For today’s TBT I’m not going to travel into the distant WoW archives, but rather will share some memories from Mists of Pandaria.
I don’t know if the Grumpy Elf intended for this to be a shared blog topic, but that’s what it’s become. I’m one of several Hunters who have chosen to write about their favorite raid encounters in Mists.
Be sure to check out what Grumpy, Delirium and Mushan had to say about this topic. In the meantime, here my top five raid encounters from Mists.
Sha of Pride
There are three reasons I liked this fight, the first being Assurance of Consequence. This is one of the best Hunter trinkets to come along since Deathbringer’s Will, and Sha of Pride dropped it.
It was rotation changing, and not having it was almost worse than not having the legendary cloak. You didn’t need spreadsheets and theorycrafting to tell you that this was the best to trinket to have.
Reason number two is the voice acting on Sha. As Mushan pointed out, he has one of the great boss intro’s in the game, and his voice is very reminiscent of how Benedict Cumberbatch voices Smaug in the Hobbit.
Every time I hear it, I wonder how much Blizzard would’ve had to shell out to go the extra mile and get him to do Sha. Listen for yourself.
Sha of Pride
Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug
The final reason Sha was great was Pac-Man! In heroic mode a random raid member would be banished to a realm where you played Pac-Man! You were in a maze being chased by ghosts, and there were dots to consume, and if the ghosts hit you, you were dead. See? Pac-man.
Oh yeah, this fight was good for Hunters. We could deterrence through the bad, disengage across the room for prisons and to close rifts in heroic. We could barrage our way through adds, and much more.
Norushen
This is on my list for one and only one reason. Norushen was voice by Matt Mercer, who did the voice of Rexxar in Hearthstone, and was a guest on the final episode of the Hunting Party Podcast.
I think of that every time I do this fight.
Siegecrafter Blackfuse
This fight was crazy. It had crawling mines, giant robots, frickin’ lasers, fire, sawblades, and magnets. Cluster doesn’t even begin to describe all the action happening on the floor.
Luckily for us Hunters, we got to miss most of that because we’re so darn good at belt duty. You could even gimmick it such that you could handle every belt, although our group never did that.
Even going on every other belt made this fight cake. Belts were easy. You had one job and that was to kill one thing. And the best part? Nobody cared about your DPS because you were doing belts.
I know a lot of people don’t always appreciate getting special jobs in raids, but this in one encounter where I was glad to have it.
Fallen Protectors
I hated the Golden Lotus dailies and I don’t even know who these guys were, but I like this fight in heroic mode.
It’s not that different that normal mode, but Hunters can be quite useful. We’re good enough to be part of the interrupt rotation on Embodied Gloom, and we can deterrence and handle the Mark of Anguish for ten seconds. The downside to that is we can’t dps the Mark during that time, but useful nonetheless.
Hunters have strong AoE for the add phase, and when the bosses are grouped up, Beast Cleave is quite beastly.
Protectors are the second boss in the raid and they drop a ranged weapon, allowing you to get a nice DPS upgrade early on.
Thok
Thok is on a lot of Hunter’s lists for a couple of reasons. One, he’s a cool looking dinosaur that we all have dreams of one day taming.
Second we get to play hero and use Widow Venom to negate the healing Thok receives by chomping on adds.
You might want to make a macro that shouts out to the world that you’re using Widow Venom. Using an ability like this is like dropping a dollar in the tip jar. If nobody sees you do it, it’s like it never happened.
We can also Feign Death out of his fixate, although that’s not a great idea. Still if you’re feeling lazy it’s an option.
These are five encounters I very much enjoyed. They’re all from Siege of Orgrimmar, which is not surprising as I hated Throne of Thunder, and Heart of Fear. Even Mogu’shan Vaults and Terrace paled in comparison to Siege.
Nice list. For some reason, I didn’t until reading this remember how much fun Sha was to progress on. When we were progressing on heroic sha, a few of us, well, mostly a monk, me and a mage (I don’t know how the mage did it) had a little competition to see who could get the most rifts. The monk could roll over multiples, and I, of course, would glyph disengage and try to get at least 3 every time. It did feel pretty great to hit deterrence, disengage over a few rifts and simultaneously negate all the damage from swelling pride. I was a very proud hunter when I managed to get top doops and lowest damage taken on one fight. I don’t know if it’s about 25 player, but I rarely get to play pacman. Maybe 2 or 3 times in the 100 or so hundred pulls/kills we’ve had on it.
Really glad you put out your list. It’s been lots of fun reading everyone’s. I emailed solar and I’m hoping he’ll have a little podcast version of this on Cloak and Quiver.