PMS and Raiding

I'm starting to think it would be a good idea to take off one week per month from raiding in WoW.  Yep, I don't think my PMS mixes well with it because I get very easily annoyed with the normal stupidity that goes on.  Last night I got REALLY annoyed.  Not my usual snippy annoyed, but rather the very rare 'pissed off to high heaven' annoyed.

A good majority of the time, I'm a cool cucumber at raid time.  I take time to make sure I've got my reagents, flasks, food, fish feasts and have done my nightly pre-raid ritual, which is to go to the bathroom, make sure I have something to drink, maybe a snack, and then I'm ready to go.  After I get started, it's 3 hours of raid time.  No biggie.  I've done it 3 nights a week for almost 2 years.  But, I don't know what it is, on our 25-man nights, it's never very eventful, everyone behaves, I have fun and it's all good.  Part of the deal is that I think my raid leader has everyone so intimidated that they don't bother to speak up because they know a proper smackdown would come their way if they even thought of getting out of line.

Then comes the 10-mans, which have been a clusterbomb from the word "go".  My group, right now in the mood I'm in, I can't help but have my eyes roll up into the back of my head.  I've got two basic options.  I either go with my raid leader if they have room and then I feel like I'm out of my league, or I go with my usual group which has always been a gigantic clusterbomb and sit for three hours grinding my teeth.  It's not a happy situation, so I've basically come to the conclusion that I'm hosed either way I go.

Last night's raid was just horrible.  But, not in the way you would expect.  To most folks, you could say it was a fantastic raid night because we wiped maybe twice and we got 10 out of 12 bosses down in just 3 hours.  Used to, we couldn't even get 6 in 3 hours.  Big improvement.  No, my problem was of an entirely different nature.  We have a crew of young men, and I stress YOUNG because that is the only excuse I can come up with for their rancid behavior.  I've started to limit my play time a lot because of these young men who just find that their mission and purpose is to be a flaming pack of assholes.  Hubris, arrogance, being foul, inappropriate remarks, ugh, the list just goes on and on about how they just could not keep their mouths shut.  Yes, I know, this is the nature of insecure heterosexual males.  They've got no common sense and they just show their asinine behavior so that their friends will think they are cool.  To a 38 year-old woman, their antics are just NOT cool.

I'm trying to blame it on my PMS.  I really am.  Maybe my nerves are so frayed that their antics are just the icing on the cake to turn my mood from cheerful to foul.  I was in a good mood when I came in, but then what do we get?  People pulling early, people who won't shut up, even after I yell, "Tanner, SHUT IT" it still continued.  My guildies know that if you hit my shit list, well, it's going to take some work to get off of it.  My patience is legendary, I give people enough rope and I see what they do with it.  But, when they've hung themselves, it's katy-bar-the-door, my patience runs out and you get to hear some very tactful and not so kind words headed your way.  Tonight, I had not one, but three land on my list and as I became eerily quiet during the raid, someone said, "Oh no, she's gone quiet, we're ALL in trouble."  Thing is, she was right.  When the raid was done, I left the group and promptly shut off the game.  I was not going to allow them another second of my time to annoy me.  First off, I don't like being annoyed; Second, I don't want to chew a head off and have to apologize for it later, it's a 'you don't have to apologize for words you don't say' kind of thing.

All I know is that there are a crew of young people who are lucky I'm not really their mom.  Heads would have been dangling from necks by just a piece of skin after I removed them with a sharp blade.  My mom always said I've got a tongue so sharp it'd clip a hedge.  Well, those boys (and girl) nearly about had their head handed to them, lucky for them, I had the common sense to just walk out and not say another damn word.

You know, just for the record, it's not polite to push people's buttons.  You want to be an ass, fine, just don't do it around me.  I have no time for drunks or perverts in my raid, they are people who I refuse to waste my valuable time on.

So, I go 10 out of 12 and it's through a very painful process.  I have given up hope of ever getting my Kingslayer title.  I know it'll never be through 10-man, the pack of folks I have to go with I'm convinced don't have the gumption or the half-sense to get it right.  On the other hand, there's the 25-man, it's got the 10 who are really good with the other 4 in my group that are decent but need heavy supervision from the raid leader.  Then there are the other 10 who can't find their ass from a hole in the ground, who either don't show up, don't know their class, pull idiotic stunts and what-all, ensuring that I'll never see my kingslayer and speaks the inevitable truth:

I'm wasting my time.

I hope to the gods I'm just having world stopping PMS.  I sure hope it's the case.  But, if I know nothing about the people I play WoW with, they're consistent.  Yeah, you guessed it, not all, but some of them are consistent assholes.  It's days like yesterday that make me question things, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a whole ton of fun watching those folks suck up to get off of my shit list.  Let me tell you, hell is going to get pretty cold before some of them ever see me do anything for them ever again.