Trihedron, the priest I loved

When the forty-man era ended and my warlock guild scattered, I did something that turned the whole game inside out for me. I rolled a dwarf priest and learned to heal. His name was Trihedron, and of every character I have ever made in any game, he is the one I loved with my whole heart. That is him up top, the magnificent orange beard and the wide hat.

The little spark, and it really is just a footnote, was that there was a healer in my old guild I did not get along with, and I thought I could do the job better and be a better person about it. But that is not the story. The story is what Trihedron became, and how much I loved being him.

The thing nobody tells you about healing

As a warlock I was one of forty interchangeable damage dealers, and nobody ever fought to have me around. The day I became a healer, that flipped completely. Suddenly everybody wanted to be my friend. Good healers are rare and precious, and when you get a reputation for being one, you are wanted everywhere.

And I got that reputation. I topped the healing meters. I became the class healing lead for our main group, the person who mentored the other healers, who figured out the strategies and taught people how to keep a raid alive. My setup was a little unusual: instead of mashing keyboard keys to cast my spells, I used two add-ons called Grid and Clique, which let me click directly on a tiny grid of everyone’s health bars. Left click, right click, middle click, the buttons on the side of my mouse, each one a different heal, all while glancing across that little grid to see at once who was hurt and who was covered. I had it mastered. I was a genuinely good healer and I was deeply proud of it, and I still am.

The guilds, and the Lich King

Trihedron carried me through a string of guilds and a lot of friends. In Burning Crusade there was Cake or Death, a big serious raiding guild where I made real friends and saw real progress, down through an underwater raid and almost all the way through the Black Temple. (It also had a gnome who swore up and down he was a working voice actor, on Ben 10 and a werewolf show, which we mostly chose to believe because it was more fun that way.) When that guild’s leaders had to step away from the game, right before the next expansion, it came apart. (Years later I drifted back and quietly finished Black Temple and the Sunwell beyond it, at a level where none of it could hurt me anymore.)

So when Wrath of the Lich King launched, I followed a friend from work named Alison to a new server, Ghostlands, and started over there. I joined a guild called Tru, and then most of us spun off into a guild called Game Ender that I helped run. I handled the administration, a friend named Sullivan ran the endgame strategy, and another, Ebalin, anchored us as the tank. I built it the way I believed a guild should feel, on teamwork and a family feel, my actual words from the time. We wrote schedules and ran meetings and recruited carefully, and we raided our way up through the entire expansion.

And we killed the Lich King. Arthas, the big bad guy the whole expansion was named after, the final boss of the whole thing. We took apart his raid, Icecrown Citadel, all twelve of its bosses, and pushed eight of those twelve on the harder heroic setting on top of that. And we killed Arthas himself not once, either. We beat him, and then we beat him again and again. I got to stand at the end of an expansion and feel, honestly and completely, that I had done it. That we had done it.

Ebalin, Feeorin, and a friend named Craig

The best thing Game Ender ever gave me was three players who turned out to be related and all from Wisconsin: Ebalin, Feeorin, and Sullivan. They started as temporary fill-ins and we made sure to invite them in for good, because they were steady and good and we liked them. And one of them, Sullivan, became a real friend, the kind that walks off the screen and into your actual life. His real name is Craig. We met up in person three or four different times over the years. He and his girlfriend came down and stayed the night at my house, and we went to the park, and it was just friends being friends. We had typed at each other for years, and then we were people.

There is a small story about the first time I went out to see them. I wore a Holy Priest shirt I had ordered from the official site, and I was flying Southwest because it was all I could afford back then, sixty-nine dollars each way. The security line was enormous. When I finally got near the front, the TSA agent clocked my shirt, gave me a nod, and asked if I played holy priest, Horde or Alliance. Alliance, I told him. He said nice job, unhooked the rope, and personally walked me to the front of the entire line. We talked the whole way up. A video game shirt got me through airport security like a VIP, which I think about more than I should.

(Faction loyalty cut the other way once, too. In a math class at college, a cute girl in front of me had a WoW shirt on, and after working up the nerve for weeks I finally asked her about it. She loved the game. I played holy priest, I told her. Then I asked the only question that mattered: Horde or Alliance? She said Horde. And that was the end of that. I am sorry, but I was never, ever going to switch sides, not even for her.)

That loyalty was not all talk, either. Early in Wrath I spent a whole night fighting into the Horde’s own capital cities to kill their leaders, Sylvanas included, for nothing but the satisfaction of it.

Still raiding in January 2011

I have a little hard proof of when Trihedron was raiding, too. These are real kill-shot screenshots, with the date stamped right into each image, from a guild called Cake or Death whose emblem was a gingerbread man. I have not fully reconstructed the guild-by-guild order of my last few years in the game, so I am not going to pretend to. But the dates on these are the dates.

On January 9, 2011, into the Cataclysm expansion, we cleared into Blackwing Descent and took down the Omnotron Defense System and Magmaw.

A couple of weeks later, on January 23, we went into the Bastion of Twilight and put down Halfus Wyrmbreaker. What these nail down is simple: in January 2011 I was still in there, still healing as Trihedron, the whole guild lined up for the photo and me somewhere in that crowd of dwarves. A few weeks after that, in February, I made one quiet trip back to old Ulduar to pick up the one trophy I had left on the table.

I will get to how it all wound down, but not here. Trihedron does not get a sad ending. He gets this one: a dwarf in a silly hat who taught me I was better with people than I thought, who gave me friends I still have, and who let me feel, just once, like I had won the whole game.