I have been creating YouTube videos of our recent kills, to provide vods for raiders and recruits. Looking through my YouTube channel, I found a video of my LijiPUG progression on mythic archimonde from many years ago. It’s a 3.5 hour long video, so I clicked in to see what things were like then.

I’m a bit in shock. It’s not that I have seen that many raid leaders, but at least from all the raid leaders I’ve seen, I think the leader I was at the time is by far the best raid leader. And this includes comparing to the me right now. You would think that with more experience a person could only get better at something like raid leading, but I think I was much better then.

It appears that Mythic Archimonde progression only took my LijiPUG 2 nights, before our first kill? In the description of my video it looked like we had only had a bit of progression on it on a previous night, and in that very video of our second night, we ended up killing it. and though by then I had many regulars, it was still a pug group and every night we still had many different people. When I compare that situation to the many raid groups I led in Syzygy after that time, I’m actually amazed. When did I end up feeling like difficult progression required a set group? When did I get used to the idea that progressing on the same boss for 30 hours was normal?

I’m actually starting to wonder if my time as a raid leader in Syzygy actually made me a weaker raid leader.

At the time of that video, I seemed to handle things so well. And looking at it now I don’t know if I could handle the same things as well anymore. The knowledge and understanding of every second of the fight, I can duplicate, I know, if I wanted to now. But I wonder if I haven’t become over-reliant on using logs to give me answers to what the relevant issues are, and as a result have lost some of that instinct that I had before in honing in on the heart of the problem. In this video, I figure out what the problem is, and then ask the raiders questions in ways that force them to address it with me, and then find out how to improve. It seems much more interactive, effective, and respectful, compared to what I tend to do now, which is go into logs and find out if my hunches are right, then tell people what they did badly. The difference is subtle, but I can see what I did then made everyone much more aware of the issues and brought everyone along as problem-solvers, rather than as subordinates who just followed my orders.

And it’s stuff like this, just the very subtle balancing of telling people what to change with asking people questions so they are constantly proactively trying to improve. I had that balance down pat at that time. And I no longer do. Or it’s the finding the heart of the problem even though it appears most everyone else was distracted by irrelevant stuff. Or it’s the way I seemed to be relaxed and chill and happy while being able to effectively make all the necessary and correct analyses in the space of just a few moments, even when people challenge me in ways that would depress or annoy me now. All this, and more, I was so good at then. Why do I no longer feel that I’m good at it anymore?

It’s like, there has been a deterioration both of my brain and of my emotional situation. Like I don’t think as clearly as I used to. Like I also have all the baggage of my Syzygy trauma weighing me down and preventing me from finding the right balance in how I handle situations and how I talk. And as time went on, I forgot what I used to be like, and the weaker version of me is the new normal, so much so that I didn’t even realize how different I was before.

I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe I cannot see my current self through a clear lens, and maybe I am not that much weaker than I was at the time of the video. Or maybe there are things in life that a person simply cannot recover from, despite being quite young still. Perhaps the trauma of the past will make it so I will never be able to handle challenges and critiques from people well anymore. Perhaps the constant strain I went through burned enough neurons that my intelligence is actually permanently damaged.

Anyway, here is the video so it’s easy to access.