This is a video of my Horde guild taking down a monster named Gruul. We had been working at it for about four weeks, averaging maybe two nights a week and a couple hours each night. The video was taken by a druid healer in the shape of a tree. He's the one in the center with the blue square over his head. I'm frequently in the picture - the bear druid with the moon over his head. Quality is a bit poor. Easier to see on full screen, which you can get to by clicking on the video until a youtube screen opens up.



Mostly you are hearing the sound of Javiar, the openly gay blood elf paladin who coordinates a lot of our raids. "Gay" and "blood elf paladin" seem to be pretty much synonymous in the World of Warcraft. Javiar is a good guy. The only time you hear my voice is just about at the end when I say "I'm down" and then something about melee watching it, and then "You've got him" a few seconds later.

Killing Gruul the Dragonslayer takes an enormous amount of timing and coordination among 25 players. We had three people (tanks) taking the brunt of the damage, with about five healers supporting them. The rest of the team was there to do the bulk of the damage. Gruul gets continously stronger as time continues and eventually can kill even highly armored characters (like mine) with one shot. There are cave-ins that drop stalagmites on players randomly and must be moved out of immediately. There are also periods of silence when no spells can be cast.

The worst problem is that every 40 seconds or so everyone gets knocked about aways, and then a few seconds later turns to rock and shatters, doing damage to anyone near them. Everyone in the cave has to be carefully positioned as far away from everyone else as possible. About four people died in the first shatter on this run, and we all pretty much thought it was going to be another short attempt, but we managed to avoid any further deaths and then took him down after his 16th growth.

It was a heck of a cool feeling when he went down after a month of trying.