f13.net

A post someone made in one of the other threads got me thinking about the best of things we've done in WoW, so I figured I'd toss together a Top 5 list that everyone could put their ideas in. Write down the stories behind your Top 5 most memorable/funny/best moments playing this game over the last few years. Mine are as follows, in no order:

1 - We had been running MC forever, and we were more than halfway through BWL when a secondary MC run started up to help out new raiders into the alliance. I was asked to help run the first few runs to get them off the ground since I was the original MT. However, due to the play boring me to tears I decided to make it interesting, so I tanked the entire run in my Fancy Pink Festival Dress on my human male warrior. It's still joked about in our alliance to this day.

2 - Our guild had events every now and then, and my favorite was Drunken DM nights. We would start in Dire Maul East, and work our way through all the wings in an evening, but you had to take a shot for every single boss you killed. This would ineviatably lead to large amounts of screwing around, giggling, and people basically just fucking up by the end in a hilarious fasion.

3 - We were in a Heroic Mechanar run. Our group overpulled the room right after the elevator and I died, so the others tried to make a run for the elevator. Most of them got gunned down except for the warlock who made it. We watched him from our positions on the floor go down the elevator, all the mobs surrounding the doorway. Then we hear, "Oh shit, I forgot to get off." We watch as the elevator comes back up, he appears right in the middle, and gets one shot by the two blood elf casters that light his ass up like a Christmas tree. We can't stop laughing for about 5 minutes, but then we try to rez him since his body is riding up and down on the elevator and we can't get a lock on him. Our priest rezzes him in the elevator, he appears at the top, and falls quickly to his death. At this point, tears are streaming down my face. The guy was home free, and just forgot the simple rule of stepping off.

4 - The first time I did the Deadmines Instance. It was just very cool and fun, and everyone was the same level because it was launch so it was decently challenging. It's never been the same since, nor has any other instance had that kind of "Wow this is neat" feeling after that.

5 - When my alliance first killed Onyxia. It was the first thing we'd ever killed long before we started MC. It sort of started the whole thing, and proved we could actually raid together successfully. Most of the same people that were on that kill almost 2 years ago are still around today raiding with us in the BC stuff, but a few aren't. It's kind of a reminder that the raiding game should be about the people you like, not about the fabulous loot.

1) Grunk
2) Grunk
3) Grunk
4) Grunk
5) Grunk


Well, actually:

1) Standing around (Dwarf Priest) with my rogue buddy in stealth and my hunter friend in shadowform as horde tried to gank the lone clothie. Disc/Shadow survivability ftw!

2) Getting drunk and doing the dance with the Ogre.

3) Getting drunk and firebombing people on Baron Geddon.

4) Killing Lucifron the first time due to the LoS bug. We were so disorganized, but we still got through MC.

5) Grunk's posts here that make me remember why I will never be a poopsocking catass ever again.

Edit: 6) Speedrunning UDStrat. Record time 10man? 46 minutes.

1. Entering IF for the first time.  Seeing the huge statue and the forge area.

2. Clean run of Blood Furnace in a random pug with no deaths.  That's some great feeling of satisfaction (and getting two blue drops)

3. Playing with RL mates who joined WoW after seeing the Leeroy video.  Nothing more fun than acting like a goose with noob buddies.

Ummmm, whay am I playing this game again?

1)  Back in the days when Stratholme was actually a challenge and we hadn't started running MC yet, we had a 10 man group going through live side.   Things were chaos, and I was a healer struggling to keep our mage alive as we did mass pulls.  About 8 pulls in I looked at my damage meter and realized why that was.  The mage had 52% of damage TAKEN for the group.  I posted it in /raid and we all had a hell of a laugh.  He still uses it as his board sig.

2)  Same timeframe, I rolled against the other healer for that +healing trinket in UBRS.   He rolled a 1, I rolled a 99.  Can't really get a clearer victory than that!

3) Downing Ragnaros for the first time.  We'd been struggling for weeks against him and one night it just fucking CLICKED.  He went down and we were elated.  Even downing Nefarian wasn't as big a thrill as that first Ragnaros down.

4) Seeing Ragnaros emerge, then pwning the Majordomo.  Few of us knew about that (I sure didn't) and it was a nice little bit of scripting that made the encounter a little more than just your usual 'boss kill'   It was pretty damn epic at the time.

