I'm in the process of fixing, reinstalling, rearranging, etc. all my machines. On this particular machine (laptop) I found the WoW videos I'd downloaded seemingly ages ago. In the process of going through them deciding which to keep and which to toss, my thoughts were again drawn to far away Azeroth.
I played nigh unto religiously for a really, really long time but only now many months after calling it quits have I finally come to terms with it. At one point I changed servers to Greymane with a few good friends. We were kind of fed up with all the BS that goes along with dealing with people and just wanted to have fun again. At some point we got into PvP and did a whole lot of it.
This time around, I played a mage which is pretty atypical of me; I usually play tanks or healers and had just come off a year gig as a paladin (yeah, sorry). For those who haven't played WoW, mages can be kind of squishy and for a good spell in the 30s and 40s brackets, I had been having kind of crappy luck and really seriously considered rerolling or finally quitting for good. I mean, shit, it had been a year and a half and it's not like I didn't get my money's worth.
I don't remember where I found it (probably the uber-useless mage boards) but I found this video and everything changed. Cliche, but true. I mean, jeez, that guy rocked. He has some serious gear to be sure, and a build that's all about making highlight reels, but still--daaamn. I figured I'd never see that kind of gear ever (I was wrong) but if you could do that, then it was something to shoot for; something far beyond the doom and gloom of the mage boards.
I respecced, busted up to 49 and we hung out there for a good couple months and went pretty much undefeated. I even made a PvP video (I'd link it here, but FileFront isn't playing nice this evening). We met a lot of great people and had a mess of fun. And little did I know it at the time, but that was the platform upon which the rest of our success would be built.
Me, Zura, and Vain were the last of the few that came from our previous server. If you look close, it's us three and a couple others in group 2. Despite my rantings and ravings and general malaise, they stuck with me (for better, I'd say). We did a lot of awesome things and got a lot further than anyone thought we would, myself included. These were the folks I counted on to stay sane when nothing was going right (pretty frequently, as I remember) and who sadly took most of the brunt of my bad calls (of which there were many).
This particular shot was just as we'd gotten some success in raiding; before it got too busy to PvP often. This was the second match we'd won after I dinged Exalted with the Defilers so I was sportin' some nice shoulders and an Ironbark: some of my first epics. Greymane was pretty godawfully one sided; if you smacked an alliance weenie real good, they'd just about rain epics like a goddamn pinata. It was terribly frustrating to lose because they had better gear which made our wins over such teams that much more satisfying. For months I'm sure I grated on folks nerves with: "What are those chumps gonna do when we start gettin' epics?" The above screenie contains the answer.
This is me and Hypo kicking ass in AV. The thing to realize is that even though the horde in general had better PvPers, they almost never showed up to AV once they got their shineys and the alliance (in general) had way better gear. The end result is that we lost a lot--but we looked damn fine doing it. I owe the top part of whatever skill I had to Hypo since he always pushed me to play better than I really could. He's an uber mage; probably the best I ever played with. Favorite story: at one point he respecced to fire like I was when we were working through MC to up our raid DPS.
This is probably one of my favorite raid shots. We had our raid firsts of Ragnaros and Onyxia pretty close together which established our position of prominence on our server. What you can't see in that shot is how we struggled through personnel issues when we couldn't get 30 people together to do a big raid or doing Lucifron shorthanded with only two priests (sorry, but you kind of have to know that encounter for the significance of that to sink in). You don't see the hours of frustration as we wiped due to server lag or just plain bad luck or the infighting that eventually drove the group to split up after I'd gone. You don't see the blood sweat and tears that went into the organization or the flak that we took for "just a game".
In the end, you don't see a lot of things in that shot, but that's the HRG I remember, the one I led: mature, determined, unstoppable.
My days as a mage came and went--memories that I might not have had if I hadn't found that one video. I met a lot of great people, many of whom I'm still in touch with today. Maybe Azeroth isn't as far away as I thought.
