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­My favorite thing about raiding: after the kill remembering the first attempts where upon engaging the boss the entire raid drops faster than Illside downing a cock-shaped toaster strudel with the word "BOYS" written out in the icing.



Of course, as always the road there looked something like this:



As I am writing this front page a pitched battle is afoot on our member forums between The Paladins, where they strive to outdo each other by comparing one another to increasingly retarded animals. It goes something like this:

First, Amber finds a picture of a tiger that (as Alex put it) "doesn’t look quite right". This goes into a post titled "If Brock Was a Tiger He would Look Like This". Brock then fires up Google Images and queries the internet for "Autistic Water Buffalo", the results of which get put into a post cleverly titled "If Amber Were A Tiger She Would Look Like This Thing That’s Clearly Not A Tiger".

Then Reginald appears. Reginald the Englishman. Reginald who, being from Her Majesty’s noble country is above these shenanigans, and is genuinely disgusted by our conversations that start with "if you pee on a hedgehog…" and our leftist-liberal approach to dentistry. Reginald, who I expect more from. Reginald comes along and says "no THIS is Amber" and posts a picture of a wild sea cucumber shaped like a penis with the subtext "this is a sea cucumber, if surprised it ­will ejaculate on you".

At some point in the past week, while farming turtles for Traps I came to a stunning realization: I am in charge of a zoo. Raid nights basically consist of a cross between Animal Farm and The Metamorphosis, where I’m a fucked up Hungarian man that woke up as a giant cockroach surrounded by talking horses and geese and militant pigs with communist inclinations. And together we sing "Beasts of England" and travel to a land that doesn’t exist to battle a snowman in a metal igloo.

And then when the horses get put down and made into glue and we have to recruit new trials they ALSO turn out to be animals. They have no idea what the fights do or where they are. They are essentially a confused baby orangutan that has been strapped into a life jacket and thrown into a swimming pool with a wild hook-nosed tapir which immediately tries to make friends with it and the orangutan yells "no help me where am i" and the tapir paddles over and says "how about i… zuck yo dick?". And the tapir is Bear’s People.



Here, I’ll end the debate forever. If Amber was an animal, she would be Illside’s cat "Gusgus" but with a cape:

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And then there’s the Mutes. I don’t even know who or WHAT the fuck they are. I imagine a scenario where a computer keyboard has been left unattended on the windowsill of an open window. Occasionally a breeze rustles the nearby trees, and an errant branch pokes through a window and presses a few keys. If we’re lucky one of those keys will run the attached player to the right when I say "run right" and we have one slightly sloppy ice block instead of say, 24 simultaneously. I guess it’s a good thing that while in an iceblock I cannot see the rest of the raid, because I swear if I ever got a GLIMPSE of the ice-forest my brain will say "fuck it, we’re done here this evening" and go into self destruct mode and my body will turn itself inside out on the spot in a spray of drool and fecal matter.

The worst part of course is being unable to field a full raid in the weeks before the kill. Believe me, I tried. WE tried. The player quality outside organized guilds has become unreal. There is a borderline zombie apocalypse out there, where everyone has eaten their own brain and become worse than useless. "I have an idea guys. We’ll run groups, organize runs, pick out potentially competent individuals and promise them the gear that we otherwise shard." And then you see a man named Frogstomper keyboard-turn-clicking his way up the tunnel in Pit of Saron, doing something I like to call "reverse tanking", where he is actually helping the mobs kill the rest of us faster while playing connect-the-dots with the falling icicles.

You know there’s a problem when the best you can do is look for "potentially competent".

I try to make it easy for these people. I get a whisper saying "yo kan are you guys recriuting?" and I say "sure we are, listen here." I tell the man to apply. I give him some names and say "okay look up these men on armory. copy their gear, spec, gems, enchants, and glyphs EXACTLY and you will get in NO PROBLEM." The next day I see an application by a hunter equipped with a tanking sword main hand, a caster dagger offhand, berserking enchant on both and an empty ranged slot. I say "???" and he says "lol those guys you sent had pretty good stuff but i made some improvmints on stuff they overlooked."

He made.

Some fucking.

"Improvmints."

I hate these people. I would line them up and run them over repeatedly but there is not a bus in this world big enough to run over all of the people I hate. And the worst part? Most of these clowns have ALREADY found their way into the guild and raid with us every single day. Some of them have made it into officer positions (you knew this was coming).

This image here is an artistic piece, I call it "Officer Chat While The Rest Of You Are Wiping", or "Why Ready Checks Never Come Back", or more simply "This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things."

