Seri sez: Raid progression in 3.3 — The shot heard ’round the world.

Yesterday, Blizzard announced their plan for opening up Icecrown Citadel in 3.3. While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is going to be extremely unpopular with the top raid guilds.” However, I have to admit… this wasn’t exactly out of the blue. Blizzard has been firing warning shots across the bows of said vessels for the last year, introducing a lot of changes that have been less than popular with the ’serious’ raiding population. Unfortunately, now it seems more like they’re shooting to kill.

Let me outline, in brief, The Plan™:

1. Icecrown Citadel (ICC) will not be fully open immediately at patch launch. Instead, its four sections (The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls) will open independently with one or more weeks in between. Each section contains several boss encounters, plus trash.
2. Sections 2, 3 & 4 each contain a ‘final’ boss that must be killed in order to unlock the Lich King encounter for that raid instance.
3. Raid teams will have a limited number of cumulative attempts to defeat these bosses as well as the Lich King.
4. The number of attempts starts small (5) but increases to, eventually, 15 once all the content is released.
5. Heroic modes are toggled on/of on a per-boss basis, but are not available until after the Lich King has been defeated once on Normal mode.
6. At some point after ICC is fully unlocked, the number of attempts per week will gradually increase.
7. Also at some point after ICC is fully unlocked, an instance-wide buff that increases the raid team’s damage/healing/hit points will be introduced. This buff will also scale up over time, essentially ‘nerfing’ the instance to make it easier to defeat. This buff can be disabled.

So, basically, it’s Trial of the Crusader plus Algalon plus Sunwell with an added sprinkling of magic ‘make the casuals happy’ dust. Pardon me while I bash my head repeatedly against my desk.

Ok, moving on.

Blizzard seems to be attempting to put the brakes on raid progression in ICC, for reasons that I can only speculate upon. What cracks me up is this, which is a direct quote from their announcement:

“We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.”

Wow, really? Since when did it become Blizzard’s job to determine what sort of pace is most enjoyable for me? What’s next, timed raid instances? You have 2 hours to work on this raid instance today… really, it will be much more enjoyable for you that way. Call me paranoid, but the code already exists in the game to despawn bosses and teleport people out based on a timer. (VoA, anyone?)

On the whole, I really am discouraged by this announcement and concerned for the health of already-struggling raid guilds around the world. Long-time raiders seem to be becoming more and more disenchanted with raiding and the game in general, and while I’m not usually one to go all Chicken Little I would definitely say there has been something of a mass exodus going on. For the last year, Blizzard has made great strides toward bringing endgame content to the casual player. (Something that has not been terribly well-received by the raid guilds.) However, with ICC it seems like they’re shifting from bringing the casual players up to raid level to bringing the raid level down to them. The repercussions have yet to be felt, but I worry they will be significant.

More perspectives:

• How limited attempts risk to make raiding more dull. – The Pink Pigtail Inn
• Icecrown: The self-nerfing raid. – Welcome to Spinksville
• Disappointing news for raid progression in Icecrown. – StratFu

Jov sez: Meters aren’t about the size of your e-peen

So, as our faithful readers are probably aware, our guild is currently recruiting.  In case of any of you bright, awesome, and intelligent people decide to work up the courage to try and spend a bit more time with Seri and myself, I’d just like to give a cautionary tale to keep in mind before you do so.  That tale can be summed up in a single sentence: Just because all the odds seem to be in your favor doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to make it to the interview and beyond.

Okay, to backtrack.

As you probably know, I’m the healing team lead of Axiom.  We’re recruiting healers, and have actually been getting a few good apps in.  Now, an application is your chance to make a good first impression, so a certain amount of talking yourself up is to be expected.  But there’s a good way of doing that and a bad way of doing that.  Talking yourself up to a guild in a way that makes them want to get to know you better involves stressing your positives, especially in a way that doesn’t rely entirely on putting others down to do so.

