Rants of a Priest

Last Post

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:43:00 +0000

This will probably be my last post on this blog, it's got more or less a little successful at one point, I was up to a few hundred hits a week, most of which were most certainly NOT unique, but it was a start. Then I kinda dropped off, lost my ambition, and try as I may I really can't bring myself to start again. I was just going to leave this blog be as it is, but after reading a blog today I thought I should atleast do my part to pass it on.

For those of you who aren't aware of the blog, The Gold Queen, has been a favourite of those of us that like to have enough gold to do whatever we want, whenever we want (in game). However it was never one that I got into. Having said that, I popped on there today to take a peek while I was a little bored at work and was very sad by the article I read. Apparently a few months ago the writer was gang raped a bunch of men, and is currently recovering. Due to the huge amount of fans she has, and the horribleness of this incident, there has been an overwhelming amount of support. A few people have now organized a "white ribbon compaign." Now don't feel bad if you don't know what that is. I didn't until a few minutes ago (although i kinda picked up on it from the post on her site). The White Ribbon is the symbol of the "campaign against violence against women."

As my final post I'm hoping that a few of you that are still following me (if any of you are) will spread the message about this story, and if you have a few spare bucks sitting around go to one of the below websites and donate.

Once again thanks to those of you that read my blog, pop onto Mug'thol and say hi from time to time.

http://whiteribbon.ca/
http://whiteribbon.ca/international/

Nerfs: Our love/hate relationship

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:40:00 +0000

This week we were able to clear the first three heroic bosses in the first night. While this may not sound like a feat, we are still between permanent tanks, and so spent a few wipes trying out new apps, and letting a few newer, somewhat undergeared players give it some attempts. We also killed Beth for the second time, and this time was a huge amount cleaner, really demonstrating that last time wasn’t a fluke (despite how close of a kill it was). We then went on to work on HC Alysrazor. We only had a few attempts on Tuesday, and went back in on Wednesday ready to spend some time wiping. And we did. But we made progress pretty quickly, with our first entrance into phase two we had her down to below 70%. That showed us how easy that fight would be once we got the mechanics settled into automatic mode. By around 11pm about 2 hours into attempts we downed her. We then went on to take on Baleroc, but only on normal mode. We one shotted him (thankfully, it’s embarrassing when we go from downing a HC mode boss in a single night of attempts to wiping on normal modes!), and moved on to HC Majordomo. On our second attempt of this fight we had him below 20%. Now this fight is more or less a DPS race, with some minor mechanics thrown in, including the one which allows the DPS to make the enrage timer. Of course with DPS races, its rarely the first few percent that a guild wipes on. The next night (Thursday) we went back in and spent less than 5 attempts on this boss, before killing him. Bringing our total count to 5/7 HC, with two those kills in one week.

While I am quite excited about seeing the content this far (I’m sure we will get Baleroc this next week), I am a little concerned about the speed that we, and most other guilds, seem to be progressing after the nerfs, it makes me think that Blizzard has gone overboard on their across the board nerf. Now as I said I am quite happy about our progress, however I wonder how much of our progress is now us just powering through the mechanics, now that we are over-gearing the content by so much. I’m quite happy that we will be hitting the new content close to as well geared as any guild out there as a result of this rapid progression, but I do wish that I could have seen how far we could get without the nerfs.

How to Gauge Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:35:00 +0000

All raiders that are at least a little serious about their own personal (read character’s) progression, or their guild’s progression should be constantly checking on their performance. Whether it’s as compared to someone, or to a potential, it’s important to have some sort of understanding of how you are doing. With the proliferation of addons such as recount or skada, people have put a huge emphasis on “the metres” and sometimes this is helpful, but other times a step back is needed to understand why someone isn’t topping the charts.

Class or spec. This is one that is often the go to favourite of people. While there will always be a little bit of a spread between the top spec and the bottom spec, blizzard does a pretty good job of balancing them out, at least with in reason. There will always be some specs better on some types of fights than others. For example demo locks are better on heavy aoe fights then affliction, but on single target affliction locks tend to out show demo locks. This is one reason why you should really look past the numbers to see the reasons. While this is a very cut and dry example of why people should learn to play all their class’s specs (so they can swap depending on need), other times it’s a little less obvious.
Utility vs. Numbers. Some specs or classes are currently a little underpowered on throughput, but they bring important utility. Shaman for example have, in the past (and still somewhat) been known as more of a support class. At first in vanilla they were buffers, they provided the raid with buffs that made them better, in Cataclysm resto shaman were brought normally for their mana tide and not for their total through put, and enhancement/elemental were brought for their amazing interrupt (wind shear).
Gaming the numbers. While until now I’ve talked about why some people may seem low, there is also times when you have to think about why that person is always on top. Ghostcrawler has talked a bit about this in the past, with for example resto druids always being a little higher on the healing charts because of their amazing cooldown of tranquility, when they are actually supposed to be no better than any other healers the rest of the time. But there are also times when people intentionally game the numbers. For example I was watching a live streamed raid the other day by one of the top guilds, and on Alysrazor their rogue popped on bladeflurry during the time when Alysrazor was grounded, during this time their tanks had silenced and brought in the two adds. These adds don’t need to be killed, and he had intentionally nerfed his single target damage to artificially inflate his numbers. I know this same guild has a shadow priest that on Shannox will triple dot, even though the dogs should be ignored by the dps.
Role. While you rarely hear of people talking about how low the tanks’ DPS is, I’m talking about something a little less obvious, such as people who are handling a particular mechanic. Shannox for example, generally guilds will run one or two people who have the job of controlling rageface, and breaking his “facerage” ability. These dps generally have substantially lower numbers than those who get to focus on only killing Shannox.

So how can you really tell where you are when all these variables make add-ons very poor gauges? Dig a little deeper, spend some time looking at more than one screen, go to worldoflogs (if your raid uses them), or just reason it out (or even talk to them). For example: Why does that healer keep having his tank die? (Death logs: oh the tank stood in bad stuff and took unnecessary damage) Why is that healer always ahead of me? (Spell breakdown on WorldofLogs: Oh 10% of his healing came from a tranquility). Why is that DPS ahead of me? (Damage done by target: oh 50% of his damage was to unnecessary targets). Or even better, compare yourself to your potential rather than others. Hit a target dummy and see how much damage you do, and extrapolate from that with raid buffs how much you SHOULD be doing, or look online for how much you SHOULD be doing, and try to reach that target (without gaming the system!). Or if you are a healer, focus more on why someone died, and how you could have prevented it (if you could have), or if no one died, then look at things like how many judgements you got off, and how many you could have (pallies), or if you could have cast more mana efficient heals, or maybe even dps’d a little? And if you were on a fight like Shannox in charge of breaking face rages, look at the amount of damage you did to Rageface, and see if you were perhaps focusing TOO much on him and could have put some more dps into Shannox, or how much damage he did by facerage, maybe you should have been quicker to break those.

There are always ways to gauge your performance, and by taking a bit of time before or after raid, or maybe on a down night, to dig into your performance you can see what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and how you can improve the next time around.

Healer Test Fights

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Last night one of our top healers mentioned how he hated Baleroc. Now this isn’t a guy QQ’ing about the fight because he’s not good at it, he’s currently ranked on it (in normal mode as we don’t have this boss down on heroic). He then followed it up with a comment about how he wished Blizzard would stop making healer fights. Given that I am overly opinionated, and USED to be a healer, I thought I would weigh in on this!

I should start with an explanation of what we mean by healer fights. Healer fights are fights that put the majority of the mechanics on the shoulders of the healers. No matter how good the rest of your raid is, there is NO way to make up for their mistakes. This is the equivalent of a dps check fight (with a tight berserk timer), or a tank check fight, with lots of adds to pick up or boss movement, such as Shannox, (although in these types of fights usually intense healing or dps can give at least some wiggle room). The three fights that are most recently thought of as healer fights are Baleroc (Firelands), Chimaeron (Black Wing Descent), and Dreamwalker (Ice Crown Citadel).

Blizzard tends to make this type of fight, in my opinion, because while dps and tanks sometimes get to deal with interesting mechanics (or at least testing mechanics), such as interrupts, “vehicles”, etc. healers are generally assigned the same role of keeping green bars full, and handling the normal high damage phase that seems to accompany pretty much every fight. As someone who used to play a healer I have to say that while you get very good at this type occurrence, it can get quite tedious and boring over the long run, “what do I do on this fight? Oh yeah stay out of bad stuff and keep green bars full…again…” Much as they make fights like Alysrazor where dps gets to try out something new such as flying, they like to let healers experiment with some new things too, even if “new” still means keeping an eye on green bars.

