Being in a guild that aims at high-end dungeons is sometimes time-consuming. If you wondered where I have been these past days, well … raiding Karazhan. So far we have defeated Midnight and his owner Attumen the Huntsman, Moroes, Opera Hall and … YES!  After three days trying to figure out strategies, we downed Curator.

So on our last raid-day in Karazhan before the dungeon reset, we just wanted a feel of what to expect with Shade of Aran.  He is the shade of Medivh’s father—Nielas Aran.

And the answer is … expect the unexpected. From what I have read before, there is no pattern to his attacks. They are random each time.  As you can watch in the video we lasted around 3 minutes in this first try as a test to taste the event.

1. Frosbolt – Aran shoots frostbolts to a single target, and attacks random targets. Each frostbolt deals around 1300-1550 damage.

2. Arcane Missles – He throws around 4 arcane missiles to a single target. Each arcane missile deals 1350-1609 damage.

3. Telekinetic-Pull – Shade of Aran pulls everyone toward him, and debuffs all players with Mass Slow slowing down movement on all party members. Priests need to mass dispell this or single dispell everyone. Run toward the walls as fast as you can. He will start channeling Arcane Explosion after pulling.

4. Flame Wreath – when you see flames surrounding you, do not move or it will auto-kill you. Stay still until Flame Wreath is over.  If you move around, you explode causing around 3666 damage to yourself, getting levitated over 30 feet above the ground and crashing hard on the ground causing around 1375 damage.  By observation, you become the bomb.  In the video below you can see Flame Wreath was what wiped six of the players.

5. Blizzard – Shade of Aran casts a Blizzard AOE causing 1400-1650 damage, damage, which seems to fall across half the room. Position yourself to the back of Aran if you are melee, everyone else move to the walls behind and spread. Melee him on the safe area.  All casters gotta move fast away from Blizzard.

6. Frost Nova – He immobilizes melee usually during Blizzard.  Dispell it so the melee players can position themselves out of range from Blizzard.

7. Polymorph – Everyone in the room is polymorphed and killed one by one.

As you see, this guy means business and he is a box of surprises.  The key to winning here, besides knowing how to deal with each spell from him, is to zerg him, constant DPS to interrupt him, and make all you can to stop his casting: Stun, kick, counterspell, Warlock’s felhunter silence, gouge, kidney shot, mortal strike, and anything else you got to stop his casting. I am not sure if he is immune to any of those, but let’s hope he isn’t. On our first attempt, he went down to around 86% health under three minutes.

From feedback I have read, your raid needs to DPS him pretty fast and hard.  Keep his health bar lower than his mana bar. Interrupting him is important so that his mana bar stays up.  Once Shade of Aran runs out of mana, he will polymorph everyone and kill single targets. In short, kill him before his mana is drained.

CHESSBOARD EVENT
A good reason for jewelcrafters to try Karazhan is at the Guardian’s Library section. Just before the Gamesman’s Hall (Chessboard), you can find a Ethereal named Ythyar.  He sells reagents, two jewelcrafting designs: Bracing Earthstorm Diamond and Powerful Earthstorm Diamond; and an Enchanting formula: Enchant Ring: Weapon Might.

The chessboard event seems to be easy cake, and you get some nice purple loot. None of us knew how this worked, so everyone just improvised.  Each of the 10-players needs to talk to one of the chess pieces to take control of that unit.  Alliance vs Horde is the scenario in this chess event.  Alliance is led by King Llane and Horde is led by Blackhand.  It was kinda nice to see necrolytes and doomguards tagged as Summoned Daemon—which is their original name in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

The room has a silence aura.  No one can cast, which means if you die by getting near the door across the room, you can’t be resurrected.  Echo of Medivh is at the center-side of the chessboard.  He challenges you to a chess game in order to move forward through Karazhan’s upper rooms.

Once all players have picked a chess piece, start the event. Each player has a cooldown of 10 seconds between each move.  So move wisely. Attack the opponent’s healers first: Necrolytes or Human Clerics.  Once you deal with healers, the event is easy. Surround the King and kill him. When the event is over, it resets. Go to the center-south of the room. There is a big chest where you can loot your reward.

Make sure no one in your team wanders around after the chess event is over. When the door to the next room is unlocked, it harbors many big flesheaters. Their aggro is decent enough whoever gets near the door will be killed.