Classic Battle for Mount Hyjal

When it comes to content and instances that feature enemies spawning on a timer, there seem to be two main camps of players: One that finds them boring because they think they're capable of going faster than the timer will let them, so it artificially slows them down, and one that finds them stressful because the timer forces them to go faster than they're comfortable with. Based on the sorts of things I've heard about the Battle for Mount Hyjal raid and Black Morass dungeon, the majority of players are seemingly in the first camp.

Me, I've always been in the apparently small minority that actually enjoys these instances because to me, they feel well-paced and somewhat challenging but not overly so. (I found them trickier in original Burning Crusade, but even then I could deal with it.)

Even aside from that, I've always liked Battle for Mount Hyjal for other reasons. One is the lush green landscape... and now that I think about it, this is something that applies to Burning Crusade raids in general: a lot of them take place in colourful and visually interesting locations, which can't be said for the raids in every WoW expansion. Too many of them are set in dark caves or stark fortresses in my opinion.

I also liked the whole dynamic of the raid group basically fighting a retreat, holding off attackers for a while and then falling back to another camp until the climatic fight for the world tree itself. That sort of narrative progression in raids isn't that unusual nowadays, but at the time it felt quite novel and like a refreshing change from just going into some big baddie's lair filled with minions that are simply sitting there, waiting for you to clear them out and take their stuff.

With all that said, I was quite looking forward to the Forks' first foray into Mount Hyjal after the tier six raids officially opened their doors in Classic late last week. However, I'll admit that there was also a bit of apprehension in the mix, mostly related to me worrying about people possibly underestimating the raid/overestimating our abilities. There'd been a lot of talk about how most of tier six is much easier than Kael and Vashj... which is true, but knowing my guild, that doesn't mean we won't find ways to wipe due to silly things anyway.

Plus there's the fact that we're on a much bigger server now, and people are seeing all these more hardcore raiders in Black Temple gear after mere days, forgetting that we moved onto a server with a lot more guilds that are much better than us - meaning that seeing other guilds clear the content quickly in no way indicates that we'll have an easy time with it too.

In the end it worked out alright by my standards. We didn't get close to clearing all of Mount Hyjal on the first night as some people seemed to be hoping (even if I'm not sure how serious they were), but we did kill three bosses and had at least an attempt on the fourth.

Our first wipe felt very typical for us: We made it through the first few trash waves easily, and the healers were joking to wake them up when there's some actual healing to do... and then we got to the wave with multiple abominations and our paladin tank just went splat, at which point things escalated quickly and we all died. People took it in stride though, and the same was true for the other wipes we had, which could be traced back to understandable confusion or first-time mess-ups that were easy to forgive. 

I do think Archimonde will be more challenging to us as it's a fight that requires a certain amount of personal responsibility and people having awareness of their surroundings, which is not something the Forks have traditionally been good at, but we'll see how it goes. I am kind of excited by the idea of us being able to work our way through both Mount Hyjal and Black Temple in good time and actually finding some time to farm gear there, and then to look at what comes after, as my original Burning Crusade experience ended in Black Temple.