The Slime's Not Flowing Anymore

Good news everyone! We finally got Putricide down a couple of weeks ago and now the fight just seems like it's not that big of a deal. Which got me thinking about progression fights and the headache/heartache/hell yeah that they entail. I don't know why it never occured to me before now, but as I look back on what 'progression' content I've been a part of I realize that for all the hours of wipes on a boss fight, when you 'get it' it just suddenly seems easy...at least relatively. When we got to Putricide this week he just plain went down. I'm not saying it was instant faceroll, but I just wasn't worried about it anymore. And it seems to me that's usually how progression content goes for us. Weeks of hating a fight to almost instantly what was so hard about that? Frankly I'm surprised I never noticed that transition until now. It also appears to me that the majority of the team reached this same conclusion at about the same time. Now we're banging our heads against the Blood Princes but there isn't any real angst about it. More of a relaxed dialog and general attitude of try x and if not that then we'll try y and if we can just get z I think we'll have this down. Very refreshing change and I don't feel that frenetic pressure I usually get on new content. I actually really like the Princes so far. It's such a totally chaotic fight (at least for us) with the spacing issues and main target switches and 'oh crap that kinetic bomb just blew half the raid out of range'. The big issue with us right now is keeping our lock up when he's tanking. I'll just have to wait and see if I have such a relaxed attitude about this if we're still experiencing a wipefest a couple of weeks down the road.

On a different note, the guild 25man team is completely bogged down on Festergut and Rotface. I am not a member of this team due to work conflict, but I often swing by my co-GL's house on my way home from work on Saturdays and watch over his or his wife's (she's guild raid lead) shoulder for a while as we chat about WoW or RL issues or whatever. Yesterday I got to see the Rotface...er...debacle might be the best word... Anyway, it's interesting to be able to just watch a fight instead of participate. Amazing how much you can see happening, or not happening as the case may be. As I sat there, two things were very apparent. People were not getting behind Rotface during his puke and some people with oozes on them would hang out around his feet pounding away in oblivion. Needless to say these resulted in poor outcomes. What boggles the mind is that I listened to the raid lead explain everything before at least 2 attempts, and I watched her tell specific toons to basically get the ooze the hell out to the OT or to get the hell behind Rotface...and did those people react in a timely fashion or even at all? I'm guessing you know the answer would be a resounding no.

The question I found myself pondering as I drove home was at what point should someone who clearly is either incapable or choosing not to learn/complete a task in a raid be removed/replaced? That question is muddied a bit further by knowing that one teammate admittedly is currently suffering lag issues that cause that toon to be truly unaware that an ooze is on them (or puke is heading their way, or whatever). A couple of others are players that I know are perfectly capable of dealing with the same mechanics in 10 man, but for some reason just can't or won't do it in a 25 setting. And of course there are a couple that just aren't very good (although not for a lack of trying), particularly in that oft bandied about situational awareness thing. And by not very good I mean quite bad, but at this point I think they are accepted to the raid mostly through a combination of persistence, longevity in the guild, and (lets face it) pity.

Sidebar: my best friend and I started this guild over four years ago largely as a reaction to the Vanilla perception that you had to be super skilled or experienced or geared to even be in a raid guild. This particularly had to do with the old question of how do you get raid experience when no one would take you without raid experience. So one of the founding tenets of our guild was that we felt anyone should be allowed to at least try raiding. I think we both knew that such a posture would inevitably lead to slow progression and some turnover issues (hello guildies that we got some gear and experience for who then used that to jump to a 'real' raiding guild, yes I'm looking at you). That said, it's 4+ years later and we're still here, operating 3 relatively successful 10 man teams and a struggling 25 man, while most of the guilds we've known have long since imploded. And frankly, I'm surprised at how many of those 'grass is greener' guildies have come back to the fold over that time span. Heck, we've even had a number of new recruits in just the last couple of weeks because apparently we are becoming fairly well known on our server as a good place to be even if we aren't remotely bleeding edge. But this is really turning into a topic for a separate post, so back to the original point...sort of...

Actually I guess the end of that last section does have some bearing on the idea of when to remove/replace perceived-to-be underperforming teammates. With fresh blood in the guild looking to get in on a raid, how do you balance some level of longtime association and camaraderie against a desire to see and do more when the resources most likely exist? The very nature of our credo on raiding in some ways has come back to bite us as for the first time in our existence we find ourselves with a glut of raiders which is setting us up with the impasse of who should go. The easy and probably most correct answer is to go with the calendar invite and first come/first serve, obviously while considering raid makeup needs. The two main outcomes from that are either simply putting up with the 'dead weight' if they get in or seeing more content sooner (or at all) by essentially jettisoning people that may have been with us for a long time (which seems to me to go against the aforementioned raiding tenet). That being said, and even though I am not actually one who will be trying for a 25 roster spot, I can't help but feel a bit guilty either way.