This raiding lark is fun….I want more

So…here we are, in a “raiding guild”……I was worried I wouldn’t be good enough, but through the nervousness managed to pull off decent enough play, passed my trial, and within a few months was promoted to officer and raid leader in this guild too.

With this guild we cleared Kara weekly, and occasionally got 25 together to eventually get Gruul down, and eventually Void Reaver and later Magtheridon…but that took months, the times we actually had 25 online to raid, most people simply wanted to farm Kara or Gruul all the time, on the rare occasions when we actually went into SSC or TK it was usually with only 22/23 people, sometimes with bad class balance, and usually with part of the raid somewhat disappointed that it was a wipe night rather than a farm night…..



In the end, I got frustrated with that, not the wiping, but the lack of desire to get further and better…..



Anyway, to cut a long story short, we couldn’t make the jump to 25 man raiding, so yet again, I found myself in a position of being in a guild that while not a “bad” guild, just wasn’t giving me what I wanted any more, so I left…..only this time it was different, this time it would just be me and one other of the group of real life friends, that would leave….(the others either didn’t want the more progress orientated raids I was looking for, or in the case of 2 of them, had a child together and could no longer commit the time)

So…I aimed high, and me and the one remaining like minded friend found ourselves in one of the high end guild on our server that was very much progress focussed, and raided 5 nights a week, 4.5 hours a raid….a different world compared to what I was used to….but…I loved it, because we actually did what we set out to do, we saw bosses drop, then instead of farming that boss, we only did it again if we needed to in order to unlock a further boss…..it was a guild very much built on the “end result”, and if a few members were upset in the process, so be it……the end result stuff was good, by the time patch 3.0 hit we had ZA bear runs, Illidan, and Archimonde all on farm….brilliant…

I learned so much from this guild, I learned the value of consumables, of survivability, of choosing a decent spec, its also the point when I discovered blogs, and forums like EJ
I especially learned what a good feeling it was to have a progress night of continuous wipes, yet STILL have a raid full of people that enjoyed it….something I’d not experienced before

I also had time, once everything was on farm, or on the twice a week offnights, to raid Kara with my alts, with the same guys I’d been guilded with back in the pre-tbc days….great stuff…..while it lasted

However, it was only when it all slowed down to a stop a few weeks before the release of WotLK that I relaised that WoW was pretty much ALL I was doing outside of work, and I was tired all the time raiding until midnight every day…..after much thinking about it, I realised that at least for now, yet again I’d found myself in a “good guild”, that didn’t do what I wanted to do any more….I wanted to spend a little less time raiding……..so I started looking for something different



The story of my time so far in WotLK coming up in the next post