Chumpavon the Ice Failure

Am I the only one disappointed with the Toravon fight... and, well, most of what Blizzard has done lately?

Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might.  The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.

When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep.  As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves.  Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.

Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep.  By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places.  The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock.  Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock.  I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.


I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not.  Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup.  We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:

"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."

... and that's really all it took.  Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.

VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one.  IT'S A JOKE!  I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!

Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.