5) Finally getting my Netherdrake. Yeah, having epic flight was cool and all but I wanted to ride the damn dragon!  A few weeks of straight faction grinding every day without fail and while i'm burnt out on the dailies, I'm damn happy with the mount.  It just looks so much cooler than the gryphon and it just feels more 'right' as a mount to me.  YOu could take all of my lootz away so long as I have my dragon and the cat I've had since level 10.

I used to drink a shot of rum every time somebody died in a run.  It's more fun when everybody is drunk though.

1) Speed Running Strat when we didn't take it seriously at all. Our best priest was good friends with my GL and his wife, and is a French fella who liked his wine. He'd heal falling down drunk half the time he played (and well I might add...it was odd, he got better the drunker he was) and actually loved it when we overpulled.

2) My first Tribute run. I thought it was pretty fucking cool to be rewarded for being kinda sneaky and clever, and trading a bunch of easy fights for a tough one at the end.

3) Raiding ZG with pugs and the alliance we had. That is easily the best designed raid in the whole game out of the ones I got to do (note I never tried naxx so I dunno if that was as awesome as people claimed it was). Fun, trash was quick but not stupidly easy, great loot, wasn't too long. AQ20 was a pretty good since it was pretty epic feeling.

4) Jumping off Thunder Bluff the first time.

5) The first competent group I ran Deadmines with. That 5-man was pretty much perfect.

I'd include my first Ramparts and BF runs in this too, as well as entering HFP with 50000000 people on opening day of BC. Ramparts made me love WoW all over again, and BF was epic.

4. The Tauren starting area and culture.  Some really amazing design and some new fantasy ideas were really brought to life there.

1) All Cloth run through Blackfathom Deeps. One priest, two mages, two warlocks. Cleared every boss, not a single wipe. Was an absolute blast.
2) A Gath'llzog run with two mages and a paladin -- green to all of us, and we had a horribly bad pull. I tell the paladin "Keep me alive" and unleash absolute hell with every AoE trick I had. It was an orgy of fire and death. Also fun.
3) My first world PvP experience -- level 15 Hunter in Westfall. A group of 5 lvl 60 Horde was dicking around. (Including a rogue who would randomly sap someone just because he could). When the alliance 60s showed up and chased off the Horde, I was part of the pursuit on the Shaman in Ghost Wolf form. I was ahead of everyone (had Cheetah on) and he was badly damaged, with several DoTs ticking. He switched out of Wolf to heal and I pulled up and fired a single shot from a hill. He died to the DoTs and not by dinky 20 points of damage, but it looked cool as hell.
4) WSG game -- we had our flag runner heading up the tunnel for the cap with a 2-2 game. The entire Horde -- all ten of them -- are right behind him. I toss a mithril frag into the mix, and stun 10 Horde, which led to the win.
5) Reading the realm forums and reading a Horde warrior complaining about "A goddamn Hunter who keeps shrinking me" and as I read on -- realizing he was talking about me. Being noticed was fun, and I was new to PvP.

First thing that comes to mind was the Ahn'Qiraj war effort. It turned my server into a sort of massive Battlefield, vying to hold "farm territory" in Silithus and then points of interest in order to defend against enemy Alliance guilds when doing the Scepter quest or to prevent them from making progress. Holding spawn mobs, taking out flight vendors, etc. Basically a week of mass war.

Second, which I'll finish on since I don't have the time to write more (nor do I want to make a bigger post), is one fight from classic Tarren Mill. Quoted from a journal of mine elsewhere. Consider it as an illustration of the event shortly afterwards more than a piece of fiction (meaing, don't bitch).

1. Doing a 4-hunter, 1-rogue romp into Gnomeregan at level 28-30. We had mend pet, bandages, and my (old main) rogue's jumper cables for healing. I don't think we actually made it to a boss, but it was crazy fun!

2. Taking out Eranikus in Sunken Temple for the first time at level 48-50 (my rogue and our tank were the lv50s).

3. My guild killing Lord Valthalak and completing our tier0.5 sets -- in retrospect, the entire questline was a horrible and costly grind for sub-par gear, but dang, it felt like a real accomplishment! Honestly, it felt better than clearing Kara with our raiding alliance.

4. Me and a druid guildie holding off a raid of about 10 epiced-out level60 horde zerging Lakeshire back in 2006 (using hit-and-runs to kill their healers/mages and having the NPC guards mop up after).

5. A lv67 undead warlock + lv67 tauren shaman tried to gank my lv69 dwarf shadowpriest alt while I was fighting an elite quest mob... a minute later both of them AND the elite were dead. Nerf shadowpriests.


