The Daily Grind: What's your favorite in-game experience?

Myfavorite in-game experience has to be "Cyber...."

I have 2 favourites. Karazhan and Serpentshrine Cavern. What 2 excellent raids. Nothing has brought back the feeling of me tanking Prince Malchezaar and surviving for the first time.

Good fun days before WoW became a casual gaming experience when you only had to wave at bosses to get loot.

well the best experience in mmorpg is reaching max level, its the journey itself that count

One of my favorite moments is back in the days of Classic. I was running Scarlet Monastary on my level 40 something mage with 4 level 60 guild members. We somehow managed to pull the whole of the cathedral and wiped. The cries of surprise and anguish still ring in my head. Ahh, great times.

Most games that have really 'stuck' with me have had a few of those moments. Here are a few that stand out for me though:

Planetside: A bunch of my guildies and I made alt toons on a different server. We all made dumb names, picked up sniper rifles, and one of us grabbed a cert for the heavy ground transport vehicle (affectionately referred to as the 'bang bus'). We all drove around trying to snipe random people while constantly emoting the 'boom headshot!' emote (or something like that, I can't remember what it said exactly). Even though we were constantly getting killed in every possible way I never laughed so hard in that game. Nothing quite like the 4 of us shooting sniper rifles at a tank yelling 'BOOM HEADSHOT' as it runs us over.


EQ (pre-velious but post kunark): For some reason I chose a rogue to be my 'main' character in EQ. When I started playing they were god awful at pretty much everything, and because of this (and because I started on a new server that opened with the kunark launch) there were very few high level rogues on my server and consequently in my guild.

Anyway eventually I ended up in one of the best raiding guilds on the server and we started raiding the planes of hate and fear. One night we were raiding hate and before long we got to Innoruuk (the god of hate) for the very first time as a guild (and my first time ever as a player). Needless to say, he killed us all on our very first attempt aside from one single cleric who managed to log off on in time (often in EQ during a wipe all clerics would attempt to log off so that they could log in and rez everyone). This cleric was all alone in hate and only had access to one rogue, me. Everyone else had died at the feet of the god of hate himself. To make matters worse, the zone was starting to respawn and we only had a brief period of time the respawns reached our area.

Now to understand the adrenaline rush I had during the next part one has to fully understand the nature of raiding in old school EQ, the extremely harsh death penalties, and the massive time and money commitment that it would have taken to recover an entire guild full of corpses from a repopulated plane of hate. I won't explain these things but just summarize by saying that it would have cost us many hours of recovery time and a lot of money if I couldn't recover the guild (since rogues could turn invisible, they could often recover people's corpses by 'dragging' them to a safe spot for a cleric to resurrect them).

So after my rez it is just me and this cleric sitting in the plane of hate with the rest of our guild laying dead at Innoruuk's feet. Being a rogue I was the only class that had any chance of getting anywhere near Inny without getting instantly death touched, but ONLY if I snuck up BEHIND him (he could see invis in front of him). If at any moment he turned on me, I would be dead in an instant. To make things even more fun he did not stand still, but instead would walk around his little domain, suddenly stopping and turning around at certain points. Needless to say, I did not have the time to stand around and study his pathing either due to respawns, so with my heart pounding heavily and my guild leader ordering everyone to shut up and stop sending me tells, I snuck in to recover whoever I could (the other rogue was the first priority, and then clerics, and then anyone).

Eventually I recovered the entire guild without aggroing Inny even once (with the help of the other rogue after I recovered him), but NEVER have I had that much of an adrenaline rush in one of these games, not even close.

delving into a new world, that has fascinating new and addictive mechanics, graphics, music and feels fresh. for me the last time was, when we started wow in beta. most memorable.

unless someone delivers this fresh feeling of excitement, you know they've basically just done a rip off of something you've actually experienced in the past.

One of the greatest moments was beating C'Thun after 6 weeks of attempts. I remember guildmates Milamber and Kmcullough spent all their DKP on the dropped items because as triumphant as that moment was, all of us knew we did not want to go back to that damn place again.

We beat him once, spat on his corpse, and never entered AQ-40 as a guild again.

