Flame Rekindled

As you may have noticed, my attention had wandered away from WoW for a bit.

I have a couple time-intensive hobbies that I have begun participating in again.

My roommate has Netflix so there’s always a gabillion things to watch.

Tore up my shoulder and now my back is mutinying on me.

Work has kicked my ass up one side of the street and down the other.

But underneath all that was a very sad little truth.

In a 25-man guild, we didn’t have room for my mage when we so desperately needed my priest.

And so Arioch was benched in favor of his Light-touched brother.

As much as I enjoy the questing, the exploring, the pet/mount collecting, the achievement whoring – none of it really means anything if the character I enjoy that on is watching from the sidelines during the very small window of play time I have.

So I was logging in to raid on Selwyn and poking at Arioch periodically to keep him from rusting, but I couldn’t be bothered to do much of anything else.

We tried getting an “alt raid night” going, but that just seemed like additional insult to injury – bringing my MAIN to an ALT run that generally didn’t even get off the ground.

The guild fought long and hard (giggity) to stay at 25s.

Just the other week, we had an officer meeting and I was told that I was too good on my priest to be allowed to bring my mage in instead. Basically, unless pigs started flying, I would not be able to raid as DPS in this expansion. (This also just solidifies my belief that I should never demonstrate skill at anything unless I really enjoy it and won’t mind being asked to only perform that skill/task/role.)

But the skies have parted and there is a glimmer of light.

We’re finally going to stop trying to be a 25-man guild.

Attendance is low. People are bored, people are moving, going back to school, getting their laptops taken away by their parents, setting their cats on fire.

When we can scrape together 25 people, we are continuously bringing in fresh meat, repeating the learning curve every week. We can clear BoT, get to Nef, and down the Conclave but Nefarion and Al’Akir are just too much – when we can get enough people for enough time to get that far.

I think 9 of us have our Defender titles, but all from 10-man kills.

So after much deliberation and debate, the officers agreed that the guild would be better served by going to 10s.

We have enough competent players with enough alts in a variety of roles that we can field 3 10-man runs on different nights. (If we could only play multiple characters at the same time we wouldn’t have trouble filling out that 25.)

And so my priest will most likely be slated for the group that focuses the hardest on progression through heroic modes, my mage will be in a real raid group capable of getting their Defender titles. (Highly important for me to have a chance at the legendary staff /droooool)

Suddenly, I’m interested in logging in again.

Of course, my back is telling me that I’m a fucking moron even as I sit to type this post out, so we’ll see just how much time I can devote to playing in the next month or so…

I researched my loot list. Looked at my achievements and picked a few that I want to work on. Got up to 140 companion pets. Did the quest chain leading to ZA/ZG. That’s the first time this expansion my mage has gotten to experience something before my priest.

Instead of feeling like filler for a raid, I’m interested in gearing up and crushing some meters (all while fulfilling any utility my class can provide, of course). I’m even considering a second spec of fire, just for a couple fights. Considering it. We’ll see. God, I hate raiding as fire.

My fire has been rekindled, can we keep it going?