Yes, Raiding is Fun! (I’ve Missed It)

For once, raiding is back to providing what it’s supposed to.  Fun.

Friday and Saturday were set up for our motley group of MOX newbies (We’re actually going to become MOX Emerald, as Sapphire is their 16-man superior group – yes, I should have guessed that Moxboss (the guild leader) also knows that Sapphires are the best Mox) to run Hardmode Explosive Conflict (EC/Denova), and those nights were pretty rough.  Due to changes in who showed up for raid again, we didn’t make the goals I had hoped to reach – One night, three bosses in a reasonable time.  We did manage two bosses on Friday, and cleaned up the rest on Saturday, defeating Hardmode EC for the first time.  I’d say that it was something to be excited about, but the fights just aren’t all that interesting in EC, and are brutal for coordination between tanks and healers.  For DPS, a lot of it is pew-pew, but there are a few “stand in the circle and you die” moments, but for the most part, it’s just stand and shoot.  I did a decent job in there, and I know I have to go back to gear up for now, but if the loot drops were the same between them, I’d take Eternity Vault over EC any day.  We did have a decent raid leader, and our tanks and heals did a fine job in there.  It just took a few times on the final boss to get everyone to execute and follow through to defeat Kephess – and they did.  Grats to MOX Emerald.

But it wasn’t a fun run, overall.  The trash in EC is plentiful and can be pretty time-consuming.  Crowd Control on the trash is necessary, which adds to the amount of time it takes, and while it means that we don’t just blow through from boss to boss, after the third or fourth time doing it all, it does get a bit stale.

Sunday, however, was a different story.

Sunday was a group of MOX raiders, mostly random people who I’ve raided with only once or twice, deciding it was worth it to run a Story Mode Terror From Beyond (TFB) raid.  It was later in the evening, and people were already feeling a bit loose and chatty, and in the end it turned out to be a great run, even though we didn’t finish the entire raid.

Pulls, pulls, pulls!  We couldn’t get our heads straight on trash pulls.  Where EC was run very rigidly in dealing with trash mobs, we really screwed the pooch on a few pulls in TFB, especially the first ones.   It wasn’t just one pull – it was a chain of pulls where we’d struggle to down a set of mobs and OOPS!  the next set added to the first ones.  Utter chaos, using every skill we could to try to stay alive and kill as many as we could, and then the next set and then the next… I think we ended up with four or five pulls happening, where there should have only been one…

And we survived!  One tank and both healers survived, and even the healers were DPS-ing the mobs down at the end.  People were cheering and laughing at the sheer insanity of it, and having a great time, tossing light-hearted blame around, shaking their heads in utter amazement as another group of mobs added to the pile, and it was absolutely fantastic.  Nobody was upset.  Everyone was laughing.  It was what raiding should be.

I haven’t had that in a very long time from raiding.  The very last time I can think of where everyone was that excited at a raid and win was back in Wrath of the Lich King on World of Warcraft, when our group after months of beating our heads against the encounter finally defeated Arthas to finish the endboss of the expansion.  Hooting and hollering, everyone just enjoying the cutscene, not worried at all about the loot, wanting to show off their Kingslayer titles.  It was a terrific feeling.

And it’s a feeling I hope to have again.  For now, Sunday night, MOX Random, TFB trash…  That’ll do.

We also managed to get some gear for some people, mats for the guild, and downed two bosses, both of which are very fun fights.  That we didn’t end up finishing the entire raid – who cares?  It was more fun than I’ve had on raids where we did finish TFB.

Thanks to everyone who was there to make it a fun run – we need to seriously “OOPS!” it up again like that sometime.

My 2 yen,

Akiosama