Lust When The Balls Come! Onineko Cracks The Sanctum of Domination! 7/10N

Hello Friends!

It’s been four months since our last Roak Poast and oh my goodness does it feel strange to be back here after so long! After making us wait while they re-released the 14 year old Burning Crusade Classic (now with extra payment gateways for easier microtransactions!), Blizzard have finally delivered on patch 9.1 including the new raid instance The Sanctum of Domination.

As is tradition, Onineko, under the watchful eye of our Guild Master: Chairman Facey CoD_Banned entered the instance on day one to pillage the new content for shiny purples. But how does this raid stack up against those that have come before? Read on below for the official Roak Poast Roak Noates on the Sanctum of Domination!

“The” Bosses

In typical Blizzard fashion, the raid bosses are grouped into wings or categories that define their position in the boss hierarchy. This first category, which I’ve dubbed the “The” category, contains all the intro bosses which are conveniently titled with the word “the”. Starting with…

The Tarragrue

The whole jazz with this bloke is you’re meant to collect anima powers from trash mobs around his room. The anima powers are the same/similar to what’s typically available in Torghast and kinda makes you a bit OP. Which is fine because the boss is a bit OP himself, although you wouldn’t know it based on how much a yawn fest the first 90% of this boss is.

Then in the last 10% you lose all your anima powers and somehow need to survive long enough to kill him before he melts your face.

Since only 10% of this boss was fun, I give it a rating of 1/10 Roaks.

The Eye of the Jailer

For almost the entirety of patch 9.0 traversering the Maw was an epic ballache that nobody enjoyed (unless you were a Druid cause travel form). This was only made worse by the eye of the jailer which continued to tick up the more stuff you did in the Maw making being there an even bigger ballache. So it would seem that we should get some level of joy and catharsism from finally facing against the stupid eye and fucking it up once and for all.

Sadly not. We accidentally pulled the boss immediately after killing trash, pressed lust and then won. There was some minor joy to be had from javelining from one side of the platform to the other to avoid the laser beams and perhaps in future we can learn to poop in the corner instead of in the middle of the room, but otherwise this fight was also kinda meh…

2/7 Roaks

The Nine

The Nine is Blizzard’s first attempt at creating a K-Pop band sensation. As is standard in all large-scale group performers. Only a small number of the members have any actual talent. In The Nine’s case, this turns out to be The Three which are the only targets that need killing, while in the background, The Six dance provocatively and wink at the camera to the anonymous 15 year old teenagers jerking it at home.

There literally is nine mobs worth of mechanics in this fight and I’m fairly certain we didn’t give Facey any time to prepare us for any of them before we just pulled and pressed lust and killed it.

3/9 Roaks

The Chamber of Angry Orcs

After the “The” bosses we enter into the Chamber of Angry Orcs. An interesting shaped space with a bunch of twisted and fucked up Orcs hanging out in different corners. Let’s get into it!

Soulrender Dormazain

After teasing Garrosh Hellscream’s endless eternal torment in the pre-launch cinematics of Shadowlands, it was destiny that we would eventually run into him during one of the raids. For some reason, Garrosh was moved from Revendreth and taken to the Maw where he was mercilessly (and perhaps justifiably) tortured nonstop by this next boss, Soulrender Dormazain.

As someone rightly said before we even pulled the boss (and wiped painfully in a vain attempt to reset lust). Do we even want to help Garrosh?

Well, turns out we don’t have much choice if we want to progress the raid, so engage and slaughter SD we did. The only thing I remember about the actual fight is that the wedges on the floor will happen 5 times, even if Facey lies to you and says it’s finished after 4.

Once SD is dead, Garrosh breaks free of his bonds and begrudgingly I must admit does a very badass job of finishing SD off and declaring his sins just a matter of opinion and that given the same choices he’d do it all again… FOR THE HORDE! Pretty cool.

+5 Garrosh Points

Remnant of Ner’zhul

On the other side of the Chamber of Angry Orcs is the OG Angry Orc himself. The bastard who basically started Warcraft when he cursed the entire Orcish people to demonic worship. Ner Motherfucking Zhul!

