The History of Hellion

Hellion was founded on April 17th 2005, three days after the launch of The Maelstrom - EU realm, making us one of the oldest guilds on the server. Throughout the years Hellion has always held a prominent place amongst the Maelstrom's raiding guilds. In doing so it has played a big part in the realm's history.

Hellion has been the home to hundreds of players over the past four years, hosting some of the most famous characters on the realm. We have shared so many unforgettable moments during our time as a World of Warcraft community. It is impossible to write down everything, even if we wanted to.

It has not always been a walk in the park though and the guild has been in trouble several times, but we have always managed to get through it together. Hellion does not rest on the shoulders of one person, but exists in deeper spirit that raises new players to take the responsibility when the need arises.

This, is our story.

From Blackrock Spire to Blackwing Lair

It all started on a lazy Sunday afternoon back in April 2005 when the guild was created by Supreme and Kaya, the latter taking up the position of Guild Master. At the time UBRS was still considered as a serious raid instance, so guild runs to Blackrock Spire were organized. Like any professional raiding guild, DKP was being kept in each member's guild note.

A little later Hellion set it's first footsteps into Molten Core during combined raids with DUSK, as neither could field a 40 man raid on their own yet. This soon changed and Hellion began endgame content on its own. Venturing further into Molten Core and looking to best the dragon Onyxia.

On the memorable date of September 4th 2005 the guild set course to Onyxia's Lair for the first time. No one had any experience with the encounter. Luckily the now near-legendary rogue Cornflake was present instead of some guy just yelling "FIFTY DKP MINUS". He gave a short briefing in Ventrilo and Onyxia was defeated on the first pull.

Shortly after Ragnaros followed and the guild moved to Blackwing Lair. Steady progress through BWL was made including the first Ebonroc kill which took like a thousand hours - Thanks Shadow of Ebonroc! Nefarian proved to be considerably tougher than anything we had faced before though. He finally fell somewhere around the start of January 2006 as a realm second kill, only being outdone by the alliance guild Apathy. But hey, they had Fear Ward and Paladins, Alliance easy mode

From Gates of Anh'Qiraj to C'thun Realm First

Patch 1.9 was released in the beginning of January 2006. Along with the Linked Auction Houses, Multiple Battleground Queues and Pre-Established Raid Calendar (yes, before that the instances really did reset a week after the raid first entered it) this patch introduced the first ever world event, The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

The world event involved every single player of the realm in gathering a vast amount of materials for the War Effort, which had to be completed before The Gates could be opened. On the Maelstrom this took around 2 months. Alongside with The War Effort, Hellion on the horde side and Apathy on the alliance side had started the long and difficult quest chain for Scepter of the Shifting Sands, which would be the key to open The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

At the time there was a huge rivalry between Apathy and Hellion related to the opening event. Both guilds raced to finish the questline and tried to prevent the other from completing it first. The outcome was decided in Hellion's favour when Arsunor, who had taken over the GM position after Kaya and Supreme went inactive, banged the gong on March 5th 2006 and opened the gates. Earning the 'Scarab Lord' title and the Black Qiraj Battle Tank mount in the progress. If you ever catch him riding around on that thing, be sure to whisper him and ask where he got it.

Afterwards there was probably the biggest ever flame war on the realm forums as not all were happy about Hellion's decision to open The AQ Gates at midnight. But we had already seen the realm going down when 3 leading horde guilds went to gank Apathy in Moonglade, when they were trying to defeat Eranikus for the Scepter quest. The same could have likely happened if the Gates had been opened during Prime Hours. With Apathy closing in on finishing their Scepter and Arsunor being unavailable all of Sunday, the decision was made.

After the gates were open we made our way through Ahn 'Qiraj. Farming Nature Resistance gear for Princess Huhuran in Maraudon and learning how to kill the Emerald Dragons. Apathy had disbanded soon after the AQ Gates and now the main race for realm first kills was between Hellion and two alliance guilds: Shadow Ryders and Relentless. Eventually we reached C 'thun and like most guilds, our first pull went a little something like
this. We did learn how to play though and killed C 'thun server first on July 30th 2006.

