I Was Never Unlucky

So a very good friend of mine (lets call him Bob) recently tried to make it into a raid group. He was passed over for another player of the same class and spec. Why? Because this other player was able to demonstrate the same ability to not stand in fire, interrupt enemy MOBs (yes it is capitalized, because it is an acronym for Mobile Object Byte, not a word that brings to mind peasants with torches and pitchforks), perform the gimmick of a strat, and consistently pulled an average of 2k more DPS than Bob. From a guild master and raid leader standpoint, the choice is clear. If you ask Bob... he claims he was unlucky.

I have never been unlucky in WoW. I have fallen victim to the RNG just like everyone else, but I have never been unlucky in the way that Bob is claiming here. I asked Bob what he meant by "unlucky". He said that the other player has more gear (I will write a post on that later; it is a whole other can of worms). I asked Bob how that makes him unlucky. He claimed that he has been trying to get gear like everyone else and it just hasn't dropped.

Let me spare you the play-by-play of our conversation and just tell you the results. Bob did not run a heroic every day, let alone more than one. He only ran about three heroics a week. He did not purchase any justice point gear. He did not PvP for honor gear to fill in the gaps. He did not craft gear or purchase crafted gear. He did not buy any reputation gear. He did not even run regular dungeons at all once he had the item level for heroics.

What did Bob do, then? He ran the bare minimum of normal dungeons to get the gear for heroics. He ran about six heroics over the course of two weeks. He spent plenty of time on an alt. He complained that he was unlucky with gear drops.

What did Bob's competitor do? He ran multiple heroics every day. He purchased both justice point and honor point gear to fill in the gaps where he didn't get something to drop. He gained the rep necessary to buy epics and the bought them. In short, he worked for it. Did Bob's competition get every single piece of gear he wanted? No. The RNG decided to not drop that gear for him. Did he have much, much better gear than Bob? You bet your panties he did.

Luck is not a big factor in WoW. Yes the RNG exists. Yes it has an effect on your play. When you look at the big picture, though, you are not lucky or unlucky.... you are skilled or unskilled, hard working or a slacker. If you are one of those people that always has an excuse for why it isn't your fault, then you do not have what it takes to compete at the highest levels.

The attitude of a winner is to adapt and overcome. No gear? Figure out how to get some and do it. Keep getting killed by the fire? Figure out how to not get killed by the fire and do it. Can't keep your DPS high enough? Figure out how to DPS properly and do it. There is always a solution, and hint: it has something to do with you... not Lady Luck.

Where I am coming from. Part 1

For my first ever blog post I have decided to give a general overview of my WoW resume and maybe some other thoughts. Why is that relevant? So you can know where I am coming from and what experiences I have had that influence my thinking, understanding, and grasp of the big picture. It will undoubtedly be longer than what will turn out to be an average post from me, as I have six years of personal history to get through. With that in mind, here goes.

Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".

The Beginning

I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.

After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.

After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.

I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.

Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.

We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.

Yep, I was in there with rez sickness. At that time it didn't reduce healing done, only damage.

When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.

Hint: I'm the floating priest.

Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.

Where I am coming from. Part 2

My Growing Disdain for Casual Players Trying to Fake the Funk

During this time the elitistjerks website started to become what it is today, people were theorycrafting, testing mechanics, sharing their data, etc. Wowhead became widely known and used, wowwiki was getting bigger, mods were being written faster than anyone expected and you could find a mod for literally anything. Wowinsider and mmo-champion came into being, and I was devouring information. Since no one in my guild was doing their own research, I did it all. They quickly figured out that they could just ask me for the info instead of looking it up on their own and I let it happen.

When my guild fell apart I started looking around for a new guild. In the mean time I was raiding and clearing Kara, Gruul, and Mag with a friend's guild. I found what I hoped would be my new raiding home on the Vek'nilash server. So I server transferred and joined them as an applicant. Long story short, I failed. Back on Gul'dan I was the best healer in the guild. I always out-healed everyone else by large margins and never ran OOM. On Vek'nilash I was usually dead last, I died a lot during my applicant raids, and to top it all off I walked in with all of my knowledge about game and class mechanics thinking I could impress them with it. It didn't impress them, it made me look like a know-it-all prick. So they politely declined my application.

