1.20. The Longest 1% Ever

Naxxramas Loading Screen
Copyright © Activision/Blizzard

The Balancing Act

Her lair was a prison of webbing. In all directions lay stretched the delicate weavings of a spider large enough to put any arachnaphobe into the fetal position. She sat perched at the far end of this spherical cocoon, twiddling her eight black legs. Evil beads for eyes glared at us while a mandible expanded and contracted, as if licking unseen lips. Her yellow-and-red abdomen dwarfed the raid. And when we made our first pull of Maexxna, she filled our computer speakers with a nightmarish clacking sound, as if two undead claws were being dragged down a chalkboard of despair and anguish. Every time Maexxna uttered these terrifying sounds, I felt my composure slipping away. It was so horrific a sound, in fact, she continued to haunt me well into The Burning Crusade. Spiders sharing Maexxna's model became tamable by Hunters, and I would lose my shit in battlegrounds when the Kill Command was given. That sound made me jump out of my chair and spaz out on my keyboard and mouse in a last-ditch effort to save my pathetic self. Only two other video games had ever made me jump throughout my life: Rescue on Fractalus!, and DOOM.

There was a reason her image graced the Naxxramas loading screen; Maexxna embodied raw, unadulterated fear. This was a good thing™. If Naxxramas was truly the ultimate raid for Vanilla, everyone should have been losing their shit.

Her rules of engagement were a delicate balancing act of nerves, discipline and timing. The main tank would hold Maexxna in the center of her lair, while the raid grouped tightly behind. We were then subjected to an intricate web of mechanics she'd rotate through on forty-second intervals, staggered among each other. One such mechanic caused Maexxna to randomly choose three people and toss them backwards toward the far wall of her nest, encasing them in a cocoon. While incapacitated these players would suffocate; their lives were in the hands of the ranged DPS. It was up to our casters to break them out as quickly as possible. Another mechanic produced a swarm of spiders that would coalesce onto the raid. Off-Tanks would have to do everything in their power to hold AoE aggro on these spiders, so as to not let them attack and kill our healers. Maexxna's venomous mandible also injected a necrotic poison into players, suppressing healing by 90% -- this had to be cleansed immediately. If the Main Tank was the target, unattended poison would guarantee a wipe. We repeated the handling of these mechanics until Maexxna's health dropped to 30%, at which point she would Enrage. While all her mechanics continued to stretch us thin, it became a non-stop burn until either she...or we...ended up dead.

There was just one small twist amid all these mechanics, a monkey-wrench which instilled fear into the hearts of every healer to ever play the game...

...Maexxna would incapacitate the entire raid for a full eight seconds.

Every. Single. Player. 

Cocooned

During Web Spray, nobody would have any control over their character -- every one of the forty players in the raid would be completely immobilized. And while Maexxna was free to continue to tear the flesh away from our Main Tank, we could only watch helplessly as their health dropped to frighteningly low levels. Healers of today may look back on this encounter and think, "What's the big deal? Load the MT up with HoTs before Web Wrap and you're good to go."

In Vanilla, you could only have one unique HoT on a target. Even if you had five priests and five druids, your main tank could only have one Renew, one Regrowth, and one Rejuvination on them at any given moment.

Ater was our most well-geared tank at the end of Vanilla. Fully buffed at the pull, he had 10,047 hit points. Maexxna was striking him for between 2500 and 3500 hp per blow, white damage. HoTs ticked for about 300 hp. If Ater was topped off and lead into the Web Spray with a Shield Block, he'd be in a good shape with a couple of HoTs. But if not, and Maexxna happened to deliver a crushing blow, his health would be nearly empty by the end of the eight seconds. To combat this nerve-wracking mechanic, the healers and I set up a Nature's Swiftness rotation. One by one, the Druids and Shamans would cycle through an instantly cast giant heal at the end of the eight seconds, shooting Ater's health back up and preventing the raid from having a heart-attack. Nature's Swiftness was on a 3-minute cooldown, so a rotation was necessary to keep an emergency heal flowing in.

