News

So somewhat unexpectedly, Ragnaros is died:­

(The video can be found here. We’ll pretend that’s the kill attempt, and not a farm attempt gone horribly wrong.)

I say unexpectedly because even taking into account the largest nerf in the history of the game, the kill for us was about 2 nights away according to my burnt-poop-log calendar. However, evidently "this is the last attempt for tonight, make it count" sometimes has unpredictable results, such as making people mostly-correctly execute a phase that they have never seen before and had no idea what to do in. I know that this is the case because the next week I watched the same exact group make another go at Ragnaros phase 3, and that circus lasted all of 2.5 seconds before everyone was made into hat.  Which means, of course, that as always the first kill was a deeply spiritual experience, where powers outside the raid were looking down on us in pity.

So Rag happened to die, and immediately someone said "what about the front page update?" and I was caught with my pants down, figuratively and literally, because as a tank and officer of the guild I am a practitioner of what is known as "socks-only raiding". I scrambled to assemble some reference materials, but after scouring my resources ended up with only a picture of a bear on a bicycle, a pigeon with french fries, and two and a half poop jokes.

See normally, in between front page updates, when I encounter appropriate situations, I write a quick note to myself that I am able to later reference when composing the front page news post. The problem is that these notes tend to be very cryptic and completely meaningless by the time I go back to read them, and therefore useless. For instance, the back of the DKP notebook (which is where these notes reside) currently contains the following:

Squeaky Gnome
Parrot With a Human Face
Me Gusta Duck Roll

And I have NO idea what any of those mean. Or what they could even remotely mean. So I had to scrap all that and come up with some original material before anyone noticed the delay. This was for the most part done this past Saturday, sitting on the train next to a girl with elf ears and a broken leg, which she got defending Helm’s Deep, talking to a fat kid with a lazy eye and a cat-ear hat that appeared to be made from several socks cut apart and turned inside out.

Anyway, Firelands. Blizzard’s latest feat of raid engineering. This time the mobs from Scholomance Molten Core were copy and pasted so thoroughly that they still reference the "smoldering" mechanic and drop crafting materials from 2004.

The bosses at least were better than Molten Core. Of course this isn’t saying too much, since (despite what the 400-pound man with Cheeto-streaks on his moobs will tell you) those were NOT the golden days of raiding and the encounters really only involved healers turning their cameras at the floor and spamming a decurse addon to dispel the raid as fast as the global cooldown will allow. But hey, at least it was better than what came before. Hal the Hunter tells of a time where a cleric in EverQuest had a handful of buffs of varying durations, without any in-game timers, which meant that the player piloting the cleric had to invest in several real-world hourglasses of varying denominations and physically use them to time things. I mean I guess I do that now with coins for the Baleroc rotation, but then everyone complains because they all want to be the quarter because everyone deserves to be rich and they are the 99% and they have the RIGHT to enter a bagel shop and poop in the sink (because the toilet is a stool-volcano due to having been used by more people than Illside’s tailpipe) and then have the sink break off the wall because it doesn’t support their weight.

I fear that at this point in the post there are too many words and too few pictures, which means we’re fast approaching the point where the average reader’s attention will be commandeered by a passing slinky. So here’s the promised picture of Quasi:

I would NOT look at the source material for this if I were you by the way. What has been seen cannot be unseen, and NEVER have those words rang more true than now. (I KNOW that all of you won’t leave me alone until I have furnished a link to this anthropomorphic lesbian squirrel porn (I THINK they are squirrels?), so I’ll save us both some time: google "peaches and cream clubstripes" and go to the first result, but remember, you have been WARNED).

Moving on, here we have Detective Mordral, who screens all submitted images to make sure they are legitimate and not simply lifted from the various cesspools of the internet:



This is his "poop face", most often seen right after dying to Alysrazor trash because our cadets are yelling "11121211221" in raid chat instead of turning the bird.

