World of Warcraft gave me my one elite gamer moment: Kiting the General in Upper Blackrock Spire

I’ve never been one to aspire to do “elite gamer” things in video games. My favorite genres are point-and-click puzzle adventures and narrative role-playing games. I prefer to enjoy video games alone, and I am constitutionally non-competitive. Given all that, you might be wondering how I spent eight years of my life playing World of Warcraft.

Maybe it was because early on in the legendary MMO’s life, it gave me a glimpse of what it could be like to have an upper-level skill level, and have that skill recognized by other players. My elite gamer moment didn’t reach max level in four expansions, or when my raid guilds ran both Arthas and Deathwing into the ground – no. Nothing else inside Wowor other games, captured the feeling I got when I was a fighter who could kite the general in Upper Blackrock Spire.

‘LFM UBRS has a key need hunter’

That was the telltale message in the Looking For Group chat channel, circa 2005, that was a sign of basic World of Warcraft‘s most testing dungeon crawls. This message meant that a group of players were looking for more people to try the 10-player dungeon called Upper Blackrock Spire.

UBRS, as it was abbreviated, was a stepping stone on the road to Molten Core, Wow‘s first-ever 40-man raid level. And it fit the part: where Molten Core was set in the Elemental Plane of Fire, UBRS was a lava-rifted fortress built inside an active volcano, full of black dragons, fire elementals, and even an encounter with a Core Hound boss, who use foreshadowed. from the two-headed, lava-slobbering beasts like Molten Core’s iconic base mobs.

To even get inside Upper Blackrock Spire – in the arguably crunchier days of Vanilla World of Warcraft – you needed at least one member of the raid to complete a cumbersome quest involving a random item drop, a hidden NPC, and at least one full run through the Lower Blackrock Spire dungeon and a journey all the way to Dustwallow Marsh to subdue a random dragon, because you specifically need its fire breath.

It took a lot of effort to put together a group for UBRS, but paradoxically those groups tended to be very weak. Although UBRS required 10 people and a Big Raid-style quest to access, it had the same loot level as any other five-player max level dungeon. So even if you were in a raiding guild, it was unlikely that this was something they spent the night of the raid doing. You would have to rely on strangers to supplement your group, and you had to have at least one person who would do that. done all the work to get the key.

And besides, you needed a Hunter player who knew how to kite the general.

Why did you need a hunter?

The final boss of Upper Blackrock Spire was a type of centaur dragon called General Drakkisath. He was a big powerhouse who hit very hard, but so were his two guards: they dealt so much damage to one tank character that healers would become overwhelmed and you would be wiped out.

The most accepted way to defeat him was to have most of your group focus on killing the guards first, while one person gets the general to drive them away from the rest of the fight, or to ‘kill him’ to fly’. And only the Hunter class, a ranged physical damage dealer with a pet, had the right combination of skills to do this.

The General ran faster than a basic player’s walking speed, but Hunters could turn on Aspect of the Cheetah to get a speed boost. The general’s melee attacks hit so hard that he quickly pulverized everyone except a tank that received consistent healing – but the Hunter ability Distracting Shot could apply a taunt from range, preventing that Hunter from being hit. A fighter could fly the general through several long, large rooms – including a narrow path without a railing with a steep slope on either side – all the way back to the room from the previous boss fight. At that point, everyone else had ideally managed to kill his guards, and the Hunter could use their ability to feign death to nullify any interest the General had in them, and then follow him back to the group to kick his ass.

But the strictly mechanical skills of a fighter still were not enough to kite the general.

The distracting shot had a limited duration, and if you didn’t keep applying it, the general would get tired of chasing you and return too early, nullifying your attack. But the Distracting Shot couldn’t be fired at anything behind you, so you’d have to turn around to hit him again. ButEven with Aspect of the Cheetah, the General was so fast that if you stopped or ran in anything other than a straight line, he would catch up to you, turn you into paste, and then run back too early, wiping out your attack.

