The angry gnome’s anger…

I should start this post by apologizing. I’ve been particularly upset lately regarding WoW, mostly because of raiding. It’s not about our progress or anything, I’m happy with anything around the top 500 or so. It’s also not got to do with raid performance, unlike many of you may think. I’ve been content with under-performing raids in the past. Honestly, I’m upset for a couple of reasons, but it can all generally be summed up as I’m upset with the attitude of our raiders. But as I said, I should apologize. I’ve been getting extra frustrated with everyone, and instead of communicating clearly what has been bothering me in a calm manner, I’ve been lashing out at almost every raider as a result. That’s not to say that the way a lot of people are behaving is ok. Because it’s not. But how I reacted is just as bad, if not worse. Allow me to elaborate on this.

Things That Upset Me:

1. This content is easy, we should be facerolling it. That’s the attitude of most raiders right now, at least as far as I can tell. And that sort of attitude doesn’t lend itself to improvement, or criticism well. It also leads to a lot of disappointment. In general, I’m really tired of raiders saying they’ve “given up” or “we were already wiping at that point” during attempts. That’s counterproductive. Until we’ve called for a wipe over ventrillo, everyone should be PRACTICING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO MAKE THE MOST OUT OF THAT PARTICULAR ATTEMPT. Rather than assuming everything should be “faceroll”, players should practice and improve to the point where they don’t make any mistakes. Practice, practice, practice. Learn as much as you can. Don’t just get frustrated that the bosses aren’t dying instantly. In fact, if you look at a lot of guilds, they take a lot of time slowly adjusting strategies and learning fights before they down a boss. Many of our members forget that a lot of raiding is in fact about learning such that in the future the boss can be a one-shot.

2. I didn’t make a mistake. That’s the most common phrase I’ve heard from players who, well, to be frank, made mistakes. Missed taunts and cooldowns. Out of position DPS and healers. Wrong DPS priority targets. Most of the time, when something goes wrong, everybody denies they played any part in this. If there is a living spinner in the air, channeling on someone at nearly full health for more than 10 seconds, all of the range DPS are to blame. They should make these a priority. If a spider reaches one of the adds at very low health, all of the range DPS are to blame. They can EASILY turn and cast one or two instants on the spider to finish it off. A number of times people don’t take blame themselves, even though they share in the responsibility of the action. There has been an increasing tendency to blame others. Cover each others backs, be comrades, don’t be selfish and blind to your friends.

3. What does that ability do? Are you fucking kidding me? There’s a dungeon journal. There are still websites, tactics videos, and forums on the interwebz. This has to be the one thing that drives me the most insane. I can’t believe that people are still so irresponsible as not to read up on boss mechanics and understand them. I hate it. I find it insulting. I can’t stand it. It makes me want to never raid again. And there’s no excuse. All of this stuff (at least 90+% of it) is in game right now. With the exception of a few mechanics, everything can be found in game. If something isn’t in the dungeon journal, then perhaps there’s a reason not to know. But if that’s the case, then it’s my job as well as everyone else’s to learn what it does and adapt as quickly as possible. But dungeon journal crap? Really? No excuse. One day before the patch was live in Europe the final dungeon journal info was posted on mmo-champion. I went and read up on all bosses. Then researched all heroic changes. I imagined that at the very least our raiders would do the same, read up on mechanics, figure out what is going on. It takes maybe 10 minutes per boss to do this. That’s about an hour of preparation time for raiders. Plenty of people have spent more than an hour on standby this patch, or AFKed in Stormwind. Is it really too much to ask that people be prepared for boss mechanics?

4. But this other guild does it this way… Really? Who the fuck cares. This is another thing that drives me absolutely mad. I’ve gone through every boss encounter that we’ve learned and checked logs of what’s going on. I’ve watched every video available on the web as soon as it was, until at least 10 videos of each encounter were up. There are several ways that guilds approach each mechanic of each fight. I really don’t care how some particular other guild did it. There are lots and LOTS of different ways to down a boss, and different raid compositions with which to get it done. For every encounter we’ve done so far, I’ve started with a moderate tactic. We’ve done some conservative tanking and healing assignments, and begun by aiming to survive as long as possible. The idea isn’t that we’ll go in and 2-shot the boss. The idea is that we get used to and deal with all of the mechanics properly. As time passes we adjust ourselves to be less conservative and output more DPS, until we kill the boss. However I’m SO FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING PEOPLE SUGGEST THINGS BECAUSE OTHER GUILDS HAVE DONE THEM. Method used 3 DKs and 3 hunters. AI used 2 boomkins and a hunter. WHO THE FUCK CARES? Some other nameless guild had a DK soloing the adds, and then a hunter on another set alone. NOBODY CARES. All of these classes and combinations are capable of doing the job. We need to calm down, and practice a few times to try to get things proper. I’m not saying that the tactic I suggest or start with is the best one in the world. On the contrary, it’s probably not optimal. But we should adapt our strategy based on what is actually causing wipes, and adjust to improve them. People don’t get that though. They just push and suggest. It was at its worst with Shannox. We started with the proper tactic, and then everyone continuously QQed and spread rumours about how other guilds did it. We wasted hours. Then people kept on saying we shouldn’t stop DPSing the adds and focus on the boss on Rhyolith. And now everyone is coming up with 100 different things that we COULD do on Beth’. Bottom line, we have 1-2 people on each spawn of spiders and healers who keep people alive. The upstairs team gets the boss under 80% (this isn’t hard at all, DPS were able to take 8% off EASILY in one upstairs phase with only 4 up, so with 3 upstairs phases this puts the boss around 76%. So that’s perfectly fine. However, the entire evening, where we were wiping BEFORE EVEN REACHING PHASE 2, people were whispering me and telling me we need to send 5, even 6 DPS upstairs. As long as those 4 DPS can each take 6% off the boss over the course of 3 phases, it’s fine. Our real reason for wiping, for the first half of the night, was fails on the broodling intercept and spiderling teams. Then, after that FINALLY got sorted, we had extremely poor DPS on spinners and drones. People were constantly moving; out of position and running around wasting DPS time for no reason. In reality, we wasted a lot of time tonight, and a lot of my patience went along with it. The same way we spent hours 3-tanking Shannox, hours on Rhyolith DPSing the adds too much and the boss not enough, now we have spent hours on this boss not analyzing what’s wrong. The fact that we spend so much time discussing what other guilds are doing, and not what we are doing wrong ourselves, is both counterproductive and exasperating.

Too long didn’t read version? I’m pissed for the following reasons:

1. Pride and lack of focus.
2. Denial and blindness when it comes to performance.
3. Laziness in preparation.
4. Looking at others rather than reflecting upon ourselves.

I’m going to take a step back and breathe. I’m going to be patient, and relaxed, and focused during raids. I’m going to ask that people however, spend more time focusing on each of our attempts. Look at what is going on, look at what is wiping us. Look at your surroundings. Learn and practice. Improve. We’ll do our best to progress as best we can.

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