Every once in a while, after a raid, I get really depressed, like I just want to sit in a corner and cry. I don’t know why and it doesn’t happen all the time. It can happen whether we do well or we do poorly. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. I wonder if I’m the only one that experiences it.
This weekend, for example, my guild did really well, better than we have in ages. We got into ICC and managed to get Marrowgar down and made good progress on Lady Deathwhisper. We also restarted our 25 mans with a guild we have an alliance with and did 25 man ToC and got to Faction Champs before we called it (god, I hate that fight!). The 25 man raids are mainly our two guilds with a couple other guilds filling up the spots, so it looks like a pug but a lot of us have been raiding together for over 2 years.
My guild is fairly casual. We don’t even call ourselves a raiding guild, barely have a raiding schedule, and we do a lot of Care Bear raiding just so that we’ll have people to fill our seats. A lot of our members (including myself) will pug with other guilds to get gear as well and sometimes they leave our guild to go raid regularly with those other guilds, which is somewhat disappointing because it alway seems to happen when we’re making progress, but we don’t begrudge them leaving for something more to their liking, and frequently they come back to us anyway, plus a lot of them leave alts in our guild. They’ll say that we’re like home and family, but sometimes they need to leave the nest to grow.
Recently a guild that had poached several of our members broke up. It was getting to be a point of contention with my guild master because he felt like they were actively recruiting our talent, and they day before they broke up, he had asked me who their guild leader was so that he could talk to him about it. I had run with them several times in order to see content I wasn’t able to see with my guild and I know I could have gotten a spot with them in a heartbeat if I’d been so inclined. However, I’m pretty loyal to my guild, seeing as I was a founding member, among other reasons, so even though I want to raid more seriously, I don’t feel that it would be right to leave, especially as I’m our main healer. Plus, they’d screwed me over a few times because I was a pug healer rather than a guild healer, so I really had no desire to join them. Anyway, to get back to my point, they broke up and we got several of our old members back plus a few new ones, including their gm (and not any of their members that screwed me over, thank god). So now we’re back to raiding regularly, with experienced raid leaders, although it’s tough to mix our inexperienced members with their experience, but they’ve said they’re willing to teach.
Our Wednesday night raid was a bit of a disaster, because a lot of the geared people gave up their spots so that we could start gearing up some of our other players and we didn’t players have enough for 2 groups so that we could mix it up a bit. I was one of the ones to give up my spot, but I told the raid leader I would stick around because I had a feeling one of our healers would “have to go” after a few wipes…and she did, so I went in and we were able to down the Northrend beasts. I think they had wiped a half dozen times before I got in there. Then we had a few tries at Lord Jaraxxus, but it wasn’t happening and everyone was getting tired and I think the raid leaders were banging their heads against their desks. However the entire raid was only about an hour and a half.
Compare that to last night, where we had several of our core raiders and a few of the less experienced and we went into ICC and downed Lord Marrowgar (finally) and we got the Boned achievement. Granted we must’ve wiped at least a dozen times on that fight and trash was starting to respawn before we finished, but we were able to persevere and get the job done. I think the difference was that each attempt we were getting a little bit better, even if it was only 2% at a time. We were learning and having a good time and after we lost one of our healers because “9 wipes was too many” and we pulled in that other guild’s gm who’s offspec was healing, and yet he way outhealed the guy who left by a long shot, we were able to do it after a few more tries. I love how it’s usually the weakest link that gets pissed off at all the wipes, but whatever. He lost brownie points and may not be asked back again. Or he may, but I don’t think he’ll be a first choice, that’s for sure.
Anyway, to get back to the topic at hand, I didn’t feel down after Wednesday night’s raid, nor last night’s raid, but tonight I did. This happened a lot in BC, and I can’t figure out why.
Today it may have had something to do with the Black Temple pug I was in before our 25 man. I ended up being really angry about that one and it ended about 15 minutes before the 25 man started so I didn’t really get a chance to get it out of my system before I had to be “on”.
The second I signed on this afternoon, a member of our alliance guild asked me if I wanted to go to BT, and having never finished it, I said sure. I knew a few people in the raid but not the raid leader. We moved along nicely, no deaths until we got to the bosses before Illidan, because there weren’t really any mechanics that we couldn’t just bully our way through. That fight, though, caused the group to pause, after we wiped. We lost several people, including a tank (who had to go in 5 minutes anyway) and a healer (which left 1 tank & 2 healers and a few dps), because apparently no one wants to learn the old fights, so I got a few members of my guild to join up, including another healer. They just started inviting people without worrying about whether or not we had any other tanks or healers and decided to go. After working out a strategy, we managed to get those bosses down, although it wasn’t a smooth fight.
Then we moved on to Illidan. No one wanted to listen to the person that had actually been there and assign rolls, so of course we wiped (cause priests don’t make very good tanks against fire elementals, let me tell you). Then they realized they only had 1 tank, so the guy who actually knew what he was doing logged off the rogue he was on to bring in his dk tank. Strat was worked out, we started the fight. Was doing well, half the raid didn’t move out of the fire, people started dying, we wiped.
Ok, 3rd try, just about to start and my computer freezes. I restart, log onto vent, where I was with my guildies because the rest of the group didn’t want to use vent. I tell them I’m logging back on but it takes a few minutes for my computer to get going. They tell the raid but everyone gets impatient, so they start the pull before I’m even to the login screen. I finally get to the log in screen and they’re just past the elemental phase and the boss is at 60%. I log in and the bar moves slowly. They’re at 50%, 30%, 20%, 15%…I’m in, but back at the beginning of the instance. I’m rushing to try to get back, but of course I can’t port in there in the middle of the fight, so they down the boss, and I don’t get the achievement. I was upset but not mad at that point. Then I find out that they started because someone in the raid said I wasn’t that important anyway (as one of 3 healers and the only priest), and that just made me livid. I had spent over 2 hours with this group, healing their asses off, rezzing them, buffing them, finding people to fill their spots, and I guess I just wasn’t important enough to their group for them to wait a measly 5 minutes for me to log on. And maybe I wasn’t that important, since they managed to down him without me. And, quite honestly, I don’t care about the achievement or the 25 gold repair bill. I’ll get the achievement at some point, and I don’t really need the money. But I can’t get that time back, when I could have been doing some…
ARGH!!!! My computer crashed on Sunday night, when I was writing this & I lost about 20 minutes of writing, so I’m just going to post this as is, without much editing…sorry for the rambling, but I can’t face doing this over again.
