Each day melted together that summer. I’d show up to work late in the morning and stay until seven at least, hiding behind drawn blinds in the cluttered studio where I spent my days editing video and marketing copy for a mobile start-up, before attempting the congested drive home. Fires raged in the wooded hills separating the Bay Area from Santa Cruz, just out of sight but close enough for the smoke to cast an eerie pall over the region. So distinctly Californian, this phenomenon, most apparent after dawn and before dusk when the sunlight takes the time to slide in from acute angles—and yet it seems universal, its grand aura reproduced and bound to a hundred different settings on as many movie screens.
Immediately after college I shared a run-down house on Waverley Street in Palo Alto with a pack of tech-worker hippies—a property oddly situated in a tony neighborhood and thus loathed by its neighbors for its presumed drain on their property values. Steve Jobs lived several blocks away, in a house whose rustic look was accentuated by an eye-rollingly obvious apple orchard. We regularly raided it to stock the house’s kitchen, since the fruit was excellent and the fence low. My house was owned by an old Grateful Dead devotee who’d made himself a small fortune in semiconductors and plowed that nest egg into below-market housing. He’d named the house “Morning Dew,” after a Dead song I’ve still never heard, and I lived in the basement. As a veteran of subterranean living I’ll stick up for plenty of cellar apartments, but this was a basement. I shared space with giant rolls of foam insulation, ducked my head under ductwork, and cozied up next to the water heater on cold nights. A panel on the base was missing, and I’d huddle up on my side to keep my legs warm watching the pale flickering blue of the pilot light.
My other life was more rewarding. Indeed, someone devoted to the World of Warcraft raiding scene would hardly see a better day. That summer saw the release of patch 1.11, “Shadow of the Necropolis,” opening up the forty-man dungeon of Naxxramas for general consumption. Blizzard turned the occasion into a server-wide event complete with new quests, challenges, and rewards for lower-level players across Azeroth. The necropolis itself loomed tremendous over the Eastern Plaguelands, a flat black pyramid crowned with spires and spines, immobile like a hateful mountain hovering in the diseased yellow air. The structure almost literally dripped menace, and inside waited the most brutal tests WoW raiders had yet seen. Without delving into the tired and nostalgia-riven debate comparing all dungeons over time, “Naxx” inarguably represented the last and most ambitious of the forty-man raids—a fittingly glorious end to the long reign of truly large-scale MMORPG raiding.
Naxxramas boasted a healthy population of thirteen bosses spread through four themed wings, with access to the final two bosses unlocked only by first defeating all the others. Early bosses like the undead stag beetle Anub’Rekhan fell to well-geared incursions in a handful of attempts, but the difficulty ramped up steeply and unevenly after the wings’ first bosses. Grand Widow Faerlina could explode an entire cadre of melee DPS in moments. Even the packs of “trash” monsters spacing out the bosses dealt enormous damage, demanded quick reflexes, and demolished more than a few raids that pulled without ensuring all forty fighters were ready for action. Responding to frequent player complaints about “boring” trash in earlier dungeons, Blizzard for the first time kept all forty players permanently on their toes.
It’s unlikely Blizzard’s raid designers knew quite what they had with Patchwerk. The first boss of Naxx’s Plague Quarter, he was very simple on paper: his visual form was borrowed from the bloated, half-disemboweled “abominations” that guarded the undead of the Undercity, but inflated to enormous size, with a health pool and basic attack damage to match. He had no minions, could be pulled anywhere inside a wide-open room, and possessed only one special ability. But seven minutes after engaging, a Berserk mechanism inflated his damage to unsurvivable levels, functioning as a time limit. If a raid could not sustain some 9,500 damage per second over those seven minutes—quite a number in those days—they wiped. DPS players never had to move, administer crowd control, or change targets. The main tank had limitless rage,1 so maintaining threat wasn’t an issue. It was as pure a gear test as was ever devised, asking players only to output X damage and Y healing for Z time as a condition for victory. It should have been so simple.
But in practice, it wasn’t. Patchwerk’s one special ability was called Hateful Strike, which he would use every 1.2 seconds to deal enormous damage to a single raid member. A single such blow killed anyone but a well-geared tank, and even then extremely rapid and precise healing was needed to shore him up against the next blow. As with the DPS, healers seemed to face a straightforward problem of mathematics, but this was complicated by the fact that nobody knew how Hateful Strike picked its targets. They immediately started work to unravel the mystery, but without access to the game’s inner workings they could settle on no answer.
Theories abounded, quarreled over endlessly in the message boards that had by this point become the game’s primary medium of intellectual exchange (as chronicled in chapter 3). Threads on Patchwerk became so common that moderators had to aggressively close them lest they dominate all discussion. Combat logs weren’t then the meticulously detailed moment-by-moment accounts they became, so evidence could be found to support any theory. On one thing most guilds agreed: Hateful Strike had to involve some component of threat. It usually hit tanks, and after all, wasn’t “hate” a common synonym for “threat”? If this seems terribly unsophisticated, well, we did our best with the tools at hand. The answer to Hateful Strike was never terribly complicated: as stated by Blizzard developers years afterward, it simply struck the highest-health target near the top of its threat list. The top position on the threat list was immune, so the main tank was safe, but every 1.2 seconds, whichever off-tank happened to have the most hit points at that instant got hit. The fight came at you so fast, and hard, that few realized how simple it really was. Those who did had no incentive to tell the rest of us.
Patchwerk’s true challenge always lay in the DPS race, in the months of gear accumulation before anyone set foot in Naxxramas, but Hateful Strike took on an outsized role in his mythology. Its seemingly capricious nature, its sudden and terrifying violence, were bad enough, but more important, it was Patchwerk’s primary wiping mechanism. Inattentive healing might lead to a main tank death every now and again, but off-tank deaths to Hateful Strike always caused the most collective misery. A wipe to the Berserk timer actually felt like an accomplishment! At least you kept the fight stable for seven full minutes. Most wipes occurred because the healers or tanks screwed up somewhere, but it almost always felt like capricious behavior on the part of Hateful Strike. Add to this the sheer volume of guilds who were capable of reaching Patchwerk (anyone who could clear a few challenging trash packs), compared to the relative few sporting the gear and coordination to plausibly kill Patchwerk, and you have one of WoW’s all-time stumbling blocks. A savage and lusty kick in the teeth. Like Vaelastrasz in Blackwing Lair, Patchwerk doled out constant lessons in humility. He became known as a “guild-killer,” a boss tough enough to single-handedly turn players against each other and break down the unspoken collective will powering any serious raid unit.
Even for a solid outfit like T K T, he presented a mighty obstacle. Our rebuilding and recruiting process over that year had prepared us well for Naxx’s earlier bosses, but we lacked depth at several key DPS positions and had always been a methodical, low-damage, control-the-encounter type of guild. Any DPS race we’d run uphill, through shin-deep mud. I knew we’d get there in time, through practice and gradual accumulation of gear and the quaffing of exotic potions, but first we’d have to heal through Hateful Strike and its constant psychological battery.
