Nighthold - First Impressions

I successfully avoided all spoilers for the upcoming raid so I could go in completely blind with only the Dungeon Journal to help with tactics.


I fully expected the RL to give us the lowdown on each boss anyway so didn't feel too guilty about not reading up... at least not until after the raid when there was a conversation about how little some people had prepared.  They weren't talking about me specifically so I just kept quiet...


I wonder if my RL knows about/reads this blog, I guess I'll find out soon  :-)


Anyway... to the Nighthold!


The elven theme continues from Suramar and is just as gorgeous, the whole place is very reminiscent of Sunwell Plateau which makes a lot of sense.
We started on Normal to get a feel for the place and have a look at a few bosses on the first night.


As we overgeared it quite substantially with an average ilvl of 884 in the raid, the early bosses didn't provide much of a challenge although there was one hilarious wipe on Krosus as the main tank rolled off the edge of the bridge.
We were probably going to wipe anyway as half of the team was already in the water because they didn't move when the bridge was smashed.


We made our way to 8/10 on the first night with only High Botanist Tel'arn causing us problems.
That is one messy fight!
There is so much going on all the time, danger coming from all sides, it reminds me of pug killers in the past.
Fights like Horridon in ToT where, if you are not on point, the fight just degenerates into an absolute mess.


I love the variety of bosses though.  Some bring back familiar mechanics and some are quite innovative, but they all look fantastic!
The time dilation on Chromatic Anomaly is particularly interesting but those cast times are painful in the 'slow' phase.


The arenas for the fights also vary quite substantially with the highlight undoubtedly being Star Augur Etraeus... I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it yet... it's a shame that this is the dullest fight though. 
At least it gives you time to appreciate the scenery I suppose.


After much discussion, we returned to Normal on our second night. 
The team was split on whether to finish normal or jump into heroic so I wasn't sure which way we would go... I'm glad Normal was chosen as I wanted to finish the raid as a team, we had no idea how long it would be until we reached and killed Gul'dan on heroic.


It would also help with pugging which, given that half the raid is on my tier token, I will probably need to do to complete the set.


So we returned to face the menace of Suramar, Grand Magistrix Elisande.
More time-bending shenanigans in this fun fight which I am looking forward to immensely on heroic, she fell a little too easily on normal.


Which brought us to Gul'dan, could we finally bring justice to this villain of villains?
This was one of the major doubts about continuing with normal, we could get stuck on a challenging last boss (Imperator Mar'gok?) while there was potentially lower-hanging fruit available in early heroics.


The doubts were unfounded though as we only took a couple of learning wipes before overpowering him.  It was only gear that got us through the fight, we didn't handle the mechanics particularly well, and I'm looking forward to this fight on Heroic even more than Elisande!


Gul'dan looks like a final boss worthy of the name, a big step up from Xavius, and I can see this fight being a major challenge at the appropriate gear level. 
Good luck to those World First guilds going at it with only a smattering of Heroic gear!


The switch to Heroic was expected to bring a bit more of a challenge, we had been joking about how many of our normal kills would have been wipes, so I was slightly surprised when we 1-shot the first two bosses!


Skorpyron is your typical entry boss so I wasn't expecting many issues but it was extremely forgiving, even on Heroic.  A number of people were knocked back and spawned extra adds but we handled them comfortably.
We do have an insane amount of AoE in our team so that probably carried us through.


As this continued on the other bosses though, I was more surprised.


Trilliax was only one wipe as a few people failed the big central beam... although, to be completely honest, our warlock was an absolute hero on the kill and covered half of the mechanics on his own.


Two wipes on Spellblade Aluriel due to too many people (me, for one) getting frozen.  The frost circle pushes you back and you freeze if you hit the edge... easy enough to run against it but that means no dps so I was trying (and failing) to get out of the circle before it fully spawned.


Another silly wipe with a drowning tank on Krosus before he fell too, lots of laughing at people failing the beam on this boss :-)


10/10 normal and 5/10 heroic in our first week!


Nighthold looks like a sparkling return to form after the rather lacklustre Emerald Nightmare and I can't wait to hit the mythics!