This week our social raid group will attempt to kill Xavius for the first time.
It will 'only' be on normal mode but the majority of the raid haven't done it before so I'm not looking forward to explaining the mechanics.
It's not that the mechanics are particularly complicated, they just sound complicated when you list them out loud.
The kind of awareness and personal responsibility that I enjoy in fights is often difficult to convey to others... for instance soaking the adds in P1 requires an individual to know they are in the dream state and to see the adds spawn, it's not something the RL can micro-manage - people just have to do it!
In an ideal world, we would just take a couple of attempts to familiarise our team with the different mechanics in each phase. I don't feel like we have that luxury though as around half the team will be made up of pugs that probably won't have the patience for wipes.
I don't blame the pugs to be honest. They haven't signed up for progress and are probably expecting a quick farm kill and a chance at some loot, despite my attempts to give them an idea in the event description (does anyone but me even read it?)
So it puts pressure on us to minimise the wipes which has then led to me switching to my Shaman to boost dps.
It feels like a catch 22...
If I switch to my Shaman, we kill bosses quicker but we learn less about the team and our true position.
If I don't switch, we burn through pugs and spend half the night searching for more people... still not learning much.
It's healers that we are really short of so I tried to come in and heal (in dps gear) on my Shaman... what a disaster that was!
I know how to heal.
I know how to raid lead.
Both at the same time? HAHA... no chance!
I ended up doing neither job particularly well but definitely focused more on the leading, making me a liability to the healing team... I would just forget to heal!
We have no healers at all though so pugging 3 or 4 at a time is a bit of a nightmare.
I can't see any way out of it apart from actively recruiting though, and I am not going down that road again!
My best hope is that the team grows organically, with people attracted back into playing as they see the guild more active again... or that some of our hunters get bored of shooting things ;-)
Regardless of the pugging woes, it's been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to starting the next tier fresh with the team.
It seems your fears were unfounded my friend since we got him down in about 3 attempts 😏
ReplyDeleteYeah, we did well. Learned the fight much quicker than I expected so only cycled through the pugs once :-)
DeleteThe new system is great for raid leaders but I still hate pugging