I thought perhaps some might find it interesting to read about how I managed to find my way into a raiding guild. I don’t know if this would be useful as a “how to join a raiding guild” article but it certainly can’t hurt.
So first, my wow background. I started playing about 18 months ago. I somehow found the 10 day free trial while surfing the internet & decided to give it a go. After all it was free. My knowledge of wow prior to this was practically zero. I had heard of it, but I knew no detail.
I started a warrior as my first toon. I’d be willing to bet most people start either a warrior or a paladin as their first. At any rate, I enjoyed the game enough in those early days to sign up & start paying cash money. Initially it was the social side of the game that I enjoyed. Making friends with people with odd names and heading out into the wilds to kill things with swords & magic. Fantastic. So, ever so slowly I levelled my warrior and eventually I reached level 70. At last, I thought, I have made it. Top level. What now? To cut to the chase, I quickly discovered that tanking was not my thing. All that time & effort levelling & I was hopeless at the end game. My problem was that I’d miscalculated at the very beginning, when I’d created my warrior. I had thought, you know, warrior, big sword, lots of armour, he will hurt things. But it turns out, no, warriors are for being hit, not for hitting. So I re-rolled a warlock.
This time around I did know more about the classes and I was making a much more informed decision. I wanted to be ranged, so a rogue was out. And at the time I thought of hunters as being too, well, unmagical. I wanted bolts of pure energy to burst forth from my extended hand. So then, lock or mage. I had quested with both on my warrior, and my impression was that I used to spend a lot of time waiting for my mage friend to spirit run back to his body. Whereas the warlock just basically did his thing with the big blue guy and if I joined in that was fine.
I levelled the lock as fast as I possibly could. I actually read about things like talent builds & spell rotations and what stamina & spirit & hit & crit mean. I used a levelling guide. I found the Warlock’s Den and Canadianpimps most excellent “Gearing your Warlock” guide. I stayed guild free as I levelled, until I reached 58 & a work mate convinced me to join his guild.
It was always my intention to raid on the warlock, I was never in any doubt. My plan had been to level to 70 guild-free and then join a raiding guild, but instead here I was joining a social guild. The core membership of my new guild had known each other and levelled together from pretty early days. They saw themselves as social players. Raiders were hard core & they didn’t want to go there.
So once we got to 70, what to do? There were a few of us in the guild keen to see some end game content, Kara at least. We lobbied the guild and although some attempts to get a team going were made it was slow going. We had people leaving the guild as they hit 70 so our Kara team kept getting almost ready & then someone else would leave. It was frustrating, but realistically, why would they wait around for the rest of us when they were ready now. It was just easier to trade up to a guild that was already raiding, rather than get an entire guild over the line. Eventually I saw that it just wasn't going to happen with this guild. I spoke to my GM & told him that I was intending to leave the guild.
By this stage I was wearing the frozen shadoweave tailoring set and the rest of my gear was heroic blues. A badge trinket maybe. I was getting pretty regular invites to guilds by pugging heroics. I always asked people about their guild when I was in a PuG, especially if I liked the way they played, or intereracted. It was fairly common when pugging to have a few people from the same guild together and even to get to know a few of them. Once people realise you don’t suck you’ll often get asked by them to join regular runs, even if you’re not in the same guild.
Finally I decided to take the plunge with Pinnacle, who bill themselves as a “casual” raiding guild. I whispered their GM & asked if that guild offer was still good. He said yes, so I quickly said farewell to all my guildy’s and /gquit, and moments later I was in Pinnacle, with a rank of “who?”. This has since been changed to “trial” but I have to say the “who?” title sure put you in your place. So that very night was a Kharazan run. Pinnacle at the time was running Kara with 2 teams, attempting to gear up enough to start 25 man raiding. I was to go in team 2, but unbeknownst to me our GM & RL were both coming along to check out the newbie. That first Kara run was a massive eye opener to me. These guys were good. Really, really good. Everyone was so co-ordinated, knew their toons, knew the fights. It was a standard of play that I hadn’t even dreamed existed. I was horribly undergeared compared to them. I think I just beat the tank for dps. But I was on my way. I was a raider.
Since then Pinnacle did progress to 25 man’s. We fully cleared Kara, then Gruul’s, then Mags. We were 5/6 SSC, 2/4 TK and had cleared ZA but not the timers when the 3.0 nerf came in.
