The Ahn'Qiraj Gate Opening Event

[MongoJerry]

We started making circuits around the zone, killing bugs, anubisaths, and other critters. Our numbers started to dwindle to the point where we thought it might be a good idea to hook up with another guild reputation farming in the area, and it turned out that the TAO farming group was at about half strength, too. We combined our raids, and that's when the rate of reputation gain turned up a notch. One of the idiosyncrasies of reputation farming is that players get the same reputation gain from killing a mob whether they kill it alone or in a 40-person raid group, so the bigger the group, the better. With a 40-man raid group, we were able at one point to tap, tank, and kill four supreme anubisaths at once, keeping the taps away from the other reputation grinding groups wandering the zone. At 250 reputation a piece, that was a big reputation boost in a short amount of time.



During the fights, some people had fun by showering the supreme anubisaths with Valentine's Day flowers, which caused massive rose petals to fall all around the raid party.



A big anubisath raiding party spawned to attack Cenarian Hold again, and this time our raid was ready.



We raced ahead of the anubisath pack to Cenarian Hold. As you can see, High Overlord Saurfang had prepared his line of troops for the upcoming battle.

Right before the anubisaths got to Cenarian Hold, our mages charged in to aoe (combined with limited invulnerability pots) and blink out and our warriors charged in to Thunderclap to try to tag all of the anubisaths. Healers did whatever they could to heal anyone who managed to tap anubisaths, getting aggro on themselves, and we all ran into Cenarian Hold.



The battle itself was quite a sight to behold. High Warlord Saurfang is a monster and tanked every anubisath himself while both players and NPC's nuked down the invaders. In this particular fight, we managed to tap all eight anubisaths, so at 250 reputation each, we got a whopping 2000 reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu for about five minutes of work. Sometimes other raids managed to get some of the other taps, so we weren't always so lucky, but we always managed to get the tap on at least a few of them.



We continued to circle around Silithus battling bugs and anubisaths.



Finally, at 4:45pm, the last invasion of Cenarian Hold before the scheduled server maintenance spawned and it was a doozy. This group included not only anubisaths but also destroyers who aoe feared.



This invasion was so powerful, not even High Overlord Saurfang could survive it. Luckily, by the time he died, we had killed enough of the invaders that we could finish off the remnants without his help. Our raid managed to get the tap on all these mobs, too, so that was a huge bump in reputation for us.



By the end of the evening, I'd gotten to 26250/36000 Hated reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu. But since at least 20,000 of that was gotten in the final four hours before the server maintenance, I see that this only shows what could have been done. If we had had a full organized raid going from the moment that the gong had rung, we could have all easily have gotten our reputations with the Brood of Nozdormu to neutral -- even with the shortened gate opening event due to the server maintenance. Oh, well. I still had a lot of fun running around during the event, and I look forward to tackling the two new Ahn'Qiraj raid dungeons in the coming weeks.