Naxxramas

After we beat C’thun we moved on to Naxxramas, which had then just been opened in the Eastern Plaguelands. If you’re reading this and thinking “Lol Naxx is in Dragonblight”, you’ve probably only played in WotLK. Naxxramas was the last level 60 and the last 40man raid instance. Blizzard recycled it for WotLK, making it considerably easier in the process.

The first bosses in the instance (Spider Wing, Instructor Razuvious and Noth) were about the same difficulty as what had been seen in Ahn’Qiraj and went down effortlessly. However Patchwerk proved to be completely different. Not only did it require 4 tanks with full Wrath (Tier2), but also 18 healers and insane dps to reach the enrage timer. Back then most of the buffs stacked with each other, so everybody was using a flask combined with multiple elixirs and food; Winterfall Fire Water, Spirit of Zanzas, Night Dragon' Breaths, Dark or Demonic Runes and tons of Major Mana Potions were also consumed. The game had reached a point where farming the consumables took more time than the actual raiding and that started to take its toll on the guild.

After the promising start things got a little tougher. Not only did the bosses get harder, but realm transfers were opened and some hardcore players left for top European guilds. When Arsunor also had to cut down his playtime a lot, it had a big impact, seeing as he was the guild’s only real leader at that time. On top of all that the release of The Burning Crusade expansion drew closer. Like a lot of other guilds we started to suffer from the
‘TBC-syndrome’. The blue items from TBC dungeons were the same quality as the stuff from Naxxramas, so farming for the insane amount of consumables needed seemed pointless. When patch 2.0 was released making all the Warlord gear obtainable with honor we gave up raiding and just played fixed battlegrounds instead. Since everybody else in the game was also doing the same it resulted in some really memorable matches like us beating Shadow Ryders in AB with a score of 2000-1990.

In the end we managed to beat nine bosses in Naxxramas. No one killed Four Horsemen on The Maelstrom, but alliance side managed to down Thaddius and Loatheb. The best moment for us has to be downing Patchwerk, who was a real pain but finally fell after Arsunor proclaimed he should "fucking die bitch". Good times.

The Burning Crusade: From 40man Raiding to 25man Raiding

Like the rest of The Maelstrom, on the eve of 16th January 2007 we were gathering at the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands. The first expansion to the game was about to be released and we thought we were prepared. Leveling went quite fast and we were soon working on the quest chain to get the key to the first raid instance, Karazhan. We struggled a bit with Shade of Aran, but had solid progress through the instance and Prince Malchezar was defeated a month after the release of the expansion, on 13th February 2007.

The first 25man raid encounter, High King Maulgar went down on 28th February followed by Nightbane and Gruul the Dragonslayer in the next few weeks. Eventhough we downed everything as horde first on the server there were internal issues in the guild. Some members that had previously been part of another guild which had disbanded felt that they were carrying Hellion and the rest of the members were not hardcore enough for them, so they broke off to form their own guild, probably remembered as the biggest guild drama of all times. However Kaervek, Kento and Pelm stepped up as officers and managed to secure some good new players to the guild and we went on to down Magtheridon on 16th April as horde first, beating the people who had left the guild. Having cleared all Tier4 content we had gained the access to the next raid instance, Serpentshrine Cavern.

From Serpentshrine Cavern to Kael’thas

The first boss in SSC was Hydross the Unstable, which required four tanks with full resistance gear and had a very tight enrage timer. We were back to the situation we had experienced in Naxxramas, farming for all the consumables was tough, even though herbs were more readily available than before. Blizzard also realised that the raiding was too hardcore in general and the battle/guardian elixir system was introduced, much to the relief of all raiders. The difficulty of the bosses was also considered to be too hard and they were slightly nerfed. Having managed to kill Hydross before the changes, we made very good progress through the instance killing Lady Vashj on 19th June.

