And Just Like That...

 ...the Monday raid came to an end.

After last night's raid, where they failed to down Kalecgos, there was an announcement in Team Loki's chat that the raid leadership had made the difficult decision to shutter the Monday raid. It was becoming too difficult to recruit given that Alliance players were abandoning Myzrael-US in droves, and while there was an option floated about moving the Monday raid entirely to Atiesh-US for next week, apparently enough people didn't want to move that it would be difficult to replace them on the fly. 

I know that things were difficult in keeping a single day/week raid going --I mean, I was in the Monday raid up through Phase 2, so I know this personally-- but I also know that the grind as well as the perception that the Monday raid team was somehow "less than" hardcore enough that it became mentally taxing to a lot of people. 

***

Yes, I was aware of how mentally taxing the perception that the Monday raid was a bunch of "casuals" was. I kept my mouth shut about it in general, both here and in guild, because it wasn't my place to say anything as I was no longer progression raiding*, but I knew it really became a thing when we were unable to get people to come to our Saturday afternoon/evening Zul'Aman runs.

That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. If you avoid running with people because they're "not hardcore enough" then they have to backfill with undergeared alts who can't clear content quickly enough, so the perception is reinforced that "they're too casual" or "they're not good enough". Rinse and repeat.

Sure, there were other issues with the Saturday ZA raids, such as other raids happening that would suck away personnel and we were caught in the crossfire, but perceptions are hard to shake.

***

Now that the Monday raid is well and truly dead, I guess I'll have to come to grips with the small(ish) fantasy I had that somehow I could get back into progression raiding before Wrath Classic dropped. 

I mean, I now have the time on Monday nights to be able to raid again, but I am so far behind --both in gear and more importantly in understanding the fights-- that there's little chance of me catching up in time. As my questing buddy put it the other day, by the time the Shamans were really needed in progression raiding (in Mount Hyjal), there were so few left of the original group of leveling shamans that it was essentially worthless to make them run through the gauntlet at the beginning of TBC Classic. All it did was burn them out and cause them to quit.

Gear drops --or a lack thereof-- also hurt the Monday raid. For most of Phase 2, we got so few decent drops out of SSC and TK that it really hurt our DPS and Tank output. When your Pally tanks and Warlocks are both competing for the same tier gear, and both need the same drops off of Vashj and Kael'Thas, then that's going to hurt your raiding quite a bit. Chasing the BiS gear --and not getting it-- was mentally taxing on my questing buddy too. I did my best to try to support her and the others with the Friday Karazhan raids (badges, you know), but I was pretty limited in what I could do without burning her out further.

***

At times like this, I just wish I could have done more to help out and keep the raid running. Even though I know intellectually that you can only do so much, that doesn't stop those feelings from coming. You never really stop caring, and when you say you've stopped caring that's probably when you actually care the most.

Yes, there's a selfish element to all this, because I'd love to be able to stick it to the doubters, and even more than that I'd love to finish my personal goals in TBC Classic. But part of being an adult is that while I can keep my dreams, I can also acknowledge reality. 

*It was brought up with raid leadership as well.

Blessed Relief

Monday's raid was bittersweet.

I was going to have to tell the rest of the raid lead team that I wasn't going to be able to perform progression raiding for at least a couple of months*, but what made it uncomfortable was that I was going to tell them after the raid.

Why so uncomfortable?

Because I've been the subject of some talks about why my DPS isn't measuring up. 

***

I've been among the bottom five DPS for months. Some of it is gear --for example, I finally got the T4 shoulders on Briganaa last weekend from the High King**-- some of it is that I needed to tweak my talents --again, I fixed that right before raid-- and some of it is my rotation.

Here is what an Enhancement Shaman's rotation has to involve:

• Keep totems up
• Totem Twist for Windfury/Grace of Air
• Totem Twist for Fire Totems
• Shock Twist (Alternating Fire Shock/Frost Shock and Earth Shock unless you're supposed to interrupt)
  
• Cast Stormstrike on CD
• Get your weapon swing timing aligned (involves casting something periodically to reset your swing timing).
  

