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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