Into The Halls of Lightening

The daily was Heroic Stratholme, BUT one of our fearless crew decided to venture in the night/morning before and was saved to a different instance...I won't mention any names *cough* Mirroden *cough cough* Anywho...we ended up trying Heroic Halls of Lightening. I honestly thought we were going to have a harder time with it than we actually did. The instance is not very caster friendly. Most mobs had an immediate attraction to Floppie and Juliettah. At one point Floppie said he was just going to hang out and let the mob charge him since he wasn't getting to cast anything anyway. :-) Flop does dps? Who knew?

The first boss, General Bjarngrim, gave us no problems at all. I tried my best to pull him in time to get the achievement, but alas, I was unsuccessful. My biggest problem as tank was keeping aggro on the little guys as well as the general. In Heroic the mobs do a knock back...which I later learned was something new with disengage. Annoying...that's what it should be called. Nothing ticks me off more than to pop Beserking and immediately be knocked back. -_- But this was the most of our problems so all in all an easy fight.

The next room was a bit more of a challenge than normal poses. It is the room with the non-elite fire elementals. They continue to respawn until you kill the next boss. We stuck with our usual plan where I ran straight through them to the stairs on the other side of the room. This plan would have worked just fine had all the mobs stayed aggroed to me. I believe Jules healed me though and they turned and ran back to her. Whatever happened, they offed Jules and Flop before I could get control of the situation. Mirroden stayed with me for a little bit, but they got him too low without any healing and he died as well. Kroffjr almost bit the dust but we killed the last of them before he died. He ate while I rezzed our fallen companions and we continued on.

The second boss, Volkhan, was cake as well. I thought his shatter might get us, which it did Jules...thank goodness for Soulstone. But we killed him so fast we got an achievement for getting less than four shatters. We collected our loot and moved to the room I was really worried about. Again, my worries were in vain. I honestly thought we would have to fight the whole room of statues, but we didn't. The first group we pulled was two, the second was three, and the last was four. The last was tough with the stupid disengage they do, but we got them down no deaths and moved on.

The elemental boss, Ionar, was about the same on heroic as he was on normal I thought. The spiders came and we ran like scared little girls as usual and then kicked his butt when he reformed. Ionar down, loot received, moving on.

Loken, ah Loken. I hate you. This was by far the worst part of the dungeon. He, as he does in normal, has an aura that puts a debuff on you. The further you are from Loken, the more damage he does to you. This rears it's ugly head especially when he does his Lightening Nova. I was able to pop my Barkskin and my Survival Instincts if I thought he was going to do too much damage to me during this phase, but my poor clothies couldn't take the hits. We made it through two Lightening Novas before I lost the healer and the dps started going one by one. Our second try I believe, we had him to 26K. It IS possible to take him down...and to take him down in under 2 minutes for the achievement...we just needed a little more healing or a little more dps to finish him off. We were extremely close but never could get it.

I think a few more upgrades for us all and we'll be ready for Loken again. You're going down Loken...you're going down!