News

Patch 3.0.2 came out 2 weeks ago, and introduced some buffs to all of the classes. Then, since clearly this could make some of the current raid encounters HARDER in ways that only Blizzard understands, every boss and trash mob in the game was nerfed by about 30%.

And that led to this:



Let me tell you a story about a man named Danrax. Dan wakes up at 6 a.m. every day, puts on a dry-cleaned suit, his best shoes, and grabs his hat and suitcase full of pictures of cats. He goes to his local McDonald’s, orders a cup of coffee, and sits back to read a newspaper. He then goes home and plays Warhammer Online. This daily ritual is known as "pretending to go to work", or as he puts it, "practicing for when I have a job".

So basically, at this point our "accomplishment" is about as real as the job that Dan pretends to go to every day. Most guilds have been working to clear these bosses since January, and here we are spending one laid-back night learning each. More often than not with about 22 people in the raid. Sure, it LOOKS like the real thing, the bosses SOUND convincing when they tell us that the world will burn and we’re about to be turned inside out and wear our asses as hats, but in reality we’re in the Special Olympics right now. It reminds me of the track and field events they had for the handicapped kids back in elementary school:



That’s us right now. Sure, within a week we’ll have the "Kill Kil’jaeden" achievement, and with time nobody is going to remember patch 3.0.2, but somehow it’s still not the same.

Speaking of achievements, the Adventure Seekers club has also been busy. The standard procedure for most weekends involves consuming all alcohol in sight and boldly venturing into the forgotten dungeons of the the pre-BC era. Some of us remember these places. Some of remember the weeks of Vaelastrasz, which turned powerful guilds into whimpering squid. Those to quit the game first were the lucky. Some go mad and begin yelling unintelligibly when they see the steps leading up to the Suppression Room. Others see the glowing square of light in C’thun’s hallway or the ground moving as Ouro is about to surface, and run for their mothers and teddy bears.



Fifteen drooling drunks can now beat difficult bosses that broke guilds and destroyed lives two years ago. In a few hours we can easily do fights that took organized teams of 40 people weeks to learn and months to perfect. And pretty soon, Illidan and Kil’jaeden will be about as difficult. Though to be fair, for that C’thun kill we had to use the Cock Phone to contact Dr. Conq, who arrived at the raid with pretty much every squid in Shattrath at his back. Most of whom got lost on the way to the boss despite being given PAINFULLY clear instructions and were subsequently eaten by beetle-people.

Even now it’s starting, Black Temple and most of Sunwell is a joke. I remember the glorious days of SSC and Vashj, where legendary bows were whispered myths and those that fucked up were dealt with strictly and quickly removed:



Back then there was a long road ahead, content was hard and conversations in vent were highly intelligent. Now we raid from a channel called "The Gay Fort", and a typical conversation looks somewhat like this:

"So a few nights ago, when we were in AQ, my girlfriend went outside and returned with her back all wet."

"Was it raining? Or do you have a pool or anything?"

"No. I think that maybe someone jumped out of a tree and peed on her."

Because, that’s DEFINITELY the first explanation I would come up with, sober or otherwise. In fact, it’s a pretty common occurrence believe it or not. Often I go out for a walk, minding my own business, and a man leaps out of a tree, urinates onto me, and then vanishes. I can definitely relate. I don’t know what you’d have to be like in real life to come up with things like this, but I predict you would look something like this:



Until next time, which will likely be the last update before the expansion, where we will look back before continuing forward.

I remember the first time we attempted Kalecgos - 10 minutes until trash respawns, and when a portal appeared, it was like squid swarming around a feed bag, flailing at it with their soft jelly-like bodies trying vainly to get in.

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But he’­s dead, finally. And of course the actual boss flies away, and instead that demon comes out and leaves behind what appear­s to be a shiny lump of toasted feces. Well, at least our positioning in­ the killshot is much better than usual, so we might be onto something here. And w­hile the lack of a proper boss corpse is somewhat disheartening, the feeling of actually beating a difficult encounter is exhilarating. No matter what differences and personal issues we have with each other, no matter what kind of drama clusterfucks people start on the long wipe nights, when that boss goes down we ALL briefly turn into squealing 12-year-old girls in gymnastics uniforms and jump on each other and make out.

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Ahem.

So now that we have that out of the way, on to more important things: for instance, finding out which way the guild "dresses to", left or right.

Not sure what I’m talking about? You’re not the only one!



From the data we managed to collect from last week’s raid, it would seem that most of the guild dresses to the left. Either that, or they’re saying it just to be cool and fit in with everyone. Which incidentally is exactly what happened when the topic of circumcision was brought up some months ago.

