Day 14 – This Upsets You

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

All righty, here’s my last planned post for today, thanks for reading “Contentpalooza 2011”! ;)

Day 14 – This Upsets You

Oh, Lordy. This is almost too much to consider. A better question would be “this doesn’t upset you”. ;)

Actually, truth be told, in-game, not a lot flat-out upsets me. I know, I know. You’re shocked. What it is that really upsets me is the people. I’ll get into that in a minute, but here’s some in-game stuff that upsets me.

Loot and randomness. Being able to kill Gandling in Scholomance 27 times and see the Beaststalker’s Cap twice (and losing the roll once), or being able to kill General Drakkisath SIXTY TIMES before seeing a Beaststalker Tunic is ridiculous. Even in Wrath, this held true. 24 kills of heroic Saurfang and 0, count that, 0 drops of the Heroic Belt of the Blood Nova. (Not that I’d wear it now, being that it’s mail, but anyways.) 13 Halion kills, 0 drops of the Foreshadow Steps.

And this continues today. 8 Cho’gall kills (that’s, you know, 2 full months) and 0 drops of Shackles of the End of Days. And I’m doing this on 25, so I’m getting 5 drops off Cho’gall each time (plus 3 tier tokens). That is 40 possible drops and we have had 0 bracers drop.

I’m not asking for things to drop every single time you kill a boss. Not even every 5 times. I’m not even asking for non-useless gear not to drop (ie: healing plate with no paladins in the group). I’m just asking for better odds than 2/27, 1/60, 0/13 and 0/8.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 5/10 (Moderate)

Raid Lockout Screwups. As detailed in my last post, this new raid lock system screwed us up last night, made us lose an hour or more of our raid time and has made us change our plans for the week. This isn’t limited to the new system, though, there were several “aw crap” moments with the old lock system as well. Still, at this point, I’d much prefer the old one. (For me. I know the new one makes a lot more sense for a lot of people, particularly those who aren’t guilded or those not doing their raiding in a guild setting.)

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 7/10 (High)

Everything else, game-wise, I can generally take. Getting stunlocked by a rogue or three, fine. Login errors? Fine, computers aren’t perfect.

The rest of the things that piss me off are things people do. True, some of them are made possible by game mechanics, but ultimately, it’s people in this game who piss me off.

Racist/Homophobic/Prejudicial Language. Fastest way to piss me off is to throw a bunch of disparaging epithets into a sentence. People are people, dammit, and I don’t care what colour their skin is, who they love, who they worship (if they do) or any of that crap. They’re people. Even bad players are people. The fact that Trade Chat is typically filled with these various slurs means I spend a lot of time reporting spam on various people and, in the case of some really bad ones, I’ll open a ticket and explain precisely why the person’s language is upsetting.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 8/10 (High)

Not doing your job in a group. This goes for 5-mans, raids, everything. It drives me nuts to join a pug and realize that, out of the five people in the group, myself and maybe one other person are doing their role-related jobs adequately. It also drives me nuts if someone just cannot master a mechanic in raid content. I am not the fastest learner. I have a learning curve and, given my crappy-ass computer, it can be steep. But I learn, I adapt OR, in the case of Teron Gorefiend, I SIT MYSELF. My computer at the time didn’t allow me to be quick enough to get all my constructs — I’d lag on the transition and no matter how fast I hit my buttons, I’d only get a couple of my constructs trapped. This was okay if I wasn’t the first person targetted, but if I WAS, it was a wipe. So I sat myself out of the fight as often as possible. The very first Gorefiend kill we had, I was in on my hunter. I would feign death prior to his casts that would give you the debuff and so I was never targetted by his stupid ability. And I did pretty darn well in terms of DPS, too! But I did what I could to adapt to all the various mechanics and that was the one thing in all of Burning Crusade I just couldn’t adapt to.

It’s not a hard game, when you look at it. Don’t stand in bad stuff. DPS this when you’re supposed to, DPS this other thing when you’re supposed to. Heal who’s taking damage. Keep bad guys away from your raid.

That SO many people fail at these basics — I’m not even talking about things like interrupts or DPS classes dispelling things or any of that — makes me sooooo angry.

Don’t even get me started on people who fail at CCing or tanks who taunt to pull.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9/10 (Very High)

– Failing Like Faily McFailerson. What makes me angrier than the above is when I fail at something. I am not perfect, I get caught by Blistering Cold on Sindragosa sometimes, I eat Fireball Barrage on Halfus sometimes. I make mistakes. What upsets me is when I CONSTANTLY fail at something. Take, for example, our Al’Akir work from the other week. Had no idea that you could delay the Wind Burst by taking Electrocute so that when the Wind Burst/Squall Line combo coincides at the MT’s location, it’s NOT freaking impossible. I ate Squall Line a zillion times that night before I wrote that post after the raid. And if it hadn’t been for Selyndia pointing out that Electrocute delays the Wind Burst, it never would have clicked and I would have ended up sitting myself on that fight.

