WoWGrrl's World

One thing that was really difficult for me in deciding to join the Raiding World and in specific, an actual Raiding Guild was the fact that I felt like I was leaving my friends behind.

When I first got into Heroics in Burning Crusade, none of my friends were anywhere near geared well enough to join me, nor did they (yet) have the intestinal fortitude to work towards it as a goal.

When I first ventured into raiding, I tried to keep it casual and non-committal by staying in my social friends guild, but the playstyle and playing interest chasm grew and grew until I knew I had to make a change and take my chances on my social circles completely changing around me.

So, while my friends were still leveling up lowbies to max level and then switching to the next lowbie to level up to max level, I took my best-geared character and entered into my very first raiding guild. I left my non-raiding alts in the social friends guild, and life on World of Warcraft shifted just a little bit for me.

Relief From Frustration

The first day I was in my new guild with my Frost Mage, I got into my first Heroics-romping party.

You know - those parties where the group is so good and so fun and so quick that you romp through five heroics in no time and nobody finds (or gives someone else) an excuse to bug out!

Keep in mind, before this point I had been doing Heroics for two months, but I had been forced to PUG all of my Heroics because I didn't have a guild of Heroics-inclined players to draw from. And anyone who does PUGs knows how rare it is to find a Heroics-romping party via the LFG tool.

Having my first day be marked by being invited into this awesome Heroics-romping team certainly helped ease the guilt of transitioning to Raider status before any of my friends showed similar interests.

In fact, it was a huge relief to be amongst players who were excited at to continue advancing their favorite toon further in the game than just hitting the level cap.

Relief Turns To Joy

In the days and weeks that followed, I discovered that some of the very same things that my social leveling guild friends and I had long agreed upon as the road to success in World of Warcraft were valuable in a raiding guild as well.

Like how my friends and I valued the Fishing secondary profession - having discovered early in the pre-BC days that some pretty expensive things could be fished up. Expensive things that could either reduce the costs of advancing our professions ourselves, or could earn us a profit by selling to others who were advancing THEIR professions.

Or the value of Alchemy for its Elixirs and Cooking for its Buff foods in terms of lasting just a little bit longer in a fight, or outright surviving a fight we would have definitely died to. Even as a leveling lowbie we had learned that elixirs and buff foods often meant the difference between a graveyard run and VICTORY, squeaking by and using a bandage afterwards while hoping to hell for no more aggro.

Or of course, the value of enchanting one's gear. For a leveling lowbie, enchants are the one thing that can make leveling super easy, after all - especially if you're putting on enchants that were originally designed for use by players 30-50 levels above the lowbie.

These opinions my WoW leveling enthusiast friends and I had developed on our own during our play time together were finally coming together in a way that paid big dividends for me.

The Dividends That Stepping Into Raiding Give

The main "dividend" that was "paid" to me for finally making the painful decision to leave my friendly social leveling guild to make the leap into my first raiding guild was this:

No longer was I one of the most knowledgable players in the group.

Now, you might not think this is a benefit initially (depending on the size of your epeen... I mean, ego) but look at it this way: If you're always amongst the best, what impetus is there to improve?

Another big dividend I got out of making the switch was that I finally got to get into a semi-organized team that didn't require a lot of MY time to put together. For the first time I could just sit back and do MY job and not worry about making sure there were people to fill out other jobs.

After all, I had tried in my previous social guild to motivate and encourage and organize the guild I enjoyed so much to try to "make it work" with them, but short of recruiting a bunch of people who weren't my friends (and thus negating the whole reason I wanted to stay in my social guild) it just wasn't going to happen, there wasn't enough interest.

The combination of these two dividend factors felt like JOY inside of me. Excitement for the game, for exploring, for improving and for learning.

I had been pretty frustrated before the transition, looking back on it now - but I guess frustration is just a form of discomfort that lets us know it's time to make a change in our lives!

Raiding With Friends Over Time

There is a happy ending to the story of my transition from a Social Leveling guild to my first Raiding Guild (which I was a member of for 4 months) and then now to my second Raiding Guild that I've called home for nearly a year.

Namely, a lot of those friends who used to be too scared to run Heroics in Burning Crusade finally did get into the whole Heroics and Raiding scene the summer before Wrath of the Lich King released. Some were bit by the raiding bug harder than others, but in general now, it's easy to find a friend to bring along to some raid PUG that is forming, because even my friends who don't hit a raid every week are well-geared from professions and Heroics badges and Enchanting and Jewelcrafting.

The One Thing I Like To Do For My Friends

There were a few of us in my friendly social leveling guild who played together for years before deciding to move to a raiding guild, but many who still remain in that social leveling guild.

Those of us who "got out" (so to speak, not like it's hard to /gquit) haven't forgotten our friends, however, and it brings us great joy to be able to bring our friends along to great raid and Heroics groups - to see them get gear upgrades and see their play abilities improve over time, and to hear them talk about the adventures with the rest of the social leveling guild folk afterwards.

Sure, these social guild friends are NEVER invited into our Official Guild Raids, but alt runs and raid instances our guild is no longer running are plentiful and generally what our social guild friends are more "in line" with anyway.

So yes, it took a while to get to this place I'm at, but it's been worth the wait and worth the journey for me, and I hope, for my friends who get to join in on fun runs they normally wouldn't have felt comfortable joining on their own.

After all, as I was aiming for in the beginning, it's a heck of a lot of fun to raid or run Heroics with someone you consider a Friend and not just some random acquaintence or complete stranger.

And isn't a large part of what makes World of Warcraft great the people and the social interactions involved?

I think so :)

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Related posts:

1. Why My Raiding Guild Rocks, Part II
2. How To Get Into PUG Raids Without An Achievement
3. Why My Raiding Guild Rocks, Part One

Tagged as: eye of eternity, heroics, joining a raiding guild, malygos, naxxramas, new to raiding, obsidian sanctum, Raiding, raiding with friends, sartharion, vault of archavon