Deathberry and the rest of the raid finished killing the blue dragon on the fourth floor. This area was open to the sky on all sides with just a few pillars supporting the sides of the tower. Anytime a dragon boss could fly it made it a headache to fight. The inevitable flying phases had strained the ranged DPS to keep up since melee DPS could do little while the creature was in flight. Positioning for ranged DPS had been difficult since the high mobility of the creature forced them to constantly be moving which further reduced their capability to pummel the boss. Finally, when the beast had died, he sighed with relief.

Their mishmash team was doing pretty well thus far, but Deathberry knew that they were going to need to have even better coordination for the final boss. Each floor had another monster more fantastic and stronger than the last. If things kept progressing much further, he was certain that their raid wouldn’t be able to continue on without significant casualties. It was time to get the officers together and review each of the raider’s abilities, assess their weaknesses and shore up their strengths. Deathberry pulled up the raid tab and started making digital notes for each player starting with their own little group. First, it had been a long time since he’d pulled up his own abilities and stat block:

***Deathberry - Level 62 Unholy Sorcerer***

Abilities: deathbolt, death-ray, darkness, summon demon, unholy aura, steal mana, silence, and stillness of death.

He also had modified several spells using his new power. General Abilities: Change Spell Type. While that sounded deceptively simple, he’d already used it to modify his silence spell to create shrill noise instead against the skitterers back on the island and just outside the tower he’d modified his darkness spell to instead create a false image. Creating the latter spell had been a bit more complicated than merely inverting the silence spell since he’d had to not only invert darkness to light but bend that light in a way that caused others to see what wasn’t there. The possibilities were quite fascinating and at some point, he meant to ask Cheezus more about his general ability: Discover Enemy Weakness.

Looking further down with his Seemi he reviewed his stats. While he’d powered up quite a bit he was still the glass cannon type:

HP: 2925

STA: 190

Att: 38

Def: 37

Mag Att: 188

Mag Def: 98

Str: 16

Speed: 40

Vit: 50

Spirit: 120

Next, he reviewed the Misfits abilities based on what he knew:

Smashit – Level 58 Knight. Abilities: Shield other, stun, shield wall, last stand, shield bash, roar of the ancestors, taunt, and knockdown.

Thag – Level 62 Unholy Knight. Abilities: Demon sword, demon shield, howling death, crippling attack, bloodsuck, unholy absorption.

Cheezus – Level 63 Rogue. Abilities: Backstab, parry, feign death, hamstring, vital slash, death by a thousand cuts. General ability: Discover Enemy Weakness

Linca – Level 62 Priestess of the Light. Abilities: Holy light, enhanced holy light, protective angel, mana tap, and healing aura

Seona – Level 57 Druid. Abilities: Woodland charm, healing of the ancients, enhanced healing of the ancients, tree of life, mana surge, and wave of healing.

Not being in the same guild as them, he had less information about the Survivors; however, what he knew as that:

Rygor – Level 65 was a Blademaster that specialized in a two-weapon attack. He had both strong tanking and melee fighter capabilities. He had used several different abilities including fighting one opponent with one sword and another with the off-hand. He’d used a tanking cooldown that involved pushing back against the enemy with both swords, and he had used an AOE ability where he wove both swords together in a deadly whirl of blades.

Kantala – Level 64 was an archer that specialized with the long bow. She had several different attacks including arrows that seemed to bleed the damage out of target, double arrows for more damage, and a hail of arrows she used for AOE.

Deathberry knew that their lead healer was a Holy Priest and had similar abilities to Linca. They had a Rogue who wore an eye patch and spoke like a pirate, there was another Sorcerer but Deathberry hadn’t seen him do much beyond standard fireball attacks. Most of the rest of the Survivors seemed to be a mix of melee and ranged mercenary types with few special abilities.

The group he knew the least about was their newest allies, the lizardmen. All of them were in the mid-level 60s but he didn’t know much else. Zracks had explained that they had some casters in the group and that they were most comprised of melee spearmen and ranged archers.

It wasn’t a lot to go on but he had enough information to assemble the groups into slightly more efficient parties after the past several boss battles. The biggest unknown was their final opponent, the wizard of the tower. If it was true to the description, he would be a caster type. It was likely that he’d have either melee soldiers to keep enemy melee from getting close or he’d have some sort of resistance ability. The other potential since this was a tower was that he was on the roof and would use a flying ranged ability to distance himself so that enemies couldn’t get too close.

Bosses who were casters tended to have huge burst AOE damage abilities and that would likely test the raid’s ability to coordinate and respond. One of the biggest dangers of cast abilities like that was that certain raid members would scatter but get too far from healing or disperse so much so that they couldn’t effectively be healed between AOE casts. Because they were effectively operating a large pick-up group (PUG) this coordination issue would be their biggest challenge.

Deathberry worked with the rest of the officers to reassign groups based on where he’d seen weaknesses in the other fights. He also needed one or two officers to do effective callouts to ensure that everyone was paying attention. A seasoned raid group wouldn’t need such call-outs and would always pay attention to where they were standing, but while they had some seasoned players, Deathberry could tell that many of the Survivors and especially the lizardmen were not used to have to work this closely with their teammates.

