My WoW Experience

My first character was a Paladin. He made it to level 9 right before WoW's open beta shut down, a month before the game was released in November 2004. Apparently, 9 levels weren't enough for me to figure out that Paladins kinda suck, so once I bought the game, I rolled yet another Paladin. Fifty-five levels later (yep, that close to 60), I abandoned him for a Mage.

I immediately loved the Mage class, actually taking one to 60 on both alliance and horde over the two years of vanilla WoW. I have always been a fairly casual player. When I first heard about raids that lasted over 4 hours, I thought those people were insane; I never joined a raiding guild, so I just ran Strat/Scholo/UBRS over and over again trying to fill the mage class dungeon set. I think I ended up with only 4 pieces (but at least I got something to show for it!).

During the fall of 2006, I got a beta key for the BC expansion. I ran around a bit in Hellfire, but at the time, I was already pretty burned out of WoW in general. Most people at the time were just doing PVP until the expansion was released. Some friends of mine decided once BC hit, we would all roll new characters on a new realm - I was considering a priest or warrior.

A few weeks before BC came out, I actually did go to MC for the first and only time. I loved it. It was like playing a completely different game. I was also very intrigued by the role of a tank in a raid. When I saw the tank charge into the huge raid bosses all alone, I instantly knew I wanted to have a prot warrior for BC. I needed to know what that felt like.

About 7 months after BC came out, I hit 70 on my new draenei warrior. My awesome druid friend got us into a guild that was getting ready to start Kara. After a few 5-man runs where I got lucky to find some tanking gear, I switched from Arms to Protection. I remember the first level 70 5-man I ever tried to tank - Shadow Labs. I fumbled around the keyboard and almost constantly had a full rage bar because I couldn't figure out how to spend it quickly enough ("omg this global cooldown thing sux!"). I was a little apprehensive because I was the newb tank in the guild while there was already a warrior, druid, and a couple pally tanks all geared better than I was. The warrior tank (also GM) introduced me to some weird magical defense number(490). I searched the Internet for level 70 pre-raid gear guides and discovered the wonderful felsteel armor items.

Once uncrittable and ready to raid, I stepped into Kara. It's crazy now to think that we wiped over and over on Attumen's trash and how totally chaotic everything seemed at the time. On the boss fight, I was supposed to pick up Huntsman. I was definitely nervous. The first time, I obviously epic fail'd, and he took out both healers and a dps before I could get to him. Next time, though, I got it right. Once he reunited with Midnight, I suddenly discovered that I had picked him up before the other tank, and I was tanking him! It was my first successfully tanked raid boss.

A few weeks later, the guild main tank wasn't available, so I stepped in to clear trash up to curator. At first, it felt like I was totally naked standing in front of the other 9 people in the raid watching me. I was slow and unsure of the pulls since I had never done them before and because I was very much afraid of making a mistake in front of everyone. Gradually, the feeling passed, and curator went down that night.

Early on, we had our first big guild drama involving a mass exodus. It happened one night after I had gone to bed. Apparently, a lot of people decided we weren't hardcore enough. We got over it, though, and regrouped. I remained the off-tank to Kara, and we forged ahead to kill Illhoof and Shade and began making attempts on Prince (I sat out being the worthless off-tank for that fight). It sounds ridiculous seeing as how now Kara is pretty easily cleared in 3-4 hours or less, but it was difficult at the time because we only raided two nights a week for 2-3 hours, so we usually ended up at prince right at the 6 hour mark (no Nightbane or Netherspite either). We weren't very efficient.

A couple months after the first mass exodus, we had our next big drama event - our guild leader and his wife left the game. We were shocked, and a couple weeks passed without raid nights. But we regrouped again to go back to Kara. With the GM tank gone, it was my turn as the main tank. The first couple times through were slow and awkward. I wasn't used to being in control of the raid's pace and was constantly afraid of pulling too fast or too many. Several times I did pull too many. I felt badly for every wipe and death my noobness caused, but the group was forgiving. While I had seen the last MT pull everything before, watching someone else pull trash through an instance is just not the same as doing it yourself. I gradually learned every single piece of trash in Kara and worked on chain pulling. We never really achieved a speed run (no pally tanks), but we at least got up to a respectable pace. Looking back, I see now that I handicapped us a lot by relying so heavily on CC even after I far outgeared the place.

After a few weeks, I found myself standing in front of the imfamous Prince Malchezaar. Although I was getting quite comfortable with the rest of Kara, everything I had read about Prince and his fast shield-block-eating attacks made me anxious all over again. After 3 attempts, we got the infernal drops we needed and downed him. A few weeks later, we pulled a single long night with our best guild members, one-shotting everything including Prince, skipping Netherspite. We decided to ride the momentum and make a pass at Nightbane (at like 3am). Once on the terrace, we paused to replace a couple members, watch a video, and briefly go over the strat since only about 3 people in the raid had ever seen the fight before (excluding me). I hastily typed up my anti-fear stance dance macro and got ready to use it. We summoned him. 75% - first set of adds. 50% - second set. 25% - last set! We killed Nightbane in one shot on our first ever attempt. That was a high point in the guild.

Unfortunately, we stagnated for a couple months after that, except for the Netherspite kill we finally took care of. We had a lot of trouble getting past the 25-man hurdle. We would always get to where we could almost run 2 Kara groups, but then people would get tired of not always being able to go, so they would leave to another guild. Dedicated healing was always a major issue. Our best members became very weary of long Kara runs; we kept wiping over and over from stupid mistakes. People began bringing in alts instead of main characters, starting more conflict, especially in terms of looting.

Finally, we made our first attempt on Gruul. It was my first time tanking for a 25-man raid, and once again, I was nervous. About 1/3 of the group was PUG'd, though, and those guys really led us through. High King and Gruul went down easily. Later, we made an attempt on our own with only a few PUG'd. It was up to us to lead, and I was absolutely overwhelmed with trying to set up targets and misdirects for so many tanks and hunters. After a few tries, we were successful on High King. We still had trouble with Gruul, not being able to get him down before the grows became too much, usually a result of having to bring in people on alts or PUG'd members still in green quest gear. Occasionally we got it together and took him down, but it wasn't reliable.

We were also somewhat successful in ZA, downing the first and second bosses without too much trouble.

Eventually, the volatility of the guild became too much. We seemed to have some kind of dramatic event once a month or more. The nature of the guild was casual, but there was always a battle for exactly how casual we were going to be, because several of us wanted to take the game more seriously. To make matters worse, the guild raided on a west coast time schedule, and I was always two hours ahead, which meant I was often staying up for wipefests well past midnight when I had to get up at 5:30 for work.

Early in July, I left the guild after being in it a year and followed my two favorite druid friends to another raiding guild which runs during the week and much, much earlier on an east coast schedule. It was difficult to give up a guaranteed main tank position, even with all the problems of the last guild. The first night of the new guild, I got to see Mag. It was immediately obvious that this guild was in an entirely different league. We killed him on the second try. While it was exciting, I was disheartened to go from boss tank to dedicated box clicker. After the warm-up of Mag, we headed to Hyjal that same night and took down Winterchill (guild's first). The next night I ran Kara with a group that cleared it in about 3 hours. I had to check and see if I was somehow playing WoW on cheat codes. Since then, we've cleared half of TK and are 4/6 in SSC. I never thought I'd get to see these places, but it's been pretty awesome.

So that's pretty much where I've been. We'll see where it goes from here. I was late getting to a lot of the end-game stuff in BC. I'm excited about being able to start over for WotLK and hitting 80 and starting the raids sooner.