I would like to think that, overall, I’m a pretty patient person when it comes to raiding, new content, etc. Most of us are; after all, we’re learning, gearing, checking strats…all that stuff, right? Most going Normal to Heroic to Mythic, even if the transition is a fairly short one.

Back during Cataclysm, my guild had a limit when it was a new fight or we were struggling: “give it a few tries, then let’s go to something else to clear our heads”. There’s something behind that, if you think about it – after so long, be it at work, school, raid, whatever, our brains tune out. We lose focus. Performance drops. Same thing if you work for longer than a certain number of hours; you lose that precious peak productivity.

Sometimes, it can’t be avoided – been there, done that. It sucked. It’s horridly stressful.

I’m gonna preface this by saying I know it isn’t true for all of us. To a degree, I envy those who aren’t in need of a break. Another preface: this is not a slight against my guild at all.

Fast forward from Cata to T17. I’m in a whole new group of people than I was then. The mentality from then isn’t there. My problem is, that was my mentality before I joined THG. I’m in the minority now. Tectus was a nightmare(40 wipes, maybe more – I just looked at the full wipes pre-kill). So were some other bosses. Imperator/H Imperator was a different story – you’re going to eat the floor repeatedly on end bosses; sometimes on others that have screwball mechanics. Got through that. Didn’t mean that I wasn’t at my limit several times – 18-20 wipes in a row…my headset was thrown at the wall, my cats were yelled at more than they needed to be, I was in tears at a few points. Basically, time in game doesn’t need to be hitting that limit of frustration. It’s fun. It’s an escape. Whatever you do in game, it’s your escape and you don’t need it pushing you to that limit, right?

Then BRF opened on Tuesday; we’d said previously(or it’d been mentioned…again, in the minority, so I said fine) that we were going to start with heroics, but some things had changed(another aside: I’m not a fan of going into one degree of difficulty without seeing the easier/normal stuff first with the group I’m running with and learning) . Normal Gruul? We learned him; he was pretty easy. Oregorger’s a pain…took us a while and eventually Blingtron 5000 had to be called in for assistance(apparently, Oregorger’s eaten too much ore and doesn’t want to play nice with more than just us). Then Normal Blast Furnace melted us(also issues with him from what I understand.)

Wednesday. HGruul gets smooshed after a few tries. We go to Beastlord; I’m betting almost no one had read up on him on our end. I know I hadn’t since I hadn’t expected to try him yet. Okay, whatever. By the end of that mess, I’d said the word “dispel” a lot. In vent and on my Twitter account. I was trying; I’m not glyphed for the second charge, which will change, but we had *two* Mass Dispels. That alone could have covered everything coordinated properly, I believe. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a fun fight! But, the mess that it was Wednesday was Breaking Point #2 for me.

Number three was last night. I was doing okay mood-wise before pull ten; I honestly forgot how many times we pulled or when my mood just tanked and my temper showed up. I’m not happy that I didn’t keep it in check, but that’s not the point; I eventually shut up for the most part by the time we stopped.

Little back story: we’d run around and explored after Wednesday’s raid and accidentally did an “attempt” on Normal Hans and Franz…one tank, two healers, random DPS, got them to like 50% or so before “oh hey look pop tarts and smashy things”. So, yeah, not too terrible. ON NORMAL.

Last night was Heroic. Shit hurts more. Most of us(including myself since I’d only seen what was done the night before since I was one of the two healers) had never seen the fight. We wiped over and over(no clue on the number of times because I haven’t uploaded the logs), progressed some, but over and over there was lots of ded. But progression so let’s keep going. That was the raid, which was around two and a half hours, maybe a little more. When I think of wiping on a boss(unless it’s an end boss – with a notable exception because of a crap composition), I have nightmares of Ragnaros and Tectus. At one point, I’d even said(off vent, just to myself) that I was done…that was around 11:25pm. Really, I think I was done well before that, but I was putting an effort in to keep going. Yeah, it probably impacted my mood, but so does one of the cats jumping up mid-fight and making me stop what I’m doing to get her off my chair so she doesn’t break things.

Am I whining a bit? Sure, I’ll own that; that’s fine – sometimes, I’m a bit of a wimp especially if I have other things wearing me down. Do we all have different raiding styles and groups that can overcome bad? Yep. That’s a good thing. I envy the guilds who wiped and wiped and wiped on M Imperator but finally got him – it was awesome to get him down on heroic and I was genuinely thrilled for friends who got him on Mythic!

Back to my original point that I was trying to get at: raid leaders, do what’s in the ENTIRE raid’s best interest, not just your vocal majority – if you’re stumbling on one raid boss, go to another. Take some time, maybe kill something else, then go back and start over after heads are clear.