-- Z.

Shadowfang Keep for the first time.  Amazing.  Great storyline.

Deadmines for the first time.

First time I saw any zone - even the Barrens was cool.  I love the art in WoW.

1 - Showing a lvl 50 Paladin where the entrance to the Defias hideout was when I was lvl 15, I didn't know it was the entrance to the Deadmines and didn't even know about instances in general.  He ran me through it and it was the first time I saw a player more than a couple levels higher than me in action.  I loved the Deadmines too for its obvious shout-out to The Goonies.  Pirate ship hidden in a cave -- nice!

2 - Doing SFK for the first time with the F13 Severence guild on Emerald Dream.  It was the first time I used Team Speak in a game and it was cool hearing and bantering with a lot of people I had seen on the board for years.  The instance was great too, especially since I hated Aragul so much from the quest line(s) in Silverpine Forest, it was great finally giving him some payback.  I liked the instance even more than the Deadmines.

3 - My first time in Alterac Valley.  It was brand new, had the original map, complete with goblin mines that spawned in the bases.  People were still new to PvP and most of us were effectively noobs. 

4 - The first time I hit lvl 40 and got a mount.  I thought it was a big deal at the time.

5  - My first griffin ride.  I was amazed when I first saw it, although now it's nothing more than a good time to grab a beer out of the fridge.

The first time I came upon the Tarren Mill-Southshore slugfest on Cenarion Circle. This was about two-three months after launch, and every day there was glorious mass PVP. Tier 0 blues were considered uber gear. Most fun I've ever had in online gaming.

Then the BG's were released...

I've mostly played healers, so, the 2 (separate) times where the others in the party said "How the hell did we survive that?!?!?!"  Also Deadmines the first time, and then a year later Deadmines at level 14 as the healer.  Scholomance the first time, took initiative and dove in, shackling and healing, without them having to ask.  Onyxia phase 2 the first time.  Ragnaros the first time.  Suppression Room the first time.

Best extended period was the 6 months with this guild that was really really good, full of good people.  Raided a lot, won a lot of the encounters on the first try.  I'd say that was as good as my EQ guild, back in the old days, similar excellent experience and friendships made.

Both of them just disintegrated to drama and then people just dropped off the face of the earth.  Well, no, actually.  I kept RL contact with 4 of the EQ guild buddies, and 1 of the WoW.  But yeah, out of 40 people each.

I ran Deadmines with a level-appropriate group (no twinks). We beat it, and our only healer was a level 14 druid. She claimed she could handle it. No wipes, only two deaths. I was quite impressed. (Turns out her main was a level 60 priest -- this was prior to TBC of coursE)

1) The first time I played. I just remember thinking "OMG this game isn't trying to fuck me in the ear!" ( I had recently left SWG ) The combination of great art and decent combat was a shock.

2) PvP in STV. Jumping out of the bushes with my rogue to give pallies a heart attack was great fun.

3) My first griffon ride. I still don't think there is a more visually interesting game on the market.

4) Skulking around to nab quest items with my rogue. It wasn't a perfect stealth game, but it was pretty good.

5) Being chased down by a bouncing gnomish warlock with a hat twice his size.

Paelos made this thread to make me cry.

1-5)  When Schild stopped playing.

You know, that was another big one for me. Just as good is the entrance video when you create your character, and it moves from cut-scene to swooping camera and you see other players running around as it's still narrating until it  zooms in on your character and into it's point of view.

I was glad to be done with the 14 part Onyxia chain to get keyed.  It was very rewarding the first time a group of 40 n00bs took her out though.

My favorite moment ever was when I first logged in and realized the little exclamation point was a quest and that quests gave experience, just for killing the same monsters you would normally grind up on.  It was like I was being rewarded for playing!

I honestly never got any wow factor from the raid bosses. I was an EQ raider from the early days so "big dragon with special moves" and "ragnaros the rooted graphical effect" was a bit meh. The WoW bosses feel choreographed and I never got enough adrenaline from PvP either. I enjoyed it all, it's really well done, but it's hard to come up with top moments out of those - so I'll have to go esoteric.

1. The sense of place created by sound, light and art in certain outdoor zones, e.g. Ashenvale, Stormwind, Tirisfal.

2. Coming across a Target Dummy in beta.

3. Exploring a virgin Nagrand in first week of Burning Crusade.

4. Bird form. Elf form. Bird form inches from the ground.

5. First DM tribute run.

Oddly enough, I've yet to run either DM or Scholo. Never did it on my main, and my alts still aren't high enough.

