Well, I snapped. At least a little bit.
I sent a fairly, how shall I put it, biting PM to my raid leader (CCing my RL friend the resto druid/healing lead) on Thursday afternoon. In it, I addressed three things:
1) Screw this noise, I am not your healing lead, even when the healing lead isn’t there. The expectation to automatically do healing if my RL friend is late or absent, without so much as a “hey, do you think you could…?” was perhaps understandable, but not doable for me. I made it very clear that my time as healing lead was temporary and that I was happy to help my friend during a time of RL trouble, but that I was done with it.
2) The MT/GM has got to stop being so freaking abusive. I’ve talked to my RL friend about this point a lot and she’s insistent that he’s not saying it to deliberately insult us but that he’s just a bad leader and that’s how he’s seen the previous leaders in this guild get results. My stance is that I just don’t give a crap what his intentions are, because any normal person is going to take offense to “HEALERS YOU FUCKING SUCK” and such. The chances of changing any part of the MT/GM’s behaviour are slim to none.
However, I did realize something. He has always been this crude, abrasive and obnoxious. It’s not a new thing. But prior to my RL friend’s break from the game, he at least was telling her in /o or whatever that we sucked and trusted her to bring the message to us. Which, we both realized in discussing this, he doesn’t do anymore. He just lets us have it in raid chat. She had been acting as a filter for him for pretty much the entire time I’ve been in the guild, but without her, he had no one he trusted to tell us we suck and fix things. Because he didn’t know or trust me. (Compared to my RL friend, who’s been in the guild for four years.) So my RL friend is going to work on getting him to use her as a filter again. Which is only changing what chat channel he says his stuff in, rather than changing what he says.
So. I guess we’ll see.
3) The late nights are killing me. The raid leader has pushed us past 2am a few times in the last couple of weeks and obviously, I stay, like a moron, because I know they can’t get X or Y down without a holy paladin or without a sixth healer or whatever. So I told the RL in my PM that I was done, that 2am is my hard limit and that any attempts that begin after 2am, unless it’s an exceptional circumstance, will have to be done without me.
Those were the basic points. Of course, I was a lot less brief about it all and I was angry, to boot.
The response I received involved the RL being pissy at me and included the phrases:
“If you’re really that unhappy raiding here though, you should probably
just stop raiding. […] If you have more suggestions about what we can do, then I’m all ears, but I’m kind of doubtful we’ll be able to fix all the issues.”
So I didn’t raid on Thursday. I’m about to post and say that I won’t raid tonight. Did I mention that they didn’t raid on Thursday, either? Not enough people in general, but only five healers as well. 0, that is zero, paladins of any spec.
I’m not one to cause issues, really. But I’m not above withdrawing my services from the guild for a little while to illustrate various points: a) We need 3 holy paladins, period, b) I have worked my ass off for you people and if you think that you can just tell me to not raid because we’re not going to solve the issues, well, good luck raiding without me, c) An unhappy raid environment leads to unhappy raiders who then don’t want to raid or do whatever’s necessary to push through, such as staying ’till 2:30am when end time is 2am.
That cancelled raids give my RL friend a better night’s sleep doesn’t hurt, either. ;)
Anyways, I don’t know what this means for me or for my guild at the moment. It may mean I’m in the market for a new guild. As angry as I am with the RL, he has a point: if I’m not happy, I shouldn’t raid, which is what so many people have said to me over the last week. His pissiness towards me (not really included in this post) has helped ease the guilt of not showing up. I have lost respect for him and, as such, I don’t feel motivated to do my best. Or, you know, anything at all.
Having spoken candidly with my RL friend really helped and I’m feeling less stressed and less worried about the impact my absence has on the guild and raids. I suspect taking a few nights off is also helping substantially.
I’m undecided on tomorrow’s raid, but it’ll probably depend on what they do, if anything, tonight.
In the meantime, priest is 79 and I’ve made almost 4000g since Friday afternoon. So there’s that. ;)
Hey there Kurn! Harsh times you’re going through. As I imagine, most serious raiders will have at some point in their WoW time. Good to see you’re still capable of having fun though, imho that’s the most important part of it all.
