Before I created Syzygy, I only raid led the duration of one raid: Hellfire Citadel (or HFC). That one raid was an especially long one though, because it was the last raid before the new expansion came out, where everyone would get to increase their maximum level from 100 to 110, and a there would be new areas to explore, new things to do. As such, HFC lasted for over a year. This was a year when I steadily grew as both a raider and a raid leader. In a sense, it culminated when the PUG I led killed the last boss of the raid on the highest difficulty level. After this happened, my next step was to move up from leading PUGs, to forming my own guild.

9 min video of when we killed the last boss on mythic in my PUG

When it all began though, when I started raid leading, my goal was simply to put myself in a spot where I would be able to raid at a higher level quickly, and to be able to raid a lot, unconstrained by the raid sessions of my guild DH. Though I had been dissatisfied with the progression of my guild, I hadn’t considered leaving. Therefore, the only way I could still do raids was to PUG. I would PUG heroic difficulty, not the highest, but still very difficult for most raiders the few month or so, and since there were 13 bosses in HFC, it took about that long for most PUGs to successfully kill all the bosses. Another reason it generally takes that long for PUGs is because loot only drops once each week from each boss in the raid, so it takes awhile for people to get the gear they need to be able to be strong enough to kill the last few bosses.

Because of my father’s sickness at the time, for the first few months or so I would be gone half the week every other week. It took me, through PUGs, 6 weeks to finally finish all of the heroic bosses. Looking back now, that seems shockingly slow to me: in Syzygy, created just one raid later, it never took us longer than the first week (week 0) to finish all of the bosses on heroic. HFC might have been a harder raid, but even so I would assume a guild of Syzygy‘s level should be able to finish it on heroic within 2 weeks at the latest. Though it took me 6 weeks to finish the final boss, the other 3 guilds/groups that I was semi-raiding with were even slower. Through my PUGs, starting from the second week (week 1), I had already progressed further than DH or any of the other groups I was with (I had occasionally joined a guild that Noci raided with called Bobalicious, not regularly at the time,  but months later I would join them regularly, and even to my last week in game, I would join them. Another group I was with called themselves The Misfits, and they were even slower, only doing normal, but to this day I will remember them as the group with the absolute best atmosphere I’ve been with).

Week 0 I only raid led the first boss on heroic, and did the second to fourth with Bobalicious. Week 1 I raid led bosses one to eight (DH was at five, Bobalicious was at six). Week 2 my PUG raids (with different people each raid, of course), progressed up to boss ten. Week 3 was up to boss twelve. And week 5 I finally killed the last boss, boss thirteen on heroic in my PUGs. At this time, my main guild DH had only killed the first eight bosses, Bobalicious had killed eleven bosses, and The Misfits were still working on normal difficulty. That I was able to progress much faster than any of the guilds I knew at the time, was partially because those guilds weren’t pushing for extremely fast progression (the timing of my PUG kill was in line with about world guild rank 1500), but also partially because guilds are restricted to their raid session times, while I could PUG for 10 hours a day if I wanted to. And I wanted to. PUGs are inherently less efficient than guilds, because each raid can consist of new people, so the experience of the group is reset each time a new PUG is formed, or even constantly reset within the same raid,  as PUGs will randomly drop out and I would need to keep bringing new people in. It was in large part because on the days I wasn’t with my father, I would raid hours and hours that I was able to make up for the inefficiency of PUGs and progress faster than many guilds. Later in Syzygy I would be really frustrated by this difference, knowing that if we raided more we would progress faster, but being restricted by many players not wanting to spend more time raiding. This whole feeling of not wanting to spend as much time raiding as possible is something that I have never been able to relate to, even when the time came that every moment in game felt like hell for me.

Because of all the time I spent in PUGs, raid leading, I also improved vastly as a player. The first week that HFC was open, I was doing average, or slightly above average DPS. A couple weeks later I was by far the strongest DPS at DH. I remember Noci commenting on how he didn’t know what happened, but I was soso one week, then the next week I was amazing. For a long time after that, I was convinced that a raid leader should be the strongest player of their team. The raid leader is the person who knows every second of the fight, and all the strategies, so they should be able to plan everything perfectly, down to each second of the fight. For much of HFC I really was one of the strongest performers of my teams. Later, in Syzygy, when I was still the raid leader but one of the weakest performers, I’d wonder whether the difference was the increase in the quality of the players that I then played with; or the faster progression, making it so I couldn’t perfect my performance before we moved on to the next boss; or the fact that you cannot PUG mythic, so I wasn’t able to get the tons of practice I got in HFC on heroic; or the result of the mental exhaustion I was under because of the pressures and busy-ness of being a guild master. But while I was raid leading in HFC, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine a day when I would not be one of the strongest players on my teams.

