Is it me?

For the third time in 6 months, I'm in a new guild.

After being in a guild with friends for three years, this is the most frustrating experience of my WoW career. I actually came close to thinking maybe I should just cancel my account and leave. At some point, you look at the circumstances around you and begin to wonder, is it me? Am I the one common element in these disasters, or am I just unlucky?

It might be egotistical to assume that one person has enough power to provoke such massive reactions among three disparate groups of people; but I'm coming at this from a far more depressive pattern of thought. Maybe I'm the one who creates problems, is a bad player, bossy during raids, needy for gear, arrogant, depressing, condescending, has a bad transmog, smells weird, picks my nose, eats worms - whatever - and that's why the guilds are collapsing around me. Now, objectively and intellectually, I know that's not the case. In also every circumstance (except when I first left my beloved Turtles), I know I had little if anything to do with the collapse.

Yet, I can't control how I feel about this. It's like being the guy who shows up to a party and then it breaks up right afterward - every weekend. Maybe the guy just has shitty timing, but man, it sucks to be that guy.

So, I flirted with the idea of just canceling my sub, and saying goodbye to this chapter of my life. But instead, I decided to give it another shot, interviewed with twenty or so guilds, shortened the list to about 3 offers and now I'm a Trial with one of them to see if I fit them (and if they fit me). 

I didn't have the heart to type "GQuit" again so I just paid the $55 and became a filthy Blood Elf on another server without the heartache. I also didn't realizing that it was PvP but I'm not as concerned about that part of it as I haven't been ganked (yet). I did wind up buying some PvP Honor gear, though.

The other thing I don't like about it, is that it's a Medium Population server while I prefer the busy bustling metropolis feel of High Population or Locked servers, but we'll see how it shakes out.  The guild I joined is 4 bosses ahead of me in Heroic progression and is a 25-mode raid, so that's another big adjustment. I spent last night talking with their lead tank to get an idea of how they do the various fights, and I hope I don't embarrass myself tonight.

At this point, I just want a quiet place to settle down long term and be content with my guild situation. I desperately miss my Turtles right now. I raided and played with my guild for years, but we've really drifted apart in terms of how we raid, and if I stop raiding - well, I might as well just stop playing this game.

So, once more unto the breach, however many times it takes.

Now, if you'll excuse me I need to put on some eyeliner, black lipstick, rip up some fishnets into torn gloves and smoke cloves in a graveyard while gazing sadly at the cloudy sky...

Changes

The summer in Warcraft has really dragged for me and part of it is because I've known for some time about a change brewing in my head that I didn't want to acknowledge. It churned, and churned, and finally it spilled over during raid about three weeks ago, when I realized, I just didn't want to raid the way we were raiding anymore. The way my guild wants to raid and the way I want to raid have drifted apart till there was a rift between us and it was making me angry and frustrated, trying to get them to jump onto my side of the gap.

Until, during a random comment in raid pointed in my direction - with no ill-intent or anything - made me realize just what the problem was. It was me. When the majority of the raid has moved on to one side of a divide, the person on the other side should shut up and follow suite. Or leave so as to stop being a problem.

And that's what I did. Well, not yet, but I began the process of trying to find a guild that would fit my needs.

It would need to be mostly composed of adults, it would need to be a mature place to play with long-term stability, it would need to be progression oriented, relatively competitive in terms of ranking, and it would need to be no more than 2 nights a week of progression. Beyond that, it didn't matter. Server, faction, 10s, 25s, I didn't care. I was willing to play any spec on my paladin or even my Warlock or Death Knight if necessary. I spoke to several guild masters after seeing their posts on various recruitment forums and finally got an invite to a guild for MoP. Alliance side, but on another server and as Retribution instead of Protection. They've finished raiding for Cataclysm and are waiting for 5.0 to start up again, which left me a bit of time to set my affairs in order.

I broke the news to my guild leader and raid leader but they took it well, even going so far as to encourage me to keep alts in the guild, which I'm grateful for. I still haven't actually moved over yet, as we're finishing up a lot of the left-over raid achievements (in fact, we only have about 11 left out of the 60-odd raid achievements in Cataclysm) but this coming week will be my last raid on Innana with the Turtles as a Turtle, when we'll finish our last achievement to get Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider.

