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.

Now what?

The nerf lists finally made an appearance today and man, they're taking the entire tier out at the knees. It's tremendously disappointing to me that we didn't clear Ragnaros, though things weren't helped by all the other crap that hit us in the meantime.

We lost our third healer two weeks ago and haven't had a third healer in that time other than our top DPS respecing to fill the slot really, really, really set us back. The last two weeks let us barely squeak past Domo on the second night let alone get 6-kill nights like I was expecting to after we cleared through Domo the first time and realized how simple things should be getting. Our third healer situation got so bad we wound up 2-healing Alysrazor just to make it go faster and it actually worked out just fine.

Though starting tonight I imagine it really won't be necessary to three-heal anything but maybe Baleroc, Beth'tilac and Domo. Or maybe we'll just do everything with three so that the night has that much allowance for mistakes...

I'll be frank, this has really taken the wind out of my sails. Even two weeks ago, I was dedicated to achievements, kills and getting a few hard-modes down before 4.3 but now it all feels worthless and pointless and I'm spending less and less time logging in or playing other games instead.

It's not even a hardcore/casuals thing honestly, it's a disappointment in myself and not achieving the goal I set out for myself a few weeks ago. A lot of my guildies seem to see this as me being upset with them, or with their performance, or me being critical of them, or of our server ranking, or whatever else, but it has nothing to do with any of that.

I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to achieve what I wanted to in the game, and now I'm looking at months of farming nerfed content with Heroic Ragnaros being the exception, and he's the other end of the pendulum in terms of difficulty - the Heroic Lich King of this tier that guilds will throw themselves at for months just to squeeze out that one kill.

A lot will depend on the raid tonight - if it feels like T11 and is just a faceroll as I'm expecting, then we'd better at least get Rag down, so I can, with my tail between my legs, go into Heroics next week and never look back.


But right now, I don't know. I don't know. Raiding is why I play this game. If I don't enjoy the one raid left to me, why am I logging in?

4.2 Nerf and the bitter taste of failure

When the nerf hits next week, it will be the first time in a long time that we will have missed the end-boss of a raid pre-nerf. And it's killing me.

I've always taken pride in killing bosses in their normal incarnation and we've only had a little bit of time on Ragnaros this time around, we had a slow, slow start, it took a while for a raid-team to fall into place, and we're dancing around a million issues with the roster but I was confident we would get through it.

And then this news comes along and it's just crushing my motivation. Unless I push for an extension this week and just spend two nights straight on Rag with maybe a third night added for progression, I think we're going to miss killing this guy pre-nerf.

My pride is tied up into it, and I won't deny it, but that doesn't make the experience any less frustrating. We've always raided on the lower end of serious progression, but I've never let that check my ambition. When I play the game, I want to play it with some level of competitive end in mind - not competing against other people, but against our own expectations of what we can achieve.

A lot of folks in my own guild seem less disturbed by this than I am, and I guess that's good - I'm sure I'll get over it myself, but right now, it smacks of failure.

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.