Welcome to SR’s Weekly (Insert Raid Instance): Part 1 (A History)

Well, we all know that my blog updates are about as sporadic as a monkey fucking a football, so having not done one in a few…weeks or so, I don’t guess you will be too surprised. Delerius posed several questions to the raiding community. Some people, including Slice and Zarigar, have already wrote up some fine responses. This is not their response but my feeble attempt at trying to give you history of myself and answers his questions. This will be a two part series.

Story time

Ok, boys and girls, gather around the bonfire as I tell you the story of Tirael, a simple man who was just looking for a new game to play.

Tirael started out as Human Warrior named Paleteal on the US-Feathermoon and a Blood Elf Priest named Naerityah on US-Burning Blade servers back in October 2006. Many of my friends were already playing, so I decided to pick it up and give it a try. I had fun leveling Pale up to 60 and running a few things with her, like BWL and MC. Naerityah didn’t get much love and only made it to level 27. Well, along came this thing called an “expansion” called “The Burning Crusade”. I picked that up and went the 10 levels to 70. Holy hell. Kara and badges and Gruul’s/Mag’s..oh my. The guild I was in made it to RoS in BT before the nerf heard round the world came in and made Illidan a flaccid version of his once great self.

Naerityah stayed at 27 as this was around the time of the birth of the twinks and you guessed it..she was my twink. I would go in and heal BGs as disc until the late hours of the night. It was so much fun to have a healer. However, I never planned on playing her at max level. She was my “escape from the guild/raid toon” character. Plus, I said that I would never have more than one max level toon. This was because I can become OCD about being able to perform all specs of the classes I play. I tend to do my level best to get enough gear to make at least two of my class roles viable. I had done this with Pale in getting her a Prot and Fury set. Yes kids, this was before dual specs…I know rough times. We had to pay for respects EVERY time we were needed for a different role. Pale’s was capped (at 50g) through most of BC. I did not have this desire for Naerityah at the time.

Then along came this thing called “Wrath of the Lich King”. Hoo boy, Death Knights. Having played my warrior for 3 years by this time, I was ready for a break. Warriors had followed pretty much the same model from the beginning (Get hit, gain rage, tank or Hit shit, gain rage, blow shit up and die thanks to craptastic threat reduction talents that still haven’t gotten any fucking better…/seethe) and I didn’t see any great and new and exciting changes on the horizon with WotLK. So, I decided to level a Death Knight.

Now, I was a big Diablo and Diablo 2 fan. Played in the East Coast Ladder. Had a level 93 Paladin, level 89 Sorc and a 89 Assassin. Remember Tyrael from Act IV? Pandemonium Fortress. Let’s just say I spent a lot of time there. Well, that is how I got my online alias (Tirael) and my DKs first name, who was a Night Elf named Tirael on the US-Feathermoon server. I leveled him with all the intentions of being a tank (duh, I picked a night elf). Of course, I had to have a viable offspec, so I picked a frost tank build. Started him out as blood, then DW frost back when it was OP a little over a year ago. Raided through Naxx/OS/EoE and such. It was fun just blowing shit up on him and much different from the smash-three-buttons-then-break-your-fucking-finger-on-the-damned-heroic-strike-hotkey style of dps that was (and still is) being a fury warrior. Tanking was also much more fun (because DKs were OP) because AoE tanking was lol easy and Patchwerk just can’t hit a mother fucker hard enough when he has 50% damage reduction every minute, 25% more armor every minute and 25% miss chance every minute.

Well it was around this time, that I started noticing a trend. Tanks were SUCKING. “Suck” isn’t the correct word for it…”completely fucking horrible” is the best to describe it. Paladins and druids were OP out the gate in WotLK, but Warriors were still trucking along as always, with some minor (Read: Completely fucking class changing ZOMG OP as fuck for a warrior) skill and talent change that made their AoE tanking playtyle a little (Read: LOLOLOLOLcompletely fucking ridiculously easy) more manageable. Thunder Clap was changed so that it could hit any target within a 10 yard range, Shockwave…frontal cone stun that does damage based of a high coefficeint of ap-to-damage of fucking awesomeness…, Damage Shield, and the ability to pick up Deep Wounds (on crit, applies a bleed affect to the target) in our Prot specs. Well, I guess these fucktards I was running into didn’t get the fucking memo (Read: Looked at 3.1 patch notes) and just needed to l2play.

