Sydera

Raiding and the Bench

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bench
Deciding who raids and who sits out on any given night is the second-most unpleasant task any raid leader or organizer has to face. (The most unpleasant, of course, will always be loot distribution). From a player’s perspective, it really sucks to ride the pine pony when you had been expecting to raid. However, maintaining a healthy bench is necessary for both raiders and guild masters alike–your bench players are the people you count on to get you through the bad times. As we all must know by now, in any human enterprise you cannot expect to succeed if your plans hinge on achieving a best case scenario every time. There will be ups and downs in any competitive activity, and the game plan has to account for that.

The Bench and Sports

I know I personally have bad memories of sitting bench from high school sports. During my sophomore year of high school, I was allowed to play on both the junior varsity and varsity volleyball squads. This meant that I got two sets of ill-fitting, 1970s-era uniforms, double the practice time, and, guess what? Almost no playing time on the varsity team. Whenever I hear the word “bench” now, I shudder, remembering that experience. However, high school athletes sit the bench faithfully, hoping that someday, somehow, next year, their turn will come. As for volleyball, mine never did–I didn’t even try out the next year. That’s always a risk with the bench. You may never move up.

Raiding with a Bench

In theory, high-end raiding guilds are run by grownups, and sitting bench doesn’t have to be the humiliating experience that many of us remember from high school. We can all share and share alike, right? Wrong. Perhaps because of our high school traumas, many raiders feel territorial about their raid spots, and people may not always volunteer to sit when too many players log on to raid. What you have to do, in the WoW context, is overcome the idea that only inferior players sit bench. That’s not true. Players sit bench for many reasons–class balance, space, attendance, etc. It’s usually not just a question of who’s better, as it almost always is in high school. How can a GM or raid leader manage this situation? The following tips should help a guild master or raid leader keep the bench under control without bruising too many feelings.

1. Have Thoughtful Recruiting Goals

The first line of defense against bench trouble is a thoughtful recruiting plan. You do have to recruit more than 25 players for a 25-person raiding team. A good goal is approximately 15% more, or 4 extra raiders. These 29 players should all have equal ranking and equal access to raid spots. In a guild with typical attendance (75%), most raids will be exclusively composed of these 29 people, and only rarely will any of them have to sit bench. Make sure that sitting bench is part of your guild culture. Your raiders should expect that their number will come up once in a while. If you have far too many raiders at present, I have a piece of advice that doesn’t seem particularly proactive–just wait. Don’t gkick a bunch of your players or tell them there isn’t room. In the virtual world, balance changes in the blink of an eye, and there are always people leaving raiding, or the game as a whole. Any time you’re not recruiting, your guild is shrinking, and you can can just wait until the numbers come into balance.

2. Institute a Substitute Rank

Typical raider attendance, which I ballparked at 75%, can drop much lower in hard times. We’re in a difficult spot right now in WoW, with the Wrath content feeling stale to many high-end raiders and Ulduar still many weeks away. If your guild hasn’t had any roster shakeups in the last few weeks, you’re highly atypical. In order to get through the bad times, you may want to institute a substitute rank in your guild. In Conquest, Subs are players who are well-qualified to raid all content but typically joined at a time when we weren’t recruiting their class for permanent spots. Some Subs simply have more time constraints than our raiding policy allows for–often one or two raids per week is just fine for them, and they remain very happy at this rank. Many Subs joined Conquest for social reasons, but some became members of the guild hoping for an opportunity to move into the Raider rank. This has happened for very many of our Subs over the last few weeks as people’s interests have taken them in different directions. I am always happy to see a dedicated Sub get promoted. Of course, sometimes a Sub will move on to a different guild that has a permanent spot for them–to me, that’s great too, because it means that the player is closer to meeting their in-game goals.
If your guild uses a Substitute rank, it offers you a sort of pre-recruiting option. You will be able to promote from within when vacancies occur. After all, you never know when one of your players will disappear without a word. In the anonymous virtual world, this happens all too often. Thus, it’s in your best interest as GM to keep a list of subs and keep them happy. How to do this? Invite them on farm raids, 10-mans, Vault of Archavon, etc–whatever your guild’s more laid-back events happen to be, and give them a prize for their efforts. Most Subs will get loot naturally as many drops from farm content will go uncontested.

