I’ve had my fair share of gut-wrenching wipes at 1 or 2%, nearly always in 25 man raids. Those are rough, especially when you’ve been chipping away at a tough boss, gradually getting closer and closer to success, only to wipe with just a sliver of their health remaining. Those wipes are very frustrating, especially when they occur on the last run of the night.
Rewind to about 5 years ago. I joined a 25 man PuG made up of mostly random late-night players from my server, including a Mage friend of mine, who I think was the only other player I knew in the raid.
The objective: Heroic: Twilight Assist, which meant downing Sartharion with one Drake still up in heroic mode, 25 man.
This was a fairly difficult achievement for a PuG back in those days, but we had a pretty decent group.
While not a particularly stand-out type of raid or achievement (by today’s standards)…the reason this raid was so memorable to me was due to the finish. It was the only time during my 8 years of playing that one of those raid wipe <1% finishes actually went my way.
During what was likely the last flame wave before the enrage timer, the wave took out the majority of the remaining players – leaving only about a half-dozen with Sartharion sitting at about 175K, meaning we were oh so close.
One after another, Sartharion starts nuking the remaining players. It started shaping up to be one of the most epic close-call wipes in history, with Sartharion down to somewhere around 20K.
Eventually the entire raid had been burned to a crisp, with only my mage friend still standing, when he pulled off the impossible by soloing Sartharion’s last few remaining bits of health in H 25 man. It was truly epic.
I’ve never been a part of anything like that since. Going from what looked like one of the closest attempts of all time, to a startling against-all-odds surprise victory, made my Heroic: Twilight Assist achievement from 2009 a treasured and memorable WoW moment.
See the original post here, along with the epic screenshot. My corpse can be seen just to the right of Sartharion, with King Krush laid out next to me.