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Deuce
by Published on 01-25-2012 04:33 AM
October 13th was an overcast day in New England. It was fall break, and I was home from college. I went for a long run in the afternoon, reliving high school memories. I want to say it drizzled, but it was so many years ago I cannot be certain. Sarah, who went to Boston to visit her boyfriend over the break, decided to enjoy the day by kayaking off the southern coast of Cape Cod. I got back from my run and wasted the rest of the day on the computer. Sarah never logged on AIM, the preferred communication medium at the time. On Monday I headed back to school with one of my suite mates who lived a town over, his semi-girlfriend, and a friend of his that attended a school an hour past ours. Fitting everyone’s junk in the car required our combined Tertris knowledge, which only our generation possess. Earlier in the day I had received an email from my cross country coach stating there was a team meeting at 6 PM. Since we had to drop off the additional passenger, we missed the meeting. After unloading him my roommate received a cell phone call, which was for me, since I didn’t own a cell phone. The call was from BB, one of Sarah’s house mates. “Sarah is missing.”
I remember: A brief explanation to the two passengers in the car, which was greeted with assurances that she would be fine. Staring out the window as Pennsylvania farm land rolled by in the dark. Arriving at school. Taking my laundry bag up to my room. The door was open and there were a few stoic teammates in our common area. I muttered that BB had called, dropped off my bag and didn’t exchange another word. I went to Sarah’s house. I entered through the kitchen door and met BB, there was a long hug, followed by a conversation at the kitchen table. The outlook was bad. They’d been missing, Sarah went out with a friend while the two boyfriends waited on shore, for over 24 hours. The ocean was cold, they went out in bathing suites and without life jackets. Calling my mother, and trying to get her to find the news article online because I was incapable of telling her what happened. I spent the rest of the night at her house with a bunch of catatonic people, who were all hoping to hear good news that never came. I eventually retired to my room and wept into a pillow before passing out from exhaustion.
My perfect, sheltered world broke, and I didn’t know until the next day, and I didn’t realize how badly for years.
At the end of the following summer I got my death wings. I’m an athiest, or a humanist, or raised Episcopal, it depends on who is asking. Sarah was raised Jewish, but what she believed is not something I remember. I don’t think there is anything after we shuffle off this mortal coil, but I know that if anything exists Sarah has found the best place. That is why I had wings tattooed on my ankles all those years ago: to find Sarah.
I’ve spent a lot of time running away from the world, a large portion of that time was spent engrossed in the world of Azeroth battling internet pixels. The running part wasn’t healthy. By not confronting my issues I allowed them to remain, while I let myself be consumed in activities that kept my mind from wandering, allowing me to continue to ignore them. My life outside the internet became defined by this tragedy, but my life on the internet flourished. The internet is also a place that can never hurt me. So I’ve stayed.
Everyone has their own reason for raiding in WoW. Mine, other than escaping from Earth, is: in a world with billions of people being the best at something, or in the top .1%, or .5%, or 1%, is alluring, regardless of what you’re good at. If I was the best whittler in the world, there are probably very few people that would care, and it would be difficult to prove, but I’d be damn proud. Luckily, it is easy to judge how good your WoW guild is, and I am proud of what we have accomplished. I may enjoy playing other games more than WoW, but the rush of succeeding with my band of raiders is unmatched. It’s why I continue to come back for more.
Why did I post any of this instead of keeping it in the journal I hide between my mattress and the frame? A fair and valid question. I guess I confused news posts with sharing time.
I think the Deathwing encounter was the best one of the tier. If every boss took fifty attempts I’d be happy. It’s a good number. It was easy to see the raids progression through the encounter and stay positive as we moved further along on each platform. If the final phase was harder well I guess the fight would have taken longer to learn, and resulted in a greater sense of accomplishment when we killed it. But, overall I’m just glad the tier is over, and all of our raiders that gritted through this tier can retire with us almost reaching my projected goal, if only I’d said the front page of wowprogress (US), instead of (25). ...by Published on 01-20-2012 01:46 AM
I’m not sure how we did it, but we finally managed to finish Dragon Soul. Now that it’s over I can safely say it was not enjoyable. All of the encounters turned out to be greater gear checks than skill checks, and gear is my least favorite aspect of the game. My outrage at LFR was misguided. I should have been furious at Blizzard for making the race about how many legendaries a guild could recruit. Our Spine kill had only oranges that were made by Vigil. We’re bad recruiters. Spine is mind numbing for twelve minutes, but right after the first lift on the last tendon the entire encounter changes. The last minute and a half is a totally different encounter, which requires many, many attempts to learn. And when you’re learning those last hectic seconds Blizzard decided to reward raiders by causing the subsequent attempt to be an automatic wipe because bloods don’t despawn. But we persevered, miraculously. When we finally killed it it took a second to register. I was the designated dispeller, and I died, so those responsibilities fell to Fetch for the last thirty seconds, but Fetch was out of mana. When we killed the tendon there was .1 seconds on debuff before Fetch’s mana ticked and was able to remove it. I’m sure the DPS was equally close to not finishing the tendon, but I was too busy watching the milliseconds tick away on the debuff to notice how much time was left on the lift when it died. The collective sigh of relief that followed the realization that the encounter was complete resounded throughout the internet. The kill was not satisfying, but the knowledge that we won’t have to complete that encounter for awhile required me to change my pants.
