For The… Horde?

*Ahem*

So I, uhh… fkshn chngd….

What? Oh sorry. I said I faction changed!

Yes, that’s correct. The imagery that you see at the top of this page* is no longer representative of Ms. Devv. She is no longer physically a Draenei, though the Exodar will always have a special place in her heart. The magical mistress of the arcane is now a… drum roll… Blood Elf.

Why?

Excellent question. There were a lot of contributing factors, but the main two were my frustration with constantly, and I mean constantly failing in Battlegrounds and, well… the Alliance on Garrosh-US are mostly douchebags. As I mentioned in my last post, I went back to a former guild. Within a couple weeks of rejoining my old comrades, the officers announced that they were all faction changing within a matter of days. My frustration with the Alliance’s perpetual PvP failure had already reached a point that it was affecting my enjoyment of the game. So when they announced that they were jumping ship, I was only too happy to join them.

I’ll miss a lot of people on the Alliance side. There were some good friends that I never had a chance to wish farewell. You see, after a particularly epic Wintergrasp fail, I immediately logged out and initiated the faction transfer. It was a hasty, impulse decision. But if I hadn’t done it there and then, I would have hemmed and hawed about it for days on end. I regret that I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, but I’m glad I left when I did.

So, the new/old guild. When Devv first dinged 80 (during my sabbatical from blogging), she joined a fun group of laid-back raiders called Of Course It Explodes. Unfortunate name, good peeps. Things were super-fab for several weeks in my new guild until a ridiculous prick named Schultz came along. We butted heads in a Heroic and he segued the argument into gchat afterward. I tried to hold my tongue, but I eventually gave him a piece of my mind. Our GM told us both to knock it off. And we did.

A few days later, I logged in to find myself /gkicked. I whispered the GM and he relayed an interesting bot of fiction from my old pal Schultz. He claimed that he put me on ignore and I responded by creating multiple level 1 characters to continue to badger him. This was a straight-up lie. Our GM asked us to exchange apologies. We did and I was welcomed back to the guild, not entirely sure what I was apologizing for.

Second verse, almost the same as the first. About a month later, I again logged in to find myself guildless. This was getting old. I whispered our GM again. He again defended his actions by relaying a Schultz original tale. After clearing up the matter once more, I was invited back to the guild. I accepted the invitation on Predatore, but I was ready to find a guild with 100% less Schultz for Devv. She declined her third invitation to Of Course It Explodes. Such a tragic name. They realized it too.

What was Blizzard thinking when they disallowed guild name changes? Clearly, they weren’t. As the officers became more and more dissatisfied with our moniker, they eventually decided to disband and reform our rapidly expanding guild. The level of organization in preparing for the switch was incredible. The officers covered all of their bases and the transition was seamless. What was once Of Course It Explodes was now Aegis. As of this writing, the Armory shows 117 members. When I logged Devv out of her Alliance digs for the last time, the more accurate head count was less than 70. More on that in a minute. Rewind a bit first.

So Devv was guildless. The whole, “You’re out! You’re in! You’re out! Come back!” Remember… remember where we left off? Coolio. Moving on. Devvy-Devvs was sans-guild. For the first time since I started playing WoW, I hit up the official forums to start my new guild search. On the Alliance side of Garrosh-US, there are a handful of top-tier progression guilds and their coat tail-chasers, a handful of widely respected casual raiding guilds and their coat tail chasers, and then the rest of the realm. The “rest” is mostly composed of super-casual guilds and, well… scrubs. I’m not a hardcore raider by my own or anyone else’s standards, so the top tier was out. But I was geared and ready to move into ToC10. So I set my sights on one tier down from the top.

At the time, Deception was one of the more respected casual raiding guilds on the server. Although there wasn’t a dedicated progression team, they were moving through content right behind the top-tier guilds. I started conversing with the GM via whispers for a few days before I wound up among their ranks. A few days later, I saw the message “Schultz has joined the guild” pop up. Wow. Just… wow. But this time around, things were different. Somehow, we put aside our differences and wound up running a lot of content together. I even took his side in a disagreement in Naxx25. But Schultz only lasted a few weeks before he moved to another guild, so enough about him.

