Ainx, Part 6

Still Life killed Illidan sometime in November of 2007. After farming the instance for 5 months straight a lot of the members became disillusioned with the game. Through this huge pause in content some famous guilds quit playing altogether (Death and Taxes, Deus Vox). Still Life managed to persevere until Sunwell, but despite our best efforts to continue playing, we simply could not. In the prior months our roster dwindled and we replaced a lot of core members with newcomers. We raided on the PTR but only twice and did not get much practice in on Kalecgos before Sunwell went live. The week that Sunwell went live, two of our priests and a healing shaman dropped off the face of the planet. At this point Mun, rightfully so, simply called it. Still Life's amazing run had come to a halt in the Burning Crusade.

Ainx and Itada were put away - stored in a safe place for future endeavors. We promised to come back stronger than ever for Wrath of the Lich King. In the meantime, a lot of us tried out Age of Conan, hopped back into Final Fantasy XI (as I found out a few people had actually played it before WoW as well!) and played other non-MMOs. Overall nothing notable happened here.

In late 2008 Wrath of the Lich King beta was just about to wrap up. I was playing my shaman, Pneu, on the beta servers at the time. One evening Kody (of Conquest) messaged me asking if I were interested in healing a Naxxramas 10 run (Naxx was repurposed from a 40-man to a 10 and 25man in Wotlk). Naturally I agreed, hungry for content to destroy. We cleared a bunch of bosses which gave me a pretty good base of strategy for SL's planned resurgence (though the new Naxx felt so easy that strategy was hardly necessary). Towards the end of 2008, Wrath of the Lich King dropped on the store shelves and like a fat kid in a candy store I jumped on it and leveled to 80 as fast as I could.

Through the next couple months we went through Naxxramas in an effort to gear up. At this point, Mun was still playing, and I was playing my warrior now. We recruited a large amount of people to fill the gaps left by between-expansion attrition. Some key additions to our roster were ex-members of Vengeance/Abandon - Horo, Chalae, Tabooman - as well as some other excellent players such as Ayume, Shalanna, Peemp, Rousse, Kaija, Drakkoniz and Tarlinras. With this extremely solid crew, after a less-than-hilarious Immortal mishap on the spider boss Maexxna, we managed to complete the Glory of the Raider meta achievement and gain the Immortal title in the process. Only about 120 people got the Black Drake on Kilrogg (Conquest, TI, Still Life, Clout Mace?, Last Call and another flash-in-the-pan Horde guild), a reward for completing the GotR meta achievement.

With Naxxramas out of the way, our next target was Ulduar, though not without destroying Sartharion 10+3 first...

We also slew Malygos really fast. I think that was an achievement too - required for the meta? I don't remember now.

End, Part 6