But while Healers were dealt the worst hand of the roles thanks to Web Wrap, the other roles were similarly impacted. A web-sprayed ranged DPS meant the possibility of players suffocating to death on the walls of Maexxna's nest. Ranged, therefore, absolutely had to make breaking people out of cocoons their number one priority. A web-sprayed off-tank had a pretty tough time collecting up swarms of spiders scurrying across the raid, so the spider swarm had to also take priority over Maexxna herself.

Things fell apart at the 30% mark. After working to perfect our timings with web spray, poison shock, and the never-ending swarm of spiders, we naturally lost a good number of players to web wrap. DPS was slow to move from Maexxna to the targets on the wall, and they would run out of air before we could break them out of their silken prisons. As it had been with Princess Huhuran, Maexxna's game was attrition; keep whittling the raid away piece by piece, so that when the enrage burn phase came at 30%, we wouldn't have the manpower to keep both Ater and the rest of the raid alive. Ater would die, and the remaining tanks would scramble to pick up, but not having the buffs or the gear that Ater possessed, they would be ripped apart as she systematically fed on every last remaining member the raid.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Maexxna,
Naxxramas

Winning the Attrition Game

Our goal for each attempt was to keep just one additional player alive as we approached the 30% mark. As we refined our pulls, communication on her phases improved, warnings on the next mechanic were consistent. Our own internal timers began to adjust to Maexxna's, and healers were more prepared to proactively protect players before the spray froze us into position. Web-wrapped targets were broken out faster, and with players being topped off more consistently, those suffocating had more room to breathe before they met their maker behind a mask of webbing.

When the 30% mark hit, Ater granted us one last reprieve: Shield Wall, the last great bastion of defense for a Warrior in Vanilla. He could only use it once per attempt, so he saved it for the first Web Wrap post 30%. It would save his life, but systematically ensure his death by the second, as we watched his health spike from 10k down to 2k...and then nothing. His death marked the burn like a starter pistol. Did we have the manpower alive to tear through her remaining health while she feasted on the aggro list like a menu? Annihilation called out Warriors frantically to burn their Shield Walls as she turned to them, and the gong of RDX rang like a death knell. Ater, dead. Annihilation, dead. Darange, dead. Her taste in our raid team diversified as she found her rhythm, eating one player per second. Another Rogue. Another Druid. Another Shaman. Another Lock.

Having succumbed to the lack of air in my own cocoon, I watched helplessly as her health dropped into the single digits. Amid the chaos of her feasting, RDX showed that we were only down 4 DPS. She continued to one-shot players, eating Siax next--the only DPS Warrior in our raid, joining DoD after his own hardcore raiding guild had collapsed in Naxx. Only two Warriors remained alive: Demus and Kurst, while Zyr and Volitar poured Greater Heals into them.

Dalans yelled out her health "3% go....2% go..."

Kadrok continued to chant "Burn Her!!" to the remaining raiders.

Her health dropped to 1%.

---

It all seemed surreal. This was our second weekend on Maexxna. Two full months of work in Naxxramas. A year of raiding. Of assimilating guilds, meeting new people, building up a roster. I had gone from a player barely able to make it through Sunken Temple to this...a raiding guild. A 40-Man raiding guild. A Naxxramas-raiding guild. Forty strangers, all working together, virtually. Coordinating. Watching timers, boss alerts, churning out Pyroblasts and Shadow Bolts. We gained players and lost them. Decisions had gone well and gone horribly. And I'd met people that would profoundly affect my decision making in the years to come. What challenges would be next on my plate? Would I be able to handle them?

And it was in that moment that seemed to stretch out for all eternity, a bizarre realization set in.

...it was my birthday.

I'd been so hyper-focused on the guild, on WoW, on our success, on the threat of 2.0 stripping away any further progress we could make in Naxx...that I had forgotten my own birthday.

---

I glanced up at the screen, The arachnid flipped over in a curled, twitching ball in the center of her nest. 

