Hey, it's January, when did that happen.

Lemme tell you something, something you may already know, something you may have yet to experience. This is the pain of the 1%.

Last night, our guild of awesome one shot the entirety of Gruul's Lair, it was well done, very few people died, and there was loot to be had. I started the night off for us by providing a sacrifice to the WoW Gods, just a teeny tiny bit of gnome flesh will do it; preferably stuffed right down the throat of High King Maulgar himself. I succeeded, to much wild applause (oh, okay, some uninterested muttering). So, in case you're wondering, here's the procedure:

● Take one Mage (It doesn't matter the race, as long as it's a Mage; last night was a gnome), and disrobe said Mage until all that remains are flesh, and possibly tabard.

●Insert Mage into Gruul's Lair, positioning as close to Gronn Priests and Lair Brutes as possible.

●Have Mage use their skill of invisibility, and wait 5 seconds. At the end of 5 seconds, have Mage run forward as fast as possible, without using any other spells, until Mage hits the wall on the other side of the Cave.

●By now the invisibility should be wearing off, or will have worn off, and your sacrifice will again become visible to High King Maulgar and his band of lemmings. If your Mage is fast on the draw, and wants to get a last shot at life in before being horribly and cruelly torn apart, they can /dance. If not, it's goodbye cruel world.

●The Mage must then release their spirit to the winds, and your raid may now seek audience with the High King.

Well anyways, then our normal Mage tank came online, and I switched to my other role: Tank for Kiggler the Crazed and dps for Gruul himself. As I said, we one shot both bosses. Now, here's where the kicker comes in. High King Maulgar drops T4 shoulder tokens. Can you guess which one dropped? DRUID/WARRIOR/PRIEST you yell, fully expecting that to be the answer, since that's the class I was playing. But NO, dear reader, in full mockage of my poor, pitiful, now dearly departed Mage, not one, not one but TWO of the Mage/Warlock/Hunter T4's dropped, and EVERYONE who was there of that class already had them. *insert heavy / le sigh in ventrilo, and much wailing*. What does this mean for you? It means two T4 tokens were left lying in the dirt, and somewhere out there, a Mage is crying.

the end....







Ok no, not really the end, cuz yeah, after we totally annihilated Gruul's Lair, we were feeling a bit ambitious, so we decided to take a shot at DOOOOOOOMWalker. Doomwalker is a relatively easy fight, he's got 3 abilities you have to watch out for: Earthquake, Chain Lightening, and Overrun. Earthquake is really just annoying, it's nothing we can do to stop, so you just kind of have to deal with it. 2k damage every 2 seconds for 4 seconds, a total of 8k damage. Chain Lightening is a random damage spike that acts just like a normal chain lightening spell, chaining to anyone within approx 10 yards of you, doubling its damage every hit. So, for this ability, make sure you're not standing too near a lot of people. It almost would be handy to have a proximity meter here. And finally, Overrun; Doomwalker will randomly charge at people, knocking them back, and wiping aggro, so you better have a tank to pick him back up again, quicklylike.

Oh, one other thing, if you die during this fight, you're down, there's no rezzes, no running back to help out, no nothin, nada, and this is because he puts this crazy Mark of Death debuff on you that lasts for 10 minutes, and basically causes you to die, over and over again, if you get anywhere in the vicinity of Doomwalker himself. Why? Because it's to prevent people from utterly zerging him, it basically makes it so that your raid can only attempt him once every 15 minutes if you wipe.

We had three tanks for Doomwalker, one of each available tanking class, a Warrior, the guild's MT and RL, a paladin, and myself as the bear tank. Our warrior would be tanking him during all three different abilities, it was the paladins job to grab him once he did his Overrun ability and bring him back to the warrior. My job was relatively simple during this part of the fight, just dps in bear and build rage/aggro on him.

My time to play came in when Doomwalker hit 20%. This is when he enrages, during this point he does double damage, so, it's best to have a tank with really high hit points and armor. I never did check to see what my armor was at (I wasn't wearing badge of tenacity, due to the need to have my dodge trink from kara and my Netherwing badge for the stamina equipped{yeah shush about the Netherwing badge, I'm working on DMC:Vengeance, alright! sheesh}), so I couldn't tell you on that front, but I do know I was sitting around 18k health.

He still squashed me flat.

How did you do!!! you scream! Well. Our sadness, let me show you it.
attempt #1 ..... 1%.
attempt #2 (15 minutes later) ..... not even worth remembering.
attempt #3 (15 minutes later, yet again) ..... 17%
Alas, it was close to midnight, and people had to leave, so we had to stop :(

ONE. FRIGGEN. PERCENT! OMG. I died when he was at about 12%, so our MT picked him back up, but he didn't last long either. so all the dps that was left in the raid took him from about 10% down to 1%, and finally, it was just healers remaining... and then nothing. I'd even taken my headset off to avoid the shrieks and OMGS and SCREAMING that I knew was going to be forthcoming (yes, this means YOU!)

You can also read about the travesty here: at BRK's site, and here: at Brigin's site. Apologies to any of the other million bloggers we have in our guild if you've written about it too, and I missed it, but these were the only two I'd seen.

1%....

sigh.