Affliction Guild

So the last couple of months have been rather devoid of updates, but not for lack of news. A whole bunch of bosses have died at our hands - too many to write about individually - so I’ll just give a brief rundown of each and pretend that’s more than enough for everyone, much like Blizzard with WotLK info.

We last left you after killing Shade of Akama, the evil twin of the emo inter-species boyfriend of Maiev, jilted ex-lover of Illidan and renowned bunny boiler, previously thought dead in a horrific gryphon accident on her way back from the Outland portal, recently found alive if not entirely well, being kept captive by Akama for unknown (but we suspect very unwholesome) reasons, who has sworn revenge on old Illy for leaving her for a skull and enlisted the aid of her captor (Stockholme Syndrome anyone?) in plotting his rather overdue demise. If this sounds more complicated and convoluted than a soap opera to you, you should hear Evangelical tell it.

So ANYWAY - rather than focus on trying to unravel the plot line of Days of Our Black Temple, we figured we’d just kill the whole bunch and change channel.

Next on the list after Akama was Teron Gorefiend, a rather confused death knight slash fallen angel slash warlock who we accidentally released back in Shadowmoon Valley in our pursuit for leet quest reward blues because someone forgot to mention that powerful and annoying raid bosses were hiding out near innocuously placed altars where tailors transmute shadowcloth. I mean honestly.

The toughest part of this rather easy fight is learning to control the vengeful spirit you become when Teron whups your ass during the course of the encounter. Although pressing two buttons and then mashing a third until the first two are off cooldown doesn’t SOUND particularly difficult, our experience has proven that it is indeed rocket science for a number of the chosen few. Indeed, the only thing this fight will test is your patience, and the effectiveness of your subconscious powers of suggestion whilst you try to will Teron into not marking “those people”. Eventually however, we plucked old Gorefiend’s wings and collected the first of many pairs of hunter boots and throwing weapons.

Teron’s death led to the discovery of even more insanely boring trash packs and Gurtogg Bloodboil, our next target. Gurtogg is a fel Orc, conceived through the intimate coupling of a fel orc female and what appears to have been a Clefthoof Bull. Though he had a pretty normal upbringing, pillaging his first draenei village single-handedly at the tender age of 3 and eating a fully grown Netherdrake at 5, he was not content. During his quest for greatness, he was fatefully bitten by a radioactive scorpid named Bob, causing him to grow 10 sizes and ransack Shattrath for a new pair of jeans. He was then recruited by Illidan as the entertainment for some legendary Black Temple parties involving Lady Vash’j, some seaweed and a whole lot of Dwarven Wine.

As a boss though, he wasn’t particularly difficult either. (see a trend here?) Indeed, once you have the strat down and assuming your healers aren’t all AFK watching TV when he enrages, the toughest part of this fight was trying to get Photonn to stop chanting “Group 3, get in the water.. group 4, get in the water..” after Bloodboil died. More largely irrelevant and mostly unwanted loot dropped and we moved on once again to face our toughest challenge yet: The three-headed emo monster.

Reliquary of Souls is a really quick but technically challenging fight that requires your tanks, healers, rogues and a mage to give 110% focus and use their cat-like reflexes to conquer evil, while the rest of the raid sits around and scratches their asses. (mostly) Between having no aggro table, evasion tanking, really fast cast times on raid-wiping abilities, our insanely reliable internet connections, high latency and threat caps, this encounter took a fair deal of work but fell eventually in a shorter time than we’d initially anticipated. We were also really glad to be rid of the constant whining and “why won’t you be my friend?” lines we’d had to put up with during the course of our attempts.

Next on the list was Mother Shahraz - a loot vendor akin to Void Reaver whose only purpose in existence is to make sure you’ve spent enough time in BT / Hyjal to have farmed lots and lots and lots of Hearts of Darkness for SR gear and to verify that you do indeed possess an intellectual capacity equal to or greater than that of a gnat. The entire encounter consists of two elements. Once you have mastered them through long hours of practice and meditation, you will have no problem collecting your shiny new T6 shoulders. As an added bonus, in the time-honored tradition presented here throughout the years, I will reveal to you this ground-shaking strategy so that you too may reap its wisdom-enhancing rewards. The strat is:

- Hit stuff
- Run away

Stare in wonder, young glasshopplas, and feel your minds expanding. If you feel anything else, that is indeed not your mind but Run having stealthed behind you in cat form, and you should not stare in wonder so much as flee in stark, unrestrained terror.

Having killed the trash mob that is Shahraz, we proceeded to the most recent of our accomplishments: The Illidari Council. The council is a quartet of noble Blood Elves, hand-picked by Illidan to manage the day to day running of Black Temple Enterprises and do an absolutely fabulous job of interior decorating. They consist of a cross-dressing warlock wannabe rogue, a zealot-like priest wannabe mage, an ACTUAL priest and a flamboyantly out of the closet Paladin. The fight (is there an echo in here?) is rather straight forward. It consists entirely of a mishmash of Blizzard’s most popular recipes for boss encounters, namely: Mage tanking, spell interrupts, dispelling/decursing and “Getting the f*ck out of AOE”. On our first night of serious attempts, we spent the first 1.5 hours on tank two-shots due to LOS, tank two-shots due to range, accidental pulls, intended pulls with people AFK, intended pulls with nobody AFK but several people asleep, several speeches about “getting the f*ck out of AOE”, some emergency player replacements, a few respecs and several he said / she said moments that belonged in a Monty Python skit.

After sorting out all the crap, making sure everyone was ready, in range, aware of the various elements that could kill them and focused on their particular job, we engaged the Council once again and proceeded to smack their collective asses out of the park. Yep, that easy.

So quite a bit of progression for Affliction to this point. Still ahead lie Illidan and Archimonde, the two final bosses before Sunwell and keepers of the “I would cut your throat for your DKP” quality loot. They both (are you even surprised?) don’t seem to be too difficult, so expect some updates here shortly.

Congrats to everyone involved on the great runs we’ve been having and our continued success and keep it up. I leave you with an image that pretty much sums things up at the moment:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.