That's a lot of irons in the fire, and a lot more complicated than most other rotations I've experienced in Classic.

For me, it's also been a question of which ability to utilize if multiple abilities come off CD at once (or close enough that they fall within the GCD). I've taken the approach that the Windfury/Grace of Air Totem Twist is the highest priority since it impacts the entire group, but after having several conversations it sounds like Stormstrike is higher priority, so I said so.

Oh no, I was told. The idea is to do all of it while keeping all the twisting up.

It was then that I realized that maybe --just maybe-- I'm hitting a wall with my age and that I'm simply unable to button press as much as I should be able to as a progression raider.

When you couple that with the "you need to get a belt crafted, a cloak crafted, a ring from Lower City reputation grinding, a totem from Heroic Mana Tombs, a ring from Prince Malchezzar, etc. etc." and I found myself realizing that none of this was that fun anymore.

And here comes my job, basically demanding I give up raiding during the work week, at the same time as the likelihood that someone might look at a gear drop and say "Hey Brig, you should get that for your gear set." Or to put me even more on the spot, "Why didn't you roll for that piece of gear? You need that badly!"*** I didn't want to have to tell people right then and there that I was leaving and it would have been incredibly selfish of me to bid on something when I was going to leave in a couple of weeks.

Thankfully, however, the nightmare scenario didn't happen.

***

Still, I had to tell the Lead Team afterward, and I hated doing that.

"I don't like to lose," Admiral James T. Kirk once said, and this amounts to throwing in the towel and admitting that Rocky couldn't beat Apollo Creed.

Especially after Monday when we were cruising against Kael'Thas and it looked like we were gonna kill him at long last, and... The trash packs in his room began to respawn underneath us.

I shit you not.

So there was that frustration to deal with, coupled with the knowledge that might have been our single best shot I might see against Kael. 

I also knew how hard it was to get a consistent raid together, because just when we thought we had a stable lineup somebody else would vanish, or gquit and ghost us, or have real life intrude and have to drop from the raid. Or, in other cases, would decide that progression raiding one night a week wasn't enough and would move to the other raid team that raids on Tuesday/Thursday.****

And here I was, going to blow up the raid again. Especially with the knowledge that Enhance Shamans are pretty much unicorns at this point in the expac. You're better off trying to recruit a Boomkin in terms of rarity.

***

I got the announcement out of the way first.

There were the usual condolences, and my admission that the reason why I could raid until 3 AM local time was because I'd been at my job for so long I could be a zombie for several hours in the morning and still get my job done, something I simply can't do in a new position working for a new customer.

I hung in there until the meeting was concluded, and that ended around 4:30 AM local time. Even I was dying for the first several hours of work on Tuesday, and I knew right then that I made the right decision and that I couldn't do this at a new position.

But around Noon on Tuesday, it hit me that outside of any Friday or Saturday runs, I wasn't going to have to worry about raiding at all. 

Or gearing.

Or (not) DPS-ing well enough.

Or grinding gold for stuff.*****

Or (avoiding) Dailies.

Or reputations.

Or attunements.

And I breathed a sigh of relief.

The long road of the TBC Classic Meta has ended, at long last. I didn't burn out completely, and it wasn't the reason why I had to give up raiding, but I don't think I could have held out much longer. The Meta had worn me down to the point where I was resenting even people I liked a lot because they were more invested than me in raiding, and they were still doing all the things to keep themselves at peak performance.

I think I kept going not for me, but for people who were depending on me to be there, like my questing buddy (who has long since run laps around my questing/gearing/dailies/etc) or those others who needed someone to be a friend to them when they were having a rough time.

Something I can now do a bit more of:
just lounging around and chatting.

Now, with my job (and my health) taking more of a center stage, I suppose it's time to take care of myself for a change. And maybe rekindle a bit of love for Classic.

*I'd say May or June at the earliest.

**I also won the Dragonspine Trophy a month and a half ago in Gruul/Mags, and I feel guilty about leaving when I'm one of only a couple of people on either raiding team who has one.

***As Loot Master, I frequently put something up for auction and then realize too late that I should have bid on something. I've gotten better at it, but I know there's a ton of people with DKP to spare who simply don't spend it very much, or bid on gear, and I think "they need it more than me".

