So this kill require some more comment than the usual. Almost exactly 2 months since we killed the previous boss, Thok the Bloodthirsty. 320 wipes. That’s not an amount of attempts to be sneezed at, certainly the most spent on a single boss in the last 2 expansions (rumor has it Lich King might have sucked even more blood of us, but that didn’t end in a kill, so not quite the same).
No doubt the boss is hard, no doubt there’s only so much good gear will help you with here. In our case, however, the greatest obstacle was the Christmas holidays, which somehow magically transformed into almost a month of no progression raiding. People had obligations, increased workload (yeah, let’s face it, by now it’s work rather than school for most of us), travels. Worse still, at the same time we’ve lost a few solid raiders who came to the conclusion they could afford and wanted to try out a 4 raids per week schedule. No hard feelings at all and all the more power to them, someone’s gotta keep Azeroth safe on the days we cannot attend to it! Still, it did result in some pretty tricky recruitment, where we needed rather geared players willing to join us while the raid size squish planned for WoD is on the horizon. With all this in mind, the first few dozens of pulls after Christmas break felt rather underwheling, since we had to give the new guys some time to learn the basics.
In the end we, as usual, did manage to overcome the difficulties, new people got the hang of it and things were falling back on tracks. Having had some wipes in the range of 10% by the end of the previous raid, spirits and expectations were high for Sunday. Even more so seeing as a nerf to the encounter was announced meanwhile, effective next reset!
We are all the more proud to present the following photo of a very dead goblin with a strong Mimiron-esque flavor.
It would be very unfair not to emphasize one more thing. Huge thanks to the people who ended up on standby the evening the boss died. With all those wipes behind us, no one was keen on missing the kill. It really is a pleasure to hang out with mature people.