I thought to myself, “I’ll show these idiots.” Then I remembered tenant number one of the laws that govern Tirael in MMOs, as spoken to me at the time by my inner gamer:

1) Thou shalt not have but one max level toon at a time, lest ye forefit thine other max level toon first.

….I told my inner gamer to go play fucking Hello Kitty Adventure Island (HKAI: 2 wasn’t released yet) and that I was leveling my fucking warrior. Internal conflicts aside, I leveled my warrior to 80. At this time, an old hunter friend that I raided BT with in BC leveled a prot paladin. Now, he knew how long I had been playing and how long I had been tanking for a good while, so he would ask me about gear choices and whatnot. How do I pull X mob? What do I do in Y situation? What happens if I pull X, then Y happens, then B and C healer dies while A/D/E healer is at 25%% mana and Z boss is at 50% hp and I have 36% hp and 5 of our 18 dps are dead and shit has JUST REALLY HIT THE FUCKING FAN????!!!! Oh, what do you think of this shield? >.<

Well, I finished leveling Paleteal to 80. Left my BC raiding guild (who had decided to go a different direction other than raiding, more on this later) and joined my buddy (who had made it to 80 long before I decided to level Pale). Joined the guild he had started up with some old raiding buddies and went to work getting gear. This was around the time Ulduar was released. I became the OT for that guild. We were tied for 3rd in Ulduar progression on our server, stuck on Mimron. Got him down pre-nerf and was still stuck on General. In 25s, we had made it up to Mimron. At the same time, and in another more casual guild, Tirael was trucking along and getting just up to Hodir. Well, around this time, due to a lot of drama (real life and guild) Pale's guild circled the drain. My buddy left the server for greener pastures and the rest of us kind of went our seperate ways. To Anariel/Seyonne/Akulut/Ace/Tuna, if you are reading this, I look forward to one day seeing you guys on Drak'Tharon (Horde side, of course) so we can tear some shit up again. Of course, my buddy is in a top 100 US guild now as their MT, so I doubt I will see him in my neck of the woods again, but one can dream, lol.

Also, around this time I left WoW for three months to prepare for the arrival of my son. When I came back, I moved my toons to a new server, and a new faction…FOR THE HORDE!! I joined up with some friends from an internet forum that I frequent, and started grinding out some emblems in ToC for both Tir and Pale. Little old Naer still sat on her original server, collecting dust due to the death of the twinks (/sad panda). Well, as you all know, Tir eventually ended up in Shadow Rising on US-Drak'Tharon (first time) thanks to a recruiting post over on Arioch’s Blog. We had some fun times, but at the time, due to some personal reasons I have covered before (no link, if you want to know, it is here somewhere *makes futile attempt at shuffling papers to find said post*), I decided to make my way back over to Pale’s server, US-Mal’Ganis. It was great, had some fun times with the people there, but more often than not, I was PuG’ing raids. That was fine, except when I had to deal with the stupidity that the internet brings out in people.

This gives me a segue into where I am now. I now have three toons (go fuck yourself little gamer, go play the new and improved Hello Kitty Adventure Island 2: Rainbow Kisses and Bubblegum Dreams expansion) at level 80 and all are on the US-Drak’Tharon server: Paleteal – Prot/Fury, Tiryal – Unholy PvE DPS/Frost Tank, and Naerityah – Disc PvE/Shadow PvE. Shadow Rising, like a faithful girlfriend who still loves you after you looked elsewhere for love, took me back (thanks again guys). All my toons have MS and OS gear viable for any ICC 25 raid I go into (Ok, little gamer voice, you were right….BUT YOU WILL STILL PLAY HKAI 2: RKaBD and LIKE IT). Now that you understand where I came from, maybe I can attempt to answer Del’s questions…..