Tales of Onineko Past: Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest
Greetings All and welcome to the first installment in a blog series I’ve decided to write to drum up a bit of excitement for the upcoming Shadowlands release. Tales of Onineko Past. In each installment I’ll detail the events of an historic moment in Onineko in the stylistic tone of a classic Roak Poast.
In this addition, we talk about the fabled Legendary staff of the Firelands raid: Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest.
A long time ago, before Blizzard adopted the “Legendaries for All” policy. Orange weapons were a sign of elite prestige reserved for only the greatest and most dedicated of players. Thus, it was quite a big deal when Firelands was announced and Blizzard further announced that the legendary staff would be obtainable in both the 10 and 25 man raid difficulties.
It was not long after this announcement that our story begins. I logged in on a typical raid night, ready for the nights festivities, when no sooner than the game had loaded, I was inundated with a whisper from all four casters in my raid team, each with some variation of the phrase “WTF is going on?”. Before I even had a chance to consider how to reply to each of these people did I receive yet another surprise.
Roaktahl has been promoted to Officer.
Oh dear, what did I do to deserve this? You see Onineko back in the day used to be an American guild predominantly run by American players playing at American times. However for those of us with jobs, raiding at 11am on a Tuesday wasn’t really viable, so I took some initiative and recruited up an Australian team that would raid Aussie times. I did this without permission or consent from the rest of the guild and for all intents and purposes, nobody cared.
That is until legendaries were involved.
Still blindsided by this whole mess I waited for Morley (then GM of Onineko) to explain the drama and why half my raid team was ready to riot. Now Morley fumbled his words at the best of times, what he intended to say was now that we had two functional raiding teams it might be possible for us to form a single 25 man team (massive timezone differences be damned) and in such a scenario, we’d need to decide who received staff bits to form the legendary and out of the people in his raid team their Mage was the most suitable.
What he actually told my raid team was to the effect that all 10 man teams would be dissolved and we’d form a 25 man group and the staff would go to the mage in the US team.
Of course none of this actually mattered due to the aforementioned time difference as our raid teams would never be able to merge into one. I diplomatically explained this to both Morley and the rest of my raid and the greatest drama to ever impact Onineko in it’s entire history (at the time), was resolved.
The next challenge however, would be determining who to give the staff to.
As I mentioned before, legendaries were a sign of prestige and glory. The unique designs and models were recognisable anywhere and most raiders would trade their left nutsack (or ovary) for a chance at one. Given how passionate the casters in my team were about ensuring our raid received the staff, I feared the worst, but in my heart I knew who I wanted to give it to.
I approached one of my warlocks – Souli. Souli had been raiding with me since early Wrath and even decided to foolishly server/faction transfer back to Blackrock with me at the start of Cata. He was my best dps and a decent bloke, someone I’d be proud to give the staff to. I grabbed him for a 1v1 in whatever chat program we used and told him the good news. Souli – I want you to have the staff.
However, instead of the gratitude and endless praise I expected, Souli thanked me and explained that he just got a new job that would be transferring him to Europe in a few months, and while he wanted nothing more than the staff, it didn’t make sense for him to take it and then unsubscribe. I was grateful for Souli’s response, as a similar event happened to me in Vanilla when our main tank received Thunderfury and promptly quit WoW a week later.
No matter, I had a backlog of casters who’d love this staff. I next approached Meshu our mage and made him the same offer – and was turned down yet again! You see Meshu had decided to leave Sydney and would be moving interstate in a few months. This interruption would detract from playing the game which he was losing interest in anyway. The staff would be in better hands with someone else.
Discouraged, but still with hope. I approached the next caster in the list of ranged my little 10 man team had, a Shadow Priest named Vreenak. Vreenak was BFFs with Souli and made the same faction/server transfer with him just to join my raid. I whispered him after one raid and said Vreenak, please, take the legendary staff and use it to be awesome in my raid team!
Would you believe he rejected me too?
You see, Vreenak was a keen snowboarder and with the Northern Hemisphere’s winter season coming up, he was traveling to Canada to snowboard the entire season and he’d be gone at least four months.
At this point I was ready to reroll Boomkin and take the staff myself. That was until I remembered I had one last caster left in the raid team. An underperforming yet (somewhat) lovable stoner by the name of Licarius. Tenuously I messaged him for a private chat and concealing the fact that I had already asked literally every other eligible player before him, offered him to be the first and only recipient of Dragonwrath.
Even with the game interface between us I could feel Lic’s emotions gushing out as he thanked me profusely for offering it to him. He promised he would do all the content and make great use of the staff as our top dps. I knew at that time (though it would be some years before I understood the implications) that I had a friend for life.
Lic would go on to rank World #6 the first week of normal difficulty Morchok (first boss of Dragon Soul) after every other guild with any semblance of talent switched to heroic and never went back to normal. The guild high record of World #6 still stands today and given Lic’s inability to achieve anything without gift-wrapped legendaries from me, I take full credit for giving him the opportunity to soar so high.
Although to be honest… I’m just glad someone took the damn staff.