Paragons Assembly Winter 2010 Journal

 

Now it’s finally time to publish Paragon’s Assembly journal. I’m really sorry it’s already Saturday and Assembly has been over for almost one week already. I defend myself saying that I’ve had the usual Assembly hangover (too little sleep) which has lasted a few days more than the previous years. I’ve mended the hangover by taking a 8 hours long shower reading a thriller (true story – and just so you know I don’t keep the water running much at all, it’s more of a steam shower!). I also spent another day doing basically nothing and sleeping a bit.

 

xenophics: Priest POV

Thanks to Maeil for the picture (8th from the beginning)  

Thanks to LoneMeow aka Kruf for the other pictures

 

Thursday 21.1.2010 

 

Assembly Winter started officially 22.1.2010 this year, but for me, Arx, Seita and Kruf it started on Thursday already. Paragon was invited to Assembly Winter by the organizers and quite a few guild members wanted to participate and see the event. In the end we ended up having 19 people coming with computers and 4 said they’d like to come by and say hello. This meant me and Arx, Sejta and Kruf had to turn their apartments into 5 stars hotels and take in other guildies coming from other cities.

 

I was super excited as I got to meet Lazei and Maeil again after our trip to Dreamhack. I was even more excited to meet some other guild members for the first time, those who have been more or less of a mystery to me.

 

Some of the people decided to come already on Thursday – first of them was Ilonie. When Arx went to pick him up, he told Arx that he had just been doing his “workout at the gym” before coming to Helsinki, so he was too exhausted to carry his computer himself…

 

While we were waiting for others to arrive to Espoo Ilo was sabotaging at our computers. He went to barber shop and changed Arx’s resto druid’s horns to those he believed were “the leader horns”. He also spammed IRC and Lightning’s Blade trade a bit – the usual stuff. In a few hours Lazei and Diivil arrived with their car and a few moments later I and Arx drove again to Pasila station to pick up Devah. He actually had been at the gym doing his workout earlier but he still had the strength to lift up his own computer.

 

With so many people in our apartment we decided to spend the rest of the evening at Kruf’s place which is a lot bigger with a real living room. Tuutti was the last person coming on Thursday so we waited for him when Seita was setting up his “Kölvi ICC 10-man group”. It consists of some third/fourth/fifth alts with bad reputation gearwise. Ilo’s rogue was in the group so he ended up declining the night at Kruf and instead took over Arx’s computer and went to ICC. When Tuutti arrived (his sister thought I was 14 when I’m actually 22) we finally set out to Kruf and had a good night there. We played rock band a bit and Kruf and his roomie Deus showed us some IIDX Happy Sky. Now that’s rhythm game that is actually god damn hard.

Friday 22.1.2010

I woke up at 10 to my cell phone ringing. Ilo and Devah wanted to come to our place to use the shower and have some breakfast with us (they were sleeping at Seita’s). I felt like zombie as I usually wake up between 1 and 2pm.

 

When we were done with breakfast Devah, Lazei and Diivil packed up their stuff and headed for Kaapelitehdas where Assembly was starting up. Arx had been at school on Friday so he had just come home. We packed up his stuff, packed up the car and followed the first car 30 minutes later to the party with Seita and Ilo. It was freezing cold outside, something like -17 and the fact that Kaapelitehdas was just beside the sea didn’t help at all. In other words – the wind was biting cold. We carried our stuff in and set out to find the table we have reserved for our guild. Table D1 was just beside the main corridor with lots of room and fairly decent view to the main screen.

 

 

A lot of our members were there already and I have to admit I had hard time recognizing them when they didn’t speak. I couldn’t believe Lappé was Lappé and he looked more like some teenage film star than a wow nerd. Kahva was also a surprise as I thought he’d be freaking tall, bald and wild-looking. It turned out that Rihmz was the freaking tall and wild-looking, but with a lot of beard and stuff. Also Zin didn’t look like himself at all. I don’t know what he should look like but definetly not that (don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with his looks). It’s funny to meet some people you have never seen before but who you have known for 6 months already.

 

After meeting and greeting each other we set up our computers and went to McDonald’s to have some dinner. It was just when the 17 of us were walking in long queue in the cold when I realized how many individuals actually play in this guild. I tried to imagine all the people on their computers playing in our raid and I couldn’t – it’s different to spend time on ventrilo with 30+ people than actually meeting even 17 of them at the same time. It felt overwhelming.

 

When we got back inside from the freezing cold Sejta, Deva, Lazei, Sniffu and Diivil started preparing for their amateur CS match. Their bracket was tough and they didn't do too well. Our main 25-man Icecrown Citadel raid was getting closer and I started to get more nervous. I had volunteered to commentate the whole 2 hours raid and I had no experience of it. Of course I had prepared for it and wrote something like 7 pages of text just to be sure I won’t freeze up when everyone is listening. I really feared I’d blow the whole thing up in front of 1000 people (the announcing of all the games was played to the whole Assembly area).

 

When it was 19:30 CET some of our members picked up their mice and keyboards and went near the main stage to wait for their turn to set up their UI’s. The main stage had room for 12 players of which 10 had big televisions in front of them. In addition we had Diivil playing on the big screen which computer was located in a whole different place – the same place I was about to commentate the raid.

