Raiding is like that Twilight Zone Episode with the Pig-Faced people

Remember that? They did face surgery on a guy, and when the bandages came off everybody thought he was a monster because he had a human face, instead of the scary rubber pig-face masks that everybody else was wearing.

That's the perfect metaphor for my raiding lately. I'm just not sure how. But I am really enjoying raiding with my guild and it's something I actually look forward to. If that doesn't make me a rubber pig-faced monster, I don't know what does.

It's hard not to enjoy the raids. The encounters are fun, and they are challenging but not guild-breakingly hard. My guild is mostly adults instead of college-aged or teenagers. We have a limited raid schedule (three nights a week) opposed to my original "every night" raiding schedule. I'm not an asterisked member of the guild that can sort of raid but sort of not raid and I'm only in the guild because I played with the guild leader before -- did that before too. Never do that.

Mostly though, I think it's nice to have an end-date. Icecrown Citadel (or ICC, as the kids call it) is the last raid dungeon before Cataclysm, so there's only four or five months of serious raiding left -- after that both Arthas and Heroic Arthas will have been dead a number of times, and raiding will taper off while everyone waits for the new expansion.