If Not For Sits

Squid-Deathwing is dead:

Deathwing Kill

Here’s a video, and another, and one of a bunch of bosses, and one last one of our raiders fighting those bosses that you should watch only if you are not easily offended.

So I wasn’t sure what to talk about here, which may or may not be the reason we’re about 3 weeks into waiting for this update to go up. The last boss itself took only like 1 night of practice, followed by a 1-shot - this was the quickest final boss kill in the history of the guild I’m pretty sure. We could back up a little, to where I had written "Spine of Deathwing = Reginald Butt-Surgery" in my notebook, but when I went to expand on this theme I got about as far as "us digging around in Deathwing’s backside is much like Reginald’s recent butt surgery" and that was about it.

The airship battle can be summarized entirely by everyone running around with no idea what they’re doing, punctuated by small windows of running down sappers which look somewhat like this:

Airship Explanation

We needed to go deeper. Ah Ultraxion, now THERE’S a good boss fight. The parallels to Archimonde, my "favorite" fight in the whole game, were clear, and this had some MEATY stories associated with it that not everybody has heard. Then I noticed the note that said "mention something about Redhero" and suddenly everything fell into place.

The problem, as I quickly came to realize, was that our guild forum does not actually have search functionality. And that Redhero has also operated under about 6 different aliases during his career. And so, it was not until three hours later that I was able to find THAT screenshot.

Let’s back up a bit. Archimonde is a large purple man that back in 2002 destroyed Dalaran by building a sand castle and then peeing on it.

A quick aside - did anyone else used to do this? I have a distinct memory of one particular beach outing, when I was about 5: it involved us building our castle too close to the waterline, and as the tide rolled closer I made an executive decision and laid the fattest kid among us in the path of the water so that he would be a bulwark for our fortress. This lasted until he started crying because he believed that he was going to drown, and some Adults showed up to end our fun and shortly thereafter our architectural masterpiece disappeared beneath the waves.

I was SO mad, and went down the beach a ways to where the girls had THEIR castle, built far enough away from the water and therefore undisturbed by the incoming tide. I felt this terribly unfair, and doubly so because they had a Parent with them who possessed all manner of foresight and experience. They also had castle-shaped buckets, which was the last straw. I waited for an opportune moment, when they briefly abandoned their fort to go eat watermelon or whatever the fuck they would eat at the beach, dropped my dinosaur-print swim-trunks, and covered their sandcastle-city in a sparkling stream of heavenly rain, destroying a good amount of it. I was never caught, and so began a very illustrious career of peeing on sandcastles.

Anyway, once upon a time a purple man destroyed Dalaran and then went to a mountain to climb a tree and the mortal races banded together in the battle of Five Armies and destroyed him. Then, 6 years later in 2008 someone thought it might be a good idea to go back in time and do it again, except this time the armies would hang out on a cliff overlooking the battle as 25 droolers flopped around helplessly. To make things more interesting, each raider was offered a vial of faintly yellow liquid labeled "Kain’s Urine Sample Tears of the Goddess" in crayon to help counteract a fight mechanic that I will get to in a second. First, I would like to draw attention to the operative word "offered". You did not have to take it. And some people didn’t. And then, twenty minutes or so later, you see on vent a GREEN LIGHT belonging to a person who has not ever spoken on vent and he says "Awww SHIT" in a distinct southern drawl and the encounter ends faster than Deathwing getting a clearcasting proc right before he begins to channel the Final Cataclysm.

The fight takes place on a slightly-sloping plain. On one end is a mountain and the trees from which we ride. On the other is Nordrassil, the World Tree, and beneath is a bottomless pool with dinosaur-sharks and that silences you if you touch the water (I have no idea why by the way). In the middle of the field is a log. A decoration, or so we thought. On the third week of attempts a man appeared out of nowhere, asked to join the guild, and raided with us for exactly 1 hour before disappearing forever. The shortest trial period we ever had, but during his stay he did whisper "Use The Log".

