A tale of double Qs
I’m a pessimistic guy, generally. When things are going well in the guild my first instinct is to enjoy them for however ephemerally they last. If things are going poorly, then I tend to expect them to get worse. For some odd reason (completely unfounded, mind you) a gdisband is a constant concern of mine.
So yeah, as you can imagine we’re in a bit of a slump. The normal raid leader is taking a break so last night it fell on Cendra and I to manage the roiling masses. I took up the job of barking at everyone while Cen took over dkp. Initially we had a bit of trouble getting loot out after Flame Leviathan (oh, by the way, guess what didn’t drop? …again[x14]) and one of the dps huffed in vent something along the lines of “can we hurry this along please.”
Oh, gee, SORRY ‘BOUT THAT. Were we inconveniencing you??
I swear the dps have no idea how good they have it. All they need to do is sit in the back, not stand in the bad stuff, and pew pew away. Meanwhile I need to run around like a goddamn chicken with my head cut off to put adds off dps, and judge when to pop my one cooldown so I can save my life and prevent a wipe, while healers need to run around and stress about keeping me up. Meanwhile I need to worry about calling out overloads, cause damned if the dps won’t know enough to not stand in one. And with all this, this guy wants me to hurry up.
Arrgh, I digress. I can’t imagine how people who have to do this full-time in their guilds get by.
In any case, here’s a pro-tip for those of you not in positions of power in your guild: don’t show any interest in how the organization is run, because you’re just asking to be plucked into the officer ranks and having responsibilities a-plenty dumped on you.
What originally burnt me out from WoW last year was running the dopey little 10man guild I was in. Basically the job consisted of organizing Kara runs like two nights a week, which was all well and good. But eventually people got sick of Kara and stopped showing up, and in a 10man guild you don’t have the luxury of an overflowing roster. So each night basically degraded to me begging random people on my friends list into coming to Karazhan with us. And then we started doing ZA, which never went really far. All this administration nonsense drove me nuts and I just stopped logging on.
The same thing is most likely the reason behind the raiding absenses of the GM (which lead to the RL taking over raids), and then subsequently the RL’s break. And now it’s on me. Again. (George Santayana, you bastid).
When I came back to the game last October I swore to myself that I wouldn’t run anything. I’d just be a face in the crowd that would show up and do my job. But here I am now, whining on teh intertubes about this nonsense.
The stupid thing is, though, I really enjoy raiding. I enjoy killing the big boss at the end, I enjoy collecting the phat purps, I enjoy the achievement of overcoming some obstacle with 9 or 24 other raiders. But for all those good aspects of raiding to occur, someone needs to be the one that makes the roster, puts up with the BS. If I, or Demo, or whoever else, don’t deal with this crap, who will? Captain Impatient over there?
One final rant: I don’t know what kind of numbers your dpsers put out in 25man raids, but mine tend to suck. The expectation I think is that in ~226 gear you should be doing 3750-4500 dps, correct? The majority of the dps in our raids tends to do under that (see this WWS from last night overall). From time to time I like to punish myself with considering the irony that the people who demand we raid faster aren’t putting out the numbers that would easily facilitate that.
TL;DR: imma QQin’.
Armory Feed
@honorshammer
22 July 2009 at 3:28 pm #
Here’s my guild. We’re a 10 man guild in 10 man gear. This is a Log from last night.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rFF55S3oD6tmkAnj/sum/damageDone/
Rogue 4540dps
Shaman 3550dps
Boomkin 3675dps
SPriest 3105dps
HUmm…
I got a ocuple things to say to you, since I know as well what its like to bark at everyone and well, you know get the “feeling” that YOU and YOU alone have to play not just your toon, but each of the raid members toon.
First: chill… It´s just a game, you might be an officer, you might be the RL, you might be the president of the Ulcered Sphincther of Ass-Erica, but you are human, and if you go to a game that feels like work, the game and you have failed. Take a break again, whatever it takes to get you back in shape.
