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Another first kill, another report from the "endgame" raiding community in World of Warcraft. This one was special, though, because it was a looong time coming.

Azgalor is the 4th boss in the raid instance The Battle of Mount Hyjal, which is a time-travel thingy re-simulating the climactic battle from the old Warcraft III game. The first time we saw this boss, it was 2 months ago when we did a "get to know you" pull after our first kill of the 3rd boss in the instance (Kaz'rogal) on June 10th.

We didn't get back to start learning how to do the fight as a group for a couple of weeks, though. It's summertime and with vacations and such, we've been bringing a lot more new people in than usual and it's slowed the group's overall progression some.

In mid-July, we started working seriously on Azgalor. Where "working seriously" = dying a whole heck of a lot. Because that's what raiding is about, really, dying a lot. A whole lot...

We went and died all night on July 18th. Then we went back a week later and died all night again on the 24th. Then the following week, we died a little more but finally got the boss to a tantalizing 1% health!

We were totally geeked up to go back later that week and finish him off for good, but a certain necessary protection-specialized paladin got sidelined by real life that raid night (yeah, me), got on an hour late and we ended up in a grumpy and disorganized raid to the Black Temple instead.

We lost our momentum and a little enthusiasm, but we tried again. We died some more on 8/6 and again this past Tuesday. And yeah, if that seems like a lot of dying on the same encounter to you, it seemed like a lot to us too.

Azgalor is the first boss we've encountered that when defeated, drops gear of the Tier 6 level -- the highest level gear sets in the game. And it was sure looking like Tier 6 is not available to a group like ours. Not one that assembles a raid group anew each night based on whoever is around, rather than having a dedicated core 25 who show up and learn together every time.

And it sure didn't look too promising as we gathered up to go back and die some more last night. Some of our most regular players were on vacation, had company visiting, or were otherwise unavailable. It's even possible a few people were simply getting a little tired of dying over and over again to the same boss. You have to be able to tough it out to succeed in raiding, but everybody has their limit where they might need a night off.

We scrambled together our group and proceeded to die as usual. Four or five times. It was after 2am, which is late even for l8raid, and we agreed to give it just one more try...

It's a crazy fight. First, the positioning has to be very precise. Everybody has to find a spot where they are able to do their job (damaging the boss, healing the main tank) while trying to stand at least 35 yards away from Azgalor himself. If you have to stand closer, and some people do, you're going to get hit with a Rain of Fire that will kill you unless you move out of it immediately and also get healed immediately. Azgalor will also periodically do a Howl that silences all casters, including the healers, who need to prepare for this by having the tank ready at full health to survive a period of no more healing for a little bit.

Best of all, every 50s, he casts the Doom of Azgalor on a random player in the group. Which kills you, no saving throw. There is no way to avoid or escape it. So a bunch of people are just going to die no matter what you do. Better yet, when they die, a Doomguard spawns from their corpse and attacks the rest of the raid. So on top of everything else, a subgroup of raiders has to be in charge of controlling and killing the Doomguards and every manner of bringing players back to life in the battle has to be planned and used effectively.

It's a hard fight. Which is why we died so much. But at 3am last night, somehow we magically put together just enough correct play, just enough mad scrambling of people charging around changing roles on the fly, and just enough good luck on who got Doomed and somehow actually killed the boss for the very first time.

Did I mention that every time you try to fight the boss, you have to spend at least 30m fighting waves and waves of hard "trash" mobs first? Sometimes we all die before we even see the boss. Sometimes we scraped by the trash and died in 20s to the boss because we didn't get the initial positioning perfect.

So yeah, that one felt special. We really had to stick it out a long time, but we finally, eventually got there. Which was pretty sweet. Even before I got my new Tier-6 gloves. ;)

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