wailing on the caverns

i began the day with a promise to myself that i would get the wailing cavern incident completed in wow.

brilliant idea, i thought. especially because i have been unable to creep all the way in on my own so it would involve a bit of that thing i don't like much - socialising.

the good thing, though, is that the amount of people wanting to do these incidents is quite high, so often you don't have to advertise yourself - you just have to be there. hang out around the front and tag yourself onto a group or something.

the problem with this logic, however, is there's an abundance of quests for such places. each one may require you to go in, kill only a few of a type of monster, and leave it at that. some people going in have already completed the main quests and are only interested in stepping foot in the front door so to speak.

i call this type of player: bastard.

the hardest thing to find is someone willing to go all the way. considering the size of wc, it was going to take some time. i was prepared for that. i had coke. i had licorice. i was ready, dammit.

however, i've gone in four times with various groups, each one dedicated to going through, but each one disbanded, fragmented, or was suddenly joined by gigantic level 60 characters because they'd "make it easier."

well, i don't want it easy! i want to go through hard, dammit! i want to fight - fight and bleed and die and come crawling back for more!

after all, this is a game! the game isn't to JUST show off your high level. it's to show how hard you worked to get there. imagine the stories, such as this one, which you could tell your children. or, at least, the low levels...

for example. we started as six. actually, at one stage we were seven. but some quit. see, they'd say yes, jump into our group, then disappear as though the very thought of crawling through blood and bone frightened them. how sad.

for them!

yes, we had four of us. one of the guys i'd already hooked up with once before so i was comfortable with having him around. he was enthusiastic, professional, full of good ideas, and didn't have an ego to go with it. he stuck through til the end last time, so i was quite thrilled to see him again. that's massacretrol, and if you ever see him around - stay close by him when you're in a fight and he'll get you out alive.

we had two guys join us who were a few levels above us. not too much above to make it easy, but enough to make us feel boosted.

one of them quit after a few seconds.

the other came in.

we got about five steps in, when one guy starts screaming at us about something, and i get pinned up against a wall by whatever the hell he's screaming about.

i kill it.

turns out it was something he was trying to tame. brilliant idea but i don't know how he was going to manage that while he was dead and it was attacking the rest of us. apparently we were supposed to stand there and let it kill us.

brilliant idea.

throwing a major wobbly, he abandoned us and called us names before sulking away like the little child he was.

unimpressed, i asked if we could go kill stuff now we had that guy out of the way. afterall, he probably would have run off once he'd tamed the stupid thing. good riddance, i thought.

so, i asked, can we please kill stuff?

massacretrol heartily approved, and off we dove down one of the corridors and into the arms of death.

our leader, lovepony, did a brilliant job, trying to keep us together despite our rogue over-powered warrior running ahead of us all the time without heeding the calls to wait for some mana recharging. needless to say, that guy only came in for one quest, achieved his goal, and then left anyway.

we were down to three.

and, might i say it, the best three.
we had barely touched the beginning of the game. hadn't even done a third of it. and there we were: a druid, a rogue, and a warrior - creeping like silent death down corridors, pulling and charging, and ducking and weaving.

it was brilliant.

in that first third, there was only one death. in the second third, two. in the final stage (the closest to the end), we died twice.

dying in wc isn't a good idea. it took about fifteen minutes to run the gauntlet that is the maze with goo blobs spawning here and there by the look of it. hard to get through. but, considering how few times we died, it wasn't a problem at all - just a good excuse for the survivor/s to have a drinks break.

yes, a fantastic effort considering our levels. it was a perfect display of teamwork, only ruined by some slightly overenthusiastic charging on my part when i beat the sap twice (once managing to reward myself with a suicide). the three of us had to take it slow, picking them off in twos and threes and sometimes getting ambushed. absolutely the most fun i've had in a game like this in a long time. just the sheer closeness of it all - and the quiet brillaint professionalism as we all did our bit.

as you can see, we had a lot of fun - desperate and sometimes tight fun. the fights were brutal, sometimes brutally tight and close to death. we were held together, however, by massacretrol's seamless skill and lovepony's determination to keep us together and alive.

i got a few chops in, and for that i was thrilled. i also managed to level to 24, which is totally unexpected.

all in all, i had a wild night. i can't say how long that took us, but i think it was a couple of hours. the three of us had to take it slow, picking them off in twos and threes and sometimes getting ambushed. absolutely the most fun i've had in a game like this in a long time. just the sheer closeness of it all - and the quiet brillaint professionalism as we all did our bit.

slicing.

dicing.

murdering in the dark.

love it.