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.

Beware of the Great Bear in the sky

I love it when the game makes fun of me for whining.

Wah, everything seems so mundane, nothing's even worth taking a screenshot of, yadda yadda yadda.

Then I fly towards the Whistling Grove to do Those Bears Up There and see this:

So, Shintar, how does that make you feel?

Um.

Er.

Screenshot!

Thanks, WoW, for making me laugh. Even if it's at glitchy graphics.

As an aside, I have no idea how that happened, other than that it seemed to be the bear cub that by boyfriend's character had already been holding up for some time, while waiting for me to finally stop being distracted and catch up. I guess they really get quite heavy after you hold them up for a while...

Random Firelands Dailies Thoughts

So how is everyone doing with the new Firelands dailies? I have a couple of guildies who've been doing them religiously and have by now unlocked the second vendor or so; I'm not sure as I haven't quite been keeping up myself. I was trying to originally, but I prefer to team up with my boyfriend who doesn't feel like doing them every day, and once I realised that acquiring more marks of the world tree on my own would only cause us to get out of sync I gave up on it.

I quite like the dailies in Mount Hyjal, they are fun and reasonably varied. Sethria's Roost is becoming a bit of a social hangout as people like to team up and take out the mobs there together, seeing how the credit gets shared automatically and everyone gets their quests done more quickly that way. I found that with all the helpful NPCs that you get, you can actually solo the elites quite easily even as a healer, but it's slow and certain abilities can get quite annoying if your class/spec doesn't have any good means of countering them (for example an interrupt to prevent the Seething Pyrelords from putting their reflective shields up).

I do kind of wonder where all those NPC druids come from. Weren't druids supposed to be semi-rare once upon a time? Now there seem to be four of them for every player regardless of class... Also, I can't decide whether the random named NPCs that show up to help you are simply funny or bordering on ridiculous. They make funny quips while fighting, but I can't help but find it slightly weird that Mog'dorg the Wizened for example has come all the way from Blade's Edge Mountains just to help me with my dailies. People like Budd or the paladins from Eastern Plaguelands make sense to me, but... Chromie? I thought you'd be better than having to do dailies like some random schmuck!

I'm a bit undecided about the Molten Front itself. I've enjoyed watching the tree grow (the "personal phasing" works quite well as far as I'm concerned), and I like that the initial set of dailies are all very forgiving towards people who may not be very well-geared or questing in a non-dps spec. There are so many NPCs around and fighting that it's easy to pick and choose your battles even when it's busy. I think Burn Victims is also the first daily in the history of ever where being a healer actually gives you a slight advantage! On the other hand, the quests are fairly repetitive, with every day consisting of the same round of mob-killing and clicking on some sparklies on the ground. I don't mind plain old kill quests at all if I can construct my own story around them, but if they are supposed to be part of an epic pre-made story of how I single-handedly conquer the Firelands by doing daily quests (or something) then I expect a bit more.

The quests for the Shadow Wardens and the Druids of the Talon are a bit more challenging in terms of mob density and respawns; I wouldn't want to be caught out there on my own or I'd get mauled pretty quickly. I also find it a bit annoying that you have to do the first round of Molten Front dailies every day to be able to access the other two factions; it would be nice if you could simply pick and choose once you've unlocked them the first time.

How does the Forlorn Spire keep getting rebuilt every day anyway? This really strikes me as one of the worse quests to make a daily out of. I can't help but picture a bunch of Sons of Ragnaros or imps slaving away, doing nothing but rebuild that spire, day after day, and sighing in exasperation when those bloody druids tear it down yet again.

Druids of the Flame possibly have the most annoying mob sound effects ever. Every time I kill one, it feels as if I'm facing off against a miniature Sindragosa, and there are quite a lot of them... /twitch.

Enduring the Heat seriously traumatised me the first time I did it. Now that I know how to do it it's stupidly easy, but the first time I just kept wondering WTF was going on since I could hardly see anything for all the fire elementals piling on my head, fell into the lava and then struggled for ages to climb back out again.