****Most of the sweatiest people are on that raid team, and since they raid twice a week they've (at least) twice as much gear as our raid team has. That makes SSC and The Eye pretty much a walk in the park at this point. 

*****No, I still don't have a fast mount. And I don't want one very much either. I'm practically the only person left in guild who doesn't have a fast mount on at least their main, and right now it's a badge of honor. And besides, paying for the rest of the mats for Mongoose enchants on both of my weapons hit my reserves hard.

EtA: Misspellings....

Fun is a Relative Thing

Next week, I'm going to flip the script.

I'm going to take my raid back into the Classic past and our first Throwback Friday Classic raid.

Instead of running Karazhan every Friday of the month --and struggling to keep the same number of tanks/healers-- every third Friday I'm going to run a Classic raid instead. The poll on the channel currently shows Blackwing Lair leading the vote, which means we'll need a few tanks with a fire resist set*, but given that Naxx was originally leading the poll I'm fine with that.

Still, this will be a new (old?) experience for me. 

I mean, I know what BWL is like. (The goblin packs alone make that obvious, you know.) But still, this will be a major endeavor, because I'll likely be leading a raid with a significant number of non-guildies for the first time. If our forays into Naxx for Atiesh completion is our guide, non-guildies will come out of the woodwork for a chance to go back to BWL and pick up various and sundry gear for RP purposes. And for the chance to get Neltharion's Tear, too.

So this will be my maiden voyage into 'herding 40 cats'. Ought to be fun, I suppose.

*Still need one, as far as I know. I can't assume we'll just overcome it by sheer force of will. Or idiocy.

Sleeping With the Enemy*

It would be nice to have some stability from time to time.

Oh, I'm not talking about personal stability, as I'm pretty sure things are going okay for the moment in real life, but rather in MMO life.

While the scenery may only change for the lead dog in a dogsled team (like I referenced a few posts ago), it would be nice if the raid composition was stable for a couple of weeks.

Our progression raid is a once per week raid, and that's by design from the beginning. Not everybody can commit to a progression raid multiple days per week, and to be honest a lot of our raid team is perfectly happy committing to only one day per week. Still, that doesn't make it easy when we have multiple people on the raid team wanting us to switch to a multiple day progression raid. 

Oh, and one of the people who either want us to go to two days or just stay with SSC, farming it week in and week out? She's one of the raid leads for the OTHER progression team that does raid twice a week.

So yeah, there's some conflict there. 

***

I was originally going to post this mid week last week, but ironically enough some of the conflict worked out in the end, as a few people split for 2 day progression raids from other guilds while the rest remained with our raid team.*8 While that means we have to acquire a few more people for our raid team, at least those who decided we weren't doing things fast enough (or whatever) have moved on and are no longer a drag on the raid team. Sure, several of them were really good raiders, but at this point I'd rather have stability than precision. I personally am happy we only raid progression once per week, because that gives me the time and space to back off when need be. And I suspect we'd lose even more people than we did just now if we really DID go to two nights per week of progression raiding.

But such is progression raiding life.

***

Still, I was disappointed when our raid's lead team felt pressure from the other raid's leadership about expanding our raid nights. If there was any reason for us to believe that our raid is perceived as the "second string" or the "farm team", it was then. And you know what? I don't care what they think. They're not downing Kael'Thas or Vashj, so it's not like they've left us in the dust. And the people on our team that aren't very good raiders? They've gradually fallen by the wayside, so we don't have issues like that.

We're good at what we do and we're moving at our pace.

***

The Friday night Karazhan run? Well, when the raid lead got back from vacation, she pulled me aside and let me know that she didn't want to keep that raid going. (Burnout, you know.) She said that if I wanted to keep it going, she was happy giving me the reins. I was flattered by her trust in me, and I accepted managing that Friday raid.

It wasn't a big deal, I figured, since we had two other Kara raids: one on Wednesday and one that hits only a few bosses (for BiS gear) on Saturday.

Well..... It looks like we hit a wall on our Kara runs. 

