My Big Secret

Dear Readers,

I’m about to let you in on a secret. One that I don’t think anyone in WoW knows. Back when I first started playing WoW the third or fourth time, I rushed to get to 80 as fast as I could. This is no secret, I’ve told people this before. I did quest after quest, spent time grinding when I couldn’t find quests, pushed through everything I could because I wanted to be 80. Still, no secret here. You are just going to have to wait. There were a couple of reasons I did this, I had a few friends who were 80 and talked about who cool stuff was when you are 80. Also, they wanted to PvP, and needed extra body to pile up in front of them. That’d be me. Again, no secret, hold your horses, it is coming soon enough.

There was a secret inner goal for me at 80 too that I didn’t tell anyone about. OK, this is a little secret, not the BIG secret later. I wanted to Raid, bad. I had gone to my friend Stacey’s server a few times on trials in WoW before really getting into it, and she was a…RAIDER ™ dun dun duh! I had even played on her server for a while, leveling up a couple of characters into the 20’s or 30’s before wandering off to whatever was shiny elsewhere. In the end, my other friends, the ones who got me to stick to WoW were PvPers, and I played on their server mostly because they pushed me much harder to get to 80 than Stacey ever did. I knew they weren’t Raiders, and wasn’t really sure if that bothered me or not. Well, we fell into a raiding guild called Off The Team over on Durotan, so I knew I had an outlet when I got to 80.

A quick note about OTT, they are now defunct unfortunately, and me and my friends are probably part of the reason for that. I do feel bad about the whole thing looking back, I would have chosen my method to complain differently, but I stand by the point that I had back then. I will also say that their falling apart was also the end of my very short lived raiding career.

Back when I was a new 80 in blue crafted gear I went on my first raid with OTT. They were doing Ulduar every week with the bigger guild group and did a “progression” TotC run with an elite group. Anyway I got myself into the twenty-five man run of Ulduar. Consistently the guild beat the snot out of Flame Leviathan and moved on to XT, and beat him, usually after 1-2 wipes. Then either it would be called by the raid leader or we’d go and wipe once on the dragon in the instance the name of which I cannot remember before the raid leader would say that was enough for the week and call the raid.

During that time, I consistently found my self in the bottom end of the DPS group, never once breaking the top 10 DPS on recount (which was in that guild a measure of an OK DPS). I tended to be in the bottom 4 or 5, and often heard how I was sub-par and shouldn’t really be raiding. No one back then told me what I should be doing though, other than vague things like get gear, learn my job, or look at my rotation. For the record, I was doing all of those things. I trolled Elitest Jerks, MMO-Champion, Wowhead, the official forums, everything. I tried different specs, I learned my rotation, I ran the heroic daily every day, you name it I did it.

Anyway, somewhere along the way I became really depressed about the whole raiding thing. I wanted to do more of it, but I got it in my head that I didn’t belong there.

A long time has passed and a lot has changed. I am still low end geared since I haven’t raided since Ulduar, but I do have myself a 4 piece tier 9 bonus and could buy the fifth piece if it was better than what I had. I know how to gem my gear (which is totally different than what I was told by OTT members), I am enchanted, and I still regularly troll EJ, and any other site that has raid strats, suggestions, or info about raiding.

Now is time for the big secret, I’m afraid to go raiding again. I still see myself as being that new 80 in a place where I didn’t belong. Granted, joining SoulBound didn’t really help my self confidence, but really there is no one there to blame but me. On the couple of occasions where they were desperate for a warm body Caralee asked me if I wanted to see if I could get in. Both times I can remember I told her no, giving her the equivalent of “I need to wash my hair” as an excuse. I think I told her once that I wasn’t going to be on long and proceeded to stay on the entire raid time, and the other time I told her that I hadn’t watched the raid strats though I remember having done it just that day (I’m sorry Stacey, it was really just a little white lie).

To this day since OTT, I have not joined a single raid other than when the weekly raid comes up that I absolutely without a doubt know like Flame Levi or XT. If I remember correctly Malygos must die is the quest this week, and I have always wanted to do that one, but couldn’t bring myself to answer the call of any of the different groups trying to form and in need of DPS.

Much love,
The Scardi-raider.