One of the big advantages of playing a tank class is that you tend to get first pick of gear, often over everyone else. It's a perk I've enjoyed greatly in the prior tiers. Because of that, and along with a dose of good luck the last few tiers, I have tended to be the kind of player who prattles on incessantly and selfishly about missing that one or another upgrade, when all the rest of my gear is already perfect and everyone is still fishing for drops.
However, that streak ended this tier. Boss drops and coin rolls have been abysmal, and I'm floundering in the high 540s, after upgrading all my gear, despite having killed normal mode bosses in SoO 55 fucking times and rolling all my coins every week. The other raid members are well into their mid to high 550s and I'm floundering like some pathetic, beached fish flopping desperate and sucking empty gills for gear.
I know gear will come, and having a second plate tank and a plate DPS also slows the rate of gear acquisition, but right now, it's frustrating when I find myself biting it while tanking wave after wave of Garrosh adds and just not being able to stand up as well as I should. The rest of the raid is geared and I'm not, and in my role, that's limiting the raid group a bit.
Wah. Wah. Wah. I'm done QQing now.
A more serious thing that's frustrating is the raid-composition we're running with. It's a bit hodge-podge, with no less than 4 Paladins, up to 2 Priest, and maybe a Warlock. And then we have 2 rogues, 2 hunters, and a shaman. Can you guess what token hasn't dropped but maybe 3 times all tier long? We also wind up missing a raid-buff frequently, and while normal modes don't really require all buffs at all times, if we're pushing to progress in Heroics, it's something I would consider for comp very closely.
And that's another thing, we often spend so much time actually building comp before every boss rather than raiding, we easily miss out on at least one if not two extra boss kills a night. To be fair, we did have a pretty decent clear on Tuesday with 11 normal mode bosses down in 3 hours, but that could have been much better. We started about 15 minutes late, ran about 15 minutes late, and also spend another half hour or so in downtime between bosses as the officers hem'd and haw'd about who to bring and who to sit. A roster of 12 or 13 is starting to feel a bit overfull, especially when the roster isn't particularly diverse in terms of token-distribution.
But. I don't really blame the officers here, either. The guild is in a situation where attendance isn't as good, we frequently have DPS missing raid or showing up half-way through, and due to the nature of raiding and loot in the group, there are no possible repercussions that you can dole out. And you really don't want to shrink the roster, and potentially wind up with not enough people to raid (there have been nights with only 10 people online), so what do you do? It's not an easy situation.
When I was running Turtles, one of the ways we were able to really improve attendance was by implementing a Suicide Kings system, where absent members didn't rise through the ranks, people Suicided above them. That was a real motivation to be at raid, if you wanted loot. But I don't know, I'm also feeling like we squander a lot of time, we killed 11 bosses in 3 hours and then took 2 hours to clean up Siegecrafter and Paragons. Part of that was starting a half-hour late.
Maybe it's my age, but if I'm putting out 9 hours out of my really busy week, I really want a well-organized, well-oiled machine in a raid. Very little down-time, a single, organized break half-way though and very quick swaps for comp (ideally, from preplanned and posted rosters).
I just don't know what the problem is. It's a combination of things without an easy solution, and I'm just frustrated. Bah.
Showing posts with label raid leading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raid leading. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Monday, December 5, 2011
Exploits in LFR & Valor Gear
So. I'm looking at the Paragon (and every other top-tier guild, it looks like) exploit that let them loot the same boss multiple times, and I am left wondering why they had to exploit when they could, very easily have farmed the bosses in a much easier way.
So, you have 25 main characters you're going into Heroics with next week, You want them geared as much as possible but you don't want to exploit. Here's what you do. Form a raid in the following way:
2. Conqueror token
2. Protector token
2. Vanquisher token
Preferably, all of a different armor type (cloth/leather/plate/mail). You also bring along19 alts who you don't care about gearing at all. You form a raid and you run LFR. Everyone passes on everything, the main take whatever they want, hopefully getting at least a 2-set bonus each. At the end of the raid, swap out 6 alts, for 6 mains.
Reset. Rinse. Repeat. 4 or 5 times, and you're done. I'm sure it will only take Paragon maybe an hour or two to clear LFR, so you're talking about maybe 9 or 10 hours invested total. Yes, you're left at a bit of the random loot mercy, but this is not a bad way to gear up mains with no risk of violating ToS at all. It's fair, you're not breaking any rules, and everyone only gets 1 shot at the loot from each boss. It just so happens that you're stacking the rest of the raid with people who'll pass over and over.
Anyway.
Speaking of gear up quickly, somehow, I completely missed the fact that there are two BoE items available at the Vendor.
My poor Merricat who is already Valor capped will have to rorego that Trinket she was pining for and buy the boots for Innana while I'll run a dungeon or two tonight with my druid so he can buy Innana her bracers if I can't find someone with the pattern.
