The most exciting content of each major World of Warcraft update will always be the new raid. With the first raid of the War Within expansion I found myself raiding again for the first time in almost 15 years. I stopped again after defeating the last boss, but now I'm back to give it another go for this newly released raid; The Liberation of Undermine.

The whole plot of the Undermine zone is to liberate it from the tyrannical rule of Gallywix. The raid is the last step in doing so where we battle through through eight bosses with Gallywix being the eight and last boss of the raid. This is also another raid where a former Horde faction leader is made into a raid boss. I'm starting to see a pattern here...

One very cool thing about this raid is that it takes place in the Undermine zone itself. Normally for raids you'll zone into an instance and explore an entirely new environment. For this raid we're actually going through am instanced version of the outdoors zone to battle through the different bosses. We're even allowed to drive our cars in here. This is really cool as we battle bosses both in already visited areas and in new locations in the zone. The climax of course takes place inside the Gallagio, Gallywix' personal casino.

I'm very happy that the group I did the Nerub-ar Palace raid with invited me back for this tier. I'm not sure if I would have bothered if I had to go and search for a new group. I was lucky to get a main tank spot in this group for the last tier and luckily my skill was enough to get me invited back for this tier. It's very convenient for a group to have a consistent main tank so it's a win-win situation.

I didn't know what to expect for this raid and mostly went in blind. I looked up some cheat sheets for the boss mechanics just to somewhat know what to expect. In the space of three hours we managed to take down six out of eight bosses before hitting a bit of a wall on the seventh boss. We got close to taking it down but ran out of time for the evening. We'll be going back in a few days to hopefully finish up the raid.

That means finishing up the raid on normal mode of course. The appetizer difficulty. After that we'll be going back in on heroic difficulty where we can't expect to take down six bosses in the span of the first night. The difficulty will ramp up big time with bosses having more health, dealing more damage and bombarding the group with new mechanics. That's where the fun begins.

Still, it's important to do the easier normal mode to get a feel for the raid and gather some loot to make heroic mode a bit easier. I was lucky enough to get both a new weapon and a trinket from this first evening. Those will definitely help me to easier progress through the game.

Mug'zee and Gallywix still needs to be defeated. Let's hope we can do it next time.