3. Have an Attendance Policy

My experience with attendance policies, both as a professor and as a raider, is that people tend to ignore them. They’re only usually enforced in the limit cases. I may have a policy on my books that says I lower a student’s grade after 3 absences, but I’m not likely to actually do it until they have 7 or 8. Despite this tendency, you need to put some kind of attendance policy on your books. It is true that it is not practical to demote someone who has 72% attendance when your policy says they need 75%. Yet, attendance figures should factor into some of the tough decisions that you might make as a leader. For example, if you need to bench one of your 29 raiders for an Obsidian Sanctum 3 drakes raid, and your choice comes down to two dps players, one with 70% attendance and one with 90%, let 90% guy have the spot. If your guild uses loot council, let attendance factor into the decision-making process. If you do enforce your attendance policy in any way, you ought to track it via your guild’s website so that people can see how they stand relative to each other. Matticus recently found a great way to do this for Conquest through EQDKP plus. As a raider, it’s a good reality check. I can see that I have 83% attendance, which is actually lower than I thought I had. I had forgotten that I took time off at Christmas. These sorts of selective blindness can have raiders thinking that decisions are unfair or arbitrary. It’s always good to see the actual numbers.

4. Keep Your Members Educated

The degree of success your guild has with the bench problem will depend almost entirely on how you communicate the matter to your raiders. Make sure that players know how attendance will be assessed and what will be expected of them. If you have a raider rank, get those players used to the idea of sitting out once in a while. In Conquest, those decisions are made based on the advantages/disadvantages of certain classes and specs in specific encounters. However, we try not to bench the same person too often. Sitting the bench is a responsibility everyone–even officers–should share. Another good policy is to ask for volunteers, especially if it’s a farm raid and class balance isn’t so crucial. Sometimes there’s a player who really just wants to go to bed. If so, be sure to thank them when you move a player into their spot. To me, a thanks from the raid leader or guild leader means a lot.

Conclusions

As the GM or raid leader, you can never entirely eliminate the bench problem. You can never recruit the exact perfect number for all situations, and you can never enforce any attendance policy so strictly that you will never fall short of filling a raid. I think it’s far better to have too many than too few show up to raid. If you’d like to keep your raiders healthy and happy, on bench and off, make sure to have clear policies that you enforce fairly. Make sure that many different players share the bench burden. When people see this happening, for the most part they will accept an occasional sideline, knowing that it won’t happen to them every raid, every time.

Girls Hate Chuck Norris: On Women and Raiding Guilds

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hearts

This article, including the title, is inspired by some of the comments on yesterday’s post from Matticus about gauging the success of raiding guilds. I thought that the issue of women and raiding, which appears on the original checklist, deserved its own post. However, I am quite aware that every time a blogger makes a post about gender and raiding, he or she gets excoriated in the comments. Gender issues–and more particularly, women’s experience in WoW–has a tendency to cause temperatures to rise. On the one hand, some commenters protest that there’s no gender-influenced experience in the game. Men and women play exactly the same way, and after all, women are just men with boobs. Still others complain about the bad behavior of women players, claiming that they’re princesses, bitches, or femmes fatales who love to take advantage of gullible men. Another group, mostly women posters, laments the poor treatment they’ve received in the past. I do realize what the comments for this post will look like, but I’m going to give you my take on the gender issue anyway. After all, I didn’t start blogging because I don’t like to speak my mind!

First off, I’ll tell you my overall stance on the issue. I would like to forward the radical notion that women raiders are people. By this, I mean that they are multi-faceted, flawed, and idiosyncratic, just like male raiders. However, women and men are not the same, neither in the game nor in life. We are each influenced by our culture, and how culture treats each of us has a lot to do with gender.

However, I also think that WoW is unique in that it lets us perform–or not perform–our biological sex as we like. I do, by the way, subscribe to Judith Butler’s notion that gender, in general, is performative. By this I mean that what men are, and what women are, is a collection of behaviors that individuals may or may not subscribe to. It is possible, if difficult, in society to “perform” a gender that does not conform to one’s biological sex. In WoW, it is incredibly easy to do so–after all, how many men play women characters? This doesn’t make them weird–they are just taking advantage of one of the fun and imaginative aspects of gameplay. Women occasionally roll male toons as well. I know I personally used to borrow Briolante at level 60 because I liked tanking more than healing and was too lazy to level a warrior of my own. All this is to say that virtual environments like WoW allow us to have a more abstracted approach to gender performance. We can perform differently though our avatars, through guild chat, and through vent–and all of this adds up to some really interesting situations.

At some point, I think I’ll do a whole post on men who play women characters, but for today, I’m really interested in whether women ACT like stereotypical women in the game, and how they go about doing so.

In order to really explore this question, I’d like to look at some of the most common generalizations about women in WoW and share how I respond to each of these issues. I’m not trying to be representative of all women here–as always, I only represent myself. Take from it what you will.

