups do exist), then the group's warrior tank can walk up to the mob camp, wait for the Dark Summoner to go into its summoning animation, Shield Bash it, and then walk back to the party. Again, the Dark Summoner will not be able to summon for several seconds and will follow the warrior in an attempt to melee him or her. The party can then take out the Summoner as before.
Good tactic #3: Miscellaneous. If the party strangely does not have a mage or warrior in it, then one can use a myriad of other special skills instead. A priest could Mind Control the Summoner, walk it over to the group, and then release it to be killed. Or, a rogue could sap the Dark Summoner. Then, the party could take out the necromancers and any nearby patrols and then kill the Dark Summoner last.
Follow one of the three "good tactics" described above and you'll find that one of the hardest rooms in the instance becomes very simple.
Beyond the Chamber of Summoning is the room with no official name but is the one that Kupeludo has dubbed "The Safe Room," because it has a long respawn timer and because the pulls are relatively simple. The first couple of mob groups can be pulled into and battled in the Chamber of Summoning, and after that, the party can move into The Safe Room and deal with mobs there.
The only tricky part to the Safe Room are the ghostly Spectral Tutors who occasionally break up into multiple pieces for several seconds at a time. It's best to shackle the Tutors from the start and kill the other mobs first. You don't want to be dealing with multiple Spectral Tutor pieces while battling the other mobs.
The deed to Tarren Mill lies on a table in the Safe Room.
Tarren Mill: pwned
There's a good reason why the Safe Room has a low respawn rate, and it indicates good instance design on the part of Blizzard. The Safe Room acts as a central hub to other portions of the instance. To the right is the "room from hell" that houses Jandice Barov. Ahead is the Great Ossuary through which one must go to get to the boss that holds the key to the Viewing Room. To the left is the room that has the locked door to the Viewing Room (and incidentally is also the room one can jump down into from the entrance hallway). So groups will be coming back through the Safe Room at least a couple of times during a run. It would be extremely annoying to have to fight respawns in this room every time you had to enter it.
Our party bypassed the "room from hell" on this trip, since none of us needed that quest at the time. We got to experience that room on the next run, however. For now, we're going to head into the Great Ossuary next to get to the boss who holds the key to the Viewing Room. Before you rogues ask, no, I'm afraid you can't pick the lock on the Viewing Room door. Nice try.
ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part IV, The Great Ossuary
Past the "Safe Room" is the Great Ossuary. Looking through my screenshots, I'm disappointed that I didn't get any good pictures to illustrate what the Great Ossuary is like in it's full glory. The main hall that you see in the screenshot above starts off with several dozen dragon whelps along with some humanoid dragon handlers. About half a dozen whelps seem to be linked to each dragon handler. The good news is that the whelps are non-elites and are therefore vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks. The bad news is that they don't like to get close enough together to make area-of-effect attacks effective and even though they're non-elite, their attacks still hurt like heck. In addition, the dragon handlers have a knock-back attack that can knock players into other groups of whelps, something that can cause wipes very quickly.
The easiest way to handle this room is to use line-of-sight pulls. The puller shoots a whelp and then runs back into the "Safe Room" and around the corner. Once the whelps lose line-of-sight on the puller, they'll fly through the door and bunch up at the entrance to the Safe Room. The party can then AoE attack them and then kill the dragon handler. Note that dragon handlers also have a nasty AoE attack, so even with this kind of pull, the fight isn't easy. As our party's priestess, I found myself casting Prayer of Healing a lot (PoH is a group heal).
I suggest using line-of-sight pulls for almost the entire room. It's tempting to move into the room after a good portion of the room has been cleared, but as you can see from the chaos in the screenshot above, which was taken after 2/3rds of the room had already been cleared, that's not a good idea. We should have continued to use LoS pulls. If you don't use LoS pulls, then the whelps will stay far apart, making them very difficult to kill using AoE attacks.
At the far end of the hall is a stairway leading down to Rattlegore's lair. Along the way, you have to defeat a new mob type called a Risen Construct. These guys are tough mothers. They hit hard, have an area-of-effect swiping attack, and have a boatload of health. Just be glad that for the most part you get to fight them only one at a time, and if by some chance or mistake two of them get aggroed, one of them can be shackled. I wouldn't want to have to fight two of them at once in a 5-player party.
The first time I came through Scholomance, I and my partymates congratulated Blizzard on introducing a new mob model. Risen Constructs are pretty cool looking and are nasty to fight. But on a later run, my friend Lem spoiled the fun, as he likes to do. He observed, "They act like those trogg guys from Gnomeregan." Once he made that observation, the connection was obvious. The constructs have that same loping gate that troggs have, and when they stop or get stunned, they scratch their behinds like troggs do. Risen Constructs aren't a new mob model at all. They're just undead troggs. I guess trogg behinds get itchy even when they don't have any sweat glands, skin or hair on them.
Rattlegore himself waits in the middle of a large chamber with about a dozen of these Risen Constructs. Luckily, he doesn't call for help when he's aggroed, so you don't have the clear the chamber before you fight him. I think that with some patience one could actually pull him alone, but there often seems to be one construct who stays just a bit too close to him and gets aggroed along with Rattlegore. That's not a big issue if you have a priest in the party who can shackle the add. If you don't, I really don't know what a party should do. Maybe you could have someone kite the add around, perhaps back in the now cleared Great Ossuary main hall? I can't imagine a 5-player party trying to directly fight Rattlegore and a risen construct at the same time. Those guys are nasty enough alone.
