Written by Sil
Thursday, 20 September 2007

There is only so many times you can hear "Let’s see how you hold up against the might of the Darkener, Thaladred" before nightmares start to invade your life and you start having delusions about a lumbering nub endlessly trailing after you throwning his axe and hoping for invisible terrain to block you in. Luckily last week we ensured that for at least 6 days none of us could hear it again. The hugely entertaining Kael’thas fight, marred only by the length of phase one and his endless babbling, was over. There was a comforting silence throughout Tempest Keep, a silence not mirrored on our Teamspeak.

After a close call on the previous reset an abrupt change to our usual raid schedule brought us to Tempest Keep last wednesday. We drifted through the other bosses, everyone’s thoughts on the annoying blood elf and the gateway to Hyjal/Black Temple. A slight ‘misjudgement’ on Void Reaver and the fact that the Al’ar kill was so slow re-blessing was required meant that by the time we got to the Kael’thas trash time was running out. Over the previous weeks the Kael’thas trash has succeeded in providing light entertainment for the evening - the deaths of the melee dps classes who can’t cope with not dpsing for a whole mob (note: they call this dedication and bravery, the healing channel has another word for it) - and the ever popular "kite the battlemages over semi afk people and see if they can get one-shotted". With adrenaline rising however there was no time for that and instead the trash was promptly dispatched leaving us in front of the giant elf and his 3 evil minions (the fourth being of such a beautiful construction no bad word may be said about her).

A few warm up pulls were made but in order to continue our policy of killing things at the end of raids we waited until almost the end to put all the hard work of the last few weeks together and clear the instance. Dispatching adds and weapons with ease the raid ploughed into phase 4 & 5 steadily beating his abilities until at last his voice was silent.

The gateway to Hyjal was open……

Running around like ten year old children on a sugar high most of the raid decided to visit Hyjal - not to make a pull but to have a look round and generally let off steam. Brief drooling over the stats on Tier 6 made way to mocking those classes Blizzard hates in terms of looks. Even in an instance with few enemy mobs people found a way to die - taurens doing their headless chicken impressions plummetting from the cliffs and falling to their deaths. Eventually growing tired of flapping around we gathered in front of Jaina and decided there was no harm in trying a pull - no harm except that 18 half dressed players and no heal setup is hardly a good way start. The first waves however were no problem and it was only about half way through that it became apparent that things were about to get painful, wave 5 demonstrated this very effectively. There was however plenty to time for all to agree there was much fun to be had and our return on sunday met with different results.

Find out about life in Hyjal in part two of this update!

With Kael’thas holding the key to the new instances we have found other ways to amuse ourselves, sauntering through SSC is hardly the most entertaining of nights and even the outdoor bosses failed to amuse. It was with relief that Battery-baiting raised its head once again and the bored dps classes took every opportunity to mock the poor little protection cow and endlessly challenge him to duels. One night (probably misclicking) one of them managed it.

Sadly for the self styled "overlord of uberness" it all went rather badly wrong. Warlocks, remember, are a very underpowered class

Not to be outdone his partner in crime took advantage of the situation to initiate a duel of his own. Oh dear.

Umbrage recruitment remains open in limited classes and while we will consider exceptional applicants in all classes at the moment we are only looking for 2 warlocks, a healing druid and a shadowpriest.

Follow our intial foray into Hyjal with this weekend’s update!