So where did I leave off. Oh yes, Endless Nightmares. After Mortality went down a guild called Endless Nightmares was recruiting new members for their raid group. I had switched my hunter's spec from Marksmanship (which I had leveled with, bad idea at the time) to Beast Mastery. Oddly enough, my wife's hunter had been Beast Mastery, but ended up switching to Marksmanship when she joined Endless Nightmares.
Thus began our time as raiders in WoW. This was probably the most fun period for me (my wife not so much, not sure if the guild leadership didn't like her or what, but there were times she was left out of raids that left us scratching our heads).
Anyway, my first raid with them was temporary. One of the members (a warlock), was running late, so I filled in for a couple of bosses in Karazhan. The first boss, Attumen the Huntsman, dropped the schematic (engineering recipe) for the best scope in the game at the time (attaches to a bow, crossbow or gun for I think extra crit). The warlock was an engineer at max skill, so he could make it, but of course, was not in the group. I was the only other engineer, so even though my skill was still too low, I got the pattern. What was funny, this was only my second time on this boss. The lock player was understandably annoyed, as he was at Exalted reputation with the faction that deals with Kara (The Violet Eye, I think) and had never seen it drop (he got it the next week though). That provided me with motivation to level my engineering skill, which also yielded the schematic for the second best scope, although I had no reason to make that one.
This would prove to be the height of my WoW powers, though we only barely got into tier 5 content by the end. We raided Karazhan weekly, and eventually had enough people for 2 groups (it was a 10-person raid), one for members who needed gear, and one more as a speed run (by this point, I was in the latter). Typically there was a competition of sorts among the damage classes to see who would top the damage meter. Usually our mage would come in first, while second place would go back and fourth between my hunter and the warlock.
Finally we had enough people to start 25-man content (Vanilla WoW raids were 10, 25, or 40 player raids. TBC had a couple of 10 player raids but most were 25 players). Gruul's Lair came first. I think we actually got through the first boss just fine (more or less). It was actually 5 bosses at once and required a fair amount of coordination. This is where my wife and I could really shine. One of these bosses was ideal for paired hunters to tank. He had only ranged attacks, and would polymorph whoever was highest on his threat meter, so two hunters stacking damage and trading polymorphs was one of the recommended ways to tank him (the other option is to have a Balance druid in Moonkin form tank him solo, as transformed druids are immune to polymorph). I remember we screwed up once, as the call went out for all DPS to move to another boss, so, being hunters, we just kind of went and started on that boss before our assigned target was down. Oops. Other than that, having my wife and I tank this thing was a great way to go. Gruul gave us a lot of trouble, though strangely, once we got him down he was practically on farm.
Magtheridon's Lair came next. Interesting fact: I never got to be straight DPS on this guy. First time playing it was in a pug (our guild leader was in the pug and they needed more players so a few of us got invited), and I was assigned as a cube clicker. He has some kind of overpowered nuke, and 5 players in the raid had to click on these cubes in the room to banish him and prevent him from casting it. I was perpetually a cube clicker after that. I seem to remember him being fairly easy. Not sure we ever wiped actually.
To be continued...
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