Friday, June 26, 2009

June 26, 2009

Naxxramas (Heroic)
Fail fail fail. That was the word of the night. We reconvened last night to continue through 25-man Naxx. It took us over an hour from start time to get organized and on our way.

We wiped once on Loatheb. Then, after a brief re-explanation of how we were going to kill spores by groups, we executed it perfectly the second time.

Then we decided to move on to military. I'm not sure why, considering we only had one priest. Praying that they wouldn't ask me to switch to my priest, I waited while others discussed the pros and cons of each of them stepping out. I didn't feel too bad about not offering to switch to my priest. I was #2 on the DPS chart, so it made sense for someone with lower dps to make the switch. After over 20 minutes of negotiations -- yes, negotiations, promises were made regarding who would get which drops in order to convince two people to bring in their priests. The original priest also switched to an alt for the fight. It was all too confusing for me.

So...we get to Instructor. Wipe #1 - one priest went in before the tanks and was slaughtered. Wipe #2 - priests kept losing mind control on the understudies, so Razuvious' attention went to the rest of the raid. Wipe #3 - a little gnome mage got bored and decided to aggro instead of letting the tanks start the encounter. Wipe #4 - the gnome mage had left and a hunter had gone to eat dinner while his toon lay dead on the floor. So, we went tried again with 23 people. It went better, but we still wiped.

That was is for the Naxx run. Over 2.5 hours spent in there and only one boss down. Not a good night.

I Haven't Been Forgotten!
After Naxx on the mage, I logged in as my priest to cut some gems for a friend. As soon as I logged in I received a whisper from the raid leader who had invited me to several 25-man Naxx raids and the 10-man raids for which we were trying to get the Undying title. I had been noting lately that she seemed to have forgotten me. It was nice to see that she hadn't.

Unfortunately, the invite to Naxx 25 didn't pan out. The raid leader didn't want to invite any more people to the group. She apologized for his grumpiness and we agreed that I'd join them next time. Yay!

Slave Pens
I logged into my Warlock to see if I could do a quick Ramps or Blood Furnace. But I noticed that Slave Pens and Underbog were now available to me. And...there was a 4-man group looking for dps! Woo hoo! Not much to say about the run itself, other than the other people in the group didn't seem to be very familiar with the place, so I ended up leading the group through. But, we made it without a wipe -- and my dps was above the tank's! hehehe The group wasn't as well geared as my previous groups, so the bosses didn't go down as quickly. I actually had the opportunity to refresh my DoTs on them. So I finally got the chance to see how my sustained dps and damage looks. Pretty good, though I still ended up just above the tank.

Just like with Ramps and Blood Furnace, stepping into Slave Pens brought back many good memories. Things were so much fun when my Priest was leveling through Zangarmarsh. That was the golden age of my previous guild. There were always just enough of us on to do 5-mans without others feeling left out. We were all roughly the same level, so we did lots of stuff together -- questing, farming, instancing. Guild chat was fun, supportive and lively. We were a family at that time. After I stop playing this game and think back on my experience, it's the time spent in Outland with my old guild that I will remember most fondly.

Guild
OK...since a couple of my guild members are reading this blog, I'll take the opportunity to write a special note to the guild leader. Darling, you know I love you. I always look forward to seeing you online and catching up with you and hearing about what's going on with your children. Your friendship is one of the reasons I followed you back to the old guild when ours imploded.

However -- yes, you knew the however was coming -- this behavior of yours during raids is really off-putting. Last night you got bored and wiped the raid (as mentioned earlier in this post). You did the same thing a few weeks ago on Patchwerk. You were bored of waiting so you pulled....and caused a wipe. I can understand boredom. I can understand frustration. But, I can't understand the selfish action of pulling and wiping the entire raid because of these. What do you accomplish from doing that?
  • You make the raid even longer since everyone has to come back and rebuff
  • You raise everyone's repair bill
  • You piss people off
I think the last point is the most important. When you did that on Patchwerk a few weeks back, everyone kinda laughed it off but were disturbed by it. Last night when you did it again, they were pissed.

Please, as your friend and fellow guild member, I beg you to stop doing that. If you're so bored and frustrated that you feel like wiping the raid, please just bow out instead. It'll be less frustrating to just continue with 24 people than it would be to wipe, regroup, rebuff, etc.

2 comments:

  1. When the raid leader goes awry it's time to save the soulstone for yourself ;)

    That said raid leading isn't exactly the most stress free job out there. If your raid leader is also your guild leader then strive towards seperating the two tasks. In the long it's simply not healthy to do both...

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  2. Our raids are actually a multi-guild partnership. Usually the RL is someone in one of the other guilds. So my GL doesn't have the excuse of being stressed by being the RL on top of her other duties.

    Also...my guild has only 4 people in it at this point. It's not actually stressful at all for her. :)

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