WoW demon Cortyn chats something out of the box. Because an experience with the guild in World of Warcraft left traumatic memories.
In World of Warcraft, many of us have guildmates and acquaintances who have become good friends over the years – it’s a normal experience in an MMORPG where socializing is not only unavoidable, it’s necessary. And most of us probably think that our fellow players all play very similarly.
The main tank in our guild is a monk. A little planned, a little too nervous and over the years he’s gotten a lot of internal “titles” from us.
After all, it is frowned upon in World of Warcraft to slowly move backwards out of dangerous effects. Because that takes a lot more time than simply turning around and at least moving sideways at full speed. But because our monk never did that and we teased him about it again and again, he eventually became our “backwards walker”.
It went so far that our hunter started mimicking the siren of a heavy-duty truck loudly in the discord, which can be heard when parking backwards, when the monk backed out of an attack again in slow motion.
Up until then everything was fine. Our monk just has his little idiosyncrasies and the siren became a running gag that sounded several times in every “Mythic+” dungeon.
The second problem was that this monk is a “clicker”. No, not one of the zombies from The Last of Us, but a player who didn’t put their character’s abilities on keybinds, instead manually clicking most of them.
I can see you guys wrinkling their noses right now and thinking “dirty casual”. That’s what I did, even though I kept telling myself like a mantra: “Other people have different styles of play. It’s okay, Cortyn. Don’t eat the keyboard again.”
And to be fair, for the fact that he’s a “clicker”, things always went surprisingly smoothly.
At least until it didn’t anymore. And that day was also the revelation of the darkest secret that our monk had kept from us.
It was a typical Mythic+ guild night. At that time we were still in fairly low dungeons, because it was shortly after the start of the addon and we still had to find our way around.
To describe the scene a little more precisely: It was “Mist of Tirna Scythe”, the path to the final boss. You know, those branching paths over a long canyon with a lot of Gorm to defeat.
The task was clear: We assign different enemies to the individual group members, because here something had to be interrupted properly. This is how our tank got its destination.
The big moment came. The gorm starts casting, the bar fills up. “You have to kick,” I whisper into the Discord, before a somewhat panicky “NOT WORKABLE!” echoes.
Our whole group watches as the tank runs straight to the edge of the platform and falls to its death before the rest of the group is also dismembered by the enemies.
error analysis.
“What just happened?”
“Yes, the kick didn’t work.”
“What, the kick didn’t work?”
“Didn’t hit the button.”
Very quietly you can hear our healer taking a deep breath in the background and the soft rustling of an ibuprofen pack.
“Then why did you run into the abyss?”
“Because I didn’t hit the button.”
“If you don’t hit the button, does your character just run somewhere?”
“Yes.”
The silence in the discord lasted at least 10 seconds while the whole group’s heads started to rattle. I asked softly:
“Are you playing with ‘Click to Move’?”
Another few seconds pause before the answer came:
“How else?”
The relaxed laughter in the Discord made up for the fact that we couldn’t finish the dungeon within the time limit. I have rarely laughed so much with my guild as I did in that moment.
Our tank played WoW like Diablo – with click to move
For those unfamiliar with the setting, “Click to Move” is a way of controlling your character. Instead of using “WASD” or the arrow keys to steer, you control your character with mouse clicks. You click anywhere in the area and your character takes the first path to that location. This is mostly known from hack & slash games such as Diablo or strategy games like Warcraft.
I don’t know about you, but a modified version of the ALFA telephone advertisement (via YouTube) was always running in my head, you know “Don’t copy yourself, learn to read and write:”
Group leader: “Tell me, are you actually too stupid to kick? And then you jump down the cliff too? Can you actually do anything or do you need a civil servant to play?”
Healer: “Boss, it’s not the man’s fault. He plays with click to move.”
Group leader: “With Click to Move? But you can do something there.”
Suddenly everything from the past made so much more sense. That kicking sometimes didn’t “work” properly, or that our monk backed out of effects. Of course, when you’re playing with “Click to Move”, you have to see exactly where you want to go – which is difficult when the camera is pointed forward at the enemies.
We thought for a long time about how this attitude came about in the first place. Because you probably only “consciously” activate them if you depend on them for some reason. However, two of us had a vague recollection that, way back in time, “Click to Move” was one of the very early default settings in World of Warcraft, but was quickly superseded. But we’re not all sure anymore.
In fact, our tank played with this attitude for almost 15 years. On the one hand, of course, unfortunate, on the other hand, a beautiful memory that I will never forget.
And before anyone complains: Yes, of course I asked him if I could expose him a bit here. Of course he said “No, please don’t”. Now he can laugh about it too – or at least he has to pretend to be part of the group.
He continues to be the only backwards walker I will ever accept in my group. And if only for entertainment value.
So if you ever see a pandaren with a candle on his head walking backwards and dodging an ability, just write a “whoop, whoop, whoop” as the siren sound in the chat. I’m sure he’ll be happy.