Community Spotlight: Fisty/Primal
MEET Fisty!
Heya, your local Vulpera Fisty (or Primal) here!
“What a weird name,” I’m sure you’re saying to yourself. Well, you’re right! But I promise it’s nothing too weird.
Back in Ny’alotha, I was raiding on my Vulpera Mistweaver Monk named Thousandfist. Thousandfist is far too long to say, so people shortened it to Fisty and the name stuck!
I also go by Primal, which is the name of my Vulpera Shaman that I tend to main more nowadays.
I joined VALOR back around late June / early July and joined the VALOR Blue Mythic Raid Team as a healer.
Additionally, I’m the healer on the VALOR Rain Mythic+ Team.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m primarily a healer, but it wasn’t always that way…
My first time playing WoW was technically in Vanilla. I’d always been curious about WoW, so I made a trial account to give a try. I was super edgy and made an Undead Warrior named Lucianreborn (Lucian based on the Underworld movie). I made my way to the Undercity, promptly got lost, and immediately quit playing.
Years later after Burning Crusade came out, some cosmic force made me interested in giving WoW another try. I was in Highschool and didn’t have any income and couldn’t afford to play WoW so I eventually settled playing on a free private server. I made a Blood Elf Retribution Paladin (again, thought the Blood in Blood Elf was edgy) and that’s all it took to get hooked.
I was absolutely entranced by the Blood Elves and their starting area. Eversong Woods to this day remains one my favorite zones of all time. The architecture, the lighting, the music…everything was perfect. I played on the private server for many years, all the way through WotLK. I was so active on the server and in the community/forums that the server owner approached me and asked me to be a GM. I helped players and answered tickets just like a real GM would on retail WoW.
Eventually, however, as I was graduating High School and moving onto college, I quit playing on the server. Little did I know, I’d get hooked right back in with my dormmates in college playing WoW on retail, which is where I finally switched to playing retail.
Though my early WoW career, all the way until Throne of Thunder in MoP, I played as a DPS – my mains being my Ret Pally and Death Knight. I was also very casual, never doing any kind real raiding apart from LFR or a boss or two in a pug. I was getting a bit burnt out on the game, not really having a guild to call home. All the guilds I’d been in up to that point were just “containers”. Just something I was in, not really something I was a part of.
In one final attempt to prevent myself from quitting, I made a forum post asking for a guild to call home, and that I wanted to try my hand at raiding. A guild did respond to my message and welcomed me to come over and level with them and once I was max level, I could try raiding with them. The guild was fantastic; they were friendly, welcoming, and even had an officer role dedicated to just doing guild events. I had a blast and when I finally hit max level, I started raiding with them as Ret.
As we progressed on Normal through Throne of Thunder, I found something out: I sucked as DPS. I was pretty disheartened, but I soldiered on. One time when we killed Jin’rokh, a Thunderforged Intellect one-handed sword dropped and no one needed it, so I took it. Shortly after, the team lost one of their healers.
These completely unrelated events were the unlikely spark that would lead to my entire Mythic raiding career as a healer. I swapped to Holy Paladin to fill the gap and found something else out: I was really good at healing.
My brain didn’t really click with DPS, but for whatever reason it absolutely clicks with healing. And to think, I’d never really tried healing before then. The rest is history.
I continued to improve and moved from guild to guild, getting further and further into more serious raiding until I got my first Cutting Edge in Hellfire Citadel. Since then I’ve achieved 5 more CEs and very high-end M+ rating through various seasons.
The lesson here: just because you might not be good at one thing, doesn’t mean you’re not amazing at something else. Keep trying until you find what clicks with you!
Now that you know my WoW story, here’s some things about the person behind the Vulpera!
My name is Zach, and I am 34 years old. I have an amazing 8 year old Lab/Border Collie mix, who’s name is Oreo, and we live in Ohio with the rest of the cryptids.
Professionally, I’m an IT Systems Administrator for a medium-sized manufacturing company, which is to say I handle pretty much everything IT-related for them from firewalls, switches, and project management to end-user tickets and general help desk support.
I’m engaged to the love of my life San (real name Aaron). He’s a fellow WoW player and Vulpera living in Scotland (though he himself is Irish).
We are re currently working on getting him a K1 Visa so he can come to the US and we can get married and start the path to him obtaining his US citizenship.
Pre-COVID, I had a pretty eclectic collection of hobbies. I was an avid gym-goer, working out 7 days a week.
I played co-ed softball, built lightsabers, and then fought with said lightsabers in a group called The Saber Legion (TSL). Think of it like fencing or HEMA, but with lightsabers.
COVID sadly ended a lot of those hobbies for me, and these days I do far less interesting things.
Nowadays I mostly play WoW, Magic the Gathering, occasionally stream on Twitch as a Vulpera VTuber, and make WoW-related memes for social media.
https://www.twitch.tv/fistyplays
If you couldn’t already tell, or didn’t know, I’m also a furry and have a full fursuit of my Vulpera, Fisty!
I absolutely love going to conventions and suiting around. I know the furry thing is probably a mystery to a lot of people reading this, so I’ll give a quick backstory on that…
I’d known about the furry fandom since before I was a teenager, but never really engaged with it. Once people in WoW started associating me the player with Fisty the Vulpera, my intention was to make Fisty the mascot of my Twitch channel – you know, a cute animal mascot to draw people in. But I started learning more about the fandom and became fascinated with. So much so I ended up adopting Fisty as my first official fursona and dove right into the heart of the fandom. And it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve made so many countless friends and memories in short time I’ve been a part of it.
I’m also an avid art connoisseur, commissioning boat loads of art of my characters, from portraits and full illustrations to silly stickers and emotes.
Just like my hobbies, my music tastes are equally eclectic. I love pretty much every type of music except country and most pop. My Pandora is filled with absolutely random stuff. It might play some Omertà by Lamb of God, and then switch to Trap or Die from Jeezy, then swap over to Síðasta afstaða by Fuimadane and wrap up with Right This Second from deadmau5.
I owe a lot to World of Warcraft – it’s literally changed my life. Even if I’m unhappy with some of the things Blizzard does, even if I quit one day, I’ll never forget it. I would never have met countless friends without it. I would never have met my fiancé without it. I’d not be the gamer I am today without it. Simply put: I wouldn’t be the person I am today without World of Warcraft.
Thanks for reading! Just like how I end all my streams, I’ll end with saying, “Always remember, you’re loved, you’re important, and you matter.”
Catch ya later ^_^
When I came back to World of Warcraft in Nyalotha, I met Fisty and we became FAST friends. Snap forward 5 years, and I couldn’t imagine playing this game alongside anyone else. He’s a good person and a great healer.
– Sean (Drex)
