Zarantai Conversation

Babylonius — Today at 9:28 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?
Your performance this tier has been fantastic, and your ability to flex between DPS and heals has been integral to alot of our success this tier. I don't think we do enough to mention the good things since its so easy to focus on the bad.

Zarantai — Today at 10:07 AM
One thing mainly. I think that the vibes that have been given off in raid this tier (and honestly a little in Nyalotha) have been pretty negative, which drags down the raid. There's very little positivity in the raid especially when things start to go south. And that inevitably has an impact on performance. One thing in particular I would like to see less of is people ranting how much they think Shadowlands sucks and Castle Nathria is poorly designed. Some of us enjoy this content and it just gets dull and I want to check out when people are constantly complaining during raid. And a lot of it is coming from some of the officers
overall for my performance though, I was pretty happy. My fights as resto could have been a lot better, but I instead focused on triage (withering touch for xymox and heart hemorrages for SLG) instead of spread healing, which hurt the numbers. And I think minus a couple of raid nights, our team did pretty well on prog.

Babylonius — Today at 10:20 AM
I agree with all points
The negativity is something that the officers identified the other night and I personally identified as something that I should have been doing a better job to fight against
And I think its a good point and perspective thats easy to forget that not everyone is unhappy with SL or CN.
I know, personally, with the exception of SLG, I think Nathria was one of the better designed raids in a long time, and I don't quite get when people shit on it

Zarantai — Today at 10:31 AM
(sorry for the slow responses, hehe I'm in a M+)

Babylonius — Today at 10:35 AM
No worries, i'm still waking up
So you mentioned that you think a lot of the negativity is coming from some of the officers, can you expand on that a bit when you get a chance?

Zarantai — Today at 11:02 AM
Koji and Jesir are generally super negative about the design of the game. Jesir on a number of occasions has stated that almost everything implemented in shadowlands is a complete failure. Like, I understand that you think it could've been designed better, but seriously, just lay off, especially in raid. Rant all you want in your own time and if I get tired of it, I can leave the channel. In raid, I'm forced to sit there and listen and it just drags my spirit down. Same thing with SLG, I know it's a poorly designed fight, I just don't need to be constantly reminded of it in raid.
And especially during SLG reclear when we were doing the "speed strat", a lot of communication coming from Jesir and Koji was "it's not that hard, nothing's changed, just do it right". But we were essentially relearning the fight and feedback like that is not helpful at all, it just leads to frustration.
there was just a lot of focus on when people messed up and the frustration part and very little focus on when we did do well

Babylonius — Today at 12:13 PM
I agree with that. The focus has certainly been on the negative things recently and through these harder fights

Zarantai — Today at 12:37 PM
but yeah, just a minor gripe on my end. You hinted at more targeted questions?

Babylonius — Today at 12:38 PM
You covered a lot of what I was going to ask lol
But I do have a few other things
One of the things we found was that a lot of other guilds took a break after killing Sire. Do you think that you, or the team, would benefit from taking a week or few off?

Zarantai — Today at 12:40 PM
Naw, I don't think so. A lot of other guilds raid a lot more than we do, so a break makes a lot more sense for them. I know a lot of people were very excited to get back into reclears after our kill.

Babylonius — Today at 12:42 PM
I agree. It’s just something we noticed so I’m trying to get peoples thoughts on it
So how has working with Zhot been this tier? Do you find it easy to work together on things?

Zarantai — Today at 12:43 PM
Zhot has been fantastic. We constantly talk during raid about things we're trying

Babylonius — Today at 12:45 PM
Good, he said similarly, so I’m glad your on the same page about being on the same page lol
Beyond what you said about being overly negative, do you think there’s anything that I, as the GM, or the officers, could do better, more, less, or different, to help the team have more success?

Zarantai — Today at 12:57 PM
couple observations
1) I got bored and randomly did the math. With 2 mythic vault options, you have a 48.16% chance to get a 233 piece of loot. Spread across 26 people, that means that you're averaging about 12.5 pieces of 233 gear from the vault. Compare that to the guaranteed 8 pieces of 233 gear from killing SLG and Sire and it might be beneficial to prioritize the 2 vault choices over killing sire. Granted, that's after we unlock the sire/SLG loot on all raiders, which I know is a priority (and later on, once people have a lot of 233 gear, it's going to be more beneficial to trade gear on SLG/Sire that people don't need over a random chance in the vault).
2) Personal responsibility with regards to survivability - I joined shortly after the spreadsheet accounting for deaths in raid was discontinued. Is there a thought to starting that back up again? Our biggest issue recently has been random deaths and seeing actual output for what needs to be addressed could help (and act as a deterrent if you know your deaths are going to show up on a report visible to the entire raid)
3) I think that our shot calling is a bit all over the place at the moment. Pao has a lot of spinning plates as a tank, and I've generally seen previous guilds have that be done by a DPS (generally ranged) as they have the least going on and are able to monitor more easily. Currently we have a bunch of people talking at the same time, which gets confusing. I think that looking into a dedicated raid leader who is the one monitoring timelines and talking to the raid is something that could greatly benefit us.

Babylonius — Today at 1:01 PM
All of those are good suggestions

Zarantai — Today at 1:03 PM
I am willing to help however I can as well. I know the death spreadsheet thing required some log review, but I generally have a lot of time on my hands and could help with that. I dunno how great I'd be at shot calling as well, but it's something I'd be willing to look into

Babylonius — Today at 1:07 PM
Yeah I think it’s something that we can discuss and consider reimplementing

Babylonius — Today at 4:50 PM
Is there anything else you wanted to mention? I appreciate a lot of your thoughts on all this

Zarantai — Today at 6:04 PM
naw, that was mainly it

Babylonius — Today at 6:59 PM
Ok awesome, I appreciate your time and your thoughts on things