The last post ended on a more positive note than it had started. Raiding was going fine and in November 2008 Wrath of the Lich King, WoW’s second expansion launched after 22 months and we were really eager for the new stuff. It’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t blog already back then (this doesn’t count). As with the launch of The Burning Crusade, I was still studying and working at the same time.
I faintly remember that it was supposed to launch at midnight and I’m also pretty sure I started to level my Warrior in Borean Tundra and was quite ahead of the curve, but not really rushing it, so I went to bed after a few hours and not pulling an all-nighter. This would be the first expansion where I was leveling 2 characters at the same time, the warrior and my Rogue Main. Anyway, back to raiding. We cleared Naxxramas, The Obsidian Sanctum, The Eye, Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader, at least as far as I remember. Heroic raids weren’t a thing yet, but there were hard modes. While I’d say WotLK was raiding at a high level for me there are not a lot of distinct memories of the early raids. I know we struggled a bit with 10man vs 25man because we were more than 10 but not exactly 25, I think we ran 2 10man groups at times, sometimes with well-geared alts standing in. It was also the time where I nearly managed to get one of each class to max level (2 missing at 73+78). It was also a time where I managed to raid on all 3 roles, DPS, Tank, and Healer. Naxxramas was ok, Ulduar was really fun (except Yogg-Saron) and Trial of the Crusader wasn’t so great.
So far I left out the grand finale of WotLK raiding, Ice Crown Citadel, which came into the game roughly a year after the expansion had launched, in December 2009. This coincides with another guild change, but I’m also a little hazy on the details. Again it was a re-form of most of the old folks of the guild we had raided with since TBC. It might be that was some disagreement, it might be that we wanted to focus on a mostly static 10 man group in the upcoming instance. The only thing I can tell for certain is that all my characters went to the new guild in January 2010.
I loved Ice Crown Citadel, I think it might be my favorite raid instance ever. I DPSed, I tanked, I healed. All the fights were kinda fun and doable. Well, ok, Sindragosa was hard, but we did it. Also there was the final fight, The Lich King himself. We had chased him all over Northrend, seen him in cutscenes in quests, 5mans, and raids, taunting us. And boy did we take long to take him down on 10man. It was the classic “no single mistake allowed” fight. When one person died we could as well wipe if we didn’t need to practice this exact phase anyway. I don’t know how long we wiped, or how often. I just know that up until that day that was the biggest achievement we got.
In early 2014 I would come back to level a Dwarf Shaman on a German server to do a locked-xp-at-80 Algalon run, I wrote about it: one, two, three.
It’s Blapril and this is post number 17.