Falling off Fireplume Peak and getting rescued by a druid who dumps you in a random place is fun exactly... once. Then you just want to be able to get on with it.

I've only had a brief look at what I'm working towards next, but talking to the lady standing next to the empty moonwell really made me thoughtful. From the way she talks about it, filling up the moonwell would have been a perfect excuse for a daily quest, transporting a bit of water through the portal every day, and maybe working some kind of enchantment to prevent it from evaporating. Instead, we are tasked with gathering some arbitrary currency, and once we pay her the right amount of marks, it'll all happen on its own. Somehow this doesn't feel very adventurer-like. Instead of actually doing the thing I want to do (fill up the moonwell), I "work" by killing mobs to earn enough currency to let someone else do it. Reminds me a lot of the "running heroics to get raid gear" debate.

Looking at the big picture, I'm also still undecided on how I feel about the system of daily tokens slowly unlocking new vendors that sell things for gold, instead of the vendors opening up fairly quickly and the player having to grind out tokens to buy their wares, as it was done at pretty much all previous daily quest hubs. I don't like that the current method encourages reading up outside the game quite so heavily. In-game you have no way of knowing which future vendor will actually sell something that you'll want, so if you just play and pick whatever you like the sound of, you may end up getting very disappointed and feeling like you wasted a lot of hours of token-grinding. (EDIT: As commenters have pointed out, you can in fact see the vendors' wares before unlocking them. Hooray!) On the other hand it feels less demanding, as there is a clear end in sight - unlocking all the vendors - whereas acquiring tokens as currency often left you feeling like you always needed more because there were just so many things to buy.

4.2 - First Impressions

For some reason I always seem to come up with a whole lot of post ideas shortly before a major patch comes out, but then once the patch actually hits I can't think about anything but the new content and end up discarding them. So, to immediately get it out of my system, my initial thoughts on 4.2: (Don't read on if you're concerned about quest spoilers.)

I wonder how many people besides me immediately stopped at the character selection screen and started shuffling. Being able to change the order of your characters is one of those small quality of life changes that just feels like it's been overdue forever. I don't care about visually preserving the order in which I created my characters, I just want the ones I play more often to be on top, damn it! I was very happy to finally be able to do that.

Not everything in the new patch is for max-level characters only. One of my guildies immediately found this little gem for level tens and up for example, which rewards you with a balloon that counts as a non-combat pet and has a rather amusing ending if you hang around to watch after handing in the quest.

Probably not a patch feature, but my guildies only discovered today that doing Ahune in a guild group counts as a full dungeon run for the purposes of the weekly guild challenge. We swapped alts in and out to get goodie bags for all of them and earned over a million guild experience in about ten minutes. I'm not sure that's working as intended, but if it is that's a handy way of racking up the XP in a short amount of time.

Starting work on the new dailies in Hyjal didn't feel very exciting, but I guess it simply takes some time until you get to unlock more. We'll see what things will look like in a few weeks. For now, I don't consider it a problem.

Now, the Thrall quest line was a lot more interesting. I was surprised to see Nozdormu in humanoid form for the first time and immediately decided that he must be evil. Don't get me wrong...

... he looks pretty badass for a man elf dragon, but... he's got a goatee. An evil goatee. He clearly can't be up to anything good.

During the initial cinematic I couldn't help but giggle at Malfurion's reaction to the intruders basically being, "I cast roots on all of them!" Sorry mate, but I can see why Staghelm had trouble taking you seriously there.

The following quest takes you all over the world, to Uldum, Vashj'ir, Deepholm and the Firelands, which would feel quite epic except that Aggra magically teleports you everywhere. I really felt rather torn about this. Part of me was definitely glad that I didn't have to manually go to all those different places just for one quest, but on the other hand I didn't really feel as if I was going anywhere. That's the eternal dilemma with features like this, isn't it?

