The pull of the arena

Eternal Brigade's raid progress has hit somewhat of a stumbling block this week. After surviving the departure of some raiding members (see earlier posts), we managed to keep two teams in Karazhan, with the second team having some good success. This showed some great guild spirit and I was really proud to be an officer in our fantastic wee guild. This week, however, things took a strange turn. Now I am always one to err on the side of melodrama I know, so please take this with a pinch of salt.

I am bored of Karazhan. Well, that is not strictly true, but something is amiss. Ok, let me explain a bit. As I said, EB kept two teams in kara and, as usual, the first team (i.e. it was established first.... we use "Sid" & "Nancy" as our team monikers in an attempt to negate any feelings of superiority and adverse competition that may arise from the more charged "team 1" and "team 2".... well, that and the fact that I love being one of the "Nancies")... sorry, where was I? Oh yes, the first (Nancy) team was well on its way to clearing kara at a fairly relaxed pace (we had some new Nancies after the recent re-shuffle), clearing all bosses up to and including the Wizard of Oz in a couple of hours on the first raid of the week. Our second raid eve then began on Sunday with Nightbane instead of the big robot, which provided interesting drops (another post needed for that one) before we made our way through to the Curator himself (T4 hands for me... to be included in that as-yet theoretical "another post", too), through Aran, Chess, and finally the Prince (satisfyingly down in one attempt even with awful luck with the infernal placements). This was to leave Netherspite and Terestian Ilhoof for the third and final raid night of the week.

Monday night came around and I logged on a bit later than our 19.00 E.R.S.T (estimated raid starting time hee hee) due to some technical problems. I was quickly informed by our raid leaders and officers that there would not be enough people online to finish our Kara run (people not already saved to the "Sid" kara team). My first reaction was one that surprised me: I was not that disappointed not to be clearing up Kara (despite Ilhoof and Netherspite being two of my favourite fights to heal). As we cobbled together a raid group to attempt the first boss in ZA to make up for the lost kara night (we sooo got our asses whooped on the final trash pull before the bear avatar rofl), I started wondering.... am I fed up with raiding or is this a mere bump in the road?

Now, this kind of brings me to the title of this post - albeit in a very roundabout manner - as well as to an good point about raiding and raid healing/tanking per se. OK, so I came to the conclusion that there were two main factors bringing about my raiding/kara malaise. Firstly, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I have been getting more enthusiastic about the arena (the challenge, the shorter duration, the difference to PvE etc etc.) and this has coincided, funnily enough, with our MT and my Arena 2v2 partner's increasing boredom with tanking even in Karazhan. Which leads me on to the "secondly" part: this boredom with tanking that my MT professed is not, it became apparent in our conversation, all about the fun or not of tanking. Instead, it could be much more accurately summed up as "burnout". Of course, I had heard about hardcore raiding tanks and healers (and I'm sure a few dps too) suffering from the stresses and strains of keeping a group of 10/25/40 people alive and happy, but I never really expected it to happen to me so soon. After all, we have only been raiding kara for around eight weeks, so I was not expecting to get tired like this.

All of this dissatisfaction/frustration/tiredness could of course be, in fact, boredom. After all, all of us, especially druids it seems, long for constant novelty, shapeshifting, respeccing and all the rest of it.

I will get around to the post about Kara gear that I promised above, which also, conveniently enough, brings me back to the still unresolved questions about spirit, Mp5, and raid healing assigments that I brought up a couple of weeks ago. Until then... grumble grumble, winge winge, moan moan *wink*!