Tier Four Cleared

Well, that was faster than expected. I mean, I always knew that tier four wasn't going to keep even my casual guild progressing for too long, considering that it only consists of Karazhan and three 25-man bosses, but the sheer speed with which we cleared it has still been a surprise to me.

Karazhan was fully clearable for us from day one; a wipe here or there just meant that it initially took too long to clear in a single night, meaning that people had to come back for the last two or three bosses another evening. Still, for the last two weeks, the groups I was in were already pulling off full one-night clears, including Netherspite and Nightbane.

Our first official 25-man raid was two weeks ago. We had a few quick wipes on High King Maulgar (mostly from early mage tank deaths) but once we got that down he was a relatively easy kill. Gruul himself was a somewhat tougher nut to crack, with his combo of RNG and personal responsibility to not wipe the raid during Shatter, but we still managed to kill him that same night as well. We then had a brief look at Magtheridon but didn't get very far. There was supposed to be a follow-up raid dedicated purely to Mag's Lair that same week, but we had to cancel it as we had zero warlocks available that night and the fight just seemed too daunting to progress without one.

This week we returned to clear Gruul's Lair on Wednesday, though the big gronn still required a lot of wipes until we got him down again. Tonight was then dedicated to Magtheridon. I chugged a flask and settled in for a long night, as I still remembered the endless wipes due to people messing up the cube-clicking back in the day... and as far as I recall that was when the fight had already been nerfed to only require ten clickers instead of twenty. BC Classic still has the twenty-clicker version right now.

We had one instant wipe when someone accidentally triggered the fight before we were ready, and then two more where things went wrong early on while killing the channellers. Then Mag himself was finally free and we could start practising our cube-clicking! And believe it or not, all twenty clickers aced their job on the first try and we killed him that very attempt. The overall mood after he died was more one of slight bafflement than joyous victory I think.

At this point I reckon that many people spent a lot more time collecting their pre-raid best-in-slot gear than actually clearing the raids. What now, spend one night a week farming these while slowly working on the Eye attunement chain in preparation for the next phase?

If only there were other things to do in this game than just chasing your BiS gear...

My Raiding History, Part 2: The Burning Crusade

The Burning Crusade hadn't been out long when I rolled a troll priest on a different server. The raiding friend I mentioned in my previous post had abandoned his alt in order to return to his home server and tackle the new raid content with his guild, and my levelling partner had rolled up a tauren druid there to join them. There was a certain amount of peer pressure on me to go along.

Like I said previously, my adventure in AQ hadn't really left me with any particular urge to raid, but I missed the company, especially as our little group of friends that had formed on Alliance side started to fracture and people were around less and less. Seeing things from the Horde's point of view while having some company didn't seem like such a bad option in comparison. And I wasn't really committed to anything.

Being a (relatively) lone leveller in a raiding guild, I didn't have a lot of interactions with my new guildies, but they did seem nice enough in chat, and a couple of them did take a liking to me and helped me out by boosting my priest through some dungeons. I remember getting pretty much all the caster drops from Shadowfang Keep for example.

I also remember a guildie who had rolled and levelled a pally for the guild (new to the Horde back then) running me through Razorfen Kraul and then using Divine Intervention on me at the end. I had never seen that ability before and was wondering whether he was doing something similar to a hunter's Feign Death. When I realised that he had literally killed his character for the sake of a laugh it absolutely blew my mind. I started to become fond of these silly people.

Just as I got close to the level cap, there appeared to be some minor guild drama - I was still too far removed from these things to really know what was going on, but the result was that the old guild/raid leader and some of his friends left the game, supposedly to start playing Lord of the Rings Online instead, which they thought was going to be so much better than WoW. It's the sort of thing that can really cripple a guild - but this one made it out fine. The new guild and raid leader was very good at what he did and determined to mould the guild into a raid force to be reckoned with. And moulding is definitely something it needed.

I think the first raid I joined may have actually been Gruul's Lair, since unlike Karazhan it didn't require an attunement (plus the scaling up from 10- to 25-man meant that there was more of a need for additional warm bodies to fill out the raid). I think it's hard to comprehend for people nowadays just how extremely clueless we all were - not just me, but most people in the guild. In the context of Classic people often mention how things were different back in Vanilla because players didn't have all those resources in the form of guides etc. and at the start of BC that was definitely still true to some extent as well.

