2.10. Carrying the Load

Kerulak watches while Gruul ends
the lives of his 25-Man raid,
Gruul's Lair

Stay

After coming off of our High King Maulgar kill with 11 people dead, I felt an uneasy tug at my gut. Our performance was going to have to be as sharp as the difficulty curve that TBC was throwing at us. Gruul's mechanics offered us no reprieve. He struck Ater hard, and employed a similar strike made popular by Patchwerk back in Naxxramas. But while Patchwerk's was Hateful, slamming an additional punch into the first melee in range with the highest amount of health, Gruul's was Hurtful, always choosing the second melee in threat behind the Main Tank as his target. Both Ater and Kurst's health were constantly spiking, and any hope of smoothing out that damage was diminished by the fact that we were painfully low on Resto Druids. In fact, we only had one to speak of: a new recruit named Breginna, who promised to do everything she could to flatten said spikes with her multitude of HoTs.

He struck our tanks with such fury that the cave shook around us, rocks breaking free from the ceiling and showering down onto random unsuspecting players. We were in a constant state of re-positioning, while Ater and Kurst moved together, slowly, cautiously -- bound by an invisible shackle that...if one or the other moved too far away from...would cause Gruul to choose a new melee in range as the second-highest threat as a Hurtful Strike target.

You'd know when it happened. A rogue would be alive one minute, dead the next. No time for a Power Word: Shield, no Ancestral Swiftness-macro'd Greater Healing Wave. Alive, then dead. Game Over. The End.

Aside from extreme damage pouring into both tanks, coupled with the panic that ensued after cave-ins, Gruul still had one big gimmick in store for us. The Gronn would punch the ground in a single explosive blow, knocking the entire raid in random directions. As we spazzed-out after landing, our feet grew heavy with mud and rock, we began to slow down, as if being pulled through clay. Soon, we all stood motionless in the cave, frozen into position, reduced to immobile statues.

Then came the Shatter.

Gruul would send a wave of damage out that multiplied against any player that was within the vicinity of any other player. The closer the player, the more damage that was multiplied into the Shatter. One poorly positioned player could easily take four or five other players out in a single Shatter. The goal, therefore, was to use those precious few seconds after the knockback to get away from each other as quickly as possible. This was not complex at all, not nearly as much as High King Maulgar. One boss. Three mechanics. It was practically a tank-and-spank. This should be over in a couple of attempts.

It wasn't.

An example of the many Gruul's Lair diagrams
guilds created to train their raiders on.

Yelling at the Deaf

On every Gruul attempt, players continued to amaze me during Shatter. The instructions could not have been communicated any simpler: Move away from each other. Spread out. Get away. Do not stand next to another player. How many other ways can it be stated? It didn't matter. Whatever we told the raid to do, they panicked and spazzed out. They ran into each other. They killed each other. The simplest of tasks became a nightmare, and paraphrasing the instructions was as effective as yelling at a deaf person.

You can yell all you want, but they won't hear you.

Other raiding guilds struggled with this, too. They created bizarre images which meticulously detailed out each one of the 25 positions a person could hold in the roster, mapping each slot to a placement in the cave and a direction for them to run. It was the thing of nightmares, a paint-by-colors strategy meant for a child, handed over to grown men and women as an instruction manual. Why was this absolutely necessary? Had we fallen to such a degree that each and every person had to have their hand held as we gently guided them to the bathroom to go potty?

But that wasn't the nightmare. The horror came when we realized it wasn't helping.

Even with diagrams and arrows drawn in crayon, players continued to panic, blindly following the path given to them per the instructions, not taking into account that their positioning was off or had changed as a result of the knockback. Walking the directions we gave them without thinking for themselves. Heading towards other raiders. Ending each others lives.

Six nights.

Six painful nights is what it took until we got it right. I can't even begin to tell you how many attempts it was. It was a lot. Far too many. Far too many for the first tier of raids, and far too many for players that should have known better. Both Blizzard and our raid team had made some pretty embarrassing mistakes in this first tier thus far. Yes, there was a huge onus on us to increase each player's personal responsibility, but from a practical perspective, one thing was clear: entry level 25-man raids were insanely unforgiving.

For all the painful attempts, the wipes, the running back, going over positioning and clarifying not where you run during Shatter, but how...over the course of those six nights we eventually knocked Gruul down a peg or two. A round of yelling -- albeit somewhat muted -- filled the Vent server with what should have been considered a triumph and a victory.

