Thoughts, ideas, bitching and bragging about World of Warcraft, raid and guild leading, and whatever else comes to mind...filled with the things Lark wants to say to her guild but probably shouldn't.
At least not to all of them. Not yet anyways....

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A (Sort Of) Brief History....Zzzzzzz......

One of the few guildies who read this blog asked me when I was going to write about the madness in the guild lately but I realized though that in order to do that right I needed to back up a few steps and provide some history...I'll try to keep it brief and entertaining!

Lark leveled as a Holy Paladin (God help me I had no idea what I was doing - serious noob). She was my first toon and I thought that playing a toon that could wear plate, heal, and use all kinds of weapons was cool. What did I know? If I had known before about level 40 how hard it was to level a holy pally I probably would have rolled a hunter for the cute pet and this would be a very different story. At about level 60 I discovered tanking (once I learned what the word "tank" meant) and never looked back. That was over two years ago.

I had to fight my way up in the tanking ranks in TBC, when paladins were just barely starting to be credible, against the established warriors of the world. (To this day I have to say, Mount Hyjal, I luv you!)

Through 2+ years of tanking I've had the opportunity to experience a variety of guilds. New ones just trying to start content that dropped shiny purples all the way to the number one guild on a former server (Yay for The Immortal title!) and took a lot of the things I loved about those guilds and the knowledge of what I really didn't love and started, Heroic, the guild I have now.

Heroic is my baby. It didn't start with any kind of influx of friends transferring from another server or from a mass exodus from a former guild on the current server but was created one individual at a time. Shortly after forming we partnered with another guild to do 25 man content and wound up absorbing many of their members when their GM decided to become our Princess. That gave us the boost we needed to step into 25 mans on our own. We started in Naxx content and have progressed rapidly to one of the top guilds on the server (where we get to cheerfully beat our heads against ICC). I'm proud of what the team has achieved and am so grateful to the guildies that have stuck around through the rough patches.

We do things a little differently than many other raiding guilds. Our two guild rules are No Drama and No Raid Nazis.

As we tell all candidates in their interview to join us, we are very protective of our guild's reputation and No Drama means not in /gchat, raids, vent, trade chat, etc. As a whole, we've stuck to this pretty well and only had to provide a few people with opportunity to find a new home. The drama is largely limited to officer chat feuds and a love/hate relationship between the Princess and me. And purple pixel drama...but that's another post!

No Raid Nazis means we do not tell people they "fail", no one in the raid is allowed to belittle or demean people in raids, and performance issues are handled privately. This is not to say to we don't give each other tons of shit, tease the hunter who auto attacks a boss while we are buffing (you know who you are), and never let the tank who pulled the Twins in TOC while still specced holy forget it (no, really, I would NEVER do anything that silly...*cough*) but it's all in fun.

Somehow we've managed to (mostly) stick to these rules and still kill bosses! Shocking! I know!

TLDR: I'm an experienced tank and a noob GM doing my damnedest to keep 24 other people motivated, focused and out of the f*ing fires while trying to keep either me from killing the Princess or the Princess from killing me.


Lark

1 comment:

  1. Sigh...lol, no words more true have been spoken than those of you and the Princess's love/hate. One of these days you 2 will "get it over with". Until then we log on each day hoping that one of you isnt already trying to vent choke the other.

    ReplyDelete