Agony was founded by our Shaman leader Verato late 2000 within the game of Everquest. It didn't take long for Agony members to create a force to be reckon with within the raiding ranks of our own Vazaelle server. The tradition had begun, but little did anybody know it would carry on for years to come. Agony has gone through good times, bad times, and controversial times, but one thing remains the same, every year this guild continues to turn over raid content and move forward within whatever game we have chosen to play. World of Warcraft has been no different, however, switching over to WoW meant we had to step down from everything we had accomplished in Everquest, and relearn a new game from scratch. Many members from Agony's beginnings are very much still around and playing, it's a great tradition that continues to live on and a legacy that makes us stand out from other guilds. This legacy gives us an advantage when times get tough, because we can always look back and draw motivation from what we have accomplished in the past, and use it to help us focus and move forward into the future.

I think we can all agree we had a lot of fun diving into something totally new this year. I really had a good time leveling up in WoW because the game got interesting very early. Here are a bunch of images that relive some of the action over the past year.

Adventures started early, for a few of us we decided to "be a man" and "do the right thing" by going into Blackfathom Depths Agony style with 3. We're animals, I know, I know, but we had a mission and this is where it started. Check out how it ended.



Remember kids, don't be walking around clicking all the candles in this place (like what Silense did) or you'll get promptly bumrushed by this zerg of foul water creatures.

This marks the heart of where real PvP use to take place.



Scarlet Monestary was THE place to be at this level, here is the first time my regular crew beat this place. We owned!



The Princess in Maraudon was the first hard boss in the game in my opinion. She could rip apart an unprepared group of 50s pretty quick. She isn't complicated, just rough, a common trait of EQ bosses so it was familiar territory for us but fun non the less.



It doesn't take long to level a Priest in this game. Not because you can grind endless mobs with your insane DPS as a Shadow Priest, but because your guildmates will take a healer, any healer, any level, into any instance, for any possible heals. This of course gets you loot you can't use for a few levels, but you want to use it so you grind out those levels as soon as possible to get your phat lootz equiped. Here's a fine example, this is Sunken Temple of course, Stromm our fearless tanker was the highest level at 55 in this 50-55 dungeon. I'm 42. They actually had me in there the previous week at 38 and we cleared the first half of the zone and up through the dragons to the ring event but that's where we ended.



On to bigger events, here is the first Agony group to 5 man all of Lower Blackrock Spire, go us!



Ever wonder who the first to 60 in Agony was?



Badkarma ended up rerolling a priest, Notarget.

Eventually it was our time to start Molten Core. Aside from Juggernaut, every single other guild that had gone into MC on the Horde side had teamed up or merged with another guild at some point to learn it, except us. This gave several guilds a month or so head start, but it didn't matter, of all those the only one that "BEAT US TO THE PUNCH" was Shadow Protectorate, who also became the 2nd Horde guild on Doomahammer to defeat Ragnaros. The 3rd? Agony. The 4th? As of today, almost 2 months after we killed Ragnaros, nobody. Here is our first Lucifron kill, pretty smooth...not, but we didn't care.



Here's our first Mag kill a couple days later. Aside from our first kill, one of the best kills we had on Mag, or maybe ever, was this one day we screwed up the start and with barely a dent in his hp the 20 (yes 20, I counted) people that remained alive slowly worked his hp down and beat him. So yea, we can beat Mag with 20, np.



When we aren't raiding some of us can be found PvPing. Speaking of which, this is the toughest match I've seen all year where we won. We won in style coming back from a 0-2 deficit. I still can't believe we won this.



