Fireworks and a Demonic Gateway front and centre to celebrate our Blade Lord Ta’yak kill. We had 11 people online for the night, so Jondayla happily watched the action on the big screen while enjoying a glass of wine.
Blade Lord is a relatively straightforward fight, with plenty of opportunities in the first phase to practise stacking up and spreading out. Unseen Strike is a reasonably annoying mechanic, mostly because there is very little time between the boss reappearing and the strike occurring. So the ‘be in the cone attack’ strategy turns into ‘stack exactly on the strike target or watch the rest of us die’ strategy.
Overwhelming Assault requires some tank cooldowns for the second application, and forces a regular tank swap, while Wind Step forces people to spread out. Simple stuff, but messing it up can make your healers want to bop you right in the nose.
We would pop hero right after the fist unseen strike, and lay tornadoes all the way down the hallway until the second phase. Intensify makes for an interesting soft enrage mechanic (very soft since there’s a hard enrage) and can lead to some deaths to poorly managed mechanics that you can just get away with at the start of the fight. For our first kill we had 19 stacks of intensify, which was a little unpleasant.
The second phase is just painful. How painful depends on who you ask. So far my responses I’ve experienced ranged from “dodging tornadoes with wind in your face sucks” to “this phase is the nightmare directly from hell that will haunt me for an entire tier and possibly beyond”. Please note: both of those responses had either swearing or tears that I’ve removed from the text.
A selected few got to use the Warlock portal to get them a good way towards the boss which was great (for them). Otherwise we put our shoulder to the wind and tried to work out exactly how close we could cut it to the tornadoes edge, and then enjoyed what a lag spike could make that look like. “Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhh, I totally $#@%ing missed that one, I swear”.
When we had a mostly full group up to the first end, we’d all turn around and hoon back in the other direction at 11% using the wind on the edges of tornado valley, and could often get quite close to the boss before everything turned around. The RNG of when each individual tornado would turn around had the potential to also cause some tears, but stiff upper lip, we put that son of a bitch into the ground.
Fortunately, both Dambrath and I used our Greater Coin of Awesome and became glove buddies.
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