It was over.

Descendants of Draenor managed to clear The Arachnid Quarter a full month before the release of 2.0. It was our final greatest triumph of Vanilla, and a testament to the resilience of a guild with a year-late start in PvE. We'd grown from a handful of Counter-Strike LAN buddies into a 40-man raiding machine, one of the few Horde guilds on the Deathwing-US server to claim this level of progress. And while most of my success at the helm seemed based off of sheer dumb luck, I nevertheless carried on, trying new things, listening to the folks whom I felt would offer us the greatest chance of success. I vowed to learn from every mistake I made, every bad judgement call that was my doing. Above all, I left Vanilla with a real sense of accomplishment -- that Descendants of Draenor could continue to be a raiding machine with much greater dedication and focus.

But perhaps not to such a degree that I would forget my own birthday.

1.17. In The Mouth of Madness

The 40-Man raid team defeats the first boss of
the Military Quarter: Instructor Razuvious,
Naxxramas

Sweep the Leg

Naxxramas gave me chills the moment we set foot in the instance, much of which I owe to the soundtrack. Matt Uelmen's orchestration of the floating necropolis was a crescendo of strings layered amid frightening horns, driven by the rising anxiety of a snare-drum death march. In the distance, the angelic choir seemed to morph into empty, hollow souls -- the damned crying out to be saved from the wretched hell of undeath. The hairs on my arms stood up. I would come to find out, years later, the reason Uelmen's soundtrack for Naxxramas had such a profound effect on me was due to the fact that he originally scored this music to drive Diablo III, a game which Blizzard had been working on in secret, only to be re-booted and re-orchestrated as time went on. Luckily for us, Blizzard re-purposed Uelmen's Diablo III score, melding it to the wings of Naxxramas, and it remains one of my most beloved pieces of video game music to this day.

Naxxramas boasted fifteen bosses, divided among the corridors of four wings. In the past, raid instances adhered to a more linear path, but this was no longer a concern; for the first time, we had the freedom to choose which direction we wanted to go. Each wing housed three bosses (save the Construct wing with four). That left two bosses remaining in the upper reaches, so we could take the wings however we chose. Blain chose The Military Quarter to start, with a plan to switch to The Arachnid Quarter following our first boss kill. That first boss was Instructor Razuvious.

Razuvious' job was to train Death Knights. We approached his ring, eying him as he meandered between his four students, each of them practicing on a training dummy. The curve ball that Blizzard threw at us was something completely unexpected: role reversal. Priests would now be called upon to do the tanking. Utilizing their unique ability to Mind Control a target, they would mentally wrestle one of the Instructor's understudies into submission, turning the pupil against its teacher. This option was the only viable one, as only the students were capable of withstanding the devastating blows that the Instructor dished out -- not even Ater or Annihilation could take such a beating. Our tanks would be responsible for holding the students whom weren't mind controlled, and act as a quick emergency between Mind Control transitions if things went awry. At the most, our tanks might survive a swing or two -- there was very little room for error.

We took a solid two weeks of work just to get a handle on clearing trash to Razuvious, and to get the Priests situated with their new role. I was very lucky to have the Priests that I did. Haribo handled his MC tanking like a true professional, keeping communication open and flowing for each transition, partnering up with Volitar to do the same. By September 10th, we were able to claim a kill of Instructor Razuvious, officially putting us on the board for Naxxramas progression for Deathwing-US.

I took a deep breath and whispered Blain, "See? That wasn't tough, eh? We got this."

Six weeks would pass before we killed our next boss.

