www.stopthesanity.com

Our token ranger has been taking some time off from raiding, something about family, being old, or something like that, so todays tale stems from one of our dirges.

We have up to 3 dirges in our raids, our MT group dirge, who has been with us for some time, a newer dirge that recently leveled up to raid with us since his pally main wasnt really as needed on our raids.. and the twobox dirge.

The Twobox dirge is run by our MT.. so when we have extra slots free on our raids, he brings him along and tanks the raid and handles the dirge.. including actively raising people, etc.

Right now we occaisionally get times where the twobox dirge out-dpses half our raid force. and usually he isnt in the bottom 3rd of the dps parse.. all while the MT is successfully tanking the raid.

A couple raids back, the MT challenged our mt group dirge to a dps-off.. he laid an open bet on everyone that he could beat her on a zonewide parse with the twobox dirge. it was 1p for 3p return. He lost, by a reasonable margin.

Then as we went to the second zone that night, he bet her personally 100p that he could beat her in that zone.. she beat him hands down and now has a nice chunk of cash.

The reasoning behind the bet I believe was to get her motivated to step it up a notch and make her realize that she can do more in the raid than her perceived role.

also this evening, our MT (who is also the raid leader) inspected the gear on the third dirge.. because he was doing considerably lower dps than either of the other dirges... and it turns out that he was so badly geared that he even had a level 79 piece of gear (and not that good of one).

To hint that he should change up his gear a post was made talking about upgrading gear to prevent death to AOEs (our third dirge's group died quite a bit that night)... and commenting on how upgrading your gear can actually result in higher mitigation, better stats, etc.

And then, our third dirge posted... complaining in a veiled manner how the MT dirge had been in the top 6 of the dpsers.. and how they weren't doing their job because of it, and how 90% of the force weren't doing their best with their AA setups, etc..

I think he was offended that he was outdpsed by most of the force, and his gear was called into question (even without naming names)...

Yeah, I can agree some of our people are not optimally set up, how else can a two boxed dirge out dps half the force.. :) but his little rant actually p/o'd several of our top people who DO know what they are doing and DO have a good thing setup wise.
I guess the moral of the story is don't challenge people to think outside their perceived roles, or they might get upset... oh, and don't let the twobox dirge out dps everyone :)

Now that I have had time to sleep, rest, and put last night behind me...

We went into Tomb of the Mad Crusader last night, figuring its green and blue con to most of us, it should be easier, and we can get some more experience working as a team and hopefully training up our less than perfectly coordinated raiders.

We worked our way down to Thet-um-aua with no issues.. that's when the fun started. Turns out asking people to actually look at their detrimental window and then make a judgement call of where to go based on if they have the effect and where others are going is a teensy bit too much.

After a few wipes we start settling in a bit and have a pull thats working fairly well until we hear "SOMEONE JUST EVACED OUR GROUP!!!!"

Turns out that the person (who at least admitted to it) couldn't figure out why they hit evac since it is out of the way of their normal combat arts and not likely to be hit... well we brush the dust off and go back in.

A few more unpleasant pulls and a group gets evacced again. Turns out the guy who evacced thought it was going to be a wipe.

Then someone evacs again, because the MT went down... mind you, the OT picked it right up instantly and there was only 1 death...

A few more pulls and someone evacs AGAIN. because they thought it was going to be a wipe.

All in all.. we had 6 evacs, 5 of them from well meaning, um, people... even AFTER we told people to quit evaccing on their own and wait for the raid leader to call it.

I think we died 20 times to that thing.. it was stingy. and there ended up being an hour long meeting of the head people in the raid afterward as we discussed it, the problems with a few of our people and generally moped..

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people dropped from the force after last night.

The other day Token Ranger and I were chatting, well lets be honest, I sent him a tell in game to remind him to install Guild Connect (this being two days after the raid just chronicled)... and we chatted a bit after he said he would. Now, I am ignoring the fact that two days later he still doesn't have it installed... but.. he asked me to sign him up for a DPS slot on the raid application thread.

Turns out, after much deciphering of what he was asking, was that he didn't have the password to his account on the website due to the same computer upgrade that caused him to be guild connectless... and then he proceeded to tell me (in /tells mind you, in game) that he couldn't do password recovery on the website until he gets the internet reinstalled on his computer.

much use was made of the /facepalm emote in real life.

I am -hoping- that it means he didn't realize he had a web browser installed because the icon wasn't on his desktop... but for all I know he could be playing EQ2 with a tarot deck and a spoon...

So, those of you who have been paying attention to the story up to this point know that I raid in a casual guild... as we fearlessly charge into content only 1-2 expansions behind current..

Our story resumes with our decision to make everyone meet a little stricter standard for raiding with the new level cap.. and to give our raiders time to meet some of those qualifications (AA amount, level, etc) we are (still, sigh) raiding old content.

We went into Veeshan's Peak yesterday, first to at least keep our hand in and second to get some sense of victory against our nemesis, Nexona the everliving now that we have the majority of our force above her level, and overall our raiding was successful, we finally took down the one mob that we just could not at level 80, Nexxy.. mostly because we could actually bring enough dps this time... but I digress.

Two little storylettes really stand out in my mind though. We have recently, and by recently I mean 3 months ago, adopted the use of Guild Connect in raiding, and it really has helped.. being able to script up a voiceover to chastise the gnome for trying to disarm chests helps improve our spirits... during that three month period, just two weeks prior to when SF was released, our token ranger has a computer crash and ends up buying a new system.

He has had his new system up and running for a week and a half now or so, and seems to have no problems... and as we all arrive in our raid room for our first post-SF raid and I start posting the macro to remind people to load up Guild Connect (yes, if I don't, about 25% forget, sigh) our token ranger pipes up with "I don't know if I have Guild Connect loaded".

So I look at he clock, and tell him, well you have 20 minutes before time, so here is our download URL to install it.

I think nothing of it since he didnt say anything else. My mistake. I should have learned by now that our Token Ranger needs to be prompted and prodded at times... oh do I painfully remember talking him through making a target macro. I don't find out the bad news until we are on the fight with Druushk, and he is on statue duty.

Apparently our token ranger just cannot see the bright RED text that pops up on screen.. but the voice over is great, it makes it easy when we can have Guild Connect say "Click Statues Now"... well, unless he didnt bother to download and install Guild Connect.

So now we have to remember to tell him in voice chat to click his statue... annoying, yes, but I guess thats what you get trusting the token ranger to follow through.

The next little storylette is as we are heading down the ramp to Hoshkar, a fight we have all done successfully many times, and our raid leader says "Ok, we all know what to do, everyone on the island" and guess who runs on down the ramp and gets on Hoshkars island...

Yes, our token ranger.

You could just hear the depression in our raid leaders voice as he just said "really [ranger name]? REALLY?"

I mock rangers, yes. But look at who you guys have as a representative.

Usually we get two or three little "encounters" like this a raid with our little token ranger, like the time he turned sprint on in a fight with Venril to bring his mana down.. then promptly got feared...Well, he did that two or three times that night, til we figured out what he was doing...

For the record, we DO have a non-token ranger.. who does quite well for where he is in progression with his gear... :)

Yes, this is just me venting mildly.... wishing I had the capacity to actually pick who got to raid with me.. :)