AQ Gate Opening Event on Hydraxian Waterlords - EU

Same event, very different experience.

For one thing, actually being a member of a guild as opposed to just timidly peeking in from the sidelines made a big difference, as I found myself invited to a raid group pretty much the moment I logged in, which was nice.

However, the timing of the event was also very different. I found it very convenient that the gong was rung at 20:35 on Sunday evening on Pyrewood Village, but on Hydraxian Waterlords the hand-ins had been timed in such a manner that it happened at 10:55 on a Monday morning instead. The guild mistress relayed that there had been some drama surrounding this, as apparently certain people had been supposed to do the last hand-ins earlier but failed to do so, leading to others kind of "going rogue" and doing it themselves.

From the sounds of it, it wouldn't have made much of a difference to the inconvenient start time though, as the idea seemed to be to start the ten-hour war between the banging of the gong and the actual opening of the instance early in the day, so that the raids would become accessible in the evening at the raiders' convenience, never mind people actually wanting to take part in the event.

Fortunately I'm working from home indefinitely now, and since I didn't have any meetings that morning, I had the luxury of moving my lunch break to a convenient time to attend the banging of the gong. One advantage of the timing being rather unfriendly towards working adults - combined with Hydraxian Waterlords' slightly lower population compared to Pyrewood Village - was that the zone wasn't overflowing quite as badly during the event. Sub-60 characters were still getting kicked out, but from what I heard no level 60s were ever teleported out the way it happened to so many (including me) on PV.

As things were actually somewhat playable and I was in a raid group this time, we got involved in the killing of the Silithid colossi. This was something I had only vaguely heard about before: three humongous, tick-like Silithid spawning in each of the three hives and needing to be taken down. Our group of course didn't get the tag on any of them, but they were so massive and had so much health that it really made you want to help out regardless.

To my great amusement, they also had a huge knockback attack that would send dozens of people flying halfway across the zone, resulting in everyone dying from fall damage who didn't have some sort of ability to counter this (such as a mage's Slow Fall). Fortunately I'm the sort of person who finds falling to their death in a video game hilarious, so I had a grand old time.

Once all three colossi were dead, NPCs in Cenarion Hold handed out temporary quests to deliver colossus samples to people in the Eastern Plaguelands, Searing Gorge and Booty Bay. These were available to all, regardless of whether you helped with killing the colossi or not, but only for two hours. The biggest initial challenge was that everyone wanted to pick up the quests simultaneously, burying the quest givers in a sea of mounts, which of course inspired some players in that pile to flag for PvP and well... you can imagine how that went.

Eventually we were able to pick up our quests though and they were quite rewarding, as each one paid out about six gold and a goody bag full of food, potions and gear. Certainly made up for my own repair bills from repeatedly going splat at least. 

We then returned to Silithus to farm some elites around the obelisks. As it was still quite busy we made a detour through Un'goro and Tanaris, but for some reason we couldn't find a single obelisk in Un'goro, and in Tanaris we killed some mobs near Gadgetzan but everyone was kind of dissatisfied with getting only five rep per kill when some of the mobs in Silithus had given fifty or more a pop. Thus we moved back to Silithus anyway, even if it meant facing some competition for spawns.

Camping at the obelisks was both pretty chill as mobs only respawned every fifteen minutes or so and endlessly entertaining due to the obelisks' mind control ability constantly turning random raid members against their friends. I'll hand it to the mages for being fairly disciplined and sheeping (or pigging, or turtling) affected people fairly quickly to neutralise them, but since it was an ongoing affair it was simply impossible to get everyone. Personally I whacked my poor pet to death a couple of times while controlled, and got killed by a gnome mage once who was standing behind me when she suddenly got MCed and blew me up with a fireball. I laughed a lot. 

I eventually had to get back to work for a while, but I did log back on in the evening once my shift was over. To my great incredulity, several of the guildies I had been grouped with earlier had kept going all afternoon and were still at it, happily letting me rejoin their little group - except that it wasn't so little anymore and eventually grew to a full 40-man in fact, as the bear druid who was raid-leading kept picking up strays.

With bigger numbers it was less of a struggle to kill the bigger/stronger groups of enemies (though the mind controls remained as entertaining as ever), and we also started elbowing out the Horde players that had also been trying to camp the obelisk. You see, the mind control also had the side effect of making you hostile to everyone without counting as PvP, so whenever we saw a Hordie getting MCed, they soon became the target of a swift and opportunistic gank.

On another amusing side note, after people had spent hours farming Silithid Carapace Fragments for our Scarab Lord, two to three drops at a time, it was funny to discover that the bugs spawned for the event dropped them literally by the hundreds. Once we noticed, I made sure to fetch my Agent of Nozdormu badge from the bank so I could collect them too, and then passed them on to the rogue who I knew was also working on the quest chain (even if he wasn't going to be a Scarab Lord).

As the last hour of the war began, a zone-wide announcement asked for all forces to gather for the final assault. This being an RP server, we were of course game for this, and people started to pile onto the NPC army south of Cenarion Hold. It took a while for them to get going, but once they did we all rode along with them.

Then we reached the gate, more Colossal Anubisaths began to spawn... and that's when it turned into a lag fest at last as the server buckled under the numbers. I didn't really do much during that last hour except aim my bow at Anubisaths while hoping that my auto-shots would go off eventually, but people were meme-ing about the whole thing in chat as if it was 2005 and it was still highly amusing. We also saw one guy finish the Scarab Lord quest chain and ring the gong about ten minutes before the end of the event, which was a pretty impressive feat.

Finally there was a bit of NPC RP at the gate and then the instances were open and even if I had no interest in going there myself right then, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction watching the first groups of players snake their way inside. That whole day was definitely one of my most memorable WoW experiences ever.

Addendum for a little bit of extra serendipity: I ended up fighting next to an orc shaman called Gnawgrim at some point, which caught my attention because I used to raid with an orc shaman of the same name back in Wrath of the Lich King. (The main thing I remember whenever I think of him was that he had his Astral Recall macroed to say "Screw you guys, I'm going home", which amused me to no end.) I did a bit of asking around and it turns out it was actually the same guy. Small world!