There are two major issues with these types of fights, as I see it. The first is that the mechanics tend to be, at first anyways, quite buggy usually, or don’t work as well as they should. Chimaeron for example was well designed (if annoying) however because of latency and the very short window to heal someone, it wasn’t that uncommon to see a green bar go over where it needed to be, only to see that person die, because while your computer registered the heal, the server didn’t. The second, and more important issue that I see is that while Blizzard’s intent is good, healers already tend to carry a ton of weight on their shoulders, 90% of the fights tend to be mostly relaxing for DPS, where they can stand there, hit their rotation, and move occasionally, normally with some sort of heavy “avoid this” phase or “burn” phase. Healers on the other hand tend to be constantly reacting to what is happening, and picking up the slack for people that don’t move or make a mistake. This is especially an issue on fights that have a soft enrage, where they tend to be able to extend the time that dps have to finish a boss by “brute healing force”. By creating healer fights, blizzard doesn’t tend to really change the fight for them, just make things more stressful, as a mistake on healer fights tends to mean at least one death, if not a wipe.

Personally I think that if done right healer fights can be a ton of fun for all involved, however the only one that I think of in recent times as “done right” has been Dreamwalker, and it’s pretty hard to extend that mechanic to new fights, without making it feel stale.

The Attendance Boss

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:18:00 +0000

The Attendance Boss.

Oh how I hate thee. Of all the bosses I’ve fought in WoW this seems to be the one that never gets nerfed and seems to scale with gear. In my current guild this seems to be the major issue preventing us from being a top 10 guild on our server.

When we first began raiding in Firelands on Mug’Thol, we had some recruiting to do, that was something we knew ahead of time and had been trying out best to do so. We weren’t real picky, it was a new patch so no knowledge of the fight was expected, and valor gear and tier 11 was so easy to come by that we really didn’t have concerns about gear level. Our first raid we downed three bosses with less than 25 people because we just could not fill the spots. It got better the following week, we filled, if just barely, and the following week we were up to around 30 people. Finally we could start to select based on performance, and we did. We of course had people quit over the fact that they were replaced do to poor performance, but we had a pretty good first month overall.

Then it happened. There was a sharp and sudden drop off in attendance. First we noticed it on Thursdays, we were having trouble filling raid. And suddenly it was every week. Normally we are able to fill our raid, although we have 24 manned a few bosses and done a few Baradin Holds with substantially less than that, however it’s WHEN we fill it that is the issue. Our designated raiding times are 830-12 Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; this is something that is clear to everyone that apps and so everyone in the guild should be aware of this. Does life sometimes get in the way and it is not possible to show up for every single raid on time? Absolutely. Working late, family gatherings, bad traffic, whatever the reason, there are always good excuses. However when we are consistently having issues making that first boss pull before 930, an entire hour after we are supposed to be buffing and pulling trash, that’s an issue.

I have found this week especially hard to put up. There’s a huge nerf to Heroic modes in Firelands that has taken place; 15% reductions of damage and health right across the board. This is the week that we should be able to really push past some bosses, using this nerf to give us a bit of room to make some mistakes, and yet this week seems to have presented our worst attendance so far. It’s Thursday today, last night we raided and again didn’t pull until 930. Around 850 in my frustration I said in guild chat something to the effect of “Is everyone that showed up late aware that we raid at 830?” The response I received from one person was “It’s just a game,” and from another “there’s no point getting mad about it, that doesn’t solve anything”. I hate both of those responses. I get that it’s just a game, but if you had plans with a friend to meet them for drinks, and you showed up 30mins-1hour late, how happy would your friend be? Sitting there waiting, and waiting, and waiting until finally you show up, no apology, and just sit down. That’s exactly what making the rest of your guild wait is like. How do we fix an attendance issue? Recruit. We recruit and start to sit people who don’t show up. Will we maybe not progress as quickly by not running our top players because they don’t show up? Probably. But it’s not as though they can really go anywhere else. Most guilds that are substantially into heroics require something in the area of 90% attendance from raiders, it’s something they can afford to say because they have a lot of applicants when they’re sitting at 6/7, us not so much, but considering we don’t progress very quickly by wasting half our week waiting around, I think I would rather raid with people that want to be there, and try hard (even if they aren’t the best) then people that show up whenever they feel like it, without the regard for others to be on time, or let us know that they will be late.

Any other suggestions?

Where in the Firelands have you been?!

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:06:00 +0000

(See what I did there? firelands....fire and stuff...you know...bah!)
So wow it has been around 5 months since my last post on here, and while I have from time to time had the urge to write a post I just haven't made myself make the time. A lot has happened and I figured I would update this blog, and maybe try to get back into a regular posting schedule.

Goodbye Healing!
Well this post was tied quite a bit around my adventures while healing, whether I was stubbornly holding onto Disc or playing as my eventual favorite spec of holy, I tried to approach this blog from the perspective that only a healer could, after all, we do tend to keep a really good eye on health bars and environmental hazards.
However, as I had wrote I was originally in a guild called Jubilance. During Cata release we swapped from a 25man to a 10man guild, that then had it's ups and downs, and eventually the raiding core decided to move over to another guild on the server ShadowRaven, which was a 25man raiding guild, a bit further progressed then we were. After a few months of raiding there we all started to realize that this wasn't what we were looking for, a few decided to take a break, but the rest of us decided to server transfer with many of the people from another guild on the server. I am now on Mug'Thol, under the name "Moriturri" (some silly lvl 62 DK had my name and Blizz said they couldn't just delete him or something...). Currently I am raiding with the guild: One Last Stand (the guild we transferred to be a part of). This server is quite a nice change at times, pugs regularly clear content on normal, and attempt heroics, and of course everyone's favorite Holy Priest Aliena is on the server with the guild from Tankspot Void.
I suppose that the bigger news for some of you out there may be my conversion to the dark side, or rather Shadowy Side! I am now playing Mainspec Shadow DPS. I actually have only healed in raid once, and that was only for a planned wipe to allow someone to do a quest for the legendary. In fact, I have probably only healed a handful of times since transferring. While I seem to be doing pretty good dps (rarely outside of the top 3 or 4 by the end of a fight) I have noticed that I spend a lot less time paying attention to the raid frames than I used to, in fact probably less than I should, there have been times when I am dps'ing away only to realize that most of the raid is dead and I hadn't even noticed. It's a much different play style!
Having said that: I am loving it! (sorry McDonald's, please don't sue me!).

So if anyone out there is still following me: Feel free to check out our guild! One Last Stand on Mug'Thol (currently as of writing we are 2/7HC, however with those pretty 15% nerfs to heroic we will likely gain a few more kills this week). We are always looking for talented players (especially tanks at this point!). If interested in joining, or even just discussing this blog or playing a priest or anything else feel free to send me a tell!

Good luck in Firelands all, and I hope to be writing a lot more of these!

Chimaeron Update

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 06 May 2011 01:15:00 +0000

As I am fond of doing, I am going to do a bit of an update to a past post. I noticed just today I received several hits to my post on Healing Chimaeron, so I thought I would update it with my thoughts on the fight now, and how I heal, now that I am in a 25man guild that is farming Heroic Chimaeron.

So far my assignment has been to the Double Strike tank. We have a soaker tank, which is actually either a DPS DK in Blood Presence, or a Ret Pally with Righteous Fury on. Regardless of who is taking the majority of the hits, they will always be jumping back and forth between 10k+ and 1hp, so no point in wasting potential dps on bringing a third tank. We have 2 tanks who alternate taking the double strikes, the only time they are actually tanking is during the stack up phases, otherwise they taunt for the double strike, then the soaker takes him back. The purpose of that is to avoid getting stacks of break. So back to me: I heal the double strike tank, along with one other healer (usually a holy pally, as they can beacon the soaker tank, which along with hots, is all the healing they need). Priority is to get that tank topped off to 100% quickly, although there is actually a fairly big window to get him topped off before the next double strike, but any time spent healing him up with slow casts is time you could be spending helping up healing Caustic Slime Targets. My "secret weapon" to keeping the double strike tank topped off, including during the stack phase, when he quite often has stacks of break, is Prayer of Mending. This spell is great because as long as they survive the first hit, they're getting a ton of healing instantly, between hits. When the Bile-o-tron is online, this spell will guarantee that the tank survives the double strike, no matter how much damage each hit inflicts.

