Last week I started to write about my experiences in WoW. I was going to go all the way through to the current expansion, yet there was so much in wrath, that I felt like it was going to turn into a wall of text that people would balk at having to read through. Instead I wrapped it up nice and pretty with a highpoint win against the Lich King.
(I decided against tacking this on with this week’s ‘Scribe of Nightsong’ and just take another week off rather than set precedence for writing AND making a new comic in one post. Anyway, back to wow.)
You have to keep in mind that Wrath was like 4 expansions ago, and a lot has gone on, not only in the game world, but in my life as well. When I started to play WoW heavily, I had extra family members move into the house with me. So my huge gloriously spacious house turned into a sloppy art-strewn corner, I was pinned in… I pretty much just dove into WoW; In theory this freed up the rest of the house for everyone else, you know, as long as they didn’t touch my stuff, or mess with my recordings…
The expansion after WotLK was ’Cataclysm’ which brought with it the reemergence of ‘Deathwing’, the corrupt leader of the Black Dragon flight. He was the most powerful of all the dragons, which, let’s face it, is probably why the corruption set in. Seems to me the more powerful they are, the more time the bad guys will spend twisting them into a destroyer. And that’s what Deathwing was, the Destroyer. The world was changed irreparably with his arrival and no one was equipped to deal with his antics as he flew throughout the world pretty much just terrorizing folks… ah, Deathwing the greatest of all griefers.
Ultimately, this was an excuse for the game developers to redo the whole world so that flying mounts could be used throughout the older areas of the game, which is great, or was great; they seem to have changed their stance on flying in the expansions that followed. But with it, other character race/class combinations were added. For example you could now play a Dwarf shaman, or a Tauren Paladin…
Actually, a lot of these changes were added prior to the expansions release, which is pretty standard at this point. I don’t remember exactly how long I had to level my new Dwarf Shaman, but I’m pretty sure he was capped before I ever set foot in the new Cataclysm zones. I have some fairly fond memories of questing through the revamped areas, especially when Deathwing suddenly appeared in said area, and lay waste to… just, just to everything.
All that being said, as soon as Cataclysm officially dropped, I was back on my mage, I want to say, ‘like I always do’, yet this was the first xpac that I had multiple capped characters to choose from. So, I’ll say ‘this is where I started that trend of always starting with my mage’. I was also still guild-less, I figured I had plenty of time, I had this whole new world to play in, so I think I was just bouncing around hoping to find some people I actually liked; I don’t know, something like that.
Cataclysm was pretty fun, and leveling went fast, but when I got into the 5mans, well, they were gloriously awesome! They were like little daily raids, which, if you weren’t any good, could be a problem, but if you were awesome, and had awesome pugging abilities… back then, I could get anybody through anything.
By this time, I had my mage, priest, and pally all capped and running heroic dungeons, so my old strategy kicked back in. I would start a new instance with my mage, learn as much as I could, then go in and play through on my healer, this is really where you’re going to see what’s going wrong… by the time I was ready to play through on my tank, well, I was a golden godsend, especially if I got dropped into a failed run.
Yeah, these were good times for me, and they only got better with the troll dungeons. The troll dungeons were like guild destroyers, yet I was crushing them three times a day in randoms. They really weren’t popular in the long run though. I think the problem was that they just went on for way too long. But this was it, all the other dungeons were obsolete, and it was troll dungeons or nothing… for months.
I got a little ahead of myself here; I have not talked about raiding in cata at all. There was one little change that came with Cata that really changed a lot- 10mans and 25mans were merged into the same thing. You could either play through a 10man, or you could play through a 25man, you could no longer do both… in wrath they were separate; Two separate lockouts, that gave the chance for more gear, and better gear.
At first I was like, woohoo this’ll be great, and my reasoning was so batshit backwards that I can’t even make sense of why I thought this would be good for me. Yeah, no, this tiny little change was like the death-knell for pugging raids in wow. The fact is, most guilds did not have a hard time filling up ten mans. For the most part, good or bad, they were running a 10 man every week, easy-peasy, the problem was getting enough people for the 25man every week. This is where I came in; this is where I got my chance to raid. So when guilds did not need to run both a ten man and a twenty-five man, the puggers started to starve… and disappear.
