Guild Pride

So yesterday I spent most of the afternoon running around on my shaman in the Badlands, leveling her, while waiting for the refrigerator to get delivered. Reversion was raiding that evening – the Sunday/Monday night people have the worst luck with tanks and he keeps getting pulled in there – and while I was tempted to play with my DK (more on her later this week), after dinner I looked at guild XP and realized we were at 75%. Of Level 24. The raid would get 5-6 bosses down, no question…. but that wouldn’t get us to 25 that night.

Well, ok, my holy pally needed some gearing runs. So I whispered Repgrind and asked if she was interested. She was. I started asking in guild…. then reached for my phone and called my brother to tank.

We got a full guild group, and drew Vortex Pinnacle. Usually I like how fast that place goes; this time all I could see was the number of bosses we needed to kill to reach max level. Reversion and I compared notes; the ten man raid seemed to be contributing about 2% guild xp per kill, while our 5 man was contributing 1%. That seemed about right.

I wiped us on the final boss in VP when I didn’t cleanse Log’s debuff and left him stuck out in the middle of the electrical attack. Oops. I swear I didn’t see him marked by a debuff…

We came back, killed the boss. I asked for a couple minutes and then another go. We swapped out one dps for another, but Chan stuck around for more on his paladin even though I was rolling against him on offspec gear (both of us are building tank offsets).

Karius swapped for her spriest, and this time we got Blackrock Caverns. We ventured off… cleared the first set of trash, pulled the first boss, and died after too many adds came out and didn’t get dpsed down. Our group was a lot lighter on dps this time, having essentially three undergeared dpsers and an undergeared healer. Log was really carrying most of that group. We went back, discussed, and killed the boss. We proceeded through the instance, carefully pulling trash and paying attention to boss mechanics. No problems on Corla or the forgemaster guy. I suggested very strongly that we skip Beauty, so it was straight on to the end.

Then we paused to discuss who would kite the adds. Initially we decided to let the ret pally try. We set up, pulled, and gave it a good try, but the boss didn’t die and I went OOM. Came back, Repgrind offered to try kiting in her holy spec and throw down Lightwell to help with the healing. I liked that plan, so we gave it a try, but she couldn’t hold aggro against the DK tossing around Blood Boil. We came back again, no luck. Came back the fourth time, asked everyone to be really careful not to AOE, and this time, the boss died.

And…. the guild was at 94% XP.

Time to queue one more time, even though we were tired and Log was supposed to be studying for a test. This time we got Deadmines. Rep had switched back to her mage and Chan swapped for his boomkin so we could blow through this place. Meanwhile the raid was making great time on bosses and there was another full guild group running. Yes!

Our guildmaster signed on, first time I’d seen him all weekend, and someone told him to look at guild XP. He cheered for us.

We downed the first two bosses in Deadmines and were working on the third as the raid group went to Four Winds for a quick Council kill. Then this happened.

So when we wiped, we called it, and I logged onto Analogue to join the lion buying fest.

There were half a dozen or so of us outside the guild vendor store, so we decided on a parade!

We had lots of curious bystanders looking at us, dive bombing us, trying to join the parade on their lesser mounts, etc.

We’re not the first guild to 25 on our server but there’s maybe three others. Might only be one Alliance side, we’re not sure. So these lions aren’t common yet.

After parading slowly all through SW, we went outside for pictures

(We had people trying to interfere with our screen shots, hence the bad angle)

Quite a few folk in guild were on but couldn’t join because none of their toons have the rep with the guild. Including out GM!  Ooops. And yes, 1300 for these mounts is a bit silly but they are pretty darn cool looking and for guild pride, you can’t beat lions.

We’ve been in Crits and Giggles for about 8 months now and I’m so glad we came over. It’s a blast, whether we’re raiding or just parading around SW.