Around the time of late-Velious or early-Luclin, the god of Fear, Cazic Thule was buffed and some amazing loot was added to his table, making him once again a contested target for the servers top guilds. Late one night, the server goes down for an emergency reset. Celestial Tomb, already raiding Plane of Growth, knows this is our chance to finally get a shot at him. The calls go out to port to Feerrott. FoH showed up also, with a modest effort of maybe a group or two, and dispersed shortly after they saw the CT zerg flooding over the forest, causing trains and havoc everywhere they went.
Now, I need to break from the story for a moment and introduce Xerxes, one of Furor's FoH crony's. He was Iksar Necro and a real devious mother fucker. Level 60 Iksar Necros were rarer than the Ancient Cyclops at that point and he just so happened to be a worshiper of Cazic Thule.
He was ominously present with us around the time we all zoned in.
Later, Xerxes was running around Fear, causing trains and mischief, but he never sent the hoards of fetid fiends, glare lords, and turmoil toads towards any CT groups. We all expected mass trains, but they never came. After a while, /who Xerxes came up blank and we continued with the task at hand. When we finally cleared enough to behold Cazic, he strangely was dual wielding a weapon that looked like a Bloodfire and a Katana. New weapons?! The raid started to buzz with excitement. The zergs were lined up, buffed up, given a quick pep talk and sent streaming in to be snared and smashed back. As a Shaman, I had the important job of Slowing Cazic. Even with Malo and Tash, it would only land one in maybe 5 tries. It must have been my lucky night because, first cast we see the message, "Cazic Thule begins to yawn." Great, now I can go patch heal for the next 3 minutes... but wait, the main tank was just mowed down, and 3 more rogues in the blink of an eye. A cleric is summoned, dead. A Wizard is summoned, dead. What the fuck? The next tank gets agro and screams, "He's not slowed!". Not only was he not slowed, but he seemed to have Haste. The entire raid was a wipe.
Someone in Guild Chat says, "Xerxes fucked us. He gave Cazic a self-dispelling sword and a haste sword." It is like 1:45am at this point and the zerg mob was grumbling. Guild leadership quelled the masses and decided we could not give this target up. Desperate times call for desperate measures and the call went out, "bind in zone." We all gave each other an uneasy look, and you had the crazy zealots immediately dropping to their asses and memorizing Bind. Jesus fucking christ, the sane (and gainfully employed) among us got the cold sweats.
The legend has it that Cazic piled the bodies sky high, with most of the Celestial Tomb's zerg leaving 4-5 naked bodies each upon the landscape. Truthfully... in reality... it was more like 10-15 bodies each. It was 2 to 3 levels each. We threw waive upon bloody waive to the feet of Cazic. It was the second coming of hamburger hill. We got him down to 4%, but alas he won the day.
It was past 2:45am at that point and about half the guild just said "fuck it" and logged on the spot. The rest rezzed up as best they could. We were all in shock and awe for what had just happened.
The next day Flame Vault exploded, with CT leadership demanding Xerxes must die and claiming it was not the act of one lone terrorist, but a FoH guild-wide conspiracy. FoH in turn posted a classic news article where a mad Gnome Scientist had created the ultimate weapon to eradicate the Zerg once and for all, MECHA-CAZIC. They had screenshots of the apocalyptic creation, bathing in the corpses of hundreds of CT zergs. With enough tears and threats being thrown back and forth, Verant actually suspended Xerxes a week for the stunt.
Veeshan, we know drama.
~Bloodmoon, Barbarian Shaman of Celestial Tomb, '99-'01
