Even though Ram is the first to show signs of fatigue, he is the one making the switch in characters, logging out of Béteulle and into his templar, which has been resting in the guild hall. (Or potentially doing other things Ram doesn’t know about, nor would his templar have liked to let him know) Especially since he believes, based on his experience of brutal mode, that this boss can be solo-tanked in all difficulties.
Little does Ram know is that Béteulle could secretly start doing what Clavet did, at least within the confines of the airport, when the Death Fiscalists are going to fight General Confusion in the control tower.
Meanwhile, his guildies move along taxiways, and even past satellite terminals of Terminal 5. Whereas no trash stood between the Cyber-Tech Alligator and the two tanks, here taxiways are littered with trash, such as baggage handlers, police officers with hound dogs, and even airport trucks, such as tankers, stair trucks and so on. Obviously, Ram must have his character travel through empty sections of taxiway until he can catch up to his guildies fighting their way to the control tower.
When Ram finally catches up to his teammates, Karine hears a few notifications for new followers on Streamlabs.
“Thank you for the follow!” Karine tells her new followers on her stream.
The party takes the elevator to the control tower’s top floor, where General Confusion awaits them in a cramped space. That room is littered with radar consoles and bordered by windows.
“For thde codebreaker mechanic...” Karine designates whom she feels is the worst DPS on the first three bosses.
“Wait a minute, this boss is supposed to be the boss where my spec does best; the codebreaker mechanic allows for a window of burst DPS if done properly!” the guild’s assassin retorts. “Caroline should be doing the codebreaker mechanic!”
“Yeah, I was doing it on brutal mode, because skirmishers take a while to set up DoTs, and the burst window the codebreaker mechanic gives us is too short for skirmishers to amount to much” Caroline argues about why the assassin is a poor choice for the mechanic.
“Your turn then, Caro” Karine rules.
On previous bosses, Caro was the one willing to take the most risks to squeeze in extra DPS. However, the skirmisher is the worst ranged DPS spec among those we have, and I expect this boss to favor melee, Karine is left wondering how would the mechanics change. Especially when the codebreaker mechanic might carry additional implications in fatal mode they don’t know about yet.
“From here on out, I say you take bio breaks only after your character dies. Just don’t cause wipes on purpose” Karine lays down the ground rules for bio breaks for the rest of the session.
Here it seems like, as the Canadian players play into their evening, their Japanese arch-nemeses are approaching high noon. The raid leader, playing a vandal, that is, a melee tank with stealth, has fallen asleep somewhere in Misawa, much to the chagrin of people watching the race to world first.
“Oyasumi Kataparuto” (Good night, Kataparuto) Kataparuto’s tired raid leader tells both his own guildies and his viewers, and yawns, not realizing that it isn’t night-time in Misawa.
Which, after he logs off the game, causes the other Kataparuto players to stop playing. However, that hasn’t gone unnoticed by other viewers, especially not Breathalyzer News’ podcaster.
“We lost the Japanese feed! However, it’s remarkable that a country with such a limited player base somehow clawed its way into world first position!” the Breathalyzer News podcaster announces while the remaining front-runners, China, Denmark and Korea, have barely started fighting the fourth boss.
And yet, even they keep accumulating wipes due to player fatigue. Even after having drunk several energy drinks during the day. When one such wipe happens to the Death Fiscalists, and fatigue made Caroline lose focus on the codebreaker mechanic, which is a counter to the boss’ codemaker mechanic...
“I need to go to the bathroom!” Caroline yells, after feeling her belly hurt, and then dashes to the bathroom, phone in hand.
“We’re due for a bio break” Karine signals her guildies, while brewing a cup of coffee.
“Caro has been a little slow on the cipher and hence we ate too many stacks of the neurotoxic gas!” Francis gets a little hasty in blaming Caro.
Each stack of the neurotoxic gas increases the likelihood of getting stunned for 3 seconds. Not to mention inflicts more damage over time per stack, Francis starts thinking about why he sees fit to blame Caro for the latest wipes on General Confusion, as he eats a snack to help him squeeze a few extra pulls out of his body prior to passing out.
Meanwhile, Karine also dashes to the bathroom after she got started brewing her cup of coffee. She also takes some aspirin to ensure that she won’t get headaches in the next few hours, after this bio break taken by her guildies. She also realizes that her team can’t keep it up much longer, and neither do their core opponents still active.
Once everyone is back into play, and have returned from their bathroom breaks, Ram has an announcement to make:
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“We’ll keep going until midnight EST, unless we feel like we’re closing in on a kill, in which case we might do another pull or two” Ram tells the raid team.
“We’re making good progress, and hopefully Caro is in a better position to work the cipher!” Karine prays for Caro to be in mental shape.
The wipes continue for the Death Fiscalists, but they make more-or-less steady progress towards killing the fourth boss with each pull. When the appointed time arrives, and the players spent a whopping 16 hours trying to down bosses from Operation Heathrow, they are in the final phase of the boss.
But one misstep from Karine going into the last few percent of the fight makes her forget about the bright line. And hence gets her character killed because the boss hits her, which would otherwise have been a miss. And the other players fall like dominoes, with Caroline falling last, since manning the cipher didn’t generate any aggro.
