My Growing Disdain for Casual Players Trying to Fake the Funk
During this time the elitistjerks website started to become what it is today, people were theorycrafting, testing mechanics, sharing their data, etc. Wowhead became widely known and used, wowwiki was getting bigger, mods were being written faster than anyone expected and you could find a mod for literally anything. Wowinsider and mmo-champion came into being, and I was devouring information. Since no one in my guild was doing their own research, I did it all. They quickly figured out that they could just ask me for the info instead of looking it up on their own and I let it happen.
When my guild fell apart I started looking around for a new guild. In the mean time I was raiding and clearing Kara, Gruul, and Mag with a friend's guild. I found what I hoped would be my new raiding home on the Vek'nilash server. So I server transferred and joined them as an applicant. Long story short, I failed. Back on Gul'dan I was the best healer in the guild. I always out-healed everyone else by large margins and never ran OOM. On Vek'nilash I was usually dead last, I died a lot during my applicant raids, and to top it all off I walked in with all of my knowledge about game and class mechanics thinking I could impress them with it. It didn't impress them, it made me look like a know-it-all prick. So they politely declined my application.
At that time there was a three month cooldown on server transferring, so my priest was stuck there. Meanwhile my friends back on Gul'dan had reformed and needed a MT, a raid leader, and a generally knowledgeable person. So I finished leveling my 57 warrior alt, and became those things for them. In light of my failures on Vek'nilash I was determined to become better. I became the stereotypical raid-nazi MT that people joke about. We progressed through Kara, Mag, and Gruul from a fresh start; but everything was not alright. Half of the raiders were not committed, refused to learn about their class and improve, and generally just wanted a free ride. Since Gul'dan was an extremely low population server, we didn't have a pool of players to recruit from. So myself and the core of the raid group all transferred to Dalaran.
While trying to recruit to fill our ranks on Dalaran we met with another guild in a similar situation and ended up merging with them. We became Twilight Ascension. The guild that we merged with had never been into SSC or TK, and out of my guild only I had experience in those two raids (from my applicant period on Vek'nilash). So off we went, pushing into SSC and TK. We made regular progress at decent speeds. This was helped by the fact that I already knew what to do and was able to easily direct things in my raid-nazi MT role. Then we hit Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider.
We worked on Vashj alone for a month. We occasionally made it to phase three, but it was seldom enough that we knew it was luck, and not skill that was getting us there. During this process the glaring weaknesses in my raid group became clear. More than half of my raiders weren't cutting the mustard. I tried to recruit to replace them but it wasn't going well. People didn't want to join a guild stuck at Vashj, and I couldn't blame them. This situation was complicated by the removal of attunements to BT and MH.
That patch happened when we were on our fourth week of Vashj wipes. Suddenly my raiders no longer cared about the kill. They lost their hunger for the progression. They simply wanted to move on the easy way, and I lost my faith in them completely. We moved into BT and MH at the prodding of my officer council and started wiping in there instead of on Vashj. The "easy 3" (as the first three bosses in both BT and MH were called) were not that easy for my guild. This is because my raiders were unmotivated, unskilled, and didn't care to improve. They wanted relaxed and easy raiding. Replacing them was severely hindered by guild policy and a poor choice of recruitment officer. Why couldn't I change that? Due to the merger I was actually a co-GM, and the officer council had more weight to throw around than either myself or my co-GM. In short, it was a poorly set up guild command structure, and I learned to never try that again.
Eventually I decided that not having my Vashj and Kael kills needed to be fixed. So I grabbed the best of my raiders and PuG'd the other half of the raid. We killed Lady Vashj in 4 attempts in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. That experience put the final nail in the coffin for Twilight Ascension. I was not going to keep putting so much time and effort into a guild that was out-performed by a PuG. As luck would have it, some of the PuG players in that raid were from a decent guild that very recently became in need of players, including a MT.
Over the course of the next few weeks I staged an exodus. I took the 12 best players I had and left Twilight Ascension. About a week before it happened someone let the cat out of the bag and drama ensued. The Reader's Digest version of the story is that we left the guild, got our invites to Heroes of the Command, and Twilight Ascension fell apart completely over the next month.
Heroes of the Command impressed me. They were fast, the raiders were on the ball, the strats executed well, exactly what I had tried to coax out of my old guild, and they did it without a raid-nazi leading them. They were in need of so many raiders due to real life circumstances. We were able to keep the guild's raid group in business and they gave us a much needed home. We joined them when they were up to 8/9 BT and 5/5 MH. I became the MT and as a guild we worked for, and achieved, our Illidan progression kill.We also earned our Amani Warbears and started our way into Sunwell. Unfortunately, that is where HotC stopped being a raiding guild.
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