There are some things I'm nervous about naturally, I have been with the Turtles for over two years, I signed the original charter, I've been writing about the Turtles since I started this blog, more or less, and that's a long time. I don't want to just cut ties and run, I think I have a fair amount of loyalty and dedication to a guild, and I like to stick with them once I find my feet. And with the Turtles, we've known each other so long, it's almost like talking in short-hand with amount of in-jokes and such that we have from a long shared history of raiding.

It's a big risk for me both socially and raid-career wise to take this leap. But it's exciting, and it has added a good deal of energy back into the game for me. I recently got my hands on a Level 4 guild for rather cheap, so I'll be moving to the new server with all my gold rather than the silly 50k cap on transfers.

On September 25th, I'll wake up from an early nap, log in as the servers come up, begin the journey to 90 and as soon as I hit cap, I'll be preparing to to raid on October the 2nd. in the mean time, I have nothing but the best wishes for the Turtles and I hope to see them on top of the server rankings in MoP - if that's what they want.

Avatar Improvement

I swear I have like, 10 posts in draft that I can post, but whenever I go to retrieve one of them, I wind up with something new to write. Something is wrong here.

This is the first week in a long time that we didn't raid. Enough folks are missing that we just couldn't fill the holes. And I was kind of glad. On the one hand, I really want to kill Deathwing and be done with it. I think we just need one solid night on him to finish it all, but even just farming the rest of the raid would be a fun experience. I really enjoy smashing the first half and working hard on the second half. The raid is well paced, and well designed. I need at least my tier gloves and chest still, not to mention the shield and sword, and maybe a trinket and a ring.

But still, when we called it last night, before even entering the raid, I was glad. A few of us queued up for LFR and cleared the first half, and I called it a night an hour and a half early. It was odd, and nice, to just walk away rather than struggling to find people, messaging every I know and flailing like mad to make a raid happen. I just shrugged and said, "Okay." I wouldn't have done that even a month ago. I would have fought to raid.

I don't know if it's the Holiday that I'm willing to be more laid back about it, I don't know if it's the fact that our server has so many relatively hardcore raiding guilds that we're really just a tiny fish in a big lake, or the fact that maybe when I'm not raiding or doing Arenas, I really don't have much to do in the game. I keep trying to level my rogue, or get the rest of my alts up to 85 who're parked somewhere between 80 and 82, or gear up my DK Horde-side, but I just manage an hour or two of any of those activities and loose interest.

The one character I don't loose interest in, is my Paladin.

Whenever I look at her, I want to improve her gear, improve my understanding of her as a character, improve the way I play, push her achievement points into the five digits, get her all the pets and mounts I can, and make her perfect. Which, of course, is impossible.

The MMO by definition is a game that never ends, and goes on forever, where we just grind for gear, and achievements, and drops, and there is always just one more thing that we could use. I remember when TBC ended, I had been doing a bit of T5 and had some of that gear, but what I really wanted was the T4 helm from Prince. After killing him for months and months, he dropped it the last time we ever raided Karazhan at level, the week before Wrath came out.

I remember changing mains on the first day of Wrath to my Paladin (and never will I change again), and we were in ICC for a year and yet I was still hunting for one more drop or one more kill. Today, I look at my character and I know even after we kill Deathwing, we'll be raiding, wrapping up the T11/T12 heroics, grinding out Sinestra and Heroic Ragnaros, eventually even trying our luck with Heroic Deathwing.

But when Pandas come, it'll reset everything, won't it?

Maybe some part of me remembers what it was like to grind ICC. Two years ago, now, we started on that raid, and man, it was a brutal time. I remember how close I came to burnout, almost burned all my bridges, left the wreckage of two guilds in my wake before we formed the current guild and stabilized ourselves. And maybe that part of me doesn't want to slip into the desperate end-of-the-expansion must-finish-everything panic.

