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.

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!

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…

We were right.

After a single warm-up pull tonight, we easily took her out. The hardest part of this fight comes before you ever face her and that’s in crafting the shadow resistance gear that you’ll need. We’d been getting ready for this fight for a long time and so while many guilds struggle to gear up to a point where she’s doable, we never broke stride and quickly hurdled her on our way to visit Illidan himself. I think we spent a total of an hour and a half in learning her.

On a side note, I wanted to complement the entire guild for the widespread effort in gathering up sufficient shadow resist to make this fight easy. We pumped a lot of time and resources into getting ready for it and I think the results spoke for themselves. Here’s to only having one more speed bump before we fight Illidan himself!

Since we last posted, we made our last visit to Tempest Keep & Serpentshrine Cavern to attune some new folks. Since we don’t do anything half-assed, we decided to attune both our new raiders and some of our more casual folks. When all was said and done, we had attuned 9 new people to Black Temple and Hyjal with a relative small amount of pain and suffering. We aren’t sad to wave goodbye to those instances though, hurray for Patch 2.4!

After we had everyone attuned and accustomed to the Mt. Hyjal/Black Temple fights we already had beaten, we focused on the next obstacle in our path towards total Intarwebz domination: Reliquary of Souls.

If Gurtogg Bloodboil is the healing test of Black Temple, Reliquary of Souls is the DPS check. We’ve always prided ourself in our DPS, so we were really looking forward to this fight and it didn’t disappoint. It’s really 3 smaller fights in one, but requires 3 general things in order to be successful.

• Reliable interrupts
• Reliable dispells
• Blistering DPS

We had all of those in large quantities. Ironically, we didn’t kill RoS as fast as we could have because our interruptors were too good. Many guilds suffer from Spirit Shocks disorienting the Main Tank and letting RoS wander off to go kill a cloth-wearer while you lose DPS time since it’s moving.

Omen suffered from a distinctly separate issue: we interrupted every Spirit Shock and Deaden that came our way (whoopsies!), nearly without fail. Once we solved that problem, we had the fight and we simply disintegrated him in Phase 3 when we had everyone up. It wasn’t even close.

After our kill, we had about an hour left and took a couple of shots at Mother Shahraz, eventually taking her to 2% before we called it a night. Expect some news on that front soon.

He’s widely rumored to be the most healing intensive fight in the game and he doesn’t disappoint. Our healers were cursing up a storm as we slowly polished our tactics over the night, then popped consumables after we took him to 26%. In true Omen fashion, we prevailed on our last pull of the night and are now officially over halfway done with Black Temple.

Our healers deserve a ton of credit for their work in this fight. They always do a great job for us, but really shone tonight. If it’s true that Gurtogg is the “healing check” in Black Temple, then we pass with flying colors.

This kill was brought to you courtesy of a horde of pandas seeking truffles. Nom nom nom…

Lately though, we’ve grown bored of that and decided to spend some time with a new friend by the name of Teron Gorefiend. We originally had planned on killing him last Sunday, but suffered from a mental block and couldn’t get him below 6% health. We were pretty frustrated, especially since we usually buckle down and deliver when bosses get that low, but got our revenge by coming back tonight and absolutely crushing him in a beautiful one shot.

It’s a fun stationary fight (assuming you know what to do with constructs) and we teed off on him as a result. Mental block solved!

The trash on the way to him was certainly more challenging than the Supremus trash, but nothing seemed too bad as we worked towards the hall housing the Shade. We were able to meet up with some friendly Ashtongue Deathsworn on the way and start stocking up on shadow resist recipes for our future date with Mother Shahraz.

While the Shade of Akama fight had been fixed from it’s previously broken “loot dispenser” mode, it’s still a pretty damn easy fight. After two “whoopsie!” pulls, we settled down and destroyed the fight in three and a half minutes while not losing a person.

Then we got to Supremus himself. He’s…..a large fellow. Pretty intimidating actually. You know how the phrase goes though: “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”. That rule held true as we easily took down Supremus on our first pull.

So tonight, we decided on a bit of a change of scenary and took our first real steps into Black Temple. We had been in previously to figure out the trash pulls and to make a couple Naj’entus attempts with a undersized raid, but tonight we brought in a full raid. Considering this guy had helped define some of our overall guild healing requirements, we were really interested in seeing how we could handle the fight.

When people say it’s a healing intensive fight, they’re not kidding. It’s a high intensity fight that allows for very few mistakes. We banged our heads against it for a couple attempts and then starting shifting our groups, positioning and tactics as we refined our strategy and polished our DPS output. Two or so hours later, on what was really our last pull of the night (are you sensing a trend here?), we took down the big fella himself.