DM is blah, but I'm saying I liked the tribute run (http://www.wowwiki.com/Dire_Maul_Tribute_Run) - a different and more rewarding way to do a wing of DM, with extra rewards and laughs.

I see. I believe it must be done with my tailor/mage.

Hard to say what my top five were.

Some things that come to mind:  The corrupted ashbringer event in SM.  One wipe on Kel'thuzad where we had gotten past stage one but were totally clueless as to how to do stage 2 and he started slaughtering people and had this cackle that played whenever somebody would die, he spent a good 2 minutes cackling and, also our first kill of Kel'thuzad which ended up being the US Horde's second kill. 

Interestingly though what I remember the most is the people I played wow with.  The events were pretty cool but the people were what kept me play for as long and as hardcore as I did.

There's no prizes for Second place, Spud.

Well, 'cept the Epix.

Exactly.  Out of all the games I have played, even soloing with guildchat\TeamSpeak was more fun.  Going all the way back to UO.  Of course once guild politics and drama occurred it all went to shit, but the same can be said of any organisation.  Douchebags just seem to come along every now and again to fuck it up for the rest of us who were getting along.  I just enjoyed logging in and hearing the occasional drunken ramblings of these two guys, the pot heads that got stoned while playing (funny as shit as long as you weren't in the group they were fucking up), and making fun of various people for various aspects.  We actually almost had more females than males in our guild that talked, which was kind of odd.

First place got banned for cheating

hahahhahahahhahahhahahhaha.


Man, that's gold right there.  Thanks.

I racked my brain but couldn't find any one moment of WoW that stood out in my head. I enjoyed the game while I played it, but abuse and all, MMO moments I still remember are all Everquest. WoW always had the overall better experience for me, but had no exceptional moments that really hit home. I was kind of a well done blandness. The people were basically the same as well, so even those I connect with the older game.

Back when I played DAoC, we always used to say that the best moments were wipes in dungeons. They were unproductive wastes of time, and uniformly negative in every way... but the tedious process of gathering a group of people to help us get back to our corpses, and struggling through with a smaller group and the healer in order to prevent experience loss... and dying again...

It was real community-building stuff. Unlike the basic experience grind, it was actually fun. It felt like an adventure and, if we succeeded, we actually felt like heroes. That "well done blandness" just makes a game easy to play. Crisis builds, uh, character.

Wow. That's like how I have really vivid memories of the time I dislocated my knee playing raquetball, but really don't have firm memories of any other raquetball game. Something about the excruiciating pain really locked in that memory.  All that fun is just dust in my memory, which is why I still play raquetball -- I go to have fun, not to form fucking lifelong memories.

Shit, that hurt. Don't dislocate your kneecap.

You used to have to go there to get your Crystal Water spell but now it's on the trainers.

Good descriptions of the blandness. I had the same problem as Tebonas in coming up with a "top 5", there's really nothing that stands out.

It's about the definition of risk vs reward. WoW has huge, satisfying rewards, but no actual risk to your character or equipment. In DAoC or EverQuest, you risked damage to your character (experience loss), or perhaps the permanent loss of every item on your character, for the possibility of reward.

Plane of Fear in EverQuest is the classic example. Many people didn't like it and considered its risks to be more a function of bugs, pathing and server disconnections than the design. But as a blind zone-in into a risky area full of powerful mobs, requiring you to "break" it (clear a survival space), most of the risk was designed in.

At some point most people experienced the utter pain of defeat in PoF - your corpse with all your best items was stuck in a non-instanced place where it could not be retrieved. A timer to permanent loss was ticking. So unless another full raid of people risked everything and succeeded where you failed, you were utterly fucked.

"The tedious process of gathering a group of people to help us get back to our corpses" was the social aspect of solving that, too. There was NOTHING as heroic and good for relationships as breaking PoF for the humbled lower-tier guild that had wiped there, dragging their corpses into a heap, rezzing them into your midst and perhaps letting them loot what your own guild did not need. Also, helping someone who had met with a corpse rot disaster to re-equip their character was a real friendship builder and a lot of fun.

After that, nothing in WoW was scary.

I can see both sides.  I have long had a theory that we play competitive games because of a need to keep ourselves sharp.  Today most people don't need to fight for their survival every day, but for the vast majority of our history, we've had to.  I think that taking on difficult tasks with a big group reassures us that we and our friends can overcome challenges, be they of the boring grindy variety or the react quickly, think on your feet variety. 

