There’s a tendancy these days to say that World of Warcraft’s reign is over. But whilst I would agree with a lot of the criticisms, games like The Old Republic have yet to grow into something that might capture me away. So I continue to raid with my guild weekly and continue to have a lot of fun doing so.
I’ve documented back in October just how crap we were when we started out. In that post, I marvelled at the fact that for the first time we were actually doing the current raiding tier’s content for the first time. Our improvement has continued and we were stoked when, come the release of the new Dragon Soul tier back in December, we tried it on a whim with only 9 out of 10 players and actually took down the first boss.

We’ve never been committed as some of the 6-nights-a-week hardcore raiding guilds but twice a week we’ve come together to try and progress through this latest raiding tier of content.
It’s been hard work and the raiding composition has changed a little as people have left and new players have joined to take their place, but what always amused us was that as a casual relaxed raiding guild, we suddenly found ourselves ranked with the hardcore players working our way through the current raid content.
Week by week we’ve progressed, week by week we’ve all got better. Fights that were complete wipe-fests have become tightly co-ordinated. As we’ve learnt our characters better we’ve been able to act to situations instantly. We’ve continued to die , we’ve continued to learn and we’ve continued to improve.
And so finally last night we found ourselves at the last of the raid’s eight bosses, an epic fight against the remnants of a world-ending dragon. With each pass we got closer to taking them down until we were all convinced that we could do this.
And then we did. The final boss of the current tier of raiding content down. There were whoops of joy, there was shock we’d actually done it, and there was pride. The culmination of many, many weeks of work.
We’ve joked that come the next expansion we’re going to make a serious stab at a realm first kill and as we’ve progressed, that is becoming more and more a possibility. But for now we’ve got heroic mode to do, a far greater challenge and one only a handful of hardcore raiding guilds are currently attempting.