I think I had one of the most disappointing raids last night, that I have ever had. Even considering we still have not progressed past the point where we can even kill Icehowl in ToGC-25 yet, though just occasionally we get to him. By the time that happens though, most of the raid is dead because of the worms. And no one is even considering going back to kill Yogg-Saran in Ulduar. Anyway, I digress.
Yes, last night tops the disappointment meter by a good amount. I've been after our GM lately to start running OS+3 every Thursday night so we can get the achievement and the Drake. But we literally spent two hours in there wiping. Miserably. Even with only 24 people we were hitting 100k DPS, so obviously DPS isn't the issue. And I can chalk the first 3 wipes up to changes that we were all unaware of. We started off with the zerg method, and easily blew Sartharion down to 25-30% by the time the second drake would arrive, but at 25% Sartharion and the Drakes would enrage and it would be a wipe. As I said, chalk those first three wipes up to changes, and we decided to go back to the "official" method.
Even on the zerg method, we had issues with people not getting out of the void zones, and getting hit by the lava, so imagine the issue as we did the encounter the official way and took the Drakes on one at a time, correspondingly moving them around the lava and everyone trying to avoid the void zones at the same time. It was a giant cluster, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The issues we were seeing last night are the same issues in other raid instances. After all, a void zone is no different than fire or poison. It deals with an ability to know what you are supposed to do and perform. All our guild problems with non-progression are clearly human related because we're about as geared out as you can possibly be without ToGC gear atm.
As clear as that is we do not have the will at the officer level to start weeding the weakness out of the raid team. Attendance drives your relative rank in the guild, which drives your continued raid availabilities. A full time raider gets first dibs on raid spots during the first 15 minutes of raid invites. Then casual raiders the next 10 minutes, then regular members the last 5 minutes. Occasionally we'll have too many people and an officer will ask if anyone wishes to sit out. So, you can see we have a fairly lax system of inclusion and it works more in the social aspect, than it does toward the progression aspect. We've had raiders that were actually pretty good who have left us over the previous months, I'm sure because of the progression issue. One of them went on to join my wife's guild, who I've seen just decimates the DPS charts. Every time I raid with them I just weep at the loss to my own guild.
I believe I've mentioned before that I'm not a completely hard core raider. I just love to raid, and while I feel raiding is not all about gear and doing something that no one else can do, I do want to progress and see all the content. Anyone telling you that they are happy to wipe for days and weeks is a liar. So, as I said, last night was perhaps the most disappointing raid I've ever had because we're talking about T7 quality raiding in full T9 gear. We should have been able to finish that encounter last night with ease, yet because of our continued player issues we failed utterly. And if truth to form holds next Thursday no one will wish to go back.
