Comic #152: Donald's Guide to Raiding (Patreon)

Originally published: July 27th, 2008.

Early Donald was more of an outlet for my frustrations. Back when I raided regularly, my comics became a great way for me to passive aggressively criticize other raiders in my guild because I was conflict averse. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not gonna lie, it was definitely therapeutic.

Donald was pretty much every example of a bad raider in the early days. In this comic alone he's stealing loot, giving bad advice, and making excuses. These days Donald is more of a lovable idiot, while the Douche character is more the stand-in for bad players.

The second rule was 100% based on a real raiding occurrence during (I believe) Archimonde in TBC. I don't remember who it was, but someone in the raid tried jumping over the fires in that encounter. I haven't done that fight in decades, but I seem to recall there being long fire paths in that fight... Feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong.

Thinking back on it now some 20 years later, the idea of trying to jump over fire in an early-wow raid encounter is extra funny to me. Instinctively it makes sense that you should be able to jump over a raid mechanic, but I don't even know if that would have been possible to program back in the original game engine.

This is the first time I hinted at the existence of "other" Donalds. I played with that joke a lot more in later comics, where I would just transfer Donald's derpy face onto another player's body.