Innana gets all the good stuff the first two weeks of the patch! I must love her best among all my children.
I made my first Valor purchase in the Relic this week, next week it will be the Amulet, along with the boots and bracers, and then I'll have to evaluate where I am in terms of gear and decide what needs upgrading first. The Trinket looks pretty damned good.
The boots are quite good, almost comparable to the Mirrored Boots, with a Fractured Amberjewel in the Yellow slot. The bracers, on the other hand, are not so thrilling. The lack of Mastery and the single socket make the crafted bracers far more appealing. Now I just need to find someone on my server who has the pattern. I might just grind a few dungeons out on my Druid alt to get the bracers in the meantime anyway... but we'll see.
I don't really look at the drops as anything that's attainable until it actually drops and my position in the Suicide Kings list grants me the item. After who knows how many kills of Baleroc, I saw the tanking helm drop once, while Maara was on top of the list. Yeah, I don't really depend on loot drops anymore as a viable thing.
The lack of Mastery on a lot of the new items is a bit annoying as I have to reforge/regem a lot to stay at block-cap but my overall mitigation has been increasing quite a bit. Raid buffed, I can get up to ~40% pure mitigation, even more if I have Windwalk procs rolling. That's 40% of incoming damage Missing, Dodged or Parried.
I can't wait to get some heroic gear.
So, you have 25 main characters you're going into Heroics with next week, You want them geared as much as possible but you don't want to exploit. Here's what you do. Form a raid in the following way:
2. Conqueror token
2. Protector token
2. Vanquisher token
Preferably, all of a different armor type (cloth/leather/plate/mail). You also bring along19 alts who you don't care about gearing at all. You form a raid and you run LFR. Everyone passes on everything, the main take whatever they want, hopefully getting at least a 2-set bonus each. At the end of the raid, swap out 6 alts, for 6 mains.
Reset. Rinse. Repeat. 4 or 5 times, and you're done. I'm sure it will only take Paragon maybe an hour or two to clear LFR, so you're talking about maybe 9 or 10 hours invested total. Yes, you're left at a bit of the random loot mercy, but this is not a bad way to gear up mains with no risk of violating ToS at all. It's fair, you're not breaking any rules, and everyone only gets 1 shot at the loot from each boss. It just so happens that you're stacking the rest of the raid with people who'll pass over and over.
Anyway.
Speaking of gear up quickly, somehow, I completely missed the fact that there are two BoE items available at the Vendor.
My poor Merricat who is already Valor capped will have to rorego that Trinket she was pining for and buy the boots for Innana while I'll run a dungeon or two tonight with my druid so he can buy Innana her bracers if I can't find someone with the pattern.
Innana gets all the good stuff the first two weeks of the patch! I must love her best among all my children.
I made my first Valor purchase in the Relic this week, next week it will be the Amulet, along with the boots and bracers, and then I'll have to evaluate where I am in terms of gear and decide what needs upgrading first. The Trinket looks pretty damned good.
The boots are quite good, almost comparable to the Mirrored Boots, with a Fractured Amberjewel in the Yellow slot. The bracers, on the other hand, are not so thrilling. The lack of Mastery and the single socket make the crafted bracers far more appealing. Now I just need to find someone on my server who has the pattern. I might just grind a few dungeons out on my Druid alt to get the bracers in the meantime anyway... but we'll see.
I don't really look at the drops as anything that's attainable until it actually drops and my position in the Suicide Kings list grants me the item. After who knows how many kills of Baleroc, I saw the tanking helm drop once, while Maara was on top of the list. Yeah, I don't really depend on loot drops anymore as a viable thing.
The lack of Mastery on a lot of the new items is a bit annoying as I have to reforge/regem a lot to stay at block-cap but my overall mitigation has been increasing quite a bit. Raid buffed, I can get up to ~40% pure mitigation, even more if I have Windwalk procs rolling. That's 40% of incoming damage Missing, Dodged or Parried.
I can't wait to get some heroic gear.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Ragnaros: Night 1
Phew. Ragnaros reminds me a lot of Lich King - very tightly tuned mechanics, very high individual raid performance requirements and a very fun fight.
Trash:
The first Lava dude puts slabs of lava cutting off travel over the platform every so often - we just kind of hopped around and it wasn't too onerous, but I saw that on the first cast, we were stacked and it forced him to put one right under his own feet and since he has a cast, if we backed up or moved up, we should be okay. Not bad at all.
Killing two Magmaws so easily is a bit sad. They put fire under your feet, dodge it. When they submerge and re-emerge, make sure tanks are in place to pick them up. Focus one down then the other. Doesn't matter which one you do first. Or it didn't for us.
