Last night, my guild finally managed to take down Illidan Stormrage, the end boss of the Black Temple.  It was an enormous amount of work to get there.  I think I joined the guild about this time last year, and back then we were taking babysteps into Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling with Lurker.

According to WoWJutsu, 5.18% of all U.S. raiding guilds have gotten down Illidan, which amounts to roughly 4000 of ‘em.  (That being said, with our fresh kill, we rank in the low 2000s).  Split the difference, and assume that each guild has about 35 raiding members (probably low), and you’d guess that about 100K people have popped Illidan.  A small fraternity, but actually not as small as I expected.

Overall, Black Temple is probably my least favorite of the raids in WoW.  Frankly put, it’s just too damn long.  You’re required to kill 8 bosses even to take swings at Illidan.  The four earliest bosses don’t drop much that’s any good, and yet we’ve killed them all at least a dozen times – we were sharding stuff on Supremus as early as our third kill.  It would be really nice if, in the future, Blizzard adjusted their loot reality to the mentality that early bosses will die five times more often as the later ones.

All this said, my guild seems to have little interest in Sunwell.  By most reports, Sunwell requires farming Illidan at least 6 weeks before you can even make serious attempts on the first boss.  So what’s next?  Who knows.  Stay tuned.

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