What makes it different from Gorefiend? Gorefiend was a technical problem. My computer wasn’t phasing me quickly enough to allow me to complete the mechanics required for the fight. It sucked, but at least I knew I had done my best. With Al’Akir, it wasn’t a technical thing. I just could not figure out how to be right up in front for Wind Burst and simultaneously halfway out on the platform to eat the gap for Squall Line. It was so frustrating that I felt like a total failure. It upsets me greatly to fail constantly at the same mechanic without issues stemming from my computer. :P

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9.5/10 (Very High)

Not being prepared. This relates to the above. Back in BC, there we stood, crafting last minute Shadow Resist gear for Mother Shahraz. And a rogue tells me she doesn’t have her Medallion of Karabor, that comes from the attunement quest. There’s more to the story (scroll down a long ways to get to the BC/Mother bit) but basically, I gave all the mats I was holding to one of the officers, made him raid leader and said to the raid that I was going afk for a few.

Right there in the middle of the raid.

I got up and punched the living crap out of my couch. I yelled into a pillow. I was SO angry that, even after all of that, I removed the rogue from the raid and instructed her to go back to Shattrath.

After months (MONTHS!!!) of posts and checking in with people about their attunement needs, their resist needs, we are finally at the fight we have been preparing for and this one dumbshit rogue is like “uh, I didn’t do the heroics” and had confused the attunement questline with the Champion of the Naaru questline. Despite the fact that I had taken two hours (TWO HOURS) one day to detail the ENTIRE questline on our forums and constantly reminded people to finish that up and let us know if they needed Al’ar or Rage or whatever.

I lost it. Dar calls it “the night Kurn drank the RED haterade”. I don’t think I’d ever lost my shit to that extent because of something someone did in-game before and I know I haven’t lost it to that extent since. I was SO angry.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 14.72/10 (RED HATERADE TIME)

There are other things — I hate when people leave my guild, I hate missing progression fights, I hate losing valuable members of the guild due to circumstances that are unavoidable. But I think the above really sums up what really upsets me when I play this game.

Earlier Today: People That You Admire
Tomorrow: Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it

5 Replies to “Day 14 – This Upsets You”

  1. You didn’t mention “when they change something vaguely related to pally healing.”

    Maybe that’s because you can’t get an accurate reading for how much that makes you rage. ;)

  2. xmolder – haha, no, changing paladin healing doesn’t always anger or upset me. I gripe, I complain about the issues I see, but on the scale of things, it doesn’t upset me half as much as the fact that it took me SIXTY DRAK KILLS for Kurn’s T0 chest. :P Things change and you’ve got to roll with the punches. I really liked the Wrath healing model from the viewpoint of all the five healing specs, but I knew it had to change. Just because I don’t like all the changes doesn’t mean I’m all that upset. I think I’m crankier about adapting to the changes that are enacted than the changes themselves. ;)

    Tikari – … there is a bit of rogue hate in there, isn’t there? ;) I have a few rogues I really enjoy — you, Oneman, plus Fusionsnake and Naomina (our go-to rogues back in BC) and then there was Ieth, who was with us in Vanilla, who remarked, upon entering Molten Core for the first time, that his lungs probably looked like the inside of MC, since he smoked. This prompted us to declare that Ieth’s lungs dropped epics. Ah, the good old days!!

    Every single Horde rogue can go stab themselves repeatedly in the face, though. ;D

  3. The Drakky kill – I sympathise totally. I gave up on the D2 questline after Baron 45 back in vanilla, because it was just too hard to do in our small guild, but when BC came out I renewed my interest in finishing it off. We did UBRS time and time again, and every time my Chestpiece didn’t drop I felt like giving up.
    It would not have been so bad if I could have soloed the place, but I needed 2 others to help with the fire boss, and I certaily needed help on Drakky himself. That was the worst part, getting people to help out and trying not to feel that I was wasting their time or forcing them to go.
    When it finally dropped (maybe 20th attempt), and I went to hand in the final quest, I realised that somehow I had lost one of the other D2 pieces! I was very lucky that a GM showed me mercy, and I got it back in the post.

    Teron Gorefiend, yes he was nasty. I remember that some people didn’t even get the new cast bar popping up that allowed you to stop the constructs, because they were using an add-on that blocked it. I also remember practising on a simulator so that I wouldn’t fail badly when it was my turn. I think there were plenty of people who dreaded that fight.

    My own fail was on Valithria heroic. I just could not get a high enough healing stack no matter how hard I tried. I heal, I don’t do flying in 3 dimensions. I was so bad at it that our Holy Priest had to take my place in the portals. /sad panda.

    The one thing that does make me mad, is when we have discussed tactics on the guild forum for days, and when it comes to the fight, some people still have no clue about what is going on.

  4. AliPally – whew, so glad the GM helped you out! It was definitely in BC or maybe even Wrath (!) when I got my Beastalker Tunic to hand in the quest.

    Gorefiend was definitely the dreaded fight of many of my raiders, for sure. Ugh.

    The flying on Valithria pissed me off, too. For the first… I’d say 5 times I healed her (and I mean many wipes on the way to that first kill and several later on) I would drop my stacks. I got good by the end of Wrath, but that’s 14 rescues on regular and 23 on heroic, so if I wasn’t good by the end of Wrath at that fight, I have no business playing the game. ;) It definitely screwed with me, though. My favourite moment on that fight was hitting LOH and it critting for over a million. Oh, I miss that fight! haha. :)

    I COMPLETELY agree about discussing tactics and people being clueless in the raid later on. I put a big emphasis on guild community and part of that is participating on the forums. :)

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