After everyone was reorganized, Cheezus came back with a scouting party to see what they would be facing up ahead. Apparently, the next room was the top of the tower and they could see some sort of caster standing in the middle. They final boss was up next. “Did you see any of the caster’s features or any other mobs with them?” Deathberry asked.

Cheezus shook his head. “There was just the single boss. He’s entirely cloaked and I couldn’t even see what level he was. There was no indication on his cloak what type of caster he is and I didn’t see any other enemies on the roof.”

Deathberry nodded. That made sense. The harder VRMMOs these days didn’t want new raiders to figure out the bosses’ abilities so quickly since information spread like wildfire on the net. They were going to have to head in and blindly and try to adapt on the fly. While he usually enjoyed going up against a boss before anyone else on the server or in game had, today’s fight had a different meaning. Wiping wasn’t an option, since it effectively meant death.

The officers all looked at each other with grim faces. Going in without a strong plan was often a suicide mission; however, their other choices were equally unappetizing. They could turn back and try to seek more reinforcements in San Francisco. Based on their conversation with Zracks it seemed like he was anxious to rid the area of the wizard as soon as possible, so doing this risked alienating their new lizardmen allies. Another option was to send someone in just to scout. The problem with that was a lot of bosses in AO didn’t seem to have a fixed and instanced room they were locked to. So, it could end up being a situation where they would still have to fight the wizard but be stuck on a staircase in the tower somewhere. Finally, they could abandon trying to kill the wizard and go back to San Francisco. They would have a hard time finding Mr. Tiel under those circumstances. After laying out all their choices Smash asked the officers to make a decision. Unanimously, they decided to push forward and try for the blind attack.

Deathberry watched as Thag pulled the boss – The Twisted Conjurer - Level 95. Since Demon Knights had a higher magical resistance, she was the ideal tank for the fight. He wasn’t terribly surprised that the caster was a summoner since the mutants were rumored to be under his command. The surprise came when the Misfits looked their old boss in the face. They had found Mr. Tiel. Numerous questions flew through Deathberry’s head as he tried to process what was going on. The creature in front of them was no longer a man but a giant wizard monster. Wasn’t he supposed to be hiding out in a bunker somewhere, nice and safe? And how had the AI transformed him? Now wasn’t the time for figuring that out.

He ordered the ranged DPS to scatter once he saw that the boss began casting. Undoubtedly, he was summoning some monsters. Seconds later, the raid had scattered and three large mutants, similar to the cyclops they’d fought in San Francisco appeared. Smash picked them up and ranged DPS were ordered to switch to them. Melee DPS remained on the boss. Quickly, the group got used to the Conjurer’s first phase: three large mutants were summoned and if they weren’t killed within a certain amount of time the debuff stacks that they put on Smash became onerous to heal, every thirty seconds the boss dropped lines of fire randomly across the raid – although there was a black shadow that came into existence right before the fire exploded, finally, the boss would cast a small ring of fire in to the melee every fifteen seconds which they had to dodge and which decreased the amount of DPS they could do. As the fight wore on the raid became more efficient with the mechanics, and so far, no one had died. Unfortunately, Deathberry could tell this was going to be a very long fight. The creature’s health bar was still at 80%.

Phase two of the fight added a few more dynamics. The boss would fly into the air every minute and choose one player to blast with a giant fireball. Anyone standing near that player would take massive splash damage and that player was rooted there until the healers had healed them back to full. They’d lost one of the lizardmen to that mechanic the first time it happened until Linca discovered how it worked accidentally. Deathberry was glad that it wasn’t like some mechanics where it just automatically killed raid members. That would have made a difficult fight impossible in this case. Phase two included a few additional fire mechanics that the cyclops had and which Thag had to avoid. Since she was a seasoned pro this addition to the fight didn’t add much challenge.

At 30% the Conjurer went into the final phase and things got interesting. During this phase the flight component included targeting of three different ranged players which put a lot of pressure on the DPS. Additionally, there was a mechanic where the conjurer became immune to all melee damage for about half the time he was on the ground. This greatly reduced the rate of DPS and the group started suffering some causalities as healers began to run out of cooldowns to keep players alive. So far, they hadn’t run into any mana issues; however, with a PUG like this one, it was difficult to both keep the players out of the areas that would damage them and still coordinate quickly enough to form up to get healed efficiently. Deathberry marked the healers with different indicators to make it easier for the ranged players to reach them during the ground portions of the fight where healing was most intensive.

Several of the Survivors fell during the final 5% of the boss fight but Deathberry didn’t have time to grieve. He ordered the DPS to stack up and use all available cooldowns. Cheezus was coordinating the melee DPS to maximize their own cooldown cycle to be most efficient since they had little time to DPS the boss with both its immunities and the long air phases. Finally, the Conjurer gave out an inhuman roar and fire seemed to consume the raid. There was little time to issue commands as Deathberry was forced to dodge continuously. He threw out several desperate deathbolts when he could and made sure his unholy aura continued to tick away at the bosses’s health. He could see that Smash had gone down to one knee and Linca’s protective angel cooldown was the only thing keeping him from death. Deathberry’s Seemi lit up with notifications as they killed their old boss.

***Congratulations! You have cleared the Wizard’s Tower***

***Mission Failed. You have located Mr. Tiel. Unfortunately, you killed him.***

The raid was just starting to recover and see who had survived when Deathberry heard an emergency notification – their bunker was under attack.