Guild Angst

Well, it's been a while since my last post, primarily because I was in Walt Disney World with my family all of last week and my wife conveniently positioned our 21 month old's porta-crib right next to the only internet jack in our room so that I wouldn't be able to play WoW in the evenings after the kids went to bed. It is supposed to be a vacation after all.

I did end up having an extremely productive WoW weekend though. I ended up chain running about 10 heroics with my resto druid without any problems at all. I'm still geared mostly in PvP stuff, but did manage to get enough badges for a new Emblem of Conquest neck piece and a new idol. Also got the Superior achievement which was nice.

I also tanked my first heroic on my Death Knight. After looking for two weeks, I was finally able to find a Titanium Earthguard Chain on the Auction House, which was enough to get me defense capped for heroics. I ended up doing the daily, which was Gundrak. It ended up going fine. We had a few deaths, but mostly from some of the standard mistakes - standing too close to the Poison Nova - that type of stuff.

All the heroics that I ran on my tank and healer over the weekend were PUG's. Can you believe that? And they were great. I had one group that we did around 4 with that was a particularly good group. Their dps was frankly not particularly good and so the runs weren't as fast as they could have been - but it was still a lot of fun. It of course helped that I was healing and my son was tanking sitting right next to me, which made the communication easy - and pugging dps is pretty easy. It gives me hope for the new LFG tool in patch 3.3.

I also did a little bit of leveling on my alts. My hunter is now sitting at level 66 - only two more levels until Northrend! I played a little bit on almost all of the other alts, but didn't really seem to make any significant leveling progress on any of them - just tinkering around mostly.

I'm really struggling with what I want in a guild. The guild that my three level 80's are in is a top level raiding guild on our server. It's really very interesting being part of a guild like that, seeing how they work and how they think. I'm not a raider - but it's still interesting seeing how that whole part of the endgame works. Those folks are just so focused on maxing out every possible stat on their toons, they spend a lot of time and gold to do it and I feel like a learn a lot just watching them. Plus, it's just nice to sport that guild tag.

But I don't really end up doing much with the guild. They raid three nights a week at times that I can't ever make - and even if I could, they're down to doing just 25 man ToC hard modes, which I'm not even remotely geared for on any of my toons. They don't really do much in the way of heroics either because no one in the guild needs any badge gear anymore.

Also, the raiding guild that I'm in doesn't really have much in the way of altoholics in the guild. It's almost all level 80's, so I'd feel pretty out of place asking to have a bunch of lower level toons invited. I really feel like it would be good if I could find a guild that did some casual raiding, but also had a lot of lower level alts and leveling toons, but not sure if such a thing exists on my server. My old guild was like that before it disbanded and merged with another guild, but after deciding to not go with the merger, it would feel strange to go back there. It would just be really nice to have all of my toons in the same guild, so that I could do my alt leveling thing, but then when people were looking for folks to run heroics, I could do a quick toon hop.

Of course the other thing that I ask myself is why I don't focus exclusively on leveling. I enjoy running heroics, but I'm not sure why I'm doing it. I like getting new gear, just like anyone, but it's not like I need it. I'm not going to be raiding, so it's really not all the important for me to have those fancy pieces of T9 gear. And I can generally find groups to run instances while leveling just as easily as I can for heroics - and it continues my leveling progress while doing it. Plus, I think it would be really satisfying to have all 8 of my alts nicely planted at 80 before Cataclysm drops so I can run all of them to 85 and then level my shiny new Goblin warrior and Worgen rogue through all the new low level content.

Finally, I also decided to finish going for Crusader on my main. I just really want to get those BoA chest pieces for leveling my alts, and I'm really very close to having it - should just take about two more weeks.

I promise to stop whining about my "what game to I want to play" angst any day now.