Of mice and raiders.

Being sick sucks. Most people already know this, but I felt that I should reiterate that point. I'm not normally a hypochondriac, but I honestly think I have the swine flu, a head cold, or cancer. I can't properly diagnose what's killing me due to the massive amounts of dying I'm accomplishing.

On the bright side, I've found that I can still raid while on a steady decline to the grave. My patience suffers, but of course I've never had much of that to begin with.

Another week spent in Ulduar 25. Wednesday's raid went rather smoothly, with only the normal complaints. We got a solid kill on Crazy Cat Lady (which is a pretty big accomplishment for us) and didn't have too many problems on the other bosses.

But Thursday was an odd night. Most of the night was spent banging our heads against Hodir. I fear that fight may be simply too technical for some of our raiders. There's a lot going on, requiring people stand in particular positions at all times. I honestly feel lucky being melee DPS on that fight - my job is to simply avoid falling icicles and whack the boss in the ass.

Ignis, a boss we thought we had on farm status, kicked our ass a couple times too. The tanks think he was stealth-buffed, I think people were simply tired, sick, and down after the failed attempts upon Hodir.

Which brings to me a thought - why do people get depressed when we fail upon a boss? I can understand frustration when we fail to the same things multiple times. For instance, if a certain warlock can't live past the first Flash Freeze on Hodir because s/he doesn't know what a 'mound of snow' means. Or we hit the enrage because all our ranged DPS keep dying early and nobody is applying the singed stack.

I figure so long as we wipe in new and interesting ways, then we're making progress. Eventually that warlock will understand how to survive Flash Freeze. People will get better at living through raid damage. Sooner or later we'll down the boss, collect loots, and move on to the next.

I bring this point up because I want to take my 10 man group into a few Hard-Mode kills. I know for a fact that we are going to wipe. In fact, we will probably wipe on purpose a few times. I fully intend on sacrificing people, including myself, for the sole reason of seeing what happens. If people are going to get depressed because of that... then perhaps pushing for Hard-Modes isn't for them.

Don't get me wrong - I don't expect us to be downing Hard-Mode bosses within the next few weeks. But I at least want people to get a taste of what's to come. If that involves wiping the raid a couple of times, then so be it. It's just fake gold in a game, and so long as we keep up good spirits while doing it, then I say it's a win in our book.