Viscidus Victory

Viscidus in AQ40 is probably Vanilla's weirdest raid boss. He's kind of out of the way and therefore optional, doesn't drop anything particularly exciting to most players, and he's very oddly designed in the sense that he requires a whole special set of gear to kill, a silly amount of consumables, and can't be overpowered with world buffs. The Forks only ever killed him once... we did go back and tried a couple more times after that, but we weren't particularly enthused to keep trying when we didn't immediately succeed.

With the Warriors of Sunlight, I never got to kill Viscidus either. When I joined, I was told that they'd done him in the past but didn't find the amount of consumables required to be worth the hassle of revisiting him, which seemed fair enough.

However, there was one member in particular, an undead warlock, who was obsessed with killing Viscidus for some reason. In specific, he was after the Sharpened Silithid Femur - again, it's not entirely clear to me why, considering that there are better caster weapons in Naxx, but chasing after certain rare items just seems to be this guy's thing. When I first joined the guild, he was on an epic crusade to acquire Pattern: Rich Purple Silk Shirt for example.

It basically became a well-known meme that he'd always ask to do Viscidus and we'd never even try. I remember waking up early on Christmas Day and having a quick look at my phone while still in bed, just to be greeted by this "Christmas card" made by him on the guild Discord:

It gave me a good chuckle! (Seal of the Archmagus is another meme within the guild...)

My own feeling on the matter was that I didn't really care one way or the other, though I did feel vaguely bad for the warlock as I did get the impression after a while that for all the memery, the whole thing was genuinely important to him and he was starting to feel let down by the fact that so many months had passed without a single Viscidus kill.

In terms of gear and consumables, I wasn't really ready to fight Viscidus myself. In the Forks, I had been required to assemble a full set of nature resist gear before even setting foot into AQ40 (something that caused me a certain degree of anxiety at the time). I only learned much later that it was apparently a bit of an oddity that we never had enough people playing melee characters and therefore needed the hunters to help with soaking damage on Huhuran. In the Warriors of Sunlight, it didn't matter that my hunter didn't have any gear since we never did Viscidus and had plenty of melee to soak on Huhu.

I did farm up a pair of Coldrage Daggers at one point when it had sounded like we might finally have a go at Viscidus soon, but then that didn't end up going anywhere.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised when one of the raid leaders pinged everyone a few hours before raid start today to announce that we were going to kill Viscidus tonight and that we were to come prepared. I immediately confessed to my utter unpreparedness and that it would make complete sense to take someone who actually had nature resist gear, but somehow I ended up on the roster anyway.

Fortunately the guild bank provided a lot of consumables, and in the end, we actually did it. It took us five attempts, but we got there in the end! I've got to say, for all of Visci's awkwardness, Horde have it comparatively easy with shamans and their cleansing totems, as there was almost no need for poison cleanse consumables, the main thing that made the fight so prohibitively demanding on Alliance side. I just had to keep an eye on the shaman in my group and stay near him.

Even though it wasn't a guild first or anything, it was the guild's first kill in over a year, so it still felt pretty good to get the boss down. And even better, he did actually drop the Femur for our warlock friend! So yay for him!

The only downside is that we might now decide to revisit him more often, which means that I really need to get onto that nature resist gear. Ugh...