Magister's Terrace

Last week we had a chance to visit Magister's Terrace, the new 5-man instance on Sunwell Isle. Having read so much about it's high crowd-control requirements and general melee-DPS unfriendliness, I wanted to wait until I could enter with mostly guildees.

Our party consisted of a Feral Tank, Mage, Hunter, Holy Priest and myself. A pretty solid group, geared mostly from Karazhan and PvP rewards. Nothing extraordinary, but no slackers either. :) We took it generally slow, and had relatively smooth-sailing up until the infamous final trash pull, more on that later.

Trash
Pulls were usually a mix of casters and melee'rs, easily-controlled encounters by using the usual best practice methods (CC, marking kill order). As a Shaman, it's important to use Earth Shock against the Blood Knights as they heal as well as DPS. Against Physicians, use Poison cleanse totem. For encounters with too many casters to fully CC, Grounding Totem is very effective.

Selin Fireheart
First thing's first: get everyone into the room at the same time! A magic forcefield locks players out who don't immediately come into the room. We wiped here not knowing that, as only our tank and one other made it into the room. Even on the second attempt, full well knowing about the forcefield, the hunter still got locked-out. Heh. Cannot emphasize this enough: all in right away. Other than that, it's pretty easy. We managed to down him with only 2 DPS. Same story as the final Steamvaults boss, destroy the crystal power things as soon as they're attackable.

Vexallus
Similar to Karazhan's Curator, this guy sends blobs of Pure Energy into the room that need to be burned down ASAFP. (like that? I just came up with that last week, been using it ever since!) It was hard to locate them, so spamming this macro (hotkeyed to your keyboard, just like Cartman recommends) might help:

/target Pure

Our tank managed to down Vexallus himself after everyone else wiped around 1%. See? Bare durid iz 4 fite 2! :)

Princess Delrissa
The infamous 5v5 PvP fight. Everything you've read is true, there is no attack table, so tanking does basically nothing here. In fact, kill order didn't seem much help either as it was pretty chaotic. We wiped a few times but manged it in the end. It seems good to start with a CC strategy, then just be prepared to go with the flow of the fight. Glance at the party's health every now and again, backup healing can be helpful here. (that means you, Shaman!)

After Delrissa came the seven mob pull that we just couldn't manage. /sigh. Maybe if I had been replaced with another DPS/CC, we could've tied up another mob, but it just didn't work out. We even replaced the Feral Tank with a Protection Paladin, but the seemingly random targeting of the Ethereal Smuggler and his nasty AOE proved too difficult to contend with. I probably spent too much time running after him, should have been dropping more Grounding Totems and interrupting casters, me thinks.

Can't wait to take another shot at this one. :) Bottom line for Enhancement Shaman though, don't be shy, you can be very effective here. Just adjust your tactics a bit. More grounding, more interrupts.