Stereotype #1 Women Are Bad Players

I have put this stereotype at the top of my list because to me, it’s the least true of all. This idea comes from a cultural bias. It’s true enough that video games aren’t often considered toys for little girls, and many women raiders (including me) probably grew up watching our brothers play video games. But you know what? I can sure as hell play WoW now. The #1 thing that gets my goat in terms of stereotypes about girl gamers is the idea that I can’t play my toon because I have boobs. Maybe they get in the way? I’ll assure you, it’s not a problem for me or any of the other girl raiders I know. Estrogen doesn’t cause my addons to fail, and it sure doesn’t entice me to turn with the keyboard. The truth is that there are good and bad players of both genders. Women might be slightly more noticed when they lack skill because that’s what people expect. There’s a natural human bias toward finding examples that correspond to one’s expectations. That doesn’t mean that the old hackneyed ideas are correct–far from it.

Stereotype #2 Women Get Offended Easily

I’ve followed up the least true stereotype with the one that is most true, especially in the context of WoW. Women’s experience of the world is a little different from men’s. A lot of us face gender-related challenges at home or in the workplace. I know I’ve been treated differently all my life–by parents, college, work, relationships–than my brother, and we’re really similar in ability, personality, and upbringing. I can’t generalize what kinds of behaviors bother all women, but I will share the things that do and do not annoy me in-game.

1. Epeen
Some people think women are offended by in-game boasting, but I don’t mind. I’m not sure if I’m typical or not for a woman raider, but I do think that I’m not a participant in the all-boys-big-epeen-club. I don’t mind it, though. When the boys are jockeying for position on the meters, or for the main tank spot, I think that’s funny, maybe even charming. It’s good to have something to strive for.

2. Foul language
I’m not bothered by foul language. Most of those 4-letter words don’t offend me at all, because they refer to things that are universal. For example, anyone can be an asshole, regardless of gender, religion, social class, or race. Therefore, it’s ok by me to see that word–and a host of others that Matt wouldn’t let me write on the blog–in guild or raid chat.

3. Discriminatory or harrassing language
On the other hand, I am extremely upset by racial or religious slurs, and also by “rape” comments directed at female bosses. I don’t like anti-gay language at all either. I think for me, the language question is all about whether it’s hurtful to somebody specific. However, I’m not offended by this type of language because I’m a woman. It’s my life experiences–my job, my friends, my politics–that make me think the way I do about discrimination. It has nothing to do with gender.

4. Being treated like a sex object
I almost never have to deal with this problem. I am never flirtatious in guild chat or whispers, and it annoys me when women behave that way. I’d rather not have my raiding–or instancing, or whatever–be about sex in any way shape or form. But the few times someone–always someone I don’t know–has made a lewd comment to me have really pissed me off. Mild flirting is ok, and I can see how it could certainly enhance a single woman’s experience of the game, but I make it pretty clear to my guildmates that I’m taken.

Stereotype #3: Women are troublemakers

I will amend this one to people are troublemakers. I’ve seen men whine over meaningless things, and I’ve seen women do it to. I’ve seen both genders start dumb arguments over nothing, and I’ve witnessed both genders do their part to break up guilds. WoW players have a tendency to QQ, whether on the official forums or in guild chat. It has very little to do with any certain demographic.

Stereotype #4 Women hate each other

We’ve all seen those tv shows where catty women waggle their fingers and scream at each other without apparent cause. I think that women raiders tend to get along quite a bit better than that–or at least, we’re polite on the surface. I don’t know quite what it is, but competition style does seem to me to be influenced by gender. The men post damage meters, and the women make snide remarks to each other about other women. I’ve met and played alongside women who consider WoW a boys’ club with room for exactly one girl. That’s not me. I feel a lot of solidarity for other women players and I am much more likely to promote and encourage them than criticize them. I don’t get jealous or competitive with other women–I want them to keep playing, more than anything else, so I don’t have to break into the All Boys Treehouse–No Girls Allowed.

Stereotype #5 Women want free stuff

I see this one pretty often, and it really puzzles me. I consider men and women equal. I expect to pay full price for everything I get or buy. I don’t want preference on loot, and I don’t want free money. Now, if you want to give me some greens because I’m leveling enchanting and giving free enchants to guildies on the way up, awesome! I’ll take them with thanks. But if you send me a gift because I’m a woman? I’m sending that crap right back. I have to think that most of the stories of women getting free loot/gold are the virtual equivalent of urban legends. Sure, somewhere there was a basis in truth, but it’s not a widespread occurrence.

