The following is kind of a follow up to my last blog post. It also is something I just now first posted on our guild forums. Unlike some though, I’m not at all adverse in “pugging” or running outside my own guild so long as its a well thought out, mature group. Perhaps you’re a small guild occasionally short a healer or something. Obviously, for this to be relevant at all, you’d have to play Alliance, Farstriders (US) server. But if you do, and need someone, feel free to contact me:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make my in game time more productive. Seems like I spend way too much time trying to put runs together on the fly or simply waiting for one to come together. I doubt I’m the only one in this boat.
So here is what I’m thinking to try within this message thread and for myself, this message in particular which I’ll edit to keep current. I suggest we post our general availability and a brief goal statement for each toon we’re *actively* playing at the moment. Then also an *out of game* means of contact that has near constant accessibility. For many people this would mean a phone/text number. For some like myself, it could be an email/im address. For those with phone only but uncomfortable giving out there real number, google offers a phone number forwarding option called gvoice I think. So somebody contacting me could hit me up with something like:
Can Sayas heal an Onyxia run Thursday at 10am server?
To which I could either commit or decline. But with acceptance, I’d know how to schedule my time. So here is my current information which could be used as a template:
GENERAL AVAILABILITY: (server times)
Monday-Tuesday: 9:30pm – 11pm
Wednesday: 9:30pm – ???
Thursday-Saturday – Any time
Sunday: Before 11pm (finish time!)
TOON/GOAL/INTERESTS:
Sayas, lvl80, priest: Healing role, discipline primary spec, looking to learn a holy heal off spec, interested in badge (heroic) runs, particularly heroic daily for triumph badges, H ToC for gear drops, Onyxia for the experience, VoA, Ulduar, ToC10
Dhume, lvl75, death knight, blood tanking, unholy dps, looking to learn tanking, group dps, leveling
Whispera, lvl22, druid, feral tanking & dps, healing off spec, learning tanking, learning druid healing, of course leveling
CONTACT:
gmail/gchat: staretssayas@gmail.com
Yesterday I made the startling revelation that my main, Sayas, a level 80 discipline priest on Farstriders (US) was better qualified for raiding than I had thought. Today I begin to explore what that means.
First of course is the time commitment. Now we’re not talking quantity of time primarily. I spend plenty of that. I’d guess 10-20 hours a week typically. It seems like most raiders devote at least two nights a week to raiding and then many guilds seem to spend one night a week beyond that on “progression.” So, we’re talking three nights, three hours a night… so nine hours. Luckily, my guild really only expects two nights reducing that number to six hours.
But my deal is more about the expectation of nights of the week set aside for raiding. While I spend plenty of time in game, almost all of my time is on an ad hoc basis. I fit my time in between other commitments. Raiding turns that upside down to an extent and says you must to some extent fit those other commitments in around raiding. Still, I want to raid and anything you want doing takes a degree of prioritizing. So what if I committed just one night a week? Would that be good enough? I’m not sure because I know sometimes each raid is a progression in itself. In other words, night two is a continuation of night one. Obviously its an inconvenience at the very least to the others if I participate on night one and not on night two. Then again, what if the day of designated were to fall on day two of our raiding schedules? The chance that I’d be called upon to fill in for someone that started on day one would certainly be diminished from having started the raid in the first place.
I could look at pugging raids instead. I actually do a fair amount of that with 5 mans. But part of my motivation here is guild participation, not just raiding for raiding’s sake so that doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory solution. Also, I could look at raiding with a guild that consistently raids at a more convenient time for me. If I could raid mornings instead, that would far easier for me to commit to. But that would involve me changing guilds and perhaps servers as well. So that kind of would defeat the purpose as well. I don’t even know, is it possibly to transfer to servers in other areas of the world so that my morning might be their evening? Hmm…
So, there you have my thinking on the time issue. Next time, I’ll look at another concern.
I just had an eye opening and thought provoking experience: I often look myself up at http://be.imba.hu to see what I should be working on gear wise and what content I should be running. Its a great site for doing that. But today I took it a step further and looked up all the priests in my guild. Here is what I discovered:
First, our guild “only” has 19 level 80 priests. That surprised me. I’ve always thought of Ex Cinis Cineris as priest heavy and would have guessed us to have maybe half again that number at very least. But what really shocked me is that I am roughly tied for 4th best in terms of gearing with two others. Looking at it another way, if this data is to be believed, I’m no worse than the 6th best geared priest in our guild. There is some room for error as some folks may have logged off in pvp gear or geared for an alt spec, but still.
What this means is that I’m harboring some delusions as to my status. I’d always proclaimed quite loudly that I was at best 2nd tier and quite possibly 3rd tier in terms of ECC priests. However, assuming 4 tiers of 5 each, I’m right at the cusp of 1st and 2nd tier.
Yet I’ve hardly ever run a 10 man (3 to be exact as of this writing.) and never have run a 25 man instance. At this point I could veer off to talk about problems in the WoW reward mechanics. Clearly I’m over geared for the content I’ve run. But I’ll leave that for others to do. (TotalBiscuit of the Blu Plz! podcast does a fine job running that topic into the ground.) Where I want to go with it is that I am once more catching myself caught up in the position of underachiever. (Wherever I go, there I am again it seems.)
Actually, this revelation of my gearing status within our guild impacts me at least 4 different ways at the same time: 1) I’m proud that my efforts of the last few weeks have resulted in such a gearing improvement. Clearly, upgrading doesn’t take as much as I’d assumed. 2) I’m shocked to discover I’m so deluded. I thought of myself as more prone to honest assessment. 3) I’m disappointed I’ve let myself off the hook so easily. My excuse for not attempting harder content was that I wasn’t properly geared to do so. 4) I’m sheepish that I’ve been letting my guild down even in the slightest. ECC is by no means a hardcore raiding guild. But we are large (500+ toons) and I suspect there are more than a few that would like challenge themselves. Why not? Isn’t that part of the fun? I still think we are probably priest heavy, but I’m also sure I’m one of our few discipline healers.
I’ve been thinking of myself as a charity case in need of help when instead I’m at a point where I really should be helping others. I don’t mean just those newly arriving at level 80 but maybe all but the the very top levels in my guild. Maybe even those top players could use my help if only to fill in spots on a 25 man roster from time to time.
I’ll continue this next time talking about what this revelation means to me in terms of gameplay. I know I still want to limit my gameplay time. But maybe its time to reevaluate how that time is being spent.
Around Azeroth: A cause to remember
Grizzleton writes that his guild, Ex Cinis Cineris of Farstriders, has changed its tabard to pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “One of the guild’s officers is a breast cancer survivor still in treatment, and many other guild members and their loved ones have had experiences with this disease. In the public forum on the Ex Cinis Cineris website is a very helpful thread dealing with this issue. As the aforementioned officer put it when the guild rallied behind supporting this cause, “We may be gamers and geeks, but we have hearts!” For their first event, the guild formed a pink ribbon with their avatars on the Stormwind Harbor steps. ECC has also planned a Farstriders serverwide Pink event for Friday October 16th in Stormwind Harbor. Check the Blizzard Farstriders forum for details.”
My guild, Ex Cinis Cineris got written up at wow.com. How cool is that? What is happening is that we’re having a series of events to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I’m very happy with my guild in general which in turn makes me proud to be a part of them. Something like this makes me even happier and prouder.
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