I felt neither. And I had no idea why.

Kerulak poses with the 25-Man raid team
after the defeat of Gruul the Dragonkiller,
Gruul's Lair

Personally Irresponsible

Gruul's Lair was behind us, but it had opened our eyes. All the work we'd done in Vanilla, the struggles, the late nights, re-learning healing, refining keys and adding mods to the tool-chain...it all seemed irrelevant. Like we had never accomplished anything in a raid before, like we were all green and needed to start from scratch. Claiming the progress we'd made in Vanilla as a selling point to new recruits made me feel like a fraud as we languished amid tier 4. They would only have to be present in one raid to see the panic-stricken raiders get picked off by falling rocks to read between the lines. You're not progressing -- you are the very absence of progression. Look me up when your guild pulls their heads out of their collective asses.

In these opening weeks of our guild re-entering the raiding landscape, I was desperate for answers. Had we lost our touch? Was the difficulty truly as steep as we perceived it to be? Did the lack of a reliable raid assistant affect Ater more than I had hoped? Did it come down to an absence of mage leadership, or the inconvenient shortage of restoration druids blanketing the raid with Tranquility? Or was there simply a much broader, more overarching reason why everything felt oppressive?

As with any team, there are going to be folks that rise to the top, a great majority of competent individuals, and a select few bottom feeders. In the days of the 40-Man, the incompetence of those bottom feeders was masked by the sheer strength in numbers coming from the remainder of the raid. The majority of these shining-stars would act as a buffer for those who were unable to deal with such technical details as standing in fire. With the loss of the forty came with it the loss of that buffer, that extra padding that softened the blow dealt by a handful of dead weights. 

In the new world order of a 25-Man, each and every person had to account for their sins, and "carrying" would no longer be a viable option. By each player taking personal responsibility, the strength of the team became that much more robust. I believed it. It is what I strove for, and what I wished the guild to adopt as their mantra.

Wishing...is a very poor way to lead people.

2.1. Preparing for the Dark Portal

Part II: The Burning Crusade

"Remind them that they have accomplished something significant...otherwise, there's nothing that differentiates them from the carries..."

World of Warcraft login screen, during
The Burning Crusade ('07-'09) era
Copyright © 2007 Blizzard Entertainment

The End of the 40-Man

On the evening I turned 32 years old, I lined up next to thirty-nine of my fellow raiders in front of the fallen Maexxna, deep within the Arachnid Quarter of Naxxramas. It was November 5th, 2006; we had been clearing endgame content for a little over a year. We weren't the furthest progressed raiding guild in that era, but given our shortcomings and late start, we'd left a significant dent in our wake. Descendants of Draenor had grown from a tiny group of CounterStrike-playing friends, to a powerhouse of a raiding machine that fielded two full 40-Man raids per week. And, I think we did a pretty good job of keeping our energy focused inward, so trolling in /general chat and on the Battle.net forums was never an issue. I was very lucky; I had some of the greatest class officers at the time, all passionate about working together as a team. They made Descendants of Draenor a fun guild to be a part of, taking pride in who we were and our array of raiding accomplishments. And so, it was our screenshot in front of Maexxna that remains bittersweet in my memory, as it was the last official 40-Man boss kill we would execute in progression.

On the horizon loomed The Burning Crusade, a mere two months away. I had a lot to think about as those weeks trickled down. The Dark Portal would re-open, guiding us back to Outland -- previously known as Draenor, the home world of the Orcs and the very world from which we took our guild name. Faction lines would blur with the addition of Paladins to the Horde, and Shamans to the Alliance. The new races of Draenei and Blood Elf were added to the game, and for the first time, we would be able to experience the freedom of flight in Outland, thanks to the introduction of flying mounts. We would also gain access to a new profession, Jewelcrafting, enhancing our gear by cutting gems and affixing them within sockets -- not unlike the system employed in Diablo II. All of these well-known, heavily-hyped changes paled in comparison to the one real change that would affect us the most:

40-Man raids would be killed in favor of the new, more manageable size of a 25-Man.