Stereotype #6 Women love cute things

Hearts. Puppies. Rainbows. Flowers. Hugs. Lolcats. Yes, I adore these things. And it’s not just me! In my former guild, Eieldin, a female hunter, had a very enviable collection of non-combat pets–before everyone was collecting them. Jesmin, also of my former guild, told even more cat stories than I do. However, I am of the opinion that deep down, everyone loves cute. The object of our adoration may vary, but everyone has a soft spot. What was the one thing that convinced me that Kimbo, Conquest’s raid leader, had to be a nice guy underneath the gruff exterior? He owns a cat. In terms of the game, I play for aesthetics during my casual time. I dress up my bank alts in pretty dresses, and I get a lot of haircuts on my lowbie characters, but you know what? All of that goes out the window when I’m raiding. I put away my little dragons and kitties, shift into Rotten Broccoli form, and get down to business. During downtime, though, I’ll be asking Kimbo about the latest thing his cat did. Kimbo’s cat is awesome.

Conclusions

One of the things I appreciate about Conquest is that, rude and crude as some of the boys are, I’m not treated like a sex object or a giant bitch. In fact, I’m neither. I am myself, full of quirks and foibles. I can do my job a well as anyone else can. The great thing about WoW, and gaming in general, is that men and women have equal potential. Performance in the game doesn’t come down to upper body strength, and all of us can learn how to play our characters at a very high level if we want to put in effort and time. It saddens me that some people have preconceived notions about women gamers, especially when the game world does such a nice job of leveling the playing field. Our virtual representations, our avatars, erase differences–they blur out class, race, religion, creed, and even gender. Heck, the slang and leetspeak so commonly seen in WoW even erase differences in education. You never know who’s behind the computer, and I like it that way. Here’s hoping that the potential for equality someday becomes a reality, if not in WoW, in the next generation of MMOs.

A Druid’s Response to the Upcoming Change in Mana Regeneration

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tree

It has been a hard week to be a druid, dear friends. Not only did restoration druids miss out on any significant buffs in the most recently announced draft of class changes, but we’ve also been faced with an upcoming nerf to mana regeneration that stands to affect us more than any other class. As such, druid bloggers have taken notice; both Phaelia and Keeva have their own takes on the 3.1 changes. In this article I am going to take a look at the specifics of the changes to mana regeneration and speculate on possible ways to play around them. In case you missed the big blue letters, I’ll quote the substance of the change to mana regeneration below:

Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.

Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.

We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.

These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

So, What Does All This Mean?

For those of you who may be puzzled by Blizzard’s language, I will sum up by saying that our mana regeration, which is admittedly too high at the moment, is going to be reduced by a number of combinatory factors, including both an across-the-board nerf to Spirit and tweaks to individual spells and abilities. This is the worst kind of nerf to receive, because it will be pretty difficult to tell how each of these points affects the others without extensive testing. Here’s hoping that enough people get on the PTR to avoid major bug fixes or crippled classes. I know that I’m planning to do some PTR raiding myself to test this out. Some posters on the WoW forums and on PlusHeal are predicting that nothing will change for them, or that they won’t “feel” the changes–that’s wishful thinking, or keeping one’s head in the sand. We’re going to notice. In terms of magnitude, my guess is that this one outpaces even the great nerf to Lifebloom in patch 3.0. And we’re going to notice out of combat. Questing as a healer is about to become very, very expensive as we’ll have to sit to drink much more than formerly. As many forum posters suggested, they’re going to need to put in some bigger, faster waters.

Why So Severe?

Bornakk’s post offers some justification for the changes. He says, “When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.” I am sympathetic to this point. I see druids stacking Spirit over Mp5, because it’s been widely believed throughout Wrath that Mp5 is too expensive a stat in terms of item budget. I’ll also note that there’s comparatively little of it available, at least compared to the ubiquitous Spirit. More and more healers are stacking Intellect as well. There’s every reason to believe that this practice will continue, and in fact become more common. I’ve also seen many raiders glyphing Healing Touch, preferring a very fast, but not very efficient spell over the slower Nourish, which when supported by 4pc T7 becomes our most efficient tank heal. And guess what? They’ve been beating me on the meters. Evaluating spells by HPM has become a practice for theorycrafters and not players. So yes, I agree that some changes are in order. I just don’t like the direction they’ve taken.

Why Should Druids Worry?

More so even than priests, the healing druid’s fate is tied to that of Spirit. I remember when the initial changes to Spirit were put in place for 2.3. Before that time, one resto druid in each raiding guild would stack Spirit in order to sit in the tank group and give a passive buff to tanks. Like all other buff-givers in BC (ahem, shadow priests), a Spirit-stacking druid traded some of her individual power for the buff. A Spirit-stacker had to sacrifice healing throughput (+heal) and efficiency (Mp5) as a tradeoff for a high amount of Spirit. It’s hard to tell without testing it out myself on the PTR, which I certainly intend to do, but my guess is that we’re about to return to pre-2.3 regen values for Spirit–or else come very close to that number. Druids have a number of abilities and talents that depend on Spirit, most notably Innervate, Living Spirit, and Improved Tree of Life. I would also argue that Intensity is greatly dependent on Spirit. As a consequence, druid gear weights Spirit very heavily. Up until now, it has been projected that at high levels of gear, a player should strive to keep their Spirit to Intellect ratio at 1.1 to 1. This has been very easy for resto druids–in fact, we’ve risked having too much Spirit–just through picking up our tier pieces and emblem items. It is not going to be easy for us to de-emphasize Spirit. We’re going to get stuck with a certain amount of it.