Blizzard's new phasing-but-not-quite worked very well in my opinion, as you could see all the other players around you and it felt busy, but the NPCs still changed for you personally, depending on which part of the quest you were on. I also thought that the mechanics of the elemental fighting quests were very well suited for the patch day crowds, as mob tagging wasn't really an issue and your "kill credit bar" or whatever you want to call it kept building up as long as you did at least some damage to some mobs. I can imagine it feeling a bit slow though if you end up doing it later when there aren't as many people around.

The only thing that really caused me any grief were other players, as lots of Alliance on my server decided to turn their PvP flag on, and as the elementals were dying in seconds and everyone was maniacally fighting to get a hit in, it was way too easy to hit another player by accident and get flagged without meaning to. I accidentally hit a draenei death knight with a smite during the Firelands portion of the chain myself, which promptly caused him to come over and gank me, so I lost my entire quest progression of what felt like several dozen kills (the bar resets if you die) and then had to take an enforced break of five minutes while waiting for my flag to wear off. Yeah, that wasn't that much fun. When I did the chain on my hunter, my pet randomly decided to go after an Ally as well, without any direction from me, and got me flagged this way, though I managed to escape death that time. It was still annoying. I guess one person's fun world PvP is another one's obstacle.

Also, was I the only one who wondered about Aggra's totems during the Firelands part of the chain? Where the hell does she keep totems that are twice as tall as a tauren? It's funny how some NPCs and items in WoW have increased in size over the years, for no apparent reason other than to make them more obviously visible to players. Most of the time I don't even think about it anymore and just accept that Tirion Fordring is a giant for example, but those totems gave me pause for some reason.

The entire quest chain gives Thrall some interesting characterisation in my opinion, as you basically find out about his most secret thoughts about a lot of issues. A lot of it wasn't exactly unexpected, but I was actually pleasantly surprised to hear that he's had doubts about Garrosh messing up the Horde as well.

And Aggra... well, I'm kind of in two minds about her. I haven't read The Shattering yet so I don't know how she gets introduced, but looking only at the game, she's basically this complete nobody that very obviously only gets shoved into our faces to be Thrall's love interest. I didn't mind her at first, but her new 4.2 voice really grated on my nerves, as it sounded unnecessarily sultry, whiny and somehow entirely un-orcish to me for some reason. On the other hand she's kind of cool, and manages to display some character even while under duress, occasionally snarking at Thrall even while she desperately fears for his life.

The only thing I didn't get was why the big ritual for which we were called to Hyjal in the first place wasn't completed after we saved Thrall. I thought it was supposed to be important?

The quest reward cloak you get at the end is very nice, though I couldn't help but feel like there was suddenly a certain cloak overload going on. Epic cloaks for justice points, cloaks from Ahune, cloaks from this quest, and did you see the first rep reward from the Avengers of Hyjal? Yep, more cloaks.

Speaking of the Avengers of Hyjal, in the evening my guild had its first Firelands raid. I took one step inside and immediately felt like I had ended up in Molten Core 2.0, with the only major difference being that it's open to the sky. But otherwise it's all there: flamewalkers, core hounds, molten giants - lots and lots and lots of them. I guess it's been a while since we last had a raid instance with silly amounts of trash, so fair enough. What with it being our first time, we didn't mind that much anyway because it was all new and amusing to find out about the mobs' different abilities, such as little turtles punting the tanks halfway across the instance.

Our raid leader decided that we should start off with Shannox, aka the guy whose face they pasted onto the tier twelve hunter helm. He doesn't actually appear until you've killed a certain minimum amount of trash, and then he keeps patrolling the entire zone, with each round taking about four minutes. This certainly made for a very different kind of boss fight, as we basically waited in the area that we had cleared out for the fight every time, discussing tactics until he came around again, and then everyone scrambled frantically to be ready immediately while the tanks had to make a good run for it to catch him in time since he moves quite fast. I can foresee a lot of whining about that on the forums and wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard ended up changing it. I think it would be a shame though, because while my first reaction was to find it quite annoying, it also feels a lot more dynamic. Why should all bosses just stand around, waiting for us to kill them?

