World of Warcraft: Back to Raiding

A couple weeks ago I was thinking about games I'd played in the past that I wish I'd streamed. World of Warcraft was the first one that jumped to mind. Having a recording of how I'd played undoubtedly would have been good for getting better, and it would also be nice to have things like Tribute to Dedicated Insanity up on Youtube to be able to watch and reminisce about years in the future. The very next day Sky put up a post on his blog about differences in recruiting in his current guild and in the one we used to run back in the day.

WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...

{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}

Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.

I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.

I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...