Last night I went to Black Temple, tagged along with a couple of ex guildies who were boosting their level 70 twinks (I don’t know) which they do every week. I went along because I’d like to eventually be exalted with Ashtongue Deathsworn, and I didn’t have the achievement for killing Illidan yet. However, upon entering, I remembered how much I loved the instance. In fact, Black Temple is probably my favourite raid of which I have done at the right level. I’d never seen the Vanilla raids until I hit 70 so I can’t count those, sadly, because AQ looks pretty epic.

The thing I like the most, aside from how awesome the gear in that place looks, is actually how long it is. Took our guild a few months to clear the entire raid. Not days or a couple of weeks, a few months. Even the trash caused many a corpse run, if I recall, everybody used to disconnect on the little poison guys after Naj’entus, so that was pretty much, “AOE them down fast! FEAR!! USE FEAR!!” If people didn’t spread, or pay attention to the people around them, on the first boss, people would die.

Supremus trash was long and boring, and I think half of the raid Afked this part, but it was made semi-interesting by “will my ring drop this time?” That and when Supremus followed me, I died, end of story. I never actually understood why they made him bigger, and I really wanted to see a gnome tank him fortehlulz.

Gorefiend was fun, I remember I had the ghost debuff on my very first time there, not long after the guild had downed it actually, and of course I fucked up, caused a wipe. Then I didn’t get it for months, not until we were working on Mother I think, and when I did get it I owned. It was easy, and fun, more bosses like Gorefiend please! Though there was always the odd filler raider who would come along because there was nobody else and mess it up.

Bloodboil and Bigfaceguy (as I named him back then) were fun because, as a Shadow Priest, you REALLY had to watch your threat. Hunters can feign, Shadow Priests can’t, if I overaggroed on Bloodboil, I was dead. At the same time, Vampiric Embrace was very useful on these fights for the extra healing, but also a big threat bomb, so you really had to time when it was best to start using it.

Akama was too easy. Mother we had a mod called ‘Easy Mother’ which told you which way to run when you got the debuff, but eventually it started sending you into other people and so on, so mostly was ignored. Council was fun, I loved that fight, so much you had to watch out for, so many different things people had to do. We had one rogue who was a fucking beast at kicking, and timing it as well, my memories of that fight are mostly hearing on vent “kickkickkickkickkickkickkick” and “combat res that guy..”

Then we have Illidan. The most annoying thing about Illidan, is that I think I was there for a try, and then my internet went down for over a month. So I missed the learning the fight with the rest of the guild part which was sad, but I also missed the first kill. This is the only first kill I wanted to be there for, and I’ll always hate that I missed that. However, it was amazing that I was able to be there for all of this, and I eventually got my connection back and farmed it all with the rest of my guild, and picked up my Priest’s tier 6, which was my favourite tier set by a mile. That, and I finally saw the anti-climax of “is Illidan dead?”

Last night, we spent an hour or two clearing, just laughing at the whole place. It felt wrong, because I remembered it as this big epic raid instance which had some of my best WoW based memories. In fact, when they removed the attunement and people started skipping Kael’thas it felt wrong.. But, I went, I cleared, and even though it was piss easy now, it was still fun, and it still reminded me of my time in Supreme.