I think we’re going to need to make this an interview question or something.

By the encouragement of several members of Group 1, I have extended this informal study beyond the guild, in the name of science. Doing an unofficial survey at work and amongst the people on my AIM and Facebook friend lists, I’ve found 1 guy and 2 girls that dress to the RIGHT.

"What Mister Kain?"

"How can girls "dress" like that?"

Behold:



That’s taking things a little far, sure. You figure nobody would EVER fall for that. But then again you also figure that the first instinct most people would have when they see fire, for instance, is to not stand in it. Nope. Not here. Here the neon glow of the flames attracts squid like the fluorescent lights in the twilight pools where they feed, and they tumble over each other in a mess of ink and drool trying to be the first in the fray. Or, in this case, the trap.

Which is what happened the LAST time I posted traps on the front page.

"Wow Kain, that girl in the news post is hot! Although I don’t really get the joke…"
"Dude, are you retarded? It’s a man."
"What the fuck, no it’s not!"
"Look closely. That’s not a fold, it’s a penis."
"Oh shi-"

At this point realization seeps in, and though we haven’t lost anyone to this yet, their lives will likely never be the same again.

You have to remember also that our raiders essentially look something like this:

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One-legged stream hoppers, rat goblins, a goat man that eats paint chips, and some sort of swamp toad that looks suspiciously like an unholy merger of Kazajin, Illside, and an aborted duck fetus.

But it’s ok. We have a foothold in Sunwell, and have proven to ourselves that we can work together and overcome challenges that require moderate coordination. Next is Brutallus, as Dan put it, "that guy that makes hats out of people".

A wise man with a beard once said, "The value of achievement lies in the achieving."

I’m not sure what that has to do with killing Illidan, so instead of thinking about it I made a sticker:



It didn’t come easy. After coming all this way a number of people apparently realized that they’d rather not see Illidan die, and went on to better things. Half the roster had to be replaced, and as it stands the raids look very different from what they were a month ago.

There were discussions in private vent channels that lasted long into the night, summits with ambassadors from rival guilds, and conferences to address the rampant paranoia that spread through binds and tells like parasites on an Illidan phase 1 gone horribly wrong. It took a lot of time, arguing, and compromising to get the whole thing back on track. Let me share with you an excerpt from one of our most heated debates:



But all turned out good in the end. We solved the attendance problems, everyone learned to get along more or less, and as a result we have a very smooth Illidan kill to show for it.

Ok, that last part is a lie. And so is the screenshot at the top of the page. The kill actually looked more like this:



And sounded kind of like this:

[Raid][Ilon]: Fuck! Kain is dead!
[Raid][Mordral]: Dicks.
[Raid][Soco]: Fuck shit bitch
[Raid][Arcnova]: He’s at 3%!
[Raid][Bake]: Fuck it just wipe
[Raid Leader][Kain]: YOU MOUTHBREATHING CLOWNS, IT’S DEMON PHASE, I DONT TANK
[Raid][Bake]: O shit, that’s right!
[Raid][Bake]: Burn him quick, healers help dps!
[Raid][Yukomo]: what the f*ck, keep Trusken healed!
[Raid][Amahu]: *bong bubbling*
[Raid Leader][Kain]: SPREAD OUT SHIT
[Raid][Nevvy]: warriors stack on me for rage, quick!
[Raid][Dalmation]: Burn him burn him omg
[Raid Leader][Kain]: KILL THE FUCKING SHADOWFIENDS
[Raid][Cdubbz]: *bong bubbling*
[Raid][Psyche]: fuck i have shadowfiends
[Raid][Sarrlock]: me too
[Raid][Anubis]: fuck i do too
[Raid][Arcnova]: lol look Trusken has them
[Raid][Choko]: fuck I have them too
[Raid][Choko]: fuck
[Raid][Kazajin]: oh wieners i’m dead *slurp*
[Raid][Trusken]: dps him he’s at 1%
[Raid][Leapidus]: more dps on illidan!
[Raid][Choko]: he’s kneeling wtf?!
[Raid][Soco]: fuck it’s the transition
[Raid][Auxi]: he’s at 1% still
[Raid][Ilon]: FUCK
[Raid][Yukomo]: f*ck mothertrucking b*tch sh*t
[Raid Leader][Kain]: wait i think we killed him
[Raid][Kazajin]: what?
[Raid][Psyche]: did we?
[Raid][Bake]: maybe
[Raid][Ahwawa]: wtf this wasn’t part of the minigame
[Raid][Dalmation]: he’s talking or something
[Raid][Yukomo]: wait he’s dead!
[Raid][Everyone]: omg omg yay woohoo etc.
[Raid][Ilon]: i think i just came
[Raid][Kazajin]: wienerz

There was some failure. And if it was Bear instead of Tolandruth in the raid, we wouldn’t even have an ankh to recover from it, and the loot would have despawned. Which is probably what we deserve after a shitshow like that.

