Tim was reviewing footage that the Misfit’s had collected during the fight as well as their logs. This had become a ritual for him after they had completed one of their top 10 kills on Magadon, the second boss from the previous raid tier.

There was a certain sense of satisfaction that he had seeing all of the team working nearly seamlessly together to execute their strategy. Tim had always been a huge fan of turn based strategy games when he was a child. It had started when Tim’s dad, Alan had brought out the family’s old strategy games. The first time he’d introduced Tim to Risk, he was hooked. He’d play his dad until Alan was sick of Tim begging to play and then Tim continued on by watching endless videos of strategy games online. Eventually he’d gotten so good at any game that the neighborhood kids wouldn’t play him anymore and eventually even his dad got tired of Tim’s winning. Tim moved on to chess. After a couple of years, he got bored of it and eventually he joined an old turn based forum that mostly consisted of really old gamers. They had introduced him to things like Age of Empires, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and War Games. Those were his foundational games but eventually he started getting involved with some of the more difficult MMOs of the time since they offered the extra difficulty of having to assess strategy in real time. Additionally, having to coordinate with other people who didn’t flawlessly execute your every tactical move added a layer of complexity that sucked him in.

He’d been playing Champions for about six months before he’d met the Misfits in a PUG. Tim had grown fond of these types of spontaneous raids because the margin for error from other random players trying to group together was so high. This allowed him to battle test his theories and make sure that they were truly bullet-proof. Of course, one of the problems that Tim came to realize with these groups was that dealing with the sheer stupidity of humanity was extremely frustrating.

Tim had been having a particularly challenging week when he’d gotten fortunate enough to join a PUG with the Misfits and a few random players. With the new raid content, nobody expected a PUG to be able to make any reasonable progress. When he’d logged in Tim’s hope was that he might be able to clear the first boss so that he would be able to show some progress and perhaps get lucky with a drop. He’d been floored to see how well the group worked together even though they had one random bad player that had been holding them back. Once that player had rage quit after the first few attempts, Tim suggested a tweak to their strategy and the boss went down easily. They ended up clearing two more bosses that night which was unheard of progress for a group that barely knew one another.

After the raid Sean had whispered Tim asking him if he’d be interested in joining the guild. Tim jumped at the chance and quickly the Misfits started showing up on the raid progression roster for their server. Within a month they had cleared their first raid together as Tim quickly started working with Sean to improve their strategies.

One of the first suggestions he’d made to Sean and one they continued to this day was going over combat logs after each battle. Sometimes if a player was dead during a raid fight, they would review the logs during the battle. Reviewing the logs was also a good way to see what they could improve next time. This was one of the key tools for determining their weak points as well as the bosses’ weak points.

Most games had a few key tactics that needed to be employed for a boss fight and sometimes even groups of dungeon mobs were susceptible to such tactics. This was one the ways to increase the chances of defeating them. Of course, another way was to optimize one’s gear and rotations at the individual level. Additionally, there were group tactics that could be employed to maximize the strengths of the group.

However, there was one final and most crucial element that Tim believed made all the difference. It was rare that the first kill of a progression boss was the best kill. There was almost always a certain element of luck as well. Clean execution was that final element that brought all the prior tactics, understanding of your enemy’s weakness, and maximizing the group’s cohesion and abilities together. Part of having good execution was psychological. For example, it had been a smart and deliberate play for Sean to call for the ‘last attempt’ of the night when he did. To have the maximum effect it needed to be called at the right time. Too soon and you would have to call the raid extremely early if you didn’t defeat the boss. Too late, and the raid would be exhausted and not able to perform at their best. Calling the last attempt was a risky gambit – for it to work in the future it had to be final. You were putting things all on the line with your raid for the evening so there was risk. However, for a group of seasoned raiders that extra bit of pressure helped to hyper focus the raid’s performance and could make all the difference in execution. Certainly, Sean and he had been right to call for the last attempt when defeating Cermillion the night before.

While Tim was highlighting one of the clips he noticed some movement from Cheezus that was likely unnecessary. He’d flag that and send a clip to Miles. The hoverboard trick had been a key element for mastering phase four; however, after the GMs had seen their stunt it was likely that they would nerf that ability since it did seem unintended. Tim already had a couple of ideas for some work arounds that still involved DPS kiting those elementals but it might take a bit more resources. For now, they should see if they could get at least one more kill of Cermillion before the next raid lock with the hoverboard strategy.

Additionally, Tim noticed that the roughest part of the whole fight was the first ten seconds of phase four. The transitions between phases were always the most difficult part of boss fights and this one was a doozy with so many different components coming together and it required the entire raid to be highly mobile and adaptive to the situation.

Tim wondered if there was a pattern to some of the way the lava pools formed in that phase that they could take advantage of. During the fight it seemed entirely random; however, he knew not to take such things at face value. Often there were patterns to raid mechanics that were subtle. Taking a few minutes, he put together a clip of the thirty-seven attempts that the Misfits made where they got to phase four and survived the first ten seconds. One of the many advantages progression raiders had on these types of fights was the huge quantity of data that they could collected over hundreds if not thousands of progression attempts. Tim reviewed the clips at 10X speed for a few minutes to see if anything jumped out at him. There were no obvious patterns, as he’d previously thought; however, something might show up if he asked his house AI to review it.

“Adiutor, review sequence and determine any commonalities or patterns. Purpose is to seek ways to minimize fire damage,” Tim said.

The AI was built into every interface in their house. “Acknowledged. This will take approximately forty-minutes to evaluate,” Adiutor responded.

That would give Tim some time to get a snack and paint a little bit. He’d been painting since the age of five. Creating on canvas was one of his favorite pastimes. That and reviewing and creating new strategies of course. It was rare that anyone would still paint with the old tools using actual brushes and canvas these days since most everything had gone digital. AI had also infringed into this area and many artists employed AI to recreate old works faithfully or even forge into entirely new artistic realms. However, Tim was old school and this was one of the few areas where he didn’t allow technology to infringe upon his life.

Fortunately, he had that luxury. Tim lived with his parents in an actual house instead of apartment so that afforded him some additional space that many others didn’t. It allowed him to have an artist’s studio separate from his bedroom as well as enough space to showcase many of his paintings.

Tim went downstairs to his studio. The room was bare except for a bench that held his tools of the trade: brushes of all sizes, scrapers, pencils, erasers, Masonite, sketchbooks, Mahl sticks, and the like. He had several easels of different sizes that held a few of his works in progress. He usually kept all the works covered to protect them and he quickly uncovered his latest work which was a surreal landscape that he’d imagined would fit very well in the world of Champions. Typically, Tim was a huge fan of portraits but at the moment he wanted a break from that. Imagining where he might go next in his favorite MMO was a huge inspiration for him and the type of challenge that he relished.

After a surprisingly short amount of time Adiutor let him know that the analysis was complete and since Tim had gotten distracted, his AI had taken the liberty of putting together a highlight reel to be showcased on the Misfit’s social media account. It was very handy having an assistant that could almost read your mind. It was also somewhat annoying that the AI seemed to know that Tim was going to forget to do that. AI had already displaced humanity’s need to work. Tim wondered if there would soon come a day when humanity’s creativity would also be obsolete... A scary thought.