On History

So, since Steph has gone and spewed forth a great number of posts, I figure I should get at least a token one in before I end up sleeping on the couch.

That being said, let’s talk about where AC came from.

Aetherial Circle started small, on Lothar. I formed it with Steph and a couple friends at level 46 or so, after drama around some of the guild leaders had made us leave the guild we were in at the time. I confess a small bit of selfishness here – I wanted to form a guild because eventually, somewhere down the line, I’d heard about this raiding thing, and I heard that if you were a druid and you wanted to get into it, you pretty much had to heal or be the GM’s best friend. And while I don’t mind healing, it’s not the thing that appeals to me most, since I usually end up feeling like I’m not watching the fight, I’m watching the health bars. So, I had my four friends or so sign and then payed people in Ironforge a gold each to sign the charter, and viola, a guild.

I think it was like 3 months later I finally remembered to uninvite the people I payed to sign the charter. Most of them were never online.

So, we continued on, and eventually got a number of other friends on board, some of whom are still with us today. Immortus, Sharvan and Diyami. Don’t get me wrong, we were total noobs in the sense that most of us had never even set foot in a raid. Part of it was that even then, the rumors of Burning Crusade were causing fewer and fewer raiding guilds to continue raiding or expanding their ranks. We discussed joint raids with a couple guilds, but it never really went anywhere apart from a couple people going to MC a time or two.

So, there we were, just starting to get enough of a base to do UBRS on our own, when patch 2.0 hit. And soon after, the free transfers. Now, Lothar was a launch server, it’s been up since the dawn of WoW, and its population reflected that. And let me tell you, when you want your WOW fix for the night, 45 minute queues do not a happy player make. So we had a guild meeting, and figured what the hell, let’s jump ship. We transferred over to Drenden, and started there.

Our group didn’t really expand TOO much until we started hitting level 70. We had some come and go, but it was the same group for the most part. When we approached the magic number, we started really looking into what it would take to start raiding in this new content. And yes, we hated Shadow Labs. Dear god. Especially the room before Blackheart before they nerfed the pulls. At that point, we started trying to actively recruit in order to get into Karazhan. This ended up probably being the roughest spot we’ve been in.

Our first issue was a chronic lack of healers. We had Steph on Cayleigh, but that was about it. We slowly, very slowly started getting people through level 70 instances, getting geared up bit by bit, and started getting our key fragments, though we hadn’t managed to complete Black Morass yet. We eventually got a Holy paladin and a Resto shaman on board, which got us at least moderately settled for healers (for an aspiring Karazhan guild, at least). It’s kind of funny to think about in retrospect – AC now has over 110 individual members, at least 60 of which are very active and probably about 40 of those being raiders. Back then, we had maybe 15 active members, and maybe 30 total.

So, we finally got our healing settled, and things were looking brighter…and in the space of about 3 weeks, our main warrior tank who transferred with us stopped playing, our Holy Paladin respecced Prot to try to tank, but then left the guild for an established raiding guild a couple weeks later (without notice and immediately AFTER Steph gave him 2 of the blue quality, world-drop gem patterns that sell for about 500g/ea). I was less than impressed with that bit of asshattery. But with him went two of his friends, and then he poached our resto Shaman who pretty much threw in the towel since we now had no tanks and two healers.

I was actually pretty annoyed and Steph and I said “hell with it, we’re finally beating BM tonight, no matter what.” I had gotten decently lucky with feral drops and had saved some of the quest items, so I said “hell with it” and went to go respec as a tank so we could more likely get a group going. Not that it’s always easy to find a tank, but I seem to remember a much greater lack, percentage wise, of tanks back then. Regardless, I had just unlearned my talents and was about to start clicking on feral talents, when Steph goes “wait, wait, wait, I’ve got a tank.” That ended up being Eska, one of our current guildies who tanked for a while then switched his main to his mage due to our lack of sheepage at the time.

So, we pugged the last two DPS and finally got Kara attuned. Over the next couple weeks, we got the rest of our 70s attuned and ready to go, and started trying to build a Kara group. This time, we were more lucky, and ended up finding some good recruits, and absorbed a couple smaller guilds. After about a month or so, we had the makings of a Karazhan run.

Let me tell you, going in and one shotting Attumen was great. Yes, I know now how much of a pushover he is. But seriously, if you have any kind of raiding experience ever, think back to that first kill. Yeah, it was only a 10 man. But that night, it was the greatest accomplishment, no matter how many times Moroes owned us afterward (took us 2 more weeks to get Moroes, for the record).

After that it picked up. Recruiting was easier, as now that we’d proven that we can walk the walk, at least ton an extent, people were more willing to trust that they’d actually be able to raid if they joined us. This is about when we picked up BRK and some of our other current core members. We never really stalled too badly, and the rise of AC has been documented more fully in more popular blogs than this, so I won’t drag on too much.

So, that’s where we came from, in a nutshell. I think we’ve lived up to the original goals of the guild. We’re a casual guild, where people who have a life outside of WoW can still experience some of the endgame content. And where we’ve found good friends who I know will, in many cases, remain friends long after this guild and WoW are both just memories.

And most importantly, where I can raid as a Boomkin.

– Jason