Gates Crashed

I bet you're expecting me to post about the patch! I will at some point of course, but not today. Today I want to talk about something else that happened this week.

Back in December I wrote about how I finally defeated my nemesis Dread Master Brontes (master mode) during my progression team's last operation of the year. I was sure that after three months of working on that kill, everyone would be dying to spend time anywhere other than Dread Fortress in the new year, but when I polled them over the holidays about what we should be doing next, the surprising result was that pretty much everyone wanted to go back to DF and beat up Brontes some more.

So we did that, and started earning Wings of the Architect for everyone. I'll forever feel slightly conflicted about that mount, because while it's a very cool and unique model, it doesn't fit my trooper main at all. It just used to be very prestigious to have for its rarity, though I guess it's less prestigious now, after my whole team acquired it.

As we got close to everyone having the mount and being able to kill Brontes more reliably (I hesitate to say that we had her "on farm", considering that we still wiped on her a lot as well), we started working on the achievement for the timed run. After shaking off some rust on the earlier bosses (we'd usually been able to use a lockout for our Brontes kill, so we'd skipped the first four bosses for several weeks) and after Mr Commando got very mad at our dps for being unable to remember their Draxus assignments, we got somewhat better at that too.

The timer for Dread Fortress isn't as tight as the one for Dread Palace, but things on Brontes can just go wrong so easily, and even if you have a clean run up to her room, you only have up to a maximum of three or so good attempts at her before the timer expires. Yesterday we'd had our best run at it up to then, with a pretty smooth clear of the first four bosses and enough time for those three full tries on Brontes herself - and they were all pretty decent as well, but alas, it just wasn't meant to be. One was a wipe at 0.8%. We even gave it a few more goes after the timer had expired, but that evening we just couldn't get her down.

When it came to the question of what we should do tonight, whether we should go back to trying to just kill Brontes or re-attempt the timed run on alts, I was initially in favour of the latter. But then I came home late from work, one of our dps players dropped out on short notice, and Mr Commando reminded me that his co-tank for the evening had actually never successfully killed Brontes with us. He soon had me convinced that it was probably better to go directly back to Brontes after all and just try to get a first kill with the less experienced co-tank.

However, the rest of our team had other ideas. They really wanted to try the full run again! So we gave in and started from scratch again. I felt pretty confident that we weren't going to be successful, so I wasn't too worried, but apparently that more relaxed approach was magic. We breezed through the first few bosses and then... killed Brontes on our very first attempt! With the co-tank who'd never killed her with us before! We just had such an insane amount of luck with the orbs, we could hardly believe it (though I also cursed a little for getting the title on my alt instead of my main).

After the extremely rocky experiences I had with raiding in early Legacy of the Sith, I didn't expect to finish the expansion on such a high. Now we just need to do it again so I can get the title on my main and so the members of our team who weren't there tonight can get the achievement too.