Azeroth vs. Tyria part 11: A Guild For Every Purpose

Quick little break from the race posts to talk about something people might actually be interested in: guilds.

For our little group, we've looked at most guilds as sources of work. We'd take up a contract with whatever guild was willing to pay and treat it like a normal job, just with dragon murder instead of meetings. I'd say no paperwork too, but the boss never gets to avoid that stuff. Once we were off the clock though, that guild tag might as well not have been there. Sure, we had friends in the guilds we worked for; usually they're the ones that recommended us in the first place. There's a difference between being a guildmate and a contract laborer though. A guildmate will usually put the guild's needs ahead of their own. Contractors however look at the bottom line: if someone on our team wasn't being sufficiently compensated for their work, we either renegotiated or cancelled the job. Friendship is great and all, but we're running our own business here and I can't pay Orgrimmar rent with friends. Well, maybe if I was a goblin.

We were in an actual guild back in the old days though, The Greyside Gang. We weren't the biggest guild in the world (setting up a Karazhan run took a bit of creative planning some weeks), but we had the most important thing I've found for guilds that last - we actually liked each other. Whether it was from a shared sense of humor or just the timing of everyone finding a group where they could complain about their old guilds with others that shared their pain, this small group just clicked.

The only guild runs we've done as a group since those days have been a few Sartharion runs back in Northrend and the occasional 5-man dungeon there and after the Cataclysm. Some of us, like my team, have moved on to working for other guilds in the years after we stopped raiding. That didn't stop us from hanging out though. Even after all these years, we still get together to talk about other work we've found or to reminisce/complain about the old days. We may not have been on the cutting edge of raiding, but I'd be hard pressed to find many guilds that still do that after all these years. After some nights of raiding with other guilds, it was nice to head over to our meeting place and vent about some of what I'd seen.

Speaking of other guilds, you might ask why we ever did the contracting thing if we were perfectly happy with the Greyside Gang. Well, it's the same reason why anyone might go job hunting despite really liking their coworkers - if there's no work, you're not getting paid. There's also the matter of staying on top of your game too. Hanging out in a bar in Orgrimmar is fine for the occasional brawl, but it's not exactly up there with fighting a dragon. You usually lose money at those brawls too (that or in the drinking beforehand), so it kinda compounds the whole "no income" problem. As such we all had to take up with other guilds that weren't quite as good of a match for us personality-wise. Sure I got along with most of the officers and usually the other tanks, but we're talking big guilds here since that's what Sol and I usually got called for. It's hard enough finding nine people you like that know their jobs, let alone 24 plus all of the backups. Combine that with some of the rougher learning nights and there was usually a chain of whispers going between me/Sol and whichever one of our friends was on to laugh at our misery.

Looking at this, you can see the dilemma we've got: run with the guild that your friends are in or run with the guild that gives you work. You can only have one guild in Azeroth and, with the addition of guild reputation/leveling/achievements/etc., it made the decision to stick with one that much more of a pain. Tyria handles things a bit differently though.

Let's stick with my example of a guild for work and a guild for fun. Normally I'd be stuck having to choose which of the two I would represent. Whichever one I chose would be the only one I'd show up for on the guild roster (everyone else would have to "friend" me) and that guild would be the only one to benefit from any of my exploits. In Tyria however I'm no longer constrained to just one guild. Yes, I can only represent one guild at a time, but I can choose between them at will. Whichever one I'm currently representing will see me on the roster or talk to me through guild chat and I'll be able to use the tools they've unlocked through achievements and influence, such as the calendar or guild storage. Once I'm done there though, I can switch over to the other guild and do things with them. You could have a guild for running dungeons, one for structured PvP, one for world vs. world PvP, one for friends - as far as I've been able to find, there's no set limit at the moment.

I know what some of you are thinking though. You're looking at all of these lists of people and thinking, "I'm never gonna get a moment's peace in Tyria. There's always gonna be a list of people that can bug me to go do something from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep." Worry not! You'll also have the option to go incognito and represent no guilds. We've all had those moments where we just want to get something done without interruption and the Tyrians have seen fit to allow for just such an occasion.

