Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

Handling Icewell Radiance

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Props to this guy for coining the term.

Daelo announced earlier in the day the implementation of raid wide buff called Chill of the Throne. What does it do?

The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid’s main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Similar in concept to Sunwell Radiance, the reason it was implemented was to lessen the overall spikiness of incoming tank damage. Spikiness refers to something like a tank taking constant streams of 15k damage here, 14k damage there, and then suddenly plummet after a 44k hit of some sort. Sometimes it was predictable and in other cases it was not. It’s a large and often unpredictable hit that is capable of flooring a player.

I call it the Chuck Norris effect.

For present healers, the current way to deal with this is to use defensive cooldowns in tandem with tanking cooldowns. If tank avoidance isn’t high enough or if cooldowns aren’t used, they can easily get 2 shot in a manner of seconds.

With luck, this will be the last time we’ll ever see a buff like this in the game. Going forward into Cataclysm, the idea is to raise the health pool of tanks. Right now our overall approach to healing is to spam really fast heals, really large heals, or AoE heals depending on the situation.

While tank health pools go up, healing spells will scale up but not as sharply. The ratio of healing done on a tank vs tank health won’t appear to be the same as it is now. Let’s say a Greater Heal can cover 60% of a tank’s health right now. When Cataclysm hits, Greater Heal might only heal for 35% or something. The approach is to make overhealing a real risk to the point where healing spells can’t be spammed just to get through the boss fight.

That’s going to present an interesting change. It feels as if it’s going to be a hybrid between Vanilla-esque healing and TBC-era healing. I daresay those were the two extremes. In Vanilla, you had to rotate out with other healers and regen for a minute before tagging back in. In Burning Crusade, you could get away with Circle of Healing spam. It looks like in Cataclysm, they just might make overhealing mean something again since we can’t spam heals nor can we switch out with other healers to come in for us.

PTR Live: Gunship Battle

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You can read my full impressions of the encounter over at WoW.com.

Hope this works.

16:54 – Clearing trash right now. Reminds me of faction champs.
17:20 – Two attempts on the boat.
17:23 – Going to zerg Saurfang
17:25 – Nevermind, Saurfang gains more health back than we can DPS.
17:27 – Yeah, encounter’s over. There’s no way we can finish it. The cannons are bugged. Don’t seem to be damaging the other boat.

Video clips at Ustream

A Val’anyr Story

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matt-mace

Several weeks ago, the leaders of two guilds met together. Both had a serious problem. Both guilds had 2 players that had 30 fragments for Val’anyr but did not have the drive nor the personnel at the time to pull it off. An agreement was made to launch an operation into Ulduar to finish off and complete the weapons of mass prevention.

A plan was hatched to take the best from both guilds and launch repeated assaults on Yogg-Saron. The instance ID was already cleared having been saved and unused for the past 9 weeks.

The first such attempts were designed to gauge how this hybrid raid group would function together. DPS checks were made followed by threat and healing checks. It certainly seemed as if the group had the DPS to do it. It was felt at times that 6 healers was one too many but it wasn’t a significant issue as the players outgeared the boss. Even then, people were dying left and right for unfortunate (and in most cases preventable) reasons.

After 2 and a half hours though, the raid managed to buckle down. On the last attempt, I fell not once but twice against Yogg’s early minions. Both battle res’s were burned and we were fresh out of pick me ups. A guardian was burned too early but there was nothing we could do but grab another. Phase kicked in. Yogg reared his ugly head and tentacles began sprouting. Portal teams were finally in sync and hitting the right portals. They were getting there early ahead of time (to make sure no one was jacking their portals).

It was frantic non-stop action. The amount of running and tentacle dodging might have rivaled a really cheesy hentai movie. Surprisingly this Dwarf’s agility managed to survive and escape the clutches of Yogg (although losing part of the beard in the process). Soon, we advanced to the final phase.

Guardians began swarming all around us as the brain team emerged from Yogg. We held fast to our positions as the rest of the strike force rallied to our position. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Ret Pally thrust his spear into one guardian before another guardian came up and struck him from behind. He crumpled to the ground from the unexpected blow. I muttered a curse and inched back towards the entrance of the room while motioning to the other healers to do the same. No sense in getting caught off guard ourselves.

When I wasn’t too busy firing off heals and shields, I would steal occasional glances at Yogg to determine how much longer we had to hold the fort down for. The reserves of the healers were all but expended. A sudden warmth and glow filled the raid. Heroism had been activated for the last minute. The raid fought back with renewed vigor. It felt like an eternity.