DPS players faced a wide-open bazaar in which to ply their trade, with only a single target to ravage and no splash-damage fireworks mandating constant movement. Convenient as this might seem, it also changed their roles. For much of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, “He never dies” was the highest compliment one could pay a rogue. Patchwerk flipped those negative expectations to positive: DPS were suddenly held to strict and quantifiable standards of performance. If after seven minutes’ time you hadn’t done enough damage, you were a liability to the raid. “Damage meter” UI mods went from data-collection projects to mandatory tools. Every second of raid performance was scrutinized. Every keystroke demanded explanation. Every suboptimal enchantment or gear choice earned a patronizing lecture from the raid leader. Guildmates who were nice people and rarely made mistakes still found themselves left out of raids by virtue of arithmetic. Undead nightmare though he was, Patchwerk sowed the seeds of quantifying, gear-parsing snobbery that would only find more verdant expression in time.
Tanks found themselves in oddly passive roles, compared with the precise motion and frenetic off-tanking to which they’d become accustomed. The main tank’s position wasn’t important. Patchwerk never moved, so the off-tanks stood in a pile atop the main, each taking Hateful Strikes in turn, populating the boss’s threat list but otherwise presenting themselves as anvils to the game’s most punishing hammer. Even using every survival consumable in the game,2 they took damage in alarming bursts with no hope of respite. Either the healers topped them up before the next Hateful Strike came or not. If not, they’d either avoid it (via dodge or parry) or die. If they died, the raid would almost certainly wipe in short order. For Patchwerk more than any other encounter, tanks sat as passive but necessary recipients of stress—galvanized bolts holding up a vast, creaky forty-man suspension bridge.3
Healers had it worst. Obviously this statement reflects my own biases, but I believe it’s correct. Patchwerk healing was unlike any other fight in terms of its combination of burst damage and singular focus. Raid healers know their assignments for every fight, and experienced players will freelance outside those roles as circumstances dictate, but Patchwerk brooked no improvisation. No non-tank ever took a hit, but those tanks suffered such sphincter-clenching damage that any heal placed elsewhere was too risky. If an off-tank assigned to another healer dropped to 2 percent health after a Hateful Strike and your assignment was at 100 percent, you had to resist every practiced reflex to assist. An isolated failure might wipe your raid, but at least it would be isolated, blame easily parceled out and adjustments made. Freelancing inevitably led to a teetering house of cards, a juggling act with too many balls in the air. Instead healers dragged the tanks’ health monitors front and center and focused with psychotic intensity on those little green bars. My stomach rose and fell with every Hateful Strike, with every precipitous drop and miraculous save. Everything happened too fast to process, too quickly to consciously react, forcing the healers into a kind of trance as they struggled to keep up with the punishment. Tough fights often demand this kind of concentration at several junctures, but Patchwerk forced you to sustain it for seven full minutes knowing a single error would wipe the raid.
I have never felt more stress in a video game than I did healing on Patchwerk. As raid leader on top of my healing assignment, it was the worst moment of every week. When he’d fall over dead, I’d abdicate my typical loot-sorting duty and step away from my PC for a few minutes. My stomach rolled and my head swam. I was dizzy with fading adrenaline and sick with anxiety. Even after we’d killed him a dozen times, most of Naxxramas comfortably on “farm status,” Patchwerk got no easier. The fight got shorter with more gear, and the margins for error grew somewhat wider, but the fight’s furious action exhausted me every single time. This wasn’t fun, neither at the time nor in retrospect. Thinking back to those fights recollects a sense of duty and pride but very little pleasure. I’m left with two overriding memories: The first, silence. Playing a game with forty people over voice chat means a constant chatter, a pleasant white noise underscoring any proceeding, but during Patchwerk attempts we all fell quiet. For seven minutes the only sound in my ears was the occasional reminder for potion timers. Otherwise, aching silence. The second memory is counting the seven concrete steps up from my basement, heaving open the slanted storm door, and sucking in the cool night air to quell my post-kill nausea. In a California summer the burning hills threw off the hearth-and-home scent of a New England fall.
If you were part of this world, of this hobby better described as a lifestyle, you know exactly what I’m talking about. WoW’s endgame was always demanding and maddening beyond the point of material reason—so much time invested for the sake of virtual equipment that future patches and expansions would inevitably render obsolete—but it nonetheless attracted devotees in the hundreds of thousands, because the challenge and camaraderie were so damn compelling. This is true for hardcore guilds more than others, with their members specializing in patience of a masochistic sort: the patience to endure repeated failure, to the point of suffering, in the pursuit of a goal. It stands quite separate from interpersonal patience, which hardcore players do not often display. The type-A elements of their personalities leave them little patience for fools and an acute awareness of time’s value. Aware more than anyone else of game mechanics and best practices, they know MMORPGs flatten out individual skill in favor of time invested. They don’t want their time wasted; when venturing into a dungeon or battleground, many avoid the automatic matching features of the Group Finder and other flavors of “pickup” play, because they feel the general population will only get in their way. “PUGs [shorthand for ‘pickup groups’] lead to tears,” went the common aphorism.
Of course, not everyone has this masochistic tendency, and many that do have the restraint not to indulge it. Bringing a raiding guild together was an audacious act, declaring your intent to blaze a trail of glory independent of whatever guilds already existed. It also demanded immediate sacrifices from its members. Hardcore raiders shoved their way to the top of the social order and stayed there through carefully applied and maniacally dedicated effort.
When I worked as a quality assurance tester for video games, the first thing I learned (besides the fact that many of my peers eschewed hygienic bathroom practices) was that it was unproductive to see my work as “fun” in any conventional way. The works in progress over which I labored were games only in the sense of economics: frameworks containing agents, choices, and payoffs. Empowering my character or advancing through a linear story was impossible; any progress evaporated with the next test build. Instead one focused on a task, whether that meant checking a particular feature or actively trying to break it, and pursued that task with psychotic dedication. Failure was not punished but rather expected. Attempt to reproduce a bug one hundred times and the hundredth failure was no more important than the first: one simply moved on to attempt #101. “Everything is possible!” proclaimeth the prophet and the game tester alike. Any barrier can be overcome with enough dedication, execution, and luck.
The same mentality inspires hardcore raiding. For those who view video games as instruments for achieving mathematical conditions, MMORPGs are the ultimate laboratory. Everything revolves around time expenditure, after all. If one deems a goal numerically achievable, achieving it is only a question of putting in the time. Twenty attempts, fifty attempts, two hundred attempts—there’s no limit, so why stop short of the finish line? Your priorities may differ, but this is how hardcore raiders think. I’ve written in chapter 4 about the virtue of patience, and raiders need more of it than anyone else. There’s no easy or expeditious way to coordinate dozens of human beings sitting in separate rooms connected by Internet voice chat. Every failed attempt is followed by a lengthy setup process as healers resurrect the fallen one by one, reapply buffing spells, and replenish their mana. Raid leaders explain and implement any changes to the guild’s strategy, ready checks are made, and eventually the main tank initiates the next attempt. Efficient guilds can pull this off in five minutes or less; any dawdling represents portions of another prospective attempt, valuable raiding time, wasted. Bathroom breaks, if you must have them, occur once you’re resurrected and have met your buffing responsibilities.
