A Little MC Adventure

Raid nights with the Warriors of Sunlight are often full of surprises. The only fixed destination is Naxx on Sundays, which I usually can't make, so you never quite know what's going to be on the menu on the other two main raid days. I guess in an ideal world we'd be able to knock out MC, BWL and AQ40 every week, but we don't live in an ideal world, and neither sign-ups nor group comp are always what we'd like them to be, so we do whatever seems feasible at the time.

This is why we found ourselves entering Molten Core with just Ragnaros left alive at the start of last week's Tuesday raid. The idea was to knock him out quickly and then move on to AQ40 for the remainder of the evening. However, as soon as people started stepping into the instance, there were disturbed mutterings about all the trash being alive again. I tried to remember whether I'd previously had any first-hand experience with this but couldn't recall for sure. Was this even abnormal? Either way I wasn't really worried, as I had been there for the rest of the MC run the previous Thursday and had seen all the other bosses die.

While we were carving our way through the same bunch of giants, elementals and so on for the second time, there was some amused commentary about the fact that someone from the PvP cluster had decided to advertise for their Naxx speed-running guild in our LFG chat. I mean, good for them, but considering that nobody on Horde side on our cluster is even clearing Naxx right now, it gave off vibes of the advertiser not really knowing who they were talking to.

We made it to Ragnaros' Lair and... it was empty. As in, Majordomo Executus, the NPC that's required to summon him, wasn't there. This immediately gave rise to confused speculation.

"Oh no, I hope we didn't miss our chance to summon him this week. There was this rumour that you only had a limited-time window to do so after killing Majordomo..."

"Did we forget to douse one of the runes?"

"No, we did douse all the runes, and we did fight Majordomo..." [The boss doesn't even spawn until all the other boss's fiery runes have been extinguished.]

A druid and a rogue volunteered to sneak to where Majordomo's boss fight took place, in case we had just forgotten to talk to him and he was still hanging out there. This seemed to be working okay until...

"I'll just distract that one..."

"You pulled!"

And then they were both dead. The ranks were surveyed for new stealthers to send to their potential doom and a rogue played by an officer was picked next. However, even as he was happily ambling along and assuring us that he was going to be fine, more discussions ensued about how it was clearly impossible to stealth the whole thing and that we needed to help him! I wasn't really fully taking this in since I was just idling near the raid leader's holy priest, but over time a trail of people started to follow in our rogue's steps... so it wasn't until I looked up at my raid frames and saw a lot of people rapidly losing health and dying that I really noticed what was going on. Same for the raid leader, incidentally:

"I said to wait! Why did you all follow him?"

"Well, the tanks were going and my job as a healer is to go where the tanks go and heal them..."

While people recovered from the partial wipe I had to chuckle to myself thinking of that Naxx speed-running advert again, trying to recruit people who were dying in MC. Around this time the rogue made it to Majordomo and confirmed that he was indeed there... however, he couldn't just talk to the big lizard as apparently the boss had used the four-day break between raids to revive all his minions from the boss encounter as well.

So in the end, we did all have to fight our way to Majordomo together, kill his cronies again, and then send him to Rag's Lair. Some people were hopeful that he'd drop loot again at least, but his loot chest was gone of course.

Raggy himself was fast and smooth after that, but instead of the "quick kill" we'd hoped for at the beginning of the night, it took three quarters of an hour to get to that point. Still, I can't claim that I minded, because the whole situation had just been too funny. I'm still not entirely sure whether it was a bug or something, but I found this forum thread from September 2019 in which someone else also expressed confusion after running into this situation, and several people claimed that you only have an hour after defeating Majordomo to summon Ragnaros or else he's known to reset and respawn his adds. The more you know! Who says you can't run into surprises and have novel adventures in an old game?