And finally we have one of our newer additions, Hyldra, seen here in bear form:

I hope y’all find this one hilarious by the way, because once SHE sees it I am going to get a reaming worse than the time I played "parachute cat" from the 8th floor balcony.

Anyway, carrying on.

The media has convinced the mothers and the mothers have convinced themselves that all of their children have ADD and so they feed them medicine but this GIVES them ADD and this ADD generation is currently what we have to work with as far as raid groups go. See once upon a time, in the formative years of the guild, we would have intelligent, lengthy strategy discussions about every fight. You can see that there is a special forum for it, an artifact of expansions past, now overgrown with cobwebs from several years of disuse. Here we would discuss knowledge and invent maneuvers and draw colored graphs in our downtime, and in the actual raid I used to go into great detail about the mechanics of an encounter, so that everyone could be well prepared and knew exactly what to expect going into a fight.

These days, the explanation must be condensed to haiku form, or perhaps a picket sign slogan, otherwise I start losing people. I can’t even have people go watch a video of the fight, because that inevitably ends with zero knowledge of the encounter and instead people screaming "omg omg Kain can you say "fuwious woar" like she does in that video?! Please? It’s ADORABLE!".

On a given progress night we start attempts, and after every attempt I say "we need to spread out more, the fire ability does damage in an area around each person and we are dying because we are too clumped." I say this over and over and pour glasses of wine to lower my blood pressure and somewhere in the neighborhood of attempt 57 someone says "oh! I just noticed that the fire ability is much easier to heal through if we’re all spread out!" and I poop myself.

It’s like screaming at someone "don’t put your hand in that hole there’s a badger in there", and then they start to move it inside the hole and you warn them again and again and then you finally leave, and then everyone is surprised when they scream "FUCK A BADGER BIT ME". Now take 25 such individuals, and you got yourself a typical Addiction-Guild raid night. I hate these people. I find them to be similar to an accumulation of feces and lye on a riverbank, fit only to be squatted on and defecated upon by the common troweling animals of the field, the plowbeasts done with tilling visit upon them a worthy reward.

As such the only way to deal with most raiders is to distract them enough so they don’t think too much about the task at hand, so that their reptilian brain just does what it heard me repeat several hundred times. In essence it’s like putting a tasty snack at the bottom of a tin can, as a trap, which is basically what I would do to interact with girl-cats if I were a cat myself:

Speaking of traps, evidently not everyone is aware of the terminology. Luckily Nevvy is back, so I will allow his words to explain what a thousand pictures of awkward bulges could not:

I guess it’s not ALL that bad. For instance, people’s brains appear to function mostly along the rules of logic (even the girls’!), unlike the "temperature panel incident" from a few weeks ago.

So Dan’s computer has a one of those temperature panel things on the front of the case, that displays useless statistics such as temperature and fan speed. Now, let’s ignore for a second the fact that these things have temperature probes consisting of a wire scotch taped to a graphics card or heat sink, and that whatever measurements they provide are about as accurate as trying to predict hurricane trajectories with a butt-thermometer. Instead let’s focus on their other feature: the alarm that goes off when the fan speed gets too low or some such shit. Because you know, modern components are definitely not made to shut off before overheating, and require a high-pitched squeal to keep the blood pressure of household children and animals from getting too low.

Anyway. Dan’s temperature-monitor-panel begins making the aforementioned squealing sounds for no apparent reason one day, but only when playing games. Dan proceeds with the logical solution, i.e. not playing games. This lasts about 2 days, until Twiller accidentally trolls and Dan is forced to defend his honor in a match of Team Fortress 2. His initial solution, which is to get a new computer overnighted to him, isn’t fast enough so he comes to me and Professor MushyBiscuit for help. We explain a series of steps to resolving this problem, which generally involve say, opening the case and unplugging the panel because it’s useless anyway.

