The Start of Something Perfect

"Joe we are going to play Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn!!"

This was a sentence my best friend told me 18 months ago. A lot has changed since then I've had a beautiful baby boy, gotten engaged to my lovely girlfriend, moved house and brought a brand new car.

Time to game? I don't think so!

Any one reading this who is an avid gamer will know the passion never goes, no matter how hard your try to subdue it.

Once I realized playing a game was a lot easier than running round a football pitch for 90 minutes I made the transition from promising young footballer into a tiny pro gamer and have been playing PlayStation, Xbox and PC games since I can remember. 

The first game I remember playing competitively was Diablo 2, I would stay up late and wake up early to get in an extra Meph or Baal run. I have a vivid memory where I really wanted to have an item called HOTO (Heart of the Oak), In order to do that you need to have 4 runes which were random drops through out the game. I wanted it so bad I got my parents to buy me the final Vex rune I needed to complete it and was so proud of my weapon. In 2001 I brought the Lord of Destruction expansion and along with that came my new love the Trap Assassin.

In 2004 I was hearing rumours of a game called WOW (World of Warcraft), being another Blizzard game I singed up for Beta and only now almost 9 years later I have finally stopped my subscription fully. I started the game playing a Mage called Joeyman, an ugly Troll with possibly the worst face, hair and tusk combo. After a month of being asked "SWE?" I gave in and created an Orc hunter with equally awful looks called Ghosthunter. Many weeks past as I leveled Ghosthunter to 60, pvping in the newly added BG WSG (Warsong Gulch) and grinding mobs as I had no clue on what I meant to be doing. Once I dinged level 60 I was lucky enough to join an MC farming guild called Spherical. Doing MC with 40 people was one of the funniest times of my WOW career, wiping endlessly on Raggy, waiting weeks to get my Hunter bow quest and eventually getting full Giantstalker set. 

There was a Nightelf warrior on my server, Rank 14, he had long purple hair and a stare that could silence any crowd. He would sit in battle grounds and gank in Tyr's hand constantly charging his way through anyone and everything. After running back to my corpse more times than I could count and waiting minutes to spawn every time, I left my hunter and my old server Bladefist and started a fresh on Frostwhisper with a level 1 Nightelf Warrior (I didn't copy honest!). The life of Ghostman began. I leveled Ghost up a lot more successfully than my hunter, achieving cap in a couple of weeks. I PVP'd the whole way through my leveling and achieved rank 8 before I dinged 60. Catching the attention of some hardcore PVPers I found myself in a WSG premade playing 8-10 hours a day grinding my way up to rank 13.

After I achieved the rank I wanted to in PVP I had to give PVE ago again, I joined a guild called Infinity with a friend of mines help and was fortunate enough to get a space in their raiding 40. I was apart of the first Nef kill in BWL and multiple others in AQ40. This character was to become my main for the best part of 4 years.

Being curious and jealous of some of my PVP friends characters, I rolled a Mage (again) as an alt and decided to dedicate him to PVP, achieving the same rank as my Warrior and farming end game content I thought I was done with the game. This was until The Burning Crusade was announced...

Rushing to level 70 and farming PVP gear in preparation for the first arena season, I obtained Gladiator rank  in 5v5 on my warrior and made a name for myself along some of the top PVPers on the server dueling outside Org taking on any challenge. Along with PVP I dabbled in PVE and found myself guild master along with some friends in a guild called Wasted. Now if I had to pick a bunch of people to play with, these would be them. I had so much fun during this part of my career. I  made some friends for life in that guild and all during leading them into Black Temple.

I could talk forever about WOTLK, CATA and MOP but I shall stop here, unless anyone wants me to carry on the story. Below are only screen shots and I have of my chars after swapping PC several times.

              

Originally NE Ghostman                  My second Warrior                      My Mage Ratha

During the past 10 years or so, I've tried a few other MMORPGs. Aion, Age of Conan, Rift and Guild Wars 2. I have always had a competitive streak and strive to achieve the highest PVP ranks I could in all of the above.

In rift i was rank 6 and then 8 when the new patch came out, in Aion I got Commander rank (ended up buying a whole new PC due to lag, damn that game!!), in AOC I think I just died a lot while trying to storm a castle myself  on my rhino mount and unfortunately GWs's PVP didn't hold me so I gave up on that, although the WvWvW was very fun.

Again due to me swapping PCs I don't have many screenshots of my game play, I have a few below of my time in GW2 though. I hit the release so hard with a couple of friends and the backing of my guild TDA (The Dark Alliance) I got max level in 2 days and was amongst the first to level 80.

     

            My first completed dungeon                                    My leveling partners, Knutti and Fiets

                     My Warrior                                                       The first huge Dragon I found

Anyway enough about games for a while and a little about me.

I'm a 24 year old IT Analyst working for a national law firm, I have been working there for 4 years now and I'm a making nice progress in my working career. I've always had a positive head on my shoulders when it comes to work and always try to go above and beyond when tasked with any challenge.

In my personal life I have a loving family which are 100 miles away, my girlfriends family and a good bunch of friends for support.

Here is a picture of myself and my Fiancée :) In case you were wondering I'm on the right :)

My baby boy and I, he is learning well.

Hopefully you've enjoyed a little insight into me, my gaming past and my personality. The following posts will be very orientated around Final Fantasy XIV and my journey with my Monk to be, Ratha Xiv. 

Below is a picture I took during the last Phase 3 beta. This is with Lily Mae (http://vanishedsun.wordpress.com/)