Something was missing

My feed reader is clogged. Seriously people, I go away for a long weekends vacation and come back to hundreds of posts. After two days working my way through the list I came across this post by Starman over at Casual Raid Leader. It really got me thinking about the mauling of Karazhan that the pug I was with laid down this weekend.

It was fun, fast, and surprisingly stress free. No one else needed the upgrades, so my young huntress came away with a boat load of shiny new purples. Things I would have gladly dumped all my DKP on not so very long ago are now just purple vendor trash. The run was fun, but it felt kind of hallow.

*fade back nearly two years*

 

 

I remember the nights of leveling my first character, a Troll hunter named Decado. During the weeks leading up to the release of The Burning Crusade I was furiously trying to catch up to my friends at 60, I wanted to raid. As I quested I would sit silently on Vent, listing in. I knew I would get there and wanted to learn what to do.

Burning Crusade hits. The race to 70 starts. There were dungeon runs aplenty, gearing up for the great monolith of Karazhan. Specs were debated, professions were learned, boss fights researched, and skills practiced. I found the ogres in Negrand provided an excellent training ground for chain trapping. Not because it made farming them easier, but because a missed trap on Morose would often spell a wipe.

Attumen taught me the benefits of focused fire, and that time is not to be wasted.

Morose taught me about crowd control and how everyone needs to work together or it will all come apart.

Maiden taught me to stay in range of the healers while still keeping range on my target, I began to pay attention to more than myself.

The Opera taught me to come prepared for more than one thing. To think and adjust on the fly, to never leave home without my Nifty Stopwatch, and to run like hell when chased by a giant wolf. 

Curator taught me patience, switching targets to handle the flares first. The Curator to follow in good time.

Illhoof taught situational awareness, switching to the chains instantly while dodging imps all the while.

Shade taught me to control myself and my pet, one move at the wrong time spelling disaster.

Then we had a problem, we were starting to cancel raids because of a lack of healers. Spread too thin the healing corps of Infusion simply could not handle two Kara teams at once. At the leaders recruited, I put Decado on hold.  I rolled a priest who never made it past 50, then Infusion died.

 We switched factions and servers when that happened. That’s when I rolled Morham, my priest. I leveled him up and raided as far as SSC before the great boss nerf of ’08, but I never forgot the teacher. Even though my new guild was no longer running Kara I pugged it every week. In the same halls where I once learned to kill in I now learned to preserve life.  Although the lessons were different I was still learning.

During all of that I was slowly leveling another hunter, Drupadi. This weekend she was finally ready. I got an invitation to run Kara and bring her along. It was time to go back to the schoolhouse and prove that I had absorbed the lessons it had to teach.  Time to show what I had learned, to impress the teacher.

And the teacher had left the building.

That’s what was missing.