Sharing grief

So there's a good balance of good and evil with dabbling outside the guild.
Trust me, I'm very happy about the joint venture but I also know how to tolerate the amount of crap that comes a long with it because I appreciate the opportunity.

Plus, because of my previous raiding experiences before TBC, I'm used to dealing with the odd sorts of flavorful a-holes out there.

So here's Tuesday's raid. 5/6 bosses cleared in SSC.
Leo, we wipe once because of agro pull during the last 10% of the boss when he splits. Throughout the fight though, hunters were pulling the most agro...which if you know the fight, you just don't pull agro. Period. Sometimes, hunters go all out and expect feign death to save them but you can't always rely on that, especially for heavy agro sensitive fights. Feign death can get resisted.

SO okay, that's established. A couple of our hunters pulled agro but it didn't cause a wipe and I told the whole group to watch their agro. Done deal.

Next boss set up is for Karathress, the hunters from jae start asking for Blessing of Wisdom instead of Salvation. Makes sense. Good hunters know how to use feign death to their advantage and will prefer wis over salv in most cases.

They ask for the blessing change like 5 times in a row with no response. I ask the pallies to make the change. Finally, someone from cykos makes a comment that the hunters need salv because they can't control their agro. And then another one makes a claim pointing out a specific hunter in our guild saying he watched him and he can't control his agro. Our hunter tries to explain how feign death failed and sometimes that happens.

Now regardless of feign death failing, hunters still have to stop dps-ing to slow down their agro if they're over the tanks. So I understand the point the cykos guy was trying to make. But he kept calling out the guy personally and the hunter's pulling of agro didn't wipe the group. So it was kind of a moot argument that didn't need to be pushed.

But he kept pushing it trying to scold our hunter. And trust me, none of jae guys need to be yelled at or scolded. They aren't kids. They learn fast and they know when they make a mistake.

So our hunter says out loud in vent "don't try to school me on how to play a hunter. I know how to play a hunter"

And the cykos guy tries to argue back but at this point I simply say "let's talk about this later, concentrate on the fight guys" and it goes silent and we one shot Karathress.

But then the cykos guy whispers our guy "are you always an @sshole like this"

a couple of interchanges between them and our guy puts the cykos guy on ignore.

I don't find out about the whisper until after the raid. At which point, I get on vent and have a discussion with the cykos GM immediately. I told him personal attacks are unacceptable and aren't productive. If his guys have a problem with my guy, it should go through myself or him.

There is no need for calling out people in vent or raid or whispers. It's completely counter productive to personally attack someone regarding how they play and then expect them to take your advice. That's just jacked up logic. You have to earn someone's respect before they're going to trust you on advice and corrections.

You can't just try to personally humiliate someone and expect them to bow down to your will. Jae doesn't work like that. We don't drive our progression or success off of fear and intimidation. We work off of support and motivation. I know that sounds super corny but it really does make a difference in the environment of the guild.

And it's easy to take personal offense from people you don't know. So you have to be very careful about how you say things to people.

But that's the world outside the white picket fences of our guild. I've been out there, I hated it. The threat of gkick all the time, putting up with people who are complete @sses, instead of people being happy you get loot they devise ways to make sure you don't get it, or they spend all day arguing about loot, or constantly arguing over retarded things, and thinking the only way to communicate is to yell or scream.

So that's the con of doing a joint venture is that you have to expose everyone to that glimpse of the nasty outside. However, I'm hoping to ensure that this kind of behavior doesn't escalate. And I told the cykos GM that dealing with issues or problems that people might be having in the raid should only go through myself or him. Period.

But the opportunity to work with another guild and actually do decent progression is quite nice. And also sharing the leadership of raiding is a lot easier in terms of dealing with everyone and of course always having the numbers to raid is key.

And for the most part, the majority of cykos are decent kids who do what they're told and appreciate the opportunity they are being given. Which is nice to see for a change instead of the expectation of having things provided for you as a given.

There's always just one bad grumpy apple in the raid who wants to make everyone the common enemy. It's just a shame too because in the larger scheme of things what we're doing isn't supposed to be a horrible boot camp experience. It's supposed to be a challenging but fun adventure we get to do together.

I am hopeful things will start to get better after my talk with the cykos GM. Perspective. It's all about putting things into perspective.

On a side note: I'm still having a lot of fun raiding with our guild members....And we got to see Mt. Hyjal which who knew we ever would! I feel very lucky.

Plus our guys rock: Our rogue went nekkid for a Tidewalker pull that went bad. He used his birthday suit mod. He forgot to put his armor back on for the next pull and still did an avg of 700 dps...but more importantly, out dps'd the other rogue. lol. Nekkid!!

And our mages are growing insane with the two piece T5 bonus. They're 40/0/21 AP mages now and work nicely with our shadow destro locks cuz of curse of shadows. They synergy is sick. I've seen an avg increase in about 300 dps per character, sometimes higher. ME LIKEY!