I am not a Kindergarten Teacher.... (The Raid Leader Rants Again!)

Seriously... Brace for a rant.

      First of all, I want to say I  love my fellow guildies.  I know I'm not always the most personable person, I prefer to do a large portion of my game solo and have some characters I play on when I don't want to be bothered.  However, I do spend a good bit of my time looking at boss strategies, and making sure I am doing the best I can to help out the raid from a gearing/preparation standpoint.  I have helped several people get prepared for raiding, whether they hadn't raided before or just needed some advice to tweak their characters.

     That being said, I expect a certain decorum from people inside the guild.  The issue on my mind dealing with this is not something I would kick some one from the guild for.  Nor would I keep them off the raid team for said issue. Its something that plagues the game here and there and I know you have all experienced it.  Yesterday I got a rather annoying reminder of this issue.

     It's the expectation that A.Things are always as YOU see them, and B.  The expectation that I'm going to step in, or say anything over misunderstandings.

     We play in a digital environment where a lot of what people say is typed and communicated without the luxuries of body language and vocal intonation to help us understand what people mean.  That means at times someone might type something to you and you won't get the full understanding of what they are communicating.  This can lead to misunderstandings on jokes, sarcasm, and even on how you plan things with said person.  Misunderstandings do, and will happen so from the bottom of my heart I ask....

    Do not get butt hurt if you misunderstand someone, or things don't go the way you plan.

    You can control exactly one person in WoW.  That is yourself.  Due to the limitations on most of communication in the game you should give people the benefit of the doubt.  Don't assume everyone in game is out to get you, because in all likely hood they are not.   The assumption that everyone lives and dies by our personal experience is destructive to friendships and interactions in general.  Not to mention a self absorbed attitude that shows a lack of character in one's personality.

      There are people who feel they are slighted at every turn.  They assume that if someone won't wait for them to run something or if they won't drop everything to help them, that it's because that person is out for number one, and doesn't care.  Sometimes these people feel used if they have recently helped that person out, and they get left behind or ignored.  These feelings are normal, however you don't know what is going on at the other side of anyone else's keyboard.

     I know if I'm playing during the day, normally it's in spurts and I'm not doing anything I can't step away from.  I have three kids, and if they are over playing the Wii or watching T.V. I have no problem plopping down and doing some quests, leveling, or LFR.  What do these things have in common? If I have to step away or drop its not going to effect anyone else's game play to a large degree.  I DPS 90% of the time in LFR so I'm replaced almost as soon as I drop, before anyone attacks me on that point.  My point being, I know if someone whispers me or needs me to do something during this time, and one of my kids need something, my kids comes first.  I will disappear mid-conversation etc... if I need to.  I normally will apologize when I get back and let you know what happened, but I am a father first and a gamer second.  If that is not your priorities, do yourself a favor and revisit them.

      This leads to my next point.  If someone has made you feel like your being ignored, insulted, or they are breaking commitments to you, DO NOT COME WHINING TO ME!  First of all, give the other person the benefit of the doubt.  In most cases you will find that you didn't understand what they meant when they typed you, etc...  Second of all, we are all adults here.  If someone is threatening you, or abusing you let me or an officer know.  If your butt hurt because you thought someone was going to wait for you before queuing for a Heroic Scenerio or LFR put on your big boy pants and GET OVER IT!

      If you approach me with a complaint that could be a misunderstanding, then I'm going to do a lot of smiling and nodding.  After that smiling and nodding I'm going to mourn the time of my day you have wasted and will go do my own thing.  I am not going to step into pointless arguments.  I am not going to  police interactions in the guild which probably are just broken communication that could be resolved if you took two seconds and asked the other person what happened.  If you do this and the answer isn't what you wanted to hear, I still don't want to talk to you about it unless said threats/abuse happen to you when your answered.

     If you end up ignoring someone in the guild, I will get over it.  If you end up deciding you won't run LFRs, scenarios, and Randoms with someone.  That is your call.  As a matter of fact if you are constantly feeling someone is making promises and not keeping them, that is my advice.  Stop doing stuff with them.  If they ask what happened politely tell them why.  Don't make accusations, just simply state that they never seemed available so you stopped asking etc...  Here is a secret to being a grown up.  It's fine to disagree with people, or to stop doing stuff with them if it impacts you in a negative way.

     The one caveat to this, if you show up and you tell me that you won't raid if the other person is in the raid, don't expect to raid with us.  I am not going to pick sides or get into squabbles.  When you hand me an ultimatum then I'm going to simply tell you that I will let you know when they aren't raiding so you can join.  I am not catering to anyone who decides they can't raid with another member of the guild.  If you don't want to raid with that person, and they are in the raid, then don't join.  This hasn't happened for a while, but it bears mentioning as it has happened before.