That about wraps it up, but I do have one more quick thing to say about guilds. Remember the world vs. world PvP I mentioned earlier? I haven't talked a great deal about it yet, but those details can wait. The important thing here is how it's related to guilds. Right now there's no guild halls in towns like some of the bigger guilds have been requesting, but for those guilds that are into PvP? In those zones where world vs. world PvP occurs, there are keeps. Keeps that your guild can conquer for themselves and proudly display their flag for all to see. Keeps that your guild can use influence to upgrade and fortify against enemy incursion. I'm not sure how big of a role these will play in the grand scheme of the battles, but the idea of having a fortifiable base of operations in the middle of a battlefield sounds great. Would've been nice to have somewhere to coordinate from during the handful of battlegrounds I did in Azeroth, rather than using BG chat and hoping they would read it.

Back from PAX: Guild Wars 2

Well, that was a fun trip and we finally got to try some Tyrian combat.

Correction: you got to try Tyrian combat. I got to do the rest of the work since there was a bit of a line and you called 'dibs' on going first.

Oh come on, that's not fair! We were both at PAX to check out some possibilities for places to move after we leave Azeroth. We had to hit everything we could, so it just made sense to split up the tasks and not have both of us trying the same thing at the same time. It would've been nice if you could've had a little hands-on time, but unfortunately it felt like every other adventurer in Azeroth was in line with me there.

I would have an easier time believing the sincerity of your words if not for your attitude after you finished trying it out. The sight of a giddy Tauren gushing over combat techniques and dodging is not a pretty one.

What? I had fun. It's important to enjoy one's work after all and I was certainly enjoying my time in Tyria.

I take it that means it was everything we've been hoping for?

Well, I wasn't able to try everything I wanted since I only had about 40 minutes before I got sent back, but what I was able to try was great. I chose to go in as a Charr warrior for obvious reasons. In that 40 minutes, I got to help fight back a ghost that possessed a giant statue (at level 1 no less!), help out at a forge and a junkyard by gathering tools and defending it from invaders, and help out at this lake thing by slaying giant lizards. There was also some giant thing that hurt like a truck that I took down with the help of some other adventurers wandering about. The last eight minutes or so centered around myself and a group of three or four other adventurers, all below level 4, trying to push our way into a cavern filled with fire turrets and level 6 Flame Legion Charr. It didn't end up going in our favor, but we managed to hold our own for quite a while.

Sounds thrilling. What about the weapons themselves? How did the new mechanics you mentioned work out?

They felt great. Switching weapons on the fly was quick and learning new techniques went fairly quickly. I think it was something like three or four minutes with my starter sword skill until I learned my second one and maybe six or seven for the next one. I didn't test the fourth and fifth techniques because I was trying other weapons, particularly the rifle. It's still not entirely natural to me to fight at ranged, but I was starting to get the hang of it during our epic struggle to enter the cavern.

Dodging is going to take some getting used to. It's easy enough to do, but you can only dodge so often until you need to let your energy regenerate. It's fairly quick, but it does mean that you need to pick those moments when you need to move.

Since you mentioned swapping weapons, did you get the chance to look at equipment?

Indeed and compared to what we've been working with all these years in Azeroth, it'll be a nice change of pace. You've got four attributes to work with: Power makes all of your attacks hit harder, Precision increases your chance of getting a critical hit, Toughness reduces the damage you take from physical and magical attacks, and Vitality gives you more health. No haste or hit rating to cap, no dodge or parry to balance against one another - just four numbers to work with.

There were upgrade slots in most of the equipment I found, but I didn't have anything to put there so I can't give a first-hand impression, but I don't believe anything's changed since last week's crafting post so that should still be valid. I also didn't have any procs to play with, but since I was in the Charr starting area, that's to be expected. An associate of mine got the chance to try an Asura engineer in one of the later zones, so I might ask him if he can write something up when he's not busy.

