Matticus

What’s Happening in WoW

We killed Gorefiend a week or two back. In the next two weeks, I picked up an Amice of Brilliant Light, Angelista’s Sash, Boots of the Divine Light, and a Cowl of Benevolence. Those are big stamina upgrades for me. I rotated out my wings in favour of chain heads on my shoulders. With the exception of the Amice, the boots and cowl have been gemmed and enchanted to provide an additional boost of stamina in the event that extra health is needed in favor of healing. Now I’ve got two sets at my disposal depending on the circumstances.

Picked up Vindicator boots for my Ret. Paladin. This brings up my hit rating to 97. Think that’s a bit much? I’ll have to find someone with the Surefooted enchant to place on them boots. No point in putting on Boar’s Speed or Cat’s Swiftness since I already have the talent speed increase.

What’s Happening with the Blog

I’m working on a new version of my blogroll that I mentioned yesterday. Maybe just some more cosmetic changes and I’ll leave it at that. I’m at a complete loss as to how to even organize the entire thing.

Oh, and I apparently hit the 500 post plateau a few days ago. Here’s to more posts for the rest of the year =)!

Latest Blog Posts

• Check out the latest incarnation of my UI which has a detailed list of all the addons I use
• After a frustrating raid, I devised a hypothesis about players and ventrilo
• Here’s what my all star healing team would be like if I was in charge
• Want to see an example of Warsong exploiting? Look no further
• Players like these need to reexamine why they are playing
• Aylii made an interesting note about how our raid environment is perceived to guests
• Here’s one of the secrets to blogging that I extensively use (note: I don’t actually read Cosmo, just the front cover)
• Upcoming Chamber of Guilds meeting has been announced: How to Turn Down the Suck
• Dealing with Raid Hangover in 3 Easy Steps

5 Barriers of a Raid Healer

My 5 part series for this month looks at the problems that new raid healers may come across.

1. Indecisivity is Bad
2. Dealing With Criticism
3. Recognizing Tunnel Vision
4. Handling Overconfidence

20 Questions by Matticus

The week before, I interviewed the blogging queen herself, TJ. Last week, Kestrel flipped it around and interviewed me.

Past Hits

Past columns I have written that still hold true to this day.

• How to Mentally Calculate Your Stamina
• Liveblogging the Raid
• Raiding is Hardly Hardcore

I’ve been working on this little project of mine for the past few days and I think it’s time for me to display some of it to you guys. At the moment, my blogroll consists of nothing more than a select few blogs that rotate upon refresh. How my new look blogroll will work is that it will examine the feed URL of any blog and pull the last 5 recent headlines to appear on that blog and display them. You might’ve seen something similar from pages like Alltop or popurls. I won’t deny that I was definitely inspired by those two sites. I’m debating setting up something similar purely for WoW. Of course, there’s several obstacles in the way of that (how the heck do I sort these, how do I determine who gets listed and who gets the shaft, etc.)

But for the time being, you can find a working version of it up live on my blog.

I also need a name for it. It’s not really a blog roll, really. Matt’s ‘Marks? Allwow? Hah, right. Any ideas on names would be appreciated.

Oh by the way, those of you with your blogs listed there, let me know if you want me to take it down. I probably should have asked for permission first but if you do have a problem with me posting nothing more than your recent headlines that link to your blog then I will take it down with no questions asked.
Siha made a nice point that sorting by class may not be the right thing to do as there are numerous bloggers who write cross class. I might just give up and not worry about any kind of categories at all and just throw everything up as a mixed bag.

So, thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? Could be executed better? Any coding wizards out there that might be interested? Design enthusiasts?

“I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan

Does this sound familiar to you? You spend some time cutting through progression content. After a couple of extra shots, those bosses are considered farm content. But here’s the kicker and I guarantee you that it’s happened to every guild at one point or another.

One week, you find yourself wiping on a farm boss repeatedly.

Dealing with raid hangover is crucial because if it is not dealt with, the confidence your Guild has in it’s own ability is going to waiver. If it continues, it’s going to lead to Guild members questioning the Guild itself. The worse case scenario would be those same members leaving the Guild altogether.

And no one wants to lose players because of something that could’ve been prevented.

Step 1: Go back to the basics

Some players take shortcuts during the encounter. They do things that they would not have done if it was a progression boss. On Netherspite, for instance, we’d find ourselves wiping after a couple of phase 2’s because of badly timed netherbreaths. They would wreck our raid and we would give up after 2 attempts and move on to Chess and Prince. Keep in mind that this is just an alt Karazhan run supported by a few T6 players. Naturally most of us were upset because this was a boss that we should not have any trouble with in terms of execution. We eventually changed up our play by running to the far side of the room during phase 2 instead of staying in for his breaths because it was clear that we could not handle it for whatever reason.

We fell back to a strategy that we used the first time we learned the fight many months ago. Even though it took longer to kill Netherspite, we still got the job done.

Step 2: Reassurance and motivation

Supportive words can go a long way in a raid that’s pushing the limit. Your raid leader should be emotionally in tune with the raid to be able to detect the frustration they have and the words to say in order to help encourage the raid to keep going. Simple words like:

• We did this once, we can do it again
• Keep your chin up
• Remember all the phat loot that drops off this guy *links random loot*

On the other hand, I tend to rely on other methods of motivation. If you can push the right buttons, you never know what kind of results you get. In my case, I get super annoyed when my healing ability is called into question. But that’s when I curse loudly and shut up the rest of the raid by being clutch. Coaches use this all the time to stir up their team in order to get them going. The same can be said true of raids. But you can only berate a couple of players so far before they get outright annoyed and leave the raid saying that it’s not worth their time to wipe AND get criticized. I suggest using that sparingly and even then only on players you’ve known for a while.

Step 3: Be like Nike and just do it

You know what you have to do on this boss. You’ve gone over your roles a dozen times with other players and leaders. You’ve killed the boss already and you know it’s no fluke. You have the tools to get through the encounter successfully. Whether or not the boss dies in style is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the raid is down to 15 players or 5 players. The perception of a raiding Guild lies in their ability to kill bosses. No one’s going to care that it took three healers, a main tank, and that geared Shadow Priest who doesn’t speak an ounce of English to kill Kael. The only thing other players will remember is the fact that you downed a boss.

So what are you waiting for?