After a fair few weeks in Hellfire with an inconsistent raid team we didn’t get much progress.
Kills were messy or things that we downed before were suddenly a roadblock.
All in all. It had stopped being fun.

With the constant change in players came a lax view on discipline. I was increasingly getting frustrated and due to having pmt I completely lost my shit with everyone.
We took the decision to bench two players who were at the time failing with the set up of ‘raid leader’ and ‘everyone else’.
One took it well after the reasons were given to him. He could see what the problem was and realised (once recount was disabled) that his dps was still viable but it’s the following instructions that really counted.
The other… Well.
After discovering he didn’t use any add ons and his flippant discription for tactics as ‘stupid’ it was a case that attitude was the biggest thing here. Yes he pulled the numbers but the other members of the team were insignificant. Even the RL.
Upon being benched for only one night due to his constant elitist attitude he decided to rage quit the team and guild.
To quote Stephen King and The Stand “no great loss”

So we buckled up with 12 players and set to going through the first five bosses on normal. This wasn’t for the loot, this was to prove we could have a flawless run when we all put our minds to it.

We even started on time! The determination to pull ourselves out of the gutter and climb back up to where we were in SoO was impressive.

I’d made crib sheets for the first four bosses. Things that may have been over looked when reading through tactics.

Starting with Hellfire assault we set to work. Marvv and Jolly were tanking and held everything together with the adds.
Which meant that we could concentrate on the tasks at hand.
I didn’t need to mark anything. In fact, I hardly had to say anything.
Frank was on box duty so we didn’t have three people standing there trying to click it.
We remembered the positioning of the vehicles as they came through and were on the right side at the right time.
TS was fairly quiet apart from the occasional “pigeon”.
Once the boss went down however, we finally got the achievement for keeping the canons above 90% health. It was a testament that we can do it!

Iron Reaver was next, with the new information about barrage being cast in the general direction of her left foot only three people were caught by it that were not tanks. Also, those three dps and healers were only hit a total of four times. A vast improvement considering our previous performance.

Kormrok however…
We relaxed a little into it. There was a conversation about Asian twins. Jolly said that they wouldn’t really do it for him, to which Shane replied “I want to do it for you”
The rest of us waited with baited breath for the one liner that was sure to come.
Jolly didn’t disappoint.
“well if you’re a good boy I’ll explode in your hands…”
Never one to forget that infamous RT2 moment where Jolly was badly positioned for the tank explosion part and he ended up next to us while we were in grasping hands. After we had got out and recovered he casually announced over TS “sorry for exploding in your hands”
(this boss has never been the same since)

It went down in one go but we did have a few boo-boos.
First orange pool went well. The runes were tidied up quickly. Then the boss was taken just a tiny bit too far and jumped into the purple pool.
“Oh” Marvv said.
“Oh dear” Jolly said.
We braced ourselves for the clusterfuck of blobs as we had managed to zone out a little as we watched what was happening. We made it to the door and then hands came in.
“To red!” someone shouted.
“No! Stay here!” a few called out.
People swarmed together and we broke out fairly quickly.
The boss then jumped over us all and went to the green pool. As we made our move to get to the middle again we were caught in dragging hands. We were not stacked well and a few got carried away in the wrong direction and died.
The boss however, was low enough for us to just kill it and leave Marvv in a hand.
Nervous laughter erupted.

Council was next and we did the ‘stupid’ tactics.
Unfortunately even though the bosses went down so quickly, we’d had a reap put under the red marker so a few people died. But the boss itself went down easily and without any drama.

We also managed to do all of this with only one break.
Asking on TS who smoked to see if we could clear trash while the smokers went it was clear we couldn’t when half the raid replied.

We did go onto Kilrogg, alas it was quite messy. Visions were missed and tanks went down… Yjelza did save the day and carried the dps so we could kill it. But it was late, people were tired and it wasn’t our finest hour.

We called it after that. Finishing at 11:30 server time and gearing ourselves up for Gorfiend and friends.

Such a good run and getting back to how it should be… Sunday shall be the test though!