This morning I did (what is for me) the 6:30 a.m. Tequatl fight. I joined a PuG map that was listed on LFG, but even as the little quaggan was spotting something in the water, we weren't quite to the numbers I had come to expect for a successful run. I figured that it would at least be a decent attempt, and even if it failed it wouldn't be so bad to stick around and see what happened.
The start was a little shaky, but there were no bone walls and it was plenty fast enough. So far so good, right? Enter battery and laser defense.
Like always I did north battery defense, and even with us calling for help, there only appeared to be six or seven people there at any given time. Grub holes were going unchecked, and three defenders left early with twelve seconds remaining. The three of us still there tried to hold out, but it was inevitable. The battery fell with one, single second on the clock.
I was still at the battery, thus I avoided the murderous wave that crashed over everyone (including the traitors who abandoned our defense early), so I was able to quickly hop back to the undead minion. A few people in map chat were blaming each other of course, and I arrived to Tequatl with no one at his feet fighting. I watched the bone wall go up, so I jogged a short distance away to get out of combat, assuming no one would be returning at this point.
But miraculously, just as I was about to open my map and waypoint away, I found that I had joined a group that wasn't so quick to call it quits. Everyone came flooding back, and the wall fell. A couple of inspirational fellows ensured everyone that it could still be done, so I too charged back in with the intention of finishing what we had started.
Here and now it was time for us to really get to work. We had the daunting task of doing the damage phase without the laser stun. We're all under Teq trying to get at the double damage spot to shave off as much time as possible, and with little more than four minutes left, we finally got another shot at defense. Everyone headed out knowing that we had to have a perfect defense and a perfect burn for the fight to continue. And following immediately afterwards, a second perfect defense and perfect burn to finish it.
This time we had help at the north battery, and everyone got to jump back early to start prepping for Teq to drop. Might was stacked, and by fiery swords and frozen bows we got the perfect burn to chain the phases. The map was truly alive now. We rushed back to defend our penultimate quest objectives, and we nailed it. The wave of bodies rolled forward again to clash with Tequatl, war cries flying between instructions in chat; no one was entirely certain if we had turned it around, but everyone was damned certain we were going to give it everything we had left regardless.
With a far too generous and anticlimactic thirty-four seconds remaining on the timer, we drove the Sunless back to the sea, amid countless cheesy cheers in map chat of "FOR TYRIA!"
For Tyria.