This application I’m referencing had, on the surface, all the stars in allignment.  It was an applicant from our server, our faction, and returning to the game after a hiatus.  We are recruiting his class.  He typed in complete sentences.  These are all positives.  Being local and horde means that in an iffy situation, we’re more likely to say yes and give you an initiate period.  We’re generally nice people and don’t want to waste time and (your) money on a transfer if we have concerns.  Being local gives you a toe in the door, if not a foot.  And returning to the game after a hiatus means while your gear might need some work, we’re not leaving any of our friends’ guilds in a lurch by yoinking someone from their raid team roster.  Additionally, this person was a friend of a friend of a former raider, who left the guild (the good way) a few months ago because RL was eating his time.

So why with all that going for him did he get a decline before he could even interview?

The answer lies primarily in a single sentence: “Most <applicant’s class> healers suck, so I enjoy healing against them.”

I’m a healing lead, I read that and instantly went no, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Okay, so…  Meters aren’t a competition.  This isn’t to say they’re not useful, but their utility is NOT in proving you’re so much better than everyone else around you.  It’s always said that raiding is a team sport, and that’s true, but it’s true exponentially moreso of healing.  In a team activity, you do not play against your teammates. You play with them in a trust game.  You trust them to know what they’re doing and to ask for help if needed.  You trust me to know what I’m doing in giving out assignments.  And if things go wrong, you trust everyone to work together to fix it.

“But Jov,” asks the kind and gentle ones in the audience, “why do you assume he’s talking about meters?” It’s quite simple– what does ever dps’er in your pug do at the end of every pull to show off how much they pwn?  They link the meters.  It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to guess that’s what he’s talking about when speaking of the suck of others.

“Does that mean it’s wrong to top the meters?” No, so you trees can let out that breath you’ve been holding.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being on the top of the meter.  It’s a listing.  Someone is going to be on the top.  Someone is going to be on the bottom.  That’s how lists work.

“If your place on the meter doesn’t really matter, why should healers even care about them?” Meters are there for self-analysis (or my analysis, I suppose) and personal improvement.  The easiest way to do that is to just look at what you’re doing.

“I don’t know how to read a meter, there’s too much information.  I don’t know what I’m looking for.” There’s really two ways of doing this:  the easy way and the hard way.  I’m a big fan of the easy way.  Pull up a boss fight, look at yourself.  What spells are you casting?  What spells aren’t you casting?  Think about your assignment on that fight, and think about why you made the spell choices you did.  Now, pull someone else of your class/spec for that same fight.  (WoL is excellent for this, since you can search by server.  Find someone roughly at your level of progression.)  Look at their spell choices for that fight.  Now do it again.  If whoever you’re checking seems to have the same spell priorities as you, you’re probably doing it right, regardless of your place (or their place) on the meter.  If your useage is different, some of that can be do to raid composition, but you might want to try out what you’ve seen.

“I’m using the same spells, at roughly the same priority.  But I’m at the bottom and X is at the top!” There’s a lot of things which can account for meter position, but the biggest culprit is going to be one of two things:  lag and overstacking of healers.  Lag is the most unfortunate, and the one I can sympathize with most.  But to put it simply, if you’re running at a higher ping or lower framerate than your raid-mates, chances are they’re going to get the heal off before you do.  More of your heal will be overage, more of their heal will be effective.  They’ll move up the meter compared to you.  Overstacking healers also tends to lead to jumps in effective healing.  Unlike DPS, who can do damage and do damage and do damage until the boss is dead, healers can only heal as much damage as has been taken.  The reason fewer and fewer healers are needed as content goes on farm isn’t a matter of the healing power of the healers increasing from gear as much as it is the incoming damage becomes less as the tanks gear up and the raid is more comfortable with the encounter dynamics, reducing raid damage.  In that situation, it can feel very much like a race sometimes to see who can get the heal off first.

