Your Top 5 WoW Moments

[Fabricated]

WoW always had the overall better experience for me, but had no exceptional moments that really hit home.

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.

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.

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.

[Threash]

WoW always had the overall better experience for me, but had no exceptional moments that really hit home.

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.

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[Kail]

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.

"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.

[pxib]

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.

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.

[Jayce]

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.

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?

[Tale]

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.

[Tale]

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.

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[pxib]

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.

[Train Wreck]

WoW always had the overall better experience for me, but had no exceptional moments that really hit home.

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...

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.

[Tale]

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.

[Ironwood]

If you can only win and never lose, why log on in the first place?

To Win.

[Merusk]

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

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.

"Memorable moments" does not equal "Fun."  Generally, for me anyway, memorable moments need some kind of tension or drama

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

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.

[Tale]

If you can only win and never lose, why log on in the first place?

To Win.

But that's not winning.

[Merusk]

If you can only win and never lose, why log on in the first place?

To Win.

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?

[Margalis]

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

[Tarami]

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?

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.

[Nonentity]

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.

[Sogrinaugh]

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.

[Prospero]

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

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.

[Nonentity]

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

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.'

[Nebu]

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.

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. 

[pxib]

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.

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.

[jpark]

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.

[jpark]

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

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

[lesion]

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.

[Scadente]

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.

[Surlyboi]

Seeing the sad orc when I cancelled my account.

[Nonentity]

Seeing the sad orc when I cancelled my account.

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

[Musashi]

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.

[Surlyboi]

Seeing the sad orc when I cancelled my account.

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

Utterly.