We didn't make much progress on the fight, but considering that there are only seven bosses in there, I would have been disappointed anyway if the first one had fallen over immediately, on our first night of attempts.

Redoing the 80-85 quests

My focus in WoW is ever-changing as ever, and in the past few weeks or so I've mostly spent my time questing on my max-level alts. I've commented on the linearity of Cataclysm's questing in the past (and so have many others), and as a result have shied away from repeating many of the quests on my alts. I don't like reading the same book or watching the same film over and over. While my main has been a Loremaster of Cataclysm for a while now, my level eighty alts mostly levelled up by engaging in other activities: exploration, gathering, instances. I'd do the first couple of quests in each zone to unlock the portal in Orgrimmar, but afterwards I was happy to never look back.

Well, until recently that is, when I was looking at what ways I had left to progress my alts' gear without raiding and realised that my best options were really things like getting the Therazane shoulder enchants and working towards exalted reputation epics. And how do you get those things? By questing.

So I buckled down and started repeating zones. I've always been someone who at least skimmed all the quest text, even upon repetition, but with the new linearity even I just ignored most of it because I didn't really need a reminder of what I was supposed to do - it was obvious. In many ways it was also boring and tedious, though a couple of zones turned out to be not nearly as bad as I had expected, which was a pleasant surprise. I also couldn't help but be reminded of part of the original purpose of quests - to give players the feeling that they could achieve something even if they only had very limited play time - which is something that I've definitely benefited from when my real life week ended up being busier than I had anticipated.

Mount Hyjal actually turned out to have surprisingly high replay value for me. It's linear, but still less so than other zones. For example there's a point where you can decide to help out at the shrine of Aviana or take another one first. As I said in my initial review of the zone, the gameplay of the quests is varied and fun, and as far as the story goes it really feels like you are achieving something tangible, bringing the ancients back and reclaiming Hyjal bit by bit. I don't mind doing that again.

Vashj'ir on the other hand feels like a massive drag upon replay. I still stand by the good things that I said about it originally, but it really fails to impress a second time. The linearity of progression is very rigid: you spend fifteen minutes at a mini hub and then abandon it, never to return again. The story also doesn't hold up well when experienced a second time. In a nutshell it can be summed up as "you get shipwrecked and discover that the naga are working with the old gods", and it relies heavily on building up suspense about what's going to happen next. Working your way through 150 quests of "golly gosh, whatever are we going to do" when you already know exactly what's going to happen just doesn't cut it.

Deepholm is a lot like Hyjal in my eyes, with a story that emphasises that you're doing something worthwhile at every step of the way and thus feels worthy of repeating. My only problem is that the quests feel a bit too samey to me (it's all about killing earth elementals and twilight cultists really), so I tend to get bored halfway through and then the rest starts to drag a bit.

Uldum is the only zone that I've only managed to repeat once so far, and I think it's pretty much the cut scenes alone that are to blame for this. I don't mind the Ramkahen half of the quests (in fact, I love just hanging out with High Priest Amet and enjoying the view of the underwater world from inside the dam), but the Harrison Jones quest line with its constant clunky cinematics drives me absolutely bonkers. See You on the Other Side! says the quest, "follow me" says Harrison Jones, but then you don't get to do anything at all because clearly moving up the hill yourself is way too strenuous so they just show you a cut scene of your character running and you automatically reappear in the right spot. What the fricking frack. It was annoying the first time, but it only gets worse upon replaying.

