In The Incred­i­bles, Dash is the young son who can run and move very very fast, like the Flash. There’s a scene where he’s run­ning away from some mer­ce­nary vil­lains, through a jun­gle. So he’s zip­ping between trees and jump­ing over logs, but his vis­i­bil­ity ahead is lim­ited because the jun­gle is so thick. Sud­denly the for­est ends and there’s a tiny bit of beach before a large bay of water, with him bar­rel­ing towards it far too fast for him to safely turn away. Dash clenches his eyes closed, expect­ing to wipe out spec­tac­u­larly… and then opens them to learn that he can run across the water’s sur­face. Sur­prise! He lets out this mis­chie­vous, joy­ous, relief-filled laugh, then zips away. It’s a great scene. (Brad Bird for overlord)

In World of War­craft, my wife and I have had that laugh many times.

Our most recent one came with my wife’s feral tank. We were doing the daily quest for Shat­tered Sun atop the Black Pyra­mid, where you’re killing a bil­lion orcs to get some arma­ments to go cleanse (or what­ever). Many large, nasty demons with big, ugly two handed swords patrol that area, and there’s nowhere that you can find these orcs for the quest with­out risk­ing con­tact with the nasty demons. My wife and I, on other toons, had died at the hands of these demons many times before. So inevitably, we ended up mak­ing an error and one of them lum­ber­ing toward us. Death was certain…

…except that it wasn’t. Feral druids in bear form dom­i­nate pure-melee mon­sters of all sizes, from raid bosses all the way down to the demons wan­der­ing around the quest area atop Black Tem­ple. So that first time it sur­prised us, she tanked it fever­ishly, expect­ing to die in the first five sec­onds, then the five sec­onds after that… but after about 30 sec­onds, she let out this great laugh that reminded me of Dash, fol­lowed by “He can’t hurt me fast enough!”

After the fight was over, I asked her, “So are you enjoy­ing your druid tank?”

“YES!”

We con­tin­ued quest­ing, and the next elite demon that came close to us, which we could have eas­ily avoided… she charged it gratuitously.

“He might have added!”

Inside, she was still laugh­ing, and thor­oughly enjoy­ing the unex­pected con­trast between get­ting stomped so often by that mob in the past and the new expe­ri­ence of turn­ing the tables on it.

WoW is a great game. See­ing it from mul­ti­ple angles (that is, mul­ti­ple classes) brings about joy and sur­prises above just play­ing one class all the time. Alti­tis is good fun. (and also good read­ing)