A quick note to Blizzard: Thank you for making me feel like an inadequate guild leader by choosing not to actively poach players because their guild chose to collectively work to equip that person with a legendary. Thank you also for designing encounter that allow us to follow your mantra of bring the player not the class, I know our enchancment shaman really value your continued efforts, and my restoration shaman would have felt unwanted if I wasn’t required to play him for an encounter this tier.
edit: I’ve just been told that there is actually another encounter after the hardest encounter, weird. I guess we aren’t done just yet, but I’ve been assured the encounter is only a technicality and this minor glitch will be resolved after the weekend.
...by Published on 12-10-2011 05:50 PM
I have a strange feeling the rules were changed and I missed the memo. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I avoided the memo. I, we, a majority of Vigil, chose to skip the Dragon Soul PTR. I was online for a lot of the scheduled Firelands PTR raids, and at the end of the cycle I felt the time commitment too large and the reward too small to warrant devoting an equal amount of time to the 4.3 PTR. After three raid nights on heroic encounters I stand by this decision, because I don’t see it as the main reason we are so far behind.
When I first heard the of the new craze, lfr’ing ten times in one week to get tier pieces for the entire raid, I had a natural revulsion. Extra raiding? No thanks. But, that is partly, or predominately, due to my aversion to playing WoW more than necessary (lfr’ing probably (read: definitely) greatly reduces the amount of time spent on progression, so my logic was flawed) and specifically due to moving the week 4.3 went live. Then I heard guilds were getting the ban hammer and I thought our lack of planning, and general apathy, had paid off. That was not the case. The obvious exploits were punished, but the “legit” raid juicers retained their edge. I was furious. I wanted to bitch from the rooftops. I wanted to condemn every guild that participated. I no longer feel that way.
The first week of this race was decided last week in LFR, and on the PTR. We knew we wouldn’t be the first horse out of the gate, but world 220th, really? That stings. To save a sliver of my ego I’m going to assume that the first four, or five, bosses in ten man are a complete joke.
My rationalization (further rambling):
It’s preposterous to get angry at a team for spending an extra five hours one week to obtain a significant advantage over a team that doesn’t invest the trivial amount of time required to obtain the same advantage. Especially when you consider the total amount of time that is about to be spent on the race. Previously, all of us spent months between content patches farming gear, and when the content was released we started on the same playing field and the raids average ilvl remained relatively level throughout the race. This helped us math averse guilds decide whether to invest time on encounters. Oh, such and such guild killed blah blah and their DPS sucks (by rule everyone else’s DPS sucks) so we can totally kill this boss. Now, I’m at a loss. This is partly due to guilds having more new tier gear in their raids, and partly due to guilds dedication during Firelands to run multiple groups in order to pump out orange sticks, and a concerted effort to recruit players already wielding orange sticks. In WoW, for those of you that need a history lesson, this is the second time a DPS legendary has been released in a tier that was not the last one of its expansion. I hope it never happens again. But, I digress.
Back to the race! We’re behind. No, we aren’t going to forfeit. Now I know everyone else is raid juicing, and if professional sports have taught me anything it’s that cheating is okay as long as everyone knows and expects everyone else to do it. Yes, I believe that running LFR for three players at a time is an unintended use of game mechanics, but Blizzard either doesn’t care, or like me, has no idea how to prevent the practice. If this is how the game is going to be played from now on then so be it. Granted, if I said we wouldn’t partake in this illicit gear we’d high horse our way into obscurity, so I really don’t have a choice, but I can pretend.
See you guys on the front page of wowprogress (25) ...by Published on 08-15-2011 02:49 AM
Lets get the Ragnaros stuff out of the way nice and quick here. Phase One sucks, Phase Two made me play a Moonkin, fuck Phase Two, Phase Three is tighter than the skinny jeans I bought for Blizzcon, and Phase Four is a crap shot, where we rolled the dice and won, and then rolled again and won, and again, and again, because all we do is win, win, win. Props to Zythain for being the last man standing and killing the boss. I don’t want to think about how many more nights we could have spent on the encounter without ever getting the frost patch spawns we got on our kill. I think I’m supposed to complain about people raid dodging. Yes, it happened to us, too. We’re recruiting people to alleviate that problem and get more front page loving from wowprogress next content cycle. That’s all I have to say about Firelands.
I attempted to write this part of the news post before the kill. I have drafts that I’m unhappy with and now the boss is defeated and I’m out of time. Ragnaros is dead, again. It was an eternity ago that I was fire balling my way through Molten Core. I remember more about the kills and boss mechanics than I remember about the people that dedicated and continue to dedicate so much of their lives to help me succeed in this game. I am not an extraordinary raider, but we have assembled an extraordinary group of people that are sometimes, usually?, taken for granted. We curse people when they are late or miss a raid, but it goes unnoticed when someone logs on on time every night for months. We are oblivious to peoples lives outside of WoW. I know where people live because of what it means for their ping and storms in their area. Real life comes up when it gets in the way of raiding. When someone stops raiding because they got a job, there is cause for celebration. When someone has to take time off due to a tragedy in their family we pause momentarily and hope for the best. And that's all. We spend a moment and then figure out how to continue without them.
I’d like to thank all of Vigils raiders, past and present, that have allowed us to succeed and will help us continue to succeed.
-Aldace
...by Published on 07-15-2011 12:17 AM
Protection paladins to the rescue! I put myself in the raid tonight for a kill! It only took specing protection and agreeing to die three times per attempt. It will be interesting to see how this encounter is handled if Blizzard changes any of the mechanics so they cannot be easily handled by one or two people at a time. ...
