Your Achievements and “Your” Achievements

So you might be wondering what I mean by that title and it goes thus; there are achievements in this game which are entirely dependant upon you and the performance you give and then there are those where you are entirely dependant upon the performance of 9 or 24 or 39 other people. Raiding achievements are often like this. It doesn’t matter how good you are, if the rest of your team is not able to keep up with you, they will drag you down with their mistakes. The safety dance achievement in Nax is a fantastic example of this. Why they didn’t make this achievement singular is beyond me. People used to require that this achievement be linked in order to get a raid spot. In many ways this is unfair. You could have died on Heigan every time you were in Nax or you could have lived every single time, but that one guy, you know who you are, always dies and ruins it for the raid. Gear is the same way. People will scoff at people with low gearscores or a low progression piece, but there isn’t much you can do about it. Your gear is not, and (in raids) will never be a truely accurate representation of your personal performance. Even in Arenas it’s a pretty safe bet that, unless you’re in 2s, you did not carry or get carried to a rating above 2000. Your gear and your achievements will only ever be as good as your group of raiders can support.
I feel slighted by this many times. I do not consider myself a “good” players, and I probably never will, but I do consider myself competant and capable of clearing any raid content in the game. Alas, Blizzard has not buffed my class and spec into immortality just yet, so I cannot go and solo everything, thus leaving me at the mercy of the skill of other players, or lack thereof. I have a nice time raiding, especially when we are successful, but I’m constantly discouraged by my guild’s lack of ability to field a fully-competant 25man raid. Ever since the days of Nax25 we have basically been a group of 16 people or so, too big for separate 10mans, and not big enough for a full 25man, who were capable of doing the content, but were unable to finish out our roster. I play on a low population server with a near-rock bottom progression rank and on the minority faction which has a further-diminished talent pool to pick raiders from. Add to that many other guilds vying for the same raiders out of the same talent pool, and you end up with a low progression environment for all concerned.
Why not transfer to a higher population server or look for a better server? well I could do that. When I started playing WoW it was to have fun with my family. My brother got a night job so we never play together anymore, my father’s computer has gone crappy and he stubbornly refuses to purchase a new one and I’ve started getting into raiding, so we don’t play together anymore. When I decided to raid I thought, ok, I’ll give this a shot, but I’m not gonna be one of those “hardcore” people. Now I’ve been raiding for months and I’ve become “more hardcore”. Where exactly the line is between what I consider hardcore and what the hardcore consider hardcore is, I can’t say, but I’m definately not a “casual”. I still cling to some kind of superiority believing that I’m somehow better because i’m “not as hardcore as those guys over there” so I’m not really an addict and I can quit raiding or WoW whenever I want. If I transfered to a server and a guild strictly for the sake of maximum progression and kept better-dealing my way to the top every time I improved, I don’t think I would enjoy the game. As time as passed I’ve basically come upon the decision that “I came for the loot, stayed for the people.” After I got used to raiding, used to getting gear, and used to clearing things, that stopped being the primary motivator for me to play the game and to raid, it was to spend time with the people with whom I enjoyed spending time. But they can still frustrate the hell out of me sometimes.