The Wednesday run decided to bow out first, and then the Saturday run bailed as well.*** So mine is suddenly the only Kara run that's running consistently. 

(No pressure. None at all.)

However, the other progression raid's lead team decided to throw a Kara run for yesterday (Sunday), which more than one person raised their eyebrows over. "I don't get it," one person whispered me the other day. "There were already 3 Kara raids, why not fill up one of them?"

"No idea," I replied, but to be fair I have my suspicions. After all, I'm on the "other" raid lead team, and am arguably based on experience the least likely to actually lead a raid. I also am managing this Kara raid very informally: if you need gear and it drops, roll MS/OS. No biggie. The other progression raid, however, uses Loot Council to distribute loot, so my laissez faire attitude would run headfirst into a "who needs/deserves it more" mentality. Finally, there isn't a Kara raid specifically from the "other" raid lead team, so making their own fits the bill.

I'm not sure if this was just a one-off, but we'll see. I get where people are burned out, and I understand where Friday doesn't work for everyone, but I suspect that there's some rivalry mentality at play as well. Which annoys me to no end.

*Yes, the song from Roger Hodgson of Supertramp's first solo album. I loved his solo debut, In the Eye of the Storm (1984), but what also sealed the deal for me was that he played almost all the instruments in the album. I knew Prince had done it, but Roger? No, that was news to me.

**Yes, the other raid lead team members who are on our raid (playing alts) left for other progression raids. We weren't surprised.

***The Saturday run seems to have revived as one person needs a BiS weapon out of Kara, and she's singlehandedly keeping it going. Once she gets that weapon, however, she'll likely kill that raid off.

EtA: fixed the exact timing on when I reference the "lead dog" quip.

Brig's Big Day*

People know the old joke about how in dog sledding the scenery only changes for the lead dog, right? The impression is that for the other dogs all they see is another dog's butt (plus tail), so only the lead dog sees where they're going.

And to be fair, that impression isn't a wrong one.

When you've got one job in a raid, it's easy to forget there's a lot of other work out there for people to handle. Likewise if you're just a cog in the raider machine, you can forget the "You had ONE job!" nature of being a "regular" raider.

But when the raid lead goes on vacation? Well, I suppose you can just stop the raid for a couple of weeks if it's not a progression raid, but a progression run doesn't simply go on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Or, if you're me, you simply don't stop running Kara for two weeks.

So I accepted the challenge of being raid lead and the sole leader for our Karazhan runs.

***

It has been.... interesting.

I mean, I know the fights**; we have 7-8 regulars on a week in and week out basis, and I still run my bookie routine for Opera. So the technicalities are down --with the exception of setting Master Looter, which for some reason I continue to screw up-- but it's the intangibles that I have issues with.

You know, making sure there's the right amount of chemistry in the raid, or me, Mister Nice Guy, having to be the bad guy and tell people they didn't make the raid because they signed up too late. Or they got bumped because we needed heals or a tank. 

My nervousness of being up front, leading, has evaporated. I know these people and they know me. They believe in me, and they actually freaking defer to me when a decision needs to be made. When the hell does THAT ever happen?

Anyhoo, it does happen, and I'm feeling better and better about this. I can be a raid leader. I can figure this out. I may not figure out everything about an individual raid, like BWL or Naxx, but I know enough that I can work my way through this. And given that nobody is going to ask me to run SSC anytime soon, I've got this.

***

Normally I'd be finished with this post, but I was on Neve the other day, having Hearthed back to Tarren Mill, and I was checking out gear when I got poked by my oldest about how Neve looked on screen. "You should screenshot this," she said. 

"Hmm?" I asked, closing my bags.

Then I noticed how the firelight caught in her staff and her clothing.

And those eyes. Light, the eyes.

It's like the Map Room in Uldaman:
the light has to be captured 'just so'....

Sometimes, the serendipity smacks you in the face with a clue by four.

 

 

*That was how the player who ran the raid logs called our first Kara run with me in charge.

