Paragons Dreamhack journal

Wrote by xenophics (priest POV)

Thursday 26.11.2009

I woke up at 6am Finnish time. It was a long day ahead of us as our trip from Finland to Jönköping Sweden to Dreamhack was about to begin. A bit tired but even more excited me, Maeil and Arx took a bus to the airport and met up with Lazei.

 

After the check-in (funny looking musicians and people in suits in the queue) we got to the serious business – security check. Maeil probably looked too suspicious as he was taken to full body examination where the guard tried his shirt and pants if there were any daggers or dangerous weapons hidden somewhere. Those sneaky rogues!

 

Our flight took off on schedule and even better – landed 15 minutes ahead of schedule. After we got our luggage we were taken to the car that would take us to Jönköping.

 

It was raining a lot when it was finally time to head for Dreamhack! When we arrived at the ASUS booth my first thought was - oh my god this is huge! There were two HUGE screens for both us and the overclockers. There was also plenty of room for audience in front both of the screens. The World of Warcraft/Aion side had four computers and a special display for everyone’s computer so that the audience was able to see all of us playing at the same time.

 

We started setting up our UIs and were introduced to our announcer called Sebastian. His job was to comment our raiding, interview us and take care of us in general. He plays in a guild that has done Anub’arak with 50 tries left so he knows what he's talking about. We had a lot of fun chatting with him.

    

 

We had something like 10 people watching all the time when we raided Onyxia, Toc normal and Ulduar 10-mans. We managed to do Yogg’Saron and Algalon with 0 deaths and got Insanity from Toc as well. All of our 10-mans had been really fast with only mains in the raid and people flasked up. At 20:00 we had raided everything we planned for Thursday so we packed our mice and mousepads and started planning how to use the remaining time at the event raid-wise.

 

The funny thing about Thursday was that at least I got a lot of whispers in-game asking whether I'm at Dreamhack and if I could help people with UIs, addons, and rotations. We all hoped that people would come up and have a chat with us but we had really little luck with that. When we had time for questions everyone just left so we went to the hotel to have a great dinner with our hosts and other participants. I’m happy that changed on the following days and we were more busy with wow enthusiasts.

Friday 27.11.2009

On Friday we had a lot of spare time before we were supposed to start playing because the booth was reserved for Aion players until 15:00. We spent our free time walking around in the event and checking out the other booths. The most interesting booths in our opinion were probably the Library of Jönköping’s booth, Blizzard’s booth, Sweden’s Army’s booth with a tank and some random booth which had machine dance (ITG) on it. Arx signed up for a Starcraft 2 tournament on Saturday in hopes to win a SC2 beta key. We tried Aion out a bit but our "playing" was mostly just smashing random buttons and pretty effects appeared.

 

The clock hit 15:00 and we sat down to your computers once again ready to play. We went to Sartharion 10-man (3 drakes) and tried to 5 man it with me, Xaar, Lazei, Maeil and Rihmz (enhancement shaman). We didn’t have the dps to kill the first drake fast enough even with bloodlust and potions. We also had problems with the Sartharion's and the Drakes' breaths killing our melee because the bosses are so hard to position correctly with only one tank who is also trying to pick up all the small adds. We took Sniffu (a mage) in, still didn’t have the dps and took Sejta (feral druid) in and 7-manned it. I think it might be doable with 5 people if you bring the right classes.

 

After Sartharion we did Malygos with a caster heavy setup. We didn’t quite get him to 0% before phase 2 but it could have been possible if we had a death knight to death grip the second spark to our position faster than it normally moves. It probably would have done the trick.

 

At 18:00 we got started with our 25-mains and went to Ulduar first. We did every hard mode in the instance and Zin was lucky enough to get few fragments of Val’anyr. We managed to kill Yogg’Saron with 0 watchers on our first pull and Baltha got his cool Mimiron’s head mount. Algalon went well as well and we achieved He Feeds on Your Tears achievement for the first time. Yay!

 

When we were done with Ulduar we prepared to Toc 25-man normal with our alts, rushed through it (had no trinkets dropping) and prepared for Toc 25-man heroic on our alts. We were aiming for Insanity, which we already have with our alt group, but sadly we wiped twice on Anub’arak due to bad playing. We had a big crowd watching our alt raid and it was a shame they didn’t get to see insanity. They were still cheering for us when we got Anub’down, and we quitted the raid hungry for insanity kill. It was a bit disappointing as we know we can do better, but we knew we had another change on our mains on Saturday.