This was particularly evident on Gruul himself, who was an extremely easy fight mechanically but involved a bit of a dps check... that we failed time and time again. Many of these people had been raiding casually throughout Vanilla, but in most of the Vanilla raids dps just outright wasn't required. Questions such as how to optimise one's gear or rotation hadn't even crossed people's minds. The raid leader had to tell us to shape up and threatened that people would no longer get invited if they couldn't hit at least 500 dps. This wasn't a particularly high requirement even back then, but for many of us it was still a challenge. I felt motivated to prove myself though, and started to work on things such as improving my gear and achieving my hit cap (also a new concept, as hit rating wasn't even displayed on Vanilla character sheets, even though it existed as a stat).

I also got into Karazhan eventually. Getting attuned wasn't really a problem as there were always people happy to help others through the required dungeons. The bigger challenge was to balance two to three 10-man teams with the consideration of 25-man progression - something of which I was blissfully oblivious at the time, as my involvement was limited to showing up when I was told to, but in hindsight it must have been one hell of a headache for leadership.

Karazhan was another place that taught me a lot of lessons. Again, most of the bosses were laughably simplistic compared to many fights today, but keeping in mind that many of us had little to no clue about anything it was just what we needed. Attumen the Huntsman taught people to watch their threat or die. Moroes taught people to apply, re-apply and respect crowd control... or die. Maiden of Virtue taught healers to keybind their cleanses so they could hit them quickly enough to save people's lives... or they would die. And so on and so forth. I wrote about my memories of Karazhan in a bit more detail previously.

I was having a good time, learning things alongside my guildies, killing new bosses and getting a lot better at the game. People were always happy to have me in their group because shadow priests were this strange new thing that hadn't really been considered viable in Vanilla but was suddenly extremely useful to have around. And we just got along well too. Looking back at screenshots I took during that time, I ended up capturing a lot of silly banter in guild chat.

We cleared Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and eventually Magtheridon's Lair (even if getting that damn cube clicking right wiped us way too many times). We were somewhat behind the curve, meaning that by the time we were ready to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye, the attunement requirements for them had been removed (though some of us still did the quests for laughs). That didn't make our journey any less meaningful though, and while there was some turnover in the roster obviously (my former levelling partner left to join a more progressed guild for example), we continued to go from strength to strength. It was a bit of a blow when our combined guild and raid leader suddenly lost interest in the game seemingly overnight, but by then our momentum was so strong that someone with a less powerful personality was able to take over and keep the show running anyway.

We killed Lady Vashj and Kael'thas, and started working on Mount Hyjal and Black Temple (also after their attunements had become non-mandatory). When Zul'Aman came out, a mage friend made it a personal goal to build a hand-picked 10-man team that would practice the instance until we could successfully complete the "bear run" - a timed challenge that would result in a unique mount reward for one person - and I was one of his picks because I was his friend and just that good by then. Beating that challenge as a team was probably the height of my WoW raiding career. I also wrote a post about that before.

We never made it into Sunwell, but didn't really care much at the time either. That instance felt like something that Blizzard had kind of tacked on at the end to keep the super hardcore busy - after all, Illidan was the real end boss of the expansion, right? We were working on Mother Shahraz in Black Temple when the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch applied a blanket nerf to all raids, but fortunately it didn't completely remove all challenge from the last few bosses. It wasn't quite the same when we finally killed Illidan, but we were still proud and felt that we had finished the expansion on a high note.

Things were about to change, however... (to be continued)

Interlude: Duoing Old Raids

It's not all about levelling.

Unlike me, my pet tank was never a raider when he played WoW previously, so he expressed interest in going back to look at some old raids once we were of a high enough level to do them with just the two of us. It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, with him getting to see many zones for the first time and me getting to indulge in nostalgia by boring him with stories of just how much of a pain in the arse this or that boss used to be back in the day. Here's a list of which raids we've done so far in order of raid progression, which is not necessarily the order in which we actually completed them:

Molten Bore Core: Okay, this was one was pretty boring as it was "before my time" so to speak (as I didn't start raiding until Burning Crusade) and I didn't have a lot of stories to tell beyond some vague memories of the Hydraxian Waterlords and needing special water to douse the flaming runes. We did have some fun failing at killing Core Hound packs simultaneously for a while, but other than that it was a pretty boring-looking instance with fairly boring bosses.