Really? An Asura? He seriously chose one of those overglorified technomages over the Charr, the proven masters of engineering and war machines?

I know, I know, it's weird but it's what he wanted to try out. I certainly wasn't going to follow him in his madness, but to each their own. Now lemme think if I've forgotten anything...

Oh yeah! All those public quests I was working on? Pretty much every time I did something to further the goal, whether it was killing Flame Legion or just gathering tools for the forge, I earned some Karma. Now we already knew that there was going to be a currency for the events, but I didn't realize it was the same currency. I got quite a bit of karma from doing that event and the one with the lizards, then found my way over to the karma vendor by the forge. There was also one out in the fields that sold some armor I would've liked, but the one by the forge had all of the different weapons and honestly that was more important to me. I had to try out the rifle after all.

I think that's about everything from my short excursion into Tyria. Definitely looking forward to spending some more time there though. I did find a few other contenders that we'll be considering though, but those are for a later post. You have any luck, Med?

Indeed I did. While I may not have been able to try engineering in Tyria, I was able to get some time in with two other worlds that suited my tastes for all things technological.

Sounds good. We'll save those for next time since we've already run a bit long. Well, that and nobody's gonna want to ready about two different worlds in the same post. You want to tease people with something before we head out?

I believe I may have something to pique their interest until next time:

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 2: The Way of the Warrior

Now that we've laid the groundwork for how weapons work in Tyria compared to Azeroth, we can move on to something I'm sure most people are curious about: the classes, or professions as they like to call them. As of right now there are seven known professions available to anyone looking to do some adventuring in Tyria. Supposedly there's an eighth one out there somewhere, but if there's anyone who actually knows what that profession is, they're apparently keeping their mouth shut. Regardless that still leaves us seven other professions to talk about, and at the rate I write, number eight might be unveiled before this series is finished anyways.

For those interested in some adventuring work, the choices so far are elementalist, engineer, guardian, necromancer, ranger, thief, and warrior. At first glance it looks like there's some familiar names amongst that group for us Azerothians. We're used to warriors, hunters have been called rangers in some parts of the world, and thief is just another synonym for rogue to us. Elementalist is a little more vague since we know both mages and shamans that are big into the whole "summoning the elements" thing. Guardian and necromancer are new to us though and engineering to us is just a tradeskill, not an identifying name. Well, unless you're Medeleth.

Names aside, most of us probably look at a list like that and think, "Ah, I'll just find the closest analog to what I am now and go with that. I'll have a real short learning curve compared to everyone else, then I'll show those rookies how a real adventurer gets things done!" Yeah... that's not gonna work. Just like the skills I mentioned last time, the professions operate a bit different than what we're used to. For today let's start with the warrior profession.

You'd think that comparing an Azeroth warrior to a Tyrian one would be a pretty simple job. We both hit people with assorted weapons, we both yell at friend and foe alike, and we both wear heavy plate for armor. True though those may be, there are some differences buried in the details. In addition, there are some tricks the Tyrians have that we don't.

Let's start off with weapons since those are pretty iconic for warriors. Now like I mentioned last time, to most of us from Azeroth, one weapon is as good as another. My Devastate, an Arms warrior's Mortal Strike, and a Fury warrior's Bloodthirst all hit the enemy the same regardless of whether it's a mace or a sword. In Tyria however weapon styles have their own specific skills and their own strengths/weaknesses, so this isn't the case. If I were using a sword, then I'd be more mobile and be using a lot of bleeding techniques, but switching to an axe would give me access to more burst damage. If I needed some AoE, then I could break out a greatsword or a bow. Yes, you read that last part right - a bow.

For all of us Azerothian warriors (and honestly the casters too but this is about us warriors), our ranged weapons served one purpose: stats on a stick. We didn't pull with these unless every single other ranged trick we had was on cooldown and the only time we used them in combat was if a dragon was flying and we felt like doing something other than twiddling our thumbs till it came back down. Gun, bow, thrown weapon - didn't matter to us. All we wanted was more strength for DPS and more stamina for tanks.

