angryraidleader.com

I’m no longer going to be playing World of Warcraft.  Instead I’ll being playing World of Standing At The Lumber Mill In Arathi Basin Spamming Thunder And Blasting Fucking Gnomes Off The Cliff.

As I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, my guild is working on Illidan right now.  If you aren’t familiar with the fight, there is a an ability he uses in Phases 1, 3, and 5 called Parasitic Shadowfiend.  It not very dangerous.  In fact it’s one of the easiest boss abilities to deal with in tier 6 raiding.  All you have to do is run over to the side of the raid where a couple of mages are waiting, stop a couple of yards past them, and wait for the debuff timer to tick down to zero.  At that point you spawn two shadowfiends that usually aggro on the raids healers and you quickly move away from them.  Mages step in, frost nova and then nuke them.  Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!

But, as further proof that a large number of WoW players snacked on paint chips as kids, people kept failing at this during our last raid.  The mages bitched about it so much, that people started doing the whole, “Stop QQing!” thing.  I rank the stupidity of ‘QQ’ right up there with ‘lol’ because most internet slang sounds fucking retarded when spoken out loud.  Unless you do it ironically like I do.  Then it’s cool.

So why bring up people failing at such a simple part of a fight.  Simple, if you suck at the easiest part of the fight, you probably suck at important parts of the fight.  If you couldn’t handle using the brake, I wouldn’t want to ride in a car with you, so if you can’t handle walking from point A to point B, why would I want to raid with you.  We made thirteen attempts on Illidan the other night and at least half of the wipes were due to people screwing up simple shit, like where to stand and stopping dps during phase changes.  So stop screwing up on the simple shit you mouth breathers.

You can’t win World of Warcraft.  There is never a point where the other side admits defeat and you get a gold star.  The game is set up that way so you keep forking over your cash every month.  There are quite a lot of people that seem to be perfectly happy playing the game and never accomplishing anything, but for most players, they come up with a way of measuring their progress so they know if they are ‘winning’.  These achievements come in many forms.  Some people try to dominate in pvp, others try to gather every pet in the game (these people scare me a little).  Personally, I measure my success in the game by how far my guild has progressed in raiding.  We’re working on Illidan right now (43% was our best attempt last night), and I think we’ll get him next week.  But there is one group of players whose measure of success is very common, but incredibly annoying.  People that think loot = win.

Now I’m not saying that wanting better loot is bad.  I’m pretty sure everyone wants better gear.  I know I do.  But I want it for a reason.  It lets me crank out more damage and live longer, so I can perform better in raids, and melt a few more faces in pvp.  If you are skipping the rest of this post to send me some stupid comment about how skill > gear and that I must be the worst raider ever, just save your breath.  Until you post a video of your raid killing Illidan in all greens just STFU.  For me loot is just a means to an end.

I’m talking about those people that freak out over every item that drops.  If you’ve ever led a raid, and had a player that sends you a whiny ass tell every time they get passed over for loot, you know who I’m talking about.

• I thought I was next in line!
  
• When do I get that!
• How come you gave that to her?!  It’s because she’s a girl isn’t it?!  I’ll cyber with you, just give me the sword!
• I’ve been gone for a month, but I’m back now, and I know I was half an hour late to the raid and forgot to bring mana potions, but I NEED that cloak!

If you’ve ever had someone freak out because you sharded an item that they could have used in an off spec that they never play, that’s the fucker I’m talking about.

But what is really annoying the shit out of me lately is that WotLK drops in five fucking weeks.  And I still have people freaking out over loot.  I have a few guys in my guild who have been raiding with me since the Karazhan days.  I have a few others who despite joining later have made huge contributions to our raiding success.  So if I can get those guys in 4 piece Tier 6, I’ll do it.  They deserve it.  I’ve even decided to pass on tier 6 and just be satisfied with the three piece I’m wearing so I can see more of my guildies get theirs.  But after that small group gets theirs, I’ve been having everyone else just roll on loot that previously we would have assigned with our loot council.  I honestly think we’re too close to LK for it to really matter.  We’re not planning on going on to Sunwell, and we’re geared good enough to kill Illidan, so any other loot is just gravy.  So why not spread it around and let everyone get something shiny.