Every second Caustic Slime I am able to cast a Circle of Healing. This spell is another of the Priest's secret weapons on this fight. Normally I either target one of the tanks, or someone near the stack location, regardless of whether they are at full HP or not; This is because I have it glyphed, so it hits 5 targets in addition to my main target. And how many targets does Caustic Slime hit? That's right, 5. This spell alone is enough to handle all five caustic slime targets. It's sometimes a little scary, because my initial heal from it isn't enough, but one second of Echoes of Light (my mastery) pushes them over the Low Health warning and into the safe zone. If my circle of healing is on CD, I will always look for a group that has more than one low health member, and throw a flash heal on them.

Before the first Stack phase, I stay in my single target healing Chakra (the holy word is great for a quick top-off on a low health party member), but as soon as we stack up I switch to the raid healing, drop my circle on the ground, hit circle of healing, and then look for my tank's HP. Because I have a Holy Pally healing with me, I know they will quick to make up for any little hits the tank takes, and we have a Lay on Hands rotation that ensures my tank will be topped off before he starts taking damage. If my tank is full on health I start throwing Circle of Healings, or Prayer of Healings on the raid. I have Chimaeron Focused so I can see when he gets the double strike debuff. As soon as he does I cast Guardian Spirit on him (first and third stack) and then a Prayer of Mending (see above!). Then I will start throwing serendipity bombs to ensure I get him topped off right away. At this point I stay in the Raid Healing Chakra, because I don't have time to swap to single target, then back to raid healing before the next stack phase, and my circle of healing becomes that much more powerful!

Phase 2 is another area where Priests shine (especially Disc, but eww). As soon as phase 2 hits we should look at the DPS count, and start bubbling our top 5 dps. Constantly keep them bubbled, this will ensure that your top DPS are taking minimal damage, and will survive the longest. If Guardian Spirit is off cooldown wait until your first or second tank is low and throw it one him, it will allow him to survive a little longer, making Chimaeron leave your high Threat DPS alone for a while longer.

This is my guide in a nutshell. Please comment or ask questions, this was wrote pretty quickly so I may have left out things you have specific questions about!

4.1 Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:53:00 +0000

Well this is pretty behind but I've been busy, okay? (I also notice a lot of traffic from the search terms "4.1 priest" which means people seem to be hungry for this information).
If you are looking for a full synopsis of the changes I suggest the Wowhead patch notes, as that is where I get most of my information, however I am going to do a run down of some of the changes that you should know as a healing priest. This will by no means be an exhaustive list of all the changes, but will outline things I think are important.
General

Inner Fire and Inner Will last until canceled. While this is not the largest change it is one that makes sense. How often have you been running around in a dungeon and not realize that it has fallen off (especially now that it's hidden in that little buff box). It never made sense to me for this spell to have a limited duration (or limited charges as pre cata!) a big Thumbs Up from me.
Dispel Magic now dispels two magical effects at once for healing priests. Its about time we got this back, while it is more of a PVP ability (I think) it's nice to have this back, it has bugged me since they took this away that all the other healing classes have one button to click for dispels and we have 2 (3 if you count mass dispel), so this is a nice little handout to make us feel a little less forgotten.
100% pushback protection while Channelling our Hymns . Quite happy about this, although it was pretty rare to deal with this in PVE it was a pain when it DID happen.

Holy

Chakra States now last until canceled. Wow is this awesome, I love not worrying about falling out of my Chakra state because I haven't been paying enough attention to my timer. Combine this with the four piece set and it actually comes off a little overpowered, but hey, Priests ARE Blizzard's favorite class right?
Holy Word: Sanctuary has had it's healing buffed, and has a much cooler spell effect (even if it IS harder to see where the edges of the actual effect are :S). This is now a spell I am actually quite happy to use, while in the past it almost wasn't worth the GCD to me.

Discipline

Atonement now triggers from Holy Fire. Not only does it trigger from the direct portion, but I have noticed that the DoT portion seems to work as well (smart HoT ftw?). Combine this spell (faster than smite, and deals more damage) with the proper glyph and this change is huge for those atonement fights (especially Halfus!)
Power Word: Barrier. Oh yes, the spell that Blizzard likes, but is never sure they like the way it works. It started off as a set damage absorption (like an area wide Power Word: Shield), then was changed to a damage reduction, and now they've decided it was over powered (now don't get me started on the Shaman Raid Wide Pain Suppression...). But alas they have decreed that this spell should have it's cooldown buffed by 50%, so now it has a 3 minute cooldown, up from 2 minute. Disappointing. Relearn those CD Rotations Raid Leaders!
Power Word: Shield has had it's duration halved. Not a huge deal for PVE to be completely honest. No one is bubble spamming anyways (except Phase 2 Heroic Chimaeron), so bubbles were popping way before that 30second duration they used to have anyways.
Divine Aegis has had it's duration increased (12s to 15s). This is a very nice change, as many of those Prayer of Healing bubbles were being wasted, and now...well they'll likely still be wasted, but hopefully less!

That summarizes most of the Priest Changes. I really encourage any good raider to go take a look at all the changes to the other classes as well (especially your fellow healers, and the priest changes I may have skipped), the more you know about other classes and how they work, the more prepared you are to adapt to changes in the middle of a fight, or change your strategy between attempts.

4.1

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:44:00 +0000

Just a reminder: Update those add-ons and read up on your class changes PRERAID!
If I get a chance I am going to discuss a few changes that are going to be important to us Healing Priests!

Nefarian down and more wipes Incoming.

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:47:00 +0000

Well my last post introduced everyone to the fact that I was applying to another guild. Well I had been planning to raid with Jubilance on the Wednesday, however that did NOT happen. Jubilance did NOT raid on Wednesday, and so I was asked to raid with the guild I applied to. I went in with them, downed some bosses (all farm content, not any of their newer kills or their progression attempts), and had a pretty good time. I was invited to the guild shortly after raid and Morituri is now a member of ShadowRaven-US|Muradin. I wasn't able to raid on the Thursday (I informed them on Wednesday I wouldn't make it, otherwise that would be a really bad introduction to me!)

I had my first full raid with them last week. We had a pretty off first night, getting Heroic Magmaw and then wiping on Heroic Halfus. We actually only got 5 bosses down that night, but Wednesday we went back in to kill Cho'gal and move on to other bosses. We one shotted Cho'gal and went on to wipe 13 times on Heroic Chimaeron, eventually calling it a night without kill him. Thursday night we only took 3 or 4 attempts to kill Heroic Chimaeron, and then went on to finish off normal Atramedes, Maloriak, and then Nefarian. That's right: I HAVE FINALLY KILLED NEFARIAN! It was very nice to see that fight go so smoothly, we wiped twice trying a new strategy, and then the third time through kinda fluffed it too, but in a way it was salvageable, and went on to finish the encounter. Not only have I killed Nef finally, I also danced on his corpse, stole his gold, and took his mace.
So now that I have a joined a guild that was three bosses more progressed that I was, and killed them all with them, it's time to start dishing out those repair bills for those progression attempts. Next up is Heroic Maloriak (or so my understanding is), and I've been learning new interesting things about the fight via the interwebz. Can't wait to get some serious attempts in on him!

Moving on.

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:36:00 +0000

I have officially applied with a different guild. To be honest I have a LOT of mixed feelings about it. I really loved pretty much everything about Jubilance, as I hope you have all seen through my posts. When we originally decided to go from a 25man guild to a 10man guild, I was reluctant, but definitely did not put up any sort of fight on the issue, and was quite happy to accommodate the group with my "Mad Healin' Skillz".