In Tyria though both bows and guns serve completely different purposes. If I want to pick off a single target at range, then I can break out a gun and start pounding away at it until it gets close enough that I need to switch to melee. If there's a group of monsters that need taken out, then I can switch to a bow and start raining fiery death from the sky.

Not sure why I get fiery sky death, but I won't say no to it

So weapons determine our attack skills and being a ranged warrior is no longer considered a sign of mental instability. Next on the list of similar yet different? Stances. Azerothian warriors used to think about their stances, but honestly that's a thing of the past with additions like Warbringer and Juggernaut. I can't actually remember the last time I had to switch out of Defensive Stance; there just isn't really any need to anymore. You find the one that suits you and the skills you have to use and it's just this passive buff that always exists.

For Tyrians stances are similar in that they have no buff duration or cast time (they're either just on or they're off), but they're not meant to be permanent. Let's use Berserker Stance as an example since both worlds have one. In Azeroth Berserker Stance is just a flat 10% damage increase and fury warriors use it because their skills require it. In Tyria Berserker Stance doesn't add a passive damage bonus. Instead the entire time you're in the stance, you build additional adrenaline, which I'll get to in a second. Suffice it to say that adrenaline is always good to have. However the entire time you're in this "yay adrenaline!" stance, you're losing energy - the resource required to actually use any of your skills. This makes the stance a tactical choice rather than a passive bonus: do I use the stance now to build my adrenaline for short-term gain or do I forgo the bonus for the purpose of having resources for a longer fight?

Since I just mentioned adrenaline, let's go ahead and compare that to its closest analog for Azerothians, rage. To an Azeroth warrior, rage is everything: it's what fuels our abilities, and with enough rage, we can destroy anything in our path (assuming we live through whatever was pounding on us to supply said rage). However rage is merely a resource for us and cannot do anything when it's not being used.

Adrenaline, while similar to rage, does have some distinct qualities. For one it only comes with attacks from the warrior, not received by him like protection warriors are accustomed to. Next it's only a secondary resource. Energy is used for the bulk of warrior skills with only a handful benefiting from releasing adrenaline. However unlike rage, adrenaline can help even when not in use. As adrenaline is acquired, it builds up like rage and once it passes certain levels, every attack from the warrior will hit harder. This will continue as long as there is adrenaline built up, so until either the battle ends and the adrenaline fades or until the warrior releases it all through a burst skill. These skills can do anything from applying conditions to just dealing a bunch more damage to your target. This means you'll have to choose whether you want to spike the enemy down as soon as you build up enough adrenaline, save up for a maxed out burst skill, or just sit on the adrenaline and chain a bunch of powered-up regular attacks until a better opportunity presents itself.

Speaking of chains, that leads me to my next point. Anyone from Azeroth is pretty familiar with the idea of an attack chain or rotation. We've all done our research to find out what our optimal attack order is and when we should use which attack. Well, chains are sorta similar, but they're more self-contained. Remember those five skills I said were associated with each weapon style? For this example let's say you're using a sword. One of your skills will be called Sever Artery. Now in the middle of a fight, you'll be doing your thing and at some point you'll use that skill. If you take a look at your HUD afterwards, you'll notice that there's something new in the spot where Sever Artery used to be. Now it's called Gash. That's because those two are part of an attack chain: Sever Artery, Gash, and Final Thrust. Chain skills add two more moves you can pull off against your enemies, but they need to be in order, or "chained". If you use Sever Artery and Gash against an enemy, but then you switch to a different skill, you'll have to start the chain again if you want to land a Final Thrust. This means you'll have to think about whether or not you'll have enough time to finish a chain against your enemy or if you'd be better off using a different skill like your self-heal or a charge skill.

