My experience with Heroic Deadmines

Last night I played a little WoW as Comcast was actually being cooperative and not going out every few minutes on me.

I logged in on my Boomkin and promptly queued for a Heroic Deadmines as I've been really wanting to check that one out. Now I heard heroics in Cata were quite hard (I know several people who were main-spec'd healing who switched to DPS because they felt healing the heroics nowadays was just too much work and not fun), but I wasn't expecting it to be *this* hard! The fights seem to last FOREVER too - some seeming to take 5 minutes at least!

Deadmines got quite the facelift - sure there's some Defias still working in the mines, but there's a lot more ogres in there it seems too. Also, instead of just making the level 15-20 bosses into level 88 versions, some of them are completely different/new bosses. And boy are their fights annoying!

The first boss we encountered does this really annoying firecast in his 2nd phase where fire moves around on the ground in a clock-like motion - really annoying if you're a caster! The fight seemed to take forever too!

The 2nd boss takes place in the Mast room, but instead of fighting a crazed gnome in a mechanical suit, you're fighting an orge on the ground while goblins standing on a beam above drop mines all over the floor. First attempt we killed the ogre, but wiped as we we were fighting one of the goblins that you fight after you kill the ogre. Our healer (who was acting like a bit of a douche) kicked the tank after he DC'd for more than a minute and we got another tank and did a lot better the 2nd time around.

We got to the next room and the healer announces that they dropped their baby and had to go - wtf?? As he leaves, so does a DPSer, so we wait a moment, requeue and go again... although the pally healer we get is total fail and the tank dies on the next trash mob, wiping us all! That healer leaves and we get another one and press on.

One thing I found as an amusing addition to Deadmines are the Mining Monkeys! As you go through Deadmines, these little monkeys are mining the mines and if you click on their ball and chain they turn green and help you fight the Defias you encounter by throwing their mining picks! LOL... another neat addition are the goblin teleporters which can teleport you to different parts of the instance kinda like the teleporters in Ulduar.

The 3rd boss in Heroic Deadmines, in the shredder room, was pretty annoying. He's a big mechanical guy and a member of your party gets to climb in a mini-shredder suit and help tank the fire elemental adds. This took us a few tries as the guy in the mini-shredder suit wasn't really getting it the first few times. We eventually got him though and worked our way up unto the Defia's ship where we encountered Admiral Ripsnarl.

In that fight, you fight the boss but kill the void ghostie adds he spawns as fast as you can cuz if they get too big they blow up and throw you off the ship, killing you. This took us 2 tries to complete.

Now the next fight is Cookie - the classic Deadmine's Murloc chef. I was told by the group this fight consists of eating "good" food and "bad" food to get an AoE and take the DoT off. I didn't get to experience this fight though because stupid Windows 7 decided to install an update and restart my computer on me without any notification or pop-ups about it whatsoever!!

Right after the fight started, everything on my computer started shutting down and rebooting. I was panicking as I didn't want to get kicked - I had already spent over 2 hours in group and we were soooo close to finishing! I logged back in as quickly as I could (took maybe 3 minutes tops) and I got back in the instance as Cookie's loot was being rolled for, but before I could type "invite me back" in /say WoW kicked me out of the instance for not being in the instance group's group.

Gah!!!

I was soooo pissed at Windows! And I felt like I wasted my time too, as all the drops were melee ones and I had spent 47g in repairs and 2+ hours of my time... Hopefully next time I get a better group for the instance that can go faster and we can actually finish in a decent time!

Frustrated, I went back to questing in Uldum as I requeued - this time for normal Grim Batol and Heroic Tide of Thrones as I hadn't done either of those instances yet and had quests for them.

While I waited, I got to do this fun bowling for crazed gnomes quest called "Gnomebliteration" - you turn into this ball of burning fire and go rolling down the side of a sand dune, rolling over crazed gnomes and setting them on fire! It takes a little while though as you have to go over 1000 of them!

 

It was pretty fun!

Soon my queue for Grim Batol popped so I hopped in there. That instance wasn't too bad, but the first we hopped on the dragons I had no clue what I was doing til the ride was almost over so I didn't get to finish that quest.

Being that it was on normal mode rather than heroic and we were all level 85, it didn't go too bad, although I did fall off a ledge and to my death once! We did alright, although we wiped on the 3rd boss as the first time we didn't clear a mob off to the side and the mage with their clones ran into them during the 2nd half of the fight - oops! We got it on the 2nd try, although the tank and mage both left promptly, whining about something - we gathered he was only there for a drop off that boss... how rude! We reformed and finished the last boss without any problems.

I'm debating what to do next - keep questing/instancing on my Boomkin to finish all the new content and see everything once (I'm about halfway through Uldum and still have Twilight Highlands to quest in) or start leveling my hordie to 85... I want to do both but can't decide! Remember - I only have a good month or so left of playing before Jay is here and the game gets put on hold!