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You know what? I don’t even care anymore. I can do a lot of things. I can fight Korean Zerg all day. I can take a net full of literal squids, duct tape them to keyboards, and teach them to kill bosses. I can listen to Conq ramble on for 6 hours about secondary crime scenes and mercenary hackers. But THESE PEOPLE are impossible to fight. So that leaves me moving towards an early death due to multiple aneurysms while I collect their shining moments and assemble them into front page updates. Except there is not enough bosses in the game to fully communicate the scope of their retardation.

Of course I COULD also join this zoo and maybe work towards getting a reverse-blowjob from an anteater. Fuck it, that actually doesn’t seem like so bad a plan. Pack your bags Brock, we’re going to Madagascar.

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Ok so. Here’s the so-called "killshot" of Blood Queen. I’d post the other one, but at the time of this writing we only have the one kill and it’s bad luck to talk about fail like it’s a good thing. It would be SPLENDID if the next kill had maybe say everyon­e alive for i­nstan­ce, instead of a feigned hunter in addition to the angel priest and bubbled paladin (and I KNOW for a fact most people are aiming for exactly that).

Anyway.

Ok so yes this post is a bit late (I think I say this like every other update), but that is definitely NOT because I spent every evening and last weekend playing Mass Effect in an effort to unlock some blue alien sideboob.

I was drawing.

Sideboob.

See Ost may break promises of microphones from now until the end of time, but I’m a man of my word. So here we have my latest Warcraft ar­twork. Also Amber tells me this is what Nora apparently looks like in real life, so you get a 2-for-1 deal today.

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Back on topic.

The story of how we finally killed Festergut, and Professor, and Blood Queen, and the other "mathematically impossible from a dps vs. enrage timer standpoint" fights are all the same. We didn’t even have to play the "Archimonde Game" this time (though we really should bring that back).

We needed a new angle of attack.

We needed a Stowaway Druid, one of the most powerful and most secret tools in our arsenal.

See not too long ago Brock had a lobotomy, as many people may remember from my last update. To make a long story short some of Bake’s brain found its way into Brock’s skull, along with the capacity to come up with ideas that have equal chances of being either distilled genius or indescribable stupidity. Like for instance trying to heal about 20 million green-dragon hp in the span of 30 seconds, alone, while also keeping the entire raid alive because all the other healers never entered portals and are sitting on 0 mana. For those that don’t understand it’s roughly the equivalent of say trying to climb a tall mountain using only your penis.

But anyway, about the druids. So the plan goes something like this: when first attempting the fight, have everyone that can possibly heal do so. Which in our case is something to the tune of 12 healers. Now, when you hit enrage (and you WILL hit enrage, usually with the boss still at about 90% hp because your so-called 10k dps rogues killing-spreed into a different instance) you simply reduce the number of healers. One by one, convert the healers to dps, until you are left with about 6, and do the fight with those, over and over and over.

And then, THEN comes the key move. When NOBODY expects it, you take say a druid or a shaman and convert them to dps. They CONTINUE to roleplay a healer in healer chat (this is a STRICT requirement, those chosen to be stowaways are threatened with ballsac-removal by me personally). And, if all goes well and the discovery isn’t made, the "mathematically impossible" boss theoretically goes down next attempt.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Addiction defeats enrage timers.

It’s not easy being in my position when these things are suggested, trust me. When Brock comes to me with one of his "plans" and I have to repeat it in a straight voice to the rest of the raid. As raiders you don’t see it, but it looks something like this:

To be perfectly honest, I don’t even need pictures of retarded internet-animals to make my job of making an interesting front page easier. Do you ever wonder what I’m doing for 3 hours a night running circles around the bank? I’m WAITING, waiting for people to explain to me how they tripped and fell UP some stairs because on that particular day they chose to wear their cape while feeding the cat.

I can’t make these things up, honestly:



So one day Brock comes to me, and he says "Hey Kain, we could really use another paladin healer. I think such a recruit would allow us to leverage an advantage in tank-centric healing fights to better co-allocate our resources and streamline operations, thus reducing the overhead margins by a significant factor."
"Well that’s a logical, well-thought out argument Brock," I said, being nice despite the above statement making absolutely no sense and containing made up words. "Let’s look into it."
And then Brock said "Mordral, who is also an esteemed fellow paladin, knows someone that might be a good fit!"
"Jolly good!" I say, and we drink to the Canadian queen.

And this is where Amber came from. See I figured that the best way to recruit paladins is to have the existing paladins do it. I said to myself, "Self, what’s honestly the worst that can happen? WHOEVER they happen to find can’t POSSIBLY be worse than Brock after half his brain was removed and replaced with cabbage."

Sadly I was wrong.

And now, Xtremecheder and Tolandruth are running wild putting their stamp of approval on people that, to borrow an expression from Mord, "can’t go outside because they’re covered in coat hanger scars".

I have a feeling that we’re not yet done with specials. I have a feeling that one day soon we will welcome Samba back with open arms.

Until next time.

