The Drama Post

So far, things have been relatively drama free over on the new server. Having said that, I'm going to talk about drama. Heh.

I've had a little bit with Goblin over the 'loot incident'. We were running some low level newbie run and from what I can tell, he accidentally hit 'Need' on a cloth item he couldn't use. Creeps was kind of rude, which isn't surprising because he has a low noob tolerance, and now Goblin is all bent out of shape and refuses to need loot because he 'doesn't want to get shit on if he makes a mistake'.

I'm also anticipating some drama that I'm really not sure how to handle. Tar saw the ads for the shiny new expansion and is making noises about coming back. There are two issues with this:

1. I moved my main
2. I don't know if I can let him into my guild

I won't get into it much because it's a touchy subject, but he had a hand in the fall of the old EnM and I don't expect a warm reception for him on the new server. Honestly, I'm hesitant about bringing him in too. If he stays on Dalv, I can still play with him on my warrior, but I know I can't split time between realms so I don't know if that will be good enough.

I think my dilemma is pretty clear, but here it is anyway. If he comes back and wants to play with me, I may have to tell him I can't let him in the guild. It would be really inconvenient and difficult because it will probably hurt his feelings and I'd rather not have to say no to my guildies because I want to do stuff with him. I'd end up blowing him off in game, which would not do good things for the real life friendship.

I really enjoy playing with Mal and his crew. Not only are they fun to hang with, but they're pro and we can actually get somewhere in the end game. I mean geez, I recreated the guild to bring us all back together. I don't want to rip it apart the same way it died before. Mal has had a huge effect on my gameplay since, well, forever. It goes beyond WoW too, with us being e-mail friends even when he wasn't playing. I just can't choose between him and Tar, and it's going to be really hard to do what I usually do, which is keep friends who aren't compatible apart.

Every time I mix RL/WoW it ends in tears or drama. You'd think I would learn. I was sad when my RL buddies quit playing WoW. I was hurt and lost when the first EnM fell apart. I cried over some of my SDS guildies. I cried when Mal left. I got in a fight with Goblin over looting. Now I'm stressed about Tar coming back.

On top of that, I feel like a loser because WoW seems to stir up intense emotions in me more often than RL. It's just not fair. This is supposed to be a fun game, not a painful QQ fest.

We and I

The longer I'm away from SDS the more I realize that I miss it. But not in such a way that if I go back that will go away. I miss how SDS used to be. I miss Huggy's escapades, which are toned down now. I miss talking about Fanta. I miss hanging out with Tran and Krom in TeamSpeak. I miss riding to the rescue with four other people when someone is getting ganked. I miss doing the Island every day and having rivalries with alliance guilds. I miss doing heroics. I miss healing Shak's Warrior.

Some of that is just a side effect of cutting back my WoW time. I'm just not there on weeknights to do these things, though I'm sure some of that is going on. But even on Friday and Saturday nights I can easily spin around in a circle in Org all night with nothing to do. Vent is empty most of the time, except for Trig and Fry. I didn't expect things to stay the same, but the reasons I stuck around so long are gone.

But now, I'm the Guild Leader, which is something I've always wanted to do. We roll around in old instances just for fun. I'm sure once we get into a decent bracket we'll be doing battlegrounds and world PVP. I'm hoping Mal will do arenas with me again once he hits 80 (and gets high speed internet :-P). As it is, we revel in every alliance kill we get. We're picking up a few solid members outside of our initial circle. Creep is putting together a guild website as a school project, and I think I've talked Goblin into setting up a vent server for us.

So why haven't I transferred Zully yet? I miss her too. I think I'm avoiding talking to Px again. Otherwise I think I would have done it a while ago.

Re-Rollin

Now that Mal is back (a million smiley faces) I've been working on some characters on a new server with him. Having a fresh start has worked wonders on my "WoW stress" level. I'm actually having gameplaying fun again, not just "working through challenges" fun. I want to spend some quality time with my new toons, and I didn't want to feel like I was taking advantage of my rank by not playing but still having officer priveleges, so I offered to step down as an officer. Px basically said not to worry about it, since it's summer and not much is really going on anyway. I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm just going to run with it for now.

One of the other officers gave up his position a few hours after I tried to because of bank drama. I asked him to take it easy on the gems in front since he has access to the whole thing as an officer. We've got uncut gems he can have cut into whatever blues he wants, I was pretty fried that 7 of the perfect green ones I grabbed from the AH to "share the wealth" just disappeared. He was asking who complained, and no one did, it was just me doing my bank thing. I've seen him do "suspicious" transactions before, but I left it alone because he was an officer. Most of the gems reappeared immediately, which I did not ask for. I'm not sure why he didn't use them right away.

