As you might have spotted from my smug “ostensibly WoW-related but really just bragging ‘cos I’m drinking beer in Munich” post, I was away last week. Rrecently, we’ve had some problems getting our raids off the ground — people unavailable because of work, people on holiday, people with social engagements which don’t involve internet dragons can leave you without the essential components — so when I signed up for Monday’s raid I was hopeful but not certain that anything would happen.
Thankfully, we were able to field a full team, so off we went to BWD where we two-shot Magmaw, and followed that up with a one-shot of the golem boys. Admittedly, it did take us a five or six goes before Maloriak fell over, which I’m prepared to blame on a seemingly phantom interrupter intervening on the first “release aberrations” cast (a distraction, I’m sure you’ll agree) but we got him down and decided to take a raid break. And then decided that, rather than bang our heads on Atramades, we’d go take a first look at Halfass Windbreaker.
The add package for this week on the EU realms is Storm Rider, Time Warden and Whelps — seemingly a high-raid-damage combination. So, we had four or five attempts, most of which resulted in us dying to AoE/standing in bad and the occasional CD-crit-crit-threat-dead sequence, and resolved to come back the following night if we could. Handily although one of our signups was unavoidably detained at work, we happened to have a replacement online and after a bit of a delay for some jewelcrafting and enchanting, we went back to the Bastion. Where we oneshot Halfass. And then, after a 15 minute “strategy break”1, we killed the dragon twins on the 6th attempt.
Sounds good, eh? It was. There was even a reasonable amount of useful loot on both days.
There’s just one tiny fly in my ointment, one little beetle crawling in my salad. I wasn’t playing well, and even before I looked at my recount window, I could feel something was off. I could feel something was off, but I couldn’t figure out *what*, or how to fix it. So as a raid team, we did pretty well, but as a raidER, I *didn’t*. In a weird way, it reminded me of being a kid.
Back in my early teens, I used to play a fair bit of football — for the school, for a 7-a-side team, then for a 11-a-side team. The 7-a-side team did pretty well; we won our little league a couple of times and had a lot of fun. When we scaled up to 11-a-side, we did less well, but in a weird way, that didn’t especially bother me. As long as I came off the pitch thinking “well I played ok, and we didn’t lose because of something I did/didn’t do”, I was fine. Well, not fine, I wanted to win games, but I’d have all but forgotten about it by the time I got home for a bath. If I hadn’t played well though, I’d be grumpy.
Same principle applies to WoW, it seems. So even though we were downing bosses and it was a couple of days ago, I’m *still* irritated with myself. My suspicion is that I was tired and not concentrating properly, as I did ok on the fights where I could just stand there and push buttons2, but I’ll have to take a look at the logs later to check *grumble*.
I don’t know — is it weird to have your pleasure at the success of the raid be overshadowed by your frustration with your own performance?
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PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Always label your macros
I have a guidie who’s a bit of an achievement queen. You name it, she’s probably got it. She (along with her boyfriend) are responsible for our guild having the 55 exalted reputations achievement, for example, and the “We are legendary” achievement too. Anyway, one Saturday3 she was doing some achievement hunting and my chatbox was forever popping up notifications of her latest new shiny. Eventually I made a macro and dropped it on my bars, which output “ROBOT SAYS: Well done Anka” to guild chat on a mouseclick. Click click clicketty.
Fast-forward to the golem council fight in BWD on Monday. I’m assigned to be the second interrupter on Arcanotron, so I need to be able to turn off my autoattack when the shield goes up. Time for a /stopattack macro, methinks. Stick it on the bars, and I can click it once the shield is up then just follow the big stone fella around interrupting things without a problem. Unfortunately, thanks to sheer laziness I didn’t give either macro a unique icon, so they’re both just question marks (mysterious buttons, you might say). Surely enough, during Monday’s fight with the Tron council, I managed to click the wrong button, miss an interrupt and instead fire off my “GRATS” macro by mistake. No big deal, we didn’t wipe…
Tuesday’s raid: while a couple of guildies are doing the jewelcrafting and enchanting for our stepped-in-at-the-last-minuate-WOOHOO-we-can-haz-raid-after-all! priest, I’m blethering away on vent, telling the story of stupidly pressing the wrong button.
“Oh.” says the raidleader. “You know, I think Anka might have been dead at that point.”
“Oh, bollocks” says I4
Cue a quick PM to explain myself and much sniggering from the raid, unsympathetic buggers that they are.
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