It has come to a point in the expansion where I have become very frustrated with our group, and I can't specifically put my finger on the reason. I think a lot of it likely comes from the selfishness that any raider has (I think anyways...) of wanting to continue seeing encounters, and downing them. We have been stuck on Nef now for over a month. Having said that, we have probably only put in 4 solid nights of attempts, and our progress has been practically non-existent. One of the reasons for this is that we haven't been able to work on him for long enough to determine what our problems are, our attempts are very erratic and I don't think we have spent more than one night in a row on him. We made a few changes near the end of our last night that seemed to help, and we had plans to make changes on our next attempts that I think will help as well (based on a few different things we have read/seen in videos of successful kills).
I think another reason is just that I see us getting into a very dangerous cycle. We have been expecting to lose a DPS in a short while, as he is about to be deployed for a tour (military), however we were NOT expecting to have to replace a tank, which we just recently had to do. Thankfully we had one that was quite able to step in, the night it was announced in fact, and is doing a great job. The problem is we now have to teach the fights (he's a quick learner, that's going well) and gear him (Nef is pretty rough, he's not exactly a walking brick wall or anything...). And as soon as we're done with that, we will start on the DPS replacement (same deal). We have also had another DPS that I think we all love to death, however he is neck deep in real life commitments, and as much as we hate to do it, we have definitely been making no secret of our discussion of replacing him. So that's three new people to gear and teach, while we are in the middle of working on the most challenging non-heroic boss of the expansion. On top of that I can (and I'm sure others can as well) tell that there are others that are becoming at least as frustrated as I am. It is reflecting in their (and my) mood, attention, and performance, creating a very nasty feedback cycle between us all, where we all start to fall off on mood, attention, and performance.

I had been talking with a few friends about possibly applying with a different guild for a while, but I'm not sure what my inspiration was that suddenly told me Tuesday morning that it was time to leave. I was really hoping that we could spend Tuesday on Nef, finish him off, and maybe that would be enough of a cathartic release to push me back into this group, however we again were unable (unwilling?) to attempt him, and instead went to clear BoT with heroic Halfus. We were unsuccessful. We wiped a LOT on Halfus, more than we did on our first attempts to be completely honest. And then we wiped on trash getting to the Drakes. And then we wiped on trash several times (or almost wipes where people ran back just as the last people were dying) between the Drakes and Council. Thankfully we finished the night with a 2 shot of council, the kill actually being the smoothest we had done it, however I think the damage had been done. Being almost sure of my intentions to apply else where: going into a raid that was clearly having an off night only cemented my decision. I informed my group over mumble what I had decided and why (citing my belief of the gear/teach-lose one-gear/teach-lose one-etc. that I mentioned above), and then asked an officer of the guild I was planning on applying to if I could sit in and listen on their raid while they finished. Afterwards I talked to their recruitment officer, and made sure that I was sure of my decision.
I am fibbing a bit. I'm writing this before I have actually applied, but will be posting it AFTER wards. Their Application is VERY thorough (something I'm quite impressed and happy about), so it will take me a while to fill out, and I have been putting it off a little, I want to get my last night of raiding in with my currently guild, I still love Jubilance and the people I raid with, and really want to have one last night of fun. I knew that I would meet with a bit of criticism over my decision. I am pretty certain that my leaving will probably kill this group, at least for a while. Healers are hard to come by on our server, and my leaving adds one more link to the cycle of gearing/teaching-losing that I spoke of. Hopefully everyone that this affects will understand my decision and we can remain friends (I have a lot of these people on real-id after all!), and who knows, hopefully we will all end up guilded down the road.
I have a big spot in my heart for Jubilance, and everyone who I have raided with in Jubilance (both wrath 25s and Cata 10s). They were my first REAL raiding guild, they really gave me that chance to get into current raiding and prove myself while learning, getting better, and of course having fun. I will be taking LOTS of screen shots before typing /gquit of me in my tabard, on the roster, and lots of other "Jubi Memorabelia", and hopefully the alt or two that I leave there (probably) and my occasional presence in Jubi Mumble, will always be welcome.
Don't be strangers Jubis.

Fun with Alts

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:02:00 +0000

I have been musing the last few days about what my next post should be. Normally I try to not think about it, and let my subconscious decided when I need to write, and what to write about. However due to the latest shout I got from Fannon, I have been watching my stats go up quite a bit faster than usual. In fact with only one post this month so far, I have already hit about 1/4 of my normal monthly views. So I thought I owed it to all you new readers out there (I hope there are some of you anyways...) to be a little more proactive in my writing. I have really struggled with nailing down something to type, I normally like to pick larger topics, things that have been "in vogue" in the blogging community for instance, however today it hit me that what I have been doing to kill time while thinking is the best thing to write about currently: Alts!

I started playing, as some of you may know, in Wrath. I didn't start raiding until ToC was out, so I was pretty far behind a LOT of my server in experience, however I did happen to have 5 level 80s by the end of the expansion, and had successfully (judged by having killed at least a few raid bosses) raided on three of them (Morituri, Guaris, and Rochrio). I was pretty slow at leveling alts in Cataclysm. Not only had I experienced the lack of excitement that everyone has been blogging about, but I had also wanted to spend a little more time on school work, and a little less time on "WoW-Work" (that's right Webster's you can attribute that word to me in 5 years when you are looking for other stupid words to add in, such as "muggle" and "lol"). I have now leveled 3 85s (Morituri-priest, Shadairharan-DK, and Guaris-Pally), and have my hunter to level 83 all through herbing. I have just recently (read: yesterday) started leveling my Shaman, and I have to say, I LOVE HIM!
I know there has been a lot of criticism of Blizzard based around this class, specifically that Resto-shaman seem to be under powered, and as a disclaimer I have only hit 83 on my Shaman, but I am finding him very easy to heal on, everything seems very intuitive, and he has some spells that I really miss having on my Priest, such as an interrupt (wind shear) and that nice little OP spell called purge (Yes I have an offensive magic dispel on my priest, but in order to dispel a LOT of things that Shaman can with Purge, I have to use massdispell, wave goodbye to 10k Mana...). I am also enjoying having the variability in buffs that I can give through my totems (what's that? I have a pally with protection aura up? okay agility and strength buff it is!).
Alts seem to be an area of the game where people are very split down the middle on. You have lots of people that have a huge number of alts, as soon as they ding 85 on one toon (or it is raid ready) they start another. And then there are the people that only have one 85, or if they have two or three, they never really play them. I guess you can throw me under the "huge number of alts" category (although five isn't a huge amount, but I suppose pre 4.1 having that many 85s suggests that by the next expansion I may have 9 or 10...).
Why do I like alts so much? Well a few reasons. The first is that its a nice change. When I am so used to playing my Priest, its nice to experience a few different styles of play through other classes, even if I do tend to box myself out of that DPS role most of the time (my DK and Hunter have always been farmers, I really don't intend to do much for raiding on them, and I never even ran heroics in Wrath on my hunter). The second reason is a little more, I suppose you could say, proactive. Have you ever been in a raid with a leader that is assigning roles, or telling someone to do something, and you are sitting there thinking "that's stupid asking the Shadow Priest to get interrupts with his 45second CD, when there is an enhancement shaman right there with a 6second instant cast, off the GCD, interrupt" or "why is he getting the Holy Pally to raid heal and the Holy Priest to raid heal?" sure those can probably be done (especially the second one) but I would imagine that most people that would say something like that have never really played those classes. Even extremely knowledgeable players occasionally make mistakes like that, and the more classes you are comfortable with, the less likely you are to make silly assignments like that.
As a little story from our raid group about this, one of the most skilled players I have ever played with (who also happens to have more alts than I do, with better gear) has never played a Pally. The other night in raid when instructing a player on a fight, he said that during a certain point, he should start using his holy power for Holy Radiance instead of Word of Glory. This is one situation where he had great knowledge of the fight, lots of different classes, but his one small blind spot seemed to be Pallies (for those of you that don't know, Holy Radiance is a 1minute cooldown, 30seconds for holy pallies spec'd into it, raid heal that does NOT use holy power, where as Word of Glory has no cooldown, but heals based on the amount of holy power you use to "power" it).

So for those few of you who ARE reading this: Leave me a comment with your favorite alt class and spec (and your main class and spec!), and let me know if you are an Altoholic, or a One-Class kind of player.