“After all that, I still want to know what’s wrong with wanting to top meters, it just means I’m wanting to do better, right?” No, no it doesn’t.  It goes back to that trust issue I mentioned above.  If you try to top the meter, you’re going to do that by trying to do your job and everyone else’s at the same time.  That means I as the healing lead (and 23 other people in the raid) can’t trust you to keep your assignment first in your mind.  I’m not talking about X Priest only healing group 2; I’m talking about X Priest keeping group 2 as their top priority and only tossing hots/prom/coh/shields on g4 if g2 is stable.  If your focus is on outhealing PallyZ, that is where your focus is, not on G2’s health.

So if you’re wanting to apply to Axiom, tell me how awesome you are.  Don’t tell me that everyone else sucks and you’ve got the recount screenshot to prove it.  That’s much more likely to get you an interview.

Seri sez: WTB Holy Paladin, Tree & DPS!

It’s been one of “those” weeks for me, so I didn’t have a post prepped for today. Instead of throwing something lackluster together, I’ve instead decided to use/abuse this space as a recruitment platform. Why? Because Wowlemmings.com is starting to invade my dreams…

What we’re looking for:

• 2x Holy Paladin
• 1x Resto Druid
• 2x DPS

We’d be particularly interested in an Elemental Shaman. Other than that, anything is fair game. (However, any Rogue/Warlock applications would have to be exceptional.)

These are core raid team spots! Our raid nights are: Wed/Thu/Mon 6-10pm CST (7-11pm EST).

Note: We are currently running from 6:30-10pm on a trial basis. This may become our schedule on a more permanent basis, but we won’t know until we get a better idea of how it works out.

<Axiom> has been raiding on Scarlet Crusade since 2007. Throughout that time we’ve been something of an enigma on our server… we’ve never participated in realm progression threads, just quietly rose through the ranks to compete with the top guilds on the server over time. We cleared all 25-man TBC content prior to WotLK and have cleared most of the 25-man WotLK content as well. We’re 13/14 Ulduar, have crafted Val’anyr, and have completed a couple of Ulduar Hard Modes. We clear Trial of the Crusader weekly, and have been making steady progress chipping away at Heroic Beasts when possible. (Unfortunately, we don’t always have 25 raiders available on raid nights… that’s why we’re recruiting!)

We’re a friendly, if rowdy, bunch. We cuss (a lot) and poke fun at each other constantly, but we’re pretty good at pulling focus when needed. We have raiders ranging in age from 17 to 40-something, with a quirky blend of students, slackers, professionals and homemakers. We also have a pretty high ratio of ladies to gents… a running joke on our server is, “Where are all the women? Oh right, they’re in Axiom!”

Axiom is a great place for someone that takes raiding seriously but doesn’t consider themselves a hardcore raider. (I’ve commented before to applicants and friends that we aren’t a hardcore guild, but we are a successful guild.) We do monthly reviews of all raiders and like for our raiders to be constantly looking for ways to improve. At the same time, we recognize that RL is important and encourage all of our raiders to lead healthy and fulfilling lives outside of the game.

What are we looking for? The ideal candidates will be right at our level of progression, available all three of our raid nights, skilled/experienced with their class/spec/role and geared in ToC/Ulduar 25-man gear with epic gems, best in slot enchants, a solid raid spec, good glyphs and a can-do attitude. We’ll consider exceptional applications from candidates that aren’t quite at our gear level… entry level Ulduar is about the minimum we’ll consider. Come to us with a positive attitude, enthusiasm for raiding, appreciation for off-color jokes and a snarky sense of humor and you should fit right in.

Self-centered narcissistic cockweasels need not apply.

Visit http://www.axiom-sc.com and apply today!

Jov sez: Dear Blizz, wtf are you thinking?

I was going to make an actual post, but instead, I’ll leave you all to wonder what I wonder:  WTF was Blizz thinking when they drew up the T10 armor?

http://www.wow.com/gallery/shaman-t10-frost-witch-regalia-shoulders/

Yeah, me too.  At least Seri’s not the only one developing a twitch.

