I’ve never been a person who aspires to do “elite gamer” stuff in video games. My favorite genres are point-and-click puzzle adventures and narrative role-playing games, I prefer to enjoy video games alone, and I’m constitutionally noncompetitive. Given all that, you might wonder how I nevertheless spent eight years of my life playing World of Warcraft.
Perhaps it was because, early in the life of the storied MMO, it gave me a glimpse of what it might be like to have an elite level of skill, and have that skill recognized by other players. My elite gamer moment wasn’t reaching max level in four expansions, or when my raid guilds put both Arthas and Deathwing in the ground — no. Nothing else in WoW, or other games, has captured the feeling I got by being a Hunter who could kite the General in Upper Blackrock Spire.
‘LFM UBRS have key need hunter’
That was the telltale message in the Looking For Group chat channel, circa 2005, that signaled one of base World of Warcraft’s most trying dungeon crawls. This message meant that a group of players was looking for more folks to attempt the 10-player dungeon called Upper Blackrock Spire.
UBRS, as it was abbreviated, was a stepping-stone raid on the way to Molten Core, WoW’s very first 40-man raid tier. And it fit the part: Where Molten Core took place in the elemental plane of fire, UBRS was a lava-split fortress built inside an active volcano, full of black dragons, fire elementals, and even a Core Hound boss encounter, foreshadowing the use of the two-headed, lava-drooling beasts as the iconic basic mobs of Molten Core.
To even get into Upper Blackrock Spire — back in the certifiably crunchier days of Vanilla World of Warcraft — you needed at least one member of the raid to have completed a circuitous questline involving a random item drop, a hidden NPC, at least one full run through the Lower Blackrock Spire dungeon, and a schlep all the way out to Dustwallow Marsh to subdue a random dragon because you need its fire breath, specifically.
It took a lot to put a group together for UBRS, but, paradoxically, those groups were usually highly tenuous. Although UBRS required 10 people and a Big Raid-style questline to gain entry, it had the same level of loot as any other max-level, five-player dungeon. So, even if you were in a raiding guild, it was unlikely to be something they spent a raid night on — you’d have to rely on strangers to fill out your group, and you had to have at least one person who’d done all that work to get the key.
And, on top of that, you needed a Hunter player who knew how to kite the General.
Why did you need a Hunter?
The final boss of Upper Blackrock Spire was a centaur-dragon sort of guy called General Drakkisath. He was a big bruiser who hit very hard, but so did his two guards — they output so much damage on a single tank character that healers would get overwhelmed and you’d wipe.
The most accepted way of defeating him was to have most of your group focus on killing the guards first, while one person got the General to chase them away from the rest of the fight, or “kite” him. And only the Hunter class, a ranged, physical damage-dealer with a pet, had the right combination of abilities to do it.
The General ran faster than a basic player’s run speed — but Hunters could turn on Aspect of the Cheetah to get a speed boost. The General’s melee attacks hit so hard that he would quickly pulverize anyone but a tank who was receiving consistent healing — but the Hunter ability Distracting Shot could apply a taunt from range, keeping that Hunter from getting walloped. A Hunter could kite the General through several long, large rooms — including a narrow, railing-less pathway with a sheer drop on both sides — all the way back to the room of the previous boss fight. At that point, ideally, everybody else had managed to kill his guards, and the Hunter could use their Feign Death ability to zero out any interest the General had in them, then follow him back to the group in time to kick his ass.
Graphic: Susana Polo/Polygon | Source image: Blizzard Entertainment
But a Hunter’s strictly mechanical abilities still weren’t enough to kite the General.
Distracting Shot had a limited duration, and if you didn’t keep applying it, the General would get tired of chasing you and return too early, wiping your raid. But Distracting Shot could not be fired at something behind you, so you would have to turn around to hit him again. But, even with Aspect of the Cheetah, the General was so fast that if you stopped or ran in anything other than a straight line he’d catch up to you, turn you into paste, and then run back too early, wiping your raid.
The solution rested entirely on whether or not the Hunter player could perform a trick: the jumpshot.
The jumpshot takes advantage of how World of Warcraft’s jump physics work to get around the “you cannot fire a gun behind you” restriction. When you press the jump button, your character leaps briefly into the air. If you jump while running, your character continues the momentum they had before you pressed it, and their direction cannot change until they “hit” the ground again — normal jump physics for this genre of game.
So, to perform a jumpshot, you start running, and hit the jump button. Then in the moment of time before your character comes back down, you whip your mouse around 180 degrees, fire off your ranged ability, and then whip your mouse back around 180 degrees again. Hopefully, you hit the ground pointing in roughly the same direction as when you started, and you’ve lost minimal, if any, forward momentum.
Thanks to the new Distracting Shot you fired, General Drakkisath is still trying to kill you (which, remember, is what you want), and, if you did your jumpshot right, you haven’t slowed down enough for him to catch you. Now do it several more times, because his guards are tough, your group isn’t done with them yet, and you still have to cross that bridge with no railings.
So you’ve beaten the odds. Your UBRS raid found 10 random players, including someone with the annoying key, and the right composition of tanks, healers, and DPS. It’s taken hours. You’ve done the tense tiptoe through the infamous Leeroy Jenkins room, where stepping on a single egg summons five billion deadly baby dragons. You’ve probably walked back from the ludicrously far away graveyard at least once, possibly because, if you played on a PvP server, there could be a 40-player raid group of the opposite faction setting up at the nearby entrance to Molten Core, and it was all too trivial for them to camp your corpses as you tried to get into UBRS.
But you’ve done it: You’ve made it all the way to General Drakkisath, the final boss. And now the question of whether this will be a successful and complete run of Upper Blackrock Spire rests entirely on your shoulders. Nine strangers depending on you, the Hunter, to kite the General right.
In an MMORPG, damage classes don’t get a lot of chances to feel like the hero of the raid. Your job is more about “don’t”s than “do”s. Do deliver the most damage mechanically possible by collecting the right gear. But don’t draw aggro, don’t stand in the fire, and don’t fuck up, because the healers aren’t going to be healing you — it’s a waste of resources. The real heroes of the raid are the tanks and the healers, by the way. If they die, that’s an emergency. If you die, it might be a little harder, but we’ll rez you when it’s over.
Kiting the General, though, was a rite of passage. It was a skill passed down from more experienced Hunter players via word of mouth that you could use to be invited instantly to any UBRS group. It gave you a sense of ownership and belonging in your class; you weren’t just somebody who played a Hunter, you were a Hunter player.
Now, I’m well aware that the jumpshot is not the highest caliber reflex skill the gaming world has to offer. It’s no Chicken Dinner, no Street Fighter championship, no Bloodborne using only a DDR pad. But World of Warcraft’s endgame culture was one of accepted guides and meticulously updated player-made calculators, of mathematically optimizing gear and button macros, creating ideal spell rotations, and memorizing focus fire order and boss patterns.
Kiting the General wasn’t about how good you were at following the math. Either you, you the player, knew how to do it, or you didn’t. It wasn’t a just-right combo of class abilities that every character got by level X, or even a piece of loot that only had a 5% drop rate. To be a hunter who could kite the General was to be an elite in your category, based on your skill and interest in the game alone.
In later updates to World of Warcraft, Blizzard made a concerted effort to move away from boss encounters that required specific classes to defeat. It was the right choice, as demonstrated by how gosh-dang difficult it was to put a good UBRS group together. And while I regretted that I was never given another boss fight on which to flex my Hunter pride, there’s still an upside.
By eliminating the demand for class-specific strategies, Blizzard made the experience of playing that class-specific strategy even more rarified. So what if nobody needs to kite the General anymore? I’ll always be among the elite cadre of Hunter players who can say they did it, and World of Warcraft will be the closest I’ve ever come to that classic (and admittedly dubious) elite gamer cachet.
