I danced around the issue in my last post but now I’m going to just say it outright: I am sick and tired of Ulduar25. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Titanguard is an elaborately constructed hoax, or that thanks to a delayed strike of the summer slump we’re having trouble clearing simple farm content.

We started off the night somewhat dimly, with only 24 raiders online and I had each and every one of them invited. We probably had about 18 or so regular raiders, and the rest were people whose time in Ulduar was severely limited. Usually it’s fair to say that doesn’t bode well.

One enjoyable part of the raid was in the run up to and the fight with FL, we had Palehoof in the raid. I seldom mention it but He Of Green Text is one of my guildees and his schedule has precluded him from raiding for a while now.

He’ll soon be able to start joining us regularly which is pretty cool, but in any case, it was pretty funny seeing Pale and his father in the same raid. His dad (also a hunter) joined us at the end of Naxx and started raiding with us regularly through Ulduar. It’s been interesting to watch Pale’s father going from being RAFed up and then slowly but surely getting decked out in better gear (and seeing more content) than his son.

It was–blech, I’ll use the word–cute to listen to them interact in vent during the pre-FL clearing as the father drove and the son was the gunner. Palehoof saying things like “dad I’m out range of the pyrite” and the father giving advice on how to shoot down choppers or pyrite barrels… like something out of a father’s day card. I opened up iTunes, cranked up Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle,” and let it warm the icy recesses of my shriveled, jaded heart.

But anyway, enough of this happy crap.

Actually, on second thought, I’m not going to dwell on this too much, because I’m sure it gets to tedious to read a blog where every other post is “waa waa raidz r harrrrd” (this isn’t LiveJournal fer chrissakes). Suffice it to say, the fallout of all this nonsense is probably when the Coliseum comes out we’re probably dropping down to 10man groups and going through a rebuilding period. Any dps that thought it was ok to coast and do 3k in a raid will soon find themselves benched, and I can’t wait for the questioning of why they’re not taken to raids anymore. The lootz will be less epic, but honestly it’ll be worth it not to drop 80g on repair bills in one night.

(Is it patch day yet? How about now?)

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’.