Paragon's Dreamhack Summer 2010 Journal

When ASUS invited us to Dreamhack Summer, I was super excited (as always I guess). I, arx, Lazei, and Maeil had attended Dreamhack Winter 2009 last year, and the whole event really had made a huge impact on us. Knowing how awesome it was last time, I was really looking forward to travel to Jönköping again to meet old and new people and enjoy the biggest computer festival in the world.

 

FRIDAY 18.6.

 

This summer our Dreamhack team was me, arx, Deva and Kruf. Our flight to Stockholm was scheduled to take off at 12:00 on Saturday, and Deva had decided to come to Espoo already on Friday. I and Arx came to meet him at Pasila, and we took the commuter train to Leppävaara, Espoo. Kruf decided to visit us on Friday as well, and dropped his headphones for us to put in the suitcases. We had plenty of time to use that night so we decided to watch Shutter Island. I had hyped the movie as a mind fuck to Arx and Deva, and was kind of disappointed when Arx guessed the whole idea of the movie in like 10 minutes.

 

I had promised myself I’d go to sleep early that night but it was already 2 am when I finally closed my eyes and tried to get some sleep.

 

SATURDAY 19.6.

 

It was no surprise I was feeling like a zombie when we woke up at 8 am the next morning. We packed the last stuff we had missed out last night and headed out to the bus stop. I was sure (like always) I had forgotten something and had to check everything at least three times. We met Kruf at the bus stop and took the bus to Helsinki-Vantaa airport. We had plenty of time before the plane would leave, but the time was needed when Deva decided to take both the security check and the check-in twice.

 

I already felt like I was in the Sahara desert because the level of the humor was so dry. Kruf and arx just couldn’t keep the limping jokes to themselves and when we boarded the plane my face and stomach were hurting like hell from all the laughing.

I missed the window seat so I was forced to try my best and get a glimpse of the always-so-cool take off. I really love the small planes which make you feel funny on the stomach. During the flight I, Deva, and Kruf were arguing about whether all Westwood Studios’ games go under the name Command & Conquer. Kruf was sure the first one at last didn’t. Arx told us later that we argued loud enough for some Finnish dude to turn around 3 rows in front of us and take a look of the idiots who are fighting over such details.

 

We took off from Finland at 12:05 and landed at Arlanda airport at 12:00 local time, pretty good time machine! A taxi driver was waiting for us at the airport with a paper which had “PARAGON” written on it. The only words he spoke us in English were “Welcome to Stockholm”. We tried our best to talk Swedish to him, and he ended up being a really nice guy with a huge moustache. I wish the 6 years of compulsory Swedish lessons at school would have taught us more. The oh-so-hyped wedding of the Swedish crown princess Victoria and this Daniel Westling was the same day pretty much the at the same time, and we were kind of worried about whether we could make it to the station in time. We thought there would be huge crowds of people everywhere, but it was really quiet. I guess everyone was at the Royal Castle. (Don’t ask me why I know so much about the Royal Swedish family, but the fault is in the Finnish media. I guess they can’t think of anything better to write about Swedish royalty).

When we arrived at Stockholm central railway station we still had plenty of time before the train to Nassjö would leave. We ate a bit and headed to the tracks.

The forecast had promised us rain that weekend but the sun was shining and Deva demanded we’d enjoy it and get a bit of tanning. He called us “kalkkilaivan kapteenit” which could be translated “the captains chalk-ship” which basically means we were WHITE. Deva was disappointed he wasn’t wearing his shorts and he changed to them in the train.

We changed the train in Nassjö and arrived to Jönköping at around 4 pm. Marcus from ASUS picked us up and we dropped our stuff to the hotel. This year we were staying at the Scandic hotel downtown, a bit further away from Elmia which was hosting Dreamhack. The thing is that there was a huge dog show in Jönköping that weekend, and all the hotels were booked full. The dog show was even in the same building Dreamhack was in, but I think I only saw 10 dogs during the weekend. Elmia is really a huge place and you could easily get lost inside it. I almost did.