From a practical standpoint, the downsizing made sense. Smaller meant less-of-a-nightmare to manage and coordinate. But for a guild that was more like an extension of a player's family, how exactly does a Guild Leader go about saying, "Sorry, you 15 people...but you're just not good enough..."? I dreaded the job that needed to be done, kept my mind focused on other things, ignoring the inevitable. I hoped that players would take their leave without my intervention. And some did....the good players. It was the folks that lacked basic common sense, unable to hold a conversation without offending every person in the virtual room, making bewildering claims like "I dunno how to check my E-mail"...they were the ones that remained, lingering like a wart you hope will go away on its own.

Warts don't go away, they have to be excised. It's painful to do...and painful to watch.

Descendants of Draenor attack Highlord Kruul as
the days count down to The Burning Crusade,
Searing Gorge

Filling Officer Spots

As players took their leave of WoW, so too, did a handful of the officer core. The reasons were many. Some were done with raiding and wished to explore PvP further, with the introduction of arenas in TBC. Haribo the Priest and Annihilation the Warrior gracefully stepped out of the raiding limelight for this reason. Others were ready to move on to new challenges in new video games. My Hunter officer, Kaleu, took this route, along with my Mage officer, Selga. Still others felt the burden of real life weighing down on them, and had to make a difficult decision to walk away from WoW and the guild. My Warlock officer Gutrippa was tasked with raising a daughter by himself. I knew well the burden a single parent must bear, having been raised by one. He was right to prioritize his time as a parent over that of a video game, so I wished him the very best, and supported his decision.

With five officers down, I turned to who remained. My Shaman officer, Kadrok, had re-rolled to a Paladin, as did the next-best Shaman on our team, Klocker, leaving me sole heir to the Shaman-healing throne. For now, I managed the Shamans in an unofficial capacity, while Kadrok took on the Paladins. Dalans had no intention on leaving, so the Druids were still cared for in his naturally abrasive style. Blain continued on as the Rogue class officer, and Ater manned the Warriors in Annihilation's absence. Blain, however, wished to reduce his level of involvement in raid leadership, choosing instead to follow Haribo and Annihilation into arenas. He assured me he'd still contribute to progression, but would no longer have the time to coordinate and lead. I asked Ater if he'd be fine, saddled with this sole responsibility of raid leadership; he assured me he would. His marching orders were to find Blain's replacement, a player suitable to assist in the coordination of our progression team.

As for the remaining roles, they were filled by the number twos left in charge by their respective class officers. The side-effect of our cancer-like growth in Vanilla was a ridiculous amount of player management. Once the 40-Man was split into an A-team and B-team, I directed the officers to each appoint their respective Number Two, a player with leadership qualities that would assume their responsibilities in B-team while we carried on into progression. For the Warlocks, this was Dreadlocker, a fiesty player that famously screamed out "ORANGE HAMMER!" during our first kill of Ragnaros. In the Hunter department, Kaleu had chosen Skarg, an excellent player with a radio announcer-quality voice; soon to handle all of the countdowns in Vent. And as for the Priests, Haribo chose his PvP partner Neps, a player originally in the roster as a Rogue, but whom had recently cut over in the hopes of following in Haribo's priestly footsteps.

No Mage number two had ever been selected by Selga; our pool of Mages had been so small that he was able to manage them by himself. With Selga's exit, the pool dried up to such a degree that no viable option remained. I left the post unfilled. The Mages would suffer as a result of this neglect.

phpRaider, a web-based raid scheduling tool

The Discovery

Over the next few weeks, I had a number of discussions with Ater about what changes we needed to think about in terms of raiding. There were a variety of contentious issues: the amount of time necessary for adequate raid progression, our DKP system and its convoluted rules, and the absence of an adequate tool to manage our roster and scheduling. The Burning Crusade introduced the concept of a raid flask: a buff that would enhance a player's performance, which was purchased via "marks" that dropped from trash in instances. These flasks ran on a two-hour timer. We agreed, therefore, to bump our raid evening's length to a multiple of two, in order to gain the maximum amount of value out of these flasks. Two hours was not enough, we reasoned, so the next best option became four hours.

Next, we modified our DKP system so that items were no longer a fixed price; a carry-over from Gurgthock's original DKP system used within Elitist Jerks. As well as it worked, it was an administrative nightmare to constantly come up with prices on items that everyone agreed on. But as items became more complex, along with the introduction of tokens that were shared among classes, the fixed-price system became unwieldy and bloated. To embrace simplicity, we converted to a private bidding DKP system, in which players would bid what the item was worth to them. Ater and I agreed this would balance itself out accordingly, subject to the economics of supply and demand. Players would continue to earn DKP per the rules of a zero-sum system, but items would ultimately be priced by the players themselves.