Sure, we've got months and months to go, but when I look at Innana without her title, without her mount, without her shield and sword, that part of me cringes, wants to post on the realm forums right now and get a PUG together so I can at least have a shot at some of that gear.

And another part of me says, "Relax. It's okay. If not this week, next week. The gear and the raid are here to stay. The only person you're playing against is yourself."

If that seems obvious, and normal, I assure you, it's a bit of an epiphany for me. Maybe it's a sign that I'm finally starting to let go of some of that hardcore edge I've always wanted.

To be in a group that was devoted to pushing through content, to grinding night after night, early in the tier, to be one of the first with the titles, the kills, the glory. To make Innana a Hero in her own right. The best gear. The highest gear rank. Because that way, I can get her as close to finished as I can - and rest, till the game paints more track further up the field.

My Attitude Sucks

My attitude in raids lately has been just total crap. My attitude in game is also a reflection of my attitude out of game, I've been going through a bit of a bad patch but that's really no excuse at all for my behavior.

Maybe it's because of my expectations of play - and sometimes I feel like my willingness to bring up points about performance is almost a detriment. I hold my play to a fairly high standard. If I let myself get killed, that's a problem, I look at my logs, I try to see what's killing me and I prevent it in the future. If I'm causing a wipe, I try very hard not to repeat my mistakes.

In the same way, if there is a difficult portion to a fight, I'll do my best to take it. I want to do the heavy lifting, I want to take the responsibility of failure if someone has to do a high-stress job, but as a tank, that's not always possible. Sometimes it's the healing and sometimes it's the DPS and sometimes it's one role that one person has to fulfill that I can't do as a tank and that's when my issue kicks in.

I begin to hold that person's performance to the same standard that I hold for myself, and that's just not fair. That person might learn some things faster or slower than mine, maybe I would take a week to figure it out and they'll get it in an hour, or maybe it's the other way around, but the point is - they have a role, and I have a role, and we're both there to perform it to the beset of our ability.

But when that doesn't work, I begin to get frustrated.

Ultraxion is a good example of this. It's a fight that sits in the hands of the DPS. If the healers can 2-heal it and get the raid to the 5 minute mark, that requires from the raid, counting the 2 tanks as 1 DPS, an average DPS of 27k.

Or 24.5k to finish the fight in 5.5 minutes which is about how long the raid can stay alive with 2 healers after the 5 minute mark.

That's a lot, even for a Patchwerk fight, which this essentially is, outside of the Hour of Twilight and Fading Light mechanic. That's expecting people to be just about perfect with their rotations, using every cool-down in the most efficiently lined up way possible, and limiting their time outside the Realm of Twilight to 2 seconds at worst. Factors having a say about this include such thing as Latency where the time you pressed your button and got to the other realm might be long enough to kill you, bad string of procs where you don't get any, a bad string of RNG rolls on your crit chance and any other number of things.

We were able to kill it last week, with numbers both above and below that average. Some bursty classes and better-geared people pulled ahead, and hit the 25k, 26k mark and others were in the 20k, 21k range, but the overall damage balanced to eke out a kill, and yet last night, we pulled a couple of times and couldn't get him to drop, wiping in the 3% range sometime after the 5 minute range.

And I was kind of loosing it with the wipes. Which is absolutely ridiculous given it's the second week and the gatekeeper boss to the hardest content in the raid.

I think there's a difference between assigning blame, and dissecting the fight. I'm always ready and willing and able to take responsibility, and do my best to improve. I might get testy, true, especially when I'm frustrated with myself, but I'll take feedback, even negative feedback, over silence any day of the week. And while we're not a hard-core guild by any measure, we do have a commitment to progression and that means we're going to dissect and fix our problems.

But I'm not dissection fights anymore.

I'm afraid I'm drifting into crazy-old-man grumbling about them DPS not pulling their weight territory instead of doing a proper analysis of the encounter and coming up with solutions.

The conflicts are getting all jumbled in my head and affecting my attitude in raids tremendously. I'm just super glad I'm not the one making calls and calling shots right now.

If I was my raid leader, I would've fired me by now.