Illidan down!

I would like to interrupt your regularly scheduled witty commentary on healing strategy and guild management to bring you an important update in the in-game life of Sydera. My guild, Collateral Damage of Vek’nilash, has killed Illidan! Oh yes, we were far behind the leading wave of progression, but this kill was nonetheless thrilling.

The death of Illidan is an in-game milestone with special meaning for me. When Collateral Damage started up, we had none of the advantages that raiding guilds typically do. We are the product of a merger of two casual Karazhan guilds, and with one or two exceptions, our players had no previous raid experience, either in Vanilla WoW or other MMOs. We had new main tanks, a new raid leader, and a new healing coordinator (who, at the time, didn’t even realize that Regrowth spam was bad–oops!). We are a grassroots guild built from the ground up–and if you, dear readers, had seen our first attempts at Maulgar, you never would have thought that these same people could ever down the final boss of Tier 6.

When we started raiding, my endgame goal was to see the inside of Hyjal. Not necessarily kill any bosses there, but just see it. However, once we killed Vashj, I started to really believe, and to outright promise all of our new recruits that we’d be dancing on Illidan’s mangled, bloody corpse by the end of the summer. And well, a few days before the equinox, here we are. As you can see from the screenshot, we also brought out our formal wear for the occasion.