To combat the problems surrounding roster management and raid scheduling, Ater and I looked into a multitude of web-based systems, finally deciding on phpRaider, which allowed players to sign-up for raids through our forums, providing them with up-to-date statuses on raid rotations. It also allowed us to keep a close eye on our pool, where our deficiencies were, and what classes we had an abundance of. It was during this web app research with Ater that I made a startling discovery about his career...

...he was a professional ColdFusion web application developer by trade -- the exact same career path as my own.

1.20. The Longest 1% Ever

Naxxramas Loading Screen
Copyright © Activision/Blizzard

The Balancing Act

Her lair was a prison of webbing. In all directions lay stretched the delicate weavings of a spider large enough to put any arachnaphobe into the fetal position. She sat perched at the far end of this spherical cocoon, twiddling her eight black legs. Evil beads for eyes glared at us while a mandible expanded and contracted, as if licking unseen lips. Her yellow-and-red abdomen dwarfed the raid. And when we made our first pull of Maexxna, she filled our computer speakers with a nightmarish clacking sound, as if two undead claws were being dragged down a chalkboard of despair and anguish. Every time Maexxna uttered these terrifying sounds, I felt my composure slipping away. It was so horrific a sound, in fact, she continued to haunt me well into The Burning Crusade. Spiders sharing Maexxna's model became tamable by Hunters, and I would lose my shit in battlegrounds when the Kill Command was given. That sound made me jump out of my chair and spaz out on my keyboard and mouse in a last-ditch effort to save my pathetic self. Only two other video games had ever made me jump throughout my life: Rescue on Fractalus!, and DOOM.

There was a reason her image graced the Naxxramas loading screen; Maexxna embodied raw, unadulterated fear. This was a good thing™. If Naxxramas was truly the ultimate raid for Vanilla, everyone should have been losing their shit.

Her rules of engagement were a delicate balancing act of nerves, discipline and timing. The main tank would hold Maexxna in the center of her lair, while the raid grouped tightly behind. We were then subjected to an intricate web of mechanics she'd rotate through on forty-second intervals, staggered among each other. One such mechanic caused Maexxna to randomly choose three people and toss them backwards toward the far wall of her nest, encasing them in a cocoon. While incapacitated these players would suffocate; their lives were in the hands of the ranged DPS. It was up to our casters to break them out as quickly as possible. Another mechanic produced a swarm of spiders that would coalesce onto the raid. Off-Tanks would have to do everything in their power to hold AoE aggro on these spiders, so as to not let them attack and kill our healers. Maexxna's venomous mandible also injected a necrotic poison into players, suppressing healing by 90% -- this had to be cleansed immediately. If the Main Tank was the target, unattended poison would guarantee a wipe. We repeated the handling of these mechanics until Maexxna's health dropped to 30%, at which point she would Enrage. While all her mechanics continued to stretch us thin, it became a non-stop burn until either she...or we...ended up dead.

There was just one small twist amid all these mechanics, a monkey-wrench which instilled fear into the hearts of every healer to ever play the game...

...Maexxna would incapacitate the entire raid for a full eight seconds.

Every. Single. Player. 

Cocooned

During Web Spray, nobody would have any control over their character -- every one of the forty players in the raid would be completely immobilized. And while Maexxna was free to continue to tear the flesh away from our Main Tank, we could only watch helplessly as their health dropped to frighteningly low levels. Healers of today may look back on this encounter and think, "What's the big deal? Load the MT up with HoTs before Web Wrap and you're good to go."

In Vanilla, you could only have one unique HoT on a target. Even if you had five priests and five druids, your main tank could only have one Renew, one Regrowth, and one Rejuvination on them at any given moment.

Ater was our most well-geared tank at the end of Vanilla. Fully buffed at the pull, he had 10,047 hit points. Maexxna was striking him for between 2500 and 3500 hp per blow, white damage. HoTs ticked for about 300 hp. If Ater was topped off and lead into the Web Spray with a Shield Block, he'd be in a good shape with a couple of HoTs. But if not, and Maexxna happened to deliver a crushing blow, his health would be nearly empty by the end of the eight seconds. To combat this nerve-wracking mechanic, the healers and I set up a Nature's Swiftness rotation. One by one, the Druids and Shamans would cycle through an instantly cast giant heal at the end of the eight seconds, shooting Ater's health back up and preventing the raid from having a heart-attack. Nature's Swiftness was on a 3-minute cooldown, so a rotation was necessary to keep an emergency heal flowing in.

