Been raiding, but I haven’t been playing much. Other stuff is more interesting these days. I think that stems from the fact that my *friends* who play WoW are scattered around various servers.
Anyways, another reset come and gone and another reset without killing Yogg. We have some fights that keep kicking our asses — Thorim’s given us trouble, Mimiron’s pissing us off, and even General is being annoying.
My poor old guild, Apotheosis, had some failings. It did. I’ll be the first to admit it. But one thing our members could do was freaking interrupt casts. Maybe it was how we did Aran back in the day or something, but our melee was fan-fucking-tastic at interrupting things. Of course, our resident gnome DPS warrior, whom we affectionately called Football, was absolutely amazing at his role, which helped. Our enhance shammies were very good and, when we HAD a rogue in the fight, all of them could be relied upon to kick when needed.
So it stuns me when we’re standing there on General and there’s a DK tank, 1-2 DPS warriors, 1 enhance shammy, 2 rogues and a DPS DK standing there and Searing Flames gets off. I mean, really. We even have to have our mage as a backup. Where is the difficulty in watching the cast bar and not using a global immediately before the cast so you CAN interrupt it? It’s a two second cast. It’s not like it’s instant, it’s not like it’s half a second.
Yogg attempts are… interesting. We’ve only had a few ventures into Phase 2, but we’re still getting used to it, I guess. Worst thing ever is people standing in green clouds. This is the part of Ulduar where I’m mostly glad I’m not leading my old guild through it, because we would spawn a zillion extra adds and I AM NOT JOKING. Weird that I’d pay money to have my old guild with me on Vezax and yet I know that we’d spawn too many adds on Yogg to ever reliably get out of phase 1.
And speaking of Apotheosis, it was formed on June 1st, 2007, just over two years ago. Our first Vashj kill was on June 2nd, 2008. I need to finish up the retrospective (of this past year) when I have a chance. Some amazing moments in the eight months we raided/played together before things went to hell.
At the same time, I MUST not be overly nostalgic, because then I’ll start thinking about getting the old crew back together and that MUST NOT HAPPEN because I’ll just be way too stressed out again and it will not be as awesome as I thought it would be, but they’re my friends and I’ll feel obliged to suffer through not being able to kill Thaddius again. Or something.
But it’s still nice to remember the good times.
Off to go figure out where our epic failure on Mimiron was last night. 14 wipes. Eesh.
You should check out my latest Twitter comment.
In regards to interrupts, I hate our melee. I was melee in TBC and these guys suck. There is no cohesion or communication. I was enhancement for about 80% of TBC and was the melee lead. It was myself, an on and off feral druid, a rogue, two dps warriors and a beast mastery hunter. We never had issues with interrupts and included any classes and specs that could assist (Remember Reliquary?). The key to our success was giving all interrupters a number that they would call out when they used their interrupts. Hearing our guys say, “who’s next.” or nothing at all is painful and embarrassing. The overall communication of the guild is embarrassing and I’m surprised we’re as far as we are.
I completely agree about the “mega-raid” comments on your twitter, btw.
I don’t understand where the problem is. Even Apotheosis didn’t have much trouble with interrupts on RoS — it was always other things that got us. The priest on Karathress never got a heal off. We were pretty damn good, but it’s hard to be bad. I cannot believe how crappy our melee is. Except the rogue — won’t use names, but you know who I mean.
As to overall communication, that’s why I wanted a healing forum — the healers were as bad as the melee in terms of communication, so hopefully that’ll help us out a bit.
We need a new enhancement shaman. And some decent DPS warriors. A new tank. Ugh. Now I’m getting depressed. ;)
The first step is to address the structure of leadership in the guild. There should be a guild master, a raid leader, a recruitment officer, a tank officer, a healing officer, a caster officer and a melee officer. I doubt this will happen. However, someone that can lead each subgroup and enforce communication would be awesome. Especially considering our own officers and AB’s rarely speak on vent.
They’re actually talking about restructuring things similarly to what you’re suggesting. I don’t know that the guild even has people who are able to lead in that capacity… but I guess we’ll find out?
As to communication, I don’t talk on vent much because:
a) I’m a girl and everyone in the guild still SEES me as such. In my old guild, they just knew me as Kurn the raid leader. That I was a girl rarely made any kind of difference at ALL.
b) If I start talking on vent regularly, I’m not going to stop and I’m going to take over. And I don’t want to do that. If I’d wanted to remain a GM/raid leader, I’d have stayed in Apotheosis. :P
Considering the GM rarely talks and when he does only half the people hear him, it would be an improvement. And don’t let the fact that you’re a woman sway you from speaking your mind.
Why DOES the GM talk so rarely?
As to being a woman, it’s not that being a woman prevents me from speaking. It’s the narrow-minded, adolescent personalities with whom we raid that prevent me from speaking. It’s that 95% of the guild uses the word “rape” casually. It’s that 95% of the guild uses the word “gay” perjoratively. Not that I’ve ever been a victim of any kind or faced that kind of discrimination, but good LORD, some of them just don’t think twice before opening their mouths or typing something. I mean, that DK we booted the other week used the GM’s religion against him in a negative fashion. WTF.
That’s not the kind of group who is going to value what “that ‘new’ healer chick” has to say or take it remotely seriously. Unless I switch into full-on raid leader mode on a regular basis and really, I don’t want the job. I think the RL does okay. I would do Mimiron completely differently, but I think he does things all right. Not to say I wouldn’t do a lot of things he does differently (what is this assigning crap without writing it down or whatever? It’s called a piece of paper and a pen. Take 10 seconds and write down names under their assignments so that when they INVARIABLY ask what their assignment is again, you’re not all ‘i forget’. FFS.) but I think he does okay overall.
Had fun. That last attempt was real good. See you tomorrow.