You can't spit shine velcro sneakers.

While this isn't a real post in terms of quality, I think it's been long overdue. I don't want to call myself any sort of great creator, but this took a good deal of time and effort, and I couldn't have done it without my barkskin-popping wife. This chart has been floating around in my head, and it probably will only make sense to those from Bladefist, or in my guild, but I wanted to show it off. I'll provide a key below, but this guy more or less describes how I've seen my guild for the past month or so. The names haven't been changed to protect the innocent and I pull no punches here. Oh, and you'll probably have to click the picture. It's a big chart.


Now then, the key, so that you might better understand how this all goes together. Most of it should be pretty explanatory: green arrows for yes decisions, red arrows for no decisions, and black arrows for process movement. Those are typical of any flowchart that I've seen. Some of the other stuff will take some explaining, but I'm okay with that, it's part of the fun.

Parabola, and the joining of said guild: is the guild I am a part of. We are a ten man guild. We like it that way. We have ten people, therefore we aren't recruiting...ever. As soon as we killed the Lich King on our server (we were the first ones by a good long while), we were almost immediately swamped with people that wanted to join. Not good people either. There was also a lot of guild shake up going down on the server, Alliance and Horde, we didn't much care for it.

Recruiting and realm forums: On the off chance that we ever were recruiting, we'd be sure to put some sort of post on the realm forums...in which case the post would be up for about two days before it got deleted. As part of a social experiment of ours, we seriously put up a recruiting thread on the realm forums, looking for 25 man raiding. We didn't ask for much, though we did require all serious applications to leave their current guild in order to be considered. We knew nobody would do it, but given the general fragility of guilds on Bladefist, we were trying to crash the market. Our social experiment would have worked out well, had the trolls not gotten hold of the thread and had it deleted in less than 48 hours. Some of us went to the CSM forums to complain, they laughed at us. Apparently Blizzard moderators want to keep us down--they won't even let us recruit. Coincidentally, every post on the realm forums that pertains to Parabola gets deleted. No joke.

Raiding and snack time: This is probably one of my biggest annoyances since coming into the raiding scene back during the MC/BWL days. Well, aside from the five minute paladin blessings. We never set our raids to go longer than three hours. We're inherently lazy. Three hours or so is a good amount of time, and we can usually clear through what we need to do in that span. This doesn't so much happen on ten man stuff, but I see it plenty in 25 man content, especially in the ones that we aren't running. In our joint 25 man runs we would blow through the first four bosses of ICC in 45 minutes or so, maybe an hour at most, and then people would be calling for a break either before, or directly after Saurfang. A FIVE MINUTE BREAK. Are you kidding me? You can't sit in a chair for more than an hour without getting up to pee or move around? Is your bladder that small? This couldn't be more true than in some random 25 man PUG I somehow got roped into. We pulled Marrowgar once, and died. Yeah, I know, let's just say that I ended up doing 14% of the total damage for that fight once all was said and done. Immediately after dying the raid leader gave us a five minute break because "the smokers in the group really needed to go smoke". LOLWUT? This isn't kindergarten. Handle your own snacks.

Vicarious: The guild that we had originally planned to run 25 man ICC with. It worked well, actually. Granted, most of them were terrible, okay, all of them, but we needed bodies, and they needed people to lead. It was something of a mutual benefit at the time, but hey, things can't last forever. It was the GM of Vicarious that ended the relationship, Everkill. A lot of it came from internal guild strife from his end because he thought he was big and bad, and told his guild as much. Some of them didn't like it, and consequentially left. Some of those that left were also part of our 25 man joint runs. He gave us the ultimatum that if we were to take those that left on the 25 man run, he'd pull all of his people out. Fine by me, because there was a catch. Long before any of this was set up, a number of rules were in place to keep attendance high, namely: should you not have a member show up to the raid and you can't supply a sufficiently-geared raider as a replacement, then you owe the other guild 2K gold. We had to pay it to them at one point because one of our healers couldn't make it, so we figured okay, if he's going to pull some 11 people out, we'll take our 22K gold and be happy. As was part of the agreement and all. To this day we haven't seen our money and Vicarious as a guild has harbored nothing but ill will toward us because we're jerks. Well, at least my playtime doesn't automatically cut off at 10:30PM server, kiddos.

Dalaran and the fountain: Parabola was the first guild to kill the Lich King on Bladefist. Granted, it was only in ten man, but hey, it still threw up the fountain. It's our fountain. We hang out there when we're bored and blow kisses to the level 77 people that spend hours watching the ending cinematic.

Texa$: While originally this was part of a Saturday Night Live skit, this has, for us, become one of the general measurements for "a whole crap ton". In this case, it refers to a whole crap ton of money that Everkill and Vicarious owe us for their sudden departure and breech of contract. We'll go to Judge Judy if we have to.

Keybinds and bads: I honestly don't know people can raid without keybinds, though I am continually amazed by just how bad some people are. How one could ever play WoW by clicking on every item/spell/ability and actually think to raid seriously makes my head want to explode. Coincidentally, we happened to pick one of said individuals up to fill a raid spot (without us knowing) and it's been nothing but headaches. Use both hands. Move with your WASD. Move with your mouse. Figure it out. Stop dying on Sindragosa because you can't run out when she sucks everyone in.

Breaking my balls, Mario: While I could explain it, sometimes a video is better.


Beasteater: See the section related to keybinds and bads for more information.

Ducktales, Tailspin, and age: This came about during one of the 25 man raids with Vicarious wherein I tried to explain how the hunter should range tank the shadowbolt-tossing Blood Prince. The hunter in question was Everkill, the GM of vicarious, and my analogy went as follows: "Alright, you see all those little shadow orbs floating around? Well, you want to be like Scrooge McDuck and those shadow orbs are coins that belong in your money pit. You want to be swimming in them, got it?" The response from Everkill was, "Who's Scrooge McDuck?" This then led to half of the raid over the age of twenty to have their eyes fall out. Long story short, it turned out that Everkill didn't even know what Ducktales was, even while half of the raid was singing the theme song over vent. This then shifted into a discussion of Tailspin, another Disney show, while we got my barkskin-popping wife to tank the shadowbolt boss instead. My conclusion? If you don't know what Ducktales or Tailspin are, you have to be, honestly, thirteen years or younger. Funny story, I hear Everkill is 15. I was close.

Amath tell me invite you k?: This gem of a line came from a shaman in Vicarious. Said shaman also has a really bad time with English. Said shaman also can't follow instructions. Said shaman also took the healing trinket from 25 man Saurfang for his resto set and then the next week announced to the world that he was going to be going enhancement from there on out. I'm fairly certain that our resident priest still grinds his teeth over losing that roll.

Lopsirio: The name of said bad shaman mentioned above.

Drakes and Algalon: We sell these, by the way. It's become something of a running joke with our guild. Somehow we always find ourselves getting people titles and drakes without even trying. The most recent drake and Algalon kill went to Beasteater. She's a hunter. We took her from Vicarious. She says she's learning to use keybinds. She keeps dying on Sindragosa. She fills a raid spot. She also helps us to piss Vicarious and Everkill off because she's seeing content they will never see. I think it works out in the end, even if it does cause me to grind my teeth.

I think that should just about do it. If any of it doesn't make sense, feel free to drop a comment and I'll see what I can do to better explain things. Saurfang hard mode went down last night. Good times for all.