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Raiding Epiphany

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You know that time when you’re working on a new boss and it just seems like you keep hitting that same block over and over? For us, it was Blackfuse. We’ve been working on the guy for the past month now. We kept bringing him down to about 65% but we’d keep consistently buckling during that first magnet phase. It was a combination of fires, mines, overload, or something else that was seemingly unavoidable.

Then all of a sudden, the clouds part.

Sunlight shines right through.

The players are struck with a wave of epiphany.

Our attempts improve dramatically. We made it past the the first magnet phase, then the second magnet phase, and now we’re breaching below 50% more often than not.

It’s like being able to breathe again after having clogged sinuses for so long.

That’s kind of where we’re at now. I call it cautious optimism, but if this level of improvement continues, then we’ll be on track.

Retooling and rebuilding

Not long after the proposed schedule went out, I had a few members express their inability to commit to that schedule. As a result of that, I did end up losing some fine players and friends.

It’s a little funny how things work out though. I was approached by a previous raider who’d been out of the game for a while and with a different group. Turns out the players in there were looking to move on up and get into some of the more top tier content in the game. Instead of trying to transition from a 10 man to a 25 man guild, they were toying with the idea of flat out signing on with a 25 man guild.

The beauty of the current state of raiding is that players can easily cross-realm on any difficulty. For the past month, we’ve been raiding with many of these players and they didn’t have to change servers at all yet. A few of them made the leap earlier on because they liked what they were seeing. Some others are still holding off for now, but it seems an amicable solution for everyone.

Conquest veterans can be rested a little more on the earlier encounters to conserve energy and mental fortitude for some of the more challenging bosses like Thok and Blackfuse.

Newer players are embracing the challenge and accessibility of heroic raids. Many of them actually fit right in with no problem. Of course, a few of them are understandably upset since they used to be the top dog in their former organization but are now being completely out DPS’d by sheer differences in gear alone. But that’s obviously an easy problem to resolve.

Our raid has received a notable shot of adrenaline, at least!

A post-Blizzcon release

How about that cinematic, eh?

Along with the November 13, 2014 release date?

That’s quite some time away! I was really hoping for an earlier release but it wasn’t meant to be, I guess. Blizzard’s stated time and time again that they’re committed to providing a more timelier expansion release.

What are your thoughts on the 2.5 week leveling period? Raids don’t open until week 1 of December. In previous expansions, raids opened up exactly a week after. I understand their rationale for Warlords in that they didn’t want to release the game during Remembrance Day (November 11th) and then there’s the American Thanksgiving holiday the week after. In theory, I could relax my levelling speed a bit.

But c’mon, my pride is on the line here.

I was beaten to the level cap in the guild for the first time in Mists when I had been the sole title owner from Burning Crusade, to Wrath, and to Cataclysm.

By a non-Asian, no less!

Need to regain my title here!

For more thoughts on the levelling process and the release date, check out the recent episode of The Edge!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iByQHQBT8VE

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Win a Beta Key from BlizzPro!

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdxIFiYGB0A

BlizzPro has five beta keys to give away and we want to hand ‘em out to you! I’ll mention how to get them in a moment.

I know I don’t often plug the show here as much (shame on me). I’m going to attempt to make a concerted effort to do so. We’re steadily aiming to ramp up our content. More co-hosts have been added for a more panel discussion type of production. On the beta, I did get a chance to test most of the bosses that were up. There’s more happening later on today and I’ll try to get in on those as well. If you watch this week’s episode, you can see my efforts as a Holy Priest against Oregorger.

Quiet Matt! How can I get a key?

Easy! I’ll quote it from the post: The Edge: Win a Warlords of Draenor Beta Key!

On August 3rd, we will send a tweet out from The Edge account with #BlizzPro and all you need to do is simply retweet that message and follow @edge_blizzprotv, @Veliice, @ktjnwow, @GitErRaid and @matticus for your chance to win! We plan to announce the winners on Thursday, August 14 and Friday, August 15.

Good luck!

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Hearthstone: Post Naxx Warlock Zoo Deck

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Everyone enjoying the new Naxxramas adventure mode? Managed to breeze through the normal and class challenges fairly quickly. I’ll admit I was fairly stumped by the heroic bosses for a bit until I reconstructed my ranked decks from the ground up and made the connection that I wasn’t playing against live players.

To out gimmick a deck, you must create gimmicks of your own. I’ll provide a list later of decks I used against the heroic bosses later.

For now, I wanted to illustrate an evolution of the popular Warlock zoo deck with new Naxxramas cards. Lists similar to this have started cropping up throughout ranked play.

Post-Naxx Zoo by matticus
Class: Warlock

Warlock (8)

Neutral (22)

The main changes from the traditional Warlock zoo deck is the removal of Scarlet Defenders and Shieldbearers along with the addition of Nerubian Egg and Haunted Creeper. There isn’t as much of a worry about overextending because if the Eggs or Creeper go down, they’ll turn into additional minions on the board.