    Folks, This is a long winded rant, and what it breaks down to  is just simply respect you fellow man.  Give him the consideration you would want and that is all that's needed.  No one is responsible for you own happiness but you.  You can either hold on to grudges, be angry, and assume the worst, or you can shrug it off and move forward without the negativity.  Your choice, I know what mine is.

Lay/Dizzty/Lazyeye

Swing it! (Raid update 01/25/2014)

So, we went once more into the breach.. oh and I just had to include the picture.

Anne Stickney From Wow Insider made this epic picture.

     Tuesday was good.  We one shot every boss except for Sha, and on Sha we still managed to get him down before the raid was over.  This is the first time we have cleared first wing in one night.  I am not saying that we won't be going back in, but we have pushed far enough through I'm happy to start working second wing first raid day now.  We are once again moving forward.  We are showing signs of the raid team improving, and I'm looking forward to making some good progression now.

     Wednesday was a good raid too.  We only managed to get two out of four bosses in the second wing down, but that puts us about even with where we were before things started to decline.  I feel we are about to flip and start getting some forward motion going, and all I can say is that it's about time.  I want to see pay off for everyone who has stuck with us for all the rocky moments, and who want to start building again.  I see good things on the horizon.  I am an optimist....

     That not to say we didn't have some issues.  We are building a raid team, which means some people need performance worked on.  Personalities are getting to know each other.  we had a tense moment at some comments someone made Tuesday night, and luckily it passed.

     One of the hard things with working with different folks it that it's easy to forget we all have different experiences in Wow.  Some of us glide through and have fun, with little problem.  Other's have experiences that have changed the way we view the game and guilds all together.  I know if you want to get my wife's hackles up, just mention the guild Midnight we were part of for a while.  And yet, I can guarantee you there were plenty of people in that guild that had no issues at all.

    That is neither here nor there however, right now we blaze our own path.  We will continue to build, continue to down new bosses, and we will eventually see where it leads us.

    I'm betting it's to a happy place.

Lag/Dizzty/Lazyeye





   

I miss the Lich King

Last night was pretty fun.  We went Retro.

      As is more then possible we did a quick run of heroic 25 ICC.  In about an hour and a half we had blown all the way through the entire raid getting several achievements.  It was fun, it was smooth, and most of all there was little or no tension.  There were a couple of achieves we didn't manage to get, but we can grab them later.  We also had a couple issues working on Frosttide's legendary quest, but he did get further. I'm calling the night a win.  I was kind of sad by the fact that you can heal through the remorseless winter portion of the Lich King fight now.  We just sat back and dpsed him down without running to the edges.  Adds died quick and we pretty much skipped the 2nd phase and 3rd phase as we kept pushing him down before remorseless winter was over.

     We will be back to ICC soon though.  I look forward to getting the next drake after the achieves are done, and I would love to get a couple peeps through their shadowmourne legendary quests.  I use to run retro raids for the guild here and there, but people stopped showing.  I think it might be time to revive the practice.  Not every week, but once or twice a month would be nice to go blow stuff up.  Wrath was the period where I really started raiding, and I look back on it fondly.  I did some raiding at the end of B.C., and never touched it while I was in vanilla, but I smile at a lot of the memories from back then.

     While the game has been streamlined, I almost feel at times that Wrath was a simpler time.  Gearing seemed smooth.  I wasn't afraid to pug my way into a 25 man and do some damage.  Tempers seemed not to flare up so much, and it wasn't hard to do a good job if you focused on what you needed to do.  I know that if I really looked back, it would also have the pain of sitting in trade pugging a group for Raids or dungeons.  Balance was a lot more skewed, and before duel specs it meant a lot of work if you needed to trade specs.  (I recognize that duel spec came out during wrath.)

     A lot of people learned to raid in Wrath as well.  I feel this is when raids became more accessible, and the story line really carried you through Northrend.  Arthas was everywhere, unlike Illidan who you never really saw unless you did the netherwing quest line.  It felt meaningful when you killed him.  It wasn't like Deathwing who would randomly nuke you, Arthas was looking at you specifically.  It made you feel connected to the story in a fascinating way.

     What was your favorite expansion/raiding experience?  Why?

Lag/Dizzty/Lazyeye

The Servers Killed Our Raid! (Raid update week of 1/16/2014)

Last night was a big bottle of suck!  I am of course not talking about the raid team.