If Spirit is Junk, What Can We Do?

At a certain point, we are limited by the gear available to us. Because one of our cherished techniques–rolling HoTs and then pausing to regen–is about to go the way of the dodo, we’re not going to have a lot that we can actively do during a fight to counter the nerf. The overall advice is going to be “heal less.” There’s no two ways around it–we’re not going to be able to maintain current levels of throughput or coverage in the raid. I can already run myself out of mana, and I’m usually doing so to try to be competitive on the meters. I have a good sense of how long inside the FSR spam casting can last, and even with my current mana regen, it’s only a very few minutes, possibly 6-8, but not 10. In terms of technique, we are going to be swapping glyphed Healing Touch for Nourish. We are also going to be keeping to tighter healing assignments. As S13 put it last night, “Tank healers will stay on tanks and just that.” Sniping heals will no longer be common practice, as we won’t be able to afford it. As for Innervate, which isn’t on the list for a buff and stands to be very greatly affected by the change, I’m expecting that it will still do at least a little something for us–half a mana bar maybe, as it might if you were now in greens with little to no spirit. We’ll probably be glyphing it and using it on ourselves only.

Gear and Gems

In terms of gearing and gemming, we can actually mitigate how much this nerf will hurt us. Despite the laments of many healers, Replenishment seems to be here to stay. The most persuasive argument I’ve seen for preferring this new regen mechanic to the traditional Spirit-based regen is its predictability. It’s admittedly much tidier than giving all dps casters their own native regen mechanics like healers have. To take advantage of Replenishment, we need Intellect and Intellect alone. I don’t expect healers to suddenly be able to roll on gear earmarked for DPS casters, so we will have to be creative to get around our gearing. I expect that, like Innervate, the Spirit World Glass and the Majestic Dragon Figurine will continue to have some use for regen, but the best trinkets in the new order will become, respectively, Je’Tze’s Bell and the Darkmoon Card: Greatness, Intellect version. Malygos’s heretofore lackluster Living Ice Crystals will also be worth equipping. We’ll also be putting yellow intellect gems in our gear where possible. The smartest thing to do would be to buy them now, when they might be selling low, and replace our Spirit and Spellpower gems later. As for a meta gem, we have two choices: Insightful Earthsiege Diamond and Ember Skyflare Diamond. I think the former will be more useful, but it really depends on the levels of Intellect a player is able to attain. As far as enchants go, in some cases we’re stuck with Spirit. There’s not an Intellect or Spellpower option for everything. However, I fully expect to use the Spellpower weapon enchant and Tuskarr’s Vitality for extra speed on my boots. If Spirit is giving a poor return, let’s make the tree go faster. That’s always good for hard content anyway.

Are There Good Effects to the Nerf?

I can think of one consequence of the nerf that will, in the end, favor healers. I know it seems that healing–and healing difficulty–is being made the balance point of encounters in 3.1. However, I am going to forward the radical idea that the difficulty that raiding healers currently experience will not change at all. Over time, guilds tend to take less and less healers to the same encounters. Our sphere of responsibility gets larger as the guild gets “better.” Encounters go faster with more dps, and guilds typically sit out more dps than healers on progression content. These dps want in for the farm content, and the overall load on the healers in the raid becomes greater. In fact, even in an era of enrage timers, one of the best ways to guarantee an easier time at a new encounter is to take one healer more than the most hardcore strategies suggest. I can feel the difference between 5 healer Naxx and 7 healer Naxx, both of which Conquest has done based on the players who happened to show up. I’m predicting that Ulduar is going to feel like the 5-healer Naxx–except that there will be 7-8 healers sharing this load. This change will allow a few new healers to get raid spots. Of course, the shaman (predictably) comes out looking the rosiest after the nerfs–and yes, I’m a little jealous. I’m sure that resto shamans will have many opportunities to join top-notch raiding outfits. Many guilds of all types will be looking to add a new healer to their rosters, and guilds like ours, who are actually carrying extra healers, will be able to dip into their bench. Each one of us can only do so much. We will continue, as now, to do our utmost, and no more can be asked at that point. I expect the standard number of healers for Ulduar encounters to vary between 7 and 9, as it did for most guilds in Black Temple. If Dual Specs come in, there may even be some 10 healer encounters in the future.

