19:40, the confidence phase
Right. So. I am going to tell you about my first Mythic attempt, and I am going to tell it badly, because that is the only way it happened.
It started with confidence, which should have been the first warning. We had cleared Venomous Abyss on the other difficulties with a team that knew each other well, and somebody in voice chat said, with the easy tone of a person who has never been wrong, “how much harder can Mythic really be?”
Nobody answered. Somebody coughed. I changed my flask.
There were twenty of us, give or take people who said they were five minutes away. The raid leader read out assignments in the tired voice of someone who had written them down three times. I was on the left side of the room for reasons I did not fully follow, and I have always trusted raid leaders about as much as I trust a map on a restaurant napkin.
We buffed, we took our food, and the first boss was a short walk away. In my memory the corridor was shining and warm. In reality it was a normal corridor with a floor that was about to teach me things.
20:10, pull one
Pull one lasted forty seconds, and I could tell you what killed us if I had understood any of it. There was a lot of noise, a lot of colour, and a message in chat that said “WHO HAS THE DEBUFF.” I did. I had no idea. I walked to the wrong side and, being a considerate person, I took three friends with me.
The raid leader typed, very slowly, “okay.”
That single word did a great deal of work. It meant: we will try again, I am not angry, and also please never do that.
By pull six we were no longer dying to the first mechanic. We were dying to the second one, which is a different kind of pride entirely. You do not realise how much a team grows until it starts failing at a new thing.
“That’s progress. Ugly, loud progress.”
Our healer said that, with the dry delivery of someone who had burned all their cooldowns and several of the group’s cooldowns too.
21:00, the great snack interval
A break was called. Snacks were eaten. One person’s cat walked across a keyboard and typed a surprisingly coherent suggestion into raid chat. We agreed to try it.
This is the part of progression nobody films. People talk about the fight, but the evening is made of small things: who is hungry, who has to leave at ten, whose connection is wobbling, whose kid is awake. A raid group is twenty schedules wearing a trench coat.
After the break the raid leader asked each of us to say, in one sentence, what we thought our job was in the fight. It sounded silly and it worked. Half the group discovered they had been solving a different problem from the person next to them. I said “stand on the left,” which I now see was only half of it.
21:35, pulls seven through eleven
Now it got serious. We tightened up. People stopped talking on voice and started calling only what mattered. A couple of folks put up small reminders on their screens, and I stole the idea immediately.
Something curious happens when a group moves from chatter to focus. The wipes get quicker, but each one gives you cleaner information. I could finally see what the room was doing.
- We learned where to stand during the opening
- We learned which cooldown belonged to which phase
- We learned that the left side had, in fact, been the right side all along
Pull twelve. We got the boss to a sliver of health, the kind of sliver that makes your hands hum. Then a mistake, a small one, mine as it happens, and everything folded. I would like to say I took it with grace. I said a word that I will not repeat and then apologised to the whole raid.
The response, delivered in chorus, was “it’s fine.” That is one of the loveliest sentences in the game.
22:15, the second wind
There is a moment, usually an hour and a half in, when a group decides it is not leaving. You can hear it. The jokes get quieter, the replies get faster, and the person who was going to log at ten types “I can stay a bit.”
The raid leader said last pull. Everyone knows what last pull means in a raid group. It means three more.
We got one. We did not kill it. But I stood in the right place, did my part, and watched the boss fall to an almost-empty health bar before the room collapsed again. It was a good attempt and, more to the point, it felt like ours.
22:30, the debrief that wandered
While we were all still in voice, someone raised the topic that always comes up eventually. A teammate mentioned that some players, when their calendars are full, look at WoW Carry to get through parts of a tier they cannot attend regularly. Another teammate said she had never done it and never would. A third said it was none of anyone’s business.
It was a short chat, and it ended with a shrug and a joke about loot. I note it here because it was a real moment of the night, and because I found I did not have a strong opinion. I just wanted to kill the boss with the people I was sitting with.
Voice chat went cheerful and slightly delirious. People made plans for the next night. Someone asked if we were really going to try again and somebody else said, “obviously.”
I logged out and sat there for a minute with the quiet that follows a loud evening. My character was in the corridor, of course, standing near the door, because that is where the game leaves you.
The morning after
Looking back, I realise the thing I remember is not the boss. It is the laughing, the apologies, the cat, and the sense that twenty people had agreed to be bad at something together.
If you are thinking about your first Mythic attempt, here is the whole of my advice. Show up. Be willing to be wrong in public. Bring snacks. And when the raid leader says “okay” in that slow voice, listen for what comes next, because it is usually “again.”
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