Deswind Conversation

Babylonius — Yesterday at 11:04 AM
So like I mentioned in the midweek channel, I’m reaching out to everyone to get their thoughts and opinions on a variety of things.

Before I get to the more targeted questions, is there anything you want to get off your chest about your own play, the team, the raid, the people, the game, anything?

Deswind — Yesterday at 12:03 PM
Hey, sorry for the late reply. I do have some stuff to say, but I'm running some errands atm so I'll have to respond a bit later. Just wanted to give you a heads up if you were waiting or something.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 12:14 PM
No worries, I'm around all day today and tomorrow, just getting started going down my list

Deswind — Yesterday at 3:52 PM
About me:
Personally, I'm not the best at reclearing/farm. I used to like to parse on farm to see where I stand, but now I don't really care as much. I mainly raid for loot to play other aspects of the game (m+, pvp/arenas). That's not the same as saying I dislike/not want to raid with the guild. Progression is fun for the challenge in itself, until it becomes monotonous because of wiping over the same thing ad nauseum. I'd say I'm better (or think I am) at progression and last I check I was one of the top consistent performers as far as dps goes relative to the respective class/spec (along with Jesir and Anxiety) on first kills. When it comes to farm, my motivation to parse goes down and I slack on relearning CD timings due to nerfs or overall raid dps increase. Mechanically, I'd say I'm not the worst offender, but I'm more of a visual learner and I pick up what to do (and not to do) once I've seen it. I tend to pick things up quickly and correct mistakes so it's not repeated. From there, I just do what I have to, to make things as smooth as possible for the rest of the raid team.

About the team:
I feel our expectations and goals aren't aligned with our current strength as a raid team. In the past, while Ovy was GM, we had gamers. I say this because we had people like Tyler, Nino, OJ, among others who can put out numbers and just top performances in and out of progression. If I'm being honest, we're now down to me, Jesir, and Anxiety when it comes to consistent strong numbers during progression. I don't care if people pull in strong numbers AFTER killing the boss the first time, I'm just wondering where that performance was when we needed it the most. I don't know much of the healing, but I'd say it's overall not as strong as it was in the past. All of this put together makes our raid team extremely weak and not entirely reflective of our goals. Our aim, as far as I know, is top 100 US, but we're more like mid-100 consistent. I'm not blameless here either.
This is 9.0 parses/performances to prove a point. Although it did have reclears, it still shows a difference among the top-mid-bottom of the raid team.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 4:10 PM
I agree that we don't have quite the same level of top performers, and to the same extent, that we did in the past. However, some of that was intentional as we felt that had led to a raid environment that we didn't want. So when we had to put things back together in EP we focused a lot more on personality than parses. Some of that is making our bed and having to lie in it, but some was intentional

Deswind — Yesterday at 4:18 PM
I think that's fine. But we need to dial back our expectations, unless we're ready to call out people for mistakes or tell them they need to prep better. I'm not one for confrontation, but there's a point where we need to tell people that they're not pulling their weight. Or at least make it more transparent where our downfalls are and how we need to address it. If that means we need more hand holding during fights where we're more vocal on every single mechanic then we should go that direction. I feel there are a lot of people phoning in their performance and it perpetuates that air of "I don't really want to be here."
That being said, I might be giving off that impression by not wanting to really reclear. I told Jake to start putting me in comp for the coming weeks, so Snuggles doesn't go without a break. I'll always put in what's needed to get done, but it becomes increasingly frustrating when people aren't in the same mindset. At least that's how I feel about it, whether that's true or not.
One suggestion I had in mind was to make a weekly raid report/spreadsheet. Practically putting wipe data, specific player notes, etc that people can see. This way they can reflect back and know what they could do better for next time for those too lazy to look at logs themselves or not know what to look for. I personally do this time to time when I dive into my own logs. Only reason I can share cd timings or other warrior specific things to both Snuggles and Maelz. I know this is a lot of work, so maybe a more generic outlook could work. At least something to put people in the right direction in correcting and preparing their own play.
Snuggles had to asked me specific timings for Denathrius last night, which I didn't mind but at the same time he could have prepped since we killed it already and there are logs to look at.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 4:27 PM
We did have a spreadsheet like that in Nyalotha and we discontinued it as we wanted to try and foster more personal analysis of that stuff, but its possible that we're not at a point where we can just do that without some form of structure and support

Deswind — Yesterday at 4:34 PM
Yeah, I feel like we need something for people to look at and then ask the appropriate questions. Otherwise, not a lot of people would want to put in the effort or due diligence. It's better to have a system structure to help people, imo.
Otherwise, we get things like "I died to this or that," but never asking how or what not to do. Eventually we end up dying to the same thing and addressing it way too late.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 4:38 PM
Yeah, its a hard thing to do, especially on prog when we may have 20-30 wipes in a night to go through and analzye

Deswind — Yesterday at 4:41 PM
Yeah, that's understandable. I'd rather just see a end-of-week report. Put out where we wiped, how we wiped, and note any players that have done the same mistake 3+ times or something. Just something so we can begin to have people become more accountable for why we're not progressing as fast as we want to.
Having spent nearly a single night on SLG rekill proves a point where half or more of the raid team doesn't know what needs to be done. That's the same for me, so I'm not blameless here. But things like, "boss needs to be at x% health before we begin aoe burn," anything small or indicators/benchmarks where people can easily become aware of to know what's coming next. When we complain about a swing in boss damage from pull to pull, I feel like no one knows when to pool for damage or when to hold or slow.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 4:44 PM
I think thats a good point

Babylonius — Yesterday at 5:40 PM
I do think it may be worth reassessing our goals, but I’m not sure it’s something that essential. I don’t think we’re super far off based on some of the things that we saw this tier

Deswind — Yesterday at 5:47 PM
I'd agree it's probably not up on priority, but disagree where we are relative to our goals. The nights where SLG and Denathrius could have seen a potential kill should have been the night we killed it instead of delaying yet another week of progression. We always seem to bounce back and forth between progressing and regressing. That shouldn't be a thing. The moment we see p3 or the last phase on a boss half a dozen times consistently, we shouldn't be regressing at all. There's a disconnect somewhere and I dunno what it is.

Babylonius — Yesterday at 5:49 PM
I agree with that. Which is why I think that we’re not far from our goals. If we can nail down that solution then we’ll be in a good position