And here in about five weeks, you’re all going to be leveling up again and replacing the stuff that you’ve worked your asses off for the last year to get.  So chillax.  Stop freaking out when you don’t get something.  I actually kicked a guy out of our guild the other day because he freaked out over a necklace that dropped off Supremus that went to another player.  Sent me a bitchy ass tell and then logged out.  Fucking Supremus.  Who we’ve had on farm for months.  Grow the fuck up.  Have fun being a loot whore when you can’t raid.  Oh wait.  Last I heard, he got so emo over being kicked out that he gave his account away and quit the game.  Great, one more person who is holed up in their mom’s basement swearing to hunt me down and kill me.  You should all get together and form a club or something.

Moral of the story.  Loot is just some fucking pixels on a screen.  And if pixels make you cry, you should find a new hobby.  Like playing in traffic.

A comment to my last post reminded me of one thing I forgot to mention…

Listen up all you leet dpsers.  What do you think your most important job is in any boss fight?  Dps right?  Sorry, wrong.  It’s staying alive.  I’m sure about half of the people reading this post, just stopped, which is unfortunate, because they’re probably the asshats who die early in every boss fight.  But, in the hope that some of you are still reading, I’ll continue.  Why is it so important that you stay alive?  I’ll get to that, but first lets address the reasons you die.  I find that most dps deaths come from four causes:

1. Aggro Whores - Warlocks and rogues, I’m talking to you.  These are the guys who go all out like every boss fight is a race you can win in the first minute.  Inevitably they pull aggro, die early, and blame the healers.  Also they ALWAYS claim to have used their aggro reducing abilites like Vanish, Feign Death, and Soul Shatter.  Somehow these abilities always get resisted, or just plain don’t work.  It’s not their fault!  The best part is when they brag about how they consistently break 2000 dps.  Yes, you hit it for about 30 seconds.  Then you die.  If I thought you were smart enough to understand basic math, I’d point out that if you managed to stay alive the whole fight and cut your dps in half you’d do more damage.
2. Lazy Hybrids - Am I the only raid leader that is fed up with enhancement shamans.  Do you guys even put your healing spells on your action bars?  Same goes for you feral druids.  And don’t bother posting any stupid comments about how tough it is for you to shift forms or drop out of shadow.  Don’t bother whining about how mana inefficient you are.  If you die, you are out of mana.  If you die, you don’t put any more dps.  You can take a quick break and heal yourself.  I play a hybrid myself, and every time my health goes below about 80% I cast a quick heal.  That’s why I’m still alive and dpsing, while your bitching about not getting heals.
3. Blind Fuckers - This is the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for those useless morons who can’t MOVE OUT OF THE FUCKING FIRE!  Seriously, move.  That’s what the mouse and those little arrow buttons are for.  Use them.
4. Lazy Raiders - These are the guys who can’t be bothered to click on the bandage or healing buttons on their hot bars.  Maybe they never even bothered to put them on their bars.  Or they’re too busy making a fucking sandwich or something.  I’d swear some of the dps I’ve raided with don’t even bother to bring consumables to raids.

So why is it so important to stay alive?  SImple.  Every person that dies, reduces the chance of winning a boss fight.  In most fights the effect is small, in some fights like Archimonde, it’s enormous.  But even in the fights where you have a nice long enrage timer, every dps death adds up.  Think of it this way.  Let’s say you’re in a raid with 2 tanks, 8 healers, and 15 dps.  For simplicity let’s say the tanks do half the damage that a dps does.  If you’re fighting a boss with 8 million health and all your dps do around the same damage, each dps will need to do 500k damage to kill the boss.  At say 1000 dps the fight would last a little over eight minutes.  But one shithead dies right at the beginning.  Now the rest of the dps need to cover his 500k damage.  Which adds 30 seconds to the fight.  Doesn’t seem like much, but that’s 30 seconds during which your healers are low on mana, your tanks might be running out of oh shit abilities like Last Stand, and that enrage timer is just a little closer.  And every dps that dies makes it worse.