 

Finally we were able to get inside Dreamhack. I really love the feeling the event has, and I realized I had missed it. We walked to ASUS booth which was a bit different than last year. There was only one big main screen and we shared the booth with other gamers and events such as Warcraft III and Counter Strike finals. We had been at the booth for like 30 seconds when someone already asked Arx what time we were going to start playing, and he didn’t even have his t-shirt on at that time. I guess people start to recognize us by our face. Our playing time started at 5 pm but first we went upstairs to eat something and get our t-shirts.

 

When we were done with the eating and stuff we started to set up the computers and our UI’s. The booth was pretty much empty when we started but it filled up pretty fast. People were just watching us copying different files to the computers and setting up Ventrilo and our UIs for over 40 minutes. We had w0lfis narrating the raid to us with a girl whose name I can’t remember. A bit before 7 pm the booth was full and we kicked our 10-man ICC heroic raid going. I thought I would be playing that night on my priest and hadn’t touched the druid’s UI. I had to raid the whole night with half working UI, but hey, that’s life.

 

We had planned 3 main events for Dreamhack: our main 25-man ICC raid and 2 10-man ICC raids which we would do on our mains and alts. On Saturday’s 10-man ICC setup we had my feral druid, arx’s retri paladin, Kruf’s hunter main and Deva’s death knight main. Half of the people in the raid had never killed Lich King heroic mode in 10-man on those characters, simply because no one had been arsed to set up the groups. We had practiced a bit on our alts the week before but it really didn’t go well, as the raid consisted pretty much of only alts and off spec players. We were kind of worried whether we’d be able to one-shot Lich King, but the raid ended going better than fine. I was playing on the main screen and I had game sounds of so everyone had to yell on Ventrilo when they wanted me to do something special. On Lich King we changed our tanking plan half way through the encounter and Kruf, Arx and Deva were all yelling me “TAKE ALL THE ADDS XENO”.  The whole raid was pretty smooth and fast even though I didn’t really get to tank shit and mainly “dps’d’” in tank spec and gear. We should have put someone more interesting to the main screen instead of me but it was too late to swap computers at the point I realized I’d be playing on the druid. Later I learned that they could have taken the signal from someone else’s computer and put to the main screen, but at that point we didn’t know it.

 

Even with the 20% buff and months of grinding the encounter in 25-man heroic mode, Lich King still managed to surprise us. The boss was around 20% health when I died and got combat ressed. Soul reaper is still deadly as hell if you don’t have any cooldowns left. Someone from the audience later told me that it was dead quiet when I died tanking the boss. Everyone was wondering whether we’d be able to make it. I was a bit worried as well but it turned out the boss just melted the last 10% with the dps we had and Fury of the Frostmourne came pretty much instantly after I had taken my combat ress and got buffed up. Lazei managed the spirits and everything just fine without me.

 

When the boss finally died after the long rp the audience was cheering. It’s kind of sad that the boss dropped a caster staff that would have been a stamina upgrade for me. Me and Deva amused the people by needing on everything after others had passed, they were yelling “ninja” and cheering. The truth is no one really wanted the loot as they already had better items from 25-man heroic.

 

I think there were over 200 people watching our 10-man half alt raid. There could have been more, if there had been more room on the half closed booth. We were looking forward to the 25-man raid because we knew it would be much more interesting to watch. That’s what we told to the people who came to chat with us after the raid. After ICC 10 we did one 10-man TOC normal mode raid and wiped straight to beasts. I was tanking the shit alone and didn’t get any tricks or mds and the guys didn’t pay any attention to that, pulled aggro from both of the worms and died. Strong bare can taunt only every 8 seconds. I promised myself I’d never ever tank anything again without a rogue or a hunter in the raid! At least the audience got surprised, they sure didn’t expect us to wipe in Toc after one shotting the Lich King. After Toc we went to my beloved Sunwell, and after that tried to queue to bgs. The timer said the queue was 22 minutes long so we just gave it up for that night and started packing our stuff. It was 1:30 am when we were done and 2:30 when I finally got to bed. There were some night clubs just outside our hotel windows and the music was loud but when I asked other if the music kept them awake they told me they didn’t even notice it after they closed their eyes. All of us fell asleep pretty much immediately.

