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Matt’s Notebook: Notes from the Frontline

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Now that we’re officially entering summer, all eyes are on the upcoming raid. Over in Death Jesters, we spent part of our raid night diving into PTR testing and previewing boss mechanics for the new tier. If you missed it, check out the full preview post here.

  • Last Call had a heartbreaking 1.3% wipe on Gallywix last night due to a missed interrupt (on a VIP, no less). I’ll take full ownership of that one. Originally, I was assigned to interrupt the edge add and it was working fine. But we decided to try having a Warlock pet handle it instead to align with our range DPS ad assignments. In hindsight, that swap was unnecessary. I’m floating left side anyway and saving Ascendance for that group. Should’ve just kept things simple.
  • I’ve been wrestling with whether I’m micromanaging too much or not giving players the freedom to make their own judgment calls. We tend to thrive on heavily scripted fights (Sprocketmonger comes to mind), but really stumble when a boss demands individual decision-making and fast adaptation (like Stix, or now Gallywix). Watching players get knocked out of soaks or misstep simple mechanics is rough. It’s not just performance disappointment, but it’s realizing that not everyone has years of CE raiding reps under their belt, and this might be their first time at this level.
  • Honestly, I might be more frustrated with myself than anything else. Am I communicating the plan clearly enough? Am I making the strategic vision obvious to the team? Smart players don’t always need to be told what to do every second, but they do need to understand why. If we get that right, they can often figure out the how on their own. Right now, it takes us about 20 pulls to bake a mechanic in. I’d love to bring that number closer to 10. For comparison, DJs usually lock things in under 5.
  • Offseason planning is on hold until we clear Gallywix. I want a clear view of where we stand before evaluating roster changes and free agent targets. That said, we’ll likely backload raid nights to farm later bosses and get people their mounts and achievements, with earlier boss cleanup afterward. We’ve already got a few strong recruits waiting in the wings, especially from teams that couldn’t finish out the season or players looking to move up.
  • Last but not least, another raid-wide buff drops today, and we’re seeing an upgrade to the D.I.S.C. belt. That extra push might just be the edge we need to skip the fourth set of adds and finally bring down Gallywix once and for all.

Crests and Flightstones Need to be Alt Friendly

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With the upcoming The War Within expansion for World of Warcraft, we’re getting some cool new features like Warbands and reputation consolidation (at the cost of Human Diplomacy, sadly). But if we really want to make it easier and more fun to play with our alts, we need to take another look at how we gear them up. Right now, the system for Crests and Flightstones is a massive pain, especially if you’re trying to gear multiple characters.

The Current Problem

I’ve got a Priest and a Shaman both sitting at item level 527, which is pretty close to max (barring some vault upgrades). But when I think about levelling up my Paladin, Mage, and Evoker, it feels like an insurmountable grind. Running endless dungeons to collect Crests just isn’t appealing. To make things worse, Crests and Flightstones can’t be sent to your other characters, even though other in-game currencies can in TWW. This really slows down progress for alts.

Some Ideas to Fix This

Discounted Upgrade Crests and Stones

A great solution would be to offer discounted upgrades for Crests and Flightstones for alts. We already have something similar for gear upgrades. For example, if you get a new belt, you can upgrade the ilvl of it to match your current belt at a cheaper rate (no Crests, just Flightstones).

Why not extend this to our alts?

Imagine if once your main character fully upgrades their gear set to a certain level, like with the The Awakened Aspects achievement, your alts could then upgrade their gear more cheaply. This would reward your hard work and make gearing up alts a lot less painful.

Exchange Rates for Crests and Flightstones

Another idea is to let players buy Crests and Flightstones for their alts using an exchange system. Many of us have loads of Crests and Flightstones just sitting there unused on our main characters. I think my Priest has like 450 Aspect Crests just collecting dust. If we could trade them at, say, a 3:1 ratio, it would make those extra resources useful again. This way, we wouldn’t have to grind so much to gear up our alts.

Better Boss Drops and Incentives

On a completely different note, we also need to talk about raid rewards. Right now, the last two bosses in any raid drop the same level Crests as the earlier bosses in the instance. But bosses like Raszageth, Echo of Neltharion, and Sarkareth are a lot tougher. In Heroic raids, for example, it would make sense for these bosses to drop higher-level Crests like Aspect Crests instead of just Wyrm Crests.

