Addition by Subtraction

Our guild used to have a this guy... You know... That one guy who is just a little off. He is a RL friend of one of the core members so... We let him in. And he was _always_ on... I mean... I play a LOT but this guy was on every time I was plus I heard that he was on most of the time I was working too. In a way, you want to feel sorry for him because he clearly has no other social outlet but then again... The things he would say in guild chat... Disturbing. If he turns out to be a school shooter I won't be the least bit surprised. Saddened but not surprised. You could tell he wanted to be accepted by his reactions every time he realized that someone had him on ignore. And I tried... As the de facto raid leader and the most visible "person of authority" in the guild, I tried to include him... But he just went too far too often.

The point is... There were a number of people who wouldn't raid with him and didn't want to start a fuss by having me not invite this guy to the raids... So they just stopped showing up... Or played alts who weren't keyed (and after the requirement was removed, who weren't 70 yet). But a few weeks ago, he packed up and transferred to another server. A happy, glorious day (for us). People started coming out to do instances again... Or just to hang out because they knew guild chat wasn't going to be bombarded with his insanity.

And on Tuesday, we actually got enough people on where I could justify getting a few PuGs for Karazhan to fill out the raid. But then more and more people started showing up, so we just ran with the 9 we had... And a 10th showed up... And it was good. We didn't clear the place. In fact, we only did the first four bosses - the same four bosses we've been farming for months now. But it was fun. We had some alts in there so people got to do some new things. One of our main healers brought his druid and he off tanked. And we had some newbies in there who are still learning the fights and who still need the loot. And it was relaxed. And everyone wanted to be there... And...

Hell... Even the wipes were kind of fun. We had a bad pat during a pull of 8 non-elites... He walked right through the casters: "Oh... Hi guys!! What are you shooting? Mind if I join you?". I saw it coming but there was nothing I could do about it but we got the elite pat down and all but two of the casters. A pretty good scramble all things considered. The other wipe was during Opera - Romulo and Julianne. It was only the second time we've done it as a guild. Hell... There were people in there who thought Opera was the Big Bad Wolf because that's what it's been all four times they've been there. That included the rogue who wasn't getting the heal interrupt concept so Julianne healed herself repeatedly. By Act three, the rogue was clearly starting to pick up when he was supposed to be kicking so we killed her but he was at 12%. It took us 13 seconds to kill him so he rezzed her and then she rezzed him after he died. Wipe city. But it was pretty clear what had gone wrong and we just had to make a few adjustments and we were there. Round two was flawless. No deaths. She only got off two heals (one in act one and one in act three) and when she died, he was at 2%. We killed him almost instantly. It was gratifying to see everyone pull together and adjust so quickly.

Then we got 8 people back together last night to "clear to Curator and hope someone else comes on". We've downed him with 9 before but never even tried 8. We made a couple of attempts but we just didn't have enough sustained DPS to get the flares down (the third round was tough when the casters were out of mana). So the other feral druid got his healer and one of the healers got a DPS warrior and we were about to try it again when a paladin signed on... And since we were already _at_ the stone to summon the warrior... The additional heals and DPS made the fight ridiculously easy. And the paladin, who had been on line for 9 minutes, picked up a tier 4 token - his 4th piece of loot so far this week.

At that point three people decided that they had to leave. The six that were left decided to see if we could get to the Chess event for the free loot. We actually made it a lot further than I thought we would. We cleared the 6 pull outside of Illhoof's room without a death. We were handling the 4 pulls of spell shades pretty easily. The sorcerous shades were kind of chewing us up but we got them down. But it started getting late so we decided to try to skip a 4 pull of shades and a room where you have to single pull about 10 elites by running through behind the tank and having a druid stealth through and rez us on the other side... It almost worked. We actually got the paladin through to the other side, but when he tried to rez me, he aggro'd a mob who stomped them royally. Oh well...

But the bottom line is... We're having fun again. And we're raiding again... And a LOT of it is because we lost a member.