Not so Homogeneous

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:44:00 +0000

There has been a lot of talk now for the last - well since 4.0 dropped - about class homogenization. For those of you who don't read dictionaries for fun, that means how Blizzard is making all the classes similar, taking away their "uniqueness". Blizzard started with buffs, removing some, and changing others, to make people "bring the raider, not the class". However, people are complaining that the classes are all losing their appeal, the things that people liked about their class are being removed or changed. Although I'm wondering if this is as big of an issue as people are saying it is, are there really too few differences between classes now?
Well lets start with the buffs. Is anyone really complaining about the fact that there are too few unique buffs now? Okay I know we all liked getting the 10% bonus from kings, and then the additional bonus to attributes from Mark of the Wild, however this is a sweeping change, it's not as though one faction lost it, the other didn't, so it's the same across the board, so really no loss here (Blizzard will be making changes to the raids based on this lower total attributes). Most of the buffs that were changed are in the same boat, there are only a few that I can think of that were dropped completely (Priest spirit buff comes to mind, wow do I miss that buff now...). So effectively I think that the buff changes were for the better, however I am probably a little biased considering I raid 10mans, where it was previously impossible to get even close to all the buffs you could in 25mans.
As for the class spells there has been huge changes that's true. The first change that comes to mind is healers (because I am a healer and have healed this expansion, at least in some normal dungeons, on 3 of the 4 healing classes). All four classes have seemingly similar main heals now. The amount healed and mana costs are different, however you can easily break them down into 3 categories:

Slow, low healing, mana efficient spell.
Slow, large heal, not AS mana efficient spell
Fast, weak, extremely INefficient spell

But is this change a big deal? I don't really think so. Blizzard has still kept the things that make these four healing classes unique. Holy pallies still have beacon of light, and I don't care what anyone says, yes it's nerfed from Wrath but that's because it was pretty OP back then, I would say it's now a little more on par. Their mastery needs some work yes, but they have kept their unique style. Shaman have kept their shields (earthshield/watershield/etc.) and chainheal (yes I know it's expensive, but it's still there) and of course their amazing totems! Resto Druids are still the hot based class, and that's pretty much all I know about them so I'm going to stop there. Priests, well what do I say about my favorite class? Discipline is still the master of mitigation, with the unique new atonement mechanic. Holy is being true to its name as the "masters of healing", they seem to be great tank healers (although I would argue Shaman and Pallies do have an easier time with it), and to be completely honest I think they are the best raid healers in the game. Of course they have always kept their signature spell that no healing priest should be without Prayer of Mending. I actually never really thought about how unique this ability was until the other night healing Chimaeron with a tank that had never done the fight before (as a tank), and I mentioned to our tank healer Janyaa that I would try to keep Prayer of Mending on the one taking the double strike. She seemed confused why that was such a big deal so I linked the spell to her. She had no idea a spell like that existed, it seems to be the Priest's deep dark secret, that we have such an amazing spell, and it's especially amazing on double strikes on Chimaeron, where it guarantees a tank has enough HP to survive that second hit!
What about the Homogenization of tanks? Well you may be thinking that there is quite a bit of variability in tanks, with one that wears leather, and one that really seems to act more like a dps looking at its spec, and you would be right. There are a lot of tanks that talk about losing certain parts to their abilities, to make them more homogeneous, such as Ardent Defender being an on use CD now, but overall they definitely have different strengths and weaknesses, and coming from a healer, are completely different to heal.
Well this is about as comfortable as I feel like taking it from a specific standpoint. I really don't have as much knowledge of classes as some people, and definitely don't know a whole lot about changes they have faced, given I have only been around for one expansion so far. As one final note I think it's important to realize that to some degree there does have to be some amount of homogenization between similar roles. If mechanics between classes were to differ too much, it would be nearly impossible to balance encounters, or to make PVP a "best player wins" sort of environment, rather than a rock-paper-scissors game. We've already seen this to a degree with the world first Nefarian
So thank you Blizzard, for making the hard choice to find the sweet spot in homogenization, to ensure a more balanced game.

How important is a Leader?

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 14:28:00 +0000

The group I raid with is full of very knowledgeable, intelligent, great players. When we first started raiding we started with the opinion that we really didn't need a raid leader. It was only a ten man, and over half of our group had done raid leading for the guild before, so we just kind of thought that we would all be okay with watching our own timers, and I guess just assumed someone would make the decision whether to, for example, release that fifth drake on Halfus. We were kind-of right. For the most part our progression hasn't been hindered by our trust in each other to take care of their own things, however we have been very lucky in the fact that we seem to have all fallen into our own roles on what specifically we each do for each fight. I have to some extent been working on the strategies before the fights. I really like watching boss kill videos, and trying to pick out all the little things guilds are doing to succeed and where they could improve. Bazain has been great with calling out timers a head of time, and yelling at people to get their heads out of their...respective places.... when we've been goofing off too much. Green is just an overall loudmouth that fills in where someone is needed. Pixelated has a very strong personality in that he will call ideas out in the middle of the raid, or yell that something isnt' going to work, he's great at adjusting on the fly and communicating that to us. And of course everyone helps out between wipes on helping to adjust our strategy, explain what went wrong from each other's perspectives, and step up when we need an extra set of eyes or one of our usual people has to tunnel something so hard they can't pay attention to a specific mechanic. Having said all that, the focus of this post wasn't really on OUR situation, but on where I see a break down.

We are trying to get a second raid group off the ground (again...) and we've been having some issues. When we started our 10man we did end up taking a lot of the past raid leaders and throwing them all into one group. It wasn't really done intentionally, it just happens that we were all pretty good friends, and so the list of who we wanted to raid with just happened to include them all. However we had a few people step up and try to take over starting a second group, and when they gave up, someone else, and so forth. We are stuck in the unfortunate situation right now of having someone that has stepped into that role that doesn't really want to be in the situation. He's done a great job mind you. The second group has downed some bosses, and put in some wipes for progression. He's constantly willing to learn from further progressed guildies, unfortunately to a fault. Where his issues seem to be is a lack of confidence. Instead of picking a strategy and sticking with it (with the few adjustments) he's too worried about doing it "wrong" and when a few of our raiders have stepped in to fill gaps with alts, he's been too ready to ask for them to tell him how to do a fight, confusing his raiders when the strategies differ greatly. This seems to be the issue all around, lack of confidence. Lack of confidence to call people out when they screw up, to sit someone for not showing up the week before without any notice, and even seeming reluctant to recruit to replace people that are running with him that aren't part of our guild (and not willing to change guilds). So how important is a leader? A person willing to make the hard decisions even if it means hurting some feelings? In a word: Critical.

(If you do read this Other Group Leader. It's really not intended to offend in anyway, sometimes I should probably keep my opinions to myself!)

Holy...Pally?!

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:43:00 +0000

Just a quick post here. I have pretty much always had my Paladin as a tank. I haven't found it to be overly difficult to play, and the practice that I was getting leading our alt runs during ICC was helping me to get - I dare say - pretty good at it. With Cataclysm brought changes, but I'm happy to say that I have started raiding with him and I am getting pretty confident with him again, including using my CDs effectively and learning when to use my holy power for what. I've always been pretty if-y on using my Hands (Salv, Freedom, etc.) but I think I am getting a bit better with them too! Unfortunately, the masachist that I am, I have been slowly building him a holy set...
...with drops in the randoms I have been running and today I took the time to craft the last few pieces I need (epic shield and then some "Stormforged" pieces to round out my set) put some enchants on them and socketed some green quality gems. I then ran a normal cataclysm random. Wow is there a lot to deal with when playing him for the first time as holy since cataclysm. Remembering to judge on cd, burn my holy power on WoG and then if it doesn't use my holy power, too use another WoG, popping hands when I need to, keeping beacon up, shock on non-tanks but try to use bigger heals on the tank (for holy power with Tower of Radiance), and throughout all of that watching my mana is a LOT to get used to. I think one of the biggest things is that the mechanics have changed enough with Cataclysm that it was like I had never Pally healed before, I didn't even realize that my slow mana efficient heal didn't build holy power when cast on the tank until about halfway through when I finally looked at Tower of Radience because I was confused (I was thinking to myself that I was missing, which is the reason that I don't build holy power when I'm tanking...but then realized that didn't make sense because heals don't miss). It's very much a different world from Holy Priest healing, where our proc's are fairly controlled by us (serendipity specifically comes to mind). I think I need to get a hold of power auras again (I removed it because I never got it working quite like I wanted, and it sucks my cpu power - what little there is), and set it up to track some things. The biggest differnce I found was how much you have to be proactive in your mana control. As a Holy Priest I rely on my rediculously high mana regen, supplemented with properly timed pots and Shadow Fiends, but a Holy Pally has to watch their mana like a hawk, and if you miss one Judgement cd, you can find yourself falling behind pretty quick. A lot of it probably has to do with my mana pool being around 80k instead of the 100K that I think would be minimum to have equivalent regen to my priest. Maybe talking to our resident expert Janyaa will help out a bit too. I should note that we didn't wipe, and with the exception of the DK standing in shockwave AND hitting a mine all in one (City of the Tol'Vir, first boss) I didn't let anyone die. Granted it was a normal, but I really wasn't over gearing it by THAT much.