     But lets rewind to Tuesday.  It was an exercise in frustration as well.  We did better then last week and got three bosses down in the first wing of Flex SoO down.  This may seem like a little accomplishment at this point, but on the first two bosses the synergy was working well.  I dpsed on my Pally Lag as we had a new tank in the raid and I wanted to be able to step in if needed.  I was pleasantly surprised that my pally pulled decent dps in ret, even though his gear was alright, but not fantastic.  My hunter still puts away better numbers, but Lag is a solid choice if I need him as well.

    The problem was the third boss.  Things didn't sync up well on the third fight, and the tension in the raid was insane by the end of the fight.  The other tank swapped to dps, as he was getting tired and I threw on my tank set.  Boss went down.  I don't believe any of the issues we had previously to that pull was one person's fault.  Rather there was a slew of factors that added up.  It's possible I didn't explain the fight well to a couple of people.  Several folks made fatal mistakes at times when maybe they normally wouldn't have.  I think it undermines everything for folks to say... "This one person made X fail".  There were 11 people in the raid.  No single person could have made everyone else die to RNG.

     Wednesday night was... horrible.  Zangarmarsh was down! Server outages across the board pretty much killed our chanced of going in and killing more bosses.  (And Lag really wanted that two hander off of pride.)  We will get our chance next week, but it's kind of irritating when you can't run your raid because of bad luck with Blizzard.  (I'm not saying Blizzard purposely did anything.  Then again... they may hate me at this point.)

      At this point in the expansion I've given up my hopes and doing and crushing 10 man.  Right now, I want to get a team stable enough that when Warlords of Draenor launches we can hit raiding in a timely manner, knowing who is doing what.  We have several people working their way in and more then one plays a couple of different roles.  This is good.  I want to see people swap between healing/dps/ and tanking occasionally.  It helps keep the game from getting too boring, or you class from becoming a mind numbing blankness when you run it.

Fight some Foo

     Next week it will be better.  We will be better.

Lag/Dizzty/Lazyeye

     

after 3 weeks, I'm back in black! (Raid update week of 01/09/2013)

So, this is sneaking out a little late.  Along with my apologies for not keeping this updated over the holidays.  Oh well, here we go.

       Tuesday was interesting.  We went into the first wing of Flex and felt the three weeks of break on top of the regression we have been seeing slap us in the face.  We went in and downed two bosses.  I was on my trusty hunter Lazyeye, who was ready to break his bow in frustration.  With a lot of irritation over Norushan we finally hung it up and called it for the night.

      Wednesday we came in to finish the first wing, and we managed to down Norushan quickly.  heartened by this, we moved into fight the Sha of Pride, and he slammed us down.  I can't sugar coat it here.  People weren't moving.  Pride was stacking quickly, and it was painful to work through.  Part of the problem is we didn't have everyone on ventrilo and even when I added more work to what I was doing (I was tanking on Lag this night) We couldn't down the Sha.  I would like to thank Rorcios from Aerie Peak for coming in and helping (I may have killed his name, but he's in one of the Convert To Raid guilds)  He was awesome and patient with us.  I wish we could have downed a Sha for him.

     This regression is starting to wear on me, and I'm admitting it. Part of me wants to tell the group that we are going to keep rehashing wing one until we can clear it in about an hour like we were a month and a half ago.  The other part of me wants to chuck everyone's heads at wing 3 to make them work harder.  I am not 100% sure what direction I am going to go but something needs to give.  We have been doing this s*** too long to keep making mistakes like this.

     Part of it is constantly getting new people into the raid.  However, when we have done this fight with one or more of our 10-15 people pulling less then 40k I am not buying it being a DPS issue.  Or a new person issue.  We all need to up our game.  My goals right now are A. Get my Hunters Legendary cloak then B get my dps above 200k.  I don't care if this is the DPS on my hunter or my paladin.  I just want to be smashing major face and I know it's possible.  I challenge everyone to start making goals and benchmarks for their characters to meet.  If we are working on constantly improving, we are moving forwards.

     I gave the whole raid team the homework of running Flex on LFR or doing PVP or finding some means of improving their ability to move out of the Poo.  I wanted people to actively work on avoiding stuff that kills them.  I am curious to know how many raiders actually did their homework.  I'm not saying I'm going to explode if homework wasn't done.  But it might be a dagger in the heart of my raid leading self if no one even tried.

     On the bright side, my wonderful wife Aeryn is back in game.  She won't be raiding with us every night, but she will be there here and there and I look forward to her wonderful heals helping out.  We managed to get her gear from 496 up to 520 something this weekend.  Soon I can not tell you how ecstatic I am to have her by my side while playing again.

Silversun Pickups for you this week.

That is the update for now, will have another one for this raid week.

Lag/Dizzty/Lazyeye.