Inside Paragon - Baltha

Welcome to my first blog here on Paragon. The idea behind "Inside Paragon" is to learn a little bit more about the people behind the nicknames and the guild through interviews. This week's interview is with Baltha who was brave enough to be the guinea pig. Enjoy reading what the Co-Founder, Officer and long-time Mage in Paragon has to say.

 

Welcome Baltha and thanks for agreeing to this interview. To have a good start, could you please give us some information about yourself, like age, location, occupation, these sort of things.

 

I'm 27 years old dude from Vaasa and I like WoW. Other than wow my studies and work (mostly in summers) keeps me busy, I also like to play golf and sit on my computer doing the usual stuff (tv-shows, games, yadda yadda).

 

 

You are playing a mage since the start of WoW. Do you feel fortunate that you are able to play this class until today while other members of Paragon had to reroll in order to be useful?

 

Yeah I've played a mage since the start and what can I say, I love it! I'm so grown to mage class, that it would feel realy weird rerolling something else. Though I haven't always felt so fortunate playing a mage, since Blizz has always had a hard time balancing us, either we've been pretty much useless or totally op.   

 

 

Are you happy with the mage class in Catalysm so far for raids and everything else there is to do?

 

Even though we haven't been topping the meters, we have quite a few gimmicks that make us crucial to the raid, so I'm pretty happy how things are atm. All of our specs are now (with the recent changes) competative and each have their own advantages in different encounters, I'm realy happy with this. There are alot of things I'm not so pleased with (ignite, rng...), but I don't want to start blabbering about those right now.

 

 

Sticking to a char for so long probably means that you are not a fan of alts. Still everyone in <Paragon> has at least one for alt raids, so what about you?

 

That is exactly true, I doubt that I would play any alt atm if it didn't help the guild somehow. I play a rogue in our alt raids and I've also leveled a druid for farming purposes.

 

 

On the website you wrote that you were one of the planners behind the merge that created <Paragon>. Who had the initial idea and how did it happen then?

 

I as gm of <Sauna> had some doubts towards our Wotlk roster and the guild in general. I remember thinking by myself that we need to make big changes, if we want to be competitive in the upcoming expansion. So when Seita out of nowhere contacted me about possible merger of <Sauna> and <Knockout> raiding cores, the decision was quite easy. After things started rolling everything happened pretty fast and smooth, and we didn't have any big problems with the merge.

 

 

You are now an officer together with Lazeil and Rakez while Seita is the GM. Is he the one to make final decisions or do you agree together on tactics / solutions?

 

We don't realy discuss tactics between officers, we always have an open discussion with everyone, with Seita having the final word. On other issues we usually discuss stuff between officers, most of the time we come to an agreement that satisfies everyone quite easily (Seita again with the final word).

 

 

The first tier of Cataclysm raid content is cleared and it was quite a lot. Kruf wrote a blog about how his days looked like during this time and how he burned out. How much did it affect your daily life and did you feel the same towards the end?

 

It had pretty much the same affect on my daily life as with Kruf, with the difference that I just didn't do much other stuff in addition to WoW...easier to skip school than work :D With progression cycle as long as this, raiding started to feel like work towards the end, work without a paycheck...

 

 

Now that everything is on farm, do you play a lot outside of raid times or is WoW only interesting to you once there is new content to tackle?

 

I dont't play WoW much outside raids atm, mostly cause I got so overwhelmed by it in the last couple of months. Also I don't realy like other aspects of WoW, other than raiding, so it leaves the game pretty boring for me on farming period.

 

 

Paragon has a lot of fans around the world but how is it in your home country Finland? Do a lot of people write to you or come to you at lans like Assembly or are you just another bunch of gamers to them?

 

There are some 'fans' that look forward on seeing us at Assembly etc, but very few come to those events just for us. 

 

 

In international guilds the different nationalities are often source for jokes, teasing or even friendly competition. How is it in a single language guild, are for example home cities a source for such actions there?

 

I wouldn't say we have any competition between cities, but there definately is alot of joking about it. Though 90% of the jokes are about Turku, since they just are sligthly more jokeable than anyone else.

 

 

To close this interview I got to hint to ask you about your presumably awesome summer job, so what do you do?

 

I don't know if it's that awesome or anything, people just seem to think it's funny that I work at a golf course...and just to make things clear, I work inside the clubhouse as caddiemaster, not cutting the grass or collecting balls :D

 

Note: I appreciate any constructive feedback in the comments and you may also suggest who should be interviewed next. Please note that not every Paragon member necessarilty wants to get interviewed, which has to be respected.