Phase 1:
We actually cleared all the way through the first phase into the first transition on our very first pull! Of course, I'm pretty sure that was exclusively on the shoulders of the healers who got us through a ton of mistakes. But we quickly spent the next hour cleaning up Phase 1 so it has become a non-issue at this point - it's a very simple phase as long as a few things happen exactly the same every time:
Phase 2 and 3:
We didn't get too much time in this, but with so many abilities gone from this phase, it should be significantly easier (no knock-back, no traps). The Seed seem to be like the Defile/Valkyr mechanic - run out/group up/run out - but I think we should be okay, as long as we can dodge the flames on the ground. It feels kind of like a Heigan dance. While being chased by living bombs. And getting 30% of Rag's health down. But I'm not too worried about it. Yet.
Phase 3 replaces the seeds with Meteor tanking - which I don't know how complicated it is. We should be able to push him over before we get more than 3 hopefully as the more meteors we get the lower our DPS will be on Ragnaros. Our DPS has been pretty high lately, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed - our basic strat on LK was that if we got to phase 3 and all the adds from transition were dead, we could basically just kind of bum-rush him the rest of the way. Blunt, but it worked. I'm hoping the same sort of thing (or something similar) works here.
Transition Phase:
This is the hard part of this fight.
The first transition and second transition are the same except for the second transition having 2 extra adds that complicate things significantly. 8 adds spawn around the platform and rush towards a randomly placed Sulfuras and if they hit the hammer, it's a wipe. You need the 5 DPS and 2 tanks to split up and handle the adds, stun, slow and kill them before that happens. But the nature of the thing is that it's very random and the placement of the Hammer gives you about 5 seconds to figure out where everyone is going and what to do, communicate that, and get into position at the same time. So it took us probably ten attempts in the transition phase to put something together that looking like it was starting to work.
We had to be very explicit about where the melee were going and where the ranged were going with relation to the hammer - the melee and tanks would always take the 4 closest with specific people assigned left to right and the ranged would be on the rest. It worked a couple of times, but we were still having the odd add slipping through. I really want to nail this to the floor and put a rug on it before we get to the second transition phase because we need this phase to be like clockwork before we handle the two extra adds in that phase.
I was talking to Thistle afterward and she said she wished we could just replay the fight to get an idea of what's going wrong in the transition and I so wish you could do something like that. Starcraft lets you watch a whole match but there it's just a series of action that have to be duplicated, the amount of data in a 4 minute long raid encounter can be significant. Maybe I should try FRAPsing a raid...
It was a fun night learning this fight and I wish we had one more night to go back to him with, but we'll get there again next week, and we'll have another handful of items upgraded which should help numbers across the board. Every week we come back it will get easier, so we'll see how it goes.
I'm not ready to push lock-outs yet - maybe in a couple of weeks, but not yet. The way I do lock-outs is that I will push a lock-out on the first night, and if we can't kill him, we just go back the second night, drop the lock and do the other bosses - this lets us have the best of both worlds. If we kill him - yay! If not, we can still get our gear without risking getting stuck on an old boss for whatever reason and not getting to him on the second night.
Anyway. It's fun to have a really tough boss to sit on for a couple of nights. I'm already hungry for next week. Rawr.
Trash:
The first Lava dude puts slabs of lava cutting off travel over the platform every so often - we just kind of hopped around and it wasn't too onerous, but I saw that on the first cast, we were stacked and it forced him to put one right under his own feet and since he has a cast, if we backed up or moved up, we should be okay. Not bad at all.
Killing two Magmaws so easily is a bit sad. They put fire under your feet, dodge it. When they submerge and re-emerge, make sure tanks are in place to pick them up. Focus one down then the other. Doesn't matter which one you do first. Or it didn't for us.
Phase 1:
We actually cleared all the way through the first phase into the first transition on our very first pull! Of course, I'm pretty sure that was exclusively on the shoulders of the healers who got us through a ton of mistakes. But we quickly spent the next hour cleaning up Phase 1 so it has become a non-issue at this point - it's a very simple phase as long as a few things happen exactly the same every time:
- Everyone has to be the right distance from each other and they need to make sure they're not getting knocked into lava from the knock back
- The person who's triggering the traps (our awesome mage took every trap) needs to give the healers a heads-up and watch the timers to make sure two AoE's don't go off at once
- Everyone needs to dodge the lava waves from the hammer (especialyl if there's a knock-back coming right afterward - tanks and melee need to be smart about how they're dodging the lava here)
- The melee WAIT for the tanks to be in melee range before getting into melee - especially on the pull and after the knockback. Our feral kitty and rogue were dashing in over and over and getting hit for 150k until we figured out they were just getting to the boss faster than the tanks after knock-backs. Just have them wait 2 secs
Phase 2 and 3:
We didn't get too much time in this, but with so many abilities gone from this phase, it should be significantly easier (no knock-back, no traps). The Seed seem to be like the Defile/Valkyr mechanic - run out/group up/run out - but I think we should be okay, as long as we can dodge the flames on the ground. It feels kind of like a Heigan dance. While being chased by living bombs. And getting 30% of Rag's health down. But I'm not too worried about it. Yet.
