Trial of the Crusader

Trial of the Crusader is truly the strangest raid that Blizzard has created. It seems that the goal has been just test out the ideas not fitting to main lore or storyline. Storyless bosses, weird mix of PvP and PvE fight on Faction Champions and so on.

I must admit, I don’t like most of this raid.

Northrend Beasts is too long – and quite frankly, boring as hell. Instead of three miniboss-fights, it should have been just one, perhaps Icehowl with more health and abilities.

Lord Jaraxxus… I hate this fight. Even with a good group, such as 15th Dusk tends to have, it is chaotic. Too much has been packed into one fight – and at the end of a day, it is still fairly easy fight. Just one of those “let’s get it out of a way” fights, no one will ever like or enjoy it.

Faction Champions (when will Blizzard finally fix the dialog? As of Wednesday, it still accuses Alliance of plotting against Horde – and that is with Alliance team…). Like it has been said many times, “if I want to play PvP, I will go to the battleground”. I wouldn’t mind this fight if it would be on equal terms – AoE working on enemies without 75% reduction, crowd control working normally and so forth – but as it is now, it is quite possibly the suckiest fight in any raid in WoW. We’ve learned to take them down fairly effectively, but… it is just “meh, whatever”.

And now the good fights. Twin Val’kyrs is a fun fight, even though it is taxing for both melee (more to run between portals) and tanks (half the aggro). The special abilities are neat, so are their screams and appearance. The (later added) AoE damage for the whole raid is kinda pointless, it taxes only groups with really bad healers – and last week we did it with one healer in iLevel 200 gear without problems.

And finally, Anub’arak. I must say I love the intro with Arthas – although, I am sure it will lose its appeal after seeing it few more times (also, the voice acting of Highlord Tirion Fordring is horribly bad). It will become boring waste of time, same as Trial of the Champion intro, which was fun for three times and skull-numbingly boring after that.

But the fight itself is fun – lots of variation and things to look out for. I cannot wait to try it in Heroic difficulty – should be much harder then.

I only wish we could skip the first three fights. They all are just “get it done” fights for me. Boring farming/grinding.

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