The WoW Experience ft. Jamie Part THREE

So I have kind of been avoiding finishing the WoW series because the posts take SO LOOONG to do, there is apparently more stuff to talk about than I remembered. But Beaksauce and BT have inspired me to get back to working on it and finishing it up, so here we go!

Actually before I get into it, I have some bad news. My screenshots for this next period were tragically lost in a changing-PC-related accident, so there will be no images until later on in this post. So I will probably try my best to speed through this next part as fast as possible, cause I imagine the screenshots are the most interesting part. I gotta make sure I mention everything that I need to, though, so bear with me.

So anyway, when we last left our starry-eyed heroes, Frostt and Stormchild, they had just left the comfort and security of Ravenous to pursue membership in the great Twisting Shadows. Before we could even apply, though, there was a mission that had to be accomplished. Since TS was working on AQ40 at the time, Scorpius recommended that we put together a set of nature resistance armor, since one of the bosses in there dealt heavy nature elemental damage.

So, in order to show the guild leadership that we were serious about becoming productive, participating members of the guild, we decided to start gathering the materials necessary to craft our respective nature resistance armor sets. It turned out, we were going to need an item called Living Essences. A LOT of them. So we spent the next several days in Un'goro Crater farming the Nature Elementals to get the Essences. Yes, DAYS. It was a bit of a harrowing experience, but we kept our sights on the goal, and eventually got our armor sets made.

So, then we went to TS' forums and typed up our applications. I don't really remember anything about it, so it was probably pretty straight-forward. In my application thread, I remember some of my old buddies like Liberto and Scorp posting their support, which was awesome, and for some reason I specifically remember Gurnkiller saying he remembered me. Those guys definitely made me feel a bit more confident about my application, which I definitely needed. Honestly my gear wasn't amazing - it was alright, but definitely a bit of a step below what most of TS' members would have.

Shortly after, I was contacted by someone in the guild in-game, asking if, since Storm and I applied at the same time, if we were a package deal. Like, they wanted to whether one of us joining the guild depended on the other getting in too. Storm and I discussed it, and decided that we would tell them that we're not a package deal. The fact that they asked made us a bit worried, but we still hoped for the best.

Anyway, after that, I was contacted by TS' recruiter, Astra. She told me basically what the application process would be - on TS raid nights, I would be expected to show up outside the instance, and if the raid had a spot for me, I would be invited and go on a test run. If there was no room, I could wait outside the instance in case someone had to leave and a spot opened up. That sounded a bit...boring, but I was determined to join the guild, so I was up for it.

So, the process started, and indeed, I spent a lot of time waiting outside instances without getting in. Astra kept talking to me throughout the raids, though, keeping me up-to-date and just chatting, I guess she felt kinda bad that I had to wait around so much, haha. But I definitely remember her as one of my favourite people that I met on WoW, just because she was so cool to me during the app process, and we stayed friends even afterwards.

Anyway, one day I remember I was just standing in the Orgrimmar Auction House, and I got a whisper from someone different. It was someone called Di, who, it turns out, was Twisting Shadows' guild leader. He asked me if I'd like to come along on an AQ40 raid. This came pretty out of the blue, and so IRL I started completely freaking out. But of course I accepted the offer, and so I got invited, summoned to the instance, and off I went. It's kind of difficult to describe how stressed I felt.

It turned out that they had just killed Princess Huhuran, and were starting the trash to the Twin Emperors. I don't remember much about it, besides the fact that they were huge mobs that were kited back into Huhu's room, and did some crazy, random stuff. So I pretty much just focused on staying alive, and not screwing anything up. I imagine my damage was probably pretty terrible, but overall I think I did alright, nothing bad happened. I don't remember what happened afterwards, but I think it went pretty much as well as it could have.

After that, I'm pretty sure I got in a few more raids with them, I definitely remember at least one AQ20 run. Then, after one of the raids, Astra sent me a whisper telling me to come say hello, I think with a smiley face. And then before I could respond, I got a guild invite to Twisting Shadows from Venth. I remember specifically that it was Venth, because he was known as one of the more tough and gruff officers in TS, so I thought it was cool that it was him that invited me. Anyway, it felt sooo good to get that invite, because it probably doesn't come through in this write-up, but it was a long application process - it probably lasted at least a couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, Stormchild wasn't having the same success. The reason was that TS just had an abundance of warriors already, and that was his main character. Luckily, though, a short while after, Storm applied on his Druid to be a healer, and got accepted. I was really happy for that, it was so awesome that we both managed to reach our goal after taking a leap of faith.

