A Murmur of discontent

The Elder converged on Shadow Labyrinth Thursday last, eager to follow up the all time session we'd had the week prior. SLABs is home to the Shadow Council and it's nefarious ways, as well as four testing bosses. Some of the trash mobs step it up a gear too, the Fel Overseer in particular take a lot of killing.

Happily we worked our way very efficiently through the bottom dwellers, avoiding our customary trash wipe before arriving at the first boss, Ambassador Helmaw. He has a nasty fear effect that sends the DPS and tank scattering, but WotF and a ramp down of ranged DPS meant we tank and spanked him without too much trouble. And a nice pair of Jaedenfire Gloves made us optimistic about the drop to come...falsely, as it turned out!

Hellmaw

Our next boss was Blackheart the Inciter, a dumb ogre with a heavy hit. This was (allegedly) the toughest boss in the instance, thanks to one particularly nasty debuff - Incite Chaos. This has the not so hilarious impact of "Full party mind control. The party will go free for all, and start randomly killing each other." As you can imagine, a Combat Swords Rogue unleashing on a hapless Neitzsche could pretty much wipe him instantly. So within 20 seconds of the fight starting, we all dumped every buff and cooldown we could, so that Blackheart couldn't turn them against us when we were controlled.

As it turned out, we made it through - partly due to luck (the DPS mostly ended up attacking each other each time we were controlled), and partly due to brilliant healing by Neit after the control wore off. After dropping some useless Druidic gloves, Blackheart ended up literally face down in the concrete.

Blackheart down

Our penultimate foe was Grandmaster Vorpil, who has a habit of summoning a constant stream of Void Travelers to his side to assist in the fight.

Vorpil

This ended up being a little tricky, and we wiped once before working out a nice tactic of kiting him around the room, leaving him out of range of his travelling helpers. Down he went too, leaving behind a worthless pile of Pally plate. Our phantom Druid/Paladin is still the best geared on Barthilas.

Finally we came up against Murmur. And finally, we met our match. This guy is a nightmare. He has about three disasterous abilities, ranging from a Sonic Boom that smacks everyone in range for 70%-85% of total health, to Murmur's Touch that randomly targets then explodes it's victim, to Resonance that starts stacking 2000 nature damage on everyone if no-one is DPS range.

Murmur

We tried and tried, but each time he wiped us pretty convincingly. If it wasn't Neit exploding, it was all the melee being Boomed, or Pax resonating into dust. We eventually had to retreat, soundly (heh) defeated.

Like Nazan before him, Murmur is right now being researched within an inch of his life, and can expect no mercy next time he meets the Children...