Heroic Sire Denathrius — The Tale of the Dodgy Victory

Last Thursday, I went over just how close we were to taking this guy down. Of course- I also went and said we would almost certainly get Sire Denathrius down on Sunday (our next raid night).

*sigh*

We didn’t, of course. I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was a bad idea to say it at the time, but I did it anyway.

That was just one of a number of tantalisingly close attempts that night. Our best one was a tad under 4%. So we still walked away from the night without a kill, still behind the curve.

And, one of our players is pregnant. And was due that night. AND, her husband is our raid leader. So… We were on a bit of a clock, to say the least.

Tonight we weren’t sure if we’d have them available or not. But we were pretty certain if we did, it was the absolute last chance we were going to get.

So.

Stage set:

How Did Tonight Go?

Well… Let’s see if we can tell this story mostly in pictures.

FAAAAAARK.

Now, if you’re about to guess that with two Warlocks in the raid, dots came in to save the day… Good guess, but no.

That isn’t what happened. Keetah is affliction, but had died without a bres available >60 seconds before this encounter ultimately ended.

When I died, Denathrius was at 0.5%, and Whatheheal (our holy priest) died not too long after that and went into Guardian Spirit.

Brulath, our Resto Shaman, was the last living member of the raid. And you’ll see he died twice. He ankh’d to see if could just eke in that little extra damage. With our raid size, and at 0.2% health — Denathrius had:

In the 4 seconds Brulath managed to get back up for — he did get off a flame shock, which certainly helped. But it isn’t how things ended.

It was Shatter. From Service In Stone, a Venthyr ability for Resto Shamans.

I- I’m not sure how I feel about this. Hah. It seems to have become a bit of a thing to get cheesey boss kills lately. Heck, in that later case it was even a case of mutual destruction like it was here.

There was still the usual end-of-tier boss-kill exuberance shouted down the Discord, but it was also mingled with a lot more confusion than normal. It took us a little bit to unpick what actually happened and discover that Shatter is what ultimately did it.

I think that mostly, I’m just glad it is over. And in particular — that it is over in time for our raid lead and his wife not to miss out on the Ahead of the Curve achievement before they go embark on the next big change in their lives.

But… do we deserve this? Being the 77th attempt I would like to think so. It can’t be denied that it was something of a Pyrrhic victory though. We quite literally wiped when we won. Sure we got him but he got us too.

Whatever doubts I might have though — I’m going to take it. I could really do with the break before 9.1 lands!