Freedom Redux and Other Musings

Last night, I went to bed early. A nice perk of listening to your body and saying "I'm tired as hell and I need some sleep," and no longer having the responsibility of helping to run a progression raid on Monday nights.

This morning, I had a message in my Discord about Karazhan.

One of the raid team's tanks wants to get a taste of raid leading, so I was contacted to see if I could let him have a chance of running a Friday Kara to get his feet wet.

I sat there for a few minutes, chewing on that, and said out loud, "Oh really?"

I'd been wondering whether I should simply leave that Friday Karazhan and just move on entirely, and here was a possibility of doing just that, wrapped up in a nice package and tied with a bow.

Of course, this request was likely a one off (or two off) scenario, but that didn't prevent me from suddenly getting very possessive of my little corner of Azeroth. And here I thought my only issue this week was making sure we had enough healers in place.

After musing over the possibilities, and admitting that I did kind of like having the Friday run to myself, I responded by saying sure, I'll let him try it out. I said I'd even reach out to him if he hasn't contacted me by Wednesday.

We'll see what happens, but that 'Happy Trails' screenshot I posted a few weeks ago may yet see a rerun. This time, for the guild and Discord channel.

***

Okay, let me address the elephant in the room: why the guild and Discord channel?

The answer for that is simple: the primary emphasis of this guild is progression raiding. Oh yes, I've read the guild charter, and there's a lot of fluff in there about friends and respect and whatnot, but what the charter says versus what actually goes on are two entirely different things.

Just like most of the progression raiding guilds, they follow the meta. There's a set of stuff to get, a set of talents to check off, a rotation to be perfected, etc. For Phase 3, that meant running Alterac Valley to get the Alliance trinket. Or Warsong Gulch for Honor/gear.* Or Shadow Resist drops. 

When I was contacted the week after I returned to work from the hospital and told that I was losing my job and would move on to a new contract, I immediately tuned out any talk of the meta. I think I knew at that moment, long before I posted here on the blog or in the raid lead meetings, that I was gone. I was not going to have to follow the meta, because I wasn't going to be in the raid much longer.

I didn't want to admit it to myself just yet, but deep down I knew.

And you know what I also knew? That 80% or more of the Discord discussions surround raiding: the raids themselves, raid tactics, raid strategy, theorycrafting for best DPS output, raid gear, leveling alts for raiding slots, running instances for rep/gear/whatever that points back to raids, ad infinitum. Strip that away, you have not much else. You login, and about half of the discussion in guild chat is about gear drops, raiding, specs, DPS/tanking (for raids and whatnot), grouping for instances (for gear/rep for raids) and not much else. 

All of that serves to remind me that I'm not raiding.

Constantly.

Right now, I have about 26 of 42 discussion channels permanently muted, so they don't exist to me at all. Of the 16 that remain, 7 are from my Monday raid team and one is a channel for raid leaders in general, which I have to remain in because I run Friday's Karazhan, the only Karazhan run the guild still does. One is the rarely used announcements channel, one is the channel for raid logs, one is the guild charter channel, and one is for raid guides. So really, I only look at 4 channels, and even then I still can't avoid raiding discussions. 

Not much of anything to look at, is it? 

The funny thing is, there was a survey toward the end of Classic --the same survey that led to me joining the Monday raid lead team-- and one of the key outcomes was that the guild focuses too much on raiding and there needs to be more opportunities for activities outside of raiding. 

Looking at it now, midway through TBC Classic, I'd say that having a single arena team doesn't really qualify for more activities outside of raiding, especially given the lack of interest in doing much of anything else. The occasional instance runs often feel more like charity cases than spur of the moment "let's run some stuff tonight", and that vibe really turns me off. I have tried to join some instance groups, but an Enhancement Shaman --much like a Rogue-- isn't people's first choice at DPS for 5 person runs. Plus, some people only want to take people who "need" something from an instance run as opposed to just "helping out" or "having fun". 

Even the Classic raids that we ought to just plow through failed to garner more than just 8-9 people's worth of interest. And yes, those are "raids" as well, so the irony is not lost on me. I had tried to generate interest in things such as a lowbie run through Ragefire Chasm --ala Wilhelm Arcturus' well documented lowbie run through Orgrimmar-- but there wasn't any real interest. 

So yeah, my interest in sticking around can be defined by one word --inertia-- and without the grounding provided by regular raiding there's no reason to stay outside of friendships. 

And like I said what feels like a long time ago, you find out who your friends are.

***

The asymmetry between Horde and Alliance questlines in a Classic zone continues to breathe life into the game. While some quests are identical --the Wastewander Pirates quests in Tanaris are a good example-- others have distinct differences. Go to the Hinterlands, and you might be tasked with quests attacking the High Elves there (Horde), or ignoring them entirely (Alliance). Thousand Needles have very few quests for Alliance, but plenty for Horde. Given that Thousand Needles is two zones away from Horde territory, the disparity is still quite stark. Wetlands is a similar scenario, only favoring the Alliance instead. I realize that some of this disparity is due to the unfinished nature of parts of Kalimdor, but that's fine with me. The quirks behind this give a 'lived in' feel to the game, and instead of creating artificial balance between the factions the differences just simply are, which is rather nice.

***

Neve is closing in on L50, and still hasn't been to an instance yet. I ought to fix that, especially since some gear from Scarlet Monastery is still really really good for a Mage, even in her mid-upper L40s. However, I refuse to run through a boost, because that's not the point of playing her. If all I cared about was getting to Outland as fast as possible, I'd consider a boost, but giving up 20+ gold (for a new toon on a new faction/server) PLUS the drops in an instance is a mind bogglingly bad idea. There is no way I am that desperate to get to Outland. I am spacing out my leveling with her so that she never leaves that sweet spot of an XP boost, which really really helps out a lot. Trying to stay within that XP boost range keeps me from overdoing it, which is also good.

*I still get hives when I hear that name. Okay, not really, but deep down in my soul I shiver. Leveling Adelwulf back in Cataclysm via Battlegrounds meant being beat up on a ton in WSG, and I have absolutely no desire to get back into that place again.