A true warrior adds some variety instead of just mashing Bloodthirst or Mortal Strike

Charge skills are going to be a bit odd for most Azeroth warriors. Other than using a mount or crafting, we're all pretty much used to instant reaction. Unless you're a DPS warrior trying to use Slam without Bloodsurge, the only time we see cast times are for crafting or summoning mounts. Well, charge skills are kind of like cast time skills, but the time's variable. The longer you want to wind up your swing/stab/etc., the harder it'll hit. Note that there is a limit to how long you can charge up though. No matter how much you may want to, you can't just sit outside of town for five hours waiting for the first thing that comes in range so you can hit it to the moon. It'll take more than shouts and banners to make your swing that powerful.

Shouts we're all pretty familiar with: I yell out something that either makes all of my friends stronger/tougher/etc. or I say something mean about my enemy's mother and lower their attack/defense/etc. Fairly standard warrior tool that even the Tyrians didn't see any real need to fix. They did however decide to add another buff to their arsenal though: banners.

Banners to me were always just something the guild summoned either to show off or to signify "stand here, you easily distracted morons". Other than a slight bonus to experience (which meant absolutely nothing to us raiders), they served no real purpose beyond that. In Tyria though, these serve as sort of a warrior totem. The example I could find was the Banner of Courage, which makes friendly melee attacks around the banner hit harder. The warrior would place this banner and then continue to fight. However, this doesn't have to be the case. For a more mobile situation, say a large group chasing after a giant monster, a stationary buff doesn't help all that much. In this case the warrior can pick up the banner and run around with it. It means he won't be able to attack along the way since his hands will be full, but all of his allies in the surrounding area will benefit from the buff while he follows the group. Once they finally stop somewhere for some stationary fighting, the warrior can plant the banner and get back into the thick of things.

That just about covers the major differences between the two types of warriors. There are a few other details like warhorns, but I covered the important parts. There's also traits, but that's another one of those "needs its own post" topics. For the most part, anyone from Azeroth who enjoys being a warrior and getting into the thick of things should be happy with what Tyria has to offer. In addition any warriors who fancied themselves as a pretty good marksman can still be proud warriors and not feel required to join the ranks of the rangers. It won't be quite the same for all of us and honestly it's probably going to require quite a bit more paying attention that some of us have been used to from the days of Wrath (and honestly quite a bit of early Cataclysm raiding), but I think we can handle it. Hell, for those of us that are old Onyxia and Blackwing Lair veterans, it'll feel like the old days of stance dancing. I've kind of missed that. The stance dancing part, mind you, not the 40 man part; you couldn't pay me enough to do that nonsense again.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 1: One Weapon's As Good As The Next, Right?

Last time I mentioned that the team was looking to leave Azeroth in search of greener pastures and grander treasures. I even mentioned that we had somewhere in particular picked out. Now that those basic details are out of the way, I figured it might be a good idea to start looking at some of the similarities and differences between our old home and our potential new one, in case any other Azerothians are looking for a change of scenery.

Given that I'm comparing two entire worlds, this isn't going to fit into one post. Well, technically it could, but that's less of a post and more of a dissertation and I know no one is going to sit through that mountain of text unless I break it up. Best to start simple, I think. Adventurers of all classes have to have their tools of the trade: swords, axes, guns, etc. You'd think that there shouldn't be a whole lot to talk about here, right?

To those of us from Azeroth, a weapon's a weapon and all that matters is if you know how to wield it and if it gives you more strength/agility/maximum damage/whatever random number your class and build was concerned with. Axe or sword, it didn't matter because the attack's the exact same for both. I always thought that was a bit odd that a sword swung the same as a mace or an axe, but that's just how it always worked. The closest we ever came to caring about weapon types was back when Arms warriors and Combat rogues had to spec for specific weapon styles. Even then it wasn't really all that involved, since all we were really doing was choosing between passive bonuses: a better chance to critically hit with axes or perhaps get the occasional free swing with a sword.

It was even simpler when it came to casters. As far as Medeleth and the other spellslingers were concerned, their weapons were annoying things they had to carry to bump up their spell power. A warlock with a staff cast his spells the same as one with a sword and book and, assuming they had the same bonuses, hit for exactly the same amount. Weapons were just eye candy to all of us and as long as we had something in that hand to do our jobs, it didn't matter what it was. That was Azeroth though; for Tyria, that attitude isn't going to cut it anymore.