I have a couple moments so i'll just share 2:

FFXI: My biggest thrill in FFXI came when i was level 70. I had to do G5 to break the level cap so i could continue to level 75 and a friend of mine went with me to get my testimony. The two of us finally farm one up after about an hour and I go fight Maat. I read up on strategies and watched videos but thought "man, i'm gonna die so hard". I was right. I did die, but it was fairly close. I decided that since it was 2am i'd try again the next day. I went, and somehow, farmed my own testimony when it normally takes 2 people and thought "This has to be a good sign". Got it on the second kill so another good sign. I go back to Maat, give it to him and commence to buffing. I run in and start attacking his old ass. I'm weapon skilling like a crazed meth addict and I won. Only i didn't realize it was over so i'm continuing to press buttons as absolutely fast as I can. I finally realize that my guy isn't doing anything then a cut scene. I see that I won and I immediately jump up and start screaming like i'd won the Super Bowl. I start yelling "WOOHHOOOOOOOOOO!!!" Running around my house, pretty much acting the fool. I then started yelling and taunting swear words at my computer. It was kinda sad.

Warhammer Online: This actually happened last night. I hate PvP so i figured a PvP centered game would be craptacular but i for some reason like it. I hate 1 vs. 1 PvP. I love 100 vs. 100 PvP. Well, The Order had something planned last night and had about 5 warbands last night (well over 100 people) and we didn't even have one. We were getting slaughtered when we thought "Lets surprise them by just respawning at our home points and attack another place they cant reach in time". We get to Mandred's Hold and we're attacking the door. We are sitting there laughing at how sneaky we were. We finally get the door down and rush in. To be met by about 60 Order who proceed to slaughter us. No really it was like a melon in a wood chipper. Needless to say, we kind of gave up as they were just wiping us out.

My best MMO experience was with EVE online.

The game is about spaceships and when you loose a fight you loose that ship wich can be expensive and therefor adding tension to any PVP fight.

I was browsing the many asteroid belts in a system and was looting all the wrecks others left behind (enabling them AND their corps (guilds) to shoot at me as i am flagged red to them). It is also worth mentioning that i was in a very expensive ship for my comparatively young age and so much was at stake when suddenly 4 of them were jumping me and started fighting me.
My shipa was expensive but also sturdy and in long and tough fight i managed to kill 2 of them, one escaped and the last one i let go as my weapons werent able to kill his tank.

in that moment so more adrenaline was set free in my blood than ever in my life before. This was a moment of an intensity close to panic wich i will never forget and seek close fights since them to have adrenaline rushing through my veins again ; )

Hmm. I guess that was in Guild Wars, my first run in The Deep.

Back then, the "Steel Wall"-method was the only way to do The Deep. It involves two or three tanks (warriors, later assassins in permanent shadow form or a spirit spamming ritualist) standing next to each other (the 'steel wall'), with lots of healers (monks and one necro) and dps (elementalists) behind them. The tanks keep the huge numbers of enemies away from the rest of the team, the healers try to keep the tanks alive and the dps attempt to kill the enemies before the tanks and healers are overwhelmed.

On my first run (and on every run ever since), I was warrior, which means I had to tank. There was another warrior in my group who had done the elite mission before, and could perfectly instruct me how to use my build, where to stand and what to do. It was a thrilling experience; the enemies were huge in number and high in level, every area had some kind of side effect (especially memorable is the maze where you're teleported to the nearest enemy every 30 seconds, very troublesome for healers and dps, especially when you're trying to run away), the view was amazing (you're descending ever deeper into a huge mine that has been dug into the Jade Sea, which is literally a sea turned into solid jade), and the boss battle was epic (Kanaxai, the final boss, would stop taking damage at 75%, 50% and 25% of his health, after which you'd need to knock him down to continue damaging him; however, every time he is knocked down a huge number of tough enemies spawn, though never more than a certain number, meaning the trick is to lure Kanaxai to one side of the room, knock him down twice to spawn all the enemies that can spawn, then lure him to the other side of the room and start bashing on him). I can't describe the feeling of accomplishment I had when we brought Kanaxai down after two hours of being surrounded by tough enemies, 11 other party members running about (the usual number of max party members is 8, only in two certain elite missions you can have 12 party members), and solid, shiny Jade.

