Our guild has a level eighty mage who has not dealt damage to a single living creature in six months. His name is Proshka. He stands in Dalaran between the auction house and the mailbox, and if you have ever gone looking for someone you know there, you have almost certainly stood right next to him.
For a long time we assumed he simply did not like fighting. Then it turned out that he does fight, just in his own way.
The man by the mailbox
Proshka knows things nobody else knows. He knows that Frostweave Cloth gets cheaper late on Sunday night, because everyone comes back from their runs and dumps a week of loot all at once. He knows that Frost Lotus goes up in price on Wednesday, and he knows why: people start preparing for the raid a day ahead rather than a week ahead, even though every single one of them is convinced that he, personally, plans ahead. He knows which tailors are permanently short of Eternal Shadow, and he knows that the blacksmith on Forge Street will pay two gold more for Titanium Ore than anyone else, because that smith does not like haggling and respects people who do not make him do it.
"Prosh, when are you actually going to come raiding?"
"I am rear-echelon support," Proshka would answer.
Once we did talk him into it. He turned up, spent a minute and a half hunting through his bags for his staff, then died on the very first pack of mobs - not on a boss, on ordinary mobs in a corridor - said "sorry" politely and spent the rest of the evening quietly sorting the loot into neat stacks. We never insisted again.
The spreadsheet
Proshka has a spreadsheet. We saw it once, on a shared screen, and it looked like a railway control room.
There are nine sheets in it. One holds three months of prices, in columns. Another lists who in the guild does what: who has Alchemy, who has Cooking, who promised to make flasks and does not. The third is called "waiting": a list of people who have said to him "listen, if one comes up, grab it for me". Proshka never forgets a single item on it.
His goal was a straightforward one: he was saving up for a crafted mount. He counted it out precisely, down to the last hundred, and once a week he would announce the remaining balance. We got used to hearing it the way you hear a weather forecast.
Wednesday
The twenty-second, a Wednesday, twenty-two forty. Proshka was standing by the mailbox and, as usual, doing nothing.
A stranger messaged him. A raid leader from another guild, one we were not even on nodding terms with. Judging by the spelling, he was typing on the move.
"Hi. Do you have any flasks? Any at all."
"I do. How many do you need?"
"Twenty-five. And food. And sharpening stones, if miracles happen."
What came out next was funny and entirely ordinary: they had a twenty-five man raid, three weeks in the making, and for the first time everyone had actually shown up - and not one of them had any consumables. On triple rates characters grow fast, but the habit of preparing grows slowly. The auction house was empty: somebody had bought it all out down to zero back on Monday.
That somebody was, of course, Proshka. He had bought the lot at nine gold apiece, because nine gold is cheap, and it had been sitting in his bank for exactly this kind of occasion.
"Here you go," he wrote. "Nine each."
"Nine? Do you realise you could get fifty right now?"
"Today's price has not settled yet," Proshka replied. "Use yesterday's."
One letter holds twelve attachments, so it came to four letters. Eleven minutes - and somebody else's raid, which had already started drifting apart, sat down to dinner.
Forty paces
They killed the boss that evening. We found out the next day, from a screenshot that the same raid leader sent to Proshka personally for some reason. Proshka looked at it and said only:
"Good. That means by Friday they will be out of everything again."
He was right, naturally. Ever since then their supply guy messages him first, before he even checks the auction house, and a tenth sheet has appeared in the spreadsheet, labelled with somebody else's nickname. Proshka still has not learned who their tank is, but he knows exactly how many elixirs they burn through in an evening.
He did craft the mount in the end - in February. He rides it from the bank to the auction house. That is forty paces.
On professions, the auction house and raid preparation - see the guides. If you do not have a character yet, one starts here.