Every guild is different in MC, some have troubles on one boss, others have troubles on other bosses. The one boss that pissed us off the most? Gehennas. Fuck that guy, seriously, fuckem. We all know how some of you beat him on the first try, blah blah, but can you beat him with no deaths? We know you zerged his ass down and had 5 people standing your first kill. We know, we almost did that ourselves with a 4% zerg attempt right off the bat. I seriously think they should double his hp, then you wouldn't see newb guilds in MC get past him for a month, or at all, without a proper procedure. I'll do something I don't ever do here, I'll admit we wiped to him about 8 times before we beat him the first time, but when we did win we only had 5 deaths. Once we got a strat down that worked for us we owned him, and have owned him many times with under 3 deaths and sometimes with 0. Agony doesn't get away with killing stuff half assed like some guilds, if we play sloppy we generally wipe, end of story. That's fine because as far as I'm concerned a quality kill is way more satifying then a sloppy kill. It means your guild's wheels are turning at 100% which is exactly what you will need to beat this guy the first time.



We wiped to Ragnaros 22 times before we won. Apparenlty this is average. I'm cool with that, but how many guilds beat him the first time with 5 deaths total over 2 rounds of Sons? It's about quality kids. "Do the right thing", oh and, "Be a man".

This image is significant and here is why. The first time you go against Rag you think your hot shit because you got to him. Then once you stay alive long enough to sustain any amount of DPS you get him down to a whopping 81% the first 3 minutes until his Sons of Flame spawn which completely FUBAR your raid up. You then spend the next several weeks trying to figure out why you can't DPS him down much let alone kill a Son. Then you find a way. Somewhere, somehow, you get his hp a wee bit lower each try. This shot was one of the last attempts we had where we could only get him down about 1/3 of his hp. Slowly, attempt after attempt you get closer to the 50% mark so if you ever do manage to survive a round of Sons, you may not have to see them again. Or you could be like us and say master the Sons and not worry about your DPS too much. There are 2 ways you beat the Sons, kill one at a time, or AE them. Now, some things don't work in Agony, like...assisting. Ok, we can assist, it's just that Rag is scary shit when your learning him so you forget to assist, or what asisst is, or what it means. Either way assisting somebody for each Son just did not work, so we tried something different that the raid leader refered to earlier, and I quote, "that is a dumb idea". Apparently dumb ideas work for Agony because not only do we kill the Sons fast , the last time we killed him, our 6th kill, I actually got up, ran to the bathroom and took a piss while we waited for Rag to repop. No joke. We had I think 4 deaths our last run, all apps, so technically we had 0 deaths. We generally take a few more attempts then other guilds to learn stuff, but when we nail the encounter we nail it like we have done it 100 times before.

Now, I want to spend a little time talking about the lamest encounter we have seen yet in this game. Here she is.



We have wiped more on her after we killed her the first time, then we have wiped to Ragnaros...period. Ya rly. What you need here is luck, lots of luck to get her 5 epics she likes to drop each time. Count em, FIVE. 10 minutes of randomness for FIVE epics. Ya rly. Actually the reality is some Agonites are like kids in the candy store. You tell them not to touch, but they can't not touch the candy. It's like having the "PUSH ME" button in front of you but being told not to "push the button". Your mind plays games on you, you can't resist, but you have to. This is Onyxia the boss that resists all taunts, so telling your 18 DPSers, " DO NOT ATTACK THE BIG FAT DRAGON THAT COVERS YOUR ENTIRE SCREEN", is sorta hard. We eventually got past this and many kills later were doing pretty good with her.

We started doing Blackwing Lair recently. The first event is like...nothing...we have seen previous in the game. Sorta, I compared it to busting into Ironforge on the previous update. It really is like that. You know what though, it's a great event because there IS a way to do it smoothly if you do exactly what your supose to. It's not nearly as random as people make it out to be. Things are weird in Agony, the stuff people claim are hard (Rag's Sons for instance), we find easy, but the stuff that is typically easy, we will find a way to screw it up, sometimes. We have stage 1 trivialized, but in our best attempt at stage 2 we got him to 55% and ran out of mana, otherwise we would have nailed this one.



It's been a great year but I want to leave this last paragraph dedicated to Entrada, or maybe even wave at our friend Sai over there on our friendly Alliance side who recently killed Nefarian..GRATZ!!...

...but then wiped to Lucifron.

Entrada's response upon reading this? "FU Lucifron R hard" -Sai

Over and out to 2005, happy new year :-)