I'll Sit Out

Last night I was tired. I was tired, I was sore, I was grumpy, and I was not functioning in an efficient manner. Since we raid on Sunday nights, it was, apparently, a raid night. I had marked myself as Unavailable on the raid calendar last week or so since I hadn't expected to be hooked up and ready to play, but somehow I turned out to be wrong. My computer was up and running, I had a connection to the intarwebz, and I even had a desk and a chair available to me.

So I signed back up.

We had about 30 people online for the raid last night, though only about 22 were signed up "properly" earlier in the day. Because I hadn't signed up again until later in the day ON the raid day, I offered to sit out when the call was made for volunteers. I simply wasn't feeling up to the whole thing. Siens doesn't like raiding without me on his main, so he offered to sit out as well - which wasn't a horrible, horrible failure because we finally had both of our other main tanks available for a change, and one DPS who OTs for us if we have enough other people online.

Thus, we both ended up sitting out for the raid, and were put on Standby. I kept my headset on and stayed on Vent in case we were needed and switched to my Hunter alt. There's been a bit of lag going around since the advent of Hallow's End, so rather than risk dying to stuff due to lage, I elected to have her hop around the worlds nabbing candy out of buckets.

In the end, I think I got about half a level out of the buckets, even with like 3 bugged buckets in random places. She was wearing her Heirloom shoulders and chest piece, so she was getting the 20% bonus, but even so, it was good hunk of experience. Depending on how mindless or bored I am over the next two weeks, other alts will probably be trying to nab candy as well. It's easy enough, if not exactly "quick." After a while I wind up with a "route" I take, rather than sort of randomly bopping all over the place.

Anyhoo... it was a nice change to sit out. The guild took down General Vezzax without me, but I'm not too bummed about that. Instead of continuing on to Yoggy, they moved on to try ToC 25 on Heroic (because there were too many people being lazy and were unfamiliar with what the Yogg right would involve), and I'm definitely not unhappy about missing that.

I think part of the problem with people not being familiar with fights is that raiding isn't nearly as linear as it used to be.

Before, when we were clearing new content, we'd know ahead of time what would be open and what we would need to tackle next. Now, there are so many options available that it's really anyone's guess what we'll be doing. So a raid leader can't say, "Everyone read up on XX fight, look at the strats and watch some videos, that's what we'll be working on next." Now, once you hit 80 you can just run lots and lots of heroics and gear up for Ulduar, and thus be available for any Ulduar Fights, most of the normal ToC fights, or OS, Ony, VoA, EoE (you'll be overgeared for a bunch of it but still). You can do VoA or Ulduar in almost any order you want (Ulduar particularly splits off in many different directions after you down certain bottleneck bosses). Since many, many people have cleared (or nearly so) both of those instances, it's assumed that everyone present knows the fights -- and if not, that simply enough people understand them that the others can be carried through.

On a new kill for everyone, you can't say that. You may be geared for the fight, but if you don't know what you're up against, you're still probably going to die unless you outlevel it to a silly extent.

So. Heroic mode Beasts of Northrend. Sounded ouchie. :)