Welcome to yet another entry of the Mancy Diaries. In this entry I'll cover Dragon Soul in Ensidia and my departure. Alright, so, Dragon Soul arrives. I had taken the responsibility of making raid finder groups in order to have the maximum benefit per run, according to Raid Finder rules. However, during our runs, we were told by friends in other guilds about this bug that allows you to get infinite LFR loot. Seeing as other guilds knew about it and were using it, we decided to use it as well. We had people against it, but still, given Blizzard's past actions (ignoring bugs) we thought that we couldn't allow other guilds to have this advantage over us. We got banned, people got sad and disappointed as I described in the previous entry and that's that. We had to get ourselves together and see what could be done.
Most guilds gathered 10 alts/non banned characters in order to experience hard modes, get some loot, develop strategies, see changes from the PTR and so on. Somehow, guilds magically managed to come up with the perfect roster and amazingly well geared characters (friends transferred from other realms) and whatnot. Sadly, we did not and had to run a sub par set up. Anyway, we get up and running, we have some guys playing other people's alts whose class were that of their main (so for example, I was playing someone's alt mage) so that we can at least get the best possible performance. And it was in this 10man that I lost all hope of achieving a World First and realized Ensidia was, well, over.
Why was that? Well, people just could not play well. They lacked the general skill to perform at a high level. From screwing up at obvious things constantly to being unable to do their job, never in my life have I seen a group play more terribly than this. And the worst part is that it was our supposed "core" in it! It was mostly healers being absolutely horrible, not just mistake-wise but simply not knowing which heal to use, when to heal, what cooldowns to use and so on, things that anyone would consider granted for a player in a top guild. Some might blame this on our aggressive recruiting, but this is far from the truth. What is true is that we did go all out on recruiting. Me and other role leaders went through a ton of other guilds' logs trying to find competent players and approach them. When this didn't go well in regards to casters with a Legendary staff at least, we had to look at other ways not to fall behind on class stacking, especially with Ultraxion, the rumored tough-enrage boss that required max DPS (and classes with the staff would heavily out DPS others). For that role, there was really no criteria as long as the guy had a staff. If they couldn't play well enough, they would only be used for that boss and if they failed there also, then someone else would log with their account and play their characters (we actually used that quite a bit in the past...pathetic but yeah). It wasn't those people's failing that doomed us, we never counted on them. It was our core's lack of skill that did. Additionally, it's not like we were the only guild going aggressive on recruiting. I know for sure Method did that as well, since they tried to approach one of our newly recruited Warlocks. Instead, I went on their vent server and pretended to be him, it was quite a funny chat that I recorded and pretty sure everyone in the guild heard. I don't have it anymore, if someone does, feel free to upload it somewhere and link it in the comments or PM it to me and I'll do so.
Regardless, I try to be positive and think that people playing bad is just because it's a 10man and they aren't on their main characters, perhaps things will be better in our 25-man raid next week. But they weren't. Boss by boss we would constantly fail due to people being unable to play well enough and this continued all the way. It was mostly healers, but it just felt like playing in a group of 15. In the past, there has always been a reason we failed to get world firsts. Call it an excuse if you like, but it was there. Be it lack of hours spent on raiding (t11), be it lack of appropriate classes (t12), lack of motivation (lich king) there was always a reason. This time, people simply couldn't play well enough to get a top kill.
Another thing that infuriated me was the fact that people failing wouldn't get yelled at. You see, during my WoW career, there was always this big bad guild master who yelled at people every time they did something wrong. I'm sure many will disagree on whether that's good, but in my eyes it is. WoW isn't a hard game, if you focus you will manage to be decent. But if someone doesn't care for World Firsts and plays this game just to raid, then obviously they won't perform that well. So if it's lack of motivation that leads to bad play, then maybe fear or shame will fix that. Getting yelled at by the guild master and publicly humiliated can and probably does boost performance. Knowing that you will get ridiculed and screamed at if you fail will make you play better. And I say that based on a lot of personal experience. However, the leadership was totally against that. Ekyu would only yell at DPSers making an individual mistake (dying in a fire), which is still pretty big but is not the reason we would wipe again and again. When you get a healer that uses the wrong heals or wrong CDs, or doesn't know which target to heal at which point and you don't shake him up and yell at him, you're missing the elephant in the room. And that's what was happening and also what pretty much led to my departure.
It wasn't until Spine progression that I found out one of our newly acquired, amazingly bad healer whose name I don't recall was keeping up a blog writing about our progress, our setup, our raiding hours and so on. For anyone that doesn't know, things like that are strictly forbidden in top guilds. One guild's progress, among other things, is top secret as they can affect the outcome of the race. So obviously, when I found out about this, I wrote it in officer chat and immediately proceeded to talk to him, in what I guess was a pretty aggressive manner. Ekyu, instead of taking my side and kicking that player out of the guild, said that it wasn't my job to talk to him but the guild leader's instead. It was at this point that I snapped, said I didn't want to be part of a guild that tolerates such bad players and left.
A lot of harsh words were said and there certainly was a lot of hate, but I didn't regret what I did. Perhaps I should have waited until progress finished, but I simply couldn't take so many bad players in one raid and no one telling them how bad they were. What I did after I left Ensidia is something that I'll cover in the next and final entry!