But while Healers were dealt the worst hand of the roles thanks to Web Wrap, the other roles were similarly impacted. A web-sprayed ranged DPS meant the possibility of players suffocating to death on the walls of Maexxna's nest. Ranged, therefore, absolutely had to make breaking people out of cocoons their number one priority. A web-sprayed off-tank had a pretty tough time collecting up swarms of spiders scurrying across the raid, so the spider swarm had to also take priority over Maexxna herself.

Things fell apart at the 30% mark. After working to perfect our timings with web spray, poison shock, and the never-ending swarm of spiders, we naturally lost a good number of players to web wrap. DPS was slow to move from Maexxna to the targets on the wall, and they would run out of air before we could break them out of their silken prisons. As it had been with Princess Huhuran, Maexxna's game was attrition; keep whittling the raid away piece by piece, so that when the enrage burn phase came at 30%, we wouldn't have the manpower to keep both Ater and the rest of the raid alive. Ater would die, and the remaining tanks would scramble to pick up, but not having the buffs or the gear that Ater possessed, they would be ripped apart as she systematically fed on every last remaining member the raid.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Maexxna,
Naxxramas

Winning the Attrition Game

Our goal for each attempt was to keep just one additional player alive as we approached the 30% mark. As we refined our pulls, communication on her phases improved, warnings on the next mechanic were consistent. Our own internal timers began to adjust to Maexxna's, and healers were more prepared to proactively protect players before the spray froze us into position. Web-wrapped targets were broken out faster, and with players being topped off more consistently, those suffocating had more room to breathe before they met their maker behind a mask of webbing.

When the 30% mark hit, Ater granted us one last reprieve: Shield Wall, the last great bastion of defense for a Warrior in Vanilla. He could only use it once per attempt, so he saved it for the first Web Wrap post 30%. It would save his life, but systematically ensure his death by the second, as we watched his health spike from 10k down to 2k...and then nothing. His death marked the burn like a starter pistol. Did we have the manpower alive to tear through her remaining health while she feasted on the aggro list like a menu? Annihilation called out Warriors frantically to burn their Shield Walls as she turned to them, and the gong of RDX rang like a death knell. Ater, dead. Annihilation, dead. Darange, dead. Her taste in our raid team diversified as she found her rhythm, eating one player per second. Another Rogue. Another Druid. Another Shaman. Another Lock.

Having succumbed to the lack of air in my own cocoon, I watched helplessly as her health dropped into the single digits. Amid the chaos of her feasting, RDX showed that we were only down 4 DPS. She continued to one-shot players, eating Siax next--the only DPS Warrior in our raid, joining DoD after his own hardcore raiding guild had collapsed in Naxx. Only two Warriors remained alive: Demus and Kurst, while Zyr and Volitar poured Greater Heals into them.

Dalans yelled out her health "3% go....2% go..."

Kadrok continued to chant "Burn Her!!" to the remaining raiders.

Her health dropped to 1%.

---

It all seemed surreal. This was our second weekend on Maexxna. Two full months of work in Naxxramas. A year of raiding. Of assimilating guilds, meeting new people, building up a roster. I had gone from a player barely able to make it through Sunken Temple to this...a raiding guild. A 40-Man raiding guild. A Naxxramas-raiding guild. Forty strangers, all working together, virtually. Coordinating. Watching timers, boss alerts, churning out Pyroblasts and Shadow Bolts. We gained players and lost them. Decisions had gone well and gone horribly. And I'd met people that would profoundly affect my decision making in the years to come. What challenges would be next on my plate? Would I be able to handle them?

And it was in that moment that seemed to stretch out for all eternity, a bizarre realization set in.

...it was my birthday.

I'd been so hyper-focused on the guild, on WoW, on our success, on the threat of 2.0 stripping away any further progress we could make in Naxx...that I had forgotten my own birthday.

---

I glanced up at the screen, The arachnid flipped over in a curled, twitching ball in the center of her nest. 

It was over.

