Illidan and Beyond

With Spasi being the obvious raid leader among us, and Leffe being submerged in tank duties, Memory and I took care of the day-to-day organizing and social aspects, including all the drama. And trust me, there was a lot of that. As with most raiding guilds, we too had our share of eccentric personalities and influential, often national, groups. I’d like to think that my major contribution to the guild was holding it together for so long. A typical day consisted of some shit storm emerging, Spasi wanting to handle it by saying “he can fuck off/piss off”, and me convincing him to let me sort it out. As with most guilds, typical issues concerned loot, not being picked for raids, having to raid with noobs, conflicts that emerged between guild members outside of raiding, and people or groups of people just hating each other.

Handing out gems and enchants after a successful raid. "Form a line. We're not in Italy."

Though I didn’t realize it until much later, this was when World of Warcraft started to become more reminiscent of a job than a game for me. Even so, some of my best memories are from this time. Nothing comes close to our server first kill of Illidan. After the scheduled raid was over, we did one more try and failed. Then we held a vote and 23 persons wanted to keep going. Two tries later he was dead. On top of that, he dropped the shield, the staff and a glaive, i.e. basically the jackpot. We refused to just hand the loot to ourselves and instead of using the typical approach with the loot council, for this occasion we rolled off. Leffe won a two way roll, Dingus also won a two way roll, and I won a three way roll, so everything ended up in our hands anyway. Of course, there was a lot of drama surrounding the glaive anyway, since some people that thought they deserved to roll didn’t get to.

Longest roll win streak on Darkspear.

It seemed like the entire population of Darkspear was greeting us in Shattrath City when we returned after the kill. In a way, I think we contributed to making Darkspear less of a dark backwater among the World of Warcraft realms, although more so in Wrath of the Lich King than in The Burning Crusade. We reached M’uru before the final nerf, a boss that most guilds except the very best in the world got stuck on. Thus, technically Darkspear was just as progressed as many of the most advanced realms in the world. This would continue in Wrath of the Lich King, where we reached our high point in terms of global guild ranking. At least during my time in the guild.

Members waiting in Sunwell Plateau while officers are discussing.

Shortly after the Illidan kill, Memory stepped down and I became guild leader, a position I held from the beginning of Sunwell Plateau until right before I quit after clearing Ulduar. The endless drama I had to deal with under the surface took its toll. I constantly had the feeling that the guild was on the verge of collapse due to all the tension between different groups. I had to deal with all of this in between raids, but the actual raids themselves also felt like work. However, I still loved the progression fights, and that somehow motivated me to do all the farm raids that were necessary.