Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The History Lesson




Intro

Today’s blog takes us all down memory lane.  ‘Memories….Light the corner of my mind….Misty watercolor memories…Of the way we were…’   So, I have wanted to do this blog entry for awhile now and it’ll probably be a good piece of prose to keep at the ready if I do ever app to another guild and they want my raiding history.  ;)

Vanilla

I was literally THIS THIS THIS FING close to almost quitting WOW before I even started it.  When I first loaded it up and rolled an Undead Warlock on Uldum, the camera defaulted to first person, and it was horrible.  An hour playing like that and getting ganked by zombies in Brill (I think it is Brill) and I was ready to quit, then by mere accident, I rolled the mouse wheel backwards and holy fing poopie, 3rd person view; addicted ever since.  5 hours of sleep became my norm for years to come.

I began leveling and at some point I met a rogue along the way named Deadwolf.  I was MavrosDeath, so in WOW terms, we had a lot in common, both our toons liked death.  He invited me to his guild named the Brotherhood and I joined and kept leveling slowly to 60.  At some point at the appropriate level, I was invited into Ragefire Chasm, my first ever 5 man and it was awesome!  Addicted x 2.  I made a point to try and do every dungeon I could find along my path of questing.  Remember, no LFD, no summoning stones, and it took 3 people to summon someone (lock and 2 more) PLUS I needed to have soul shards in order to summon someone, so getting 5 mans wasn’t easy and sort of had to be something you did rather than quest.  I remember some questing areas having tons of elites, not dungeons, just some random questing areas just had elites and you needed groups to clear them out to do all the quests.  They felt like outdoor 5 mans.  Getting to 60 was not easy plus you had to read quest text to figure out where to do or use a site called thottbot where would could search a quest and find out what to do and where to go.  Also, no BOAs and random elites everywhere and basically I died a lot.  I could go through all the noob stuff I did in vanilla, but I’ll spare the readers that horror and myself the embarrassment.

Fast forward to raiding!  40 man MC.  Wow, get to raid 30 mins in advance to hope and secure a spot.  Having 100 people on at once was the norm back then.  Then farm a crap ton of soul shards for healthstones for raid.  Trash repops were super fast so you wasted so much time on trash.  We spent every night raiding until like 1-2 am ET to some degree and the raid lockouts were 3 or 5 days and on a staggered schedule.  I continued to run 5 man dungeons and you could “raid” dungeons like Stratholme and Scholomance and UBRS.  I think they were all 15 man then went to 10 and ultimately 5.  I forget where I finally took a break, but my guild broke up when the main tank made the legendary sword with guild mats without approval.  So, the guild split and I lost all my DKP and had to start over and I was hoarding my DKP.  From that point in vanilla into some point into TBC was the only time I ever took a WOW break and it was 6 months long.  I haven’t ever quit since…

TBC

I came back to WOW and rolled a priest on Ravencrest with Moonglum and 2 other guys that no longer play, but were also real life friends.  Got to a point where we got bored and were looking for a raiding guild, but to no avail.  Moonglum found a guild on Uldaman with a bunch of Greeks in it called Dead Gnomes Float (DGF), he knww one of the guys, Barbaros, IRL.  So, we all transferred and joined. 