 

SUNDAY 20.6

 

We woke up too early (can’t remember when) to make it in time for the hotel breakfast. None of us bothered to really wake up because when we were done with the food, we just went back to our rooms and slept late. There wasn’t any playing scheduled for us on Sunday so we had the whole day free to do whatever we wanted. Arx had made plans with svt, the Swedish national channel to participate in an interview that day, but that was pretty much all the official stuff we had planned when we woke up.

 

We went to Dreamhack at 2pm. I and Arx had 2 of our friends coming to the event with their baby to meet us for the first time in real life. Over 3 years ago when I was a total newbie (hadn’t seen a druid in bear from yet for example) I was leveling my draenei priest in Redridge Mountains. I met this gnome mage and tried to trade her a soulbound staff. That’s where our friendship began and I tell you, she is the sweetest girl in-game ever. It was awesome to actually see how they looked in real life and talk to them without needing to type anything.

 

When we were outside sitting in the sun and chatting Arx asked me if I wanted to hear the good news or the bad news first. I wanted the bad news. He told me that I’d be participating in the interview as well. I then asked what the good news was, and he told me that the stream had over 100k viewers the last time. I didn’t really mind so I took them as good news, and at around 5pm we said goodbye to our now real life friends and walked upstairs where the svt studio was. On the ASUS booth there was Sweden vs. Poland female cs game going on. I heard Sweden raped the other team.

 

Arx had made the arrangements with Anna who was playing World of Warcraft as well. While we waited for our turn in the show we talked a lot with her, and she told us what we’d be doing in the interview and stuff. When it was our time we had around 2 minutes to sit down and prepare ourselves. There were some ladies putting face powder on us, I think Arx got make up the first time in his life. The questions we got asked dealt with us more than wow, and some people told us later they didn’t really like the interview as there was so little wow-related stuff. The interview went worse than our ICC 10-man, at some point I blurted men in Finland spend 6, 9, or 12 years in army. I hope Nalena, Sossu, or Lappe didn’t hear me. I’d probably get beaten at Assembly for jinxing their upcoming army experience.

When we got back from the studio Deva had gone missing. He came back with a smile on his face while we were watching Warcraft III. Arx was explaining me how the game worked and what were the “nice moves” the announcer was talking about. He also said the tactics human vs. human used were the same as when he was competing in the game, which is _long_ ago. Rest of the night we walked around, checked out other booths and went to the huge LAN halls. We stopped behind some random guy who had his computer place just at the entrance to the hall. They were raiding 25-man ICC and me and Deva got curios and watched them raid for a while. We ended standing behind the guy for almost an hour and there were other people stopping by, talking with us and watching the raid as well. I really felt sorry for the guy for attracting a huge crowd. Also, we couldn’t understand people who asked us loud are we going to tell the guy he sucks and we are much better than him. I was kind of shocked, we’d never say anything like that; we were happy we had the chance to watch them raid. So we’d like to send our “hai” to Inquisitîon guild on Hellscream and thank them and especially one of their hunters for letting us watch their raid.

There were quite a lot of people at ASUS booth when we were leaving for the hotel. The Sweden vs. Poland CS league game was about to begin and we left a bit before they started.

