Milestones For the Record Book

You know.. I've been thinking a lot on milestones lately. WoW is just pretty much full of them.

• Each level of course is a Milestone.
• Each class has certain level Milestones.. I know I was excited for Ghostwolf at 20.
• Level 40 (soon to be 30) for the mount.
• Level 60 for epic riding mount
• Level 70 for a bunch of reasons.

There are also some really good guild milestones that for me were special..

• First guild Karazhan run (My first ever as well).
• First T4 passed out (down with Curator!).
• First Prince kill.
• First Nightbane kill.
• First 25 man run.
• First Gruul/Mags etc., kills.

I guess since we have recently formed our new guild, there have been many particularly special to me, since I was very involved in the structure and formation of said guild. We also had a really important one just last night, so this has really been on my brain. I am really excited about it, but I will get to that in a minute.

First I want to talk about some of the Milestones in the new guild, and what has made them special for me.

The first was, obviously, the formation of our guild. As stated above, I had a lot of say, and was able to be a huge driving force in the realm of making it happen. I feel like (and I am sure everyone feels this way about their own guild) I have been a major part in creating a guild that is truely unique. A progression guild that has no DKP, no EP/GP system, and is pretty much based completely on free mainspec roll, then free offspec roll. It's fair, and I believe it shows our guild that we believe largely in consideration, and encourage everyone to make that choice for themselves. I pride myself on how many considerate raiders we have.

The next few are obvious.. Our first raid was special because...well it was our first raid. We went in and one-shot Gruul (not HK though - dang), and we did it in a fairly timely manner, and we did it in 9 grows. Along with this is our first Mag kill, and our first Lurker kill. We one-shot them both in our second week of raiding.

Last night was one of the most important for me, even if it doesn't seem that great. This is the one that has me thinkin'. Last night on 6/30/08, we downed Morogrim Tidewalker. Yeah, not a big deal, but for me it really was. Forget that we got him within our first month of raiding (6/2/08 was our very first raid), and forget that we got him in our 13th (spread across three separate raids) attempt. This one was big for me because it was our first truely "All us" progression.

I am not talking about PuG's though. I am referring to the fact that before we had ever done Gruul, We had (we being the raid/guild leaders) been there before. Same with Mag. Same with Lurker. Unlike those, Tidewalker took hours of poring over strats, stats, and shats (sucky attempts), to come up with a solution that fit our player set. Numerous healing setups and murloc-tank permutations abounded, and we were able to really figure it out, and we did it by ourselves. Obviously we had knowledge of giants to lean on, but it really brought a huge sense of accomplishment to myself (and our whole guild). For them it may not be as special as it was for me, but listening to the cheers and whoops and hollars on vent made me feel really proud.

These are the milestones that really thank you for a thankless job. It makes all the mediating, and recruiting rigamarole really worthwhile. It makes the countless hours administrating the website and moderating forums worthwhile. It makes the sometimes-painful gearing runs all worthwhile. It even makes the extra money spent for the website, vent, and domain hosting worthwhile.

In short, it was super-rad, and it will be hard to beat, but there's a lot more game where that came from, and I am sure the first pieces of T5 that get handed out will be so sweet in their own respect, as well as the first bosskill we get in TK, and beyond!

And even if they never read it, I would like to thank all those in our guild. You work hard, you play hard, and you get the job done. I appreciate all that you do to better your play, to help each other, and to simply rock the house.

-Snos