Matticus, Author at World of Matticus

Leaving the Guild the Right Way

January 4, 2011February 14, 2008 by Matticus

So relations have soured and you feel like you want to leave and start fresh. Several days ago, two of my most respected and trusted colleagues left with almost no word or reason why. It was a surprise to many people. One of them had done it before and to be quite honest and open, I had a feeling that person would leave again. The second was a real true surprise because I honestly had no idea.

Before you GQuit, I’m asking you do one really important thing.

Talk to your GM

As much as your feelings may be overtly obvious to you, it isn’t to anyone else. Not every GM is psychic. You cannot expect things to happen if there is no idea nor awareness. It’s unfair to expect your leadership to understand you inside and out. Pick a time and a date and talk to your GM about it.

Let your leadership know of your problem

Let me make clear that I have no problem with anyone leaving the Guild. You’re paying your 15 bucks a month to play this game. It’s your right. The fact is, you and your Guild got this far together. If you have a problem with someone or an issue with a system, let your leaders know. Speak up about it. If you don’t say or mention anything, then nothing will get changed.

It’s like people who complain about the Government and don’t vote. By not voting, you’ve forfeited your right to complain.

A month ago, another colleague of mine left. But he did it the right way. He expressed his misgivings and it was clear that the Guild progression rate was not enough to satisfy him. That’s okay. That can’t really be solved unless by some miracle. There are always going to be people like that in this game where everything isn’t going to be enough. At least he was mature enough to be kind and forward about it.

Don’t lie or deny

If it’s plainly obvious that you’re dissatisfied because you’ve been silently mentioning your problems to other people, then don’t deny it when your GM gets wind of it and asks you up front if everything is okay.

If you have an issue with the way loot is handled, then for cryin’ out loud speak up. I’ve BEEN an officer before. I’m a grunt right now. I like being a grunt because I don’t have to be the poor guy stuck dealing with brushfires week. I can tell you nothing is more frustrating then not knowing what the issue is.

“Avoiding Drama”

I’ve had issues and problems with people and systems before. In the past, I would have quit overnight too to “avoid drama”. Upon further reflection, I realized I was just sugarcoating the answer. I didn’t want to avoid drama. I wanted to avoid confrontation. I didn’t have the guts or the courage to speak up. That’s why I used the drama avoiding excuse to ease my conscience. I’m doing it for the “good of the Guild” right? Can’t they respect the fact that my leaving overnight will save the Guild trouble in the long run? No, they can’t because you left them hanging. You quit without saying why.

Ever since I was an officer in my past Guilds, I realized what a pain in the ass excuse that was. My heart goes out to every GM and officer on the planet who knows what I’m talking about. It’s a tough job to have such unrealistic expectations placed upon your shoulders and that makes this game less fun.

Do it the right way

So you finished speaking to your GM about it and have explored every possible solution. There’s nothing more anyone else can do. Be classy about it at least. You can leave your Guild the same way you entered it: with your pride and dignity intact.

Common and recommended excuses

Looking for a new direction:
The goals of this Guild no longer coincide with my personal goals (IE, not moving fast enough, moving too fast, SEE YA)
Personal problems
I’m having problems working with various aspects of the Guild and I’m no longer able to handle the stress along with school/work (IE, this guys a jackass)
Raid times
I’m losing sleep over raiding and it’s screwing up my schedule so I’m going to leave to find a new Guild that can fit it (IE, can’t raid at midnight anymore)

How you do it is entirely up to you. When I left Angelic Advocates, I posted a long and lengthy explanation on the forums explaining my problem. I left that Guild because I could no longer commit to their raiding times. When I left Aurora, it was right after a raid on a monday before the reset. I went from vent channel to vent channel explaining that I was leaving. I was no longer satisfied with the direction the Guild was going in and I received a contract offer to sign with Carnage (an organization I am still a part of to this day).

In regards to the 2 that left, I’m not angry at them. It’s worse. I’m disappointed at them.

Raiding Horror Stories and the Opportunity it Brings

April 23, 2012February 13, 2008 by Matticus

Cracking a 25 man raid roster is not the easiest thing to do in the world, especially when it’s been set in stone for a while. Every now and then, a slot or two will open up which could allow any other player in the guild to fill it. They just have to be given the opportunity to step into it. Benching a raider is a strong message to deliver and it should only be used sparingly if that player’s performance is not up to par. On the other hand, it allows another person the chance to replace them. But when do you determine who gets to sit and who gets to go? Surely the following will help you shape your opinion.

