Kara, I Barely Knew Ye

Well, since I've been told I am to go into more detail about the death of Karazhan, here we go.

Last week, a group of five brave adventurers (or insane dungeon looters...take your pick) decided to give Karazhan a go, 5-man style. We knew it had been nerfed to high heaven, and we wanted to see just HOW nerfed it was. So Thylaana (paladin tank), Diabeetus (lolret paladin), me, Osethme (hoontar supreme), Crumbum (or is it Bumcrum?...Doomkin...undergeared, no less), and Kyuui ("spam chain heal dammit shammy"), charged forth. We're a solid group; we've done many many heroics together, in our various alts and incarnations, and know how we work together.

Trash before Attumen? It was always easy with a paladin tank (ok, after you had run it a few times). But now...yeah. Poor undead horsies and stable hands. They never knew what hit them. And Attumen? The fight was over in less than 2 minutes. The Huntsman needs to brush up on his skills. And drop us a horse. And, I found out about the hunter bug (YES IT'S A BUG! and not just my blonde) that will hold a shot back if a mob died mid-shot; it will then send it to the next mob you target. Fun times...I learned to try to remember to hit misdirect on the tank before I changed targets.

So we moved on, after pausing a bit to mourn the castle in which we all cut our raiding teeth. It geared us, so long ago, and some folks still use equipment from it end-game. Ok, so we sort of mourned, and laughed a good deal.

On to Moroes, that rakish rogue. We were apprehensive; Moroes can bring pain, without good crowd control. But with a paladin tank, who needs crowd control? Tanky even asked that we leave at least one of Moroes's little friends up, to remove the gouge. Yeah. They died, quickly. But then, so did Moroes, easier than we anticipated. And I found out just how NICE it is that volley can crit. CRIT! A hunter with an AOE that CRITS! No more gimpy hunter damage on AOE packs.

Two of our nemesis down, we traveled on, hoping to see at least one challenge. And, well, the skanks and 'hos under the Maiden's "supervision" proved to be too much of a temptation, and managed to kill all of us. But we bounced back and spanked their skanky butts, and faced The Maiden of Virtue. She can be tricky with a paladin tank, since she silences every few seconds. It depends on good button mashing to make sure you keep aggro and manage to cleanse. Alas, even The Maiden wasn't as virtuous as she used to be. She went down like the titan 'ho she is. We paused a moment, ostensibly to mourn her passing, but most likely so the boys could look up her skirt. And then we laughed again and moved on.

Now for those of you familiar with the tricks of Kharazan, you'll know how wiley those skeletal ushers are. They want to make sure you don't see the show without a ticket, and will hit like a kodo on steroids to do it. My new gorilla off-tanked. And lived. We had a death or two, but damn, we got past them. Keep us from our theatre, will you!? And no, you can't sneak past the two at the top of the stairs. They know you're there. And they will try to eat you.

Exploding actors proved to be painful, but not terribly so, and we dispatched them post-haste. We had a small acting troupe, after all, and we wanted our own day in the spotlight. And the show of the evening? Romulo and Julianne, of course. Somehow we had enough interrupts, and managed to burn them down, even with a heal or two sneaking through.

So, since we are starving actors, we decided to tackle the walk of money...and let me tell you, the entire instance is a money pot when you are 5-manning! I think we all made a profit.

Our tank was feeling a bit nervous about visiting the Menagerie, since The Curator has big robot friends. The robots were pansies, but the little arcane packs that protect The Curator...they had a taste for Draenei; our poor shammie died just about every pull (See, I almost said they had a taste for goat...but I refrained!). And The Curator himself? He evocated once, came out enraged, and fell over, probably in shock of being beaten by a half group with a toon whose main DPS was arcane, to which he is all but immune (Ah, Boomkin, you need to concentrate on your nature damage! ;).

We were feeling pretty cocky by now, and skipped our way onward. Our first boss wipe was to Illhoof, thanks to most of us forgetting to target the chains immediately. So, we learned from our mistakes, and came back fists (and arrows and hammers) flying. Illhoof died, even with two little demon companions up to start. I think we had three or four Kil'Rek corpses around when he was done. Once again, volley that crits was so veddy nice.

Well, at this point we were wondering: should we try Aran? Do we have the DPS? The Shade of Aran was our bane for so very long, when we were wee little raiders. We had wiped on him so many times, and wondered if we would be able to conquer him. The first time, we wiped. The second time, the day was ours. Take that, old man! You didn't even get to drink! And your elementals? Pansies!

At that point, we realized we'd completed a first night raid, with five people. We decided to try Nightbane, just to see if we could do it. We could not; BUT! With one more healer or DPS, we would have have had him the first night; we did have him the second, with one more DPS.

Two and a half hours in Karazhan...we stood in some form of shock at what we had done. We would have been blood-covered, if the undead bleed. Instead, we looked at each other and had to grin, rather ruefully. Karazhan, our friend, our teacher, our bane, had become another heroic.

We decided we had to finish it. We knew it would be almost impossible to dance with Netherspite with only 5, so we let him live another day. We returned a couple days later with one more in tow, to finish the Prince and Nightbane. And we saluted that bastion of undeath and the diabolical, and returned home to The Outland, to await the call to Northrend.