Breakfast Topic: Do you enjoy wiping?
OK, I'll admit that headline was perhaps an overly blunt way to phrase this particular question. Let's try it again: Do you enjoy the actual process of progression raiding? Plenty of raiders claim to love pushing progression, but I'm not sure all of them enjoy fumbling for a strategy and dying and racking up mistake after mistake and death after death as the night wears on. I know some players do, though. I know that because I'm one of them.
I love a good wipe. There's an art to it, after all. I love the process of running back to the raid site, mulling over what went wrong. I enjoy the frantic whispers with other players ("Did you see what happened right before the boss rose up? Do you think if everybody moved apart right then that we could avoid some of those issues?"). I relish that moment when the creative thinkers tentatively offer up some harebrained maneuver (most certainly not something already laid out on any strat site or YouTube video) that turns out to be solid gold. I've even enjoyed wipes caused by players having problems with their execution; as long as they're improving with each attempt, I'm totally cool holding their hand along the way.
I'll admit that there comes a point in a night of wiping when patience wears thin and it's time to call the raid. Still, that doesn't mean I don't look forward to the next opportunity to puzzle and manhandle my way through new content with a group of guildmates and friends. (All of this assumes a group of known friends; I don't know of anyone who would enjoy wiping in LFR mode.)
My fondness for wiping uphill five miles through the snow is probably not one that's shared by the majority of the playerbase, but I've been wrong about these things before. Who here loves to wipe? Do we have any odd birds here who, even more than the thrill of victory, enjoy the process of picking up the pieces of an encounter and trying them again in a different configuration?
