The WoW Experience ft Jamie Part 4

So here we are, time for the continuation! Let's jump right in. (edit from later: HOO BOY it's a long one.)

Well before I continue with my fate after Twisting Nether, I just wanna mention one thing that I forgot to put in the last post (it was supposed to be towards the end anyway so it's not too out of place). After my paladin reached a reasonably good level of gear, one of the DPS warriors in my guild, Jerele (nicknamed Banana, because in vanilla WoW he used Lightforge Shoulders on his warrior, which were yellow and kind of looked like giant Bananas) asked me to join a threes arena team. Unfortunately I don't have any screenshots of this, but I'll try to describe it as best I can.

So, when he first asked me, I was a bit hesitant. Even going back to my warlock days, PvP was never my strong suit. For some reason I just didn't enjoy it as much as PvE. Banana worked hard to convince me, though, as paladins were pretty strong in small-scale PvP because of their buffs, shields, and CC. He said it would be easy, but I wasn't so sure. Eventually I caved, though, and joined the team that also consisted of an enhancement shaman, Burningtree (BT for short). And in the end, I was pretty glad I joined, because BT became one of my best friends from WoW.

So anyway, the team ended up doing alright. When our teamcomp worked, it worked really, really well. With BT's windfury totem, he and Banana were doing massive damage, and I could stand in the back and heal/shield them, and stun high-priority targets. The smarter teams knew what to do, though - target me first. In games where I got chain stunned/silenced/otherwise dominated, we didn't do too well. In the end I think we ended up somewhere around 1700-1800, which wasn't great, but wasn't too bad. Personally I think BT and Banana could have done better if they'd had a better pally, but we still had a lot of fun.

Also ANOTHER anecdote I forgot about from waaay back was in Twisting Shadows, two of my guildies, Gurnkiller and Azilis got in an argument over my name. Gurnkiller said that he thought my name (Frostt) was supposed to be pronounced 'Frosty', because the extra t on the end was to be pronounced as 'tee'.  However Azilis disagreed, saying it should just be 'Frost', like you say 'Matt'. I don't even remember how I responded to this, I think I just laughed. But in the end I guess Gurn won, because that's the story of why most people that knew me in WoW called me Frosty. The more you know!

So anyway, back to our main storyline: what happened after Twisting Nether was disbanded? Well, Di and the core officers started a new guild, and invited the best members from Twisting Nether, with the intention of recruiting some new blood to get a strong raid group together. Luckily for me, my buddy Agnor made sure that I got an invite to the new guild - I don't know if Di had intended to invite me anyway, but regardless, I was happy to be in. We made sure Storm got in too, so overall I was pretty happy.

The new guild was called 'A Guild', because Di just wanted to get the new group together as quickly as possible and couldn't think of a good name. Ironically, though, we never ended up changing it, because we took so long to try to think up a new name, that A Guild just grew on everyone. I thought it was pretty hilarious for the name of a raiding guild, so I liked it.

Anyway, after a short time of getting things together and picking up new people, it turned out that the plan to make a better guild worked! Raiding with the new members proved that a lot of our problems from before were gone, and we started making much better progress. I'll post a screenshot of one of our early A Guild raids - unfortunately it's after a wipe, but it shows some of the new names.

I think I took this to highlight the combat log, since I got hit for almost half my unbuffed health. Cool...I guess?

Of course, when you get a wave of new members, sometimes things don't go perfectly smoothly. A lot of the newer members started getting along with each other really well, but didn't really mesh with some of the older members. Some of the older members were annoyed with some of the things being discussed in guild chat, and asked that the newer members take it to a private channel if they wanted to discuss such things. I didn't like that situation too much, because I actually ended up being kind of part of both groups - being an older member I was close with the other old members, but I also got along really well and liked talking with the newer members. It wasn't that bad, though, sometimes I just had to be the guy trying to keep the peace between the two groups haha.

So anyway, out of all that spawned a new private channel called Club Chorizo (oh BT). BT invited me to join, and all the people in that channel ended up becoming, outside of Storm and Ash, my closest WoW friends. Huge shoutouts and love to BT, Iggy, Viyna, Neph, Endal, Tain, Beak (again :P), and Katarn. I'm pretty sure that's it. We were always chatting and doing runs together, and those guys are one of the reasons that my memories of WoW are so amazing.

