The Enigma Order

Top 6 guild moments



Our guild is over six years old. We made The Enigma Order already in the beta, and had the guild up and running just a few days after official release. We have been raiding constantly and consistently through three versions of the game, starting on the fourth. We’ve always had a big member base, and for some weird reason, many of our earliest members are still active to this day. Naturally, those 6 years are filled with great moments, and it’s been really hard to pick just six of them to include in a list like this. But let’s try anyway.

Instead of just jumping straight to the list, I’d like to sum up a bit of stuff I couldn’t make room for. When it comes to raiding, we’ve had some epic boss kills, and some equally epic boss wipes. We’ve both had 1% wipes and kills with one raider alive on Onyxia. We’ve had some really disastrous times on bosses like Cthun or Lich King, but we also had some spectacular moments when we steamrolled Blackwing Lair or Naxxramas 25. And the likes of Lady Vashj, Twin Emperors, Vaelastrasz, Kael’Thas, Illidan comes to mind when we’re thinking of our greatest kills. We’ve looted a few legendary items, and we’ve never looted Stormrage pants. We’ve been clad in purple items pretty much ever since Apox looted those Lawbringer boots from Lucifron up untill now, when we’re picking apart cataclysmic raid instances for those shiny 359 epics.

Being in a guild is also more than just raiding. Sure, we have members who log on for the raid, and log off it’s over. And we have those members who are online all the time but never raid. And that’s not any surprise really, such a big game leaves many options on how to play it. But all can agree that being in a community is rewarding on many different levels. And with a big community comes weird situations, and some of the most memorable moments in this guild are not necessarily the accomplishments from raids.
Not unexpected is Enimusha/Namino involved in many such moments. Not only has he been in the guild since pretty much the beginning, he’s also an extremely skilled player, has the gamer attitude, and is an.. eh.. interesting person. To say the least. There was a time in BWL, we were practicing Razorgore – a boss we kinda struggled a bit with. But this was the moment, we were all buffed to the bone, waiting for final instructions. When suddenly Enimusha (mage) ran mindlessly into the mobs, starting the event. After an obvious and painful wipe, Enimusha could tell us that he spilled coffee in his keyboard and paniced, unable to talk in teamspeak and clearly unable to control his toon.
Speaking of spilling stuff in the keyboard. Ihsahn/Windir is obviously best known for levelling his hunter, then deleting it and levelling a new hunter with the same name. But he’s also a notorious keyboard-destroyer. The likes of tomato soup, christmas pudding and the most common: christmas soda has found their way into his keyboard on numerous occasions. Windir is also famous for coming late to raids twice because he got stuck in an elevator.

When it comes to pvp, we’ve also always produced great moments, specially when our best pvpers were wrecking havoc in arenas, or when Chimp got famous for being the first moonkin to ever produce results in battlegrounds. And then we have Denatus, who was guildmaster during our best times in vanilla. He tried hard to find recognition in the world of pvp, and his efforts paid off. On the unofficial forum, Denatus got the title ”the known ganker” by his horde counterparts. Good job!

Like I said, many good moments, and it’s been hard to choose. I’ve asked a good handful of members to help contribute with their opinions and I've come up with the following list: The six greatest moments in The Enigma Order’s history:



6. Our many great videos.

Not actually a single moment, but there was a time when guild members were pushing out videos on a regular basis. Sadly, we see less of this today. This is something I hope will change. The cool thing was that the best videos weren’t necessarily of us killing raid bosses. When I think of our best videos, one name obviously comes to mind: Xxar. Obviously not in our guild anymore, and sadly not present in our forums either.
Now, Xzar used to film our raids during vanilla, but my favorite movies of his was the propaganda videos, where he tried to get us to sign up for raids. The Cthun and Naxx videos are particularly great. For some reason, he also immortalized a time we tested Nefarian trash naked. I’m not sure why.
I mentioned Chimp, who enjoyed pvp. He made a video that for apparent reasons became somewhat famous. The minute druids got moonkin, he went into AB, decked in the best spelldamage epics and shot movies, and Instagib is still to this day a cool little video.
I also found a cool pvp video of some of our other dutch members, which I rehosted. It’s called Explosive Care, and I just love the silly little intro.
Then there is the famous video Xzar made of us doing AQ40. This video ended up winning a contest, and the guild got 20 beta keys for TBC.



5. Enimusha is fooled by The Enigma Owner

Now let’s advance a few months to the first expansion, and turn our attention back to Enimusha. He has been known to react strongly against stuff he’s uh against, he’s also always been a big fan of pvp. April 1st was coming up, and me and Mojorising cooked up a devious april fool’s joke. In the midst of the night, we created a new guild with the cheesy name ”The Enigma Owner”. We also posted on the forum that anyone in the community that wanted to do pvp had to place their character in this guild. Most people got the joke immediatly, but Enimusha... well, instead of telling you more, check out the original thread, and then Enimusha’s reaction in the classleader forum. Just a spectacular guild moment.



4. Anub’Arak



Our greatest challenge in Wrath of the Lich King expansion was the Lich King himself. We beat him in heroic 10 man, but with 25 players, we just couldn’t get it to work. And like a certain old god, we never actually conquered heroic Icecrown Citadel when it was relevant. A blemish on our record, no doubt. But if we would have gotten him down, it’s still likely to be overshadowed by the kill of Heroic Anub’Arak.
After wiping more than we had on any other boss, something weird happened. The guild spirit appeared. No one was down, no one was discouraged, and no one gave up. The result is of course that we ended up killing arguably the hardest boss so far in the game, and at a point when most guilds would have given up.