Descendants of Draenor managed to clear The Arachnid Quarter a full month before the release of 2.0. It was our final greatest triumph of Vanilla, and a testament to the resilience of a guild with a year-late start in PvE. We'd grown from a handful of Counter-Strike LAN buddies into a 40-man raiding machine, one of the few Horde guilds on the Deathwing-US server to claim this level of progress. And while most of my success at the helm seemed based off of sheer dumb luck, I nevertheless carried on, trying new things, listening to the folks whom I felt would offer us the greatest chance of success. I vowed to learn from every mistake I made, every bad judgement call that was my doing. Above all, I left Vanilla with a real sense of accomplishment -- that Descendants of Draenor could continue to be a raiding machine with much greater dedication and focus.

But perhaps not to such a degree that I would forget my own birthday.

1.19. The Sprint

DoD clears trash during an evening raid,
Naxxramas

Nerfed by Proxy

The glue of the spider wing's webbing dragged Naxxramas out for weeks. I kept optimistic by reflecting back on how far we had come. Our raiding career thus far had produced plenty of accomplishments we could claim ownership of. Ragnaros. Nefarian. Princess Huhuran. And while other guilds may have progressed past us, we remained one of only a handful of Horde guilds on Deathwing-US to be Naxxramas-capable. We'd grown from a tiny handful of close-knit players to this monstrosity that was able to run two separate 40-Man raids per week. The players were respectful. They made an effort to be civil. And, we boasted a number of unique strengths, including a few High Warlords -- the first of which whom was both an officer and a trusted friend. Upon reflection, I'd made a real effort to stick to my guns on the guild's ideals. When it looked like trolling was about to start, either in general chat or on the forums, I shut it down. The officers were also aligned with those ideals; I trusted them to shut down trolling on my behalf. We kept a low profile on Deathwing-US, and as a result, were rarely called out by other competing guilds. We'd lost people, true...but not in massive quantities; we certainly weren't hemorrhaging players. For the most part, loyalty in Descendants of Draenor was good. The trash in Naxxramas may have been brutal, but players returned each week. They knew time was running out on Vanilla. The finish line was in sight. The sprint had commenced.

When not on an actual boss, the conversation turned to 2.0 with curiosity and speculation. Initial talent trees had leaked out, promising new forms of heals to my Shaman -- the most significant of which came in the form of an Earth Shield. Other classes were similarly buffed with new talents; I'd bug Dalans by asking him if he was looking forward to the new Tree Form, and was promptly told to cram that tree of restoration up my ass. Dalans made no secret of his hatred in healing. Come 2.0, he would leave it behind once-and-for-all, and planned to follow in the footsteps of Ater and Annihilation as a Tank. Meanwhile, Volitar the Priest and Kadrok the Shaman were fully committed to leveling a Blood Elf Paladin, as the age-old faction restrictions fell to the wayside in The Burning Crusade. They spoke of marathoning a 24/7 leveling effort, sacrificing both hygiene and sleep...which was certain to produce some amusing dialogue in Vent.

As exciting as it was for all of us to pour over those new talents, a sinister side-effect remained: an implicit drop in difficulty to all the raid instances we were working on. Fights like Anub'rekhan that were so tightly tuned would suddenly become trivial with the existence of talents like Vitality, granting Ater an overnight bonus of 5% to his Stamina; the equivalent of an entirely new set of gear. The brunt of the free-for-all healing would no longer rest solely on the shoulders of the Shamans, with our raid's Priests blanketing the group with Circle of Healing. And of course, our damage dealers would all gain a 41 point talent that would inflate their DPS by a significant amount, the Hunters with The Beast Within, the Rogues with their Surprise Attacks...the list went on. Our heals would heal harder, our tanks would live longer, our damage dealers would be deadlier...

...and our raids would be nerfed by proxy.

To the guild, 2.0 meant a breath of fresh air, exciting new content and challenges. To me, it meant the end of Vanilla progression. The day that 2.0 hit, anything we had yet to execute would officially be off-the-table, tainted by the stench of these new talents...none of which had been considered in the design of Naxxramas. Whatever we could clear before 2.0 would be our legacy in Vanilla.

I wanted our final effort in Naxxramas to be significant.

Grand Widow Faerlina

We pushed further down into the Arachnid Quarter, clearing away the spider threat, until at last we came upon a room filled with cultists. They bowed and chanted toward a woman dressed in fanatic robes of yellowish greens, adorned with jagged black spikes -- instantly recognizable as the Tier 3 Warlock set, Plagueheart. The woman stood on her circular stage, flanked by six senior religious heads, four of which were deemed "Worshipers", the other two, "Followers". Ater and Annihilation rushed into the hypnotized crowd and the raid proceeded to put them out of their misery, granting us a wide berth to setup our strategy.