I think this fight was about balls and knockbacks but fuck it’s all becoming a blur at this point.

△ / ▢ Roaks

The Cool Bosses

The trashy boring bosses that we killed on Wednesday and my poor short term memory can no longer recall aside. We finally enter into the final wing of bosses in the Sanctum of Domination. These bosses I have dubbed, “The Cool Bosses” not because of any ice themes, but because despite being normal difficulty bosses, have a series of unique (ish) mechanics and tight requirements that forced a bit of creative strategy, much anal clenching and a bit of luck to pull off. These bosses begin with…

Painsmith Raznal

When a boss gives guilds trouble in heroic, you don’t really expect the normal version to be tuned so tight. This was not the case for PR who in addition to some pretty rad mechanics, has some pretty tight dps timelines that need to be met to ensure success

In spite of retarded comments from the weakest healer (and possibly player) in the raid, suggesting tanks just need to “move faster” the crux of this fight comes down to how fast you can dps the balls down in order to open the way for the tank to dump his poop in the corners.

This is the first fight in the instance that really gave us some trouble and pushed us to the limit, but credit for this boss kill belongs to one person and one person only. Yours truly, the Great Roaktahl.

It’s been well documented that Bob was given the easy tanking job in this fight, but there’s more to my heroic efforts than just carrying Bob’s lazy ass again and again. The deeper into the phase we get, the worse the timings become in terms of balls vs. spikes. We managed to stay on top of this for the entirety of the fight, but for the last phase where there is no intermission and we have one extra round of ball spikes to get through before we wipe. The attempt before the kill we were too slow and ended up spiking the raid, so for the kill I resolved to sacrifice myself to take spikes into the corner.

Instead, as luck would have it, the balls lined up in such a way that I was actually free to run the spikes deep into the blue corner – the same blue corner that had the warlock portal. I ran those spikes into the corner, unleashed the ripple then took the portal back to the raid which was now safely behind the balls like a fucking rockstar and I was so proud of it I had to dedicate several paragraphs to writing about it.

8/7 Roaks

Guardian of the First Ones

Continuing a different theme which is prevalent in the Chains of Domination. This is yet another boss that deals with balls and explosions. GOFO is some kind of mechanical cunt with an energy bar that depletes over time, causing him to fuck shit up. The only way to stop him fucking shit up is to top his energy up by moving him towards a pillar. This basically makes GOFO a dps race as there is a limited number of pillars and a lot of damage when none are left.

GOFO is particularly problematic when you have a Balance Druid who likes to start casting the 2 second wrath spell at the 5 second countdown mark, but this can be resolved by repositioning your Balance Druid behind your tanks. Speaking of tanks, this fight is allegedly very easy and boring for tanks, except for when they decide between pulls to change the timing and then forgot about that change mid-fight.

This was a good fight, not as good as the last fight, but still a good fight.

97%

Roak’s Observations

This is a new section that I’m introducing this week that will cover my main thoughts and observations for the week.

• Shacarius has really let himself go. This guy used to be top healer playing the worst healing class and now he’s just an absolute joke. Roak’s vote for Most Diminished Player 2021
• You guys honestly missed a great night of jokes Wednesday. I think during the break something fucked out and all my post-break-smoko gold was wasted. Ah well, next time.
• Bob’s obvious shortcomings are well known, but I’m starting to think he might actually be a secret genius. On the spike boss he sneakily stole threat the first pull because “the tank who goes first has an easier time”. So we decided that I would get to tank first and have it easier. HOWEVER. This does not take into account what happens after every intermission which is that in the majority of cases, Bob lands with the boss and therefore becomes the “tank who goes first” for each wave of more and more difficult hammer throwing spikes. By tricking me into taking the “easier” first tanking, he ultimately ended up with the easier job in the two more difficult phases. Blind luck or sheer genius? You decide.
• In general, the Tanking, DPS and Healing squads have all been performing well, but the Mechanics squad (obviously led by Markus, the king of mechanics) is the sole reason why we didn’t notch another boss last night.

That about wraps up this Roak Poast! Four months waiting for this content and we’re already 70% of the way through it! Looking forward to the next couple weeks and the journey ahead into heroic!

Love
– Roak