I haven't seen Krom in weeks due to my new schedule. I also have mixed feelings about this. I do wonder how much of my wanting to reroll has to do with what happened with him. Then again, it's not like we're ever online at the same time, so that doesn't really matter. I think I just finally hit "burn out" with being max level, at least for a while.

Break

I think maybe it's time I took a WoW break. A real one, not just a week with my Twitter going off all the time and checking up on WoW Insider twice a day.

I've been thinking about this since we started our raid alliance with the Meat. I think one of the reasons I was playing so much before was simple sense of obligation to my guildies. They're great people, and fun to play the game with, but as I pull back from the game a little I see that I miss my own friends, and my own family. Now that there's more healers and more people to choose from, I feel like I can step away and it won't sabatoge anyone else's fun.

I thought the patch would freshen things up for me, but it turns out there's really not any content that I'm interested in. The Argent Tournament is just annoying. I don't want to have to learn to push five buttons in the right order to get my reward. If I wanted to roll my face on the keyboard, I would have rolled a hunter or a death knight. I don't think we're going to be doing Ulduar any time soon, and I just don't have the schedule to pull off the gear up.

The last time I logged in I just stared at the screen and wondered what I was doing. I logged off Zully and went to my Shammy. I suppose I could take that route too, level up for a while, put my 80s on the shelf. But I don't know if I SHOULD, you know?

I planned a Malygos run for Friday. Four deathknights, three rogues, two paladins, two dps warriors, two hunters, and a warlock signed up. I called for 2-3 ranged and 2-3 melee. This is why I didn't send out the mass invite before. Do I do it on pure gear? Do I go with the people I know? What about the new people, if I don't invite them will they quit? We'll see if it turns into the mess I think it's going to be.

I'm going to level my shammy until my business trip is over, then see if I still want to play. Right now, I really don't know.

*sigh*

I cancelled the OS run for Sunday. Our tanks are being really annoying right now. I'm not going to rearrange my schedule for people who can't commit. All three of us raid leaders are frustrated with them, so I'm just going to back off. I hope things improve soon.

I mislooted some purple pants in VoA 10 today because I thought there was only one hunter, when there were two. If it doesn't get fixed Trig won't get his set bonus. I think I've lost my master looter privileges for a while.

I think I may just take the rest of the weekend off.

Ambition

I've been trying to decide about the raiding situation in my guild. Things have been going OK progression wise, but part of me knows that we can do so much better. I've been trying to push our best raiders to do harder content than I think we would normally attempt, the Sarth +1 raids. It's going alright, but I'm really starting to get frustrated with the response I'm getting. One of our best tanks was hedging today about accepting the invitations to Krom and my raids. I'm really not sure what to do with him, since he's one of the long LONG time members of the guild. I don't want to cut him out, but at the same time it really irritates me that he refuses to plan ahead. I even talked to him directly, and he still didn't accept or decline the invite. I'm about 1 step away from just cancelling Sunday's Sarth +1 raid and doing something else instead.

But here's the thing. I'm ambitious. It's just ingrained in me. I really want to push us to our limit. I just have this gut feeling that if someone (me) shows our best guys that they can do the difficult parts of the game, we will be awesome. The people I've been bringing have been playing for a very long time and know their stuff. Wow-Heroes says that 10 of us are good enough to attempt Malygos. This makes me happy, and annoyed at the same time. The hard part for me right now is riding through the learning process. It doesn't matter how good your gear is, raid experience is something else entirely. We didn't really start serious raiding until Wrath came out, and it shows. It's just going to take us some time to get going, and logically I know that.

Maybe I'm just getting impatient. I've been thinking about that raiding guild again. Aeth has been pushing pretty hard to get me into his guild. Even though I'm undergeared for what they're doing I think I could rise up pretty fast. The other thing that's getting to me is the stress. I've had a lot of personal stress recently. All this raid leading and personality conflict has been getting to me. So I'm sort of at a crossroads. Do I just keep doing what I'm doing, and maybe take a week break or so? Do I continue to take charge and try to push us into better raids? Do I just quit because I'm taking this whole thing too seriously?

I really don't know. It's not simple.

Peace

I got a lot done this weekend. Did four heroics for a boatload of badges, did 25 dailies today and probably another 20 yesterday, played with a new spec, won Wintergrasp about 4 times. Got that new wand I was after. And a silly hat from Blackwing Lair. Got some good quality time in with Krom, Tran, and Px, among others. I think I needed that.

I also think I found some peace this weekend. I basically spent the last few hours running with that guild I was talking about yesterday. They let me come in their vent and I got some good lurking in. I basically reaffirmed that the grass is always greener on the other side. They weren't really all that interesting, especially compared to the guys I hang with. Just doing easy old school raids I could feel a bit of the cut throat raider mentality. That's really not what I'm in it for. As much as I'd love to see the end game content, I need to do it on my terms. And I really think it will feel cheap if I just drop in on some hard core guild who already did all the groundwork. It's the same reason I hate being dragged through dungeons as a lowbie. It's how you get there that's important.

