Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. Guild topics for your perusing.
Please forgive me for squealing like a little girl, but….
I HAZ CRYSTAL SPIRE!!!
4 months of Illidan kills, and it finally drops. The sweetest part? Every healer in the raid whispered me Grats, before it was loot counciled out. They’d gotten together… and decided to pass it unanimously to me.
No lie. I nearly cried.
Image courtesy of woodsy
I’m a tremendous advocate of using all the tools available to evaluate and improve your toon, your gear, and your gameplay. (It’s how I first met Matt!) Hands-down, the most valuable resources for learning to play are other players willing to share their experiences. Even with access to some great minds, though, it helps to know what questions to ask to get the most bang for your buck. Besides that, I’m an information junkie. These are, in no particular order, some of the resources that have helped me the most in my quest for Priestly perfection.
Be.Imba.hu – The first online character auditor. Takes a look at your gear, the available gems, enchants, and add-ons and gives you a solid opinion of what stats are best for you, and what level of content is appropriate. I’ve found it a little cut-and-dry, but a very useful place to start.
GankBang – The armory, comparative. Wanna know how you stack up to the other Priests on your server? Wonder no more. Great tables, which you can organize by stat, show you how you compare. Be aware that you may need to manually update or add players.
warcrafter – The ultimate armory sandbox. Load your character, change enchants, gems, or see what your stats would be if you were in full T6. (Or T3!) Now you can REALLY find out if +6 stats or +15 spirit to chest is a better idea.
Arena Points Calculator – Arena points calculator. Plug in your rating, guesstimate your points. Hooray!
WoW Reputation Calculator – Tells you how much rep you need to hit the next level with any Burning Crusade faction. And tells you how many instance runs it’d take to earn it. This gem has helped that 21000 rep look much, much more manageable, and helped me make decisions of which instance to run for max. rep reward.
Warcraft Realms – Statistic crawler for all realms. If you feel like your faction is hopelessly outnumbered… it just might be. This sucker breaks down all kinds of information – and is especially helpful if you need to know when it’s time to start recruiting from off-server.
WoW Character Watch – Allows you to stalk anyone and everyone. Really great if you want to follow up with an applicant or a former guildie.
Edit: I dunno how I forgot this one, but Mapwow is Google-based maps for WoW. It shows herbalism nodes, mining nodes, and a million other VERY handy things.
WoW Web Stats – Upload your combat log for a bird’s eye-view of what really happened. Have a few different people from the same raid do it for extra well-rounded-ness and you have a hell of a tool for improving not just your own gameplay, but the synergy of the entire raid.
Love forums? Two you should check out are the official Blizzard Priest forums (No, Really!) and Elitist Jerks. (I have another favorite that Matt launched a while ago which you are no doubt already familiar with.)
Here are my favorite threads from the first two:
Lux et Umbra – The greatest intro-to-priesting guide I’ve ever read. I have stolen so, so, so much from her….
Elitist Jerk’s Holy Raiding Compendium – Required reading for any Priest wanting to raid.
Another great guide written by DwarfPriest – it’s a work in progress, but holy cow, what a piece of work
I left off things like the Armory, WoWhead, Bosskillers, and WoWwiki. If you’re reading World of Matticus, and you DON’T know about those sites, you should’ve spent a little more time getting to know Google.
Luv,
Wyn
P.S. I gotta stop letting Matt write my headlines!
Image courtesy of andehans
Sure, it’s all about killing the boss. It’s a group effort, a bonding experience, and a hell of a lot of fun. The problems start right after the screenshots are taken and the congratulations are over – loot dropped. What was it, and who should get it?
There are two common systems for deciding who, of the 10 or 25 people standing over the body, should get the gear upgrades: Loot Council, and DKP. Both systems function well on a day-to-day basis. Like most governing systems, the issues come in at the extremes, when a piece is wanted by more than one player, and especially if it’s a rare item. My guild used a pure DKP system when I first joined, and has slowly migrated to a full-blown Loot Council. I think it’s brilliant.
In a Loot Council system, the Raid Leader, Officers, Class Leaders, or a combination decide which player in the raid has earned the gear. Ideally, their decision is made based on attendance, viability, available upgrades, and the individual’s contributions to the raid and to the guild.