There was no rocket surgery here: Main Tank on the Grand Widow, Off-Tanks on the Worshippers. Kill the two Followers, then unleash Hell on Faerlina. Decurse the Poison Volley, move quickly from her Rain of Fire. There was only one gimmick to the fight: we'd call on our Priests again, as we had with Razuvious. Every minute into the fight, Faerlina would gain a powerful Enrage, making her sword strikes so brutal that healers would empty their entire pool just to keep the Main Tank alive. But, we could no longer rely on our Hunters to tranquilize the buff -- she was too powerful, even for them. Much like turning Razuvious' students against their teacher, we would have to call on our secret weapon Volitar, who would Mind Control a Worshiper. The Worshipers alone possessed the power to purge Faerlina of her rage. This power would cost the Worshiper their life, which meant we only had four silences at our disposal.

The first enrage came at the 50 second mark, then every minute thereafter. The 3:50 mark would be our last opportunity to purge her of her enrage ability. If the fight drew out to the 4:50 mark, our healers would be running on empty, and she would most certainly cleave us apart, one-by-one, until there was nothing left alive in our crew of 40 raiders. This style of fight, where resources are limited and poor execution can lead to a wipe via attrition, is what we referred to as a Soft Enrage. The terminology stands to this day in communicating to players whether or not they are fighting to beat a static timer before the boss goes ballistic (Hard Enrage), or we ultimately do ourselves in by not utilizing the hidden mechanics in the encounter.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Grand Widow Faerlina,
Naxxramas

Emergency Maneuvers

Haribo had me and a few other Shamans on Kurst and Darange, the Off-Tanks for the Followers. They were the first to be killed; Follower AoE silence posed a threat not only to our other healers and casters, they could potentially cause issues for the Priests attempting to control a Worshiper. Once the Followers were dead, this freed Kadrok, Klocker and I to start painting our Chain Heals across the remainder of the raid.

"In 15 seconds, we're going to have an enrage, healers get ready," Blain called out into Vent. I spun Kerulak around, winding up more Chain Heals.

"No. We're gonna do one more, then the Enrage", Volitar called back, as he prepared to take out a Worshiper -- his implication being that we were planning to silence Faerlina before her next Enrage. This tactic would also kill the Worshiper, but grant us 30 additional seconds of smoother incoming damage. Rather than risk a few seconds of Faerlina's enraged strikes, which could one-shot an ill-prepared tank, guilds would employ the tactic of silencing her before her enrage, granting temporary asylum from the onslaught, negating a round of poison volley in the process. Two birds to be killed by one stone.

But in the chaos of Naxxramas, it was easy to get mixed up. Volitar still thought we were on the first Worshiper, when we were already ready for the second.

"Nononono", Blain called back, "Need to let her enrage...now."

Faerlina grew large, her entire body bathed in a deep blood red -- the telltale sign of an enrage mechanic. Volitar silenced her in an instant, and she resumed her normal size, the redness washing away. The raid continued to unleash while Blain's voice remained calm, giving us updates as necessary. A cool, collected head breeds success, Blain was adamant on stymieing panic. We gave up our fourth and final Worshiper, but he kept us focused with words like "plenty of time". The DPS poured in. Another volley of poison showered us while we decursed it away.

"She's enraging, Ater get ready to shield wall." Blain called out. Too late. Before Blain's digitized voice finished transmitting across the Internet, Ater was struck and killed by Faerlina's enraged blows. Initiate Plan B.

"Rogues, get ready to evasion tank." They swarmed in behind him, ready for an Evasion rotation, which would give each rogue their 15 seconds of fame as they held Faerlina, dodging her blows -- the raid pushing out the last of their DPS. But the Rogues would not see any fame this day, for as they moved into position to begin emergency tanking maneuvers, Faerlina's pool of health went dry, and she collapsed near the steps to the stage she was worshipped on. The death of Grand Widow Faerlina was a sigh of relief to DoD. After agonizing over Anub'rekhan for six weeks, the Grand Widow only took us one weekend of work.

If our luck kept up, we could potentially close the Arachnid Quarter down completely. But if the next boss proved to be another Anub'rekhan, Faerlina might be the last boss we could claim under Vanilla.