Being in TS was really awesome for me. I was reunited with a bunch of my old friends, and made a bunch of new ones. Pretty much everyone in that guild was really cool, people like Beak, Agnor, Venth, Zoya...god I'm trying to remember who else, I feel like I'm forgetting a ton of people. And then there was of course Di, who is DEFINITELY another one of my favourite people I met in WoW. Just a really cool, patient, hilarious guy. I think you'll be hearing at least a few stories involving him coming up in this post and the next.

So, my early days in the guild basically consisted of me getting to know my new guildmates, and running raids to get geared up. I spent pretty much all of my DKP getting loot in Blackwing Lair - I was quickly into NEGATIVE DKP, because I was getting so much loot that the other warlocks already had. It was still fun though, stomping through the lower level raid content always made for a really relaxed atmosphere.

I was thrown a pretty huge curveball early on, though. Scorpius told me that the reason he encouraged me to apply so much was that he was quitting the game. So basically he wanted me to replace him. This was sad, of course, because it's always sad when a friend quits, but this had some other rather important implications. See, we were going to be working on the Twin Emperors as the next boss, and the main strategy to beat them requires two warlocks to have maximum shadow resistance. Liberto was one, but Scorpius was TS' other main warlock. So, long story short, I had until the next AQ40 raid to put together a shadow resistance armor set. Gah.

I did manage it though, with help. So then the next time we worked on Twin Emperors, I got thrown into the fire, trying to tank one of the Twins. It's a long explanation how it worked, but basically tanking the Twins involved switching between a warlock and a warrior on each Twin. The transition was a bit tricky, though, and we were having trouble with it. Inevitably, the leadership decided that we would just stick to warriors tanking for the whole time. It would be a bit harder on the healers, but they were up to the task.

Luckily, though, my shadow resistance set didn't go to waste. WAAYYY back in Ravenous, during a ZG raid I got an item called Nat Pagle's Broken Reel. This was an accessory that, when activated, raised your chance to hit with spells such that it was basically 100% (I think there is a base 1% or 0.1% chance to miss regardless, but it was essentially 100%). At the time, this item was deemed to be completely useless, because spellcasters wanted damage accessories, but I decided to take it just for fun.

Fast-forward back to the Twin Emperors. One of the Twins only dealt magic (shadow) damage, and could only be damaged by magic, so he had to be pulled into place at the start of the fight by a spellcaster. And this spellcaster HAD to hit him with his first spells, or else the Twin would ignore him and run amok, ruining the attempt. So enter Frostt, with his max shadow resist and max chance to hit with spells - the perfect warlock to pull the magic Twin! Serendipity, I say. Of course without my damage gear on, I was practically useless for the rest of the fight, but I always loved fighting the Twin Emps because I had a special job.

So the rest of this period was basically just working on Twin Emps and running old dungeons to gear up and have fun. In fact one of the memories that sticks out to me the most during this time was during a causal ZG run, while we were waiting for people to arrive, Di told us a hilarious story over Vent about a time that he got in a bar fight in college. It was these kinds of things that really made the game so fun to play.

Eventually, we beat the Twin Emps, which was always a nail-biting fight (I think it lasted like 15-20 minutes). We decided not to continue on to Ouro and C'Thun, though, because Naxxramas had just come out. So we started in there, and we did alright. In the end (when the expansion came out), we had cleared the Spider Wing, and killed Instructor Razuvious. Grand Widow Faerlina was especially memorable for me, as her trash respawned very quickly. That meant that after attempts, several people always had to be summoned back to her room. So Soul Shard management among the warlocks was, let's say, hectic. I also remember on Razuvious, the warlocks had to be told to tone it down, because we kept pulling aggro. Jive-ass tanks just couldn't keep up, man.

Anyways, the guild actually went through a rather big change around this time. The opportunity came up to transfer off Eonar to a new server, and the guild decided to take it. I don't remember the exact reason why, but Twisting Shadows moved over to the Arygos server. There the guild was renamed Twisting Nether, which was apparently its original name before a guild merger caused a change. Personally I liked Twisting Shadows better, but whatever, it was still the same awesome people.

So that's pretty much it for that phase of the game, that's as far as we got before the expansion, The Burning Crusade came out. Exciting times! It was especially exciting for me, because I volunteered to be one of the players to roll a brand new blood elf paladin. Horde didn't have access to paladins before this, so we needed some people to reroll to get some. Horde didn't have elves before either, so I was all over that. Plus I always liked the idea of paladins as a class, and DPS seemed kind of boring to me, cause you always had to keep an eye on the threat meter instead of going all-out. So off I went starting my new life as Mateus, Blood Knight!