So rumor has it that Dan has been threatened with bodily harm if this update doesn’t appear QUICK. I’m not even going to begin to try and explain this, but I figure it’s part of the Twitter experience. And pitching shady business plans to men named DOLPH and SVIRRE on Skype.

Luckily I don’t believe in Christmas, so I am free to spend the day composing yet another masterwork.



The difficulty of these first few encounters is surprisingly appropriate. They’re not really 1-shots, and at least for us the bosses died JUST AS some individuals began to transition into the "wow fuck this it’s mathematically impossible" mentality. Of course it could have just been the bulletproof planning and coordination on the part of the officers:

And we almost didn’t clear the whole place in the first week either. Monday I come home from work, pour a glass of Spanish wine, and log on to raid. There are about two and a half healers present. There is a message in my mailbox saying "don’t hate me daddy"  with a face like this ——>   >________________<   from one of the other healers and something about having to work. A status text from Brock arrives immediately afterwards with an excuse about having to take a dog he doesn’t have to a place that doesn’t exist.

I begin to feel apprehensive. As if perhaps there is going to be a revolt. See the last time this happened, Illside got not one but TWO black eyes from his wife for ditching an anniversary or some such shit for what ultimately turned out to be a canceled raid. This was NOT going to end well, and action needed to be SWIFT.

So to boost morale we kicked a couple of inactives that we had been saving for a time like this, and brought some alt healers and spent a few hours wiping in the most spectacular ways. See the purpose of that exercise was to have everyone ELSE practice, so when the real healers found themselves we’d kill the boss quickly. Which, surprisingly, is EXACTLY what happened.

Fucking Brock.

See he wasn’t always an embarrassment to the Officer rank. THIS is the Brock I recruited and promoted and loved and gave a legendary hammer to: a handsome Canadian horse-cop with a sweet dog, who not only had a hot classmate/supervisor/whatever named Allison pressing her chest against his head but who also HIT THAT on a number of occasions as the story goes.



And this here is the Brock we all know and love:

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How the mighty have fallen.

That’s it for now. See since Blizzard decided to space out the content, I am also forced to space out the epic 3-page Arthas kill update. Until next time.

Another patch, another instance, another update. With Samba safely quarantined in a swine-flu-infected Virginia campus, business can go on as usual - so I give you Anub’arak:



The fact that we’re downing bosses cleanly and quickly is at least somewhat encouraging, considering only a few weeks ago our raids resembled the recent Vault of Bearchavon, and not the good kind. See there’s something about the end of summer that makes people go "FUCK raiding, I’d rather _________" where the blank can be filled with almost anything, usually something between "school", "work", and "trannies".

And when that happens, there’s only one thing that can be done: promote new officers, and send them to the twilight pools where the squid come to feed with a net and a checklist of questions. And before long a new FLOCK appears. Of course, it takes some time to turn a milling mass of trials into a well-oiled raiding operation. But over the course of two weeks, we go from this:



To this:



It’s an exciting time, and doing new content with new people makes an otherwise easy instance highly enjoyable. Some people may disagree, but I think that taking a truckload of sloths in boxes and making out of them a tightly-coordinated killing-machine team of ballerinas with rifles is a lot of fun.

You also have to remember that I’ve been doing this for some time. Here’s an artist’s rendition of my early elementary school years:



Of course I’m the kid with the bat and garbage-can-lid shield. We had the concept of "main tank" even back then.

You have to understand, unlike others I have a lot of faith in humanity, I believe that everyone who plays this game is a fundamentally intelligent person capable of learning, they just make mistakes sometimes.

See when I was in 3rd grade I wanted to be a crocodile. The kid sitting next to me in class liked the idea, so he bit my arm, for practice. After that I decided that crocodiles are kinda dicks. Wanting to be a crocodile was a mistake. I then very carefully elbowed him for biting me, but missed his arm and ended up hitting him in the stomach. That was another mistake. He then leaned over and threw up his carrots and orange juice onto the retarded girl with the one fucked up leg and eyes that look in different directions and she started to eat it.

Ok, I’m a bit off track here, but I think the story is more interesting than whatever point I was going to make, so I might as well finish it.

So AFTER the teacher saw the retarded girl eating my friend’s vomit she FLIPPED the fuck out and dragged me out of the room by my collar and all the way down to the principal’s office. Once there I nervously sat in a big chair waiting for him to arrive, and then inexplicably got up, peed behind his desk, and sat back down. You see, I was too scared to get in trouble for leaving the office to go to the bathroom, so somehow I got the idea that peeing right then and there in a corner of the room would somehow be more acceptable. That too was a mistake.

To my great relief there was another episode later in the day where several teachers had to wrestle a raged fat kid into that same office and he ended up urinating all over them, so my "trail" was covered. There’s a good chance by the way that the fat kid was Elaithe, but he will never admit it and I will never remember so the world will likely never know. Not remembering the situation more clearly was probably the greatest mistake of all.

