Hello there. Not posted for a while, been to busy pulling my hair out and slowly going insane. Not because of the Economic depression, or the fact that the Job market is FUBAR, oh lord no. Ive bee going banana's because every single night is Epic Fail night. Thats right, in order to tick of the list for every single dungeon in the game, my group of friends and I have been running all over Azeroth, Steamrolling at level 80 over the far lower level 60 and 70 end game instances and raids. Of course, there is a minor issue with this deceptively simple task. All of us are geared up for heroics and regular 80 raids, no worries. What the problem is however is that the Insane amount of convoluted petty run-around BS you have to do in order to even enter the instances.
For today's example, I shall discus one of the biggest culprits of this crime, Karazhan. Now, Karazhan was the Home of Medivh, the Last Guardian. For those of you who didnt play any of the original Warcraft games, he's the dude who instead of guarding the Dark Portal, opened it and summoned the first Horde to Azeroth. Ok, he was possessed by Sargeras the Titan megalomaniac and creator of the Burning legion at the time, but yep, he's considered one of the most powerful folk in Lore.
Now, Karazhan is also a level 70 10 man Raid, and was originally part of the End game for the Burning Crusade, hence the Demons etc and all the 69-72 mobs wandering around. Before entering this Raid, players must first grab hold of the Masters Key, in order to get inside. Which is all very well and fair enough. Now, in order to get the key you must go through a variety of quests, speaking to various Mages at the ruins of Dalaran, Medivh's old student in Shattrath etc. He then tells you that Medivh gave him the key, and he ended up splitting it into 3 pieces, hiding it around the world. Now, for some malicious reason he hid the key fragments in different level 70 dungeons in Outland, so players must head to the Steam Vault, The Shadow Labyrinth and also to part of the Draenei's captured ship's prison wing. Now, the first 2 are simple to pick up especially for some swarthy purple geared 80's, just walk through and smash. But as for The Arcatraz.... not so easy. Turns out the Prison has a barrier, and you need to get the key in order to gain access. And in order to get the key you need to go through a quest chain.... Hmnnnn.
This is where what seemed to be a simple task suddenly becomes a little less simple, and a little more irritating. Please bear in mind as well that we are all doing this from 10.30 onwards every night, due to conflicting timetables etc, and this is the only way we can play together. So, after realising we are going to have to go through yet another INSANE long quest chain, we just decided to screw it and call for a Rouge. Luckily we have one with a good skill level and he lets us in the dungeon, who's squishy level 70's are no match for a bunch of angry hate Fuelled Horde, and we nuke the place. So, we end up getting all 3 key fragments, we complete a few obscure dungeons and everyone's happy, right?
Oh so very wrong.
Now Medivh's former tea boy says after grabbing the key and re-forging it, its a useless piece of metal. Sure it fits the lock, but without Medivh's blessing it wont open the door. So, the only available course of action is to go back in time and ask the guy to bless the key for us. Hmnn..... The Caverns of time for the uninitiated is a kind of Alice in Wonderland place hidden deep underground, where different area's of Azeroth's history are reachable, and nefarious forces keep trying to re-write history. One of these key events is the opening of the Dark Portal and the summoning of the horde, and this is where we can chat to Medivh face to face. There is but one problem... we cannot gain access to this event. The Guardian's of the Cavern, the Bronze Dragons have need of our help first want us to stop their enemy's from preventing Thrall, leader of the new Horde, from escaping Durnholde keep sometime after Warcraft 2, and make sure history remains on track. Considering the fact that the Tauren would probably be wiped out by centaur and the Horde would not exist without him, we thought it would be wise to go along with the Dragons wishes. Plus theyre Dragons. Big, scaly, and while polite they can breath fire. And eat you.
So we go back in time, rescue Thrall, beat the shit out of evil Dragons and everyone's happy. Yay! Oh wait, some of us didnt do the quest properly and now we have to do the whole thing again, fuuuck. Ok, round 2 and Thrall escapes once more. Wait what was that, now your quest is bugged? you didnt pick up the object you needed, right fine we do it AGAIN!!!! Its just as well Thrall and his Human girlfriend keep getting their memories erased as theyd probably be as sick of us as we are of them by the time this damn thing was done with. Anyway, we return to the present, or limbo or whatever semi-hell we've now found ourself in and are now told that yes, you can go chat to Medivh. In fact, the other dragons have gone back in time and are trying to kill him so the first Horde dont arrive on the planet and start slaughtering all the babies and townsfolk of Stormwind. While Im kind of ambivalent to the slaughter of the Alliance, Im still not that big a fan of the First Horde, the Orcs were after all being poked around by Demons after all, but as long as we can get this damn key blessed its all well and good.
So we head into this stinking swampy bog that looks suspiciously like the Swamp of sorrows, except its the dark portal, despite not being the smae model or even looking anything like the one you go through in order to get to Outland. But yeah, whatever, so we head in and bash the living daylights out of anything stupid enough to come near Medivh as he performs his summoning etc. So we win, yay the Dark Horde rush out of the portal to begin their campaign of blood and terror, and we can get Medivh to let us into his house, right? Well wrong, first of all my own quest didnt take for whatever stupid reason, probably the fact I didnt pay attention so I had to re-do the damn dungeon again. But anyway, instead of blessing the Key Medihv thinks, oh what a nice key, I have one just like it and pockets it for himself. Now in a fury we storm back to Shattrath and consult his ex-bitch assistant, and it turns out he had the damn thing in his pocket the whole time. Freaking obnoxious bastard. "Oh sorry, I couldn't tell you I had it, because then you would never have been able to grab it, give the pieces to my master who then gave it to me and BLEEEAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
So, whatever, We have the fucking key. Wonderful, epic, superb. Now we can go and enter an now totally redundant raid just to tick it off our list and also gear up lowbies with items that will end up being worthless in 5 levels time. Oh well done us.
Of course, while writing this It occurs to me in Hind-sight that we all made one very important omission when it came to thinking this whole sordid affair through. We went through all this B.S. just to get a key. We did all this arbitrary running around just so we had the permission to enter an otherwise locked place. So if we had to do all that crazy shit to get in... what the hell are we supposed to do inside Karazhan?
Lets just say I'm still shaking in rage and hatred.
See ya tomorrow!
