elitist jerks

Not all that long ago, something happened to me while raiding with my guild. The situation has been resolved, but the reason I want to write about it is that it touches on what this blog is all about, i.e. the "casual hardcore" experience.

I consider myself very lucky to have found a guild that is all about inclusiveness. We may not progress as fast as some other guilds, but everybody has a great time, and we all do our best, whatever our best may be. I won't lie; sometimes I get impatient. I hate wiping over and over to the same mechanics; I get frustrated when people don't seem to be maximizing their gear; I really believe in consistency of attendance. But I generally try to keep that to myself, and if things aren't moving fast enough for me, there's no longer anything stopping me from finding a group that's further along, while continuing to help my guild progress. That's what I did with HFC and it's worked out fine (aside from maybe burning me out a little bit).

I raided with my current guild for two expansions before throwing my main toon in there, so I got to know some of the core members very well. There have been some new faces this xpac, but everyone has that same easygoing attitude, which I really appreciate. However, we've also added some people to our twice-weekly raids who are from another guild on another server. I have no idea why at least some of them have been raiding with us, but it started out with maybe four or five people and has grown to 10 or 11. At the same time, some of our own guildies who were not able to be there earlier have returned. So we've got 20-25 people there most nights at this point. My biggest issue has been that sometimes people from the other guild will roll need on tier pieces and then not return, when some members of my guild haven't been getting the rolls, and I did raise the point to our guild leader and our main tank finally, which did improve things.

At any rate, the other night we were waiting for one of our guildies, who has a new healer he's trying to gear, to show up before we killed Mannoroth, who drops the one piece that toon didn't already have. To kill time, we decided to kill Zakuun. We were pulling the last demon that's in his room, and I pulled the boss by accident with an errant Barrage. This was not a big deal; most of us are overgeared, and we just ran out and reset the boss. I am pretty sure nobody died, but even if they did, you can mount up right outside the room and repair, and many of us have repair mounts for people to use.

But one person, who had only been with us once before, sneered that there was no reason to use Barrage on a single target fight anyway. Now actually, this is just not true. I watch Azortharion, who in my opinion is the best hunter in WoW (even if you disagree, he's statistically one of the top), and he recommends Barrage in HFC single target fights because you're rarely able to stand still long enough for Powershot to be more effective. I will often, if DPS isn't actually an issue, open with Barrage because I'm not all that likely to use it later in the fight. So I pointed this out. He said "It's not better than Aimed Shot." At the time, I was thinking he meant Powershot, but of course I actually do use Aimed Shot all the time.

Now, this guy's DPS is better than mine, sure. I can get the exact same numbers he does, but I often don't. But that said, other than him, my DPS is higher than anyone else's in the guild (well, except my husband's if he's not tanking), But it didn't even matter on this fight, and frankly, it wouldn't matter on any fight we were planning to do that night, because two hunters doing 72K DPS weren't going to make the difference between downing and not downing the last two bosses in Normal HFC.

I work constantly on my DPS. I could probably work harder than I do, but I work 40 hours a week, have a family, and have a chronic illness, so I do have other priorities. I'm also in my 50's and my reflexes definitely aren't that of a person in their 20's. My guild knows all this, but of course, this guy did not. So I whispered the guy from his server/guild who had brought all these new people in and asked him to tell the new guy to please STFU because I did not need this.

They (apparently) had a whispered conversation about me, because all of a sudden the guy I'd whispered sent me a whisper which said "I don't get why some people get insulted instead of wanting to improve." It turned out that the whisper was meant for his elitist pal, about me. When I asked him where he got off, he told me he was sorry he'd mistyped, but really, he didn't get why I should be upset when his friend was just trying to help.

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I don't believe "help" should be delivered in a snarky tone. If Mr. Elite wanted to help, he would have sent me a whisper saying "I see you are using Barrage a lot. Can I offer some advice?" Like him, I've cleared Heroic HFC, and I wasn't carried. My raid leader in that group did, in fact, have some suggestions for me, such as switching to Marksmanship from Beast Mastery, that he he delivered in a kind and polite way. So I wasn't buying it. At that point, particularly since I was also in Officer Chat in my guild telling them what was going on, and having several people initially disbelieve me when I said the second guy was now saying less than nice things to me, I ended up leaving. I suppose you could say I rage quit, but when I later discussed it with our GM, he said that he didn't feel that it was a rage quit under the circumstances. I'm pretty grateful for that, because it's not a thing I typically do. But I did feel pretty bad about it, because while I'd assumed that everyone would just go on without me, it actually broke up the raid for the night.

Here's the thing, though: you don't come in my house, where I've been raiding with this group for literally years, and start making snarky comments. If you're new to a group, doesn't matter if you know stuff better than other people, you keep quiet in voice chat. If you feel someone's screwing up, you talk to the raid leader or, perhaps, just message the person directly and let them decide if they want your "advice" or not.

As I said to my GM later on - and he agreed - if it hadn't been me, he was going to anger somebody else at some point, because I was not the only one he was addressing his snark to. So even though I don't feel great about the fact I quit the raid (which was an emotional response to a LOT of stuff, not just his remarks and what was going on in game), I don't necessarily feel bad about it either, because it's clear that I was speaking for a lot of other people and their frustrations.

We'll be raiding again on Wednesday, and I have no idea what the composition of the group will be. My GM actually offered to toss everyone from the other server/guild out, and I told him that the only thing I wanted was that this one guy not be invited back, so we'll see. By the time I post this, it will have already happened.

(Update: the second guy, who also has a toon in our guild, was there, along with the other members of his guild who have been with us for a while. Not surprisinly, the elitist eejit, and the other extraneous members of that server/guild, were not.)