When we got our first Illidari Council kill, there were some contributing factors, like changes to healing assignments and better interrupt rotations, but the number one reason we won was that people stayed alive.  And when we missed the interrupts on two heals in the last minute of the fight and the Main Tank died right as they enraged, the only reason we won, is because we still had enough people alive that we burned them down in ten seconds before they could wipe the raid.

So stay alive.  Your raid leader will thank you.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments over the last week, and a large number of them have been…

You complain about how no one knows how to use ability X, Y, and Z, but you clearly don’t know anything because I put out amazing dps.

… and?

Let me rephrase that.  So fucking what.  I hate to burst your bubble but very few fights are won by raw dps.  Unless you’re in a top raiding guild that is burning through content so fast that you getting every server first kill, chances are your dps are geared so well that you can mostly ignore enrage timers.  When a smart raid leader puts together a raid, he doesn’t just pick people based on dps.  It’s usually your class abilites that he or she is picking.  A rogue may outdps an enhancement shaman, but the shaman buffs four other people.  A lock may out dps a mage, but he can’t cast int buffs or sheep on trash pulls.

Look at the last time your guild beat an enrage timer boss for the first time.  Chances are you had the same gear when you killed it as you did on earlier attempts when you ran out of time.  So what made the difference?  Simple, people learned their jobs, which let them focus on maximizing their dps.  Anyone that can hammer a couple of buttons will see their dps jump 25% or more once they learn their part in a fight and can focus on button mashing.

What separates a great player from a medicore one, is mastery of ALL of their class and spec abilities.  Which is why I don’t care how much dps your Hunter does, when you can’t remember to feign death.  I don’t give a shit that your Lock can hit 2k dps if you don’t life drain when your health is low.  I do great damage on my Shaman, but if I kept forgetting to drop totems, I’d kick my ass out of the raid.

Then I’d come here and post about how much I suck!

Sorry if you couldn’t access AngryRaidLeader yesterday.  My hosting company is supposed to automatically increase my bandwidth limit if it gets low, and they failed.  And while I hate to see the site down like that, it’s because I’ve had over 10,000 visitors since friday, which is up from the 100-200 a day I was averaging.  So there is an upside.  Thanks for reading, I’ll have a new post or two up later tonight.

And a special thanks to everyone that has been visiting my sponsors.  I think I’ll need that money when I get my next hosting bill.  I’ll be putting up some new advertising in the coming weeks that won’t be full of gold sellers and power leveling sites.

If you haven’t stumbled across this little YouTube gem yet, you must stop what you are doing and go watch The Guild.  Unless you’re doing something really important, like brain surgery.  Brain surgery is totally more important than YouTube videos.  So is sex.  But if you’re having sex, why are you reading this.  You must be into some kinky shit.

“Yeah, pull my hair!  Now read me the blog.  Yeah, read it to me!  Read it me!  Read it!  Read it!  Read it!  That’s it!  Right there!  Now smack my ass!”

But if you’re not doing brain surgery or getting some strange, totally go check out The Guild.  Funny writing and great examples of some MMO sterotypes.  Only one problem.  No… Angry… Raid… Leader….  You’re never gonna get anywhere unless you have a hate filled, unstable, psycho to tell you how bad you’re screwing up.

Seriously though check it out.  Felicia Day is some serious geek girl eye candy.  You may have seen her in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  Unless you live under a rock and haven’t heard of the In-ter-net.

I’ve posted here about the problems we’ve had recently with our raids.  Players not showing, people taking breaks before LK, wiping to shit that was on farm, and all kinds of other retarded shit.

