Stress and Relaxation?

I’ve been finding it hard to blog lately. I’ve also been finding it hard to do a lot of things I’m used to. Guild leadership has really started taking its toll lately. When I became an officer, 2 others were promoted with me. Since that time 3 officers have retired one of which left the server. We lost one recruitment officer… and 2 raid leaders.

That leaves me as the sole raid leader. That means I have to organize and set up groups for 2-3 ICC 10 groups during the week and organize/lead the ICC 25 raids on the weekends. Four nights of progression raiding. Four nights of logging on to find: people not showing up, people signing up at the last second, having to tell extra people they aren’t needed, and having to balance out multiple raid, raid ID’s that run over multiple nights.

On top of that I’m expected to lead Tuesday night raid(s) as well for ToC, VoA, and the weekly raid. Tuesday night I’ve been able to get out of a lot lately due to the fact that my mother in-law is currently staying at my house (cuz that doesn’t add stress) and I told my wife and mother in-law that I was committing to wed/thurs, sat/sun for raid progression.

** Quick time out from the bitching… I really want to thank my wife for being understanding of my play time and hobby when it comes to raiding. We’ve come a long way from her nearly leaving me over my raiding habbits… to her tolerating me being a raid leader in the same guild I nearly lost her over. I love you so much!**

Dealing with people you just don’t like…

In addition to the stress of raiding is the stress of dealing people that I frankly, just can’t stand. There are 2 people in the guild currently that I honestly don’t think anyone likes. People that half the guild has on ignore and some who are flat out refusing to raid with these people. The thing is… they aren’t exactly breaking any rules. They are just annoying! They rub people the wrong way and their play style/attitude is non-conducive to bringing people together.

Every officer is at the point where we are vying for the job of G-kicking the person… but how can we? How do we kick someone who isn’t directly violating any of our rules just because we don’t like them? How does that portray our guild to outside players? Would that hurt the view of new recruits coming in? On the other hand it’s like a poisonous wound that is just slowly spreading through the guild. Is it better to cut off the arm if we can’t draw the poison? Rather than infect the entire guild?

There is also a growing complaint on the guild forums about raid’s getting delayed or people wanting to know days in advance if they have a spot or not… Our guild doesn’t run with constant set groups specifically because of the fact that we have a large number of unreliable people. These people are nice and fun to hang out with… and do a good job when they show up… but they don’t always show. I’m stuck setting up raid groups the day of the event due to the fact that I never know exactly who will show up till that day!

The ironic thing is a lot of the people who are demanding to know in advance… are the same people who cause us to have the problem in the first place.

Where’d my fun go?

Do to the stress of being an officer I find myself staying away from group activities in which I may have any kind of responsibility. I used to join pug raids all the time before becoming an officer… now a days I just can’t. I don’t run heroics for the same reason. That means most of my alts that still need emblems are stuck progression wise… I haven’t tanked anything on my DK for weeks. It almost seems like it is just PvE content in general I just can’t do anymore.

The only thing I find motivation and joy in is PvP. I love doing BG’s on my warrior because it is fun to steamroll stuff in the awesome gear that my warrior has… but to what end? The only progression my warrior has there is from arena. I’m only doing that once or twice a week if I’m lucky. Next to my warrior my paladin is in best shape and I absolutely love playing a holy paladin… but healing in a bg is so much fun when you do it with friends that you can support and don’t… suck. Kobeck is in much the same situation… which leaves him on his druid and me on my paladin both healing which is just weird and ineffective.

I do PvP on my hunter and rogue from time to time… but honestly that just kind of gets boring after awhile. Sometimes I’ll hop on my mage… but I’m terrible TERRIBLE as frost and just get frustrated. So I swapped my druid to balance and have been doing bg’s on him lately. My druid barely has any pve resto gear… yet alone PvP gear… so playing balance is like going into a tank fight with a rubber band as my only weapon. It is so laughably bad that it is fun. I’m getting the old feel back from BC and I’m brutally effective in the back of a demo in strand of the ancients…. But otherwise I die a lot and get to the point where I just need a break.

