Aww...blame the game

Hmmm...as usual, I 'm a bit slow with posting here. Blame it on the game. :) No, really! It does seem that the game is a rather central point of my attention span more often than not. So let's just realize now that if I'm not here, I'm there. We good on that? LoL

Both Khrox and the little spriest have been engaged in some new aspects of the game, at least new to them. Khrox finally got his first taste of arena battles, courtesy of his guild leader. More on his initiation to arena's in a bit. The little spriest isn't so little anymore. At level 63, he's romping through Outland spreading disease, pain, messing with your mind stuff and death. He's also strong on alliance presense in each zone's pvp dailys. Just loves taking all those towers and fortifacations away from the Horde. This little gnome has got some serious ankle-biting going on!

Let's talk a bit about Cle first. If you're new here, he's a gnome shadow priest who favors battlegrounds over dungeons. In fact, he hasn't seen the inside of his first dungeon...yet. Always a possibility it could happen. At level 61, he finally gave up skinning and took up engineering for the fun of it. Mining had been his other gathering profession all along, so he had plenty of metal bars and ore banked. He practically raced through all the early skill ups, and now sits at 353 skill. He made mostly all pieces and parts to get there, with exception to some later level bombs and his first flying machine. Engineering is not a big gold maker, so far. In fact, most everything you make is useful only to yourself. It is though, a FUN profession. Neat little things that go BOOM! , and little personal items that create/add some very interesting effects. Looking over his trainers list of things to come, well, I can see that battlegrounds just might become incidental playgrounds. And, no telling what might happen with those world pvp encounters.

And then there is Khrox. Once again, if you're new here, Khrox is a dwarf hunter. He leveled to cap as a Beast Master, loves battlegrounds, and you'll most likely find him running about in his MM spec these days. He is decked out in the best honor point Vicious pvp gear and quite thirsty for the conquest point upgrades. The Horde nation has this intense hatred for him, so all seems rather good for now. At least on the surface.

TBH at this point, on a personal level I have this fear thing of trying new things in the game. First it was dungeons, "omg! I'll get the group wiped." Then it was battlegrounds, "I'm such a noob Huntard! I keep dieing all the time." And we won't talk about all the early BG chat tossed at me. LOL, the end result is total procrastination.

This effect carried over with me when I changed guild membership. Part of the reason for changing guilds was so that I could progress my pvp into arena and maybe even rated bg's. It's been over a month now and I still had'nt gone forth with arena entry, until this past Saturday.

I was sitting around in the Dwarven District in SW, self-debating which bg to do. Along came one of the co-gm's of the guild, the one who recruited me, and we started chatting. Next thing I know, she's created a 2's team for us, and now the nervous fear sets in. She says we can try some practice games first if I wish, which sounded really good to me.

Well, I guess the season is old enough now and no practice games were available. The entry que pops up again, I accept it, saying oh good, we got one! Wrong. lol, she tells me no. It's the real thing, go all out. Needless to say, I died in like 15 seconds. By the fourth round of losing, I was lasting closer to 30 seconds. btw, she's a disc priest and wound up fighting several long minutes on her own until she suffered some horribus death. Again, and again.

This kind-hearted gm kept telling me everything's okay. She had a great attitude and mindset. Even pointed out her own mistakes as she thought them to be. Then something happened. On the next game, even though we lost again, we actually had a good 5-6 minute fight on our hands. This was rather encouraging for me. By this time, I was entering the arena stealthed, and tossing out several traps in what I hoped would be the main fighting area. Seemed like a good plan, and to some extent it was working.

A stroke of luck on the next game, the other team did'nt que, we won our first by default. Yea! The very next game.....well, we actually WON! It's like "OMG, we beat them!" We que'd a couple more times, although we still kept losing. Then I suffered a disconnect that lasted a bit. By the time I got back in, the co-gm had gone on with her regular arena teams. I whisper'd her generous thank you's and appreciations. We ended our arena outing with a 2 win--10 loss record.

I really have a lot of respect and admiration for this gm. She's a very accomplished pvp player in her own rights, yet she took the time and had the patience to get me started, in spite of my inner fears and obvious failings. And about that win/loss record? She said the losing and points didn't matter for her, it was all about getting me the conquest points I needed. In my mind, she is an "Epic" player. I think I'm going to be with this guild for a long time now. It "feels" like "home."