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Interview with Epic Advice

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epic-advice

There’s a new Warcraft side to the community. It’s not really a Wiki. It’s not a directory. It’s not a news site or a blog. It’s nothing like those.

Welcome to Epic Advice! The premise is simple.

You ask questions and you receive answers from other players who might know. It’s entirely peer driven. There isn’t a single “authority” that has all the answers. Everyone pools their knowledge into answering questions. Sometimes it can be much more straightforward than browsing forums or wading through database sites to get a simple answer.

I managed to catch the team behind Epic Advice in a brief email interview to shed further light on their unique project.

So before we get on to talking about Epic Advice, I’m sure the community would love to hear more about you guys. Why don’t you introduce yourselves?

Corey: Introductions always seem so boring.  I’m Corey – I own my own web development company, and do a lot of freelance programming/system administration.

Aaron: My name is Aaron, I work for an international association as their lead web developer developing and managing about 7 websites. I also work with Corey on the side, doing programming and design work.

I’m guessing you guys play WoW as well. What kind of characters do you play and what do you do in game?

Corey: I started playing WoW shortly after the beta, raided molten core with my friends, saw naxx at level 60, wrote the original PallyPower – and find it awesome that they still use my "buff grid", although my code was horrible and the new guy maintains it better. I did it all again towards the end of Burning Crusade. I haven’t been playing during WoTLK, I started my own company and needed all the time I could find. I hope that someday I can make enough money to pay myself to play this game again.   I played many characters, but the best fun I ever had was being a 39 feral tauren druid pvp twink named ‘Cowbellie’. She eventually became quite the DPS cat.

Aaron: Many old school priests probably know me best by my priest, Jesta. I used to write a lot of shadow priest articles, before shadow priests were truly embraced. I am currently one of the GMs of a guild on Lightning’s Blade (US) called Untamed, we’ve cleared everything but Heroic Anub’arak, which were hoping to get this weekend! I also was the author of "VampWatch", which was a popular shadowpriest mod used to track how much mana restoration you were causing (back before Replenishment existed). Currently I am raiding on a DK named Jadra in my guild.

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What exactly is Epic Advice about? It’s slipped under the radar for a while. When did it launch even?

Corey: You cheated – thats two questions.  🙂

Epic Advice is about World of Warcraft.  It is a Question and Answer site, a knowledge exchange as it seems to have been dubbed.  We hope to provide the community with a place to help ask and answer questions about World of Warcraft, from the early leveling process, to the cutting edge raiding instances.

It launched about 24 hours before you found us- It seems you’ve scooped everyone on this one.  It hasn’t really been under the radar for long.  We had been talking about the concept of doing a ‘Stack Overflow’ for WoW, have been playing with the idea of writing our own software to handle it.  An opportunity occurred when Stack Exchange hit its beta.  We could launch the site using their engine to see if it was something that the players even want us to work on.

Aaron: Yeah we launched on the night of the 6th, sorta told a few friends who told more friends, and um, this is where we are now. EpicAdvice’s goal is to try to create a centralized location to find answers about the game itself, and hopefully organize it so you can find what you need. The rest of it, corey seems to have summed up perfectly.

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Who came up with the idea and how did the team get formed?

Corey: I can’t remember which of us mentioned it first, but I remember being instantly in love with the idea.  I’d also like to say that the team has not fully formed yet.  We will need more moderators, and hope to find a few good ones during this beta phase.

Aaron: I’ve known Corey for a long time, we’ve been friends for like, 8 years? Over the past year and a half or so, we’ve been doing work together and just advancing ourselves as programmers. We have a lot of pow-wows brainstorming web-application ideas and this happened to be one of them. I have a passion for WoW, just like I have a passion for programming, and this was the perfect project to get involved with to play off both sides of what I enjoy doing.

Where did the inspiration behind the site come from?

Corey: The amount of time we spend on Stack Overflow basically started the concept rolling.

Aaron: Couldn’t of said it better. Also the fact that the WoW forums are so unorganized and hard to find information in, which is the same problem that plagues a lot of programming forums. Since the release of StackOverflow, its been a lot easier to find programming related material. So, we took that concept and decided it would be an amazing fit for WoW.