Ok back on topic, for real this time. If I can get an already unstable person with a lazy eye to eat thrown-up carrots, then pee behind the desk of the most powerful man in a school of hundreds, then go on and become a successful and well-adjusted member of society then ANYONE can figure out how to move out of fire or dodge spikes that move slower than Brock clicks ready checks. It’s simple really: other than a few occasional bad decisions made in the heat of combat against giant beetles or codpiece-wearing fire men, every person is a fundamentally intelligent and well-adjusted individual with the best interests of the greater community in mind.

And then of course Bear invites me to Vault of Archavon Round 6 and shatters any illusions I may have had. Granted, I shouldn’t be too surprised, since on a daily basis I have to deal with this:



Until next time.  

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of The Front Page. Yogg-Saron is dead, and by extension, all bosses leading up to him as well.



Before this post gets too wild, I’ll start with something serious. I’d like to dedicate this server first kill of Yogg-Saron to Foxery, formerly one of our core raiders. He was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident one week prior. He will be greatly missed.

That said, I have a feeling that employers are secretly GOOGLING my name whenever I apply for a job. Though I try to rig the google search results, this front page inevitably appears somewhere near the top. Some have suggested maybe toning down the content of this front page, to make it a higher class of humor if you will, to perhaps make this here operation at least APPEAR a little more professional and legitimate.

Personally, I’d rather keep it as is and let them have a better time reading it. Because you see, people who don’t play the game and raid will never see it the same way. They will never be able to understand the denial or realization in the voice of someone that just died to rockets. Or appreciate the wonderful excuses we hear when one of our special cadets goes afk in the 3 seconds between a ready check and a pull. You see, from the outside it looks a lot like a small confused male child sitting in a corner having a tea party.

When I was younger, say 4 years old, I was with my grandparents visiting some friends of theirs. These friends had a girl my age, and my grandparents decided to get her a tea set as a gift. Now, so that I would not feel particularly left out, they got me something too: I don’t recall exactly what it was since I allegedly threw it at a wall after getting it, but more than likely it was a racecar.

Now I personally remember the details of this story very very vaguely, but living witnesses have described it as such: shortly after the two presents were opened I forcibly broke the racecar or whatever was given to me, punched the little girl in the head, and then proceeded to take the tea set to a corner where I had a tea party. Attempts to approach me during this time were met with wild screaming and throwing of various objects.

So what I’m trying to say is, raiding is basically a tea party over the internet.

Overall Ulduar is a refreshing experience after running Naxx repeatedly for a few months. In Naxx the boss would usually have to find a way to kill every single raid member to truly wipe the raid, since about 3 out of 25 people could reasonably salvage a bad attempt. Here the punishment for bringing squid tends to be far harsher. And once again the hardest encounters are those that make you fight against your fellow players. Like the man that splits your raid into two parts and puts one of them into a tunnel. Arguably the easiest fight in the instance, but I don’t think we’ve yet had an attempt where everyone that was supposed to be in the tunnel actually ended up there. The best we can possibly hope for is for the stupidity to balance itself out, meaning that those who stayed outside are balanced by an equal amount of "stowaways" looking to visit Egypt.



The later, more difficult encounters are essentially the continuation of Loken’s legacy. In addition to this Ulduar is also a place of great mystery - beneath the circular Walkway of the Watchers sits a suspiciously empty room, at the center of which is the woman from Scholomance, whose purpose is at first not entirely apparent. And as such, to combat these new foes, a very special kind of weapon needed to be brought in.

From the sand-beaten flats of Khloo-poon, the land of ents and Wickerwhims, comes a man in a tattered robe, leaning on a cane. Around his belt hang containers of various sizes and descriptions, filled with exotic wines and spirits that grant him tremendous power. On his back hangs a flag with a picture of a cat. It is said that in the slurred speech of this powerful warlock lie the answers to the secrets of the Woman and Loken.

And then of course there’s Yogg-Saron himself, a well-tuned encounter with interesting mechanics, the best being where you fuck up and the whole raid turns into anteaters. If you weren’t one of the very privileged few that got a chance to go insane on that fight, believe me, you’ll know when you see it.



And so, it’s off to hardmodes for us. Well, I guess before then we’ll probably have to kill Yogg-Saron again, which seems a little tenuous as of this writing. My theory is that the excitement of a first kill was too much for some people, and a number of individuals are still missing. Gleppars for instance went on what was described as a "cock-sucking trip" to LA, and there are theories that Eggbeater got lost at a gay bar. Well, actually FOUND at a gay bar, if you know what I mean. But back on topic: I’m not sure what the updates will look like for the less interesting hard modes, but in any case I’ll keep a checklist:

Until next time.