Approaching Hodir: Aug 2009

You may have heard this fact quoted in serious discussion about World of Warcraft: According to Malcolm Gladwell, 10 000 hours spent doing an activity (before the age of 21) is all that is required to become a “virtuoso”:

showing masterly skill or brilliance
a virtuoso performance _source

The average World of Warcraft player spends quite a bit of time in the game. To many it becomes something of a part time job: voluntary and unpaid, unfortunately. Play for a good few years and you could very well have approached that 10 000 hour mark.

Do you dare type /played right now to find out?

I first heard this fact quoted because I follow – and watch – a lot of the TED lectures. And, since I’m a gamer and avid World of Warcraft player, Jane McGonigal’s mostly upbeat short lecture on how Gaming Can Make a Better World really resonated with me.

It’s nice to think that, while I may never be a brilliant violinist or pianist, I might have some kind of special skill in something, even if it is a game played by millions. Actually I quite like the notion that many otherwise ordinary people – like me – might also be secret World of Warcraft virtuosos.

But there’s something that nags at me. And maybe a real artistic virtuoso could throw their two cents into the conversation (although, frankly, the idea that an artistic virtuoso from another field might also be reading this WoW blog seems highly unlikely).

Once you reach that level of mastery… what next? Are you always a master? Is it possible to lose your mastery without practise?

You see, I’m fairly confident that I’m past my peak. If I did attain the level of mastery required to be considered a virtuoso of World of Warcraft at some point (let’s disregard the fact that I’m well over the age of 21!) I’m certainly not as brilliant a player as I once was.

One expansion and many patches and over six months of no practice or play has definitely been a setback.

The only real metaphor that works for me is comparing skill and proficiency in the game with athletic ability. I have some of that (athletic ability, that is) and it’s something that I’ve had to work very hard at over a long time. It’s hard not to talk about artistic ability without running into arguments about talent and how talent contributes to mastery. You can have the same problem when talking about athletic ability. But I can honestly say I have zero talent in that area. Any mastery I have, I worked at.

Over time, and with lots of hours of practice, I can see that I’m better: I can run faster and for longer. Presumably if I ran and practiced long enough, I could reach some level of brilliance. But if I stopped running for six months I wouldn’t be able to pick up where I left off and perform at the same level.

Nobody expects this of athletes.

So is this expected of an artistic virtuoso? Is this expected of a World of Warcraft virtuoso?

I’m just not sure.

I received a bit of flack from readers since returning to WoW and writing for the blog. Because I tend to be vague about stuff that I say that I mastered years ago, and because I’m so clearly a novice right now in the game, my credibility seems to be in question.

I’m OK with that. It seems to me that for some players, they can reach the level of a virtuoso and maintain that level of mastery for years. And perhaps they are writing from that view point: having reached that level of mastery they have not wavered or had a set back that makes them doubt their own skill. And they cannot even imagine that, once attained, they might one day lose that proficiency.

However, I am most certainly at a different place. I am past my peak. I can say, for certainty, that I reached my peak as a raider at some time between Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel. And if I have any doubts, well I have game play footage of my raiding from most of those tier and earlier ones too. And I can see far less errors in my decision making when I watch footage recorded at my peak vs my ascent or decent from that place.

For example I always get caught up watching back our Hodir (I Could Say This Cache Was Rare) capture. There’s a moment when I’m not gathering additional damage buffs by stacking for storm power or standing near a comfy fire and every single time I watch it I think:

that’s a wasted moment – why didn’t I move into a better position?

only to see – before the thought has fully formed while I’m watching the capture – my past virtual self spring into action and step right onto a safe zone because Flash Freeze is imminent. I had the next move lined up way in advance. And I knew exactly what I was doing at the time.

And even if I didn’t take a break from the game at the start of Cataclysm I knew that my skill level wasn’t at its best anyway. Too much farm content at the lull in Icecrown Citadel progression and too many changes to the Shadow Priesting game.

As a guild we hit a point where we snagged on Heroic Professor Putricide for months and months. This meant that the earlier bosses were well and truly farmed and didn’t require much attention. And the final bosses were on normal and also didn’t pose too much of a challenge (although I don’t want to imply that you could AFK through the Lich King encounter).

But I’m pretty sure paying attention for one night of the raiding week while working on progression content and repeating familiar content the other 75% of the time didn’t keep me at the top of my game. I know I got lazy. Perhaps you did to?

There’s a fairly simple model floating around regarding MMOs. The play trend is described as so:

Novice -> Mastery -> Burnout -> (presumably quits game and picks up another game)

I don’t think I ever described myself as “burned out”. I certainly never reached a breaking point that made me consider deleting my characters, my account and unsubscribing. I never stopped subscribing – even during my break.

Like many others, I have played the game with varying degrees of commitment and mastery for years. I’m certainly not the first player to take a long break and return to the game. And I’m sure that some players have come back even stronger after a break.

Maybe the more realistic model looks something like this:

Novice -> Mastery -> Break -> Novice -> Mastery -> Repeat!

or you could take it a step further and look at mastery closer to training for sports:

Novice -> Training -> Mastery -> Off season break -> Training -> Mastery

I like that cycle I think because the most satisfying feeling is breaking from “training” mode – when you’re aware that you still have room for improvement – into “mastery” mode when you feel powerful as a player. When everything seems to come easily and anything is possible.

What do you think? Do you think attaining the status of a World of Warcraft virtuoso is like learning to ride a bike? Once learned, you are always that proficient? Do you think it’s something that you have to practice to maintain?

So surely I would remember off by heart the “glory days” of my early raiding and my hard sought after weapons? Nope.

However, because I’m sentimental and also because I used to be a graphic designer (probably more of the latter than the former) I do have visual, eye candy, memorabilia, pre-71-Disenchanting:

Cassandri's BC Gear - click to enlarge

I particular enjoy reliving the complexity of the level 70 gemming system for Shadow Priests.

What I’m really wearing is all the Mage gear I can get my hands on that isn’t specifically equippable by Mages and only Mages.

That said, if a Frost Mage rocked up in Frozen Shadoweave to raid he would have been laughed out of the room at the time. Mostly just for being a Frost Mage. Unfortunately not for being a Mage.

Ha! I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Mage jokes.

By the time I put together this wallpaper they had already homogenized stats in the move towards Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of those item were sought after initially for their +Shadow Damage. I spent most of level 60-70 grinding the materials for my Frozen Shadoweave set in preparation for level 70 raiding. I’m sure that’s a big part of why I love the set so much.

The Spellstrike Hood, Belt of Blasting and Darkmoon Card: Crusade are all crafted item. However, they do require some pretty tasty materials available only to raiders and the wealthy. I remember having these items, I remember valuing them. I remember some of the materials.

What I don’t remember is pretty much everything else: everything that was purchased with Badges of Justice. Even though I would have put in scads of raiding hours to accumulate all those Badges (or Emblems or Valor Points or whatever they’re called now as Currency) but once the shopping was done I didn’t really care about those items anymore. I certainly didn’t remember their names.

This led me to think about what I could remember from Wrath of the Lich King. Surprisingly, I tend to remember weapons and trinkets. And I think I know why: these are the items that, in a DKP system, I had to wait a very, very long time to get. I never won a weapon or trinket on a roll. I was never the only one in the raid who could use an item, or wanted it. I always had to fight and, more often, wait patiently in the wings for the healers and other casters to get through their wishlist first.

I remarked to a guildy only a few days ago that my strongest memory of ICC was waiting patiently for the Phylactery of the Nameless Lich to drop not once, but twice for our raid. This was one of the few items that very few classes and specs wanted – great for Shadow Priests – all I had to do was wait for the other Shadow Priest, an officer, to get it then the 2nd one would be all mine.

My luck being what it was, I only just got it right before the end of Wrath of the Lich King. About 6 months of hardmodes before I saw that reward. Now that’s how you come to value and apprieciate an item.

Both Badge/Emblem and raiding items are purchased with currency: really the Badge/Emblem system is just Blizzard’s way of putting in a DKP system across the game that’s not tied to one guild. You gain currency or DKP by spending time and killing difficult bosses. You spend currency by purchasing items.

So why do I value one – DKP bought gear – over the other – Badge purchased gear? It must be the chance to drop.

I think when your goal is to purchase an item for 100 Emblems or 1000 Valor Points while you’re earning those Emblems or Valor you stop thinking about the item and just start thinking “I need 22 more Emblems”. When it’s a boss drop you spend the entire raiding week thinking “Please let this week be the week that Dislodged Foreign Object drops… and even though Orlith has way more DKP than me, please let next week be the week that Dislodged Foreign Object drops again… and it will finally be mine”. /evil laugh

Just repeating the name of the item so many times mentally makes it easier to remember.

Of course it probably helps that four or five others in your raid group are coveting the same item. It becomes desirable, spoken about in hushed tones, because everyone wants it.

