Rise From Your Grave
That’s a Sega Genesis reference, folks. I miss playing Altered Beast so much!
WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INC
Anywho, I’m back from a brief, voluntary hiatus, although my return wasn’t really planned, nor was my leaving announced to the general public. Back at the end of June, I was in a position to inherit leadership of the guild I’d raided with since mid-January, Celestial Being. We were raiding Ulduar-25 three nights a week, and had gotten as far as Mimiron phase 4 when the summer raiding slump earned another victim. Our attendance was slipping, tempers and egos were running high, and I had a lot of other stuff going on IRL that I won’t bore you with. But suffice to say, I called it quits, intending on not playing WoW for a healthy amount of time. This was basically the last nail in the coffin for CB, which is something I still regret somewhat.
My annoying, wonderful friends kept talking about the game, and wanting me to play again, and I still had a bunch of time left because my account renewed a few days before I made the decision to quit. I played my lowbie paladin Tharae here and there, maybe one day a week, and healed the odd Heroic on Ithato for my buddies. I played a lot of offline games in the meantime, and had a brief fling with EVE Online as a one-player-two-Podder mining team. That game…I could write pages about my forays with that game.
So now, it was a gradual process, but I’m back to playing quasi-regularly. Tharae is up to level 42 at the time of this writing. Some of my closest friends from Celestial Being and/or the real world decided to make their own guild, and I got dragged along for the ride, and somehow wound up an officer again. I don’t really have any responsibilities, aside from volunteering to host/admin our forums and a Vent server through TypeFrag.
We’re just big enough to do Ulduar-10 regularly, and I’ve learned that I highly, highly enjoy the lower stress and better, er, intimacy of 10-man raiding. There’s a lot more room for goofing off in vent and raid chat when 7 or 8 of you are seasoned veterans of Ulduar-25, and when all 10 of you seem to be highly competent. I really enjoy the whole crowd we have and it’s only going to get better as time goes on.
Due to the aforementioned kickassery, we cleared up through to General Vezax in two nights in our first lockout, and last night we cleared up to General V again in a single 2.5-hour raid, our second week in. Really looking forward to getting more attempts on him tomorrow night, because last week we almost had him. Big shout-out to some of our members, like Ampharos, Aliatris, Quintas and Khulgar/Kyliana, who all hadn’t seen Ulduar before and still listen/learn well enough to be 1-shotting bosses all night last night.
I’d never seen anything past Mimiron in 25-man nor 10-man prior to this, so it’s all very new and exciting, even though it means I need to be watching TankSpot vids and reading boss strats again.
As far as loot and gear goes, I’m still sitting pretty decent in terms of gear, although I thank the FSM every day that I can shift into Tree and not have to stare at my god-awful Soot-Covered Mantle. It clashes hard with all the rest of my gear. I currently have 3/5 T8.5, and I keep getting bad luck with token drops on Freya/Thorim for either my shoulders or gloves. I want that elusive 4-pc bonus so bad!
In: Gear, Guild, Meta, Raiding, Ulduar · Tagged with: Gear, general vezax, Guild, hiatus, ithato, new guild, primordial fate, Raiding, tharae, ulduar, vent
