Joining The Guild – The Climb #651

Friday 4^th December 2020

I’m in a guild again!

Some time back in October some of my old raiding buddies from 8 years back got in touch. They saw I was playing a lot of Warcraft and now streaming and said I should join them.

Back in Warlords of Dreanor my old guild decide to server swap and faction change. Whilst I had created a number of characters on various servers, by this time I had consolidated them on our Horde server. A couple date back to Vanilla and I know from transferring my Dwarf Hunter to a Goblin during Cataclysm, I was a little attached to them and their look. Plus for my main, the name wouldn’t work and would likely be taken on the new alliance server.

I opted to create and level a new character rather than transfer, and I’m glad I did. Our raiding sort of fell apart during that expansion. I really wasn’t feeling the Alliance and, like many, I drifted off for a time.

I found myself going back to my 3 horde and ended up solely playing them, soloing old dungeon and raid content an expansion or so later.

But I really had fun raiding. And I do miss it. They were crazy times, in the best of ways.

As a result, when my friend said I should level a character on their server and join them for Shadowlands raiding I decided why not. I was already leveling a bunch of characters and I was interested in seeing the Alliance story in BFA.

As the weeks have gone on, I’ve got a little worried. I never got a guild invite and I wondered if I was leveling for nothing. Yet, at the same time, I realised I was one of the people (but not the only one) who walked away during Warlords. Maybe there was trust to be earned.

Leveling and gearing my new Alliance Demon hunter became part of my pre-patch plans, and when it came to Shadowlands launch my plan was always to speed level them in the first week, right after I leveled my Horde main.

I’ve done that, and whilst I’ve not really done any dungeons with them I have geared them up somewhat through world quests.

But today the guild invite came through and I’m both excited and apprehensive. This is a new guild where I know only a couple of people. So there are new social interactions to be had, and frankly – after this year – that kinda feels weird.

Then I realise I need to put a big effort into gearing. I’m playing a class I’ve never raided with before. Even with the Demon hunter on my Horde server, I one button macro it. Have I learnt enough over the last couple of months to not only play the class, but play it to a standard where I’m not letting the raid team down?

I feel I have something to prove, and whilst the level of anxiety is nowhere near that of running a random dungeon with group finder, I’ve remembered why I don’t always like playing DPS. It can become a pissing match, and I’ve run dungeons on some of my alts only to have people complain about my lack of DPS. At least players argue with tanks less, even if they do have greater responsibility.

It means that I really do need to focus on leveling my gear. Raiding starts in just over a week which should be enough time, but I can’t afford to put off running dungeons.

Even with these fears, I’m excited. Raiding is a bunch of fun and with swordfighting likely to be off the cards until summer at least, doing some sort of group activity that’s safe has really been missing from my year.

And whilst the thought of having to run dungeons gives me unreasonable levels of anxiety, I’ve had the biggest smile on my face today since I joined the guild. I can’t wait to get started on the first boss.