Comic #834: Set Bonus (Patreon)

This one went through a couple iterations before settling on the final version. Initially a character was going to look at the newspaper, and get asked how they liked their tier bonuses. They would then glance at their class discord, which would be very negative. In the final panel they would yell "I'M OUTRAGED!"

I would have ideally used Keydar or Narya for that role, but I didn't want readers to take my meaning literally, as if I was complaining about rogue or mage set bonuses. Especially because they are not terrible as would have been stated in the comic.

In #832 and #833 Keydar is told by a simbot to re-roll. Too many readers interpreted those comics as my personal opinion. As if I was using the comic to get on a soap box about how awful rogue DPS was. In reality I was just telling the joke of a simbot telling someone to reroll, and I only used Keydar because he was the right character for that joke. The later of those two comics was also more about how awful Keydar is as a rogue.

To avoid that I came up with the idea of ending on the panel with them checking discord. Whether the bonuses are good or bad are irrelevant. It also gave me the opportunity to use both Keydar and Narya, and play their discords off each other.

I was mostly just excited to poke fun at the culture of class discords. I also had to hand draw some mage and rogue features onto some Pepes, which was a bizarre experience.

It can also be a bit tricky to make names for people on Discord, because of the high chance you will actually use a real name. So for the rogues I thought of as many edgy rogue names as possible and stuck them all together. And for the mages I just came up with a couple of generic tryhard names and then JainaModestLess being a parody of Jaina Proudmoore.

And for those of you who have read a lot of these commentaries, you know how much I love a newspaper panel. I snuck in a couple extra jokes there too.