SSC - Quibbles and Bits o' Gnomes

That profile pic is my artwork by the way, to showcase my body art drawings. Not on an actual body, mind you.
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Anyways, last night, a group of officers led Serpentshrine Caverns without our guild leader. which means,
1) People will fall in the water.
2) People will talk more.
3) People will wipe.
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Some people are actually afraid of our guild leader, who is one of the most self-realized person I have ever had the pleasure of raiding with. He is open and willing to challenge people on thoughts, using the smoothest techniques I have ever seen. As a new officer, I feel pressured to figure out how to play friendly with my fellow members and yet, coax out the respect that the officers have garnered through their experience. What makes it challenging is that I'm provocative, naive, and sometimes, even though I know it doesn't help in the long term, I still engage in childish backtalk with members who want my attention, no matter how negatively they go about it.

And that's what sorta kinda happened last night. I write about it because in a way, I'm still upset of how it might have affected our progress with Vashj. Oh we've downed her several times in the past. But this was the first time I was main tanking Vashj. And I was dismayed at my threat performance.

I'll go into the details of the fight. Initially, I blew my wings (Avenging Wrath), tenatively inch in the platform, throw out my Avenging Shield, judge Seal of Righteousness, throw up my Holy Shield, throw down a Consecrate, manuever backwards toward the center of the platform and work my ass off to build threat by judging Seal of the Crusader, then judging Seal of Vengeance over and over. One of the officers said I was hovering between 500-700 tps. What BS!

I changed up to my spell damage set while remaining uncrushable. Eventually, I had it down to: tossing out an AS, judging SoR over and over while my Libram that dealt more damage with SOR, blowing AW while I was actually in melee range, spamming Consecrate and of course, HS. It was exhausting to the point that I lost my voice (I wasn't even talking at that point). People told me to stop talking, it sounded like I was dying.

I'm so frustrated with my low-threat generation. I have all of best pally gear that one can buy with badges, until Phase 3 of the 2.4 finally commences. I gem up proper, I read that 500 is more than enough for spell damage, and refine my technique as shown above, but still, for dps that does plus 1k damage per second, it's hard! Like hard in a "I'm whiny and gimme more threat, you bastards of Blizzard and I will throw myself on the ground and work out a temper tantrum" way.

So I suppose this means I should go solo some elites and figure out what I could be doing better. At least the naga were easier to work out. Two off tanks in dps gear would be on either side of the platform and would pick up them to bring to me. I had the tendency to blow my taunt the moment the naga peeped over the stairs which would go right before they blew their own taunts, meaning for a long ass prayer for a non crushing blow while cooldown chanting. I decided to trust the tanks and pull off when they had the secure hold.

Back to raid leading. During a break, a member who happens to be female and a wife of another member had her mic open and muttered, "Typical male." I admit that I guffawed very loud, blasting some ears on vent. This sparked a raid conversation that went into gender differences and power. One fella who admittedly said that he didn't listen to my instructions during a critical raid fight because of my voice (which is melifuous from years of singing) and my avatar's beauty which I hope to hell, he's joking about. I end up putting him on ignore because his shinanigans were disruptive to my focus and perhaps the raid's focus on the raid leader's prep descriptions for Vashj.

At least the Leo fight went okay. I could really really really do without the bloody coaching (backseating driving). I've done the fight before. It's not that much of a challenge. But I can look at it in two ways. Hiliarious because there are so many people who are telling me what to do or maddening because there are so many people who are telling me what to do.

I run in to deal with the first mobs, then hover over Leo who is banished. I throw down a Consecrate, then judge SoR the moment he comes up. Block, parry, dodge until he whirlwinds as I strafe behind him to make certain he's within range of my AS. That searing totem is a blessing. There was one time where downing my inner demon was a challenge. I had 2 seconds to go before I would have been MCed. I had my spell damage gear; only once did a couple of people pull off of me as they dpsed prematurely. They died in a pile in the corner :P
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Here's an interesting article about raid leading and real world applications.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn_pr.html