Perhaps they should randomise the Emblem/Valor/Justice Points vendors. Make it so that only 4-5 days out of a month they stock Mercurial Vestment. And I’m not talking about a set schedule. Waiting for the Darkmoon Faire is annoying and tedious.

What do you think?

Here are some other gems (well, my appreciation of these things might be greater than your own) that I found in the same folder:

Cassandri early 80 Naxxaramas Gear (HoTs & DoTs launch)

Lathere stats and gear at the end of BC

My rogue in her level 70 gear

Turns out I'm not a very good headhunter. Should have rolled a Troll.

Xeppe (author of the excellent blog An Ordinary Priest) and I have a strange history.

I actually found Xeppe’s blog through a link via another link from someone else’s blog. I was amazed to discover that she was not just a fellow Priest, or a fellow Oceanic Priest, or even a fellow Barthilas player – Barthilian?, or even another girl WoW player. No. Xeppe was all those things, but even more interestingly, she was a brand new recruit in my guild’s shady splinter guild: DeZire.

Talk about good gossip!

You see, back around the time my guild was first struggling with the new Icecrown Citadel hard modes two distinct, but major events occurred within our ranks. Firstly, we recruited a third Mage to join our two existing Mages (the existing pair of boys happened to be very good friends and had gamed together for years and I think, perhaps, even knew each other well outside the game). The third Mage, I’m sorry to say, was a piece of work. She was one of those people who help perpetuate the girls-are-trouble-and-don’t-belong-in-serious-raid-teams stereotypes.

In those days we made a fundamental mistake. One that your guild is probably making right now:

We put our pure caster DPS in Group 3.

Do not do this. For the love of god, do not do this. It was pure happenstance that one week I also found myself in Group 3 (perhaps I had logged on extremely early and sniped one of the first slots). And by the time we had killed Heroic Blood Princes party chat had dissolved into a pretty serious argument between New Mage and I over the Shadow Silk Spindle. New Mage made a snarky comment when one of our Restoration Druids (not Lathere, by the way) outbid everyone else and won the Heroic Shadow Silk Spindle. It was the first one our raid had seen, and yes, coveted by all the casters.

New Mage felt that the item should be for DPS casters only. Because any serious raider would know that there is a Spirit offhand waiting to be had from Heroic Sindragosa, and that is better for Restoration Druids, and the Resto Druid that won the Shadow Silk Spindle was outting themselves for being unprepared and ignorant of their class.

I think she was surprised that I was so angry with her. I think she was really just directing her complaint towards the other two Mages in the party, and both agreed with her, and never intended for me to see the conversation. I’d certainly never seen her say anything like that in Guild or Raid chat before.

I have no patience for players who claim to know what other classes should or shouldn’t be equipping (especially when it’s to argue that someone doesn’t deserve the item you want – talk about biased!). And furthermore our loot system is set up to be as open as possible and we make no concessions for best in slot or class by class comparisons. It’s not a Loot Council. Far from it. You bid on what you want. And if you want it that bad be prepared to spend a lot.

We got into another argument about a week later, also in Party Chat, but I can’t remember what it was about. By then I had mentally labeled her as a Troublemaker with a capital T. Over the next few weeks our other two Mages became more and more discontent with our raiding and were quite vocal about it. They were fast to post DPS meters when one of the Mages had hit the #1 spot, and very defensive of each-other if anyone dared point out a mistake that one of them had made.

At the same time one of the core founding members of the guild, a Rogue, was also becoming unhappy with our raiding. He was angry when we struggled to get numbers, angry when he felt the officers weren’t recruiting properly. He was angry at our raid leading, angry at our mistakes. He eventually left to join a more progressed guild and I, like most of the guild, was both sad and relieved.

Anyway, to make a long story short, our unhappy Rogue decided to come back and give our guild, and his old friends still in the guild, another go. He chafed under the rules even more than before. Throw that into the mix with our 3 discontent Mages and it was a pretty miserable time to be raiding with Vitare. I blogged about it here.

To make a very long story short, during a tough night wiping on Professor Putricide, our Raid Leader decided to penalise one of our Mages (who had been topping the DPS meters) for doing something silly: getting hit by Malleable Goo or something. Within a few minutes all three Mages had left the raid and left the guild. While it was completely expected, and in fact the officers had over-recruited caster DPS just for that reason, it was still a pretty uncomfortable moment for the guild. Probably the most drama we’d seen in two or three years.

Not long after, perhaps a week or two later, our unhappy Rogue also called it quits. This time he decided to head up a brand new 25 man raiding guild on Barthilas, clearing the same content, with the same hours, same start time, same everything as our guild. DeZire started with 1 Rogue and 3 Mages. They took raiding applicants that we declined. They welcomed raiders who decided they didn’t like us enough to stay after their trial period (we can’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I suppose). And they built themselves up to a formidable and successful raiding guild, eventually surpassing us on the server progression tables if not by content cleared, but by the speed that they were able to clear it.

So imagine my surprise when I started reading An Ordinary Priest and all the drama of their new 25 man raiding guild is there to see written in between the lines of a young Discipline Priest second guessing herself during her raiding trial. It starts here, and gets better, and even better here and ends here.

Xeppe and I got to talking both on her blog and also in game – after all, we were on the same server raiding the same content at the same time. We had many online friends in common, and I had met a few of her raid team in real life so I had my own impressions and stories to tell.

Unfortunately Xeppe didn’t have a very good time of it in her Barthilas guild. I started thinking of ways to get her into Vitare. I knew she would fit right in, and while her guild and mine were identical in raid times, gear and progression, the personalities and attitudes which drive both guilds are as different as night and day.

As much as I would have liked to sponsor an application to my guild from Xeppe the timing was all wrong. We had a full roster of Priests and our Raid Leader leader is a Discipline Priest. And she was of the opinion that Discipline Priests don’t stack well.  Tack on our two excellent and long term Holy Priests and there was just no reason, other than pure favoritism, to welcome another healing Priest to the team.

I was dismayed to hear that Xeppe had burned out and left Barthilas, forever associating hardcore raiding, 25 mans, and progression raiding with that bad experience in DeZire.

If you haven’t been reading An Ordinary Priest you might not know it but Xeppe has turned from a white bar into a dark blue one: these days she’s playing a Restoration Shaman. And it just so happens that my guild, Vitare, is being very open-minded about our roster for Cataclysm. And there’s definitely room for a Restoration Shaman.

There’s room for Xeppe. If only I could convince her!

Natassia, a Rogue in my guild, played with Xeppe when they were both in DeZire, Xeppe’s old Barthilas guild. She chimed in on Xeppe’s blog to add support to my Must Recruit Xeppe Plan of Attack. Our Raid Leader has been reading An Ordinary Priest on and off for almost a year. Our Recruitment Officer is keen for Xeppe to join too.

And if you need further proof of how much we want you to join, Xeppe, here it is!

Plan: How to Recruit Xeppe

My hopes for Vitare in Cataclysm are thus: to hash over our experiences in game online here at HoTs & DoTs (written by yours truly and if you’re lucky you might get some mad ramblings from Lathere), our guild’s anti-gnomes Warlock over at Emberstorm (written by Velidra) and our future guild’s Absolutely Unique Shaman (that would be Xeppe)!

ps. These days it is a firm rule in Vitare that Mages are never placed in the same party within a raid and are, instead, almost always separated among Groups 2-4.

It's funny how a Dwarf with a legendary makes everyone feel better

It’s been an interesting couple of raid weeks for me.

On Wednesday night, “farm” night, we suffered through one of the worse raids I’ve ever been in since joining the guild over a year ago. We wiped on Marrowgar’s trash three time. We nearly wiped on Marrowgar too. I was healing (extra stressful) and I just couldn’t keep people alive. I couldn’t keep myself alive either – I was dead on a bone spike with 30% still left on the boss. I think everyone was relieved that we didnt technically wipe: a tank and healer survived at the very end. But that set the scene for the night.

I expected Deathwhisper to be a struggle. The last two weeks we’ve regressed and had to drop her back down to Normal mode. I blame the ghosts in Sunken Temple and Naxxramas’s Military Wing for establishing a dangerous precedent for dealing with ghosts. It seems, even with someone (usually me) screaming “ghosts!” every few seconds people still believe that the ghosts might just disappear if they ignore them. On Wednesday we got Deathwhisper Heroic after a few warm-up attempts. Things were looking up.

Saurfang gave us a few more difficulties but eventually we executed our Blood Beast DPS and healing assignments perfectly, with some help from a Rogue, and killed Saurfang.

We went on to spend the rest of the night wiping on Heroic Blood Prince Council.

For several weeks now attendance has been abysmal. I think lots of people are just giving up til Cataclysm. Lathere went casual some time ago and hasn’t logged into the game since (sorry, I know she intended to post that herself). Some of our new recruits have just stopped logging in altogether. Other raiders have gone casual, had their account hacked, gone on holidays etc. It’s incredibly rare for us to fill the 25 raid slots.