The overall strategy here is to make smart trades and establish board supremacy.

Your Nerubian Egg can be activated over a number of different ways. Abusive Sergeant, Dire Wolf Alpha, Shattered Sun Cleric, Dark Iron Dwarf, and Defender of Argus can allow you to trade your egg into an opponent’s early minion to get an early 4/4.

Should be fairly self-explanatory what to do with aforementioned 4/4.

Mulligan any expensive cards like Doomguards, Dark Iron Dwarf, and Defender of Argus out of your hand. You want cheap minions as quick as possible. Always keep your opponent’s health total in the back of your mind and weigh it against trading against their board.

So far so good! Managed to shoot myself up from rank 7 up to rank 5.

Good luck!

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Is It Time to Level Up the Guild?

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Serious time.

I should mention that everything you’re about to read is something I’ve been thinking about. I haven’t committed to any course of action yet. But it’s all been weighing deeply on my mind.

There’s a couple of things I’m mulling over right now with regards to the direction that my guild should be going come Warlords. I’ve been wrestling with the guild’s identity for weeks now going back and forth over what I want. By many standards, the guild could be considered solid, stable, and successful. Other than that short hiccup during Throne of Thunder and the past few months with regards to attendance, I’d consider it a job well done.

But I’m at the stage now where my ambition is slowly starting to take over. I had a conversation with my raid leader about our expectations. He believes we can clear out first tier Heroic level content within the first few weeks and challenge for Mythic within the same month. I had to admit, I’m a little more reserved in that judgment. I’m not sure if the current culture or schedule would allow that. Some of our players actually want to make a run at server first. A quick glance at our realm progress shows that we have a guild that’s at least US top 70 or something.

I could be content with where we’re at. We’ve floated around Top 500-600 for the past two expansions. During Wrath when 25 man guilds reigned supreme, we were hanging out at the Top 1000 mark. I earnestly think that with some of the players here, if sufficiently pushed and “encouraged”, we could maybe move up to the top 200 or 300 mark. Top 100’s a little out of our reach. Another goal would be to at least to contest faction firsts.

So I asked myself the following question:

“In order to challenge for faction first or Top 200 US rankings, what must be true?”

Simple answer:

  • More hours spent
  • More efficient use of time
  • Stronger caliber players
  • Raid composition flexibility

Rearranging the Schedule

What was it Allen Iverson once said? Something about practice? I’d love to be able to get to the point where we completely clear out content within a day or two. It’s odd that in order to spend less time raiding later, it’s common to invest more hours raiding and frontload the learning near the start of a tier. The fact is, we need to spend more time practicing pulls and trying new strategies. Granted, we could be more efficient in how we spend our time to begin with. I’m always looking for ways to cut corners. I’m looking to add anywhere from 1.5 hours to an additional 3 hours a week. That would mean an extra 30 minutes per day to an hour per day.

Seeing as we raid from 6-9 Pacific, I can add an hour in front or add an hour later. If I add the extra hour in front, it means many of our west coast players won’t be able to make it due to the time. An extra hour later would wreck the schedules of our east coast players because they’d be settling down and attempting to sleep at 1 AM Eastern. No matter which direction I go, I’m going to lose a segment of our players either due to scheduling or a difference in focus and personal objectives.

But if parting ways needs to happen to further guild goals, I’m prepared to do it.

Secondly, I’d want to go hard during the start of the week. Instead of raiding Tuesday, Thursday, and Monday, I’d drop the Monday and move it to Wednesday. That gives 3 consecutive days of raiding allowing raid strategies and repetition sink in. Practice makes perfect, after all!

Revisiting the Alt Policy

During certain progression nights, we were hampered because we were missing certain class compositions. As a result, we ended up shifting back to normal mode and clearing out the rest of the night. I don’t for a second believe that having 3 extra Paladins during Thok all those months ago would have resulted in us killing him then. But I do think it would have allowed us to get more practice and grow comfortable quicker.

For the longest time, we’ve had a strict no-alt policy unless it was under exceptional circumstances. I’ve started reconsidering this. A good player is a good player no matter what class they’re on as long as they put in the effort to learn it and gear it. Many players spend their off times pugging raids on their alts.

It would be too much to ask to make having raid worthy alts a requirement. But I’d definitely encourage those interested to do it.

There would be strict conditions to this, however.

  • Profiency: The alt must be able to perform at a level that’s satisfactory performance to other raiders who main the class.
  • Gear: No blues or greens. They need to be raid geared and ready to go. It’s up to the player to find ways to do it. Between crafted gear, raid finder, and other drops, it should be easy to pull it off.

One player brought up a good question.

“Would I be punished for not having an alt? What’s in it for me?”