I spent a few weeks in Deception, happily grouping with guildies for some Heroics and an occasional raid. During a particularly busy week at work, I wasn’t able to log in to WoW for about three days. Upon my return, I discovered that about 50% of the guild had /gquit. Half of the guild bailing in a mass exodus would be troubling enough, but the fact that 90% of the core raiders were involved in the ship-jumping festivities made it difficult to justify remaining in the guild. This was compounded by the fact that the people who I considered friends had all left… all of them.

It took me a few hours to figure out that the majority of the departed players had splintered into two factions. Half of them went on to form The Fraternity, led by one of my closest friends from Deception, Fairchild. The other half were absorbed into… get this… Aegis. Not even kidding. It seemed like a no-brainer to join the ranks of The Fraternity. I enjoyed the company of most of the Deception refugees who landed their. And by “most,” I mean all but one.

When we were all in Deception, a Druid by the name of Kyndris was our #3 healer. As she was the only one of that trio who made the jump to The Fraternity, she became our #1 by default. Unfortunately, her personality type made it dangerous for her to be the top-rated anything in a social environment. She was a prima donna. She was arrogant. And frankly, she wasn’t that good of a healer. It’s not that she couldn’t keep a tank up or kick in her fair share of raid heals. Her problem was that she used zero healing add-ons and overhealed like it was her job. She would always snap back, “I can’t help but overheal.” Her rationale was that she was better-geared than some of our tanks and DPS. Yeah… not kidding.

One night, the gang took a group of some of our relatively new 80’s to run 10-man Ulduar. Kyndris was joined by another healer who was slightly out-geared by her, but much more talented at the mechanics of healing. Clearly, she felt threatened by him. After a wipe that resulted from Kyndris overhealing, generating threat, and quickly going down, the other healer took the opportunity to question her decision to not use add-ons. Given her flawed personality, Kyndris saw the resulting argument as the perfect opportunity to /gkick the healer who was about to overtake her as the guild’s best. My first thought was, “That… just… happened.”

I promptly whispered Fairchild and told him that I was tired of her bullshit and that the recently kicked healer was a bigger asset to the guild than she was. I explained that many others also felt this way and would probably leave if she wasn’t reeled in immediately. The other healer was promptly invited back, but what came next kind of surprised me. Fairchild logged into his other level 80 toon,a Draenei Hunter named Fireaway, and /gquit. Moments later, another good friend was right behind him.

I decided to whisper my old Aegis GM to see how things were shaping up over there. The next day, their recruiting officer, Luminata (who was also a former Deception guildie and has since faction-transferred himself), asked me if I could jump on Vent to see if I would be a good fit with the current generation of the guild. This part of the conversation stands out to me the most:

Luminata: I see that you recently left The Fraternity. Do you still have a good relationship with Fairchild?

Me: Yeah, in fact, Fair is one of the reasons it was difficult for me to leave. You, Fair, and I used to run Ony back when we were barely geared for the fight. Why?

Luminata: He brought his Hunter, Fireaway, over to Aegis yesterday. Just wanted to make sure you guys were on good terms.

All I could think was, “Hell yeah!” I got to escape the irritation of Kyndris, hook up with my old Of Course It Explodes pals, and bring along my best friend from my Deception/Fraternity days. What else could I ask for? Well, maybe a win or two in Wintergrasp. Or not getting five-capped in Arathi Basin. Or considering Alterac Valley a victory when we actually won. It was getting to the point that we considered it a win if we prevented our opponents from knocking out the Alterac Blitz achievement.

I think that brings the story full-circle. Ms. Devv is now a member of Torn Asunder. Some Aegis guildies are still migrating over; others have decided not to make the jump. But I have faith that Kalagrim (formerly the Draenei Kalanar) will rebuild the guild back to the level we’d come to expect in our Alliance days. In the meantime, I’m roflstomping my former brothers in arms in every battleground and Wintergrasp. Devv made the faction change over a week ago and has been extremely active in BG’s every day since. She still hasn’t lost a BG since going Horde. Dead serious. On her first night as a Blood Elf, she ran Alterac Valley five times. Since then, she runs it at least once a day as part of her daily routine. She hasn’t even died in AV, much less lost… not once. For all the time that I “hated” the Horde, it’s amazing how quickly I’ve changed my tune. I’m reminded of a very appropriate line form Casablanca:

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

*Since the time that this was posted, I’ve gone back and updated the header to an image of Devv in her new Horde digs.