There was a problem, though. Remember the whole thing about me taking a long time to level up? Well apparently that persisted. Not only was I miles behind everyone else who was starting the expansion at level 60, but all the other pally rerolls leveled way faster than I did. So, by the time I got to level 70 and was ready to start healing it up, the rest of the guild was already into running heroics. I never got to run any normal (easier) dungeons, since everyone was doing those while I was still plodding through levels.

So, in I went into heroics, with nothing but green healing gear. Being a paladin, I also only had single-target heals. This made things DIFFICULT. But looking back, maybe I was better for the experience, because getting tossed into the deep end can be a great way to learn. And I quickly learned the ropes and got geared up, so dungeon runs started getting easier, and more importantly, more fun!

So, I kept running heroics, and started to get into the 10-man raid Kharazan, too. But, around this time, a new hurdle presented itself. For one reason or another, we started losing pallies. In fact, my buddy Agnor, who rolled a paladin called Agnorei, had a bit of a...unique situation. He claimed that he got a new job, and couldn't play anymore. That was fair, of course. He said he deleted his paladin so that he wouldn't be tempted to come back. But then, shortly after, Stormchild and I found a paladin called Agnorei on a different server, through the armory. It was definitely Agnor's paladin, he had the same items and professions, down to the level. Storm and I thought it was weird, but didn't really know what to make of it. Then, shortly after THAT, Agnor came back and said he could play again, and that he'd gotten his pally restored, but he had decided to switch to playing his druid. So basically we figure he didn't want to play his pally anymore, and came up with a weird charade to switch to his druid. Agnor was a weird, weird guy...but we still loved him.

Anyway, why was this a hurdle? Well paladins had several different buffs that they could give, in two forms. The greater blessing would give a buff to all raid members of the same class that lasted for fifteen minutes, and the lesser blessing would give a buff to a single player for five minutes. But see, some players of the same class wanted different buffs. Like the tank warriors wanted kings, but the DPS warriors wanted salvation. So, as often the only paladin in the raid, I had to juggle tons of buffs on different people every five minutes. It was really pretty stressful, but I kept with it, because I knew if I left, there would be NO paladins.

We soldiered on, though. After sufficiently gearing up in heroics and 10-mans, we started into the 25-man raids. I don't remember what order we started them in, but the first screenshot I have is of Serpent Shrine Cavern, so we'll go with that. There was a problem, though, one that had been evident from our days in Naxxramas and AQ40. It turned out that some people in the guild...just weren't that good.

Ahh, private channels. Where the REAL TALK happens.

I knew I was doing my job, though. This was around the time in the game's balance where paladins were very good healers. But I mean of course I was really good, too. Look at the top of that healing meter!

Being the pink one loses its sting when you're the BEST.

We also did Gruul! Now this was one of the places where the no-pally thing was the worst, but we pushed through it and killed him eventually. This screenshot below wasn't the first time we killed him, but it was definitely the most hilarious.

Ahh, nothing says 'celebration' like standing perfectly still for 15 seconds.

Anyway, thankfully for me, all my hard work in the dark single pally times didn't go unnoticed. When we killed another 25-man boss, Magtheridon, Di decided to give me first dibs on the tier 4 chestpiece. He actually said over Vent that it was in appreciation for always showing up and sticking it out, so that was really cool. I don't have any screens of that kill for some reason, but here's a random Magtheridon one.

Remembering: not everyone's strong suit.

And, well, remember that problem I mentioned about not everyone being all that good? Well...it didn't get better. We killed Gruul and Mags, but we showed little progress in SSC. And the thing about Di, he was a great leader, but he was also really, really nice. He didn't want to kick people out of the guild for not being good enough, it just wasn't in his nature. And I respect that, really. But, he decided that something needed to be done. So, in a tough decision that, I imagine, came after lots of discussion with the officers, he decided to disband the guild.

This was, of course, pretty crushing for everyone involved. But it wasn't all bad. It lead to one of the greatest moments of my life, captured in the image below, which I will treasure forever.

You have kicked Stormchild out of the guild. I felt like my entire life had lead to that moment.

So what actually happened there was that one of the officers, Enoc, took the disband particularly hard, and couldn't even bear to type the /gquit command. So, I offered for him to promote me, and I said I could kick him out, as all the other officers had already left. So he did it, and I removed any other members that didn't want to quit. I felt like I was helping, but obviously I took no pleasure in it. Except for Storm.

So, I think that's a good place to leave off for this post. Next post (which will be the last!), we'll find out what happened to me, Storm, and the other members of Twisting Nether. It couldn't just be the end, could it?!