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:

1. I don't need you to flash Recount every time you do well
2. I don't need you to make excuses when you aren't
3. I don't need you to blame everyone and everything else but yourself when you die
4. Sometimes, the Healers choose tanks over you and you wind up dying, so deal with it
5. Dying to mechanics you fail to execute does not mean the mechanic is bugged
   
6. 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
7. Please don't correct me, and then when you're proven wrong, feign acute memory loss

If you're in a raid and find that you're suffering from a feeling of being the Outsider, check the above list and if you do any of the things on it, the problem might be you, not the raid.

Lessons Learned

I really hope Cataclysm changes things for me and I fall back in love with the game because I really enjoy playing Warcraft quite a bit, but things are just not a lot of fun right now.

A lot of it has to do with the boredom of a lack of content, and even the new elemental invasion feels anemic with the quick little questline which was fun the first time, and then the wide-spread elementals which is more of a chore, trying to find a node when it happens to be open.

Some of it has to do with the lack of guild activities (or guild interest in activities) so that when I log in game, there is little of the socializing and commaradarie I crave desperately which I think also ties into the big "people are bored and they aren't playing" thing.

I've just about given up trying to push any progression or agenda at this late point and we're trying to use raid-nights as a chance to keep interest up and just do achievement runs in old raids or whatever people want to knock out. Someone mentioned that one of our problems is that we only Raid and maybe if we expand out to do a BG night or something, we can open up things a bit more and I'm certainly open to such activities.

--

I'm trying to think ahead and see what lessons can be learned from the last six - seven months of raiding and I think the biggest - the biggest - factor in success and failure is a consistent team.

We made amazing progress when the same core people showed up again and again and we really floundered and struggled when we didn't. That's number one. As a small, friendly, casual guild, I can't really use loot or member standing as a motivation to help attendance and so I'm just hopeful that a year of old content is what is causing this hot-and-cold attitude towards raiding and that this is not an endemic issue.

Another was loot. I don't know what to do about loot (see above re: small guild) as we've always been very casual about handing it out and loot is easy to get these days so it's not really a motivator but I have seen people with BiS trinkets or weapons decide to GQuit or stop raiding and that's always a bit of a pinch. I'm willing to chalk this one up to a shrug and move on, as we've been relatively okay regarding walk-outs and our inner core is very strong.

Lastly - progression. I think I need to set higher standards for progression and be more ruthless towards loot farming and extending lockouts to force progression. The last time I really pushed for progression, we got LK down on our second extension. I think there's a lesson to be learned there.

--

But all of this won't be a factor for another long, hard month. Thankfully a holiday takes up part of it, at least. I really, really hope Blizzard doesn't make a mistake like this again - a year between expansions is ridiculous and I for one am just about burned out on the game entirely because of it and I can't afford to quit and come back because I have a guild to sustain.

/waits_for_December

The Reason For Lack Of Posts

My drop-off in posting is directly tied to a drop-off to my time in game! Often I log in and then my toon just sits around doing nothing. I've even begun missing raids here and there, and often, I have to take an AFK while the raid continues clearing trash without me.

It's quite shameful and I'm expecting to be fired from my lofty position as a Raid Lead any minute, now.

And there is someone directly responsible. And it's this guy:


My little son! He was born on October 7th and has become a giant distraction from gaming and blogging. This was the little project I referred to a little while ago in a post as to why I might not be posting or playing as much in the near future.

He hasn't figured out what class to roll yet, though based on the insane level of energy, excitement, movement, physical ambition and strength he displays on a regular basis, I'd say he's going for a Fury Warrior. He spends all day in Berserker Stance anyway.

What a betrayal! Doesn't he know his dad plays a Paladin? For shame!

Woah!

So, I was going to write about how awesome it is to raid right now in the buffed post-patch period and how much I'm enjoying raid-tanking as a Paladin right now, but, then, I saw this...

O_o

I was a finalist in the Blizzard 2010 Global Writing Contest!

I came this close to winning the contest! So exciting! Eeeek! I wish I could go to BlizzCon to meet the other writers and staff and stuff. But still - wow, this is the highest scale recognition of my writing so far.

I think it's a sign of some sort... but regardless, I'm so giddy and excited right now.

