Comic #989: Champion of Azeroth (Patreon)

This one ended up being a pain to write. The entire point of this comic was poking fun at how players are basically the champion of their own story and have saved the world countless times, but most of us are pretty low on the skill totem pole. Also, I wanted to poke fun at myself playing a rogue for 20 years and still I follow cookie cutter builds made by better players on discord.

The biggest challenge of the comic was the dialogue. I needed her to drop a lot of exposition just to make the punchline work. I wanted to make it clear she was a rogue, Keydar was a rogue, she wanted his advice, he was a veteran player of 20 years, and why she wanted him and not other in-world characters. A lot of fun dialogue ended up being chopped out just because it wouldn't fit.

I originally had a panel where he told her to look for builds online, and she reiterated she wanted to "hear it from the lips of the Champion of Azeroth". I ended up cutting this just because it stole a little thunder from the punchline. I knew it would work better if the entire dialogue was in-lore until the final panel.

I also was originally going to have one of the discord members posting this image in reply to someone's question:

But when I saw the final panel it was just too distracting. It also raised weird questions of why my comic were in the discord.

This comic idea originally came to me when I was playing a new character and was being "trained" by NPCs. I thought it might be interesting to see how players would train someone in-lore.

Another challenge was figuring out who the rogue NPC was going to be. I wanted it to be a rogue, and it couldn't be anyone too renowned, because then why would they seek advice from Keydar? I thought about using Mathias Shaw or Valeera Sanguinar, but I felt like their personalities didn't really fit with the narrative. I don't think Vanessa VanCleef works perfectly either, but she fits the best out of the three.

Also, Keydar's comment in the final panel is a reference to #794. I originally had someone in the discord saying this exact line to him, but it ended up feeling like too much.