With the human town well and truly under the control of the evil minions of Archimonde the attentions of our brave members turned to Thrall, a bastion of strength and wisdom within the instance, and his valiant followers. The proud lines of trolls, orcs and taurens drew themselves up around us and prepared for the onslaught. Again wave upon wave assailed the camp, to be beaten back by the horde forces. A major step up from the trash at the start, multiple areas of the camp were assaulted by minions who made the ones the humans had to deal with pale into insignificance. Luckily the horde is made of stronger stuff and held fast until Kaz’rogal made his way towards the town.

Kaz’rogal has obviously been to the Kazzak School of Abilities for Nab Bosses. His mana burn affects the whole raid and has the same explosive result when people go dry. His pathetic attempt at a melee attack does not make him harder although his cleave can be a little bit unwelcome towards the end of the fight. Thrall and his tauren warriors seem to enjoy this fight although explaining to them the mechanics of cleaves seemed to be a lost cause. Despite the best attempts of some people to detonate the raid he died in short order. This boss is more a reward for surviving his trash than a challenge, even when your healers are totally oom you can happily zerg him down with rogues and dps warriors. Lovely idea, put a tiny amount to tweaking to make it more challenging would make the experience a lot more enriching. Even the taurens seem to disrespect him.

The second boss who assaults the Horde camp is a far tricker propositions (well until your healers get some shadow res and go back to slacking). Azgalor is preceded by more waves of trash - mercifully they are significantly easier than the Kaz’rogal waves unless you have no warlocks. In which case they suck. Azgalor is a well thought out encounter which is relatively challenging without being absurd. Hyjal is the one place where you want bosses which are slightly easier then elsewhere, having to redo the trash is a soul-destroying result for a wipe. Thrall and his followers once again engage the boss with ferocity, although their constant chaining of rain of fire onto the raid means that having them die in wave 8 of the trash provides a certain sense of satisfaction. the first of the Tier 6 items come from this guy, and much like Void Reaver he is happy to cough them up much earlier than the others.

With the Horde camp ’saved’ it was time to leave and Jaina turned up to whisk Thrall and his remaining followers to safety. Learning from last time we rode away before meteors started falling from the sky, mining along the way. The mocking cries of Archimonde rang down the mountain as we made our way towards the Night Elves camp to review their forces.

True to form the night elves looked and acted like prissy cowards. Not only was their fluffy little camp not assailed by the undead but they sat around on their mounts looking important and refusing to engage the enemy. They did seem to be experts in keeping a save distance and were, as Rimmer might say, "guarding the rear". Taking our trinkets from Tyrande to aid in the battle ahead we rode down for our first encounter with the final boss of Hyjal. I think it is fair to say he blew us away.

The fight did provide some entertainment for us (given we are not exactly overflowing with druids) as early wipes could easily be blamed on mages and their decursing. As we spent more time on the fight we enjoyed many many complaints of "lag" which can be accurately translated to " I didn’t pick up my tears", "I didn’t keybind my tears" and "i didn’t manage to click my tears". Countless wipes were followed with excuses as to why people persisted in standing next to doomfire with 1 sec to a fear and why they couldn’t manage to click their tears before splatting into the ground. Archimonde is another fight which punishes individual deaths, with the demon unleashing soul charges after every death. This inevitably leads to a chain of deaths.

Our initial joy at seeing no trash was tempered by the sudden realisation that this mean more wiping. A lot more. Then, as so often happens it clicked and he was taken down to 10% with a single death which the raid managed to survive. As 10% arrived the raid unleashed it’s full fury against him. Before the kill there had been some debate as to whether or not the wisps would kill him on their own. We decided that the first kill was not the time to test this and made sure his corpse lay before the tree. Who would have guessed saving trees was part of an orc’s task.

With Hyjal cleared the focus of the guild moved back to Black Temple but the question of the wisps still plagued some people and the following week we decided to test it. Having beaten the instance we decided we needed a new challenge. While some people thought to test the wisps we should get to 10% and then sit about we decided that it was a lot more fun to try and time it so that at 10% we had only one person alive.

The shamans tried to cheat by ankhing but it was clear that one paladin can take off 10% of Archimonde’s health by himself. Exactly how the alliance managed to progress faster before TBC was immediately clear.

We also took a few forays into TK and SSC to key our newer members and this gave us the chance to scrutinise the behaviour of some players and to see whether they could truly understand their class. Deli, the self confessed "good looking, talented one", was the first to prove his worth trying to emulate his personal hero Ugluk, our classy elemental shaman, by breaking a sheep. Sadly he chose to do it with earth shock, immediately earning his hero’s displeasure.

Elsewhere the secret of the periodic grumpy behaviour by our warriors was solved

Some recruitment remains open, most notably from a druid point of view. We a currently looking to add at least one high playing druid to our roster to complete the druid group. Currently we have two ferals, Fluffy and Bouncy (names altered to protect the innocent) who love gamboling around and trying to catch fish, but at the end of the day they need a nice tree to rest under.

We love our little ferals and are becoming worried that one of them might be becoming a cross-dresser…….

Recently they have become more and more vicious, picking on our poor little mages. So please help them out by joining their little team and making them feel complete.

Black temple awaits!