When I first started playing World of Warcraft it was in the late vanilla days and I swore up and down that I would never raid. The friend who had recruited my husband and me to the game was a raider and his brother-in-law was what you might call a hardcore raider. Everything we had ever heard about those old 40-man raid days sounded hellish in the extreme, between lag and loot scrabbles.
Burning Crusade came out right around the time my husband and I were somewhere in our early 50's. Changes - major changes - were washing over the game but we knew too little at that point to understand just how fundamentally things had shifted. Our idea of sweeping changes at that time was that the GM of the only guild we had ever been in just came on one fine afternoon, passed the mantle of leadership to an officer, said farewell to us and the game and quit.
My husband and I paused in our slaughtering of pigs out in Hellfire (trying to grind our way to 58 so we could start the quest lines) and speculated aloud over what this might mean. All our friends, real life and otherwise, were wrapped up in this guild and we were getting our first real glimpse of how unstable, how transient things could be in this world.
Two weeks later, through a series of events and the desertion of nearly all the original members of the guild, my husband was the Co-GM of War Within a Breath. We were, we decided, a casual guild, focused on leveling and being social. Over the next several months we hit 70 on our mains and some alts. We leveled new alts. Our real life friends went to raiding guilds and started decking themselves out in epics. Our in-game friends started to decide that being casual and social wasn't enough for them and they also went to raiding guilds, many of them following the former guild leadership. We went through round after round of guild drama and eventually lost the other Co-GM. And we eventually got bored.
When we at last decided to start raiding, we had perhaps 12-15 70's in the guild and several of those were our own alts. Nevertheless, we started down the raiding path. Our real life friends came back, not because we were starting to raid and they just couldn't wait to slog through Kara again, but because they got burned out on the hardcore raiding scene. That's where the dream began, of raiding without being hardcore. Of having a guild that could be social and still get epics.
Within three weeks of starting to raid, we had a full clear of Kara. Yes, it had been nerfed all to hell at that point, and yes, our hardcore raiding friend main tanked us all the way through, but we were jubilant anyway. All of us in our little tight-knit guild had achieved something big. But we wanted more. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to easily put a raid together? Wouldn't it be astounding to move on to harder content, like Mags or Gruul?
The guild alliances picked up in earnest, as did the recruiting. Soon we were running Kara every week with two or three different raid teams. The third one was often comprised mostly of alts. Then our big break came, or what we thought was the big break at the time. The number one raiding guild on the server decided to farm Gruul and since not everyone in their guild was interested in revisiting such easy content, we were able to bring several people along and essentially get carried through.
I learned how to mage tank Krosh Firehand and how to ignore the constant stream of profanity from the hardcore types. Everyone was abused pretty equally by the raid leader and it seemed more clear than ever that casual raiding was the way to go. Still, we were getting more tier gear in working with this other guild so we stuck with it.
A few months down the road, we broke off that relationship. We were farming both Mags and Gruul with them at the time, but we were growing as a guild and they were making room for only about 5 of our raiders at a time and there were a lot of complaints. We decided to go ahead and strike out on our own raiding adventures. Because we had so much practice with Mags and Gruul, neither of those were much of an issue for us. But then we thought that we should go give Loot Reaver a try.
At this time we had recently absorbed another guild and had elevated a few people from there into leadership positions. One was an officer and the other was a raid leader. All of a sudden, there was this huge push for being more serious about raiding. Within a month the game lost all its sparkle, friendships were at jeopardy (real life and otherwise for myself) and we splintered. In the aftermath I was more than a little ready to throw in the raiding towel altogether. It caused nothing but drama, it wasn't fun, and we couldn't do anything but Kara anymore because we were down something like 17 people. And I was sick to death of Kara.
Burning Crusade came out right around the time my husband and I were somewhere in our early 50's. Changes - major changes - were washing over the game but we knew too little at that point to understand just how fundamentally things had shifted. Our idea of sweeping changes at that time was that the GM of the only guild we had ever been in just came on one fine afternoon, passed the mantle of leadership to an officer, said farewell to us and the game and quit.