And so… without any other alts to really level… I take a break. We got Netflix and with the PS3 disc thingy I get to just plop down and throw on an action movie.

I’m starting to see why Nikkyo really just logs on these days to join raid and then log off. I still really like playing but most of the things I love to do have been jaded by having the responsibility of being a raid leader and officer. There really isn’t anyone else in the guild who I would trust to become an officer. I mean I trust Kobeck, Blanda and B2 with everything… but they are smarter than me and wouldn’t want the responsibility of becoming an officer. They’d rather just bitch to me… right guys? :P

Curinir who was one of the raid leaders… quit the guild and swapped servers to play with an old guild mate of ours… who plays in the alt guild of Elitest Jerks. He has been raving lately about how different things are and how great it is to be able to just log on and raid without any responsibility… and if you don’t do your job you don’t get invited back. So yeah… that isn’t demoralizing or anything. /envy

So yeah… when stress starts interrupting the relaxation of your hobby… what do you do?

Ready for Icecrown? I was born ready!

Whether the patch comes out this week or next, I'm totally ready for Icecrown. Our 10 man group pretty much took this week off and I couldn't be happier to say goodbye to ToC. Still that won't stop me from raiding 25 tonight on my shaman as Enhancement.

I have to remember to include Flame shock in my rotation and pray to the loot gods that a nice slow onehanded weapon drops. Death's choice wouldn't hurt either... but if I do win the roll I would probably give it to Cassiana... since she has lost every roll since we started doing ToC. That of course brings up the whole morality of rolling on something with the intent to give it to someone else... but that's neither here nor there.

Hmm... third paragraph now and I've come to the realization that I don't have a point in writing any of this. I'm just really freaking excited about seeing Icecrown.

Lets see if I can organize this into a list of things I want to do once icecrown comes out.

1) Run the 5 man reg, and heroic on all 8 80's if for nothing else then to do the epic questline for a sweet 251 weapon... of which most of my toons are in dire need of.

2) Run the 5 man reg, and heroic another 5 million times on my rogue and warlock to get them caught up on gear and into the raid scene.

3) Run the 5 man heroic of every other instance because I'm masochistic and like pugging.

4) Run the 10 and 25 man raid on all who is currently capable (5/8 80's).

5) Get ready for the final Arena season and switch to one of my MS capable characters (rogue, warrior or hunter) for our serious 3's team.

6) Get poor old Artorin to 80 (semi motivated to do this before the patch)

7) Remind myself that I need to go to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Oh and saying hi to my family now and again.

8) ???

9) Uh... phat loots?

Did I mention I'm excited about patch 3.3?

Looooonnngggg Weekend

Having a fairly normal 9-5 type job I had the luxury of having Thursday and Friday off giving me a nice long 4 day weekend. The RL stuff was pretty typical going to my Uncles for some turkey on Thursday and then going to my parents Saturday for some decorating of the Christmas tree. Ok... so my sister and mother mostly decorated... while the rest of us sat and watched... Star Trek.

Anyway the rest of my RL weekend was pretty uneventful which of course means I spent a lot of time on WoW. My wife found out one of her old high school friends plays WoW and so we both created characters on Nordrassil. Wilderness my brand new female Orc hunter is currently level 14 questing in the Ghostlands, because I've never leveled a blood elf but wanted to experience the lore rich zone. My wife also created a hunter... a male blood elf and the 2 of us together literally destroy everything before us. My wife has been spending more time playing her hunter then me but meh whatever playing a low level hunter is boring when I have an 80 hunter.