But then a couple of weeks ago a guild just below us in progression quit raiding and broke up and we invited a group of them to raid with us.  All I can say is, I should have wrecked some guilds a long time ago.  Fuck recruiting one person at a time.  Bust a guild then grab a half dozen people who actually know what the hell they’re doing.

After a good week of raiding, we went in tonight and got our first council kill.  It wasn’t pretty, we missed two interrupts on the priest when we were below 10%, then the Main Tank on Gathios died at 1%, but we managed to finish them off.  Time of fight 15:10.  Yes that is ten seconds after the enrage timer.  We’re lucky as shit I guess.  It’s a pretty cool fight, and now we have a pretty good chance of downing Illidan before LK, but after being on interrupt duty all night, I have to say one thing…

Fuck Reflective Shield right in it’s ass!  Fuck the shield, fuck her for casting it, fuck the developer who gave it to her.  And fuck every strategy guide that says it reflects 50% of the damage.  Last time I checked my Lightning Bolt spell doesn’t hit for 10-12k, so explain how a shield reflects 5-6k damage on my ass.  I got so tired of dying to a poorly timed spell reflect combined with a Flamestrike/Blizzard/Deadly Poison, that we eventually just stopped dpsing during the shields.

Then we went upstairs and Leroy’d Illidan, cause you just have to.  Expect to read lots of blogs about unprepared raiders and how much I hate Illidan in the weeks to come.

I know that if you’ve been reading my blog your probably thinking, “Wow!  This guy is like the greatest Warcraft player ever!”  And while that is mostly true, even someone full to bursting with finger lickin awesomeness such as myself makes the occasional mistake.  Today I will share one of those with you.

Last summer we had finished Gruul’s Lair and started in on Serpentshrine Cavern.  Like a lot of guilds we skipped over Hydross and did Lurker first.  There were a couple of wipes while people were learning that spout has more in common with a riot police water cannon than a water pistol.  And a few more while the squishies learned that standing in front of an add with a cleave that hits for OMFGALLYOURHEALTH, is unwise.

Now despite playing a shaman I had never used the water walking/breathing spells much because I’m too lazy to keep track of reagents, but fish oil drops off everything in there so by the second week I had a lot of it and started water walking if we wiped and had to run back.  So we wipe, run back, rebuff, fish him out and I start dpsing.  45 seconds later, spout starts, I call it out and back up off the platform.

See where this is going?

But I don’t sink.  Now maybe if I had used the water walking spell more often I would have realized what was wrong and clicked the buff off, but it never crossed my mind.  Instead my solution to my Jesus impression was to jump up and down, in the misguided belief that the extra force would plunge me through the seemingly sold water.  Then Spout hit….

Moral of the story: No matter how good you are, at some point you’ll fuck up in a hilarious manner and the 24 assholes you raid with will never, ever, ever let you forget it.

Ok, so I log in to write a few new posts and my little tracker that tells me when another blog is linking to mine shows two new ones.

• Stepford Mom - Who says she wants to marry me and have my babies, except she’s already taken.  That’s sweet of her, but why is it that nice women that like me are always taken.  My last ex-girlfriend has a website too.  But it’s NSFW and it has the world teen in the title.  I date bad bad women.
• WoW_Ladies: Girl Gamers of World of Warcraft - It’s a blog/community and they’re all women.  As if that isn’t cool enough.  There’s page after page of pics.  I think they should be the founders of the AngryRaidLeader fan club.  Chicks dig bad guys, right?

I’m glad that some women play online games.  My guild is a total sausage fest.  Our vent got so full on gay that I had to step in and insist that we try to keep it straight until like 9 PM.  Then the village people take over.  And for anyone who’s about to send me some big flame about what a homophobe I am, save your breath.  I love me some gay people.  Especially all the bear cubs who get big gay crushes on me and profess them when they get really drunk.  Like my friend Johhny Bacon.  I keep telling him to change it to Johnny Sausage cause he would get more ass, but he doesn’t believe me.

Wait where was I.  How did I get from talking about gamer chicks to gay dudes in Vegas?  See this is what my guild’s vent is like!