Not our Priests, I should add. The five of us are still going strong! Clearly we’re the backbone of the Vitare raids. /wink

The last two weeks have been extra interesting because our Raid Leader has been away on holidays. And at the moment we really only have one other Officer and he hasn’t been able to make each raid night. When the cat’s away… the mice will play.

Even though it felt surprisingly liberating (and quiet, I should add) to play without an established leader, it still surprised me how little we, as a group, knew about some stuff. How many healers do we do this with? Um we need Blood Beast assignments? Can’t everyone just remember whatever their assignment was from last week?

Our successes have been huge. Last week, with only 20 players on Thursday we almost got Rotface’s achievement and we did manage to kill Blood Prince Council on Heroic. Yes, with just 20 players. On the same night one of our players finished his Shadowmourne quest. This was a surprisingly special moment for the entire group.

Our failures have also been disturbingly huge. Festergut and Marrowgar, two of the easiest hard modes, have proved to be extremely difficult for us. Why? I have no idea.

We’re trialling two new main spec tanks (Druid and Death Knight), 1 Restoration Druid, 1 Holy Paladin (yet another one disappeared mysteriously during their trial), 1 Rogue, 1 Hunter and 1 Elemental Shaman. As soon as we can find a Warlock, Mage and main spec Restoration Shaman we’ll be trialling some new caster DPS and a new healer too.

Back to Wednesday night. Hours of wiping on Heroic Blood Prince Council. With 25 people in the raid. Suddenly there are flaws in our strategy – problems that we’ve never had to worry about before. We had three healer deaths when they took an Empowered Flame Orb to the face. And if they moved to run away their healing target (usually one of the tanks) would die. We missed Kinetic Bombs. We had Hunter pets moving away from the Bombs just as they came down to ground level.

I remember looking at the people (well characters) around me. It was pretty much the exact same group that had managed to kill the Council with 20 players the week before. These were our regulars, our core raiders. How had everything gone so wrong?

I logged off for the night completely miserable. Resigned to struggle through each raid night until the end of the expansion.

Then last night, Thursday, the day of the week that we’re most likely to have to cancel our raid everything just clicked into place. We had a full raid. We even had three or four people on standby. Unheard of! We blitzed through Blood Prince Council, doing the exact same thing we’ve always done, it just seemed to work again. We lost our first bite in Blood Queen but came back and killed her the very next attempt. Rotface and Festergut keeled over as intended. Dreamwalker was easy, even Sindragosa (only on normal mode, I should add) was easy peasy.

Then, oh my, we even had an hour or so left over to work on a progression fight!

I logged off on a high. And not just because bosses were falling over – it certainly wasn’t a night where no mistakes were made – we made heaps. We still needed one wipe or so before we could kill a boss. But I was so happy because all those new recruits: the DK tank, Feral tank, Ele Shaman, Hunter and Rogue were amazing. If anyone was making mistakes, it wasn’t the new guys, oh no.

This week the new Hunter and Rogue paired up to handle a Blood Beast on their own for Saurfang. And did an excellent job. That same Hunter got the very first Blood Queen bite and smoothly ran around finding and biting people.

Our new DK tank was awesome – his threat on the Shadow-y dude in Blood Prince Council was easily as good as any tank we currently have in the guild. And it’s this boss that I’m most likely to be threat-capped on.

The new Elemental Shaman is my Blood Fiend killing partner and saved me from death with a very nicely timed Thunderstorm.

So we go into the second half of this raid week, Monday night, with time to work on Heroic Professor Putricide, a bunch of promising new raiders, and some extra orange pixels. I know that raiding has its cycles, but I feel like we’ve just been on a roller coaster.

Suzushiiro (Holy Priest) in the opening credits of Big Crits

Are you watching Big Crits too? (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)

Big Crits is a newly formed 25 man World of Warcraft raiding guild. And everything that happens in the guild raids is recorded and edited back for us to watch as online episodes: an inside look into the running of a raiding guild.

I thought the show would be like watching a cross between an instructional how-to video with the occasional argument recorded over vent thrown in. Deep down I didn’t really think that a guild under that kind of pressure and exposure would be able to function as a hardcore raiding guild and be successful. Is the priority the show or the raiding?

Excellent raiding, in my experience, is rarely accompanied by guild drama. And wouldn’t the guild drama be the part that makes the show interesting?

To make a long story short, watching the very first episode answered a lot of those doubts. And it’s fascinating to watch. I love the raiders. I love the web-cam style confessions. I’m already attached to the main cast (not everyone in the raid group has their own “talking head” moment to talk directly to the camera and their audience).

I really respect what these guys are doing. Nothing captures what it’s like to be part of a raiding guild as well as this series does. The chatter on vent that kicks immediately after the opening credits make me feel right at home – it sounds and feels like every pre-raid chatter I’ve ever heard. And is, of course, totally forgettable. There’s the subtle, awkward conversations that we’ve all heard before:

I mean this in the nicest way possible. But… Whornnie could you do more threat?
– Episode 3

I’m tempted to send a link to this series to some of my friends – the friends of mine who theoretically understand that I play World of Warcraft, but don’t really understand what that entails.

I went out for dinner with a bunch of people I’d never met. Strangely enough it came out in conversation that one of the guys at the table was taking his new girlfriend to his mate’s place the next day. And the boys were planning to play Dungeons and Dragons. What really disappointed me (and my expectations were very, very low) was this response:

“Oh my god. Don’t you have to dress up like a wizard or something?”

It’s one thing to vilify a game for being geeky or nerdy, but there’s no need to turn it into something it’s not. If you’re into Dungeons and Dragons of course you’re into cosplay. And in turn you must be into roleplaying. And World of Warcraft is the same again, right?

What I’m trying to say is that so many people have a black mark next to the words “World of Warcraft”. And yet they have absolutely no idea what it is, and what it isn’t. And still they go around, convinced, that they have it all figured out.

Anyway, back to Big Crits.

Even if I wanted to apply, talk to my web cam and be part of the show, I can’t. Not just because they’re Horde (really, what were you thinking Stoneybaby?). Not just because they raid my time 10am Saturday and Sunday (believe it or not, I can’t play WoW all weekend). I can’t apply because they have a Shadow Priest already. And he’s pretty damn smart:

… it’s not just people geeking out in front of their computers. There’s more to it. I think people are afraid of what they don’t understand.
– Furioso, Shadow Priest

Smart guy, huh?

Big Crit’s Discipline Priest, another one of the main cast members with her name in the titles, is Jadeice. Jadeice seems to be struggling a little bit. She’s well spoken and I have this feeling that she comes from a guild in which she was one of the core members of the team – someone who everyone could count on. We actually don’t know much about her yet, she’s only had a few talking moments.

Unfortunately Jadeice was that person. The member of the raid who just couldn’t seem to pick up Sindragosa’s Frost Tomb mechanic and, instead of getting away from the raid and standing in the clear upon impact, managed to wipe the raid by entombing everyone around her (See Episode 2, 6.30 minute mark and then Episode 3, 7 minute mark). In Vitare that person is Citadel (but we forgive him because you can’t really expect much from a Ret Pally, right?). I’ll bet there’s a special person who has that label in your guild too.

Jadeice was swapped out. And they got their first Sindragosa kill as a guild. Ouch.

I mean, I know it probably wasn’t just me… but… they one shot it. I don’t know.
– Jadeice, Discipline Priest

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you are the only person in the team who can’t seem to cope. I’m still convinced I’m the absolute worst person in my guild at dealing with the Lich King’s Defile. I offer to sit out that fight pretty much every week.

But my favourite cast member by far is their Holy Priest, Suzushiiro. This guy makes me laugh absolutely every time. He’s determined to top healing meters and just gets that little bit crazy when he covets loot. He’s always hilarious. Here’s Suzushiiro’s explanation of Sindragosa:

…if they cast too many spells they blow themselves the fuck up. As someone who likes to whore healing meters it’s kind of annoying.

She’s not going to fucking touch me with it in Phase 1 but in Phase 2, when she starts really doling out the damage, and I’ve got to really push that shit out and more importantly, when Prayer of Healing becomes really good so I can really pull ahead of everyone else on the healing meters … then she’s gonna start fucking me with Unchained Magic.

– Suzushiiro, Holy Priest

And I’m not going to spoil it, but 6 minutes into Episode One I almost spit my drink onto my keyboard.

[youtube tuxFNf4-fog Big Crits on Youtube, Episode 1]

What really worries me about Big Crit is that it follows some of the tricks you see in reality TV. Part of the fun in watching Survivor is hearing the individual competitors confess to the camera – in total privacy – then turn around and behave completely differently in front of their team mates. The show doesn’t go to air until all the decisions and votes have been cast so by that stage what they’ve confessed to the camera and to the audience can’t really get them into trouble.

