Hi everyone,
A lot of my lifetime, I was playing World of Warcraft. In fact, all-in-all it will be at least a full real-time year in terms of playtime. This is a lot. Too much, I decided four years ago and quit playing World of Warcraft. I might play it again, actually I am quite sure, I will play it again, but I won’t play it as intense as I did 10 and more years ago. But sometimes, when I read gaming articles like
The 22 most frustrating video game bosses of all time (and how to finally beat them)
from 
Molten Core
The first big raid instance that opened in World of Warcraft was called Molten Core. To get in, you needed to be at max level (I think it was 60 back than) and had to finish a key quest, you could already start with level 55. It involved going through some dungeons and in the end you got handed out the "Shadowforge Key", if I remember correctly. Only with this key you could enter Molten Core. It was later removed from the game, because it happend too often people saying with a low voice in teamspeak: "Oh no sorry, I forgot my key. I have to go back to the bank“ and 39 raid members waited on this one guy forgetting his key for 30 minutes. Later we improved and ported those guys back with Warlocks. Still it was a 50/50 chance someone forgot his or her key. After entering Molten Core my job as mage was to provide… food. Back then, you had to refresh mana and health almost after every fight and only mages where able to summon free food for all. So us six or so mages sat down and summonned food and drinks, for almost 15 min. Some weeks later mages had to prepare food upfront in terms of raid preperation. This way we could start almost right away with the raids, but since every second time someone forgot the key, I only prepared half the food in advance 😇.
Trash mob wipes raid
Before we could engage with the 10 bosses in Molten Core we needed to get rid of some pretty strong trash mobs. Our first tries ended in chaos and wipes. I think we spent our first night in Molten Core only to figue out our way to the first boss encounter. The problem was, that those trash mobs respawned after a certain time (I think it was 1 hour or 30 minutes). If we weren’t quick enough on our way, we had to do do it all over again. Endless times people pulled other mobs because fitting 40 people into the dungeon was possible, but required some discipline. But long story short, after some days, we managed to reach the first boss of Molten Core.
Lucifron
(All pictures are taken from wowwiki.wikia.com)
And then our wipes began. One after another. Back then, there were only a handful guilds globally, that killed bosses or even cleared the whole raid instance. We felt like pioneers and in some respect we were. There had been some rough guides online on how to solve the boss encounters, but seeing the problem directly before us, felt a lot harder than described in the guides. When there was no guide available, we choose to trial and error. It took longer, but eventually it worked. The problems with Lucifron were two area damage debuffs, one magical and one curse that needed to be dispelled, mainly by mages and priests I belive. So my job was clicking on other players' charcters and dispell their curses almost during the whole fight. This took out damage and healing for most part of the encounter. Later on a macro was written for this sequence by some smart guys, allowing to bind it on a specfic key on your keyboard. That was very helpful. Thank you guys! Looking back, quite a fun fight.
Magmadar
In my memory Magmadar, a big double-headed fire dog, was relatively easy to kill. The only problem has been a fire bomb, you had to avoid being killed from and his frenzy he went into from time to time. Hunters had to dispel this. Unfortunately, this was a skill dropped by Lucifron, the boss before. So during or first encounters only one Hunter had the skill. We learned that night: the dispel can miss, so it only saves your ass, if two hunters know the skill. Since we had killed Lucifron for this week (40-raids were on 7 day reset timers) we decided to quit for this week after having been killed too often. Later on, it got an easy loot and I actually got my first Tier 1 raid set piece, the Arcanist Leggings. One more good thing about Magmadar was, that all trash mob core hounds didn't respawn again after killing him.
Gehennas
This fight was actually pretty straight forward, but still it took some time to get everything right. Again a curse needed to be dispelled by mages and everybody needed to take care of getting out of the fire rain he casts. It think his adds needed to be killed first. Im my memory, the main problem was adding some other trash mobs or even the next boss Garr. Because of the fire rain, people were running around like scared chicken without looking what they are running into.
Garr
Yes, this is actually a (German) video from our raid guild alliance from back then, when we killed Garr for the first time. I found it the other day. Thanks to Christoph for putting this on Youtube. My own videos are on my old computers. Unfortunately, those won't boot anymore. As you can see, Garr's adds had to be banned by Warlocks. Then we all (at least those who survived) killed Garr. Pretty easy fight after some tries.
to be continued...
In the next episode of World of Warcraft Classics, I will cover "Molten Core Part 2" with the unforgettable Baron Geddon and Ragnaros the Firelord.
Please share your World of Warcraft memories in the comments. 🐑 (who gets this?)
Thanks for reading!