Onyxia last night

Crap, it's already 04:30. Where does the time go?

Last night our guild ran Onyxia. We called in a few friends that had left the guild in the last big blow-up a few weeks ago. These two left on fairly good terms, but I know that they expected a mass exodous to go with them. Raiding just hasn't been the same since that last blow-up. We were probably a month away from downing the last boss in Black Wing Lair (BWL), and now we can't even finish Molten Core (MC) every week.

Anyways, Onyxia is a gimme, and after 2 failed attempts these two people left, stating that they were out of time. I would have said the same thing, or something similar, and I wouldn't expect anyone to believe it. It really looked like the raid was going to fall apart as even more people left, but we were going to give it one more shot, as hopeless as it may be.

I happened to be on my Mage, because we supposedly had enough healing and wouldn't need my Priest. Well, for this last attempt I decided to 2-box my Mage and Priest. I was doing it almost as a joke, but I figured if my Mage died I could switch to healing and if the Priest died, no big deal. I never planned to be attempting to focus equally on each character in the fight, that's nearly impossible to do during Onyxia.

I totally didn't expect to down her, because once a group fails at something a few times, the spirit of the group is just defeated and typically they can't win at that point. It's human nature, and raiding in WoW can sometimes boil things down to the basics of how we as people function. It becomes less and less about gear and skill, and more a factor of who has the desire and drive to make things happen.

Let me deviate from the story a bit and explain the groups involved in a raid. First, there are the officers, such as myself, who manage everyone and try make things happen. In a raid of 40, we have about 2-4 present. Second, there are the class leaders who are in charge of their specific group, be it Warriors, Priests, Hunters, or whatever. About 5-10 people in each raid are class leaders. And third would be the guild members who are the body of the raid, making up the remainder. Different outcomes depend on the different disposition of the three groups. When the officers lose the ability to lead or even control, things go sour and it's obvious. When the class leaders have lost their drive, it's less obvious, and doesn't lead to failure as surely or as quickly. Also, a few good class leaders can easily make up for the officers shortcomings. And lastly, when the guild members who form the bulk of the raid lose their spirit, it's sometimes difficult to see what exactly is wrong. It's even more difficult to correct this. I still don't have a fool-proof way of picking up the body of our group and getting people to perform. What seems to work one day, will fail the next time. Sometimes it's like herding cats. You get a few immature punks in the group that want to crack jokes nonstop, and soon everyone is screwing around. That's when I play bad cop, and I get mean. Verbal abuse DOES work people. But it has to be used only in extreme cases. If you do it all the time, people disregard your anger as a personality flaw rather than a call for them to correct themselves.

Tonight we had a case of the third group losing it's drive, and we mis-diagnosed it as a class imbalance issue: "Not enough DPS". It wasn't a case where the bad cop could fix it. I definitely didn't know what to do, and that leads me back into my story. I was going to control two different characters, on two different computers, at the same time.

I've done this before, but on my own, when other people weren't affected by my performance. In this case, I was playing my Mage, BigGuyCasts, one of our top 10 DPS characters in a guild of over 350 characters, and I was also controlling my Priest, BigGuyKills, our #1 healer (name is somewhat ironic) in that same raid. Yes, I'm a bit proud of my accomplishment with my Priest, and no, I wouldn't be half of what I am if it weren't for the other people I play with.

So during this third attempt, where practically nobody thought we would succeed, at the end of the battle both of my characters were alive. My Mage was 7th in total damage done, and my Priest was first in total healing (having done 25% of the healing in a group of about 9 healers, the next nearest had done about 16%).

This was a case of the body of the raid losing it's focus, but pulling through at the end. I still don't know exactly how it turned around. My guess is that the two groups of leaders, about 10 of us, took their game up a notch and covered for everyone else who had lost their edge.

Well, I know that none of you really care about all this. I'm just really proud that we were able to recover from 2 failures and end the day on a good note. And I guess I need to look deeper into why these things happen, as well as how to recover better and faster.