Twilight Highlands was another pleasant surprise, but for different reasons than I expected. It has both slightly more lenient and more linear bits, so my enjoyment of those varied. It also had one quest that keeps annoying me in a new way every time I do it, due to having hidden quest requirements that aren't mentioned anywhere, and my characters having suffered repeated deaths due to the helpful NPCs despawning or getting lost whenever I needed them the most. However, one thing that really works in the Highlands' favour are the item rewards. Yes, all the zones shower you in quest rewards, but with how fast you level and how quickly the ilevels go up, many of them don't feel like significant upgrades and don't last very long. Twilight Highlands however offers the best rewards you can get before hitting max level instances, and it's a great way of getting characters up to speed that have fallen behind in terms of gear progression. I ended up taking both my shaman and my death knight through this zone in quick succession without feeling any annoyance at all, simply because getting both their gear sets up to speed for level 85 within an evening felt rewarding enough on its own.

Now, this is one of those topics where I'm really interested in other people's experiences. How many alts have you levelled to 85 yet (if any)? Did you repeat a lot of quests? If so, did you enjoy it? Which zones did you find the most fun to play through repeatedly?

Coming down the mountain

Continuing my inofficial series of belated Cataclysm zone reviews, I'd like to talk about Mount Hyjal today. Like Deepholm, it was another zone that didn't leave me with a strong impression after the first playthrough. It didn't wow me like Vashj'ir did at first, and it didn't tick me off like Uldum. It was just... okay? I guess?

Once again playing through it for a second time made it easier for me to realise what I liked and what I didn't. For example, I really liked the quests in terms of pure gameplay. I don't think I can remember a single quest in Mount Hyjal that bored or frustrated me, aside from Cindermaul being a bit buggy on my first visit and causing a huge congestion in his corner of the cave as nobody could continue without having looted his tome. I also enjoyed the jousting quest line, even if it made my fingers hurt a little.

The main thing that I didn't like was that the zone felt a bit schizophrenic to me in terms of mood. I mean, I really loved the first third of it or so. You do that introductory quest to fly to Mount Hyjal from Moonglade and oh my god, there's Deathwing and Ragnaros and everything's on fire... serious business for sure. The initial quests also put a heavy emphasis on the large scale of the battle, making you battle elementals right outside the inn, getting you involved in fighting Baron Geddon (an ordinary quest that can easily kill you if you're not careful) and restoring the Shrine of Goldrinn. Phasing is used intelligently to show that you've really "won" in certain areas, such as the shrine or "The Inferno" turning into "The Regrowth".

Here and there some funnies are sprinkled in for comic relief, such as that guy who calmly hangs from the ceiling in the cave with the ogres (I was most disappointed to find that there's some kind of bug that made it impossible for me to pick up his quests on my second playthrough) or the dryad whose only concern is saving all the wee animals, but the overall tone of the quests is mostly serious.

But then, as you start getting towards the "middle" section of the mountain, I felt that implementation was starting to get a bit lackluster. The phasing seemed to stop and even after I totally kicked Twlight butt according to the quests, cultists and dragons remained all over the place. I don't actually need phasing to show me how I've changed the world to feel accomplished, but when it's done so well for the initial quests and then just stops that's rather disappointing.

It gets worse when you get to the part where you're supposed to infiltrate the Twilight cult and there's this unbelievably huge and unchanging area that's dedicated to nothing but training recruits, and all the quests are highly silly. Again, I don't mind silly fun at all and I thought the quest where you get a crowd to riot with your public speaking skills was hilarious. But to me, it just didn't fit with the rest of the zone. One moment I'm involved in a serious battle against elemental lords, the next I'm in the middle of a slapstick comedy about incompetent cultists? Meh.

Once you're done with this chain, the zone then goes back to serious business and I actually really liked the final quest to beat Ragnaros with the help of Cenarius and the two archdruids, as it didn't feel to me as if the NPCs were doing all the work for me and there are a variety of things to pay attention to instead of your character just nuking the boss. It's just a shame that getting there involved such a long and bumpy road.