Now the system as a whole is a lot more complicated than I'm going to lay out right here, but just to keep things simple, I'll focus on the basics; we'll go over the specifics later. For the moment, let's start with how we dealt with combat back in Azeroth. You'd have your long list of abilities available in your spellbook. Depending on your spec, you'd pick out the abilities that made sense for you to use, then you'd put them somewhere where it was easy to use them. Assuming that you were using whatever was agreed to be the most efficient build/rotation for your class, this meant that you pretty much picked the same abilities as every other person of your class doing that job. You'd have your single target skills, your AoE moves, your "oh crap!" buttons, etc. Pretty much everything you could possibly need during the fight needed to be available at a moment's notice. The standard-issue adventurer's HUD makes it easier to keep track of all of this stuff, but after a while it can get pretty cluttered, especially when you start to consider add-ons. I managed to keep mine fairly clean, but that took hours of work and a lot of extras to minimize wasted space and duplicate information. I couldn't do anything for all of those hotbars showing my abilities other than shrink their size a bit and hope I could still make out which button was which. When we move to Tyria however, that kind of heavy-duty HUD management should be a thing of the past.

This is the kind of mess I'd rather avoid

I can't comment on whether the add-on management will exist or not because, well, I don't know if they're allowed to modify their HUDs or not. What I do know is how many bars of buttons there will be on the screen:

One bar. 10 buttons.

That's it. At last count I think I have something like 48 buttons on my Azeroth HUD; Med's even worse at 60 just because of all of that engineering crap and warlock summoning stuff he keeps on his.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're looking at that and going, "So instead of having everything at my fingertips, I'm gonna have to dig into my spellbook whenever I need to switch from single target to AoE or whatever else I need to do. How is this helpful?". Remember when I was making a big deal earlier about how weapon types were going to matter in Tyria? Therein lies the secret.

Let's take that 10-button bar and break it into two sets of five. Looking at buttons 6-10, we've got a healing skill, an elite skill, and three utility skills. I'll talk about this three things at another time, but for now let's look at what we've got left: buttons 1 through 5, or as they're better known, your weapon skills.

To illustrate, let's say that you're a warrior and you've got a one-handed sword equipped. If you took a look at the abilities on your bar, you'd see some high mobility move and an emphasis on bleeds. This would be great when you need to bounce around the battlefield and the bleeds would be great since you could have one ticking away on multiple targets. This isn't perfect for all situations though. What if you ran into a big rock elemental by himself? Assuming rock can even bleed (don't look at me like I'm crazy - Kologarn can take damage from Deep Wounds and he was rock with a moustache), the mobility from the sword is kinda wasted if your target's slow and the bleed's less impressive if there's only one target taking damage from it. How can you improve your odds in this situation? Switching weapons, that's how!

If we switch over to an axe, now we've got access to some high spike damage in case the rock elemental has high armor. If we go with a mace, now we've got stuns in our arsenal. Assuming we can get the drop on the elemental, our warrior could even go with a rifle and decimate him from range. Yes, I know the idea of a ranged warrior sounds like heresy, but it's true. Things get even weirder though when we get to the casters.

We'll use an elementalist for the caster example (they're like mages, but they don't pick one element and pretend the others don't exist). Let's say this elementalist has two weapon sets: one with a dagger with a focus in his off-hand, and the other with just a staff. Were this Azeroth, these two would cast the exact same spells with the only differences being how hard the spells hit, how fast you cast them, etc. In Tyria however, your combat spells are in those first five buttons and because those are weapon-specific, your two weapon sets now serve different purposes. With the staff equipped, the elementalist will now have access to a set of long-range attacks, but he'll have to deal with longer cast times. If he switches to the dagger and focus, his dagger will give him a set of fast casting, medium range spells while the focus will fill in the remaining slots with powerful close range spells. For a little extra customization, the elementalist could even swap out his main hand dagger if he's planning on being stuck in close quarter combat or he could go dual daggers and be built for medium range destruction.

