If you recognize the image above you might already have realized what I'm going to be talking about but I still believe this is my most important gaming achievement and most emotional gaming moment yet! So I hope you enjoy it and maybe share your own experiences if you where lucky enough to count yourself amount the few players that where able to experience this almost 10 years ago! boy am I getting old or what? Can't believe this happened almost 10 years ago!

I want to set some context in case you don't know which game is this or if you don't know what a Nerdgasm is so lets start with that! I only use the most accurate sources for my information so its quite obvious that the best place to go to look for information and definitions on these types of words is no other than Wikipe... Urban Dictionary, thats right! I'm going to use the definition provided by Urban Dictionary so that you can learn what a nerdgasm is!

^Source

With that cringy word I decided to use out of the way! Lets start talking about my emotional gaming moment!

To begin I'll tell you the name of the game I will be talking about, in case you have been living under a rock for the past 14 years, its World of Warcraft! One of the best MMORPGs produced to date, I have a long story with this game, not as long as it has been out but long nonetheless! I started playing World of Warcraft back in June 2008, This means I've been officially playing WoW on and off for over 10 years at this point, but at the time I got in, It was a little late to the party, the first expansion of the game was coming to an end and the 2nd expansion was approaching quickly, Wrath of the Lich king! Most of my time spent during the few months I had with Burning Crusade was spent leveling and learning the game, so I barely did anything of importance before the Wrath expansion came out.

Now its October 2008 and Wrath of the Lich King was just released! I remember that I was leveling my Blood Elf Paladin around Borean Tundra when I meet a guy called Raziel (yeah, very creative) and we partied together and did a couple quests and dungeons and he ended up inviting me into his guild, which I accepted, I was in a guild but I was not really active there and I knew no one really, It was one of those guilds that just invites people massively to have a chat room rather than being a cohesive guild. The name of the guild was and together with the people at that guild I had what I consider to be my best 2 years playing World of Warcraft! Over the years I've managed to find similar guilds and people to play with but I've never gotten as attached as I got to my guys at Blank.

We raided a lot! 3 nights a week! Over the course of Wrath of the Lich King we managed to beat every raid before the next one was out, Which I might add, was an already impressive accomplishment back then in the days before easy gear and easy raids to get you geared up and going fast, No back then it took weeks to months to properly gear up a character to do current content! and we loved it!

My Character sitting in front of the Lich King

With all these things said, we can go ahead and talk about the actual emotional moment! After playing together with the guild for over a year, the "end" of the expansion was approaching, December 9th was the date patch 3.3 of World of Warcraft was released, this included the final raid of the expansion(shut up, Ruby Sanctuary wasn't a thing) and everyone was ready to take on the Lich King! I remember our guild being really excited to go inside the raid as soon as possible but I remember pretty vividly how terrible the release of that patch was, the game was unplayable for over a week so that happened lol, back in the day updates to online games didn't go as smooth as they do today and blizzard had a pretty terrible reputation when it came to patches back then!

The patch was released pretty late into the year so we only managed to kill like 4 of the 13 bosses of the raid before time came to take a break for December celebrations and stuff, since some guys had to attend to family meetings and stuff, our raids where cut completely until January of 2010 and when we came back, we where ready to kill this guy! The excitement didn't last for that long though! It took us until March, 2 whole months raiding to finally be able to reach the last boss of the raid! Arthas, The Lich King! and what a trip it was!

The Lich King Right Before the Battle Starts

After working hard for months to finally get into this room(platform?) with Arthas, We where finally here and I'll tell you what, it sucked, for us! Today in hindsight when you look at raid mechanics from more recent expansions like Legion, the raid fight against the lich king was pretty simple, some debuffs here, a few adds there, moving across the platform a lot and not killing your allies by standing in the wrong places but back in 2010 this guy was the real deal, no doubt it was the hardest boss fight yet created by Blizzard and not a lot of guilds where ready for this, a lot of guilds even broke up under the pressure because they couldn't handle failure after failure! Our guild almost broke apart too, a lot of conflicts and a lot of fights where happened, you know, the usual blaming after you get frustrated, if your guild had 2 hour raid nights, depending on how far you got into the boss fight, your guild might have been only able to squeeze 3-4 attempts at Arthas a day! because this boss battle was long as hell! The longest fight back in the day too!

It took like 2 minutes of roleplay to get the battle started and then the actual boss battle could last anything from 15 to 20 minutes! That was a lot back then when boss fights used to last 8 to 10 minutes and all the time invested could go down the trash can for a single mistake here! So a lot of frustration happened over silly little mistakes that ended up wiping the raid. It took us 44 attempts to finally get the Lich King down, our guild almost splits along the way but when we managed to do it! Wow! The relief you feel after you have invested so much time in something and it pays off is amazing, we where shouting all over ventrillo(feel old yet? no?) It really was a once in a life time gaming experience and I wish I could have recorded it but back then in 2010 not everyone had the hardware to be able to record and play at the same time, so all I have left from that experience are screenshots! Which I'll be sharing right here!

Album

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This brings my short emotional gaming moment to and end! I was inspired to write this because lately there has been a lot WoW discussions going on in the Archdruid community, especially by @enjar and I've been getting tempted a lot by those discussions to go back into the game, which I might end up succumbing to or not, who knows! I do want to play but I don't feel like this is the right time to go back into the game!

As I mentioned above, I wish I had the hardware to record myself back then while playing, because recording that would have been an amazing memory but at least a few people managed to record themselves and they had similar reactions, If you want to take a look yourself at the experience that is participating on a raid, I will leave this video here of the first guild that managed to beat the Lich King back then! Enjoy!(Its a 2 part video! Back in the day when youtube didn't allow for more than 10 minutes of video lol! feel old yet?