The Road to Sisters of Elune

Here's a little background on me and how I came to SoE.

I started playing WoW the last week it was in beta and have been a constant player ever since. I first rolled on Argent Dawn with a small group of friends. I was the guild leader of our little guild 'A Herd of One'. As a small guild, we pretty much ran out of content that we could do, including playing several characters to 60. Our big claim to fame was running Scholomance in a 5 man group when most people were running it with ten. We were not a very advanced as a guild, but we had fun. When Rags was killed on our server the first time, I had no real concept of what that entailed nor had I ever been in MC. The prospects of getting into a raiding guild on AD with all my friends were slim, and getting into a raiding guild solo as a rogue would also have been tough due to the number of rogues on the server.

Around Christmas, the queues on Argent Dawn starting getting really bad (over 45 minutes). I decided to roll an Alliance toon on a brand new server, Vek'Nilash, which opened Jan 2nd, 2006 to get out of the queues and start from scratch.

On Vek'Nilash, created a warrior named Jamison. The first guild I joined was one of the first created on the server as well as one of the bigger ones. The people were ok, but it obviously wasn't going to make it far in raiding due to lack of leadership and completely open recruiting. It was way too early to worry about raiding anyway, as nobody on the server was over level 10 when I joined. By the time I hit level 40, I decided to find a different guild which had more prospects for higher end content. The most promising was 'You and Who's Army', but they really weren't looking for warriors. I rerolled a lock named Kianda and got into the guild where I stayed all the way to 60 and even became an officer. We couldn't didn't quite have enough to raid Molten Core, though. We even tried merging with another guild to get enough people, but that didn't work out for various reasons. The merger was my last hope for the guild to be able to hit MC. It failed, and, with no hope of real progression after that, I quit the guild and got into the most progressed guild on the server, 'Decerto', who had cleared Zul'Gurub and all the way through MC up to Domo (all server firsts).

'Decerto' was the best move I made. I learned a lot from that guild. We had tons more server firsts, including Domo, Rags all of BWL, all of AQ20, Satura, 3 bugs, Krinaxx (sp), and Huhuran, and we were the first original guild on the server to take down the Twin Emps. Also, we were told by a GM that we were the fastest guild across all servers to open the gates to AQ.'Decerto' went from starting on a brand new server to taking down the Twin Emps in 7 months, with a majority of their members never having raided before.

Less then a week after we opened the gates to AQ, server transfers were enabled to Vek'Nilash. As a newer server, Vek had a lower population and short BG queues. This was a time when high population servers were reeling under the weight of huge player bases, experiencing huge lage spikes and crashes aplenty. Several high end guilds transfer to Vek'nilash. Some of our better players decided loot was easier to get by joining these guilds that were further along then us. Other players were getting burnt out and, after loosing a few too many top players, the officers decided to /disband. It was rather fitting that the last boss we killed as a guild was Vek'Nilash in AQ40. For more info on 'Decerto', click here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Guild:Decerto_(Misha_US)

While I was still in 'Decerto', my friends on Argent Dawn hooked up with 'Circle of Fear'. 'CoF' had been raiding MC for a long time, but was still struggling with Domo. I joined them, and became an officer with 'CoF' because of my raiding experience and being the guild leader of my old guild. It was easier then it sounds to be part of two raiding guilds as our schedules worked out almost perfectly. 'Decerto' did it's new content raids Fri-Sunday while 'CoF' raids M-W. When 'Decerto' broke up, I came back to Argent Dawn full time so I could play with my friends.

I wish I could say my raid experience from my Alliance character paid off and that I was able to bring a lot of what I learned to 'CoF', but in fact, it didn't work out that way. We didn't make a ton of progress on AD. We did manage to take down Onyxia, Ragnoros and finish off ZG, but never took down any bosses in BWL, AQ40 or Naxx, although we took a few attepts. I would have to say this is mainly due to poor/inconsistant raid attendance.

With the expansion coming up, and queue times on AD building up again, me and a few friends decided it was time to jump ship and start over. Blizzard opened up free transfers to a new server, Sisters of Elune. On the same day we decided this, in a completely unrealated incident, several other players decided to leave 'CoF'. They came over to Sisters of Elune to try out our new guild we were making, and 'Bloodmoon Rising' was born.

I had already decided to roll a paladin because I had a much better understanding of how powerful the paladin buffs were and how much they would be needed. The fact that Blizzard was trying to make paladin tanks viable was icing on the cake.