Speaking of which I had a lot of fun doing Arena on Arravis with Kobeck's druid Averlexis. We did most of our games last night bringing our rating from 500 something to 1100 which means that I can pick up the furious helm. Before the games I splurged and picked up the Furious legs with arena points and then bought the Furious Shoulders with emblems of Triumph that I had piling up. All in all I'm sitting on 596 resilience so I'm getting there. On the raiding front for Arravis I did Ony 10/25, and ToC 10 man. Still without a good 2h weapon... I swear the weapon upgrades I really need never drop.

Which of course leads to Saravid. I did a TON of raiding on my shaman. I ran VoA 10/25, ToC 10/25, Ony 10/25. So pretty much everything. I got a pair of legs out of ToC 25 for my enhancement set... but I can't really spare the hit to use them not to mention they have armor pen.... and would break my tier 8 bonus. So for now they are sitting in my bags. Most of the raids I ran as enhancement, but I did go as resto when I ran with Phired's guild (one of the regular tanks in or 25 man's) when we did ToC 10. Duo healing with a disc priest was a lot of fun and we cleared ToC without incident. Which was good considering they run starting at midnight... (east coast server west coast guild) and it was Sunday night.

My mage went through VoA 25 and ToGC 10. VoA was funny because the raid had 4 mages... and all 4 of us were at the top of the charts. Korolarn of course dropped nothing useable by us... but then the next 2 bosses all dropped tier gear that none of us needed. ToGC we ran Wednesday night and went through beasts and Jarraxus with only a little difficulty. That of course brought us up against faction champions for the second time. We didn't have any kind of solid strategy and the comp we were up against certainly didn't favor what we brought to the table. I still thought we did well though and on one attempt we killed off 2 of them before wiping. No upgrades dropped (sensing a trend?).

Well after we finished our last attempt on Faction Champs some people had to go and the rest of us swapped out some peeps to go run through ToC 10 reg. Cassi switched from her uber hunter to totally undergeared DK and I switched to my warrior. Hour later and we were done. I picked up a nice tanking neck but still no upgrades I really need... like a freaking shield to replace my crest of lordearon from CoS heroic. Anyway Sunday while I was doing Arena on Arravis I got a whisper from Curinir one of my old guildies and good friend. He was looking for a tank to finish up some of the later parts of Ulduar and wanted to know if I would be interested. I wasn't sure at the time but 2 hours later when the raid was about to go down I figured I had nothing better to do.

The Ulduar raid happened to be a Guild run for Serendipity... my old guild. The old guild leader (who put into place stupid rules leading to my leaving) had quit the game and now my friend and old druid mentor was the Guild Leader. I really had fun playing with some of my old guildies and hope that I can do more runs with them... while still being in a different guild. Anyway... we had Thorim, Hodir, and mimiron still up and they went down in that order. Thorim was a one shot... damn tanking in the arena as a warrior is freaking hectic. Hodir I went Arms and let Nikkyo the bear tank take Hodir. Took us 3 attempts before we got him due to people getting frozen. I wasn't one of them but I was curious and found out that if you are in the middle of bladestorm while the freezing thingy goes off that you won't get frozen.

Mimiron took a bunch of attempts, usually people (including myself, stupid shock blast) dying to stupid stuff. I was tanking the head during phase 3/4 and eating bomb bots om nom nom. With Mimiron dead... we headed to General Vezax. I LOVE the journey down to his room. Some of the people in the raid hadn't been this far in Ulduar... as we were headed down I announced that THIS is why ToC was such a disappointment to so many raiders. Icecrown better be worth the wait. But I digress, General Vezax is the furthest I have ever been in Ulduar before and have never killed him. On top of that I had never done the fight as a tank. So here I was getting ready to stand toe to toe with a boss that could easily kill me and the raid if I wasn't careful.

First attempt went pretty well all things considered and we got him down to 1 mil health. Ethren who is one of the best rogues I know in the game did an incredible job of interrupting of interrupting the flame thingy. I had 2 or 3 interrupts to his 20 and we only had one go off on an attempt because one of the mages was a little overzealous and pulled the boss out of range. I would use shield wall through the big shadowy thingy and run like a little girl when my cd's were er... on cd.