Blackwing Lair: The transition from Molten Core to Blackwing Lair always fascinates me because it's just such a complete change of pace in terms of how complicated the mechanics are; I can only imagine how much of a pain that must have been for raiders back in the day. Razorgore is pretty much the perfect boss to duo these days though, with one person using the orb and the other killing everything. He also gave us our first pet drop, an Unscathed Egg, which was won by me.

Vaelastrasz was the first boss to give us trouble, as we first tried him at level eighty-one or so and found that we couldn't get him down before he cast Burning Adrenaline twice, thus killing both of us. With proper cooldown usage we eventually managed to down him anyway, as I cast a quick battle res on my tank after he died, so that he was still alive when the boss finally keeled over. When we came back a second time at eighty-six, Vael didn't even get a single Adrenaline cast off before going down.

During our first visit we were also stopped dead by Ebonroc, as we couldn't outdamage his self-healing and my pet tank wasn't keen on trying a possibly long and drawn-out tank swapping strategy with me in bear form. Again, once we came back at eighty-six he gave us no problems whatsoever, and all the bosses after him also fell in quick succession.

Karazhan: Not much to say about this one other than that it was very easy. After all the trouble I remembered having trying to solo the chess event, I was grateful to have another person to help with keeping the king out of the fire though. Pet Tank also commented that the trash looked like it must have been a nightmare back in the day.

Gruul's & Magtheridon's Lair: These were also fairly boring once we sufficiently overpowered them, though it was interesting to note that High King Maulgar and his posse, as well as Mag's trash could still rack up a significant amount of damage due to the sheer amount of effects and debuffs they've got going on.

Serpentshrine Cavern: Ahh, a raid that was much beloved by me in Burning Crusade, and not just because of the mad end fight! The first five bosses gave us no real trouble, except for Karathress' minions being a bit of a pain when they were all piled up on top of each other with all their different effects and abilities (similar to the Maulgar fight). Vashj on the other hand was going to be a different kettle of fish (pun intended). I had a hunch that they had removed the tainted core's ability to root you, but other than that I wasn't sure whether the fight had been nerfed significantly in terms of mechanics, and the answer seemed to be no. Our first attempt went hilariously badly as I was atrocious at killing the regular elementals and chasing down the tainted ones before they despawned, so by the time we finally freed Vashj herself she was up to eighty stacks of empowerment. I was impressed that it still took us a little while to die! On our second attempt things went much more smoothly, but we then wiped in phase three as Pet Tank kept getting stunned in puddles of green goo and I couldn't provide him with enough healing as feral. After I went resto for our third try, we managed to overcome that obstacle too (and incidentally, Moonfire spam is actually not a bad way of killing the elementals either).

The Eye: After the trouble we had with Vashj, I knew that Kael wasn't going to be a slouch either, and I was right. The other three bosses were once again easy enough, and Solarian even dropped a little voidwalker pet that was won by my pet tank. Just like back in the day, Kael started off easy enough as well, but the phase with all the advisors up at once was just a giant mess. With only two people to eat all the various debuffs, we were basically in a state of constantly being punted around the room while stunned, disoriented, feared and on fire all at the same time, which soon led to our demise. For our next attempt I respecced resto once again and made sure to loot and equip the Staff of Disintegration to at least save us from some of all the disruptive effects - which was fine until phase four, when Kael started mind-controlling me over and over again to heal him and made me get up to all kinds of shenanigans, which once again led to a wipe. I wasn't sure whether there was any way of getting around that other than going in solo, but fortunately I found a video online that showed that simple line of sight prevents the mind control, so I just spent most of that phase standing behind a pillar, which eventually led us to victory.

Anyone got an idea up to what level old raids will be solo-/duoable once we are ninety? I'm guessing that some Cata bosses will be manageable, but probably not all of them...