Black Temple first impressions

Oh what, was I meant to be going to a different raid instance?

Because with every new patch comes chaos, both from the many addons I run, and the Blizzard servers being a bit unstable, the Thursday night raid was to Black Temple. Having never even seen the inside of TK, I was quite excited to hit the home of Illidan and try to get my mods and talents working.

I've finally gone with a 16/55/0 build, sacrificing one point in Improved Shields so I can take Shamanistic Focus. In our 10 man raid environment no class is guaranteed, so replenishment is still not generally available. However this time I wanted to try Static Shock and use a Lightning Shield, especially as the Tier 7 set bonus increases LS damage. I think Blizzard's design goals for Enhancement is to use LS and get mana from Mana Stream, Shamanistic Rage and now Stormstrike.

I'm pleased to say that I didn't have any mana issues during the run, our 20 man raid managed to get most of the bosses down despite not really knowing what we were doing, but being level 80 we could resist/soak a lot of the damage which I imagine would have killed level 70s. Although the longest boss fight was 3 minutes or so, I never had to use Shamanistic Rage once, so the build bodes well for "proper" raiding. We didn't have replenishment again, even with 20 guildies coming along.

Some of the fights were really cool too - the Reliquary of Souls was especially impressive and it's a real shame that more people didn't get to see them. The instance design is neat too, sometimes we where fighting in rooms in the temple, other times in the outside areas of the temple. I could almost imagine someone sitting in Shadowmoon Valley on their flying mount could be watching us fight our way to the top. I do wonder quite what Illidan was doing with a den of iniquity in his temple though.

Kam finally killed Teron Gorefiend, to make amends for his earlier mistake in Shadowmoon Valley. Unfortunately our crusade through the Black Temple ended at Mother Shahraz. It seems her Fatal Attraction ability, which is meant to target 3 members, actually gets applied to a group of 3, then another group of 3, then another... within milliseconds! Somewhere the cooldown has gone missing. The result is the whole raid was teleported together and then much death occurred. I'm still not convinced we could have done it without shadow resistance gear anyway.

The guild is due to hit Ulduar on Tuesday, which has predictably gotten massive interest, although I don't think Kam will be attending, so it's back to Naxxramas for some more spec testing.