"And you see, I'd rather go blind"
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Thinking of the Mike Griffin cover here... The third encounter for TDC in Blackwing Descent was the blind dragon Atramedes. After clearing trash approaching the dragon, we were treated to a short vignette of his creation as an experiment by Nefarian's mad scientist Maloriak. Almost makes you feel sorry for the big guy...
This fight has mechanics based around sound; as you might imagine, the only way Atramedes knows what's going on around him is his acute sense of sound. This manifests itself in the sound based attacks used by Atramedes, as well as the sound meter attached to every raider. This sound meter gradually increases over time based on Atramedes attacks, and can be reset by using one of the 10 dwarven gongs positioned about the room. Timely use of the gongs is crucial to a successful fight, both in resetting the sound meter for players (who are immediately killed if their sound reaches the maximum), and to forcing Atramedes to change targets during his air phase. It's a chaotic, survival based fight, that depends on every member of the raid avoiding mistakes and ensuring they are always aware of what the rest of the team is doing.
P1 is the ground phase; we tanked Atramedes right next to the gongs, so we could have our tank use one during each Searing Phase attack by Atramedes. We had the rest of the raid set up on the dragon's left flank, which allowed for better movement when a player was tracked, as well as maximizing the use of AoE heals. During P2 (the air phase), we spread out across the room, using our insta-ghost wolf shaman to kite the Flame Breath with one other raid member on backup to ring a gong if needed (which resets the tracking mechanism to that player). The increased movement speed and the consistent approach made this phase much easier. Once we improved positioning the raid in the subsequent ground phases we had this guy in the bag.
This fight really required coordination between the team, and was a lot of fun to execute. We now have 3 bosses down in BWD, and are getting ever closer to our inevitable encounter with Nefarian