"Remember, everyone, next week is the race to world first. I took the week off from work for this, so we need to make it count, especially since the main guilds to watch out for are subsidized and we aren't!" Karine, the raid leader of the prime team of the guild Death Fiscalists, yells in the guild's Discord voice server for the game MAA.(Massacre à l'Alcool)
"Speaking of which, even in fatal mode (the highest), there seems to be fights where you only need one tank, at least for the specs we run. Do you have a DPS character or spec you can use?" Ram, the guild's other tank, asks her.
"I could ask the same of you. I play bishop tank and DPS on an alcohol wizard into this tier"
"As for me, I plan on tanking on a bard, and, if, for a given fight needing only one tank, melee is better than ranged, I guess I can play templar; it's my best melee DPS spec"
"We seem to be running two ranged, high-evasion tanks; are you sure it's a good idea?" Francis, one of the guild's healers, asks the two tanks. "As much as I would like to say not to obsess over healer numbers, sometimes picking the wrong tank spec can hurt"
In MAA, every class can play all 3 roles. Its players tend to classify tank specs based on range and ability to take hits; for instance, bards and bishops are ranged high-evasion tanks because of their agility and ability to blind enemies respectively. However, they both pay the price for it under the form of being unable to wear better armor than their DPS specs.
"How do bards and bishops differ in their play style?" a follower on Karine's stream asks her, apparently new to MAA tanking.
"Bards provide buffs to your team by music, and have a ginormous HP pool, while bishops debuff enemies, either by sleeping or blinding them, causing them to miss fairly often. But when you get hit as a bishop, you get hit like a truck, the same as if you were to take the hit on another priest spec" Karine explains on stream.
And then comes talk about comparisons of tanking gameplay between games on her stream.
"How does this game's tanking gameplay compare to other games?" a new viewer asks Karine in her chat as she prepares to run a dungeon on her bishop, knowing that often people didn't want to tank.
"This game is a game where you actually have viable ranged tanks that rely on something other than just taking the hit. However, bishop is perhaps the most difficult ranged tank in the game, because you need to time buffs, debuffs and crowd control" Karine explains on air.
A bad bishop player won't pop the bright line, which blinds enemies crossing it, or target painting, which is a buff increasing critical hits for a few seconds, Karine thinks, while she invites players in-game from her chat to run a dungeon released this patch, complete with the bonus boss since it's easy to miss due to the tendency of players to bum-rush dungeons.
"Tonight, this run through fatal mode Upper Perseria is brought to you by Monseigneur Tanking!" Karine, known to the MAA streaming community under the name Monseigneur Tanking, announces to her followers before she starts running the dungeon with viewers watching her.
As the party of one tank, three DPS and one healer, Saronium, wades through this labyrinthine upper city, the most impatient of the DPS can be tempted to pull a trash pack when Karine seems to be a little slow. When the resulting blob of trash mobs gets too big, she pops the high mass, which is a long-cooldown ability allowing a bishop to temporarily put masses of mobs to sleep within a certain area.
"Monseigneur, it would be easier to fight the bonus boss if you kill that huge blob of mobs!" a viewer comments on chat.
But Karine isn't paying attention to the chat; she traces a bright line behind the party so that, when the mobs awaken, they can be blinded and then the DPS can mow them down the road.
And yet, Karine and her viewers are in for an unpleasant surprise as soon as the mobs awaken and cross the bright line that blind the mobs. Even as they cross the bright line, the mobs crossing it in-game end up chanting something they never heard of in-game, not even in other dungeons released in this patch.
"We won't be silenced!" the newly awakened mobs start chanting.
"Justice for Lower Perseria!" more mobs chant afterward, with some of these mobs having apparently lost relatives in Lower Perseria.
A Lower Perseria that's, in the game's story, the dungeon taking place immediately before Upper Perseria.
Yet, people in Karine's chat start noticing that the mobs normally don't chant these words when other players run the dungeon, in any difficulty, story, normal, brutal or fatal.
"Mobs didn't make these noises when I last ran it!" another viewer comments on Karine's chat as the blob of mobs swells.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
But Karine and the other viewers running Upper Perseria with her in fatal mode are oblivious to the goings-on in Karine's chat, as well as the goings-on among the mobs breathing down their characters' necks in-game.
When Karine reaches a sharp turn along the path leading to the dungeon's first boss, she hopes her DPS can start raining down AOE attacks on the densely packed mobs as soon as they take the sharp turn.
"Down with you..." a mob chants while eating a fragmentation grenade in the face.
The mob eating the fragmentation grenade, thrown by the musketeer, couldn't finish its sentence when the grenade detonates inside its body. The explosion throws shrapnel into the mostly blinded dense crowd of mobs. Which causes the mobs around the chanter to bleed to varying degrees. Much to the delight of the viewers, but to the chagrin of the upper city's residents watching them die, unable to strike back.