That's why people tackle PvE content even though the only reward is better gear to tackle even more difficult PvE content.  It's also why "hardcore" PvP games like early UO and Eve are so gripping and polarizing, where the people who excel in the game swear by it and those who are burned by them think they're a blight.

Given that, it's more meaningful if you have something to lose or get into a horrible situation and are saved by your close or extended friend group.  Your mind is saying "pay attention, you're learning something" and whether the outcome was good or bad, you really remember it.  The good outcome really cements you to the game because you remember it as fun, but the flipside is that too many bad outcomes really turn you off to it.  We don't like to think we weren't up to the challenge.

Anyway, theoretical rambling off.  My top 5 in WoW:

1 - The intro swoop for the first time.  I've seen countless intros, but I like how this one takes you from 15-second history to your actual character's POV.

2 - My first run of the deadmines.  It was my first time exploring this "instanced" thing, as well as the design that people have already commented on.

3 - Hitting 60.  Before WoW, I never made max level in any MMOG.  Too casual.

4 - My first raid (ZG) and my first purple (halberd off Bloodlord Mandokir).  I had never thought I'd be the kind of person who would hit max level in a game, much less have a purple item.  I later had a dream that I had to duel someone and win before I left the instance or I couldn't keep it.  In the dream, I didn't believe it, and left the instance, and I watched the item fade away.

5 - Hellfire peninsula for the first time.  Everyone was there since BC had just opened, but I took a day off work, so it wasn't super crowded.  The ambiance is pretty cool normally, but it was especially cool on opening day, as it felt like we had really just re-found Khadgar's expedition after however many years.

Wow, the EQ vets from my WoW guild would probably fuck you in the mouth for saying anything positive about the planes of Hate and Fear. I've had it described to me as the most unfun thing in any game ever, even when done right.

Same here, ive done tons plane of fear and plane of hate and i cannot for the life of me understand how someone could possibly think back fondly on them.  Thats like saying being a prisoner of war was fun because of the bonds you formed with your fellow prisoners while electricity was being applied to your balls.  Just no, stfu about how great it was.

I don't need pain to have memorable moments.  Sorry that some of you need it.  You might want to talk to Grunk about it, since that's the train of thought you just boarded.

Since I'm quoted in that train of thought, I just want to state for the record that its not the painful moments in Everquest I find memorable.

You do Everquest a disservice if you reduce it to that, the same disservice the makers of Vanguard did it.

Not one of my good moments has anything to do with raiding. At all. That was just something I did to help out my friends because the guild needed a slowing bitch. And when we wiped in Fear and had to get rescued by a higher tier guild I was just embarassed because somebody with my guildtag managed to aggro the whole zone.

"Memorable moments" does not equal "Fun."  Generally, for me anyway, memorable moments need some kind of tension or drama (they're generally the climax to some conflict or something I'm having), and I don't really get that in WoW very much.  I get it in EVE a lot (generally right before I die and take a month's worth of ISK with me), but that doesn't mean I find EVE more fun that WoW.  I do enjoy WoW, just not in "moments."  It's like eating a meal or something; I can't say "Wow, that eighth bite of pie was AMAZING" but I still enjoy the food.

Touché.

Now if playing DAoC or WoW had actually been fun, rather than merely a carrot-on-a-stick time waster, I might have kept at it. As it stands I need the painful memories just to make me feel like I didn't completely waste months of my life playing them.

I really don't understand you people sometimes.  Why did you play for months at something you didn't find fun?  Maybe there was a carrot at the end of the stick that you didn't reach or you now think was never there at all, but why waste time finding out?  There are other things in life that are fun that don't take months.

Or are you just using hyperbole?

I mistakenly thought that, you know, if I mentioned very clearly that a lot of people disagreed with what I was about to say and I understood why they disagreed, that the above bandwagon might not get rolling. Giant quote slabs and all.

Where did I say it was fun? It was indeed the most unfun thing in any game ever. I wouldn't ever want to be in that pit of unfun again. But WoW's lack of such potential doom is why I struggled to come up with a top 5 moments in WoW. The stakes are lower in WoW, so I just couldn't get the same sense of euphoria in achieving something, or forge the same strength of relationships.