 

Saturday 28.11.2000

 

Arx fought relentlessly on Starcraft 2 but got a bit ass kicked. He says he is the moral winner though! Before our turn at the booth started we also had a chance to play goblins and worgens at Blizzard’s booth. Can’t wait for Cataclysm to ship (though I’m happy with Arthas first).

 

We were pretty much out of content when we sat down at our computers at 15:00 so we tried to ask the audience what to raid. We ended up doing Sunwell with 12 for the cool looks and memories. Kil’jaeden wasn’t as badass as I remembered but he sure still looks dangerous. After Sunwell Arx, Maeil and Lazei did some bg’s and I showed the audience some of our old kill videos. Our Anub’arak videos seemed to be of interest especially as the main 25-man Toc raid was getting closer slowly but steadily.

 

A bit before we started our main raids for the night we were interview by two really freaking energetic Americans. They asked us to take our Finnish rock star pose. Finns don’t pose, we just stand like statues so you can imagine how stupid we looked… Despite all the stiffness in pictures we were on fire in-game and managed to deliver Earth, Wind and Fire to the audience on our first pull ever. We also did Onyxia 25-man and the audience got a few laughs when the tank (Lazei) started to spin Onyxia around like mad on 5% so that she would randomly cleave or breathe someone to death. One can see a lot of that kind of humour in our raids.

 

After our Toc 25-man normal raid we started getting mentally ready for the main event – Toc 25-man heroic (hopefully) insanity run with our main characters. Getting insanity is perfectly normal for us but I must say that we were under more pressure than usually as we were hungry to show the audience how insanity is done.

 

A bit before we started the raid Sebastian interviewed us shortly about the upcoming raid. When we finally got to pull I was feeling really nervous but somehow I knew we’d be alright. We have reliable and skilled players, so there should be no reason to worry – I told myself. The crowd of over 100 people was cheering at us when we killed Northrend Beasts, Lord Jaraxxus and Faction Champions without anyone dying. Our good streak broke down on Twin Valkyrs where our boomking Lappe got a bit unlucky and died. At least now we know immortal is perfectly doable and we might even try to get it for real some week.

 

I hearthstoned and changed my spec to improved vampiric embrace for Anub’arak and sweated in Orgrimmar waiting for a summon. After what felt like an eternity we were finally at the pulling spot, flasked up, in right specs and ready to kill. As our guild master, Sejta ran forward and pulled Anub’arak I heard Sebastian announcing that the challenge is now on. After that I focused 100% on executing everything as good as possible. The fight went on perfect like normal and we even had a bit better dps than usually, as Anub was on around 40% when he came up from second burrow phase. We positioned the boss, gripped the frost patches down, clicked off our health buffs and prepared for the final showdown – phase 3. As we popped bloodlust in the beginning of phase 3 I noticed people leaning forward and becoming more and more nervous. They wanted to kill as much as we did. We killed 2 waves of adds and started to dps the boss when he was at around 12%. The last 10% were extra tense as we had another wave of adds spawning when Sebastian was announcing the last 5%. At 2% it was clear we had made it. People started cheering and clapping and when the boss finally fell to the ground the crowd just exploded. The applause went on for almost 30 seconds and I must say it would be cool to have that kind of audience yelling with you for your first kills as well.

 

A lot of people stayed around after the kill and chatted with us over an hour. It was awesome to talk to people who were as happy about our success as we were. I could have gone on forever with the guys I had near my computer but a bit before 00:00 we said goodbye for the last time to ASUS booth. We left our backpacks at the hotel and headed to a gamer party we were invited to. The night truly was unforgettable.

 

                            

 

Sunday 29.11.2009

On Sunday it was the time for us to head back to Finland. We were tired like hell but extremely satisfied with all the cool things we had the privilege to experience. The trip back home was long but luckily all the stupid jokes made the time fly. My jaw might never heal from laughing so much. We were happy as we all knew we had our backpacks full of stories we could start telling on ventrilo once we got back to Finland and the rest of Paragon.

 

We will miss all the cool guys we met during our four days trip to Sweden and can only hope that we’ll be able to see you again someday. This was definitely something none of us will ever forget and we are honored we could share the event with you.

xenophics, Arx, Maeil and Lazei

Paragon