So no more of this doubting about my guild and raiding. We're doing just fine, and we're staying together as friends. That's what really counts.

Guild Groupie

Ever since that Obsidian Sanctum run I've been keeping in touch with my Heroic friend. I don't have a ton of non-guild time to do heroics, etc, but I managed to do half a Culling of Strat run with his guildies when they dropped their terrible PuG. Once again he sent me a tell that said his guildies were happy to "have a good healer pug for a change". I get down on my healing a lot because I run with a lot of challenging groups, so it's nice to get an ego boost once in a while.

I had looked up the guild and if they're saying nice things about me I'm really flattered. Our server isn't exactly a top WoW server, and we have very few notable players that are active in raiding and on the message boards. I've always been a trade chat/message board lurker, so if I recognize names it means they're about as close to "server superstars" as you can get in my world. When I looked up the guild on the armory I saw at least 4 or 5 names I recognized, including my priest hero Tony from way back in the late vanilla/early BC days. I know he has fallen from his pedestal a bit, but he's still fantastic and knows what he's doing.

Does this make me some sort of weird guild groupie? I keep wondering how I managed to impress this random heroic friend so much they've been persistently asking me to run with them. What if they invite me to this guild? That would be a really difficult decision to make.

WoW Rage

I'm really struggling to get anything done this weekend. I'm so frustrated about us not raiding that I'm starting to not even want to play. I've resorted to bribery to get our healers going, I'm making Wispcloaks as fast as I can, but that's only going to go so far. It's pretty hard to heal a dragon to death. If I can keep our new drood I'll be happy, but I'm not feeling terribly optimistic.

There's this one tank I've been running with and he's making me crazy. I just can't keep him healed. We got stomped by Trollgore about 10 times this morning. All I need is one badge for the Egg of Mortal Essence. One! Is that too much to ask?

I think I'm just going to pug it tonight.

Raid Dilemma

I have an interesting dilemma. I want to raid. Really REALLY want to raid. I've wanted to raid since the day I started in WoW, and all 65+ days of game time I've put into Zully. My guild is spinning up to do some raiding, and I'm thrilled. They've made it pretty clear that they need me in order to start doing it, since I'm the Holy Troll, which makes me feel good and freaks me out at the same time. Pressure! Ack!

The problem is, raids take time. Big, uninterrupted blocks of time. Most of my big uninterrupted blocks of time are between 12a and 4a server time, or on the weekend not between 6p and 9p server time. I highly doubt the east coasters are going to want to wait until 9p server time to start a raid, and I also doubt that the west coasters will get up early enough to be done by 6p server time. I'm assuming a minimum of 4 hours of raid time, but they usually run 6-8 hours. A lot of our geared players fall into one of those two categories.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to let everyone down by not being able to raid, but I don't want to plan my life around raiding in WoW. But I REALLY REALLY want to raid. This is so frustrating.

Sometimes Life Gets in the Way

I've been ridiculously stressed out in pretty much every part of my personal life for the last few weeks, so I decided to cut the easiest stress maker first and take a WoW break last weekend. I'm really glad I did. I was so much more easy going during arenas this week despite the drama, and just in general I feel a lot more chill while logged in this week.

I'm just going to have to start taking a break when I start feeling stressed out over WoW. I get so involved I forget that when it comes down to it, it's just a game. I can turn it off for a few days and the world will not come to an end. My guildies will still do their heroics, arenas, and BGs, get their chants, run their lowbies, talk on TeamSpeak, and so on, if I'm not there. As I occasionally say, "I'm not that cool", or in other words, the world does NOT revolve around or depend on me. I just forget that occasionally.

I was comforted to find that Mal did not instantly rocket up to 1700 points by switching to a different 2s partner for the weekend. He was a little over 1550 last week, which we have managed to do a few times. I hope I see him on later this week, and I also hope I can run enough AV to get my s2 chestpiece before rollover.

For every good day...

I suck at this game. I've put so much time and effort into it, but you know what? It doesn't really matter. Arenas? Yeah right. Zully can wear as many purples as she wants, I'm just not cutting it. I know it takes two to tango, but it's really discouraging to not even have a 50% win rate on over 70 games. Instances? I'm the easily distracted one that backs into the mobs. BGs? I hide with the rest of the crowd.

Sure, I have my good days where I feel like I rule the world, but then I get a slap in the face day like today that makes me want to quit.

The phrase in Arena talk is "carry me". I feel like that's me all the time, unless I'm helping the lowbies. I want to be in the pros, but I'm still on the pickup team. Sigh.