Affliction Guild

And so it was that after a long, hard week full of attempts on Kael’Thas, Affliction zoned into Tempest Keep once more last night with dreams of bringing Kael’s palace shattering down around his ears. It was a week full of wipes, repair bills, consumables and wipes. And some wipes. And a couple of wipes. There were also wipes. And because you can just never have too many of them - another wipe. There were wipes of all shapes and sizes. Some long, some short. Some began before the actual attempts did and some ended long after the first person had died. Some were amusing, some were frustrating and some we’re still not sure about. But we persevered, dusted ourselves off and tried again.

And again.

For those that have never experienced it - it’s easy to describe the mechanics of the Kael’Thas fight. You can run through the various phases, the mobs, the strategies and lay it all out on the table clear as day. But until you actually take part in this elaborate dance, this merry-go-round of porcelain plate juggling jesters, every attempt teetering at the brink of a cliff with only jagged edged rocks and bad metaphors below - until then, you’ll never truly understand when someone tells you that Kael’Thas is quite possibly the most awesome and rewarding encounter in WoW up until this point of progression.

Blizzard took a different route in this encounter. They heeded the cries of the masses who told them that the Lady Vash’j fight was too random and luck based. They did not want to create another boss who at a whim could summarily execute a quarter of your raid with nothing you could have done to save them. So they created Kael’Thas - a fight that is only about control and execution.. and seven thousand miscellanous things that COULD go wrong and wipe your raid in a slow and painful death.. but which you are perfectly in control of.

The above is, perhaps, the most frustrating thing about this fight. Experience has now taught us that you cannot assume that every person is born with a survival instinct, and that it would naturally translate into their online play. Indeed, it seems that for a fairly sizeable portion of today’s humans, a fifteen foot tall maniacal and savage-looking Blood Elf wearing horns and flaming armor and wielding an axe that could level Shattrath if dropped from a sufficient altitude is absolutely, positively no reason to panic. It also seems that this transcendent feeling of euphoria abounds even when said Blood Elf is bearing down on them, drooling blood and with a look on his face suggesting that your torso is quite possibly the tastiest morsel of food he has ever seen, and it cannot be in his mouth quickly enough.

Yes, you guessed it, many an entertaining wipe was had at the hands of Thaladred “It looks like I’m only walking, but remember that I’m fifteen feet tall” the Darkener. Many a “he’s after you! Run!” was cut short by the death screams of a daydreaming raid member, or your typical mage whose priorities in life place firing off another fireball above.. well.. life itself. It took many an explanation to convey the idea that Thaladred wasn’t, in fact, on his way over to give people an encouraging word and a friendly slap on the ass. But finally, we were past that particular hurdle.

Then came Capernian - an embarrassment to the warlock community who forgot to spend all of her talent points when going down the destruction tree and then forgot which game she was playing and took a level in the Mage class to pick up Fireball. She also didn’t bind any of her keys before the fight and forgot to drag her abilities to her action bars, and is thus limited to spamming Fireball and Conflagrate for the rest of her rather short and not so illustrious career. She also gave us many a headache, displaying a female characteristic that has baffled men since the dawn of time by never quite being able to decide what she wanted. Thankfully however, she had very little health and we only had to put up with the random conflagrations, aggro changes and high pitched squeeling for a minute or two at a time.

I could go on about this fight because, frankly, there are FIVE bloody phases to it, each of which is divided into various sub-phases, each with their own little sub-sub-phases which I suspect were soon to be listening to the pitter patter of little sub-sub-sub-phases of their own had we not arrived and put an end to the madness by ordering our warlocks to eat all of the children.

In case you were wondering, the only really tough part of the entire fight is Phase3, when Thaladred “I’m walking faster now because you seriously pissed me off earlier” the Darkener comes back with the rest of his posse, with twice the HP he had before and a dent in his helmet which he is very, very upset about. Once we’d given him a couple more matching dents, it was onto Phase4, where Kael’Thas finally graced us with his supremely Drag Queen-like presence and offered to let us play with his Phoenix. (it’s not as bad as it sounds)

It took a bit of persuading to stop the rogues from trying to stab the Phoenix’s eyes out as soon as it spawned. It also - rather surprisingly - took some persuading to convince people that a patch of fire all around them on the ground topped by three flaming orbs spinning in a decidedly “I’m about to go supernova and wipe out any trace of your very existence” way was something that they should - as they say in the delightful French language - get the F*@#$ away from.

But eventually, all of these useful little lessons sunk in, and our attempts got closer and closer to our goal - which was of course, to stick Kael’Thas’ staff somewhere he would find decidedly unpleasant. Phase5 turned out to be a cakewalk, punctuated by periods of frantic swimming through thin air and vent shouts which might have led a stray passerby to believe that an egg was about to, in fact, take over the world and kill us all.

But so it was that slightly overtime on our very last attempt (well, obviously, but I didn’t mean it like that, so shut up) Kael’Thas’ evil mana-sucking existence came to an end and we received our Vials (woo!) and phat loots. We also totally trashed his room. Rock on!

A huge congrats to everyone present on the night, and to Affliction as a whole for another awesome achievement which has now opened the door to BC endgame. We’ll send you all a postcard from Mount Hyjal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.