Welcome to the Jungle

Though I had been to MC on my first toon, it was a run with a more established guild. This would be my first true raiding experience, being first string, going in for the first attemt. I was excited. We had scheduled our first run for a Friday night at 7. I told my IRL friends I couldn't make it to the bar that night, and settled in for raiding, bag of cheetos, two liter of Mountain Dew and a poopsock at the ready (just kidding about the poopsock).

We had no problems clearing the trash (more than I could say for my first MC run). I believe we started with the snake boss right across the first bridge. We wiped a few times, but by the third or fourth time we got the hang and downed him. Forgive me but other than farming the tiger and raptor bosses for their mounts I haven't been in ZG since so my recollection of the bosses is hazy (this was about 3 years ago? 4?). But I remember we downed like 3 or 4 more bosses over the next few hours. I was getting compliments on my healing, which was nice. What wasn't nice was having 19 other people constantly needing bio breaks, smoke breaks, doorbell breaks, phone breaks, pizza breaks, etc. We had been at it close to 4 hours at this point and were only about halfway through.

Finally, we got to one of the bosses, I don't remember which (spider maybe?), and wiped. And wiped again. And again. Some people who had done this fight on other toons were giving the group instructions, but half the raid didn't seem to be paying attention. After an annoyingly high amount of wipes and some repairing trips, it was decided we'd try another boss and come back to this one later (I guess hoping a few good drops might push us over the hump). We headed for the tiger boss, I believe, and then things really went south. After 2 wipes to trash, and a few people falling to their deaths over the cliffs, our leader decided to call it a night and pick the raid back up the next day.

I looked at the clock. It was past 2 am. We had been in ZG for over 7 hours. This was unacceptable to me. As much as I loved WoW, and my guild, there was no way I was going to sit and do one thing in WoW for 7 hours straight. I just couldn't justify it, especially on a Friday night when I could have been out having a good time with friends.

For the next few weeks, I avoided my main and my guild. I busied myself playing a couple other alts I had, a level 19 UD warrior twink I had made on my old PVE server who was teamed up with one of my IRL friends (a 19 rogue), as well as a Tauren warrior I had been leveling with one of my IRL friends on the same server as Magdalena. But, as my IRL friends interest in the game slacked off, and my realization that end game raiding was not for me, and even with the exciting prospect of the Burning Crusade being released in a few months, I decided to quit WoW. It was meant to be a permanent vacation.... but, WoW is like a black hole, or the mafia....