Steve and I logged on just a little while ago and transferred the leadership over to Sorat, with Kalbaras as 2nd in command. I demoted our army of toons and alts to "On Hiatus," even though we will almost certainly never come back. It felt so weird and well, like it was no big deal except to the people that we most cared about. I got a /tell from one of our guildies, who was sad to see us go, but other than that...out of the 15 people online, no other comments. WOW! Gosh, and I thought they wouldn't be able to live without us! LOL...Steve and Janet who? In a way that makes me feel sad, but really I don't mind. I'm so glad that we no longer have any responsibilities to people in the game and that we can now leave with a clear conscience.
Isn't it interesting how you build up your importance when building a case to not leave WoW? "What will they do without us?!" "How will they put raids together?" "Who will keep people happy?" "How can I survive without them?"
Your experience reflects what everyone on Wowdetox says. I never got up to raiding (finally quit when my main reached 72), but from the outside, it seemed like raiders were a real tight group. Maybe the game is more superficial than everyone realizes. I got about 4 goodbyes when I left and gave everything away, but truth was, I wanted to tank, but sucked at it, so I know no one "needed" me, we used to just have fun together and joke a lot.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Steve and I didn't become serious WoW addicts until we began raiding. And it wasn't really serious until we made our own guild and Steve led three raids. At that point we were dug in like ticks with nothing but WoW in our lives. We are very committed and responsible, as well as being good examples so when we had a guild, we were on as much as possible, for the most part. Ugh. That was wearing on our relationship too.
ReplyDeleteI never wanted to be a tank, but my world-class shaman healer turned into a just average elemental shaman after Cata took away all of the power healy shamans used to have. I had fun but I was never as good at ranged dps as I was as a healer at my best. My healing druid was my second main (!!) and she was just starting to get up to speed in Cata. I could see she was going to be equally spectacular once she got geared...I'm glad we stopped when we did.
And you know...once you become a raider and you get to be really good at your class, you can't go back to just "hanging out". At least Steve and I couldn't. We're just too ambitious and want to do it all. Sometimes I wished we'd never raided because it would have been nice to just be casual. But that's just not who we are, in the game or in life. We have and always will be over-achievers!
Boo again. Without tempting you to revert to WoW days, maybe you could tell me what IS so fun about raiding? As I understand it, it's like doing an instance over and over again, right? No one in-game would ever answer me since it was such a hopelessly nooby question to ask. But in leveling alts, I disliked doing the same quests more than once or twice; I couldn't see doing instances over and over again without getting bored super fast.
ReplyDeleteDo the bosses do something different each time? Or, does the raid group do something different each time? Or is it always the same and just fun? I guess I don't expect roller coasters to be different each time I ride them, so maybe I'm just not cluing in to raids the right way. (I'm not going back to WoW to find out, just curious about raids since I know now I'll never be in one.)
Oh, don't worry about tempting me. The fact of the matter is that I got to do EVERYTHING I really wanted to do in WoW so I'm OVER it. It's fun to talk about once in a while though!
ReplyDeleteOk, here's the deal about raiding. 10- and 25-man content can be very challenging. In order to be successful, you must have a group that can work as a team. Every one of the members of the team must know what they're doing or, more likely than not, they'll wipe the raid. On top of that, everyone must learn the strategy of downing the boss. They have to learn what will happen during the encounter and be able to react properly. This takes time, which means wiping over and over again while everyone learns what to do and how to correct mistakes.
WHY is this fun? Because we all learn a different dance with each boss and if we are capable raiders, the team will eventually kill that boss. The challenge to figure out how to do this is incredibly addictive because when a team downs a boss that's taken WEEKS of work to succeed, the feeling everyone gets is absolutely indescribably cool and fantastic.
Steve and I didn't get to be in control of our raiding experience the way we wanted until we had our own guild. Once we did, we picked our team and they were all-star players. When you get a group of AMAZING players together, it's just AWESOME to see what they can do together. Our premier ICC 10-man group was just incredible. We went all the way through the 10 man content and then we did it all over again on Heroic (except for Lichy), and THEN we did all of the achievements and our reward was that truly amazing mount, the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher (not me, but here's a picture if you don't remember what it looks like: http://nooptions.org/forum/Punchy_news/May_10/sindy_mount.jpg
To us, once we started raiding with people we liked, there was no turning back. The feeling you get when your team is successful at completing a difficult achievement or killing a bitch of a boss on heroic...it's out of this world! We're lucky because we got our fill, so we have no desire to play anymore. We feel like we "won" the game, at least in terms of Wrath of the Lich King. It was enough. But yeah, raiding is wonderful. It can be hell too though!