One Priest’s Journey

I’m feeling a little nostalgic today. Wrath has been a difficult, yet rewarding experience for me so far. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it’s been a journey. A search for shared goals and a stable raiding environment. It hasn’t been easy.

For most of my WoW career, I have considered myself a dedicated, loyal guild member. Someone who sticks around for the long haul. Wrath has been different. I’ve been in more guilds (and on more servers) in this expansion than in the rest of my playing time combined. I’m getting ahead of myself though, let’s start at the beginning. Warning though, this is loooooong.

Vanilla/BC WoW

Yes, I played back in Vanilla. My first character of any importance was my Night Elf Hunter, Aduialwen. When she was about level 7, I met another hunter who was starting up a guild. It was an RP guild (I played on Shadow Council). Would I join? Sure! I was a total noob and didn’t know anything about guilds or well… anything beyond Teldrassil to be honest. I joined her guild and became a member of <Rayven Order>. Flash foward two weeks and the GM goes on vacation only to never come back.

It wasn’t a total loss, however, since I met some people who would become good friends over the next few years. One of those individuals decided she wanted to make a new guild, and so we did. <Imladris Elite> was born. We were Tolkien fans; well, some of us were anyway. I was in Imladris for the entire duration of the guild, one year. Actually, I’m the one that disbanded it, having been promoted to GM after the current GM left to go hordeside. It was a tough decision, but I still feel was the right one.

Moving on! A good friend and fellow officer from Imladris decided to start up her own guild, <Beatha Siorai>. It took me a few months, but I eventually joined them, became an officer, and eventually became second in command. That’s where I stayed for the rest of Vanilla WoW and all of BC. Three years we ran the guild and it was an awesome guild!

Enter Wrath

A lot of changes happened in Beatha over our three year stint. The biggest, was the gravitation from a super casual guild to a guild that raided. We struggled with this transition for most of BC, and were bound and determined to have successful raiding in Wrath. Ten mans were going to be our salvation. Looking back, I can see that part of our problem was that over the course of the years, our goals for the game had changed. As officers, several of us wanted raiding. That’s all we were really interested in with the game anymore. Many of our members, however, had joined because of the family and social aspect the guild had for so long. We could have probably sorted through it all, but RL crit for 100,000 and life for the GM and myself changed pretty drastically. We decided to disband. I cannot explain how this felt. Felt like I was loosing home. At the same time, it felt like an opportunity to find the things my husband and I wanted out of the game. We wanted to raid, period.

Ok, so here we are. Me, holy/disc priest (I forgot to mention that I leveled this priest up about midway through vanilla wow and swapped to player her as my main) and my husband, a I-can’t-remember-what-cause-he-has-changed-mains-so-many-times-this-expansion, and we are looking for a raiding guild. I had never been in a raiding guild, so I really didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. All I knew was that I wanted a friendly, team oriented, supportive environment that took raiding seriously. The catch? Due to my craptastical work schedule, I can only raid on the weekends. NONE of the progression guilds on my server raided weekends. That was ok though, cause we were really looking for something at the same level of progression we were at. We don’t like being carried through anything.

I’m not going to name guilds anymore at this point, cause some of these guilds I have been in are still around and I don’t feel like giving anyone a bad name.

Guild #1 – My GM from Beatha (who happens to have become my best friend over the course of time) was friends with the GM of another guild on the server. She was able to pull some strings and get a few of us invites into this guild. They were a little ahead of Beatha in terms of raiding, but the group was a little more rough around the edges. Since that’s where our close friends were going, my husband and I decided to give it a try. We didn’t last too long. It wasn’t a bad guild, but there were too many prima-donnas and bad attitudes in the raids for my taste. We wished them luck and moved on.

Guild #2 –  This guild really seemed like the perfect fit for us. The guild environment was casual, but they seemed to take raiding seriously. It helped that my husbands former roommate was an officer in this guild. He was also the one driving their raiding success. The problems there didn’t start until the GM decided to quit one day and promoted a new GM. This happened not long after we joined – maybe two weeks. We were ok with that until we realized that the new GM was a DRAMA QUEEN!!! Big time. And let me tell you: I have Z E R O patience for that kind of crap.

Guild #3 & 4 - After the GM Drama Queen experience, I decided I had had enough and wanted to try running my own guild. At this point, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted. I’d also come to the realization that I suck as a regular guild member. The recruiting prospects on my server were pretty dismal, so my husband and I made a decision to transfer to a new server were a friend of ours (who was transferring with us) had some family. Between his family’s group, and our group, we had about 8 folks, so it seemed a solid building block to make a 10 man guild.

You know how the poem goes: “Best laid plans…” That was the case here. Turns out that his family opted to join a 25 man raiding guild instead of joining up with us. Oh well, big set back, but we were still determined to build our guild. During our recruitment process, we found another small guild (4 folks – we had 4 as well) that were looking to build a 10 man guild that raided same time we wanted to. After discussion, we decided to merge. <Reckless> was born. We had some excellent players and started ploughing through content. Cleared up to Yogg in Ulduar, doing some hard modes along the way. Cleared ToC easily. Things were going wonderful until…

My hard drive crashed. Bought a new one and then my monitor went kaput. Same time all this was happening, we started having trouble with our internet connection. Disconnects became frequent. Our success was then marred by frustration as raid nights had to be cancelled or didn’t progress as far because of the comp issues. Needless to say, about half the guild (we only had 15 folks) split off and joined a 25 man guild. At this point, my husband was done and just wanted to join a guild were we could raid and not have to build something.

Guild #5 - I did a lot of research to try and find us a good guild that raided weekends. I can’t tell you how hard that is. The only guilds I could really find that fit our level of progression and schedule were newer guilds. With new guilds, you always take a chance, but we didn’t have a lot of options. I finally found one I thought would be a good fit and we transfered after talking to the GM for awhile about guild goals, how they ran things, what the raids were like, etc. It really did seem that they shared our goals and values. For a little while, things were good, but once the guild started running 25 mans, things took a turn for the worse. It eventually became apparent that the GM valued gear over all else. If you didn’t have the gear he thought you should have then you weren’t doing it right and you weren’t serious about progression. When he decided to turn that line of thinking my direction, I voted with my feet and walked right out that door. Where do you get off telling ME I am not gearing correctly when I am outperforming you in raids!!! Performance > gearing choices. Period. Basically, it became apparent that the GM was an idiot. (That guild has since disbanded, btw).

Guild #6 – This guild is probably the golden child in my WotLK journey so far. I 100% enjoyed being in this guild. Raiding environment was serious, but the guild was casual. It was everything my husband and I had been searching for for about a year. That was, until the GM went overseas to study abroad. Who knew that you can’t get much of a connection in Japan? Raid attendance started to take a decline and guild leadership decided to put the guild into hibernation until the GM returns in late May. Everyone was free to join other guilds to finish out Wrath, and welcome back when the guild was up and running again. Since my husband and I have a personal goal of killing Arthas, we decided it was time to look for something else.

Guild #7 - Apparently the only guild on our server that raided times we could raid was Guild #6. I absolutely refused to go back there and the husband agreed. We were deciding what to do when the Raid Leader from guild #6 sent me a tell. He’d just /gquit and was going to be forming up a new guild. We liked him and agreed to join up with him. <Dark Covenant> was born and for some reason, I got promoted to Co-GM (I built the website and had all kinds of input on guild policy haha). So far, we’ve been doing well in 10 mans, and have our first 25 man next weekend. I am hoping that this is the end of the line. I’m tired of moving around and around. I want a guild to call home. I want a team I can count on. I think this time, we’re on our way to just that.

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