"Shane!!! Shane!!!"*

I wish I'd recorded it.

That somewhat flippant comment was my takeaway from Monday's raid.

But if you'd seen what I saw, you'd understand.

Until I opened my mouth during pre-raid announcements, only four other people in raid knew I was leaving: the three other raid leads and my questing buddy**. As soon as I said*** "My job is changing, and not by choice, so I'm going to have to start over with a new position at work," the whispers began.

At that point, when I said that I'm not going to be able to raid until 3 AM while I'm trying to learn a new job, the whispers were flying by so fast I couldn't possibly read them. I finished my (semi) prepared remarks with "I'll miss you all. I'll miss progression raiding with you, and I'll always be proud to say that I raided with Team Loki and with Valhalla in Classic." I'm not sure how I managed to stay focused after that.

When the raid lead said (officially) that she was going to miss me, I finally had to step in and say that "I've been getting a ton of whispers and there's no way I could personally respond to them all, but thank you for all your kind words." I'm pretty sure my voice got pretty rough along the way.

I've quit jobs before, but this was harder. In spite of everything --and TBC's Meta-- I did look forward to raiding with friends. And I still have Friday and Saturday to work with, but I won't be in progression. And to be honest, since I'll have dropped progression, I'm not sure how much longer I'll remain in guild. That divide will grow over time, and the unintentional separation will just snowball to the point where I'm (effectively) out of the loop on a permanent basis. So while I'd hope otherwise, I think this is the beginning of the end.

Cue 'Happy Trails'....

*Surely you've seen the ending of the movie Shane, haven't you? 

**I told her first, because she deserved to know first. There were others I would have told as well, but they've all burned out and left, which hurts. Understandable, but it still hurts. I also presume the co-GMs knew as well, but they're in the hardcore raid.

***Paraphrasing. I couldn't remember exactly what I said if my life depended on it.

Raised Eyebrows

 Well well well.

I thought at first it was just a hoax, but since it landed on the Washington Post's and New York Times' websites, I'd say it's legit.

Microsoft is going to buy Activision Blizzard.

Alas that Bobby Kotick is going to stay as head of the new MSFT subsidiary, because if he were kicked out Microsoft could put one of their own people in charge and bring salaries in line with the rest of Microsoft. But I guess Bobby wouldn't like that, would he?

So for gamers, this is a non event. The people in charge of the Titanic are still there.

EtA: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bobby will be officially gone after Microsoft closes the deal. Of course, that doesn't change anything until Microsoft actually does something with ActiBlizz. So I'm not exactly waiting with baited breath for WoW's content to suddenly improve; so the old line of "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" still applies until proven otherwise.

I Am Not Amused

I have been caught by my own nocturnal activities.

It is presently 3:22 AM local time, and I am wide awake.

I woke up around 11 PM to make sure I took my insulin*, and I haven't been able to get to bed since.

I've tried all of the usual remedies --outside of drinking milk or eating anything with excessive carbs, of course-- without any luck. And I am absolutely not going to try to use an over the counter solution for fear of accidental addiction. Besides, there's an inch of snow atop 1/3 of an inch of ice outside, and I'm not running to the 24 hour drugstore just for this.

So I got on Neve and knocked out a quest or two, then logged and spent time perusing YouTube for interesting things to watch.** 

Courtesy of a replacement piece,
she now looks less a mage and more
a "sexy pirate". Sexy Pirate Mage?

 

This is something that is going to have to get corrected soon, because I'm living on borrowed time.

***

Aside from that, seeing the prep work for Phase 3 has made me realize this is going to be harder a transition than I thought. I got twitchy about needing to get on and do things, and I had to tell myself multiple times to relax and that I won't be having to do any of that going forward. Given that a couple of weeks ago I was getting twitchy and nervous about having to do all of that Phase 3 prep, that my body did a 180 the past couple of days caused me no end of consternation. "Irony, thy name is raiding," I muttered.

Take the edge off, as well as just get back into exercising, I made a trip to a nature preserve on the east side of town and went for a hike.

Volunteers replaced the old, rickety
bridge since I was last here.

Although overcast, the weather hadn't turned yet, so that was an additional bonus. The hike gave me time to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other and enjoy the woods for what they were. No deadlines, no raids, no blood pressure, no diabetes, no min/maxing. 

No nothing.

It was fun while it lasted.

***

Now I just need to accept what's going to come on the Monday raid when I make my formal announcement.

*Still hate needles, but it has to be done.

