It’s been quite a while since we talked about hardcore kills – a year and three months since Ragnaros died to be exact – and HC Elite are back with the second raid of Vanilla WoW cleared! It took quite a while to muster up the courage to clear all the way to Nefarian and take him down, with pretty specific strategies needed for some bosses (Vael says hi), but HC Elite proved everything is possible with enough dedication and time. Also, if you’re here looking to see some hardcore deaths, stick around to the end of the article.
Here’s the Nefarian kill (and you can click through the video for the rest of the clear):
The entire run had 0 deaths but there were two very dangerous issues, starting with Vaelastrasz. The way they avoided people dying to the bomb there was a simple hearthstone out for those affected, since it removes the debuff, with healers waiting at the inn for any additional damage from the dot! Also the extremely fast, sub-1 minute kill didn’t hurt either.
The other issue was a potential Razorgore bug that could cause instant wipes randomly, and the guild did have to go outside of hardcore to address that one, making a WeakAura to warn them if it was about to happen – but luckily it didn’t, as esuvii explains below while talking about the guild’s preparation process:
We did not prog on PTR/softcore at all. Basically all of our preparation was done from watching VoDs, and looking at old Warcraft Logs entries, and from memory of when we played softcore back in original Classic.
For each boss we have a dedicated Discord channel to discuss/research strategies, then eventually that becomes a raid plan with assignments etc in a Google Drive spreadsheet. Our raid leader also made a commentary video going over BWL VoDs that we would be doing similar strategies to.
Everyone had watched this commentary video earlier in the day, and there was a lengthy discussion therein about those Drakonids and their different possible abilities (e.g. Whirlwind).
With Razorgore there is a bug where he can unexpectedly cast the insta-kill raid explosion that usually happens when you wipe. For this we did go onto WotLK PTR with a couple of people to investigate. We were able to make a WeakAura that detected if that bug was about to occur and warns everyone to Flask of Petrification. Thankfully we didn’t actually encounter the bug!
Huge congrats to HC Elite once again, and now it’s time to see how long it takes until their next conquest, as C’Thun is quaking in his his boots! And if you only came here for some hardcore deaths, here’s something for your bloodthirst, courtesy of esuvii:
