How a guild of deaf players conquered World of Warcraft's toughest raids

Joseph Antle has raided World of Warcraft for a long time. His first guild was called Blackguard in vanilla, and he carved his way through Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Ahn’Qiraj with his trusty Tauren hunter. “I can’t recall if I was any good back then, but I have a memory of accidentally pulling Hakkar and wiping the entire group,” he says. “The team wasn’t too pleased with me, but I got over it.”
                 

You can’t understate the coordination demanded by high-tier Warcraft raids. You and 24 friends are the only things standing in front of a boss deemed too difficult for the vast majority of the player base. Each encounter cycles through four or five central mechanics that need to be handled perfectly. If you do something dumb, like forget you’re the living bomb, or stumble through the Flame Wreath, or accidentally aggro the Blood God Hakkar, you’re looking at a long walk back from the graveyard.

Most serious raiding guilds use voice chat to bark orders or refine strategy between wipes. In an age of Discord, built-in microphones, and automatic audio channels, connecting with your fellow players outside the chat box is easier than ever. But Antle is deaf, and wasn’t afforded the luxury of coordinating over voice comms. He still plucked ultra-rare loot off of Warcraft’s fiercest horrors, but his experience was far more isolated—the only guy in the group left out of all the jokes.

A small community of deaf players who knew each other outside WoW formed the Undaunted guild (known until recently as Durus Veritas) in the spring of 2011. All of them had experience raiding, and wanted to use their skills to clear high-end Warcraft encounters without voice chat. And they were successful, progressing through the stringent demands of Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. On January 15, 2017, they cleared the Emerald Nightmare on the highest difficulty—the first major raid of the Legion cycle.

Antle was recruited into Undaunted in 2013 by a close friend who needed a DPS for their alternative 10-man team. Today he’s guild master, playing a Blood Elf protection paladin.