Getting into Kara

My guild is gradually working their way into Karazhan. It's been a little slow as we are mainly a role-playing guild. Raiding and progression through the game content has been secondary. We've also had a small bit of drama and head butting in deciding how to be casual raiders. We have the people that want to do it, but we also have the people who fear that we'll become so focused on loot and killing the next boss, that we forget about the role playing and the socializing that form the basis of the guild. I think we can have both.

One of the underlying tenants of Veritas is that we are a group of adventures, treasure seekers, and explorers. This plays very well into going to dungeons and picking up loot, and gives us a springboard for role play.

"How goes the expedition into Auchindoun? Recover anything of value?" and so forth. So it's really not beyond the scope of our guild to get a group of people together and explore, adventure, and pillage Karazhan. But the way the game is designed requires you to have spent some time preparing your self via gear and practice to overcome the challenges that present themselves in the dungeon.

We don't require people to spec a certain way, or to come as often as we tell them they should come. I think this is great and fits the mold of a casual guild. Play the way that's the most fun for you. But if you want to go to Karazhan, you'll need to have appropriate gear so that the combined effort of the raid can down each boss and continue to progress through the instance. And in order to get the coordination down to learn the boss fights, people will have to run the instance several times. This is where the balance of commitment to role play and commitment to raiding gets fuzzy. We want to be role play first, but in order to do the other things we want to do, we'll have to make time for raiding as well.

I haven't actually made it into Kara yet. Elionene's base stats are good enough to start on the first few bosses though, so I hope to make it in one of these weekends. As I explained the person heading it up, I can't commit to twice a week runs, or even every week, but I can commit to coming if I sign up. If you sign up, show up, and that should make it easy to get runs going. I think we're partnering with other guilds to in the event that we don't have enough people to run the thing.

One of the other things I personally have to deal with in getting to do Kara is Lal! Most of our evenings and weekends when we play is spent playing together, which means that if I'm in Karazhan, Lal is on her own. We've both decided we want Lal and Salthier to level together, so playing them apart, unless it's just for crafting purposes, is not an option. So Lal went ahead and started an alt character. Another Night Elf priest!

Ever since we went to the Scarlet Monastery with Vagne, a shadow priest and his Vampiric Embrace ability, Lal has really thought they were cool. Whereas before she started, she was adamant that she wanted to be Holy, and not Shadow. Well now she can learn the best of both worlds. My hope is that on the few occasions that I decided to go storming through Karazhan with Elionene, Lal can switch over to her new Shadow Priest, Driya, and solo level. We'll see how well this plays out as I have no idea how much time to expect to be in Kara when I do it, but I am looking forward to seeing the Tower of Medivh.