The Hard Way

It has come to my attention that sometimes I do things the hard way. I think, in a way, I'm also what you would call a "pleaser". I work fairly hard to help my friends, no matter what the situation. I always remember back in high school on a Friday night when a friend called me because his car was stolen. So, I left the group of friends I was entertaining at my house to drive the 5 miles to find that my friend had simply misplaced his car, and had since found it in my travel to his aid. (Before the days when everyone had a cell phone, obviously.) I was not angry; in fact, I was relieved that he still had a vehicle. And it became a running joke between friends.

But I also recognize the importance of completing goals and accomplishing tasks. Especially when I'm leading others, I have a strong desire to do the job right and fair. From the little "hard core" raiding experince I have, it seems that the typical Guild Master or Raid Leader (certainly not in my guild) tends to have this lofty attitude and isn't usually willing to listen to others, or just be mean or harsh in general. Sure, it's a pain to get whispers from 24 different people in a 25-man raid. But sometimes, there's valid input. "Hey, maybe this strategy might work better... just a thought." -or- "What do you want me to do?" -or- "Cat's on fire, gotta go." And for a guild that seems to have a surprisingly large amount of "mutes" on Vent, it's usually much easier for me to track the whispers then the goofing off that can happen in raid chat.

On Monday night, the group we had going into Gruul's was pretty solid. We had enough of each for role in the fight. I think High King Maulgar was taken down about 20 minutes after the first trash mob, and there were plenty of attempts on Gruul himself. Last night, however, it was a different story. We had to be a tad creative in our attempt. There was 1 less tank, so we had a rogue tank Blindeye (the priest and first to die). Our 1 warlock did a great job taking care of the felhounds, but they still ran rampant every once and awhile. (We usually use at least 2.) Not to mention that some of our key people that live in the same area were having connection problems like no tomorrow. (Just hope the storms gone now.)

It was a learning curve, that's for sure. I'm certain we could have pulled it off if we didn't have so many lag/connection issues. There were some issues when we first started the attempts, like getting the pull down, but we worked them all out. Just not a lot you can do when one of your tanks goes offline mid-fight. So, that was the hard way, I suppose. A few other players had logged on in the last 30 minutes or so of our attempts, and we brought them in and substituted out a few people. Also to change it up, another raid leader took over. Not that anything at all was done or conducted differently. After the change, we took them down on our second attempt. I guess that was the easy way.

I got a number of complimentary whispers thanking me for doing a great job with what we had to work with, which I really appreciated. I think I got one smart alec comment after we downed him that our previous failures were "Lei's fault". Oh well, boys will be boys.