Stories

Every Guild has their AFK stories. Every Guild has their horror wipe stories. These are all true stories, I guarantee you. They’ve been collected from friends and colleagues of mine as well as my personal experience.

We clearing to Kael and as we enter the room, one of our mages appeared to be quite fidgety. So he starts strafing left and right because the raid leaders is going over trash or something. Before you know it, the mage goes from the raid group to the middle of a kael trash group and promptly dies. Turns out his blink key was bound to his “f” key. I can say with absolute confidence that he no longer has blink bound to a key.

We’re doing Al’ar and it’s phase 1. It’s right after a flame quill and one of our tanks goes rushing up the platform to pick up Al’ar. He grabs him and oversteps the platform and falls off the edge. Goodbye Charlie.

FPS problems are a plague for some players because it drastically affects their ability to perform. During the Pre TBC era, there was a boss called Baron. He’s essentially like Solarian. Every now and then, a person gets a debuff and he explodes taking out people around him within a certain radius. There was this player who raided with about 3 FPS. Now at the time, it’s a 1 in 40 chance of who gets the debuff. Sure enough, he gets chosen. His bomb warning is processed too slow which leads to a slow reaction time which leads to him literally taking out half the raid. Does anyone believe in lightning striking twice? Yup, minutes later he gets debuffed again and blows up another half of the raid. The policy now was that this 1 player gets his OWN position without anyone around him. You can’t make this stuff. You just can’t.

There’s this Gruul’s run. The Guild’s in the ready position. Out of no where, this Paladin darts straight ahead right into Gruul. Over vent you hear cries of “WTF” and “OMG”! And then there was silence. The Paladin sheepishly says “Sorry guys, that was my kid on my lap and he was just smashing the keyboard!”

Players who alt tab back in the game when they hear “Shatter” over vent during Gruul.

There was this Gruul’s run. While the main tank was on High King, one of the Paladins DI’d the main tank! Naturally you can kind of guess what happened.

Opportunity

For the GM’s

There’s going to be players in Guild’s that display similar behavior or rationality like the ones I mentioned above. This is a GREAT time for you to try out that new guy in your Guild. You know, the one that joined a few days ago. He’s shown up on time and ready to go. He expects to get shot down but he waits outside the instance logged off in the event hes needed.

Give them that opportunity.

For the new guy

This is your chance to show of your ability and skills. Don’t squander it. If you’re ever unsure of anything, ask. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Work hard and you’ll get your shot soon enough. Turn over in Guilds can be low but they are by no means non-existent. There’s always a player that has to leave at some point and there are always going to be players to take their spot.

Here’s a brilliant example right here. Ryan Shannon is hockey player with the Canucks. He hasn’t fully transitioned to the big club. He’s usually on the farm team (minor leagues). Whenever there’s an injury on the Canucks or if there’s a hole in the lineup for some reason, players are called up from the farm team to help fill their positions. Sometimes, you just never know what they’re going to do. You just have to pray that they’re going to do their job and do it well.

In this case, Shannon not only does the job well, he looks good doing it. Remember, minor leaguer called up to play in the big leagues.

By the way, I know I can’t be the only raider with some stories to share. I’d love to hear your funniest wipes (or most stupidest). So how about it GMW, Karthis, Phaelia, or Galadria?

Top Comments this Week: DPS CC, Heal Organizer, and Fitness Tips for WoW

August 7, 2012February 12, 2008 by Matticus

Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing a blog. Looking at some of these comments over the past several days reminded me that there’s always someone WAY more brilliant then you are. Why they don’t have a blog of their own, I have no idea. I doubt a good number of you even read comments (or know that they exist) so I’ve decided to share a couple of them with you.

That and I have an exam in a few hours so this is my cop out post of the month >:).

Noplace like Gnome (Best gname of the year, IMO) said in Minimum Requirements for Karazhan:

The reason why folks are talking about ret pallys, or arms warriors, or demon locks, etc. is because they are most interested in PvP or solo-ing than being with a group. Seriously.

A ret pally or arms warrior is not going to touch the DPS numbers of a similiarly geared mage, rogue, or lock. But the second part of DPS is CC. Whenever I’m looking for a group to hit heroics/raid- I look for real healer (holy priest/holy pally/resto druid), a real tank (prot warrior/prot pally/feral druid), and the rest DPS and CC. Notice the ‘and’.

If you are just a DPS, then that slot could be used for someone that does the same damage you do, plus can take a mob out of the picture. As long as there are two CC folks in the group, its great having them. Less than that, they become a liability. The healer has to then heal THREE off tanks, and that usually spells disaster.

