Posts Tagged heroic

Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

bridge 450 Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

In the post on guild mergers, I talked a little about what to do when you’re trying to expand from a 10 person to 25 person guild.  Today, I’d like to expand on that a bit outside of the context of mergers or alliances (the latter of which will be covered in a future post).  Hopefully this one won’t turn into an opus (I honestly didn’t expect the last few to run so long, that was just how they looked when I finished writing).

So, you’ve got a 10 person guild.  Perhaps you started it with a few friends, perhaps it was a group of former guild members who left your old guild at the same time, or perhaps you just stuck it out in the trade channel until you had enough people to run a regular 10 person raid.  You may be happy with the situation, but a few of your guild members are making noise about the better loot that they want out of the 25 person raids.  You’re not certain, but you suspect that the sentiment is a common one – people want to run what they perceive to be the “best” content, and for many people that means 25 man raids.

Some practical ideas on how to proceed then:

Is This a Good Idea?

First, make sure the sentiment is commonly held.  It may just be one person rabble-rousing, and you may be better encouraging them to seek a guild that is running 25 person content rather than try to push the guild into what can be a tumultuous period in its life.

There are two points to remember here: Blizzard has decided, at least in WotLK, that 25 person content gives one tier better loot than 10 person content.  They have not, however committed to continuing to do so in Cataclysm.  Remember than the 10/25 versions of every raid were a bit of an experiment for Blizzard.  I think everyone will agree that the experiment has been been successful on the whole, but the item level spread could do with some improvement.  We might see changes to the way the 10/25 split is handled in Cataclysm.

The second point is to remind people that a boss with more HP and damage numbers doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a harder encounter.  Does it feel more epic?  Sure.  But in terms of raw difficulty, many 10 person encounters are harder.  You can’t recover from the loss of a healer (especially if you’re only using two).  You may not have the full complement of buffs and debuffs to boost your DPS.  For a good while after WotLK released, Sartharion-3D was considered to be significantly harder on 10 than on 25.  I know a former guildie who is more proud of his “of the Nightfall” title than “Twilight Vanquisher”.

What’s driving your members to raid?  Are they in it for the loot, or for the challenge of the fights and the feeling that comes from defeating an encounter after several weeks of refining strategy and execution?  I am more proud of what my guild accomplished in Blackwing Lair (Razorgore to Nefarian in six weeks) back in patch 1.9 than I am of my experience clearing WotLK Naxxramas in three weeks.  The raid size isn’t the point here – it was learning to master things like taunt rotations on the drakes, healing teams on Chromaggus and the periodic loss of a role on Nefarian.  These were new concepts to people used to steamrolling through Molten Core, and to get together with a group of people and overcome them was very rewarding.

I haven’t really felt that same level of accomplishment since (though I am proud of what my guilds have done in WotLK).  Then again, I’ve never been in a guild that pushed hard mode content.

You may find that what people are really craving is that feeling of accomplishment rather than the high item level loot.  When I inspect someone and see item level 239 items (which can only be found in Ulduar-25 hard mode), I’m impressed moreso than people wearing item level 245 (easily obtained from Trial of the Crusader on normal).  If so, perhaps now is the time to revisit the hard modes you didn’t complete.  The extreme hard modes from older content tiers are still something to be proud of beating (though obviously less so the further you get into ICC).

(more) Ways To Get There...

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Selfishness

selfishness Selfishness

Warning: rant incoming.  It’s been a while since the last, and the commentary on the time-to-emblems post pushed me over the line.

I’m calling out everyone who’s become a selfish, self-centered “me first” jerk since patch 3.3 was introduced and the Dungeon Finder became the best and worst thing to happen to WoW in recent memory.