The WoW forums generally aren’t known to be the best place to go to for help or advice without some guy coming along with a smartass remark. How do you plan to control trolls and the like?

Corey: Well, the cop-out answer is "we don’t".  The idea behind the site is that the community will reward the positive, and punish the negative on its own.  This site isn’t really for me to control, it is for the community to control.  I just want to lay down a few basic rules and let the community decide from there.  You build up reputation by providing good questions, or good answers.  Hopefully the trolls and flames will get ignored or downvoted, while the informative and well-thought gain good reputation.  We are not here to flame, we are here to answer and ask questions.

Aaron: He’s nailed it on the head, its up to the community to "down-vote" those trolls, which will cause them to lose reputation, and in-turn, lose privileges they may have on the site. It self-polices itself pretty well, and we will look hard at the system rules we have in place to see if we could tweak it more to fight the trolls. But for the time being, I think the community will police itself just fine.

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What the current plans for the site? What kind of features can we look forward to in the future?

Corey: Right now – We are in a very early concept beta.  We aren’t sure we are going to stick to the current engine behind the site – there are a few features we want to add that may not be possible within the Stack Exchange system, but we want to start asking/answering questions now to build up a good user base and community.

As far as what kind of features we plan on implementing.  Thats where we want some of your input.   There is already a question on epic advice about just that.  Perhaps you should sign in and post an answer.  We can also be reached via e-mail: team@epicadvice.com

Aaron: We also have some amazing ideas written up in our todo list for new features to implement, its just a matter of time before we can get to them. We both have real jobs, this is just a hobby right now more or less. We want to make it as easy as possible to talk, show, link and organize answers as possible. A rough "item linking" system is already in place (thanks WoWhead!), but we’d also like for people to be able to link characters from the armory, spell ranks, tag a question with a specific "patch version" and so forth.

There are a ton of ideas we have floating around and we will take the best approach possible to try to implement them.

Bonus stuff with Corey:

Favourite drink: Coffee (mountain dew a close second)

Favourite movie: Too many to mention.

If you had a million dollars, the first thing you would do is: Laugh

If you weren’t doing your current job, you would be a: WoW Player

Top 3 sites you frequent the most for fun:

1: Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/users/91914/gnarf – its my crossword puzzle collection)
2: XKCD
3: this space intentionally left blank

Your personal hero is: Underdog

Warcraft is like: Crack?

Any shoutouts? They know who they are.

Thanks for your time guys!

So if you have any burning questions or the desire to help, head over to Epic Advice! You may wish to check out the FAQ before doing anything.

Be a Healer by Nature

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matrix_dojo

This is a guest post by Thespius, a raiding Priest

As I stated in my last post here, the first incarnation of Thespius was a Human Warlock. Raided SSC/TK and was usually top of the DPS meters. I did whatever I could to crank out the biggest numbers; I was a victim of constant competition. Usually, I couldn’t Soul Shatter fast enough to keep from pulling aggro. "But that’s what taunts are for, right?" (Since my days as a healer, I’ve learned to loathe that excuse.)

I liked DPSing, but I wanted a change. In the raiding guild I was in, we had what was called the "Holy Trinity" of our guild. Three priests. They knew their stuff, and they were GOOD. As Matticus has illustrated on this site before, they used what he calls Heads Up Healing to predict what was going to happen and when. I wanted to be able to play my character as well as them. I daydreamed of raid leaders calling my name, saying I was essential to any raid (still working on that part).

I took it upon myself to start a priest. I wanted to dive into the realm of healing. It seemed like since they were the ones directly responsible to a full health bar, they had to be the ones most in tune. Euripidus (now the second "Thespius") was born.
Once I actually started healing dungeons in Outlands, I realized how much fun being the healer was. Always easy to get a group (even if sometimes it was "Epic FAIL"), and it always seemed more of my style to help out the group in that capacity. I enabled the tank to keep taking the hits, and saved the DPS should something go wrong. That’s a cool responsibility.