I have a holy priest and a afflock. I picked these specs so that I can help out whatever group I’m in. And my play style has always been for whatever is best for the group. I’ll give up my big dam curse (CoA) and suffer the DPS loss- if my Malediction buffed Curse of Elements or Shadow means more DPS overall by debuffing for others. Sometimes that person picking who goes on the raid is looking at what else you bring to the party.

Birkin said in Healers: Simplify Your Tank Targets:

I am the healing leader for our raids and I have been doing something similar for quite some time now. We are just now making the 25 man transition, so I don’t have any SSC/TK experience, but we’ve been farming kara for the past 4 months and have been working our way through ZA.

There are two specific examples that come to mind: Netherspite and Nalorakk. On Netherspite, it is a lot easier to assign healers to “Red Beam” and “Blue Beam” duty, then assign them to heal Tank 1 and Tank 2 (depending on who is tanking) and heal Warlock A and SPriest B (depending on the Blue Beam extra damage soaker). This way, it also promotes raid awareness and your healers are paying attention to what is going on around them. They will need to pay attention to see where these beams spawn and which person is going to be in them. The other example is for the Bear boss in ZA (simpler version). This one isn’t very hard to figure out, but you need some serious heals on Nalorakk and 1 healer per tank won’t cut it. So the solution: Heal the tank with aggro at the time.

Also, if you are the healing leader in your raids, I hope you are using a mod called Heal Organizer. This mod will give you an interface window with all the healing/dispelling/decursing/abolish poisoning/hybrid classes in your raid. You can then assign them healing duties (or dispelling duties) by dragging them and dropping them into many different customizable sections whose headers you can change. You can then click one button to have it broadcast in the channel of your choice (/ra, /rw, /). You can also save your setups for future use. Another handy option is that you can check a box to have it whisper everyone that has an assignment so that you know your healers specifically got it. And to top it all off, anyone can send you a tell with the word “heal” (/t Birkin heal) and it will automatically send them a reply with their assignment. (Although lots of my DPS buddies think it’s funny to spam my chat during Kara by sending me a tell with “heal” and getting “You are not assigned” messages spammed back… over and over… haha) Oh, I almost forgot that for Heal Organizer, to get the interface menu, you have to type a “/” command. (I’m at work now and can’t look it up) Instead of memorizing this and typing it every time you want to change assignments around, it’s much easier to put that “/” command into a macro and throw it on one of your extra bars so it is just a button click away.

Teazone said in 6 Signs You Masturbate Too Much:

If you want a weight free exercise then consider using your own body weight. Simple exercises like push up, or dips(with your chair) is a simple solution working out your arms. Also as push ups become more easy, you can vary the distances of your arms or prop your legs up on the chair for more of your body weight.

Keep in mind that you need to work out your biceps and triceps equally to have better improvements over all. So alternate your push ups and dips during those long flights to tanaris or something.

Simple weights free leg work outs are lunges, great thing about lunges is that it works out just about all of your leg muscles.

And don’t forget about those epix six-packs thats hidden under that layer of fat! Body planks are a easy way of working out your core muscle groups like your abs oblique and back muscles. Body planks are simply getting on your elbows and holding your body up like in a push up position.

Be careful as to not let your body sag as it might injure you.

To work on the side abs simply rotate your body over while still on either one of your elbows.

To work on your back roll over another time so your belly is upward and both elbows are behind you to prop yourself up. This will strengthen that pesky lower back that always aches when you sit and raid for too long.

Always to remember to stretch out before and after any work out to prevent injuries and know your limits! If you do these simple exercises during downtime i guarantee you’ll see improvements in your body after many weeks of raiding.

That last comment’s really good to know. Recently I’ve been having some lower back issues. I’m almost positive it comes from sitting on my ass too long. During the spring and summer months, I’d go out and play some street hockey. Since it’s winter, that isn’t much of an option. And no, I don’t know how to skate.

Actually that’s not accurate. I don’t know how to stop without the assistance of a wall.

Anyways, something of substance will come up later today after the exam, I hope. But I tell you, there’s something to be said for conquering whole galaxies. That’s also been eating up my precious time as well.

Silly SSC Mistakes

February 11, 2008 by Matticus

I’ll have to skip out on my usual digest post this week sadly. It’s exam week and as a result, lower time spent. Don’t expect anything else until Tuesday evening.

