Enigma was formed two weeks prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King, with the purpose of clearly standing ahead of the rest of the competition on our realm, Deathwing. Despite our best efforts though, when we started to pick people up at first, things were looking iffy. Duffmanoyea and I had been attempting to gather people for an all-star core, but so many people ended up backing out that we had to settle for a lot of raiders we'd had problems with in the past. Not only that, but by the release of Wrath we were still only at roughly twenty raiders. Fortunately, the first few weeks were fairly kind to us. Several players emerged from the dust and were interested in the guild, and the opening three raid instances rewarded people for getting people in there quickly as opposed to a super tight core. From there it was all uphill.

When World of Warcraft was in beta, my older brother had a friend who was really into it. He brought the idea to me, but at the time I was 14 and Defense of the Ancients on Warcraft III was the only game I'd played for any decent amount of time. Off the bat, paying a monthly subscription seemed pretty ridiculous to me, and if I'd convinced my brother of this I never would've played in the first place. I was pretty casual right away. It wasn't until I was 15 and my real-life circumstances changed that I had enough time to pull off the Warlord grind. You could say I've been pretty hardcore ever since. As for the title, it stays forever, unless you guys bring it back. Please don't.

There are two pretty big ones for me. First for me would be the week after I hit Warlord, running around with the title, and all kinds of free time. Getting that title took playing non-stop Battlegrounds over a long period of time. Most people who went for High Warlord completely burned out halfway through General, which was a shame after the work they'd already put in. Fortunately as a Feral druid, Warlord was as far as I needed to go. I was completely euphoric; it was the best week I had on World of Warcraft hands down. The second was our first Kael'thas kill. It was getting pretty late at night, the trash had respawned, and the entire raid was getting into that apathetic mood, where despite the fact that we had time left, nobody wanted to reclear. 80% of the raid just wanted to give up. The few of us who wanted to continue managed to push the majority for a full reclear and a few more attempts, and that was when we pulled off our first kill; after five weeks worth of effort and a three-month guild break dividing them.

To be honest, my people in Enigma are what keep me playing right now. Any new content or major changes will keep me very interested, but after this amount of time I've been to every corner of World of Warcraft. For anyone new, World of Warcraft is better held together than it's ever been. It's the really wacky changes that will keep us old farts interested though, the ones that reach deep into playstyle, whether or not we agree with them.

The aspects of really good leadership and people management are virtually endless, and that will keep me attracted forever.

Back to the Warlord grind again. If you wanted to succeed in the old PvP system, you formed a Battleground group and farmed all the pick-up groups all day for honor. When the guy who was running the group before me got his title, I just picked up the mantle and did my best to make it enjoyable for everyone. After the grind I had a pretty solid reputation on the realm. I picked what seemed the most fitting guild to join, and a few months later a minor officer position opened up and I figured I could do a pretty good job. You learn a lot of things when you start really leading. I ran into it with the views that if I was kind and good to everyone, they would do their best right back out of respect, but that simply wasn't the case. That was somewhat of a disappointment. It's odd to find that where being completely rational and logical won't calm someone down, a firm slap in the face will. It took me a while to get a hang of that, and I still have a lot of room for improvement. The aspects of really good leadership and people management are virtually endless, and that will keep me attracted forever. Always have to keep an eye on yourself, though, to make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. Anyway, over a year later that guild started to founder and I was the guy everyone was pointing fingers at to get the next thing started. I've been in that sort of position since.

My previous level of progression was nothing really amazing. I had up to Twin Emperors down in original World of Warcraft, with some spots here and there in Naxxramas 40-person, and up to Felmyst in The Burning Crusade. It wasn't until recently with Enigma that we hit realm-first, and not until even more recently (the past few weeks) that we've started to show up on a continental scale. The up-swing feels great.

As a guild, only a few of us really PvP. Nothing bad to say about PvP though. Arena is pretty well balanced right now. For me personally, ever since my old Arena partners stopped playing, I've been badly ashamed of my PvP status. For a few months in season 3 I was the highest rated Feral in the world, but I don't even have Gladiator at 80. Finding someone skilled and keeping a grip on them has been quite a trial on our realm lately. As far as Battlegrounds go, they're more of a means to an end (Arena) right now. Whether Enigma wants to participate in rated Battlegrounds in Cataclysm will be up to them, but we might have to recruit a separate PvP core for it.

I'm pretty sure we did do this as a guild, but it doesn't really stand out too much. We tried it once at 70 with about 40 people and got thwomped by just Tyrande. The caster DPS had something insane like a 3% chance to actually land a spell. At 80, though, it was pretty trivial. I'd find the shenanigans after the achievement to be far more interesting. Things along the lines of killing the auctioneers and having forty people follow some level-6 gnome for like 45 minutes.

How rigorous? Well it's nothing extreme. We raid sixteen-hour weeks, with a potential extra four tacked on if we feel we want it. Most of the time we only end up raiding about eight hours a week. I don't think we've ever had someone leave because they were too exhausted by a raid night. As far as 10-person content goes, it would only ever take priority over a 25-player group in the circumstance that we needed to use the 10 to teach us the boss. On progression Tuesdays, we'll run one group as close to realm start as possible to learn as much as we can, but generally it'll be three groups simultaneously on one of our main raid nights. The most high-end thing you could really do with raids lately (short of Faction Changing the guild for a double reset per week), was to use everyone's alts to feed their main characters gear. For a few weeks we ran two guild groups of Icecrown Citadel 25-person, and we've only got 30 players total. Some guilds out there will do this with far more runs, up to four runs per instance, per person. This won't work on any progression week though, or you'd have the characters you need to kill a new boss split apart in different raid IDs.

Icecrown Citadel has been excellent for us. This is the first time I've ever been on the map as far as PvE goes. The only gripe I've had so far with Icecrown Citadel is the same one that most high-end raiders have had -- difficulty level. Otherwise, everything has been great, the end-wing bosses were tuned well, and the Lich King himself is nothing to snub your nose at. Definitely the hardest boss of the instance, and the length of the fight is something well in tune with the lore aspects of his character. Favorite boss of the instance has got to be Putricide.

I really hope the game changes significantly. Adaption is one of the major qualities of a player.

Depends on just how much Cataclysm changes. I really hope the game changes significantly. Adaption is one of the major qualities of a player. It'll give me a really good view of our raiders transitioning through a change of their class -- maybe a few of them just got lucky with a playstyle that fit them this expansion, or maybe a few of them will be world leaders at theorycraft in the new changes coming. It will be interesting to see from my perspective how our raiding core reshuffles in quality when the slate is wiped clean.

Every guild has to recruit at one point or another. Personally I'm of the opinion that a guild should always be recruiting, or at least looking at applications. The classes and specs we're looking for will change on a monthly basis, as people tend to drop off here and there and need to be replaced, or maybe we just decide that someone isn't pulling his or her weight anymore. If anyone happens to be interested, we start all our recruitment from our guild site at http://enigma-dw.com/. If an application looks good it's into a month of trialing and then a vote into membership.