Hand of A'dal

The title, Hand of A'dal, was supposed to be removed from the game with the 3.0.2 patch. Apparently rumors of it's demise were slightly exaggerated as a bunch of us are now able to sport it at will. Either it's a bug (and might even get removed), or the fact that we had completed all the related quest lines up to Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider meant we maintained our eligibility through the patch.

But first we had to kill Kael'thas, which we had not done before. Unlike Vashj, we had never really even practiced much on him. I was delayed by a dark and stormy night drive into the city to the train station to pick up my mother-in-law. Not only is it far (45m), but I apparently bugged the directions on my iPhone and ended up having some extra driving around (the end pin moved mysteriously, and thus directed me to a point ~3mi south of the intended location and I had to drive back).

So it was super-late, even for me, when I got on. The rest of the raid amused themselves by killing Al'ar and Solarian before I got there. Kilborne stepped out for me (much appreciated, along with waiting for me to go after Kael'thas) and I got to go in and repeatedly die embarassingly to the melee whirlwind guys.

We were light on healers initially, so Barantir and I both considered respeccing Holy. After seeing how melee-unfriendly the whole encounter is, maybe we should have. But we perservered through repeated deaths, doing what we could.

The fight is complex and technical. But overpowering dps simplifies things considerably. Phase 1 is 4 adds, one at a time, and we realized right away we could kill them so fast, that we could be patient about positioning where we defeated them. Phase 2 is 7 weapons and took 2-3 trials to get the positioning and dps order down, but we were always able to finish them off before the next Phase. Phase 3 brings back all 4 adds to deal with and is chaotic. The published strats warn that it's extra chaotic if you don't have all the weapons down. Yeah, this fight must have been a bitch before the T6 instances opened up (much less the badge and 3.0 patches). We scrambled into Phase 4 a couple of times and learned about the fire bomb on the floor and the Shock Barriar/Pyroblast combo. Phase 5 is just really the second half of KT's hp from Phase 4 and the first time we got there, we managed to finish it off.

Of course, it was 3:30am server time by then, so we couldn't keep the raid together to down VR as we had planned. But Wiseman headed straight to the Caversn of Time and when we saw he got credit for the Hand of A'dal (in addition to the uber MH ring), everybody ran over there to do it too. Not everybody got the title, so it does look like you had to complete the BT quest chain first (or maybe they can still finish it). Kind of a nice unexpected bonus.

A good question is what next. Mt Hyjal and Archimomde? Or try to press deep into BT? We heard a rumor that you can get past Mother Sharazz with minimal SR gear now, so BT is tempting. But I like the idea of killing another end instance boss, too. Maybe we'll /random on Saturday.