New beginnings

I've left out blogging for some time now and it appears that it's time I come back. Alot of things have happened that led to my discouragement with the game and taking a break from blogging. Fortunately, things are taking a turn for the better. The game is starting to get interesting again even though Cataclysm isn't given a release date. And my interest in blogging has been resurrected by reading The Big Bear Butt blog. Upon reading TBBB, I realize that writing a personal blog has more to do with just having fun telling stories about myself and other adventures than progression in a game. While I'll still talk about some progression (because in the end it's hard not to, especially after achieving some feat requiring a team effort), I will leave the progression talk to the event and not so much about who sucked and who rose to the occassion.

But back to the main point of beginning anew.

First, let's start with a brief background on what's been going on. First, we had some core raiders drop to an inactive status and at this point we're not sure if or when they're coming back. Our guild is pretty casual in that we have alot more invested in our personal lives than making it on the game every night. For me personally, I have a child with special needs and somedays he tends to be "more special" in his needs than other days. So we had some people go inactive because of kids, vacations, job changes, school changes, and other changes that I don't have room to list here.

Second, the departure of one particular player pushed me into the role of a tank aside from my prime healing duties. So in filling out my tanking gear, I found that I can be a viable third/backup tank. Of course this caused a problem in that I wasn't expecting to enjoy tanking as much as I did. Matter of fact, I liked it so much that I was looking forward to tanking more than healing. I know that's a good thing, but I'm a much better geared and skilled healer than tank. So while I may not get many chances to tank in a raid of the final days of Wrath, I'm going to carry the enthusiasm over to Cataclysm.

Thirdly our server, Altar of Storms (AOS), has been the worst place to fill out a 10 man raid. Once Blizzard implemented faction transfers, the Alliance on AOS was doomed. The current ratio is 1 Alliance to 3 Horde. I know it's probably worse on other servers, but then again AOS has a registered player base of less than 7k people. So your chances of running into a horde on AOS is VERY likely.
As for raiding and PVP on the server, there's only one consistent 25 man Alliance raiding guild left and about 4 - 10 man guilds. And only 2 of which have gotten Kingslayer. So pugging a 10 man raid is just a nightmare and takes up to 30-40 minutes to find someone without a raid ID. As for PVP, it's not uncommon to zone into Wintergrasp and see a tenacity greater than 8. NUFF SAID.
Therefore, the remaining active players in our guild had a vent meeting last Sunday to finalize plans for us to transfer servers. We decided a server with a higher population and better Alliance ratio was needed. I for one am pretty happy. We can finish out the Lich King and after Cataclysm is released, we can level in peace without getting ganked every 5 minutes.