But in Big Crits… eventually the raiders are going to have to eat their words as episodes go to air. Things that they say to the camera, after raid, might upset their guild members weeks later.

I can’t help but worry that the raiders will find themselves self-censoring, or not being 100% truthful simply because they don’t want to upset anyone. Stoneybaby is taking a different approach, complaining when his officers and raiders do something that he doesn’t like, but then confronting them about it before the episode goes to air. Even so, it’s a hard line to toe.

I have lots of other “favourite” moments from the first five episodes. What are yours?

ps. If you’ve yet to start watching you can subscribe to episodes feed and watch them in your feed reader or watch them on their website.

From Naxxramas to Icecrown Citadel

Things are getting quiet in the World of Warcraft. Guild chat is quieter, forum conversations are rarer. Bloggers, Lathere and I included, are posting less frequently.

This is the perfect time, at the end of one expansion, to reflect upon that expansion and perhaps even start thinking about the next. One of the questions I found myself considering was:

If you had a fresh group of level 80s ready to raid now, what path of progression would you take them on in order to clear every single Wrath of the Lich King boss?

Someone new to raiding in World of Warcraft might assume that the answer is straightforward: clear all the Tier 7 bosses, then clear all the Tier 8 bosses and so forth. But how many guilds remained in Ulduar when Trial of the Crusader was released trying to finish off those last few bosses? They couldn’t know that the new bosses would be easier.

So this is my list. The easiest to the most difficult bosses to kill.

I’m not comparing purely the encounter difficulty because I’m not disregarding gear requirements. I would consider that a super easy boss to kill in Icecrown Citadel is more difficult than completing a more complicated fight in Naxxramas because you need good enough gear to make it easy.

I am ignoring instance sequence: imagine that all the bosses are accessible just by zoning in. I’m also ignoring hard mode options just to try and keep the list short. Maybe that’s a list for another day.

Coloured by loot rewards so you can see which bosses are significantly easier/harder than their contemporaries:

• Tier 7 (Naxxramas and equivalent): Poison slime green
• Tier 8 (Ulduar and equivalent): Titan gold
• Tier 9 (Trial of the Crusader and equivalent): This place has never been cleaned orange-brown
• Tier 10 (Icecrown Citadel and equivalent): Frosty blue

The 52 Bosses of Wrath of the Lich King

Starting with the easiest…

1 Noth the Plaguebringer Naxxramas Plague Quarter

Want to make life more interesting for DPS? Give us multiple targets and make us think about what we should be attacking. Noth just disappears when it’s time to switch targets. No thinking required.

2 Grand Widow Faerlina Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

You know something has gone wrong when it’s easier to ignore the fight strategy and zerg the boss with some good healers and a couple of Cleansing Totems. Free achievements for all!

3 Archavon the Stone Watcher Vault of Archavon

Assuming your entire raid doesn’t stand in his dirt cloud Archavon is super easy to defeat. And you’re not even expected to have decent PVE gear when you kill him either.

4 Anub’Rekhan Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

The Spider wing is usually the first one approached by new guilds and PuGs but Anub’Rekhan requires more knowledge and planning to defeat than the bosses above.

5 Maexxna Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

The last boss in the Spider wing had only one difficult bit: that 5 second gap when all the healers are wrapped up tight and can’t heal, while the tank took a beating during the final enrage. Turns out that tanks make good sacrifices.

6 Lotheb Naxxramas Plague Quarter

The last boss in the Plague wing was defeated by two players on 25 man mode not long after Wrath of the Lich King was released. This fight was all about when to heal and when to wait. Oh yeah. And stealing spores!

7 Sartharion Obsidian Sanctum

Remember, I’m not factoring in hard modes in this list. Sartharion + 0 Drakes was really, really, really easy. Especially on 25 man setting.

8 Gluth Naxxramas Construct Quarter

My least favourite boss of all time. Listening to Hunters argue about how they shouldn’t be expected to kite gets old really fast.

9 Patchwerk Naxxramas Construct Quarter

Surprised that I didn’t put Patchwerk up as the #1 easiest boss? That’s because I healed this wearing blues on a Restoration Shaman before they doubled the Mp5 quota on gear. It was hard.

10 Heigan the Unclean Naxxramas Plague Quarter

The safety dance man himself! Easy once you have the timing down and practice, difficult for first timers.

11 Flame Leviathan Ulduar

I know that vehicles scale with gear but I’m pretty sure driving in the near vicinity of Flame Leviathan is enough to kill him. Facerolled by PuGs every week since the day Ulduar was released. I think this boss/golf caddy deserves to be considered easier than Instructor Raz (a raid weekly that PuGs sometimes fail).

12 Grobbulous Naxxramas Construct Quarter

I really like the flower shapes you can make when you drop Mutating Injection in just the right spot. Like a daisy chain. Very pretty.

13 Instructor Razuvious Naxxramas Military Quarter

If I had compiled this list before the advent of the Raid Weekly Quest I would have placed Instructor Razuvious higher up the list as a much easier fight. Unfortunately PuGs really mangle this encounter which makes me think it’s difficult without experience.

14 Gothik the Harvester Naxxramas Military Quarter

One of my personal pet peeves: bosses that are un-attackable for 15 or more seconds. Just enough time for me to start up my DPS rotation; just enough time for all my DoTs and stacks of Shadow Weaving to expire. I did enjoy watching the Warlocks drain all Gothik’s mana while he stood there on his balcony and did nothing. Very amusing.

15 Thaddius Naxxramas Construct Quarter

Did you earn the achievement Shocking!? Yeah, me neither. Friendly fire FTL.

16 Sapphiron Naxxramas Frost Wing

Cool – a dragon!

17 The Four Horsemen Naxxramas Military Quarter

A complicated scenario requiring a hell of a lot of raid coordination to defeat it. I loved this fight, even when I was confused. One of the best in the entire expansion, if anything in New Naxxramas (flown in from EPL) can qualify for that title.

18 Kel’Thuzad Naxxramas Frost Wing

As the last boss in Naxxramas, Kel’Thuzad was actually suitably difficult compared to the bosses that came before. Shame that the fight was drawn out so long by a totally pointless adds phase at the start.

19 Malygos The Eye of Eternity

I think the idea was that raiders would be well versed in dragon riding by completing Aces High! every day. Shame, I really love this fight even though it’s impossible to find groups for it. Double stacks of a damage buff? Oh yes please!

20 Kologarn Ulduar

I feel like a fraud putting this boss in so early: I still don’t really understand what happens when you kill each of his arms and when you’re meant to do it. Stay out of his eye beam lasers and win without trying.

21 Razorscale Ulduar

Not much to say about Razorscale except it’s a fairly enjoyable fight – typical fare in Ulduar. Kill some adds, stay out of fire and kill the giant dragon when he lands.

22 The Assembly of Iron Ulduar

Kill the biggest dude and then kill the next biggest dude and then kill the little dude. Obviously the biggest dude in the room is the greatest threat right? Cliched perhaps, but in this case it’s definitely true.

23 XT-002 Deconstructor Ulduar

Before he was a vanity pet, XT-002 was a robot that behaved like a spoiled little boy. This fight was pretty fun – unless you were responsible for running around the room taking out bomb bots. Make sure you check out his remix.

24 Ignis the Furnace Master Ulduar

I think Ignis was intended to be quite a challenge: with tanks assigned to kite adds from flame into water and then a damage dealer chiming in at just the right moment to kill them. However in my guild, and in most PuGs, he felt a lot more like a tank’n’spank with an avoidable spell interrupt. /yawn.

25 Koralon the Flame Watcher Vault of Archavon

Don’t stand in fire. That is all. Oh yeah, don’t take too long either – you could argue this guy is a bit of a DPS check. That said he was created for people wearing PVP gear so I wouldn’t get too concerned. I’d like to say that Koralon is the easiest Tier 9 boss, but he’s up against a real face-roll contender.

26 Emalon the Storm Watcher Vault of Archavon

Remember how I said target switching was difficult for DPS? Now add in a time limit, DPS quota and the possibility of switching to the complete wrong add and you’ll see some raid wipes. I’ve seen PuGs kill Koralon for Tier 9 drops and then wipe on Emalon for Tier 8 gear.

27 Auriaya Ulduar

Crazy, crazy cat lady indeed.

28 Thorim Ulduar

The easiest of the four Keepers in Ulduar – the goal being to beat the crap out of each Keeper to turn them into your friend. All four Keepers (Thorim, Hodir, Freya and Mimiron) are a step up in difficulty from the bosses that precede them in Ulduar. And being part of the Thorim gauntlet team was hell fun.

29 Hodir Ulduar

A friend tried to explain the fight to me from their experience on the PTR “these giant ice storms come in and you have to get the fuck out of the way, because they moment the ice drops and forms a snow pile you have run on top of it. If you stand under the ice, you die. If you are too far away to reach a snow pile, you die. If you don’t get on the snow pile, you die.” Hodir lets DPS really enjoy themselves – bring me that Storm Cloud and no, I’m not leaving this Toasty Fire.

