(I hope you don't mind, but I've combined these two sections into one, as I feel they are told better together)

I'm going to assume that 'MoP' at the end is outdated, as WoD is almost over (and there's not much to say otherwise). As I said, I started playing in 5.4 as a very casual elemental shaman, eventually raiding normal(new heroic) SoO2 days a week on Openraid with a group of friendly people, 10 man Garrosh Hellscream Normal with them, not much to say, but it's something, I spent most of 5.4 learning the game & some advanced concepts of raiding.

Going into WoD I started to adapt the hardcore Mindset I have today, I dropped my Ele Shaman for a Mage, because Shamans were bad, and Mages were good. I started raiding Mythic for the first time in Highmaul, on my casual-ass realm, with a guild called 'Salty Tears', where I got 3/7M, 5/7 after BRF hit. The guild broke up in BRF, because a 'mythic' guild called 'Salty Tears' on a RP server was never going to last. From there I transferred over to Horde side - Tarren Mill, and joined my current guild, Zanity(around world 500th at the time), during Mythic Thogar Progress, and from here things started to click in my brain about raid progression in WoW, I started to stalk websites like www.altered-time.com for any drops of new information about my class, watching kill videos from top world guilds to study how their raids were structured, and watching Warcraftlogs.com for top end Mages, to improve my dps and my play; by the time we reached BH Mythic I had been promoted to an officer, and was structuring a lot of the tactics & doing as much as I could to kill Blackhand.  We downed Blackhand around a month before 6.2.2.

When Hellfire Citadel dropped it was my first tier raiding mythic from the start. It was here where I started to stop watching how other people did first kills, and developed the same thought processes for myself, sure I still look at altered-time.com and warcraftlogs.com, but I don't rely on them for my talent/spec choices. We cleared up to 11/13M on Hellfire citadel, and throughout the tier I was starting to grow restless of other people's faults, I would spend hundreds of wipes on bosses like Gorefiend, that I had nailed in 10 pulls, waiting for other people to learn the fights, the only reason I didn't apply to another guild earlier is because I had already made a commitment to my friends and GM to finish the tier, I'm not going to be the guy that leaves in the middle of progress for a better guild. Tyrant was the point where people like me got tired of the weaker members, and started to lose all motivation for the guild, Mannoroth was the nail in the coffin, as one of our best players left for a guild called 'Drive', world 60th. After that, me and the officers got together and came to the conclusion that raiding was grinding to a halt, and we should start to go our separate ways. Which brings me here, I'm looking for the next step, somewhere I can really push myself.