Even though I was having a blast firing off Flash Heals, Shields and Prayer of Mendings, I appreciated when I wasn’t in a mad panic to keep everyone up the whole time. I do love the momentary bursts of crisis, however–finishing off a pull or fight with my hands shaking and my breath panting. I specifically remember my first time downing the Halls of Stone event and collapsing on my desk. Most of the group was at about 20% when we finished it. I was undergeared and still learning. Having an entire raid or dungeon that tense? No thanks. The less there is to heal, the better off everyone does.

While I was experiencing the perils of being a new healer, I realized something. I was playing my alts better. I was more aware, more responsive. I used more abilities and spells that I never used before. Since I had known the panic and frustrations of being a healer, I played each of my alts as though I was trying to make the group’s experience as painless as possible. Let me lay out a couple examples.

DPS

Problem: "Ganking Aggro" – What is the standard response to this? Especially in a PUG, I hear a lot of "Well, the tank should get more aggro faster." Or, "It’s not my fault you can’t keep up with my awesome DPS." /facepalm

Solution: Having the ability to throw up huge numbers is awesome. The difference between an amazing player and a horrible one is knowing when to use it. Congrats, you can push your buttons in the right order. Now, here’s your challenge: see if you can time it correctly, and on the correct target.

From the Healer’s eyes: In most circumstances, there are multiple mobs involved. If you pull one of them off, then I have to divert my attention from the tank to keep you alive. Therefore, the tank’s not getting heals. That’s the simple version. If the tank dies, we all die. And you just lost your spot in any of my future raids/groups.

Problem: DPS Meters – These are the bane of my existence. I once fell victim to them, and it wasn’t pretty. Yes, they’re awesome bragging rights. However, if you’re standing in a fire so you can get that one last cast in, or holding your ground in a whirlwind, then you’re just not being smart.

Solution: There’s a reason it’s called avoidable damage. If it’s a fire, a whirlwind, a blizzard, it’s your responsibility to move. It is not the healer’s responsibility to "heal you through it".

From the Healer’s eyes: Same reasoning as above. If we have to divert our attention to someone like that, the heals aren’t going where they’re needed the most.

Tanks

Problem: Tunnel vision – I’ve seen this not only caused by laziness, but also by tanks that try to up their own DPS on the boss as well. If you have high DPS as a by-product, then great. If you’re losing aggro on other adds, then it’s a problem.

Solution: Make sure you’re totally aware of what’s going on around you. The tanks primary job is to keep all the mobs’ attention on him/her.

From a Healer’s eyes: If an add gets loose due to healing aggro, I have to go into self-healing mode, which means heals are not on you.

Problem: The "wanna-be" Tank – This basically equates to any tank that doesn’t do everything they can to soften the blow.

Solution: Make sure your gear has the necessary caps needed. The necessary defense cap (if applicable); the right gear in general. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a healer to heal you in nearly all resilience gear. Make sure you’re using shouts/roars/etc to keep the mobs attack speed slow and their strength/AP low. If you have minor cooldowns (e.g., a warrior’s Shield Block), use it often. Save your big cooldowns for when needed, however.

From a Healer’s eyes: If you’ve ever healed a tank that’s not defense capped, or isn’t using the necessary skills available, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re healing in constant panic mode, which isn’t fun. If you use your mitigation abilities when you can, it means I have mana to use my abilities when you need it most.

As a continuation of the "Team Sport" idea, keep in mind who else is involved when you’re raiding. Always be on the lookout for opportunities that can hugely benefit the raid based on your contribution. Have a DoT or debuff to throw on the boss that will make it easier for the rogues to kick a spell-cast? Maybe a debuff that will decrease the damage output from the boss. Even if you have to lower your personal dps an inch, in order to up the whole raid’s dps a mile, you just made everyone’s life a little bit easier. Remember, it’s a team sport.

3 Proper Steps to Switching Mains

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Throughout my tenure as GM, I’ve had to address a variety of challenging situations. One of the questions that GMs will undoubtedly face in their reign is the topic of switching mains.

Allow me to provide a scenario.

BarryManaLow is an Arcane Mage. He’s one of the main staples in the DPS lineup. Barry routinely comes in consistently as top 5. For his efforts, the council of Elrandom rewards him with the items necessary to contribute.

And then it happens.

Tragedy strikes.