If this seems excessive, keep in mind the number of people involved. Any time wasted is everyone’s time wasted, and these are competitive individuals who’ve put aside real-life responsibilities to attend the raid. Efficiency becomes a question of courtesy, of respect. Everything about a raider’s performance is subject to the same discerning judgment. The game of WoW, as more than a few raid leaders have sneered, is not especially difficult. Any given raider’s time in combat consists of pressing the same handful of buttons over and over again, often in a prescribed order, while moving and switching targets as dictated by the strategy posted in advance on the guild’s internal forums. For this reason, it is less important that raiders be preternaturally skilled than that they play in a thoughtful manner. True greats exist; every serious WoW player ran across a few. Just about every serious raiding guild had a manically driven warlock who topped every damage meter even when his class was underpowered, or a virtuosic priest who’d throw his Shield spell in that sliver of time between a rogue pulling threat and the first hit landing. These people are wonderful to have around, but they don’t ultimately define a guild.
In fact, when examining elite raid units, one is quickly struck by the dearth of geniuses. They’re rare commodities, after all, and anyone trying to build a guild of geniuses will never have the numbers to raid anything. Competence is the key. The biggest difference between average and elite guilds lies not in the top 10 percent but in the bottom 10 percent. Good guilds don’t field bad players. This simplistic maxim obscures the difficulty of not fielding bad players, as nowhere in the stars is it written that having the free time to raid twenty or more hours per week makes someone good at MMORPGs.
Filling a handful of crucial roster spots (main tank, principal healers, and DPS) with good players is easily done. From there it’s a question of fleshing out a roster, providing sufficient depth and diversity to deploy a consistent mix of tanking, DPS, and healing, balancing class numbers to spread loot around, and leaving just enough flexibility to shift your raid’s class composition (adding a rogue for melee damage, an extra warlock for Banish, two more healers to stabilize the raid for early attempts). Meeting all these needs and meeting them with good, dedicated players whose schedule matches yours? Good luck, unless your guild has the name recognition to pull the absolute best recruits from your realm and poach good players from others. Nearly every guild in the world compromises. Somewhere on their rosters are poor players, players lacking either the motivation to research and pursue optimal play or the particular game-connected sense of awareness necessary to run very quickly out of fires. “Don’t stand in the fire” is probably the single most important piece of advice anyone attempting a WoW dungeon can receive. If the area under your avatar’s feet lights up in any way, move.
Or don’t move! Maybe that’s not a lethal pit of shadow energy—a dreaded “area of effect” spell, or AOE—but instead a magical glyph increasing your damage output by 300 percent! Every fight is its own puzzle playing its own script, and it’s every raider’s responsibility to know everything possible about that script, including exactly how she should react to each of its events. The earliest WoW raids may have been “tank-and-spank” affairs, immobile nukefests enlivened by the occasional area-of-effect fireball or perhaps a squadron of lesser minions (“adds,” in the parlance of our times), but modern raid encounters demand quick reactions and varied behavior from every player on the roster. (The rosters vary these days, since WoW now allows anywhere from ten to thirty players into automatically scaling raid encounters.)4
A druid might find himself transformed into a ghost, tasked with using unique spectral abilities to dispel four malicious phantoms before they kill a guildmate. A rogue might be randomly targeted by a boss’s Charge ability, forced to sprint in a wide and prescribed arc to keep herself alive while ensuring the boss remains in range of the hunters. Any failure or even, in some cases, any hesitation will get you killed, at the very least making you look silly and at worst leading to a wholesale wipe. A bad player targeted by one of these abilities notices it once the debuff icon appears, thinking only then of how to react. A good player anticipates, expects herself to be targeted (even if the chance is remote) and has already visualized exactly how she will react so she wastes not an instant. Perhaps it’s reasonable to fail the first time one encounters a new challenge, but if everyone fails the first challenge the guild is in for up to thirty painful wipes. Raiders must be ever aware, ever poised with lightning reflexes, reacting instantly to new developments and all the while maintaining the greatest possible throughput of threat, damage, and healing.
DPS, the most quantitative of the holy trinity of MMORPG roles, is by necessity the most rote. If ever classes were designed to sit and mash a single button, that changed years ago. Blizzard pushes every player to stay active during fights, pushing a button at least once every 3 seconds but not more than once every 1.5 seconds.5 Every DPS player cycles through a handful of abilities, typically maintaining at least one DOT spell that causes damage slowly over a long period while striking consistently with efficient medium-damage attacks and deploying special high-damage attacks as circumstances and lengthy cooldowns allow. Using gear optimized for her talent build, the DPS player uses her abilities in a basic rotation to maximize her output. That’s well and good for tank-and-spank fights like Patchwerk, but most modern raid encounters involve a great deal of motion and multiple “adds” to occupy extra tanks.
DPS players hate both of these things, as they ruin optimal rotations. Certain classes can attack on the move, but boss fights demand precise positioning, and a moving raider can’t focus all her attention on damage. Switching targets hurts efficiency as well, as fresh debuff spells need applying and the adds may not live long enough for a proper damage cycle. As a general rule, a player’s damage per second accelerates with her time on target before eventually peaking at whatever height mathematics and latency allow. Yet even a weak boss’s health bar drains at glacial pace, rendering their furious assaults slightly absurd. An erstwhile girlfriend once remarked, peering at my screen during a raid, “It looks like everybody’s really busy, but nobody’s accomplishing anything.” This remains the single most accurate description of MMORPG raiding I’ve ever heard.
Good DPS players move very little and always with purpose, taking advantage of every loose global cooldown to shift a few steps. They bind hotkeys to target whatever their tanks are targeting, as clicking a target on the screen leaves room for error. They pan their personal cameras around, constantly alert for new threats, ignoring the numbers exploding on their screens except perhaps if a lucky string of critical strikes boosts their damage enough to pull threat off the tank. Those with cheap PCs point their cameras straight down at the dungeon floor to tone down any graphical fireworks and ensure a smoother (read: more efficient) raiding experience. If they die for any reason short of collateral damage in a wholesale raid wipe, they are yelled at. They don’t get to complain about much and are generally expected to be grateful for any loot, as their roles are presumed the easiest. Of course, if dealing top-flight damage were actually easy, everyone would be doing it.
Tanks, on the other hand, we treat with reverence. Though a casual observer would discern little difference in their keyboard mechanics, and no rational person would suggest one’s choice of WoW raiding role as a proxy for moral value, in our collective psychology tanks assume the role of the suffering ascetic. Forgoing easy farming and enjoyable PvP combat, they exist to suffer pain. Blow after blow thuds on their armored hides, each sufficient to kill anyone else in the raiding party, and the healers ward them away from death’s edge. Were this not a video game it would be a truly macabre practice, something out of Kafka’s deeper depressions, but hit points are an abstraction to begin with. Even though avatars don’t feel pain, the tank’s role as a sponge for suffering lends him an air close to holy. Tanks, especially main tanks, don’t get yelled at. They’re honored and rewarded as much as possible, not only because they’re hard to replace but because everything they do in a dungeon is a literal sacrifice.
Once a tank has initiated a fight and made himself the opponent’s first target, he strikes it with special abilities that generate vastly more threat than their feeble damage would suggest. Building and maintaining a threat lead over the DPS is just one of his tasks. Bosses range in size from a passenger van to a large building, most are mobile, and nearly all are best attacked from the rear, so their position and facing are crucial, and it falls on the tank to place the enormous monster in exactly the right spot. But because his own survival prohibits ever facing away from his target, all positioning and repositioning and dodging of fire pits and void zones and swiveling to direct frontal attacks must be done in reverse. Tanks, like the late Ginger Rogers, do their work backward and in high heels. Main tanks also must attend every single raid, or damn near to it, because their extravagantly valuable gear is the fulcrum by which the guild leverages its strength into loot. To kill a boss you first need a player who can take the boss’s damage.