The idea of mixing main and offhand weapon types isn't just for casters. When I was talking about sword and axe techniques for the warrior only, those were one-handed weapons. The warrior could mix the two for bleeds and spike damage, he could go all-out if the situation calls for it, or he could toss a shield in his offhand for some defensive skills. There's also mixed weapon techniques for that middle button of the five, but those are for thieves only (damn greedy thieves).

Now I could go on about the ramifications of this for days, but I'll try and sum this up. Switching to a system where your weapon style matters does make it where you'll have to carry around multiple weapons, but honestly we've been doing that for ages already. I've had to dedicate two bags to spare gear for as long as I can remember. Plus with some of the other stuff I've seen, I might be getting some of that bag space back, so I can afford to hold onto a few spare weapons. We'll talk about that "other stuff" another day though, along with the other twenty things I couldn't fit into this mountain of text.

LF Adventurer Work Not In Azeroth

*cough* Damn dust! *cough* Guess I should've hired someone to clean while we were gone.

Hello, anybody who forgot to take us off their feed readers! Been a while, huh? I suppose I should talk about why we haven't posted in a while and maybe play a bit of catch-up for what's happened in the last couple years.

The former's kinda easy to cover honestly: nothing worth writing about happened for a long time. Looking at the last couple posts we did, it was the guys running heroic dungeons over and over again and I was just doing weekly wrap-up style posts. After a few of those, we decided to take a break until something worth writing about came along. I didn't enjoy writing those "Dear diary, we ran heroics today..." posts and I doubt anyone really enjoyed reading them. There's something to be said for making yourself write just to stay in practice or to get into the habit, but we can recognize when we're trying to hard just for the sake of having a post up with today's date.

As for what's happened in the last couple years, I'm gonna save a good chunk of that for other posts. Part of that is because there's enough there for separate posts, but most of it is just for brevity (my rough draft of this post with all the details hit four pages and I was barely finishing the wrap-up). I'll summarize it all though: we ran heroics, we went to raids, Azeroth blew up, we did a lot of leveling, and we were starting to get a bit burned out towards the end. Being tanks though, you keep going for the sake of the group and because there was still some enjoyment to be found in the work. Earlier this year though, the guild Solannis (who became Solagar - long story for another day), Mordigg, and myself were all contracting for kinda, sorta exploded. They were still there in name and general spirit, but the ones we all enjoyed working alongside the most all left for various reasons. Some to find work with another guild, some to go join the PvP circuit, but most of them just needed a break from the war and the Horde and went their separate ways.

This left us with a decision: do we stick around with the guild despite it no longer having the people we enjoyed working with, or do we follow suit and blaze our own trail? After some discussion with the entire team (even the Alliance branch came down to weigh in), we came to a conclusion: time to move on. I got the feeling from the team that we all just needed a change of pace and scenery. Some new business contacts also wouldn't go amiss, since the Alliance branch wasn't particularly thrilled with King Varian and I really hate Garrosh. Between the two of them, a lot of good soldiers are going to die for stupid reasons and I'll be happy to be gone while they fight it out.

Of course, deciding to look for work other than Alliance or Horde does leave us with a predicament, but we've got enough engineers on the team that we can find a way around that. I mean, if we can send men off to alternate Azeroths to open new branch offices for us, I think we can find a new home. Med's been hard at work investigating new worlds for us where we can set up shop and members of the team have already investigated a few of them. Some have held promise, but just didn't pan out. Some visits have ended nearly as quickly as they began.

There is one place that has our attention though. It's got plenty of work for adventurers like us, there's far less faction vs. faction nonsense than we're dealing with on Azeroth, and it's technologically advanced enough that Med and the other engineers are all fighting over who gets to do the first scouting mission:

Usually a good sign when the team's actually competing to see who gets to go in first instead of needing coerced or threatened. Guess I should start digging through the recon Med's found, so I can start posting about that.