When in Wintergrasp, Why not Visit the Vault of Archavon?

We had done the Headless Horseman for the day and run another battle for Wintergrasp, which we had won, having dodged the Horde pre-made group again, and were looking for something to do.  We had a short group, so we were not going to be able to face any heroics ourselves and we never fill out the group with rando DPS.  We tend to be slow in instances, our runs interrupted by things like the need to feed the cats at a specific point in time… and we’re also not inviting randos to our Discord for voice chat.

Having just won Wintergrasp, Potshot suggested maybe we could peak into the Vault of Archavon, the raid in the Wintergrasp fortress that you can only access when your side has won the battleground.

As far as I could recall, I had never been in there and I had done quite a few past expansion raids solo back before the level squish in retail,  So off we went, flying into Wintergrasp from Dalaran.

The first question was whether or not we held the keep.  You can only get there if your faction won the last Wintergrasp match on your server, and while we had been on the winning side in a match just minutes before, the cross-realm match making means you’re never sure which server you are on.  As it turned out, the Alliance had won on Bloodsail Buccaneers, so we were good.  We could enter the keep and get to the portal for the raid.

First things first, we set the raid size to 10 person.  We tried the 25 person version of Naxx one afternoon and found that was pushing things.  Once that was set, it was into the instance… which wasn’t all that big.

Once in and down the stairs… who puts in so many stairs, we found just a few trash mobs running around.  Those were dispatched pretty quickly.  This raid looked to be about getting to the bosses quick.  We decided to just go down the line, starting with the first boss on the left, Koralon the Flame Watcher.

There being not much between us and the first boss, we just ran in the take him.  Koralon, however, had other ideas.  He threw around a lot of flame and Deadly Boss Mods was telling me to go this way and that.

This did not end well.  We wiped, though at least you revive back in the keep so the walk back is pretty fast.  But there were clearly things going on in that fight we needed to know about besides “don’t stand in the fire,” though that was certainly on the list.

Having read the comments and changed my tanking strategy a bit, I managed to keep him in motion around the room while avoiding the fire long enough to bring him down.  One boss down… and an achievement.

Apparently each boss in the vault grants an achievement… two achievements actually, as you get one for doing them at 25 person difficulty as well.  Well, achievements were new and Wintergrasp was a big deal, I guess Blizz just couldn’t help themselves.

Koralon down, we crossed the way to face the next boss, Emalon the Storm Watcher.

Having felt the need to research the previous boss and seeing that Emalon comes with four friends, I decided to peek into what he had to offer.  You can’t clear the friends, they just respawn, so we were going to have to live with them… sort of.

Every so often Emalon overcharges one of those friends and, after a short count down, they explode hitting everybody with what was described as a “raid wiping” 25K blast of damage.  We have Cata hit points, so 25K didn’t seem so bad, but we still followed the instructions and tried to kill the picked friend when overcharge was cast… though it could be hard to spot the right one in the scrum and I fear we failed at least once.

But we lived and Emalon went down.

Having done that in one go, we moved on to Toravon the Ice Watcher.

I read up on his tricks, but I fear I did not quite grasp the plan needed to deal with him.  He has a stacking debuff and the first comment I read about him just said I needed to untarget him for the debuff to time out and fall off.  This did not appear to be the case and we wiped again.

Going down the comments to something more clear about the fight, it turned out that what I needed to do was have an off tank pull aggro and hold him while the debuff timed out on me, at which point I would resume, with a recommendation to start in on the swap at around six stacks.

The thing is, we didn’t have a lot of extra tanks hanging around.  So Kharageenan was volunteered, and being a Death Knight, he put up blood presence and and got his self heals ready.  This was made a bit more tricky by the fact that Potshot was running both him and Fergorin, our paladin healer, and if there is one thing you don’t want, it is a healer distracted with other business.

Still, as noted, not a lot of other tank options.  This isn’t Season of Mage Tanks or whatever they  call it, so we went with what we had.

And it was a near run thing and I was pretty sure Kharageenan was going to die every time he had to pull aggro, his health bar dipped so quickly… but somehow we managed to keep alive hanging Tovalon back and forth until he was down.  Third achievement.

Which left us with the final boss at the end of the instance, Archavon the Stone Watcher.

I mean, his name is on the vault, right?  And he is the last boss.  I figured this was going to be the toughest of the bunch, though the comments on the fight were kind of vague… something about avoiding falling rocks and keeping apart lest people share the damage being rained down on them.

So I got on my bicycle, ready to keep him moving if I needed… and then the fight went by so fast that I didn’t end up doing much at all save for calling out his occasional special attack.

Well, that was it, done and done.  We took our usual group shot in front of the final boss.

Then it was back out of the instance, which I want to point out has way too big of a stair case for the size of the place.  I mean, I get it is a vault, but still.

I haven’t seen a set of stairs like that since the Blood Furnace back in Outland.

I wonder if they used the same steps?

Anyway, with that done and another Wintergrasp coming up in a while, we looked into mounts that might people jump the barrier for the early start bonus.  I ended up picking up the multi-passenger ice mammoth from the Sons of Hodir.

Not a bad mount, but a bit awkward for the purpose.  I think I am just going to have to spend the 12.5K gold for the parts and make the chopper.