As you can see, Cassie and I had us some fun in a little old thing we like to call ‘Gruul on Farm Status’.

For the fourth time, Legatum Ignavis has entered Gruul’s Lair and downed High King (on a one shot), and for the second time we downed Gruul himself, this time after only 1 wipe.

The fights were strong, the guild really did a great job on both.

What was most interesting was that this marked the first real raid we have done since our Raid Leader, Joppers, returned from his 2 month long out-of-town work trip.

When Joppers left, our guild did not have the raw numbers to attempt a 25 man raid. Since then, our numbers have climbed, due to the hard work of Irviding, Whirlish, Rynadur and others on recruiting.

But Joppers also seemed to experience firsthand the frustration that many of us raiders have felt lately. There are a large number of players that seem to have taken the ‘Bum’ slogan of Legatum Ignavis seriously, people who never ran with Joppers in the ‘old days’ (lol), and who see nothing wrong with flagging PvP cause they are bored during the last few seconds of waiting for the run to start, or not bringing consumables, or of going afk with no warning, or of taking forever to rebuff, or of talking wildly on open chat.

Jopps don’ be puttin’ up with dat shit, homey.

Last night our DKP system went into effect, Joppers organized and directed, and the High King portion went smooth. Down fast and hard, minimal deaths, good loot. And then, the normal crap started back up.

People that have to go afk without warning were the biggest problem.

After the shoulder Tier 4 tokens were handed out, several people wanted to trade them in for new shoulders immediately before the Gruul fight. This was reasonable, and especially in the case of our main tank, Bladeofdeath, smart.

It was not a problem. It was organized to take minimal time, a quick port to Shatt, a Warlock summons back. Fast and easy.

However, we seemed to have a few people think that this signaled ‘do whatever the hell you want’ time in the raid. I say that, because from that moment on, every time we had a pause, we had drama with afkers and other crap.

We had afkers and such during the first trash run to Gruul, a silly annoyance, but we got through it. The person that was afk the longest simply had bad computer connection problems, and worked them as fast as possible. Sometimes, it happens.

But after we had our first shot at Gruul and wiped when the main tank went down and we only had two DPS left after a real bad shatter, (oh yes, and I took your advice and I off tank this instead of main tanking… it seems fine), we had so much afk action that after only the one attempt, all trash had time to respawn, so we had to kill it all again.

Finally, we got a couple new people into the group, lined up on Gruul for try two… and realised we STILL had a paladin afk. No warning or announcement when he went, but still afk. And this guy is one of the officers. No one knows why he left, but his TS is still up, he’s still there in game, he didn’t say anything… wtf?

So we wait. And we wait.

Can we boot him? Well, no. Because he’ll still be in the instance. In a raid, you can remove someone from the raid group, but until they actually leave the instance, you can’t bring in a replacement.

And Xhandhele just ain’t coming back. We wait, and wait… after all the other piddly little bullshit and afks and stuff, this is really getting frustrating. He is removed from group, but of course sometimes it can take over an hour before player inactivity forces a logoff. What the hell are we gonna do?

So I advance the idea… let’s kill him and wait the 5 minutes for his body to despawn to the graveyard. 

Cheers all around!

Everyone but Whirlish and I left the instance. I stepped back into the shadows, stealthed in kitty form, and took a good position to watch the show. Whirlish, our guild leader, took the honor of starting this himself. Whirlish and I were both prepared to die to get the shot.

Whirl moved forward, and prepared to take his shot. He knew he had one chance at a Feign Death, and he prepared himself for the most important shot of his career.

He nocked his arrow, and let fly. Hey! Gruul! Come get some fresh meat!

And Gruul, apparently, was hungry.

Gruul came right on in. Whirlish was prepared, he looked death straight in the eye… and Feigned.

Oops! Apparently, Gruul didn’t buy it. Too bad, Whirl! You took one for the team! After Whirlish went down, the still afk Xhandhele came to attention, as if, even with his controller afk and leaving him uncaring to his fate, the avatar still sensed the rush of doom upon him.

Poor, poor Xhandhele. When seen, crumpled up in death, you look so tiny next to the immensity of Gruul’s hoof.

The sadness of this scene leads one to contemplate the transcience of life, the fragility of our brief, fragile few moments in the vastness of the cosmos.  How vulnerable we all are to the permanence of death. How sudden, our fall from grace.

The lessons we learn through life, that we wish we could share with others.

Lessons like, next time, don’t go afk for 30 minutes on the boss fight, bitch.