Prodding for progress

It occurred to me at some point last week that I hadn’t taken a good look at my teams character maintenance efforts in a long long time. I remember, back when I first started the whole raid leading malarky, that it used to be a fairly prominent part of what I did.

Back then the task entailed looking at be.imba.hu or wow-heroes.com for each of the people in my team and then cajoling them into actually following the advice. They’d get bonus points if they went off someplace else and did some of their own research but that was a very rare thing indeed—pretty much all were content to just follow the instructions and be on their merry way. Beating on internet dragons is the aim of the game here, not the meta-game that is theory-crafting.

Now, the websites may be different (askmrrobot.com is very much the site du jour) and I may have learnt quite a bit more about classes that are not pink but I’m still more then happy to hand the theory crafting hat to the more experienced players of sites like elitistjerks.com and by extension askmrrobot.com. They live and breathe the numbers and algorithms behind buttons 0-9¹ and are always going to do a better job then I.

Yet I am now confronted with people who have different ideas. People who claim that the hours spent at a training dummy have given them a unique set of gemming and reforging priorities that can hold it’s own against players in this list and they’re determined to prove it. Now I’m all for being a unique and beautiful snowflake but where am I supposed to draw the line? At what point does not being the best you can be become a hinderance for the group? Is 1k dps below simulationcraft’s estimated output enough? 2k? How about a /headdesk inducing 4k?

Realistically I’d like to leave it to the members of my team to sort themselves out and leave the micro-management to my employers but this last week has been an eye-opener in many ways. I guess I have some work to do.