Face, meet floor
My very casual guild has a very light raid schedule, Saturday/Sunday on alternating weekends. Based on this schedule, it was our last ‘official’ raid weekend before WotLK hits the shelves. I wanted to do something special for this last weekend, but it didn’t quite turn out as expected. Due to lack of numbers doing T5 or even T6 content for shit and giggles was out of the question. Let me tell you, I sing the praises of 10-man progression, bring it on.
Then old-world raids came up as alternative. Everyone loves to complete achievements for old world stuff. My guild recently co-hosted a Molten Core adventure, so I had my eyes on bigger goals. AQ40! Bug mounts for everyone, and seeing C’thun, that was my goal. Now, I have been sick with bronchitis for over a week, and on Saturday I just didn’t feel like leading a raid and tanking. Never mind that we had only 19 people signed up, not all of them 70. It just seemed a recipe for disaster. A friend and raid leader from our allied guild took over and I brought my boomkin for facerolling DPS.
Very few people in the raid had ever been to AQ40, so it was mostly a brute force approach, subsequent wipe, visit to Wowwiki and then a second try getting the boss down. I think the only boss we one-shot was Prophet Skeram. We wiped once on all other bosses. The bug trio was a bit chaotic, so was Battleguard Sartura. I have no words to describe the bug tunnel and wish I had taken a screenshot. If you can’t stand bugs, do not go there. Ever. Grossest gauntlet ever. We weren’t done with the gauntlet yet when someone already pulled Fankriss, but we got him down. I am not surprised that people went nuts with nature resistance for Princess Huhuran, she was pretty nasty, and like all princesses in the game, pretty ugly.
And then came the Twin Emperors. Oh. My. God.
Here’s where things went down the toilet pretty fast. After the first couple wipes, one of the physical tanks had to leave and so I brought in Kadomi after all to pick up Vekni’lash after the teleport. On the first try with me in I promptly messed that up. On all other tries from there on I picked up fine, though it sucked when the teleport timer was a little bit off and I moved in too early, hit with an Arcane Barrage. Still, Warbringer really helps here, a lot. The damage you take there as tank is a joke, every trash mob in a heroic hits harder.
And yet we wiped continuously. We just didn’t have the numbers, especially when it came to healers. The warlock tanks just weren’t kept up and as soon as one of them went down, shit happened. Eventually we called it. Hats off to those of my readers who actually did this content at level 60. I have no idea how you did it, because it sure made places like ZA and Karazhan look like a joke.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:10 am
We’ve been doing very light raiding duty as well lately (not that we ever do it heavy). We went to ZA mostly to see how fast we could do the timed run even though you can’t get a bear now. Wow. The nerf bat hit that place hard, but it was so much fun watching everything get mowed down. We’re a tiny, new guild so we’d never even cleared ZA before. It was our first time seeing both Hex Lord and Zul’Jin. We ended up 1-shotting both though. I think we’ll do one more Kara badge run this week. Those old pally badge boots are now amazing for warriors and I’m 17 badges away. I want them.
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November 4th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Heh.
Emps’ damage may be a joke *now*, but I’ll tell you that at 60, with 9K hp buffed to the gills, taking 2500 regular hits and 4K+ specials *that lowered your defense*, it was no joke. We had 5 healers keeping each tank up. I was one of the tanks on our first kill of Emps, and my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry, and I was still wound an hour after they hit the floor!
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admin Reply:
November 4th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Serious kudos, I have no idea how you guys did it then. Our big problem were the warlocks, the healers just couldn’t keep them alive. With the much smaller health pools at the time, I have no idea how you did it? I thought the instance seemed crazy hard. The bug tunnel was insanity.
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mavfin Reply:
November 4th, 2008 at 4:44 am
Half the time I stood there and ate shadow bolts on the caster boss, too, while heals landed. We had *one* warlock who specced and geared to tank. I ended up eating bolts sometimes if he died. I think they were hitting for 3-4K each.
Another scary time was being stuck in zerker stance on warrior call tanking Nef, and eating a shadowflame. I lived with like 50 hp before a heal landed.
Probably the biggest pita tanking had to be the green dragons we were hitting to get NR gear. 40-second cooldown on *sunder* sucks. (pre-devastate). I threw everything but the kitchen sink at those dragons to keep them looking at me.
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November 4th, 2008 at 6:00 am
We did this at 70 with my guild. It was hard to do then. The twins gave us troubles as well it was most difficult. But we had fun and most of us got ourselves bug mounts
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November 11th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Yeah, twin emps are definitely still a challenge. Honestly, we might have had a lot more trouble if we hadn’t just pugged the remaining people. We only had about 15 people between DotA and CoD who wanted to go, and then pugged some more and others just logged on and decided to come, so we ended up doing the whole thing with 30-35 people… I think we had 2 healers on the warlock (including me, who I think was the best geared healer in the raid). Warlocks used to have to go soul link in order to tank this, and I think they also wore special resist gear.
When I did it back in the day, I was a hunter… aimed shot weaving, aspect of the cheetah, run to the other side (aspect of the cheetah so we could squeeze out as much dps as possible), aspect of the hawk, aimed shot weaving… repeat! XD
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