If at first you dont succeed, find someone better!

This post is a little late in coming, but in an effort to keep this joke running for a few more weeks its well worth mentioning!!

As i was writing this post, i actually remembered that this situation had actually happend twice in the last two weeks!! coincidence much??!

So to set the scene a little bit, we were in ICC10 and had cleared upto Rotface without any real issues. We had a Pally (Brenstorm) healing the Tanks and me, in my 70's disc(o) spec healing the groups.

A couple of wipes into the Rotface encounter, or RotGate as i now referrer to it, the raid leader (Brenstorm) calls for a change in the raid setup. At this point i should probably also clarify that as we are a relatively small raiding guild, we are quite versatile in our spec's and between the raid we can cover various roles.

Now to this day, i still do not think our previous wipes were as a result of poor healing, but i can be overly defensive when i believe i am being criticised, and never the less i was swithced out to my dps role and DJhuxter (druid) was brought in to group heal.

Needless to say we downed Rotface first time with the new setup, admitedly moreso because of my imba dps then the change of healers (in my expert opinion) :P , although it soon transpired that DJ had forgotten to switch to his healing gear, which was slightly embarrasing for me, much to the raids ammusement.

Anyway, I dedicate this post to Brenstorm. Without his insight and bravery in switching me to dps to melt faces like never melted before, we would probably still be wiping now!! Thanks Bren!!!

Holy Tree, how i missed thee...

If you are reading this chances are you probably know more about priests than i do, but nether the less, its worth pointing these things out.

So, a tip for all you priests out there... play to your strengths.

Im all for priests being spec'd a specific way to help their guilds, but no matter how much you work at it, some priests cant play holy and some cant play disc, its just not in their dna. I have learnt over the years that i am a holy spec priest, i eat, sleep and breathe holy and wouldnt have it any other way.

Before my last wow break i had decided that i would ms/os holy/disc, just so i and the guild had options for raiding, and to be perfectly honest it came in really useful on certain fights. However upon my return and due to the loss of raiders i changed my o/s to dps and the expense of my holy spec.

^^This was without a doubt the biggest mistake ive made in wow, period! Over the last few weeks of disc healing 5mans and raids i have come to realise that i cannot heal disc spec for shit, my play style just doesnt suit it, at all! and so with that i had no choice but to respec.

Last night was my first raid using my precious Holy spec again, and to be frank it was fecking amazing!! I wish i had remembered to screenshot the meters before resetting them, as it would have been nice to have a record of my return to form, however im content knowing the improvement even if noone else saw it.

So fellow priesties... dont let the bastards get you down!! We are a very unique class but we have the ability to heal in pretty much any situation! play to your stregths and heal like you've never healed before!!!

Why we are drawn back into the wow universe!

Ive done the whole coming out of retirement thing a couple of times now, and ive usually blamed it on new expansions etc and wanting to see what all the fuss is about, but recently I’ve been reconsidering my views and reasoning behind returning to wow.

I wont bore you all with the details, but suffice to say the last couple of months have been some of the hardest of my life and in that time I felt cancelling my subscription was a sensible move. I’d like to say id spent this time away from wow wisely, but in truth if I was not sleeping or working, I was sat staring at blank television screen or pretending to be interested in a book, but in reality ive not really been interested in anything, and have been relatively disconnected from the world.

Yesterday I decided that I would resub, only for a month at first to see if I was really interested or whether it was just something else to pass the time. Upon logging onto wow I still felt pretty empty. I know there haven’t been any real changes to wow in my absence and so there wasn’t really anything exciting to do. After an hour or so I went on a random run with a couple of guys from the guild, and it was then that everything sparked for me.

Last night was the first time in a couple of months that I actually felt connected to anything or anyone. Speaking to these people that I have known for so long, even though I may never have met, or ever meet them, really made me feel, well, secure. I was in an environment that I understood and felt comfortable with, and although I don’t envisage playing every night, or every week, its so reassuring that even ingame friendships can provide you with this reassurance.

So in answer to my initial question, why do you come back?

For me, I now realise, whether it be consciously or not, I return to wow for the community that plays it with such passion and camaraderie, and makes you feel welcome no matter how long you have been away….

I have played a lot of games in my time, but the community spirit within wow is still one of the greatest I have come across, and long may it continue.

~Cav~

You heard it here first!

Finally blizz have fulfilled my dream to play a gnome priest! Whether i actually have the patience to level another character is yet to be seen, but i will try!

Do blizz read my site? Hell No, but none the less, my dreams have finally come true!

~Cav~

Where are we now?

Its been almost 3 months since I last posted, but given my track record with this blog you shouldn’t be too surprised at that. I don’t do farewell posts, simply because they would contribute to over 50% of my post count.

Anyway, I just thought it was about time I did a bit of an update of where we are since May.

So as you may remember the situation was that Ulduar had just landed and it was causing major problems for our guild. We’ve never been a "large" guild and our lack of numbers was halting our raid progression. A number, I estimate around 3 of our regular raiders left the guild for pastures new, and this rocked the guild. There was a snowball effect, which resulted in around 8-10 members moving on.

It took until the end of June for everything to really sink in and get back to "normal" In the meantime, I, along with another long standing member of the guild were promoted to officers and went about the task of rebuilding the guild.

We are now at a point where we are progressing through Ulduar nicely on 10man, and have started doing joint 25man runs with a guild in a similar position to ours. Whilst these are going sloooowwwwllly, we are progressing and learning each others personalities and abilities along the way.

But the most important, and in fact noticeable thing over the last 3 months is the spirit! Since June everyone has been amazing. I think we are now at a place where we have again, a like-minded set of people who have similar goals in wow. There is no doubting that we all want to progress and see new content, but we’re doing it at our pace. Those that don’t raid are not being talked about (which has happened in the past) and everyone is left to get on with there own thing. In fact the guild is pretty self sufficient now, so much so that I don’t really do anything in my role as officer!

Where do we go from here?

Who knows! The current bug where XT is stuck in hard-mode has really affected our plans for this week. The aim was to extended the raid lock-out and clear ulduar over the next two weeks, with a view to starting the new content the following week.

I would still really like to clear ulduar, but we need to consider what the rest of the guild would like, although tbh there are still a number of people in the guild that would like to raid, but cant get their gear levels up to the required levels, mainly because we don’t run naxx anymore.

So there we are. Valerius is fighting fit, and long may they continue. If I was a betting man, I wouldn’t bet against Valerius getting back on the 25man radar before Christmas!!!

~Cav~