 

MONDAY 21.6

 

We woke up a bit earlier for breakfast on Monday and I, Arx, and Kruf went to sleep again after it. Deva was the only true man and he went to the hotel’s gym. Nuts, I tell you. We arrived to Dreamhack at around 12 pm. Our raid was to start at 13:30 and we were planning on doing a fast Toc 10 man (weekly) or something before it, but Sejta wasn’t online, so we ended up waiting for him. The booth was filling up steadily and there were a lot more people than on Saturday. We started with the other 10-man ICC raid which had me on my main shadow priest, Deva on his alt hunter, Kruf on his alt holy paladin and Arx on his main resto druid in the setup. Somehow the boys had managed to put up a raid with 0 caster buffs and I lost do Deva’s alt on dps.

 

The run was smooth but we had a really dangerous situation at Sindragosa where there were only 2 guys alive at the end. Ande, the holy priest disconnected and almost froze the whole raid with his ice block. Arx died while he was ressing him just before my first divine hymn tick and we were left with only Zeir healing the whole raid. We just had to burn the boss down as fast as possible. We had to wait a while at Lich King and replaced Ande with Nalena. The boss went down on the first pull and we took a small break and divided up. Deva and Kruf went to one interview and me and Arx sought out Anna from svt. Apparently people had enjoyed our performance on the interview on Sunday and they wanted more of us. This time the show wasn’t going to be live but cut afterwards and aired with some other show. We went to a bench outside the building and Anna asked us questions which were more wow-related. We talked about our world first Lich King kill, Cataclysm and many other interesting topics. I felt good about the interview until I blurted out even more stupid thing than on Sunday. I was so happy the show wasn’t live! You gotta ask Anna if you want to know, I’m too embarrassed.  When I, Arx, and Anna had gathered ourselves from all the laughing we managed to continue to interview. Thanks to Anna for taking good care of us.

 

When we came back to the booth we got our food and went upstairs to eat something before the main ICC 25-man raid. I was getting a bit nervous, as the raid was our main event of the night. The raid was to start at 17:00 but there were a lot of people 30 minutes before it. By the time it was 17:00 there were probably around 200 people waiting for us to start. Some had bought pillows and lay in front of the smaller screens which were connected to our computers. Our narrator, w0lfis had gotten a new partner and that night they were commentating the raid a lot more. I have narrated our raid twice live and I was curious about what they were saying, but sadly I didn’t understand much. They introduced us one by one and we stood up and greeted the audience. When we sat down we gave to word on Ventrilo and the first trash pull went off immediately. Managed to hit at least one trap before Marrowgar and had to clear the big Bone Sentinels. I hadn’t gotten my mouse’s keybinds working that day because of some technical difficulties and I had to click shadowfiend and potion of wild magic. I fixed it somewhere in Plaguewings. The first 4 bosses were fast as always, even though we had like all of our melee exploding at Lady Deathwhisper. The zone buff was 20% so there was no problem killing the boss with half the raid admiring the floor.

 

Deva was collecting the shards for his Shadowmourne and he lacked only 4 before the raid started. We had agreed wit w0lfis that if he got the 4^th shard that night we’d change him to the main screen while he was getting his legendary. The rng gods were on his side that night and the first 4 bosses all dropped a shard. So at Saurfang Deva needed his last shard, turned them in and got his Shadowmourne with people cheering and applauding. I was really happy for him; he really had worked hard towards it collecting the shards from pug raids and all. While he was gemming his new weapon we almost wiped to the trash in the beginning of Plagueworks. Melee exploded again and we had to stop and ress half of the raid. Otherwise the wing went good as well as Crimson Halls, but we didn’t really shine at Sindragosa. On the second air phase people were too eager to kill the ice blocks and first one broke just after the third breath. People were running to their left to one block which was closer and it broke just before the last breath came down and it killed 7 or 8 people including our main tank Sejta. I was wondering if we’d wipe on Sindragosa but at least we were able to show the audience how we recover from catastrophes like that. We used all our combat resses and focused on playing extra safe. We also soul stoned the tanks just to be sure they wouldn’t blow up leaving us wiping with no combat resses. After we actually managed to bring her down we were ready to face the Lich King.

