Clearing BoD – Empire’s Fall

This wing was super fun! I had to cut out a lot of footage for both Opulence and King Rastakhan, both of which were long fights and it took us a while to figure out mechanics (Opulence wiped the floor with us for a while). We did actually defeat Conclave in two pulls, which is funny to me because my guild just cleared them on Heroic and it’s a totally different story. Conclave is one of those fights with a lot of things happening at once, and as time progresses in the fight it seems like it gets easier to mess up or miss a step.

It’s hard to remember that this raid opened at the end of January and that some of my thoughts about certain bosses have changed in all that time. Opulence is definitely one of those bosses. I was really excited to fight him because of the preview we get during the Alliance war campaign where we sneak into the Dazar’alor treasure vault. That, and he drops a golden crown which I am the proud owner of! Opulence is a two-phase fight, with the first phase splitting up the raid in order to defeat two mini-bosses before getting to Opulence. It’s completely possible to skip the two mini-bosses and head straight for Opulence, but then you’d have a ridiculously hard fight against the main boss and two mini-bosses that each have their own sets of mechanics. Although, the phase one bosses were nerfed so it’s easier to imagine people attempting this now.

Anyways, figuring out the logistics of the fight and how to divide the raid for phase one is challenging but Opulence itself isn’t very difficult. I was discouraged by phase one for a while but once we learned the fight and were taking down Opulence like pros, I was having a blast. Now it’s one of my favorite fights and I look forward to it every time we start a fresh run. I thought I liked Conclave at first, but then I just realized that’s because we defeated them pretty easily (on Normal). Compared to Opulence and Rastakhan, Conclave just doesn’t stand out to me.

Rastakhan is a good mix of difficulty and fun. Watching this little story unfold between Bwonsamdi and Rastakhan is still really cool to me, while at the same time the fight has a good difficulty level that fits the two characters. There’s a lot going on in this fight, and getting sucked into the death realm by Bwonsamdi is tricky, but it’s presented in a good way that allowed us to make good progress during each pull. After defeating King Rastakhan, and feeling a bit sad, we all felt like we had fought an epic fight. Onto the third and final wing of Battle of Dazar’alor and, more importantly, the Jaina Proudmoore fight!