A Look Back, and Updates!

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 03:39:00 +0000

I looked back at some previous posts over the last few days, specifically at I Don't Heal; I stand there and Regen!. This post was very...down i think is the right word. I know that I mentioned that I wasn't QQ'ing or anything of the sort just presenting my situation, however it still came off a little...I like the word down - so I thought I would update a bit on what I have experienced.

As I expected the mana pool got a LOT better. I picked up probably another 20k mana since that post, and probably another 2k incombat regen (Holy priests get a huge amount of their regen from straight regeneration, we don't get all those fancy "% of your mana pool" things like Divine Plea and Rapture). In fact, raiding tonight we cleared BWD (except Nef, that silly dragon refuses to die, not that we've really been able to put in attempts for a fortnight now), and I didn't go OoM on any of the boss fights, trash with the pull as I was swapping specs, then a second group face pulled by mistake I did. What's more, I actually realized on a few fights that I hadn't popped my Shadow Fiend yet, just as the boss was dying, of course this may have something to do with the fact our newest healer Rillfane seems to think of me as a lightning conductor and is constantly dropping his Innervate on me on CD, however I'm choosing to ignore that for argument's sake!
I did swap to holy shortly after that post, however I swapped out my Shadow spec for the week to give Disc a bit of a try, we thought the extra CDs would be helpful on Nef, and given that I am healing the Onyxia tank, Atonement should work out very well. I tried it out tonight on Maloriak, the fight seemed pretty well suited to Discipline, as long as I am healing the Maloriak tank, and it worked out VERY well, my mana pool hardly ever dropped, the casters were again thanking me in extremely quick to respond whispers (now that I think about it, maybe those are add-ons....) for my Power Infusion, that Pain Suppression saved a tank, and my Power Word: Barrier is AMAZING on the red phase. I still haven't got to try it out on Nefarian, as we are holding off on him until one of our regular dps comes back (we really don't want to get our first kill without him, and his dps, raid buff, and cc are pretty intricate parts of our strategy), however it is definitely a spec that has major uses in certain fights.
In summary (yes I know grade seven English teacher, that's a bad way to start a conclusion...), things DID get better, the change in healing style was huge, and I think getting used to it was so gradual and such a natural thing to do that I really don't know when I stopped freaking out and going to flash heals, and instead went to greater heals and trusted that next hit would get dodged. I am still loving this change in style from pop everything and hope to keep him up, to conserve mana and prioritize. And they didn't take away our pop-everything style either, if you need proof, try two tanking Heroic Halfus now, you would be surprised how well you can rotate cooldowns and how fast you can burn mana throwing serendipity bombs.

10/25 Difficulty Split

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:55:00 +0000

When Blizzard announced in Wrath that they were going to have 10 and 25mans dropping the same iLVL of loot, there was a LOT of noise about it. In response Blizzard made a ridiculous number of posts trying to assure people of their intent to make the two raid sizes more of a preference to the guild, rather than any sort of strategic choice. In theory this means that they were intending to make both 10 and 25mans of equal difficulty in terms of the fight itself, and excluding the logistics of running a larger raid. Originally Blizzard intended to reward people for their logistical effort of having 2.5 times more people in a group by awarding more loot PER PERSON. There was again a lot of noise about this, and eventually Blizzard backed off of this idea, going back to making the raids identical in nature, with absolutely no difference between one and the other, besides the number of people you bring (of course anyone that knows much about probability understands that having more pieces in total drop means a higher chance of seeing those elusive 5% drop rate items, knew I would get called out on that if I didn't mention that now!). So how did Blizzard do as a whole on making the raids balanced?

Poorly. Now before I get too far into this, I want to say that there is going to be a lot of disagreement with what I have to say, but I am going to provide as many facts as possible to back up my opinion, and while many of them will be biased in my opinion's favour, that's not (entirely) intentional, it just so happens that this fun thing called Cognitive Dissonance causes people to ignore facts that are at odds with their beliefs, so feel free to direct me to dissenting opinions in the form of blog posts!

Looking at the majority of the ranking sites you find that they first do a horrible job of splitting 10 mans and 25mans because of how armory works, but if you can get past that (for example by using an awesome though not well known site like WoWTrack) you will find that 25mans have progressed much faster and on a larger scale than 10 mans, in fact only 3 guilds have cleared the first tier of cataclysm raiding and they've done it quite recently, as opposed to the 45 guilds that have done it on 25man. Now there are a few ways of looking at this:

25man guilds are more prevalent and by simple statistics are more likely to have advanced further (False, 4,000 25mans VS 44,000 10mans)
More of the "hardcore/hi-calibre raiders" are in 25man guilds. This one is a very plausible suggestion, considering that most of the top guilds from Wrath are still in the 25man format (Ensidia, Vodka, Method, Paragon, etc.) However, the problem with saying this is that we really can't determine whether or not they are 25man guilds because they were in the past or if they are because 25mans are "easier" and therefore encourage guilds interested in doing world-firsts to take this format. An argument could be made in this direction considering that in the first week or two Ensidia actually tried to take advantage of the flexible raid lock by doing a fight on 10man, only to discover it couldn't be set back to 25man after, effectively costing them a week of progression raiding (given that they missed World third full clear by 6 days, that's quite a hit).
10mans are, on the whole, harder.

My belief is that both two and three have a bit to do with this. If you are in a guild as skilled (and almost a little ridiculous) in their game play, why would you possible go down to a 10man guild? There are definitely disadvantages in terms of less class variability and therefore less "utility" abilities. Not to mention you don't want to say by to 15+ raiders and find out that next tier one of you raiders is burnt out and doesn't want to push as hard, suddenly you are down a very difficult to replace player.
However, the premise, which I have taken the long route to get to, is that I believe that 10mans are harder overall. A few examples to back this up that pop to mind?

Nefarian phase one has two dragons that must be kept 60 yards apart, meaning 2 tanks are necessary. Plus you have adds that must be kept away from the front of the dragons. On 25man you throw a third tank in and suddenly you have no issues with that phase. On 10man, you have to CC SIX adds, if you don't have the right mix of cc available (or a feral dps that can go bear and still be a fairly respectable tank) this fight is impossible, you would have dps and healers taking hits left and right, and very little dps on the dragons.
Heroic Halfus. This is a little less apt of an example, because it is still 2 tankable, however when Blizzard changed the mechanic that the Drakes had to be killed before Halfus received the damage debuff, they effectively took away the need to release only 1 - 2 drakes immediately, while removing the ability of disc priests to heal around 30,000 HP per Second, while keeping extremely full on mana. The easiest way to do it now is to throw a third tank into your 10man and have one tank just hold some drakes, with no mortal strike debuff the third tank doesn't take much damage. (Don't think this strategy is the best? well maybe not, but we used it last night and after adding the third tank, 2 shotted him). It's a LOT easier to add a third tank or even a fourth tank, into a 25man raid than it is in a 10man raid.
Chimaeron. The reason that this fight is a bit easier on 25 than on 10 is because in Phase 2 when healing becomes ineffective, on 25man losing 6 dps is equivalent to losing 2 dps in 10man (17dps vs 5 dps, not 25 people vs 10 people), that is a LOT more time the boss spends running from one end of the room to the other and back again, as dps arrange themselves properly according to the threat metre. Now granted Phase 2 really isn't where most groups find themselves wiping so this is a bit of a "who cares?" point, but it's still valid.

Constant rebalancing in the form of Blizzard reducing HP and Damage dealt on 10man and 10man heroic ONLY side of the fight means that blizzard feels the same way (or maybe they are just avoiding the "noise" again, but I am choosing to interpret it as agreement). Specifically I should draw your attention to the fact that Heroic Valiona and Theralion were actually SO imbalanced that they were considered harder than Heroic Nefarian on 10man until Blizzard hotfixed in some EXTREME balance changes cutting damage and HP but HUGE amounts (apparently they were very close to values found in heroic 25man).

There are certain mechanics that honestly will always make it difficult to balance the two sizes of raids, such as healer circles (the pretty little circles they put on the ground) which heal X number of people at a time. In 25man it's not too difficult to drop a Holy Word:Sanctuary on 6 people. In 10 man, unless your Tanks, Healers, and DPS (range AND melee) are all stacked on one place, it's pretty rare to find 6 people in that area. also the advantage of being able to supply EVERY raid buff in 25mans, while in 10mans, it's pretty hard to bring every buff and debuff, even though Blizzard has Homogenized many of them (including three classes now giving Heroism/Bloodlust/Timewarp/Hysteria).