**Such as the America's Test Kitchen posts on a good 12 inch stainless steel skillet. Or understanding just what the hell ASMR is. And to be fair, some of those ASMR videos make me more than a bit uncomfortable, given how the woman in the video sounds; it's less soothing and more... seductive. Keeping that sort of thing up for about 30 minutes or more makes me feel like every woman who's used that tone of voice with me has been pulling my leg.

Blessed Relief

Monday's raid was bittersweet.

I was going to have to tell the rest of the raid lead team that I wasn't going to be able to perform progression raiding for at least a couple of months*, but what made it uncomfortable was that I was going to tell them after the raid.

Why so uncomfortable?

Because I've been the subject of some talks about why my DPS isn't measuring up. 

***

I've been among the bottom five DPS for months. Some of it is gear --for example, I finally got the T4 shoulders on Briganaa last weekend from the High King**-- some of it is that I needed to tweak my talents --again, I fixed that right before raid-- and some of it is my rotation.

Here is what an Enhancement Shaman's rotation has to involve:

• Keep totems up
• Totem Twist for Windfury/Grace of Air
• Totem Twist for Fire Totems
• Shock Twist (Alternating Fire Shock/Frost Shock and Earth Shock unless you're supposed to interrupt)
  
• Cast Stormstrike on CD
• Get your weapon swing timing aligned (involves casting something periodically to reset your swing timing).
  

That's a lot of irons in the fire, and a lot more complicated than most other rotations I've experienced in Classic.

For me, it's also been a question of which ability to utilize if multiple abilities come off CD at once (or close enough that they fall within the GCD). I've taken the approach that the Windfury/Grace of Air Totem Twist is the highest priority since it impacts the entire group, but after having several conversations it sounds like Stormstrike is higher priority, so I said so.

Oh no, I was told. The idea is to do all of it while keeping all the twisting up.

It was then that I realized that maybe --just maybe-- I'm hitting a wall with my age and that I'm simply unable to button press as much as I should be able to as a progression raider.

When you couple that with the "you need to get a belt crafted, a cloak crafted, a ring from Lower City reputation grinding, a totem from Heroic Mana Tombs, a ring from Prince Malchezzar, etc. etc." and I found myself realizing that none of this was that fun anymore.

And here comes my job, basically demanding I give up raiding during the work week, at the same time as the likelihood that someone might look at a gear drop and say "Hey Brig, you should get that for your gear set." Or to put me even more on the spot, "Why didn't you roll for that piece of gear? You need that badly!"*** I didn't want to have to tell people right then and there that I was leaving and it would have been incredibly selfish of me to bid on something when I was going to leave in a couple of weeks.

Thankfully, however, the nightmare scenario didn't happen.

***

Still, I had to tell the Lead Team afterward, and I hated doing that.

"I don't like to lose," Admiral James T. Kirk once said, and this amounts to throwing in the towel and admitting that Rocky couldn't beat Apollo Creed.

Especially after Monday when we were cruising against Kael'Thas and it looked like we were gonna kill him at long last, and... The trash packs in his room began to respawn underneath us.

I shit you not.

So there was that frustration to deal with, coupled with the knowledge that might have been our single best shot I might see against Kael. 

I also knew how hard it was to get a consistent raid together, because just when we thought we had a stable lineup somebody else would vanish, or gquit and ghost us, or have real life intrude and have to drop from the raid. Or, in other cases, would decide that progression raiding one night a week wasn't enough and would move to the other raid team that raids on Tuesday/Thursday.****

And here I was, going to blow up the raid again. Especially with the knowledge that Enhance Shamans are pretty much unicorns at this point in the expac. You're better off trying to recruit a Boomkin in terms of rarity.

***

I got the announcement out of the way first.

There were the usual condolences, and my admission that the reason why I could raid until 3 AM local time was because I'd been at my job for so long I could be a zombie for several hours in the morning and still get my job done, something I simply can't do in a new position working for a new customer.

I hung in there until the meeting was concluded, and that ended around 4:30 AM local time. Even I was dying for the first several hours of work on Tuesday, and I knew right then that I made the right decision and that I couldn't do this at a new position.

But around Noon on Tuesday, it hit me that outside of any Friday or Saturday runs, I wasn't going to have to worry about raiding at all. 

Or gearing.

Or (not) DPS-ing well enough.

Or grinding gold for stuff.*****

Or (avoiding) Dailies.

Or reputations.

Or attunements.