In summary: a zone with fun quests, but the heavy focus on story doesn't always work as its tone and execution are fairly inconsistent.

A trip to Mount Hyjal

No Cataclysm spoilers here, this is about the old Mount Hyjal, the instance. My guild didn't have enough people for a "proper" raid last night, so we gathered what we had and went for a trip down nostalgia lane by fighting the battle for Mount Hyjal once again.

I had a feeling that it would be a fun run when our mage discovered that there were Brewfest banners on the tower in the Alliance base.

Time travel and impending doom can't stop Brewfest!

It did indeed turn out to be a fun run; we revelled in nostalgia and so on and so forth - but it also made me think.

The feelings of nostalgia that I experienced in Black Temple not long ago for example were bittersweet. It was nice to see the bosses again, and kicking butt with ten more levels under our belts was fun in a "getting revenge for all the wipes back then" sort of way, but the realisation how much the game had changed and how a lot of mechanics had become completely obsolete was also accompanied by a certain sense of melancholy, knowing that we'd never get to experience the game that way again - because even if it had been hard and frustrating at times, it used to be fun too.

Mount Hyjal evoked almost nothing of the sort. Maybe it's the scenery, as I'm generally less prone to feeling down in a bright and sunny environment, but there was little that I felt we were missing out on, even as we were steamrolling the instance with seven people of a way higher level than intended.

Take the trash for example: Hyjal was always the home of AoE, the main difference being that this heavily favoured paladin tanks, warlocks and mages back in BC, seeing how they were the only classes with spammable AoE damage abilities. For everyone else it was just pretty dull, single-target stabbing or nuking a lot of relatively low-health mobs, while only a select few people in the raid got to bask in the glory of their unbeatable AoE dps. Going back there at level eighty, with everyone being able to make a contribution, actually felt nothing but right, and almost as if we were only now able to finally clear the content the way it was meant to be played.

Likewise all the bosses except Archimonde were always pretty much tank and spank with only one major gimmick and a couple of minor abilities - they kind of had to be that way back in the day, seeing how the trash made every single boss attempt take about half an hour, and if they had been much more difficult, nobody would've ever got very far without going insane. When coming back at level eighty this has the advantage that even though the fights are obviously still considerably easier, they don't feel completely different and trivialised (unlike several fights in Black Temple for example, which used to have lots of fiddly mechanics that can mostly be ignored these days).

The NPCs also got me thinking, as I watched them die pathetically during the trash waves because nobody really gave a damn about saving them.

Back in the day they were actually really well balanced when I think about it now, because they were genuinely valuable. We used to have people dedicated to kiting single mobs into the NPCs to get them to help out and tried to save them if they got aggro, because they really contributed - but at the same time they were nothing without the players. Jaina and Thrall were powerful, and again, strategies often included positioning that would help to get them engaged, but they still died quite quickly without the rest of the raid.

I do wish that this was something that Blizzard remembered, as I feel that they've thrown way too many NPCs at us during this expansion that were either totally useless in a fight (like the guys "helping" you to get to Valithria Dreamwalker) or so powerful that they could solo everything and made you feel redundant (the leaders in the Battle for Undercity, Tirion stealing the show on the Lich King). Friendly NPCs can be cool, but only if their power is balanced correctly against the player characters.

And then there was Archimonde, oh yeah. I know some of my fellow raiders hate him with a passion, but I still love the fight to this day, despite of the many weeks we spent wiping on him before we finally killed him. I just love fights that force you to think on your feet, where you start with a strategy but have to be able to make small adjustments on the fly depending on circumstances, while at the same time not descending into complete chaos. (Why hello there, Doomfire!)

I also felt a weird sense of pride, always timing my tears correctly so that I didn't even take the tiniest bit of falling damage. It's hardly a transferable skill, but maybe it's because of that that there is something deeply satisfying about still remembering how to do it. Shows just how much time I spent on that fight, when the right way to click is still ingrained in my muscle memory years later.