Phase 3 replaces the seeds with Meteor tanking - which I don't know how complicated it is. We should be able to push him over before we get more than 3 hopefully as the more meteors we get the lower our DPS will be on Ragnaros. Our DPS has been pretty high lately, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed - our basic strat on LK was that if we got to phase 3 and all the adds from transition were dead, we could basically just kind of bum-rush him the rest of the way. Blunt, but it worked. I'm hoping the same sort of thing (or something similar) works here.
Transition Phase:
This is the hard part of this fight.
The first transition and second transition are the same except for the second transition having 2 extra adds that complicate things significantly. 8 adds spawn around the platform and rush towards a randomly placed Sulfuras and if they hit the hammer, it's a wipe. You need the 5 DPS and 2 tanks to split up and handle the adds, stun, slow and kill them before that happens. But the nature of the thing is that it's very random and the placement of the Hammer gives you about 5 seconds to figure out where everyone is going and what to do, communicate that, and get into position at the same time. So it took us probably ten attempts in the transition phase to put something together that looking like it was starting to work.
We had to be very explicit about where the melee were going and where the ranged were going with relation to the hammer - the melee and tanks would always take the 4 closest with specific people assigned left to right and the ranged would be on the rest. It worked a couple of times, but we were still having the odd add slipping through. I really want to nail this to the floor and put a rug on it before we get to the second transition phase because we need this phase to be like clockwork before we handle the two extra adds in that phase.
I was talking to Thistle afterward and she said she wished we could just replay the fight to get an idea of what's going wrong in the transition and I so wish you could do something like that. Starcraft lets you watch a whole match but there it's just a series of action that have to be duplicated, the amount of data in a 4 minute long raid encounter can be significant. Maybe I should try FRAPsing a raid...
It was a fun night learning this fight and I wish we had one more night to go back to him with, but we'll get there again next week, and we'll have another handful of items upgraded which should help numbers across the board. Every week we come back it will get easier, so we'll see how it goes.
I'm not ready to push lock-outs yet - maybe in a couple of weeks, but not yet. The way I do lock-outs is that I will push a lock-out on the first night, and if we can't kill him, we just go back the second night, drop the lock and do the other bosses - this lets us have the best of both worlds. If we kill him - yay! If not, we can still get our gear without risking getting stuck on an old boss for whatever reason and not getting to him on the second night.
Anyway. It's fun to have a really tough boss to sit on for a couple of nights. I'm already hungry for next week. Rawr.
Friday, August 12, 2011
PuG Blues
Man, this is the longest gap I've taken from writing in some time. Mostly because I've been kind of glum in game as raids haven't been very engaging - not that I don't want to raid, but our raid group has been having some trouble gathering up and actually raiding and it's starting to wear on me.
I feel like we're just in this hanging phase, where all we need are a couple of good, solid, three-day weeks to push through to Ragnaros. This is exactly what it was like when we were on Nefarian - except that was one bsoss and here we have an entire raid to learn. Our core is kicking ass as usual, it's the last couple of slots that worry me. We've been picking up people, and if I look at the roster, there are 21 people who could conceivably raid... and yet I'm PuGing at least one slot every week.
There are a lot of things that happen when you have to bring in someone new.
1. You have to let your entire raid comp adjust to this new person, personality wise. We're a nerdy, smart, funny, laid-back group and we've had people join who immediately began poking, poking, poking at someone's performance, I think jokingly, and it got to be an issue. While I'm trying to figure out DPS distribution, I don't want us to be distracted by people management.
2. Things are just going to take longer. Even if they've done everything, they might not just gather up scorpions to AoE and then move out as stacks grow. Maybe they kill Shannox a completely different way, or they're used to being on the top with Beth'tilac and don't know how to manage adds on the bottom. Or worse, they don't know the fight at all and now the raid is sitting there for five minutes while you explain their role to them and suffer wipes while this person gets up to par. We're not to a point in Firelands where we can just cruise through a boss with a person down. And there is nothing worse - nothing worse - than explaining complicated things to one person while eight other people sit on their hands doing nothing.
3. The rest of your raid suffers from having to adjust around this person. Maybe you're moving people's roles around, maybe someone is playing an off-spec, and you go through all of the above with your own people. Admittedly this is less onerous, but it is still an issue where the alt-spec gear might not be up to par, or the person might be rusty or less adept with that spec, and you're wasting more time getting them used to the fight in a different role.
