T4 loots for me and a T5 boss down
On Saturday my raid group got back together and finished the remaining three bosses in Karazhan; Nightbane, Illhoof and Netherspite.
I got a Gilded Thorium Cloak from Illhoof, my first piece of real raid loot with my guild, The Asylum. My new cloak is only surpassed in bear-tank goodness by two other cloaks in the game according to Emmerald’s feral tanking gear list.
On Sunday we strolled on into Gruul’s lair and knocked some faces in the dirt and I picked up the Mantle of Malorne from High King Maulgar. These are also pretty high on Emmerald’s list, only surpassed by the T5 and T6 shoulders, two PvP shoulders and an upgraded Sunwell drop (Shoulderpads of Vehemence + Sunmote = Demontooth Shoulderpads).
After Gruul was down we regrouped at Coilfang Reservoir and had another stab at The Lurker Below. We had given him a shot last weekend but couldn’t make it happen.
This time we gave it three tries before we had to call it. On our second try we got Lurker down to 2% but we had too many dead folks to make it through the Naga phase.
After our third attempt we did a ready check to see if we’d have enough people to make Monday an official raid night for this week and give it another shot. We had enough, so it was settled: be here and ready to go on Monday night for another go at Lurker.
After two full nights of failures on Lurker, Vishyna and I started looking up as much information as we could about the encounter to help mitigate any errors that had occurred or might occur.
Here are some important facts we found:
- If you use any consumable whatsoever while the Naga are swimming into position, they will immediately aggro you, teleport to your position, and kill you.
- The three Guardians that spawn have a really nasty frontal cleave attack which hits cloth for 8-9k.
- If Lurker doesn’t have anyone in melee range he will start hitting random players with Water Bolt, a 10k attack.
- If you repeatedly jump up and down in the scalding water, each jump refreshes the damage tick making it 500 damage every 1 second rather than every 3 seconds. If you’re in the water, just sit there. An average HoT will be enough to keep you at full health.
On Monday, we made sure that the entire raid understood these things along with what we had already learned, and then we had at him. We had a couple people who hadn’t been in on the previous attempts and we lost them early during our first two tries. After those two tries though, everyone seemed to finally get it.
On our third try we only ended up with four or five dead players and Lurker went down quite easily in just over 10 minutes. Grats to the Asylum for now being 1/6 in SSC.
After three full nights of trying to kill The Lurker Below it has become apparent to me that he is not actually a difficult boss. He is a test of attention span. Each individual in the raid must stay focused the entire time. There is a lot going on in this encounter and you can’t just sit back and repeatedly fire off your favorite spell or ranged attack while occasionally moving out of the way of a cave-in or black hole.
If everyone pays attention and survives, which is very easy to do, then The Lurker Below will be happy to cough up his T5 loots for you.

