My favorite script, currently, is the Warcraft Scarlet Monastery script in the Cathedral with Mograine and Whitemane. Look …
The actions aren’t the big deal, it’s the audio files that play along with it, exactly as the screenshot text appears. For you WoW noobs, the group attacks Mograine, he calls everyone infidels. Whatever. He’ll die just the same, no need to namecall.
The group kills his ass, then his bitch, Whitemane, runs from the back room — the group starts nailing her evil ass until she does an AOE stun/sleep exploit — she rezzes Mograine (Arise, my champion!).
The group starts laying down some smack on Whitemane, Mograine shakes off the heebie-jeebies from being recently rezzed (At your side, milady!) … ahhh, so we have a roleplayer here. This should be cake.
Group kills Whitemane, group turns on Mograine … script over. Loot, stone out of that hellhole, what’s next?
Now hold up a second, because I can just feel the diametric opinions already. Hear me out.
The script’s not complicated — but the accompanying audio, the first startling discovery that the bitch has AOE stunned (mezzed) the group and then rezzes the very target of the instance so the group has to kill both their asses now … it’s well done. The loot isn’t bad either. (Ok, the POTENTIAL loot isn’t bad, because we’ve been rerunning this ass of an instance looking for the, reportedly, common drop until I wanted to put the proverbial bullet in my head.)
Still, it qualifies as A Script I Have Loved.
From vague memories … (and from ancient EQ notebooks that I just happened to have handy) … I also loved the Kael Drakkel quests in EverQuest (for the noobs, that was the Giant zone in the EQ Velious release — absolutely DESTRUCTIVE release for the game, but great speeches.)
King Tormax’s speech: Those who raise arms against me will suffer my wrath. (heh, no, but that was cute he thought so.)
The Avatar of War … he’s the boss of Kael, but his is only the second best speech, in my opinion. Still, it was not uncommon for players to lose bladder control when he shouted to the zone: Who dares defile my temple?! Come forth and face me! (Make no mistake … for his time, he was bad ass.)
Best speech in Kael Drakkel, and since I spent a billion hours there, I think I’m best qualified to judge … Derakor the Vindicator (Vindi, as we came to know and love him): Your kind will not defile the temple of Rallos Zek!
My kind, indeed. I defiled his temple as often as I could … until there were leeter pastures available.
Just out of curiosity, did you not do the Deadmines? There’s a similar encounter there, but it’s only a “miniboss” with a couple rogue minions. It’s still pretty cool tho.
I liked the Gnomeregan fight with the Mekgineer. “Bombs, need more bombs!” It was funny watching the tank fly across the room until the boss came right for me!
Some guildmates and I managed to break Whitemane’s script one time while running some low-level folks through the instance. After Mograine went down, we began tearing Whitemane a new one, and took her down to 1% HP before the AOE sleep triggered. (I’m guessing the script is triggered after a certain amount of time, or when Mograine’s HP gets very low, whichever happens first.) At this point, while we were standing around mezzed, one of our Shaman’s totems actually finished her off before she could revive Mograine.
So, Whitemane was dead, and Mograine was stuck in limbo… not actually dead, just a corpse model with 0% hp that lay there and sucked up damage like a sponge. I don’t know if anyone else managed to do this before, but I thought it was kind of interesting. It was a good opportunity to get our weapon skills leveled up, at least — corpses make the best punching bags.
It all reminds me of some time I spent building areas on MUDs way back when. My favorite part was always writing the scripts that made everything actually come alive.
A few weeks after WoW went gold some bros and I were farming chapel, after we beat the script for the umteenth time we went afk for a few, the price you pay when playing with chain smokers that can’t light up in their own house. Once back, we were shooting the shit about how much easier chapel was compared to when we originally plowed it together. Afterall, they were beta junkies and I had been whoring it up since 1st phase alpha.
Suddenly, Whitemane respawned out of nowhere, and we smacked her ass yet again like the cheap slut she is, sadly there was no Mograine respawn. We were fuckin ecstatic by this as we got the drop we were after. It felt like a compounded orgasmic relief had overcame the group, as kinky as that may sound, a huge burden of compunction from investing so much time was lifted off our shoulders. I’m sure some of you can relate with not wanting to flee on trying to acquire an item after investing a massive amount of time and effort into that goal. Eventually, it becomes moot early-on to chase said items in such a fast level paced game.
After that, we stuck around for a bit to see if she would respawn again, and she did. We didn’t need any loot from her, so bailed and went to see if it would work on Herod in armory, well it didn’t and we weren’t about to do 10 runs of Herod for all the tank drops we wanted. I later read about some named npcs respawning without resetting in certain instances, I may of read it on foh or maybe even some patch notes, perhaps one of you remember because my memory escapes me right now. Either way, I guess that confirms the mantra of once a cheating bastard, always a cheating bastard.
WoW has some great scripts that usually don’t get the credit they deserve from the jaded–experienced crowd. One of my group favorties would have to be the Archaedas event, albeit Uldaman makes me want to stab myself in the face after 30 minutes of troggs and all the fart noises they blurt out.
Ya, did the Deadmines (unfortunately — hate that instance). Think you’re talking about First Mate Smite? Fight him for a while, he sleeps everyone, runs to his chest to get better weapons, etc. That’s a pretty good one, too. Heh, I love the part where you blow the door to the ship area and Smite shouts to the pirates to go check what the noise is all about and none of them really do. Lazy swabs!
About the buggy Whitemanes … we go easy on her too so she can rezz Mograine .. one of our guys wanted something from him. We would have called each other noobs if we downed her too early.
I’m a big fan of the line the ogre in the begining of deadmines says “Van Cleef pay big fa your heads!” I liked the Archaedus fight a LOT as far as bosses go, awsome script and voice acting for that guy. I got say though, i fukin HATE that instance like it’s my job to do so. Gnomergan was fun with the final boss yelling about needing bombs, reminded me of fighting bowser from the old nintendo games for some reason.
One last thing, anyone else besides me get a chuckle out of the obvious 80s cartoon Transformers reference in Uldamon? When you fight Grimlok (original dinobot leader) he runs at you and either yells “Grimlock kill!” or a line from the Transformer’s show “Grimlock SMASH!!!!”
Uldaman… HATE. Stabbity, stab, stab. We just had one too many times of dying to the boss [attempting it at probably too low of a level] throughout beta & release.
the scripts in WoW are well done in general.
The Scarlet monastry fight, the Smites fight, the whole Uldaman end stage (when it is actually working…).
The only problem is, after SM you expect every boss fight to be that cool, but many aren’t.
If you kill Whitemane too quickly, you won’t be able to loot Mograine. Did it with a bunch of 60s.
–Jaana on Whisperwind