Passion

I like to think I'm passionate about raiding.

I've pursued it twice a week, just about every week, for the last three years. It's something I enjoy very much, the puzzle-solving and teamwork style are my kind of thing and I like to think I'm good at it. Through two expansions, I've experienced the best and worst raids and continued to work through them, through roster problems, through waning and waxing interest, through a year-long drought of new content, through a glut of bosses, through simplistic encounters to encounters so complicated we never finished them. I never stopped.

And I'm still hungry for more. It's a  comfort to me, to know that I have six hours a week where I can sit down and unravel puzzles with my friends, work on executing my play and being rewarded for that time not by loot or achievements, but with the feeling of camaraderie and teamwork.

I've raiding with the same core of people for almost all of those three years - in fact, about half of my raid group is the exact same as it was at beginning of 2010 and about 80% is the same as it was in the beginning of 2011. That's a pretty good record as far as groups go - we've held together for a long time. So the raid isn't just about problem solving as I said above, but also about the companionship of these people.

But.

Raiding is also about achieving what you set out to achieve. It's about solving those problems, not giving up on them. It's about doing the content when it's still reasonably relevant. It's about taking personal responsibility and correcting our play. Owning up to mistakes and not repeating them. Taking the initiative and showing a capacity for spontaneous thinking rather than waiting to be told what to do. It's about pushing through adversity even if it means sitting on the same boss three nights in a row.

And I don't have that with my current group.

Did I ever? I don't know. I remember things being different even as late as last summer, but memory is unreliable and I might be constructing a golden age that never existed. Still, I feel there has been a shift in the guild and slowly but surely, we've moved away from the realm of personal responsibility and progression into the realm of shrugging and moving on.

It isn't any one thing holding us back either, we lost a core healer in September and never quite recovered from it. The last couple of DPS slots haven't been consistent and we've seen many people come and go over the months in an effort to try to fill them. Having me substitute as a healer lately has been a hit-and-miss thing as I try to learn an entirely new style of game-play that I never pursued before. I'm miles away from where I need to be to push new content and I feel I could contribute more as a Tank than I do as a healer. Or maybe that's just me wanting a return to my comfort zone rather than pushing myself to do something new.

"It's not that I want a Hardcore guild, necessarily," I tell myself. "I want the mindset of hardcore progression, the passion that hardcore players bring to the game, that's what I want from the game."

Because I feel that some iota of that passion is missing from my current group. Maybe we're tired, maybe we're bored, the expansion is long in the tooth and when we can see the Elysian Fields of Mists on the horizon, it becomes difficult to remain passionate about the muddy, old, familiar dungeons of Cataclysm that have been ravaged by time and their predictable ways.

I toy with the idea sometimes, of finding such a group, but this is an old song, and we know the ending to this already. After much soul-searching, I decided, way back when, that I'd rather play with my friends than find a guild dedicated to hard-core progression and that hasn't changed.

But perhaps, as with any passion, this hunger for raiding needs to evolve into something else, something more stable. Something that doesn't burn out with the heat and intensity of passion. Perhaps I need for this hunger to smolder, and become embers, something that warms and sustains instead of consuming.

Perhaps, at this point in my life, what I need is a hearth that won't give out.

In pursuit of this, I sent an e-mail to the other officers that I want to step down and become an ordinary member. Last year I stepped back to assistant raid-lead, but even there, I couldn't help but keep my hands in the pie. The temptation is too strong. It's time to let go.

I'm going to go sit by the fire and warm my hands. My responsibility will be to my play and nothing more - I'll always be ready to help if asked, but I think it's time for me to figure out how to sustain myself for the long haul. When Mists rolls around, I might not be first through the breach in the walls, but I'll be on the field.

Burnout

It's funny how fast things can go from being okay to just total crap.

This week's raids have been the worst in months. Struggling to get even simple bosses down, and just a total lack of communication until I have to ask the same question eight times to get answers from people. The kind of nights you just want to end. And then after an hour of trying to pull things together, someone's connection craps out and you just want to log out and never log in again.

So I called raid, and told everyone I was canceling raids for next week as well. We'll regroup on the 15th - with whoever doesn't leave the guild by then - and see how things go from there. I'm also going to just not log in during this time and try to focus on other stuff. I have a lot of writing on my plate anyway.

Lessons Learned

I really hope Cataclysm changes things for me and I fall back in love with the game because I really enjoy playing Warcraft quite a bit, but things are just not a lot of fun right now.

A lot of it has to do with the boredom of a lack of content, and even the new elemental invasion feels anemic with the quick little questline which was fun the first time, and then the wide-spread elementals which is more of a chore, trying to find a node when it happens to be open.

Some of it has to do with the lack of guild activities (or guild interest in activities) so that when I log in game, there is little of the socializing and commaradarie I crave desperately which I think also ties into the big "people are bored and they aren't playing" thing.

I've just about given up trying to push any progression or agenda at this late point and we're trying to use raid-nights as a chance to keep interest up and just do achievement runs in old raids or whatever people want to knock out. Someone mentioned that one of our problems is that we only Raid and maybe if we expand out to do a BG night or something, we can open up things a bit more and I'm certainly open to such activities.

