The Backstory: Deadwood Days (pt 2)

Been a long while, since I posted a "Backstory", in fact just looking at the last one and its been almost 6 months, man I have been slacking more than I realised. So I guess it's time to make amends for my erroneous ways.

So just a brief recap of where I left the story, a few months into The Burning Crusade myself and a few friends set up our own raiding guild, Deadwood. We had high hopes and put a team of suitably skilled raiders together and battled through Karazhan and eventually we got 25 people and went and killed Gruul.

The majority of Deadwood were friends and friends of friends both in real life and those formed in game and while we were very dedicated to raiding we were relaxed about it and had fun. But looking back we were treading that fine line between casual raiders and hard-core with a few of us really aiming for hard-core results.

One of the changes that I made during this transitional period was to switch to raiding on my other priest, Wilkini. The decision was tough but we needed a Shadow Priest and to do that meant I had to be a tailor, simply because of the Frozen Shadoweave 3 piece set, Shadow's Embrace as it was THE best shadow priest items in the game and I had simply invested too much time and gold into collecting all the rare alchemy and enchanting recipes to give either profession up.

With our Gruul victory claimed we went and banged heads with Magtheridon and quite frankly after all the fuss we were a little disappointed at how easy he was and within a few weeks, we went full on 25 man raiding when we moved into Tempest Keep: The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern. Our raiding time was split equally between the 2 and we slowly made progress from just killing the loot pinata bosses and made real progress it seemed taht each week we would get 2/3 new bosses and before long we were working on Lady Vashj and Kael'thas. I'm not 100% clear on the order they fell but I know that a lot of effort went into killing them both and the victories both came after a nerf but that didn't dampen our spirits we had still killed them and we felt damned good about it too.

Unlike the days in vanilla were instances were farmed repeatedly, we decided that we would move onto the Hyjal Summit and Black Temple raids after only a couple of kills as it was mid-summer and we knew that the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King was in beta and likely to be released and we wanted to kill Illidan. Unfortunately, for us the summer vacation boss hit us hard and stopped us raiding for most of a August and when people returned it took us another few weeks to get back in the swing of killing things. We did soon get into the swing of things and got to Archimonde in Hyjal Summit and as far as The Reliquary of Souls in Black Temple before time ran out on us and as the pre-Wrath patch hit raiding stopped completely due to the insane lag that was being caused by the newly introduced Achievements and Statistical gathering that made 25 man raiding impossible.

Overall I look back fondly on the days of Tier 5 and 6 raiding even if it was on my other priest and even if that did mean Evlyxx missed out on 2 really cool titles, Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal. What are your memories of The Burning Crusade?