Recruiting for A Guild also brought in a bunch more of awesome new people, like Rothir, Serna, Eyeless, Gd, Mutavi, and Odium. Though of course, if I named all the cool people we played with, I'd be here all day. I have to give a special mention to Rothir, he was definitely another one of my best bros in the game, and helped me a lot with improving my pally play. All the people in the last two paragraphs actually joined the guild at different times, but I just wanted to mention them all together while I was thinking about it.

Anyway, with our new raid group formed, we started back into working on SSC and Tempest Keep. we were doing well, but of course we all knew there would be wipes. For some reason, paladins seemed to have trouble with The Lurker Below.

Neph: taking responsibility like a man. Also I got pinned to the wall by water somehow apparently.

But despite such setbacks, we continued to make steady progress. Times were good! Here's a particularly hilarious moment: our resident feral druid, Dreyo, had to miss a raid one night. Of course, that was the night that THE feral druid item in the instance dropped.

Stormchild (on Harmless, his druid) never missed a chance to punk Dreyo. Or anyone, really.

Some things never change, though. This time Rothir screws up on The Lurker Below, and once again I get pinned to the wall by water.

I have no idea what Agnor (Gravian) and I were talking about, but it was probably entirely his fault.

Anyway, we soldiered on, and soldiered on. Eventually we got to one of the arguably tougher bosses in SSC, Leotheras the Blind. If I remember correctly, he had low armor, so melee DPS was especially effective on him. However one night, Beak, one of our strongest rogues, decided not to raid (I assume he had something else important to do). The rest of the guild was pretty bummed, because that was a lot of damage we were losing, but we decided to do some attempts on him anyway. And in the end, somehow, we actually killed him that night! Here's a screenshot of the aftermath.

Can you feel the love? I feel the love.

So yeah, things in SSC were going well. But we were working on TK too, remember?? Weirdly I have next to no screenshots from TK, they must have been lost. But here's one from after we killed Al'ar. Woo hoo?

I think I had to wear that ridiculous costume for the Black Temple attunement quest. So ugly D:

And, just for fun, here's a screenshot of a dead Hydross. Yay!

Most of the healers were busy resing the raid. Not me though! I was too important for such rabble.

But of course, we had to have a break from the progress raids on some nights. We did some of the older raids for fun, and to gear up some peoples' alts I guess, too. One night on one of our Gruul runs, I got knocked up into a weird place that I thought looked pretty cool.

Oh, wow, tanks complaining? What a surprise.

We also did Doom Lord Kazzak one night! ONE night. I don't think anyone really knew how to do this fight, we just powered it down because we out-geared it. It ended up going pretty well.

Who died? The PUGs aaaand...Agnor. Of course.

Hey, look! I found another screenshot from TK! Let's take a gander.

Pffffff-*giggle*

So yeah, at this point, nearing the end of both SSC and TK, we were getting pretty geared. This meant that doing the lower-end dungeons and raids were really easy, but to me, they were really fun. They were times to just relax and hang out with people in Vent, while I could just AFK-spam Flash of Light to keep the group alive. Karazhan runs with Club Chorizo were some of the best times we ever had, I think. Unfortunately, only one screenshot from Kara survived.

Oh hello, ladies.

So anyway, I'll give an update of where we were at this point. After forming A Guild, we were behind the other horde guilds on the server in terms of progression. With our new powerhouse group, though, we quickly caught up, and there was a horde-wide stall at the last bosses of SSC and TK both, Vashj and Kael'thas respectively. Against all odds though, we managed to topple Vashj first, becoming the top horde guild on the server. From there, we never looked back. Shortly after we managed to kill Kael'thas, which got us into the next level of raids. INCOMPREHENSIBLY, I have no screenshots of either of these events (IT WAS THE TIMES BEFORE THE CLOUD, OK)...but here's the one screenshot of the Kael fight at all that I have.

Good guy hunter pets, taking the debuffs for the team.

But yeah! New raids, woo! Here are a couple of screens of us breaking new ground.

Ah the naked celebration, a WoW staple.

Our first steps into Black Temple. It was the end of the night, so we didn't do anything, but it was cool to go inside.

