Tales of Onineko Past: Siegecrafter Blackfuse and the Secret Raid

Greetings Friends and Frenemies to the second in a blog series that, like George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, will probably never be finished. In this edition, we jump on Chromie’s back and ride the time waves back to 2013/14 at the height of the year-long final raid of the Mists of Pandaria: The Siege of Orgrimmar.

Onineko in MoP was a rollercoaster ride of emotion, from failing to even complete the first tier of content and almost imploding. To rebuilding back and taking the scalps of a number of heroic bosses (before the days of Mythic) from Throne of Thunder up to Siege. After siege dropped, good fortune smiled on Onineko and we were able to grow to almost four times the size, with now multiple 10 man raiding teams running weekly. The guild was in the best position it had ever been since the glory days of Burning Crusade.

However, there was one thing standing in the way of Onineko’s complete and total domination of this tier. Siegecrafter Blackfuse.

For those not familiar with MoP or the raid instance. Siegecrafter was THE boss of the instance. Many raids had come before with the next-to-impossible guild destroying boss that ruins friendships as well as keyboards, but none so far in my experience have ever been or will ever be equal to Mr. Blackfuse.

The fight was split into two parts, the “belt team” and the “everything else team”. Writing this, I can’t tell you which was the easier job because everything in this fight was just fucked. The belt team however arguably had the “simpler” objective. Take the portal, jump on the moving conveyer belt and avoid a bunch of 1-shot mechanics while trying to destroy one of Blackfuse’s upgrades. Dying or failing to destroy the upgrade was an immediate wipe. Oh and this had to be done on repeat every two minutes.

For the everything else team, as long as belts were handled, all you had to do was stand and dps (well sort of). You see, for each upgrade that was not destroyed, SC would get an upgrade and his mechanics would change. This could be one of:
A giant magnet that kept pushing and pulling players in all directions
A giant fire-breathing laser that basically turns the entire room into lava.
A series of crawler mines that randomly target raiders, exploding for life-threatening damage if allowed to reach the target.
A series of giant missiles that just hurt really hard.
Needless to say, every single one of Onineko’s raid teams failed this boss. Even after a series of events that saw Onineko form it’s first 25 man team in 5 years – SC would not go down.

Thus, time moved ever forward and each of us patiently waited for what would be the greatest abortion of an expansion ever in Warlords of Draenor.

But wait! That’s not the end of our story.

One week out from WoD’s release, I received a message from Shacarius. While most of us had put WoW and MoP to bed for the expansion, he had been busily working away forming the ultimate Onineko raid team from the remnants of the multiple raiding teams we had while simultaneously researching the shit out of every second of the Blackfuse fight, such that he could micro-manage the position of every single raider at any given point in the fight. And so, we headed into Siege of Orgrimmar to give that Blackfuse bastard one last roll of the dice.

Dubbed “The Secret Raid” this elite team of autistic, arrogant and egotistical fuckwits that somehow still included Peggysui (putting into question the whole “elite” status) entered a saved raid instance for Siege of Orgrimmar and set to work on this boss… and it was still stupidly hard. I could attempt to go into detail and try and describe the fight, but better to just watch the video:

Amazingly, we somehow managed to beat the unbeatable boss, thanks in no part to the clutch Lay on Hands cast on Peggy moments before he bit the bullet, while less than a week out from the prepatch event. Not only that, we decided to try our luck at the next boss, the Paragons of the Klaxxi the next evening and beat them too.

Then WoD released and pretty much everything went downhill, but that’s a tale for another day.

Roak