DGF was a PVP centered guild run by a guy that trolled people in WSG BGs.  When enough people joined DGF and we started raiding Kara, the original GL left the guild and Photia aka Porkofdoom/Bloodrooted became the GL and most of his officers were these Greek dudes and some RL friends of his from Boston.  I am not sure when I became an officer of DGF, but it was at some point in TBC.  I do know I was always a dps and a damn good one for a time (don’t laugh).  The game was different then, aggro was a huge issue, Omen or some aggro addon was essential to raiding as a dps getting aggro over tanks was really easy and soulshatter was a 5 min cd to drop 50% of warlock threat ; even that was not enough.  So, using any agro drop had to be strategic and sometimes you just had to flat out stop dpsing.  As we “progressed” through Kara and got to boss #2, Moroes, it was obvious we needed another CC to handle this boss as we were wiping for a few weeks.  So, we ran 3 priests, 2 holy (no one went disco back then) and 1 shadow to have at our disposal 3 shackles and we finally beat Moroes.  From then on, I sort of split time healing/dpsing and kept both my priest and lock at the ready.  TBC was the first time many  folks in DGF had ever raided, so we didn’t get very far.  We cleared Kara, ZA up to Hexlord (never got the bears), Mags, and Grul .  We tried Loot Reaver, but he ate our lunch, we almost got him once if I remember correctly, the rest of the times he did not feel like a Loot Reaver to DGF.  I do remember having 3 x 10 mans run Kara weekly, but I do not recall the raid schedule back then.  WOTLK was announced and in typical WOW fashion half the guild quit or took a break. 

Note about TBC:  Best raid content of all time, but some of worst character mechanics, 1 button rotations were not uncommon and needing 100s of flasks for raid week was the norm. 

WOTLK

An amazing expansion and if you were a Warcraft 3 RTS player, this was the crux of WOW for you (and me).  Naxx was rebooted as a 25 man from its 40 man glory days of Vanilla where it is still considered one of the best raids when current ever that barely anyone ever saw, hence the reboot in WOTLK.  Broken (DGF was renamed after being  hacked) joined forces with 2 other guilds on server, The Order of the Stick (OOTS) and another guild whose name is eluding me now, but I can edit this when I remember.  OOTS provided the tanks and some heals, Broken provided dps and some heals, and the other guild chipped in with a handful of DPS.  We got through 25 man Naxx on late Friday nights from 1030pm to 230 am ET, for a 2 guild effort, it went pretty well.  It really was a lot of fun, but tiring for Broken members as the other guilds were not in the ET zone.  Eventually, Broken had enough for our own 25 mans and asked OOTS if they wanted to join/merge with us and they declined.  So, Broken moved on and raided the content which was really great.  Naxx, Ulduar (minus FL), TOC (came too fast), and then ICC with the Lich King (basically the Darth Vadar of WOW).  We raided 10 mans and 25 mans weekly.  It was a lot of raiding, but at the time we could dedicate the time and WOW was in its heyday with 12M subs.  Cata was announced and half the guild quit or took a break.

Cata

We rebuilt yet again to do 25s although 10s and 25s were now the same gear, but we had enough for 25 so we decided to go for it.  The 5 mans were awesome to start off, then got nerfed.  Ugh, thanks Blizz.  BOT, BWD, and TO4W were the first raiding tier and were all pretty good minus the last boss in TO4W which was like Malygos named Alakir.  Those flying bosses are not fun and awkward.  All went pretty well, but Broken ran into trouble and some drama.  The skill divide was too extreme to clear content and so we broke into 2 x 10 and divided the skill and that wasn’t enough either.  We made a guild decision to go with a 1 x 10 man team and progress through the content with the most skilled talent we had.  We cleared T11 in regulation and then had our, at the time, best tier ever with FL in T12.  We got 7/8H with the nerf and Rag normal pre-nerf.  T13 we started out great and fizzled out as we lost core raiders and Diablo 3 was launched.  We were 6/8H at 10% when Broken hung it up for T13.  I started raiding with Masochistic Tendencies (MT) and a weekend guild on an alliance server as well.  At one point I was raiding 6 nights a week.

For the remainder of this story visit a blog I already wrote, it is all in the beginning of the blog entry below.

As for the MoP story, we are still writing it, but so far so good as T16 has been Broken’s most successful tier ever.

Conclusion

Sure, I could have joined a guild by now to get more heroic progression or to not have to do as much work as I had to, but perhaps all this work and effort has made the game and this success that much more appealing to me.  Grassroots efforts are always more personally rewarding rather than joining an already excelling team or guild.  I am content with where I started and where I ended up so far in game.  We shall see how this story continues to unfold as WOW gets older and so do I….

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