I’ve decided no matter how short it boring, I must do one post every day I do wow. It’s way past time I kept a log of my daily experiences, so that I can document this process, whether it ends successfully or not.

I guess from that start you can tell I’ve been less than positive lately. I think it may be slight burnout, and that’s probably rubbing off on my guildies and just in general making the whole situation worse and worse.

Today not enough people showed up for us to progress. Same thing happened last Thursday. And the posts to not showing up until late came last minute, so it was quite hard to find a way around it. We normally would have been able to, but 2 of our raiders quit wow a couple of days ago, and though we have found possible replacements, the earliest they would be able to join is next raid week, so this last day has been incredibly rough. And since many people (including myself) are already experiencing some exhaustion, seeing several people not show up is much harder to take than it normally would be.

Instead of the 6 hours of progression we were expecting to get this week on mythic star auger, the 8th boss out of 10, we got half an hour or less of progression on it. 

Things I can think of that I may have done to contribute to this include:

1) hyping everyone up for the earlier bosses, but not being prepped enough as raid leader, and thereby not being able to pull us through with only a few pulls. Instead we went through many many pulls, where people stayed patient on the surface, but were probably privately very frustrated.

2) being exhausted dealing with setting up the weekend group, drama in the weekday group, and having guildies complain to me and telling me they don’t like or agree with my decisions. This exhaustion is lowering my motivation to prep well by far, and when I’m not in wow, instead of wanting to prep, I just want to do anything that’s non-wow-related and just relaxing. So I become less well prepped, and I feel worse about myself, and this ultimately makes everything become a vicious cycle.

3) not giving into the desires of people in guild, who were offended during the drama, to punish those they feel deserve it. I worry that these people are so unhappy that they didn’t get the satisfaction and vindication of knowing those they felt behaved badly were punished, that they are also less incentivized to want to do well. 
Ultimately, the only thing I can do is get myself out of this rut. 

So our roster has problems now. Our roster had problems in EN and in ToV, and we got through it and did better than anyone expected us to. I have always been able to give us a roster of enough people to pull through (even though I have never stopped worrying that the rapid turnover is a reflection on my poor leadership skills). 

So I feel my raid leading has been inadequate and I haven’t been prepped enough. Well stop whining about it and feeling bad about it and start prepping. 

So I’m exhausted. Did I gain 20 white hairs in a week like I did at the start of EN? No. I lived through that, I pulled us through that. I’ll live through this. I’ll pull us through this. 
In the end, instead of doing progression today, we did achievement runs. Putting aside the huge disappointment I feel in not being able to progress, as well as the nagging worry about the effect on morale, the achievement run in itself was fun. I was able to relax in a raid I raid lead for the first time in over half a year probably. I was able to enjoy myself, feel decently good about myself, and chat with people and enjoy the conversation. 

Yes. We’ll pull through. And even in times this disheartening and this scary for us, moments of fun and enjoyment did flash through. That’s the main thing I need to keep in mind.