Unbearably HoT

In the months precursory to The Burning Crusade expansion, the desire and drive to push progression crawled to a standstill for many guilds. Why keep raiding when our high level epics will be replaced with greens in the next three months? Why keep our noses to the grindstone when really, we could just coast until the expansion comes out? Are we seriously going to have to cut our 40 man raids in half? The list goes on. Disheartened by the prospect of starting over rather than amping themselves up for incoming new content, many raiders just quit the game entirely.


Many people probably heard the announcement that Wrath of the Lich King alpha testing was released to friends and family of Blizzard staff very recently—and if Blizzard’s track record is any indication (five months from alpha to release), that might mean we’ll see a hastily assembled expansion by September or October. The face of raiding changed dramatically from the original release to the expansion, and predictably, is set to change again. According to this blue post, one of WotLK’s major selling points is that all content, I repeat all raid dungeons, will be available in a handy ten-man sized serving. Shit, son!


Before everyone decries this as the total casual catering, regardless of how tightly tuned the encounters might be, think about it: you could take ten of your best raid buddies, the guys you trust, the chicks you know kick ass regularly, and destroy all content without any of the loldrama that tends to accompany the 25-man progression guilds we have now. If you have a small, tight knit group of raiders who even have similarly well-geared and well-played alts, then what’s stopping you from creating a ridiculously well-oiled class rotating raiding machine? This move by Blizzard represents the ULTIMATE in casual candy-coated raiding for the Everyone, but is also, in my opinion, one of the most alluring. Will the 25 mans still have better loot? I hope so. But would you be willing to settle for sloppy seconds if you didn’t have to bust your ass 17 hours a week with maybe 8 people you really like and 17 others you only tolerate? Maybe “sloppy seconds” was poor phraseology.


As the old cliché goes, history frequently repeats itself. To say that I haven’t seen this coming would be a bold-faced lie, but let’s just say I’ve been delaying writing about the inevitable—this is going to destroy the guilds who are already licking the knife’s edge of implosion. Death and Taxes, a veritable staple in World and US firsts since before Burning Crusade, officially disbanded on May 16th and cited this as one of the reasons:

“The ship went down faster than the Titanic, but the rats were bailing before the iceberg was ever in sight.”

Destruction imminent. While their mainpage goes on to cite a laundry-list of concerns and excuses et cetera, I hear the same amgcasualcraft mutterings that Risen expounded upon at length and the general consensus that, while Sunwell is finally the fine-tuned dungeon we’ve all been looking for, it’s too little too late. My raider radar didn’t really start beeping until I continued on toward the end:

“Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that they were bigger than the guild.”

Why is that? Some intrinsic human decency and vague sense of honor and obligation seems to have evaporated once forty-mans went the way of the buffalo. Were progression guilds still full of douchebags, elitists and general troublemakers back then? Oh, absolutely—but something kept us together. Drama existed but generally remained muted. Guild relations were often terse but not usually downright hostile. Any player who pulled some spectacular bullshit could find him or herself perma-blacklisted by top end guilds on their realm. Overall, I contend that there existed a greater loyalty toward the guild rather than toward the player, as we see now. I attribute this phenomenon to:

1. Slower gear up: fully gearing a 40 man raid took a ridiculous amount of time when bosses dropped fewer tokens than we see today in 25 mans. Acquiring T2 or T3 gear required a fairly substantial time commitment and a large amount of patience. As a newcomer to Awen, I had to compete with other druids (nevermind other casters or rogues or intrepid leather-wearing DPS warriors) who had hundreds upon hundreds more DKP than me—and still hadn’t gotten the items they wanted. The more time you spend with a group usually tends to imply that you get to know your fellow raiders more and, I’d argue, creates a sort of implicit, binding contract: you help me get my gear and I’ll help you get yours.
2. The “real” reputation grind: in my experiences, it was largely difficult to get into a decent guild on any particular realm unless you had some sort of in-guild sponsor or were realm-famous for…something else. Old World PVP, maybe. Raiders, or rather—prospective raiders, oftentimes found it necessary to cultivate realm-wide relationships without stepping on too many toes if they wanted to have a chance to break in to a specific raiding community. I was lucky enough to have a few sponsors in Awen that pushed my application forward—other top guilds, such as Lunaris, were notoriously “tight knit” and exceptionally difficult to break into.
3. Inaccessible server transfers: I lay a lot of the blame for guild breakdown on the ridiculously easy ability to server transfer these days. With six months in between allowed transfers, you had to be really fucking sure you wanted to leave, and super certain that you had a place to go to on your target realm. That, combined with the notion that you’d have to “rep grind” all over again, as listed in #2, was a huge deterrent to picking up and leaving. While I’ve server transferred a total of three times in two years, once was with my entire guild, for free, once was when my guild broke up and there wasn’t anything left on Baelgun, and the final time was to my permanent resting place on Doomhammer. It’s so easy to leave now that players aren’t required to commit to a guild for longer than three months—you can, essentially, with the ease of gear acquirement in TBC, loot phat purplez and leave for better grounds.
4. Name changes: similar to the easy server transfers, it’s more and more difficult to track someone’s progress across multiple realms now. Get all the gear you want out of people and then don’t want to stick around to work on a boss? Change your name and leave! Sell your toon! Become a new person all over again! Reinvent yourself into someone even more unoriginal and lame! While this feature has undoubtedly created some hilarious name changes (Dongwaffle comes to mind), I find that it caters to a player’s vanity more than anything else. Vanity—now we’re getting back to players feeling that they’re bigger than their guild.

As has been mentioned by a million people already, the 25 man raiding environment means (by numbers alone) that each person is almost twice as important, is counted on in a greater fashion, than each individual person was in a 40 man raiding environment. Egos have soared. The loss of 3 key individuals, depending on class, can cripple a guild until it finds replacements. There are folks who use that to their advantage and essentially blackmail the guild until they get what they want. They don’t care what they say or who they say it to, because they feel invulnerable. Me—I still standby my old guildmaster’s adage: “Everyone is expendable. You can and you will be replaced if I see fit.”


That’s how it should be. But even now, I’m feeling the heat. As the only feral druid with a ridiculous gear set who just happens to be coupled with the protection tank with the best gear, there’s a heavy reliance for both of us to always be on and always be available to spearhead raids. We have other warriors with only slightly inferior gear, and, even now, a protection paladin, but our combined experience and gear (along with my sass and ability to mediate when I feel like it) makes us a valued asset. It’s pressure. It’s hard not to feel like we should get some sort of special treatment. I am compelled by my old world loyalties and deep-rooted obligations to continue raiding in the best capacity I can despite the fact that I have, lately, felt unappreciated and generally disrespected. People have passed gear to me so that I can function as the best tank I can, and it’s important, in my mind, to set an example by not taking their “sacrifice” for granted. I don’t want to be “that person”.


So what have I been doing the past raid week, then? Sleeping. Watching movies. Playing Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and laying out a series of articles. Pointedly not playing WoW. After making sure that Kalecgos and Brutallus were appropriately handled, Lycentia and I found it in our best interests to take a four day break from raiding and reevaluate our roles in raiding. With people regularly ripping out each other’s throats, our minds growing progressively worn and patience thin, and with the siren’s call of 10-man raids nibbling at our ears, the question arose—do we keep doing this? Do we put up with the bullshit and keep pushing toward Kil’jaedan?


The quick answer is yes.


I implore all of you, however, to take a moment and subject yourself to the some serious thinking about your raid style, and bring these kinds of questions up in your guild as well:

Am I having fun?
Is this interfering with my day to day life and/or out of game ambitions?
Am I losing sleep over the game?
Is my generated effort being matched by the rest of the guild?
Am I being treated with respect and, similarly, treating others the same way?
Am I setting an example or contributing to a problem?

All instances reset today. Sunwell Plateau beckons us once more with the prospect of continuous wiping and brief moments of in-game glory. I am endeavoring to change mindsets this week, exact change and put my best paws forward—for now.