Comments for Cold Comfort

Comment on Reforged Loot Distribution by Karatheya

Karatheya — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:36:45 +0000

This is my take on it as well – less shards, more gear choices.

One huge benefit that I don’t see alot of people talking about is the value when your tier x is replaced by tier x + 1 and you have dual spec. If you’re a healer and your offspec uses similar gear to your mainspec, you can re-forge spirit into crit or haste and get a free boost to your offspec set if you haven’t yet managed to fill it out to the same levels.

This may have a slight impact on loot distribution (though not policy), as the demand for offspec pieces may drop slightly. Depending on where raider rank offspec falls relative to recruit mainspec in your priority system, that may help new people gear up quicker.

Comment on Reforged Loot Distribution by Malevica

Malevica — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:32:47 +0000

I’m in agreement with Klepsacovic’s view that people will just tend to value it less and not bid/roll on it. As a disc priest I don’t value spirit gear as highly so I allow other specs to take it before I go for it, while saving my bids for items closer to my ideal. There’s no need to alter costs, it’s still decent gear, just not BiS for your particular spec.

On a side note, I have to say I’m not enamoured of the sort of negative and almost irrational assumptions I’ve seen in a few places that Blizzard is simply going to stop making X type of gear, or that all gear will be fundamentally broken on the assumption that players will reforge it to suit. Perhaps I missed a similar trend in the blogs when socketed gear came about, which is essentially a pretty similar concept, but it seems this attitude is more prevalent these days.

Personally, I see this as a (partial) solution to the thorny issue for the developers of stat caps and “junk” loot: bears can’t use parry on their rings; a lot of casters can become haste- or crit-capped relatively easily. Allowing reforging could be a way to let these drops be used as an intermediate upgrade while you wait for BiS, gearing up the raid quicker overall.

Comment on Reforged Loot Distribution by Thisius

Thisius — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:58:43 +0000

I think at the end you’re not going to be able to consider reforging when talking about effective gear cost, and you’re going to have to think of it as just another gear enhancement, much like gemming and enchanting are in today’s WoW.
Now logically you could say that everyone is going to be putting the same “level” gem or enchant in/on the piece so it doesn’t really matter, and reforging is different. While thats true, let me put it in this context.
You take down Lord Marrowgar and the Bracers of Dark Reckoning drop. Two your tanks could use them. However, one of your tanks is a blacksmith and the other isn’t. You wouldn’t end up attaching a higher GP to the bracers if your blacksmith tank won them simply because he can socket them, add gems, and effectively end up with an item of a higher level than if your non-blacksmith tank won them.

Comment on Reforged Loot Distribution by Vinz

Vinz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:49:40 +0000

Reforging is the “new thing” in Cataclysm. Blizzard will want to showcase it. Expect every single item to contain some useless stat for the item’s intended classes, such that nobody will ever want to wear something Purple that hasn’t been reforged.

Prepare yourselves for cloth items with Spirit and Hit such that if a healer picks it up the Hit becomes Spirit and if a caster picks it up the Spirit becomes Hit.

You’ll see haste/parry items, maybe Strength/Agi items (assuming you can reforge between the two, and why not? The only thing you won’t be able to reforge from is probably Stam), etc…

YOU WILL REFORGE EVERYTHING.
Which makes your loot distribution system problem go away.

Comment on Reforged Loot Distribution by Klepsacovic

Klepsacovic — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:48:03 +0000

I’d say runeforging shouldn’t have any direct impact on loot rules. If it’s good for the priest unforged and good for the warlock forged, then consider the relative benefits of each in their ideal states. The warlock might end up with a lower ilevel item (effectively), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s of lower benefit.
For a loot system, I’d give no varying priority. However as individual players we might want to consider whether to take the sure upgrade now that costs more (due to reforrging) or wait for an item which is comparable without reforging. That’s a consideration we’ve always had to make, or at least since jewelcrafting. X is an upgrade but I’d have to regem Y and Z isn’t all that different from X is an upgrade but I’d have to reforge it.

Comment on Portal Roulette, Corrupted Healing and Other Mischief by Sadreus

Sadreus — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:01:25 +0000

As the Guild Leader I have anointed myself the guild scribe. During every guild run or event I keep a record of the things that we laugh about or make comments on, and I do a write up in the guild forums for each event or week of events. I always make them fun and funny. Most, if not all of the antics become “inside” jokes. I have found this to be a good way to make fun of ourselves and build comraderie.

Comment on Arouse in the Other Person an Eager Want by Gravity

Gravity — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:40:40 +0000

True that there have been more guilds popping up every day, than I remember in previous content history. I wonder why.
I don’t think it was this spammy with “new raid guild, tabard, guild bank, blah, wanting to raid asap, join now” .
Gravity´s last blog ..The class you avoid playing

Comment on Arouse in the Other Person an Eager Want by Malevica

Malevica — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:28:52 +0000

My guild held together for over 3 months having had to drop down to 10-mans after half a dozen friends jumped ship for greener pastures.
We discovered we had two different types of people in the guild: some like you say who left pretty much immediately when 25s stopped happening, but about 15 people pretty much refused to leave. People were willing to put up with a lot for a good atmosphere, a good guild structure and leaders they had faith in.
Ultimately we decided to all but disband the guild as a kindness when we had fallen so far behind the curve that it simply wasn’t fair on people to prolong things. The majority of those 15 are the same guild now, and the rest are scattered among the other top 3 Horde guilds.

More broadly though I have noticed that the relative ease of raiding has made people more likely to guild-hop, but perhaps that’s related to the increase in the fly-by-night guilds that seems to have accompanied Wrath. Established guilds have lower churn, but there’s a second population of higher-churn, shorter-lived guilds that was enabled by the accessibility of Naxx, where going in with a terrible comp, or undermanned, was perfectly acceptable.
From reports of applicants leaving them these guilds tended to have less dedicated, late or absent leaders, lower standards.

TL;DR: I think if you set the guild up well and attract like-minded people, your members will follow you to the ends of the earth. The quality of the leadership determines people’s desire to follow you though.

Comment on All About EP/GP by Karatheya

Karatheya — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:40:02 +0000

I just tested this. It pops up a warning if you try to edit an officer note by hand, but it does not log that change - it just calls out to the built-in officer note editing routine.

There are a few things you could do to protect yourself from this (exporting the log and uploading it to epgpweb.com for example), but the best policy is to not have officers or lootmasters who would abuse this power.

The log isn't stored in the guild roster - only locally, so this would be hard for the addon author to implement in any case. While you could try to find an addon that announced (or whispered) changes to any officer note, it would only work when you were online.

There just isn't any place for an addon to store an audit trail server-side. And even if there was, if somone really wanted to they could just run a hacked version of the addon with that bit taken out.

Comment on Arouse in the Other Person an Eager Want by Gravity

Gravity — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:14:31 +0000

I wonder whether good raid leadership is enough hold together a guild in the kind of contrived situation you wrote about. I worry that the rain (or reign) or free epics has led to an even more debilitating sense of entitlement in players, which in turn would make them less likely to listen to inspired leadership, to put effort in and work at it, when they could instead swap guilds (or realms, or factions) and start afresh, which is now also possible.
Gravity´s last blog ..Updated strategies index