WHO AM I?

THEY CALL ME HOR
Hello my name is Keith, but your probably know me better as Khaas. Those who’ve known me personally for any length of time however, know me even better as Hor. In real life I’m a 31 year old student, husband, and freelance writer. In World of Warcraft I am a Death Knight, a tank, a guild leader, and a bit of an entrepreneur (that word makes me feel stupid every time I try to spell it).

It may sound like I have a bit of an identity crisis, and it’s definitely a fair amount to juggle, but I manage. I started this blog in 2009 with the intention of documenting my adventures in both dungeons and the auction house. My primary objective was to prove that one could be successful in World of Warcraft without giving up home, health, and family. In other words, rising above the social stigma of Basement Dwelling WOW Nerd. Similarly, I wanted to push myself to be the best. I wanted to obtain some level of notoriety on my server without being a total prick. I feel that in these regards I’ve been successful.

Of course after reading various gold blogs I also wanted to reach the gold cap, which I’ve now done several times over. So the blog has become a documentary of my ever changing goals within the game, chronicling my experiences, my successes, and my failures on Bloodscalp.

Okay, great but why do they call you Hor? Fair question. For that, we must look back to a simpler time and to a game called EverQuest. In those days I was a Barbarian Shaman named Horaxe Dreamwalker. The name was both a bastardization of the name I tried previously “Horus” and of course, a not so subtle combination of two things to make what I felt was an appropriately fantasy sounding name. Originally though, I wanted to just put in Thundar but apparently someone else watched that cartoon as a kid too.

I quit the game after several years, EverQuest was in a slow decline and had lost much of it’s earlier appeal. I had another brief fling with the game after moving to Utah. My three roommates still played, they tempted me into making a completely new account on Sullon Zek (a faction based PVP server). I rolled a Wizard named Volos and we began our climb to the top. We skirmished higher level characters as we scurried from dungeon to dungeon. But eventually the new wore off the same old game we were all already tired of.

About this time World of Warcraft was in Beta and people kept leaving EverQuest little by little. It was inevitable, servers began to merge in a last ditch effort to make them seem less empty. For me, the merged servers proved to be the final nail in the EQ coffin. However, it should be mentioned that I didn’t even want to play WOW when it was first released. I had the usual laundry list of complaints: It’s not EQ, I hate the graphics, I can’t get my heart broken again, and most damning of all they don’t even have Death Knights!

Eventually my friends won out. I returned to Arkansas for a wedding, it was at that wedding that I met my wife – a woman worthy of her own great saga (a saga which one day I may relate in further detail). About this time World of Warcraft was released and I decided to drop in to visit an old friend from the EQ days, Fielding. He and his brother were already level 10 and they wondered what I was playing. I told them if they got me a copy of the game I’d play with them, an hour later I created: Malignor on the Blackrock server. I leveled up the tried and true EverQuest way: grinding, grinding, and more grinding. It seemed like years before I hit 60 and found out that I was doing it completely wrong, that quests in this game were much easier to manage and complete than they ever were in EQ.

By then, the die had been cast; I was sixty and ready for action. I ended up in a guild called Burning Sky Clan, raiding Molten Core. I became the class lead before a large portion of the guild (myself included) moved on to join Mediocrity.

It was lonely on Blackrock, my friends had quit, and I was only on that server fighting the ques because of them. Actually, I was only playing at all because of Fielding and his brother. A short time later I rerolled on Malorne, this time my friends were both well ahead of me. Level 60 already and Fielding was the Main Tank of an Alliance guild, Absolution. It took a couple of weeks, but I caught up with my new Human Warlock, Xombi.

We stayed on Malorne for a year or more. We cleared MC, BWL, both flavors of AQ, and even started working on Naxx. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun, it was also however very draining. Raids lasted, and lasted. “One more attempt guys…” became a dreaded mantra I heard in my sleep. By the time Burning Crusade came out, the guild had fallen apart. Fielding had been hacked and lost his Gnome Warrior, he was talking about never playing again. Several tanks left word they were quitting. Some just disappeared. The guild seemed to dissolved overnight.

BURNING CRUSADE AND THE BIRTH OF FACE ON FIRE
The Burning Crusade release was on the horizon when I reconnected with my friend Alex from Utah. It turns out my old roommates were stuck in WOW too, though we were all spread across different servers. Paid realm transfers had recently been made available and we were looking to get away from the hardcore raiding grind. I think we were all a bit burnt out and just wanted to have some fun together. We chose the server Bloodscalp as our target and consolidated our efforts, on December 10th 2006 Face on Fire was born.

We started off essentially as a Friends and Family guild, none of us had the slightest interest in raiding again. But we had varying interests in the new PVP Arenas. BC is largely a blur to me, boredom began to creep in through the cracks and I realized there wasn’t a lot to do. I rerolled multiple times, in a month I’d have a new level 70 with PVP gear. A month later, I’d do it all over again. This wasn’t a complete waste of time however, I’d say I learned a considerable amount about the different classes during this time. By the end of BC we were all getting the itch again, we started playing around in Karazhan and Zul’aman. By the time the third expansion was announced, it was decided we would be a raiding guild in Wrath of the Lich King.

WRATH OF THE LICH KING AND DUAL-BOXING NIRVANA
By the end of the Burning Crusade, I’d learned to love wow again in a wholly new way: I had become a tank. With the announcement of Death Knights as a new tanking class in Wrath, I decided to work on skills I would need when I created Khaas. I started a dual-boxing a team of four Shamans and a Paladin, Sedlec. The paladin served as my main through the end of BC, tanking Kara and ZA for the guild while I honed my skills.

The night Wrath of the Lich King was released, I was first in line for my copies of the expansion. Soon afterward I was back home installing and creating Khaas, I added the fledgling Death Knight to my group of Shamans and got underway…

I learned a lot on my rise to 80 and was soon farming heroics with my group, before long I cut it down to a daily heroic with my group. Then I stopped playing the Shamans all together. I felt confident in my skills and started plying my trade as a Death Knight tank. The guild began to build, though those that had created it were gone. Different members of the Utah crew would appear and then disappear. As I focused more on the guild itself I found I was ok playing the game on my own terms. I missed my friends when they were gone, but they weren’t the reason I played anymore. As the guild grew, so did our accomplishments.

Face on Fire grew from a 10 man casual guild into a 25 man raiding guild, soon I was tanking my way through achievements and hardmodes. We even managed to do Sarth with drakes up before Ulduar was released. Though at the time, I was still an Unholy tank, and still using Titansteel Destroyer. That thing was the bane of my existence for like a year…

By the end of Wrath our guild had reached new heights, we were one of the top guilds on the server. A far cry from our humble beginnings.

CATACLYSM AND THE FUTURE
The release of Cataclysm found me in a situation I had not been in before, I was playing an established character. My guild was stable. And I was one of the most geared players on Bloodscalp. I had hit the gold cap already several times, and was in a prime position to do whatever I wanted. I decided to go all out, hit the new level cap (85) as soon as possible and maybe try for a realm first achievement.

I actually had the Jewelcrafting achievement on lock as well, but abdicated the spot to my buddy Aximand over on the Alliance side. Things have been good to me so far in this expansion, I’m still one of the top geared players on the server. As well, my guild is strong and growing stronger. The adventures continue, but where they’ll take me is anyone’s guess…