At that time there was a three month cooldown on server transferring, so my priest was stuck there. Meanwhile my friends back on Gul'dan had reformed and needed a MT, a raid leader, and a generally knowledgeable person. So I finished leveling my 57 warrior alt, and became those things for them. In light of my failures on Vek'nilash I was determined to become better. I became the stereotypical raid-nazi MT that people joke about. We progressed through Kara, Mag, and Gruul from a fresh start; but everything was not alright. Half of the raiders were not committed, refused to learn about their class and improve, and generally just wanted a free ride. Since Gul'dan was an extremely low population server, we didn't have a pool of players to recruit from. So myself and the core of the raid group all transferred to Dalaran.

While trying to recruit to fill our ranks on Dalaran we met with another guild in a similar situation and ended up merging with them. We became Twilight Ascension. The guild that we merged with had never been into SSC or TK, and out of my guild only I had experience in those two raids (from my applicant period on Vek'nilash). So off we went, pushing into SSC and TK. We made regular progress at decent speeds. This was helped by the fact that I already knew what to do and was able to easily direct things in my raid-nazi MT role. Then we hit Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider.

We worked on Vashj alone for a month. We occasionally made it to phase three, but it was seldom enough that we knew it was luck, and not skill that was getting us there. During this process the glaring weaknesses in my raid group became clear. More than half of my raiders weren't cutting the mustard. I tried to recruit to replace them but it wasn't going well. People didn't want to join a guild stuck at Vashj, and I couldn't blame them. This situation was complicated by the removal of attunements to BT and MH.

That patch happened when we were on our fourth week of Vashj wipes. Suddenly my raiders no longer cared about the kill. They lost their hunger for the progression. They simply wanted to move on the easy way, and I lost my faith in them completely. We moved into BT and MH at the prodding of my officer council and started wiping in there instead of on Vashj. The "easy 3" (as the first three bosses in both BT and MH were called) were not that easy for my guild. This is because my raiders were unmotivated, unskilled, and didn't care to improve. They wanted relaxed and easy raiding. Replacing them was severely hindered by guild policy and a poor choice of recruitment officer. Why couldn't I change that? Due to the merger I was actually a co-GM, and the officer council had more weight to throw around than either myself or my co-GM. In short, it was a poorly set up guild command structure, and I learned to never try that again.

Eventually I decided that not having my Vashj and Kael kills needed to be fixed. So I grabbed the best of my raiders and PuG'd the other half of the raid. We killed Lady Vashj in 4 attempts in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. That experience put the final nail in the coffin for Twilight Ascension. I was not going to keep putting so much time and effort into a guild that was out-performed by a PuG. As luck would have it, some of the PuG players in that raid were from a decent guild that very recently became in need of players, including a MT.

Over the course of the next few weeks I staged an exodus. I took the 12 best players I had and left Twilight Ascension. About a week before it happened someone let the cat out of the bag and drama ensued. The Reader's Digest version of the story is that we left the guild, got our invites to Heroes of the Command, and Twilight Ascension fell apart completely over the next month.

Heroes of the Command impressed me. They were fast, the raiders were on the ball, the strats executed well, exactly what I had tried to coax out of my old guild, and they did it without a raid-nazi leading them. They were in need of so many raiders due to real life circumstances. We were able to keep the guild's raid group in business and they gave us a much needed home. We joined them when they were up to 8/9 BT and 5/5 MH. I became the MT and as a guild we worked for, and achieved, our Illidan progression kill.We also earned our Amani Warbears and started our way into Sunwell. Unfortunately, that is where HotC stopped being a raiding guild.