So, I was forced to find a guild or leave raiding behind. Uhg! Bleh! My communication problems are real, people; I pay for who I am every day of my life… and, but…QQ some more, whatever, I had to get to it.
I actually had a druid at this point too, that I failed to mention last week. I started him way back in wrath, with a friend who i had not seen in a long time, so I just leveled him the rest of the way up on my own. So anyway my half-baked scheme was that I could use this character to scout out guilds without offending anyone for guild hopping on my known characters. I felt like people wouldn’t really like it if I quit their guild… to ‘try’ another. lol
I should also squeeze in here, real quick, that I was done with the whole ‘filling out applications’ for a raid spot. I had enough of that in wrath and it was also how I got into that guild that jumped server on me. I was determined to find a guild without all the hoopla and BS. So I started posting that I was looking for a guild in chat.
My druid got snapped up pretty quick and plunked into a raid group, like amazingly fast. So fast my head spun! You see, I leveled up my druid as a tank, and apparently I ran members of this guild through a five man without ever knowing it… but they remembered me, ‘cause I was an awesome tank. So when they saw me looking for a guild, they snatched me up… which would be great, except I decided to switch to boomkin for raiding. Needless to say they were pretty disheartened that I was only geared for dps… Add on to that, the guy that actually recruited me, was a bear tank that really wanted to play a boomkin, things did not go well.
All of which could have been avoided, in my opinion, if he took the time to ask, ‘hey, what spec do you run?’ before I was ‘gifted’ a spot on this team. They were clique-y too, which means ‘assholes’. I think they wanted to get rid of me pretty quick once they found out I was dps. Rather than saying, “hey, sry we messed up, we thought you were a tank,” they just all started to shit on me until I got the picture. Anyway, it wasn’t until I had a real clear indication, that they were complete morons, that I /gquit and got out of there. This just added to the jadedness of my guild jadedness.
Arg! guilds!
This post is turning into a wall of text again, and that was only Blackwing Descent! I actually found another guild for Fire Lands and had another horrible experience, this time I think I was on my priest… uhg, it was typical, just trust me. I think you’ll have to imagine an eighties montage of me joining new guilds, all full of hope and wonder, just to be smashed down again with a series of /gquit boom!… /gquit boom!… /gquit boom!… between the takes.
Raiding in cata, for me, was a nightmare, and I blame the merger of 10&25mans. I did end up enjoying the 5mans all the way up until the stupid ones. Uhg, they were bad. I can’t think of what they were called at the moment. They were right after the troll dungeons I mentioned earlier. People griped so much about the troll dungeons that the game developers at Blizzard made the next batch so stupid easy that the whole game started to unravel.
5mans have been questionable ever since, even to this day.
At the same time the dungeons died, we got Raid Finder. This was great for me. I mean it was way too easy as well, but I had a small stable of heroes to raid with. Sitting in queue and letting the computer pick 24 other players for me, was great. Especially just for the value of seeing the end game content, which is all I cared about. Even in wrath, I only killed the Lich King one time before cata dropped and that’s all I ever wanted to do. But Deathwing… Deathwing went down, what, 5 times a week? lol Once on my mage, my priest, my pally, my shaman, and my druid.
Of course, I could not let the expansion end without killing him, at least, on normal too. I came across a guy in trade chat, early on in the expansion, that claimed all his guild needed was a ‘good healer’ and they could do just as well as the guy he was arguing with. Yeah, so, I embedded my shaman into that guild…
I found it satisfying that the same character, who witnessed entire zones repeatedly razed by Deathwing while leveling up, got the credit for the ‘real’ kill in the end. So, in my mind, Deathwing was officially killed by my shaman, ‘Tharnan, Destroyer’s End’… even though at this point, I’d killed him over and over and over again in raid finder. lmao
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