To that end, a tank looks always to his own survival. If he dies the raid is probably going to wipe in short order, so this is hardly a selfish impulse. He cycles short-cooldown abilities like Shield Block to mitigate incoming damage while always keeping a watchful eye on a whole slew of cooldowns and consumables. Potions, healthstones, survival talents, and the like might not seem like much compared to the punishment he takes, but heals are constantly landing and so survival is decided in fractions of a second. Any one of these “oh shit buttons” may save a tank from the hit that kills him, so he guards every one of them jealously. Outcompeting DPS for the top spot on a boss’s threat list used to be more difficult, particularly for early Horde players who lacked paladins’ threat-minimizing abilities.
Tanking changed a great deal over the years. What used to be an arcane (metaphorically speaking) practice reserved only for the most skilled warriors was democratized—first by the introduction of viable druid and paladin tanks in the Burning Crusade expansion, then by the smoothing out and homogenizing of tank abilities in the Wrath of the Lich King. Every tanking class now enjoys reliable single-target and multi-target threat abilities, a Taunt mechanism, and a slew of emergency survival abilities on long cooldowns. All can find gear suiting their class and play style. This was not always the case! Now every tank worth his salt, regardless of his class,6 maintains a diverse arsenal of tanking gear customizable for any occasion: a set for maximum hit points, a set for evasion, a set for high armor and block to mitigate sudden bursts of damage. Tanking has been smoothed out and streamlined, made accessible enough for novices to handle but kept enjoyable for longtime veterans. The appeal of shielding one’s allies from harm, of snapping aggro back with a Taunt so quick the foe barely has time to turn, has never gone away.
It’s that same appeal that motivates the healing classes. I came to healing out of necessity. Originally I’d planned to be a face-melting elemental shaman who slung lightning at his enemies, but in vanilla WoW it just wasn’t an option. Hybrid classes, capable of playing several different holy trinity roles depending on their gear and talents, were hybrid only in name until the Burning Crusade expansion. Paladins, druids, shamans, and priests were good only for healing. No matter what I did, my damage would always be pathetic, and so I made the adaptation to a support role. To my surprise, I quickly learned to love it. Healing is unlike almost every other gaming practice in that it does not unconditionally reward output. Every point of damage or threat a DPS or tanking player can produce is inherently valuable; the same is not true of healing, since every character has a fixed pool of hit points. If I cast a 1,000-point heal on a character missing 500 hit points, fully half my spell is wasted. Perhaps I’m so fearful of burst damage that I’ll take the loss, but every point of inefficiency carries costs in time and mana. Healers can empty their mana pools in barely a minute if they choose, so their every choice carries some question of efficiency.
It should come as no surprise that over the years they’ve contrived many ways to pursue this. UI mods were long necessary, as Blizzard’s default UI left no way for players to see the health or status of any raid members not directly in their five-man party. What was intended to be a clear and attractive field of vision for play grew cluttered with forty distinct health monitors in addition to any other bells and whistles like tank health monitors or assist indicators. Only committed aesthetes or masters of digital feng shui could maintain attractive UIs while raid healing. Modders developed add-ons to abort likely overheals, but as with Decursive—another efficiency mod used primarily by healers—Blizzard disabled it. But players kept on innovating. There was a long period at the end of vanilla WoW and early in The Burning Crusade when healers would deliberately use lower-level versions of their spells, taking advantage of healing boosts from their gear while paying less mana.7 For a long time, various ranks of Healing Wave took up half my action bars!
To heal in a raid is to be constantly presented with split-second decisions, the failure of which will result in the swift deaths of your comrades—who, once you’ve resurrected them, won’t be happy. You learn to ignore most of the action raging around in favor of your health monitors—their healthy little green shoots shorn off to hazardous yellow, orange, red, and just as violently replenished in a deluge of healing magic. In time the abstraction becomes legible. In time you learn to discern the fight’s ebb and flow in the colored language of the monitors, reading it like the vertically scrolling green glyphs of The Matrix. Unless the deaths are instant one-shot obliterations, there’s almost certainly something you could have done to buy time, if not prevent them outright. Thus every wipe is in some sense your fault. Even trash monsters in a raid dungeon will swiftly kill a tank without constant healing, so healers rarely get to play on autopilot. For this reason good healers tend to be neurotic sorts, perfectionists who wear the weight of their awesome duty.
Healing is a constant tightrope act, keeping your raid alive through expected constant damage, unexpected bursts of damage, and scripted bursts of damage such as when a boss uses a special attack. Anticipation stands you in good stead but only to a point, as the most efficient healing spells tend to be the slowest. Speed exacts a painful price in terms of mana, and a healer must never run out of mana except perhaps in the closing seconds of a particularly stressful boss fight. Managing this crucial resource becomes second nature over years of raiding: the familiar rhythm of an early Mana Tide or Innervate to replenish mana and give the spell’s cooldown time to elapse, potions every two minutes, the second Tide about six minutes in, by which point in any given fight things probably have gotten hairy. Raids are puzzles, and healers keep the puzzle from eating you alive while you figure out how to solve it. When learning new encounters, every minute of survival the healers can buy is another precious minute of live-fire practice dodging AOEs, picking up and burning down adds, adjusting to the fight’s particulars.
Of the holy trinity, healing might appear to be the most essential—as indeed it was in the early days, with tanking a close second. Good healers were so hard to come by, and you needed so many of them for forty-man raiding that a guild was largely defined by its healing corps (in addition to the highly visible front man figure cut by the main tank). Packing the raid with healers and turning boss fights into highly stable marathons was the safest bet. Tight time limits, like Patchwerk’s Berserk mechanism, changed all that, and much for the better: DPS play became every bit as crucial. Well-geared rogues and mages, long considered disposable cogs (“Shut up and Frostbolt”), became treasured commodities.
And yet the main tank and top healers always amass the most accolades. Their roles as the wardens of life and death are just too visible. Whenever a raider takes a big hit, the surge of saving light has a name attached. Everyone learns pretty quickly which healers have the best reflexes, whose heals will be the first to land. The healers, in turn, take tremendous pride in their work. I know few feelings in video games like landing the perfect heal at the perfect moment, snatching a teammate back from oblivion and turning the tide to victory. Being on the receiving end of that save is a wonderful feeling as well, completing a powerful feedback loop. Healing in online games is a legitimately emotional experience. The experience of destroying one’s enemies gets familiar in a hurry, but saving a teammate’s life yields a special thrill. The gratitude that often follows cements the bond. There is no quicker route to friendship in WoW than healing and being healed. Any antipathy toward your teammates must be set aside. You cannot allow them to die; you must save even the worst asshole’s life because his success is necessary for yours, and in that bond between (often) total strangers there’s something beautiful. We as a species have invested too much in the symbolism of life and healing to be cynical. In the moment, in the game, this bond is very real.
