Growing pains on Heroic Ji-Kun

When doing H Ji-Kun last week on my alt hunter, I made a lot of stupid mistakes as part of nest group 2, as I mentioned in my previous post. These mistakes led to wipes at times, and I was beyond frustrated.

My frustration was probably exacerbated by the fact that, while this group has killed H Ji-Kun several times, and I had no real experience with the fight, I was expecting to be successful without much experience. In reality, I hadn’t gone through the learning process at the same time they did. I was, in fact, way behind. And on heroic fights, not having mastered mechanics is even less forgiving than it is on normals, and I was making all kinds of dumb mistakes. The worst was not jumping down to nest two (also nest eight) correctly. I would not get the jump off the platform correctly and miss the nest entirely, resulting in periods of pulling at my hair helplessly while my hunter spun upwards towards death during Quills. As I said in that post, it was very, very frustrating. My self confidence was pretty low at that point.

It was probably a somewhat unreasonable way to think about myself, but, if nothing else, it motivated me.

After the fact, I reflected on it, and reminded myself that it was really my first time. And I thought about some fixes to my problem, with the idea that I would make staying alive and correctly getting to nests my top priorities the next time we did the fight.

Last night, after spending three hours wiping on H Tortos the previous night, I got my chance to prove that I had learned something. And in one pull, I proved to myself that I had somewhat overreacted (internally/emotionally) to my failures during the previous week’s attempts.

The keys to my successes/failures were two-fold: 1) I needed to use or take advantage of a speed boost when going to lower nests, and 2) I needed to have an awareness of which nests I was responsible for.

Part 2 was easy enough. Nest team 2 only has four nests, and so once I got into my head that nest 9 is both upper and lower, and watched my timers, and kept track of the tanks, I was fine.

Part 1 was an execution thing, and I managed to get it down just fine. On the first lower nest, I used Darkflight. On the second one, I ran with the Down Draft and got a nice jump. And aside from that, everything went fine.

It was kind of lame, probably. But I had to go with what I had.

For the upper nests, I found that jumping down and then disengaging onto the main platform was a perfect solution.

The end result was a one-shot – in spite of my still-pathetic damage on that toon – and I didn’t die! I was very happy with the results. Sometimes, the best thing is to step back and think about the situation again, and make adjustments, rather than expecting that ramming yourself against the barrier will somehow produce a different result at some point. I’m glad that I gave it some thought, instead of going in and hoping that I’d simply ‘make the jumps’ this time.

…

Thanks for reading this bit by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

Through success and failure

In a post last week, I told you about how I was trying to speed-gear my “other” hunter, Ghilleadh.

There’s a story as to why that was happening, and since that story is winding down, I figure I can talk about it with more than a “this is what I’m going to try to do*” vibe to the post.

*One of my blogging faults, in my opinion.

Over the past month or so, our raid team has missed a couple of weeks. With that in mind, I brought Mushan to a couple of runs with a better-progressed guild, which I have written about already. I got my first full clear, first H Jin’rokh kill, and a couple of nice pieces along the way.

In that small bit of experience, there was some learning going on, on both sides. They learned that I was a competent player. I learned that they were good people to play with. And somewhere along the way, a couple of members of that team thought I was the full-time replacement for their recently-departed hunter. Of course, I was not.

However, getting to clear more content has been awesome. And so the idea was eventually floated, once certain people learned that I have two hunters, that we could gear up the second hunter fairly quickly, to run with them full-time on Tues-Thurs, with Mushan still running with my weekend team.

So last week I ran with them on Ghilleadh.

It was a largely frustrating experience.

Even going in at ilvl 486 – way below everyone else – I had a difficult time being carried. Being a non-contributor is tough for me. Perhaps that’s a personality flaw, at least in this situation, since I was not expected to contribute much. My biggest contributions that first day seemed to be kicking turtles on Tortos, the occasional well-timed Silencing Shot, and not doing dumb stuff to wipe the raid. In general, though, my DPS was, as expected, below the tanks’, despite my best efforts. The worst part, though, was when they decided to do H Ji-kun.