But it was done.

Without Hodir.

Who needs him anyway?

Case study: The Player Who Wanted More and the GM Who Couldn’t Care Less

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Have you heard of the grass is greener concept? It’s a basic premise that there is something better elsewhere or on the other side of the fence.

When it comes to Warcraft, there are all sorts of guilds with different aims. You’re going to play alongside players with different goals. These goals aren’t static. People’s ambitions change. Sometimes life deals a curveball and the game has to take a back seat. The end result is the departure of a player.

One case I wanted to discuss is the departure of the player who wants more. I’m not going to delve too deeply on other reasons and there’s no hard feelings between myself and the player who left. I’m very liberal when it comes to stuff like that and I’ve learned long ago to not let people leaving bother me too much.

What it boils down to was that the player was ambitious. He wanted to do more and see what it was like in an a higher echelon guild. The environment in an extremely hardcore guild is obviously different compared to a simple raiding guild. He’s never been in a situation like that before and he told me he wanted to try it out.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I encourage everyone to try apping with or raiding with a top server guild at least once just to see what it’s like in that sort of setting. I believe everyone should experience it at least once.

What’s unfortunate is the way he did it:

  • Left in the middle of the raiding week – As a GM, given the choice between having a player take off midweek or depart at the end of the week after multiple attempts on hard mode, I’d rather they leave at the end of the week. It’s advantageous for both parties. That player still remains an asset to the guild until such time that another player can fill in and they don’t waste their lockout until the time is up.
  • Took an item – I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset about this one. I might have done the same thing if I were in their position. It’s incredibly bad form to take an item knowing that you’re planning on leaving if there’s another person in the guild who can also use it. But, we did award it to him because it was felt he deserved it after an increase in performance.
  • No advance notice – My only desire is he spoke to me first before leaving. Instead he opted to leave before consulting with any of the leadership about his attentions. I would’ve been happy for him to go and get the experience. In my view, there’s two things that can happen: Player leaves and raids with a higher end guild, discovers he enjoys the pressure and is able to sustain the high level of performance required or comes back after having his confidence shattered and realizing that high level of guild isn’t what he’s looking for.

How should a GM react in this case?

So this is where a bit of introspection comes into play.

Reactions are going to vary based on situation and individual. Why wasn’t I as upset as my officers? They were rightly pissed. I felt indifferent. He expressed interest in some gear which we awarded to him and took off with virtually no warning. I should have been super angry. Chairs should have been thrown against the wall. Headsets should have been smashed. Don’t get me wrong, I care about my players. I’m just not sure if any player warrants begging or groveling to return. Other GMs on my server would have pitched an absolute fit if a player deserted their ranks. I suppose I am just as mortal as others for not recognizing the signs and the symptoms.

I didn’t feel any shock nor did I feel anger.

But why?

The guild still has a some amount of depth. It may not be the most ideal, since I had to ask a Resto Druid to come in as Balance instead. It’s funny because on previous attempts on Heroic Icehowl, we were only 1 for 4 on dodging his tramples. It was disappointing. The other night we didn’t have any Hunters for de-enrage duty and we were able to pull off a 100% success rate on dodging the oversized Yeti Icehowl when he was trying to take us out. He was killed with 1 tank, 4 DPS and 3 healers down. Thankfully he enraged right after he crashed into a wall allowing everyone to pour a large amount of damage resulting in a kill.

As a sidenote, we were able to wax Heroic Jaraxxus after 9 or so attempts as well. Faction Champions was down after another grinder of 6+ wipes and reached Heroic twins.

I suspect my lack of emotion could be attributed to my inherent belief that everyone is expendable and replaceable (which is true to an extent). I do care about my players, but as a GM I also keep many people at arms length. Again, I wish I could explain why. It just feels like another day.

“Hey Matt, this player left today.”
“Alright, put the word out for that class. I’ll be in my ready room reviewing logs.”

On a side note, I’m looking for some additional ranged DPS and backup healers for our raids if there’s any free agents out there looking.

Two fantastic posts by new team additions Mimetir and Thespius earlier today. I’m putting the final touches on a post that addresses the idea and problem that Wrath is too easy and follow it up with a solution. Look for it as early as tomorrow.