And I breathed a sigh of relief.

The long road of the TBC Classic Meta has ended, at long last. I didn't burn out completely, and it wasn't the reason why I had to give up raiding, but I don't think I could have held out much longer. The Meta had worn me down to the point where I was resenting even people I liked a lot because they were more invested than me in raiding, and they were still doing all the things to keep themselves at peak performance.

I think I kept going not for me, but for people who were depending on me to be there, like my questing buddy (who has long since run laps around my questing/gearing/dailies/etc) or those others who needed someone to be a friend to them when they were having a rough time.

Something I can now do a bit more of:
just lounging around and chatting.

Now, with my job (and my health) taking more of a center stage, I suppose it's time to take care of myself for a change. And maybe rekindle a bit of love for Classic.

*I'd say May or June at the earliest.

**I also won the Dragonspine Trophy a month and a half ago in Gruul/Mags, and I feel guilty about leaving when I'm one of only a couple of people on either raiding team who has one.

***As Loot Master, I frequently put something up for auction and then realize too late that I should have bid on something. I've gotten better at it, but I know there's a ton of people with DKP to spare who simply don't spend it very much, or bid on gear, and I think "they need it more than me".

****Most of the sweatiest people are on that raid team, and since they raid twice a week they've (at least) twice as much gear as our raid team has. That makes SSC and The Eye pretty much a walk in the park at this point. 

*****No, I still don't have a fast mount. And I don't want one very much either. I'm practically the only person left in guild who doesn't have a fast mount on at least their main, and right now it's a badge of honor. And besides, paying for the rest of the mats for Mongoose enchants on both of my weapons hit my reserves hard.

EtA: Misspellings....

Welp....

Well, that escalated quickly.

I went from "Things are kind of getting back to a new normal" to "Well, THAT's gonna leave a mark" real fast.

Oh no, I didn't have any issues with my health this time, but things are about to change at my job.

As in, my entire job is about to change. And not by choice.

No, I'm not getting let go. Okay, kind of, but I have places I can land at work, so the old adage about when one door closes another opens isn't too far off the mark. And yes, there's internal politics involved, but there's also the knowledge that my bosses have my back, and they're in favor of a scorched earth policy regarding the people behind the shenanigans.

What this all boils down to is that the job I've had in one form or another for about 20 years is going to be upended, and I'll have to start from scratch. Which means that raiding until midway through the night on Mondays isn't going to be feasible.

***

I recognize that people might ask when progression raiding until 3 AM local time ever was feasible, but I could do it because I knew my job inside and out, and I could do my job with my eyes closed. That might have meant I needed newer challenges, but it also meant that I could handle other duties at work than strictly what I was supposed to be doing. 

Or that I could be a zombie for an hour or two in the morning and still work at a high level.

Since I'm starting over --albeit in a similar position but at for new customers-- Redbeard the Zombie is going to have to shelf progression raiding. 

***

Like I said, this all came rather fast. 

I knew a change was coming, as I have ears to the ground, but I wasn't expecting it to be this soon. I was expecting it to be at least through the end of Phase 2 and the beginning of Phase 3 in TBC Classic, and even into March, but that didn't happen.*

And because of the shortened timeline, I'm going to have to devote a lot of time toward my new position, and that will mean I simply won't have time to devote to trying to get my DPS up to acceptable levels.

So....

Tonight's raid is going to be one of my last in progression. I can still run raids on Friday and Saturday, because it's the weekend, but my current main raid I'm going to have to walk away from. The Lead meeting after tonight's raid isn't going to be a pleasant affair.

*That scorched earth policy again.

Hey, You Exist

What makes a home?

When you play an RPG --video game version or not-- you are frequently out in the world, adventuring. You leave home --whatever it's defined as-- and do your thing.

But what is a home to an adventurer?

Are they just dopamine junkies, moving from one experience to the next, without something to anchor them? Or is their wandering a subliminally driven search for a new home? Or do they have a home they want to get back to, but can't for some reason or another? 

Deep thoughts for a Friday Sunday, I suppose, but this invaded my head when I considered the plight of the Draenei and the Sindorei while I was doing other things. 

In both cases, their original homeland has become untenable, so they flee to what they consider a better alternative: Draenei to Azeroth, and Sindorei to Outland. In both cases, they discover that their new, adoptive home isn't what they thought it was. The Draenei discover that the isles The Exodar crash landed in have enemies that followed them from Outland as well as the ecological disaster caused by The Exodar's crash. The Sindorei arrive in Outland to discover their leaders --and a lot of their best and brightest-- have betrayed the rest of their kin and sided with either Illidan the Betrayer or the Burning Legion itself.*

***

Where does Brig consider her home to be? Shattrath? The Exodar? Somewhere else? Nowhere?