I had very little experience on that fight, and we just went into it, and I was assigned to the second nest team. And I failed all over the place on the nests, for dumb reasons. They are fixable issues, and I’m confident that I’ll be better for the experience when we tackle them this week. However, at the time, I was failing all around, and I hated the way I felt.

In spite of me, they downed Ji-Kun after several attempts, and we finished up the raid a couple of days later with few problems. Along the way, I got six pieces, including the Voice of the Quillen… which means that Ghilleadh already has a better weapon than Mushan. Which irks me. Of course.

Last weekend, my normal team raided, clearing up through Primordius on Saturday and spending most of Sunday night working on Iron Qon. Iron Qon, FYI, is a wall for our team. Just gonna say that right now. And as it stands, it’s on the docket for the entirety of this coming weekend, as we’re extending the lockout. Hopefully we can make some progress.

…

After the raid on Sunday night, one of the things I noticed was that my arms were very tight. This isn’t uncommon, since I tend to play a little more intensely than is perhaps good for me. However, with it being my fourth day of raiding in this lockout, as opposed to the second, the tightness and pain were a little more pronounced. And I started to think about how I was scheduled to raid again in less than 48 hours…

And I started thinking that a bad RSI (repetitive stress injury) might be in my near future with this type of schedule, which weighed heavily on my mind over the past couple of days. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was probably going to have to make a choice.

My choices were:

1) Continue as planned.

2) Pull Mushan out of Nos Consensio’s run and make the weekday raid my regular raid.

3) Decline the opportunity with the other guild and continue running with Nos Consensio, as I have for the past year-and-a-half-plus.

Choice 1 would be the easiest choice, socially. And not so much, physically.

With choice 2: I’m good friends with a couple of people in that guild, and becoming friends with a couple of others. And they even adjusted their raid time slightly to accommodate my potential work schedule. Those factors, combined with my natural predisposition to avoiding being a source of frustration to people (more than I may already be), made choice 2 tempting if choice 1 was going to be off the table.

That, and the fact that my best chance to kill Garrosh Hellscream before Christmas would be with that group, if we’re being totally honest here.

However, there are stronger ties in choice 3. Nos Consensio has given me a home for almost two years now. There are four people on that team (and one occasional substitute) that I’ve been raiding with for more than five years. I’ve built relationships to some degree or another with almost everyone else on the team as well. But the overwhelming factor is those four people in particular.

We are five people left from a splintered Wrath-era guild/raid team. We are good friends and good players. We have a good, long history. And there are two things I feel about playing with those people: a) I am personally committed to them, and have invested much time with them; and b) I want to play with those people.

I decided that I’m going to stay with the Nos Consensio run. I let the other guild know last night, and the raid leader respected my decision. It was tough, because killing at least some current content at heroic level is something I really want to be a part of. However, since I don’t think my hands will be able to handle the weekly stress for very long, and I have to make a choice, there really is no choice.

…

My girlfriend suggested I play more relaxed during raids. I don’t know if I can do that. If raids were easy mode – and our team was a great team running barely-challenging content – I could do that. Faceroll city would be a great raid for that. However, the point of all of this is to overcome challenges together, and I make sure that I do my part for our team. I don’t know how to not play intensely.

By the way, playing intensely doesn’t necessarily mean I am slamming (or spamming) the keys and mouse buttons. I just think that I am on edge, and my muscles are tense and poised to react, during raids. Sometimes I feel the tension up into my shoulders and neck. And I think that I probably need to have four or five days every week where I take a break from that type of sustained competitive tension.

…

I still took Ghilleadh with them last night, since I didn’t exactly give them much time to find an alternative. I got my first H Horridon kill with them on our second attempt (the wipe was a healer-DC issue), and did pretty well handling the pink elephant. And I’ll be running with them for the rest of the week, and I assume they will be looking at someone new next week. They have two people to replace by the time we descend on Orgrimmar, so they’ll want to get a look at someone as soon as possible.