On our 4th attempt the big lobster finally died! I have to say that this is one of my favorite fights so far to tank. Having to watch everything and be ready to run for your life while still putting out as much threat as humanly possible combines all the elements that make a fight great. I was about to start using the 1h dps sword that I had gotten from Anuberak( that I use for PvP ) just to kick out extra threat.

Lanora did ToC 10 and VoA 10... and thats about it for raiding. Llina, Jadedfury, and Skillet got almost no attention. Perhaps when Icecrown comes out.

As an aside... how is it that most of my toons raiding the current tier only got one paragraph each... but I easily wrote 4 paragraphs on just Ulduar? A raid that offers absolutely nothing in terms of gear upgrades... but feels more exciting then ToC and Ony?

I'll take them myself, Cover me!

Yeah OK the title has nothing to do with the following post... but I couldn't think of a title because I decided to try something new and wrote a post while at work. I had the post all set up but was missing the title... my daughter was watching Star Wars and Darth Vadar was in the fighter and had just said "I'll take them myself, Cover me!" so that is the title.

I was reading a post over at AA talking about why it is that Zan is into alts, I have to say that it mirrors my own reasons pretty closely. Zan mentioned and I’ve talked about before, the fact that playing multiple classes helps you as a leader. You know what kind of gear people need, what rotations they should be using or what unique abilities can help during a fight. For instance during Onyxia I taught one of our hunters to use Chimera shot to disarm the big adds. She didn’t even know that chimera shot could be used as a disarm!

The other thing Zan talked about was solo play when it comes to alts. Growing up I learned to entertain myself as a child… no get your head out of the gutter that’s not what I meant! I mean playing with… ok that doesn’t work either.

The point is growing up we had one computer. This meant single player games were all I grew up on. We also didn’t get games regularly which meant I had to find ways to replay games to make them entertaining. I’ve played the original half life from start to finish probably 30 times growing up and warcraft 2 was the same way not to mention starcraft.

I never had a strong enough internet connection to do much of anything online with any game. In fact it wasn’t until after I was married that I played my first MMO… Runescape. My brother got me into playing this game and as much as I made fun of him for it at the start… I really got into the game. I only really played one character in Runescape, but that was because I didn’t need to play anything else. There were no varying classes so I can learn everything… and I did exactly that. I was nearly 100 when I quit playing with many of the skills in the 90’s.

Even though Runescape was an MMO I played it nearly entirely solo. I played runescape for 2 years I think before starting to play Guild Wars. Guild Wars was cool because you could combine classes… but each class was still unique that I ended up buying extra slots so that I had one of all the 10 classes the game had to offer. I found during this process that I couldn’t focus on a single character because there was no real need to. You could complete the entire game without ever having to group with another human yet all of the content was group based.

I didn’t like how Guild Wars was instance based and really missed the open world environment of Runescape… but the graphical difference made it impossible to play any browser based game again. I also hated the fact that you couldn’t jump in either game…

My best friend got me into playing WoW and I rolled a druid… the class that could do everything. I discovered a community that didn’t exist in the other games and once I joined a raiding guild was hooked. Life at 70 though outside of raiding was pretty boring (wasn’t even daily quests at that point). The issue was that I had soloed my way mostly to 70 and now everything that was remotely challenging required groups. So when I felt like getting out on my own I turned to leveling up alts. Having an unguilded alt was a great way to escape from drama and just feel free of the burdens of the endgame.

I love soloing or at least attempting to solo group quests. Always have. It’s a challenge and you have to adapt and use abilities that you normally wouldn’t in order to survive. Can I solo this elite that I killed on my hunter solo on my priest? Ouch guess not! How bout on a mage?

I do the same thing even at 80 with various elites around icecrown. What is the hardest thing I can kill with the different classes? Pretty much all of them can kill the big monstrosity guy but so far only my paladin has been able to solo the riders.

Anyway enough rambling for now cya!