Except that this solution is not appropriate for Dan’s needs, as he is CONVINCED that if he opens the case everything will be destroyed since computers operate with the help of voodoo - you have to remember that this is the same person that once upon a time reformatted his computer in 30 seconds while talking on vent from said computer. No, Dan has a far more elegant solution: see the panel has a sticker with a number of unlabeled squares on the front, which of course MUST be buttons because they are made to look like buttons. The panel has a SECRET CODE that must be entered to unlock special functionality and make the beeping stop. Dan is sure of this, as he has done this once before. The solution then is to google pictures of temperature panels until one is found that resembles the front of his case, and then attempt to look for the secret code on the associated website. Except he knows nothing about computers and is convinced that the websites are written in the language of computer-shaman and he is therefore not able to do this task himself, and requires assistance.

MushyBiscuit, a man with more patience (and a larger stock of amphetamines) than I, actually went on this quest. Naturally it proved fruitless. Last I checked Dan was actually playing the squealing sound over vent to people hoping someone would recognize it and be able to tell him the secret code that will solve his problems.

I cannot make these things up.

The thought processes of these people sometimes make less sense than Frankie Twill having a wife, because THAT MAN is so deep in the closet he’s having tea with Aslan the Lion. (Get it?! It’s a Narnia reference, because the children go into a closet where all the magical people live. And Frank is a latent homosexual, which means he ALSO hangs out in a closet.)

Until next time, where our heroes go on to vanquish Squid-Deathwing with a laser beam and bring this expansion to a glorious conclusion, hopefully before my brain aborts itself due to seeing one too many geometrically-impossible fire-forests.

This first raid tier of Cataclysm got off to a very powerful start, but as time went on and boss counts rose people began vanishing and the end seemed ever further away. It was then that I went off alone, climbed atop a tall mountain, and pooped upon a yew log. I then took this log, smeared in sticky leavings, and set it ablaze, holding it aloft as an offering to the powers that be, beseeching them to show me the way. The fumes of burning excrement swirled around me, and I began to see into the aether, catching glimpses of the path I now knew I must take. I meditated for three days and three nights beside the smoldering stool, and when I returned victory was ours.

(Incidentally, this is also the process we use to determine who becomes an officer and who gets legendaries.)

Seeing as how the wait for a front page update is FAST approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels, this update must be significantly longer than usual. I had originally aimed for this to go up somewhere in late February, but there were some incidents with tanks winning Cho’gall tentacle meters which made progress a bit difficult.

Come on guys, it’s not that hard. You LOOK and you see a man with an eyeball POP OUT next to you all you have to do is switch targets for about 3 seconds. I mean you don’t even have to stop slamming your face against the DPS buttons, just hit TAB somewhere in there and the game will do the rest for you. I know it looks like you’re doing better DPS by staying on the boss, but trust me the faster the adds die the better it is for EVERYONE. You are NOT being more efficient by not switching, that is a LIE perpetrated by people like Bear whose ability to maintain an erection is directly linked to a very narrow interpretation of damage meter placement. Ok when you don’t switch targets in an attempt to pad meters you are basically taking the Feng Wah bus from New York to Boston to save $3 on transportation, only to spend it on a dinner of Roast Hare with Mint Fig Leaf for 55 (no dollar sign).

You know what that makes you? That makes you BEAR’S PEOPLE. And trust me you do NOT want to become Bear’s People. Recently there was an episode in which I was stumbling and WEAVING about the streets of Boston with suspect men named SPENCIL and Anubis’s new boyfriend MINSY MIN while stopping to photograph a goddamn jug full of pee as a man is licking pocket lint because he thinks it’s mushrooms and calling the cat on the bar stool "dog" and "Rick" and you know what? I say to myself "at least I’m not Bear’s People".

I don’t think you believe me. You think that I am only being dramatic for the sake of it and that didn’t actually happen. Ok, here’s a picture of a jug of pee and a cat on a bar stool that might be a dog and might be named Rick. And you BEST not think of calling the legitimacy of these pictures into question, that is Anubis’s hand next to the cat (you can tell by the distinct fur cuff).



Anyway, back on topic.

