For The Horde!

I had my last raid with my previous guild.  Last Thursday (ie one week ago) I made the transfer to horde and my new cataclysm 10man guild.  I decided to do it then as the night before the 25man barely ran and that night had been called.  My new guild were on my case saying "Come raid with us!!".

So, I was torn.  I sat there thinking "I should stay and help my 25s, they need me, they put effort into me" And then I caught myself.  No, I had earned everything I had via DKP, I didn't owe the guild anything for my gear, if anything they owed me at this point.  I had turned up, put up with complaining and bitching.  Put up with a culture I had enjoyed less and less as time went on.  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I was still there staying with a guild that I wasn't overall comfortable with and denying the people who actually wanted to play with me (and not just because of my shiny mace).  RealID meant I had everyone I wanted to keep in touch with on my friends list already and I could talk across faction with them.  There really was no downside to my leaving except personal guilt.  And personal guilt, in this case, was very silly!  So, I said bye to the 11 people online, the 3 people left in my vent channel (not including all the people in passworded channels - I really hate passworded channels) after the 25man failure and hit "continue" on the transfer webpage of my battle.net account.

This is (slightly abridged, but) what I posted to the guild:

This has been coming for some time, you all know what I am going to be saying. I'm not retiring, however.

I am moving early to the 10man guild I am starting horde side. The transfer is currently in process. I was going to see out this raiding week, but given the dogging I decided to add to the shitness and move earlier rather than later. 4 holy paladins last night is not great for raid balance at the best of times, and when one is the goo queen [NER: That's me, I keep getting hit by malleable goo no matter what I do!], it's even more sheeite.

I wanted to say that I have honestly enjoyed my time [here]. It was a big thing for me to do, move to [this guild]. Not sure how many of you will understand how big a deal it was, some might, but there you go.
...

I do feel awful about leaving, but I am a guild leader at heart. I have spent most of my wow time running guilds, and to be honest, I miss it a lot more than I thought I would.

But this is what I am going to be going to do:
(it happens to be horde because people wanted it)
I am running a 10man focussed guild... This guild will be special in that come cataclysm when we start raiding, none of us will research anything. No boss mods, no clues. We will walk in there cold. We will take off our clothes and run into the boss and see what happens.

We want to recapture the magic that we used to have learning new bosses, working together, strategising and NUDIE PULLS! FD pulls with pets, remember them? I do, and I miss that feeling of walking into a new boss and looking around in awe and not knowing what was in store. More and more I feel like raiding is simply going through the motions - everyone knows what to do before we walk in there, you get yelled at if you ask a stupid question.

Here is a guild who has been doing it for a while if you are interested in more information:
http://www.converge-dh.com/website/z...ncetactics.php [NER: Oh for the love of the light, I cant find the post with the comment in it from a guildy of that guild to credit them!!]

Yes, this will mean we are not competing for server firsts, but I don't care about that anymore. For me, there are 2 things to playing wow. The satisfaction of defeating a boss by the skin of my teeth with cunning and luck, and having fun with friends.

For me, 25s progression raiding is not magical anymore. I don't care if I kill LK HM, because that first LK kill we did was everything I could have wanted.

So, that was that.  Mostly I got sarcasm and bitterness from the people who bothered to reply to me (there were a couple of nice answers) which sealed the deal completely for me.

Since that time, I have raided twice in my new guild.  And I never realised that going backward in content could be so much fun.  We were wiping on LDW ICC10 normal (because, despite all my raiding time, I have never killed LK in 10man mode) and I was enjoying it.  People were learning, they were improving, criticism was constructive and people never took it personally.  I got to talk about balls to the face, and horizontal and vertical balls when explaining princes (which was hilarious to all involved).

In short; new guild good, old guild broken.  Looks like I will have things to write about soon enough!