**Except Netherspite, but I have plenty of regulars who know who to put in which beam, so I'm fine.

A Brief Glimmer

Shintar, over at Priest with a Cause, posted today about her experiences lately in TBC Classic. In their own way, they provide a counterweight to my own impressions of the expac, given that while I started from L1, she was able to go to Outland from the moment the Dark Portal opened only to discover some of the same feelings of FOMO that I was experiencing. But as she explained in her post, what she thought initially was just FOMO has turned out to be something else, where her relationship with her guild has not been what she thought it would be when TBC Classic dropped. In its own way, her guild and my own are doing similar things, where they spend most of their time working on their individual checklists rather than enjoying the game as it is. 

And in both of our cases, it can be an alienating experience, realizing that your relationship with your guild isn't where you thought it was.

In her case, she feels she's treated as just another flavor of the month Hunter, and some people in guild can't even remember her name right. That matches a similar situation I find myself in, where people can't remember that Card is no longer my main. 

Once every couple of days I get a whisper from somebody saying that they miss running or raiding with me, but then in the next breath they say they're just too busy with other things. Well, out of game issues I understand, but in game? That's a choice that you make. You can make yourself feel better by a drive by hello, but the reality is that you have control over what you do in game. To have all of your boxes checked prior to entering Gruul's Lair or Karazhan is placing a lot of pressure on yourself.

Of course, there are limitations to that. A Mage will have to acquire tanking gear before they step foot into Gruul's Lair, and a tank will have to get enough of the right type of gear to make it even worth their while entering into the Phase 1 raids. But chasing 9/9 pre-raid BiS slots with a vengeance? Or getting all the patterns for Enchanting? Or who you hang with in game? That's a choice you make.*

***

I have some friends in game that I miss, not because they're not playing or anything, but because they server transferred. I was assured that they left because they felt the larger server would work better for them, but I can't help but think that if I had the chance to spend more time with them they might not have considered transferring so much.

At the same time, there's only so much of me to spread around. I have to make decisions based on the time I have, and I have to live with them.

***

I was contemplating all that when we were preparing for last night's Karazhan raid. We had almost enough people for two raids, but we ended up having to get a couple of puggers to fill the last two slots. We were trying to find a healer when I ran into one of our regular raiders from our Saturday Night Blackwing Lair runs. We hadn't spoken since the series of raids had ended, so we were catching up on what we'd been up to and I noticed that she was at L70, so I asked if she'd gotten into Kara yet. 

"No," she replied, "I'm geared and ready to go but no luck."

I blinked. 

"You know, we're in need of an extra healer for Monday night," I said. "Would you be interested?"

Her reaction was somewhere along the lines of "hell yes!", so she hopped onto our Discord and immediately signed up. 

Shortly thereafter another regular from our BWL and AQ20 runs also hopped on to sign up as melee DPS. 

Problem solved.

But as the raid approached, I grew nervous. This was not only going to be my second time entering into Karazhan, but a first as an actual lead for the place. And you can only read/watch so much before you have to go out there and actually get into the raid and do it. Thankfully, however, the overall lead was the lead for all of those ZG/AQ20/BWL raids I'd done over the last several months, and once we started I began to relax. It wasn't the same raid, but it was the same person. 

She did a fantastic job distilling a fight to the most basic components, and while it was a learning experience for about close to half of the raid, it felt so much better and smoother than last week's run. Even when a disconnect zapped my macro for handling loot, we just rolled with it.

We got what is supposedly hardest opera event, the Wizard of Oz, and wiped twice, but the third attempt was as smooth as butter. We accidentally pulled Moroes early and wiped, but we recovered the next time. 

And there was one memorable trash pull where everybody went down except for the Warrior tank, the Pally healer above, and me. We had three of those arcane creatures on us, and the tank kept aggro while the Pally healer kept him alive, and I improved my positioning enough that I didn't take damage so I could DPS down the trash. "I thought we were going to have a wipe," the raid lead admitted. 

"I thought so too," I replied. "But that was an awesome job tanking!"

"An awesome job healing, you mean," the tank replied.

"Hell yeah!" And if I hadn't run into her randomly out in the Old World, that pull would have turned out completely different.