Assuming one skips Jandice Barov, Rattlegore is the first miniboss parties will fight in the instance, and it's quite time consuming for a party to make its way to this first instance miniboss. Luckily, from this point on, the minibosses come fast and thick.
So what does Rattlegore drop? The answer is: a key. Rather, he drops a special key to the door of the Viewing Room through which one must go to meet all of the other minibosses in the instance. He also dropped some random vendor loot item of no consequence.
All that was left to do in this first stage of the instance was to make our way to the Viewing Room door.
ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part V, The Final Room Before the Viewing Room
After getting the key to the Viewing Room off Rattlegore, we headed back to the Safe Room and proceeded to clear the room containing the Viewing Room door. Incidentally, this is also the same room one would land in if one were to jump off the platform at the beginning of the instance.
Like the Great Ossuary, the easiest way to clear this room is to pull mob groups back to the Safe Room and dispatch them there. Mobs in this final room like to wander around at different speeds, so the puller has to be careful. It can be easy to pull too many mobs, if one isn't paying attention.
The most difficult mobs in that final room are the diseased ghouls. When they die, they release a large poison cloud plume, much like the zombies in Diablo II. Unlike the poison clouds released by the zombies in Diablo II, this poison cloud plume hurts like crazy -- as in 700+ damage per tick crazy. The above screenshot illustrates the proper technique for dealing with the ghouls. When the ghoul is about to die, it should be stunned and the melee attackers should back off and let the spellcasters finish off the ghoul. Anyone who stays within range of the poison cloud after the ghoul dies should be summarily ridiculed for being a newbie. This whole problem with the poison cloud illustrates why ghouls should be shackled and saved for last when a mob group is pulled.
This room before the Viewing Room is small and can be quickly cleared. There is one other feature of this room besides the Viewing Room door, however. An iron gate blocks the way to some sort of chest. Some people had heard that clearing that final room opens the gate, but that didn't work for us. Others speculated that one had to also clear the entire Safe Room, too. Since it was around 6am at this point, however, we weren't in the mood to experiment, so we left the chest alone. I have a feeling, though, that that chest could have something pretty valuable in it, like the chest in the Seven Dwarfs room in Blackrock Depths. If someone reading this has concrete information on what specifically opens the gate to that chest, I'd like to hear about it. My guess at this point is that it involves opening up the Viewing Room door and hitting a switch somewhere. If someone can give me concrete information about this, I'll post an update.
Wow, great job. It was very interesting to read! Like a real journal. Not unlike most of these in worldofwar.com where you can read whole "journal" in 2 minutes. No details, no anything
ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part VI, The Viewing Room and the Laboratory
Neriad and her party opened the door to the Viewing Room and walked inside.
Breaking away from the narrative for a moment, let's talk a bit about Scholomance's design. I would rank the three most difficult sections of Scholomance as follows:
1. "The Room from Hell," the room containing Jandice Barov
2. The Reliquary
3. The Great Ossuary
Notice something about this list. We've already finished them all! Or technically, we passed by "The Room from Hell," did only a small section of the Reliquary, and finished the Great Ossuary completely. Up until the two final boss challenges (which are really fun) the rest of the instance is a piece of cake. The instance is literally divided into two halves by the Viewing Room Door. Before the door is a grueling instance with few minibosses and little treasure of the kind players look for. After the door is a series of treasure rooms filled with easily killed minibosses that give players the items of their dreams. The difference between the two halves of the instance could not be more striking.
The Viewing Room itself is eerie. It's a large schoolroom filled with yellow non-aggroed mobs, much like the bar in Blackrock Depths. At the front of the room is the headmaster, Vectus, who is supposed to be the final boss of this instance, and yet he is non-aggroed as well. You can talk to the students who respond with various comments about their studies or your dress, and you can even talk to Vectus who will tell you to get in your proper school uniform and open your books. The room is disorienting, because you know that at some point all these people are going to attack you, but you don't know when.
Opposite the Viewing Room Door is a stairwell leading down to the Laboratory. This room has mobs similar to those that were in the Safe Room. Here, like there, the mobs can be safely pulled. The only problem mobs are the Spectral Teachers which occasionally break up into multiple parts for a small amount of time. It's best to shackle the Spectral Teachers in each pull and deal with them last.
The laboratory is run by the lich, Ras Frostwhisper. He moves around the sarcophagus at the front of the room, which is convenient, because when he's behind the sarcophagus, the skeleton guards in front of the sarcophagus can be pulled without pulling him. There's not too much more to say about fighting him. Hit him as hard as you can and keep your party members healed.
Frostwhisper dropped the Bonechill Hammer pictured above. In my first run, he dropped some robes that gave a bonus to frost damage spells and to frost resistance. Unfortunately, neither bonus was very big and the robes had no other peripheral stats. Not even a dedicated frost mage would want to wear them. That's a lukewarm item to drop from a cool boss (pardon the puns).
The laboratory itself is quite interesting. For one thing, a chemistry set on the counter can be clicked on to pick up "Frostwhisper's Embalming Fluid." No one in our party knew what it was used for, but we guessed that it's used in some sort of rare alchemy recipe. Note that this embalming fluid is classified as bind on pickup, so if it is indeed for an alchemy recipe, then make sure that only alchemist characters pick it up.
The room has a strange feel about it. For one thing, the laboratory is way off to the side of the other "treasure rooms" in the area. Kronos suggested that the laboratory could be the alchemist's equivalent of the anvil and forge in Blackrock Depths. That is, perhaps there are some rare alchemy potions that can only be made while standing in the Scholomance laboratory. It'd be neat if that were true.
One other thing: The laboratory also has the Deed to Brill.
Neriad: Schooling Scholomance
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