A pleasant surprise

A week ago I made a post about how repeatedly missing out on killing Yogg-Saron and my chances of ever getting to do it diminishing rapidly every day was making me lose my will to raid. I couldn't really make up my mind about whether to stay or go even after getting some encouraging comments in response to my last post, but at least I managed to formulate a plan: In a little less than two weeks I'll go on holiday for a week and thus have an "enforced" break from raiding. I'd sign up for all the raids until then, enjoy my holiday, and then make my final decision after that, based on how my last few raids went and whether I missed raiding at all during my time off.

Somehow just having a plan already made me feel a lot better, less put upon and more in control. I didn't expect the outcome of all this to be positive, but even if the last couple of raids continued to frustrate me, I'd at least know when to stop then. I also sent our raid leader a private message to inform him about my plans... not to make a "go kill Yogg now or I'll quit" type of threat, but simply to keep him up to date. I realise that no raid guild can keep all its members happy all the time, but at the same time you can't expect people to hang around if they are not having fun anymore.

Anyway, tonight was normal Trial of the Crusader farm night. Both of our usual raid leaders were unavailable but two other officers did their best to make the raid happen anyway. I was under the impression that this caused some people to actually play better than usual, being aware of the extra effort the officers put in and trying to do their best to do their own part as well. Either way we cleared the raid quickly and with no issues and followed it up with a twenty-five-man Onyxia kill. "Now what?" came the inevitable question and the acting raid leader decided that we'd go to Ulduar.

Wondering how far we'd get in two hours I made my way to the instance, when my boyfriend suddenly whispered me with "you'll like this" - he had convinced the raid leader to extend our previous raid ID which only had Yogg-Saron left alive. After having to disband and reform the raid to get everyone into the same instance, we were off to Yogg's prison.

I tried not to get excited but couldn't help myself. Maybe he would die tonight? People seemed to be playing well... but no, I mustn't get my hopes up; I had been disappointed too many times! And just sorting out the strategy took so long again, surely by the time we'd actually start the fight everyone would have lost focus again.

On our first attempt we aced phase one, phase two also went pretty well except for a few casualties, but in phase three everything fell apart as usual with Yogg constantly healing up until we were all dead - an all-too-familiar scenario unfortunately. On our second attempt we actually wiped before we even made it to phase three properly as multiple people got mind-controlled or died in other ways during the brain phase.

"This time he'll go down" a rogue friend assured me in a random chat channel. I had my doubts, but as I started to dodge evil clouds again I tried to pull myself together once more. I could actually feel myself losing focus due to the disappointment, but this was the content I wanted to do - if I couldn't focus here, where else? We executed phase one flawlessly again. In phase two there were one or two deaths again but we had combat reses available. Then came phase three. I sprinted towards the door, targetted Yogg to watch his health and started healing and dispelling my little heart out.

And suddenly... everything seemed to come together. The adds were dying so quickly that we never had more than two out at a time, if that. Yogg's health was going down slowly but steadily and we were well ahead of the enrage timer. "Keep it up, guys", the leading officer reassured us cheerfully on TeamSpeak.

And then he was finally dead. Even though it was somewhat belated and with better gear than you should need for this kill, I was happier than I've been about any boss kill since Archimonde. But the best thing was the way in which people reacted: I had felt so alone and abandoned in my quest to kill Yogg, but suddenly everyone made a point of congratulating me specifically on finally achieving my goal.

A Fragment of Vala'nyr dropped, and with both our main fragment collector and his backup not being in the raid the acting raid leader suddenly piped up with: "I think we should give it to Shintar, just so she'll always remember this night." I was quick to assure them that I wouldn't have any problems remembering this night either way, but before I knew it the fragment had landed in my bags. "Put it on your mantlepiece," one of the shamans joked. Nobody wanted the tier eight shoulders either since everyone (including myself) had bought tier nine already, so I got those as well just for show-off value.

More than anything I'm feeling extremely touched. I posted this scribble on my guild's forum afterwards to express myself better than I could right after the raid - I was too giddy really - but I still don't think it quite does the whole thing justice. For all the complaining I sometimes do, I'm really lucky to be in the guild I'm in.