A Word of Encouragement

Dear friends, we have all faced the nerf bat before this moment. This current danger to our mana regeneration is in truth no greater evil than the changes to Lifebloom, which we all suffered and survived, though our tanks have taken more spike damage ever since. Some day, we will look back and remember this mana regeneration nerf, as even now we look back on the nerf to Lifebloom. Let us continue on, then, healing faithfully in raids as we always have before.

Best in Slot for Resto Druid

by

pinwheel1

Note:This article is now out-of-date. It does not take into account new items from 3.1 or the 3.1 changes to mana regen or Restoration druid abilities. (edited 3/8/09)

I see the question of what items are actually best-in-slot for one class or another come up time and again on forums and blogs alike. These lists can come in pretty handy. Of course, at the current difficulty of content, you don’t really need your best-in-slot, but without something to strive for, where would we be?

I have worked to keep this list mostly leather, but where there’s a cloth contender I’ve tried to mention it as well. My criteria of judgment are purely the relative stats of the item. The item level serves me as a guide, but is never a consideration in its own right.

Head

Valorous Dreamwalker Headpiece, from Kel’Thuzad 25

This helm, featuring both Spirit and Mp5, is most certainly the best piece in our tier set–it’s a shame, though, that there are other good headpieces as well.

Hood of Rationality, from Malygos 25

If your loot rules allow you to pick up some cloth, here’s a piece to consider.

Headpiece of Reconciliation, from Sartharion 25, 2 Drakes

This should be our best-in-slot, but right now it isn’t. It’s a level 226 item, but the stats don’t match expectations. It could be corrected in the future, but I’m not holding my breath.

Neck

Necklace of the Glittering Chamber, from Malygos 10

Shoulder

Spaulders of Catatonia, from Malygos 25

These shoulders have the best stats, but be careful. If Nourish is in your rotation at all, you will want to keep your 4 pc bonus. If not, have at it with the non-set pieces.

Valorous Dreamwalker Spaulders, from Loatheb 25

This item is well-balanced and very useful for filling out the set bonus. However, it’s clearly inferior to the Spaulders of Catatonia.

Cloak

Cape of the Unworthy Wizard, from Kel’Thuzad 25

There’s no argument here. This cloak is far out ahead of its competitors, a must-have if you can get it.

Chest

Valorous Dreamwalker Robe, from 4 Horsemen 25

I’m a big advocate of wearing leather while I can, and this item is quite good. I also like my set bonuses, even though I don’t get much out of the boost to Nourish.

Blanketing Robes of Snow, from Malygos 25

If your guild gets enough of these to outfit the priests, by all means, add this to your set.

Bracers

Unsullied Cuffs, from Sartharion 2D

These may be cloth, but they are my runaway favorite, much better than our leather options.

Bands of the Great Tree, From Emblems of Valor

These bracers are probably the best in leather, but they are not significantly different from the more easily accessible Swarm Bindings, from Anub’Rekan 25. I wouldn’t spend the emblems for them myself.

Hands

Valorous Dreamwalker Handguards, Sartharion 25

There’s no contest here. This is a nice, balanced item that will help you get your bonuses.

Waist

Unravelling Strands of Sanity, from Malygos 25

I was very lucky to pick up this little beauty on our second Malygos kill. There’s no doubt about it–this belt is by far the best.

Legs

Valorous Dreamwalker Leggings, from Thaddius 25

Once again, the tier piece isn’t strictly ideal in terms of stats, but that has more to do with it being introductory gear than with it being the “wrong” piece to wear. I use these quite happily.

Leggings of Mortal Arrogance from Kel’Thuzad 25.

I like the stat allocation pretty well on these leggings. They’re better for priests than druids, though, and you should by all means let your clothies–maybe even dps–have them first.

Feet

Rainey’s Chewed Boots

Get these boots with your Emblems of Valor and never worry about it again. They are the runaway winner in this category.

Fingers

Lost Jewel, Naxx 25 shared loot

The Spirit makes this item a good bet. I’m personally going for Spirit on both rings, but your budget may vary.

Band of Channeled Magic, Emblems of Valor

This item gets points for spirit and accessibility. A must-have.

Arguably, the real best in slot is the Loop of the Kirin Tor, but I’m never going to have 8,000g for a marginal upgrade.

Trinkets

Je’Tze’s Bell, BoE world drop

I love everything about this item except its price. I saw one last night on Ner’zhul that had bid up to 5,000. I don’t have that much total gold across all my toons. Here’s hoping I get lucky with a trash drop.

Forethought Talisman, Naxx 25 shared loot.

This one packs a huge spellpower punch, and the proc, while lackluster, will give me an extra 3,000 or so effective heals per fight.