…

It has been just under two weeks since the idea was hatched. In that time, I’ve put a lot of work in on Ghilleadh, between the raids and other gearing/Valor capping activities. And I’ll admit: right now, speed-gearing another hunter hasn’t been all that fun. The Valor cap, queue times, RNG, reputation gates on gear, and just the feeling of “been there, done that grind on a hunter already” lessen the general awesomeness that I felt taking Mushan through much of what’s happened in MoP.

And that’s not even considering that I’m so far from a legendary cloak on that toon that it’s not even worth thinking about any time soon.

I am certainly going to have regrets about this decision. I’ll get to sit aside as my girlfriend is killing bosses that I won’t see for weeks or months. I won’t be a part of that. But that won’t be a new experience for me, so I’m OK with it.

The toughest part of deciding the way I did was my fear of making those people angry. As I said, I have a strong aversion to causing disappointment or frustration. It was tough to not delay the decision, but nobody else was going to make it, and so being forthright was the best option, in my opinion.

Ultimately, I’m going to continue to be frustrated by my guild’s slow but steady progress, but if and when I have to choose, I wouldn’t trade raiding with Somb, Squid, Rain and Hass for a better progression opportunity unless they either came with the package or they were no longer playing. And I decided the same thing when Convert To Raid was starting up its guild(s). I only have so much energy, and I prefer to spend it with them, through success and failure.

…

Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

Ahead of the Curve (T15) and other bits

This past week, with at least three people from our raid team scheduled to be out due to travel and whatnot, I was invited to run with my girlfriend’s guild, which is 3/13H, but has suffered some attrition recently. They ended up bringing three people from my guild for the bulk of the run on Tuesday.

Waiting for that final person, pre-H Jin’rokh

Due to that attrition, we didn’t do a 3-heroic-kill run. Rather, we downed H Jin’rokh, which was fun, and made a few attempts on H Ji-kun, although we didn’t kill her (note: I suck at the nests. Horribly.), and otherwise farmed normal mode. When it was all over on Tuesday night, we had killed up through Dark Animus with few problems, all told.

9 of us died at the very end of the Jin’rokh heroic kill, due to the nature of the heroic Ionization mechanic… as you can see in the corner of the screen, I didn’t do too badly!

Thursday night, they filled their raid team with eight normal team members, a substitute from their guild who would be a star on our guild’s team, and myself. We managed to down the final three bosses in slightly more than an hour – which was great, because it was my first-ever regular kill of Lei Shen, which got me the Feat of Strength “Ahead of the Curve: Lei Shen.” Sweet!

Additionally, we managed to grab another achievement along the way, on Twin Consorts…

From Dusk Till Dawn, Twin Consorts

And here’s a Lei Shen screen…

Ahead of the Curve: Lei Shen!

At that point, we’d been running for less than 70 minutes. People were tossing around big ideas (“Let’s clear H ToES!” “Let’s try H HoF!”), but after a couple of people expressed the desire to log for the night, we finally settled on snagging this bit of fun from the Protectors of the Endless:

So we killed Regail last… so we got an achievement… yay! :)

Of course, with this team (of eight of us at this point), it was a pushover. But easy raid achieves are fine by me, especially with a group like this, which runs on all cylinders.

And finally, to cap off the screenshot spam in this post, I managed to get my final Titan Runestone on Wednesday evening, which allowed me to then get the Heart of Lei Shen, complete Wrathion’s (er, Yu’lon’s) challenge, and acquire my ilvl 600 cloak that night. Man, adding a 600 anything to my gear set at this point is nothing less than awesome!

Mushan, proud owner of the Tigerfang Wrap – courtesy of Wrathion, RNG, and persistence/hard work.

*Note: I chuckled at how they just went ahead and actually mentioned Patch 5.4 in the next quest!!! ^^

…

All told, it was pretty great! I accomplished two goals that I’ve been working/wishing for:

1) the 600 cloak

2) Lei Shen (N) killed pre-5.4.

In the end, it was an exciting week playing Mushan. A couple of nice pieces of gear, a few nice achievements, and a great raiding experience overall. 

…

Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!