31st September 2010
The haze lifted, I came to my senses, and I found myself charging halfway to Razor Hill on a legally obtained racing ram.
"Oh, right, it's Brewfest," I told myself.
The craziest things happen when you're getting smashed every night at Brewfest. You get drunk and you see pink elekks wandering around, and weird little rabbit-deer-chicken things hiding in your beer mug. I'm pretty sure that I've engaged in fierce battle with a bunch of dwarves invading the Brewfest grounds, except these fierce battles involve me drinking beer as quickly as possible then throwing the now-empty mug to bonk them on the noggin.
They're pretty fragile dwarves, if you can knock them out with a single empty beer mug to the head. Maybe the lack of beer in the mugs offends their dwarven sensibilities and it overloads their ale-addled brains to the point where they just keel over in outrage. But as odd as it is, it's the bashing up of dwarves. It's quite therapeutic.
Anyway, because of all the drinking, by the time the dwarves leave, I'm usually so drunk I can't tell if we've won or lost. I think I've won a couple of times.
Also at Brewfest, some of the stall vendors take advantage of your pliable drunken state and convince you to get on a legally obtained racing ram and charge around Orgrimmar, hawking their wares. It must work. I see lots of drunken louts charging around Orgrimmar on legally obtained racing rams and yelling about beer, and sure as eggs I find myself at the Brewfest that night and hung over the next morning.
There's also the goblin who sends you to his supplier, who always, always, *always* breaks down halfway between Orgrimmar and Razor Hill. You have to go pick up as much of the beer shipment as you can. On a legally obtained racing ram of course. They must go to a lot of trouble to legally obtain the racing rams because you get a lot of use out of them. But why don't they take the trouble to fix the wagon, if it's always breaking down?
Oh well. So, where was I? Oh yes, that's right, on the back of a legally obtained racing ram and charging down the ravine to Razor Hill, with the drunken haze lifting. Over my whisperbox I heard Dreadkrathor, orc death knight extraordinaire from the guild, asking if anyone could come help heal his raid, which was quite thoroughly stuck in the Temple of Ahn Qiraj.
I eyed my ram critically, and checked my stash of Brewfest Prize Tokens. I'm saving them up so I can get a magically-refilling pony keg, see. Anyway, I figured I'd easily be able to get enough tokens by the end of Brewfest, and besides my racing ram looked pretty tired. I decided to give him a much needed rest. As soon as I had picked up and delivered the next keg, anyway.
Once that was done I let Dreadkrothor know I could come help.
In short order I found myself standing outside Ahn'Qiraj.
The place had been quite thoroughly wrecked a few years ago. I was just a young Tauren calfling at the time, not even a novice druid yet, but I remember all the hoo-ha going on as people got ready for the opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Varok Saurfang made an awe-inspiring speech, there was a lot of bug-squishing, then a whole bunch of adventurers went in to Ahn'Qiraj and beat the snot out of a bunch of really nasty bugs that were planning to take over Azeroth, or something.
But the funny thing is that nothing really stays dead for very long. Adventurers come back, big nasties come back, and so to stop the big nasties from regrouping, training and improving their skills, and resuming their plans of conquest, us adventurers have to repeatedly stomp them into the dirt.
Like our raid was about to.
It became clear from the discussions over the whisperbox that not only was it my first time there, the place was new for a lot of the group. I followed Shadowtoch, a Forsaken priest that looked like he knew where he was going. Turns out he was following me, too. Quite obviously, we both got thoroughly lost.
Uriu, the guy that was organising the whole thing, came and got me and Shadowtoch and showed us where to go. Yay him!
So, after a little while of being lost and confused, we all assembled deep in the bowels of the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, ready to stomp Qiraji bugs into goo.
There were a few others in the raid who, like me, were in our 80th season of adventuring, including the paladin main tank. It's fair to say that we quite thoroughly pwned practically everything there. Though some of the young'uns just kept dying, over and over, with nothing but a look from one of the bugs. It was quite depressing really. There I was, charged with keeping people alive, and they were dying the instant a bug looked at them.
We came thoroughly unstuck when we came to the Emperor brothers, though. Our guide tried to tell us what we were supposed to be doing and what the Emperor brothers were going to do. But barely 30 seconds into the fight the Emperor brothers did their teleport switcheroo trick, the pally tank ran after his target instead of staying put, a bunch of the group died instantly, the Emperor brothers were busy throwing massive heals on each other, and Uriu our guide, dead himself, was telling us all through the whisperbox that we'd lost and it was time to wipe.
(Incidentally, as useful as it is, doesn't anybody else find it creepy that the whisperbox lets you talk to dead people? But I digress.)
Oh well. I rustled my branches in a leafy shrug, wandered over to one of the Emporer brothers, waited, and he duly smashed me into firewood.
Ow.
We were all quite dispirited after the defeat, and the group split up so we didn't get to try again.
And thus ended my first ever attempt at Ahn'Qiraj.
I went off to find out more about the Emperor brothers and what they do and how you fight them. If we'd gotten our tactics right I imagine our fight against them would have been absolutely epic!
But I think the most *important* thing to take away from this is that raids aren't scary. Er, well, actually, okay, they are. You fight big scary monsters and Old Gods and the Lich King himself, after all. But what I think I mean is that the forming of a raid isn't as scary as I always imagined it to be. Who knows, maybe I'll go on another raid one of these months.
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