It's kind of hard to say, because WoW --both Retail and Classic-- doesn't have that sort of grounding for a player. It can be both simultaneously freeing and terrifying, because the player is free to do whatever.

And to be fair, most players don't give a crap about existential issues such as finding a home; they'd rather do other things such as raid, PvP, run dungeons, or quest rather than muse about their toon's home or backstory. But there are those --especially those who have played pencil and paper RPGs, who are used to this sort of thing-- who DO care. And I'm one of them.

That doesn't mean that I'm in favor of player housing. WoW tried their own version of that once already, in the Warlords of Draenor expac, and it was widely panned for being more isolating than anything else. My personal opinion is that the isolationist trend was already present in WoW, and the implementation of Garrisons merely encouraged it. After all, there's been a big trend in WoW for quite a while now to login, do your dailies, raid if it's the time and date, and log. There isn't a lot of lounging around; even if you don't do the minimal amount described above, you're likely leveling an alt and/or doing the same thing there. There is a subset that are checking the PTR for info and raid strategies, min/maxing, and other highly obsessive items, but that is a very specific subset.**

***

What I am in favor of is some player grounding.

In BC (and BC Classic, apparently) if you're Exalted with the Cenarion Expedition and you arrive at their home base, some of the guards will acknowledge you as you pass by. I thought this was introduced only in Wrath, but it's an occasional nice reminder of your reputation. Now, what I'm not suggesting is to have everybody acknowledge how great you are, but occasional interactions/commentary from NPCs in locations that, well, you exist. Well, exist without the "sales" angle that you see from that Troll in Lower City, who is constantly trying to sell you trinkets, or "Topper" McNabb trying to shine your shoes for a copper. Kind of the "Hello, Cardwyn, good to see you again," you'd expect when you pass by the guards at the checkpoint in Elwynn (near the logging camp) after you completed quests for them. Or if you hit a certain number of logouts in a specific inn, the innkeeper greets you as a regular. Small stuff like that which are fairly easily implemented.

Kind of like this. Sorta.

 

Of course, I'm talking about this like it's going to happen in Classic, but a guy can dream, right?

But please, no more ego trips about how awesome the player is. After a while it feels, well, ridiculous.

*I could easily see both Card and Neve yelling at those Blood Elves "You are a disgrace to your ancestors!" It's personal for both.

**To that crowd, even our Turkey Award, given out to the player with the most deaths in a raid, detracts from the emphasis on "winning" the raid. I've seen killjoy comments after a Turkey Award posting and it's affiliated banter saying "remember, the point is to avoid deaths" and "it's good to see the number of deaths go down". To me, those comments strike me as tone deaf and missing the point of the Turkey Award: everybody knows you're supposed to not die, but nobody --and I mean nobody-- sits around and says "Hey, remember that time we ran Naxx and had only about 4 deaths at most?" When people remember raids, they remember memorable boss kills, raid drama, or memorable player deaths. This is just like real life: if you're doing your job, you're kind of invisible.

EtA: I started this post on Friday, but finished it on Sunday. So I replaced one with the other.

Lipstick on a Pig

I still remember my first time with a Looking for Group automated tool.

Maybe because my anxiety at meeting other people was so high that it was burned into my head, but I remember it well. It was an Ajol'Nerub run, a 15-20 minute affair, and I'd recently switched from Holy to Retribution on my Paladin, Quintalan.

Ajol'Nerub is a pretty straightforward instance, and by far the biggest issue with the instance is figuring out where to go because the graphics kind of make it hard to figure out. 

"You just follow the webs and...." I was told once when I couldn't make heads or tails of the graphics on screen. 

Surely I must be nuts because there was no obvious path. "...and what? It can be hard as hell to distinguish differences in the webs."

"Well, just follow everybody else."

I rolled my eyes back then, but going in solo? You don't want to project "noob-ness"; you want to be seen as cool, calm, and collected. In short, anything but a noob.

For a brief foray into Heroic Wrath of the Lich King LFG queues, it was pretty much a non-event, but mentally it was like my first time venturing into Orgrimmar, only without the random person coming up to me and asking for a guild signature.

