A Good Nights Sleep
Monday night I did not sleep well at all. I was up late futzing and waiting on a print job for my wife, that ultimately ended up printing the wrong thing. As a result neither of us got to bed until after midnight. After that I don’t think either of us really got solid sleep, and next thing we knew it the alarm was going off at 5:30. As a result I spent most of yesterday sleep walking through it. There are just some hazes that not even caffeine can clear, and this is only compounded by the fact that my allergies are still killing me. Even the smallest task seemed like a struggle, and last nights raid was pure hell to suffer through… in part because of my present state of mind. I realistically should have just bowed out and headed to bed, but that didn’t happen.
I did however managed to get to sleep around 10:30 and last night was probably the most luminously glorious night of sleep I have had in a long time. Granted I woke up before the alarm by about twenty minutes… but I did the correct thing and just got on up instead of trying to struggle for those last few minutes of sleep. The end result is I feel more human than I have in a long time. Who knew I needed this sleep thing after all? Now if only I didn’t have to go to work I could actually enjoy my day. Today in particular is going to be a strange one as I have to go to lunch with a vendor. Working lunches make me grumpy, especially since during this one we will be grilling the vendor for information. At least maybe I get a free meal out of the deal.
Rough Raiding
Last night I was not in the right frame of mind for raiding. That is the simple fact but the end results of the night didn’t really help either. As a whole the night felt like we were beating our heads against a wall. We had fourteen people, two healers and opted to run Blackrock Foundry Heroic. I am not the raid leader so I am sure there was a reason, but it felt like we were just setting ourselves up for failure. We managed to eek out a victory on Hans and Franz with that configuration. Then we lost one healer and gained a different healer, and someone healing in their off set. We pushed forward and managed to down Beastlord Darmac in this fashion, before heading on to do some attempts on Flambender Ka’graz. There we made some swaps to the layout that seem like they might have worked, but it required a lot more work adjusting on the tanking side, so overall it was a wash and we wiped horribly.
This stagnation and continued throwing ourselves against heroic when it seems like on some level we are just not ready for it is completely destroying any desire I have to log in. I am not sure what is going wrong honestly. I am not sure if our tanks are undergeared, or if our healers are undergeared… or if the dps are just taking too much “could be avoided” damage making the healers heal someone other than the tanks. All I know is that we are having to battle rez tanks constantly, and as a matter of course which makes all of our attempts sloppier than they should be. Our Tuesday WoW raid is generally bad at adjusting to the conditions on the ground which is maddening to me, because this is precisely the strength of the Monday night Final Fantasy XIV raid. If things don’t go according to plan we seem to lose our shit completely, and end up flailing wildly… or standing in shit and dying. So I am not sure if we just have a massive case of tunnel vision or if there is some gearing problem at hand. I know for me personally I am still wearing 640 pants because nothing better will drop.
Bad Medicine
The problem is right now I am right back in that old familiar place. I dread logging into World of Warcraft Tuesday and Thursday to get a raid invite. I’ve reached that point where I am just frustrated with the whole raiding in wow experience. I have been here so many times before, and I am not quite sure how to fix it. I feel committed to “take my medicine” and log in for the sake of my friends, but I question… are any of us actually having any fun right now? Monday was won of the funniest nights of raiding I have ever experienced, and we spent it wiping like nubs to turn 9 after having taken a month off of it. So it obviously is not progression that ultimately dictates how I feel about a raid… it is the attitude of the raiders and the atmosphere of the raid. We spent Monday laughing and joking, and at the same time we made some serious progress. That is when I love to raid, when it feels like we are pulling together as a team even if we are wiping horribly.
The Tuesday/Thursday night raids just feel broken. They have about as much mirth as the waiting room of a battered women’s shelter. I log in and join the raid and I feel worse, because there is an unspoken tension going on. No one talks anymore, because key players in the raid are easily distracted by chatter. What is frustrating is, this is not the raid I joined. This is not the raid I saw at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, or even during High Maul. That raid was excited about the prospects of this expansion, and enjoyed their evenings spent together. This raid just feels stressed and burnt out… and I have no clue how to rehabilitate it. I wish I did know honestly, because I miss that raid that existed before we set foot into Blackrock Foundry. That is a raid I enjoyed spending two nights a week with. This one… I just end up zoning out and waiting for the night to be over.
Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bad Medicine