Thursday, October 6, 2011

Some philosophies on raiding

Remember how just last week I blogged about being in that brand new job phase where I was turning things around probably way too quickly? Well, just one week later, and I am in a completely opposite phase. I've had so much to do this past week that I've been working until anywhere from 9pm - midnight. Crazy excel models FTL.

This means I haven't had to time to log in at all, even to unwind a bit:

Oh my goodness I love Chuck & Beans!!! Anyways, today and tomorrow will be slower before picking back up again on Monday, so I have some time to finally do a post I've been planning for a while, sharing some of my philosophies on raiding.

First, Jess created this for me the other day:

The story here is that I bring the seafood feasts, which means that I get to choose whether the raid is worthy of being fed or not. And if its a fight where we are learning a certain phase, I tend to not put down feasts. I guess I think its wasteful if we are clearly just learning something. If then we show progress, I give the raid a /headpat and feed them. Isn't the image so cute? See how its a tree? Giving the fuds? Get it? :p

Second, I'm going to confess something that perhaps some of you may not completely agree with. Ready? Here it is. I tend not to watch boss fights before encountering a boss. Why? Well yes, of course we all like winning:

But for me, I want to see and experience a boss for the first time on my own screen. Watching a video of someone else do it somehow cheapens that first experience for me. I also tend to be very much of a experiential learner, so that watching boss fights don't help me learn or do any better than just knowing general strats and learning through experience. So generally I just tend to read what a boss will do or what happens in a fight and go into new fights with that information.

I know this drives some of my fellow raiders crazy, while others tend to be more on my side of the fence. And yes, raiding is a team activity so that one person's performance affects the rest of the raid. But I think for the most part our raid has found or perhaps accepted the duality across the raid in terms of watching videos for raid preparation.

I think we're lucky in that Jess is a pretty good raid leader in terms of explaining new fights, so this helps us. The few times I've had to explain fights, there was a lot of "ums" and "so there's this thing" and "then you do that thing" and "then something happens". And perhaps this only works for us because we aren't a hard core raiding guild.

So while it may not be the popular course of action, I for one am here to admit that I don't tend to watch raid videos before seeing a fight myself.

5 comments:

  1. I'm with you about watching videos and even included that little snippet of information in my last raiding application. (And <3 for the comics!)

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  2. I have a hard time watching videos and even live feeds. I want to move my camera around in the video and when I realize that I can't, then I give up. Also, the music is always poorly chosen.

    I did watch a live feed from TTGF (Drenden-H) and that was slightly better because there was also chat along with the live feed where we could tell jokes.

    Though, I'll one up ya. I don't watch videos or even read strats. And generally, when the raid leader is explaining the fight, I'm thumbing through the loot tables...hehehe. Our job is really easy in boss fights, HEAL ALL THINGZ. So, knowing the strats are meh.

    Also, "practice makes perfect". We spend too much time standing around talking and not seeing. And, then we fail because something happened and people are like, "What was that?". Well that was the that we talked about in the strat. Oh yeah. It's better to see it and do it then talk about it.

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  3. I'm right with you about videos. I actually don't find them helpful at all. The images are too blurry and too full of stuff exploding for me to get anything out of them.

    I've even gone to the extreme of looking for a blind guild, but the only ones I could find were either too casual, or too intense, and all them played on East Coast times which is no help to me.

    If I have time, I'll usually use World of Logs to learn new fights. I'll browse over the general description of the fight on Wowpedia, the set myself free in WoL. I figure that way I'm learning the fight SOMEWHAT actively, instead of reading a guide that just tells me what to do.

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  4. Sweetie...your WoW encounter memory is not what someone would call eidetic..."so, the boss will do something with the something and don't die. Okay...ready check!" It is awfully cute though when you do explain encounters

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  5. Yay I'm glad I'm not the only one!

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