Quit pissing on my thread with side issues. If you don't have a top 5, don't bitch about why or why these games suck and can't create top 5's. There are enough threads to whine in about MMOGs, this is supposed to be a happy place.

I'll add a new one to get the ball rolling again.

- The first time I did the chess event in Karazhan. I'll be damned if that just isn't a barrel of fun in it's own right. The fact it's actually attached to epics is even better.

1. Blackjacking lazy peons.
2. Realizing that the Lesser Magic Wand could be used at level 5.
3. Making Alliance friends while grinding in the catacombs under Raven Hill Cemetery as an Undead priest.
4. PvPing in Ashenvale.
5. Finally quitting.

That's the kind of shit that caused me to hate EQ so much.  When you can lose so much xp in one night that you would have been better off not logging in at all, it begs the question why log on in the first place.

If you can only win and never lose, why log on in the first place? If I can only piss on Paelos' thread with side issues, why not go to bed? Night.

To Win.

Fun?  Nah, clearly an outmoded concept.  ACHIEVE ACHIEVE ACHIEVE! 


Apparently I'm broken.  All my memorable moments IRL and Virtual revolve around "Fun" and "Good Times"

Well that or almost getting killed, but that's "Oh fuck remember not to do THAT again, dumbass"  survival.

1) When I first started playing, I got in a serious powerguild, which was a really good thing for me in terms of thinking about MMOGs--I'd always played in/studied more "fringe" sorts of guilds. The night we downed Rag, we did it on our first try, and were only the second guild to do it on our server. Everybody was still feeling kind of "yeah, yeah, let's keep going". We heard Azergos was up, so we all took off to get him. Got there before the other powerguilds, downed him. Then we heard Kazzak was up, went and got him. It was just kind of a crazy in-the-zone, we-are-the-champions thing. Good fun.

2) My current main is a rogue, and oddly, in my guild, there's only a couple of other rogues, I'm basically the rogue-dps in most cap-level instancing. So one night after the expansion went live, we went into Sethekk Halls, which none of us had bothered to do before. Couple of level 70s, some level 65-68s. We're fighting Talon Lord Ikiss, the last boss, and everybody goes down except me with him having about 25% of his health left. So I just pop everything I've got: adrenaline rush, my dodge trinket, my +200 attack power trinket, my evasion, and do everything I can to him, not figuring that there's really any chance. Everybody else is figuring "wipe" as well. But I managed to get him somehow: it was kind of dream-like, everybody was shouting over TS and chat.

3) The time we ran a bunch of level 1 Hordies to Ironforge on a PvP server.


The thing is, most of the stuff that's memorable isn't the ordinary activity of play in WoW (or any MMOG). That's what sort of sad about them, in the end: so much of what you *do* is unmemorable, routinized.

This sounds like my first kill of Aran, which was very similar. I'm the last man standing in my DPS gear throwing up executes and hitting my dodge trinket hoping I can shave off the last 25k of life he had left. Those are always fun kills where it's about to go to shit and you still pull it out of the fire at the end. Of course, those happen about 1 out of every 20 times we've had a boss at 1-3% with things spiraling downhill. Gruul whooped our asses at less than 10% numerous times with an untimely execution of the tank.

But that's not winning.

So you never use saves in single player games then.. other than when you quit for the evening, yes?  Beacuse otherwise, why play if you're not risking the entire evening's session?

Playing for two weeks without ever seeing what the world looked like in the daytime.

Not so sure he's talking so much about actually losing as actually sacrificing. It was a concept I always felt WoW lacked, the ability to utterly devote your character to one thing and one thing only. I never meant to PvP, I never cared much for farming stuff (as I did that with a friend), I just wanted my priest to be the best healer she could possibly be. I could have sacrificed every other aspect of priests just to get my perfect healbot; oddly, I really liked that shit. That would be losing to win something else. Like carpal tunnel syndrome. As is, you can win everything without losing anything (in-game that is, in real life you'll probably lose pretty much everything if you try to win everything in-game.)

As for heights of my WoW career, I think all five postions are occupied by RP events.

Top five? Yeouch. I've been playing this game for a long, long goddamn time. I started playing in Beta 1, and have been playing since then.

Hmm...

1. Doing World PvP on my dwarf chick warrior, right after the introduction of the Honor system, and before Battlegrounds. I was in a guild called Lag on Tichondrius, which was just full of the most hilarious, crazy pile of people ever. Having raids on Kargath that quickly escalated into giant brawls.

