BALNAZZAR
Wow
I was not active on Baln until 2008. Would like to think I was a legend there by the time it died to server mergers. My vanilla days were spent as a low effort loner, and this server was definitely my first WoW home even if I didn’t switch over until WotLK launch.
I started out as a charter-signing member of Slayers of the Night. While they never accomplished squat in raiding or pvp, they ended up becoming the largest Alliance guild on the server for its final years.
I switched to Karmic Retribution in late Naxx and got my feet wet as a fill-in raider and world pvper. Didn’t really know what I was doing or leave much of a mark there, but I hung around through ICC.
Decided to give raiding a proper go at Cata launch and accepted a try-out with The Knights of Nijel. Stuck with them through Ragnaros and ended up leading a lot of the raids by the end of it. The server was shrinking fast and I had the gear and knew what I was doing, managed to get into more competitive guilds from there. Cleared normal DS with Status Quo and ultimately ended up burying the stand-alone server with Fusiøn. Never got to raid with Grip and Sip, sadly.
Not remarkable really, but I was invested in the server in a lot of other ways. I loved you guys and loved competing against the horde as a distant shot underdog faction when we had at best 100 active players left.
I was almost certainly the highest geared Alliance hunter on the server at the end of Cata.
I built up the resources to monopolize the dwindling auction house and became the main supplier of end-game needs for the last year or two of Balnazzar’s existence, got to know a lot of guild leaders in the process of cutting deals.
I passed Fiedler by 5 achievement points to become the #1 highest point player on the server hours before Cataclysm ended, knocking down a sea of Skunkworks horde.
I helped organize a fake city raid on alts in Orgrimmar that saw half of the online level 85s on the server teleported to the bottom of the Stormwind crypts to be butchered by the Alliance in waiting.
I crashed a Skunkworks-hosted Darkmoon Faire loot competition for a free Lifebinder’s Handmaiden with 40 ungeared scrubs, resulting in Aydin actually awarding the prize to the Alliance.
I lead cross-server Isle of Conquest Bloodthirsty farming and put our little home on the national map. This escalated with the launch of cross-server grouping to Balnazzar folk leading some of the top Alliance raiding guilds in North America through Battlemaster grinds and legacy content runs for difficult achievements.
I participated in what was, to the best of my knowledge, the final pure Balnazzar Alliance raiding group to ever complete progression content–a haggard team of holdouts from Fusiøn, League of Justice, and Outcasts in early MoP when Baln was so dead it took a whole faction to band together to kill a boss.
I love you guys.
Probably in an unhealthy Uncle Rico way.
glgl in Classic. I just resubscribed after 3 years for it.