Memoires (Part 9 - The 3 Musketeers)

I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I lead a raid. It on a Kindred raid, one of last ones that I attended. We were making attempts on Ragnaros the Firelord, and it wasn't going well.

The Firelord himself.

A healer's eye view, to give a sense of scale (he was pretty damn big).

Ragnaros was a fight that not only was technically challenging, but also had lofty gear requirements. There needed to be two tanks, and they needed to have enough Fire Resistance so that they could block his fire based attacks. In the absence of this fire resistance, Ragnaros would punt the tanks sky high, leaving the rest of the raid open to his attacks which pretty much resulted in instant death.

Positioning was also really important, as Ragnaros had a bevy of fireball based attacks which would knock players around. This was especially important for the healers, as if a group of healers got interrupted whilst casting then it most likely meant that people were going to die.

The fight was also a push for the damage dealers, as the longer the fight dragged on the harder it became. This was due to the fact that every 3 minutes, Ragnaros would call forth his "Sons of Flame", eight at a time. These little fire elementals burned the mana from the casters and they were difficult for the tanks to get under control as they came from many different directions at once.

So, this particular Kindred raid was going badly. Tanks kept getting punted, people weren't watching their positionings and so everyone else was getting buffeted left and right into the lava. Everyone was growing more and more frustrated with each failed attempt and tensions began to run high between varying people. The raid leaders got annoyed with people not being spaced out properly, who were annoyed by the raid leaders because it was hard to judge distance correctly. The damage dealers got annoyed at the healers who got annoyed at the damage dealers, and the tanks were just annoyed, as they lacked the appropriate fire resistance to properly handle Ragnaros.

It seemed that whatever we tried, we could not get Ragnaros below 80% health. Finally, after a particularly bad attempt and a heated argument, some of the Kindred elite had had enough and left the raid in a rage. The rest of the raid milled about, unsure of what to do; the leaders had left and everyone else seemed to have lost their wits.

"Give me the lead," I said to one of the Kindred mages, who had had ownership of the raid passed automatically to him after the real leaders had left. I could tell that everyone felt a bit demoralised and the raid was on the verge of giving up, so I felt that a little speech was in order - if we were to attempt this boss seriously, I needed to get everyone focused again on the task at hand and to ignore all the stuff that had gone on before.

I proceeded to give a little speech, the specifics of which I can no longer remember, but I can remember that people responded. The raid gathered itself up and began to buff up (casting all of the necessary pre-fight spells and enchantments). However, before we were ready to go, one of the mages strayed too close to Ragnaros and started the encounter prematurely, the raid quickly wiped, ruining the good spirit that had just been built up, and so I called it a day. The mage whispered me afterwards, apologising profusely. I shrugged; what happened happened.

Soon after this raid, the alliance project began, and I stopped raiding with Kindred. This decision was met with a surprising amount of distress from the Kindred officers, who told me (and several others from The Revenants, Blue Moon and SWE), that they had been deliberately giving us raid spots over their own guild members because of our importance to the raid. That statement struck me as a bit of a falsehood; it seemed to me that they were more upset that they were going to lose two great tanks (Hildaa of SWE and Zacker from the Revenants), as well as a number of good healers and damage dealers.

With the alliance, we began back at square one: Azuregos. The process was much the same as when I did it the first time around with Kindred, except that I was now one of the experienced members. I was the one explaining the tactics and I'm sure in the raid somewhere was a young priest, listening wide eyed and rapt with attention just like I was a few months previous. We made swift progress from Azuregos to Kazzak to Onyxia, owing to experienced members filling all of the key roles such as the main / off-tank and main / off-healer.

As word of our kills spread, we garnered a bit of a reputation as the challenger to Kindred's raiding dominance on the server. We were finally also given a name through an offhanded comment made on the community forums: The Three Musketeers. It stuck, and from hence forth we were known as The Three Musketeers, or T3M for short.

Animagi from Blue Moon took the undisputed leadership position of the raid, and he was great at the job; being old and wise enough to command respect from everyone and being firm and fair with the raid to ensure everyone behaved. I took the role of tactician, regurgitating all the information I had learned from my time raiding with Kindred. In a short few weeks, we were back in the Core, ploughing through the bosses. However, Animagi soon had real life issues to attend to, and that effectively meant he could no longer raid, and so, the leadership role passed naturally to me.

It was a little daunting in some ways, but I was willing to take on the role of raid leader. It was something fresh, something challenging; a complete escape from the doldrums of life, which at that point was pretty boring. Also, proving myself as the leader of a raiding alliance and taking down bosses in World of Warcraft was to me an interesting legitimate achievement that I was passionate about, and so I embraced it with all my energy. It was also the summer holidays, which meant I had plenty of time to spare, and I sank all my spare time into the game. It was not unusual for me to play upwards of eight hours a day. My parents, given that they both worked, seemed partly glad that I had something to occupy myself with, yet also somewhat worried that I wasn't getting out enough; perfectly justified, as I didn't get out at all (unless it was to play badminton - that other addiction in my life).

As T3M progressed through the core, the infrastructure around the alliance began to really take hold, with a unified set of forums for the three guilds being set up as well as the implementation of something called a DKP system (Dragon Kill Points). This was essentially a way to distribute the loot gained from killing the bosses amongst the players in a fair way. It worked by awarding players with points for attending a raid, and then the player could "buy" dropped items (which had an associated cost) with those points. Players with the most points got first dibs on the items. It was a way to reward loyalty and continued attendance to raids and to ensure that the items which the raid obtained would be equipped on characters that attended regularly; after all, there's no point giving someone the Sword of a Thousand Truths if it's never going to be used.

To keep track of attendance and items, I wrote it all down on scrap paper. I am sure to this day there are hundreds of pages of paper somewhere in the house which have lists of names (forty at a time) and assigned items written on them.

Magmadar, Gehennas, Garr, Geddon, Shazzrah, Golemagg, Sulfuron... they all fell rapidly to the onslaught laid on by T3M, whilst Kindred were still slowly chipping away at Ragnaros. By the time we made it to Majordomo Executus, Kindred had finally managed to kill the Firelord. I didn't really pay that much heed though, concerned as I was mainly with the progress of T3M. The atmosphere within the raid was fantastic, even better than those early days with Kindred; it managed to be both relaxed and fun as well as focused. The raid had also become disciplined enough that I'm sure we would have been able to do a military parade if we had wanted to, something which I never really found was true of Kindred.

It took us a short amount of time to take down Majordomo, and so by mid-August, we were up against Ragnaros the Firelord.