In an archetypal fantasy narrative common to all fiction, heroes arise through a combination of exceptional talent and trying circumstances. Either born or fated to her role, the hero can easily establish conflict with it, and the innately jealous (for they are human) audience may collectively forgive her the audacity of being exceptional. But a hero who states, “I wanted this, worked for it, and earned it, and the rest of you should make do with less,” draws the same disdain as a cocky professional athlete, from whom we expect undying gratitude for his every opportunity and reward. We prefer our Sully Sullenbergers, diamonds in the rough called to action in one shining moment and then content to spend the rest of their lives trying, trying in the face of cruel fate to live anonymous “normal” lives.
Hardcore WoW raiders don’t fit this bill. Of course they don’t save lives either, but I bring up heroes to point out how the raiding game is spiritually opposed to most RPG conventions. Downing the biggest, baddest threats to Azeroth’s existence should be thrilling, but in reality it’s a matter of attention and relentless execution. Perhaps the Peter Jackson version would include breathless chases and sweeping pan shots, but raiding always reminded me of Tolkien’s classic novels in that it’s not thrilling. There’s no immediate reward to be had; it’s a scholar taking five full pages to describe a tree. For the right type of person, meticulous craftsmanship is its own reward. Let’s imagine, for a lighthearted conceit, that a traditional fantasy narrative took a power-gaming turn! Imagine it hewed roughly to World of Warcraft’s timeline. It would start in roughly the same place—the beginning, a very good place to start, and like most fantasies it would be an utterly faceless beginning.
Reared alongside countless indistinguishable others in the ruddy desert of Durotar, three orclings leave their hardscrabble pig farm to seek their respective fortunes: Ichiro, Niro, and Sanyo are their names. Ichiro, being the oldest and the halest, chooses the path of a warrior and sets out from home bearing Porkplower, the family’s ancestral great ax. Niro, the middle child and never able to best his elder brother in a fight, cultivates his mind for the dominion of nature. Hewing his very own staff from an ash sapling, he swears fealty to the god of thunder and chooses the path of a shaman. Sanyo is the youngest of the three, her frame lean and hard from a lifetime of fighting for scraps, and with her natural cunning she’s a natural cutpurse. Sanyo resolves to spend her life in the shadows, striking suddenly with foul poisons before retreating without a trace. She becomes a rogue.
The three grow along with their peers. They labor where adventurers’ work may be found, first in Durotar and then in the neighboring Barrens. Ichiro wades through quilboar and kobold alike, gleefully thwonking away with his ax though he wishes he had more interesting skills than Heroic Strike. Ichiro builds his mastery of the elements by hurling lightning bolts from a distance, converting one plainstrider after another from proud flightless birds into crisped Thanksgiving turkeys. He finds this highly agreeable, though he finds himself terribly thirsty and having to take water breaks every two minutes. Sanyo skulks through a local cave complex slicing up purple-cowled cultists, stealing their purses and selling their cowls. She’s learned to brew a few poisons—simple but effective compounds that nevertheless wear off her blades and have to be replenished far more often than logic would seem to dictate.
“But why?” the trio ask, when every two levels they return to their class trainers. “Why must each rank of these new techniques be so expensive, when they provide only paltry benefits?”
“For the economy,” the trainers reply, and the trio sigh and hand over their gold.
Time passes and they reach the limits of their physical power. Try as they might, some kind of externally imposed barrier impedes any further growth. Their only path to advancement lies in the accumulation of better equipment, weapons, and armor. “Where can these treasures be found?” they inquire of Google, and the legendary sage answers, “In the very deepest and darkest of dungeons.”
This seems reasonable enough, but a few abortive forays discourage the siblings. The three of them haven’t might enough to overcome the monsters within. Much as they’d prefer to keep their adventuring a family affair, they need help. Enlisting two confederates from Orgrimmar’s back alleys, they fight their way painfully through and begin to acquire better gear. Progress is agonizingly slow, as the dungeon runs are long and the squad’s spoils rarely match up with their needs. But the siblings are persistent if nothing else, and after a few months they’ve thoroughly subjugated Scholomance, Stratholme, and their ilk. Their gear mostly matches. Life is pretty good.
But it’s not enough. What’s the point in being, they ask rhetorically, if you’re not advancing? Again, better gear is their only forward vector. It exists, hoarded by creatures of immense power in dungeons so deep their mouths lie at the bottoms of still other dungeons.8 The young orcs don’t fear the challenge, though they are queasy at the prospect of throwing in their lot with dozens of others. How far, they wonder, can their fortunes truly be advanced by union with these people? Skilled though some may be, surely others are weaker. Much as the trio chafe at sharing the spoils, without these dungeons and their epic rewards they’ll have nothing else to do. The lords of the realm promise a series of official “battlegrounds” for heroes to match their strength against each other for reward and renown, but these have yet to arrive, and so off to the dungeon our protagonists traipse!
Upon arrival in the Molten Core, where heat shimmers in the air over burbling lava lakes, they find their lives much changed. Niro’s lightning bolts fizzle out feebly against the highly resistant skin of the two-headed, fire-spewing core hounds; unlike a mage or warlock, his spells don’t benefit from weakening curses, and so he’s unable to harm them. “You should heal instead,” the guild leader suggests.
“Look, I’m happy to use my healing spells in a pinch, but I’m not a priest. I’ve got these fly lightning spells and I want to use them!” protests Niro.
“Be that as it may,” says the leader, “every shaman in every top guild heals.” Stunned, Niro consults great Google once more. He sees it is so. The next day he forks over gold to change his abilities, throwing points into healing talents and adapting to his strange new role in every battle. Thankfully, the gear he has so far accumulated needs no replacement, as Intellect is the only available statistic that helps shamans. He’s not sure what he’s doing, but there’s loot to be had.
Sanyo keeps her role, as every one of her abilities represents simply a different way to stab her foes with pointy implements. She keeps her talents too, as stealth seems much preferable to the alternatives. Each battle sees her comrades drop in heavy clots. Whether a cleave or a fire breath or a terrifying roar causing the warriors to lose control of a core hound, rogues are constantly killed. A lucky string of critical strikes, far from an exciting occurrence, can spell doom for an entire raft of the raid. Sanyo learns to be patient, to carefully pick her spots, to never jump in early and always back off sooner rather than later. Survival remains her golden imperative. She isn’t having fun exactly, but there’s loot to be had.
Ichiro finds himself very comfortable, the happiest of the bunch. Having traded in old Porkplower for a blue metallic specimen of craftsmanship known as an Arcanite Reaper, he chews through foes as fast as Sanyo. And should he make an error, should anything go wrong, in a flash he can whip out his shield. Nearly any episode is survivable, and the guild always seems to find itself with a surplus of two-handed warrior loot. Oh, the loot to be had!
The gods announce the creation of yet another dungeon, harder yet with rewards commensurate. A fabulous idea, our heroes concur! They seek still better gear—for what is life without pursuit?—though Blackwing Lair is wracked with encounters seeming to defy the laws of physics and nature, which only some cosmic error will suffice to explain. They endure the dragon Nefarian’s infamous Shadow Flame attack by wearing cloaks crafted from his own sister’s scales, and even near the end of the battle, when the dark lord’s fallen minions leap to life and the world grinds to near a stuttering halt, they keep their composure. Ichiro hacks away with his newest great ax, Niro peers constantly from one ally to the next, inspecting for the smallest wound to heal, and Sanyo does her best not to get hit by the dragon’s sweeping tail. Nefarian’s severed head is placed atop a spire in Orgrimmar, and the trio celebrate while they can, knowing the next dungeon’s not far off. The three are known throughout Azeroth, feted and ogled when they step out in public, feared and respected by their rivals, but this position is by its very nature precarious. With time a dozen competing guilds conquer their own Blackwing Lairs (how each of them can fight the same fights, and do so every week, is something the gods never explain), and the trio find their advantages diminished. They eagerly await—nay, loudly demand if ever they think the gods are listening—the next dungeon, so they may collect new loot.