I’m specifically talking about anyone who:

  • drops group without saying a word (at the start of the run or otherwise)
  • complains when a group member’s gear is vastly beyond what is required for heroics just because it’s not equivalent to their own
  • complains about someone’s DPS without giving any constructive advice at all
  • queues as a group leader but doesn’t do anything that can be called “leadership”
  • doesn’t bother to check if the group is ready / in the right spec / buffed before they start pulling
  • pulls when they’re not the tank
  • pulls when the healer is out of line of sight
  • pushes the group to at an unreasonable pace (i.e. “gogogogogogo”)
  • skips bosses without checking what the majority of the group wants to do

If you’re one of the 80% of people I’ve run with who make my dungeon runs enjoyable, this post is not for you (though you may get a laugh out of it).

Here’s the problem I have with people who do one or all of the above: you don’t care if your actions inconvenience other people.

Now, there are always going to be some percentage of people that are jerks, but since patch 3.3, something has changed.  It’s not that I’m encountering more jerks – this was to be expected.  I’m running more dungeons, so given a stable percentage of jerks in the community, I’ll run into more of them.

Jerk Pride

What surprises me is that the “selfish jerk pride” I’m seeing in party chat, trade channels, official forums, and even in the comments to my posts.  Not only do they not care that they’re screwing other people over – they’re standing up and defending their selfish behaviour as if they think that there is a logical argument to be won here.

In real life, shame acts as a limiting factor to jerk behaviour.  If you have an explosion of asshattery among your friends, they’re going to call you on it.  Your desire to not face that and to maintain your friendships might prevent you from acting like a jerk in the first place.

Even among people that you don’t know, there are certain societal norms that discourage you from doing whatever you want.  When you know that you’ll be held to account, you may change the way you act.

The virtual world of WoW removes that shame factor, and these people seem to be missing the gene that self-regulates behaviour in such situations.

(more) Exploiting Anonymity...

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Tools for Mentoring

mentoring Tools for Mentoring

A few months ago, I wrote an article on ways to turn bad players into good players.  Today I’m going to expand on the mentoring advice that I laid out in the hopes of showing some practical ways you can help even a completely new player improve their game very quickly.

Advice vs Mentoring

First, let’s be clear on what mentoring is.  It’s not just throwing someone a few URLs to your favorite class specific blogs or sites and expecting the person to perform better next week.  In order to perform the job of  a mentor well, you need to analyze their current performance, identify the problems, help them find workarounds, then measure the improvement.  It’s a coaching role.  A football coach doesn’t just show up at the start of practice and tell the team “just kick the ball better this time” before walking away.

This means that mentoring is a non-trivial thing for a member of your guild to do.  If this is not something that someone has already agreed to do (say by becoming a class leader), then make sure they understand what they’re getting into.  This may be a good place to offer loot system bonuses, commensurate with the amount of time invested.  If someone’s going to spend even two hours per week talking with and measuring the performance of another member – time that they can’t be doing dailies or random heroics – then shouldn’t they be rewarded in the same manner as you reward people for time spent raiding?

What you want to avoid is having someone say “sure, I’ll help _blank_ get his DPS up”, only to have them get frustrated and quit (or be short with the person they’re helping) once they realize the scope of the task.  I’ve been playing for nearly four and a half years, most of that as a healer.  I’m now pretty close to the top of my game, but to transfer what I know today to someone who is new to WoW and/or new to healing is going to take several weeks of coaching, as well as some heavy hands-on with user interfaces and explaining the nuances of experience.

To Match Class or Not

Let’s say that you’re a small guild, or one which is light on a few classes.  You’ve recruited a resto shaman but their performance isn’t where it needs to be for the content you’re on.  The only other shaman in your guild is enhancement and is very good at DPS, but only heals in a pinch for 5-man runs, never in raids.  Pairing the two shaman may seem to be the obvious choice, but I would argue that any raid-capable healing class would be a better mentor.