Relaxin'

It has been a quiet week or two in Warcraft for me. I decided to take a break from heroic Icecrown as I saw signs of burnout imminently flashing orange and red on the anger meter of the HUD that is my brain. Thankfully, my guildies decided to back me up on a side-winding detour into Ulduar to wrap up some achievements.

In addition, we saw a bunch of people get close to their mounts and spent the last night dragging them through the first half of the place picking up achievements and killing Algalon again for titles and the cool Rhonin quest and stuff.

Right now is a good time to do this sort of thing - relax, hang out, kill some bosses, make some money, grab some titles and achivements, earn some mounts... no stress, no fuss, no muss.

--

So, there is a lot of doom and gloom about Protection Paladins in Beta/PTR. Last time I checked, I played a Protection Paladin as my Main character of choice in this game we called World of Warcraft, so I grew concerned!

I downloaded the PTR, copied my main over, saw that I had an option to modify my character and decided to make him a Female Draenei, added an effeminate affectation to the name to make it less manly and jumped in! I spec'd away like crazy, fumed after finding no Glyphs on the Auction House, redid my tool bars, wept at the simple joy of pressing one button to buff an entire raid, fell in love with the high-detail, high-frame-count animation of my Draenei avatar, girded my loins, and queued up for a random.

As my feet landed in Utgarde Pinnacle, I immediately warned my cohorts that this was my first run on the PTR and to give me a bit of time with pulls to generate threat, and to please let me know if my threat was an issue. And then I proceeded to face-pull like a gibbering rabid warthog and finished the place with no deaths in about 12 minutes flat. No one pulled off of me at any point that I could see.

Without access to Inquisition, on AoE pulls I was more or less using:

• Avenger's Shield
• Holy Wrath
• Consecrate
• Hammer of the Righteous
• And I was tab-spreading Judgments around willy-nilley

On bosses I was using:

• Avenger's Shield
• Crusader Strike
• Shield of the Righteous (at 2 to 3 - I didn't pay too close attention to Holy Power, honestly)
  
• Judgment
• Holy Wrath
• Consecrate

The only time I felt like I was in trouble was when I pulled 3 groups at the same time and my health dropped significantly, when I bubbled with DP (I keep forgetting its a very short term cool down now, so I can use it way more often).

With how fast trash died, I don't think I ever really had Vengeance scale up and bosses were dying pretty fast too so I didn't see really big numbers from my attacks at any point but I held threat fine. Also, getting up to 60k in heroics from just priest, druid and self-buffs was kinda sexy. I only had time for one run last night but it was enough to give me a lot of confidence and faith that when the patch drops, we'll be just fine.

Also, I might race-and-gender-change Joachim if I get too used to my tail-wagging friend on the PTR. That'd be something. O_o

--

Anyway. I'll be away from game (and possibly the blog) for a few days. Due to a real life thing happening tomorrow...

/mysterious_omen!

Well, that was unexpected

What a great night. Amazing guildies and friends gathered together to helping knock this out tonight. That's one thing marked off my to-do list!


Thank you, guys. :-) I owe you guys a song.

No Time

Just when I'm so close to wrapping up a bunch of stuff in game, is when work and personal life are piling up to make it impossible for me to even log into game.

Aargh.

But even now that the official date for Cata has been pushed to Dec. 7, I don't know that all this content will sit around and wait for me to finish it. So... before Deathwing devours us all, I need to finish up at least the following on my Paladin:

• Get at least 35 Exalted reps (and finish up the Z'G grind - only need 2 more solo clears!)
  
• Start working towards 3,000 quests done so I can pick up that title
• Start collecting more Heroic Kills for that title
  
• Finish up Glory of the Raider (10)
• Finish up Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10)
• Finish up Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10)

That list could be achieved in one week if I did nothing but just sit down and play for a week!

But lately, I'm lucky to be able to get on twice a week to raid... I was hoping to hit Cata with more than 100k gold, but I'm sitting on just 54k and I doubt I'll be able to double that in a couple of months. Bah. My virtual life is slowing down!

Sexism and Racism in my Warcraft

Every time I turn around lately, I seem to be running into stereotypes about Warcraft that I would love to deny but I just can't. Warcraft players are immature, racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynists and I want to say, no. My guild isn't. My friends aren't.

Maybe we're a subset, because goddamn, the rest of the community is an exercise in depression.

There are guilds out there that reject you as a raider if you're a woman (read their application requirements). Which. I don't know. The name and the aggressively anti-gender attitude is upsetting but whatever. Their loss. I'd certainly never apply or play with them.