4. You have no reliability. The person might just have joined to get the sword from Shannox and then drops group right after the boss dies. Or they were in your raid because their own guild benched them, but suddenly asked them to swap in as one of their members left. Or maybe they forgot that they had another obligation and when you said "10 server" they thought you meant "10'o clock their time" which is an hour after you started. Sorry. And now you're stuck a boss or two in with no hope of finding someone to come into a locked instance.
5. The night is shorter because of it. You might have wasted time at the start of raid finding someone and by the time you zoned in it was 15 - 20 minutes past your start time. Now you're pulling, and explaining at the same time, and maybe someone gets confused typing or talking and half your raid just got punted off the ledge. Or you wiped. Or even if you get to the boss quickly, instead of just pulling, you're sitting there explaining again. Now it's 50 minutes after raid time was supposed to start and you do your first pull on Shannox. At this rate, you're looking at no progression work at all, and by the time Beth'tilac dies your raid is so shot and grumbly from relearning downed fights, that you might as well go see if your faction has BH just so you can come back in tomorrow with fresh brains. And you better hope like hell someone will show up tomorrow to fill that PuG slot because your odds are slim that they'll show up again.
6. You have absolutely no way to separate the good from bad. This is probably the worst problem. You can look at their armory, you can look at their gear, you can look at prior raid experience, you can even check the dates of their achievements on kills to make sure they killed Nefarian when he was far more difficult - but all of that won't guarantee a good player. Maybe they were carried through, maybe it's their girlfriend's account, maybe they're having a bad night or swapped spec because you needed a DPS and they went Shadow just to step in and haven't actually played Shadow in months. That vetting you did, checking their amazing gear, raid experience and availability for length of time just went to crap and you might not even realize it until you get to a boss.
All of that said, I'm just grateful to those who PuG with us for two things.
1. I've met some of my favorite raiders through PuGing. Three members of my core right now are people who responded to my "LF1M" calls on LFG. That's what keeps me PuGing - knowing that there are amazing people out there, looking for a chance to raid, and every time I PuG with someone, I don't know if they're going to be the next core member of my raid group.
2. I do get to go into Firelands and kill things. This is started to feel a lot like late summer from last year when we were literally begging for people to get a raid, any raid, off the ground. And other guilds are struggling far more than we are just to get started. So the fact that these PuGs let us raid and kill things is enough to make me very grateful for them.
What makes this worse is that I actually quite like Firelands and would love to get to work on it with a good, consistent team. I am enjoying these raids so much, both T11 and T12 have been fantastic raids to work on.
But. The patch is relatively young still and if our record is anything to go by, I think we'll clear the normal modes and at least a couple of hard modes before 4.3 drops, though our progression rate might move at the pace of our guild's namesake.
I hope you're having some luck out there! And if you're looking to raid, poke that link.
I feel like we're just in this hanging phase, where all we need are a couple of good, solid, three-day weeks to push through to Ragnaros. This is exactly what it was like when we were on Nefarian - except that was one bsoss and here we have an entire raid to learn. Our core is kicking ass as usual, it's the last couple of slots that worry me. We've been picking up people, and if I look at the roster, there are 21 people who could conceivably raid... and yet I'm PuGing at least one slot every week.
There are a lot of things that happen when you have to bring in someone new.
1. You have to let your entire raid comp adjust to this new person, personality wise. We're a nerdy, smart, funny, laid-back group and we've had people join who immediately began poking, poking, poking at someone's performance, I think jokingly, and it got to be an issue. While I'm trying to figure out DPS distribution, I don't want us to be distracted by people management.
2. Things are just going to take longer. Even if they've done everything, they might not just gather up scorpions to AoE and then move out as stacks grow. Maybe they kill Shannox a completely different way, or they're used to being on the top with Beth'tilac and don't know how to manage adds on the bottom. Or worse, they don't know the fight at all and now the raid is sitting there for five minutes while you explain their role to them and suffer wipes while this person gets up to par. We're not to a point in Firelands where we can just cruise through a boss with a person down. And there is nothing worse - nothing worse - than explaining complicated things to one person while eight other people sit on their hands doing nothing.
3. The rest of your raid suffers from having to adjust around this person. Maybe you're moving people's roles around, maybe someone is playing an off-spec, and you go through all of the above with your own people. Admittedly this is less onerous, but it is still an issue where the alt-spec gear might not be up to par, or the person might be rusty or less adept with that spec, and you're wasting more time getting them used to the fight in a different role.
4. You have no reliability. The person might just have joined to get the sword from Shannox and then drops group right after the boss dies. Or they were in your raid because their own guild benched them, but suddenly asked them to swap in as one of their members left. Or maybe they forgot that they had another obligation and when you said "10 server" they thought you meant "10'o clock their time" which is an hour after you started. Sorry. And now you're stuck a boss or two in with no hope of finding someone to come into a locked instance.
