Wednesday night was a particularly exciting night for me and the guild (and this is going to be a long post, so bear with me). During the day, while I was at work and desperately trying not to have to deal with the work that I needed to do, I found myself prowling around on WoW sites. This naturally meant that I visited WoWhead, where I was greeted with a wonderful surprise: 50% off server transfers! My guild had been talking, for a while, about server transferring. At one point, Tortheldrin-US was ranked 4th lowest population server in the game, but that was before two raiding guilds left the server, leaving <Arrested Development> as the last raiding guild around.
We had pretty much always intended to server transfer, but there were quite a few things that were getting in our way. One was a lack of money to do so for certain people. Server transferring is an expensive affair, especially when moving from a low population to high population server. On a server as low population as Tortheldrin, it almost felt necessary to have alts with every profession. Omnialias, my main, was a blacksmith/miner, but I could never rely on the ability to run to the auction house and buy the gem or enchant that I needed, so I leveled alts to do that. At the end of the day, I had 4 alts that I would have wanted to transfer with my main should a server transfer happen, which totals 125 dollars. That’s 125 dollars that I would not have had to spend if I had just chosen to go to a different server, which leads into second reason we hadn’t transferred.
There were many in the guild that were disinclined to server transfer on principle, that principle being that Blizzard didn’t deserve our transfer money. Some of us felt that the imbalance in server populations was something that Blizzard could have and should have fixed, so why in the world would be giving money to Blizzard for their screw ups? This has been a major sticking point for my guild, in fact, because it is an issue of principle, and some people have had more issue with breaking these principles than others. <Arrested Development>’s main raiders are more like a family than just a group of people that raid, and so the idea that one of us would not transfer with us should we decide to do so was just unthinkable.
With those issues in mind, however, it was becoming almost unbearable on Tortheldrin. The auction house was dead, and I mean dead. I could very rarely find any gems that I needed, and 80-90% of the items I was trying to sell expired over and over again. Our guild leader was becoming fed up with not being able to buy materials for pots and flasks and other things we use on a regular basis. Finally, she said that we would begin to really consider server transferring around the time that 5.4 would be dropping, which seemed reasonable. We could finish out the tier and start fresh on a new server. However, that was not what the Fates had in mind for us.
When I saw the announcement about a discount on server transfers, I immediately messaged some of my guildies. I logged onto WoW and was immediately greeted by a message from my guild leader about the transfer situation. “We’ll talk about it after the raid tonight,” she said, but her tone was, basically, “Yeah, we’re doing this.” Raid, that night, was another beast, altogether, and just added to the excitement of the night. I’m a fairly new WoW player, and to highlight this fact, before that night I had a total of three Heroic boss pulls. Tonight, though, was going to really, truly pop my Heroic cherry. We walked into the raid with the expectation of trying to down Heroic Jin’Rokh. Usually, we’ll walk into a new fight and spend about ten to fifteen minutes talking about the boss and the mechanics, but for whatever reason, that night we just pulled the boss straight out of the gate. Our first pull saw us wipe right at the first Lightning Storm, which made us feel pretty good about the new mechanics. This was also the first night I began recording and streaming our raid (check out the Videos page for the kill video). In what seemed like a decent number of pulls, we were regularly getting Jin’Rokh down to 30% health. Then, at one point, we made it to the fourth Lightning Storm and I realized this was going to be it. We all pushed our DPS as hard as we could, I toggled off Righteous Fury and blew my offensive cooldowns, and died just as Jin’Rokh hit the ground. And to top it all off, I got the Heroic Thunderforged version of my chest piece. My BIS, bar none.
Later that night we spoke about server transferring and everyone seemed to agree that it was time to get off the server. The discount as well as our first Heroic kill of the expansion seemed to us like a sign that it was time to get out of the kiddy pool and join the real world. However, such changes do not come without negative setbacks, and ours came in the form of losing our warlock. He had been the leading voice regarding not transferring on principle, and we knew going into this that it was going to be difficult to convince him. Once all of the server transfer decisions came through, our warlock told us that, after evaluating the amount of time and money he spends on WoW compared to the amount of enjoyment he gets out of it, it’s not worth it for him to continue. He had, in the past, also expressed his wishes to quit WoW, but he had stuck around because he enjoyed raiding with us, however with this server transfer it seemed like the proper time for him to call it quits.
All in all, though, it’s an exciting time for <Arrested Development>. We’ll be changing our guild name (which hasn’t yet been decided) and we’ll be moving to Mal’Ganis, going from one of the lowest population Horde servers to the highest population Horde server. Although we’re losing a dear friend, raider and <AD> family member, we’ll hopefully gain more wonderful experiences on this new server of ours. It’s a brave new world.
ShotRdin 