Brief note

Derevka has a poll up pinging the community for interest in his new idea: a video blog detailing encounters, UI stuff, and general healery.

Go take a look, and comment if you’re interested!  (I know I am.)

http://www.talesofapriest.com/2009/11/perhaps-return-of-sorts.html

Seri sez: Exit, Stage Left! (No, not mine.)

Burnout. It happens to everyone. Sometimes it sneaks up on you and whacks you with a cartoon-sized mallet. More often, the slide from contentment to disinterest is rather gradual. There are ways to combat it: Scaling back your play time and/or guild/team responsibilities, gearing up and swapping to another character, taking a night (or a few nights) off… but what do you do when you realize that it’s time to call it quits? If your answer is ‘disappear without a word to anyone’ I have a few choice words for you.

I get burnout, I really do. I’m not immune to it myself, either, and I try to take nights off when I feel like I need them. When my raiders come to me and say ‘Seri.. I need a break’ my first words are usually ‘Ok, how long do you need?’ no matter how much it may hurt the raid team to be down a(nother) member for a couple of days/weeks. I like to think I’m a pretty reasonable person, and I like happy well-adjusted raiders. Unfortunately, sometimes people ask for a week off and simply don’t return… or, worse, just stop signing up for raids without a word to me (or anyone) about why. I’ve seen this behavior from extremely dependable/reliable raiders that I’ve known for ages, and I just don’t understand what is so difficult about contacting someone to tell them you’re not coming back.

I don’t know about your guild, but I think it’s fair to say that most guilds have some means of communicating outside the game. Whether that means forums, Twitter or a good old fashioned phone tree… unless you’re shipwrecked on a deserted island, in jail, or hospitalized, you should be able to get in touch with someone. Even if they’re not an officer, they can relay a message for you. Account expired and can’t/won’t renew? Leave a forum message, send an e-mail, tweet, or poke someone on the IM client of your choice. Computer dead? Use a friend’s. Have no friends? Call someone. Don’t have anyone’s phone number? Use an internet cafe. Broke? Find a local hotspot and start asking folks politely if you can borrow their laptop to send a quick message. (Offer to let them watch so they can see you’re not doing anything malicious.) Heck, these days most people are carrying around a cell phone that can connect to the internet. There are ways of getting a message through!

There are so many ways to get a message to your guild that there are really only two reasons I can think of for not doing it: Apathy and cowardice. If you are so apathetic about the game and your guild that you can log off and never look back without giving it a second thought… wow, you really do need to quit the game. If you’re afraid of telling your GM for some reason, take a few minutes to think about why. Are you worried they’ll be mad? That they’ll beg you to stay? Do you just feel so guilty for ‘abandoning’ the guild that you just can’t face it? Get over it. The world (of warcraft) won’t end because you are leaving. If your guild is strong, they’ll make it without you. If they’re not, well, then there are greater problems that you staying would probably not fix.

Now, I’m sure someone out there is going to say ‘What’s the big deal? It’s just a game… I don’t owe anyone an explanation.’ To that, I say: Good riddance, you self-centered narcissistic cockweasel. This sort of attitude is fine for a casual player… the sort of person that joins a guild for socialization, shared resources & occasional heroics. When it comes to raid guilds… you’re occupying a spot on the raid roster. There are people depending on your ass being in your chair on raid nights, and the time that your guild officers waste waiting & wondering if you’re coming back is time they could have spent recruiting for someone to fill your slot.

I know that there are occasions when it is just impossible to get a message out, but it seems in my experience that in most cases people could have easily gotten a message to the officers but they just—for whatever reason—didn’t. So, in closing, I’ll simply implore you all to not follow their example. If you decide to quit the game, tell someone. Don’t leave us twisting in the wind.