5. The night is shorter because of it. You might have wasted time at the start of raid finding someone and by the time you zoned in it was 15 - 20 minutes past your start time. Now you're pulling, and explaining at the same time, and maybe someone gets confused typing or talking and half your raid just got punted off the ledge. Or you wiped. Or even if you get to the boss quickly, instead of just pulling, you're sitting there explaining again. Now it's 50 minutes after raid time was supposed to start and you do your first pull on Shannox. At this rate, you're looking at no progression work at all, and by the time Beth'tilac dies your raid is so shot and grumbly from relearning downed fights, that you might as well go see if your faction has BH just so you can come back in tomorrow with fresh brains. And you better hope like hell someone will show up tomorrow to fill that PuG slot because your odds are slim that they'll show up again.
6. You have absolutely no way to separate the good from bad. This is probably the worst problem. You can look at their armory, you can look at their gear, you can look at prior raid experience, you can even check the dates of their achievements on kills to make sure they killed Nefarian when he was far more difficult - but all of that won't guarantee a good player. Maybe they were carried through, maybe it's their girlfriend's account, maybe they're having a bad night or swapped spec because you needed a DPS and they went Shadow just to step in and haven't actually played Shadow in months. That vetting you did, checking their amazing gear, raid experience and availability for length of time just went to crap and you might not even realize it until you get to a boss.
All of that said, I'm just grateful to those who PuG with us for two things.
1. I've met some of my favorite raiders through PuGing. Three members of my core right now are people who responded to my "LF1M" calls on LFG. That's what keeps me PuGing - knowing that there are amazing people out there, looking for a chance to raid, and every time I PuG with someone, I don't know if they're going to be the next core member of my raid group.
2. I do get to go into Firelands and kill things. This is started to feel a lot like late summer from last year when we were literally begging for people to get a raid, any raid, off the ground. And other guilds are struggling far more than we are just to get started. So the fact that these PuGs let us raid and kill things is enough to make me very grateful for them.
What makes this worse is that I actually quite like Firelands and would love to get to work on it with a good, consistent team. I am enjoying these raids so much, both T11 and T12 have been fantastic raids to work on.
But. The patch is relatively young still and if our record is anything to go by, I think we'll clear the normal modes and at least a couple of hard modes before 4.3 drops, though our progression rate might move at the pace of our guild's namesake.
I hope you're having some luck out there! And if you're looking to raid, poke that link.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Problem Solved
As might be clear from my posting habits, out little guild is a friendly, cozy little place. Generally speaking, we're a warm, inviting, and very open group that embraces new members and will quickly assimilate people and their quirks and jokes and such into our own group. In the seven-odd months of our existence, those that don't fit in generally slip away quietly and quickly in the midst of the night and I generally don't go chasing after them.
By now, those who're going to stick around, do so, through thick or thin. We've had members stick with us through the really really difficult time from August till now when putting raids together has been absolutely brutal, when teams fluctuated almost weekly, and progress just about crawled to a stand-still. About a month or so ago, we had a tiny infusion of fresh blood and it really pushed us back into gear and we finally started making some progress, especially as 4.0.1 dropped and excitement crept back in.
However, some of this new blood also brought in its own problems.
This member was really informed, knowledgeable, generous with their information, a good player, filled a class need, but... there was a feeling that this person maybe belonged in another guild somewhere. They were obsessed with their position on Recount, being knowledgeable they had very strong opinions about things, and constantly contradicted their own expectations of raiders with their personal behavior.
My problem with this person generally only extended to their behavior in raids and we spoke to this person a couple of times, but here is where our guild structure causes a bit of an issue. Because we're so friendly and the line between officers and members is so thin, when situations for corrections and discipline come up, authority isn't really established outside of raids. It makes having these discussions more difficult, but I took it up as an officer, and I thought I had made myself clear about my expectation of this person's behavior.
It worked for a couple of weeks, but then, last night, it all came screaming back in high-velocity. So much so, that an argument broke out in GChat at one point, and while I was forcefully retaining my impulsive GKick button the person spared me the guilt and GQuit themselves.
Things immediately restored themselves back to normal. I threw a tiny fit in my head about loosing ANOTHER geared, trained raider but the peace of mind that followed their absence was worth the price. The tragic thing is, I liked this person quite a bit, and had it not been for their behavior and epeening, we could have enjoyed a long and healthy relationship.
Ego can be a big thing in games, and I understand it's a rush to be at the top of the heap and it stings to be at the bottom, but:
By now, those who're going to stick around, do so, through thick or thin. We've had members stick with us through the really really difficult time from August till now when putting raids together has been absolutely brutal, when teams fluctuated almost weekly, and progress just about crawled to a stand-still. About a month or so ago, we had a tiny infusion of fresh blood and it really pushed us back into gear and we finally started making some progress, especially as 4.0.1 dropped and excitement crept back in.
However, some of this new blood also brought in its own problems.
