Had my first Cross-Realm Zone fail on Tuesday night.

It was around 11:30pm when I was doing some last-minute AH shopping before logging off, that I saw the “LFM Sha” in Trade Chat. I whispered the guy and asked if he really thought he’d get enough people at this late an hour (on this dead realm of all places). He seemed reasonably confident, so I joined. Soon enough, I witnessed the source of his confidence: you can apparently form cross-realm raid groups to fight world bosses.

I was shocked. Yeah, I knew CRZ was a thing, and I knew you could group with cross-realm people. But raids on world bosses? I am not sure of the mechanics of the inviting process, whether he had friends log onto alts on other realms and advertise in Trade or whatever, but we had 40 people in less than ten minutes. It almost makes me wonder why Blizzard even bothers with world bosses under this paradigm – it felt just like an LFR system minus the automation.

Definitely configuring Grid next time.

The fight went fine, with the Sha dying just slightly faster than the raid wipe well in process. I died in the final moments and elected to not release just to be sure; TBC has a way of carving archaic rulesets into one’s permanent memory. I received the purple box, made an extra roll via Elder Charm, and received a thoroughly inadequate sum of gold. At this point, I released and started running back. “So and So is attempting to resurrect you.” Accepting the (Mass) Resurrection, I prepared to loot the quest item from the corpse… what the hell? The Sha has respawned?!

The Sha appeared to be alive and well, with nary a corpse to be seen. I imagine what happened was that those of us on Auchindoun had been pulled into someone else’s realm and defeated the Sha there. I am not sure whether the transition back to Auch was due to accepting the rez, or the person whose realm the Sha died on leaving the raid, or whatever else. Bottom line: no quest item, and no way to even determine where the raid boss’s body I just killed was located.

It’s been 24 hours since then, and the queue has moved 4 minutes.

My guild mate and I put in our tickets, but it remains to be seen whether CustServ will honor our requests. Well, not Joeses’ request, but perhaps mine. Regardless, I suppose the CRZ mechanic made the kill possible (and the chance at random loot) where it would not have happened otherwise. Of course, so would simply putting the world boss in a more formal LFR setting. All the CRZ seemed to do in this instance was introduce novel ways of getting screwed.