This is the kind of stuff that can easily turn a 3 hour run into a 6 hour run. Kudos to the folks at Fallen Heroes for allowing us to borrow their instance (Lurker down). In this really short post for today, I’m going to let you in on some of the stupidest mistakes that top tier raiding guilds can make. You look at these errors and mistakes and it seems so plainly obvious. But when you’re actually in there in the heat of the moment, things can go from bad to oh crap at any given moment. We popped into SSC due to the lack of manpower for Hyjal ops.

Hydross

Wipe 1: Shadow Priest stood on the wrong side of the “line of scrimmage”. He didn’t wait the requisite 3+ seconds for our tank to secure Hydross. Sure enough, Hydross crossed and we pulled 8 elementals. Positioning is oh so very important! Make sure you stand on the side that Hydross is on. At least if you pull, you won’t make 4 new friends!

Tidewalker

Wipe 2: Simple miscommunication here did us in. We were at the 27% mark and our bear tank was going to mosey Tidewalker up from his spot and tuck him into the side between the pillar and the wall. Problem? Healer’s didn’t hear the tank. Yeah the onus was probably on our end to move up with him. By the time we realized what happened, he had already parked himself out of line of sight and took several shots to the face. He did call out that he was moving him in vent. Unfortunately, no one heard him. So if you’re in charge of calling out a particularly relevant and important piece of information, make sure you speak up. If you call it out and don’t so much as get an acknowledgment, yell it louder until you do.

Fathom-Lord

Wipe 3: My fault but my hands were absolutely tied. I think the worse time to get a disconnect in WoW is DURING a pull. What makes this worse is that I’m the only healer on the Hunter tank. You can kind of imagine how that worked out. I noticed too late that we were standing around much to long and vent was far too quiet. This was right after a ready check, as well. It just goes to show that players can fail under the most ordinary and routine of situations.

Leotheras

Wipe 4: Oddly enough, we didn’t even wipe to Leo personally. We wiped to his 3 cronies in front that kept him in place. True it had been about 6 – 8 weeks since we last foray’d into SSC. We also had 3 players that we’re trying to key up to increase utility. Like a bunch of sheep, several of the players stacked up in one area attempting to DPS down Leo’s mobs. What they forgot were the AOE mind blasts that those mobs cast. Every once in a while, players need to be reminded that they are not supermen. Just because you’ve picked up flashy T6 level gear does not mean you can stop doing the simple lessons that kept you alive in the first place. In this case, it was to take down 1 at a time.

Lady Vashj

Wipe 5: We breezed through most of phase 1 and half of phase 2 with no real difficulties. As luck would have it, we hit a crimp in our plans when our Strider kiting Warlock bit the bullet and went down. Our Shadow Priest took a multishot to the face. I also think we lost a mage there at some point. It all took place within a space of 10 seconds. The boss took a note of that and called a wipe immediately so that everyone could run to the stairs. What he erred out on was that our Shadow Priest got the call for a battle res and our warlock chewed down a soul stone to get back up. What was a deficit of 3 players was now of 1 player. We might have had an outside chance for that. I think what happened here was that our Raid Leader made a judgment call far too early without ascertaining what kind of resources were free to get the dead players back in action.

Wipe 6: This one takes the cake for the most stupidest wipe of the night. We forgot to change it from group loot to FFA loot. The first core was only lootable by our MT who is busy trying to stave off the Naga’s coming up those stairs. By the time he got to it, it had already despawned. Repeat that another 2 times and you can see that we were way behind the game on that one and would have been eventually overwhelmed. There are encounters where FFA looting is a requirement. Make sure you check to see if the encounter you are doing is one of them!

How Fast can you Kill Curator?

February 10, 2008 by Matticus

Curator speed

One of the funnest encounters for me in the game is when I get to see big 4-digit numbers scroll up through my screen. As a healer, I hardly ever see that. So it’s definitely a pleasant sight. I posted a cropped version of a kill shot I took of Curator several weeks ago because we killed him in a ridiculously fast amount of time. My personal goal is to see this guy dead before the 2 minute mark. If you’ve ever played Mario Kart, you’ll remember that the game had a function called Time Trial. I wish WoW had something like that. Then maybe we could all get funky titles based on how fast we blitz an encounter.

So how fast can you kill Curator?

Group Makeup

General Tips

Blow cooldowns at the 10 second to evocate mark
Drop fire elementals at the base of Curator
DPS down the sparks until the last one, then let it free. Group should be geared enough to withstand 15 seconds of that free spark.

Oh and you know the cardinal rule of bragging and SS or it didn’t happen. Photoshopping doesn’t count either, you crazy people!