You see, I was playing Dungeons and Dragons Online before bed, solo'd this one mission on normal in about 15 minutes, then formed a group with two other players to do it on elite, foolishly thinking that we'd be able to take it on together. Big mistake. Within 5 seconds of the initial encounter with the enemy, the entire party was dead. Three players, two NPC hirelings, and an iron defender, just crushed like bugs. There was a shrine right next to the entrance, so we tried resurrecting our hirelings over and over to slowly whittle away the enemy's health, occasionally joining in ourselves to get a few good whacks in before getting vaporized. We persevered, secure in the knowledge that this was an early bossfight and that the rest of the level wouldn't be so bad if only we could make it past this part. 30-45 minutes later the minibosses were dead and we were free to resurrect, heal, and continue. Several tense fights later, we slowly learned to our horror that the regular enemies took almost no damage from our weapons and hit like a ton of bricks, but despite heavy losses we made progress.

Then the real fun began. We were ambushed and had to camp out by another rest shrine, using the same tactics as with the minibosses to clear away the demon horde. By the time we were done with that, almost all of our equipment was broken and worn, rendering it unusable. But that fight was a happy spring picnic compared to the boss at the end, with its constantly re-spawning demon army and its own instant death attacks. The tantalizingly close rest shrine would be blocked off by a barrier once you stepped into the room, forcing us to play musical chairs recalling from the mission and healing at an inn while one of us stayed behind to keep the mission active, then returning to deal a tiny bit of damage to the boss before dying.

In the end we finally beat the boss. Sure, we died 158 times, spent a small fortune on repairs, (I was left with only 12 platinum after blowing several thousand on repairing my gear) gained zero xp from winning due to our numerous deaths, wasted over four hours on what what supposed to be a relatively short mission, (we finished just before 2:00 am) and gained some fairly mediocre loot for our trouble, but on the other hand we killed over 800 monsters in total and got delicious, delicious revenge, as well as a truly memorable experience. (we all ended up friending each other and updating our character bios with details of our exploit) Madness? Perhaps. But then again, in our defense we were trying to close a portal to Xoriat, the plane of madness.