My History!

When I first started playing WoW, I rolled a rogue, because my friends said it was easy and I could level quickly. This was the most important thing to me, since I had played EQ for 3 years and never got past level 53. Granted, most of that time was spent socializing and watching the auctions in north freeport, but still.

So here I was in WoW, leveling, doing stuff, and it was great. I finally got within striking distance of 60, and was so excited. I took a week's vacation from work to relax and make the final push to 60, and I did it! I had made it, I thought. Now what? Well, time to do all the fun stuff my friends talked about. 60 rogue LFG UBRS LBRS SCHOLO STRAT! 6 hours later I logged off. Man, it was hard getting a group! Group after group would tell me, sorry, we're full on rogues and hunters. Well crap. So i decided to try out the new Alterac Valley while i was looking for groups. 6 hours later, still in queue, still looking for a group.

This went on for quite a while... Finally, after my friends said they couldn't get me into their MC guild, I decided to try my luck elsewhere. My server was plagued with queues and I decided to reroll on another friend's server, a roleplay server, and this time I was gonna do it right! I made my first warrior, and with my wife playing her new rogue, we started again. This time we knew what we were doing, and we were 2 manning solo stuff, so we ripped through the levels, finally dinging to 60 in silithus.

Finally, with my sword and shield equipped, i was able to see all those fun instances. I had made it! We ran UBRS, LBRS, Scholo, Strat, all those fun instances. It was great. For a while. Once we had run all there was to run, and I had cleared Scholo for the 20th time with no warrior helmet to show, I craved more. I craved MC!

The guild i was in was never going to raid. We barely had the people to run dungeons, no way we could get 40 people to do a raid. So i went looking. This was about the time that paid transfers came out, and there was a brand new server full of guilds looking for who knows what. So I made my level 1 alt, hopped over to ironforge, and began looking. Holy cow, this guild wants rogues?!? It was fate. I sent them a tell and told them about me and my wife, our 60s on other servers, and they offered us a spot. So I transfered my rogue and she transfered her druid (who was not quite at 60, but was close enough to get some help leveling from the guild, they really want healers too). And we did it. We were totally raiding!

My guild was called Enders, and had ambitions to be the top guild on steamwheedle cartel. The guild was run by a boyfriend/girlfriend combo who were our MT/MH combo and great raid leaders. We were also in competition for realm first kills, and another guild, who had alot of transfers who already had full t2, were killing stuff left and right. But we did manange to get a realm first gaar kill and were 2nd on alot of other bosses. We went on to clear MC and even started talking about BWL. It was perfect.

Then, the happy couple started having problems. In hindsight, it was probably part of the act, but we didn't see it for that at the time. A couple days later, they were gone, with the contents of our bank, which they had on their characters, and all of our MT gear. The guild was shattered. It fell apart left and right. Alot of us tried to start it again, reformed a couple times before finally they settled on the name Pantheon. But the damage had been done for me. And my friends from my old server had rerolled too, on a PVP server, and were officers now so they guaranteed me a spot in their guild, which was working on AQ40. I took it as fate, and off we went to level again (since back then you couldn't transfer from a PVE server to a PVP server).

Of course looking back, I wished we had stayed with Pantheon. They are doing really well now. They were clearing Sunwell with the best of them and are currently top on their server, and pretty high US wide. Shout out to my dwarf warrior friend Tubs, who became the inspiration for what I would become.

Anyway, back to the story... We once again set out to reroll on another server, this time a pvp server. I consulted my friends, what was the best combo to survive for me and my wife? Mage/paladin was the reply! So off we went. A paladin healer and a frost mage, ripping through levels, finally getting to 60 shortly before 2.0 hit. We went to BWL, we went to AQ20, we even went to AQ40! It was great, even though their guild was full of arrogant people, they got stuff done, and we were happy to be along for the ride.

BURNING CRUSADE! It was great! I set out into outlands with a full weeks vacation and plenty of sodas and hot pockets. My wife decided to reroll a shaman while I rushed to 70. 6 days later I was one of 5 people at 70 in the guild, and was the 3rd person to get my karazhan key. I was psyched! I was guaranteed a spot in the first raid group! I even beat my friends to that point since they hadn't taken time off, suckers!

We had to delay a week because we didn't have enough with keys to start karazhan that week, and by next week, there was about 15 with the key. And even though I was one of the people running instances for gear 24/7 and helping with key quests, I was benched for raid 1. Ok, I had thought that might happen, I'm still kind of new. Group 2's roster was posted... and who wasn't on it? Yep, yours truely. I was devastated. I had worked my ass off to get to that point, I had a ton of gear, better than 3/4 the guild at that point (blues were the new purpz remember!). And they had benched me. I was a fill in for whoever didn't show.

Needless to say, I was pissed. I was so mad, I quit the guild, even though my friends were officers and said they would get me into one of the runs, even though my wife was still in the middle of her leveling competition with the other guild's new shamen, i /quit that guild like it was about to disband.

The next day, I transfered my character back home. Back to that server I had been a rogue on so long ago. I was back! And then they were all back, all my characters. My wife's too, eventually. I thought, these guilds are run by morons, surely I know what it takes to make a great guild. So I set out to start my own guild. We got a sizable number, and I switched to playing my warrior full time to help the guild as a tank. Now, I had been missing my warrior all this time, and I had newbie warriors on all those servers I had played on at various levels. I just loved everything about them. So I was excited not only cause I was guild leader of my own guild, but also tanking on my warrior. It was a good time. We had troubles recruiting, but we managed to get 5 consistant members on to be able to run instances and heroics. And we began the karazhan hunt.

Well, we had half a run, surely some other guild had half a run we could join. I found a good guild that was in the same situation as we were, and we teamed up to run KZ. We finally cleared it shortly before BoJ were introduced to KZ, and I was excited about getting them running kara. Then the drama started. The other guild had a loudmouth that was sending tells to my guildies during the runs, but noone had said anything about his abuse in tells until 3 people stopped logging in on raid nights. After some digging, i found out what was going on, and we broke the alliance off.

So now we were stuck. Noone wanted to risk another alliance, but we wanted to raid, but were really picky about recruits so we had only gathered another 2 during that time. 7 people did not a karazhan raid make. So after some talk, we decided to join another guild, to absorb into theirs. A few didn't come with, but 5 of us did, and join Mayor of Stormwind. They had been running kara for a while and were building up for 25 man raids. We ran some raids with them for a while and really felt like we were home.

But making the transition to 25 man raids was harsh, and though we were able to get to SSC, various things kept the guild from making it past lurker. We had one spectacular Hydross attempt, when, at 10%, the frost tank D/C'd. We wiped at 5%, never again getting close. Shortly after people began to leave, and we tried to scale back to kara, but it was no use. The majority of the guild decided to give up on raiding for a while, so I decided to start looking for a raid guild for my warrior. We decided to join a guild we had run a couple Gruul's lair with, RKoD. We did more Kara and then did some ZA when it was released, but we could never get the showing for SSC. We gave in and decided that 10 mans were it. Eventually, drama began to creep up, and my wife and I had seen more than our share, so we decided to bail and hang out with our friends back in MoS. We did heroics, did some kara occasionally, and I pugged some other raids, too.

Then we decided that the hell with the (25)man, we were gonna get back into raiding 10s. So we recruited, ran ZA every week, and worked up a good roster. And here I am now, an officer in a guild with friends, tanking stuff left and right. And this is where the story begins...