Let me explain.

… no, there is too much.  Let me sum up:

An event occurred, hereafter referred to as [Guild Drama].  I will not go into all the details here, only that:

1. The drama actually took place outside of the game, so it’s not one of those “I didn’t get into the raid” or “Someone else got the gear I wanted” scenarios.  I don’t raid often, and gear drops more than once.  I won’t cry about either of those things.

2. The number of involved parties is very small.  3-4 people small, including me.  One of those involved has never touched Warcraft ever.

3. I tried just living with it for quite some time before I snapped.  Up until that point I remained amicable and even friendly with the GM.  At this point however it takes a lot of strength just to not hate him for his betrayal.  He knows this, he may even be sorry about it, but I’m not sure I can trust him any more.

4. The issue was severe enough for me to sever as many ties as possible with the Guild Master of that guild – someone who before now I considered to be a real life friend.  I feel somewhat bad about the good members of that guild who had nothing to do with the [Guild Drama], but I really don’t want to associate with that GM any more.

So now what?
I had previously been really into this guild – enough so that my wife, sister, and a friend from college all joined as well.   The wife and friend both paid to transfer characters in from another server.

There is another guild that I have recently joined.  It was once a lowly bank alt guild for the college friend but has since grown due to previous unrelated reasons.  Alas, Star Wars: The Old Republic has lured many of those members away.  I’ll admit I don’t have an abundance of time available for video games, but usually I am the only guild member online when I do play.

I have considered going back to Cognitive Dissonance.  They’re a great guild full of fellow teachers, but they’re on a totally different server.  I would either have to server transfer, reroll, or pick up one of my lowbie abandoned alts over there.  However, do that then I am abandoning my friends and family that actually came to this server to play with me.

I feel compelled to make a choice, but there seems to really be no good solution here.  I can either continue to deal with the [Guild Drama] for the sake of others, or potentially hurt the feelings of unrelated parties because I didn’t want to deal with it any more.

Until then, I’m mostly just playing solo in a MMORPG – and that gets old fast.

Recorded for All Things Azeroth.  It makes more sense if you listen to that podcast.

Crashbang Sings 12 Days of Winter's Veil [ 4:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Those of you who follow my main blog know I’ve been experimenting with Minecraft.  I now have a server to play with.  Expect more soon.

The school year has commenced, and with it has come an end to my slightly-less-than-unlimited time to play Warcraft.  I will continue to use this blog to post thoughts and experiences I have concerning games and education, but as academics come before leisure those posts will most likely be few and far between.

This is not an end, merely a hiatus.

Apologies for not blogging more often, but since this is a “WoW blog” and I’ve been distracted of late (Including but not limited to TWO road trips out of state in the recent past.) I haven’t been gathering much content to go here.

Oh, but I made a warrior.  Keeping with the trend of old family names, I call him Montgomry.

My intentions for creating a warrior, like many before me, was to play as a tank in instances.  What brought THAT on was an increasing occurrence of utterly horrible tanks in the instances I encountered.

For the uninitiated, a “tank’s” job is to be the guy (or girl) who all the monsters are trying to kill while the rest of the players are either trying to kill the monsters or heal the players.  To keep the other players from getting attacked, the tank will do the in-game equivalent of jumping up and down and saying mean things about the monsters’ mothers (or equivalent) while making as much noise as possible.

The tank can do this with some variations in style, but at the end of the day they need to have a lot of armor and a lot of hit points to withstand the beating they take in each battle.  This can be achieved through acquisition of better gear as well as spending points in the appropriate talent tree.

Each class has three talent trees to pick from, and each tree has its own pros and cons.  With the exception of death knights, the classes that can be tanks only have one tree that makes them good tanks.

And most of the tanks I saw didn’t put points into the correct trees.  Many of them were wearing the wrong gear.

I don’t use the words “correct” and “wrong” lightly.  Warcraft is a game where there is often more than one way to do something, and those that claim the “best” way (by their standards) is the only way are missing out on the fun that a little variation now and then can provide.

But … if I need a lot of armor and I can pick some boots made with leather or some boots made out of chain mail, I’m going to pick the chain mail.  If I need a lot of hit points and I can choose between the gear that gives me more of those or the gear that helps me hit harder, I’m going to pick the hit points.

If I’m the designated meat shield, damage sponge, or whatever fun term there is for the tank, I’m not going to handicap myself so that I die before the healer can get their first spell cast.

So … I made a tank.

And I like playing him, for now at least.  It’s already established that in the next expansion a lot of things will be changing.  Whether tanking is made better or worse might be irrelevant to whether or not I continue playing one.  I’ll need to still enjoy doing it, and that’s something I just won’t know until the expansion ships.

We’ll see.