There’s too much sometimes. It’s not just the money thing, although that’s certainly part of it – there are so many jerks in randoms, so much frustration in the raids I lead, and I just got too fed up with it. It’s just time to be done.

I’m playing a lot more StarCraft II these days, though. I’m still only Silver League, but come September 27th I’ll have a lot more time on my hands to make a push up to Gold or higher. Should be fun.

So I guess the question is really how much did I accomplish in WoW? Looking back, I’ve finished most raid content every expansion since BC, helped out what seems like every NPC in the game, written a blog for a couple of years about the game, and earned a ridiculous amount of achievement points. For $15 a month, it wasn’t a bad deal – I guess eventually I could only take so much.

I might reopen this blog to talk about how I’m doing in StarCraft. We’ll see. Either way, it’s been a fun ride.

Obviously, I disagree with some of the ways that raids are being run right now, and yes, I’m frustrated with some of the people in the guild still, but it’s not my job to make policy anymore, so there’s not much I can do about it. Maybe I made the wrong decision when I gave up the GM spot – but that’s neither here nor there. What’s done is done. Guess I didn’t realize just how big of a deal it was to me that I had an active voice in guild policy. I mean, I still do, to an extent – I was a pretty influential voice in determining the way that the guild would be raiding in Cataclysm – but I’m coming in from a much more outside perspective than I was before.

I still have some issues in RL as well, a pretty tricky class coupled with a complicated prospective relationship means that I usually have a lot on my mind, and don’t really have time for blogging. To that end, I’ll be going on hiatus for a while from blogging, not sure when or if I’ll be returning. I can still be reached at velinath (at) cloudyday.net or via commenting on my blog.

Thanks, everyone. Whether I come back to blogging or not, it’s been a fun ride.

YES WE DID. Got our All You Can Eat on Thursday, which gave 4 separate people the meta. Fantastic stuff.

Anyway, on to what this post’s actually about – playing a mage in 4.0. I’ve played around with a couple talent specs – both Fire and Arcane – and I’m pretty happy with the changes that were made. Feels like Mage Armor is the best thing for Arcane right now with the new mastery, which is pretty cool – each spec having its own armor that’s suited to the playstyle and so forth. Neat stuff. Onwards to Fire, though.

After speccing on Tuesday night, I spent some time benchmarking with the test dummies in Orgrimmar, just like everyone else. Pulled around 10k DPS without any uses of my Impact proc, so I was really looking at just a basic Patchwerk-style single target fight. All in all, I’m fairly impressed with the new tools they’ve given us, including the cool Hot Streak proc chance on non-criticals. That said, the coolest talent in Fire tree is probably Cauterize – I spent last night thinking about the bosses with “nuke” mechanics that we can ignore if we spec properly now. Festergut and Algalon, of course, are the first that I can think of. Definitely looking at offspeccing Fire as well as my main spec just so I can have the option to pick that talent up.

Rotation feels pretty much the same as it did in 4.0, with the welcome change that I don’t really need to worry about Scorching now – Pyroblast procs pretty much cover it for me. The only real difference is going to be watching for Impact and Fire Blasting that – whether that’ll come in handy on single target fights, I have yet to see. Combustion changes are interesting – I’m looking for an addon that tracks the strength of my Ignite DoT right now, as it should help a lot – any suggestions?

edit: found one! Check out CombustionHelper, it works great. (of course, this addon had the added side effect of making me worry about Frostfire Bolt. Since I’m pulling 14k DPS on some fights without it, I’m not too concerned.)

Mastery stacking is questionable right now from what I’ve seen. There’s a nice bonus straight from training; if anything, I’m dropping only haste and not crit to pick up a bit of mastery. We’ll see how it turns out. I think it won’t make too much difference until we hit Cata and there’s actually gear with mastery on it.

Pity fire mages are getting a slight nerf soon. Hopefully it doesn’t affect too much.

In other news, the tankadin changes are nice (after 12 seconds – once we get to start pressing our shield of the righteous button, you know, the one that can hit for 40,000) and the new druid tree form that got revealed is absolutely fantastic – although I may have to glyph the old one and switch it in/out depending. I really liked the old treant model too.