But as they say in Canada, a kill is a kill, and after rezzing everyone and equipping our new items we’ll stand around and pretend we’re pro or something.

We’ve come a pretty long way. Addiction was made a little over a year ago, and here we finally stand at the end of the content we set out to conquer. The journey was long, and many people came and went. This first kill is dedicated to all those that stopped playing due to real life issues - believe me, I know how you feel. Often I myself questioned if all of it was really worth it. But then I remembered what "real life" was like. Let me tell you a story of a typical college party, an episode from a few years ago:

It begins with myself and a few friends standing around on a lawn outside a frat house. The night was uncharacteristically quiet. The beer pong tournaments were over, the drama was over, the fights were over, the cops and ambulances had come and gone, twice. With the slam of a screen door a girl walks out onto the lawn. Let’s call her Kelly. She was stumbling somewhat, eyes glazed, all thought concentrated entirely on putting one foot in front of the other while trying to balance a plastic cup filled with hard lemonade and cherry vodka and other girl drinks that you’d have to ask Bear about.

She walked a couple of steps onto the lawn. "Walked" is a relative term, since her movements consisted more of falling onto the ground, crawling, getting up, taking a few weaving steps, then repeating the process. Anyway, one way or another she got to the middle of the lawn, not too far from where we were standing. At that point she stopped, thought about something for a second, then dropped her pants and took a shit on the grass.    

Now, taking into account all of the alcohol that was consumed, it didn’t seem too surprising at the time. At that point in the night, I would have likely believed anything I saw.

There was a man named "John" there at the party, a local legend of sorts, and an honorable member of the "party planning committee". As a college hockey player he had lost many teeth and even more brain cells getting into fights with angry Canadians during matches. This, along with a tendency to achieve feats of retardation that nobody even dreamed possible, was the primary source of his fame.

So John walks out that same screen door roughly an hour later (my sense of time may have been a little off). He’s barefoot, having lost his flip-flops earlier that night by throwing them first at girls that tried to leave with somebody else’s alcohol, then at the vehicle in which said girls made their escape.

Then there was my friend Mike. Mike is that guy that always wears a nice shirt and has a great smile in every picture, the guy that your mother always talks about and says "why can’t you be more like HIM?". He’s also THAT GUY that you sometimes see in the background of Facebook pictures, blacked out drunk, screaming at the top of his lungs and wearing nothing but a cowboy hat. He doesn’t remember any of these episodes of course, but at some point between the tenth shot and the fourth kegstand he starts believing that he’s the world’s greatest stripper, and hilarity ensues.

Anyway. John walks out the door barefoot. Mike fortunately has his clothes on still. He breaks off from our group and goes to talk to John, trying to tell him something, and laughing hysterically in the process. Mentally, John is somewhere between being utterly confused and beating someone half to death with a hockey stick. The two keep trying to communicate, but don’t get very far. To make an already long story a little shorter, at some point during all of this John steps into the feces that Kelly left on the lawn some time ago.

And he slips and falls. He says "fuck" in a loud slurred voice, picks up the now-empty beer cup, and gets back on his feet. Now, at this point he had not yet realized exactly what had happened. The lawn was wet, and parts of it muddy, so even a sober person may have trouble fully grasping exactly what happened. He then reaches down to wipe the "mud" off his leg, which means that it’s now on his hand, and this he wipes on his shirt. Then he smells the air. And a second time to make sure. And with a slight twitch in his face he realizes that something is very, very wrong.

Mike meanwhile is on his knees, holding his stomach and laughing hysterically. I don’t know if people can really die of laughter, but for a few terrifying seconds I was sure his head was going to explode or something. John meanwhile is staring intently at his soiled hand. His other hand drops the red beer cup, and goes to his stomach, and he proceeds to violently vomit onto himself and Mike, who may or may not have pissed himself right then and there while stale beer and EasyMac poured down from above.

College life is fun. To this day Mike and John and even Kelly view themselves as heroes for having played a part in such an epic event. And sure, I think it makes for a good story - but quite honestly, looking back at it, sitting home on a Thursday night and hearing "Who will be next to taste my blades?!" for 4 hours doesn’t seem so bad.

