The Queue is tired today (the Queue is tired every day)

It’s not that I’m tired of raiding, it’s more that I’m tired of everything. It’s been a week, folks.

My guild has been making approximately zero progress on Heroic Sylvanas, and I think we’re all getting tired of trying.

We haven’t put in nearly as many attempts on Sylvanas as we did on Denathrius, who took over 250 pulls to down — but it just doesn’t feel like we’re making much progress on this very long fight, and that’s kind of exhausting. Sylvanas is around a 15 minute encounter, and we’re getting to around eight minutes in on our best pulls. We’ve made it to phase 3 exactly once and only one player was alive to see it.

For those who haven’t had the chance (or the inclination) to do this fight, phase 1 is all about dodging. There are tons of things to dodge, tons of things you can’t dodge, and if you aren’t quick on your feet, you’re going to be dead very quickly. I’ve run as both heals and DPS for this one, and as heals you can’t stand still long enough to get heals off frequently, and sometimes there’s just no heal that would solve the problem. The encounter takes place on a huge platform and players frequently run out of range. As DPS it’s a constant struggle to actually stay in range to do any damage.

In phase 2 you’re chasing Sylvanas across a series of platforms where there are adds, waves of anti-healing death clouds with knockback, normal anti-healing death clouds, bridges built by your so-called allies that would not pass an OSHA inspection, and spells you have to race to interrupt before they cause an auto-wipe. We can get nearly to the end of this, but we don’t down the last set of adds quickly enough and can’t get to Sylvanas quickly enough to interrupt her, and then we’re all dead and starting over. And there’s still one more phase to go!

So that’s eight or so minutes. We spend about six hours a week doing this, and we haven’t been making much progress. And not making much progress on a long fight like this is kind of exhausting, because each time you go back to the beginning which you have to execute perfectly to get back to where you were… except everyone is a little wearier each time.

We had that problem a lot with Denathrius: we’d get into phase 3 and we’d be so close, but then we’d wipe, start over, and be sloppy on phase 1 because we were tired of it or just tired.

I think we’re at an impasse here. Blizzard wants to make fights more interesting, which means making them more complicated, which means making them longer. And that gets rough. Playing DPS, where I’ve got a fairly strict rotation I’m running through as quickly as the GCD will let me, my hand will cramp up after about an hour and a half of non-stop pulls, which may be a sign that I’m getting too old for this. (Or a sign that I need to completely rearrange my hotkeys so the most common DPS abilities aren’t just clustered together on one side of the keyboard and have me constantly stretching to hit shift with my pinky.)

So it’s a long fight, which makes it tiring, which can make it less fun. But I’m not sure the length is necessarily the problem. In our case, we just aren’t quite putting out enough DPS to get into phase 3, which means we have to repeat it over and over and over again, and that endless repetition is where the length becomes a problem.

Is that Blizzard’s fault? I’m not entirely sure. Could they make a difficult fight that was 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes, and thus lessen this problem? Probably so.

I can say I’m not having the most fun of my life here, but that’s not all on the fight length.

Yep! It might take a little time for it to show up, but not long.

Home, I hope. We’ve had a long time away, and I’m ready to go back home to Azeroth and enjoy building a little house with a little garden and play Animal Crossing: Azeroth for a while. A nice happy, peaceful ending.

Is that actually going to happen? Well, I’m not holding my breath. WoW has a history of sending us from one big bad to another, even bigger bad, from one catastrophe to the next. I’m in the mood for some breathing room, though, so we’ll have to see if we actually get it.

Puppies are always puppies, no matter their age.

Time is an illusion. Youth is an illusion. Find your inner puppy. Be that puppy.

Well, we all are, so at least it’s a shared experience.

And that’s all for today, my probably equally tired friends. Until next week, I wish you well and hope you have a good Friday and an even better weekend. I’ll see you again next week, just in time for the holiday shopping extravaganza of the year!