I know I have left out the 25mans that are harder (Al'Akir and pretty much any other one where space is constrained and there is a "spread out" style mechanic), and I am not denying there are some, I'm just saying that overall I think it is harder currently to full clear content in 10man. Any thoughts? (Stir, Stir goes the pot...)

Response to my response...

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:14:00 +0000

Okay so it's a little conceited to respond to your own post but honest the last post I did "Problems with Linear Progression" started a bit of discussion in the comments. I did think up a few points related to this topic while reading Rillfane's post that I also wanted to touch on, so here it goes:
Thank you to everyone that responded, I had a very strongly opinionated response to the contrary of my post, and I'm quite happy to see those as well!

One interesting thing that Blizzard did with ToC and ICC was they made the heroic gear from ToC better than the normal gear in ICC (iLVL 258 vs 251). This is something that they seem to have turned their back on in Cataclysm (Firelands gear from the list I have seen is higher iLVL than heroic Bot and BWD), however I think it's very important for a few reasons. (OMG not another list...)

Blizzard has stated that the heroic modes are designed for progression "high-end" guilds, which means that they don't expect your average PVE player to clear hardmodes, and in fact hardly even see most of them, as they should only be clearing endgame normal mode bosses slightly before the release of the next tier. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view point), they have gated heroics by requiring all normal mode bosses to die first (at least in that raid). This means that guilds like Paragon, Method, etc. still must spend a week clearing normal modes, which for them isn't that huge of a deal, but for guilds not QUITE as hardcore they may spend multiple lockouts getting there. I see the style of iLVL done with ToC and ICC as being a good way to allow those progressed guilds to get into their preferred level of raid a little faster, give them a gear boost so that if they were in heroics to start with, they can get there quickly again.
I see this as a bit of a hybrid between the linear raid style and the "gear reset" (as it was called in one of the response comments), while it doesn't mean you have to climb from the very bottom rung of raids all the way step by step to the top, it does mean that there should always be two tiers of raids that stay quite important all the way through (again, think about all the Solace of the Defeated, etc. that were farmed once ICC was already out).
It allows those guilds that worked really hard to get the handful of heroic bosses down to feel like they had more of an achievement by giving them an advantage over those guilds that up and decided to start raiding at the end of the last tier/beginning of the current tier.

Is my view skewed? Absolutely, it's my blog, not a newspaper article (which are SUPPOSED to be impartial, even though they rarely are), however I really see that the fully "on-rails" raiding scheme does more to punish new players that want to raid, by leaving them with the "entitlement-sloths" than it does to reward hardworking progression guilds.

I really do appreciate all comments, even if I do pick on some respondents :P As a final response to the response to my response (lost yet?) I really want to ask: How do you expect a new player to learn to raid if they are stuck in "Naxx" with all the "entitlement-sloths" that don't know how to/aren't capable raiders?

Problems with "Linear Progression"

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:40:00 +0000

I started to respond to a post one of the bloggers I follow made, and then realized my response was going to end up as long as her post...So this seems like a better alternative: Asilwen this post is for you!

For those of you who don't want to read the post, basically what I got out of it (so this may not be the intended message), Asilwen states that she liked the BC style of raiding involving keys, attunement and the basic need to do the raids in order, even near the end, in order to go on to harder raids. I see many problems with this, and while I think they have been presented by a number of different authors (Weekly Marmot by Tankspot, Blizz Blueposters, and probably a ridiculous number of others) I decided I would post what my perspective is.
I am a "Wrath Baby", I started playing when Ulduar was out, and wasn't geared for raiding until ToC came out (see My First Post for the whole story!). While I suppose I fit the broad definition of this title, I like to think I adapted to both the style of healing (triage/mana conservation) and tanking (avoidance/mitigation >>>>> Stam) quite a bit faster than most people seem to have, though this may just be the conceit that all people have to some degree, and maybe I am a true "Wrath Baby" and don't see it. But, I digress.
Here is a brief list of the problems I see with what I call "Linear Progression" (needing to clear each raid in succession before moving on)(presented using Wrath as a bench mark, because that's the "Tier" I best know!)

Skilled Guilds/Players move on when new raids are released. Yes they may go back for achievements, or that one piece that is still BiS until heroics (Solace of the Defeated anyone?), however they spend most of their time in the new raid. Raiding Guilds generally expect applicants to be at the appropriated gear level for where they are raiding, this means that guilds raiding ICC would have expected applicants to have cleared (or close to) Trial of the Grand Crusader, before applying, guilds raiding ToGC would have expected people to have basic familiarity with ToC (and most of the gear), and guilds raiding Ulduar would have expected people to be fully geared in Naxx gear. This part I don't necessarily disagree with. It's a much easier way of weeding out people who know what progression takes, have some idea of how a raid is ran, etc. However, going back to the first point: Guilds that can move on to higher progression will. So how does someone that starts halfway through Wrath get to the point where they can raid ICC? Well first they need to find a group doing Naxx. This should be easy, trade chat spam FTW, everyone who has ran heroics is geared for Naxx so your applicant pool is basically every level 80. So after wiping with Pugs for weeks, you are now geared for Ulduar. There is suddenly a much smaller pool to pull raiders from, however there is likely a pretty large number of people at the point you are at, that have pugged Naxx, and are ready/want to move on. So you find yourself a guild and run Ulduar for months, yes months. Here is where this Linear issue starts to break down. If you are raiding progression ICC, you are not spending time raiding Ulduar, meaning only people geared for Naxx and Ulduar, will be raiding Ulduar. As soon as a toon is geared for ToC, if their entire guild is not ready, or close to (another week or two) they jump ship to a guild that IS raiding ToC, meaning that guild becomes stagnated at the Ulduar level, generally with players that aren't quite as good as the average ToC raider. So eventually you get geared enough to raid ToC, so you jump to a different guild. At this point guilds are getting harder to come by, and you may have to consider a server transfer if you are on a Low Pop server. Again your raider pool is pretty small, meaning there are probably only a few guilds to apply to, which means that you will need to be a pretty good player to get a regular raid spot. Again you have the issue of "attrition" where the geared players jump to the ICC guilds, and so every week you have new, less geared people coming into raid, and so progression goes slow, you get geared slow, and eventually by the time you are ready to move onto ICC, the new expansion is released. Wow TL;DR climbing the progression ladder takes a REALLY long time if you start playing after release, and is a HUGE uphill battle that burns people out faster than raiding ICC for a year waiting on Cata release.
Burnout. Lets say you are a Raid Leader for an Ulduar guild. Lets say you REALLY like this guild, and it's hard to find friendly ToC guilds (Damned Elitists!), every month you see people leaving your guild for ToC

Okay, well I guess the main issue is probably with number 1. When I started this post I was really thinking I had all these good reasons, I would have this huge list, but really it all comes down the first point, that unless you are willing to put in those 4 nights a week to raid with a serious group, and ride that wave of tier releases, you will be left behind and forced to fight your way uphill (both ways, in blistering winds, waist deep snow, and without shoes, okay so maybe I've been talking to my Grandparents too much lately?)

Boss Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Well with 4.1 coming out in the next few months seems like a perfectly terrible time to start releasing Jubilance's strategies for each boss, I'll be working on these when I have a spare bit of time, which may mean I won't get very many done before 4.1. Don't forget either when reading these over that "no plan survives contact with the enemy" (-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder), so while we may say these are our strategies, it seems likely they change within the first minute after the pull, although they should last longer the more practiced we get with them.

How Important Is Your Community?

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:29:00 +0000

I had an unusual weekend. Normally my schedule dictates that I not be online much over the weekends (and given the proximity of exams, 2 yesterday, and 3 over the rest of the week, I probably shouldn't have been...), but this weekend I found myself online quite a bit. The most striking thing for me? My guild seemed to be deserted! Now don't get me wrong, we had our usual Alt-aholics, and the few people that don't ever seem to log off (that's right Mr. My-Boss-Lets-Me-Play-From-Work, I'm talking about you!), but there were very few others on.

