What Makes A Cleric Tick (A Fuse, Maybe)?

Posted August 11th, 2003 under DAoC.

So at the start of the evening, I was all excited. See, I had THIS fantastic story to tell you about:

Yup. No photoshop trickery there – I really did kill him! He was a level 49 Shadowblade, down in DF ganking Albs. But with my superior firepower, I brought him down!

Okay, okay, I’m pretty much lying: although I did kill him, there was a couple other guys beating on him already. If it had been me alone, I would’ve gotten killed before I even knew what was going on. But still, the fact remains that “Pessum just killed Rakin” spammed throughout DF. Can you imagine how much humiliation that guy had to face when his realm mates heard about it?

“Pessum? Ain’t that Kwip?”
“Dude – did you just get killed by Kwip?”
“/appeal I think something’s screwed up – someone just got killed by Kwip. Could you check that out, please? We think he’s cheating.”

I mean, think about it – if I got hundreds of appeals about my name alone, can you imagine how many people appealed me getting a kill on someone? Well, if you’re one of the people appealing it to Mythic, please stop. I assure you, it was merely a glitch, and it won’t happen again.

Now then. The rest of the night.

I was pretty happy with that whole thing. So happy, I made the terminal mistake of thinking I might actually know what the hell I’m doing in this game. Which of course was a sin in the eyes of the Gord, and he had to move swiftly to punish me for such arrogance.

The trouble started when I joined a group. Normally I have this speech prepared: “Hi, I’m Pessum, I’m going to get your entire party killed multiple times and do things of such staggering stupidity you will want to blame them on a computer glitch. However, if your party is really good, you might survive long enough to use my pbt. Highly unlikely, but still possible. If you don’t want me in your group, I understand.”

But tonite, with my new-found confidence, I somehow overlooked warning everyone. So now this group of unsuspecting goombahs thought they had just signed on a competent Theurg who was going to actually help them. Sigh. Poor bastiches. Never had a chance.

We descend into Darkness Falls (they had to come get me – that should’ve been their warning right there). Enroute, I got to meet Elrawen, whom some of you might know from the N3 boards as having the best introductory post ever. Now she has stated before that she is a Cleric, and that she will gladly rez anyone.

However, I don’t think she’d ever met someone of my… talents… before.

So my group starts hunting. We’re in the next room over from Elrawen. So she’s close enough to hear the screams when I get my whole party killed the first time.

“Pessum, what the hell are you doing?”
“That’s going to bring ALL of them!”
“Look out!”
“Gack!”

Like a good sport, she comes over, rezzes us all, and chuckles at my ‘zany antics.’

After about the twentieth time she had to do that, she was forcing the laughs, I’m pretty sure.

Honestly, I’m someone that’s used to screwing up horrifically and dying often. But even I was amazed at the amount of death I wrought that night. I mean, sheesh, if we start hitting half a dozen, I’m in rare form. But I died six times in less than an hour. Do the math yourselves, kiddos. That’s once every ten minutes. Impressive, huh?

The experience really revealed a new truth to me: people that play Clerics obviously have some seriously deep-rooted guilt they need to work off. Well, no, not Smite Clerics – they’ve just got a lot of pent-up frustration and self-righteousness (just kidding, Phil! Put down the hammer!). But think about it: to spend all your time following idiots like me around, only to pick up the pieces of my own personal catastrophe? How much bad karma can you really have that needs worked off?

I know I couldn’t do it. No way could I follow someone like me around all day and save him from his own stupidity. I mean, I want to choke the heck out of myself now. How do Clerics not spend all their time gloating over corpses? Someone would send me a tell, and I’d be like, “Oh-ho! And silly me, I told you that you were all going to die if you kept trying to fight those big monsters, didn’t I? Guess what you and the career of Winona Ryder have in common? THEY’RE BOTH DEAD AND NOBODY’S GOING TO BRING THEM BACK!” and then I’d gloat over their corpses.

In fact, this makes me want to roll up a cleric and just follow the dumb people around who regularly get everyone around them killed. I’ll make a big point of spec’ing my rez skill. And then I will simply choose not to resurrect their sorry butts!