Wow nerdery
Our guild cleared Karazhan in 3 hours!!!!
For those of you who have no idea what that means, let me see if I can break this down. It's also perfectly acceptable to skip this next paragraph and just assume that all it says is "NEEERRRRRRD".
So, in WOW, you take your character from level 1 to 70, the current highest level. Once you reach 70, you don't go up in numerical level anymore, and progress in the game is measured primarily through obtaining gear (epic loot), I.e. successively more rad-looking and stats-enhancing armor, weapons, etc. Most of this phat lewt is found on bosses (large, hard-to-kill bad guys with special abilities) in dungeons, which require 5, 10, 25, or even 40 man groups in order to conquer. While you can get from 1-70 doing solo quests and adventuring on your own, post-70, you pretty much have to be willing to group up. This is why guilds become important-they provide you with people to run these dungeons with that you can start to rely on to be responsible, skilled, and fun to play with. Our guild, Terror Nova, is particularly awesome in this last respect: the people are fun, relaxed, but also competent and interested in exploring as much of the game as possible. There are a large number of 5-man dungeons that you can run when you hit 70, but one of the first significant challenges in high-end dungeon progression is Karazhan, an enormous 10-man dungeon with 10 boss fights. In order to survive Kara, you need to have a significant portion of gear from the lvl 70 5-man dungeons, you need to learn how to work as a 10-person group, and you have to learn a large number of very technical fights. The simplest kind of fight is what is known as "tank-and-spank", where one or two very well-armored team members hold the attention of the boss and take hits (tanking), a couple healers keep the group's health up, and the rest of the team unloads as much damage as possible onto the boss without attracting him away from the tanks (spanking). The first couple Kara bosses can be beat with the strategy, but then it gets more complicated, and instead of just standing in one place and shooting/slicing things a lot, you have to do things like run around in a circle to stay out of a traveling blizzard, block magic beams to keep them from hitting the boss and giving him power-ups, deal with as many as 6 boss-types at a time instead of just 1, and so forth. Our guild started working on Kara over 9 months ago, which involved getting people geared to enter Kara, running the dungeon regularly, learning the fights, etc, to the point where we could handle it all reasonably well. Some of the fights involve a great deal of coordination between everyone. So for the last month or two, we would run Kara for 2-4 hrs twice a week, clearing half the dungeon one evening, and the other half the second. It got to the point where we had well more than 10 people who were geared for and experienced at running Kara, so someone in the guild proposed an event: a timed race through Kara with two separate 10 man teams. We decided to run for 3.5 hours and whichever team brought down the most bosses would win. A number of people contributed in-game gold to a "pot" to split among the winners, and this lead to our Canada Day Kara extravaganza.
Okay, so now that all that has been laid down, perhaps it makes a bit more sense why it was so exciting to enter and clear this dungeon in 3 hours. We had never cleared the entire place in one session, and certainly not in that short amount of time if you added up separate sessions. It was indescribably fun to just roll through the place, laying waste to everything. We one-shotted all the bosses (meaning we killed them without wiping, wiping being when the boss kills everyone on the team and you have to run back in from the graveyard). Josh and I were on the same team, which won, and the other team cleared it about half an hour later.
Here's a current picture of my character:
For those of you who have no idea what that means, let me see if I can break this down. It's also perfectly acceptable to skip this next paragraph and just assume that all it says is "NEEERRRRRRD".
So, in WOW, you take your character from level 1 to 70, the current highest level. Once you reach 70, you don't go up in numerical level anymore, and progress in the game is measured primarily through obtaining gear (epic loot), I.e. successively more rad-looking and stats-enhancing armor, weapons, etc. Most of this phat lewt is found on bosses (large, hard-to-kill bad guys with special abilities) in dungeons, which require 5, 10, 25, or even 40 man groups in order to conquer. While you can get from 1-70 doing solo quests and adventuring on your own, post-70, you pretty much have to be willing to group up. This is why guilds become important-they provide you with people to run these dungeons with that you can start to rely on to be responsible, skilled, and fun to play with. Our guild, Terror Nova, is particularly awesome in this last respect: the people are fun, relaxed, but also competent and interested in exploring as much of the game as possible. There are a large number of 5-man dungeons that you can run when you hit 70, but one of the first significant challenges in high-end dungeon progression is Karazhan, an enormous 10-man dungeon with 10 boss fights. In order to survive Kara, you need to have a significant portion of gear from the lvl 70 5-man dungeons, you need to learn how to work as a 10-person group, and you have to learn a large number of very technical fights. The simplest kind of fight is what is known as "tank-and-spank", where one or two very well-armored team members hold the attention of the boss and take hits (tanking), a couple healers keep the group's health up, and the rest of the team unloads as much damage as possible onto the boss without attracting him away from the tanks (spanking). The first couple Kara bosses can be beat with the strategy, but then it gets more complicated, and instead of just standing in one place and shooting/slicing things a lot, you have to do things like run around in a circle to stay out of a traveling blizzard, block magic beams to keep them from hitting the boss and giving him power-ups, deal with as many as 6 boss-types at a time instead of just 1, and so forth. Our guild started working on Kara over 9 months ago, which involved getting people geared to enter Kara, running the dungeon regularly, learning the fights, etc, to the point where we could handle it all reasonably well. Some of the fights involve a great deal of coordination between everyone. So for the last month or two, we would run Kara for 2-4 hrs twice a week, clearing half the dungeon one evening, and the other half the second. It got to the point where we had well more than 10 people who were geared for and experienced at running Kara, so someone in the guild proposed an event: a timed race through Kara with two separate 10 man teams. We decided to run for 3.5 hours and whichever team brought down the most bosses would win. A number of people contributed in-game gold to a "pot" to split among the winners, and this lead to our Canada Day Kara extravaganza.
Okay, so now that all that has been laid down, perhaps it makes a bit more sense why it was so exciting to enter and clear this dungeon in 3 hours. We had never cleared the entire place in one session, and certainly not in that short amount of time if you added up separate sessions. It was indescribably fun to just roll through the place, laying waste to everything. We one-shotted all the bosses (meaning we killed them without wiping, wiping being when the boss kills everyone on the team and you have to run back in from the graveyard). Josh and I were on the same team, which won, and the other team cleared it about half an hour later.
Here's a current picture of my character: