Do I Really Like This Place?

   

Yeah, The Oculus.

I know...

I ran this place a few times before they nerfed it, I seem to recall spending an hour in that place because we managed to mess up so much.  This was back in the day that you did the flying bit in the nude - you knew that you were going to die twenty times, so why bother wearing gear that was just going to get damaged when you fell hundreds of meters to your death.

Why was it so hard?  A combination of people having to use a "vehicle" that they were unfamiliar with, coupled with having to think, move and fight in three dimensions (technically, four...).  It's not that the place is especially badly laid out, it's just that very few people ever spent the time to get to know it and as a result, people who were used to being channeled down dungeon corridors suddenly developed severe cases of agoraphobia and had to deal with the option of being able to fly everywhere.  This resulted in people getting lost, pulling half a dozen mobs and wiping.

Again and again...

Enter gear scaling.  You can't do it in the nude anymore, you need to be wearing your gear to be able to do anything.  If you were in Ulduar level gear at this point, The Oculus just got a bit easier, if you weren't, you just got big repair bills.

Then patch 3.3 and the wonderful Random Dungeon Finder arrives to the celebration of nearly everyone until they realise that "random" actually means "you're going to get The Oculus 45% of the time".  I still don't understand how that worked out...  This meant that you had to learn how to do this place or you were going to be spending a lot of time in Dalaran waiting for your deserter debuff to wear off, which must have been pretty annoying for all the DPSers who had to wait for a while to get the dungeon in the first place.

The good news is, everything in the place had been nerfed and hopefully you had better gear so you could blow through it with few problems.  Add to that the sack of loot that get at the end and The Oculus became tolerable.  Especially because I want that Blue Drake Mount.

People have got used to the place, don't get lost, know the mechanics inside out and this can result in brilliant runs where pulling packs of mobs on the ground turns into paratrooper moves - fly above the mobs, everyone jumps off the drakes, parachute into the mobs and unleash chaos - great fun.

Except on a run last week, only the healer and I seemed to have any clue what we were doing - it was like the bad old days again.  People getting totally lost.  People pulling half the flying mobs in the instance.  Pulling mobs and then getting off the drake on boss 2.  Not moving behind the pillars in boss 3.  Generally getting killed by everything that they even looked at on the final boss... now, I'm not the kind of person to drop group (unless people are being rude), but it was sooooo tempting.

Didn't get my Blue Drake, either... I swear that place hates me.


- Keep your diseases up and move out of the fire.