The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj disappoints. Fun as it might be to battle giant insects, their teeming minions are unrewarding bores. Worse still, the bosses’ loot only occasionally improves the siblings’ gear. The weapons are nice, but the gods’ armor smiths seem to have no concept of value. Naxxramas comes as an improvement, packed with bosses and offering full eight-piece sets of armor. Attacking a new boss grows into routine, a measuring of boundaries and an inexorable boring through them. The guild asks Ichiro to hang up his ax for full-time tanking, as certain fights in Naxxramas demand eight reliable tanks, and with a grumble he agrees. Niro’s learned to love his role with its delicate timing and grave responsibility. Sanyo’s totally changed her fighting style, discarding her daggers for kludgey and boring swords. She doesn’t appreciate the constant scrutiny to which her play is subjected, her every swing recorded for later evaluation. They spend their days working in preparation for nightly trials by fire, sword, ice, and shadow. All have made so many compromises, have so thoroughly adapted to the dungeons’ imperatives, that their younger selves would scarcely recognize them.
Then the world shifts under their feet. The gods redraw the mystical ley lines undergirding the world. Dungeons once requiring forty heroes, they announce, will now accommodate only twenty-five. This sets off immediate infighting: who, everyone wants to know, will be left behind? Jokes about being cut from the guild abound. Anxieties build. Ichiro, Niro, and Sanyo don’t worry over losing their positions, but they do worry about losing the challenge of dungeons. It’s simply easier to corral fewer people, and what few twenty-man dungeons exist don’t satisfy. They’re lesser hurdles for lesser players. But the gods have spoken, and they promise all will be well.
Venturing through the Dark Portal into the newly discovered continent of Outland, our heroes find themselves betrayed—or at least it feels that way. Their sumptuous epic gear, desperately hard-won, begins immediately to show its wear. Simple quest rewards in Outland tend to outclass treasure from the vaults of Naxxramas itself, which strikes the trio as unfair. Shouldn’t those who’ve worked so hard enjoy such advantages? But the gods have spoken, and Niro counsels the others that Outland’s new dungeons will supply them anew. The new world’s dungeons aren’t too easy after all, as some had feared. If anything, they’re too damn hard.
Alchemy had always aided mortal heroes in their conflicts with immortal forces. Victory against Naxxramas’s strongest bosses had been possible only with dedicated use of Azeroth’s most potent potions: “flasks,” enormously expensive and powerful enough to be worth it. No one enjoyed using them, but defeating certain bosses was all but impossible without them. The orcish three have long since made their peace with this—Ichiro in particular, as tanks use the most flasks and struggle most paying for them—but the new regime demands them for every difficult fight. The mechanics are straightforward, but even experienced raids find themselves struggling with sheer damage output. And because this becomes the standard practice, the gods construct each subsequent dungeon assuming constant flask usage as the standard. Large portions of the day are spent collecting materials or gold to aid in their crafting, and Ichiro finds himself supremely unmotivated. This isn’t why he set off adventuring. Still, he’s grown fond of his comrades and the familiar routine of dungeon raiding. He sticks it out.
In time the gods hear the pleas of their people; flasks are made weaker but vastly cheaper. Twenty-five-man dungeons seem to be working well, natural attrition whittles the roster low enough, and the smaller cap gives more freedom to everyone—though Niro still can’t realize his thunder-throwing ambitions. Through Serpentshrine Cavern they march, and Karazhan, and the Eye, and the Black Temple to defeat the legendary demon hunter Illidan Stormrage, and Mount Hyjal and the Sunwell besides! A dense succession of dungeons keeps our heroes sated with gear and an escalating series of challenges, broken up only by the opening of the Northrend continent to exploration and plunder.
The cycle begins anew! The guild accommodates new classes and outfits their gear using the newest crafting professions. They gear up through small dungeons to prepare for another series of long raiding campaigns, but they do so without Sanyo. She’s watched the arena battle scene expand for years and no longer enjoys the grind of raiding. Loot and fame can come with less of a grind, she realizes, and so she takes her leave. Ichiro continues as the guild’s main tank and Niro adapts himself to a new role. The gods have strengthened his shaman lightning spells to the point where they rival anything a mage casts, and he takes full advantage of the opportunity. Onward they push, through a repopulated Naxxramas (the particulars of its bosses’ resurrection being something they’ve learned not to question) and the Argent Tournament and Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel, where they deliver the final blow to the dreaded Lich King and save all of Azeroth from the threat of undead domination. Lest boredom threaten, the gods have already announced their next big plans: the Obsidian and Ruby Sanctums, with fresh bosses and loot!
The world explodes in fire and chaos, the result of an evil dragon loosed upon the world and all that. By “all that,” our narration means a seemingly endless series of minions and plots culminating in dungeons to raid for loot. The event comes to be known as the Cataclysm. In the course of fighting their way to the dragon Neltharion,9 the now-duo will clear the Bastion of Twilight, the Throne of the Four Winds, and the Blackwing Descent. It’s during this time that Ichiro begins to feel burned out. It’s a dire affliction common to raiding heroes, and Ichiro decides his time has come—but he cannot yet retire, as his guild has invested tremendous resources in him and his gear. He is too valuable to quit, but he resolves to do so once Neltharion is defeated. After all, the gods’ next series of plans and dungeons will render his treasure useless, once more as in the past.
The final encounter is spectacular. The gods have grown supremely skilled at crafting these challenges, and Azeroth’s most powerful boss to date demands a show. Ichiro and his comrades assault the corrupted black dragon in midair, leaping from an airship to forcibly pry the elementium scales from his spine. After crashing into the sea, they finish off his broken and maddened form for good. Tucked into the haul of loot is a sword of incredible power, which the guild immediately agrees should be Ichiro’s. As their main tank, their physical and emotional anchor, he has more than earned it. But he can’t accept their gift, and he cannot explain why without explaining everything, and so that’s what he does. He is leaving, he says, retiring to help rebuild the sundered and brutalized Durotar of his youth. The rewards must go to his successor, to help the guild going forward. There is always the next dungeon. There is always the loot it holds.
We are left with Niro at last, Niro alone along with twenty-four of his guildmates forging ahead to the lost continent of Pandaria and then through time itself back to the reconstituted world of Draenor. He senses the world around him changing. New adventuring heroes appear every day, rising, accumulating power and gear, slapping together undisciplined bands nonetheless able to achieve great power through raiding. The distinction between ten-man and twenty-five-man raids has collapsed—one simply zones into a raid with any number of comrades between ten and thirty and it scales itself appropriately. The truly bold attempt Mythic challenges with twenty, conquering the final bosses and then for months after selling the copious loot to strangers for piles of the gold that everyone seems to have these days. Raiding is no less rewarding than it ever was, but it no longer confers special privilege. Niro is unsure what that means. Though he knows the gods will continue to produce exciting dungeons to plumb, he no longer enjoys their exclusive favor, and so his life’s pursuit feels less valuable. A sacred calling, a discipline for which he’s strived and suffered, is now one choice among many. A campaign through the Broken Isles in pursuit of the ancient Tomb of Sargeras sees him acquiring an “artifact” weapon, a tool of unspeakable power and majesty, but every single one of his guildmates can say the same. They raid a few hours a week, nudging their gear up to the point where it is powerful yet utterly uniform, for who can really get excited about upgrading his boots from item level 810 to level 815 and then to 820? So much work for such fleeting reward. Niro still enjoys his adventures, particularly in those frenetic months after each new continent opens for plundering. They just don’t seem to mean much anymore.