 

At that point there were 300-400 people lying, sitting, or standing at the booth waiting to see the hardest encounter in the game at the moment. I really hoped we would be able to one shot the boss, but it wasn’t a given that we’d manage to do that, since most of the weeks we use 1-2 wipes before actually killing him. The mechanics of the encounter are still merciless, they don’t forgive mistakes. I was calms when the final ready check came and Tirion started walking towards the Lich King. When the boss attacked I couldn’t concentrate on anything else than doing my job. The first phase went ok but the second phase started to look bad from the beginning. Arx had problems with his computer and he needed to relog a lot during the encounter which left us with 4 healers. One of the infests killed 2 of our dps and I used my divine hymn on the next one where 4 more were dropping dangerously low again. Then our discipline priest got grabbed by the val’kyr when the shields weren’t up and Arx dropped again at the same time. We didn’t have anything to use for the infest, and with around 8 people dying we knew there wouldn’t be any way to recover from that. We had to give in and wipe. When I looked up I saw people disappointed and some leaving the booth but I just had to accept what we had known from the beginning: Lich King is no cake walk and sometimes you just wipe there. We could have done better but now we had to focus on getting the boss down.

 

On our second pull we had no problems with the connection or anything else and we made it to the last phase alright. We got the third raging spirit down just as we got sucked inside the Frostmourne room. We had one of the spirits blowing up dangerously close to the raid and the hit points of the raid dropped really low. We kept the situation under control and played it as we had always done. The raid was topped again when we came up and killed the remaining raging spirit. After the second Frostmourne room we popped bloodlust. The boss went down pretty fast and after one more Frostmourne room the boss dropped to 10% and casted Fury of the Frostmourne: we had cleared 25-man Icecrown Citadel hard mode with 1 wipe on Lich King. Of course I felt disappointed for not being able to one shot everything but I didn’t let it bother me too much. We got a big applause from the audience and again had the opportunity to spend some time with the people who came to talk with us. Too bad there was another competition starting at the booth soon and we had to collect our stuff while we chatted with people. I’m a really bad multitasker, so when I tried to chat and do something else, I almost left my stuff in the wrong place.

 

We had to leave the booth and went to eat our late dinner around 8pm. When we were sitting in the tables chatting we got another invite to an interview, this time me and Deva participated. It was around 10pm when we were ready to leave Dreamhack for the last time that trip. I felt kind of sad to walk out to the cold night air from all the noise and hotness. Still I was more than satisfied; I had had the chance to participate again. We’d like to thank everyone we were able to meet there for making the event as awesome it was. Our special thanks go firstly to ASUS for inviting us again and taking outstanding care of us, as well as to Steelseries for supplying us with gaming gear. We’d also like to thank all the parties who interviewed us and showed interest in Paragon at the event. Last but not least our biggest thanks goes to everyone we had the honor to meet at the event, you really made our trip. We hope we’ll be able to see you all soon again.

 

Bonus material: Dance event at RAKAKA & ASUS stand which I and Deva attended.

 

TUESDAY 22.6

 

Bzzd. The bar night on Monday left us with around 5 hours of sleep. Bzzd. I woke up in the hotel. I woke up again at the breakfast. Next time I woke up at Linköping station, and after that in the train to Stockholm. We had some problems finding our taxi at the central railway station but it all worked out eventually.

You would be surprised to know how many entrances the building has! At the airport we met our Finnish friend who had attended the event and he told us his job there was to be drunk the whole time. Or that’s how I understood it. At the plane he sat 3 rows in front of us but we didn’t fight over Command & Conquer. The trip had taken its toll and even the take off didn’t get me excited. When we finally made it back to my and Arx’s apartment we ordered pizzas and boys watched some movie, can’t remember which one. I just went straight to bed and slept for 16 hours.