Ever since, I've had the same stomach flip-flops whenever I grouped up for any PUG, whether it be using the automated tool or not. 

You can dress them up as much as you
want, but they're still Pugs.
(From The Spruce Pets.)

Being in WoW Classic --and avoiding the automated queues of more "modern" MMOs-- has helped to an extent, because bad behavior in PUGs will earn you black marks among people. While I know that among a couple of thousand players on a server an individual is hard to remember, it's far easier to remember the asshat than the person who did a good job. 

Having the perspective of over a dozen years playing MMOs, I'm all the more impressed by my old friend Vidyala and her pugging experiment, as chronicled in her (now retired) blog, Pugging Pally. It did make fodder for plenty of posts, but I doubt I would have had the mental fortitude to do what she did and PUG her way to L80.* From that viewpoint, I understand why people prefer to run instances within the confines of a guild. They're people you know (minimally, at least), and they're people you can trust.

***

That being said, I had a conversation with some people in Classic about Wrath Classic which is on the horizon. It was kind of funny in that people were talking about how hard killing Arthas was, and the breakups of guilds over ICC raids, but there was nary a mention about the automated LFG tool. I found that conversation somewhat odd, given the poor reputation the LFG tool has, but I kept quiet about it. 

But the LFG tool is out there, lurking, and while I'd prefer that the tool never make an appearance in Wrath Classic I do believe that it will show up eventually.

In a bizarre way, I'm watching the rollout of Classic --and it's associated reactions-- as a repeat of what happened in the original WoW rollouts, only the timeline has shrunk a bit.** I remember the blogger debates over the LFG tool rollout, and how it was largely greeted as a positive development, and I hear the arguments now about how hard it is to get a PUG run together and think that people will --by and large-- have a positive reception of the Classic version of the LFG tool. Which seems silly to me, given the long term effects of the tool on the in-game community, but I guess I've played WoW long enough to see history repeat itself.

But still, I do believe that the problems created by the Meta in TBC Classic will also carry over to Wrath Classic, turning Wrath Classic into a weird reflection of both Classic and Retail at once. For me, having been on the short end of the stick in TBC Classic, I am leaning toward taking a hard pass on progression raiding in Wrath Classic. I'm not planning on sprinting to L80, maxing out reputations, and other bullshit that the Meta foisted on people just so they could min-max their way through progression raids. I did not have anything resembling fun in the first half of the TBC Classic Phase 1 experience, and I'm not intending to repeat that at all. 

I guess that's not a big surprise, but I'm putting it out here now before I forget and/or get talked into progression raiding after all. And I'm not making this decision while I'm in a bubble, either: of the Leveling Shamans, both the Leftovers and those that managed to sprint quickly enough to L60 so as to not get left behind when the Dark Portal opened, there's only 3 of us left. The others are gone, having burned out on the game and either left it behind entirely or stopped progression raiding and are on other toons doing anything other than Shaman work. And to be fair, once you get to progression raiding, parsing well as a TBC Classic Enhancement Shaman is hard, so the pressure doesn't really let up once you get to progression raiding. As much as I like Briganaa personally, the Enhancement rotation, coupled with totem twisting and shock twisting and swing timers, really really sucks. It's twice as difficult as the Rogue and Mage rotations in Classic, as the sheer number of irons in the fire you have to maintain are nuts.

There will be another post on my foibles getting the Shaman rotation down --or rather NOT down, as it were-- but I will say that rotations for raiding are a totally different animal than anywhere else. Just setting up your rotation in a lot of non-boss scenarios takes enough time that the fight is over once you're "ready", a problem I found in a lot of nerfed raid trash as well. While other players' DPS may go down over time, an Enhancement Shaman's DPS may actually go up because that initial burst that a Mage or Rogue might have doesn't exist for an Enhancement Shaman. There's reasons, of course, but that'll come later. I promise. 

But yes, there are times when I miss Card for her relatively high output and uncomplicated rotation. At least when I got into PUGs with her, there wasn't any extra anxiety over trying to maximize my DPS; that pig didn't require more makeup than some lipstick.

 

*We were on different servers --and on different factions back then-- or I'd have helped her out from time to time. Well, I'd like to think so, but I also believe I would have been too shy to ask her if she needed an assist because... Well, that's how I am: not exactly a pillar of confidence. (And before anybody gets in their head "Just how on earth did Red ever meet his future wife if he's so damn shy?" the answer is that she made the move first.)

**Or at least it feels that way.