Have a good weekend

Counterpoint: Wrath Saved WoW Raiding

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young-frankenstein

This is a guest post by Thespius, a raiding Priest and blogger of Healer By Nature.

With all of the talk going around that Wrath of the Lich King made things significantly easier and therefore "killed the game", I wanted to bring another perspective into the mix.  I believe that Wrath SAVED WoW.  Yes, that’s right, I said it.  I’m happier playing WoW now that the game has changed.

I will whole-heartedly agree that the difficulty level has dropped in the end-game content.  I was never around for Vanilla WoW, but my share of SSC/TK content and the little I saw of Black Temple was daunting.  My favorite fight to date?  Leotheras the Blind.  Getting 25 people to move away from his whirlwinds and not DPS until the tank reacquired aggro was one of the toughest things to do.  Having to force healers to DPS their own doppelgangers down was priceless.  A tank that wasn’t a druid, warrior, or paladin?  SO much fun.

By comparison: Toughest boss in Naxxramas? Heigan the Unclean.

(Pause for laughter)

I know, right?  Personally, I still don’t see the hard part about avoiding the lava waves, or helping to cleanse diseases. 

When I look back to the BC days, if I wanted to try to get a newly-minted 70 friend into raids with me, we had to run him through Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, and Magtheridon’s Lair.  CONSTANTLY.  If I needed to take a break from WoW for a bit for work, school or family, I might as well /gquit.  I saw tons of people take holidays back in Karazhan.  When they saw the work needed to get up to SSC/TK levels, they ended up quitting altogether.  The condensing of difficulty into smaller bite-sized pieces makes the process of "catching up" a lot less daunting, thereby reassuring players that it’s OKAY if life gets in the way at times.

With "gearing up" a breeze, guilds can actually afford the "selectiveness" with which to form their raid team.  Elite raiding guilds in BC ideally had one requirement: gear.  If you had the right gear to enter SSC, you were good to go.  We were all compartmentalized by our gear.  It was as if we all came with little tags on us that said "put me here."  On my server, those with the correct gear were in short supply.  In those situations, you have to disqualify other pre-requisites such as team-oriented, ability to adapt, or the skill to actually play your class.  Few guilds back then (in my experience) rarely looked at your actual personality.  They looked at your contribution to the overall DPS, instead of your contribution to the actual raiding core.  "No amount of gear can upgrade a poor personality," I always like to say.

Now, if a friend, family member or co-worker just hit 80 and you want to bring them along in your 10man ToC team, it doesn’t take too long to get them up to speed.  Vault of Archavon, Onyxia, Heroic Dailies, Triumph Emblems are all viable (and quick) ways to get your selected raider up to speed.  Instead of dealing with geared raiders that don’t listen or cooperate, now you can get people you trust geared quickly to join you.  Thus, you make your team THAT much better than you would’ve been able to back in BC. 

The 10man vs. 25man debate comes into question as well.  I’ve heard the argument that making content accessible to 10mans has made the content too easy, since it’s supposed to be accomplished by less people.  This is true.  10 people would have a hard time clearing content only designed for 25.  Follow my logic:

  • In BC, getting a bonafide 25man raid together was tough. Coordinating 10mans in WotLK is much easier.
  • More guilds get the chance to see, experience and progress the 10man content.
  • 10man content is not drastically different than 25man.\
  • If you need to look for someone to fill in for an absent raider in your 25man, you’ve now got a bigger pool of available people who know the fights.
  • From this bigger pool, you can be more selective (like how I brought it all together?) of who you bring along. 

This transition into WotLK made it that much easier for you to form your raid team, even from your own realm.

And last, but not least, WotLK has made it more interesting for off-raid nights.  The guild I raid with runs 3 nights each week.  We primarily do 25mans but will do 10man content on occasion for hard mode experience.  On the off-nights, we can do other 10man content, "The Daily", even slightly lower content for Conquest Emblems.  Maybe a raider needs that vendor ring to replace his/her ilevel 200 one.  Instead of waiting for the next full raid night, you can be proactive in getting your other raiders up to par.

Overall, I believe WotLK has helped WoW’s raiding base.  Utilizing hard modes and bosses like Algalon, it provides a tough challenge for the hardcore raiders.  For the casuals or the "hardcore casuals" (as I like to call myself), it affords us the experience and ability to sub in or even start our own group of like-minded individuals who pay their $15/month just like everyone else.  Getting ready to raid is no longer an arduous process.  Less time focused on gearing, and more time focused on actual raiding.