Cloudy Day downed H Sindragosa this past Tuesday – after working on her for three weeks, it was nice to finally get the kill. People finally started actually coordinating and getting stuff done, which was great – on the kill, things went smoothly in P3, which in itself is a feat on Heroic. We followed this kill up with our guild-second H Putricide kill – which, again, was one of those things where we spent a night wiping in stupid ways, and then things just came together on the last attempt. I was so happy to finally see him go down again – it got a lot of guildies the H Plagueworks achievement.

This is really just a roundabout way of getting to the actual point of this blog post, though. I’ve been GM of Cloudy Day for, oh, about three months now – started leading before that, but officially got the GM spot around July 9th or so. I’m pretty burnt out on it, though; having to deal with some people being bad as well as the regular day-to-day drama is not something I’m really cut out for.

Essentially, I took the position out of necessity; our GM at the time had been AFK for the last 4-5 months, and someone needed to step in. As our other officers had either left or had RL stuff come up, I was basically the only person that was already in a leadership position and also had the time required to be a GM – so I took the job rather than letting the guild die. Three months in, though, it’s getting pretty tough for me to keep going.

At the same time, it’s hard for me to give it up – I feel like so far, I’ve been fairly unsuccessful as a GM, and I don’t want to leave without having the opportunity to give something to the guild. I decided the best option would be frost drakes, and those have been going well. If things keep up, we should be getting our first sets of drakes in the next week or so, and should be able to finish off the achievement for most of our top raiders before Cataclysm hits.

After that, though, I really can’t justify being GM any longer. It’s become more of a job than anything else, and that’s tough for me. Maybe it’s because at the moment I’m both GMing and raid leading, and that’s putting quite a stress on me – I don’t know. Either way, though, it’s not too fun anymore.

I figure the best thing to do is finish leading during WotLK, and then transition leadership as the guild heads into Cataclysm and level 85. That way I don’t try and switch leadership while we’re still actively raiding, and also allow the new GM to start taking charge and getting things ready to go before we start raiding again.

This was supposed to be my blog post for recently. Unfortunately, I had a pretty terrible night tonight. Two of my guildies got into a pretty big fight, and I didn’t step in or try and break it up at all. It kind of woke me up to how much of not a GM I really am. I ended up essentially resigning as of tonight, and whoever wants the GM can take it.

Obligatory Alliance resto druid post.

It’s not fun anymore.

To combat this, I transferred my druid off-realm to play with some real-life friends. I do some casual raiding on the weekends, not leading or anything. It’s relaxing. I don’t have to dissect everyone else’s gameplay, I don’t have to deal with the drama, stuff like that. Playing like that is something I haven’t done in over a year, probably, and I missed it.

Maybe I’m meant to be a leader. I don’t know. It certainly seems like it – I’ve risen to an officer level in both guilds I’ve been in without really trying. It is frustrating, though, having to deal with everything – which is why I plan on giving up the GM position in Cataclysm and raiding casually both on Gul’dan and on Lightbringer with my RL friends. I enjoy raiding more than I do leading, and I think it’s for the best.

Of course, this leads straight into my quandary: I’ve told a couple close friends in Cloudy Day about my plans for Cataclysm, and they’re not exactly happy with my decision. I’ve heard from a couple people that they think I’m essentially abandoning them, which hurts a little – especially since I’m not planning on just up and leaving. That’s half the issue – the other half is that I can’t think of anyone that I want to give the GM spot to. Finding someone who wants to uphold the ideals of the guild, is also not cynical and jaded from being an officer/GM before, and is a good enough player/administrator that they could do this job – that’s tough, and I haven’t found that person yet.

What would you guys do? I love the guild I’m in, but I just don’t want to lead it anymore. What’s the best way to handle this?

Before I get the comments of “Hey, Sindra’s hard!”, trust me, I’m aware – but this guild downed Sindra 10 waaaay back during the days of only 5% pity buffs. We’re a mere 3 achievements away from getting the first guild frost drakes – All You Can Eat, H Sindra, and Long Time (LK). Just trying to kill reg Sindra, though, is apparently sometimes beyond the grasp of some. We scraped by this week with no hope on the achievement – we had people getting ice blocked 2 and 3 at a time, melee wasn’t moving away, pretty much everything that could go wrong did. We ended up with what is probably the sloppiest Sindragosa kill that I had ever seen – especially for a 10/12 hardmodes guild.

After that mess was over with, I made the silly decision to go ahead with my plan for the week, which was to kill LK and do the 30-stacks-of-Plague achievement. People still couldn’t bring themselves to listen when I (or another of my officers) said “HEY, X, PLAGUE ON YOU”, or “RUN TO THE OFFTANK”, or pretty much anything to that effect.