30 Freya Ulduar

I don’t really remember much about Freya. Only that there was at least one or two accidental pulls while a raid member herbed the hell out of her little garden zone instead of helping the rest of the raid.

31 General Vezax Ulduar

You don’t know how much you take mana regeneration for granted until it is taken away from you. This fight also featured the first evil green and black pools of death that really were beneficial to stand in. Just don’t stand in them too long.

32 Lord Jaraxxus Trial of the Crusader

Spread out and enjoy the soundtrack. Easiest boss in Trial of the Crusader for sure. Let the death of Wilfred Fizzlebang be a lesson to all Gnome Warlocks: do as you’re told.

33 Onyxia Onyxia’s Lair

It’s possible to wipe on Onyxia. As long as someone is tanking the whelps and you have a couple Tremor Totems I think you’ll be fine. AoE it up!

34 Northrend Beasts Trial of the Crusader

A 3 in 1 combination meat deal. Poison is bad. Fire is bad. But Poison + Fire is good?

35 Twin Val’kyr Trial of the Crusader

What can I say about the Twins? Hmmm a fight where individual raid members need to watch their own debuffs and react accordingly. The people who die during Twin Val’kyr are probably the same people who stopped you from earning Shocking! when you fought Thaddius.

36 Faction Champions Trial of the Crusader

The fake PVP encounter. It might be fake, but I think it still exposes those members of your raid group who wouldn’t last 5 minutes in an actual battleground too. No, you can’t tank the Rogue.

37 Anub’arak Trial of the Crusader

Yep, the last boss in Trial of the Crusader was easier to deal with than a couple of Ulduar bosses (below). The burrow phase was kind of scary and exhilarating as those spikes chased you down faster and faster: shink shink shink shi- sh- dead.

38 Mimiron Ulduar

A complicated fight. Lots of fire, rockets and stuff-to-avoid. Mimiron is actually a tiny, crazy little gnome dude. With a small stature inferiority complex. So to “kill” Mimiron you actually have to kill the giant robot body that he has built for himself. First you kill all the pieces, then you kill them all again, at the exact same time. Props to Blizzard for giving us casters another opportunity to range tank!

39 Gunship Battle Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

You know a fight is pretty easy when PuGs on your server swap to heroic mode just for this one fight. And it’s still pretty easy.

40 Yogg-Saron Ulduar

The final boss in Ulduar. And man, he was a tough one. I think Kae’s illustrated guide at Dreambound sums it up quite well. A lot of guilds couldn’t quite finish this guy off before Trial of the Crusader was released.

41 Lord Morrowgar Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Turn off your sound for this one, Morrowgar’s jokes are terrible. There’s lots and lots of blue fire to avoid in this fight. Which would be impressive if not for one thing: you can just stand right inside Morrowgar’s hit box and ignore it completely. The trash to Morrowgar is harder to kill than Morrowgar himself.

42 Festergut Icecrown Citadel Plagueworks

Festergut is responsible for the most boring strategy videos released in Wrath of the Lich King. Just combine Patchwerk with Loaethb’s spores and you get a DPS race requiring a small amount of healing skill.

43 Toravon the Ice Watcher Vault of Archavon

A fight that favours melee. As long as you have some casters willing to dedicate their time in service to killing Frozen Orbs you’ll win. If you wipe, those same casters will be blamed. This was actually quite hard when Toravon was first introduced to VoA. But we all know what happens to bosses when they get too hard, don’t we? They get nerfed.

44 Lady Deathwhisper Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Definitely more bark than bite (she does talk a lot). Her friends are much more difficult to get rid of and at any given time damage dealers can only kill half the adds running around: only casters can kill Fanatics and only melee/hunters can kill Adherents.

45 Deathbringer Saurfang Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Saurfang has to be the most misleading fight in Icecrown Citadel: new players would be forgiven for thinking that it’s a fight set to test their healers’ ability, more experienced players would call it a DPS race and the truth is it’s actually both of those things combined with some well coordinated Blood Beast control/killing.

46 Rotface Icecrown Citadel The Plagueworks

Yet another boss that favours melee. Now us casters just pretend that we are melee. In Cataclysm I expect to see my mana bar start out empty and fill with combo points/rage as I DPS. It will always be blue though. It’s the colour of the resource system that counts, don’t you know?

47 Valithria Dreamwalker Icecrown Citadel The Frostwing Halls

Dreamwalker was billed as The Healing Boss of Icecrown Citadel: the boss that’s meant to make healing more fun! It’s true, that first night we all ran around in circles while the healers debated who should take the portals and whether Unending Breath was superior to Crusader Aura and basically called the shots. Now we just force all our Paladins to switch to Holy, all our hybrid casters to dump their mana bar with offspec heals, and zerg it. I still run around in circles doing nothing convinced that – just as long as our Holy Paladins don’t lose their “stacks” – we’d still succeed.

48 Blood Prince Council Icecrown Citadel The Crimson Hall

If you play with Deadly Boss Mods or a similar mod that tells you where to go using a big floating arrow be prepared to get confused. You’ll can be alternatively told to run away from a Shock Vortex and run towards an Conjured Flame orb – and you can bet that the orb is heading right into the vortex. But if you stand in a corner and /dance for several minutes (like I ususally do) nobody yells at you over Vent.

49 Blood Queen Lana’thel Icecrown Citadel The Crimson Hall

At one time in the distant past I thought Blood Queen was all about spreading the vampiric DPS love by biting fellow players. Now I know the real secret to success is learning where the other 24 players in your raid like to stand at any given moment of the fight. And the strategic use of Fear Ward and Every Man for Himself. Go go Human Priests!

50 Professor Putricide Icecrown Citadel The Plagueworks

This is a truly difficult fight and props to players who have defeated it: especially those who did so when you only had 10 attempts per week. Like a pendulum you’ll go from killing a slime on one side of the room to killing a red slime – “gas cloud” whatever – on the other side of the room. If you get a good spot you won’t even have to move til the very end.

51 Sindragosa Icecrown Citadel The Frostwing Halls

Sindragosa says it herself: “Suffer mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!”. Unchained Magic is quite likely the single boss ability in Icecrown that will have your healers threatening to rage quit. Healers secretly love the Lich King’s Defile simply because anything is better than getting Unchained Magic 3 to 5 times in a row.

52 The Lich King Icecrown Citadel Frozen Throne

The boss of the expansion and he lives up to his reputation. I believe he is the most difficult boss on the list. His signature moves: Defile, Harvest Soul, Remorseless Winter and Necrotic Plague are pretty horrifying. If you’re struggling to move beyond 11/12 ICC start praying that it’s the players with low latency that are targeted by Defile. Or simply replace all your DPS with Mages and Warlocks and hax your way to victory.

***

Would you rank them differently? Does your guild have old bosses that were never completed or killed when the new raid instance was released? Which bosses?

Changing Raid Sizes, from Classic through to Wrath of the Lich King... and into Cataclysm

A few days ago we got to look into the crystal ball and see the future of raiding in World of Warcraft. Developers released this announcement which outlines how they intend raids and progression to work in Cataclysm. Most of the changes left me feeling pensive about Cataclysm – I can’t help but feel that all the things I love about raiding are slipping further out of my grasp.

I was happy to hear that they intend to release a lot of raid content out of the box and include more than one, mid-size, raid instance in the first raiding tier. Finally! Perhaps this time they might get the raid length/time commitment right.

I loved running Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in the same lockout week. Naxxaramas with a quick jaunt off to kill Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum always felt more like a diversion and hassle than a proper change of scenery. And Naxxramas just went on forever. Especially in a PuG group.

One raid ID per guild, per week

Keeva over at Tree Bark Jacket has the unique experience of having run a 25 man guild, and then having run a 10 man guild only to return to 25s, all during Wrath of the Lich King:

Some people are upset about “missing out” – ie if you choose to do 25s, you’ll “miss out” on 10s. You’re not missing out on something that doesn’t exist anymore (a second lockout). We never had parallel 10 and 25 raids in TBC. There were 10man raids, and there were 25s. We didn’t have the same instance for both sizes.

I think at first, it seemed like a good idea to be able to choose; it seemed like it would give people the choice to be a 10 or a 25man raider.

It’s true. Wrath of the Lich King gave us the ability to choose the format – 10 or 25 man. And by choosing one, you weren’t locked out of running the other format.

Unlike many 25 man raiders I never felt obliged to run both raid formats at the same time. I think the experience you gain by wiping on new bosses in both formats does help you learn, and defeat, encounters a bit faster. But I’m concerned that the method they are choosing will force raiding guilds to have one raid ID per raid zone per week. Sounds good at first, and it may slow down progression a bit which is good news for Blizzard, the content lasts longer, and good news for us as players, more anticipation and more thrill when you get that first kill.

