Guinea Pigs

Charles

Chuck ran his hands over the keybord of his custom gaming rig, typing out a series of instructions for the boss fight the raid group he was in was about to pull. He grinned to himself about the fact that despite the instructions, he knew that at least one, probably two or three people from this group of sixteen would mess up on the instructions. But that was okay. This was Noob Night Friday. The guild he was in for this MMORPG was a large and welcoming group that always had people who had never done a lot of the raid content. Raid content had been designed to be the high pinnacle of end-game content, and unless you got a dedicated group of players that stayed on top of things, random pick up groups just wouldn't be able to get far in a raid.

Because of that, a good number of people had never even tried the older raids, from the game's prior expansions, which people were typically over-leveled and over-geared for. As a minor officer in the guild, he had designed NNF's as a weekly event that welcomed anyone to try the older content. He would walk them through the content and even if the group made no progress, no blaming or complaints were allowed at all. A much different environment from the typical raid scene.

As he finished the typed explanation, he hit the push to talk button for his headset. "Alright chickadee's, instructions are posted in raid chat. To briefly sum up what it says, this is your typical tank and spank. I'll head in and grab his attention. Then everyone just start burning him down. When he's at two thirds, one third, and one fourth health adds will spawn that the Off tank will grab. Once they're gathered, burn the adds before returning to the big boy's gluteal cleft. Remember Raid Rule Zero, and above all else, have fun!"

He popped the command for a ready check and a small window on his computer screen started showing green checkmarks next to each person's name. once he had all sixteen. He initiated a count down timer. Numbers appeared the middle of his screen, counting down from five. At zero he moved his character forward on his screen and hit the hotkey for his agro-grab, wanting to make sure he pulled the raid bosses attention before anyone else.

A torrent of ice shards shot out of his character's hand as the beefy titan of a superhero headed straight at the Godzilla-like kaiju. The fighting area was made out to be a middle of a downtown metropolis. Once he got the huge lizard's attention, he ran to a position between two of the taller skyscrapers. Letting the kaiju face his character, Chocolate Frosting, and not the rest of the raid group.

With the boss in position, he stopped cycling through his rotation to type into chat, "Engage", but a split second after hitting enter, saw it really wasn't needed because the group was attacking. Be it fire blasts, arrow, bullets, ice projectiles . . . or even a few of the more melee style characters had run in at Chocolate Frosting's feet to begin pointing on the giant lizard with feet, fists, and all manner or weapons.

He watched the boss's health drop slowly. This particular fight's biggest challenge was merely how much health the monster had. It was just an endurance slog to actually chew through enough health before the enrage timer hit. That would start to exponentially increase both the bosses' damage and damage resistance, making the fight nigh impossible.

A flashing red and orange marker appeared on the ground directly behind the lizard. Despite it being faced away from the main group, there was still a tail sweep attack it had that would be very dangerous. He watched as most of the damage dealers moved out of the marked in area, not wanting to be hit. Chuck closed his eyes as the marker disappeared and the kaiju's tail appeared to swipe through the few remaining characters that hadn't moved. Their health bars in the raid frames emptied and the tiles in the UI Chuck was looking at greyed out.

Immediately the healing and support characters started rezzing those that fell. Chuck just kept his rotation up, concentrating more on keeping agro than dealing damage. Granted, at this point, he didn't think anyone had the stats to be able to pull the kaiju's attention off of his ice tank.

Glancing at the boss's health bar he hit the push to talk button and said, "First group of add in coming, Tee, you got those?"

"Yup." He heard a voice in his head and he saw one of characters directly behind the boss peel off and move to a point nearly on the other end of the map. Just as he got there, what appeared to be a wild pack of velociraptors jumped into the fight. Tee's character, a girl with fire or lava-based powers, set off a series of miniature volcanic eruptions right in the middle of the group.

Chuck typed into raid chat, "Stop on the boss, hit the babies." And was surprised that most everyone did. As they did, the kaiju's eyes lit up and the ground at Chocolate Frosting's feet lit up with the red orange damage marker. Now, whereas the First Rule of Raiding is "Don't Stand in Stupid." As the Tank, he needed to take this TankBuster attack so as to make sure no one else got hit with it. It would definitely be an instant kill to anyone else.

A radioactive laser beam shot out of the eyes and mouth of the kaiju, merging into one at the point of impact . . Chocolate Frosting. As he was hit, Chuck glanced at the raid frames and saw that all of the support heroes were depleted of endurance, the resource they had to use their healing abilities. Therefore they had no means to apply extra protection to him, or rez him once he did, indeed, fall from the damage.

Chuck watched the quick remainder of the fight as the momma kaiju turned and stomped toward the remaining members of the raid. Without Chuck's tank to keep her attention . . . it was a wipe very quickly.

Despite his rule or no blaming for Noob Night Fridays, having the night end on a wipe was always depressing. People had thanked him as they always did, and started logging off. Chuck did the same, starting through his nightly routine of doublechecking his social media and e-mail. One particular e-mail caught his notice.