Will I ever learn ?

I caught myself doing this again a few days ago, and I though “when will I learn ?”

I’m farming eternals in WG, walking between the elite mobs with guaranteed drops of crystallised, 2 normal mobs, one left, one right….I take a second to judge the gap, try to stand exactly in the middle, so I wont agro either…..start attacking the elite, and suddenly….BOTH normals agro to me because in my desire to “save time” by not having to kill either of them, I’ve misjudged the distance and pulled both, AND of course the elite that just got a fireball in the face !
Of course now I have to kill 2 normals and an elite, which is doable of course, but takes a while….

It would be quicker to just take out one normal first, clear a path to the elite I actually need !

I know this….yet I do it anyway !

Similar things happen when I’m on my alts who can either herb or mine….I go for a node knowing there’s a mob close that I might agro, but instead of killing it first, I get 0.5s from finishing the gathering, and THEN it attacks me, which of course means I need to kill it first, then start the gather all over again !

Will I ever learn ?

Finally in the present

Well, if anyone is still reading at this point, we’re almost up to date with where I am today. almost 10 weeks on I’m still enjoying raiding with my guild, we’re making good progress into Ulduar andI’ve been present at a good number of first kills, and one of my real life friends is currently on trial with us too, which is even better.

From now on, I’m going to stop writing about the past, and join the rest of the bloggers and talk about current experiences, and my opinion on WoW issues, rather than just write diary style on my history

Is also ends the pre-written posts I had prepared before I started the blog, so now is the real test of how I will get on…wish me luck …

New beginnings

If anyone has been reading my posts so far, you’ll know that the story so far was that I was about to move servers to join a new guild….

My experience of raiding in wotlk up to then was only 10 mans, with the exception of 2 runs in Naxx to make up the numbers in an old guild (and even then not all bosses), and I was now in a guild that had everything on farm except the absolute hardest encounter in the game at that time
If I remember correctly my transfer completed on a Monday, and my first raid with new guild was the day after….
First raids when on trial at a new guild are always interesting, you’re never quite sure what the style will be like, will the connection to a new vent server be ok ? will I be able to understand the raid leader ? and what’s more, this was no ordinary, easy gentle lead in to a new guild…..this was a “wipe night” on Sartharion with all 3 drakes up !!!


Talk about in at the deep end….I don’t mind admitting I was nervous, very nervous….I wanted to perform well of course, I wanted to register decent dps values, and mostly, I didn’t want to be the one that always died to the void zones


The leadership of the guild clearly saw something in my application they liked, because they put a lot of faith in me that night, I didn’t even get so much as asked if I knew the tactics for Sarth3D, it was just assumed I’d know….luckily I did know, at least from reading about it, so other than getting answers to specific questions I had such as at what time the raid leader wanted me to take portals, when do you want me to start using AoE to take the adds down etc, I wasn’t given any instructions at all…..

Well…if I remember correctly, on the very first attempt I died pretty early (though I wasnt the first) in a flame wave, which I attribute entirely to my graphics settings, which for the 10 mans I’d been accustomed to, I had on maximum……and as anyone that has done it I am sure will agree, 25 man Sarth3D has a lot going on in it graphically…..my computer just didn’t handle it very well at all…


That didn’t help my nervousness one bit ! I felt like such a noob….

Anyway, one tweak of graphic settings to something more suitable and one restart later, I was back for the next attempt, which fortunately, went much better (for me at least, at this stage, I honestly didn’t care how the fight went as a whole, I just wanted my own performance to be good enough to not fail a trial period at the first hurdle….

Thankfully, with a proper frame rate, I was able to avoid silly deaths (mostly, I’m still human and did make some errors of course)
And much better than that, after only maybe 10 attempts, the big dragon fell….thats right, my very first raid in my new guild was the guild first kill of Sarth 3D…..not only that, but I was alive at the end, and my dps stats were decent…I wasn’t the highest, but I certainly pulled my weight….I was happy enough that I hadn’t just been boosted

It was a very very weird feeling……pretty much my first proper 25 man raid in wotlk, and I’d beaten the hardest encounter the game had to offer…..how’s about that for my first raid with a new guild !!!!!

