Welcome to Soulbound

I pretty much vanished off the face of the blog for a while there. Since I got a bunch of new co-workers, I’ve spent my lunch breaks socializing instead of blogging, and things in WoW weren’t very interesting for a while.

Until Soulbound.

Things in my guild weren’t going very well lately – canceled raids, people only signing for farm night, the usual end of expansion lack of interest. Things snowballed, people leaving led to more canceled raids led to even more people leaving… and the guild management didn’t seem very interested in communicating with us. I wasn’t terribly concerned, because my schedule was pretty busy and I didn’t make all the raids anyway, but my friends wanted to raid more so they applied for another guild. I stayed for a while, but then it became obvious that WoW really is a social thing for me, first and foremost. I don’t care about the purple pixels if I don’t have fun in the process, and for me fun is playing with friends. They applied to another guild and were declined… then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. It wasn’t the first time the idea came up, but now the time was right.

Two days later, Soulbound was born. Two days and a few hours later, the news about Cataclysm raiding hit – perfect timing. We decided to focus on 10-mans and get our ICC drakes before Cataclysm. (I have dreamed of one of those since they were announced, but I never thought I’d actually have a chance of getting it.) If everything goes as planned, when Cataclysm hits we’ll have at least one strong 10-man team, maybe two, and we’ll be able to hit the ground running.

Last week, our guild (only) had potential. There was the three of us (a tankadin, a rogue and a tree, aka me and my little group of friends who’ve been following each other in guilds for a year or so), plus my boyfriend’s shaman alt (because he doesn’t want to leave his main guild yet). Since then, our little Soulbound has progressed far more than I would’ve imagined – our first semi-PuG raid has stepped on the Lich King’s toes last night and our raids for the next reset have 8-9 sign ups, all of this without having to recruit anyone we didn’t know already. We were expecting one or two people from our old guild to join us, but we got more and we’re still talking to a few. We got some even older WoW friends to join and I still have some on my “to recruit” list. We even had to leave people out from the last raid.

Our raids are a bit like six degrees of separation now: our pugged pally healer was the GM of a social guild we joined for a while in Wrath, and then she raided with my boyfriend; the shaman was in the same social guild with the pally, then he joined the guild I was in during TBC; the moonkin used to work with my boyfriend, then he was in the same guild as us in TBC. It felt a bit like a high school reunion and hearing familiar voices on Vent felt amazing. Hearing familiar voices of people who can also pew pew and get out of the green shit felt even better.

The future looks bright. The guild itself is not big (if you don’t count the gazzilion officer alts), but we have the best pugs. If everything goes right, quite a few of those pugs will become guild members and join in the fun every night. We’re at the “dazzle them with amazing guild progress” phase right now, and so far, so good. I’m having a blast playing with the guild site and playing raid leader assistant (i.e. I’ll handle DKP and anything else as long as I don’t have to actually lead), our raids have just the right amount of Vent snark and banter, we’ve killed bosses at a steady rate and everyone seems to be having fun. (And I totally didn’t get lost in ICC trying to get to the Lich King and then spent 10 minutes trying to find my way there. I also didn’t release on a “failed” Sindragosa try and didn’t miss my achievement when they actually killed her.)

With a little luck, this tree will be a Kingslayer soon. Until then, some screenshots.

Soulbound meets the Lich King.

Mandatory “me on the Frozen Throne” shot.

Kids, this is why you need to DPS and slow down the Valkyrs. “Tiiimbeeer!” jokes aren’t funny when the poor tree dies :(