We're so used to terms like "rape" and "fag" being used in PvP and Raiding environments that we just accept them now and create a hostile environment for people who're hurt by them.

When I see people writing feminist blogs about Warcraft and the issues at hand, when I see other blog entries grappling with the impact that casual use of worlds like rape - which, by the way, in a word, promises horrific and very specific violence against a particular gender - I don't understand why the rest of the Warcraft community doesn't want to stand up and say, "Fuck this, I'm not going to tolerate someone using these terms in my guild, in my raid, in my presence, period."

And the thing is, if that happens in my raid, I can step up and tell that person to shut up and if they contest me on it, I will kick them. Hell, before I do a thing, my Guild Leader who's an amazing feminist woman herself, will probably have that person on their ass outside the instance portal.

We won't tolerate homophobia, or sexism, or misogyny in our raids, not because we play with a lot of women, and not because we have people of all sexualities in our raids, but because it's just fucking wrong.

Guild raids are a controlled environment, I'm in a raid with my guildies, and my friends, and they'll back me up. Things are different when you PuG. If I'm in a PuG where I see a lot of this happening, I will drop and go find a non hostile environment. But a few weeks ago, I ran into a different kind of environment and my reaction there was really unexpected.

Halfway through an ICC 25, someone began to sing a Skinhead songs. If you're interested, it was the words to a song called, "The White Man Marches On" that this person wanted to share with us. Look them up.

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach and no matter how much I want to say now that I pressed that push to talk and said, "Kick him or I'll drop," I sat there petrified instead. A second of stunned silence passed and then Vent broke up with scattered giggles, a few people moaned that "now some bleeding hearts will drop raid" and then the Raid Lead chuckled, and said, "Someone is griefing us, let's just keep going."

And they went on with jokes that were maybe less overt but no less hurtful.

Now, I've been gaybashed in the real world, I've been racially attacked, never physically, but I've had someone walk up to me and a friend of mine and threatened to fuck us fags up if they ever saw us on campus again just because they thought we were gay. Right after 9/11 my family faced a fair amount of discrimination in small upstate-NY towns. My Caucasian wife of six years is frequently assumed to be alone when we're out together.

This sort of experience - vocal violence, aggressive discrimination, casual but unintentional racism - is not something new to me. I felt like I knew how to handle myself in these circumstances, in these situations, but in that raid, I didn't.

I shut down. I didn't say anything. It was just so bleak and depressing. Nobody else said anything about it other than to build on it without being quite so outrageous. I don't know why it bugged me so much, or the way it affected me, but really, I felt even more emasculated that I didn't do or say anything, so I stood there for a bit while they kept pulling trash, and then I just dropped raid and logged out.

Maybe it was the level of violence that the song was promising. Maybe it was something about the casual way in which twenty-four other people took this threat. I don't know.

This doesn't take a lot of effort to work out. Language has power, it affects us in profound ways, and if you don't stand up for your friends and colleagues, then you're letting these insensitive people victimize them.

I don't want to see this sort of sexist and racist and homophobic behavior continue. I don't know that I can really make a difference other than to control the limited environment in which I have influence, but Goddamnit, I'm sick of the casual way these words are used. When words become a casual part of speech and language, they become acceptable, and the person hearing those words is forced to accept them as part of a chain of abuse.

These things are not casual. They never were.

Greatness

Last week's raid was disastrously under-attended but this week we had a full guild run with a couple of folks who came out of the shadows to lend a hand and we cleanly knocked out 8 hard modes and the Full House achievement on Lady Deathwhisper after one false start.

Took just over 3 hours and every boss was a one-shot except for Lady Deathwhisper (took one wipe to figure out how to taunt swap the boss), Blood Princes (tweaked our strategy to go for 2 tanks instead of 3 and it worked just fine, three wipes later, when I stopped exploding the healers or pulling an extra boss) and Dream Walker Valethria (where one of our healers had a misstep but the kill came on the second pull and was super, super clean.)

I think these nine bosses are easy mode at this point. Of course, I'm nervous and excited about Thursday - will everyone show up again? With this team, even with the inexperience and the slightly lower gear-curve, I'm confident we can knock out the last two bosses standing in our way. I've been giving a lot of thought on how to kill Sindragosa and Putricide on Heroic, and I have what seem to be solid strats in mind based on the way other folks have done them.

