So last week MAY have been a minor set back… Being that I MAY have been completely Hammered on the heroic Ultraxion encounter. However, we got a chance for a rematch last night… and that went a little better round one! Obviously I wouldn’t be writing this unless we kicked that son of a bitch square in the nuts and stole his loot; so I won’t bore you with the thrilling details of our hard won epic victory. Instead I want to focus on something a little more interesting in this post. After a pretty discouraging couple of attempts of straight fail on the giant purple dragon, the call was made for the “last attempt“…

Last attempt, what exactly does that mean to a raider? Over the course of the six years I have been doing the raid lead gig: I have always found that, as everyone knows, wiping is discouraging – but – wiping and giving up… now that’s completely unacceptable. However, there does have to be a point that someone “turns the stove off” and says – alright guys, we’re burnt out, we’re not getting anywhere and it’s getting far too late to put any more attempts into this. That person is the most loved and hated person in the raid group, this is the guy that is saying “we can’t do this”. Usually that winds up being the raid leader – or Zyleys wife.

Last attempt – When mumbled through the ventrilo; It almost seems as though those bone chilling words send something to the far reaches of a raiders brain – telling them; “this is it buddy, this is the attempt that we have to actually do our best“. Leading the raider into a frenzy of awesome that functions like an adrenaline rush of awareness, DPS, and almost god like reflexes. It’s almost like doing a butch of uppers for the raider and it puts them into a state of gaming that cannot be obtained any other way. You will never find this in a gamer for a Playstation!

Last night is the perfect example of this: We began heroic Ultraxion at roughly 9:30: after 50 straight minutes of getting our butts handed to us; It was becoming pretty obvious we were not going to get this guy. We recorded our best attempt at 15%, with the enrage timer going off. The majority of our attempts we had someone mixing up there turn to absorb his special…. So basically failing all around. (To put that into perspective 15% of 20 million is still 3 million hit points and that puts us quite a bit off of actually downing this boss.) The iconic “last attempt” is called. Not only did we down the poor bastard, but we also downed him with NO casualties and NO errors in the absorbing.

Really makes you wonder if we should just call for a one shot on everything, eh? Food for though.