In 5-mans, there’s no other healer to compare yourself against, and you rarely have to heal continuously for more than a few minutes.   Overhealing doesn’t matter, there are no healing targets to stick to, and the mix of spells you use isn’t that important.  Any sufficiently geared shaman with a resto spec can chain heal spam their way to victory.  When you get into a raid environment, everything changes.  You have to pay attention to more people, you can’t afford to overheal too much, and you have to know when to not heal a raid member because another healer is assigned to take care of them.  If you don’t heal raids, you won’t have this type of discipline.

For everything related to healing, I’d rather pair up the resto shaman with a priest, druid or even a paladin (who, for all their history vs shaman are probably the least like them in healing style).  When it comes to things that are shaman specific (such as totem synergy), you can either rely on web site resources, or pitch those questions over to the enhancement shaman.

Know the strengths of your potential mentors and match them up based upon the value they can provide, not just the color of their raid frame.  This is itself an argument against class leads and more towards role leads – a technique I’ve found to be more effective in the guilds I’ve been a member of (more) Website Resources...

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Loot Accessibility and the Role of Guilds

insert coin evolution Loot Accessibility and the Role of Guilds

I read a post on a bluetracker last week (and forgot to bookmark it – again) in which the poster asked “do you need a guild now that we have the dungeon finder tool?”.

Thinking about that leads me to consider the changing role of the guild in WoW.  Since the initial release, guilds have changed from being the only path to high-level gear to a primarily social organization that provides access only to the highest tier of gear and the latest content.

While the response to patch 3.3 has been overwhelmingly positive, it has pushed a major change in the social dynamic of WoW.  For those who are not driven by the pure challenge of raiding the latest content, the argument for joining a guild as a way of gearing up no longer has as much weight.

Let’s look at what your guild could do for you with regards to loot from release until today.

Vanilla WoW

If you weren’t in a raiding guild, your loot capped out at Dungeon Set 1 (commonly called “Tier 0″), and later on Dungeon Set 2 (Tier “0.5″).  The later parts of the quest chain to upgrade your gear from dungeon set 1 and dungeon set 2 were quite challenging and can arguably be called the first “hard mode” in the game, but once you’d finished it, that was the limit of your progression.

The only raids available were 40 people, and in the early raids like Molten Core and Zul’Gurub the number of warm bodies was more important than individual performance.  As you progressed further, the level of technical skill required increased, as did the rewards.  Still, the raid size requirements meant that you didn’t necessarily join a guild for social reasons.  On any given realm there were a limited number of guild capable of fielding a team into the later raids.

Several encounters (Twin Emperors in AQ40 and the original Four Horseman come to mind) were known as “guild killers” because a few weeks of wipes against them could break the tenuous bonds that held some guilds together.

If you wanted PvE loot, you joined a 40 man raid guild.  There was no incentive to go back and run the old 5 man content on your main.

Importantly: if you ruined your reputation in a large guild, your weren’t likely to get into another top-tier guild that easily.  There just wasn’t as much choice as there is today.  This pressure helped keep some of the drama in-line compared to the nerdrage explosions we see today.

(more) The Burning Crusade...

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Sweating the Small Stuff

bang head here Sweating the Small Stuff

Let’s talk some more about pickup groups.  Every time I run them, I’m on the lookout for people who might be a good fit for the guild.  At the very least, I like to keep track of people who know what they’re doing so I can group with them again.  There’s no 5-man heroic content that should really pose a challenge these days – you can start doing heroic with far better gear than was possible when WotLK launched thanks to Trial of the Crusader normal, and very shortly thereafter you should be pulling in tier 8.5 / 9 emblem rewards.

Skill is the only thing that can really screw up a heroic these days, and even then you have to be very lacking in it to cause a wipe.

There is however a middle ground in performance between able to get through a heroic without causing your group members undue stress and this person is someone I’d group with again without question that I see regularly.  This is the my gear level means that I don’t have to care about the small stuff zone, and people who live there drive me nuts.

