Early Raiding in The Burning Crusade

At the time, I didn't pay too much attention to the top guilds on Darkspear. I know Diesel was number one the Horde side, and Random Violence on the Alliance side. Those were the true giants of Darkspear at the time. Knowing someone in Diesel, or being a former member, was something that truly inspired awe. A few notches below Diesel, there was a constant struggle for second place among guilds such as Thousand Souls, TDC, and Aftermath. There were probably more guilds in contention, but sadly I don't remember their names after all these years.

I had to run a few dungeons with the officers of TDC as some kind of trial, and apparently my performance was satisfying enough so I was accepted into the guild. My first few weeks in TDC weren't exactly exciting, though. The guild was quite large, but still there was only one Karazhan raid every week. I still don't know the exact reason for this. Maybe there was a lack of able tanks. Since there was only one raid group every week, there were a lot of people that never got picked for the raid.

Most of the time I would farm materials for consumables together with all the Rogues and Hunters while the raid was going on, in case they needed a replacement for some reason. This went on for quite some time, when one day while doing the usual farming, this very thing happened and I was asked to replace someone at Karazhan. Strangely enough, I don't remember any details from my first Karazhan raid. We killed the first few bosses, Attumen, Moroes, maybe Maiden of Virtue, and I didn't make a complete fool of myself. On the contrary, I seem to have done pretty well, since from this point I slowly started to become part of the in-group that was always picked for Karazhan. I signed up for raids pretty much every day of the week, which might also have helped.

As a side note, performing well as a Shadow Priest in the early days of The Burning Crusade wasn’t anything spectacular. As anyone that played a caster at the time will know, the crafted set from tailoring was extremely overpowered. Not only that, Shadow Priests in particular scaled exceptionally well with it. The set outperformed the Tier 4 Set by a wide margin and was pretty much on par with Tier 5, and in some ways superior to it. I didn’t replace it until Tier 6, even though I easily could have done so had I wanted to. Even worse, it could be obtained without even setting your foot in a raid instance. On top of that, Shadow Priest was a top tier damage class, while still providing great utility for other raid members, and I don’t remember any other Shadow Priests in the guild at all. So by sheer luck, I had pretty much the best pre-requisites possible.

At the time, we were working on Shade of Aran. From what I recall, this was the first boss in The Burning Crusade that required the whole raid to be somewhat coordinated, since one person could cause the whole raid to wipe, and this caused some serious problems for us. When we finally killed him, he bugged, and we got no loot. We filed a GM ticket and waited for several hours with no GM showing up. After a while, there were only me and a few officers and core members left. We were talking and goofing around all night, and this was the moment when I finally felt that I was part of the core team of the guild. When the GM finally showed up, it was in the form of a Gnome Mage that killed all of us in one shot. Except Marlen who Ice Blocked, of course.

Shade of Aran down, waiting for a Game Master.

One thing that strikes me is how amateurish we were, and still we were one of the top guilds on the server. A contending topic in face of the release of Classic has definitely been how hard the old raids actually were. I can’t really speak from experience in regards to the Vanilla raids, but I have vast experience from the raids in The Burning Crusade. Compared to my later guilds, TDC was an absolute mess. Despite this we cleared Karazhan (and more), something that the vast majority of the players on Darkspear didn’t do until much later when the raid was nerfed and better gear was available, or simply never did at all. I attribute this more to the inexperience of the player base than the difficulty of the raids. Compared to retail, the player base back then consisted of a huge fraction of casual gamers that simply won’t be present in Classic. In Classic you won’t meet any Shaman tanks, or Druids that ask at what level you can become a Shaman. That’s one part of the experience that I will definitely miss.

In regards to Karazhan, I don’t know how much my judgement is blurred by the fact that it was my first actual raid experience, but still to this day I think it’s the most well designed raid in the game. The impressive size of it was just stunning, and the mazelike layout made it look even larger. Running back after a wipe was always a mess since people got lost all the time. This was when I developed one of my favorite pranks. Whenever someone did a /follow on me after a wipe, I would intentionally drop off a ledge and levitate, and enjoy the raid leader yelling at the poor dead rogue when he returned from his bathroom break.