Barry needs to take a 3 week leave of absence. Let’s say he’s got some real life issues and it’s the time of year where school exams are going to strike and he needs to focus and get it out of the way. He’s also getting slightly bored with the game and wants to recharge a little.

The boss signs off on it and brings a call up from the lower ranks to substitute in for good ol’ Barry. MissilesMcGee does an admirable job. He’s not quite top 5, but he’s coming in at a respectable top 10 placement.

Fast forward 3 weeks and Barry returns from leave. He discloses that he wants to switch mains. He’s not satisfied or happy playing on his mage. Barry has an alt Death Knight that he’d like to raid with instead.

Now it’s perfectly normal for any GM to be annoyed at this point. After all, you’ve spent time gearing the player up only to find that gear is going to go to waste and isn’t going to be contributing anymore.

So before you flip out and completely lose your cool, stop for a moment and breathe.

Step 1: Determine if there is a need

Is there a current need in the guild that needs to be fulfilled? Are you missing a tank or a melee DPS? Maybe you’re low on a healers. At this time, Conquest was lacking a solid third tank. We knew we would need one heading into the recent patch and we were doing what we could to find potential players to come in. Not many players responded because they didn’t meet our tanking requirements or just couldn’t fit our raiding schedule.

Barry provided an alternative as a Death Knight tank. He already knew the fights and our procedures. That solved that question. Chemistry wouldn’t be an issue since he knew how the guild operated. We wouldn’t have to worry about his in game smarts. This would bring up two more concerns.

Step 2: Can she hold her own?

Does the player demonstrate that they know what the heck they’re doing? If I were to switch from healing to tanking, I’d fail pretty hard at it because I wouldn’t know what the heck to do. When dealing with main switches, find out if the player has done the job before. An agreement was made where Barry had to work his way through a few lower level raids to prove his ability to tank.

You can think of it as a modified trial run. After all, Barry was re-applying to the guild with a new character after all.

Step 3: Is their gear on par with the content we’re doing?

Bite back the urge to say gear doesn’t matter.

Because when you’re a tank, it does. A Naxx level tank is going to have a tough time working on Trial of the Grand Crusader. I stipulated to Barry that if he wanted to get into our raids, he’d have to work on gear himself which meant pugging what raids he could and crafting any other pieces necessary. Emblems of Conquest allowed him to purchase items he didn’t win from pickup groups. The condition was that Barry had to bring his own character up to an acceptable raiding standard before we’d insert him into our primary lineup.

And he did. He got into as many heroics as he could to farm badges. He transferred money to purchase mats to craft tanking items and augments.

After about 3 weeks of solid gear acquisition, Barry was ready to rock. We gradually threw him in our 10 mans and kept a close eye on him before bumping him up to the 25s. He’s just about ready to tackle Trial of the Grand Crusader.

Final thoughts

There’s nothing inherently wrong with main switching. Players do get bored from time to time or maybe they undergo the grass-is-greener complex. View this as an opportunity for them contribute in a different capacity. To raiders, there’s nothing wrong with switching mains as long as long as you keep these 3 things in mind:

  • See if the guild has a need: If they don’t, you’re going to have to leave and go elsewhere. If the guild has 9 healers to select from, it’s not likely you’re going to see any action as a healer. There’s simply too many. You’re better off playing a role that a guild is lacking. The leadership will be much more receptive.
  • Prove your skills: Show that you know how to play the class and role. Prove that you’ve done your research. Take the time to be familiar with how your role might be different in certain fights. DPSing Freya is certainly different than tanking Freya.
  • Get your own gear: Different guilds handle this differently. But under my watch, if you’re going to switch mains, you better be willing to get your own gear. The guild might contribute a few BoEs or enchants for a discounted price or something, but it’s up to the individual to put in the effort. Show your willingness and passion for the class. It also proves you know what you’re doing. What kind of message does it send if Barry the Death Knight did nothing but pick up gear with shield block on it?

Tier 10 Healing Bonuses

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The new Tier 10 bonuses are available for preview. Note that none of them are finalized yet but these are some serious bonuses. Check them out:

Druids

  • 2 piece: The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
  • 4 piece: Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

    • Paladin

  • 2 piece: The cooldown on your Divine Favor talent is reduced by 60 sec.
  • 4 piece: Your Holy Shock spell causes the next Holy Light you cast within 10 sec to have 0.3 sec reduced cast time.

