Nefarian down!
Our raid normally runs pretty close to the line as far as having available people. We always have plenty of DPS lining up trying to go, but people who can fill key spots like tanks and healers are slightly more difficult to replace. Sometimes, like it did last week when our main tank got food poisoning, the loss of one or two people is enough to derail any plans of raiding for that evening.
Ah well, such is life, right? The raid officers are usually able to make the best of an unhappy situation and get a few heroic groups going, and we try again the following week.
Last week, though, we were floored when our raid leader said “Well, as you guys can see, we don’t have the people for Tempest Keep, so… we’re going to Blackwing Lair and see if we can’t kill us a dargon.”
Rewind back a year and a half to January 16th, 2007 - the date that the Burning Crusade went live. That week saw our last full raid into Blackwing Lair, and the last time we saw Nefarian. We tried for the next few weeks to keep the raid going, but I have very vivid, very bitter memories of about 20 of us standing in the entrance hall to Blackwing Lair ready to go, listening to people looking for quest help in Outlands in our raid channel - people who should have been in there killing a dargon with us, damn it. I mean, seriously! We were perhaps two more weeks at most from having him dead.
I digress. The raid just kinda fell apart at that point, reforming when people started getting their characters to 70 and getting back into the raiding groove.
Anyway! Returning to last week (please keep your arms and legs inside the time machine while the vehicle is in motion), our raid leader decides on a whim that we’re going to BWL. Of course, a large percentage of our raiders are on characters that haven’t been attuned, so we do the single fastest UBRS clear I think I’ve ever seen, summoning people up to the orb so they can join us on the raid. About an hour after our normal start time - first pull on Razorgore!
Did you know there’s a bug now on the Razorgore fight that causes the adds to endlessly spawn, even after he’s dead? Neither did we before last week.
We made it to Ebonroc on our first night in there, winding up with perhaps 28 people in the raid by stop time. We actually did really well considering the number of people that hadn’t seen any of these boss fights, and we only had two raid wipes - one on the Broodlord, and one on Ebonroc where a certain nekkid shaman let his earth elemental cause the entire raid to get shadow flamed in the face. Whoopsie!
It was a great run, we all had a blast even if we didn’t make it to Nefarian. Ah well.
Then Sunday comes, and again we’re short a few people for our normally scheduled SSC raid. Thirty minutes later we’re pulling Ebonroc, this time with proper tank tauntings to prevent raid wipes.
Ebonroc. Flamegor. Chromaggus! Before we know it we’re standing in the throne room of Nefarian himself, challenging the ruler of Blackrock Mountain, bringing him the death he escaped a year and a half ago.
The start of phase two killed all but five of us, I think. Shadow flame still really hurts, even at level 70, and the majority of us didn’t have our Onyxia Scale Cloaks. No problem though, since just about everyone in our raid is a packrat. Runecloth from trash is handed over, Onyxia Scales are dug out of long forgotten alt banks, and cloaks are made.
Not long after that, Nefarian died in a flawless attempt.
\m/
*I totally stole these photos from our raid forums.
