Where I am coming from. Part 1

For my first ever blog post I have decided to give a general overview of my WoW resume and maybe some other thoughts. Why is that relevant? So you can know where I am coming from and what experiences I have had that influence my thinking, understanding, and grasp of the big picture. It will undoubtedly be longer than what will turn out to be an average post from me, as I have six years of personal history to get through. With that in mind, here goes.

Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".

The Beginning

I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.

After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.

After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.

I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.

Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.

We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.

Yep, I was in there with rez sickness. At that time it didn't reduce healing done, only damage.

When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.

Hint: I'm the floating priest.

Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.