Staving Off the Burn

[Kiralyn]

It's been over a year since our first Maulgar kill. Over a year of of learning, tweaking, and teaching strats. A year of handling recruitment issues, DKP complaints, poaching, and drama. A year of raid leading. You'd think that with the end in sight, probably 4 months away from Wrath, I'd catch a second wind. It hasn't happened. It's gotten harder and harder to deal with the day to day crap, people complaining about loot, people trying to find loopholes in the system, people doing random trial runs with other guilds. It's affecting the players as well. People are taking breaks, randomly missing raids where they used to be 100%. If anything the stress of it all feels like it's increasing.

We're 5/5 4/9 and wanting to be in Sunwell before Wrath lands. I've got 4 more months of the stress and the lack of sleep and handling the drama. How do you guys who do this day in and day out keep it together? We only raid 2 nights a week, and at this point I'm starting to doubt weather this is something I want to keep doing.

[Barkle]

You are not alone. There are an awful lot of guilds going thru this right now. Between summer vacations and the impending expansion, many guilds are having trouble keeping the raiding going. I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but it isn't you.

[Alifeyl]

This is why I am not in a guild and pretty much just pvp now. When my game started feeling like a job, I realized I was on the wrong track! Unfortunately, it is the nature of high level raiding - it is very demanding both time-wise and discipline-wise, and eventually even the best people burn out on it because WoW is, after all, just a game! I wish it was different, because I would love to be able to see the end-game content, but I'm just not willing to do what it takes anymore.

[vosfihalo]

My lock is on vacation right now; I'm trying to level other toons before the xpack. He's usually parked in the area my alt is leveling, and I drag him out when there are hordies that won't leave me alone.

[Barclande]

Take a break. Here in a few more weeks, with summer coming to an end it should pick back up. At least that's my hope.

Personally I have taken quite a step back from 5/6 SSC 3/4 TK and 4/5 MH to a guild that is gearing people up in Kara. With me back in their guild (I had left when they stopped raiding, to go to another raiding guild that had the same problems as yours), I have started up a second Kara group to get people geared. Basically I do one raid night a week and the rest is spent casually leveling my alts until we get enough geared people to break back into 25-man.

[Bodhisage]

The locks in my guild are also pretty upset with the whole "spell power" change that will come w/ the xpack. It's just trouble also when people look at 70 blues and see they are better than than T6/Guardian level stuff.

At this point what drives me is seeing the fights. Killing Illidan at level 80 just won't be the same. There are fights I want to do and know I'm geared for, the frustrating part comes when other ppls lack of gear/skill is what's holding me back. But there is no point to back track to T5 now, so I guess it's wipe wipe wipe in Black Temple until others start to preform.

[Kiralyn]

Woah, front page news. Who woulda thought...

And yeah, the break thing isn't really a possibility in my mind. It's more than a DPS class saying "I'm out for a couple weeks, take care." I handle everything from invites to loot most of the time, and while I know the raid can carry on without me (and has in the past), it's more that I feel a sense of responsibility to be there for my guild. Maybe that's the biggest indication that it's become a job, but it also isn't something I can walk away from without serious consideration. I've done most everything I can think off to try and get back to enjoying my time in game. I've tried not playing except for raids, I've leveled and geared a shaman, who has healed out Hyjal raids in a pinch, I've tried to PvP just for a change of pace; any suggestions on how I can get a fresh outlook on raid leading and guild management without simply walking away?

[Alifeyl]

What about delegation? Can you get a few responsible people (officers?) to take on different areas - a master looter, a person to do invites, a person to make up the groups, etc.? So that you can just be a raid member sometimes and enjoy throwing out the DPS? I know that would be hard because so often, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. But if it's not fun anymore, maybe it would be better to have someone else do it, even if it's not done exactly the way you would do it.

Just an idea - like I said above, I did walk away, and I was never a raid leader. I just hate to see you losing the awesome funness of being an imba, OP, fear-abusing warlock!

[Cynic]

Kiralyn, unless you're doing something unhealthy like raiding 7-10 hours a night, two nights a week isn't enough to clear BT before wrath, let alone sunwell. I'm afraid you might have to pick up another night or two. Eventually you'll get to the point (Soon, I imagine) where all you can do in those two nights is 5/5 Hyjal and perhaps 6/9 BT.

The generally accepted, and the generally functional method of crushing your way through bt is 3-4 nights a week I'm afraid. Two-night progression is certainly possible but either you're going to leave Hyjal entirely untouched for a month (possibly months) or you're only going to have about an hour to two hours a week of time on progression bosses.

[Kiralyn]

Two nights has gotten us this far, and for better or worse, that's what we do. It's possible we might do a third now and then, but that's it. We also have a hard date set to stop Hyjal and focus strictly on BT.

As for delegation, the reason I lead is because no one else would. It started with me reviewing strats, because I could simplify things much better than the guy that was doing it, and it turned into full-on raid leading. To this day no one will step up and take it off of me. I don't think the raid would die if I were to walk away, but I think there would be a lot of problems.

I have been delegating a lot, but again, there is a lack of willing participants. People don't even want to handle something as simple as loot. We did recently get back out old raid leader from MC/BWL, and I've been leaning on him heavily as of late. Killing Archimonde has our wings back under us, so it isn't all bad, but I still feel like it's a matter of time before I get fed up and walk.