At the end, we hung around late --because of some trash wipes-- and we killed the Prince on our second try. It felt.... well... like we knew what we were doing. Even though I'll admit that I didn't.

Afterward, I sent the raid lead a message via Discord that she did a great job, and that I really missed this over the past month of leveling alone. I got a thanks as an acknowledgement, but really that message was as much for me as it was for her. I really had missed our regular raids together, with some of the regulars across several guilds, and how we came together and had fun.**

***

It felt... good.

Like I wrote to the raid lead, it was the best I felt in game in a month.

It doesn't cover up a host of faults I've discovered about this expac and how people are pursuing it, but it did provide a welcome respite from the in-game shenanigans. It also gave me some hope that perhaps I won't have to take the drastic route and leave the guild (at minimum) just to find my place in TBC Classic. There's still a couple of months of Phase One ahead of us, but this is the first glimmer of hope I've had in a while, and for now I'm holding onto it.

*One of the people I knew from Classic, upon hearing a gratz aimed at everybody in his guild who made it to L70 within two weeks, quipped about "that was only the 'no life' crew that sprinted to L70." To which I laughed.

**This doesn't mean I suddenly started liking Karazhan; I haven't. It's just that I liked the raid itself rather than what we were raiding.

The Maiden Voyage of the Loot Master

I should have taken screenshots.

Really.

I'd never performed any raid lead functions before, and I mean the "real" raid lead functions, not merely organizing the Mage Int buffs. But last night during our regular Zul'Gurub pug run* I assumed the role of Loot Master for the first time.

Courtesy of my new gig being part of a raid lead team, I knew I was going to have to learn this job anyway, so I figured no time like the present. I'd already been growing more and more concerned about the burnout that the pug Raid Lead had been facing, and I wanted to take on a greater role in her raids to make her job easier.

So last night's ZG run was a great testcase as to whether a) I could handle this technically, and b) I could handle this without getting too much stress.

While I realized that I wasn't going to be as smooth as she does it --she's been doing it for months-- I have no idea how she juggles all the hats on these smaller raids.

***

We spent about a half an hour before the raid working out the settings for the LootReserve add-on, which is what we use for our raids with the Soft Reserve loot system**, and then based on a quirk of Classic I had to assume the Raid Lead position and then grant her Assist so she could perform all of her 'regular' tasks.

It actually wasn't that bad.

It helped that the raid was composed of a mix of guildies (still feels weird saying that) and regulars, and they were very encouraging throughout the raid. The two other Mages stepped up to help out with managing the Int Buffs and taking care of other small things I'm used to doing, so it freed me to focus on the Loot Master's job.

Which actually contributed to my death at least once. 

I was busy looking at the reserves and whatnot in the approach to the spider boss while we were killing those spider packs. Since my mind was on that, I kept spamming Arcane Explosion and not paying attention to my threat levels. Naturally, I pulled threat and died.

"A Card in her natural habitat: eating dirt" was how I described it in Mage chat.

"What happened?"

"Died due to skitterer packs."

"How?"

"Was busy looking at reserves, spamming AE, not paying attention."

"Yeah, that'll do it."

I died one or two more times, both of them directly related to me focusing on the Loot Master job, so I'm not terribly concerned. But given that I'm not exactly swimming in gold, that money spent on repairs did hurt.

***

Since I'll be taking this job going forward on the two 20 person raids, I'm sure I'll get better at this as time goes on. And I think I can do this when we get to BC and I graduate to the DKP tools we currently use in our progression raids. Of course, stakes about loot are a bit higher there, so hopefully I'll have this down enough to not cause any drama all by my lonesome.

*While technically it is a pug, this raid (as well as our Saturday BWL and Sunday AQ20 runs) has so many regulars from across several guilds that it's more of a semi-pug at this point. 

**If you're considering running Soft Reserve, the LootReserve Addon is AMAZING. For both raiders and the lead team. For raiders, you get a GUI that handles everything you wanted to do (so you don't overwhelm the Loot Master with requests to the point the LM's account is throttled by Blizz). For Loot Masters, you only have a half dozen settings to worry about without having to type out commands on the chat line. If it was all command line driven, it'd take forever.