This member was really informed, knowledgeable, generous with their information, a good player, filled a class need, but... there was a feeling that this person maybe belonged in another guild somewhere. They were obsessed with their position on Recount, being knowledgeable they had very strong opinions about things, and constantly contradicted their own expectations of raiders with their personal behavior.
My problem with this person generally only extended to their behavior in raids and we spoke to this person a couple of times, but here is where our guild structure causes a bit of an issue. Because we're so friendly and the line between officers and members is so thin, when situations for corrections and discipline come up, authority isn't really established outside of raids. It makes having these discussions more difficult, but I took it up as an officer, and I thought I had made myself clear about my expectation of this person's behavior.
It worked for a couple of weeks, but then, last night, it all came screaming back in high-velocity. So much so, that an argument broke out in GChat at one point, and while I was forcefully retaining my impulsive GKick button the person spared me the guilt and GQuit themselves.
Things immediately restored themselves back to normal. I threw a tiny fit in my head about loosing ANOTHER geared, trained raider but the peace of mind that followed their absence was worth the price. The tragic thing is, I liked this person quite a bit, and had it not been for their behavior and epeening, we could have enjoyed a long and healthy relationship.
Ego can be a big thing in games, and I understand it's a rush to be at the top of the heap and it stings to be at the bottom, but:
- I don't need you to flash Recount every time you do well
- I don't need you to make excuses when you aren't
- I don't need you to blame everyone and everything else but yourself when you die
- Sometimes, the Healers choose tanks over you and you wind up dying, so deal with it
- Dying to mechanics you fail to execute does not mean the mechanic is bugged
- You might have been top DPS because you sat on the boss, but the people who actually switched over to the adds saved the fight
- Please don't correct me, and then when you're proven wrong, feign acute memory loss
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
After the Lich King
This is the hard part, isn't it?
Right after the end boss is dead, right before a new keep-'em-busy raid is released, trying to motivate and encourage people to come for raid progression into hard modes. Tonight is the first night of our steps into Hard Modes so we'll see how it goes.
My expectations are modest so we'll see what we can accomplish, but tonight will also be a test of our perseverance and tenacity. Can we continue to run face first into walls on fights that we've cleared with our eyes closed on heroic and succeed or will someone just whine for us to "switch to normal mode already."
Thankfully, Blizzard has added the Vanquisher mounts as motivation to keep doing hard modes, not to mention the fact that some of the 10-man heroic loot is BIS outside of 25-man Hard Modes. But really, loot is a weak excuse right now.
We're expecting some sort of loot reset at the start of Cata so who knows how quickly we'll be dropping out 264/277 level gear? Will we be seeing so much stamina and strenght on gear that no longer has to pay points out of its budget to the old stats, that the old gear just evaporates? Or will they upgrade our ICC gear to be so awesome that we can walk into Cata Heroics with it?
I'm hoping to be successful tonight and use that momentum to push my guys to get to 9/12 in a couple of weeks. If we can get there without too much nonsense, then I think we can knuckle down and focus on Putricide and Sindragosa on heroic and once we get through that nonsense, I'll just have to push push push the raid towards H:LK.
Hopefully the progression will keep up and we'll see raid attendance regularly fill up until the eve of 4.0. I don't want to stop raiding - for one, I'm enjoying the game a lot at this level, and am looking forward to old bosses with new twists, but also, if we loose focus I think we'll spend a lot of time getting it back in Cata. I know we'll miss a month of raiding as people level and gear up so I don't want to add any more to that missed time than absolutely necessary.
But all of that is months away.
Wish us luck tonight as we face down Heroic Marrowar. :-)
Right after the end boss is dead, right before a new keep-'em-busy raid is released, trying to motivate and encourage people to come for raid progression into hard modes. Tonight is the first night of our steps into Hard Modes so we'll see how it goes.
My expectations are modest so we'll see what we can accomplish, but tonight will also be a test of our perseverance and tenacity. Can we continue to run face first into walls on fights that we've cleared with our eyes closed on heroic and succeed or will someone just whine for us to "switch to normal mode already."
Thankfully, Blizzard has added the Vanquisher mounts as motivation to keep doing hard modes, not to mention the fact that some of the 10-man heroic loot is BIS outside of 25-man Hard Modes. But really, loot is a weak excuse right now.
We're expecting some sort of loot reset at the start of Cata so who knows how quickly we'll be dropping out 264/277 level gear? Will we be seeing so much stamina and strenght on gear that no longer has to pay points out of its budget to the old stats, that the old gear just evaporates? Or will they upgrade our ICC gear to be so awesome that we can walk into Cata Heroics with it?
I'm hoping to be successful tonight and use that momentum to push my guys to get to 9/12 in a couple of weeks. If we can get there without too much nonsense, then I think we can knuckle down and focus on Putricide and Sindragosa on heroic and once we get through that nonsense, I'll just have to push push push the raid towards H:LK.
