Rage Quit – The Climb #800

Sunday 2^nd May 2021

I thought tonight would be the night!

I’ve been feeling a bit meh! today. We’re in this bizarre stage of the pandemic where the end is in sight but there’s this anxiety that you’ll go and do something before your final vaccination and ruin all that time isolating yourself from other people. As a result, I’ve just been feeling really bored at the moment. It feels like there’s nothing to look forward to.

So highlights of the week can be bizarre things. Warcraft reset day: woot! New episode of Curse of Oak Island, that’s exciting. Ordinarily, you’d not pay this more than passing attention but anything that helps define one day from the next is something to be celebrated. I guess this is what old age will feel like.

Sunday’s is raid day. I’ve been enjoying raiding during the pandemic. I used to enjoy it during Pandaria, but our raid nights collided with my sword fighting nights and so it dropped off. During the pandemic, it’s been a way to connect with other people and I seriously think it’s done my mental health a load of good.

But we’ve been raiding Castle Nathria since January, and people are getting tired. Sure we got Normal done and have now gone onto heroic, but people are getting short-tempered now.

I enjoy the journey. I don’t care if the boss goes down or not, I enjoy seeing us go from a group that wipes at 80% to one that can kill it. I tried to explain it to C but they don’t understand just how much co-ordination it takes. It’s that’s working together to get a boss killed that I love.

And we got the last boss down to 3% tonight. 3%! For me that’s progress, that’s exciting. But others are tired and it prompted a bunch of moaning about other players. That’s never healthy.

We all get frustrated, especially when someone else seems to cock up. But we also all make mistakes. They way you get better is by going again and again. Yes, there are times to sit back and take stock and made strategy adjustments, but a lot of it is doing what you know what you need to do, better and more efficient.

For example, I do very little damage in the first stage. We need people to get the correct number of stacks to make it to stage 2, and we’re in danger of taking the boss down to the transition before people have the required stacks. But we do get a lot of adds that need clearing up. So I do very little damage on the boss so I can burst AOE on those adds.

Tonight ended with one of the players just rage-quitting and ending the night early. It was close to the end of the night so it wasn’t too bad, but still it was enough to make me sigh. We’re making good progress. At 3%, we can do this. It may take another 20 tries, but all we need to do now is throw ourselves at it so that we get another lucky run.

Warcraft is such a metaphor for life sometimes.