Posts with tag pressure

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

If you've queued as a DPS for the dungeon finder lately, you've probably marveled at the estimated time and wondered what happened to all the tanks and healers. Maybe fewer players want to tank when crowd control is necessary; maybe fewer players want to heal when mana must be managed. Maybe it's the fact that gear is more critical at this point in an expansion, so people are shy about signing up for those roles. Or maybe all the tanks and healers are skipping the unpredictable dungeon finder crowd altogether and looking for guilds to join.

Whatever the cause, dungeon finder queues for DPS are absolutely brutal at the moment. If you don't want to wait 30-plus minutes for every run, you're going to need tanks and healers in your guild who are willing to run heroics. You may wonder, why wouldn't they be willing to run heroics? After all, the content is fresh, the upgrades are flowing, and most people still need justice and/or valor points.

The question isn't so much whether they want to run heroics; the question is whether they want to run heroics with you, right now.

This week, I'm going to focus on what players and officers can do to avoid stressing out your tanks and healers and help them to enjoy the game along with everyone else.

I know it's just a game. Sometimes, though, I feel the pressure of having to perform well. It's obvious during Arena matches, where the pressure to win gets to the point where it frays nerves and leads to nerdrage, frustration, and sometimes just plain exasperation. When our GM announced that he would be holding tryouts for Ulduar based on our raid performance, I felt pressured to perform a little more. Even though we have all content on farm, I would respec to a PvE spec for Naxxramas of all things, just to perform well enough to justify getting into our Ulduar core group.

Mind you, I'm a founding officer of this guild, but the tryouts apply to me just the same. I respect that a lot, as it means that our GM looks at everything from a performance persective and not just because this or that person is a friend or this or that person has been with the guild a long time. This gives me a lot of confidence for Ulduar. While most of the game now is pretty casual, I guess there are still a precious few aspects that put butterflies in our stomach. Would you agree? Let's say, being the healer in a PUG. Do you feel the pressure to perform? Do you feel like you're under the microscope? Or being the new recruit in an Arena team, do you feel like you have to come up with the numbers to keep your slot? Or how about when your guild is going after Immortal or Undying? As easy as the game seems now, what situations give you some form of stage fright?