Archimonde summons fire snakes. The snakes snake around and kill the bad enhancement shamans trying to heal themselves while standing in fire. BUT, the snakes cannot cross The Log. If the boss is tanked ON TOP OF The Log, the fire that spawns above the raid, on the hill under no conditions can CROSS The Log and destroy everything. That way, with a bit of luck, there is only one firesnake to deal with.

If Not For Sits

Which makes the raid-wide 5-second duration fears a little easier to handle. Which makes people a bit more focused when they get randomly selected to be launched into the air with 0 warning so they can click their Tears, assuming they remembered to take them from the NPC, remembered to put them on their bars, remembered to lock their bars so that the clicking doesn’t simply attach the icon to their mouse which they flail around the screen, remembered which of the 2 identical icons is the Tears and which one is their "VERY VERY WARNING" macro, and on top of all this have enough spatial awareness to click the tears right before they hit the ground and not at any other time during the launch or fall procedure.

Oh yeah, and if ANYONE in the raid dies Archimonde gains something called a Soul Charge which means that in the span of about a second he constructs a sand-sculpture of the entire raid and travels back in time to 1989 to get a 5-year-old Kain to drop his dinosaur swim-trunks and pee on the sand-raid and hit everyone for pretty much their entire hp pool and if by some MIRACLE only 2-3 people died that’s 2-3 new Soul Charges and 2-3 dropped swim-trunks and you see where I’m going with this.

So please explain to me once again how somebody manages to fail Ultraxion when the entire fight consists of standing still and hitting a button that APPEARS ON YOUR SCREEN of its own accord, has no cooldown and a very long duration, and must be pressed PRECISELY every 45 seconds with a gigantic window for mistakes. As Mord’s /sit macro would say: IF NOT FOR SITS, WHY IS IT MADE OF WARM?

Redhero, then a Druid, was one of the many names on what has come to be known as "Kain’s Poop List". He took my screaming of "I want to see Tears in every goddamn space on your action bars and make sure you enable all the secondary ones as well so that way most of your screen is covered in shit you should be clicking and MAYBE as you flop your flaccid squid-body onto the keyboard and screen there’s a chance that you’ll press something that you actually have to be a vegetable to fuck up" literally, and by way of apology he sent me this image, as well as a picture of himself completely unclothed.

Tears of the Goddess

Hello This Is Bear

If you look REAL close at that by the way, you begin to SEE some things. For instance, looking at The Grid (it was called "The Grid" then, Brock had just discovered it while everyone else was still clicking character models directly and then piloting the mouse cursor slowly across their screen to click their heals), you will actually notice that one very important name is missing, i.e. that of our Main Tank and dear leader. And by "missing" I mean covered up by party buffs, which makes Mr. Redhero’s job of you know, healing the main tank as the rest of the raid was running around due to fears and swimming underneath Nordrassil quite difficult.

But hey, it’s probably better than how most of our raid nights ended. This is when you know you’ve dug so deep that there’s literally nowhere else to dig: a cock-phone and a bear on the other line.

Moving on.

I think I found the thing that might be responsible for sending me to the hospital for a night. See after a raid ends and we are all making and taking portals to various places there tends to be brief tells and conversations about maybe what went wrong, or what we could do better next time, or whatever. Towards the end of Spine attempts, when the kill was in sight, I momentarily felt like I was leading an actual raiding guild and not just herding cats that are trying to lick their own balls. THAT lasted all of about 30 seconds, since this is what I was greeted with as soon as the portal-roulette deposited me in Stonard:

Why I Drink

Next thing you know, you’re laying in a bed in the emergency room a man named Dr. Singh says "please roll over we need to take a look at your backside" and you hear a glove snap and the sound a rogue makes when vanishing. And then, before you can truly prepare, Dr. Singh is dpsing some tendons so to speak so that Thrall can better aim a dragon-laser into your bowels.

And that’s it for this edition of the Front Page. In a month we are off to Boston, and PAX, to meet a number of BIG NAMES from the history of the guild. There will be wine, and stories, and if we're lucky a few dickgirls with cat ears. Hopefully it will be more like a group of old friends going out for a night on the town and less like what these situations usually end up looking like:

Surprise!

Until next time.