Related post: The Ethical /gquit

P.S. <Axiom> is recruiting DPS! Visit our recruitment page for more info and instructions for applying.

Jov sez: Icecrown can’t hit soon enough

As if to rub my well-established hatred of TOC in my face, new fun things are apparently on the menu for Icecrown.  One of which is a healing fight.

For those who’ve kept themselves buried under a rock, the hilight (screw Arthas, this is the hilight) of Icecrown is Valithria Dreamwalker.

If you don’t feel like following the link, at first glance, she seems slightly reminiscent of Vael back in BWL.  Friendly dragon, captured by our enemy, worn down and at half health…  But there the fight changes, my friends.  Unlike Vael, Valithria wants our healings.

Our tasty tasty healings.

That’s right, we heal the boss to full to win the encounter.  (yes, there’s also waves of trash and stuff.  But none of that matters.  This is a HEALING FIGHT in the truest sense of the word.  Hot damn!)

And I have to sit here in ToC for HOW much longer?

/protest!

Birthday Greetings

Happy Birthday to

You live in a

You look like a

And we totally love you for it <3

Guest Post: Gaming With Your S.O.

Howdy.

I was reading my excessive list of blogs I check daily at work and noticed they were looking for guest posters during the vaca. (I really do hate that word, but it’s so easy to use.) I thought I’d drop my hat into the ring as it were so here I am!

I guess I should introduce myself a bit prior to getting to the meat of what I’d like to discuss with you fine readers today. I’ve been playing WoW since the early days, November 26^th, 2004 is when I created my account and my very first character was a Night Elf Warrior. Rawr. I dabbled through vanilla, and managed to get myself to around level 43 and quit cold turkey for a good year. I would have had a nifty zergling or panda pet as well but I really despise a certain gaming establishment that sold my copy of the original CE I had paid for, but that’s a story for another time. No hard feelings. Really. No, really.

Anyway.

Way back when I started to play my significant other started to play with me. We both bought the game, made some Night Elves because they were cool looking and went on our way. She took a break about half a year before I did, and then I took my good long break.

We picked the game back up when BC was released and I created a hunter at that point. She a druid and we went along our ways and played through BC to Wrath. Long story slightly less long, today I am an official alt-a-holic. I have four 80’s and turned out to be a raid leader in the guild I’m currently in. She’s also amassed a number of 80’s under her belt and we both have a good selection of people to choose from to play.

That said, I read a lot of WoW related blogs as I stated above. Some of the ones I read often have posts about their spouse who plays with them and it got me wondering. Are she and I alone here, are we one of the only couples I’m aware of that when they play a game together, such as WoW, we don’t actually play together? We sit three feet apart from each other, and we talk and we even raid and instance on occasion.

But during the entire 1-80 process for our multiple characters we never actually grouped. Is that odd? Seems normal to us and fits us I guess since we do it without a problem but I always wonder, are we just the weird people, and every single other person out there does that?

I guess it’s enough that we raid and run heroics together. I mean, I see her a lot. We both work for the same company, more or less the same hours and same days off. She’s not remotely a bad player, not someone I wouldn’t want to bring on a raid. Are we doing something wrong here? Is it chaos? Cats and dogs sleeping together sort of chaos and end of the world…ness?

I personally feel it works out. We live together, spend a lot of time with each other and our friends but in game we get our “alone” time as it were. We get a nice little MMO-Break from each other. I think that’s a good thing in a way. We don’t really fight, or argue we still get our work done and our house clean and the dogs and cat fed. So it must be good, right?

What do all of you think?

Those of who play with your significant other. How do you do it, do you two constantly group/party up and does it work out? I wonder.

Guest Post: EZ WoW– Solutions for the E-Peen Generation

This rebuttal is brought to you by Morrigahn of Caer Morrighan

There’s been some discussion about WoW being too easy recently.  It started with a discussion of how the change in the difficulty has affected social relations on World of Matticus.  This was followed by an excellent post at the Pink Pigtail Inn which I must say I agree with 100%.  Then it spread across the blogosphere like wildfire and was picked up by the likes of Casual Hardcore and  Tobold.

