Very Special Moments

When is the very best moment of the whole raid? Is it in the second, when the end boss, the main target of the night, finally seems to have decided to let go of the 1 percent stadium, that he somehow strangely always seems to stuck on, when I take his last breath, stumbles a few steps and falls to the ground and the cheering starts on the vent?Or is it when you for the only time in history roll 99 and sweep away that missing set piece you've been longing for months to come up?

Or maybe the magical moment is during actually raiding. In the middle of the fight, when the vent goes silent. You're focusing completely on what you're doing, you're absorbed by the game, you have full control of all of your meters, o the fight, of your coplayers, and you know that everybody else has it too. You are a cog in a fantastic machinery, a team that is using it's full potential. You may not realize it then, when you're in the middle of it, you have other things to think about, but afterwards you'll know that it was in that very moment that you were as happy as you'll ever be in the game.

Or maybe it's just like it is in Christmas. Never is the Christmas as wonderful as late, late the night before Christmas Eve (the day we celebrate in Sweden), when the smell of the traditional freshly cooked ham is spreading through the house, when all the gifts are wrapped up and you've done verses on all of them, when the house is cleaned (well, a bit at least), the Christmas tree is decorated, the fridge is full of food, and the relatives are still friends. The preparations are done and all the expectations are still there, all the possibilities. That is exactly how it is the moment before the first pull. Everything is in place, everybody has sharpened their weapons, taken their boosting drugs, adjusted the bags, thought over the strategies and taken a deep breath. Focus. Presence. End of muddling. You know that the raid will happen, there's no late no-show-up, no dc, no ill-just-fix-this-thing. Now the adventure will start - and no matter if it will be a tough learning-a-new-boss-fight-night or a more easy we've-got-the-boss-on-farm-night anything can happen. The parcels are still there, unopened. The magic is in the air. The play can start.

Of course with raiding there'll always be a lot of very Unspecial Moments. Moments of waiting and fuzz. Endless corpse runs. Things just don't work out. Prolonged discussions about loot. Information on boss strategies that you've heard one hundred times before, that will turn into something like the security review on an air plane. It's hard to focus on, even though you know that you should.

But in the memory still the golden moments will stay. And it's hard to pick one above the other, they're rather like a pearl necklace of small pills of happiness, from the first pull to the last loot. The necklace that make us willing to pay the price and grind for gold, gear and consumables.
Very Special Moments