As of writing this, my guild – Devierum – remains the only guild on Malfurion to see past Brutallus. In fact, we have been working on M’uru now for several weeks. But only a few months ago, we were gearing ourselves up to fight and scratch for the title of top server guild. Everyone was excited and ready to begin competing with the two guilds that had beat us to Illidan and been around a lot longer – Echelon and Promethian. Here we are, a few months later, and we are the only true stand-out guild on the server.
So what the hell happened?
In the case of Promethian, I think it’s universally agreed on our server that they were a victim of stagnation. They had killed Illidan so long before Sunwell and had so settled into a 1-2 day raid week they simply couldn’t get back into the groove again. As for Echelon, they were just bad. But on a grander scale, guilds have been dying in droves since the release of Sunwell. Is the place really that hard?
On the contrary, it’s the problem that the rest of TBC was too easy.
With the exception of maybe Kael’thas Sunstrider (pre-pre-pre-pre-nerf), Burning Crusade raiding content was largely criticized by the majority of vanilla-WoW raiders as being too easy. This is evidenced by numerous guilds clearing Hyjal and Black Temple much more quickly than Blizzard had probably hoped. And it is those same guilds that then spent months waiting for new content that took far too long to arrive.
When I think back to lvl 60 raiding and all the stuff we didn’t see…it was because the stuff in AQ40 and Naxx was so challenging. Malfurion was not a launch server, it was released just a few months prior to the AQ Gate patch. From that time until TBC was released, we were able to complete full clears of MC and BWL, and clear most of AQ40 and two bosses in Naxx.
Compare that to TBC, where the new age of Devierum has only existed since after Black Temple was already released. In roughly 7 months, we cleared everything that TBC had to offer at the time, with plenty of time to wait for Sunwell. Then comes Sunwell, the first true testament to hardcore raiding in TBC, and FINALLY we’re having to strategize, think, work together…finally we need to actually TRY to be a successful guild. Granted in the old days there was room for more idiots in the raid, but that doesn’t change the fact that we killed the most highly anticipated boss in WoW to-date in just 2 nights of work in BT.
But hey, so what if Sunwell has officially killed the likes of Death and Taxes. The fact remains that it has single-handedly renewed my faith in Blizzard to still be able to deliver fun, challenging content (even if I hate the toon I play while I experience it). And really, that makes me feel a whole lot better about the coming expansion and how things stand to play out.
