Thank You Conan

I had an interesting tell come to me from Agamegnome, a former Guildmate of mine from my Heroes Inc days.

These days, Aga, as he is called, is in the guild called Dominion on Altar of Storms. They happen to be the second most progressed guild Alliance side on Altar of Storms.

It seems that Dominion's Protection Paladin has left WoW to purse a career in a game called Age of Conan.

I had always worried about losing my own guildies to another game, but I never considered it could lead to opportunities for me.

What was strange was that Aga had not seen my post on Tankspot where I advertised that I was looking for a guild. So far as I knew he doesn't read the blog. i had bloged a month or so ago about blowing him off for a Kara run to go with Heroes Inc, and he never commented on it.

The huge advantage to Aga's offer was that it meant I could stay on Altar of Storms. I was nearly certain that I was going to have to transfer servers.

I am a man of my word. Dora asked me to give her until reset, and I will do that, but I think her job just got a lot harder.

If I leave Mal Katai and show up in Dominion the next day, no one in Mal Katai is going to believe that the offer to join Dominion came to me AFTER I had already decided to leave Mal Katai. Really, guys, that's they way it happened! I put the Tankspot ad up on Friday afternoon. Aga didn't contact me until Friday night. I held off putting the blog post up until I could talk to Dora. I had the blog post written and set to delayed publish. I wanted to tell her before I told my readers.

I jumped on to Dominion's vent and talked with Aga and Dominion's GM/Raid Leader, Vladimer. I hadn't seen Vlad since I helped her do the Ring of Blood quests back when we were both leveling in Nagrand. Back then, she never really struck me as the Raid Leader type.

We talked about their Raid Times, their loot system, and how they felt about Protection Paladins.

What struck me most about the conversation was their stated goal of downing Illidan before the Xpac. They aren't too worried about Sunwell, but they'd like to have finished the original Burning Crusader content.

This is a goal I share.

I talked to them about my 'night off' which is usually Wednesday, and Vlad didn't feel it would be a problem. We also talked about what would happen if their Protection Paladin suddenly decided to return to WoW.

Basically, what they would tell him is "Sorry, your position has been filled. How is your availability on Wednesdays?"

Now, I have no delusions that I'll be Main Tanking anything for Dominion in the short term. My main goal right now is to prove myself to them and begin to earn their trust. I have to show first that I'm a "Raider", then a Tank. I know it's very hard to "try out" a tank, especially when the life of the raid can very well depend on their actions.

Once I've established myself as a good tank, I can think about asking for a MT spot on a Paladin friendly fight. I've heard from others that Gorefiend might be a good spot. I'm not someone who needs to be Main Tank. I never felt I was contributing less to our success just because I was tanking Hurtful Strikes on Gruul rather than tanking his melee, or when I was gathering a dozen Murlocs instead of standing in front of Morogrim, or even when I donned healing gear to keep the "real" healers alive during Eagle Avatar in ZA.'

What's important to me is to make a real contribution to the success of the raid, and not have that contribution be healing 100% of the time.

Further complicating my move is that Dominion has done 4 bosses in Mount Hyjal and 4 in Black Temple. I've seen one boss in each place. That means I'm going to be learning these fights and the trash on the fly as it were.

I've watched some videos, so hopefully I'll be able to keep from doing anything completely noobish and wiping them on a farm boss.