2. My old guild's first kill of Ragnaros on my dwarf chick warrior. There was just so much excitement leading up to it. I wasn't in a top world raiding guild, it was just a guild among friends.

3. Naxxramas on my Shaman. I hated it while I was doing it, but looking back on it, it really was the most well-made dungeon in the entire game. I loved learning Thaddius, learning the DDR fight Heigan, and everything up through being in a top 10 US guild that downed Kel'Thuzad.

4. The days in the Level 50 cap beta where me and my girlfriend at the time would just run Sunken Temple over and over and over again, with some guys we knew in the beta. Also, later on meeting those guys outside the game and hanging out with them.

5. My first PvP experience in Beta 3, where the PvP server just opened. I was a night elf warrior, and there were some undead who had snuck into Ashenvale. We banded together and had an amazing back and forth fight - we were all level 10 or so.

And, for bonus points:

6. The realization that three girls I hooked up (in real life, no e-dating) with in some capacity all played healers in World of Warcraft (Two Priests and one Druid - I knew two of them outside of the game prior to knowing them ingame, and the third I didn't hook up with until well after I had met her in real life).

I put that one in there for fun.

1)  Seems everyone has a Ragnaros moment.  Our first kill we crashed our vent server with the cheering, then proceeded to immediately guild-que for like 5 AV's consecutively and beat the living piss out of Van in record time.

2)  This isn't a single "moment", but after our first rag kill, untill blizzard killed it, guild-queing AV became a tradition after raids.  At the time we had 5 GL's, and one of them very emphatically pvp oriented.  He led the raids, and though some proclaimed him an idiot he made the game alot more fun.  He had this wacky elemental shaman with invulnerable mail, which he used to pull every guard in an alliance tower out.  He had all these stupid engineering trinkets, bombs, and other crap that mostly people didnt use or care about but he randomly pulled off cool stunts with.  I would classify "Tsumo's Antics" as one of my memorable moments.

3)  When one of my best (online) friends quit this game, the last night he played we spent about 6-8 hours strait, from like midnight to 7am, world pvpin.  He was one of those dps warriors that no guild wants, not that active, strictly pvp spec'd, cried loudly when asked to tank, etc.  He went blatantly afk right before a bosspull, etc.  But again one of the people i most enjoyed playing the game with, and one of the best pvp warriors on the server IMO.

4)  Our first C'Thun kill.  We had to PUG it, after a fashion.  At the time no horde guild on my server had enough quality players alone to form a raid group that lacked any idiots who would fuck it up.  So we had to take half from our guild and half from another to do it.  We did it on a friday night, and we were about to call it quits around 2am because some people had to leave, and flasks had run out.  Just then a couple old guildmates who had quite the game randomly logged back in.  A shaman and a mage, EXACTLY what we needed.  These were also 2 of the best players we had, but they were both drunk as hell and scared they were going to fuck it up.  But they didnt, we killed the stupid fucking eye and a good time was had by all.  That would be the very last time that mage played the game, and imo a perfect way to end it.

5)  Un'goro crater picking dreamfoil on my mage to make mana pots for my shaman.  I made it a compulsive habit almost to without exception kill each and every single fucking alliance player i saw.  One because they were competition for this resource that was so odious to farm and two because i was extremely bitter at the time at my inability to get elemental gears for my shaman (PVE PRIORITY LAWL).  Anyway, one particular player who i had been mercilessly griefing logged on his main and after i killed that one too got some guildmates to come help him.  So i called some of mine, he called more of his, etc etc.  Went on for hours and hours, we had over 25 ppl in our ungoro raid group at the end, and they alliance had at least that.  Really epic grudge match, had spies and friends on both sides, got confusing at times, but so much fun.

Hells yes. Actually mine was watching the sunrise in game as light poured through my windows at the exact same moment. It was a very weird and very cool. I <3 the 24 hour clock.

Except if your server is three hours ahead - then it's just depressing, because when the sun comes up in the game, you realize 'Oh crap, that's gonna happen in a few hours here, I need to get to bed.'

For me, DAoC was 5+ years of logging on and having some oustanding 8v8 pvp with good friends. The amount of time I spent gearing toons or doing pvp was < 1% of my total time online.  Since most people didn't have the same experience, I can understand why DAoC got such a bad rap. 

I didn't spend much time gearing up toons either. In fact, I never got to max level with any of my characters. Most of them didn't make it past 25 before I gave up. Most of my time was spent in the battlegrounds, or wandering out onto the frontier to get ganked by groups of 8 good friends.

