A Day in the Past: The WotLK Story

If you read The TBC Story, this story starts off right where that one ended. It's less self indulgence about me and my own personal history (but don't worry, I still managed to squeeze it in there) and more about the history of my long passed, best guild I'd ever been in.

To catch you up, after TBC release I screwed around as a non-raider until my guild exploded and asked me to go resto during T4. Fast forward through that guild dissolving shortly after, during T5, and over a year of me healing TBC progression in a new and better guild, and slow down around the end of TBC when I went back to balance.

flashback fade out, queue dream sequence music

TBC was the pinnacle of my raiding career. As I said at the end of my TBC story, at the homestretch of Sunwell, I was ranking as 4th best balance druid in the US and 12th best in the world.

A Day in the Past: The TBC Story

While I started as feral and fought tooth and claw to succeed and have my ability be recognized, at the end of Vanilla, a friend convinced me to go balance.

just add moonfire

He wanted to play my character late at night in WSG (don't tell Blizzard), so I let him. He raved about how amazing balance was in PvP and sent me many screencaps of impressive scoreboards. I think he was just a very good PvPer, but he did get me exalted with the Warsong Outriders, so there's that.

Because I was "stuck" as balance, I got adjusted to it, to the point where I realized, hey, I kinda like this. I stayed balance into TBC where I kept it while leveling and for the first three or four months.

In terms of socially being a subhuman low life hybrid spec, I definitely took a step backward. Feral got a lot better in TBC, while already ahead of balance in the first place. If I had stayed feral, I'd have achieved being a "real spec" a lot sooner, but as I've said before, I never back down from being an underdog.

A Day in the Past: Winterspring

Welcome to a day of the past, the days of Winterspring before the Cataclysm.

It was one of my favorite zones in hang out in during Vanilla. Apparently, this was kinda weird, because people always asked me "what's going on in Winterspring?" I'd get whispered unusually regularly by guildies and friends who noticed I was in Winterspring who didn't understand why anyone would even be there.

is this even a zone?

I went there on both my hunter and my druid. It was a really great place, especially Darkwhisper Gorge.

yay dark and dreary deadly demons!

A Day in the Past: Vanilla Feral

Back in the day, when Androgyn might have looked sorta like this...

rough estimate. this was awhile ago man.

 Or more accurately, usually like this...

(mouth breathing sounds)

Most of our enemies were dragons and undead, we didn't have flying mounts, and only 1% of the playerbase even saw our most difficult raids. It was a simpler time, when the world was new and
"of the Boar" was for some reason a stat combination that appeared on gear on purpose.

yeah we're doing this

I reminisce a lot. I can't help it. Nostalgia is one of my most frequent post tags. Well, I'm doing it again, and this time I'm going to do it with purpose. I've written about parts of the following personal history before - it was actually my ninth post on this blog. This time it has a little more of a narrowed focus and specific purpose. I'm going to do two things that I really like - I'm going to reminisce, and I'm going to tell stories about my reminiscences.

Welcome to A Day in the Past, my new series about Warcraft back in the day. Specifically, my Warcraft life. If you're a stick in the mud about that dreaded nostalgia, feel free to read my post about what it is and why it's totally normal and okay!

Now, on with the show!

Pucking the Fug Up

While I've been pretty content to show up to some friend's guild raids and do casual stuff while I decide where I am in life and whether it's even a good idea to find a new serious guild right now, my elitist itch came back for awhile when I realized I would be locked out of [Ahead of the Curve: Blackhand's Cruicible] if I didn't down him before 6.2, which is currently in PTR and could come out any second now.

or like in a few months

I had some decent luck with doing pugs before, back when my guild was busy not doing any content, so I didn't think much of it until I realized that this was the final boss of the tier that I had done twice in LFR and never had any legitimate practice with.

I read up on the fight and I was relatively familiar with it, so I figured if I could just sneak into a pug that wasn't already asking for the achievement, I could just stay off the radar by not dying and just doing the dps thing I do until one of the groups I joined was good enough that we downed the boss.

Unfortunately for me, there is a niche mechanic that balance druids are known for being very good at, so I kept getting volunteered by other people who had no idea that I was unfamiliar with the fight. If I said I didn't know the fight or tried to talk them out of it, I'd probably be removed immediately anyway, so I opted to just try my best.

can't we just ask them nicely to stop throwing things

My best wasn't very good. For the first time in my life, I was removed from a pug for under performing.

Lagoon: Land of Druids

At the local game shop with a small group yesterday, I was contemplating how I wish I had more board games, but also how I didn't want to spend money on one. I opted for the first option when I saw this game, Lagoon: Land of Druids.

If you couldn't already guess, it had gained 70% of my favor for simply being druid based, so I looked it up on my phone for a few minutes before deciding that it had a seemingly positive enough reaction on the internet and made up my mind. We were looking at some other games, but "land of druids" won, not to mention the how gorgeous the art is.

small sampling of the tokens and game pieces, it's just dang pretty

Niche Roles Gone For Good

I started out the game as a hunter. My role was purely dps, though we had other little niche functions - I actually pulled trash to the tank to keep pulls going quickly, I remember split pulling the fire elementals in the beginning of Molten Core, and bringing Baron Geddon into Garr's room with eyes of the beast.

"Pulling" was something I did on purpose, regularly, even in dungeons when I was with my guild or if I had to save a group from a tank who didn't know how to not pull the whole room. It was always fun in UBRS to pull General Drakkisath into The Beast's room and kite him around while the rest of the group killed his two adds - it made the fight a lot simpler and was well received by my group. This is a role I played that doesn't exist today, and probably a lot of people don't even remember it.

The Underdog Strife

I started playing World of Warcraft as a hunter during Vanilla. I began my first MMO adventure by experiencing what it was like to be passed over for groups because of the class I played. Hunters didn't have the best reputation and that's something that really hasn't entirely gone away - it isn't as prevalent as it was, but "huntard" started back in my day.

Basically, if you didn't know, Blizzard literally gave Hunters an enrage dispel in order to make them an attractive option to bring to raids. I was of course in a guild that was all right bringing me and other hunters to dungeons and raids. Strat and Scholo being 10 mans and UBRS being 15 man made it easy to bring hunters along, even though we were "useless and stole other classes' gear". This, along with my own natural perfectionist personality, drove me to be as knowledgeable and skilled as possible so that people would be happy to bring me along to dungeons instead of that mage or rogue.

Transmogrification and Druids

I'm a big fan of transmog. One of the first things I did for each new alt I leveled was find them some gear for a good outfit. Finding a suitable transmog for my druid became an urgent situation when they introduced the [Glyph of Stars], finally allowing me to see my gear after so many years. I change my druid's transmog rather frequently, though gloves tend to always be a problem for me - I'm always struggling to find a matching pair of gloves. I've been collecting quite a lot of gear, so I'm really looking forward to the wardrobe function they said would be coming later on. Even with a full void storage, I'm looking at currently having three open bank slots out of 220, though I do have a good helping of other things that will be able to fit into the toy box.

I'm pretty happy about my current balance kit transmog...