But I think it could backfire. I think it could backfire because they’re giving 25 man guilds the opportunity to scale down to the 10 man format mid-week.  I can’t help but wonder what will happen if only 20 players arrive for the raid on the second raid night for the week – a common occurrence in many raiding guilds when players only turn up for “farm night” and mysteriously disappear when it’s time to wipe on progression content. In the proposed Cataclysm raiding model the guild has the option to switch down to 10 man mode on that exact same raid ID. So who get picked as the lucky 10 to raid that night when the numbers are low and who gets benched? That’s potentially 10-12 upset people, all saved to that raid ID but unable to raid for the night.

Furthermore, if the guild is struggling to recruit, or going through a poor attendance phase, with 22-24 players turning up night after night I can’t see many officers willing to keep going. They can pick and choose the best 10 players and turn it into a strong 10 man raiding guild.

Losing the “epic” experience

But giving us the choice steals some of the realism from the story environment. For me it cheapens the experience – loses some of that omg feeling you’re meant to get when you first see a boss.

Beru refers to it the “grandness” of 25 man raiding. Once when you’ve experienced the pure chaos of fighting Yogg-Saron with 24 other people -  brain linked, feared to hell and back, and screaming at each other when someone steals their portal – coming back the next night with a team of 9 and succeeding seems just a little bit sad.

I’m always a little disappointed. It makes the boss less impressive in my eyes and takes away some of the satisfaction and sense of achievement.

Being able to switch your guild’s Raid ID from a 10 man one night to a 25 man the next night isn’t going to “fix” the experience. It may help with raider burnout. But it’s not going to make us believe that our enemy is all powerful, and near-impossible to defeat. And that’s how I want to approach every new boss I come across in World of Warcraft.

1 vs 25 means that the boss you’re facing is 25 times more deadly than you are as an individual. How can the Lich King triumph over the entire Argent Crusade but be defeated by 10 people? 25 mans make the bosses feel more powerful, the encounter more overwhelming and ultimately more satisfying when you triumph.

The convenience of 10 mans

I do believe that handing out the same rewards, in terms of gear, will be the death of 25 man raiding. Why? The raid weekly quest. When was the last time you got 25 people together to do the raid weekly quest? Never. You always grab 10 people to do it, why not? It’s easier to organise and the loot isn’t a deciding factor.

Coordinating 25 people to all show up is one thing. Coordinating 25 people to all do the right thing at the right time, produce amazing DPS, heal and tank perfectly and run out of fire, run together for brain links/pacts is harder. It’s just plain harder.

Even though I really, really enjoy 25 mans I know that most of my team, and even myself to a certain extent, are motivated by gear. And I can’t see myself being able to convince 24 other skilled players to raid with me without the lure of loot.

The truth is, some guilds will not survive this. Sure, the more solid and well established guilds will likely continue on about their way, but for guilds that are already struggling for numbers and/or progress it’s likely the signature on their death sentence. I mean…why continue to struggle to field 25 people when you can more easily have 10? — Beru

I couldn’t agree more. I think of how many nights we struggle to get just one or two more players to round out our 25 man team. It’s almost become a joke that Vitare can only down bosses when we have 24 players in the raid – almost all our ICC progression kills seemed to be with 24 players.

I can only hope that if any 25 man raiding guilds survive in Cataclysm, it will be because the 25 people in the team truly enjoy the 25 man raiding experience like I do. And, fingers crossed, those 25 players will be as skilled as the team I currently play with.

I just hope that brand new World of Warcraft players will get the chance to experience 25 man raiding before they are drawn into a steady 10 man team. I want new players to get the chance to experience both raiding formats. I want to show new raiders the madness and awe-inspiring sight of a perfectly coordinated 25 man raiding team and the tight-knit 10 man team. Before they make up their minds and join a raiding guild.

We talk about making raiding accessible, but I think it’s important to make 25 man raiding accessible too. Is the only time I’m going to be part of a mob when we raid Crossroads? When we compete for PVP zones like Wintergrasp?

How did the default raid size shift to double that of your regular dungeon run – 2 x 5 players – away from a 40 man army?

Encounter Difficulty

Guess what people? 10 mans aren’t easy. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the reason 25 man raiding guilds snipe all the 10 man raiding achievements and realm firsts is because they have higher gear scores.

Last year Lathere and I completed A Tribute to Insanity while wearing 10 man gear. I can promise you, the reason we got that achievement without wiping had very, very little to do with our gear. We got that achievement because our 10 man team was good at working together. Most importantly, our 10 man team had an excellent group makeup, with a fantastic variation of all the classes, providing all the buffs you could want – including Heroism.

A part of why we were able to get the 10 man realm first is because we were running the instance in both 25 man and 10 man. A lot of what we’d learned about Anub’arak came from completing the encounter on 25 man, I’ll give you that. But we’d only cleared Anub’arak perhaps three or four times when we completed the 0 wipe achievement – that’s not that many attempts or wipes.

I don’t think 10 man raid teams are inferior. 10 man raiding is difficult. But from my experience most 25 man teams are run more strictly and raiders are held to higher standards than the pure 10 man guilds I’ve seen in action.

A 25 man raid has it’s own balance but because the number of spaces is bigger, you can actually get away with overlaps in the raid composition. Our current 25 man team is far from perfect: we have 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Moonkin, 3 Restoration Druids, 1 Shaman and no Feral Druid. We juggle where we can to get all the buffs – one of our Warlocks will usually volunteer to be the caster buff bot for the evening because we don’t have an Elemental Shaman.

My 10 man guild group has changed quite a lot from what it was last year in Trial of the Grand Crusader. Last week we we attempted Deathbringer Saurfang Heroic with 2 Prot Warriors, 1 DPS Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enhance Shaman, 1 Warlock, 1 Shadow Priest (me), 2 Restoration Druids and 1 Discipline Priest. Certainly not an even mix of the classes!

We couldn’t get it. Oh we did very, very well considering. The Warlock and I both had our own fiends to kill and we juggled threat with our tanks, kiting them back and forth until they died. If we got hit once – if a tank’s taunt missed, or the Warlock’s Demonic Circle expired – we wiped. We tried all kinds of things and to the best of our ability, came up with a bit of a stun rotation to bring them down to nearly half health before they got out of melee distance. It wasn’t an ideal strategy, but it was all we had, and we pretty much perfected it. On our best attempt I think we got him down to perhaps 10% or 15%. We had a lot of blood power accumulating and several Marks of the Fallen Champion.

I spent the entire time wishing for a Death Knight’s Death Grip or a Hunter and their Distracting Shot and slowing traps. Or I would have happily traded in my Shadow Priest’s slow and steady DPS for a bit of Mage burst DPS. I know that our healers were crying out, wishing they could heal both tanks at once.

A well meaning guild member came on Vent to ask us how we were going. When we tried to explain how we were managing the adds they sounded bewildered “oh in our 10 man kill last week we just used Hand of Freedom and Blessing of Protection on the ranged DPS”. Yeah thanks for reminding us that we don’t have a Paladin either.

However, I’ve read a lot of comments on various blogs and the general consensus seems to be that 25 man aren’t difficult to play, they’re only difficult to organise. I disagree.

25 mans are difficult because 1 person in a 25 man can ruin things for the other 24 people. It’s harder to get 25 people working together, focused, playing perfectly as one cohesive whole. Even excellent players have off nights, or trouble with certain boss encounters. If 5 players are making mistakes in any given attempt it just means that killing the boss as a team is more difficult and challenging. You have to consider the group as a whole, as one entity.

25 mans are difficult because you don’t have as much room to maneuver. Positioning in 25 mans is often very strict because standing a couple yards away from the ideal spot can get both yourself and your friends killed. 10 mans are much more forgiving.

25 mans are difficult because you often have to share duties – you might have 4 people in charge of keeping Kinetic Bombs in the air and you need to coordinate and check with those other players throughout the fight – not stepping on toes, but coming forward and taking control if they’re struggling.

25 mans are difficult because it’s nearly impossible to improvise over Vent. Conversation between 25 people would be a nightmare. It’s nearly impossible to ask questions like “which Empowered Fanatic should we kill first?” in a 25 man raid. You usually just end up guessing, because you’d be talking over someone else coordinating a battle resurrection, or calling out a phase change. Yet in a 10 man I’d be much more likely to ask, or request that the priority target is marked. Improvisation can wrangle a successful kill out of what looks like a wipe in 10 man, improvisation hardly ever works in a 25 man.

Raid Composition Min/Maxing meet 10 Mans

I think we’re going to see a min/max attitude applied to 10 mans. I don’t believe in “Bring the Player, not the Class”. Yes, you want 10 equally skilled raiders in your team, but beyond that only through variety can you bring all the buffs and utility stuff to your group. That doesn’t change, no matter how much they like to share the buffs around between classes.

