An ode to Briess.

Last Monday I witnessed possibly the finest example of heroism I have ever seen in a raid. Truly a story I will be telling my grandkids when I'm old and gray, one for the record books.

The year was 1999, and the Plane of Hate had just been released. It marked the second true raid zone ever released, and it was all kinds of broken ass fun. The term "raiding guild" was still a few years away from being coined, and the concept of raiding was still in its infancy. All we knew as players was that we wanted to kill some badass shit to get some badass loot, and kill some shit we did.

The only access to the Plane of Hate was via a Wizard port that required a rather expensive reagent. A Wizard could only port his own group up there, so for each group you sent up you needed one of those reagents. Have a full wipe? Use them all again. Someone late to the party? Need to send a Wizard back down to port them up. We had spent months prepping for this raid, implementing a 200 platinum per member per week guild tax to pay for it. Didn't matter if you were level 30 or level 50, you coughed up the tax just to be in the guild.

Once you ported up there three things could happen. The first, what you would hope for anyway, is that nothing would happen. You'd get into position, illusion: dog form (this was a faction exploit that would make monsters friendly towards you), and start the laborious pulling process. Or you could port up into a lone mob, and if you acted quickly enough you could kill it. The third option, much like its predecessor the Plane of Fear, was a complete zone wide rape train to your location where you'd then promptly die.

Our first trip up there was auspicious enough, with nothing adding and us getting set up into dog form really quickly. We had our elite enchanter team scout the zone while we coordinated with our monk puller to get the first mob. It took us around an hour to make the first pull, mapping all the mob paths, testing add range, and the general shit you need to do when you zone into a place that really hadn't even been screenshotted, let alone mapped and spoiled, up to that point. We dared not try to get two mobs at once, lest we end up wiping and have to send everyone back up. The second pull clocked in 45 minutes later. It was slow going, sure, but we were excited and picking up the pace the more pulls we made. Our first cleric BP had dropped, and like any pug 6 man group up to that point we had simply /randomed on it. It ended up going to an alt, but no one really cared since what mattered is that we were killing the badass shit.

Eventually, however, we got sloppy, and a bad pull turned worse when the monk Feign Death'd them a little too close for comfort, and four, count them FOUR mobs ran into the camp. Immediately two things happened, the first was that Enchanter team hauled ass back to the entrance to get things under control. Alann, the supreme badass and occasional guild leader that he was, was calling out orders and slinging mezzes like a madman. It was a hairy situation, but we thought we might be able to get through it. And then all of the sudden one of our tanks was gone along with the rest of his group.

The second thing that happened, apparently, is that one of our Wizards shit a fat brick and evacuated his group the hell out of Dodge. Fortunately we ended up killing the four mob train, and lived to fight another day, but that didn't make Alann any less pissed. After being scolded for what seemed like a good thirty straight minutes, the only excuse the Wizard could offer was that he didn't want to lose experience, and upon conferring with his group, they agreed. The Wizard quit what seemed like shortly thereafter, the Warrior even sooner than that, and it went down in my notes as the finest display of heroism that I had ever seen. Fuck their exp loss, what about YOUR exp loss!!!


Monday we were doing Nefarian. It was a somewhat suboptimal group, and we had been having various problems getting it set up. Like the troopers we are, ingrained with years of raiding experience, we persisted through the wipes in high spirits knowing that once we got everything nailed down it was an assured kill. That is, at least, until we hit phase 2 on one of our attempts and we notice that Briess, one of our healers, had left the raid group.

"Fuck me! I didn't mean to do that invite me back!"

Apsallar wasn't quite sure if he should be angry about that, or just really angry, and asked the question on everyone's mind, "why did you leave the group?"

"Well I was trying to heal myself and I accidentally clicked remove from group and it's just...well can you invite me back?"
"No we can't fucking invite you back, you're in raid combat."
"Oh. Well I'm being ported out then."

And all I could do was think back to that Plane of Hate run, knowing that it had truly just been one upped. Bravo, sir Briess. You are a men amongst men.

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