Working Hard to Keep Myself Happy

Real life can be a harsh mistress at times. Family life and work place demands on us all and can cause us to change our habits.

For the past 6 years, I have managed to fit raiding in around family life and fortunately found guilds that started at 20:00 my time (21:00 server) and when my son grew older and that restriction was removed I was able to join friends and raid with them at 19:00 (20:00 server) despite this being a tight squeeze as the I like spending time with the wife to eat meals and stuff before she settles in to watch the plethora of soaps she pollute her mind with.

But recent events have caused me much pain and suffering. Firstly, I went through hell in my job, I'll not bore you with the details here but long story short I suffered broken promises, no pay rises, no hope of promotion and no professional development over 3 years before I had to quit or get signed off with depression. Neither option was good but the medical route wasn't really compatible with getting a new job so I quit and took a 2 month summer break to look for a new job. After hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews I landed myself a nice job with a 8 day shift pattern. 

This really screwed up my raid schedule but I thought that I'd be able to attend 50% of raids and that I'd cope. Sadly I was wrong on both counts. I started my new job the week of the Firelands nerfs and missed a lot of first kills and subsequently have not learned the fights and now feel like a passenger on them being boosted by the team around me, which simply isn't enjoyable for me. Also my shifts are either 0700-1900 or 1900-0700 and I have a 1 hour commute. This means I actually miss 2 out of 3 raids over an 8 week period and for me Warcraft is raiding and I'm not getting that anymore. 

I've suffered this in silence for a few weeks trying to tough it out. Eventually I cracked and started looking for a new guild to sit Evlyxx in so I could raid. My dilemma is that I love the guild I'm in as I'm there with people I consider real friends, rather than just colleagues and if I were to move Evlyxx I would become one of those annoying players that logs on for raids and then logs out.

So the current plan is to form a 2nd raid team within Saturday Knight Fever starting at 20:30 which gives me time to get home and attend to the family duties before switching to WoW Raid mode. With tactically placed raid days of Wednesday, Friday and Sunday I'll always be able to raid 2 days a week and will hit 17 out of 24 raids in an 8 week cycle instead of 8 out of 24.

So I'm building a new team and hopefully will be helping to introduce some new faces to raiding from within the SKF ranks and also let some of the other raid team get their alts into raids as a few people are capable and have the gear to go. The other cool thing with starting from a blank sheet is that I can build the team around balance rather than stacking hunters and druids as we did with the existing team. While the goal is to fill the group from within, I do anticipate having to do some recruitment  to fill in the teams shortcomings.

So I'm now full of renewed hope and purpose at building a new team. If you have any tips on building a new raid team I'd love to hear what strategies you found most successful.