“Do you want to keep going?” Karine asks her guildies while she waits on the bright line to recharge.
Everyone answers yes to this question and Caroline, still trucking at the cipher, is making her prayers. As are the other players, who kept wiping over and over on that night. Fingers crossed that this pull will be the right one, Karine prays, especially since the players start feeling the fatigue in their bodies.
With the players’ headaches mounting, they start feeling a little dizzy, making it harder for them to stay focused, even for those who drank energy drinks. However, their opponents are doing the same thing, also thinking that one more pull will get them closer to winning against General Confusion.
Stay on target… stay on target! Karine starts applying target paint on the boss as soon as Caro triggers the boss’ codemaker mechanic during the input phase. Which compels Caro to DPS the boss for ten seconds since she has a clear line of sight on him.
Chasing Karine around the control tower, the boss crosses a bright line. Doing so makes the burst window last much longer than it would normally have, since the codemaker mechanic takes longer to perform.
At the end of the extended burst window, the boss falls in a puddle of blood. They all seem to be getting some joy.
“We did it! We killed General Confusion! Now, I strongly advise you to log off the game and go to sleep!” an exuberant Karine jumps for joy in looting General Confusion, while logging off the game.
“Karine, it seems like Denmark beat us to it!” Caroline tunes in to the Breathalyzer News podcast, with the Danish national anthem being played on said podcast. “By a few seconds perhaps, but still”
Shortly before Karine goes to bed, she is once again visited by astral projections of MAA player characters. However, this time, she’s visited not by one but three astral projections. From left to right, Clavet, Monseigneur and Caroline’s skirmisher.
“Karine, have you come to terms with the fact that people in your world control real people in ours?” an angry Monseigneur asks her. “It’s not the first time I told you about the suffering of our kind! The picture your world portrays of ours is pretty embellished!”
“How so?” a confused, tired Karine feels like she has double vision.
“Your world seems to treat the death of our kind as something that can be reversed, and that we can recover from anything short of death. But the cold, hard truth is that constantly being on quests of all kinds subjects us to injuries not reflected on a health or status bar, such as overuse injuries” Clavet answers her player.
“And even then, what players calls our deaths, doesn’t actually result in us dying” Monseigneur comments on the so-called deaths she suffered during the race to world first. She then points Karine to a ring on her right middle finger.
“Why are you showing me this ring? A hallucination wearing rings is nothing special to me!” Karine yells at Monseigneur, unable to make heads of this situation.
“This ring activates an angelic beacon that prevents me from dying after a wipe, but it activates only when my health bar goes down to zero, that is, when I’m unable to fight”
“Do you realize just how much of an asset does having this kind of ring makes me for the Perserian rebels?” Clavet also wears the same ring. “At dawn, we’re going to attack a prison camp where protesters and other political prisoners are held, awaiting trial”
Am I delirious? Is Clavet really going to do this? I expected her to remain in the airport’s premises while I use Monseigneur to compete in the race to world first! Karine seems to feel like her mental health has worsened, and her headaches are mounting. I really hope these hallucinations end with the end of the race.
“And Caroline! While she mostly gets the mechanics right, sometimes I feel like she fails to consider the physical demands of raiding!” Caroline’s skirmisher vents about the inconsiderate risks Caroline has her take.
“You’re telling me nothing new!” an irritated Karine screams at the astral projections.
“I have one, but not everyone has an angelic beacon ring!” Clavet points out.
“Caroline only seems to think about my DPS, and sometimes to the detriment of my health or of other people’s health!” Caroline’s skirmisher keeps complaining.
So it seems like these angelic beacon rings are also double-edged swords. While that beacon saves me from the brink of death, I seem to be subject to some otherworldly entity’s every whim whenever the other property of the beacon is active. It seems like my brain is hijacked, that I’m not in control of myself, when the other property of the beacon ring is active, Clavet’s hyperactive brain seems to be getting a flash of insight when neither feature of the angelic beacon ring is activated. However, she keeps to herself because she still feels like it’s too much information for Karine to process in her current state. It seems like I can conjure only a fraction of my full power in rapid-fire casting.
With Karine’s fatigue turning to exhaustion, she slips into her bed, and her mind still plays tricks on her in her dreams. Monseigneur told me about how we on Earth held some power over her world. However, for some reason, she, and Clavet too, always appears to me when I’m sleep-deprived. I can kind of feel like her complaints sound like the players are torturing their characters, in ways clothing, titles, gear or housing wouldn’t placate them. And yet, the only way to set the world free the way my characters keep implying is to close the game.
Meanwhile, the other players are also feeling the fatigue from the intensity of the first day of the race to world first, and so do the other players from other guilds.
As a result, Karine has slept quite a bit, longer than usual, because of her having played over sixteen hours almost continuously during day 1 of the RWF. When she awakens, she sees that, while the main opponents have caught up to the Death Fiscalists, none of them killed Tiamat yet.
When she starts streaming day 2 of the race to world first, Karine makes a request to her stream’s viewers:
“Can anyone refer to me a psychiatrist? I think I need a psychiatric evaluation; I keep getting hallucinations at night!” the streamer then gives specifics of what she wants out of a psychiatrist.