Hopefully the progression will keep up and we'll see raid attendance regularly fill up until the eve of 4.0. I don't want to stop raiding - for one, I'm enjoying the game a lot at this level, and am looking forward to old bosses with new twists, but also, if we loose focus I think we'll spend a lot of time getting it back in Cata. I know we'll miss a month of raiding as people level and gear up so I don't want to add any more to that missed time than absolutely necessary.
But all of that is months away.
Wish us luck tonight as we face down Heroic Marrowar. :-)
Friday, May 14, 2010
The King, However, Is Still Alive
So, we faced up to Arthas last night.
We cleared up Phase 1 after 1 wipe and consistently got to phase 2 after that. The Transition is a bit messy, but I have some thoughts on how to clean that up. I don't want to go into too much detail about what we did since I'm just learning the fight now and once I have a strat down, I'll type it all out.
We only spent about an hour and change on him, so it wasn't nearly enough time, and I think I will extend the raid lockout into next week, though what I really want is to clear up the achievements (I think we only have 4 or 5 left to do).
But. Putting in time with the King is important and I want to maintain progression momentum. And I know we need more time on him. We just do. Once Phase 2 clears up, I'm confident we'll coast to a smooth kill in a couple of weeks, just like we did with Sindragosa.
We wiped on her for two weeks in a row before killing her this week very smoothly in three attempts, and I think the time you put in does good, you put in attempts, you learn the rhythm of the fight, you go to sleep and process it over, you think about it during the day or remember the sequence of events better or whatever, so the next time you come in you're much more ready for it.
But the issue is, when a boss is that difficult, how do you keep coming back week after week for more? How long do you beat your face on a boss before it gets tedious? How do you keep coming back and motivating and encouraging people to keep coming back?
Well, I'm trying very hard to do that.
I typically tend to be a chatterbox as my guild will tell you, but I think it helps to take a minute or two after every raid to talk over how it went (though I tend to take 5 - 10 minutes *cough*), congratulate everyone on progression, encourage them to show up, set expectations, and also, review the progression plan! I go over our plan on a regular basis, let everyone know what I want to do and discuss any questions.
I think it helps keep the guild engaged, and hopefully, they feel like a part of a team. That does a lot more for morale than all the cold-hearted efficiency you can muster, and people will show up time and time again to progress, and be loyal because you're showing your own loyalty to them.
I typed this as part of a comment in another thread on wow.com but I think it fits in here as well:
Good luck to us all! I can't wait to down him and move on to hard modes.
We cleared up Phase 1 after 1 wipe and consistently got to phase 2 after that. The Transition is a bit messy, but I have some thoughts on how to clean that up. I don't want to go into too much detail about what we did since I'm just learning the fight now and once I have a strat down, I'll type it all out.
We only spent about an hour and change on him, so it wasn't nearly enough time, and I think I will extend the raid lockout into next week, though what I really want is to clear up the achievements (I think we only have 4 or 5 left to do).
But. Putting in time with the King is important and I want to maintain progression momentum. And I know we need more time on him. We just do. Once Phase 2 clears up, I'm confident we'll coast to a smooth kill in a couple of weeks, just like we did with Sindragosa.
We wiped on her for two weeks in a row before killing her this week very smoothly in three attempts, and I think the time you put in does good, you put in attempts, you learn the rhythm of the fight, you go to sleep and process it over, you think about it during the day or remember the sequence of events better or whatever, so the next time you come in you're much more ready for it.
But the issue is, when a boss is that difficult, how do you keep coming back week after week for more? How long do you beat your face on a boss before it gets tedious? How do you keep coming back and motivating and encouraging people to keep coming back?
Well, I'm trying very hard to do that.
I typically tend to be a chatterbox as my guild will tell you, but I think it helps to take a minute or two after every raid to talk over how it went (though I tend to take 5 - 10 minutes *cough*), congratulate everyone on progression, encourage them to show up, set expectations, and also, review the progression plan! I go over our plan on a regular basis, let everyone know what I want to do and discuss any questions.
I think it helps keep the guild engaged, and hopefully, they feel like a part of a team. That does a lot more for morale than all the cold-hearted efficiency you can muster, and people will show up time and time again to progress, and be loyal because you're showing your own loyalty to them.
I typed this as part of a comment in another thread on wow.com but I think it fits in here as well:
Encourage your raiders, talk to them, treat them like a team, motivate them, and engage them. Make coming to progression content a privilege and most of all, make them feel appreciated. I never get tired of saying, "Thank you for coming," and I mean it. I couldn't raid without every single person who logs in and stands next to me to raid - and I want my raiders to know that.I'm really happy to be in the guild that I'm in, with all the people I'm in it with. They're good players, but more importantly, they're good friends.
Good luck to us all! I can't wait to down him and move on to hard modes.
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