Maurizio the warlock, and the forty-man nights
Why I rolled a warlock (free mounts), the vanilla raids we cleared and the one we never did, being the Warlock Class Lead, and the friend at the bakery I talked WoW with for hours and then lost.
Maurizio was a warlock for one very unromantic reason: warlocks get their mounts for free. In vanilla World of Warcraft, gold was genuinely hard to come by, and most classes had to save up to buy a mount. Warlocks summon theirs through a class quest instead. I did the math the way I always do, the same instinct that later found me a free soda machine and an extra hundred dollars off an iMac, and decided the smart move was the class that did not have to pay for a horse. There was even a long, elaborate ritual quest for the epic mount, the Dreadsteed, that I went and did.
So I was a warlock, and I got serious about it.
The forty-man
This was the era of the forty-man raid, which is exactly what it sounds like: forty people, online at the same time, on the same night, all pointed at the same monster. Getting forty teenagers and adults to show up and cooperate was its own small miracle, and we did it over and over, on very, very late nights. I was in a raiding guild whose name I have, to my real frustration, completely forgotten.
We cleared the big ones. We killed Onyxia, the dragon. We worked our way through Molten Core and put down Ragnaros, the giant fire elemental at the bottom of it. We went into the bug-filled desert ruins of Ahn’Qiraj and beat that too. One raid at a time, we got through almost everything vanilla had.
Almost. The last one was Naxxramas, a floating necropolis full of skeletons that hung in the sky, and it was brutal. It was the hardest thing in the game by a wide margin, and only a small handful of guilds in the world ever got deep into it. We killed a couple of its bosses and started collecting the scattered pieces of a legendary staff you could assemble there, and then the clock ran out on us. Burning Crusade, the first expansion, was about to launch, and it was going to end the forty-man era entirely. We never finished Naxxramas. That one still sits with me a little.
Around all of that there was a second, grindier game I also played on Maurizio, the slow old honor ranks and reputation grinds nobody made me do. That part has its own story.
Class Lead, and the problem with being DPS
I was good enough, and around enough, that I became the Warlock Class Lead, the person responsible for all the warlocks in the guild, helping them gear up and play better. I liked that part.
What I did not like was the other side of being a warlock: I was pure damage, and the world was full of pure damage. When you are just one more guy who does damage, nobody is fighting to have you in their group. There are always more than enough of you. I spent a lot of nights waiting around, hoping for a spot. Hold onto that, because the day I stopped being a damage dealer, my entire experience of the game turned inside out.
The bakery, and the friend I let slip
There is one piece of this era that has nothing to do with raiding and everything to do with me. During all of this I was working the bakery counter at Schnucks, making donuts and bagels and cookies. The maintenance guy, the porter who cleaned the store, played World of Warcraft too. The job was strict about standing around talking, but he would come back to pull my trash and take his sweet time about it, and the two of us would stand there in the back and talk WoW for what felt like hours while I worked.
I wish I could tell you we became real friends. We did not, quite. One of us left that store without ever really saying goodbye, and I never saw him again. I cannot even remember his name now, only his face, and that his character name was something close to his own, something like Ram. Years later I think I found that he had moved off to the Carolinas. He was a little older than me, and a genuinely good guy, and I never once told him I wanted to actually be his friend. I just assumed there would be more time. I regret that one. I have gotten better, slowly, about telling people.
When Burning Crusade arrived, the forty-man guild scattered, the way they all eventually did, and I was on my own. Which is where I stopped being Maurizio, and became someone I loved a lot more.