In the first half of this post I'm going to explain the game and how I played it. In the second half I'll talk about the skills I learned and how they've helped me.
If you played a lot of WoW, or you aren't interested in detailed descriptions of parts of the game, you can click here to skip to the second half. It features a large, open world with thousands of players occupying the same world at the same time. Unlike lots of games, it doesn't have a story you play through from beginning to end. You're free to roam as you please, with challenges of varying difficulty open to you if you want.
These ranged from finding rare herbs, to fighting other players, to convincing 39 other people to spend years of their lives beating complicated boss fights. Boss fights in WoW take place inside "raids. In the early days, you needed 40 people to stand a chance of beating a raid. Each encounter demanded focus from all 40 people, for up to 30 minutes on some fights. It was common for a night of raiding to last between hours.
Blizzard, the game studio behind WoW, have crafted hundreds of creative boss fights over the years. For this post, I'm going to focus on one of my favourites to give you a taste of what we were up against. C'thun is the final boss in a raid called "Ahn'Qiraj. This alone took tens of thousands of people 19 days to complete.
In total the fight takes about 15 minutes and consists of two phases. But first, we need to talk about entering the room. C'thun is in the center of a large room. The entrance of that room has a corridor extending both ways, and a set of steps leading in. As soon as you set foot on those steps, C'thun will attack you. C'thun's primary attack is a green eye beam that deals about half of the average player's health. The catch is that if there is another player within 10 yards of you, the beam will "chain" to that player and deal 1.