This is my contribution to the debate.  Instead of talking about the problem I’m suggesting a solution.  Its not a practical solution.  Its more a ranting, slightly insane type of solution.

Let me tell you whats really behind the ‘too easy’ and ‘welfare epics’ complaints.

Once upon a time, only a very few people had epic gear because only a very few people could raid.  This allowed them to feel better than everyone else.  Their gear was the visible evidence of their success.  They could walk around their relevant city, confident that no one looked better than them.  This rewarded them for their lack of social life.  They were the ‘elites’.  Everyone else was a ‘pleb’.

Fact 1: players who whine normally weren’t a part of this elite.  They resent the fact that they won’t ever get the chance to lord it over their fellow players based on having cool looking gear.

Solution 1: make gear more user definable.  Then elites can prance around in ridiculous looking gear and think they are better while plebs get a good laugh instead of having to listen to them whine.

Fact 2: players who think that raids and gear should be limited to a select few are quite happy to be gaining whilst others pay for them to do so.

Solution 2: make raids ridiculously hard but make players pay extra to access them, whilst us plebs pay less since we can’t access them since we have jobs/lives/our sanity.  So if for every 10 players, 9 are plebs then those 9 players can pay say $10/£6 a month.  Raiding is about 1/3 of the game content so plebs pay 1/3 less.  That means that the $45/£27 a month that the plebs were paying should all now be paid by the elite.  The elite can be elite, but they have to pay $60/£36 a month to do so.  Of course since the elites have no jobs they can’t afford to do this.  Which means even less elites.  Which means, to cover the cost of raid development, the fee would have to be higher.  It also means you brought your epics.  But you can strut around and look cool if that’s what you really want.

Fact 3: players who complain that content is not worth doing because world top 5 guilds have already completed it need a quicker way to get the hell out of my WoW.

Solution 3: implement software that recognises these key phrases so that when someone makes a statement like this an option box pops up in WoW allowing them to choose to end their subscription immediately.  In fact, give them a $50 bonus for leaving.  That money will easily be made back by the saved time on the forums not answering their posts.  Plebs would be happy to increase their subscription by the 0.50c/30p it would cost to cover this for the reward of not having to listen to this complaint ever again.

Fact 4: players who like to be judged based on their gear don’t like it when new gear comes along to replace it.  This makes them feel that all their work has been a complete waste of time.

Solution 4: allow gear to scale with epeen.  Then the plebs will be able to spot the enormous d***** a mile off and avoid them.  This would be an addition to Solution 1.

Fact 5: players who want to be better than everyone else don’t want to play in a cooperative environment.

Solution 5: make a whole new version of WoW that doesn’t involve cooperative play but can be played competitively only.  Call it … Starcraft?  In order to make up for the lost revenue from Solution 3, players could be directed to this game instead.

I am a pleb and proud of it.  I call upon plebs everywhere to rise up and defend their right to have epic gear and participate in raids they are paying for the development of.  Yes, entry level raid content is easier than it was, but this is our right as paying players!  No the game is not easier because most players still have never even seen Algalon yet, and hes the end boss of the previous tier!  No they are not welfare epics because every player who has an epic item has to suffer through the complaints of the epeen brigade and that is payment enough!

Disclaimer: This was a political broadcast brought to you by Morrighan, head of the Plebs for Epix party.  Morrighan accepts that not all vanilla raiders are epeens.  Not all people who complain about the game being easy or welfare epics are epeens.  Morrighan has a lot of friends who were both vanilla raiders and don’t like how easy epics are to get and is not calling them epeens.  She’s just fed up with listening to complaints about WoW being too easy from people who can’t even manage Heroic Azjol Nerub!