My husband and I paused in our slaughtering of pigs out in Hellfire (trying to grind our way to 58 so we could start the quest lines) and speculated aloud over what this might mean. All our friends, real life and otherwise, were wrapped up in this guild and we were getting our first real glimpse of how unstable, how transient things could be in this world.
Two weeks later, through a series of events and the desertion of nearly all the original members of the guild, my husband was the Co-GM of War Within a Breath. We were, we decided, a casual guild, focused on leveling and being social. Over the next several months we hit 70 on our mains and some alts. We leveled new alts. Our real life friends went to raiding guilds and started decking themselves out in epics. Our in-game friends started to decide that being casual and social wasn't enough for them and they also went to raiding guilds, many of them following the former guild leadership. We went through round after round of guild drama and eventually lost the other Co-GM. And we eventually got bored.
When we at last decided to start raiding, we had perhaps 12-15 70's in the guild and several of those were our own alts. Nevertheless, we started down the raiding path. Our real life friends came back, not because we were starting to raid and they just couldn't wait to slog through Kara again, but because they got burned out on the hardcore raiding scene. That's where the dream began, of raiding without being hardcore. Of having a guild that could be social and still get epics.
Within three weeks of starting to raid, we had a full clear of Kara. Yes, it had been nerfed all to hell at that point, and yes, our hardcore raiding friend main tanked us all the way through, but we were jubilant anyway. All of us in our little tight-knit guild had achieved something big. But we wanted more. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to easily put a raid together? Wouldn't it be astounding to move on to harder content, like Mags or Gruul?
The guild alliances picked up in earnest, as did the recruiting. Soon we were running Kara every week with two or three different raid teams. The third one was often comprised mostly of alts. Then our big break came, or what we thought was the big break at the time. The number one raiding guild on the server decided to farm Gruul and since not everyone in their guild was interested in revisiting such easy content, we were able to bring several people along and essentially get carried through.
I learned how to mage tank Krosh Firehand and how to ignore the constant stream of profanity from the hardcore types. Everyone was abused pretty equally by the raid leader and it seemed more clear than ever that casual raiding was the way to go. Still, we were getting more tier gear in working with this other guild so we stuck with it.
A few months down the road, we broke off that relationship. We were farming both Mags and Gruul with them at the time, but we were growing as a guild and they were making room for only about 5 of our raiders at a time and there were a lot of complaints. We decided to go ahead and strike out on our own raiding adventures. Because we had so much practice with Mags and Gruul, neither of those were much of an issue for us. But then we thought that we should go give Loot Reaver a try.
At this time we had recently absorbed another guild and had elevated a few people from there into leadership positions. One was an officer and the other was a raid leader. All of a sudden, there was this huge push for being more serious about raiding. Within a month the game lost all its sparkle, friendships were at jeopardy (real life and otherwise for myself) and we splintered. In the aftermath I was more than a little ready to throw in the raiding towel altogether. It caused nothing but drama, it wasn't fun, and we couldn't do anything but Kara anymore because we were down something like 17 people. And I was sick to death of Kara.
After a period of darkness, we eventually got another guild alliance going. Because this other guild was also pretty laid back, we were able to work through content at a reasonable pace. We downed most of Tempest Keep, moved on to SSC and tore through it, hit up Mount Hyjal and only faltered on the last boss. We even went and cleared a bit of Black Temple before Wrath hit.
Since Wrath has come out, we've of course cleared Naxx on normal and heroic modes. We don't pay much attention to any of the one-boss wonders (EoE or OS or VoA), but have been known to get those taken out. Now we're heading into Ulduar, amidst a string of bad luck (summer schedules, computer issues, and server crashes), so are still working on Kologorn.
I've also become the Raid Leader. Whereas I was an officer ever since my husband became the Co-GM, I recently felt it was time to step down from that position. Then I got suckered into stepping into a position we haven't had open since that horrible splinter back in BC.
Which brings me around to why I am even here writing this. It's been a very long and often convoluted path that has led me to this place in my gaming life and I have found it interesting to think back to that new-to-MMO's girl who was dead set against raiding and contrast that with who I am today - the major proponent for organizing a recently bulging roster of casuals into something that can work together well enough to more or less keep up with content as it comes out.
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