By this point, Karine has gained subscribers, and not just followers, since the Death Fiscalists are still in the running for the world first. But she needs to comb through the recommendations to see which ones appear legitimate and which ones don’t.
“I’m going to see this tier through. After the race ends, we shall see” she announces to her viewers, before an email from her colleagues arrives and she must put the stream in be right back mode to answer it.
In the past, when clients come to us and a gaming addiction was involved, I systematically gave them to Karine. She might play MAA and claim the game is not addictive, but even she knows the dangers gaming addicts face, an insolvency professional in training thinks while he awaits Karine’s answer about what to do with the client’s gaming account.
Karine’s mind switches from trying to defeat Tiamat to answering questions about the sale of a gaming account in bankruptcy. You don’t declare a gaming account as an asset in a bankruptcy. It’s usually worth more on the black market than in a bankruptcy auction and, on top of that, games’ terms of service prohibit us from auctioning it off. On top of that, I am not concerned about the seller passing off the addiction, because buyers typically want to run specific content without having to work for it, or buy achievements, Karine tries to formulate a coherent answer for her colleague.
However, angry guildies start questioning when they will even start pulling Tiamat, because they finished clearing the trash on their way to Terminal 4’s helipad. And crossing the 9R/27L runway to get there, while the stream resumes.
“Monseigneur, when will we pull?” Ram asks her.
“Just a bit of patience, please. I need to cross the runway” Karine warns her guildies.
Speaking of runway, aircraft land from the east every 2 minutes so players need to hold short. And the closest taxiway to the helipad leading to Tiamat is approximately halfway. However, when they arrive at the helipad, unlike in lower difficulties, they must pilot the helicopter to the last known position of Tiamat first themselves, rather than to have a NPC pilot do so for them.
“As far as I can make out, in fatal mode, you need to be cautious about your nausea stacks” Ram points out after watching Bulgogi before Karine woke up.
“At how many stacks should I do something special? Or we?” Karine, not having watched anyone else try it before, had no idea of what nausea does in this fight.
Meanwhile, having lost contact with the powers-that-be at Heathrow, Belzebuth issues his orders to the remaining forces, with his own antennae being used for communications with his troops:
“All units, fall back to Gatwick!” Belzebuth yells in his radio unit.
Yet, with the bloody mess left behind by the raiders, the units stationed inside Terminals 2-3-4, who were ordered to fight the intruders after the control tower fell, lack any semblance of cohesion and just took whatever buses, limos or taxis they could find just to get to Gatwick.
What Belzebuth doesn’t suspect is that retreating to Gatwick is about to get far more complicated than he believed, even if the units stationed at Terminals 2-3 were to be sacrificed to cover for the retreat of the Terminal 4 one.
As the tanks get familiar with the luxury helicopter controls, which is spacious enough to seat 10 passengers, they also get a better understanding of the nausea mechanics and what makes them gain nausea stacks. The easy part, for them, is flying to the boss.
When they catch up to the boss, a giant five-headed dragon dwarfing the helicopter they fly on, and sporting blue-green scales, the party must close in on the boss’ back.
It’s then the tanks realize that flying the helicopter is a tricky business, but also that the boss is a clumsy flier. They can out-maneuver the boss, but on the first few pulls, they struggle to understand that they must return to the helicopter periodically, as both the boss and the party are flying on a south-easterly path towards Gatwick.
“We keep wiping because we are unable to keep our nausea stacks under control!” Francis points out to the group.
“The tricky part is that whichever of us doesn’t hold aggro must be flying the helicopter, and stay close to the boss, while not being buffeted by the boss’ wing flapping” Karine makes a comment for Ram. “Or at least not that much”
“Yet at the same time, the helicopter must be positioned in such a way that the boss can’t spit at it without hitting itself” Ram’s head is spinning after piloting the helicopter.
“Is there any kind of air sickness medicine, or barf bag, onboard?” a DPS player who, up to this point, was too preoccupied with the boss’ other mechanics, asks his teammates.
“I wonder if we should just, you know, approach this boss on a diet so we won’t vomit? I guess the food being eaten is part of what goes into the nausea mechanic” Caroline suggests, believing that barf can be prevented if the boss is pulled with the players on an empty stomach.
“I beg you, people in the chat, to tell us what worked for you when you get airsick, because we have trouble with the nausea mechanic!” Karine asks her viewers for help.
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Oh boy… it’s a tight DPS check, food or not. My followers told me that a team hit enrage on this boss upon arrival at Gatwick, but I wonder how much of an impact would food have on the nausea mechanic, Karine starts to think about the implications of this boss, knowing that the helicopter getting shot down or crashing will result in a wipe, one way or another.
Here they need to hack all five heads off the boss before they can take on the boss’ main body.
After wiping for the umpteenth time, the Death Fiscalists realize that there is an order in which to kill off the boss’ parts. And, somehow, no guild has killed Tiamat yet. I can’t believe making the players fly the helicopter and the nausea mechanic makes the boss that much harder! Caroline starts wondering whether something has gone wrong in how they are approaching this boss.
“It appears the helicopter is a little finicky to pilot” Ram sighs, frustrated by his struggles in flying it. “I wonder who here played flew one in another game; if so, are you familiar with the tank mechanics in brutal mode?”
“All I knew was that, while I hold aggro on one head, I need to position myself so that it can’t hit me without hitting a part of the boss” the assassin retorts.