And now, the moment that we’ve all been waiting for, the reason why we tried so hard to kill Illidan in the first place. Below is the picture of Kazajin, the Master Squid himself. Just think of this picture every time he speaks. And remember that on every boss fight, the fate of the entire raid depends on this clown successfully applying a Misdirect to the correct target and getting off a few shots before dying. Be afraid.

I really don’t know what to say, except maybe "oh wieners".

Our adventures continue in Sunwell, where items are better and bosses are harder, and the first step to progression is ensuring that all squid are extinct. Join me next time.

Another few weeks go by, and it’s time for another update to the front page. This time we’re dealing with the Illidari Council, the second-to-last boss of Black Temple, and the so-called "super bowl of not standing in shit". And indeed, there’s many different things you have to watch for and avoid. This sounds easy on paper, but poses a unique challenge to us. Before you argue remember that we are a guild that embraces and even respects people like Pezz, who last I checked was being pursued by police from 3 states due to the "hey guys give me a number to call and I’ll talk shit to them" episode earlier this week. He was drunk, there was vent, and the result of that is about 1.5 hours of epic recorded footage and the 6 people involved nearly getting a hernia laughing.



Not that hard of a fight quite honestly. We spent about an hour 2 weeks ago learning what all the abilities did, then came in this week (having forgotten everything) and wiped at 90% twice, then got them to 2%, and on next attempt collected epics despite having to 24-man the fight due to a "hunter glitch". It’s all about situational awareness, and thankfully that’s something we’ve been able to learn over the course of our raiding career.

When somebody does something dumb and wipes the raid, people get angry. Some people get angrier than most. Like Benix. Do it enough times, and he enrages. And if you’re the clown responsible for this particular instance of fail, then the tapping noise you hear on vent is him punching his screen with both hands trying to uppercut you over the internet. One day that will be possible, and as you stand in a blizzard or doomfire and attempt to heal yourself with bandages your door will fly open, and to the blaring sounds of Master of Puppets you will be charged by a very angry man with a cardboard viking helmet and axe:



And now that Council is dead, we can begin work on Illidan. It might start a little slowly, since people are still taking finals and writing papers and we may not have the ideal raid group every night. But soon summer will start, and he will be dead - faster than Vashj and Kael and Archimonde, most likely.

Speaking of finals and term papers, here’s an excerpt of an essay written by one of our "special" members, on the topic of "Inter-family Psychology". Remember kids, if you need to write a paper, take the night off from raiding. If you raid on one screen and compose essays on the other between trash pulls while talking on vent, you get this:

You know, after Archimonde every fight seems easy. Gurtogg, initially, took only a few attempts. Reliquary of Souls took a single laid-back, casual evening. There’s about 5 people total that need to pay attention that fight, for everyone else it’s "stay off the ramp, DPS hard in phase 2, DPS harder in phase 3". Mother Shahraz consists of "tanks stand there, and other people run AWAY when you get teleported". We had some issues explaining to several individuals what exactly "away" means, but even then we 2-shot her.

Just like many other fights in this game, these two encounters were defeated through the use of creative thinking rather than just brute force or luck. Even Nevvy had a good idea in there somewhere I’m pretty sure, which is surprising to say the least.



Lost yet? Well, if you’re someone that doesn’t regularly raid with us, you probably only know Nevvy as the bad troll in trade chat that says "banned" after every statement, or as the person in Skettis that chooses to wipe you on the escort because he disagrees with the shoes you wear. You may or may not know that he has a kitten in his freezer. But here in Addiction’s raiding scene, we primarily know Nevvy as a veritable fountain of bad ideas. These suggestions are usually delivered at the most critical moment of a fight, when everyone else is desperately trying to focus, and Nevvy himself is lying face down on the ground due to an earlier attempt to put one of his ideas into action. I think this says it best:

The humor may be lost on some of my readers. In that case, I recommend you find a shiny ball to play with, or maybe a slinky. Or play one of the many creative games that our star raiders invent in their free time while running circles around Shattrath at 4 a.m. on the weekend.

Game one is called "Get On Your Mount And Fly Up As High As You Can And Dismount, Whoever Lives Wins". Another is called "Make A Level 1 Alt And See Who Can Get To Stormwind First". I swear, playing a DPS class gives people Downs. I can just imagine these people in real life, coming up with things like "Poke The Alligator Until It Flips Out" and "Lick The Electrical Socket". Or even worse, congregating with other idiots on the internet and bringing that sewage to guild chat. If you don’t believe me, scroll back up and read the first word of every paragraph of this news post. Then tell me what you think.