Day 4: Best WoW Memory

That's a tough one.  Could it be when I managed to reach my Commander rank?  How about downing Archimonde or Yogg-Saron?  Could it be Herald of the Titans?  Or the honor and elation at being chosen to receive Val'anyr?  But I've already written about those.

There is one night which may not have been terribly spectacular, but which was very memorable.

My eldest daughter had raised her Death Knight to level 72 or something, and my husband had raised his tanking paladin to about the same level.  I was decked out in Ulduar healing gear.  (Yea, a certain amount of disparity.)

Normally, my daughter and I did not play with my husband very often.  Throughout our WoW experience, his patience had been somewhat lacking, which meant that if one or the other of us didn't play as he thought we should, we would find ourselves the target of a lot of disparaging remarks and minor losses of temper.  This didn't do much toward making us better players (some people thrive under the put-downs of the drill sergeant; some people lose their minds even more.)  At any rate, although we wanted to play with him, we had learned it generally did not end well, no matter how pleasantly started.  It got to the point where I outright refused to play with him and told him exactly why.

But this day, he promised he would control his temper.  (We cautiously decided to give him a chance.)  He thought it would be fun if we ran some instances together, as a family.  We set up everyone's computers in the same room, so we could talk directly with each other, and prepared for the experiment.

We entered Utgarde Keep and prepared to face the first pull.  Coaching our daughter on basic dungeon techniques ("Target the tank's mob", etc.), my husband's pally pulled, and off we went.  Each pull was carefully planned, and I both healed and dps'd.

We finished the dungeon in record slow time, I think, but we finished.  Elated, we went to another instance, then another.  We went farther than we would have thought we could have made it, with just the three of us.  We were slow, but we were successful.

After a few hours of this, it was time to quit.  There were no losses of temper, and the evening actually ended better than it began.  We never did do this exercise again, but that night remained in our memories as proof that when you work together and communicate, you can accomplish much more than you might have thought possible.