For once we have a first raid tier that is actually well thought out and properly implemented. Except for that part where they can’t come up with new lore characters and just use the ones we’ve already killed fifteen times because "Neferiun is cool". I GUARANTEE that nobody who raided the original Nefarian still plays because they had a goddamn brain hemorrhage when they saw men like Bubbalarry and Badurpadur 1-shot the 4 horsemen with 10 people, a boss whose original version destroyed entire servers by requiring top guilds to steal about 4 guilds worth of main tanks and then shitting all over their own loot systems by defaulting all gear to said tanks so that maybe the fight would last longer than the intro speech. But hey man, Nefarian was COOL.  

Ok guys I got an idea. People liked Onyxia, right? And they liked Nefarian, right? Ok guys listen. Guys. We will make the end boss Onyxia and Nefarian but BEAST. Ok imagine how cool it would be if Onyxia was an ELECTRICAL ZOMBIE ok and Nefarian was BEAST with blood dripping off his jowls. And then remember that awesome part of the original fight where certain classes would get called out and their abilities used against them? Yeah let’s not do that, and instead make some adds. Ok guys we will make these ADDS that need to be TANKED and they will be these skeletons from Scholomance but BEAST.

There is a team at Blizzard that eats caviar and wears expensive suits to meetings and discusses good ideas that they have. Here’s an excerpt of a meeting:



Ok the first time I killed Onyxia it involved a man named Glamdring the Foe-Hammer praying for us in Spanish and then somehow wedging himself UP the wall of the whelp cave where he managed to get out of combat and just repeatedly resurrect whoever died. The current version can be defeated by a potato taped to the keyboard. And people STILL manage to fuck it up and not switch targets correctly, and she explodes and kills everyone. Because you know, these days exploding for a trillion damage is the only way to actually ensure that the fight ends, because otherwise people just keep slip n’ sliding in their own drool banging their heads against the keyboard with 3 people alive and saying "keep going we almost got this" Bake-style.

I exaggerate a little of course, for the most part encounters were refreshing and well designed, with a good amount of what Alex the Flying Camel would call "digging deep". Here is a rare photograph of Alex the Flying Camel in his early years, when he operating out of the Middle East with Brock:

And Al’Akir was certainly a fun fight. Here’s a brief synopsis of how our kill attempt went:

We start on what is essentially a floating pizza, several people to a slice. A line of tornadoes sweeps across the platform, picking up Quasi because she is from Alabama, the natural enemy of tornadoes, and Squade, because he’s high. Then it starts to rain. Out of nowhere a giant T-REX appears and lands among us. Alex has only time to glance up and mutter "clever girl" before he is eaten whole. Then Nora the long-neck yells (well, types furiously I guess) "THAT WAS MY MOTHER" and BITES the T-REX in the leg but he just laughs because Nora is a plant-eater and doesn’t have very sharp teeth and then he’s like "I will break your cuffs!" and he’s backing up getting ready to charge and we’re all baby dinosaurs holding onto each other BUT he backs up too far and into a beeping ROBOT AIRPLANE that is actually Ost and before he is pureed by the propeller he poops out something shaped like a camel but it’s actually Alex and we have our friend back.

And we start BITING and SCRITCHING Al’Akir and then a giant man wearing wind chimes appears in the sky and the man is actually Mordral and we are standing on his raid pizza and he is VERY angry so he TAKES the pizza and we are falling BUT then Kalecgos is flying overhead and he’s like "I HAVE CHANNELED MY POWER INTO THESE ORBS" and then Nevvy appears and clicks an orb even though I told him not to and turns into a dragon and we land on his back. Then Illside flies in on the back of GusGus the flying cat and riding on Illside’s back is Brock and he has a comb and a Canadian quarter and a VERY ironic mustache and GusGus is vomiting and pooping coins everywhere.

