The last thing I went back for was a rusted dragon
Before I quit World of Warcraft for good, I drove back to a raid we had half-finished in 2009 and beat the two bosses that had beaten us, for a mount I had wanted for two years.
In 2009, in the best stretch of my whole time in the game, my guild took apart a raid called Ulduar. We did almost all of it, including the hard modes, the optional extra-brutal versions of the fights that existed mostly so good groups could prove they were good. We were good. We did most of them.
Most. There were two we never beat. One was Firefighter, where you fight a giant robot named Mimiron and then, for the hard version, flip a big red switch that makes him violently self-destruct while you try to finish him off in the chaos. The other was Algalon the Observer, a secret boss tucked at the top of the raid, a man made of stars who tells you, very calmly, that your entire world is scheduled for deletion. We ran out of road on both. And clearing every one of those hard modes was the only way to earn a particular mount, a skeletal dragon called the Rusted Proto-Drake. So for two years I had an Ulduar that was almost finished, and no dragon.
Here is the screenshot from the day I finished it: February 15, 2011. By then I was a whole expansion stronger and in much better gear, and Ulduar was old, abandoned content. The fights that had wiped my whole guild in 2009 I could now walk through with almost nobody. So that is what I did. I went back to the quiet version of the place where I’d had the most fun of my WoW life, killed Mimiron’s self-destruct, killed the man made of stars, and the game finally handed me the rusted dragon.
I did not see it this clearly at the time, but it was a goodbye. A few months later I put the game down for good. It is fitting that one of the last real things I did was drive back to the best place I had ever raided, mostly on my own, to pick up the one trophy I had left on the table. I got the dragon. Then I left.