By the time I successfully raid led PUGs to killing all the heroic bosses, I had been ahead of my guild’s progression for over a month, my ability as a player had also improved so much that I was far above the level of most of my guildies. By then I had felt that I was stuck with a group that wanted much less from raiding than I did. I finally decided to move to a more progressed guild. I wasn’t comfortable going through the application process that most high-end guilds require, but I had met someone in my PUGs who offered me a raid spot in his guild, a guild that was working on the first few mythic bosses. In truth they were slower than I was at finishing the raid on heroic, but PUGging mythic was not feasible at the time, so once I finished heroic I could no longer progress by myself, and joining a guild at a similar progression to my personal progression seemed like a good idea to me. That guild is called Symbiosis. Though it made sense for me to make that move, I still feel ashamed about my behavior throughout my time at DH, and my decision to leave it when I did. Earlier, when I left DI, it was because they were no longer raiding. When I would later leave Symbiosis, it was shortly before the new expansion would start, so I wasn’t deserting them mid-raid. I deserted DH mid-raid, though, after a lot of complaining about issues that dissatisfied me there, without ever having tried to work to address them and help out. Less than a month later, they stopped raiding.

Once I moved to Symbiosis, I continued raid leading PUG heroics, and just did mythic with my new guild. In this time, my focus was mainly to improve myself as a player, though all the raid leading I did helped me improve a bunch as a raid leader. After every single PUG I led, there would invariably be at least one person who would tell me I was the best raid leader they’d come across. I would get compliments about how calm I was, how useful my callouts were, how good my performance was despite my raid leading, how I inspired people to perform better, etc. etc. Part of why people were so impressed by me probably because though there are many other great raid leaders, most of them lead guilds, not PUGs. But I felt pretty great about being a raid leader. I objectively did think I was good at it (and I still think I am), people constantly validated that idea for me, and I felt every day that I was improving as a raider, and was also having a positive affect on the people I came across. I wrote a bit of a guide about my raid leading experiences for the first and second boss on heroic, and gradually started feeling not only that I would be a capable mythic raid leader, but that I wished that I could continue doing my PUGs on mythic.

This wish came true three months later, when Symbiosis had just become 10/13M (killing ten of the thirteen bosses on mythic). On November 18, 2015, it became possible to PUG on mythic difficulty the same way we had PUGged on heroic difficulty, and I officially started LijiPUG. Much like a guild, I had specific raid times during the week, and anyone who was interested in joining were welcome to. Also like a guild, I planned to progress weekly. Unlike a guild, the members would be different every week, which normally means mythic progression wouldn’t be viable (heroic is less punishing and people can get enough gear for it more easily; mythic is much more punishing and less easy to get good enough gear for, so normally you need every single member to practice together week after week to learn the fights). However, unlike most heroic PUGs, I planned to have regular members that would join every raid session. By the November 24, I had already been raid leading heroic PUGs for five months exactly, and had a group of people who would regularly try to join my PUGs whenever they could. Out of this group, I worked things out with maybe 5 to 10 people: two tanks, three healers, and maybe two or three dps. Once I started I also made it clear that if people kept showing up for raids, they could possibly become regulars. As such, despite being a PUG with random players each week, mythic progression was feasible. It’s a situation that has rarely happened in WoW, as far as I know (even I eventually stopped using PUGs and went for what I thought was the stability of a guild about a year later, when I created Syzygy).

Video of my first LijiPUG mythic raid. It is nearly 3 hours long, the length of my raid sessions.

When I started raid leading mythic PUGs, it was over three months after I finished heroic. Not only was I far behind Symbiosis, I was also far behind Bobalicious, who were at 8/13M. The first week we raided, LijiPUG go to 6/13M. It was a shockingly good week, even if there were nearly half of us who were experienced in the group. Week 2 there was no progress (I write about how that felt here). Week 3 we got to 8/13M. Week 4 no progress. Week 5 we were 10/13M. Another four weeks with no progress (during which time it was Christmas and New Years, and I was dealing with my father’s death). Then on week 10 we got to 11/13M. Another three weeks with no progress, and on week 14 we were 12/13M. By now we had progressed beyond Bobalicious, but were still behind Symbiosis (I was in both these groups, so with my own group I had a total of 3 raid groups a week, each raiding at 9 hours a week). In fact, Symbiosis got to 13/13M (and so got their final rank) the same day LijiPUG got to 12/13M. Four weeks later, on week 18, my PUG finished the raid on mythic, killing the last boss. The first video in this post shows the actual kill. Below is the video of how that day went, we raided over 3 hours that day on the same boss, before we finally got the kill.