I think we’re going to see very specific recruiting as serious 10 man raiders build their raid teams with progression in mind: “Recruiting 1 Survival/MM Hunter for serious 10 man progression raiding”. I think we’re going to see every class – pure DPS too – really use their dual specialisation in order to approach each new boss fight with the strongest team they can muster.

I think variety is the key. I don’t believe that you’ll be able to waltz into a Cataclysm 10 man raid with the kind of group make up that we had for our 10 man – heavy on just a couple of the classes – and expect to defeat all the bosses. I think progression teams will be more likely to keep people in the wings to swap in and out per fight.

10 mans are made even harder if you’re trying to accommodate friends, letting them play whatever class/spec they desire, instead of playing with a group composition that really works well.

Incentives for 25 Man Teams

At the moment Blizzard are planning to entice raiders to run 25 mans instead of 10 man by offering up more Emblems and Gold to compensate them for the effort to coordinate the damn thing. Not going to work.

Unless the Emblem system changes dramatically you only need Emblems at the start of a raiding tier when new items are released. Even if you only earn Emblems of Frost by running a 10 man each week… well you’re going to get all the items you want sooner or later anyway. Being ahead of the curve by a week or two doesn’t really mean much to me. But I don’t like gear from Emblems anyway – I have no sentimentality or attachment to the item itself.

Gold is an even worse incentive. I can’t think of anyone in my guild who cuts corners (skipping Flasks, refusing to buy epic gems or the most expensive enchants) or worries about running out of gold. We even ask, as part of the recruitment process, if an applicant has a healthy gold balance and most applicants scoff at the question – they have more than enough gold to keep raiding.

What is a good incentive? I don’t know. I think the player to loot ratio needs to be higher. If 10 mans offer 1 piece of loot per 5 players for each boss kill, 25 mans need to offer about 1 piece of loot per 4 players. Perhaps even if only 1 Tier Token dropped in a 10 man and 3 dropped in a 25 man raid, that alone would be enough.

I think the only real incentive is to make sure that 25 mans are just a bit easier than 10 mans.

Read that again. I think 25 man boss kills should be easier for your average player. I think we’re going to lose so many players to 10 mans in Cataclysm – out of convenience, not because they prefer the experience – that the quality of players applying for 25 man guilds will be lower and I think the pool of applicants will be much smaller. Give us a chance: make the encounter more forgiving, just a bit easier, on 25 man setting. Tune it assuming only 20-23 players will be present.

The Dream

What I’d like to see is multiple raids – some only for 10 people, some only for 25 people, different content filling the same tier gear.

I’d like the content to dictate how many players you need to defeat the boss in question. Cataclysm Nasty Boss #1 should requite 25 people, Cataclysm Nasty Bosses #2-#5 should require 10 people – but all bosses 1-5 should drop the same item level gear. Why can’t there by a 25 man that drops Tier 11 that’s totally different content to a 10 man instance that drops the same Tier 11? Hell, let them drop the exact same Tier Tokens.

I want to see less flexibility – I don’t want to be able to change the raid size mid-week. I want to walk up to Deathwing and need the best 10, 20, 25, 40 … whatever… players I know to defeat him.

I hope that they give guilds flexibility by offering multiple raid lockouts per week by offering multiple raid instances per tier. I think that they’re trying to do this and I applaud them. Yes, this takes more time and effort to produce, but I’m not adverse to revisiting an existing zone in a later patch to take on a new “wing”.

For example, imagine that Ulduar – the zone in the north of Storm Peaks, not the raid instance – comprised of 3 raid instances. Halls of Stone (10 man, Tier 7) would contain 6 bosses and be released with Wrath of the Lich King, Ulduar (25 man, Tier 8 ) would contain 13 bosses and be released sometime later then perhaps we’d skip a whole patch cycle and eventually return for Halls of Lightning (10 man, Tier 10) to kill just 4 bosses. Remember that at each Tier level they would be other raids – a 25 man Tier 7, a 10 man Tier 8 and a 25 man Tier 10.

And, finally, I hope they bring back a 40 man world boss! Let’s not lose the Massively in MMORPG.

25 Raider Types: I'm Helpful, The Stratmonger, Teehee and the list goes on...

A guild member posted a link to an article on MMO Champion: 25 People in Your Raid. Perhaps you’ve read it? It got me thinking. Am I just like one of these raiding personality types? Do my guildies think of me as a Teehee? Ms Prepared?

It didn’t take long for me to spot which type I know I am, but I also think I do a pretty good job at hiding (or dulling) the sharp edges of my personality while raiding. Perhaps the people I raid with have been fooled into thinking that I’m a kind, patient and forgiving sort.

I’m Helpful

Most likely a Ret Paladin or a Hunter, I’m Helpful will be the person who calls out everything needing to be called out, whether it is wandering plague on Arthas, Snobolds on a character, the fact Steelbreaker just died, or that someone is standing in a fire. This person is probably immensely helpful since even though everyone has DBM installed, no one is actually paying any attention to it.

I’m not I’m Helpful. I don’t have the endless patience and enthusiasm required to remain upbeat for a 3 hour stint. And why should I call out when we’re about to enter Phase 2? If my mods can tell me that, you can watch your own. I do genuinely like having a Helpful person in our raids though. The moment you finally kill <insert crazy difficult boss>, the boss that you’ve wiped on for months, you’ll hear Helpful declaring proudly on vent “See, I knew we could do it!”. I love that.

McTalksaLot

No matter what happens in the raid, McTalksaLot has a comment for it, a comment that is neither witty nor makes people laugh, but simply a meandering, petty, spiteful or moronic comment. Does good damage or healing, but has no idea when to stop queuing the microphone to talk, and so simply keeps rambling even when important things are trying to be done or said.

I’m not McTalksALot. At least not in game and certainly not in 25 mans! Chit chat is annoying and 99% of the time it’s totally pointless and meaningless.

Teehee

Most likely a girl in the 18-24 range, Teehee injects random cutesy comments into Vent in the middle of important things or strategy discussions. “Like, I remember this time where we were in MC right, and they pulled all the corehounds at once hehehehe!!”

I hope nobody would say I was a Teehee – the description reminds me of the start of all those bad band camp stories in American Pie “This one time at band camp…” and you know the story is going to be bad. The few times that I’ve tried to entertain my guildies with a personal WoW anecodote over Vent the punch line has really fallen flat. Silence. I suck at telling stories, apparently.

The Hybrid

Hybrid is the poor fellow you ask to do 2 or 3 different roles in the same instance. Either has a druid, paladin or shaman, or has multiple characters that are geared for the content, Hybrid is usually a very good player that doesn’t really remember what character they play any more. Doesn’t mind doing either role, just gets confused sometimes while trying to lightning bolt with Holy light, or wondering why they can’t demonic circle on their mage.

I’m certainly not the jack of all trades Hybrid. I suck at playing my alts, and I suck at healing.

The Stratmonger

He’s read every bosskiller strategy, watched every tankspot video, and has every movie on Warcraftmovies memorized, recorded, and on an external hard drive ready for immediate use. Stratmonger is prepared to take over. “Well, I remember in this one video, where they moved Putricide over near the red Slime and had the abomination on it..” He will inject a thread of doubt into your strategy even if you wiped because 4 dps blew up in a goo.

I’m not a Stratmonger either. In fact I much prefer to just go in “blind” and experience the encounter for the first time without any prior knowledge. Strategy guides bombard you with lengthy descriptions of every single goddamn ability. Even the ones that are only really relevant for the tank, healers and melee DPS. Strategy videos look too easy – it’s nearly impossible to understand what you’re watching.

I also think it’s just more fun to work things out for yourself.

I’m secretly a Patton.

Will continually be yelling in /rw to “WAKE THE FUCK UP” or “C’mon guys, it’s been six minutes since we said to take a 5 minute break”, Patton will be in charge of keeping everyone awake and interested.

A totally thankless job, since people will meander back to their computers at their own speed anyways and roll call is meaningless anyways, Patton will nonetheless walk down the line, /poking people and trying to keep them from going away to go to the washroom. Really have to pee? Your dog wants out? Forget it.

Patton will come to your house and duct tape you to your computer chair so you don’t do any of that meaningless crap. Now drink another flask, and lets do another hour of Anub attempts, maggot.

I’m the first person to roll my eyes when someone fails at:

• standing in fire running out
• biting finding and clicking one name on your raid frames
• malleable goo running out
• pact of the darkfallen running in
• swarming shadows running out
• face/body pulling standing still
• talking to NPCs standing still
• and the list goes on

I always think the minus DKP penalty enforced by officers is too lenient. It should be -1000 DKP, not -100 DKP.

I think people should be punished if they can’t manage to maintain a 1 hour Flask buff for 3 hours straight. Especially considering that about 3 people will say “check flasks” before each attempt.

