Back during my WoW research days, Lord Marrowgar, in Icecrown Citadel, was the first boss I learned to tank entirely by myself. I feel like I just said that to a room full of WoW Anonymous members, but it’s important to this story, in passing.
I was starting to do serious research, but I insulated myself from the first boss in Icecrown (in terms of outside blog posts, strats, videos, etc.) because I wanted to feel the experience of actually trying the boss on the PTR (where I learned to fight him, then had an easy time when the day of release he was nerfed drastically) and figuring him out just from making mistakes and charting my progress. It took about four days of 3 hours-or-so per night to down him. He’s not that hard to tank once you figure it out, but there’s not a real logic to some of the stuff that happens in that fight until you’ve seen it. It’s a cool fight. Plus he yells BONESTORM all the time.
The newest Hearthstone expansion is… wait for it… Icecrown Citadel. The first boss is… guess it… Lord Marrowgar. He has a really, really annoying hero power that heals him to full and costs zero mana, so he’s kind of a punk. He also has an ice spike that he casts, and much like the WoW battle, two of the spikes will kill you from full health. Therein lies the secret to beating him. Using his spikes against him.
I wanted to figure him out on my own. So… I did. In theory. It took me about four times fighting him with my standby quest warrior deck (which cannot beat him, I don’t think) to see what I needed. I needed to be able to silence the spikes or steal them from him, because at 15 damage per, two of them would kill me… or kill him.
So I went about building a silence/control deck. I haven’t spent more than my $50 per expansion on the last two, so there are a number of cards I don’t have. So making that deck has been challenging. I was trying, for my third short game session, to kill him today in front of some of my students during my open office hours.
I got close. Twice. And I did poorly like four times. One of my students–who is trying out for our HS varsity team– was quick to offer suggestions. And while what he suggested made sense, I don’t want to give up on the strat I built myself until it works. I can see it working; I’m just RNG away from the win.
Of course that means I’m way sub-optimal. It shouldn’t be a case of me only being able to win this encounter if I’m lucky enough to get all the right draws. But I can see the victory with what I built.
So I want to get it. My way.
That probably seems silly. And I will admit, from a straight-up gamer perspective, it is. I know there are decks that would make this easier, even with the lack of cards I have (I looked– after I decided not to abandon my strategy, I wanted to see how close I was to what experts figured out). But on a personal level, I can see my method working, and there’s a stubborn side of me that wants Marrowgar to die on my terms.
It’s like coming full circle from the first time I dropped this dude in WoW.
It’s something I want for myself.
And that, my friends, is a variable, valorized outcome. I don’t just want the win. I want the win on my terms.
It’s illogical, it’s irrational, and it’s going to mean that I spend more time being frustrated by the luck of the draw.
But I’m having fun.