--

I'm trying to think ahead and see what lessons can be learned from the last six - seven months of raiding and I think the biggest - the biggest - factor in success and failure is a consistent team.

We made amazing progress when the same core people showed up again and again and we really floundered and struggled when we didn't. That's number one. As a small, friendly, casual guild, I can't really use loot or member standing as a motivation to help attendance and so I'm just hopeful that a year of old content is what is causing this hot-and-cold attitude towards raiding and that this is not an endemic issue.

Another was loot. I don't know what to do about loot (see above re: small guild) as we've always been very casual about handing it out and loot is easy to get these days so it's not really a motivator but I have seen people with BiS trinkets or weapons decide to GQuit or stop raiding and that's always a bit of a pinch. I'm willing to chalk this one up to a shrug and move on, as we've been relatively okay regarding walk-outs and our inner core is very strong.

Lastly - progression. I think I need to set higher standards for progression and be more ruthless towards loot farming and extending lockouts to force progression. The last time I really pushed for progression, we got LK down on our second extension. I think there's a lesson to be learned there.

--

But all of this won't be a factor for another long, hard month. Thankfully a holiday takes up part of it, at least. I really, really hope Blizzard doesn't make a mistake like this again - a year between expansions is ridiculous and I for one am just about burned out on the game entirely because of it and I can't afford to quit and come back because I have a guild to sustain.

/waits_for_December

A bit of a break

Idunno what's going on with things lately. We can breeze through ICC 10 with our eyes closed at this point but hard modes outside the basic ones just seem impossible lately. I don't know what's up - either motivation, or boredom, or burnout... I don't know what it is. I made a little speech in raid last night before swapping over to normal modes and a couple of people have talked to me about things... but I don't know what else to say or do about it.

Next week is vacation week for me (I'll be at GenCon!), so we decided next week will be a Ruby Sanctum night on Tuesday and then the guild is free to do what they wish with their ICC 10 lockout the rest of the week.

But I've set a hard expectation that I want to get to 10 to 11 Hard Modes a week by the end of August and work on Hard Mode Lich King throughout September. I'm really hoping the 11 day break from ICC will let people come back in with fresh minds, fresh perspectives and we'll make some real progress again because, as I said last night, I have zero - zero - interest in farming easy bosses.

Once we swapped to normal mode, all the other bosses went down very smooth and easy. At least we got a few more people caught up on the BQ achievement.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Almost There Is An Inch Too Far

Someone needed to leave early last night so we got about an hour and a half of work in on Arthas, and it was pretty productive.

Phase 1 is a piece of cake, the transitions are almost effortless at this point, and Phase 2 is getting a hell of a lot cleaner. Even on messy Phase 2 attempts we can pretty reliable dodge Defiles and kill the Val'kyr before they drop someone off the edge.

We finally broke through to 40% last night, got through the transition okay, with one raging spirit still up but we totally fucked up the positioning into Phase 3 and wiped after the first Vile Spirits and that was on our last attempt.

So, after the person left, we pretty much 9-man'd 7 bosses in about an hour and called it a night. Next week we'll go back in on Lich King again on Tuesday. My team is giving me a lot of latitude here, and they are hungry for a kill, so I'm glad to have them with me. No one is complaining, no one is bitching, we're all here to be supportive and do our best.

--

Warning: Sloppy emo whining ahead...

I don't know what else to say about this fight. I've wanted to kill this son of a bitch for ages. When the raid opened in December, I was RL for a guild that was trying to do so much that it didn't get ANYTHING done and I was raiding 4, 5 nights a week and was on the path to burnout and insanity trying to fit 18 people into one 10-man or run 2 10-mans with alts.

When Frost Wing opened, I went Horde side to join a guild, that was very professional, but it lack any sense of fun or camaraderie and I felt like I was just a number which is no fun for me. I lost all responsibility, but I also lost everything else that was fun about raiding.

When I came back, it was mid-March and joined up with some friends from the old guild, and we didn't get a stable raiding core together until about a month ago. And even now we regularly have people dropping out due to emergencies and issues, which is understandable, but when my two most geared healers are offline, and I'm relying on an under-geared druid playing his off-spec to pre-HoT Infests - and he is a damned good healer! - it's frustrating.

I feel like this is the third time I'm starting from scratch on my journey to killing Arthas. And now that the end of the road is in sight, I feel like I keep snatching for the ribbon that marks the end and just keep missing it with the tip of my fingers.

I'm ready. I'm eager. I just want to kill him and I think I want him dead so much, it's making me desperately hungry. I know I shouldn't be this attached to a kill for a game, but I want this very much. I want this, for myself, but more than anything, for my team, for my friends who've stood by me while I went on my Horde Adventure... I owe this to you guys.

We're almost there. The lights in the house on the mountain are on, warm and inviting, we just need to get through the last bit of snow in our way, just get over that last hill and we'll be Kingslayers, drinking mead and sitting with our feet up in that house on the mountain top and I'll buy all the rounds all night long.