Unfortunately, again, I don't have many screenshots from this period. I don't know if I lost them or I was just lazy. Rest assured, though, we continued to make steady progress through the new content. I do have a couple of funny stories, though. One was during a Hyjal raid, during a break Di was telling us how his wife was going to be on a call-in TV show. He said he wanted to do something funny, so he decided to go yell something in the background while she was on the show. He went afk, did it, and then came back and told us all about it. You probably had to be there...but it was hilarious at the time.

The other big story I remember is when we were working on Kaz'Rogal, the doom guard boss, we were having...a little trouble.  Somehow, some of the waves from before the boss were still alive when the boss came, but they had de-aggroed us, and were just walking around the orc camp. So when we engaged the boss, to avoid aggroing the group of trash, we had to pull Kaz out of the camp and down the hill. It was the sloppiest, most pathetic attempt probably ever, but somehow we managed to kill him. I don't think I'll ever forget that.

But anyway, yeah we just kept progressing through BT and Hyjal. Here was one moment when Beak trolled Di, and gave him a gem (a fairly common drop) for a huge amount of DKP. Good one, Beak.

I just loved the perfect wave of lols.

Meanwhile, when we got to Hyjal's final boss, Archimonde, we hit a bit of a wall. This fight required a lot of situational awareness and quick reflexes from everyone in the raid, and some of our members...lacked those things. Even the best of us could fail, though! Here's a time when, unbelievably, I died first.

The pally buff isn't even that bad guys, clearly I can't be blamed for this.

BREAK TIME! Here's a screenshot of my beautiful, resplendent paladin. Except those shoulders, just ignore those...

God I hated those shoulders.

Anywho, despite our troubles on Archimonde, we ultimately prevailed. Unfortunately, it was one of those fights where luck was kind of a factor, so repeating kills wasn't the easiest. Still though, it was a big accomplishment, and felt really good the first time we killed him.

TELL EVERYONE. ALERT THE PRESIDENT.

So that was cool, go us! Things were still going really well, and I was having a great time. Speaking of that, I think it's time for a few silly shots! ARE YOU READY TO LAUGH??.........*cough*

Here's me wearing a pirate costume and angel wings. Ooooo....

Burn Eternal were our bitter rivals. The Vegeta to our Goku, really.

Next up we have a shot where I got hit by a shrinking debuff, twice. If you can't see me, click on the image to enlarge it.

I'm not sure if moonkins even had innervate. I just liked yelling at Storm.

For the next one to make sense, I have to explain something about our good friend Serna. He was definitely one of the most level-headed, laid-back, soft spoken people in the guild. A really cool guy. So when this happened, it was especially surprising. Again, click on the image if you can't see the chat.

One of my favourite moments ever. It was just so out of character!

And finally, another favourite moment. I was just walking through Shattrath one day and came across this.

Speaks for itself, I think.

Ahh, good times. And actually, I think I'll take this opportunity to talk about one of my favourite things ever in the game, my ascii macros. See, back in Twisting Shadows, Nerey had a macro that pasted an ascii house in guild chat with the words 'GET OUT YOUR HOUSE' surrounding it. This was posted to inspire people to go all out, basically. So in A Guild, as a tribute, I decided to recreate it. Here it is in all its glory (I pray to god that it works).

/g GET OUT YOUR
/g     .---| |-------.
/g    /_________ \
/g    | ___        ...  |
/g    | |_|_|       | .|  |
/g    |___ _ _ _|  |  |
/g       HOUSE

Well...it looked better in-game. I even added a garden and a little dog in the yard. But my favourite ascii macro was what I called the 'Care Police'. I don't have it anymore, but it was an ascii police car with CARE POLICE on the side. I was posted whenever someone said something that no one really cared about. But it also had other uses! One time, when Venth caused a wipe on Illidan at 6%, when he logged in the next day, I posted the police car with 6% POLICE on the side. Venth promptly kicked me out of the guild. It wasn't the first time I got kicked, and it wasn't the last, but it was definitely the best.

Anyway, back to business. Around this time is when a new 10-man raid, Zul'Aman came out. It had a special condition that if you beat it in a certain time, you would have access to an exclusive mount, the Amani War Bear. This was, of course, a difficult thing to achieve, but one of our guildies, Mutavi, was pushing hard to work on it. On learning days, we had trouble finding people, but us guys in Club Chorizo were happy to help out. Eventually, after weeks of work, we managed to beat the timer, and got our first bear mount. Then we spent the next few resets getting mounts for the other members of the core group, as a reward for their hard work. This annoyed some members of the guild, who said that we were hogging spots when other people wanted to get in to get bear mounts. We countered that by asking where they were on the learning nights? Nothing too big ever came of this, but to my dismay, it did serve to widen the rift between the older guild members and the newer ones. Ah well..