And then I’m like "GUYS WE ALMOST GOT THIS DIG DEEP" but translated into the language of the raiders it sounds like "bark bark moo" and Roo crushes a pool ball with his anus and Toland crushes a pool ball with his cloaca* and the boss is at 1% and then we all get knocked back and stunned and killed and he’s like "IS THIS IT MORTALS? IS THIS ALL THE FURY YOU CAN MUSTER?" and then he starts channeling a meteor that will destroy the world because his mother was an alien and he was an experiment and just as it’s about to finish Bake appears and he’s like "I will do it, I will take the ring into Mordor" and KICKS Al’Akir and interrupts the cast and Yukomo flies in riding on the back of Peppars who is actually a crocodile and ok you seeeee him wearing 6 stolen shirts and Yuko is like =^_^= and resurrects us all and we kill the boss and Kain spends the next several hours hopping around Orgrimmar wearing nothing but fur handcuffs and a buttplug-tail because that’s what he was forced to promise in order for the boss to die.

(Note to readers: the above passage was written some time before we actually killed Al’Akir, and indeed before I even read the fight, so there might be one or two minor inaccuracies concerning the exact encounter mechanics).  

* Cloaca: noun. What birds (including owls) poop out of. Essentially a bird butt. When writing this segment Toland was not available for consultation so I had to actually google "bird butt".

In other guild news, Qim and Tevar gave birth. Well Qim did the birthing mostly I guess, the way I hear it Tevar was standing nearby and trying not to look and thinking "oh god 10 centimeters is a lot wider than it looked like on paper please let this end soon".

The best part is that they play with speakers on. This means that at some point that child will begin to act out some of the things that I must threaten raiders with in order for bosses to go down, which will make for some VERY awkward conversations around the dinner table. The day she tugs on Qim’s skirt and says "Mommy, what’s a reacharound? I heard the computer man that fights dragons say it" my entire career will be justified.

In retrospect it’s actually better that it took us a while to kill the last few bosses of this raid tier, otherwise the end of this update would fall right about here and to extend it I’d have to pull out stories from PAX, which consist of very convoluted and layered inside jokes about tall men in berets and women’s sweaters that roughly 3 people actually understand.

Speaking of PAX, the one in Boston happened while we were working on bosses (and by working on bosses I mean myself repeatedly screaming "WHY AM I #1 ON TENTACLE METERS AGAIN" over and over in officer chat while the others begged me to not gkick innocent core raiders as a means to inspire people to not play like shit).

Anyway a bunch of us went to Boston, which is much closer to New York than Seattle, which means that we have the LUXURY travel option where we drive a car there in 4 hours instead of spending the whole day flying in planes and arguing with airport security about how I should have the right to be groped by a female TSA agent instead of a male one. Of course some of our colleagues opted to save $3 by taking the Fun Dong bus instead, where there was roughly a 50/50 chance that somebody attempted to use them as a toilet.

Ok so anyway, a few days prior you get the hotel room list and it reads:

Room 2:

Anubis
Steve H
Danrax
You
Samba (staying illegally, do not let hotel staff see him)

Two nights later you come to the room. Steve is completely unclothed, laying sprawled across the bed on top of the sheets and hence exposed. This is due to our ongoing battle with hotel thermostats, which we cannot figure out how to operate properly: on most nights the air conditioning somehow ends up on and set to high, so blankets become a rare commodity over which Dan and I end up fighting battles in our sleep. This particular night, Steve REALLY thought hard and outdid himself and made sure we wouldn’t have the same problem again by setting the thermostat to about 95 degrees. He then proceeded to fully disrobe to better adjust himself to the steaming jungle habitat that he created.

The other bed is occupied by Dan, the PAX media badge that he refuses to remove tangled about his neck and partially constricting oxygen intake. He is speaking in tongues. As you approach his eyes SNAP open, and without a word he jumps a full foot into the air and runs out into the hallway and attempts to exit the hotel through a 15th story window because he believes himself to be Batman and the hero this city deserves. This does not surprise you, because you are by this point used to Dan transforming from a professional journalist into a raving lunatic somewhere between the hours of 7 and 9pm on a daily basis. In fact, you realize that you have not actually ever heard him say or do anything coherent after darkness fell. Which is unsettling, but instead of being unsettled you simply set the thermostat to a cooler setting and go to sleep.

