Thursday, October 2, 2008

The endgame hasn’t ended yet

There’s no better cure for the expansion blues than a guild first boss kill. Tuesday night this week Archimonde went down after months of trials. And the energy injection it gave us could have enlightened a metropolis, I swear.

The only thing I regret is that I can’t share the joy with someone outside of the game. To my family this was just another of those two nights a week when mom is online, speaking in a headset, staring into the multicoloured screen, refusing to watch TV like any normal woman at her age, hardly even replying if you say something to her.

How could I ever explain it to them?

“You see we have spent a number of nights in this place, and every one of those nights we have died like 25 times without killing the bad guy we wanted to kill. And now we finally did it”.

They’d stare at me with blank faces, wondering what’s so fun about dying 25 times a night in the first place, considering if they should book a time with a psychiatrist on my behalf.

So I don’t even try. Instead I share the joy with the guests of the inn, knowing you know what I’m talking about.

Lost in time and space
I’m afraid haven’t got any screenshot of my own of the event. The remains of the guy didn’t look too impressive, rather like a heap of junk than a trophy. And besides I still had a stupid diamond mark above my head, being one of the decursers in the raid. Not pretty. But there's a pic on our our website. Yeah, the tiny little gnome in the front is me, you can't miss the pigtails, can you? It will be an eternal reminder that it wasn’t a dream.

I was there and I’ll never forget it. It was the most intense fight I’ve done so far in the game. Always looking for people to decurse. Always looking out for fires and running away from them. Fast. Always being ready to make sure you land softly if you’re tossed up into the air. Always looking out for where you are when you can soon expect a fear and stay FAR away from the fires if the trinket is on cooldown.

I was completely lost in time and space, the world outside ceased to exist – it was so demanding that it swallowed me up completely. I’ve never ever experienced a fight in the game taking so much of concentration and putting so much pressure on every individual player not to make any mistake. We sure lived up to our guild name this night – Adrenaline.

I probably could have done a lot of things much better. I did die first of all in the raid once, because of a stupid mistake. And I’m pretty sure that I took some bad ways away from the fires a few times, putting my raid mates in awkward positions.

But still, I did what is most important of all – I managed to stay alive in the last, successful try. There’s no way to describe how happy and proud I was, standing on my feet as he entered the famous 10 % state, when he’s a sure kill, and we were realizing that this actually was going to happen.

More epic nights
The reactions after the kill have been mixed. I and a few other fellows thought: “Wow, this was fun, let’s do it again!”. But I think the majority, who’ve enjoyed a few more wipe nights than I have, feel that they need a break from Mount Hyjal. “I’m afraid I’ll get little red spots all over if I have to do any more waves”, as one of the mage veterans put it. So in the next few weeks we’ll probably focus on Black Temple again and see how far we can progress there before the 13th November.

There are yet another 16 scheduled raids to take off, the last one of them planned to November 11. I bet we’ll run every single one of them, according to plan. We should be able to do some more first kills before there’s a new game to deal with. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have any more epic nights this autumn.

My conclusion is that the endgame of The Burning Crusade doesn’t end unless you decide you’ve had enough. The thrill and adventure is still there, waiting for us.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats!

That's very exciting news!

Gevlon said...

Whoa! I really envy you for making the smart choices and find a guild where this was possibe. I wish I was smarter half year ago. Congrats! Your success is inspiring!

Anonymous said...

gratz for the kill, and gratz for the success on the epic quest of maintaining a functional 25-man raid when everybody seems to be with altholism or warhammerism

Anonymous said...

@Isisxotic: Thank you!

@Gevlon: Thank you! I guess I did the right choices (which were pretty tough sometimes and included a server transfer into the unknown) and had a bit of luck as well.

@Eishen: Thank you! Yes, the summer ment struggeling for all guilds including ours. But thanks to dedicated officers, bumping recruitment posts every day and keeping up the spirit in the guild, we're on track again. I'm happy to have found other people who haven't gave up about raiding in TBC yet.

Xdawgg said...

Woot. Congrats. I too have a family that has no idea whats so fun about this game. Well, my kids enjoy me talking about it, but the wife doesn't care.

Spicytuna said...

Grats!! Did he drop you his sword?

Anonymous said...

@Spicytuna: Nope. He dropped the head, but it turned into a rogue one this time. We would have to farm him for quite a while before my dkp would be enough to get anything from him, so it's quite unlikely it will happen.

But this night loot felt pretty irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

Woot, major gratz! Getting Archy down is quite the achievement. :)