The effort you put in...

The effort you put in sometimes does reap the reward you're after.

I've been struck ill with a ghastly flu making me miss out raids for nearly a week. I won't go into any details about that, I just wish you all to not get into touch with it. It sucks, I've never been ill for longer than a couple of days now it's been more than a week.

Yesterday night I knew the regular 10 man team would be short a tank if I didn't show up. Since the doctor said I could take as much aspirine as I liked (within reasonable confined doses, mind you!) I figured I'd go and give it a shot.

So there I sat, under two blankets with the biggest, warmest woolen sweather I had. Drinking tea with honey - oh and I had a scarf around my neck because that feels so good when your throat is sore... Tanking against knowing better.

The first hour was quite okay. We breezed through normal Trial of the Crusader, for me it felt like some sort of dream. I tanked half detached and mechanical. Had a few minor slip ups but all in all not too bad. By the time we'd done Onyxia (10) and started heroic mode it felt like the aspirine was losing its hold on me. I gritted my teeth and held on. I wasn't going to let my team down, we were going to do this!

We managed to reach Anub'Arak with only two unfortunate wipes - one on Jarraxus and one on Twin Valkyrs. Especially the latter could have been prevented (it would have helped if I had actually noticed my valkyr go for our mage but hey... I am ill, I'm allowed a little slip right? ). Either way we've had one messy and one really good try where we wiped at 3% on anub'arak...

So we gave it one more and at 5% the raid started to unravel, just a little too much healing - one burrowed add getting his shadow strike off and there we went. But somehow, as the tanks went down people nuked on and gave us the messiest kill ever (just our warlock standing!)

Pay up time:

A tribute to Mad Skill.

Wow!

Now this is something I expected to only reach when we were allready halfway through Icecrown Citadel! Either way I can only say thank you to the 13 ish other people that put in the time and dedication to pull this off on their 'free' nights. We're not the world's best, fastest or whatnot, but we've proven we got skill a plenty for such a wonderful ragtag band of adventurers. Thanks a lot guys! Now let's go back and get me that sword next week!

Aethelas