The solution rested entirely on whether or not the Hunter existed player could perform a trick: the jump shot.

The jump shot uses how World of Warcraft‘s jump physics work to bypass the “You can’t fire a gun behind you” restriction. When you press the jump button, your character will briefly jump into the air. If you jump while running, your character continues the momentum he had before you pressed it, and his direction cannot change until he “hits” the ground again – normal jump physics for this genre of game.

So to perform a jump shot, start running and press the jump button. Then, as your character comes back down, rotate your mouse 180 degrees, fire your ranged ability, and then rotate the mouse back 180 degrees. Hopefully you hit the ground in approximately the same direction as when you started, and have lost minimal or no forward momentum.

Thanks to the new distracting shot you fired, General Drakkisath is still trying to kill you (which, remember, is what you want to), and if you nailed your jump shot, you haven’t slowed down enough for him to catch you. Now do it a few more times, because his guards are tough, your group isn’t done with them yet, and you still have to cross that bridge without a railing.

So you’ve beaten the odds. Your UBRS raid found 10 random players, including one with the nasty key, and the right composition of tanks, healers and DPS. It took hours. You’ve done the tense toes through the infamous one Leeroy Jenkins roomwhere stepping on a single egg summons five billion deadly baby dragons. You’ve probably walked back from the ridiculously far away graveyard at least once, possibly because, if you were playing on a PvP server, there might be a raid group of 40 players from the opposing faction at the nearby entrance to Molten Core. and it was all too trivial for them to camp your corpses while you were trying to get into UBRS.

But you did it: you made it all the way to General Drakkisath, the final boss. And now the question of whether this will be a successful and complete run of Upper Blackrock Spire rests entirely on your shoulders. Nine strangers depend on you, the fighter, to kite the general to the right.

In an MMORPG, damage classes don’t get many opportunities to feel like the hero of the heist. Your work is more about ‘not doing’ than ‘doing’. Doing do the most damage mechanically by gathering the right equipment. But don’t make aggression, don’t stand in the fire and ruin it, because the healers won’t heal you – it’s a waste of resources. The Real By the way, the heroes of the attack are the tanks and the healers. If they die, that’s one emergency. If you die, it might be a little harder, but we’ll contact you when it’s over.

However, the general’s passing was a rite of passage. It was a skill passed down by word of mouth by more experienced Hunter players that you could use to get instantly invited to any UBRS group. It gave you a sense of ownership and connection with your class; You weren’t just someone playing Hunter, you were a Hunter player.

Now I’m well aware that the jump shot is not the highest caliber reflex skill the gaming world has to offer. It’s not a Chicken Dinner, it’s not a Street Fighter Championship, no Bloodborne with only a DDR path. But World of WarcraftThe game’s endgame culture was one of accepted manuals and meticulously updated player-made calculators, of mathematically optimizing equipment and button macros, creating ideal spell rotations, and memorizing focus firing order and boss patterns.

Kiting the General wasn’t about how good you were at following the math. Or you, you the playerYou either knew how to do it or you didn’t. It wasn’t the right combination of class skills that each character got at level X, or even a piece of loot with a drop rate of only 5%. To be a fighter who could kite the General, you had to be an elite in your category based solely on your skills and interest in the game.

In later updates of World of WarcraftBlizzard made a concerted effort to move away from boss encounters that required specific classes to beat. It was the right choice, as evidenced by how damn hard it was to put together a good UBRS group. And while I was sad that I never got another boss fight where I could express my Hunter pride, there’s still an upside.

By eliminating the demand for class-specific strategies, Blizzard leveraged the experience to play that class-specific strategy is even rarer. So what if no one needs to kite the general anymore? I’ll always be among the elite of Hunter players who can say they’ve done it, and World of Warcraft will be the closest we’ll ever get to that classic (and admittedly dubious) elite gamer cachet.