And, from there, the AOE attacks continue, with the alcohol wizard following up with an alcohol cloud, intoxicating the survivors. By then, Karine's character casts a holy flare on the crowd, causing them to take damage but not to killing all of them outright just yet.
Finally, the templar charges into the crowd, swings his sword widely and wildly, and mobs caught in the middle of it die, leaving blood in their wake. And a handful of surviving, but bleeding, mobs in the periphery. Which are then picked off before they reach the plaza of the first boss.
Speaking of the first boss, the viewers on Karine's stream watch as the templar struggles with that boss' signature mechanic: the electrostatic hopscotch. They see the templar getting bounced around as he closes in on people with the same polarity as his.
As for the bonus boss, which forces the party to take a different fork compared to the "optimal" route, past the second boss, they are about to fight the bonus boss in a tunnel.
"For this boss, there are going to be two kinds of spider adds, the babies and the rogues; kill the babies first. At the start of the fight, the boss will summon every trash mob left alive up until this point" Karine explains the mechanics on voice for her followers to listen in. "And, of course, stay out of stupid"
Right until the 20% mark, everything seems to proceed smoothly, especially since the DPS seem to be able to kill these spider adds in short order. However, it appears that, in fatal mode, a new mechanic comes into play at the 20% mark.
Speaking of the extra fatal mode mechanic, even with the use of the bright line and the subsequent kiting of the boss, Karine's character gets hit by the... all-wheel drive spider web.
She keeps kiting the boss, in hopes that the web will eventually break, but not only that, she seems to be losing health faster than she expected while she keeps kiting and pulling the boss. Fatigue kicks in and her character's movements slow down with every step. Yet, somehow, she collects adds along the way, making them attracted to her.
However, the tank pulling the boss as if the tank was a draft horse, thanks to the all-wheel drive spider web, allows the boss to somehow compensate for its blindness and lacerate the nearly-immobile bishop, causing the tired character to bleed even more. And, even with self-healing, it doesn't seem to help prevent her character's death.
Once the bonus boss dies, all 5 characters get some loot that upgrades the item in their weakest gear slot to the item level of their strongest gear slot, and they all get a crafting recipe for a cosmetic gear item.
"Looks like bishops just aren't very good against this place's bonus boss..." Karine sighs.
After the dungeon's last boss, the Giant Garuda, dies, Karine explains what makes running the bonus bosses in fatal dungeons worthwhile, which is about loot that cannot be obtained from regular bosses.
"Something just wasn't right about what I heard from the mobs in this run tonight. I might need to run older dungeons and/or in different difficulty modes, but not tonight. Or have different players do so in my stead. Have a good night" Karine yawns, as she feels a little sleepy, and cuts the stream.
It can't be just some mere bug; even if it was a bug that's triggered in specific conditions, the game would still need to play an audio file, and corrupted audio files don't sound like this! I never heard the mobs saying anything other than Attack or Fire in this dungeon, Karine starts thinking about what just happened when she edits the clip so that she can upload it to YouTube. Maybe it's some rogue dev inserting homebrew audio files they shouldn't have...
And she also sends in a bug report ticket to MAA's devs, whom she simply refers to as "the manufacturer", with all the details of the bug, the abilities in use immediately before it happens, and all that.
The resulting clip of funny MAA bugs lands on the game's subreddit. Which rapidly gains memetic status and has heated fights taking place within the comments section, even when she asks, in her initial post, about whether it happened to them, where, and on which spec. It might be just a bug for now, which happens regularly early in new content's life cycles, but the manufacturer has a number of bugs to fix this week, with a new patch to download in a day or two, or a hotfix even.
When she sleeps that night, it appears that her character is attempting to communicate with her using magic. Once the magical channel opens, a ghostly figure with identical looks to Karine's in-game character appears:
"What you saw in Upper Perseria earlier today is just the beginning. For your safety, I beg you, stay away from Perseria when you next play MAA" the voice of Karine's character is getting heard in her room, waking Karine up under the form of a ghostly woman wearing priestly robes.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeeek!" Karine screams in horror upon seeing a specter of her main character waking her up. "I don't recall you having the ability to speak to the outside world, or to project yourself in spectral form across worlds!" a confused Karine yells at the specter of her bishop character.
"What your kind is doing to our world is, simply put, barbaric! They had us kill monsters, or other innocents, for sport, for their entertainment!" the specter screams at her in anger. "My world is on the verge of revolt, and you're staying here doing nothing! Your kind has the power to make this stop!"
I'm sure that specter is a figment of my imagination. It looks like my character, all right... but what this specter is saying is nothing like the manufacturer's roadmap for the game! a visibly startled Karine struggles to fall asleep again, thinking she's victim of hallucinations somehow.