Where I am coming from. Part 3

How I Went Hardcore... For Real

With the release of WotLK I became a retribution paladin. I had leveled one during TBC to use as a PvP alt specifically because, at that point in time, ret was the laughing stock of all specs and I was determined to become good at it anyway. In WotLK, that obviously changed. HotC started raiding two weeks into WotLK and had a rough start of it. People that were the core of the raid team before were now displaying extreme amounts of apathy and disinterest. Performance was low everywhere, and my frustration started running high. Then after several conversations on ventrilo with the whole raid group, it was decided that we weren't going to push our raiding forward as a guild. We would raid, but not place any emphasis on min/maxing, achievements, hard modes, or even trying to correct failing raid members for the betterment of the team. Several influential people felt that all of those things created a hostile environment that they didn't want to be a part of... but they still wanted to raid. So the guild slowly declined into casual-ness. As it did so I ramped up in being an asshole.

Fast forward to ICC, when the 5% buff had just gone active. HotC was still trying to kill Professor Putricide; I had gotten every 10 man achievement you can think of, including all achievement mounts, Algalon killed, and ToC completed on heroic with 50 attempts left because I formed my own group that I ran my own way. In the HotC 25 mans I had blown up on vent with outbursts of frustration and telling people off so many times that I only had two actual friends left in the guild. During a late night conversation one of the officers asked me what it was that I liked about HotC. The answer? From where I sat there was not very much to like. So I gquit, faction changed to horde, server transferred to Firetree, and joined Relax.

When I joined Relax we were #32 in the US. While I was there we went from being #32 to being #24. This was the hardcore raiding that I had wanted since I first stepped into ZG. This was a group of people whose motto was "Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion." (Yes, that was our motto. Yes, they stole it from Wedding Crashers). We completed every hard mode, every achievement, earned mounts in both 10 man and 25, and raided hard modes with alt groups. The people there were all self motivated, success driven, and goal oriented. They didn't require prodding to min/max, that was the expected norm. You never had someone show up to a new fight that hadn't gone over several strats and videos with a fine-toothed comb. They were in it to win it, and it showed... and with them I proved that the heart of a hardcore raider within me wasn't just pie-in-the-sky dreaming, I proved I could hang. I was hardcore.

Contrary to popular belief, they were not all dicks to each other. They were not a bunch of people who hated each other that banded together anyway because they needed to for success. They were just as fun and congenial as any guild mates I have ever met; they just had that drive to be the best.

When WotLK was nearing a close I came to a point in my life that required lots of change and upheaval. I moved cross-country and started a job that worked me 12 hours a day. Needless to say I had to stop raiding. At least for a while. When I settled in and came back to WoW I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I had always had the heart of a hardcore raider, recently had been able to fulfill that heart's desire, and knew without a doubt that I was not going to be able to do that again. Real life is way more important and I no longer have the time.

This is not going to change any time soon. I was offered a spot with Relax in Cataclysm, which I declined due to aforementioned lack of time. The idea of starting my own guild from scratch again didn't seem fun. I knew what was coming in Cata with regards to difficulty and how the game was going to change. Knowing that, the prospect of retraining a bunch of people who learned how to play for the first time in WotLK was a big turn-off. As I was musing over what to do, I got a call from an old friend. He had played with me since TBC and was with me all the way through WotLK, right up until I quit HotC. When I quit HotC, he had also quit. He had become Horde and was now raiding in his cousin's guild. He wanted me to come raid with him. As he explained their raid days/times, the attitude of the raiders, and what the guild was like it all started sounding pretty good.

So here I am in Cata, I am geared to the teeth for raiding. Completely min/maxed. I have power-leveled new professions because their bonuses are now the best for my class/spec. And I cannot raid. Due to my real life schedule I am not able to make the raid days of this new guild. So I am left with a few choices: make my own guild, find a new guild, or stop raiding. I don't know what I will do.

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P.S. Heroes of the Command is still on Dalaran. I am still friends with one of their officers. They have changed. Over the course of time they have decided that being so casual is not what they want and they are back at going for the gold. If you are interested In joining them then I suggest you make a level one alt on their server and whisper someone in the guild. I recommend them to anyone who is not willing to/doesn't desire to be super hardcore, but wants a competent group of raiders that gets content cleared. As for me, I have burned too many bridges there, and am not entirely convinced that I would be happy there if I did go back.