28/08/2020

Recruited

Classic WoW has made me think about guilds a lot: what I value about them, when I want to be in one vs. when I don't and why. I mentioned that I felt somewhat lonely after being kicked from my Horde guild for inactivity after two weeks of not logging in, despite of only ever having had quite limited interactions with the people there. While I know this isn't necessarily the modus operandi for most guilds, I still wasn't sure whether I even wanted to join another guild at all. More recently I started mulling over the idea of maybe trying to find a casual guild with people interested in doing five-mans, since I still feel I know way too little about so many of the Classic endgame dungeons.

One morning I was standing at the Ironforge auction house with the intent to just re-list some expired auctions before work, when someone whispered me to ask if I was an alt of someone with a similar name. I politely replied that I wasn't. The other person (who I realised was a paladin in Judgement gear actually standing next to me) proceeded to ask why I wasn't in a guild. I answered truthfully that my last guild on another server had kicked me for inactivity after two weeks and I wasn't sure I wanted to get invested again just yet.

Next thing I knew we were chatting about his guild and mere minutes later I had accepted a guild invite. I briefly responded to the friendly welcome messages in guild chat before politely bowing out since I had to log off for work. All I could think was: What the hell just happened?

Contrary to my earlier considerations, "Order of the Holy Fork" is another raiding guild, if casual. In hindsight, I think the recruiter might have been looking to recruit me as a raider (all that ZG gear probably made me look way more competent than I actually am), though I was happily accepted as a social member instead. The thing that sold me was that he described their approach to raiding as "not going for speed runs or anything like that; it's more about having fun. I mean, look at me: I'm a holy paladin in full plate!"

I soon got my paladin alt invited too, but then wondered how I was going to make myself feel at home in a raiding guild - again - without actually being a raider. I figured that since I had been actively recruited, they might at least be a bit more interested in playing with me than the Horde guild had been, where I had been "that person that got invited because her friend was a new recruit but then her friend quit and she just stuck around despite of not knowing anyone".

One thing that came to my aid was the fact that the chatter in guild and on the guild's Discord was all about farming elite silithids to help a member of the guild become a Scarab Lord. That sounded like something I should be able to help with even as a casual member. I asked how the whole thing worked and there was some amusing confusion as I was told that I "needed to get the item from Damaazz" and I kept trying to find an NPC with that name until I realised it was another player, namely the prospective Scarab Lord. After I had been deputised to collect silithid carapace fragments, I joined farming groups for two evenings that week. My contributions weren't great (not least because I kept getting horribly distracted wanting to skin all the things) but my willingness to immediately make myself useful seemed to be well-received.

A few days later the required amount of silithid fragments had been achieved and now the prospective Scarab Lord needed help with other tasks. I missed out on the farming of demons in the Blasted Lands but managed to join in for the same thing happening in Winterspring just in time to see the item drop.

What next? Damaazz said that he didn't think we had enough people to try the world boss he needed, but that we could go raid Undercity instead. I thought he was joking until people started seriously talking about how to best get there and I realised he actually needed to steal an item from there for his quest as well. Oh, those Vanilla quest designers!

We flew up to the Western Plaguelands and rode up to the Undercity sewers where we assembled like some sort of guerilla strike team. I had joined their Discord voice chat to make sure I didn't miss anything, and just as we started to ride in someone put on the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now - it was so absurd that I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes and recorded the whole thing (my laughing not included):

The mission was very successful in that we were in and out in less than five minutes and nobody died, though thanks to an overzealous mage we ended up with four dishonourable kills (a mark you get for killing low-level civilian NPCs and that affects you negatively if you want to rank up in PvP). On a PvP server that kind of thing would have caused some serious drama I think, but as it was people just jokingly agonised about the awfulness of their characters having killed innocent civilians. (RP server, remember.)

At this point we had a couple more people join in and decided to try the world boss on Alcaz Island after all. I had never been there in Vanilla and it was another interesting experience. We wiped once as there was an issue with the tank swapping, but got him down on the second try, though it was still a bit of a close call. I even got to make myself useful by using Scare Beast on one of the druid tanks when he got mind-controlled.

I missed out on the quest steps that involved actual raiding, but was back in business when it came to helping out with farming elite dragonkin around the Emerald Dream portals in Ashenvale and Hinterlands. I never knew those buggers had such insane amounts of health! We got lucky and got the drops in both areas pretty quickly, which delighted the guild mistress a great deal as she claimed that other guilds had supposedly spent whole days farming these without getting anywhere.

Finally I managed to snag a summon just in time to join in the fight against Eranikus himself in Moonglade, which is apparently quite an event and involved us teaming up with another guild for mutual benefit. The funniest thing about that was some random person walking in - with all the RP going on and shades spawning everywhere - and exclaimed something like: "I just wanted to hand in a quest! What the hell did I just walk into?", followed by frantic attempts by some people to quickly shoo them to safety (not entirely for altruistic reasons, as people dying during the event apparently empower the enemy).

With that Damaazz acquired everything he needs to ring the gong when the gates are ready to open. It's all been a bit of a whirlwind, joining a guild completely out of the blue and immediately getting roped into the grand adventure of making someone a Scarab Lord. I'm not complaining though.

2 comments:

  1. I have no idea how I missed this the first go around, Shintar, so I'm taking advantage of it now.

    All I could think was: What the hell just happened?

    Yeah, I have SO been there. As in even "this happened just last night" sort of been there. It's... I don't know how it's happened here in Classic as opposed to other MMOs (even retail), but it does.

    I really am glad that you found a home, however. I'm happy with my social guild of a couple of people, because I'm kind of a semi-member of at least a couple of other guilds, enough so that they opened up some of the more restricted areas of their Discord. In AQ40 last night, one of the guildies there (who I knew even before he joined that guild) kept teasing me with repeated whisperings of "You are one of us".

    If you'd have told me all this back in February, I'd not have believed you.

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    1. I wouldn't have believed myself, haha! The social aspect of Classic can be quite a whirlwind if you let it.

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