    • Priest

  • 2 piece: After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
  • 4 piece: Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

    • Shaman

  • 2 piece: Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast.
  • 4 piece: Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.

    • If I were to rank these bonuses, I would have to say the 2 piece for Druids is a clear winner. Wild Growth without the reduction in healing strength as a constant bonus? That’s a strong bonus. The 4 piece translates to 1 in every 50 Rejuvenations will switch to a new target with a full duration a chance for Rejuv to jump per tick application.

    For Paladins, I’m really liking the 4 piece myself. Holy Light’s going to see some even heavier use. But that 2 piece basically means a 1 minute cooldown on Divine Favor. That’s pretty darn sick.

    The Priest 2 piece seems okay at first glance. It’s going to take Pain Suppression talents and the Guardian Spirit glyph to make it truly stand out. Remember how long their cooldowns are. I have to give the edge to Guardian Spirit especially if you have the glyph. The 4 piece one looks really good to me no matter what spec you are. I don’t think we’re going back to the days of the Circle of Healing spamming Holy Priest or anything.

    And as for Shamans, they seem to consistently rank high on the tier bonuses. Riptide giving haste? Chain Heal crits doing even more healing?

    How are you liking the upcoming tier 10 bonuses?

    Officers: Who Watches the Watchmen?

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    watchmen

    “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

    I realize not many readers understand Latin. It basically translates to “Who guards the guards themselves?”.

    During one of my earlier years in university, we studied up a bit on Plato’s The Republic (ethics and government stuff). Who protects the people against the protectors? Plato responds by saying they have to guard themselves against themselves. Ideally your officers are going to be just individuals who won’t become greedy or evil.

    Your officers

    In a majority of cases, your officers are simply normal people who have invested their time (and perhaps money) to handle guild tech or infrastructure. They’re busy tackling things that no one wants to deal with like personnel, scheduling, and what raid operations to carry out. Policy has to be continually updated. Loot has to be awarded and DKP systems have to be managed.

    To be frank, the officers are the overseers of the guild and possess the power along with the responsibility.

    The level headed ones have no desire to go all political. They’re leaders of a loose organization of gamers, not the mafia. There’s no backroom deals going on. With luck, there is no maneuvering or behind-the-scenes backstabbing.

    Red alert!

    Now something has happened. Maybe one of your leaders committed some kind of grievous offense. You, Joe raider, happen to take exception. You don’t agree with whatever they did. Maybe they completely screwed over a pug in loot. Or they might have completely dished it out to a raider one day who was undeserving. The reasons could number beyond infinity.

    In any case, whatever the reason, you’re upset enough to the point where you want to do something about it.

    Your options

    Now here’s a list of things you can do and what might possibly happen if you go down these roads.

    • Do nothing. It’s the easiest choice. Keep it to yourself. Don’t say anything. You don’t want to rock the boat. This is something I’ve observed most players doing because they perceive there is too much at risk by doing anything else.
    • Speak to your GM. Have a chat with the boss and see what she says. Perhaps they don’t realize it’s an issue and maybe they can talk to the officer and try to resolve what happened.
    • Speak to the officer in question. Directly confront the officer in question and let them know what they did wasn’t cool. I don’t advise doing this publically. Do it privately in whispers. When I was just a grunt, I preferred taking the direct route and telling officers personally that I thought they did something wrong. It has a stronger effect then you might think.
    • Change your reaction. This option isn’t quite the same as the first. This involves a complete philosophy change on your end. Is their offense that serious? Does it really matter that much? What if you changed your reaction to the point where you could tolerate it and ignore it? The guild my alt is in has a raid leader who randomly calls people morons. I get called it myself once in a while because I can be a touch slow getting out of fires periodically. I don’t take it personally because I simply don’t care enough (It’s my alt’s guild for one).
    • Leave the guild. It’s fairly self explanatory. Be prepared to leave the guild. If you cannot accept what the guild is doing or if speaking to the GM and the officer prove to be futile, then the last option you have is to change your environment entirely. Not every guild is suited for every personality.