Wipe-tacular: Part 1

First off, two orders of business. One: Thanks to Grimcross (one of our shadowpriests) for this fantastic title. It's clever as hell. I'll explain why shortly. Two: since I didn't post anything about Monday or Tuesday night's adventures in the World, I'll combine a few posts at once to make it a long one, but a good'un. (As such, this post will be chock full of that tasty catch phrases that I define at the bottom, including a few non gamer phrases that originate the same place I did: the Deep South. Settle in. *wink wink*)

Lemme explain the title. A nifty little twist on spectacular, it's honeyed-up with just enough sarcasm to make it amusing. A wipe in the World is a complete party meltdown, where the bad guys win for whatever reason. It could be that someone wasn't doing their job. Maybe you hadn't even seen the fights before and you are still learning the moves. Or.... >.< ! It could just be that the situation was a little above your abilities at the time (although hardly ANY of us will admit to that last one. It's a leet pride thing). Regardless, you do not down the bad guys, you do not pass Go or collect 200 dollars. In our case, the Tier Tokens. O.o

We have enough people in Guild (ours is called We Demand Blood, or WDB for short) that we split into three ten man raid groups for off nights. Group one is Wilder's personal group, and on Monday night we took off into the bowels of Ulduar to continue our run from Thursday night, before the server reset. (sounds a little creepy, doesn't it? Muahahah....*cough*... Sorry about that.)

The run went really well, all in all. It's spilt into quarters, as most of the encounters. The Siege consists of Flame Leviathan, a battle tank; Razorscale, a giant pissy dragon; Ignis, a grumpy, oversisized blacksmithing dwarf; and the robot known as Deconstructor XT. (That last one is great; she does these aerobics reminiscent of a early 80's music video. Some legwarmers and a few bangle bracelets and you'd start digging for your hairspray and looking for Madonna and Duran Duran.) The second piece of the progression is more grumpy Dwarfs, called the Iron Council; a crazy Cat Lady with a voice sweet enough to curdle milk ( can you taste the sarcasm? I think I dripped some on the keyboard. Lemme get a napkin....) known as Auriuaya. Those to encounters test your ability to tap dance. Lots of moving around, to make sure you don't get shocked by lightening, melted in a void, smushed into tiny pieces or have your head exploded from sonic torture. Good times.

After that, comes the Keepers. These are good guys that you have helped through out the course of the game; the Old Gods of Northrend. But, surprise surprise, they've been brainwashed! The evil god Yogg-Saron has slipped into their brains and taken over!

The first day we downed all of the bosses up through Hodir, the confused frosty Giant Lord. You have to work your ass off doing mundane daily tasks, like feeding ghosts and killing spies, for weeks to earn the trust and friendship of Hodir's sons during the course of the story, so it's doubly insulting to have to battle it out with Papa in order to save the world. I mean, I know they are an ancient race of frosty giants, but communication in families is key. Couldn't one of them have shot over a note? "Hi Dad, it's Junior. Got friends coming by... please don't freeze them into statues and smash them with a hammer, k? Peace." O.o

We also took out Freya, who is a blatant Mother Nature based Celtic nature goddess. Nifty stuff. Take out her viney plant friends and a few giant trees who remind me of the Ents from Lord of the Rings and she's tasty cake.

The next attempt was Monday night, where we busted up their buddy Thorim, who is the only one who kinda remembers you from the storyline. You have to spend quite a bit of time, shape shifting and gender changing in order to wake him up from his greif induced coma that came about after his creepy younger brother Loken pulled a Cain and took out Thorim's beloved wife Sif. After all that workin', you find out that all you've done is help Loken capture Thorim and thus set up the fight I'm describing. Go us! O.o

When you start up his encounter, he does this double taking blink thing and almost shakes off the brain washing. "Wait, I know you....*big bomming voice* Props for the attempt, but needless to say, it doesn't pan out or I wouldn't be talking about it. (Ha! I'm so funny. lol) It's an exceptional battle, where your team has to split up in order to combat the many facets incorporated into the coliseum type battle you've stumbled into. (I think the Blizzard design team has been watching a lot of Gladiator and Troy-esque movies, because they gone all Roman Battles, Old Norse Gods on us. I like it.) This was only our second attmept, but we managed to own him in two tries.

By the way, if you are interested in seeing these things because you're a visual learner, there are really nifty sites like TankSpot that will break it down for you and give you videos. Just click the search link and type who you wanna see into it. Plus, it's bonus that the narrator dude has a really calming voice. So they whole time you're thinking how hard it looks and how much it's going to suck when the bosses kick your ass, you are strangely ok with it.

After that, we moseyed on down to Mimiron. He's a cranky robot gnome, with a government defense contract research budget. You'd be amazed at the stuff he pulls out of god knows where to burn you, blow you up and otherwise hurt a whole bunch. He has three phases, each with a machine more complicated that the last. If you manged to make it through all of the rockets, robots fiends, fire puddles, missiles and laser cannons (oh yes, LASER BEAMS!) ... you get the dubious honor of battling it out tooth and nail with the Fourth Phase. A combination of all three machines Terminators up and come at you from all sides, using a gross mixture of all the three machines creepy kill you abilities you saw before.

Thus the wipes began. O.o

It was our first encounter with this guy, so I wasn't surprised or disappointed. It takes a few moments of falling flat on your face sometimes, to figure out you should have probably tied your shoes before attempting to tap dance. Also, Wilder is an exceptionally good raid leader. He maintains a level of calm that is legendary, even when he's struggling to get 10 nerdy gamers with ego issues (myself included) to shut up and do what he tells them to do. *grins* It might help a little that he's and elementary school teacher. You'd be amazed at the similarities between a bunch of gamers and some third graders. O.o

(Speaking of, remind me to tell you a story about this particular run, immature gamers, egos and Wilder. It's a doozy. We'll get to it after this.)

We manged to get him to Phase 4 after only a couple of tries, but never quite got through it. But, considering the fact that we'd only just seen him for the first time, I'm ok with that. We'll extend our raid ID and go on back to dance with Grumpy Smurf again tonight. This time, that annoying little robot won't be so lucky. *cracks knuckles*

That as Monday. Part two will talk about Tuesday, which... wasn't quite as focused, but was equally finny. However, you'll have to wait until this afternoon for more clever banter and definitons. I have to make a cheesecake. :)