Failure 101

How many times have you been in a heroic where someone:

  • stands in the Ticking Time Bomb in Utgardge Keep
  • gets hit by Impale on Anub’arak in Azjol-Nerub
  • stands in the Mojo Puddle fighting the Drakkari Colossus
  • doesn’t bother to interrupt the Spell Flinger’s Shadow Blast in Ahn’Kehat
  • gets hit by Shadow Crash cast by the faceless ones guarding Herald Voljaz in Ahn’Kehat
  • as melee dps, stands on top of the tank during the Anub’arak fight in Azjol-Nerub and get one-shotted when he chooses them as the target of Pound
  • doesn’t cleanse debuffs that they are exclusively capable of removing (e.g. a Paladin tank failing to cleanse magic from themselves when paired with a Shaman healer)

These are all little things, and most of them won’t wipe a group.  Some of them directly translate into things you need to know in raids (see my article “FFS, You’ve Been Trained for This!“), but most just piss off your healer.

Still, I like to run heroics like I did when WotLK first launched.

A year ago when tanks had 22k HP and DPS were barely scratching 13 or 14k, you couldn’t afford to be hit by a shadow crash for 12.5k damage.  Today, gear levels allow you to make a few mistakes and still survive, though the danger of others hasn’t changed.  Did you know that Shadow Blast hits for 80% of your maximum HP?  If you have a new 80 healing a well-geared tank, it’s actually harder to heal Shadow Blast today than it was a year ago.

(more) The Reason for the Behaviour...

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Inexperience and Weakness

experience cos hc Inexperience and Weakness

In my last article, a comment led me to another blog post which in turn led me to a recently released addon called Experience.  The idea behind the addon is that when you target someone, it queries their character statistics to see how many times they have killed the bosses of each instance in the game, converting that to a measure of how much of the game they have experienced.

Like GearScore, this is just a tool to provide quick insight into another player.  The graphic above is of a 5-man group I ran CoS heroic with last night: as you can see, most of them were very inexperienced, but we breezed through the timed run only slightly slower than my personal best (5 minutes remaining instead of 8).  We then followed that up with a heroic Trial of the Champion run that featured none of the deaths or “stupid” moments that are a hallmark of PUG runs in that place.

On it’s own, this mod gives a useful but far from complete view of players.  It has a few rough edges:

  • outside of combat, the boxes above appear every time you target someone.  I really don’t care about seeing experience for people I’m not grouped with, so I use the LDB toggle to disable it except when I first join a group, but the LDB launcher defaults to “on” and doesn’t remember the setting from session to session.
  • the total experience value isn’t very useful for people who do 10 or 25 person raids exclusively.
  • the default setting is to require you to kill a boss 3 times to get 100% experience.  For example, I’ve only killed Malygos-25 once, so I get a 33.3% rating.  You can change this via a slider – I find 2 kills to be more useful.
  • it doesn’t appear to count Onyxia.  As the addon was only came out on Oct 20th I’m not sure if this is an oversight or intentional.
  • As Malevica pointed out, not having the statistics be account-wide doesn’t tell me anything about the player.  I doubt that all the members of the above group were new 80s based upon their performance.

GearScore No More

I’ve decided to ditch GearScore and use Experience for a few weeks to see if it gives me a better view of what to look out for when doing pickup groups.

Even just from testing it last night, there were some moments when the experience value didn’t match performance.  The member with 9.2% total experience was pushing 4.5k DPS on bosses, which is more than you might expect from someone who had only done heroics (and even then not all of them).  In his case, he had been farming both EoC and EoT gear since the last patch, as he was sporting mostly tier 8.5 / 9 gear and obviously knew his class well.

As a tool for guild recruiting, I would be more comfortable using either Experience on its own or in conjunction with Gearscore to set a minimum bar for applicants.  I would probably set the threshold to one, just to see which instances an applicant had run to completion rather than using the default of three.

I don’t want to spend this entire post talking about this addon.  What I really want to discuss is the concept of experience, not just in terms of the content you’ve completed but how experienced you are at WoW in general.
(more) How Inexperienced are You?...

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