The Lich King Era

About a week after launch, I heard that some friends on the server (mostly ex-guildies from my first guild, the people I’d been alt raiding with at the end of tbc) were forming a new guild, just a small one, with a view to being “focussed on end game progression in the 10 man environment”, with a schedule of 3 nights a week, 3 hours a raid
I thought about it, and at that time, it was perfect for me, provided they would actually do what they said they would…

Me and the same friend that had always been guilded with me applied and got in there, and before I knew it, yet again I was an officer and raid leader….
This guild was amazing to start with…yes Naxx was easy, but even so, within a few weeks of starting raiding, we had all the standard level content (including Malygos) on farm, and were regularly doing Sartharion with a drake up and some of the Naxx achievement style kills….we were going great, at for a few weeks it was about as close to “perfect” as I’ve ever felt in a guild…. BUT….it was short lived…

The success of the guild had given some people a taste for what successful, focussed raiding was like, and the guild developed into two camps…some people started wanting to do 25 man stuff….more and more people started pugging them, and a few members left to a 25 man raiding guild. Other people decided that even a 3 day a week 10 man only schedule was too much for them and they didn’t want to raid at all, they wanted to concentrate on levelling alts etc….eventually we got to the stage were so many people left (or stopped being available to raid) that we couldn’t even get a properly balanced 8-man team together to do the 8 man achievements, let alone a strong 10 man team…even WITH using lots of alts….

So…the guild collapsed as I guess so many others have in the past…..it actually still exists, a couple of my alts are there and we run the odd 5 man together in our free time, but all our mains have gone to other guilds…

Personally though, I found myself in a guild that was surely going to collapse, with no plan of where I would go next…and the only thing I knew I didn’t want to do is go back to the 5 night a week guild I’d been in before (even though I was pretty sure they’d have me back, and I’d been raiding a bit with them when they were a man short)

It was in this short period, when on my regular lunchtime blog reading session, I read this post on Larisa's blog....a chance to join the same guild as a blogging celebrity….a proper raid guild, with a good history of decent progress, but on a relatively relaxed schedule with times that suited me…sounds good…..they weren’t recruiting my class, but what the heck, I was encouraged to apply anyway, and lucky me, they liked my app enough and I got in…..this was a big step for me though, I was about to change servers, on my own (my last remaining friend I was guilded with had decided by now to quit WoW altogether)…..how would I get on ? would I like it on another server, would I hate not knowing anybody at all ? Would I pass my trial ?

Answers to all these questions in the next post…

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

WoW, the early days

From my last post you will know that I was introduced to WoW by a group of friends from work…..


They told me what server they were on (Bronzebeard-EU) and what classes they all played, which at that time was 2 prot warriors and a holy pally, so even though I know nothing about WoW directly, I did know from my experience in the fantasy game genre that it made sense to me to play a damage dealer in order to be the most use to them…


So I started a character, that character was a human (purely because they were all human, so it made sense for me to be in the same starter zone) mage…and the name was chosen as “Lerbic”….Lerbic had been my 2nd character in MUME, back in those days on MUME, Lerbic was a dwarf warrior, but I couldn’t keep the, mages name, after all it was chosen as something silly because “I wouldn’t keep him”

I assume it’s the same for most people, but while levelling Lerbic up I died a LOT, and I mean a LOT….I know nothing of game mechanics, nothing of using websites to help me learn about them, it was all trial and error…and believe me, there was a lot of error

I was guildless until mid 20’s level I think, I remember being in Redridge Mountains when I got my guild invite to the same guild my friends were in….the guild shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but lets just say that by my standards of today they were Ultra, Ultra casual….I remember it being a big thing when people dinged 60…I remember stopping one friend in the corridor at work, shaking his hand and saying “well done” when he was the first to do it…and alts ? what were alts….it was almost TBC launch before anyone in the guild had a level 60 alt….
That guild was brilliant for the social aspect of the game, for a start it had a load of people I knew from real life in it, but also, the guild chat was great, full of jokes and banter, something I’ve never quite been able to replace in any other guilds I’ve been in since....
The quality of play ? Well, I didn’t know any better at the time, but I thought we were good, we had all the 5 mans down to easy farm status, and we even had the 45 min baron run down to about a 50% success rate, which means we certainly didn’t suck completely, that was a tough run when done at the correct gear level
Raiding though was a different story though, pre-tbc, despite having a membership of over 100 accounts (no joke) we never ever went in MC, and we struggled to even get 20 online at the same time to have regular runs to ZG and AQ20
The total raid kill count was 3 ZG bosses, and only one of those was a purely guild kill (snake boss), the other 2 we had help from a few friends from other guilds on the server.
But…those little attempts into raiding did one thing for me, they gave me a taste of what the large group side of the game might be like…and I wanted more…