I had to think about that one for a second. I suppose the gain would be a more flexible raid allowing the group to work it’s way around various obstacles. There’s always some flavor of the month or certain classes that are better than others before nerfs or new content drops. Another tangential benefit? I have a suspicion players wouldn’t be bored as much raiding on the same character doing the same content. I believe raid content becomes a lot more interesting on a variety of characters just due to being in a different role or perspective. Raid burnout often kicks in if players have been working on the same thing for months on end with seemingly zero to little signs of progress. Do it fast enough, and it won’t be a problem.

Warlords has given us an excellent opportunity to manage all of this. Mythic and heroic will no longer share lockouts. Early tier will be spent working hard through heroic content. An optional raid night on the weekend focused on normal (or flex) can provide a boost to the players who want to do it. The fact that it’ll be cross-realmable means I can pickup other players on other servers to help serve the needs of the group composition for that night. It won’t be a requirement, but there’s players like myself who actually want to raid more. When it gets to the point that normal raids no longer serve our purpose, we can shift normal clears to that night instead. Hopefully, by that time, we’ll be well into the mythic rotation.

This is all new to me. I’ve stayed the same course during my tenure as GM. Never really changed my values or my goals. I’ve never made a venture down a road like this before. Definite about-face for sure.

Remember that scene from the original Matrix?

The one where Neo’s in the car and Trinity and Morpheus are with him and speeding down the road? Morpheus offers Neo the red pill or the blue pill. He can get out and Trinity reminds him that it’s the same street with the same buildings and the same people. He’s been down that path before. He knows what’s waiting at the end. That’s kind of what going through my mind at the moment. Either this works and I manage to find that fulfillment I’m looking for, or it’ll ruin me. It’ll be a gamble.

Let’s ante up!

I haven’t written to “you” readers in a long time. Not really sure what I’m looking for.

Warnings?

Affirmation?

Disagreements?

Validation?

I just had to get my thoughts out somewhere on print so I can review it. If things get written down, it becomes a little more real. Everything in my head tends to just stay that way – An idea. My raid leader’s going to be in for a surprise when he’s back.

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Thok: Turning Panic into Reflex

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We killed Thok.

Damn, that was a rough encounter. I had a feeling this week was going to be a good week. We set a guild record for day 1 kills by clearing from Immerseus to (and including) Malkorok on day 1. Fast forward to day 2, and Spoils ended up being Spoils that took a little longer than I expected due to some confusion on cooldown usage. In the end, we managed to get it down just after the first hour of the night.

And now, the Thok Block.

We haven’t squared off against an actual progression encounter with an appropriate group composition in months. In fact, our last progression kill on Spoils was mid-February! The past three months was spent recruiting, re-gearing, and re-training players. Even then, we had a few players from Open Raid in the group who had came in for us on Tuesday to help us out last night. This was arguably one of the strongest rosters we fielded in a long time. I’ll admit, it did pain me that I was unable to get everyone from the guild to participate on the attempts and the kill. It sucks when you have to rely on people outside in order to get the job done but for composition reasons, it had to happen. We ended up having to field 7 healers on this one (4 Priests, 1 Resto Druid, 2 Resto Shaman).

Something my raid likes to do when it gets to a completely new boss is panic. This is doubly true when you’re staring down a really large dinosaur. As the leader, my job is to try to settle them down and remind them to get back to their routes. Stop overthinking things. Simply react. In this case, I recognized that the troublesome part was the kite path. We’ve reviewed it several times during learning attempts. Despite that, my players were still losing their cool. Sometimes the dinosaur went the wrong way. Sometimes they’d panic and run one direction before doing a 180 and dashing down in the other. Deep down inside, I was freaking out too.

The best way to battle nervousness is simply more training and discipline.

We kept telling our players two things:

  1. Visualize your route.
  2. Think of your escape plan in case a rabid dinosaur or yeti comes charging down the middle.

No one wants to be the guy that completely derails a solid attempt. I wanted to turn kiting into a reflex. I wanted to “program” their reactions. For example, if Thok targets me second, I would run to the rear corner where the fire guy is. If Thok targets me fourth, I take the portal all the way down the hallway. I had to keep drilling it in attempt after attempt until it was firmly locked in their minds.

The actual cooldown planning stages took much longer. But we were spoiled due to the number of Priests and other available cooldowns. We were able to stretch the stacks to 24 before transitioning out to the kite phases. Our raid leader called the individual stack numbers, the rest of the team hit their cooldowns which corresponded to their assigned stack number. I need to look into an addon for this instead of a spreadsheet.

Our first attempt we took him above 50%. Second, below 50%. Third, below 20%. Fourth was at 4%. Last one resulted in the kill.

Siegecrafter Blackfuse is next. Anyone have any pointers? The hunters appear to be reluctant to do the whole disengage on to platforms thing.

We’re looking for healers to help us finish out Siege and going into Warlords of Draenor. Check us out!

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