Honestly, I didn't play very long. I was pretty surprised at myself, while I have been feeling the WoW apathy that so many others have talked about (see my post about it), I was starting to get into leveling my Palladin again (he was my go-to-alt in Wrath, I used to lead our guild's alt run with him). This situation has really made me think about what I enjoy in this game. I used to think that it was raiding, and dont' get me wrong I REALLY LOVE raiding (don't kick me from the raid group guys...please?), but I'm not starting to realize more and more that it's the community that I have built up, especially those 9-12 people that I raid/dungeon with regularly.
I know that the media has really played up the role that video games (MMOs being their go to scapegoat) play in encouraging antisocial behaviour in people, but situations like this really make me wonder if they've really looked into this as a real link, or if it's another situation with Downloading/CD sales, where they see a hint of a correlation, or imagine one, and POOF! FACT! (i.e. Foxnews).

For those of you who haven't heard about it, there is an interesting study being done by a PhD candidate in Europe on WoW (and MMOs in general), she's been focusing mostly on Paragon, however I am really interested to see this study when it's finished (excuse the pun...you know...'cause Paragon is Finish?!). Although I don't think she is specifically looking at community in MMOs, I'm sure any discussion would be incomplete without it.
What about all you readers, have you experienced the same thing, logging on to find an empty guild or friends list and quickly swapping activities?

I HAZ MAIL!

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 04:29:00 +0000

Anyone that hasn't checked out our Cho'gall kill video should, make special note of the fact that apparently Reflektions (the PoV of the video) is waiting on an important mail message that just couldn't wait till after raid!

Applications

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:31:00 +0000

Jubilance tends to go through periods of no applicants, followed by huge numbers of them for a very short period of time. I haven't really noticed that the increase occurs around guild achievements (boss kills, etc.), it just seems to be completely random. We just went through a bit of one of these phases, very welcomed to say the least, as our second ten man is still trying to get off the ground, and the one I am in has been looking for a back-up or two.
First I want to express one of my big "no no's" about applications, and really it's less of an application issue, and more of a tact issue. We recently had a member of another guild apply, which isn't really unusual. He was the Raid Leader for another guild, which again isn't neccessarily unusual in and of itself. What WAS unusual was the fact that he didn't mean it. He put in an application to be completely a joke. Upon commenting on his application I meantioned that I really didn't see this as being an appropriate use of his time, especially when this guy is normally good natured, and his guild tends to get along, more or less, with Jubilance. The spur for this application was that he has apparently been bringing his alt (who he "applied with") to the second 10man, in order to assist them. I made a comment that I would like to see guildies get first opportunity at these spots, which I assumed was already occuring, but I suppose it was my passive agressive way of saying "Listen, we really don't need your joke apps cluttering up our forums, and sapping member's time in reading them, they really aren't funny, and I think it's offensive that you did this," (or something along those lines...). He responded to my comment that maybe I should discuss that with the other raid leader, as such a public place was not the best location for that discussion. This is where I would like to pause, and point out, that a guild's website forums, in a thread that is locked to members, really isn't in ANYWAY public. Yes you can create an account and go and read applications, but this really isn't the front page of the website or anything of that sort. I suppose in a long way, this is my way of saying of don't apply unless you really are considering joining the guild, it will burn bridges with atleast one member, and in the future you may regret damaging relationships over a "joke".
My second "subtopic" that I want to discuss is the proper way to fill out an application, and the improper way.

Complete ALL fields, if you don't know how to provide a link to your armory, ask someone, do a google search, something. Not filling it out or saying "I dont' know how to do this" appears to the guild that you can't be bothered to take the time to do ANY research or put in a moderate amount of effort. This translates to: comes to raids unprepared with a lack of knowledge regarding encounter design.
Put effort into your answers. The application is the first look a guild usually gets. If you think that a field isn't really important, too bad, it's not your decision, you are not the one judging the application, and despite what you may believe, the members will not spend sleepless nights lamenting turning you down because your application was horrible.
Grammar is more important than you may think. Yes this "iz tha interwebz," however think of this as a job application. Just because guild chat tends to be cluttered with "ur" and " i " does not mean that your application needs to reflect how you will type in that environment. Poor grammar, and mispelled words, run on sentences, and difficult to understand phrasing, is often looked at by guilds as (see above in point 1) you can't put in the 2 minutes of effort, why would we expect you to put in the hours of effort to learn a boss fight.
Make an account, and watch your application. This is one of the most missed steps in an application, and honestly is one of those that I most forgive. If you don't make an account on the website and watch your application, you have no way of responding to questions, or following up on comments to clarify for people who are weighing in on your application. One of the fastest ways I know to judge a Priest applying is to ask them a question about why they took a specific talent. Normally I don't care much about the specifics of the answer, I just want to see something besides "because that is what elitestjerks told me to take."
Follow up, but not 5 minutes later. It is not overly unusual for people to be anxious about an application, however hitting "submit" followed by "/w 'RandomPersonInTheGuild' I applied can I get an invite" will actually harm your application. By the same measure, not checking up within a few days if you haven't heard anything back, and have no comments on your application, can make it look like you don't care. Sometimes it just happens that officers never see you on, and wispering them after a few days to check on your application could be the reminder they need to ask you a few questions they have, or just get a feel for the type of person you are. This goes for if you are transfering servers as well. Make a level 1 toon and check in from time to time to see if officers are on (again, not five minutes later, a few days).
Ask for alternatives if you don't think this application will properly represent you. We have had people apply before that have had horrible typing skills, their grammar was so bad we couldn't understand half the sentences, and they were offended when I made comment of this on their application, saying that "typing isn't their strong point, and this is a game, not a Job Application". If this person had taken the time to put on the bottom of their application that they were not the best typist, or not very good at written language (seriously, I am not being sarcastic, if you know it, admit it) , we could have taken this into account and an officer could have wispered him for a "verbal application" over voice software.

Remember that an application is required for almost any guild that is looking for anything more than a completely social experience. This doesn't mean they take the game too seriously, or that they will make it a job for you, it means they are a little careful about who they spend 10+ hours a week sociallizing with, just as I'm sure you are in real life.
As a final note. One of the latest applicants we received was from off realm, he did everything expected of an applicant, and his application was so strong we literally did everything we could to get a hold of him quickly, and get him into the guild before someone else sniped him. That's how almost every guild is if you do a good enough job on your application. He also go into our ten man the first raid night that he was on, and had a very fast chance to prove himself. We are VERY happy with him, and I am sure that anyone following my advice will get a similar experience from most guilds.

Success in WoW and Life

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:12:00 +0000

The other night my friend, named in game as Sail (and soon Qail, as he switches mains from a warrior to a rogue), were sitting around talking, playing some Call of Duty and drinking a few Heinekin (okay, he was playing, I was drinking...) and we got talking about some of the people we knew in game. We both tend to be in fairly social guilds, and as such know quite a bit about the real world personas of our fellow raiders and ingame friends. One of the things that we quickly got caught up in is that so many of the people we know seem to be extremely successful in Real Life. In fact, we seemed to notice a correlation between successful raiders being successful in their vocations.

Disclaimer: I am not in anyway suggesting that all Successful People (in RL) could be successful raiders, or that all successful raiders must be deffinition be professionals or anything of that sort, this is merely a recount of our observations. (If anyone reading this feels that I have come too close to mentioning your real-life identifiers and would like me to remove any sections please let me know and I will do so immediately!)

A quick list of the vocations we noted:
Stock Broker
Software Company Owner
Mechanical Engineer
Professional Skydiver (apparently instruction is where most of this money comes from!)
Software Engineer
Criminal Defense Attorny
Surgeon

Now this is by no means an exhaustive list of the people we discussed, nor is it a list of all the people we mentioned as being "successful vocationally," but I am curious if anyone else from other guilds or servers has noticed this as well. The reason it is so noteworthy to me is that society still seems to view gamers as almost exclusively a) teenage boys still in highschool or b) adult, unemployed men, who live in their parents basement. This ties into a bit of what many other bloggers have mentioned about how hard it is to come out to your RL friends, acquaintences, even family, about your gaming habit. If everyone openly talked about this sort of thing, look at all the people that would quickly help break this stereotype!

Let me know if your In Game friends seem to have a high instance of vocational success!

Random Thought for the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Morituri) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:35:00 +0000

After taking bread out to make sandwiches: Do NOT wait 30 minutes for the servers to come down before completing them and putting them in a nice airlocked container...The bread becomes quite dry and crusty :(

Update: They were still delicious!