Of course, nowadays The Deep has become easier due to the (some PvE-only) skills introduced by Nightfall and Eye of the North, the discovery of very well working perma-shadow form and spirit spamming builds and a new method called "Cryway" of which I do not exactly now how it works. Also, it's usually run on Hard Mode nowadays, since the elite mission is still done basically the same way, only the enemies are tougher and the rewards bigger. But still the mission is hard (it isn't called an 'Elite Mission' for nothing), and in the past few months I have only managed to complete one other run. It makes me realize just how lucky I was to join such an experienced team on my first run who taught me to do the mission instead of kicking me for being inexperienced, and how lucky we were to actually finish the mission. There is no feeling like doing such an incredibly hard mission for the first time, and succeeding in it. Take that, you PvE-skill junkies!

I'd have to go with the first time I logged into Runescape classic and realised that the entire thing was a virtual world populated with people that I could explore.

My favorite MMO experience was my first Deadmines run. It was awesome and a world apart from what I was used to in MMOs at the time.

Relic keep runs in DAoC

WOW: I put a ton of time and effort into my hunter in and lucked out to get into the best raiding guild on server, we were/are generally within the top 25 to clear any new content across all servers. The guild was from EQ and most of the players knew each other for 5+ years. But my best raiding experience was our first time through Blackwing Lair. We all stayed up late to play it the first night or two, but the raid starts with a tough first boss, Razorgore... We could clear his adds but then he would come out and own us with his fireballs. Every 30 sec he would send a powerful AoE fireball that hit everyone in line of sight 360 degrees, and he was fast.

I had good range as a hunter so I could escape his AoE and still come back to damage him hard... this led to tons of aggro, and the tank died at some point so I had Razorgore chasing me. I figured out at one point that I could put on my fast shoes and stay far enough ahead of him to kite and hold aggro, while running in figure eights. I was taking damage but never being directly hit (that would one shot me), so the healers could follow me pretty easily. On our last try of the night we get him down to 40% and the tank dies so Razor starts coming after me, at this point half the raid is dead but we just keep at him. I'm doing my jumping shots to hold aggro and switching between aspect of cheetah and aspect of monkey to keep distance or dodge adds hitting me.

At the end there are three of us, me, one healer and one mage... and we have him down to 2%. It doesn't look like we will make it but we were all really prepared with consumables. I had so much adrenaline at this point, the raid and guild chat is going crazy.... and at 1% I take all my last consumables and turn around to start shooting at him, I unload but it's not enough so he gets to me and I have to feign death right as he swings. That wipes aggros so the aggro moves onto the casters, but that gave me the range to unload my Aimed Shot and finally take Razor down! There were only 2 of us left and both our hp bars were below 10%. The whole raid was cheering and we were among the first guilds to do it in the world. I got props from just about everybody, it was a fun night and ever since then I was asked to handle all the difficult hunter duties in raids even though I had only been in the guild for a few months. That was the highlight of my WoW days and my MMO days in general, it was a great feeling, almost on par with doing really well in sports or winning a big game. I would love to have an experience like that agan

Vanilla WoW, first time we got 40 people attuned to Molten Core and dressed up in blues from 5-mans. Raid leader is organizing the groups and buffs, then someone leeroys the two giant core hounds, which quickly proceed to wipe the raid. Everyone runs out of the instance right into an incoming alliance raid. Ouch. Good times.

And first time seeing Ragnaros coming up out of the swirling lava. All you were thinking was "we are gonna get our *sses kicked...!"

DAoC, me (spiritmaster) and a couple other sm buddies, plus about 3 healers are standing on the walls of a relic fort thats being attacked when one of us has the brilliant idea of just dive bombing them with pbaoe. We thought wed get a few kills then get ground into burger. What we DID was wipe an entire relic raid with 6 people. Thats right beeeyaches we invented the spirit bomb!
Goblyn
The Knightwatch

I think my most memorable MMO experience has to be EverQuest, back in 2000 on my monk, my group were playing late in Guk & the zone was deserted except us & we went in & cleaned the place out, though we had some really scary "oh s**t!" moments one of which being when we were trained by tons of frogs, one escaped us and went to get friends, a lot of friends, those "Guk Trains" became legendary.

We managed to kill them all leaving us with just 2/6 group members alive & both were on their last gasp of hp, luckily 1 was our Cleric, the other, ironically, was our Ranger (they are usually the 1st to die) so we managed to recover in short time & carry on fighting, got loads of then rare drops & had a blast, though I had nightmares about frogs for several nights after that.