We all leave the game eventually, as I can’t help reminding you. High-end raiding is a paradox in that it labors to retain players while at the same time driving them away. Blizzard’s designers are experts in player retention, pacing out new content and ever shinier rewards on an invisible but remarkably consistent internal schedule: major updates at least every six months and expansion packs every two years. Building every new raid dungeon as an outgrowth of established storylines, they leverage the work you’ve already done against the promise of conclusions. Each final boss they engineer as a showstopper, showcasing never-before-seen mechanics in a grand assault against some edifice of Warcraft lore. You stand ever at the precipice of satisfaction, of a peace that never comes. In Azeroth, it is always the End Times.
That this is a kind of pyramid scheme scarcely needs stating. Leave aside the question of hours invested and the human capacity to rationalize almost any further investment given enough principal already paid, logic says it’s not sustainable. Pushing for one late night after another through a brand-new dungeon thrills like few other gaming experiences, but you do it knowing you’ll be doing the exact same things in four months’ time when the next dungeon drops. Add to this the malaise I ascribed to Niro in the preceding section, the self-interested (but fair) dissatisfaction with a game that no longer puts raiding first, and it’s easy to imagine veteran raiders leaving the game. Indeed, “burnout” exerts constant pressure on every guild’s roster. Smart guilds are always recruiting, as a healthy roster keeps raids painless and helps avert further burnout. Raiding is failure, after all—masochism in the pursuit of pixel riches—and most of us already encounter enough rejection in our day-to-day lives. It’s why I don’t own a cat.
So it’s not uncommon for raiders to take breaks, when their work schedules ramp up or the hours on the treadmill get to be too many. Doing so used to be difficult; anyone who missed a tier of raid content would need to be carried back through it (wasting the guild’s time) in order to gear up enough for the following tier. Thankfully Blizzard has been diligent about catch-up time, making gear progressively easier to get until anyone can be made ready for endgame encounters in a matter of weeks. From a practical standpoint this is fantastic, though again it devalues the achievements of those on the cutting edge. But those players have alts to level in addition to their main characters, and they may want to take breaks themselves. Any hardcore raiders badly wounded by concessions to the casual left Azeroth long ago, as the developers have been pushing (at glacial speed) in this direction for the better part of a decade. More than a few quit in a huff to later return, profiting by the same systems they scorned, returning to the fold having found no better vessel for their gaming ambitions.
Because there’s nothing else quite like it, after all. The world abounds with MMORPGs of many stripes, some more hardcore than others, and while some enjoyed success, many foundered precisely where WoW succeeded: the late game, that nebulous universe of content past the end of the leveling curve. You can build your leveling process around a compelling narrative like Star Wars: The Old Republic or you can stretch it out with endless grinding like Aion or you can add mini-games and fun platforming sections like WildStar, but eventually players will reach whatever arbitrary cap you’ve set, and then they’ll need something else to do. They need some other way to continue enhancing their avatars, and most games on the market simply don’t have a good answer beyond PvP arenas and a handful of small dungeons. Rarely do developers invest in large-scale raiding content, because it’s time-consuming (read: expensive) to produce and only a fraction of your customers will ever see it. Most of the raid discussion in gaming the last few years revolves around the first-person shooter Destiny, whose MMORPG-inspired “raid” encounters accommodate only six players at a time. The style of raiding popularized by EverQuest and perfected in WoW is just too ambitious for margin-savvy modern publishers focused on mobile gaming. This means that if you’re a raider by past and inclination, and if you want to scratch that extremely particular itch, WoW is the only real game in town.
So why bother? Why build raid content at all, if it’s just going to be a never-ending treadmill for a small tribe of quirky masochists? In the case of WoW, it may have been a product of personnel: early in the game’s development, Blizzard hired Jeffrey Kaplan (alias: Tigole Bitties) and Alex Afrasiabi (alias: Furor), who were famous for their leadership and commentary in the EverQuest raiding community. They were also infamous for campaigns of online harassment and unrestrained misogyny, as Kaplan’s childishly offensive nickname suggests. The EverQuest guild Afrasiabi helmed, Fires of Heaven, solicited nude pictures from female applicants and circulated those photos among its membership.10 That Kaplan and Afrasiabi’s pasts never became an issue during their years at Blizzard is a testament to the blinkered, back-scratching nature of video game journalism—no reporter given access to Blizzard developers would jeopardize it asking after years-old discussions from the web’s benthos. Perhaps Kaplan and Afrasiabi have grown in the past fifteen years; perhaps they enjoy excellent rapport with their female colleagues. In any case, these individuals (along with designers Rob Pardo, who played EverQuest with Kaplan, and Tom Chilton, who worked on Ultima Online’s legendarily punishing player-versus-player system) were instrumental in WoW’s early development, championing the value of endgame content and catering to the relatively small portion of players doing it. As the game’s most invested players, they’d stick around as paying customers year in and year out.11 Their consistent presence would mitigate the inevitable churn of more casual players.
What’s more, those hardcore players yield downstream benefits to the community. Raiding demands a great deal of material investment, from precious metals for crafted armor to herbs for potions, to cloth for bandages. Some enterprising raiders farm these components themselves, as I typically did, on a squad of alternate characters diversified like a stock portfolio into every region of the economy. A death knight with mining and herbalism skills to gather materials, a mage with alchemy to process the herbs, and a monk with enchanting to break down any incidental gear might back up a druid main character who uses jewelcrafting and inscription for their attendant gear-enhancing benefits. Leveling those alts and developing their professions takes a great deal of time and money in purchased materials (as with so much else, the grind is now more humane than it used to be), but for serious raiders it’s often worth it over the long haul, preferable to paying volatile Auction House prices for consumables. Any savvy merchant knows to place useful raiding materials for sale Tuesday evening, when the lazier raiders are logging on for a fresh dungeon clear following the weekly reset. No matter your approach, raiding provides a necessary avenue for consumption, fueling demand for important supplies across the server. Even the leveling of alts helps the community by populating cities and leveling zones. Underpopulated MMORPGs find themselves trapped in a downward spiral, where empty zones come to feel like tombs and the game’s social element withers away. Raiding guilds are just the highest link in an ecological chain distributing resources throughout each server, maintaining the health of this odd colonial organism.
