Vlaming

So this turned out to be a bigger beast then I had anticipated. Damn you Kris. When we last left our heroes Whip and I were leaving Synergy. They were 4/5 Hyjal and on RoS in BT. They eventually would kill Illidan. I don't know how far they made it into Sunwell though because I stopped paying attention and they transferred to a different server before WotLK to die.

So what brought Whip and I back to WoW? Honestly, we got bored after a few weeks away. One day we were just like "Let's roll new chars." So we did. We ended up Horde side on Auchindoun. Whip's brother was there with his warrior (Now known as Rorax). I rolled a Paladin named Flashoflawl. Whip rolled a troll mage named Redthirteen (I had just recently played through FF7 ;p). We got to 70 in an average amount of time, we still weren't playing a whole lot. One day we were looking to do some heroics when we saw someone advertising in trade chat that they need a mage and a holy pally to fill out their group. We signed up and ran some really smooth heroics with 3 people from the same guild, Malice Dei.

They invited us to their guild, but we weren't really sure that we wanted to be part of a guild at that point in time, but we kept in touch with them. After a couple of decent Karazhan runs with them we joined up. The guild only had about 6-7 people, and they weren't the most skilled people we had been around, but they were friendly and we weren't looking to be that hardcore anyways. We stayed in this guild for quite a while. I quickly became their "raid leader" as we pushed 10 man content. We pushed for ZA bears. The guild had a problem besides lack of skill though. Healing was rough. Oh and did I mention that we couldn't down the dragonhawk boss?

I was the only healer in the guild, and the only other contact we had was a pug holy pally who wasn't that great. I mean that I would literally do 3-4 times the healing this other paladin did. We wanted war bears for everyone, but we needed to make a change. Whip brought her orc shaman to the server (the one from our first raiding guild) and renamed her Whipstrike. On top of that we had one of our two hunters switch to a prot pally to replace our druid tank (who was much better at cat). We were finally able to kill all the animal bosses in ZG, but hex lord proved to be a problem, so we would have our shadow priest switch to holy. I hate the fight as a holy paladin, it made me feel fairly useless. But we succeeded in down him, and we succeeded in downing Zul'jin as well.



My keybinds are starting to look a little better! ^_^

During this time Whip's brother joined the navy and spent 8 weeks in basic training. Once he was back he joined us a holy priest. Enter Spottybum stage right. Spotty was max level, and I really only used that character for moonkin pvp, which fascinated me a lot for some reason



Notice how Spottybum single-handedly put that group on her back and carried it to victory before the server restart.

Anywho, I made some horseshit kind of hybrid balance/resto spec so I could dps on certain ZG animal fights and heal on others (Flash would come back in for HL and Zuljin). In the end Malice Dei would come within seconds of getting the final mount, but was never fast enough. This is really one of my bigger regrets with this game tbh. I felt like I could the run in my sleep, but we chose to be in a casual guild at the time and could never get to the end. But like I said, they were cool guys..... WERE cool guys.

Malice Dei was growing a bit. We were working with another smaller guild to move into 25 man content. I was pretty much running the raids. Loot was rolled on (lewlz!) and pugs filled the holes if there were any. I think we killed Void Reaver a few times. Once the 25 man loot started coming a bit though, our guild leader lost it. I guess he couldn't control himself with such quality items, but one night when Whip and I weren't on he promoted a few more officers and they decided that loot would be given out based on guild rank. Yes, guild rank. He also felt that if he brought an alt in to help the raid (which a lot of us did at the time) that his alt got priority on gear too. The new officers agreed with this system, and thus "outvoted" the objection Whip and I would've had, since the fuck knew we'd object. Speaking of this... I need to talk to Mhose about our current loot system....

So yeah, we objected, he felt like he was right, so we headed out. Me, Whip and her brother, all 3 of their main healers and a resto druid who whip's bro had met in the navy who came along for 25 man shit. Malice Dei pretty much died after that with the remaining members joining up with the other guild we raided with. The guild leader didn't last long there either and bounced around quite a bit. Those of us who left made a guild called and pvp'ed while we waited for WotLK to launch. Flashoflawl would make the transition to Ret. I kind of enjoyed how overpowered ret paladins were in pvp once 3.0 hit. Divine Storm as holy damage ftw!

Note - I really stopped taking screenshots around this time.

We went into WotLK in our own small guild. We leveled to 80 and started trying to run 10 man with a group of pvp'ers that whip's bro had known for a while, but they didn't stick around too long. Around this time I started leveling up my troll warrior again. Mid way through TBC I rolled a troll warrior and sort of twinked her out at 39 (WW mace + mace spec stun = good times in pvp). I leveled as prot and quickly jumped into doing heroics. One night Whip and I met another couple, kind of got to know them and quickly found ourselves in another Malice Dei like guild (This time it was called ). I have fond memories of topping the dps charts on guild heroic runs as a prot warrior. Heck, I remember getting my bronze drake on a run where I topped the meters at 1500 dps. I wouldn't have thought that something like that would've been possible. Anyways, the guild struggled. I think we killed Grobbulus once, and spent an entire night wiping on KT 10 man.

Around this time Whip's brother had just been shipped to the east coast. He met up with some dudes who were into online gaming. He transferred a druid to an alliance server and began leveling it up. Whip and I thought about following him, but we weren't really sure about it. If you armory search Vlaming you'll find a level 20 dwarf warrior who was my scout for our potential future guild. Suddenly one day he tells us that he's going to Bleeding Hollow with his warrior. Again we weren't sure but he told us that it was so amazing that he would pay for us to transfer 2 characters each. Inc Vlaming, Spottybum, Whipnova and Whipstrike. We joined with no questions asked and one shot every boss in a Naxx 10 run that night, so I can look at my Naxx 10 complete achievement to see exactly when I joined this group of gamers.

So there it is. My gaming life in 4 long ass blog posts. We've met a lot of interesting people over the last 9-10 years, but we love where we are now and look forward to being with this community as it continues to grow and get better.