Wiping to Trash

Failing is a part of learning, but when faced with oppressive odds, it sometimes seems as though you learn nothing. You begin to second guess yourself. Did we make the right decision? At least in AQ40 we were killing bosses. Yet, week after week we returned to Naxxramas, burning hour after hour on trash, clearing to Razuvious, botching a number of attempts -- then finally killing him. From there, we moved to the wing infested by spiders, only to be killed by trash on nearly every pull. There were no more opportunities for "healing buddies", no more chain pulling, no more carrying dead-weight. Every single one of the 40 players in our raid had to play at top of their game...just to survive the swarm. But the trash in the Arachnid Quarter continued to mock us, algorithmically dividing and conquering. Trying to cut a path through the web-work reminded me of how n00b we were on that first pull in Molten Core. Everyone thought they were a bad-ass, fresh off their latest Alliance slaughter at Tarren Mill. We didn't know what to expect, and dropped like flies as a result. We were ill-prepared for the devastating damage that the Molten Giants, Firelords, Core Hounds and Lava Surgers showered down on us.

Molten Core was a joke compared to this.

Even something as basic as pulling trash was an ordeal. Ater and Kurst slowly inched towards the pathing spiders, trying to get close. Heroic Throw had not yet been invented, pulling options were limited. Annihilation ran a tight ship: the Warriors knew better than to pull with taunt. Taunts produce temporary threat, gone in a matter of seconds, at which point the mobs they controlled leapt to the faces of Mages and Warlocks. The only way to pull from a safe distance was to use a ranged weapon. In Vanilla, the volume of a gun blast produced more AoE aggro than the silent shot of a bow and arrow, so guns were commonly equipped by Warriors. They snuck close, but not too close to aggro neighboring packs. Annihilation and Darange stood at the ready, with Taba close behind, waiting to pull off them as fast as they can, so that multiple blows didn't drop a single tank in under a second. I waited in silence, my finger hovering over healing keys, leaned closer to the monitor, and prepared for the blow. Ater inched forward a bit more, a bit more...

...then, the madness.

Over in an instant, it played out in slow motion. Nothing I seemed to do made any difference. A white rope of spider silk gripped Ater across the room, out of range of heals. I scurry down into the pit to save him, while the chaos in Vent grows loud, voices become indistinguishable. Zyr's hands drew a pattern in the air as he summoned a Greater Heal, and in the blink of an eye, he became a statue. I watched while silken bandages spiraled around his feet, his legs, up his torso and finished at the top of his head. Cocooned. To my left, bolts of green acid spat from the arachnids infected mass quantities of the raid. The bursts of damage continued, and players died faster than the insects were. I'd panic. Do I struggle to keep purging poisons or heal those about to fall over dead? I'd have my answer in moments: neither...because I'm laying face down in the dirt. Again. It is another wipe on trash. We ran back from the graveyard in a ghostly procession, crossing Plaguewood, and found our way back up to the floating necropolis, only to repeat the process ad infinitum.

Maintaining The Facade

By the time we eventually made it to the first boss in the spider wing, the majority of the night was burned away. Repair costs were steep, attention was waning from exhaustion and frustration. The lesser motivated players cancelled more frequently...forcing us to pull from B-team -- which only served to increase the time needed in Naxx. This ate into morale, and we were treated to a rise in grumbling from various A-team members still displeased with our decision to divert from AQ40. 

"We'd so be through Twin Emps by now," I'd catch someone saying. I said nothing in response.

I doubted my own decision making capabilities. Each day I arrived back in the instance to try to chip away at it, I braced for the other shoe to drop: the day that I'd be "found out", that all of this "guild leadership" is a sham and I have no idea what I'm doing, no idea how to lead. I waited for the day that the guild decides to call a meeting and reveal to me that the jig is up, and that they've all figured me out...that the true leaders of the guild are tired of putting up with my shitty, uninformed decisions, ready to return to AQ40 to get real progress done. The turning point of so many guilds. The separation of the casuals and the hardcores. My mind was made-up that this was where we were headed, like so many other guilds that brickwalled on raid bosses. The guild would divide, and the truly talented players would form a new, much stronger, more efficient guild. And the casuals would be left behind to suffer and rot, eventually quitting the game. 

How long before they saw through the facade? I wasn't leading anything. I held the title while others did the work. Each day I returned to Naxxramas to wipe on trash, I braced for the blow.

The blow never came.