Small Things That Aren’t So Small

Have you ever had one of those nights where everything just went wrong? And the harder you tried to make it go right again, the more it went wrong? Yea, that was my raid night last night. Y’all I was so off my game, that I shit you not, I didn’t use swiftmend on the first two encounters we did. Just…didn’t use it at all.  Yes, I am now wearing the cone of shame.

In the hopes that this post can work something like confessional and wipe away my sins, let’s start.

Forgive me Cenarius, for I have sinned.

I think to fully understand this story, we should start from the beginning. The Tuesday of doom. I don’t know why, but I was so anxious and overwhelmed on Tuesday that I could barely function. For whatever reason I apparently thought that patch 5.0.4 was the apocalypse. That all things would end and there would never, ever be WoW again. In honesty, I had the great add on update and having to redo my UI. It makes me frustrated and irritable. And I know I would have problems with one of my major add ons: Power Auras.

As it turned out, Power Auras was not the main problem. Grid was. Well, not specifically, it worked fine. But I couldn’t get my Rejuv to display in text as a timer. I had read I didn’t need extra modules for this any more, and for the life of me I couldn’t get it to work. I will touch more on this later, but for now, let’s just suffice it to say I was flustered. After more than an hour of trying to make it work, I gave up and figured I would just use the dot, and it would be fine. (Hint: it wasn’t).

After I gave up on Grid, I decided to tackle power auras. The new interface is…well, something different. I have been a loyal power auras user for sometime and was willing to give it a go. I made my first aura and then spent thirty minutes looking for how to give it a timer. I gave up, and gave in to the weak auras pressure. One of our moonkin walked me through making auras and helped me through the interface and I got all of my auras completed (can you guess which one I forgot? Yup…swiftmend). However, when I log out and back in all of my auras are gone.

I somehow get them back, make an export, and log for the night.

This Brings Us To Wednesday

I woke up early, and observe there is a new Grid update. So I download it, and log in. And I still can’t Rejuv to show as a timer. Frustrated, I it in a ticket over on wow ace…but rush through it a bit because I am now running late for work. And as a result, my ticket isn’t as complete or clear as I’d like it and I missed a question. When this is pointed out to my by the dev I feel like an idiot. I apologize, count the hours until I can get home, and rush home at the end of the day. I know that I have about forty five minutes from the time I get home until the time raid invites start.

I log in and take care of the rest of my ticket.

The next thing I do is go to fix a couple of the auras I did last night, only to find that they have all disappeared again. Frustrated, I delete weak auras completely. Removed the saved files from my WTF folder and do a clean reinstall of them and import my auras again. I make the handful of changes I want, log out, back in….and my auras are gone again. Trying not to just break down and sob, I take to twitter to find out what is going on. I learn it is a known bug. The auras are there, they just don’t show up. Ok, fine, whatever. I have five minutes to get to the zone at this point and I feel defeated.

The First Raid Post 5.0.4

Was a disaster for me.  While I thought I would be fine with the basic grid DoT for my Rejuv, I learned I was sorely mistaken. After over three years of looking for one thing, completely changing it through me through a loop that shocked even me. This was just the start of a very bad night. But was likely the catalyst for one of the worst raids for me, personally, in memory.

Like a good little Druid, I tried to use mushrooms every fight. It turns out, that for the first two, I was so keyed up about the damn mushrooms (and grid) that I completely ignored one of my base heals -swiftmend and subsequently efflorescence. And my healing is indicative of that. I played poorly.

To make it worse, I went to the wrong spot on Zon’ozz. For nine months I’ve been going to the same spot on Zon’ozz, and last night I went to the wrong place. And as a result two people in my group died. We let a ball hit the wall, and I died coming down and didn’t get to heal the last 10% or so of the encounter. I am usually the top healer in this fight for our raid team and last night I was…fourth. Granted we were all very close, but this is not a place I’m accustomed to finding myself, and it only served to deepen the funk I was in.

I finally got my act (mostly?) together by the time we hit Yor’shaj, but I felt so off that the rest of the night was tainted. This was only exacerbated as I watched out disc priest dominate the raid with spirit shell. I couldn’t help feel envious at his cool new toy that was done more than 40% of his healing, while my concerted effort at using mushrooms resulted in a whopping 3-5% of my healing done…and were often to my detriment and I could have done more healing had I just ignored them.

I finished the raid extremely disheartened, and even more so after looking at the logs and seeing some of the glaring errors I had made. I felt a fool. Who was I to give anyone advice when I forgot to swiftmend, for Christ’s sake. I know it was only one night, I know people have off nights, but I’m not people, it doesn’t happen to me. Only apparently I am human. I do have off nights. And I make mistakes.

No matter how hard I try to shake it and tell myself I’ll do better next week my self perceived failures last night are going to be hard to shake. I’m too hard on myself, I know this. But it is who I am, and I’m going to have to dig deep down and pull myself back up. Somehow I’ve got to find the courage to use my struggles from last night as motivation for next week.

As I had my pity party for myself, I realized something.

Relearning to Heal Isn’t Fun

This is now the fourth time I’ve “relearned” to heal. The second time with massive mana changes. And you know what? It fucking sucks. I’m tired of trying to work small miracles with my toolkit, figuring it out, only to have it yanked out from under me and made to go through all the learning pains of learning your limits again.

Maybe I’m just outgrowing WoW after eight years. Maybe I’m that old, grizzled tree who is yelling for everyone to get off her lawn. I don’t know. I just know that I’m tired of the constant changes, not always for the best, after finding my groove.

Find My Way Out Of The Corner

I know, next week is a new week. I need to approach it like a blank piece of canvas waiting for me to paint a new story. And somehow I need to shake last night and put it behind me. Perhaps 10 save woodland creatures will do the trick and then my sins of last night will be cleansed 🙂