Bad Medicine

by

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

Wow-64 2015-04-21 20-48-48-06 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

Wow-64 2015-04-10 06-18-41-75 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 one 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.

13 thoughts on “Bad Medicine”

  1. Pingback: Tales of the Aggronaut » Archive » Enjoying Wildstar

  2. Well, I gave it a shot. I subscribed to WoD for a month (which ends tomorrow) and am supremely disappointed with WoW’s direction. Garrisons are implemented poorly and the quality of the game has gone to shit (little things from typos in the Dungeon Journal to buggy quests and a widely used area fog that brings my older computer to a grinding halt). I got to the point of tanking and healing heroics, and doing the LFR but it’s just not fun. Sadly, the best part about coming back was soloing all the Wrath raids.

  4. In re: Allergies —

    Several friends started taking Quercetin supplements last fall and this spring they’ve all coincidentally reported that their allergies are hardly bothering them at all. I’d never heard of it, but found it on Amazon. OTOH, I’ve never had allergies, so…. not for me: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Extension-Optimized-Quercetin-Capsules/dp/B0020XW68O/

    For something a bit different, 2 of my sisters had some pretty severe allergies but went through courses of treatment called “NAET” and are now allergy free. They both looked at it with a jaundiced eye at 1st since it sounds really new-age-y, but it worked for the one, so she recommended it to the other and it worked for her too. The wikipedia article pretty much says the same thing — no scientific basis — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambudripad%27s_Allergy_Elimination_Techniques, but on the other hand, both my sisters are a lot happier now. naet.com can help you find a local practitioner if you want to give that a try.

  5. The height of my raiding career was when logging in meant a fun night, whether we progressed or not. Once progressing became my only joy, I quit while I was ahead.

  6. This is going to be very boring for anyone that isn’t Bel – and probably will be for him too. ^_^

    As you weren’t privy to healer chat, I fully admit I was the one that pushed to try with two healers. It was partial selfishness, partial need to try and push people. Damai is very familiar with this rant from me, but I feel we are generally running with too much healing. If you look at our log for last week’s Hans and Frans kill, where we ran 4 healers for 17 people. The HPS was between 23 and 33k, and Valera aside (disc shields being what they are), the overheal was 35-40%. Even being an LFR hero is more challenging to me as a healer than this, and lack of challenge makes me bored. Additionally, a full 10% of the damage taken was from the presses. So in theory, overheal should have been higher.

    Again, looking at the logs, raw HPS between the four healers is 178k HPS.

    Logs weren’t running for last night’s Hans and Frans kill, so I can’t directly compare. So I’m basing it on what I saw in Recount, which is never quite in line with the logs, but is close. We ran 2 healers for 13 people. On our kill, recount showed both Val and I around 39k HPS with 15% and 20% overheal respectively. My math is going to be a bit fuzzy here, but between the healers, raw healing sounds like around 92k HPS? (this is 15 second math here). So proportionately, about the same output. But we ran with 75% of the group, and succeeded with 50% of the healing. Again, without any direct data, I can’t say this for sure, but it implies that people were taking less unnecessary damage as well.

    I guess it really comes down to what people think is more fun – playing your character to the full extent of your abilities, or throwing more healers at the problem until we win. You can tell from my rant above which way my feelings lie. And the latter is what we usually do. Of course, I defer to the raid leader’s decision, but I know Damai well enough that I can express my dissatisfaction about it without it being a problem. Maybe it’s a discussion we need to have though? I realize I come from a more hardcore raiding background than most in the group (with the exception of Arria and Carthuun, who raided with me in those days), so my perspective is also likely skews differently than the majority.

    • I wish we could clone you Ath. If I had a couple of you, we could take on the world. There are a lot of issues going on. One of the big problems I see is that the bond of trust has been broken between healer and tank. This happened to me personally during Ulduar. I stopped believing that my healer would save me. There is nothing more frustrating in the world than knowing there is not a damned thing you can do to save yourself as a tank. There are just some situations where you have pushed all the buttons you have… and you are still dying. The problem is this changes the way you start tanking. You start to hedge your bets and pull your punches. You maybe blow your cool-downs early on a damage spike that could have been managed so you don’t have it for when the big spike that you couldn’t comes.

      I don’t mind doing serious content, what I mind is feeling like not a damned thing I do is making a difference. I stop having fun when I hit walls that I cannot progress past. My enjoyment in raiding right or wrong comes from my getting new items. I raid for the loot because if there were no loot I would not be raiding… which is also why I don’t really do heroics on my alts… because there is no loot to be gained. I like the feeling of seeing my numbers go up when I put on a shiny new piece of gear. The problem is I am stuck in a rut because for whatever reason we cannot kill bosses other than the handful we have. We need to kill Gruul regularly enough for me to be able to get a sword, and we have not killed the bosses that drop pants enough for RNG to stop being a dick and get me a pair.

      So when we go into an instance and wipe to things I feel like we should be killing… yeah that is no fun for me. More than anything I don’t feel like we are progressing. When we were wiping and inching closer to the goal post… that was cool. At the end of the night I felt like we were moving somewhere, we were gaining something. When we regress as we have been lately, I start to wonder why in the hell I am even showing up. The whole idea of challenging the raid works great… if everyone is like you or Ry… that feeds off a challenge. I question if we have enough of those type of motivated players to make that work? I started phoning it in when we stopped moving forward, but I feel like others have been phoning it in the entire time we have been raiding. Anyways… I hear you and I appreciate where you are coming from. I am not privy to the conversations in healer chat. To me it feels like we are just dead in the water, and if my post can start a dialog to figure out why we are dead in the water, awesome. I would rather get us back on track than quit raiding in wow, but one of those two needs to happen soon because I feel like I am wasting my time.

      • Of note since someone pointed this out to me… I was in no way using “battered women’s shelter” as a way of making light of any situation. I used to work on the same floor as one, and when I think of “least happy places ever” that waiting room has to go down in history of one of them. There was a tangible feeling of fear in the air, like any moment they would be found out and that they weren’t quite safe just yet. So yeah… just want to drive home that I was not meaning that as a humorous quip.

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