DKP, or Dragon Kill Points, is much less arbitrary on the surface. Guild members are awarded points for raid attendance, presence at kills, and sometimes other contributions to the guild (donations to the Gbank, for example.) This is usually tracked on the guild website. Then, when the gear drops, players are either allowed to bid, auction style, or simply purchase the piece for a set price. The raider with the most DKP has priority, and unless they choose to pass, wins the item. The price is then deducted from their DKP balance.
For a Loot Council system to work, the people making the decisions have to have a working knowledge of the needs of each class (knowing that Spirit is nearly useless for Paladins helps when awarding healing loot), and the strengths and weaknesses of each of their raiders. It helps a lot to have class-leaders involved in the decision-making process, since they’re usually the most familiar with both. Most importantly, the raiders have to trust their officers. If favoritism or greed are real issues among your guild leadership, Loot Council won’t cause the collapse of your guild – but it will definitely speed it up.
For a DKP system to work, every individual raider has to know their gear, possible upgrades, and playstyle. Each raider spends their points on the items that will make the biggest impact for them. If players buy an okay item, without knowing that a better item for the same slot, or for the cost, drops one or two bosses later, it’s their loss. Supposedly. The best and worst thing about DKP is that it is completely objective. You raid, you earn your points, the bosses die, and each raider spends their points as they see fit. It’s the ultimate self-actualizing system. The problem? Raiding is a group-effort.
The system doesn’t care if a raider played their heart out, and has no other viable upgrades. A more-tenured player has first dibs on anything that drops, regardless of benefit to the guild as a whole. DKP, by its very nature, focuses exclusively on the measurable contributions of the individual. It objectively tracks how often they’ve shown up, how many boss-kills they attended, and how much money they paid. DKP is, essentially, an attendance grade in what should be a meritocracy.
Not that attendance is trivial. Being willing to show up and throw down day after day is part of what makes a top-notch raiding core. And those who show up every day SHOULD by all means be rewarded. There’s a marked difference, though, between playing your guts out and just showing up, and DKP can’t differentiate. On the other hand, any good officer knows who their key players are.
As a byproduct of this individualistic focus, participants in a DKP system tend to build up an entitlement mentality. “This gear is mine, because I earned it and paid for it,” is dangerous when the whole point is to continue progressing, not as 25 individuals, but as a guild. I’ve seen it get nasty when passing is suggested to a more-tenured player – it’s not that they really need a piece, it’s that they want it; regardless of the fact that the increase to their own swollen stats would have a significantly smaller impact on the group than would helping a guildie get rid of one of several sub-par items. Obviously, even in a DKP system, responsible raiders do pass to other players – but then the recipient of the gear has just been granted a “favor” by a more-tenured player. And there’s absolutely zero back-up if the veteran isn’t feeling generous.
Raiding in a Loot Council guild, you haven’t done your job by showing up. You haven’t done your job if the boss merely dies on schedule, either. You are constantly auditioning, pushing yourself and your teammates, you are forever earning not only the gear that might drop that night, but the gear you’ve been awarded each night of your membership, and your very raid spot. Yeah, it can be stressful. But I prefer the shared stress of 25 people pushing to do their absolute best over the stress of 25 people trying to figure out whose fault that 3rd wipe was – on farm content.
I have yet to be in any run where the raiders weren’t congratulated on their shiny new purples. In a pure DKP system, I’ve never understood this practice. Congratulating a player on gear that was essentially defaulted to them based on their accumulated points rings very hollow in comparison to congratulating a guildie who was awarded gear for their contribution to the latest group effort. The difference is the same as that of receiving a gift or buying the damn thing yourself. There’s a bonding experience with the former that isn’t replicated in the latter. And friendships and guilds – long term relationships – are built upon multiples of those small bonding experiences.
