This encounter is the final 'optional or unlockable' fight in the dungeon, similar to Nightbane's role in Karazhan. The actual unlocking mechanic is described here.Background:
Black encounters have been done (Onyxia, Nefarion, Sartharion), and they tend to be more of the "vanilla" dragon of WoW; understandably, due to lore... The black dragonflight is outright hostile, while a red member such as Vaelestraz in BWL was forced against his will to fight the lesser races. Their basic attacks (excluding 'flavor attacks' like Nef's calls) are pretty straightforward conical fire, cleaves, and maybe fears (Nef and Ony), or something like Onyxia's Deep Breaths. Lots of fire being thrown around. What makes these fights more interesting is the phase shifts or other "non dragon" elements thrown in that need to be dealt with, i.e. Sarth's firewalls (plus the addition of drakes left up), Ony's whelps, Nef's calls and drakonids (and subsequent bone constructs).
Looking on Wowiki, I can see that in the game, there are two 'unused' black dragon flight members that we have yet to defeat, and would make ideal candidates, since they're already in the game.
- Sabellian (ony and nef's borther?) is a quest giver shown in human form that gives out quests pertaining to Gruul and his sons (who he despises for killing his people).
- Kalaran, a quest giver in Thorium Point, tells some lies pertaining to the dark iron dwarves. Kalaran was also the name of the original character in EQ of Alex Afrasiabi
At the culmination of each of these quest chains, both dragons reveal their true selves. Sabellian battles Goc in dragon form (Rexxar takes his place horde-side), and Kalaran flies off after giving away some items, to gather forces to ransack the Searing Gorge, apparently (it never actually happens). Rexxar has been 'repurposed' in The Burning Crusade to serve as a quest giver in the Blade's Edge Mountains for the horde (and removed from the now-pointless Onyxia attunement chain), so it serves that these two (especially Kalaran, in the old world), could also receive the same treatment.
Let's see where we can go with this, using Kalaran.
Setting & Fight Mechanics:
He’s a black dragon. Big and Black. Black and Large. The encounter itself is a ranged fight, where you don’t actually get a chance to melee him until the last phase. He’s in a cave, with a 20 yard moat of lava in between him and the raid. In addition, there’s a waterfall of lava flowing over the ledge where he resides. Like, the whole encounter takes place in a big grotto, but the dragon himself is in a smaller cutout behind a waterfall of lava. The lavafall itself is wide, about 60 yards across. There are ruined catapults strewn about on the floor of the main area, where people have tried (and failed) to assault him previously.
Side View:
Head on View:
The Gimmick: As the fight rages on, boulders will fall from the ceiling. These either:
- fall into the catapult loadout baskets, which would be entirely too convenient and pretty lame
- need to be transported by one or two players to a catapult to be launched
- break into pieces that are small enough that they can be ‘looted’ by individual players, and be put into the basket for launching.
The design problem here is figuring out how to make it not seem so lame that you’re loading up catapults out of crap that falls from the ceiling. I like the idea of the boulders remaining large, and requiring two people to work together to move them (more on that in a sec). Keep it simple… there are many catapults in various stages of disarray, except for three that are the main Left, Middle, and Right ones. The teams of two coordinate to load up a catapult when they can, and the raid waits until the proper moment to fire it. The thing is, you’re not aiming to hit the dragon in the face with it, you throw it ABOVE him, into the path of the streaming lava, and that creates a window in the barrier he’s hiding behind, and gives you a brief moment to actually DPS him, before the boulder is dissolved in the lava flow, and the window closes again.For that reason alone, I think it would be best to have BIG boulders that would actually last for a few seconds. Or maybe the boulders are big enough that they just stay up there, averting the lava for the rest of the encounter? If you had individual people collecting little pebbles, then when you threw them up there they’d just rain back down… hardly big enough to part a lava stream.
The whole other option is to just have it not be a lava stream at all, but instead just a ravine or moat of lava across which DPS has to attack using ranged spells. The idea being that you need to keep him moving back and forth because he chucks red hot blasts that deal splash damage or something of that sort. The melee need something to do, as well, so dragonkin are spawned throughout the encounter to keep the tank and melee on them. Hmmm... actually... dragonkin are the default standbys for dragon encounters, so maybe Kalaran has something different. In his earlier quest chains, he fought against the Iron Dwarves. Perhaps now he has a band of unwilling followers who he’s subjugated. They serve him in his lair, and in order to not be cooked by the heat in the chamber, he’s granted them a certain degree of spell immunity. They run from nooks behind the raid towards the lava moat, carrying various charms and shouting about “sacrificing themselves to serve their master”. They need to be stunlocked and melee’d down (spell immunity, right?) before they can leap into the moat, or it triggers a wave of lava to crash up and over the raid, for massive AoE fire damage.
This whole time, ranged DPS is trying to nuke through the slots created by the catapults (or just nuking as they move back and forth along the ledge face, if we skip the catapult mechanic), while avoiding the crap falling from the ceiling, and targeted cones of lava from Kalaran’s mouth. I like the idea that he shoots a thin stream of lava at a target, and that stream then settles onto the floor, creating a little 2 foot wide creek of lava that needs to be hopped over as you move… but if that’s creating too busy of a ‘workfloor’ then he could just shoots fireballs once in a while that land for splash damage.
This all continues until a certain percentage of health, when phase two begins. Kalaran leaps across the ravine, and engages the raid toe to toe. The traditional tank steps in to grab threat (aggro wipe), and your typical dragon tank and spank ensues. This gives melee a chance to ‘get in on the action’ directly, or we can continue to have our dark iron shamans leaping for the ravine. Maybe, as a shift of pace, when he comes over, they would no longer want to hurl themselves into the lava (as it would splash lava on their master as well), but instead choose to come out in full force and engage the interlopers head on… interfering with healers and spell locking mages, etc.
At this point, the fight can flip flop back between these two phases, at various percentages of his health pool, or just play out with one phase shift... phase 1, phase 2, collect loot. The basic idea for the fight is fairly straightforward, but I think the execution of the fight would be tricky enough to keep it interesting.
(link to original post on my blog)
