Another milestone was reached in my raiding alliance on Saturday night. I’m sure you all remember my post about nasty old Leo. This time, it was personal.

Sure, he kicked us around last time. This time, though, we were better prepared to fight our inner demons, and from the start things were going well. Now, we didn’t one shot him or anything, but by the third try we finally seemed to have our act together. It wasn’t long before we took the shot below, over Leo’s dead body.

No good loot for yours truly, but I didn’t have a ton of interest in the T5 gloves anyhow. The exciting part was getting to 5/6 in SSC, and having the opportunity to take on the Big Lady herself. So we moved on, everyone giddy to finally have our own look at one of the final T5 bosses. We’ve been cutting our teeth in SSC for awhile now, learning the boss fights, improving our overall gear, and gaining valuable experience. At the point, we have the potential to one shot everyone up to Leo, as we have a good handle of those fights.

For us, getting to Vashj is our first real payoff.

One of the great things about WoW, and one of the reasons it has held me for so long (since closed beta), is that I have almost NEVER felt cheated. Whenever I have reached some kind of milestone, be it in five man instances or in Raids or elsewhere, I always felt like the payoff was really worth all the work. I have played a lot of MMOs previously, and their payoffs often felt empty. Your chasing that carrot on a stick for some time, when you get ahold of the carrot, it better taste pretty darn good.

Of course there are always more carrots, but the ones I have tasted in WoW have been pretty darn good. My first introduction to Lady Vashj was no exception. Here’s a shot of the hall leading to her, if you haven’t seen it before. Screenshots only do so much, though. It can’t give you what I felt as I walked through that hall.

Epic. That’s how it felt. You hit a console on a platform once everyone else is down, and the whole inside of the cavern seems to impossibly shift and twist to reveal the road to the Lady. Of course the typical Blizzard high attention to detail is present, with moss and vines hanging from the ceiling, vast open spaces, and the haunting voice of Lady Vashj, drawing you to her. You know you’re in for a heck of a fight. Here she is, patiently waiting to kick us around.

Now, I won’t try to bore you with the details of the fight and how we failed. We got in three good attempts, and everyone there learned a lot. We never got past the second phase, but we got that all valuable experience. IMO, when it comes to raiding, it’s all about everyone getting a good taste of the fight before you can succeed. The first phase is pretty basic, and we got through that easily enough all three tries. In the second phase, though, it takes on a very difficult, very chaotic, and very epic feel. Basically adds are coming from everywhere, and you have to deal with them all in different ways. Nasty adds.

Anyhow, we didn’t get her down. But now we’ve been there, and we’ve seen the fight. As it has been with all the fights thus far, it’s only a matter of time before it clicks for enough people and we take her down. I plan to be there that day.

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