Video of the LijiPUG raid day where we finally killed the last mythic boss. It is 3.5 hours long, and shows what mythic progression can look like.

Though we killed the last boss a full month after Symbiosis did (and over a month before Bobalicious did), we were able to rekill everything starting from the next week. A situation that is apparently quite rare in many guilds: most take a month before the rekill of the final boss happens. I would eventually experience this in Syzygy, and realize how much behind-the-scenes drama in guilds can cause problems. At the time, though, I didn’t understand why other groups would struggle to get their rekills. I arrogantly and erroneously credited it to my being a better or more charismatic leader. Certainly, there were things to be said for my leadership (from early on, I had always had a lot of thoughts on how I should be as a raid leader), and after we completed the raid, for the next five months before the next expansion came out, everything seemed to bolster my idea that my leadership was something I should be proud of, and possibly make something out of. I had people tell me before we killed the last boss that it was impossible for our group to do, because we had too many weak players (which is to be expected of a PUG). That we did it when we did was in large part attributed to me. The smooth rekills of everything week after week, even as other guilds struggled, were constant validations of the success of the groups I lead. I was still consistently getting feedback about how the way I lead makes others happy, and want to be the best versions of themselves. As this continued, I started thinking more and more about how it may be a good idea for me to have my own guild, where the values I espouse can really thrive.

The final boss on mythic would drop a mount, each team could get one a week, it was the most coveted loot in the game. I would use this as a chance to highlight my gratitude for each person on my team, and portray some values that I found important. 3 min video.

In Symbiosis, I felt there were problems with some of the officers on power trips, who would make decisions about what to do in raid that were not intelligent and counter-productive to being successful, and I also felt they would at times yell at people in disrespectful ways. Disrespecting people is a deal-breaker for me, in so many ways. One time, I was pissed at a slow taxi driver, and before I left his car I was disrespectful to him in that I threw the money I was paying him on the seat instead of handing it nicely to him. I cried for days afterwards when I calmed down and fully took in how I behaved in a way I hate the most. Each time an officer spoke to people in a disrespectful way in Symbiosis, it made me more sure that this guild wasn’t the place for me. To be fair, the guild master of Symbiosis never did this, and the officers who did this didn’t do it all the time. But any moment just seemed like too much to me. As for Bobalicious, I felt people didn’t expect the best of themselves, many viewing themselves as second-tier raiders. This is another point that I couldn’t really accept. I felt it was ok to think of oneself as weak or far from the best, but that’s a far cry from viewing oneself as second-tier. For me, it’s a big deal to feel that no matter where I’m at now, I’ll keep improving, and one day I’ll be amazing. This philosophy is something I gradually developed after my early twenties, when I was constantly feeling that any lack of success or fault was a reflection of who I was. I found it difficult to accept who I was for years, and I was only able to come to terms with myself after I realized: who I was at any moment is only a snapshot of that moment; who I truly am is a person who improves on anything I don’t like in myself. So dealing with an atmosphere of often saying things like: ‘well others can do that but we can’t cuz we’re just not that good’, was not something I could stomach well.

In the five months after LijiPUG finished HFC on mythic, we continued to raid every week, and rekill the bosses. Since we were rekilling quickly, I ended up forming two LijiPUG raids a week, so that eventually we were finishing the raid twice (and towards the end, three times) a week. In this time, I grew more and more certain that I wanted to create my own guild, one where I would try to bring out the best of everyone, and create a place that truly fit my values. The two elements that I disliked in my two guilds Symbiosis and Bobalicious became the founding principles on which I decided to build my own guild, Syzygy. Anytime anyone joined Syzygy, I would go through our two basic tenets with them: 1) respect others at all times, 2) always strive for self-improvement.

From here, the actual story will start. It will go through the two years that I led Syzygy. It will go through how I feel it may have ruined me as a person, and did almost lead to my death. And at the end of it, I hope I will be able to see where I truly am at now.