 

Team Fortress 2 tournament was before us and they were finished something like 20:05, a lot later than we thought they would. When we finally got the stage I started the commentation with Wabbit, a guy who was commentating all the other events at Assembly. He is experienced and doesn’t run out of things to say. The only problem was that he had played World of Warcraft only to level 50 and had no idea of Icecrown raiding. I planned that I’d let him talk more than me and I’d mainly tell about the fight details and tactics. What actually happened was that when I got the microphone, said the first sentences in panic I actually got hold of myself and just let it go. I ended up talking 2 hours with very little breaks with Wabbit assisting me only a little. It was fairly easy to come up with things to say, it was harder to try to explain what wow is all about to people who don’t play it.

 

It took the people at the stage almost 30 minutes to set up their UI’s so we had only 1,5 hours to clear the spire and 2 wings in Icecrown Citadel. The first trash was pulled with really fast phase as the clock was ticking. I told the audience things like “standing in fire is pretty much always bad in wow” and “many people think gunship battle is the worst battle in Icecrown Citadel”. At Saurfang I tried to put some lore into commentating and told the touching story of the old orc collecting his son’s body. I also slipped out the following sentence “Arthas has quite a lot of problems with himself because he is a Lich King”. Try to guess how many times that have been quoted.

 

When we entered the Plagueworks we were just barely on time. We made some unfortunate double pulls which slowed us down a bit. We one shotted Festergut and Rotface and rushed to Professor Putricide. While people were buffing up and preparing for the pull I explained the fight mechanics to the audience. It had a lot of small details execution wise and I’m not sure if I missed out something important. When phase 1 ended I told the audience that “Professor will now go to his table a take a zip from his potions. Now you can see him coming back with those tentacles.”. In phase 3 the boss literally melted as we had only mains in the group and it would have been easily doable with 2 tanks even after the changes.

 

It was around 21:30 when we got out of Plagueworks and started pulling the super annoying Crimson Halls trash. I was very pleased that we had Diivil tanking Keleseth and the audience was able to see the pretty rarely used caster tank POV. The kill was really chaotic with a lot of mistakes but we still one shotted it. We had only 15-20 minutes before our time was up and we rushed to Blood-Queen Lana’thel. We had made the biting order in advance but we were still a bit uncertain how it would go. With only 10 minutes remaining we finally got to pull the boss. The beginning went really good until the air phase when we had too many people stacking up and 7 died instantly. I explained the case to the audience said we’d only have one pull left.

 

I rushed the guys to corpse run as fast as possible and it was 22:07 when we were ready to make our last pull. It started good and Kruf got the first bite as planned. We didn’t repeat our mistake of stacking up too much at the first air phase and avoided failing on other ways as well. Diivil got the bite in the third round and started climbing the damage meters. We survived the second air phase as well and got the bites to all 16 dps in our raid as planned. When we popped Bloodlust it was pretty fast and painless – Blood-Queen died well before her enrage timer. The audience gave us a big applause and the guys at the stage grabbed their mice and keyboards instantly and gave room for TF2 players who had been waiting and looking angry.

 

After the raid we hanged around a bit and decided to go to sleep at 2am. Arx has parked his car to what felt like other end of the world and it took us 20 minutes of walking in the freezing weather. I was tired but felt relieved, the commentation went a lot better than expected and the fact that I was losing my voice didn’t matter one bit. The raid had also succeeded in killing everything in less than 2 hours.

 

Saturday 23.1.2010

 

This time Ilo called me at 1pm. I felt like zombie again when we were sitting at the table and having breakfast.

 

We didn’t have that much scheduled at Assembly on Saturday, one Toc 25-man heroic raid and some 10-man Icecrown Citadels. We hit the event around 3pm and spent hours doing very little on our computers and mainly chatting. Liha and Shuri came visiting the event so we had a change to meet them as well. Liha actually wiped our alt 10-man normal Toc which I was “healing” on my (crap geared) shaman. Zhinn was supposed to be healing but Liha was sitting on his computer and had no idea of the keybinds. I don’t think he got out other heals but prayer of mending and some flash heals.

 

I met a lot of other friends at the event as well – one of them was Shoy who draws her special kind of wow art. She actually drew one for Sk-gaming boys 3 years ago at Summer Assembly. They promised they’d put it on their website but we sadly never saw it there. I asked Shoy to draw a picture of Devah’s, Nalena’s and Ilo’s characters and she was happy to do it. We might get the censorised version uploaded here later.

 

We started the evening’s raid at 19:00 and went straight to Toc. The raid was at our computers so I got to play and didn’t need to do the commentation. We cleared the whole thing in 45 minutes without wipes. When we were playing we had a long row of people watching behind our backs and I was glad we had picked up spacious table next to the corridor. We continued doing 10-mans and I had the chance to see other guildies playing on their original UI’s. It was fun walking the row and seeing the same 10-man raid from the different point of views.

 

Later that evening we visited the Peliliiga’s stage and had time to meet people and chat with them. I spent something like 30 minutes talking about dk dps, Blood-Queen encounter and other stuff with the guys we met there.

 

Rest of the night/evening Seita and others had their own Quake battles going on and we had a lot fun. We went back to our apartments at 4pm. This time the car was a lot closer.

 

Sunday 24.1.2010

 

Assembly was coming to its end and it was time for people to travel home. One by one they collected their stuff, drove to Kaapelitehdas to get their computers and become voices in ventrilo again. Only this time I actually can imagine them sitting on their computers and raiding. When I and Arx were getting our computers from table D1 everyone had already left but I had gotten a lot of “see you at Summer Assembly” s. I’m looking forward to participate it in a less freezing weather.

 

I’d like to thank Assembly organizers for inviting us there and the whole Assembly team for taking care of our needs at the event. I’d also like to send my special “hai” to all the guys I had a chance to meet at Assembly Winter 2010 – hope I’ll see you again next summer.