No Regerts*

When you're a Mage, you don't have to wait for Summer to enjoy some sun and relaxation.

Time to conjure up another frosty drink.

While Cardwyn has been enjoying some fun in the sun, I've been contemplating what to do with her. Originally, my plan was to see how high her leveling in the Old World could go before I run into practical limits --and I still want to see how that'll work out-- but I'd rather not just grind mobs all day for fun and (dubious) profit. Like maybe work on a mount or something.

Or at least finish some quests out there that I'd originally skipped on her while getting to L60. 

One thing about TBC Classic is that you don't gain access to new spells until you go to Outland, so my refusal to take Card through the Dark Portal means that I'm invoking "hard mode" back in the Old World. Sure, I get more mana and more health, but I don't get anything else along the way. It's more of an annoyance than anything else at this point, but every time I run into that limitation it gets me annoyed enough to say "Okay, fine. I'll do it my way, and I'm gonna like it!"**

Kind of like how every time somebody asks when I'm going to level Card in Outland, it reinforces my decision to be obstinate.

Or go play Neve more.

Speaking of whom...

I like how Melisara thinks. Very Orc-like.
But don't tell her I said that.

Having access to teleports all over the place makes Neve's questing a lot easier than Briganaa's ever was. I'd forgotten how nice it is to just pop over to wherever and then have a much shorter flight to the zone you needed to be. If anything, she leveled so quickly that I had to go back and work on leveling tailoring so I could gain access to useful patterns for her. 

I have been keeping an eye open for instances, but like the LFG channel on the Alliance side, there's not a lot out there that's not strictly for Outland. Or the occasional boost.

And yes, boosting does go on, based on the requests for SM and ZF boosts. I guess that could get me some gear, but you also must have gold to get boosted, and with Neve's perpetual poverty that's where some crafting and farming come into play.

But I'm also not in any particular hurry to get Neve to Outland, as I'm enjoying seeing the Old World quests from the Horde side for a change. It also gives me a welcome respite from having to think about anything Black Temple or Hyjal related.

Believe me, I'm not missing having to get ready for those raids. My gear is still subpar, but even if I do get into a raid this coming Monday*** I'm not planning on bidding on any gear. It should go to people who are continuing in progression, not me.

There was a request in our guild Discord for a run in Heroic Mana Tombs to get the DPS totem for a Shaman, and the people involved wondered if I wanted the totem too.

"No thanks," I replied. "It's no longer a priority for me, so go for it yourself."

And after I typed that, this was my reaction:

No, I wasn't eating sand, but...

Or maybe it was this:

"The hills are alive..."

No worries about being an example for people, or being judged for gear (or lack thereof), or getting judged for my commitment to the raid, or anyone of a half dozen things that would float through my head and just get me depressed about the situation I found myself in.

***

Stepping back now, I can see that my feelings about progression raiding actually have been haunting me for longer than I cared to admit. 

All of the farming for mats to make the consumables that went on for the entire time we spent in Naxxramas wore on me to the point where I'd not login on Card unless I absolutely had to. Since most of my farming was done on Azshandra, I could hide from people. Well, since I wasn't in Valhalla at the time, that little fact made my life easier too, but looking back on it everything was about the raid****, and nothing about what enjoyment I got out of playing WoW. Trying to keep my raiding life separate from my non-raiding life was becoming more and more difficult, and I can now see why some people left the raid back then. TBC Classic and the meta only accelerated some aspects of the turnover to where it was blatantly noticeable to even me. 

But still, despite the stress I did have some fun times.

No regrets? Nah. I have regrets. I just can't let them tie me down.

*Intentionally misspelled. It's based off of this commercial for Milky Way:

**Stubborn Midwesterners and all that.

***It's looking more likely for the Vashj kill, as one raider still needs it and another raider had already gone into SSC this week thinking that we weren't going to SSC this Monday. So I'll likely drop in for the Vashj portion of the raid, after everybody else is finished working on Kael'Thas.

****And a significant portion of that was devoted to people trying to recruit me into Valhalla.

Not a Bang, But....

We spent over 2 hours on Kael'Thas last night and couldn't bring him down.

Our best chance ended up being our first, where we got to 20% before enough healers went down that the rest of the raid started dropping due to attrition.

We had mind controlled people running in the raid, we had people dying early in Phase 1, we had people pulling threat in Phase 4, etc. etc. Stuff that I'd say --for a raid team that has been after K'T for 3+ weeks now-- shouldn't be happening. You can only expect healers to heal through so much, but making it worse and dealing extra damage to the raid? Well, we ran into our limit.

And that's how my progression raiding ended.

***

I was supposed to go next week, but since we decided on my replacement in the lead meeting after the raid, I said I'd sit next week out so that my replacement could get the Kael'Thas kill. I'd like to have a K'T kill myself, but with Hyjal incoming it made practical sense to let my replacement get the kill in so she could go to Hyjal with the rest of the raid.

So I moved myself to the bench for next Monday, and that's that.

I seriously doubt that I'll make it into Monday's raid, but every time in the past that I've been on the bench I did make it into the raid, so you never know. But I'm not counting on it.

"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.