So first, my wow background. I started playing about 18 months ago. I somehow found the 10 day free trial while surfing the internet & decided to give it a go. After all it was free. My knowledge of wow prior to this was practically zero. I had heard of it, but I knew no detail.
I started a warrior as my first toon. I’d be willing to bet most people start either a warrior or a paladin as their first. At any rate, I enjoyed the game enough in those early days to sign up & start paying cash money. Initially it was the social side of the game that I enjoyed. Making friends with people with odd names and heading out into the wilds to kill things with swords & magic. Fantastic. So, ever so slowly I levelled my warrior and eventually I reached level 70. At last, I thought, I have made it. Top level. What now? To cut to the chase, I quickly discovered that tanking was not my thing. All that time & effort levelling & I was hopeless at the end game. My problem was that I’d miscalculated at the very beginning, when I’d created my warrior. I had thought, you know, warrior, big sword, lots of armour, he will hurt things. But it turns out, no, warriors are for being hit, not for hitting. So I re-rolled a warlock.
This time around I did know more about the classes and I was making a much more informed decision. I wanted to be ranged, so a rogue was out. And at the time I thought of hunters as being too, well, unmagical. I wanted bolts of pure energy to burst forth from my extended hand. So then, lock or mage. I had quested with both on my warrior, and my impression was that I used to spend a lot of time waiting for my mage friend to spirit run back to his body. Whereas the warlock just basically did his thing with the big blue guy and if I joined in that was fine.
I levelled the lock as fast as I possibly could. I actually read about things like talent builds & spell rotations and what stamina & spirit & hit & crit mean. I used a levelling guide. I found the Warlock’s Den and Canadianpimps most excellent “Gearing your Warlock” guide. I stayed guild free as I levelled, until I reached 58 & a work mate convinced me to join his guild.
It was always my intention to raid on the warlock, I was never in any doubt. My plan had been to level to 70 guild-free and then join a raiding guild, but instead here I was joining a social guild. The core membership of my new guild had known each other and levelled together from pretty early days. They saw themselves as social players. Raiders were hard core & they didn’t want to go there.
So once we got to 70, what to do? There were a few of us in the guild keen to see some end game content, Kara at least. We lobbied the guild and although some attempts to get a team going were made it was slow going. We had people leaving the guild as they hit 70 so our Kara team kept getting almost ready & then someone else would leave. It was frustrating, but realistically, why would they wait around for the rest of us when they were ready now. It was just easier to trade up to a guild that was already raiding, rather than get an entire guild over the line. Eventually I saw that it just wasn't going to happen with this guild. I spoke to my GM & told him that I was intending to leave the guild.
By this stage I was wearing the frozen shadoweave tailoring set and the rest of my gear was heroic blues. A badge trinket maybe. I was getting pretty regular invites to guilds by pugging heroics. I always asked people about their guild when I was in a PuG, especially if I liked the way they played, or intereracted. It was fairly common when pugging to have a few people from the same guild together and even to get to know a few of them. Once people realise you don’t suck you’ll often get asked by them to join regular runs, even if you’re not in the same guild.
Finally I decided to take the plunge with Pinnacle, who bill themselves as a “casual” raiding guild. I whispered their GM & asked if that guild offer was still good. He said yes, so I quickly said farewell to all my guildy’s and /gquit, and moments later I was in Pinnacle, with a rank of “who?”. This has since been changed to “trial” but I have to say the “who?” title sure put you in your place. So that very night was a Kharazan run. Pinnacle at the time was running Kara with 2 teams, attempting to gear up enough to start 25 man raiding. I was to go in team 2, but unbeknownst to me our GM & RL were both coming along to check out the newbie. That first Kara run was a massive eye opener to me. These guys were good. Really, really good. Everyone was so co-ordinated, knew their toons, knew the fights. It was a standard of play that I hadn’t even dreamed existed. I was horribly undergeared compared to them. I think I just beat the tank for dps. But I was on my way. I was a raider.
Since then Pinnacle did progress to 25 man’s. We fully cleared Kara, then Gruul’s, then Mags. We were 5/6 SSC, 2/4 TK and had cleared ZA but not the timers when the 3.0 nerf came in.
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