Except that the colder temperature has roused other creatures in the room, and then on multiple occasions you see Samba, wearing a bedsheet, attempt to SLITHER up from the floor onto the bed and you are forced to fend him off with an umbrella and cane while loudly exclaiming "I say good DAY sir!" in the accent of Reginald’s People. Around this time Dan, who through constant tossing and turning and ROLLING has completed the transformation into a human burrito, begins screaming in his sleep in Hebrew.

Also you realize that you have to poop, but the toilet is clogged. And not just clogged such that you can add a few logs without much trouble, I mean the whole bowl is a SOLID mass of stool and tissue with a layer of muddy water on top and flowing outwards and the lid closed to make the whole thing a surprise.

Simple enough, give the hotel staff a call and they’ll come plumb it right quick. Except that when they walk into the room the first thing they will see is Steve’s grundle, followed by a caterpillar in a straitjacket having a seizure on the bed and an illegal Fifth Guest somewhere on the floor breathing in the darkness and watching for those on the beds to let down their defenses.

So basically, that toilet is staying the way it is and your log is sliding to the front of your colon at an alarming rate. Basically, "fuck".

Then you come back home, and back to raiding, and are politely informed that half your raiding roster disappeared. And those that quit are goddamned PROUD of it, and take every opportunity to inform you much better their lives are and how they have so much more free time to do the things they’ve always wanted to do like sit around in Google Chat for hours on end screaming at each other in what they believe to be Japanese:

Frank: hai
Dan: oh hai
Frank: HAI! kawaiiiiiiiiii nanneuuuuusan
Dan: KAWAIIII NESU DESAIIII
Frank: HAI HAI HAI
Frank: IBUKI SAN
Dan: FUKAIIIII NANNNNUUUSAIIIIIIDESSSSUU

And then you collect some fresh recruits, and re-explain the encounters, and then fail because all 3 tanks are halfway up the damage meters. And people are pissed off because of the fail, and start blaming interrupters, ON A FIGHT THAT DOESN’T HAVE INTERRUPTS, and then you attempt to clarify that the problem is with DPS and you show them a graph but to them it looks like this:



Then at some point the raid gods take pity on our souls and the DPS is actually really good but then THAT GUY gets a yellow arrow and stands in the raid and we have what I like to call a "butt cleaning". And you WISH, you PRAY that it was one of the new guys that has an excuse but no, the new guys all execute the mechanics perfectly and the person responsible was someone who had been doing it since day 1 and has been raiding for roughly 7 years.

And then when yelled at they say something glorious like "sorry i was on the phone for your whole explanation" and I become aware of a low humming in my brain as I get closer to aneurysm. "The explanation was for the new guys that have never done this," I say but then I realize that the man I am speaking to has actually forgotten how the fight works and who he even IS because he has a degenerative brain disorder caused by eating his own poop as a child.

And then I try to make it as simple as possible, I give people shapes and use a pizza slice analogy to better communicate what "please spread out" means. Then of course one of our cadets stands JUST slightly off center and lightning bounces sideways and this invigorates and inspires the lightning and it continues to arc about halfway around the platform leaving only small puddles of voided bowels where a raider just stood. And if I feel a small trickle of poop when I see that, I can only imagine my less patient colleagues like Mordral hovering near the ceiling of their apartments on a steady jet stream of stool.

And then I very calmly ask the cadet responsible to help me understand WHY this lightning situation happened, and they begin saying something about trying to outsmart tornadoes.

Remember kids: when you start trying to outsmart the encounter you end up outsmarting YOURSELF.

And before long you’re on the Fung Pee bus to Dragon land, that way you can afford the Bamboo Root Honey Dipped Duck Roll "55" with FRESH sprouts.

­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:

­

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."

­

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.