One of the unique part of The Burning Crusade were all the attunements required to enter the raid instances. Getting attuned to Karazhan was relatively easy: You only had to pay 1000g for the flying mount, and do a couple of instances. For Serpentshrine Cavern you had to kill Nightbane and Gruul and talk to the quest giver in heroic Slave Pens. For Tempest Keep you had to complete a quest chain of 25 quests to access the difficult Trial of the Naaru quests that required you to complete some of the hardest heroics in the game, and back then, the heroics really were hard. We were smart though, getting almost all of the guild to talk to the gnome Arcatraz when one group managed to clear it, and Sop tanking Shattered Halls almost daily so everybody got the quest done. We managed to get attuned to Tempest Keep and had downed Void Reaver just before Blizzard decided to lift the attunements from these instances in a patch released on 20th June. This resulted in us losing a big advantage we had gained over other guilds on the realm.

Tempest Keep bosses weren’t difficult, but the last boss, Kael’thas, was the most difficult boss in the expansion before Sunwell. The usual summer slack combined with a very consuming encounter resulted in us losing the horde first kill to a newly formed partly server transfer guild called Kill Loot Repeat. The first three Kael’thas kills on The Maelstrom were basically in the same reset though. Killing Kael’thas on 12th August got us attuned to Mount Hyjal and Black Temple (Again through complex attunement quests that required questing in Shadowmoon Valley and killing various raid bosses and killing Al’ar using a disguise, which of course people always forgot to wear.)

From Archimonde to Illidan

The first three bosses in Mount Hyjal went down right after killing Kael'thas. Attuning enough people for Black Temple took a little longer though. Lot of people stopped playing after completing the Tier5 and Season 2 content and we had to recruit people that were good players, but didn't have the quests done.

The first bosses of Black Temple, High Warlord Naj'entus and Supremus, went down on 3rd September shortly followed by Shade of Akama. We were pro at not taking the fires though and killed Archimonde on 18th September, two days after downing Azgalor. Gurtogg Bloodboil went down on 2nd October.

Illidan proved to be a tough fight for us, mostly because of the availablity of tanks with full fire resistance. The feeling when we finally downed him on 21st December has to be one of the highlights of The Burning Crusade, coming just in time before the inevitable Christmas break. Eventhough we downed him as 4th guild on the realm, after Shadow Ryders, Sanctum and Kill Loot Repeat, the following three months that we were to spend farming Mount Hyjal and Black Temple was really good time. Raids were easy, vent was fun and of course getting equipped in all of the coolest gear was nice too. We put together 3 dual Glaive sets. During this time we also got the horde first Amani War Bears from Zul'Aman, farming the timed event every reset and waited for the release of the next raid instance, Sunwell Plateau.

From Realm First Felmyst Kill to Kil'jaeden

When Sunwell was released we had a very strong core in the guild, strengtened from all the chilling in the MH/BT raids. Kalecgos went down in the first reset on 30th March 2008 followed by horde first Brutallus three weeks later. Because of Terrag's legendary skills with Felmyst breaths we downed it as realm first on 29th April. After this we progressed with the Eredar Twins to a point where we had one of them down.

However, because of the summer, the UEFA European Football Championship and the raid composition requirements of Sunwell, we weren't able to get proper raid groups together. Many saw no other option than to look elsewhere and by July we had about half of the raiders left in the guild. Elmira and Valora organized a merge with a fresh guild called Mortifere, which gave us enough players to continue raiding.

Eventhough merges don't always work out, ours was a success and Eredar Twins were killed on 19th September. No one killed Kil'jaeden on our realm before patch 3.0 was released. After the patch we finished off Sunwell as the 3rd guild on the realm, which is quite an achievement considering all the trouble we went through during the summer.

To The Wrath of the Lich King

This chapter concludes the history of Hellion. If you're reading this you know now, what the guild has been through in these four years World of Warcraft has been our hobby. We are sure our story will continue for a long time, there are Titans, Old Gods and a Lich King to kill after all. And also Legendaries, as we still have to compensate for never getting a Thunderfury made.