Performance Anxiety

I’ve had some really good questing buddies in the last few days. I usually play solo, I think you’re probably all familiar with my unfortunate guild situation at the moment, so the time I spend it groups is limited at best. It’s rare for me to want to quest with a random stranger, especially for quests that don’t involve an instance or elites or other group-requiring details. In my experience most of the people who group randomly are either sort of irritating, complete newbies who can’t find the party chat, or loot ninjas who don’t bother to /roll before grabbing. So I’ve typically steered clear of random groupings.

When you’re very very used to soloing there are certain routines you get into. Certain spell rotations, certain distances to pull from to avoid being hit the longest, certain specific reactions, self defense mechanisms, and so on and so forth. So I’m extremely accustomed to doing things my own way.

Maybe that’s why whenever someone offers me assistance, or when I team up with a stranger for mutual benefit, I promptly dissolve into all elbows and hoofs with not an opposable thumb in sight.

This is what happened to me the other day in Un’Goro Crater. I was roaming around the tar pits, happily blasting the faces off any hapless Tar Lords who crossed my path and collecting the occasional Dreamfoil as I went by. This was all well and good, and I was making fantastic progress. Then I found that my next available quest led me down in to the horrible Silithid pits in the south part of the area. I hate Silithids. I despise them. I loathe them. I don’t know why they bother me so much, I think it’s because I play late at night and when I sleep afterwards I dream about oddly organic looking caverns lit by the pulsing glow of baby bugs’ thoraxes. Ick. They’re disgusting.

So in pursuing the Silithid Queen’s brain I was more than a little hesitant. Thankfully, I ran into a friendly Druid a level or two higher than me in the entrance to the caverns. Together we made short work of the repulsive arthropods and wound up spending the rest of the afternoon questing together across the crater.

Playing with someone else, especially a Moonkin, throws me off my game. His root effect trapped the mobs way farther away than I was accustomed to. I kept having to run closer to get in range for arcane missiles. His Starfire pulled faster than anything I could do. I didn’t need slow, I didn’t need counterspell. It was, in fact, all I could do to get off a few spells before stuff keeled over. He was playing my game while I stood there and watched.

And add to that the fact that most of the time I wound up standing still looking like an idiot while I tried in vain to target the right enemy, or when I accidentally flipped down to cast bar two without meaning to and instead of frying something’s legs out from under it, stood there drinking mana potions when I already had full mana. I felt like the shy kid at a neighborhood birthday party. You want to run and play with the other kids, but you somehow just can’t do it.

Despite all that, I must not have looked as silly as I felt, or been as useless, because we stayed partied together for most of a day. And as we finally parted having run out of quests and heading in different directions next, he told me what fun he’d had and how nice it was to quest with someone instead of soloing all the time. He was a genuinely nice player, leveling not-his-first alt, and when he found out that Rhii was my main, he even gave me the BOE blue that dropped when he won the roll for it.

What it all boils down to is this: when I’m playing with strangers I lose my head. I can’t fight, I can’t hardly walk straight. I develop unprecedented lag of the brain. I’ve got to start getting into groups more, getting a feel for group dynamics, learning what my class can and should do when I’m not solely responsible for my own survival. I need to kick my case of performance anxiety before it starts cutting into my ability to play how I want to play.

Tagged as: PUGs, Rhii