Breakfast Topic: The retro feeling

My wife and I were recently watching old videos of boss kills back in the Burning Crusade days and chattering to each other about what we remembered, what we were doing at the time (I was usually tanking) and how the raids and encounters felt. One moment in particular stands out: we were killing Lady Vashj and I, as the main tank, was taking her down the stairs.

“Why are you taking her down the stairs towards the water there?”

“Because there was nowhere else to go,” I said in the grim tones one might associate with a hardened veteran and not just a dude who played a video game, which is what I was actually doing at the time.

Nostalgia seduces us because it flattens the layers on memory. Instead of remembering all of an experience — all of the wipes, the tensions, the we’re never going to kill her frustrations, the bickering and heated words, the weeks of farming gear, the attempt after attempt to get the strategy down — you just remember the golden moment of success. You remember the moment when Vashj went down and died in a puddle of her own green goo and took your raid team’s best healers with her, but it didn’t matter because she was dead and it was over.

Killing Kael’thas in Tempest Keep was like that — at the time it was an ordeal, a nightmare, but the victory I remembered for years. It felt better than killing Illidan or even Kil’jaeden.

So today, let’s discuss your most nostalgia laden moment in WoW. What was it? Was it a boss kill, the forming of a guild, your first successful raid, getting your epic mount? Do you remember it like sunshine peering down on you from behind a cloud, or do you remember the clouds, too? Share with us.