Look at your posture and notice rigidity and if it’s how you normal display yourself. Forcing heart rate elevation (forced state of being alert and attentive) while seated you could find you need to spend time mid session (every 20 30 minutes noticing what you feel like and dealing with it before it becomes overwhelming). Its also then worth trying to settle what’s causing the need for that state change. If you’re very morose doing “menial” (I say “menial” because killing a boar and a raid boss are the same thing memory wise, its your need to be alert to other things that is changing in terms of gameplay, even then physically you’re only adding at most a keychange per second) then maybe you need to not be forcing engagement during “menial” tasks and mentally just try and find a way to always be at a comfortable level of alertness.
You’re free to leave that comfort, but you could notice 30 minutes in that zone and you have to take a break, the more chaotic the information you take in that window, I mean its entirely positive and negative so you could claim its soothing to be overwhelmed and veg out but I think in reality you need to understand the game better before you play it.
Says as soon as you got invited you had to log out lol.
This. The game’s poulation is so vast that you just aren’t likely to run into the members of a pug ever again. Therefore, they’re not real people. They are very convincing AI that occasionally rage and occasionally offer advice but most often don’t communicate at all.
you;re trying to prove yourself to your friends…either stop that or hopefully they are more receptive to your honresty if you just flat out say you’re terrible, then strive to improve a little each day.
Yes. When I was in my own I did. You actually took the time to look at my profile and then try and give me a hard time for what I freely admitted in my OP? Sheesh.
Try to address the perfectionism-pressuring things you heard as a kid (most likely from your parents) but now as a rational adult. Respond to the things you heard or believe and ask what is the actual worst case scenario here, then what is realistic. Then re-evaluate.
If you make a mistake, what’s is actually going to happen? Your friends say “oops, no problem” and retry. Are you still going to have some security if you fail in this video game? Will you be fired from your job or get physically injured? Will your friends all hate you for not being amazing at a video game? No, but if they are, you’re actually better off without them.
XO hope it gets better for you
Hence why I said I’m amazed you survived lol.
Yeah, sometimes the pressure we put on ourselves causes our own problems. I know a lot about that firsthand. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, really. Just gotta figure out what works best for you.
Welcome to GD where we will praise Blizzard for accommodating arachnophobia and tell everyone else to get over it. Because we care.
Plus I want to turn things into crabs. Can you imagine the lulz?
It’s just a game, dude… No one’s going to remember or care about how well you performed (or not) tomorrow. Guildies may give eachother a hard time (it was a running joke for a while that someone thought there was a second Fyrakk intermission during our prog), but it’s all good fun. But randos you meet in queue or in LFG don’t really care. So neither should you.
Address the glaring elephant in the room…you will suck. You will fail. You will waste the time of 4-19 other people. It will be your fault. But your friends at the very least know and accept this about you. They value your company and presence and want you in the content with them.
Nobody starts off doing an activity and gets it right. Success is built upon heaps and heaps of failures. Go and be the sucktard getting carried and making noobish mistakes…but do your best to learn from them and see where your weaknesses lie and get better. Anybody who is pugging content gets to deal with the reality that sometimes you get a subpar player. They have the option to network and build their own community of quality players. You failing even in the worst of cases is sometimes just par for the course. And that is worst case scenario. More likely, the runs will go fine.
I’m not gonna lie. Your story has red flags. Heroic dungeons are beyond stupid easy. There is no “failing” in them as they are all but impossible to fail. If your friends are CE/3000+ IO, they would be carrying you in lesser content themselves feeding you the gear…but I’m taking you still at face value anyway. Go jump into the content and be the bad player you are. You aren’t going to get better without getting practical experience and that is absolutely going to take just getting into the content and working through it until you start to develop the muscle memory and skill (along with confidence) to where you emerge as a competent player.
And even if they do, what’s the big deal? I don’t see why people work themselves up over NOTHING to the point where they have panic attacks?
If you worked yourself into having a panic attack over a stupid little game, then you can work yourself out of it.
That’s… not really how anxiety disorders work.
@OP
What matters in life is entirely up to you to decide. Whether it’s the approval of your friends, the approval of anonymous people you play with or even artificial standards you unconsciously set for yourself in a video game…these are all things that YOU get to decide.
The best advice I can offer is to really train your mental game to treat these areas where you fear failure as areas that ultimately don’t matter to you. It works in real life too. Fear of rejection? Fear of imposter syndrome? Fear of looking stupid? All of these things only matter if you let them.
Yeah, it’s not something you can just turn off. But I’d at least hope they can try to work past it. Especially in a game like this where there are literally no stakes. You don’t even have to speak up in a voice call…or join one in the first place.
Can relate. Is why despite loving tanking and healing I no longer do.
We have an arachnophobia filter coming Wiggly. An arachnophobia filter. In a game that features spiders frequently and has nerubians as a major theme of soon to be two expansions.
I’m sorry but everyone has a right to complain about their anxiety and phobias now.
We can of course pick and choose what we take seriously but that also makes us hypocrites so…
I hate PUGs, I still struggle with solo applying to other people’s keys except on my paladin but that’s because I only DPS keys and feel like the only thing I really had to learn was the utility rather than how to do damage. When I was playing in season 4 of SL I was terrified of queuing for dungeons because everyone knew the dungeons but I didn’t, so when DF came out I actually went on Wowhead to read about the dungeons and what mobs and casts to look out for and that was just for normal and heroics. With the changes coming to dungeons, heroics will be on what is right now M0 and we’re going to have the 8 core DF dungeons (no Dawn of the Infinite). So I suggest reading about the dungeons, familiarizing yourself with what to watch out for, or watching a video if that helps you more. It won’t erase your problems, but going and knowing what’s going on can help ease some of the nerved.
While it is nice that your friends are helping you out, for season 4 it’s a double edged sword. Having people who already know what’s going on leaves a lot less room for failure and learning. I don’t know how much they explain to you about the dungeons, but learning that information during the dungeon can be a lot. Researching at your own pace will lift some of the mental load of trying to play while learning because it will be less on the fly.
And as Galabris said, there will be times you will fail. It sucks, but it happens. And there’ll be things about the dungeons that even research you may not know. I only learned last week that you can fear the Necrofrost in the Blight of Galakrond fight to remove it, I don’t really play classes with fear and a root mechanic that you’re supposed to either DPS down or use an ability that will free from roots is not something I would even think of to try to CC. Also, sometimes the first pull of a dungeon is not indicative of how the run will go. Sometimes you find yourself done with the first pull with 5+ deaths but after that there may only be one or two more deaths if any.
Clearly Blizzard should just expand the follower dungeon system to allow the OP to run mythic raids and 20 keys with AI party members. Seems like a simple and potentially necessary fix.
I’m not sure how it would change the game for anyone else.
I think most people have some type of fear of failure and anxiety around performance. I know that I feel more comfortable doing content with people I am familiar with. Not liking to fail are the fear of holding the group back was ( and still is a bit) is what held me back from even trying. I was in a really good guild that did not judge which put less pressure on me.
From there I did the only thing I could do, learn how to play and get better. I got a dps meter, looked up rotations, gemmed and enchanted gear, looked up dungeon/raid guides, and read all the demo forums I could. I also got weak auras which I used to track my procs for added help. For me when I had something to focus on, doing my rotation to the best of my abilities and trying not to die I had less time to think about if I would fail/ anxiety.
Oh, I also made to sure to have food, pots, and flasks. It very much was like prepping for a very important test or presentation. The fear and anxiety does not go away but at least you can see you did everything you could do.