3. Ginnunga is owned in Silithus

Back in the Molten Core days, we had a close competition with another guild on the server on who took Ragnaros first. And surprisingly enough, it wasn’t an alliance guild. The horde guild Cosa Nostra were exactly at our point of progression, taking down the MC bosses the very same reset we did. This competition stretched out beyond the instance, and we ended up doing some intense world-pvp against their members. But surprisingly enough, there was no anymosity between our guilds, we even had their members come to our forums for quite a while just to chat and post nonsense. Sadly they ended up migrating, and we lost our horde counterparts. At this point there was still a lot of world pvp going on, but it was certanly not on a friendly level, like our skirmishes against CN.

The big horde guild at the time was Trolltyg and Ginnunga. Trolltyg was all about raiding, and kinda carebears otherwise. But Ginnunga was a force to be reckoned with, both when it came to battleground and world pvp. Many an evening could we hear cries in guildchat from Apox and Ihsahn when they were being ganked by Ginnunga players. And obviously they were always outnumbering us, always killing us when we were surrounded by mobs, always when we were low on hitpoints.

Now, there was this time when we were doing the Twin Empererors and they bugged. They bugged a lot, and they could be really hard even when they were not bugging and rogues on top of their game. But this time we had to wait for respawn or something. Someone said they could summon an abyssal lord. Cool enough.. We sent a scout out to the next crystal, but it was already being used... by Ginnunga.
Now is the time to see the video, and skip to 8.34 for the most satisfying, one-sided pvp moment in wow history.



2. The Enigma Order’s first anniversary

This is the story about stuff that just came together perfectly. Picture this, our first anniversary is coming up and we want to celebrate it in style. Obviously at this point, we had no idea we were to celebrate five more, so we were really excited. We were doing BWL those days.



Believe it or not, we were steamrolling through the hardest instance at that point in the game...
And then we kill Nefarian for the first time the very day before the anniversary date. Arguably one of our greatest first time kills, after many early wipes, we just went straight for the throat with a perfect kill.
Funny thing that we replicated this feat 5 years later.



And of course we went all out with various events. We held the original ”low level leveling competition”, with 20+ participants. Boltan won, and made a great recount of his journey from 1-10.
We also had a memorable duel tournament, with brackets, finals and all. Everything was allowed, and believe me when I say people farmed for flasks, and all available buffs, trinkets and assorted weird items that would give them the edge.
Enimusha won, with Nemus and Sweter close behind, and all agreed it was glorious!
And finally we had a lottery where the head of Onyxia was the first prize.

It was just the perfect birthday. Sadly all the threads that documented all these events were lost when we moved the forum from the server in Denatus’ closet, to somewhere a bit more stabile.


And the greatest moment in The Enigma Order's history... No shocking surprises today...






1. Ragnaros

Do not think it’s sad that our greatest moment is from the first raid instance we cleared. We have killed many harder bosses than Ragnaros. Look at it as a major part of the guild’s rich history. We have accomplished more than 99% of the guilds in the world, we’re still strong, we’re definitely still around. But there was something special about Ragnaros and actually our entire Molten Core experience... And I’m sure when you hear me out (and see the evidence), you’ll agree that Ragnaros was a special moment.

You see, apart from the first time we kill bosses, they’re most of the times simply done for the farming aspect. If even that. If I recall correctly, we only killed Vasjh twice or something. There really wasn’t any need to do it again.
But Ragnaros was... is special every time. In fact, those who were there will agree that simply reaching Big Rag was one of those very special moments, simply seeing Ragnaros being summoned is monumental.
And we shared lots of great moments with him, first time kill, first time before sons, first time we got Eye of Sulfuras, first time we got Stormrage Pants... Wait, what?

Seriously, we had a lot of fun with Ragnaros. And one moment I’d like to talk a bit about was a special occation, I believe it was our 5th or 6th kill. Could have been our 10th kill, I don’t know, but I do remember the moment. We were buffed to the bone, and still not guaranteed a kill in the first try on the big guy.
* Then. Bam! 15 minutes till server restart *
We knew we had time for one try, and we feared that restart could mean trash respawn – and in worst case scenario, Ragnaros despawn! And we took him. Flawlessly, before sons. And never have you seen faster loot distribution! And this was the days we had master looter. Fantastic moment!

And then there was the first kill.

And you need to realize that there was a time when we had no clue how to play this game (some of us still don’t). Now, imagine you have 40 of these clueless boys and girls. Molten Core, while simple, was a mighty challenge for guilds where half the players still had no grasp of the basics, like threat. Or buffs. Or playing with keyboard and mouse. Or being in front of your PC when the fights started.

Yup, Molten Core wasn’t easy, and Ragnaros was particularly hard. We had two hours to practice him before he despawned. And believe me, at this point, Majordomo was hard enough for us, and it was just completely demoralizing for us to take him again just to summon Ragnaros. So yeah, we practised Ragnaros two hours per reset. Sounds weird? Well, things were different, our view on raiding was different, our view on the game was probably very naive (for instance, we ran out of Molten Core, went to LBRS to mind control mobs that had fire resistance buffs). Things were different indeed. And we didn’t become eh ”hardcore” before we got past Vaelastrasz in BWL. So naturally, it took a long time before we got him down. We spent probably like 4-6 resets getting him down.

But when we finally took him, we knew it was a team effort, and even those who weren’t inside MC were listening to Teamspeak. I’ll be honest, for me it was probably the greatest moment I’ve had while playing a game. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.  For those of you who weren’t with us back then, I’ll assume you either did it with another guild, or have experienced fights that generate similar feelings.

And in any way, I think both new and old members will find this video – and sound – monumental, and familiar. And even if the quality of the video is low, it still captures perfectly a magnificent moment. May we have many more!


Happy birthday once again, The Enigma Order.