Theconfusedone wrote:
Jaedann is an Illidan legend. I can't think of anyone on BH who you could compare him to. If you ever heard the Troxxed soundboards, he makes mention of Jaedann many times.
He's known primarily for being an exceptionally terrible player who has been around. It's also been noted that every guild he has had a hand in has fallen apart.
That being said, nobody is expecting EG to be around for a very long time.
I might see that being the case.
Anyway, I had remorse, and asked GS to take me back.
Bass said to get on vent at 2PM. When I did, he put up a message, "brb 30m". I waited.
The ensuing conversation reminded me of the dialogue between Crebane and I before I got gkicked by Tempest - the "total capitulation or gtfo" position, and as with Tempest, it was driven by others' aggression. Most of the understood my motivations.
The conversation largely revolved around the dynamic between myself and the other prot paladin, Sharizon. Sharizon does a few things that I've never been very good at better than me - positioning bosses on a dime, moving a boss along a fixed path, functioning while communicating in vent - but by and large he's a far inferior prot, and he knows it. He uses a 969 macro to tank, which destroys his threat (we wiped many times to aggro pulls on Halion and Sindragosa); his pickup is glacially slow, he is poor at AoE tanking, and has the particular shortcoming of becoming increasingly haphazard in performing the same task repeatedly during progression. He also itemizes on the basis of Gearscore, so even though he has at all times outgeared me, he's far more fragile; he's also not good at using utility spells, something that has long been a strength of mine. This was actually the decisive quality in WMOs.
WoW is life to Sharizon in a way it is not for me. I take the game very seriously and dedicate a great deal of time, mental overhead and energy to the game itself - even when not actively playing it - but I've never considered WoW a self-defining quality outside the game community. Having 146 mounts is something I very obviously take enormous pride in, in case anyone hasn't noticed, but it only has meaning to me within this world.
Not so for Sharizon. For him, being THE prot paladin is central to his entire identity, and I eclipsed him not only in skill but prestige. Several times we'd both join pug raids and predictably the entire raid would take note of me and not him; he would engage in epeen fests in trade, boasting about his Gearscore or being "the best paladin tank on the server" and inevitably my name would come up.
He would also AFK trash and was responsible for more downtime during raids than the rest of the raid combined. He was in the habit of imperiously barking out orders and micromanaging other raiders. He would also send me discreet inquiries on how to gear and solve problems. He had a Zanick-like need to be THE MT, and I was "the offtank". I honestly didn't care about this sort of patronizing nonsense. In fact, Aestu was ROLLED to be an offtank, not a maintank. What did annoy me was how he would make serious mistakes then send abusive tells, or wholly impractical raid instructions in ultimatum form.
IRL, Sharizon is a recently employed security guard. Prior to this, he was a clerk at Wal-Mart. The part about him being in college is pure fiction. I'll say this, I didn't know him at all before writing "How To Lead Pugs".
He continually insulted and talked down to me in the most ludicrously outrageous ways imaginable. I saw him as an insect and largely disregarded him, though on the occasions where he really did go too far I had some harsh words. Of course he then SS'd some of my more choice insults and cried to the officers, as if it wasn't his insulting language that provoked it in the first place.
When I asked to return, Bassaren decided to pass the shoe to the other foot and insisted the drama stop - and as with Tempest and most drama in the game, the drama wasn't what had happened, it was the reaction to it - giving into the crying and aggression from disgruntled mediocre elitists. And as with Crebane, I didn't go for the "capitulation" bit and parted ways.
I initially began to do what I did with Tempest, which was write a massive TLDR establishing my point of view. However, I thought better of it, deleted the two pages I'd typed up, and simply wrote,
Quote:
Bass,
I do have some respect for you and now that we part ways I’d prefer to dwell more on the fun times that were had. In leaving the guild, I was honestly more fearful than you can imagine of finding myself in this position – of wishing I could turn back the clock.
Good luck.
-Aestu
It was true. There really was no problem until I had made the hasty decision to xfer. As with Tempest, initially I was quite angry about having been, as I saw it, taken advantage of - my patience abused. And also as before, this initial anger gave way to perspective.
When I was asked why we hadn't downed HLK25, the honest opinion I'd reply would be that it was due to poor decisions made before I joined the guild about who to gear up and rely on - people who were unreliable, or mediocre, or disinterested, or only interested in loot. A lot of this, I felt, was driven by Bassaren's arrogance and susceptibility to manipulation. I was fully cognizant of the irony that this served to prove the point Seribus had made.
In the final analysis, the many things said in dialogue had really established the truth of this beyond any doubt. Jaedann had fed me a lot of bullshit and flattery - and more than anything else I felt deeply foolish having gone for the bait - but his decisive argument had been the one I made to myself, which is that I'd "done everything I could".
I had explained my reasons for leaving truthfully, and I was nonplussed when Bassaren basically said he found this less appropriate than total bullshit excuses which everyone but him found insulting to the collective intelligence of the guild, all of which left us with 20 people on for attempts most nights and recruiting players who had no business being there.
I'm not Tuhl - or Tojo - and I don't go down with ships or commit harakiri; this could be called selfish, but it could also be called pragmatic. Quixotism is self-defeating.
So I logged back on Aestu and got a haircut, the same as Fyrei's. The other night, I raged on vent about Jaedan's various misrepresentations, but instead of kicking me, the GM had the wisdom to see clearly my point of view (and how tight the prot paladin market currently is). There's tons of FOTMs with 277 gear but 95% of them suck. I show Hand of A'dal over Herald of the Titans or Kingsbane for a reason.
So I ran a heroic with the holy pally officer and cleared H UP in 10 minutes, pulling Gormok to Ymiron. Then I helped the GM farm mounts (he can't solo ZG, I guess that establishes where he is relative to Seribus or Jushiro).
Good and bad often defies cause and effect.
