The Backstory: Deadwood Days

Deadwood 1st raid Boss Kill July 4th 2007 and Shynight started a tradition...

While I still consider Vanilla the Golden Era of raiding, it was with Deadwood that I had the most fun and success. As mentioned in my most recent "The Backstory" post prior to forming Deadwood my previous guild, Teddybears of Doom had just killed High King Maulgar and had made good progress through Karazhan. The group of players we had were some very good players but as a raid group we lacked balance. We managed to recruit a few friends into the guild and we managed, with the power of alts, to get 2 tanks and 3 healers and 5 DPS together to go and start back at the beginning. Attumen the Huntsman was our first target...

Maiden of Virtue dead

Moroes dead

My memory of that first night is sketchy at best but I do remember Shynight, a druid tank and a larger than life Geordie outside WoW. It was he that started a guild tradition that night of sitting his big bear ass down and facing away from the camera during screenshots. Fortunately for him he got to practice this new tradition 3 times that night as in addition to killing Attumen the Huntsman, Moroes and the Maiden of Virtue also succumbed to the might of Deadwood. But that was not the goal that night, the big result was that we acquired some new faces into the guild most of whom were "stolen" from another guild that a few of our members had been in previously, a guild called Saturday Knight Fever. 

We progressed through Karazhan quite slowly and it would be four months before we finally cleared the place. I'll admit that it was frustrating for the more experienced raiders but it was 100% necesary as we had people that we were teaching raiding to and these were really good player they didn't share the same raid focus that we did. This produced a really good mix in the guild though and made even Regaal chill out a bit, although everyone did like to here him use his catchphrase "C'mon guys". 

Regaal, Cheiftan and myself slowly but surely recruited more people into Deadwood. We had a vision and therefore were rather particular with who we would accept because our aim was to be a small 25 man raiding guild with a core of 30ish players raiding for 3 hours per night on 3 days of the week, we didn't want the real hard core raiders who were looking for 7 nights a week raiding at the bleeding edge we wanted the casually hardcore raiders, those with a life outside the raid scene but had the focus to succeed. 

We had a wish list of people we wanted to join from our friends lists and previous guilds and whilst not 100% successful we managed to get many of them. We also acquired some very good server transferees and soon the 25 man goal was achieved, Our first 25 man raid was to Gruul's Lair and killing High King Maulgar took us a few tries  before we could kill Gruul himself. The Gruul fight wasn't hard just unforgiving and I'm sure it took us a couple of days of wipes to get him down, but that first kill of him was one of the most awesome experiences I have had in WoW, the instant cheers on TS when he dropped to the floor was simply unforgettable.

And so 4 months after forming and 10 months behind the other 25 man raiding guilds, Deadwood was ready to join the big boys....