I think people talk too much on Vent. I think they type too much in Raid chat.

I think people who decide, after everyone is buffed and ready-checked, that they “need a drink, brb” should be /slapped. Time wasters.

I think most people are lazy. “Let’s go do VOA and try Sindragosa another night!” We’re not going to miraculously 1 shot Sindragosa anyway, so why not learn some of the fight now. VOA can be pugged. Sindragosa can not. This kind of thinking is why we never got Heroic Anub’arak. It was too hard. Too much wiping. People got lazy.

Fortunately for me, in pretty much every single guild I’ve been in there has already been another, more vocal, more impatient, more exacting and more demanding Patton than I. They call people out for failing before you’ve had a chance to release after a wipe. They call them lazy, the cry out for -DKP.

Yep, they come across like a total bastard. Which means I get to keep my – mostly untarnished – reputation of being a nice person. (Love you, Drag!)

If I could tape those people (who conveniently stopped showing up to H Anub nights) into their chairs for 3 hours of uninterrupted wiping, would I? Damn right I would.

See most people listen to that Onyxia -50 DKP Minus sound recording and think “that Asian guy is such a loser!”. Not me. I listen to it and think:

Crushem gets -50 DKP? Is that all? -500 already!

***

ps. Oh yes, I know I totally wrecked my own “nice” reputation by writing this. Oh well, it’s a relief to just put it out there.

pps. I was actually quite disturbed by this image of myself. I’m not like this in nearly any other setting – not socially, not even when I do heroics or PuGs. This is my work mode that comes out when I’m raiding.

We currently rely on the sale of BoE items to cover our expenses

Guild Banking has changed so much since the days in which I first starting playing. In vanilla and the early BC days one officer had a bank mule who looked after the guilds assets and gold! Cass was once even part of a guild that taxed its members – requiring them to mail a couple gold to the guild banker each week – in order to remain a member.

My guild recently overhauled its guild banking system. First we asked our members for feedback. It was very interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts. There were lots of good ideas on how we should spend the guild’s money, unfortunately there wasn’t really any good ideas on how the guild could make money.

I haven’t been in many guilds so I can’t really comment on what amount of gold a raiding guild should have. But it seems to me that Vitare has a pretty healthy bank balance. And its definitely a lot more gold than any of the other more casual guilds (that I’ve been part of) have had.

How We Spend It

In the end we decided to spend our gold on things that would benefit our entire raid team each night. We didn’t like the idea that our members would have to spend significant additional time outside their raiding commitments farming gold just to cover the costs of consumables and repairs for raiding. So now we pay for, per raider:

Repairs: 100g per Raid Night
Flasks: 1 Flask per Raid Night
Food: Fish Feasts will be provided throughout the night
Enchants: A number of popular enchants scrolls will be available to raiders when they win that brand new weapon (or chest etc)

Previously we had covered repairs and food, now we’ve extended that to help cover the cost of another raiding consumable: flasks. We’ve also decided to help our raiders pay for the cost of getting new gear – by giving the raider a suitable enchant so that they can start using their new item immediately.

We spend approximately 10 000 – 15 000 gold per week to cover these expenses.

How We Earn It

However, the only way we make money is by selling any Bind on Equip epics that we gather from raiding on the Auction House or at a reduced gold price to raiders (50% off Market Value).

I’m sure other guilds have alternate ways of making money but I simply can’t work out how.

I know that there numerous ways a single individual can go about earning gold and all the information out there seems to be directed at how a single player can play the Auction House for cash. But it wouldn’t be fair to ask our Guild Banker to play the Auction House and hand that income over to the guild – it’s income that they earned on their own from their own effort and should remain theirs.

I would be very interested to hear how other guilds run their guild banks and how they fill their coffers. In fact I would really like to get heaps of information and do a guide because frankly Google just didn’t cut it for me this time.

So please, if your guild bank runs well leave a comment explaining how it works!

The Pick Up Crowd, the /wave folks, gather at Eventide

By Raiding Alliances I don’t mean “LOL lets go kill the Stormwind Auctioneers!” I mean, when people talk about being part of a “collective” or a raiding group bigger or outside of their guild, how does it function?

How many people are in it? Do raids run at scheduled times? Is everything just /roll-ed on? What’s the incentive to join a raiding collective over a regular or casual raiding guild? Do they have a website?

And, most importantly, how the heck does it differ from your typical Pick up Group?

I sincerely hope that you didn’t come to this post looking for answers, because I have none. I’m hoping that some of our readers might be able to fill me in.

How do I find out if there’s a collective already running on my server, or even if there’s one on another server if I was willing to transfer?

In my mind I picture some loosely formed private chat channel “BarthilasCollective” or some such rubbish (you could call it “FluffyPinkBunnyRaiding” of course – actually lets stick with that) where, if you happen to be online at a time when some intrepid soul is willing to Raid Lead, you might see something like:

[5. FluffyPinkBunnyRaiding] LFM ICC25 – healers especially

Looks a lot like your average Trade Channel spam. Of course the members of the collective probably don’t need to be worried about having their loot ninja’ed right out of their hands, and there’s probably some assurance that the group will comprise of fairly skilled players.

But, at the end of the day, isn’t it a glorified chat channel and the luck to be online at the right time?

I swear I’m never online at the right time. Since Thursday last week, when I missed my guild 10 man ICC run by 20 minutes, I’ve been keeping an eye out looking for a promising PuG run.

80% of PuGs forming advertise like so:

[2. Trade] LFM ICC10 – need 1 tank and 3 geared healers!

About 10% read like so:

[2. Trade] LFM ICC10 – need 3 healers and 2 ranged (hunter prefered)

And about 10% read like so:

[2. Trade] LFM ICC10 – need all!

I usually try and weasel my way into those 10% of Pick Up Groups still looking for ranged DPS when I’m PuGging – and try and convince them that although I’m clearly not a Hunter, I do a pretty good job anyway. I tried to do that last night by asking very politely:

To [Slippy]: Do you have any room for a Shadow Priest in your run?

On this occasion I actually got a reply, which is a step up from being ignored:

[Slippy] whispers: No sry

Which I was fine with until I spotted Slippy’s ammended macro:

[2. Trade] LFMICC10 – need 3 healers and 2 ranged (pref hunter, lock, mage, boomkin)

I kid you not. He listed pretty much every single ranged class except Shadow. I took a deep breath. No, Cass, the other kids don’t want to play with you today.

I assume that there was another Shadow Priest already in the run, or even more likely a Shadow Priest forced to heal, who would have had a tantrum if another Shadow Priest was invited to the group. I can understand that. If they’d just given me a chance I would have assured them that I would happily pass on all drops… just for a chance at the Emblems.

So I monitored Trade chat for a bit longer and noticed a Warlock trying to do the same as me – find a 10 man Icecrown run:

[2. Trade] Geared lock, 5.4GS, LF ICC10!

I thought about whispering him, trying to either recruit or piggyback my way into whatever 10 man he stumbled in to, but decided that might be a bit much to ask of a perfect stranger.

So I decided instead to follow his example. I’m a smart girl! And I used to work in marketing, I should know how to sell myself (er, you know what I mean) and get noticed from all the fluff in Trade chat.

First off, I decided to advertise in LookingForGroup. That’s what the goddamn channel is designed for after all. Mistake. Oh yeah, I don’t have GearScore and have absolutely no freaking idea what my gear score would be anyway.

[4. LookingForGroup] [Cassandri] Shadow Priest of unknown GearScore LF ICC10 – I promise not to steal all the clothy drops

Unfortunately I got no reply in that particular channel, so I dropped principles and readvertised in Trade. I guess you could argue that I was offering up my time in exchange for loot and emblems – that’s still something of a Trade.

[2. Trade] [Cassandri] Shadow Priest of unknown GearScore LF ICC10 – I promise not to steal all the clothy drops

I really just wanted Slippy and his Shadow Priest to reconsider me for their raid. No go. I didn’t even get people offering to tell me my GearScore.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned “not stealing gear”. Does it make me sound suspicious? Like I’m trying to counteract a reputation for ninja-ing?

A bit deflated by all this lack of attention I logged off and came back to try again a hour later. This time I skipped the runs wanting every ranged class except for Shadow Priests and jumped on the “need all” type groups.

It started off with 3 people when I joined. 30 minutes later we had 4 and a half (someone was disconnected – hopefully temporarily). Another 15 minutes and the Raid Leader, the guy who invited me, left the raid. I gave up.

If something exists between the totally organised, you-know-what-quality-you’re-getting guild run, and the randomness of PuG raids, I want to know about it!

***

By the way, I thoroughly apologise for using that hideous tan pale pink colour on this website. I don’t know what Blizzard were thinking when they set the default chat channel colour to such an awful pastel. The only good thing is that you can re-colour them. And you should.

* All character names are totally made up, not to protect the identity of the player, but because I honestly don’t remember who said what.