We mentioned in our last post that our focus had been completely on Black Temple as we pushed to complete in before the release of Patch 2.4. Since we accomplished that goal this past Sunday, we decided to swing back to visit Archimonde, who had the distrinction of being the only boss we hadn’t killed outside of Sunwell Plateau.
Tonight we quickly ripped through the first 4 Hyjal bosses, taking about 2 hours to clear to Archimonde himself. We took a quick break to refresh ourselves and got to work on a boss who we hadn’t seen in well over a month.
Archimonde hits like a truck and loves to send his pet flames out chasing after random people in the raid. He also has a great time throwing random people (and the folks around them) into the air and hoping they fall to their death. Basically, he’s an asshat of the highest order and we made it our mission to see him fall.
But first we fell. A lot. There was a lot of carnage and costly repair bills, but those things don’t phase us. We just picked ourselves up and kept going, slowly getting better and better as the night went on. Finally, on our last attempt of the night and as a surprise to no one who regularly reads these posts, we took him out. That makes two instance-end bosses in two days and I’m proud of us for the hard work and execution.
Some people note amusedly (and rightfully so) that even though we’ve been working on Illidan for the last two weeks, we haven’t taken down Archimonde yet. They’re right of course, nearly every guild completes Mount Hyjal before progressing substantially into Black Temple.
Then again, Omen has never really done things like other guilds and what those other people don’t know is that we set a guild goal of completing Black Temple prior to the release of Patch 2.4. We started talking about it back in late January when we were 4/5 in Mount Hyjal and 3/9 in Black Temple and needed something to really challenge ourselves to play our best.
Back then, we knew that the 2.4 patch would be released at some point in the “near” future and wanted to challenge ourselves to try and clear Black Temple before the patch was released. So we pushed and pushed, mowing down Black Temple bosses at high speed as we constantly refined our clears to be faster and faster, hoping to down Illidan before Patch 2.4 was released.
Tonight, on our 3rd night of full attempts on Illidan Stormrage, we accomplished that goal. We knew that Patch 2.4 was looming, with nearly every sign pointing to it being released tomorrow, so we rescheduled our traditional Sunday raid (which we normally may have just skipped because of the Easter Holiday) to tonight and got down to business. Our reward came in the form of a 20 minute epic battle in which we were victorius even though we had never taken Illidan below roughly 45% health in our previous attempts.
This kill represents a lot of hard work from all of us and to accomplish our goal literally right before our self-imposed “deadline” makes it that much sweeter. Congratulations Omen, I’m very proud of us all - we earned it!
Kill Video (Feral Druid PoV)
I mentioned in our last post that there was only one more hurdle for us to clear before we were able to face Illidan himself. The Illidari Council is a group of 4 nasty Blood Elves guarding the doors to Illidan himself.
They make for an interesting fight. Think High King Maulgar coupled with the Twin Emperors and then throw in a sprinkling of Kael’thas. There’s a lot to keep track of and the potential for some very nasty burst damage that can insta-gib nearly anyone. The mobs also share a health pool (ala Twin Emperors), so the fight takes a long time as you slowly whittle them all down. It’s a well designed encounter in which everyone has a very specific job to do and I, for one, really enjoyed it.
We had our first chance to work on them last week after downing Mother Shahraz, then came back tonight at the tail end of a pretty slow week and got back to work on them. As usual, we tweaked and adjusted our tactics and made consistant progress as the night went on. Finally, to the surprise of no one reading this, we took them out on a nearly flawless last attempt of the night.
Kill Video (Feral Druid PoV)
Normally I’d end the post right there, but I can’t leave out a nice teaser picture of us listening to Uncle Illidan tell us a story…
