New Adventures

Fresh after the high of defeating the Lich King, I've reached a bit of a low spot in my time with WoW. Lal and I have decided to leave the only guild we've known for the last three years and search for something new. What that something new is has not been entirely decided yet. It wasn't easy to leave for anyone involved, and I'll miss everyone dearly that is still with Veritas. I still consider them friends, even if we don't share a guild tag. I sincerely hope Veritas goes on to bigger and greater things than they ever have. I plan to stay in touch with the guild leaders and other members without being a nuisance, and in the mean time branch out into new territory for myself.

This blog will continue to be a place for lore posts and raiding stories and other miscellany of the World of Warcraft. I have been lax in those duties for a few months now, but the coming Cataclysm has me excited to write more. Lal and I have returned to the Draenei we started years ago, Bogdan and Nadya, and are now leveling in Outland and having a rather fun time of it. I expect we'll be in Northrend in a week or two and hopefully level 80 before long. After that, we'll be anxiously awaiting the new expansion before leveling any new toons. I have some low level alts that I'll probably re-roll in Cata to experience the revamped zones that are coming.

It's about time.

We have finally killed The Lich King.

The Strength of Wrynn buff was at 30%. I'm pretty sure that's as good as it gets. After weeks and weeks of struggling just to get 10 people together on the same night that knew the entire fight from beginning to end, we finally got our act together and converged on the Frozen throne.

First attempt: Lost some people to an errant Frost Orb on the first transition phase. A careless mistake, but we recovered quickly to try again.

Second attempt: Bad defile placement on the second phase, so we called the wipe and started again.

Third attempt: Everything went smoothly into the second phase. We nearly lost Lal to a Val'kyr but managed to kill it at the very edge. We're running in and out of defiles, and the Val'kyr are dying a little quicker than we're used to thanks to that buff, and a focused intensity of our DPS. As we're heading into the next transition phase, I'm mostly hopeful that we just get some time in the last phase as we've barely spent any time there.

Transition happens, and spirits are dying fast. We head back into the Lich King and someone gets whisked away to Frostmourne, I'm not sure who. Raging spirits are dead, but the Vile spirits are just appearing, so I swap targets. They don't die nearly as fast as they need to and I realize then that it must have been our other ranged DPS in the Frostmourne room. The spirits come down and start exploding on people. I hear Lal yelling from across the room at the damage people are taking. But after the spirits are gone, we're still alive.

At this point we've got a weird rhythm. People are scattered due to defiles and spirits, but I'm still trying to call out when to close in and when to spread out. Somehow the healers are keeping us alive through explosions. Then I see Giraud go down. I call out for a battle rez and we're back to full strength again. More spirits, more running, more explosions. There goes a healer! Thank goodness he's a Shaman. He's back up and we're still fighting. At this point I realize we're not just practicing. We're nearly there.

My hands start to shake when I see Kill Shot come up because that only happens on mobs below 20%. We only have to get him to 10. His health is dropping fast and we still have 10 people alive. At this point I start thinking people are surely going to start dying, and planning what do do if that happens, because we could still potentially pull it off. But in the end I didn't have to worry about that because we all died at the same time. And that was the most amazing thing that could have happened that night.

The scene played out, and in the end, we stood triumphant. After months of working on just this fight and nothing else, it was such a relief to finally have beaten it.

I'm proud of everyone for making it through, and putting up with all the pain and heartache that got us there. We've essentially beaten the game now. For some of us that have been invested in Warcraft since the RTS games, this was the ultimate final boss. And now, we're the heroes of the story.