As for other trinkets–the Spirit-World Glass is something I really want to pick up for myself just in case changes are made to mana regen. I like the idea of the Illustration of the Dragon Soul and the Majestic Dragon Figurine, though there’s probably a bit of a learning curve to keeping the effect up as much as possible.

Weapon

Torch of Holy Fire, Kel’Thuzad 25

This one is a no-brainer, but good luck getting it. This is a very hot ticket item in almost every guild.

Off Hand

Matriarch’s Spawn, Maexxna.

Idol

Idol of Lush Moss, Emblems of Valor

There’s no real choice here. Lifebloom may be nerfed, but we still need it.

Set Bonuses

Make sure that you get your 2 pc T7.5 set bonus. You will continue to depend on your Lifebloom, particularly if you ever heal tanks. 4 pc T7 gives enough of a bonus to Nourish to make it your most efficient heal on a target who already has all your other hots, i.e., a tank. However, the 4 pc isn’t strictly necessary. You have plenty of mana regen for this level, and a less efficient Nourish won’t hurt at all. Efficiency will only be in play in a harder dungeon (Ulduar) or if the mana regen formula should be changed. If it’s only a factor in Ulduar, you probably won’t hang onto 4pc T7 for long anyway–you’ll be replacing it with T8.

Final Note: Introductory Gear

Remember, no matter how good your T7 gear is, we’re still in the first tier of Wrath content. If you look over the Resto druid items, there are many items with “wasted” stats like crit and haste. Don’t pull your leaves out over it. At this point, there are no real best in slots. Je’Tze’s Bell comes the closest, but even that may be replaced in Ulduar. I’m hoping that when we do start getting some T8 upgrades, the stats actually come closer to ideal.

On 1337n355

by

ordered_statues

The following is a guest post by Briolante, one of Conquest’s main tanks, also sometimes known as Mr. Sydera. Brio is normally a man (ahem, night elf) of few words, but here he waxes poetic on what it means to be leet. We’ve all wondered this, right, as we struggle to define what makes a good player both for ourselves and for our guilds. Enjoy!

Montaigne’s meditation on glory states: “there is the name and the thing.” The same could be said about leetness, which is what passes for glory in the World of Warcraft. We all know the name. We all sometimes sprinkle the word in our conversations and boasting. We may even think we know what the thing is that our words refer to. However, we’re usually wrong. After a ridiculous night of stupid trash mishaps in Naxx, I heard that word thrown about in a context that puzzled me, and I began to wonder what it really means to be an elite player.

Leet or sloppy?

Any raiding team has had off nights, nights where the focus, drive, and attention to detail just aren’t there. Sometimes we even intentionally (gasp) horse around to have a little fun when the content is as stale as the current raid content has become for many of us. The other night in Naxx, we had all manner of bedlam happening around us. Tanks weren’t paying attention to patrols and pulling extra mobs, DPS was opening up AOE before the tanks had even arrived at the scene, and on and on. And guess which green-haired night elf was up there helping cause the problems? Yeah, that was me. Who was left to sort out this mess? The healers, of course, who were usually able to keep enough of us up to get through the pull. It was after pulls like this that some of us bandied about the world leet. But, is this really leet? No, it’s sloppy, it’s lol-1337. But sometimes players fall into the trap of thinking they’re so good that being able to survive the biggest SNAFU confirms the group’s collective leetness.

Early in the Wrath leveling process, I pugged a Nexus run with a group made up of four other players from a guild whose name I have since forgotten. When the priest and druid couldn’t figure out who was going to heal, I started to worry. When two of them decided they were going to jump off the platforms and die below for shits and giggles, I knew it was going to be a long evening. Over the course of our 2.5 hours together (yes I stayed), each one of them committed suicide at least 4 separate times. When we were actually fighting mobs, they died constantly because they weren’t paying attention. Most of the boss kills were lol-kills with one or no players left alive at the end. Any of my guildies who were on that night will remember how pissed off I was in guild chat. I’m usually pretty Zen in my virtual life, but those two just made me lose it. But do you know what? The members of this other guild I was playing with were proud that they could always pull it out, no matter how sloppy. They even described this as their guild ethos. This style of play, in their mind, confirmed their leetness. I could not disagree more.

Leetness is a state of mind

What might the thing called leetness be then? In my mind, the best example of leetness would be the old ZA bear run. Depending on your gear level, earning a bear required near perfect execution and play. Each player had to know every pull and what his/her role in those pulls was. Of course, as we got better, people could make mistakes and we could adjust. But in the early days, it really required minimal mishaps. Is that leetness? I can say that for me, nothing was more pleasurable from a raid leading perspective than those bear runs. When everyone comes together, experiences the synergy, and executes an encounter well, it feels good and everyone knows it.

