Gabryell slept straight through until morning.
Carlos was still snoring when Gabryell asked Hugo, who was already at his computer, "When did he get back?"
"A little after six."
Damn.
He really had pulled an all-nighter.
"How did their Molten Core progression go?"
Gabryell naturally wanted to know how the guild's self-organized run had gone.
Hugo gave him a blank look.
"What's MC?"
Only then did Gabryell remember that dungeon and raid abbreviations hadn't really caught on yet.
"Molten Core. MC for short."
"Oh."
Hugo nodded.
"Carlos came back with bloodshot eyes. I asked him how it went, and he only managed one sentence before collapsing into bed."
"What did he say?"
Hugo imitated the irritated drawl Carlos had slipped into.
"Fuck you, Blizzard... what kind of bullshit is this?"
Gabryell burst out laughing.
Carlos had been so tilted by the wipes that even the way he talked had changed.
Gabryell sat down, turned on his computer, logged into the game, and immediately opened the guild roster.
Of everyone who had voluntarily joined the Molten Core progression run last night, only one person was still online.
"It was brutal," DaVinci said.
"How brutal?"
"We died nonstop. We got nowhere. Spent the whole night corpse-running."
"What was your best pull?"
"We got one of the giants down to 60%. Those two at the entrance hit way too hard. One Stomp stunned everyone, another chunked half the melee, then the next one killed a whole group. Even Carlos and Susie couldn't survive three."
Gabryell frowned.
"What level were the giants?"
"63."
"Both of them?"
"Yeah. Both level 63."
All right.
Gabryell could only offer a moment of silence for the raid that had gone into MC last night.
There were two types of Molten Giants, level 62 and level 63. The level 62 ones didn't use the AoE Stomp, while the level 63 ones did.
And the group had run straight into two level 63 giants at the entrance.
At first, they had almost certainly tried tanking both together and let the repeated Stomps tear the raid apart.
If they had eventually gotten one down to 60%, they had probably figured out that the two needed to be separated.
Even then, the unnerfed giants hit brutally hard.
If the healers eased off for even a moment, the main tank could simply disappear.
That was exactly why Gabryell insisted on a minimum gear baseline for the core raid.
Without a solid foundation from the major level-60 dungeons, Molten Core progression didn't punish just one undergeared player.
It punished the entire raid.
After finishing the conversation, Gabryell Alt-Tabbed out of the game and opened his browser to check the Azeroth Community Forums.
Two topics dominated the forums that morning.
The first was Fearless killing Thrall on Tichondrius.
The second was the wave of Molten Core progression attempts across the server the night before.
Fearless taking down Thrall had Alliance players all over Tichondrius celebrating.
They were suddenly very happy they had rolled Alliance, and the forums were full of people taunting the Horde.
"Let's see you do it."
The Horde players were furious, but there wasn't much they could say.
If they were really that tough, the Alliance told them, they could go kill Bolvar themselves.
Gabryell figured quite a few major guilds on Tichondrius would probably try storming the enemy capitals and killing faction leaders over the next few days.
"Bolvar, Magni... good luck."
That was about all the moral support he could offer the Alliance leaders.
In the current state of the game, breaking into the opposing faction's capital and killing a faction leader was still extremely difficult.
Without someone like Gabryell, carrying experience from a later life, it wasn't something most guilds could pull off anytime soon.
"Not bad. The server's big guilds are doing better than I expected."
Gabryell read through the Molten Core threads and found that several familiar guilds had already managed to kill one of the entrance giants.
Unfortunately, most of them had burned nearly every major cooldown just to do it.
By the time they turned to the second giant, they had nothing left.
Main tanks opened with Shield Wall and Last Stand just to stay alive.
DPS immediately blew their long-cooldown damage abilities to burn one giant as quickly as possible.
Healers threw out Lay on Hands, Nature's Swiftness, and whatever else they had just to keep the tank standing.
"Flasks and potions are about to get expensive."
Gabryell closed the forums and returned to the game.
He headed straight for the Auction House and started buying every reasonably priced flask and potion material he could find, along with any useful rare recipes.
He wanted to stock up before the rest of Tichondrius realized how much progression raiding was going to consume.
"Quite a few lucky players around here."
When he searched for flask recipes, the Alliance side of Tichondrius didn't disappoint him.
Besides Flask of the Titans, several other recipes were already listed.
"Recipe: Flask of Supreme Power. Buy."
"Recipe: Flask of Distilled Wisdom. Buy."
"Recipe: Flask of Petrification... Damn, only fifteen gold? Definitely buying that."
"Recipe: Flask of Chromatic Resistance. Twenty gold? I'd be an idiot not to."
Gabryell bought all five major flask recipes he could find.
At these prices, buying them now was practically guaranteed profit.
If you wanted a first kill, you couldn't cheap out.
If gear and execution weren't enough, consumables could make up part of the difference.
Potions.
Flasks.
Anything that gave the raid an edge.
First kills cost gold.
There was no way around it.
After cleaning out the Auction House, Gabryell checked the gold left in his bags.
Damn.
He'd gone from loaded to broke in one shopping spree.
"My alts are level 40 now. Nothing urgent to do, so I might as well boost them."
Going broke had a way of making gold farming look very attractive.
Gabryell remembered the four alts he had leveled earlier.
All four had been parked at level 40 ever since.
He had been too busy with max-level quest chains and farming the major level-60 dungeons to work on them.
Now that things had finally calmed down, he could boost them to 60 and make some gold along the way.
He had deliberately left all four characters parked at Maraudon's purple entrance so he wouldn't have to make the trip again.
"Darnassus to Rut'theran Village, then fly to Desolace. That should be faster."
Gabryell checked his action bars.
No Teleport: Darnassus.
"Maybe I never dragged it onto the bar."
He opened his spellbook and looked again.
Still nothing.
"Oh, come on."
Then it hit him.
He had never even been to Darnassus.
How the hell was he supposed to know Teleport: Darnassus?
"I'm a disgrace to Mages everywhere."
He hadn't even learned all his teleports.
Gabryell was starting to question whether he deserved to call himself a Mage.
Imagine someone offering to pay him for a portal to Darnassus so they could make Mooncloth, only for him to admit he couldn't open one.
They would probably assume he was being an asshole and refusing on purpose.
"Any Mages in the guild know Portal: Darnassus?" he asked in guild chat.
"I do," OnlyOne replied first.
Gabryell checked his location.
Ironforge.
"Open one for me."
"Sure."
OnlyOne accepted without hesitation.
Gabryell invited him to the party, and a moment later OnlyOne came over and opened the portal.
Gabryell tried to trade him one gold for the service.
OnlyOne declined.
"I don't charge guildmates for portals. Especially not you."
What a guy.
Gabryell made a mental note of the favor.
Someone that helpful deserved some support in return.
He stepped through the portal and arrived in Darnassus.
First, he went to learn Teleport: Darnassus and Portal: Darnassus.
Then he headed toward Rut'theran Village.
He hadn't unlocked Darkshore's flight path yet, so he took the boat there first, then flew from Darkshore to Nijel's Point.
"Today I need to get the alts to 50 so I can take them into Stratholme."
The plan was to boost them to level 50 in Maraudon, then borrow Coldhands's account and use a two-Mage Stratholme boost to push them even higher.
Once this batch reached level 60, Gabryell would level another set of alts as backups for future GDKP runs.
And for the next batch, he'd roll a Rogue.
He'd use GDKP to get Thunderfury, then build the flashiest Hemorrhage Rogue imaginable with Teebu's and Thunderfury.
He didn't care what the DPS looked like.
Teebu's and Thunderfury just had to look cool.