The last boss of a new raid tier on that first heroic week is always an aspiration for any mythic raider. Often, most mythic guilds cannot manage to kill it that first week, and the next week when mythic opens, many guilds end up killing the first mythic boss before going back and killing the last heroic boss. Otherwise, several mythic guilds don’t really start mythic until the second mythic week, using the first one to actually clear the raid on heroic difficulty. Syzygy always full cleared on the heroic week though, and usually this was made possible by the extra time I, and sometimes a few other raiders, put in by pugging the last boss before our raid to gain experience. Normally, one would expect that a difficult boss can only be killed after the raid has wiped a lot of times on it, and learned the intricacies of the fight (how many seconds after the last ability do we have to recover? When do some bad overlaps of mechanics happen? Does this fight benefit from overhealing, or overdpsing? etc.). Sometimes, you can push your raid group far ahead by having the raid leader experience and know all of the details of the fight, and use good callouts and raid leading to pull the group through. That is what I would always do. Basically, my guild would benefit from the struggle my pug groups would go through.

A new tier opened in WoW a day or two ago, and I see Syzygy‘s current raid leader doing the same thing. And it reminds me of times when I did it before. I struggled more though, because I was raiding 6 days a week for Syzygy‘s two groups, so I had very little time to spend in pugs to get this experience. I managed it by sacrificing my sleep and my entire social life in real life. This had serious consequences for me though. I remember the fourth raid I raid led, called Tomb of Sargeras, about one year in from when I originally formed Syzygy. By this time our guild was established as quite a strong guild, ending usually somewhere with ranks of between US 50 and 150, and I had thought by this time that my raiders should already know how much I do with them, and I had earned their trust and respect. So I was under the assumption that my raiders would know that I had spent 8 hours outside of the raid pugging the last boss on heroic, that first heroic week, that I had spent a ton of effort learning the fights, and especially the last boss. I was under the assumption that they would not challenge my decision on things they would themselves know less about.

That last boss of Tomb of Sargeras was called Kil’jaeden, and during the 8 hours or so I spent pugging it, I had learned that a specific ratio of healers to dps would considerably ease up the fight. My forming our group to meet that ratio meant there were a couple weaker players in the group. One of our tanks at the time, Beastgril, did not understand why I would choose to do this. He whispered me to criticize my decision, and express his dissatisfaction with me. All my burnout, all my exhaustion from sacrificing everything for the benefit of my guild, and all my frustration of knowing that for a year I had done so much for everyone while most everyone did nothing but complain, it all welled up. I gave into my emotions and made a really bad decision: I responded to Beastgril in a whisper and told him that he was making me not want to play the game. He responded by saying well I’m making him hate the game, or something like that. I couldn’t take it. My thought process was: how can he do this? He barely did anything, just showed up to raid and reaped the rewards of all the effort I put in so that my raiders can enjoy the game. There were even times when other raiders complained about him, and I used my  full support of him to tamp down on any problems that may have arisen from this. And he was one of my favorite people on the team, because he had always been strong, fun, and had a good attitude.

But really, he’s just one person, and isn’t everyone else like this? Out of the 75 or so people who passed through my guild by then, maybe only 5 people were not like this? I was operating on barely any sleep, had no life, did everything I could for my guild, secretly helped and supported almost every guild member when others tried to use politics and intrigue to tear them down, and my thanks is this? By this time, almost nobody in my life had anything good to say about me: my real life friends and family didn’t because I stopped seeing them to spend time on my guild; and most of my guildies didn’t because apparently after they got used to me they don’t feel there’s any need to validate me or praise me anymore, and only a need to criticize me any time they are unhappy with something (and with 50 people there’s always going to be someone unhappy about something or other). I say my guildies apparently felt this way, because I have been persuaded since that all of them actually had a very high opinion of me, it’s just not something most ever expressed to me after they had been in my guild for a little while.

I remember after that exchange with Beastgril, I broke down. I was raid leading my weekday team on Kil’jaeden, and I started crying. It was apparent, because I was making callouts, telling people to move where, kill what, but I was crying while I was doing it. Everyone could tell, and the atmosphere immediately changed. I could almost feel everyone tense up and sit straighter in their chairs. On that very pull, we killed the boss. Afterwards, people joked with me that I should cry more and maybe that’ll get everyone to perform better, but I know that that was also really a turning point, where instead of sparking joy in that group of people, I only gave them tension. A bit over a week later a bunch of them decided to leave the guild, a blow so enormous to us that it was the only tier we were unable to finish mythic and get the Cutting Edge achievement. We probably went from US ~100 to US 5000 in rankings because of that.