Second: GOD the RNG hates you… Titanguard is getting sharded on my guild runs…
Third: YUP, your DPSers are slacking, like Honor pointed before me… the numbers should be higher, a LOT higher… On a regular 10 man raid, our mages pump around 4k dps, our ele shammies around 4.6k, Locks have to be yelled at to take it slow since they pull over 6k.
This gets higher on a 25 man. the locks are the bane of my tanking experience… 8k dps or more, having to ask all of our pallies to pop salv on them on each CD, the Warrior tanks slapping Vigilance on their asses, and even then… having to ask them to synch soulshatter to my wall of salvation+ wings combo so they dont just get a hearth attack when the boss stares at them right before the ZOMGWTFBBQIJUSTATEALOCKYUMM! moment…
(And well yeah, most of our DPSers are now on 219/226 gear)
ok, just checked at your WWS a bit closer… the DPS ain’t that bad… they are pulling around 4k on bosses… thats more than enough for most of the normal boss fights… the problem may lie on the execution. I mean, I got tired of yeling “IPEWPEWMORETHANYOUDOLULZ, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE FREAKING GLOWING RED CIRCLE OF DOOM THAT ONE SHOTS TANKS BEFORE THE ROCKET LANDS!” on mimiron, now i just say the boss’ gimmicks/highlights quietly at the beggining of a fight, if someone screws up once, I whisper him and ask what happened, but if he/she (i raid with a lot of women) keeps screwing up, its brought on to /O and we decide what to do, either go with the classic DKPminus, bench the person and get another one to do the job, or just cancel raid.
I would suggest you talk with the other officers beforehands, set the rules, communicate them to your raiders, and then enforce them.
haha i totally understand where you are coming from…
i ended up being a defacto raid leader after i organized a couple ulduar runs and explained the strats and what not…
for our dps we have “dps tests” so we know where the dps’ers stand on their performance.. the min req is 2.7k average boss dps in heroic UK… a number that is lower than what i would like but we make do…
tried going into a 25man ulduar a couple weeks ago but didn’t go so well because of some general lack of dps and some of the people we pugged just outright sucked…
we are at a point where getting siege + antechamber is like clearing spider wing and the keepers are giving us a problem… and i got angry this last week when a dps just wouldn’t let me explain the fight without constantly asking if we could or are we ready or not…
Stick at it…
Everyone has trouble through the summer, not least because they don’t bother signing up because they know others are away.
I hope you get your Titanguard soon, good luck in Ulduar and in the coming patch. :)
My guild seems to be having the same problems as yours, and our DPS’ers suck and somehow fail at pressing 4 buttons and a situational order. I think we have managed to obtain the worst mages in the world, because we have 5 that can’t break 3k, but due to our server population and the recent realm transfers of our decent players we can’t really do much about it.
I too, also told myself I didn’t want to raid lead, or become an officer of any sort, yet i still managed to think it was a good idea and that is where I am now. I play a pally Holy main spec, with a prot off-spec, and how the loot has been treating us, my off set pieces are better than my main spec.
But like everyone else has said above, just stick at it. Summers seem to be a rough season for wow players, for both raid attendance and annoyance levels.
Really enjoy reading your blog. heck, if the faction change happens to work out to a point of server choice, I wouldn’t mind hopping over to your server with my girlfriend. Shes the only warlock in our guild pulling 4.5 unbuffed.
Good luck with titanguard, keep at it!
@Rhidach
27 July 2009 at 12:48 pm #
Yeah I’m sure is somewhat to blame for the malaise that’s hitting the guild pretty hard. We avoided it somewhat for the first half of the summer, but it seems like lots of vacations are coming up so the heaviest part of the slowdown may be just ahead of us. Yikes, haha. Thanks for the kind words, and we can definitely always use folks that can play their class (as few and far between as they seem to be, alas).