Quitting Time?

I’ve been on a downward spiral when it comes to WoW as of the recent months.  Each login becoming more and more difficult until it has become a job that I want to call in sick for.  You know it is bad when you are considering not logging in for the raid you are supposed to lead and turning off your cell, leaving 24 other people in bewilderment.  Then the lil’ dwarf angel on my shoulder (they are smaller than regular angels but super hairy!) talked me out of doing such a bad thing.

I’m mostly sure I’d regret it.

I’ve decided to take a week off from raiding (this week) because I’m quite frankly ready to cancel my account.  I’ve talked to a few friends about it and mostly its just been guilt trips on me to stick around cut back my time.  They think it is just burnout… which for the most part it is but there is another component.

Even with a reduced schedule I don’t enjoy logging in… and its because of my raiders.  It isn’t all of them mind you (uhm… if you’re one of my raiders reading this it most certainly can’t be you whistle).  I can’t solely blame them, part of that blame is on Blizzard certainly.  They have made the game so easy that a lot of really talented players forget that it still takes a bit of work and focus to kill some of the bosses.  You can’t simply show up and stand in one spot DPS’ing the boss while you watch Three’s Company on Nick @ Night (does nick @ night still exist?)  Maybe it is only obvious to me that the slacking has grown to an intolerable state.

Each week our raid the struggles has been harder for bosses that we’ve had on farm.  Hell, it took us weeks longer to kill some of the easier bosses like Rotface and Festergut than it should have.  No longer are we progression forward.  We are standing back looking at those succeeding with our thumbs in our asses wondering what is going wrong.  We just aren’t wondering long enough to fix it.  We shrug our shoulders and say oh well and move on.

Problem is I worry about everything, I sweat the little stuff.  I’m not sure if I could live without stress and anxiety but it has turned into me feeling like the errors in the situation are my fault.  That I’ve done something wrong (which I’m not saying isn’t possible).  I’m just not being fair to myself though.

I’ve always said / heard that if it isn’t fun you have to do something to fix it.  That is what I am going to do.

I let everyone know Friday we’d be taking the coming week off (I didn’t inform them I’m considering not coming back though).  That our general blah attitude wasn’t going to cut it and it was time to get a bit serious about the issue.  If people couldn’t focus for the 5-10mins it took to kill a boss then they wouldn’t be there.  I hate nothing more than having to cut friends that I raid with, but it is time to make the decisions that need to be made.

I want to leave you with this song.  It isn’t completely related but I’m really in love with it.  It isn’t sappy if that is what you are thinking.

Failure is not an option.

I’m not sure when this revelation came about, maybe I’m trying to prove something to myself, but failure is something I’ve never taken very well.  Hell, I don’t even like to be 2nd best.  To me, fun is winning.

Because of this desire to not fail I’ve always been in some form of a leadership role.  I’m always willing to learn and do whatever it takes to get to first place.  If I’m not leading, then I’m mentoring or learning.  Being first is an insatiable appetite that never ends.

It’s also why I take failing so badly.  When my raid group fails… I fail.  What did I miss that could have kept us alive?  Did I assign DPS incorrectly?  Was the healing targets wrong?  Should I have put one more person on picking up adds?

QQ: Disc or Holy

About two months ago we had the big nerf to penance.  I’m still recovering QQ’ing about that.  I still find myself hitting penance with a second or two left on the cool down.  It’s only killed a few people but for some reason I’m just not adjusting to the change.

Slow Progression

All the trouble we had with Thorim and when he finally went down it was a huge sigh of relief.  The problem is that it stunted our progression quite a bit.  The week after that was kind of a scrub week, we cleared all of our regular content but didn’t get any practice on new stuff.

Lack of progression has really been chapping my ass….. butt….. booty….. behind!  I’ve mentioned before that I raid 35+ hours a week.  I mainly run Relentless’ raids and on the side I run my resto shaman with another group.  What I haven’t mentioned is that we only raid Ulduar25 two days a week, Friday and Saturday.  We’ve tried picking up a 3rd day and it just didn’t work.  Which is fine… it just doesn’t give us any real time for progression if we have a rough start.

This no progression stuff, coupled with all the raiding I do on multiple toons can really burn ya out.  Enough to where the game has really lost its appeal to me lately.  I took this week off with my shaman to cut out 12+ hrs of raiding and give myself a break.

I had a good talk with Kraylessa and she pointed out that we only raid Ulduar25 on two days a week, Friday and Saturday.  We are actually doing pretty dam well for only raiding Ulduar25 two times a week.  She really picked my spirits up with our little talk.  Enough to where I logged in and started farming my Rivendare mount.

Tangent – I’m up to 49 kills of Baron Rivendare without a mount, the bastard!  This doesn’t include the countless times I killed him in Classic WoW for my devout gear.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to starting up tonight and clearing some shit out.

If you are starting to burn out, take a few days break (or a week or something) and talk / hang out with some friends that make you feel better.  Its really nice this time of year so get out and get some of that evil sun (vitamin D = win).

Tangent – GLEE! (no not the show, which is amazing… I’m talking about the /glee type of feeling)  Leafshine added me to her blogroll which I’m very honored to be included on.