Razorfen Kraul

After my rather unrewarding experience in Shadowfang Keep, I chose to seek higher level instances earlier to keep the excitement coming. My choice at level 26 became Razorfen Kraul an instance filled with what appears to be boars standing on their hind legs. A reference to Animal Farm perhaps? Regardless I was a little more satisfied with this instance than my previous one, but still hoping for harder challenges. Links to the video are at the bottom of the post.

The major difference in this instance than all my previous is the fact that almost every creature seems it is necessary to flee once they get below 15% health. A very annoying trait that will catch you by surprise if you are not prepared for it. Luckily my paladin gained a new skill which counteracts the opponents need to flee. Namely Seal of Justice, that when judged will cause an enemy to be filled with outrage causing it to fight to the bitter end. However to my annoyance, the incredibly long cooldown (10 seconds) of the Judgement attack makes it almost impossible to use my essential aggro generating judgement before the target feels the need to book it out of there. Luckily my shaman are rather sturdy meaning there was never any need to try to maintain control and heal mid fight.

Another brilliant technique of the shaman class was experienced during this instance. The water totem! This amazing invention flows health and mana into the veins of its party members at a steady and constant stream. A great addition for any group. How about four of them? 3 Healing Steam totems (can stack) and 1 Mana Spring totem (can’t stack) reduced boss encounters to simple elites with above average health pools. Multiple groups could be pulled without a care and defeated at leisure. Basically these vastly unappreciated skills are a source of untapped potential.

Not everything was sunshine lollipops, blue skies and rainbows though. I believe I am just stepping onto the long downward slope down into the pit of mana problems with my shaman. Their new rank of shocks takes a lot more mana than it did before percentage wise. After 3-4 pulls I either have to slow down or take a global drink break, and this is using Blessing of Wisdom on everyone. Even though I finally chose to give them enhancement talents, they don’t crit nearly enough to make good use of the talent which reduces shock mana consumption. Primarily they use very slow two hand weapons to maximize damage per second, and so a critical hit is rare and far in between, unlike something one would experience dual wielding faster weapons.

I have also had the chance to capture some boss fights during my excursion into this place, as well as what I thought was a funny little bug in the quest I attempted. I did not add any commentary this time, as most of it should seem self explanatory by this point. However I am always glad to answer any quests you may have, so don’t hesitate to comment.

Nifter in RFK from Nifter MB on Vimeo.
Download High Quality Version From FileFront (24 MB)

I did manage to kill all the bosses in the instance, and suffered no wipes. All bosses were killed being a level below them, an improvement over the previous instance. Successfully completed 3 out of 4 quests, with the last one being bugged (Blueleaf Tubers). However I resorted to looting all mob kills in order to build up more enchanting resources as I have run out at this point. This wasted a rather large amount of time, bringing the total instance length close to 2 hours.

Final Score: A-