Gathering the karazhan key fragments

Now while patch 2.4 removed the need to hold The Master's Key in order to enter Karazhan our guild still has a rule that any character that wants to go raiding should have gone through the atunement quests, partially to open up the other quests for the nice reputation reward rings, and to ensure that people have had at least some experience of playing that character in a group, which is important given that it's now very easy to level to 70 without stepping foot into an instance.

So now that Medrare is 70 and getting some tanking experience under his belt, the key fragments needed to be collected from the various arcane containers. The first step was to head into the Shadow Labyrinth and required the full clear.

Our group did fairly well considering, the first boss didn't cause any major headaches, the time for fun guy killed a few people but we got him down before he got all of us or incited enough chaos for us to kill each other. Grandmaster Vorpil gave us a couple of scares, once for not getting out of Hellfire, and the other when a rogue skeleton popped up and took out our healer. The third time was the charm and we moved on and stood face to face with the essence of sound Murmur.

I've got bad memories of this fight on Crash who managed to die on every attempt due to getting hit by Sonic Boom. However this time no such problems, Quartz made it a doddle to know when to run out and Feral Charge means that you're always on the very edge of the hit box when it's time to head back in there. Down he went and after defeating the guardian the first fragment was retrieved.

Lessons learnt: Having important information up front and centre in my UI makes things so much easier in terms of keeping aware. Once I've sorted out the full tanking setup I'll post some screenshots along with Crash's dps version.

The 2nd and 3rd fragments require trips into Steamvaults and Arcatraz and whilst not a full clear enough to warrant a full group and some team effort.

Doing things a bit backwards we went into Arcatraz first, and seeing how we went past the first boss we took a chance and had a go. Our boomkin died quite soon in and our healer succumbed quite close to the end. Unfortunately I died just as the boss did so whilst not a complete wipe, the two mages left standing meant that it was a runflight back from the graveyard. After that we cleared the rest of the necessary trash and the third fragment was secured.

Lessons learnt: Trying to spot void circles on the floor, whilst tanking a boss with your butt against the wall is impossible, and moving out of line of sight of the healers can cause greater problems than just your health going down.

Finally we went into Steamvaults, a place I will learn to love if the Earthwarden is to be mine. The was a slight hiccup when I managed to pull two groups but other than that things went well and we managed to down the first boss again even if it did require the mages to go nuclear on the elementals.

Lessons learnt: Just because every other pull has been flawless doesn't mean you can be any less careful about the next one.

Just Black Morass remains to get the key blessed by Medivh and I can go test my tanking skills in Karazhan against some of those nasty raid bosses.