This change could also keep players interested in completing entire raids. Right now, when I join pickup raids, I notice many players quit after getting their weekly vault rewards from the first six or so bosses. If the final bosses offered better rewards, more players might stick around to finish the raid or decide to give it a few pulls just to see.

Wrapping It Up

This expansion is a perfect chance for Blizzard to make the game more friendly for players with alts. By adding discounted upgrades and an exchange system for Crests and Flightstones, the game could become a lot more enjoyable for those of us who like to play multiple characters. Not only that, by tweaking raid rewards to match the difficulty of bosses, Blizzard could keep more players engaged throughout the whole raid. We can do it with the power of… uh, friendship!

In the meantime, I’m going back to chain-running dungeons to try to max out my Paladin before expansion launch.

State of the Jesters: Entering the Emerald Dream

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It’s official, raiding has been suspended until the next raid tier. I tried my best to keep it going but with turnover higher than normal and the constant wipes on Zskarn, it was felt we were doing more harm than good. A few players ended their trial and a few of our veterans wanted to take some time to play other games for a bit before returning for Emerald Dream. It sucks because we only killed Sark once and those of us who patiently waited on the sideline won’t have a crack at it. We’re currently at a roster of 22 , and I’ve been diligently looking for players. I have to be honest and transparent with them during our trial conversations about where we’re at raidwise. Many of them understood the situation we were in. Since I’m recruiting specifically for the next raid instead of for right now, this opens up the recruiting pool significantly. The recruiting communities seem to be a little more subdued at the moment with not as much activity going on, but I suspect that’ll ramp up in the next few weeks as players are looking to return. This feels like the precursor to Season 1 Vault of the Incarnate all over again. The plan is to bolster our ranks back up to 27 to 30 players or so. We finished US 300 in Aberrus, but my projection is that we’re going to drop down to US 400 – 500 range for the next tier. If you’re looking for a raid team (or community), come check us out!

In a change of pace, we did schedule one of our raid nights to step into the PTR though. There was a weekend where normal Emerald Dream was available and we all had good looks at some of the boss abilities and our own class changes in a raid environment. Without anyone around to take that mantle internally, I’ve had to start designing the raid playbook for all of the bosses. I’ve got the movement and major abilities diagrammed and what the overall strategy is. The next step is to put together a draft of healing and raid defensives but we can’t do that just yet until Viserio’s comes out with a new sheet. We have around 6 or so weeks to prepare and get as much information put together. Once that’s done, we schedule one of our raid nights for a film review day where we sit in Discord and go through all of the encounters with PTR footage, maps, and other important parts for the briefing. We started doing this back in Vault and Aberrus and felt that it was effective with player preparation. They still have the ability to go through raid material individually, but some players tend to learn well in a group environment on a Discord call and it lets us all ask each other questions or highlight key moments in an encounter that need to be more thoroughly explained.

Aside from that, there’s still a lot more housekeeping we have to do.

  • Raiding road map: This usually falls on the GMs shoulders here. We have a better idea of this after the first week where we lay out what nights are for normal, to heroic, and when we start mythic raiding along with when reclears should occur and when we start raid extensions.
  • Loot council: Right now, it’s a loot dictatorship and it’s all me! But I’m not smart enough to figure that out on my own which means appointing new members. We can’t do this without…
  • Loot wish lists: We use Readycheck.io for this but it isn’t updated for Emerald Dream quite yet.
  • Raid Plan: Where I’ve been doing the bulk of our playbook design. About halfway there, but still missing some information.
  • Defensive CDs: One of our trials volunteered to take a crack at this once it’s released.

Guild administration is challenging stuff but satisfying when it works. I wish I could clone myself a few times to help with everything that needs to be done.

Don’t Ask your Guild about Shadowlands

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(No story spoilers)

I missed writing. But between raiding, orchestra practice, and the esports job, something had to give and it was blogging. Though with the current states of affairs going on in the world right now, I find myself with a little more time than usual. Dusted off the site and applied some paint to give it some more life. I’m going to need to dive deeper into the rest of the archives though to see if anything broke.

