Switch

I switched guilds last night.

This has a lot of consequences for me.

I had been thinking about it for some time. I don’t think anyone would have been surprised that I had been unhappy in my former guild for some time. Surprisingly, I saw it coming from very early on. I knew that at some point, if I took a position of responsibility within the guild, I would grow frustrated, burn out, and quit the guild. That’s exactly what happened.

Oh, the manner in which it happened wasn’t something I had predicted. I hadn’t predicted, for instance, that I would pour my heart into a project just to have my legs cut out from under me by the guild leadership. I had figured instead that I would just eventually have been unable to juggle the leadership role with my personal life and gotten so wrapped up in it that I needed to quit. Perhaps the former is better, perhaps not. It makes little difference now.

I suppose that was the impetus for making a change. It didn’t make the change for me, but it certainly made me start thinking about it. So I had been thinking about making a change for a month and a half or so. As I said in an earlier post (paraphrasing because I don’t feel like getting the exact quote), learning that another guild on the server needed DK tanks was far more tempting than I thought it would be.

The situation with my former guild continued to deteriorate. Though I had been branded as being divisive, the guild had split into a small group favored by the guild leader, and a large group of everyone else. The former were put into positions of responsibility (in one case informally, because a bunch of people raised a stink over that person’s immaturity), the latter mocked and belittled during raids. I decided at one point I didn’t want to raid anymore, until I figured out something. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to raid. It was that I didn’t want to raid with them.

In the meantime, the opportunity presented to me by my new guild became more and more attractive. They were the guild referenced in my previous post — the ones who downed Saurfang in the time it took us to get to Marrowgar. They were the ones desperately needing a tank.

In the end, it came down to that opportunity. Last night my former guild tried Festergut for the first time on 25-man. At one point, we hit the enrage timer, which was a good thing, because it meant that we had survived to that point. The bad side to it was that Festergut still had about 45% of his health left.

Festergut is not a forgiving fight on dps. There’s a lot of motion necessary, which makes it very hard to maintain a solid rotation. Ranged have particular problems with vile gas. On early attempts, I think I was pushing about 6000 dps. In later attempts, when I got moved into melee range, I started pushing 7500 dps or so. Getting an unholy death knight helped immeasurably. Unfortunately, because of the mechanics of the event, the tanks and dps have to average 7200-7600 dps in order to beat the enrage timer. I was in the top three of the dps — and I was barely adequate. There was just no way we could do it, not with the several people between 4000 and 5000 dps. I think my former guild has met its limit as far as Icecrown 25 raiding goes. A good portion of it is gear, some of it may well be skill, but they aren’t moving past that.

My new guild, however, has downed Festergut on 25-man. This impresses me.

My last post had some indications of the unpleasantness that was part of raiding with my prior guild. There was more. Ultimately, though, I think that if you wiped all of that away — suppose the raid lead was cordial, I had never had the rug pulled out from under me, and there were no significant clique problems — I think I would have left anyway. I’m confident that my new guild will down the Lich King (on 10 man and 25 man) within the next six months. I can’t say that about my old guild. I realize that they are all interconnected — if our raid lead were better we’d have had better players — but, never mind that.

It’s an exciting opportunity.

But with that opportunity comes another switch. My new guild is woefully short on tanks, so much so that my guild note upon arrival was “omg a tank”. Trax will be needed on the ICC 10 and ICC 25 runs. Jana, most likely, will not be needed — they have a bunch of mages. So when my new guild defeats the Lich King, it will most likely be Trax that’s there, not Jana.

I’m okay with this. I said before that I don’t really like the idea of a main/alt as applied to me. They’re basically equally geared, and I enjoy playing both of them. What I enjoy most, though, is the feeling of being wanted, and the feeling of being a contribution to progression and success within the guild. In my old guild, I wasn’t getting that, either on Trax or on Jana. In my new guild, I expect that I’ll get that on Trax.

I’m looking forward to it.