My 2012 Christmas Project is to level my 40-ish bank alt Grokknome. The tricksy little Gnome Rogue must be level 80 by the end of the break so I can take him into Ulduar and get a Herald of the Ancients achievement at some point next year. Failure on this point will result in not getting said achievement — this is bad.
There. Since it’s now written down it has to happen.
Year: 2012
I was fortunate enough to get on the Cataclysm Beta. If you scroll down enough you’ll see my huge screenshot gallery and possibly a few thoughts on it. It was a fantastic experience but I’m not going to repeat it.
Because Spoilers.
Since I purchased the Annual pass I was guaranteed a spot on the MoP beta. This excited me back last year when I signed up but as time passed I’ve decided that no, I don’t want to know what a Panda is like, that no, I don’t want a Monk just yet and that no, I really don’t want to know how they’ve changed the Holy Paladin’s play style/role/armour/beard1
The other day I was asked by a new raid leader in the guild if there were any tips I could give him. I was in the middle of running a raid myself at this point and I’m fairly certain that whatever I replied with wasn’t all that useful. It was probably barely more then a string of non-sensical letters and yet he said his thanks and carried on.
It occurs to me now that there are number of things I should have known when I started raid leading and that if I’d spent less time trying to figure these out and more time actually leading the team I was with would likely have made quite a lot more progress then it ended up doing. I have written about the most salient points but there are so many different ways to approach raid leading that there are many I won’t have covered. All of them are a vital part of any leaders armoury and learning them is as much a part of your journey as your teams progression is.
I’m sure we have all had experience of ’that’ raider. They seem to come in an almost infinite number of flavours but the end result is always the same — a disruption to the team. Perhaps your version of ’that’ raider does not ever stop talking, perhaps they do not ever start talking, perhaps (and this is probably a little more common) they talk just enough to offend, antagonise or generally upset the teams delicate emotional balance1.