Council proved to be an interesting fight, but not necessarily a challenging one. Even with most of the raid watching the Superbowl, we still managed to master the pull and dodge the AoEs long enough to overcome the shear attrition that makes the fight difficult in any way. In four pulls(counting the instagib first pull where our Mage didn't get BoP'd), they lay at our feet, and Ely Dan himself awaited us.
Krispy having a sentimental moment by himself. The poor boy was so happy to finally see Illidan that he couldn't hold back his emotions, and needed a moment to compose himself. Simply heart-warming.
With about an hour and a half left of raid time, we decided to take some shots at Illidan to get a feel for Phase 2 and some early experience. While we waited for one of our FR tanks to log on, we went over the strats and watched the last few minutes of the SuperBowl. (Suck it Roty!) Once everyone was back in the game and we had our setup worked out, we pushed in a few solid attempts at learning, and managed to get through the crux of Phase 2 in a little over an hour, ending the night with 1 Flame down and another at 55%. Since the common opinion seemed to be that Phase 2 was the fight, we were confident in our ability to kill him the next night.
Come Monday, we again entered Black Temple invigorated and confident, but this time with our eyes on a completely different prize. The past eight months of raiding had led up to this point. The hours of research put in by our Officers to perfect our strats, setups, and raid leading; the endless cycles of attrition and recruiting; the dedication put forth by our core as we went through bumps in our roster; and most importantly, the time, effort and focus put in each night by our Raiders had all led us to this point in a game that is more than a simple hobby to the majority of us. We walked into Black Temple last night with one clear goal; to clear the last of endgame content Blizzard has given us, and subsequently prove to ourselves that we could compete with the top guilds in the world.
As attempts began, as we had assumed, Phase 2 was mastered relatively quickly, only offering a few bumps here and now due to silly mistakes. Within the first hour, we familiarized ourselves with the Phase 3 and 4 transitions and spent the rest of the night perfecting the nuances of them. Problems such as spreading out enough, spreading out too much, phase transition pickups, and tank instagib were all overcome in ideal fashion. Each attempt that we pushed him into the Phase 3 and Phase 4 transitions, you could feel the raid becoming more confident in their positions and knowledge of the fight's intricacies. A raid leader couldn't ask for a better attitude for a progression fight.
Despite the increased improvement, we were plagued with small mistakes that kept preventing us from getting ourselves deep into Phase 3 and 4 again. Small positioning problems in Phase 2, or a tank instagib during transitions kept eating away at the little time we had remaining. As the last hour crept away, it was becoming obvious that the shadow of doubt was creeping up in everyone's mind, though no one wanted to say anything. With a little less than an hour left on our Flasks, we got into Spike Flail's proverbial "zone," and focused, leading to two very solid attempts into Phase 5.
With less than four attempts remaining on our Flasks, we utilized the knowledge and experience we had learned from the long night of attempts to execute near perfect Phase 3 and 4s, and pushed Illidan into Phase 5 and the kill...
Of course... we couldn't have done it without our trusty [itemico]Six Demon Bag[/itemico] [item]Six Demon Bag[/item]!
I made the joke that I was going to name every person who's been a part of our raid team over our eight month endeavorer and thank them, but that would take forever and fuck that. However, there's been a lot of people who've helped us get where we are, and I and the guild collectively want to thank every one of them for the portions of their lives they gave to help this guild as a whole progress into something we all can be proud of.
I mentioned this back on the Kael kill, but I'm going to do it again. We started at TBC launch as a small group of friends bored with the monotony of the FFXI endgame and looking for something new, with no intention of ever going this far. We were joined by great friends from Andorhal, and slowly formed ourselves into a respectable raiding guild. The going was not easy, we had a ton of ups and downs, and during a roster gap back in SSC we were inches away from throwing in the towel all together. Due to the great dedication from the guys who show up every day and give it their all, as well as the hard work and effort from our guild officers, we've pushed through every hiccup and hump that WoW attrition has thrown at us; from ninja transfers to other servers to mass schedule changes with new semesters. Each time, our core group of Raiders gave us the patience we needed to push recruitment and add fresh faces to the guild, who brought their own unique personalities and experiences to our small community and has shaped us into a completely different, but amazing group of friends than what we had originally started as.
Again we want to thank all of our members past and present who helped us get to where we're at today, even the ones who left us.
We'd also like to thank our great friends in the other endgame guilds of Ner'zhul who gave us their support and well-wishes; we're glad to be playing on the same server with you and look forward to seeing you all in Sunwell. But mostly, we'd like to again thank our Raiders who stood by us through our highest and lowest times and had faith in us, the guys who came every day and gave it their all to push us to where we are. You all know who you are, and it's been amazing playing with you all the past few months, and I personally and looking forward to clearing Sunwell with you guys and beyond. Thank you again and congratulations to all, you deserve this win.Spike Flail, February 4th, 2008: Black Temple cleared...
