I QUIT

Yes, I decided last night to hang up my crossbow until after the expansion. Like most I am just burned out. Since i transfered in March, we progressed through Kara (my previous guild couldn't clear Kara in 20 hour raiding weeks, this guild did it in 3 hours), through Gruul and Mag, on to Serpentshire Cavern, through Tempest Keep, Mount Hyjal, and finally Black Temple. We are currently knocking on the door of the Betrayer himself, but I am not sure the guild will survive long enough to take him down.

Anyway, we did alot of progression, and i think it's natural that I look back and say hey we did great. But anyway this is why I am leaving.

1) Too late. With raid starts at 8:30 now, I'm raiding until 12:30 usually. Not good when I need to get up and go to work.

2) Too much like a job. In the end it's just a job. You log in, you show up, get yelled by your boss routinely, demoralized, etc. If you get your bosses down, ho hum, that's your job, no big deal. The thrill is def. gone.

3) Too much work. In addition to 3 nights a week raiding, I figured out my mats requirements. Most of this you can buy at AH.

2 x Flask of Relentless Assault - you can farm for an hour or so to get these, or buy them, 60g or so of mats each. 120g.
20 x stat food - can easily buy, 20g. Or fish it or whatever.
40 x pet food - buy it from vendor
28 stacks of ammo. about 2g each (1.8g).
25 x fel mana pot - need to get mats from AH, extremely expensive. Probably 100g for those 25, and I'm the guy who makes the pot. If you buy the pot in AH, its..about 30g a stack.
Repair costs for a night of wipes. This isn't bad any more because each boss drops 10g. But if you are doing progression, expect at least 50g in costs.

So total for a typical raid night is 370g. Multiply by 3. That's easily 1000g a week in consumables. You can do dailies every day (another 5 hours of work), and thats 700g. I'll typically have to gather mats for another 2 hours. So if I am raiding 3x a week, I'm easily spending 20 hours, actually playing the char. Then there is the strategy learning, etc.

4) Too many bosses. I get so confused now that we've go through 20 or so bosses, and will face 14 on a given week. It's very hard to remember all the strats.

5) Lack of skill. I just don't have it in me to be one of the best players on the server, which is basically demanded to raid the top instances. Its humbling, but there you go. As it is, I'm in very elite company, maybe 100 people on the server have ever seen Illidan. So...we've come a long way, but now I'm ready to do other things. I look forward to playing on my Horde side guild more esp w the expansion coming up.