Yet Breathalyzer News start talking about how the helicopter mechanics throw off a lot of teams, be it Bulgogi, Donghua Networks, or even Kronborg.
It seems like, a few hours in, and with no guild seemingly able to get the helicopter mechanic done properly, Karine gets hungry. She takes suggestions from viewers for food as she struggles to keep the heli aloft.
The Death Fiscalists, despite playing better as more pulls are made, are approaching Gatwick and the helicopter comes under anti-aircraft fire. But even CIWS guns could destroy a helicopter.
“We couldn’t even get to the burn because we lose too much DPS uptime to the need to get on the helicopter and off to get air sickness medicine!” Caroline rants as her character gets hit by CIWS fire.
Gatwick’s close-in weapon systems start targeting the players on the boss after the helicopter crashes. However, by doing so, the CIWSs munch through the boss as it lands on runway 8R. The boss survives the sheer number of 30mm rounds being fired at it, but the players die on its back.
“Yeah, if even we couldn’t get it done, I can’t imagine lesser guilds being able to do it either!” Francis comments on its implications.
“We tried everything to fly the helicopter as close to the boss’ spine as possible!” Ram comments while reading the notification left by the manufacturer.
A hotfix is being deployed for the nausea mechanic in fatal mode Operation Heathrow, the pink text is appearing in everyone’s in-game chat boxes. While most players are oblivious to what the hotfix means, the wording is implying the manufacturer might have found issues with nausea on Belzebuth on top of Tiamat. Because Belzebuth, too, is another airborne fight. As a result, all teams running Operation Heathrow in fatal mode are ejected from their instances for a few minutes.
If the nausea becomes cleansable, it might not seem like much of a hotfix from the manufacturer’s standpoint, but it would be a pretty significant nerf, Francis muses while he’s ejected from the instance.
“Finally, the food has arrived! Time to eat some tasty, spicy pork bulgogi!” Karine pays Doordash and then takes her meal to her desk.
Yet, Karine hasn’t finished eating the bulgogi or, more specifically, the jeyuk bokkeum, that Operation Heathrow is open once again. And everyone is at the Terminal 5 roundabout, ready to jump into the magic circle at its center, and go the Terminal 4 helipad.
“Now that’s what I call spicy bulgogi!” Karine quips for her viewers before the party boards the luxury helicopter.
“Since some of us had to endure upwards of forty stacks of nausea before, I recommend that you cleanse the nausea about every fifteen stacks or so. As before, don’t eat before the pull; I don’t think its impact on the nausea mechanic has changed” Francis suggests to them.
Once she sits in the pilot’s seat, they’re treated to a loading screen. As the fight starts, it becomes clear as day the DPS and healers aren’t going to need downtime in the helicopter as they did before the hotfix. Here all guilds that made it to the CIWS phase before have the mechanics done much better since it mostly amounts to doing what they did in brutal mode now. Much to the delight of viewers around the world watching guilds duke it out against Tiamat.
And yet, later in the fight, much later, Karine is about to vomit even when Monseigneur has come close to vomiting several times over in-game. Her nausea, caused by her having pulled this boss so many times today, causes her to fly erratically. And the boss flapping its wings is not helping her. The helicopter gets buffeted over and over, making it impossible for her to maintain control over it, since the boss clipped the rotor, hurting its left wing.
However, as the helicopter crashes only a few hundred meters short from the runway’s threshold, the boss yaws to port.
“Final burn!” Caroline yells in her mic while Ram sees his character die.
Shortly after the removal of the boss’ final head, Karine’s viewers watch, powerless, her team squeeze every ounce of DPS as the headless boss is going to miss the runway. And, by the time the boss gets within CIWS range...
“Stay on the boss’ port side! The CIWSs are firing at the boss’ starboard wing!” Karine tells her team since, for some reason, the demonic CIWSs don’t care about collateral damage.
As they move around the boss’ port side, the boss is taking fire. The DPS also feel the heat as they hit the boss’ innards. With each drop of boss health going down, more blood drips from it, splashing players. Yet, the healers struggle to keep the DPS alive as they get hit by CIWS rounds.
Then a nauseated Karine dashes towards the nearest bathroom. Feeling the urge to vomit, she appears to be missing everything. Even when the boss turns away from Gatwick, and away from CIWS range as well. I really ought to take Pepto-Bismol right now! Karine’s surface thoughts seem to haunt her on her way to the bathroom, where she hopes to find release. But why am I so nauseated? Is it the jeyuk bokkeum or is it my brain being tricked into being in movement my body doesn’t actually feel because of the helicopter mechanic? And I need painkillers, too!
After vomiting, she reaches for both the Pepto-Bismol and the aspirin before returning to her desk, with a little less malaise. She returns to a bloody mess of a field and the dead boss within walking distance of where the helicopter crashed.
“It appears that we were beaten to the world first on this boss by Bulgogi…” Caroline breaks the news to them.
“Speaking of bulgogi, I don’t think I’ll look at bulgogi the same ever again” Karine comments on the mental image bulgogi will conjure in her after this tier’s RWF ends.
Japan ultimately proved a flash in the pan in this race to world first, since Kataparuto has barely begun fighting Tiamat, Korea, on the other hand, might prove a serious contender for this tier. As is Denmark and, of course, Canada. That said, the real rewards of the RWF are reaped on Twitch, over the lifespan of the tier, Karine reflects on Breathalyzer News’ podcast.