If Thursday doesn't pan out, I might just extend the lockout since I'm really bored of even the hard-mode bosses and while I enjoy watching guildies get tier tokens, I also want progression at this point, and we've proven our prowess with the nine bosses already. We know how to do this shit. Seeing the guild work last night was really gratifying. The folks we've brought in and our veterans are performing at a very high level and our healers and DPS are just off the charts. Absolutely amazing work across the board.

But at this late, late stage of the game, with so many of us within grasp of the final prize, it's time to bring the beacon in. The next two bosses I kill will be Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa.

Tankadining in Cataclysm

This week was a clusterfuck of scheduling issues and half my raid having RL blow up in their faces. Still killed half the raid on Heroic. Not too terrible. So, I'm going to talk about Cataclysm Paladin Tanking Talents.

I'm feelin' this 3/31/7 build.

Stuff I'm skipping:

Reckoning - same ol' reasoning. More swings might be good for threat, but parry-haste will wind up making us take more damage. No, thanks.

Guarded By The Light - I just hate having to heal myself as a tank. That's not my job. I'll pop Sacred Shield every now and again if I don't have a paladin healer but really, putting up a piddly shield doesn't thrill me when I can use my Holy Power for a Shield of Righteousness/Holy Shield instead.

Eye For An Eye: Magical Attacks only? I'm not the world's biggest fan of reflective damage anyway and this seems like a purely PvP talent an a shitty one at that.

Stuff I'm ambivalent about taking:

Improved Judgment: Ranged attacks? It will be good for trash, but I think I'd rather spend 2 points elsewhere than to pick up something that is useless on most boss fights. Still, I want to get Pursuit of Justice so I guess I have no choice in the matter as Eye For An Eye is even worse.

Divinity: 6% increase to incoming heals? I don't know where the theorycraft hammer will land on this, it could be a lot or it could be a little depending on what healing numbres look like. I dabbled a little bit with the current iteration of this talent before dropping it completely and didn't miss it, but in the current build, I don't know where else I would drop points. More threat in Retribution? I don't know. I feel like I want to focus on survival first and then worry about threat as I need to. This is really big "menh" for me.

Stuff that has left me scratching my head:

Shield of the Righteous and Holy Shield make it seem like you no longer need to maintain Holy Shield - it is instead, a constant source of Block chance every time Shield of the Righteous is used.

So I guess that mean our rotation is starting to look like...

• Crusader Strike for single targets, Hammer of the Righteous for multiple targets (30% weapon damage = useless for bosses)
  
• Judgment (Seal of Truth for bosses due to scale-up time, Seal of Righteousness for multiple target)
  
• Avenger's Shield (Procs! Procs! I love procs!)
  
• Consecration (with Hallowed Ground, mana cost becomes 17% so while not spamable it can be a longer term part of our spell toolkit depending on the damage output)
• Shield of the Righteous (at 3 stacks) to proc Holy Shield

In addition we have good old Holy Wrath which is buffed to hit all enemies along with a talent, but I doubt it'll be part of a single-target rotation. I feel like all of this is pushing paladins into AoE territory along with Hammer of the Righteous loosing its target cap.

On an AoE pull (yeah, yeah, I know, no more AoE, we'll see how that goes), you drop a Consecrate, Avenging Wrath, Hammer, Judgment, Shield of the Righteous and go from there and as long as DPS gives you 3 or 4 GCDs I doubt agro would be an issue from there.

I also find it interesting that Shield of the Templar drops the cool-down of Avenging Wrath by a minute so that it can be used up to 3 times in a really tight 5 or 6 minute long fight. Is Blizzard expecting Tankadins to pop wings during fights more often to gain agro leads and then pop it again on CDs as a way of staying ahead of blistering DPS? I hope so, I'm a fan of aggressively pushing my DPS without giving up on my survivability (I can manage ~4.5k on H:BQL now, while our top DPS caps around 21k for that fight). Really looking forward to this.

Compared to our current rotation of Judgment, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Righteous, Consecration and Holy Shield, it's not unfamiliar. If we just had different tools for AoE and single target, it wouldn't feel like much of a change, but the big, big difference are the procs.

Avenger's Shield popping up randomly and Shield of the Righteous crits when you don't have a full bar of Holy Power ready - decisions on the fly! Chaos! Excitement!

*runs around screaming*