Good times.

1.  Defeating a higher level mage through melee with my staff (I was a mage - wow beta)
2.  Accidentally summoning that Maiden boss in Uldamen while the party was medding up (I had the urge to click!)
3.  Leading charges as a protection tank in AV and rallying my entire side
4.  Shadowfang keep
5.  Healing in MC at level 59 with no Fire resistance  :-D

I can't fit it on my list - but absolutely DM tribute runs were great - talk about a different way of playing.  Good stuff.

Not on my list but I fully agree - it's the most visually impressive city thematically.

1. when undead players were still undead in beta. every moment spent playing was a reminder of how much more bad-ass you were than other races; I spent 30 minutes at the bottom of a lake going JAWS-apeshit on Alliance. here is the key...to operate the exploder button.

2. getting halfway between the min/max recommended levels for instances and duoing them with a friend. or spending way too much time soloing an instance while still in the recommended range...although that isn't as fun.

3. being 2nd main tank for a raiding guild pre-expansion. I would try to pull as much as possible without killing everyone horribly, and it sometimes worked. SO fun.

4. echoing chess in Kara. every instance should now require a mind-control event that ends with either dumptrucks of loot or dumptrucks of ridicule (a friend's guild failed it one time and I made sure he never heard the end of it).

5. using a frost-spec mage when fire was FOTM and kiting every damn thing I possibly could, amazing local townspeople and saving several infants.

There are alot, most pre-TBC, so here goes:

1) Ragnaros, guild first kill. I was Main Tank. We'd been stuck at him for weeks, and we were determined to take him down before setting foot into BWL. Easilly the best kill I've had, ever. We still hadn't perfected our sons strategy, so things were pretty patchy all over and this was our last attempt that evening. We were a pretty casual guild, allowing off-speccs and not very strick on gear requirement (or player skill for that matter). Everything was going smooth, a few deaths (people with next to none fire resistance); then the sons hit us. A few more die, but surprisingly, we kill them soon after Ragnaros reemerges. Ragnaros was at about 52%, we saw an opportunity... Melee keeps dying and dps is pretty low overall, we still have loads of healers left and some ranged dps. Ragnaros submerges again at 3-4% people start cursing on TS, I run in and start tanking sons with my, Russian, Off-tank. Running back to Raggy with four sons on my back, the rest rapeing our healers and ranged dps. Pop Shieldwall and Execute "tank". My trust OT does a last ditch fear on the sons on my back before dying heroically. Boom, I die, just five ranged dps left, Rag has been on 1% for a long time... Shamans Ankhing just to earthshock, boom a single mage left and.... Rag goes down! TS goes nuts! Truly and epic evening. Felt like heroes after that, hehe.

2) Tanking AV with half the raid healing me. Rallying the troops as a prot-specced Warrior, chargeing into the fray, knowing that I would survive, watching 20 allies attacking me, and never getting me down. Running the whole Alliance raid back to Stormpike. And the best part was getting known for this, and people cheering once I joined AV :)
God, I miss old AV.

3) Leading ZG raids. I was know as a pretty Gung-ho raidleader, preffering to zerg through the instance, rather then slowing down. Believing that keeping people active, would keep focus. This was tremendous fun, zerging liek madmen through ZG, chain- and ninjapulling at all times. Didnt really matter if a few people died, all that mattered was that healer mana was above 30%

4) Finally gettin Quel Serrar forged, that felt like an epic quest, with a really epic reward. Although the travel back to DM after each failed attempt didnt feel very epic....

5) Getting back into WoW at TBC, it felt so fresh and new. Although it didnt really last too long, but it felt so much better designed. Like a real production game with even more polish (and more grind). But the zones themself were ace, even the quest structure really kept pushing you the right places.

Seeing the sad orc when I cancelled my account.

Was it really worth bumping a month-old thread for that?

1.  The first time I got ganked.  Fucking Mage in Stonetalon.
2.  Farming Felhound pets under Ravenhill Cemetary then killing noobs with them.
3.  Any one of a number of drunken Orgrimar raids.
4.  Ragnaros
5.  All the people I got to meet playing this game on the internetz.

Utterly.

i still liked running to ogrimmar for the first time in my server when i hit 60 on xmas day
(http://geocities.com/rkjunkmail2002/XMAS04.jpg)

for some reason tossing snowballs at each other turned on their pvp flag. so i just told me pet to eat some while i camp the roof.