Twenty to twelve, twenty-four people in the voice channel, and almost nobody is talking. You can hear other people’s apartments: somebody’s washing machine on its spin cycle, somebody’s kettle coming to the boil for the third time — a kettle plainly nobody is using any more, just forgetting to switch off. The weekly reset is at midnight. After midnight the week closes, and everything the raid has chewed off this boss over five evenings goes back to zero: the same percentages will have to be fought through again, from Monday, from a clean sheet.
Cedar is a shaman. Not the best in the raid, not remotely; he even knows exactly what place he holds on the damage meter, and it is a dull place. He is not the raid leader, not an officer, he does not build the tactics and does not write up the analysis after a run. His job on this fight fits into a single line of the text the raid leader reads out before every pull:
“Interrupts: Rusty, Caffeine, Cedar. Cedar is third.”
Forty minutes
Third means almost never. The first one interrupts, the second covers the first, and the third stands there watching two other people do his job. Over five evenings it came round to Cedar twice. Both times right at the end, when the boss speeds up and casts faster than other people’s buttons can come off cooldown.
Which is exactly why he has not gone to bed. Not because he believes in the kill, but because if he logs off there is no third at all, and at that one single moment when it does come round, there will be nobody left to interrupt. This is not heroism. It is like not leaving the kitchen while something is still on the stove.
“Forty minutes,” the raid leader said. “We pull as many as we can fit in.”
Twenty-eight minutes
The attempt fell apart at eleven percent. Nothing new: the tank lost the second add, the add went into the backline, and the rest came down on its own.
The channel went quiet in that particular way things go quiet at the end of a week. Nobody blamed anybody. Blame had got expensive: it takes energy, and everyone’s energy was going into simply sitting there.
“Twenty-eight minutes,” the raid leader said. “Two more tries. Maybe three, if we regroup fast.”
“I’m out after the third,” somebody said. “I’m up at six.”
“Understood. Thanks for staying this long.”
Twelve minutes
The second attempt ended worse than the first — at nineteen percent, stupidly, because of a marker two people did not see. After it three left the channel: the one who was up at six, and with him two more who turned out to have just as many reasons. Nobody tried to hold them.
Twenty-one people were left. For a minute the raid leader counted out loud who to move where, and his voice was the voice of a man who spends all day at work counting something too.
“Healers, you have mana for four minutes of the fight. Not five. We play it that way.”
“Cedar, you alive?”
“Alive,” Cedar said.
He sat in his chair with his legs tucked under him, keeping his hand on the interrupt key the way you hold a spoon over a pot — not cooking, just in case. Outside the window it was already that time of night when you can hear every car in the yard.
The last attempt
Pull at eleven forty-eight.
At first it went almost too well, and that was suspicious. The adds died on time. The tanks swapped without any nerves. At thirty percent the boss sped up, and the interrupt chain started getting eaten faster than it came off cooldown.
At twenty-two Rusty died — number one. Caffeine, number two, interrupted the next cast and went into his own cooldown.
After that came a second with nothing in it but a white cast bar and Cedar.
He pressed. It interrupted.
Eight seconds later, again, and again he made it, because there was nobody else left to make it. Neither he nor anyone else in the channel said a word about it: there was no room for words, somebody was shouting about the add on the left.
The boss dropped to four percent, and at four the healers ran out of mana — exactly the way the raid leader had warned, to the minute. The raid went down in twelve seconds. The health bar froze into a thin red thread, and there was still so little of it left.
Zero
“That’s it,” the raid leader said. “Midnight.”
The weekly reset went through smoothly, without any event at all: from that minute on there simply was no week any more. Nobody typed anything loud in chat. One person said “ah, damn,” and that was the strongest statement of the evening.
“Four percent,” the raid leader said. “We finish him Monday.”
And already disconnecting, he added it plainly, with no particular tone:
“Cedar, you made it. Both times.”
Cedar said “mm-hm.” He sat in the empty channel for another three minutes or so, listening to a clock ticking in the room of the last person left. Then he closed the game, walked to the kitchen, switched off that kettle — it turned out the forgotten kettle had been his — and went to bed.
There was no kill. There was a line in somebody else’s memory saying that if it comes round to the third, the third will be there. That, on the whole, is what raids rest on: not on the best players, but on the ones who did not leave when leaving was easier.
If that feeling is familiar — an evening, somebody else’s tiredness in your headset and one button that is yours after all — then the road here is a simple one: how guilds and raids on Valor are put together, what a WoW 3.3.5a server actually is, and where to start if you have never logged in. And about another man who held a raid together not with a button but with a notebook, there is a separate story — “The one who fixed the raid”.