Oddly, once I made the decision to give up on the achievement, things went fine. People paid attention – or at least enough attention to get by – and the LK kill didn’t look horrible.

I don’t consider myself the authority on how to play perfectly all the time by any means, but I do expect some modicum of attention from my raiders. I ended up having to give a little speech at the end of the night last night, which is something I absolutely despise doing. I feel like I shouldn’t have to treat people like they’re in kindergarten – if I can pay attention to what I’m doing, watch bars for other people, and fill my role successfully, it really shouldn’t be my job to babysit everyone through a raid. I shouldn’t have to say “X, ice tomb on you. Y, Z, Q, move away. MOVE AWAY. MOVE AWAY FROM THE GUY WITH THE SKULL ON HIS HEAD AND AN ARROW POINTING AT HIM. MO-goddamn it, aoe, go.” That shouldn’t happen – and yet it does. Frequently. It just boggles the mind.

This is why I’m considering rerolling for Cata, to be honest. I have some good RL friends that play this game, and a few of the people who I don’t have to yell at all the time want to come with me. It might be worth it, just to get away from the mess that things have become in my current guild.

A final note: As some of my tweets have indicated, yes, I am indeed in the Cataclysm beta. I may post some screenshots in the next couple days – there’s some great stuff to see. Leveling is also fun again, which is nice – quests are well-paced and there’s a nice amount of lore included. The only thing I don’t agree with is that you have to explore a dungeon entrance before you can queue for it – seems needless, IMO.

Back in 2009, Dusk of Uldum started a thread on his realm forums – the beginning of a story, with a relatively simple premise – you start out in Razor Hill as a level 80 hunter, but all of the NPCs are missing. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more involving – there are parts that will just have you giggling as well as some masterful tension-building. This all leads up to a stunning climax that I, for one, was awed by.

It’s written in the style of a text adventure such as Zork, but the writing incorporates not only the WoW world but also elements of Silent Hill – the player interaction leads to some pretty hilarious situations, especially early on, but it’s also interesting to watch the characters develop.

Dusk’s writing is very high quality – it reminded me of Terry Pratchett at times, which is a very good thing. He’s writing a book right now as well, and I fully expect to be camping out outside my local bookstore the day it comes out.

The story’s been backed up on http://thelittlestmurloc.com, or you can find the original thread stickied on the Uldum realm forums. I’d definitely recommend reading this one – it’s absolutely fantastic. (From what I’ve heard, it’s somewhere around 225,000* words, so expect to spend some time).

*see comments, I was way off originally

edit: As Dusk noted in the comments section, Tednug and Scratchfever are going to be NPCs in Cataclysm! There’s a nice screenshot from beta here.

My current guild, which I joined due to its great atmosphere and ultra-charismatic leadership, is dying. It’s not a fast death by any means; ever since the GM when I joined quit, we’ve been on a downhill slope. The next leaders started to steer us towards a more hardcore style of raiding, and some people had some issues with that. After they left, we did all right for a while, but our current GM is indefinitely AFK – perhaps permanently – and our current leadership isn’t really working out.

Not that I don’t like the people in charge right now – trust me, I do – but there are conflicts. Attendance is the lowest it’s ever been, with all of 8 people on some raid nights – and remember, I’m in a 25-man guild. I’m supposed to be the raid leader, but I haven’t been doing much of that – one of our officers has been mainly leading raids recently, and his style clashes – to put it mildly – with both the raiders and my image of what Cloudy Day was when I joined. One of the friends I made from this guild actually /gquit tonight over sdrama in raid, and a few more guildies are getting pushed close to the edge. The whole passive-aggressive thing that’s going on right now isn’t helping at all. Our other officer is kind of semi-inactive right now too, so he can’t really do much to keep things going.

The other thing is, I’m not really a leader. Yeah, I study the fights and know what I need to do, but just like it used to be in Neo Imperela (my old guild), I just don’t really fit into a leadership role. I think that’s what most missing from CD right now – a really good leader – and I don’t know where to look for one right now.

I hate to see something like this happen to a guild that I once really, truly loved being in. I need some suggestions as to where to go from here – should I stick it out and see what happens, try and pick up some slack and step up into a leadership role, or just give up and go my own way, as much as that would hurt? What are your thoughts?