Speaking of organisms, one of WoW’s most notorious incidents started in September 2005, when raiders did the field of epidemiology an inadvertent favor. A new raid dungeon called Zul’Gurub contained a boss named Hakkar the Soulflayer, because the self-aware humor that characterizes WoW has never extended to its hilariously overwrought names.12 Hakkar afflicted players with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which caused heavy damage over several seconds and, more hazardously, could be spread to any adjacent comrades. It was never meant to leave the raid instance, but an oversight on Blizzard’s part left the pets of hunters and warlocks vulnerable. If a player dismissed his pet before Corrupted Blood expired, he could resummon it later in the open game world and thus pass on the disease. Players would die quickly, but a second programming oversight made computer-controlled NPCs into asymptomatic carriers. They took no damage themselves but passed the disease to any player who drew close. Through a mix of accidental and intentional transmission (using pets to deploy raid debuffs in major cities was an occasional hobby with hilarious results like blowing up the Auction House), Corrupted Blood spread across entire servers in a matter of days. Players avoided population centers where they might encounter tainted NPCs, and ultimately only a series of server restarts and bug fixes from Blizzard annihilated the plague. Mainstream news sources leapt on the story like few others in that first year of WoW’s existence. Researchers broke down the spread of the plague and players’ reaction to it, their struggles to isolate and protect themselves in a deliberately social game.
But nobody blamed the raiders for this. I can’t imagine any kind of collective misbehavior that would honestly threaten raiders’ position at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone, put bluntly, wants to be the coolest kid in school—wealthy, surrounded by friends, decked in the newest style. Our race of adolescent apes can’t help but invest in social currency and hierarchy, particularly in a game that’s social by nature. A new player walking into Stormwind City will be drawn to the highest-level characters in the most impressive-looking gear the same way tourists to a museum swarm around its most prestigious attractions. For all the complaining über-players do on forums, their mere existence provides a guide to aspiring new players. If you joined an MMORPG and all the only other players you saw in its greatest cities were wearing shabby gear little better than your own, you’d assume that was the game’s ceiling. To shamble, a pauper, into Ironforge and see characters clad in spectacular, dramatically crafted epic armor vastly eclipsing your own is to get the inkling that you too could be wearing that armor one day. You too could be downing raid bosses or winning “Gladiator” titles in the arena and crushing lesser-geared players in battlegrounds. Just about anyone with enough spare time can work her way to epic gear these days, but the absolute best loot will always go first to the game’s elite. When I raided, any spare time in Orgrimmar was spent politely answering queries about my gear: Where did you get it? How? What’s raiding? How does someone get into raiding? Is there any space in your guild? I promise I won’t annoy anyone! One guild has some success in the raiding game and others follow, competing even if they don’t intend to fully catch up. This is on one hand a simple thing, almost juvenile, but it’s how small things grow large. It’s how an admixture of jealousy and admiration inspires games (online or off) to grow into cultures.
And it’s culture you need, if you’re an online game developer and you want to keep your job for more than a few months after going live. New games come out at a dizzying pace, and online gamers are a fickle crowd, often flitting from one game to another in order to play with friends. Convincing players to stick around takes more than responsive combat or a fun crafting system; it takes a genuine human connection. If a player’s friends leave the game, he’ll probably leave as well unless something else in the game can reliably provide that connection. He needs a guild of people to play with, to bond with. Raiding provides guilds with the kind of structured, scheduled activity they need to stick together—which is why purely social guilds rarely thrive. Working for hours every night on collaborative puzzles while socializing—is it any wonder these organizations grow so tightly knit? This is more time than most people spend with their friends; if you and a friend play an MMORPG together it’s a guarantee you’ll see each other more online than off. You’ll spend more time with them than you do with anyone except the people living in your own home. What’s more, you’ll spend that time helping, supporting, and saving each other, building and reinforcing those bonds on a nightly basis.
From a certain perspective raiding is a strain of masochism, but from another it’s a form of practiced love. I mentioned love as part of healing earlier, but everyone in a raid environment is in some way emotionally bound by it. Sage observers of humanity have long noted the relationship between practice and belief, and raids are always steeped in ritual. The weekly server reset filling dead and empty dungeons with fresh life and loot in a cycle of rebirth; the raid leader marking targets with abstract symbols before each pull; the pull itself, the hunter’s use of her Misdirection spell before the twang of her bow and the lumbering surge of her enemies into motion; the repetition of spells, tactical calls, the casting of Bloodlust for a final burn; the rolling of virtual dice to divvy up loot. Each guild performs these rituals in its own way, with its own superstitions. Fitting into a new guild becomes a matter of repeating the practice until it feels natural, asserting you belong until one day you do.
If today you ask longtime raiders their opinions of the raiding game, they feel conflicted. On the one hand, they’ll acknowledge, encounters are better designed than ever before. They demand more from players, intellectually and mechanically, than their ancient forty-man forebears. Raiders invest fewer hours for vastly more loot,13 and the farming requirements become trivial through repeatable quests (see chapter 7) and a battery of alts, easily leveled and maintained. The superelite still treat raiding as a job, putting in sixteen-hour days with mandatory meal breaks and seven hours allotted for sleep, but these pushes only last about two weeks at a time or, as the European superguild Method has claimed, until they run out of vacation time. But they do that because they love the intensity of the experience; they love the masochism of relentless failure followed by giddy screaming triumph, much as veteran political operatives crave the caffeinated insanity of the campaign trail. Some only enjoy the game in binge form.
Countless other guilds work through exactly the same content at their own pace, happy for the loot and the challenge and unconcerned with the race for world firsts. The game belongs to them now, and who’s to say it isn’t richer? It’s hard to get an exact number, but by the best estimates only about thirty guilds—which is to say, only twelve hundred people on the planet—killed Kel’Thuzad, the final boss of the original Naxxramas. Even if that elite raiding is important to sustaining an MMORPG community, such exclusive challenges probably aren’t healthy, and they certainly aren’t good investments of developer time. Now raiding is broken up into clearly delineated difficulty levels, so even those unready for the hardest fights can accumulate gear and train on versions with easier mechanics. The first time a raider sees a fight in twenty-five-man Heroic mode, he’s already beaten it a half-dozen times. The game’s changed, not grown corrupted by casuals or any similarly tired formulation. But by the same token nobody’s obliged to prefer the new. By this writing, most of the old-school raiders are gone, and there’s nothing on the gaming horizon even claiming to offer the same experience. Those who remain have made their peace with a long, pleasurable twilight.
Back in the old days, I’d stand at the mouth of my cellar door and suck in cool air to quiet my stomach. We scheduled Patchwerk for early on Wednesday nights and there’d usually be just enough sun still out to turn the clouds on the hills bloodred. The neighbors would arrive home from work in their BMWs and Lexuses (Teslas were a few years off), easily spotted down the block by the blue LED glare of their automatic headlights even if it wasn’t yet dark, and if they looked to me at all it was with thin-lipped contempt. I felt like I deserved it, unshaven in sweats outside my basement dwelling, but it didn’t hurt the way that kind of feeling had hurt all my life. I was Ghando, after all, restoration shaman of accomplishment and renown, leader of the world’s top Spanish-speaking raid guild, privy to a universe they couldn’t begin to understand. At this moment in my life, sneered at by successful people, the idea of a career feeling elusive in the best moments and impossible the rest of the time, I stood at the top of my own little profession. And if you told me it wasn’t real, I’d have pointed to the forty people waiting on direction for the Grobbulus pull. It was as real as we made it, and good God was it fun. When the discomfort subsided I unlatched the door and gently pulled it closed, padded down my cold concrete steps, and settled into the warm throne of my desk and its stuffed black rolling chair. I’d strung white Christmas bulbs down the rafters and over the ductwork, and they lit the room like gauzy little stars.