Let's get back to happier things. One of the trash mobs in ZA could mind-control raid members. One time I got mind controlled, and the results were surprisingly disastrous, at least for Katarn.

Ooh, dat's gotta hurt. That holy pally damage.

But my favourite story from ZA involves our good buddy Reflex. See my paladin has the baby panda pet from the vanilla WoW collector's edition, and one of his animations is to fall asleep on the ground. When you move far enough away from him, he gets up and runs back to you. So one day we were going through the part of ZA that was kind of a gauntlet, the trash mobs respawned in under a minute. So you had to kill a group, then get moving before the previous group spawned on top of you. This time, as we moved on, my panda had fallen asleep and was just lying on the ground behind us. Reflex, in his haste, mistook my panda for a shaman totem, which would have aggroed a respawned group. He freaked out. Just then, though, the panda totem got up and ran back to us. We all got a good laugh out of that. From then on, Reflex hated that panda, and I used to rib him by saying how much the panda loved him. I even went so far as to unofficially name the panda Flex Jr. Reflex was not impressed.

And now for something completely different - BT and me in winter costumes, dancing in front of Odium.

Nice angle, Jamie. I'm sure I was trying to take a shot of the design on the ground. Yeah, that's it.

SO ANYWAY, at this point we'd made our way through Black Temple, and were working on Illidan. It wasn't all good times, though, I remember our group had particular trouble with Teron Gorefiend. This was another fight that required the whole raid to be on their game, as random raid members were selected to do a little 'minigame', where they had to kill 4 spirits using a set assortment of abilities. It was a pretty simple rotation that was needed to kill the spirits, but some people just couldn't get it down. Their spirits would enter the raid, which spelled a wipe. Of course, I could do it just fine, but in all the months that we spent clearing BT, I'm pretty sure I only got picked to do it once or twice.

But, as I said, we made it through, and got to working on Illidan. This was by far the hardest fight any of us had ever faced - generally attempts lasted like 20-25 minutes if we got most of the way through the fight. It took us quite a while to get it down, but after a lot of hard work, we finally beat the last boss in the game. It was a great moment!

Again, just soak in the love, people.

So, that was pretty much it, for a time. We just spent the rest of the time before new content came out farming BT and Hyjal, getting everyone as geared up as we could. I actually liked going through the fights a bunch of times, because as one of the top healers (*hair flip*) I was usually put on unique healing assignments. Stuff like healing the mage tank in Illidari Council, or healing the doomguard (or 'doumgahd', as we called them, due to the Bostonian accents that were prevalent in a few members) in the Kaz fight in Hyjal, stuff like that.

So coming up now are a bunch of screenshots from the farming days that I thought were funny/cool. First up is one featuring one of my best buddies in the game that wasn't actually a person, Archmage Vargoth. Through questing in Netherstorm, you got an item that would summon a ghostly image of Archmage Vargoth to help you with a quest. For some reason, though, after you completed the quest, you kept the summoning item. Summoning him didn't actually do anything, it just made him stand there awkwardly wherever you put him. Observe:

This just makes me laugh, I don't even know why.

Next up, we have a demonstration of how bored I could get after raids. In the officer tab, people were able to deposit important items like raid-gotten gems, but only officers could take items out. That didn't stop members from being able to move items around, though! I made this face that ended up starting a trend of people drawing stuff with gems.

My favourite part of this, I don't think Beak ever finished that sentence. WHAT DID HE THINK?!

Ah yes, another one of my favourite duties in the guild was being in charge of PallyPower. This was an addon that organized the buffs that each paladin in the raid would cast. In order to organize it for everyone, though, I had to be a raid assistant. So, pretty much every raid started out with me whispering Di 'a plz'. Almost every time he responded with a 'god damnit Frost' over Vent. Of course, this allowed me to also post raid warnings, giant messages that would pop up on every raid member's screen. I didn't do this during actual play, but posting stupid things during breaks was fun. Of course, organizing the buffs was a bit of a hassle, so when I managed to avoid having to do it, I enjoyed it!