By the time of TBC launch, I was an officer and raid leader in the guild, but despite my best efforts at getting any good progress into heroics and Kara, we got stuck after only Attumen and never made it further before me and the group of real life friends left
I just read that through and it sounds very bad, I’m aware that a lot of guilds got stuck for several weeks at Moroes, we didn’t just jump ship when it got difficult, there were also problems getting commitment, reliability, consistency of play standard, more than one raid a week etc etc…basically the guild was a social guild trying to raid, and the majority of the players just didn’t have the right mindset…and frankly, I don’t blame them, I never did. These people didn’t join a raid guild, they joined a social guild…it wasn’t that the guild was bad, far from it, it was simply that I’d changed in what I wanted from the game

So…..my friends and I found a casual raid guild on the server, who offered “access to the end game without the need for soul-less every day raiding”…sounds good….lets apply and see what happens…..

This has got long again, so I’ll continue on another post

Gaming, Online gaming, and my intro to WoW

This will be a potted history of me and gaming, and kind of story of why I am where I am today….as I start to write this I really don’t know how long it will get, or how many posts it will take, but I don’t suppose a lack of advanced planning will hurt a blog, so I’ll just start, and we’ll see where it takes me

I’ve always liked computer games, for as long as I can remember, the first computer I ever personally owned was a Spectrum 128k +2, and I had hours of entertainment out of that thing, I loved it….especially the adventure games like the “Dizzy” series
I bought my first PC with my student loan when I first went to university, and while I did of course use it to write up assignments and stuff, I of course played games too…
I went to Uni in the late 1990’s, right about the time when internet became affordable for “financially average” people, meaning that it was no longer a toy for the ultra-rich, and that meant most people could afford it, so it became popular

At around the same time I discovered the internet while away at uni, a very close friend of mine from my home town had started playing a MUD called MUME – Multi Users in Middle Earth, a text game based on Tolkiens world…as a Tolkien and game fan, I had to try it….
MUME is still around today, amazing really…

I first played MUME at my friends house in 1996, and of course being naïve I didn’t think I would like it, so chose a stupid name for my character, thinking I would only be playing for a couple of hours to humour my friend and was going to be a means of keeping in touch with him…I was known back then as “Gibbon the Man Magic User” (basically a human mage)
Well….after the first 20 mins I was hooked, and stupid name or not, that was it…3 years later when I left Uni, my combined playtime on all my characters (some of which have names that live on today on my WoW characters) was well into the 60 day area…a number which I thought was HUGE at the time, but compared to my WoW time these days, wasn’t all that much
I still log in maybe twice a year when I get nostalgic (I bet I log in later on today now, having been writing about it) but nobody I know still plays as far as I know

That was my first trip into the world of online, multiplayer gaming…and I only stopped playing because when I moved back home from uni, I had no job and had to move back into my parents house, and there was no way they were allowing me to play a computer game into the small hours on a daily basis, and they certainly didn’t want to pay the phone bill for me to do so (back then most internet suppliers in the UK charged by the hour of connection)…so I quit in late 1999

I still kept an interest in games, but mostly in the form of single player games such as Might and Magic, Command and Conquer, Diablo 1&2(offline only) in which I could simply save the game when I got distracted or whatever

Fastforward to years later, I was older and wiser, now employed, living away from my parents, and had some money (enough to pay for an internet provider at least) and one day at work I overheard a few people talking in a corridor….I heard the odd word like “Orc, Paladin, xp, level”, that type of thing….I shrugged it off, but then a few days later I heard them again….same type of conversation…..this time I asked them what they were on about….and was told about this online game they’d been getting into called World of Warcraft…..and the rest, as they say….is history

Except it isn’t, this wouldn’t be much of a WoW blog if I wrote about my gaming pre-WoW and left my actually WoW story as a one liner….


I will write more…..but it will be in a different post