Life Happened

It has been 265 days since my last confession.  It is somewhat staggering when I put that number on paper, but my absence from the blog has been a pretty extreme one.  The longer I went without writing something, the harder it was to put virtual pen to paper and make something worth reading.  So for the last several months, my blog has sat here collecting dust staring out from the darkness as a constant reminder of my failed experiment in blogging.

Various sundry real world events happened, but if I were to condense a timeline of in-game events it would look something like this:

• Server Unplayable
• Years Behind Fails
• Raid Struggles
• My Account Gets Hacked
• I Get Horribly Burned Out
• Shift to Deathknight trying to fix low raid dps
• Start regretting the decision to switch mains fast
• Form new 10 man so I can continue tanking
• Get burned out again raiding 4 nights a week
• Quit one night of raiding and start playing other games
• Start plotting my switch back to tanking

There are various sub events tied to each of the above, but thats the basic lay of the land.  The most traumatic of the events was probably getting my account hacked.  Blizzard did an amazing restoring everything that was taken from my various characters and the guild vault within 24 hours.  The however hacker took one of the things that really mattered to me, that can never be restored.  House Stalwart was formed on the day WoW was released and this was a point of pride.  The Hacker moved Belghast my main to another server, and in the process disbanded our guild.  Now our re-formed guild date commemorates the day I got hacked, which is not quite as enjoyable.

The shift to Belgrave my Deathknight was a pretty major event as well.  I reached a point where I flat out didn’t trust my healers anymore.  I had taken too many needless deaths in a row and had gotten gunshy.  I could only do the things I have been able to do, because of the extreme faith I have had in my healers.  I knew no matter what trouble I got myself into, what measures I had to go to to attempt to hold aggro, they would keep me standing.  When that faith waned, I started playing like a shell shocked veteran.  I became slower, more cautious, always trying to make sure I had an ace in a hole for when the heals just stopped for large blocks of time.  I got physically angry with myself, my raid, my healers when I ran out of "oh shit" buttons and nothing I could possibly do could save me.  I came to the realization that something needed to change.  I was going to have to either stop raiding as Belghast, stop raiding entirely, or just outright quit the game.

I chose to switch to raiding as my Deathknight, because at the time we were struggling in the DPS community.  My DK had been my "help friends raids" character, and for the most part was better geared that much of the active dps.  We’ve since recruited more players and solidified our DPS camp, but at the time me switching over allowed us to take down the content with more wiggle room.  But since the first raid I went as a Deathknight, I had the little pangs of remorse in the back of my head.  My identity has been wrapped up in Bel the Tank for so long, that it was difficult for me to accept the transition.  As I look towards Cataclysm I am planning on making the shift back to Protection Warrior as my primary raid focus.  If this ends up meaning I will need to leave the raid I helped form to make this happen so be it, but I know without a doubt that I am not as happy as a DPSer than I am as a Tank.

As I come back to blogging, I still very much think of myself as an aggronaut…  a tank at heart.  While now I wear the hat of a Unholy/Frost DPS Deathknight during raids, I still approach the game as though I were the tank.  I plan on still covering tanking topics, but mixing in a few DPS issues now and then.  I plan on still posting regularly about guild management and raid maintenance, and even now and then throwing in a topic like rotations.  I can’t promise to be nearly as regular as I once was, considering my life is in general more busy than before, but I promise to keep posting.

Thanks for letting me back on your screens