I know that, due to the end-of-expansion doldrums and my own issues, I haven’t done one of these in a long, long time but I have news that must be shared with you all.
Here’s Papagenia with the report on the combined raid that took down Heroic Argus:
Raid report: DOWN Goes Heroic Argus!
I haven't had a lot to report for some time - I took a few weeks off in April to get some health matters straightened out, and since I've been back, Team Pm has been slogging thru heroic Antorus while the Tues/Wed group has been chipping away at heroic Argus, the final boss.
Team Pm did a special extra raid night last Friday, and got Kingaroth down, which was terrific as we'd been stuck on him for a while; the team was at that point 7/11, with Varimathras, Coven, Aggramar and finally Argus to down, and if we wanted the Ahead of the Curve achievement and mount, we'd have to do all that before the end of July or thereabouts which seemed unlikely. The Tues/Wed group, meanwhile, was looking for additional dps that week, and did get Argus down to 0% before wiping - arrrgh.
So, we started discussing in our raid Friday about how we could both help the Tues/Wed group and give ourselves a better chance at AOTC as well, and everyone was interested in doing it. So, we proposed, and Tay and Kaels enthusiastically accepted, that the two progression groups join forces and collaborate on an attempt on Argus on Tuesday night June 5th, and then, if we didn't get him that night, again on June 19th, as our tank/field general Cahirn is out of town the week of June 12th, if the Tues/Wed group hadn't gotten him in the meantime. Cahirn and Thanael, our regular tanks, worked out options with Austeer, the TW regular tank, to try a few different variations on one of them doing DPS or just trying 3 tanks throughout. Kaels thought 5 or 6 healers would be the right number, so our healers Palleys, Wealtheow and Earthdream were able to heal along with Taymatt, Zephyrs and Aija from the other group. Our Orqwa brought his Death Knight Fasriel to do DPS instead of healing on Sarahoshi (and did great DPS!) By the time we got going and well into it, we had 29 people, just shy of the 30 player limit, possibly the biggest at-level raid the guild has ever done. I think going in, many of us thought it would be easier than it turned out to be to get Argus down. Cahirn, however, had it right - he thought we could maybe do it by the end of the night and he was right.
The mechanics and choreography of the fight are not very different from the normal version - but of course things take longer to die, and Blizz occasionally gets cute with the placement of various ground effects in the first stage in particular. The tanks had to work out how to best trade off on pulls and decide on the 3 tank vs 2 tank and 1 dps strat (they finally decided to go wtih 3 tanks in the end.) And we DPS occasionally seemed to forget everything we knew about dropping bad stuff of various descriptions away from the group! So it was tougher than we had hoped and we wiped 8 times. At last, 11:30 arrived, and we had to call last pull, for the 28 folks who remained - but Last Pull Magic came through for us once again! I can't recall exactly how many people were alive at the end, but there weren't many, I know. However, enough of us had stayed alive up to the last minute of the fight to allow the few left at the end to finish him off, and BOOM! AOTC for everyone and much hooting and hollering in Discord! We all also got a wonderful mount, a violet spellwing, a beautiful multi-colored bird whose wings ripple through the color spectrum constantly - imo, it gives the Ashes of Alar serious competition for "most beautiful mount in the game". We took pictures of all of us on the mounts which I hope someone has posted on the website somewhere.
It was extremely satisfying, given how hard everyone there had worked on heroic progression, to get this done in time for the achievement. Even better, it was a whole lot of fun, having both groups in Discord together, joking and laughing in between reminders to "PLEASE run out of the group!" For me personally, it was great to raid again with many folks I had raided with in past expansions on various iterations of Team Kaels - I can still remember when Cylen (Varond) started raiding with us when he was still in high school, back in Cataclysm! Special shoutout for our tanks who had to figure out the most complicated mechanics working as a very unfamiliar team of 3 - Austeer, Thanael and Cahirn, great work you guys! The only downside was that neither Vanillope, of Team Pm, nor Voban, of the TW group, was able to be there, so we all agreed to do a joint effort again in two weeks when they can both be there, to get them the achieve and the mount.
Team Pm is certainly going to keep raiding as a team - we've been together as a pretty stable group for 2 expacs now - but I hope in the future, the progression groups can get together again occasionally for a joint effort when we get stuck on a final boss. Wreck List is 9th in raid progression on the server, entirely because of the Tues/Wed group's excellent progression work, but we on Team Pm are happy to think we've contributed a little to it now with our participation in the Argus win. Well done everyone!
As Tvath always says, Best Guild Ever!
Best.
Guild.
Ever.
That's all I have for this week. For theHorde!