Nothing particularly funny about this I guess, just reminded me of being a raid assistant *nostalgia*

MEANWHILE, while all of this was going on, I was having fun leveling up my warrior alt Frostor with Iggy, Viyna, and Neph. When we were running dungeons, it was clear who was the best.

36% of group damage are you guys even TRYING???

One of the things about Frostor, was when I made him, I chose the pure white skin colour. I just thought it looked neat, I guess. Apparently other people (Iggy...) thought differently, though, as they constantly made fun of how weird he looked. This really came to a head in a Caverns of Time instance where all characters are turned into humans. So normally, Frostor looked like this:

Aww yeah.

And then his human form was apparently this:

Well that's...something.

Ahh, it was all in good fun, though. By far my favourite story with our alts, though, is when we were level 70 and going on a run through the Shadow Labyrinth. Somehow they managed to convince me to tank it - though I had tank gear, I'd never actually tanked an instance before. So we kind of fumbled our way through, doing fine, but I was constantly lamenting how much I sucked at tanking and hated it. Iggy played a tank in raids, but preferred to DPS, so together we kind of cried and complained about tanking. It was a true bonding experience. Viyna, however, was not so into it. Iggy apparently complained to her about having to tank quite a bit, and now with me doing it too, she'd had enough. She burst out over Vent, yelling at us and telling us to quit being such babies. She rarely said anything over Vent, so this outburst was more funny than offensive.

Another similar story took place in a normal, causal Kara run when I was on my pally. We were on the Curator, who, if you don't remember, spawns adds that have to be taken care of. This time, however, the group decided to ignore the adds and try to take down Curator as fast as possible. This left the adds running around in the group. It actually got to the point where I couldn't keep people up, and while we did win the fight, some people died. After the fight, people were complaining and asking why I let them die. Now, usually I am a really chill guy, but for some reason this kind of irked me. I yelled at them over Vent that if they had killed the adds, I would have been able to keep them up. I remember everyone was taken aback, and Iggy commented that I was actually mad! I immediately caught myself, though and promptly apologized for yelling. In the end it was a pretty funny moment for everyone.

So anyway, back to normal raiding. It actually got a bit boring after months of farming the same instances, but at least there were some perks. We eventually managed to get exalted with the Caverns of Time faction, which gave the reward of a really nice ring.

Mostly just showing off my ram mount here. Baah.

We also managed to pick up the guild's first legendary! Beak got a Warglaive of Azzinoth, probably one of the coolest looking weapons in the game, at very least at the time. I managed to get a cool shot of him with it beside an alliance rogue who had one too.

I feel short. I don't like feeling short D:

Yeah, not much more to say about this period. We just farmed and farmed. Incidentally, here is a picture of friend-of-the-guild Sarcie standing on Frostor's head.

*comes back from afk* wait a minute...something's different...

Short story about Sarcie - he had a pally alt in our guild, who came with us to Kara once. We out-geared the place so badly that we always only took two healers, so this time it was Sarcie and me. Only problem: Sarcie only had crappy green gear. So basically I ended up near-enough solo healing Karazhan. The run was a little rockier than usual, but we managed to finish it! That was a pretty fun, if stressful, run for me.

Well friends, that's about it for my WoW experience. Eventually, a new patch came out with a new zone and new Sunwell instances, but by this time, by fondness for the game was wearing thin. Blizzard was making design decisions that I wasn't thrilled with, and at the same time, I was entering my final year of University. I decided that I wanted to spend it focusing more on school and hanging out with my real-life friends. I hung in there until the second boss in the Sunwell 25-man, but that was when I made the hard decision to quit the game.

I feel like I made the right decision in the end, but it was definitely bittersweet. I missed playing with all my friends, and while I was able to keep up with some of them on Facebook and the like, I lost contact with a lot of people that I really liked. I just want to say right now, thanks to all the people I played with, and especially those mentioned in these posts for making my time playing WoW as amazing as it was. I really miss those days, and think about them often. Writing about these experiences was a lot of fun, and hopefully if some of the people I played with read them, it was fun for them too.

The last thing I'll say, if you DIDN'T enjoy these posts - I'm not sorry.

Bye!...for now.