How about you? How’ve you all been? Take care of yourselves (and each other) out there.

Shadowlands

If you’re like any other guild and you ask them their thoughts on Shadowlands, I guarantee you the consensus you’re going to receive is that it is literally going to be the worst WoW expansion ever. Some of the reasons include:

  • Covenants are going to make everything so imbalanced.
  • Literally every class is going to be overpowered.
  • There is clearly no testing going on.
  • There is a mission table (still).
  • Rogues exist (still).

I’m telling you, Shadowlands is going to be the best expansion (for Holy Priests)! As I was huffing around beta, I jumped into a dungeon queue. Bless that 2 minute healing queue which is both a blessing and a curse. If you ever want to feel pressure, it’s setting up your keybinds via the default system UI, dragging spells out of your spellbook, and configuring talents whilst keeping your party alive.

Everyone’s been all over Discipline in this expansion and Holy Priests are like that forgotten lip balm you have tucked in your drawer somewhere. Prayer of Mending is instant cast. Casting Circle of Healing can reduce the cast time of your next Prayer of Healing (via talent Prayer Circle). The resurrect cloak from Legion has returned in some fashion. Power Word: Shield can be spammed again across the party. I can access Power Infusion (take a number, stand in line)! I am quite delighted with where the class is at right now. Are we going to be throughput monsters in Shadowlands? That’ll most likely be a hard no. Holy was always designed to be above average to good at everything but I know we’ll never excel at one thing.

There is no way I can contain my giddyness. There is going to be a boss somewhere that involves some kind of soak mechanic or else the raid is going to wipe. Obviously, it’s going to go to some Ice Blocking Mage or a Bubbling Paladin first. But there will come a time when the raid leader will say, “Matticus, we’re out of options. You know what to do.” and I will gladly take a dive in the name of progression!

Seriously though, it does seem like my guild has a giant, dark cloud looming over them. I wish I could snap them out of it but I don’t know how. My worry is that they’ll be so demoralized to the point where they want to quit the game. Then what am I going to do? I’d have to go look for another guild to raid with again :(. I understand how seemingly inflexible covenants can be but to Blizzard’s credit, they’ve actually come out and said they’re prepared to allow for ease of use for switching if the system is deemed unsalvageable. I can’t remember the last time the dev team openly saying something like that about a new system they’re shipping with an expansion. So in a way, the acknowledgement is a step in some direction.

Other news

  • We cleared Mythic N’zoth (316 pulls).
  • Reached Platinum 1 in Valorant.
  • My vibrato technique continues to be non-existent.
  • I haven’t cut my hair since January.

Highmaul Day!

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What an exhausting week. Running heroics, challenge modes, recruitment, and preparing for Highmaul took quite a toll. Given the option between raid launching after a week into the expansion or after two weeks, I think I would’ve preferred the former. The issue with taking the time to gear up is that everyone plays and levels at different rates. Inevitably, no matter what I do or how many runs I attempt to do, there’ll always be players who feel left out.

Anyway, I won’t have to worry about dealing with five mans anymore. I’m looking forward to raid. We’re opening with a large raid size of 34 players. Once we feel ready for Mythic, that number is going to drop by almost half.

World bosses

How are we going to handle world bosses? I’m sure this is another question GMs are struggling with. We have no definitive time frames on respawn timers or their frequency. Is it once a week? Several times a week? Fifteen minutes? We don’t know. My current approach right now is to take world bosses off the schedule and encourage players to get into groups and run it on their own until we get a firm idea of when they appear. I’m not going to sacrifice a raid night waiting for a spawn when it could better off spent diving into Highmaul.

Returning guilds

Have you noticed this? I’ve seen characters coming online and recruiting for guild names I had thought since retired since the days of Burning Crusade. I never expected to see them again. This expansion has been a real jolt to the community, it seems. We’ll see how many of them end up sticking around, however. I suspect the opening month will really dictate how many guilds are pretenders and how many are contenders. I think the reality of raiding and the logistics will hit home for many leaders again and they realize why it was they ended up quitting in the first place. But with all the difficulty changes and the flexible raiding options, maybe it might not be so bad for them.

To all the guilds entering Highmaul this week, best of luck!

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