Remember those Summer Doldrums I’ve mentioned recently? Sometimes things click after a while and the team hums along until the Fall when the original team members tend to come back online? And sometimes things do not go so well? Well, that is exactly what I’m going through right now. So I’m going to vent a little.
We have a minority of players on the raid team right now that are just not pulling their weight. The same people are dieing, over and over again on nearly every boss pull. Either because they are not doing anything to save themselves, aren’t doing anything to avoid damage in the first place, or aren’t getting healed. There are a couple healers I have to lump into this category, which makes matters all the worse considering how vital they are to the raid team. We got rid of one healer a few weeks ago because she was completely devoid of any skill and would die every boss attempt (and sometimes more than once if she would get rezzed) and consequently was of no use to the team. I wish they would get rid of another such healer and that we could find a good replacement.
Anyway, I digress. The issues are that people need to do a certain amount of self-preservation. They need to avoid damage as much as possible, which includes not standing in front of bosses, move out of fire, avoid adds, and a host of other things that can loosely fall under the “situational awareness” category. In other words if you can’t remain aware of your surroundings and DPS at the same time then you perhaps should go down to the minor leagues and get more experience before coming back up to the majors.
Healers, unlike DPS, have a more critical role and really need to be on their game. They need to be able to remain aware of their surroundings at all time as well as react quickly to the damage their team members are taking. It’s a stressful job (I know). If a given healer isn’t remaining aware of their surroundings and is dieing either because of effects they aren’t avoiding, are getting eaten by adds (which isn’t necessarily a problem they can avoid at all times if the tanks aren’t doing their jobs properly), or aren’t healing adequately then not only will they die, but then DPS starts dieing as well. Once too many healers/DPS dies it’s wipe no matter what happens. Its even more egregious when tanks die, and this is really where I start to get even more frustrated with the healers on our team right now because our tanks die all too often. When the main tank dies on Ignis for example, despite two healers dedicated to him, that is a problem. There simply can’t be any excuse for that sort of thing because there isn’t any huge burst of damage coming toward the tank that can’t be anticipated. It’s a simple matter of the healers not remaining aware and not acting according to the conditions. Tuesday night we wiped five times on Ignis before we finally gave up, and on a boss that we had had on farm previously. Very frustrating.
So these last two weeks what we’ve been seeing is a less than steller initial Tuesday night raid where we’ll get to Auriya (if we’re lucky), kill her, then go back and kill the bosses we skipped. The last two weeks we have been unable to kill Auriya and people are really beginning to get frustrated. We couldn’t even kill Kologarn Tuesday night either. It shows in the decline of raid attendance that resulted in the last two days of raiding last week to be cancelled and thus far two days of cancelled raids this week.
The Officers are recruiting but they’re having problems finding “good” raiders. Most of the raiders (not all) we’re recruiting these days are sub-optimal and hasn’t improved our situation any. Most of those end up getting kicked from the guild after a few weeks because of their performance (they’re on trial when they’re invited) or because they’re not meeting raid attendance requirements.
I’ve found myself actually hoping raids don’t happen these days because I’m just so sick of the lack of progression and the wipes. I’d rather spend my time leveling my Rogue and running dailies and farming then sitting through another night of failure in Ulduar. The knowledge that the Argent raid is only a number of weeks away at this point makes the situation all the more frustrating for me because I should be decked out in all my Tier 8 pieces at this point (I’m missing gloves, shoulders, and head). Raiding isn’t all about gear of course, but anyone telling you they don’t want to improve their gear is lying. Raiding is about gear progression as much as it is in boss progression and having fun. Dieing on boss attempts and failing to progress in Ulduar after weeks and weeks of attempts is not fun. Not at all.
Unfortunately there isn’t a lot any of us can do about it.