I might say then that leetness is a state of mind and a precision of execution. In raiding anyway, this is not something that just one person can have, because the whole team has to be there mentally. Conquest’s recent three-drake kill is proof that we have the potential for that state of mind and that precision of execution. But have we suddenly become “leet”?

The importance of execution

One of my biggest disappointments in my former guild from a raid management and leadership perspective was that we only managed to get Illidan down once before the pre-Wrath nerf. The intial kill wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but he was definitely defeated. In the few weeks after that kill, we were never able to get it down again. We got close, but never quite hit that same focus and precision again. It was as if we had accomplished something once and that was enough. People just didn’t care anymore. I asked myself, had we really proved our leetness once and for all by defeating Illidan?

The answer to both of those questions, I would argue, is no. Execution is important at every stage of the game, on progression and farm content alike. Leetness is not something that can be earned definitively. It’s not something that can be possessed, like the many titles that now commodify it for all to see. Leetness is something that we demonstrate, each time we raid. It’s a state of mind and play that we arrive at together, maybe not all the time, but most of the time. It’s our intention, our goal.

Leetness and teamwork

So Brio, you might ask, I top the dps/healing/threat charts. My dps is world ranked! Am I not leet? My answer would be no. From a raiding perspective, leetness is not something that just one person can earn. Raiding is about team play, period. While worrying about topping the meters or beating someone else in your class can sometimes force you to improve yourself, taken to extremes it becomes a hollow form of narcissism. Yes, you topped the meter, but did you get out of the fire? Or, on the contrary, did you overtax the healers who needed to be focusing on the tank? Yes, you topped the healing meter, but did you do your job and do it to the best of your ability? Did you try to “cover” for other people in order to eke out more effective heals? Yes, you did 3000 tps, but did you properly manage your buffs/debuffs in order to make yourself as easy to heal as possible?

As I see it, excellence in raiding difficult content cannot be about egos and winning personal performance meters. You have to do your job first and foremost. On three-drake Sarth, some players didn’t get the message until we obsessively repeated that a player’s first priority is to get out of the void zones. The second priority is to not get hit by the fire walls. The third priority is to dps/heal/etc. As one of the officers in my former guild liked to say, the dead don’t dps.

Raiding is about synergy and teamwork. Difficult content demands it. Difficult content cannot be completed without it. When the desire is there, when the focus is there, when the precise execution is there, when everyone does his/her job, the kill is, quite simply, beautiful. A well-executed kill is breathtaking to watch and experience. This is why sometimes the leet kill isn’t necessarily the first one, but rather the one where the kill looks effortless, like simplicity itself. We’ve all felt this, whether in 5-man dungeons or in 25-man hard mode raids. When Conquest finally downed Sarth 3D after many wipes, we found this state of mind and executed the fight almost flawlessly. Does that mean we’re now leet?

No. Leetness is not something you earn once and for all. It’s something that you work for, every raid, week in, and week out. It starts with desire and then requires the trust that the rest of your team is there to do the same thing.

Can we be leet in the current content?

Naxx is ridiculously easy. You don’t need to mark, you don’t need to CC, and yes, you can slop your way through there, survive, and still get it all done in under three hours. But that’s not leet, that’s lol-1337. Running in with an immediate seed, blade flurry, arcane explosion, hurricane, whirlwind, or whatever and pulling everything on yourself and the healers is not leet, it’s lol-1337. Pulling 18 mobs at once, allowing 10 players to die, and still managing to kill them all is not leet, it’s lol-1337 (and yes, that one was my fault–sorry).

Playing sloppy can be fun, loose, relaxed. Sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered after some really hard work on a difficult encounter. Even I can’t help myself from laughing when a hunter misdirects the next pull onto the resto shammy. But make no mistake, that’s not leet, that’s Leroy Jenkins.

Leetness is focus, precision, synergy, teamwork, execution, and above all else, control. It’s an individual and collective intention, something that we arrive at together with varying degrees of frequency. Due to the easiness of the current content, we’ve forgotten what some of those things are. Let me ask a scandalous question – do our dps players even have their crowd control abilities on the main bars anymore? This is symptomatic of the problem. But if all blue indications hold true, Ulduar will be a different story. Thank heavens, because I was getting frustrated with just how forgiving many of these encounters are, including the trash. I raid for the challenge and for the beauty that results when a team of players meets that challenge with precision. Does that turn the beautiful, effortless kill into a work of art? Maybe, but perhaps that should be the subject for another post.

To return to the matter at hand, dear readers, after this long rant, do you still think you’re so leet? Then show your guild mates how truly leet you are by executing every fight like you mean it.