Blaugust Day 9: Trap and Switch

Late post yesterday, early post today…

After dropping everything I helped build, I turned around and joined something else altogether. And… good gods. It was structured, it was thought-out. I enjoyed it. However, they had a couple rules, one of which was no trolling allowed. Not just within the guild itself, but no trade trolling. This was the hardest thing for me to accept, since I was most definitely known as a troll on our server. But I agree, and joined up. I stopped responding in trade, to the point of contemplating leaving /2 altogether.

Didn’t much help that I almost got kicked in the first couple weeks for snapping at the guild leader for calling me out on getting killed by a simple mechanic that I didn’t understand. Yeah, it wasn’t my brightest moment. He barked, I snapped back, everyone went quiet, and I had a nice talking to afterwards. I got over my ego, settled in, and accepted the team mindset, and quickly became one of their team players.

They had apparently known about me for a while, and were slightly unsure of bringing me on board because of my two-part reputation. Put me in a raid, and if I know the mechanics, I’ll go to bat and be the mechanics bitch through and through. However, put me in trade chat, and I’m likely to make someone pissed off or cry. And it wasn’t even that vague… the co-GM had a close friend. Her close friend got into one of my BH runs. Her close friend didn’t stack with the giant explodey debuff, and instead stood off to the side. Her close friend got herself killed, and took out two healers in the process. So when loot dropped that only her close friend could use, as per my loot rules, she died to doing something dumb. I sharded the piece of gear instead of letting her use it, because I wasn’t going to reward someone who died right out the gates and got others killed with their actions…

…the leadership in my new guild RESPECTED that mindset. And even told the friend that it’s the behavior you should expect in a progression guild. I just had to tone down my egotism and attitude along the way, which I did. I filled in with two of their raid teams in Throne of Thunder, then the guild transferred servers and factions for Siege of Orgrimmar. I lacked the cash to drop for a server/faction transfer, so I leveled a hunter instead. They said they wanted more ranged instead of melee, and I liked it there, so I chipped in and helped. It’s both a good thing and a bad thing that I did.

Good, because they needed me. Bad, because they needed me… to do every damned mechanic. I didn’t have the previous raid tier’s gear, nor the experience, so I was getting benched in the main run for progression. But since I soaked up off-spec pieces, they suggested I went to the late night 10-man run instead. I rolled in there and started rocking the meters. Even if I wasn’t topping the DPS charts, I would be taking the lowest damage at times, or had the most interrupts, or whatever niche thing they needed, I was on it. For gods’ sakes, I was a rogue, but ranged. I could do anything, then deterrence+feign out of it.

So Team Lights Out rocked out with our group, pulling a couple old faces into it, and eventually shaving off  some dead weight that was holding us back. We trimmed the team up to be a lean, mean, Heroic boss battling machine. And then we got to fuckin’ Blackhand.

For those who don’t know… there’s 2 ways to do the fight. One is to have a hunter or two on the belt and make the side mechanic a completely trivial joke. The other way is the wrong way. So I was voluntold that I’d be doing belt duty. I argued, and still had to do it. I tried to learn, and failed, hard, several times. But eventually, I got it, kept it, and rocked it out. To the point that I was acing the belt so well, they forgot I was over there during the next few weeks of boss progression.

Fast Forward through other boss fights, other fun battles of figuring out the who-can-do-what, who-is-useless, and a couple other drama events causing roster rearrangements, and we eventually managed to down H Garrosh before the next patch. And the first time we killed the bastard, after several weeks of sub-3% wipes? They use loot council (well, they always use loot council) to see who got the mount. Based on seniority in the group, attendance, team spirit/performance… and finally, the fact that their learning of the pain-in-the-ass mechanic on Blackfuse was 75% faster than any other person in the guild… guess who got the first mount in our run? Yours truly.

And you bet your ass I still use that mechanical Iron Juggernaut scorpion looking mount to this day.

-Bane Falcon
“Schist!” (a poor, flaky mineral—the equivalent of saying S**t!)

The Revenge of Blaugust