Comic #931: Augment (Patreon)

Now that I've finished this one I'm a little worried the joke may have gotten lost in the weeds. Sometimes I have a lot of trouble translating a joke into the visual medium, and in the process of writing, then re-writing, and then re-writing the dialogue again and again, some of the nuances behind the joke get lost, and the final result is misinterpreted.

The whole joke behind this comic was the idea that Augmentation evokers are "meta" and extremely impactful in a group, but it's a lot harder to notice if they are good or bad because their impact isn't quantifiable in the same way as other roles. So the joke here is that the whole group feels the impact immediately, but the whole time the evoker was AFK. So it's almost like a placebo effect.

After reading the finished product however, I had a sudden worry that some people will interpret this as me saying Augmentation evokers don't actually do anything, or their rotations are so simple they can AFK or something.

We'll see.

My initial script for the comic had the evoker in the final panel saying something like, "Sorry, I'm back now" or something along those lines. The problem was trying to communicate in a really short easy way that the evoker was away and just got back. In the end I decided just giving them an AFK tag was the easiest method.

I did have another early idea where each panel would show the results of a good role player vs. a bad role player. So for example I would show a good dps, and a bad dps, a good healer, and a bad healer, a good tank, and a bad tank, then the joke would show a good and bad augment evoker and you couldn't tell the difference between the two. That version felt a little overly complicated so I decided to go for this simpler version.