Blackscale Blowout

I spent a couple hours this weekend running Blackscale Sepulcher with some guildies. This out-of-the-way group instance is on Cacotoxic Stain in the Bonemire, in Kingdom of Sky.

It features a ring event that pops a named with some pretty decent (for the level) gear. To complete this ring event, your group must kill four Stewards of the Seal within a very short period of time. There's just one problem, they aren't all up at the same time. So their placeholders must be pulled and killed. Complicating matters further, the Stewards will despawn quickly if left alone. So what results is a crowd control exercise. The Stewards must be pulled and put in cold storage until all four are spawned. Then they must be killed in short order.

I have been called upon many times to mez one, then two, then three of these mobs in support of a group. This is where I first realized the importance of switching gear when I faced a task that was primarily mezzing. As in, I almost killed one mob just with the procs off my mez here once. So, after that, I got rid of all my proc gear and buffs when doing a big mez job. Procs can cause other problems on mobs with high resistances. In particular, if they resist your remez, but not the proc, you've got an awake mob on your hands, and he's not going to be happy with you.

However, last weekend I was playing my bruiser, and so the crowd control used was root, not mez. It worked well enough, particularly since we had a warlock and a conjuror in our group to share the root load. Apparently Stewards don't really have any ranged attacks. Who knew?

We were mentored to level 75, so most of the zone was green to us. We got a good drop that the level 75 can use, I don't remember what. And with all of us mentoring, she got a lot of exp. After we cleared the nameds, we did something I like to call "mages have AE fun and pretend they are tanks". We never wiped, though it was close. I think we must have had four groups pulled at one point, and there were definitely deaths involved. But not as many as you might think.

I was "tanking", but there's no way I can keep aggro on everything when there is all-out AE. Fortunately, we were strong enough compared to the mobs to be able to handle most of it. The biggest problem we had was when one healer ninja afk'ed and the other, being 2-boxed, got hung up on a corner. So there was a pull (not by ME!) of multiple heroic encouters and no healers. All I can say is, thank Rallos for Feign Death!

Anyway, it's a fun zone, and pretty fast to do, if a bit out of the way.