The Backstory: Deadwood Days (pt 3)

It really is strange, I made this blog because I wanted to tell the story of my progress in WoW and I am not even close to telling the story upto the point I started the blog some 27 months ago. Anyway, the story so far can be read in the following posts The Backstory: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, and Part 12, which ended with me in a guild called Deadwood at the end of Burning Crusdae. 

Today I'm going to give you the next installment.Wrath launched and with it came a new found passion for the game, the guys of Deadwood were hoping for big things and we had retained most of the guild during the end of expansion lull and had even strengthened the roster with some cross realm recruits, from Nagrand iirc. 

As my wife and I weren't planning on holidaying abroad the next summer, I'd taken the plunge of a 2 week holiday to get raid ready and whilst not first I certainly hit max level early and at the end of week 2 a bunch of us had got to the point of being able to put a 10 man raid team together.

Our first few trips in are a bit blurred on detail but I do remember clearing the spider wing and then wiping on the gargoyles on the way to Noth. We managed to clear Naxx on 10 man on December 23rd 2008, just 5 weeks after the  Wrath launch date, by January 12th 2009, we had the 25 man version cleared too

and by the end of February a few players were getting bored with farming and as we were a small 25 man guild (we had about 30 accounts) we soon had problems getting raids together. Then a few players quit and by the time Ulduar was released we were really struggling.

That first night in Ulduar was attempted with less than 25 players and we managed to kill Flame Leviathan and I got the first of my Fragments of Val'anyr (which I am still 10 or so short). Within a matter of weeks the numbers dwindled, repeated failures to get a raid team out led to more people leaving and eventually we switched from 25 man to 10 man raiding. The change had a dramatic effect on guild activity and while I was happy with the raiding I was often bored and lonely in /g and I realised mid-summer that I needed to leave. It wasn't an easy choice as I'd had so much fun with the guys of Deadwood and it was my baby. I looked around for a guild with similar progression and an active 25 man community. 

While there were many guilds that met both those criteria there were other criteria that I needed to match up too, the first and biggest was a raid start time of 2100 because of my family commitments the second was I wanted a casual style and the third was that they needed a disc priest. This narrowed the search down and I had to compromise the progression part to get the shortlist down to 3:

1. Encore;
2. Quercus;
3. Immersion;

All seemed OK but all 3 had their flaws but only 1 had a friend in so the choice was obvious, I applied to Encore  got accepted and joined my old friend Hukin....

Before I sign off I'd just like to thank Etheral for making these videos. Etheral was our MT in Deadwood and a general all round good guy. Please feel subscribe to his YouTube channel