I must say I’m impressed. I’d ask you how you deal with it all, but then again, you let us (the readers) know by really putting yourself out there, in here. You have my utmost respect, both as a fellow blogger and a fellow Holy paladin. And as such, I would urge you to really re-think about your current position. To me, it looks like that guild needs you more than you need them. It depends on the other guilds available though.
Good luck dealing with whatever they manage to shove in your face. I sincerely hope you won’t burn out completely and manage to find the fun in raiding again. With a fun atmosphere, preferably ;-)
By the way, on a side note, I discovered a fun way to farm some gold. My wife’s druid (in feral spec) and me in Retribution spec duo’ed some TBC heroics today and made quite a few gold. Not just the vendor loot and gold/silver drops, but some of the loot sells really good on the AH. If you feel like it, and have some time on your hands (granted, it’s not the most efficient gold for your time) it might provide for a fun way to earn some well-deserved gold pieces.
Honestly, good for you. However I have to be honest that I don’t expect much will come of it from your guild based on what you have said. however, if you are feeling better, that’s all that really matters.
As for the gold making, I have a few rules I go by:
1) Don’t farm unless it’s for fun. The best gold can be made via your professions.
2) Watch your net income per item closely (AH Sale – Material Cost). It is very easy to get caught crafting stuff at a loss. Especially if you have lots of mats stored up in your bank in the first place.
3) Find a niche and stick with it.
To elaborate:
1) I farm 2 things. The first is Herbs on my druid because I find it oddly fun. I don’t actually use them for much of anything (xmute alch as well), but the ability to put on some music and just go flying around northrend/outland is kinda fun since druids don’t have to deshift to gather. The second is when I need uncommon mats for leveling a profession. My server’s economy is top heavy, low level mats are almost never on the AH, and when they are it’s for ridiculous prices (and they don’t sell), so I will take my prot pally down to where ever it is I need mats from and grind for an hour or so. had to do this a bunch for my JCer. I dislike it, and I make no money from it, however I literally could not level JCing from the AH, nto enough mats.
2) This is a new rule for me because I screwed up bad. I recently thought I would try and sell enchants on the AH and just started crafting up the really expensive ones (weapon enchants mostly) using my backlog of mats from various characters. Well, I ran through my crystals and went to restock, only to find out the price of raw materials is about the same as the scrolls when done. DOH! I no longer actually craft enchants for my self now, I just buy em on the AH for less than the materials sell for!
3) My personal niche was the Titanium xmutes. I got on it when the patch first hit and dropped the price of pars from 50g+ to 18g and simply flipped all the saronite on the AH into titanium bars, racking up about 50K gold rather quickly. At this point there is enough competition that the price falls down to 11g sometimes (this is below material cost), and so my gold flow has slowed down a lot, however I can still make about 1-5g a week for minimal effort (fine by me, I’m not aiming for gold cap).
The couple last things I would say are:
Base commodities (Belt Buckles, gems, enchants/spell threads/leather thingys, flasks, glyphs, etc) are always worth a look. It depends on your server, but one of those will not have some much competition, and you can probably craft out a metric tonne of them and make some decent gold.
Empty out your bags.
The remote AH is up and running in beta. I think it’s available on all servers now, and lets you sell stuff from ANY bag on your active character (and you can switch the character). Go through, pop up 2-3 pieces of random garbage you have (copper ore, fel lotus, whatever) and just get rid of them. If they don’t sell, vendor trash them when you log in and collect them from your mail.
I’m obviously only suggesting this for the actual garbage, the crafting mats that you stuck in there ‘just in case’, or are left over from leveling a prof. Any vanity or keepsakes should be kept, and I’m sure that Kurn (at least) has a LOT of those. I have it easy. I never raided prior to wrath, and all of my active characters were actually MADE in wrath, my old characters are on other servers, however this is my current activity, cleaning out my junk. Then it’s on to ravaging our guild bank (no, we shouldn’t have old world BoE greens, spell tomes, or any of that garbage! graaaa!)
Also, finally got to see lich king this week. Got trounced on horribly :P
ninja addendum:
Did I mention I’m an AH whore?