The level fourteen keystone had been sitting in his bag for six days now. Taren carried it around the way you carry an unread letter: you remember it's there, and every time you put it off.
The five of them
It wasn't a guild that brought them together. Taren didn't have a guild — he'd come to the server alone, in March, while the open beta was still running, and alone was how he stayed: leveling in the evenings, reading the chat, saying hello to the people who said hello first.
The group of five came together by accident, out of whoever ended up in the voice channel in the evenings and didn't leave. A druid named Msha, who typed «msha» instead of «one sec» and never once fixed it. A paladin, Grond, who repaired his gear with the stubbornness of a man who once got caught in a raid without a shield and remembered it. A rogue called Wormwood, who spoke rarely and always to the point. And a mage who promised every single time to read up on the affixes and every single time didn't.
They cleared the eleventh. Then the twelfth — on the second attempt. The thirteenth came easy, and that was suspicious: at these levels, easy usually means the next one is going to be unpleasant.
The week's affixes
Taren opened the keystone on Wednesday, and on the very first pack it was clear how this week would differ from the last one. Enemies left behind patches of ground you couldn't stand in, and half the corridors turned into a geometry problem.
— Msha, — Grond said into voice chat, very calmly, — don't stand in that.
— I'm not standing in it.
— You are standing in it.
— Msha.
They wiped the first attempt on the second group. The second one on the boss, eight percent from the end, when the timer was already hopeless and they kept pushing anyway, because you don't drop a pull at eight percent.
The third
Before the third attempt, Wormwood spoke at length for the first time all evening. He suggested they skip the run through the great hall and take the right-hand corridor instead — two more packs that way, but none of the tight spots where the affix turns the floor into a mosaic.
— We won't make it, — the mage said. — That way's longer.
— We're not missing the timer because we run slowly. We're missing it because we get back up off the floor four times.
That turned out to be true. The right-hand corridor cost them an extra minute and not a single death. They reached the boss with two minutes to spare and with that strange calm that settles in when a group has already worked out that it's going to make it, but nobody has said so out loud yet.
The boss went down inside the timer with forty seconds left. The chest gave Msha the shoulders she'd been waiting three weeks for, and a cloak nobody needed, which went to the mage for honestly admitting he still hadn't read up on the affixes.
The fifteenth
The keystone leveled up to fifteen. Taren looked at it in his bag and realized that this time he wasn't going to carry it around for six days.
— Friday? — he wrote in chat.
— msha, — Msha answered, which meant «one sec», but as applied to Friday meant «yes».
Grond posted a plus. Wormwood wrote nothing at all, but on Friday he showed up first.
He never did start a guild. It's just that at some point he stopped counting himself as playing alone.
How Mythic+ keystones, affixes and rating actually work is covered in the breakdown on Mythic+ keystones in 3.3.5a. If you want to put together a group of your own, start with installing the client, and take a look at the class breakdowns in the guides.