In fact, I’ve seen DKP systems actively erode those bonds. If you’ve ever calculated your own DKP vs. another raider’s, found yourself wishing they just wouldn’t show so you can beat them out, or quietly tried to convince them not to bid, you’ve had some of those same anti-group effort sentiments that underscore the kind of bickering and jealousy that tear guilds apart. Doing your best and proving you’ve earned a piece is a world away from hoping that your talented teammate is a no-show. But, if there’s no Council that will hear your case, you don’t really have any other recourse in a DKP system. Even if you KNOW that a Druid won’t get the same benefit from the Crystal Spire of Karabor, you can’t argue with the points. A good Loot Council will listen to your case in the bids, and make their reasons known when they award the upgrade. It’s hard to have sour grapes when you know the other guy deserved the reward they got, but easy to grumble if their major contribution was signing the guild charter before you did.
Which leads to a more long-term tricky situation – certain gear was designed to be optimal for certain classes. Not things as clear-cut as a heavy-spirit cloth healing helm, but truly questionable items – rings, weapons, necks, and trinkets. Some of them are just better for some classes than they are for others, especially given available upgrades. DKP absolutely cannot account for class-optimization without some pretty strategic loot-master intervention. I’m not saying Paladins should never equip a Light Fathom Scepter or Coral Ring of the Revived, I’m just saying an equivalently geared Druid or Priest would get a LOT more bang for the Guild’s collective buck. Not only will the player keep the piece longer, which frees up more gear for more upgrades for other players down the line, but the raid will get more benefit from it while they wear it. And as heart-wrenching as 1% wipes are, they are much easier to avoid when every player in the lineup is optimized.
Switching from DKP to Loot Council is not a panacea for everything that afflicts your guild. You won’t miraculously find that all the gear goes to the exact-right player, or that no one gets their feelings hurt. And if you don’t trust your leaders to award gear, you have problems no loot system will patch up for long. Similarly, raiders that grumble about deserving players being rewarded are likely not the players you want to keep around – and they’ll remove themselves from your guild long before they have a chance to leech hard-won purples that can’t be recovered. A good Loot Council provides a level of deliberation, thoughtfulness, and a bias in favor of hard work and team effort that DKP can’t replicate. And if there ever really is a tie in terms of overall contribution and deservedness, a good ol’ fashioned /random will end most disputes.
Luv,
Wyn
….Or at least another Priest.
It could be a Soulstone, a Divine Intervention, a vanished Rogue with a pair of cables, or a clever Druid with a well-timed battle rez taken once the coast is clear. The idea is to save the raid the lengthy corpse-run, and to pick up and move on as quickly as possible.
Wipe Prevention – (n.) – \?w?p\ \pri-?ven(t)-sh?n\ – the concept of having at least one raiding member with the ability to Resurrect other members still alive after all other raiders are dead, and the boss or mobs have reset.
Because the entire purpose of wipe-prevention is time-efficiency, it has always frustrated me when the player charged with reviving the raid seems to have no concept of whom to rez first, second, or last. It gets worse when no one else in the raid seems to know what to do, either. After my guild’s last efforts in Sunwell, I decided to write a quick tutorial:
This is the most crucial point, but even within this simple concept, it makes the most sense to pick some rezzers over others. Three classes have out of combat resurrection spells. Priests have Resurrection, which costs 60% of our base mana. Shamans have Ancestral Spirit which costs 72% of their base mana, and Paladins have Redemption which costs 64% of their base mana. It makes sense to pick up your Priests first, since they will be able to resurrect the most people without having to stop and drink. Remember that HEALER doesn’t necessarily mean REZZER. Druids can obviously not help here, but non-healing Priests, Shamans, and Paladins should. Don’t let them be lazy.
Personally, 60% of my base mana is 1,500. My Shammie brothers-in-arms’ rezzes cost as much as 3,000. I only have to drink to the point where I have 3,000 of my mana back and my regen will allow me to chain-cast rezzes without stopping until the whole raid is up. It makes more sense to pick me up than to pick up an ele shaman with only 250 mp5 and a 9k mana pool.
This means warlocks who need to summon healthstones and demons, Hunters who have to revive their pets, and buff-classes who will need to fill their mana in order to buff. (Mages, Druids)
Rogues who may need to apply poisons, non-buffing (usually feral) Druids, and Warriors.
That can sound like a whole bunch of rules, but the underlying principle is very simple: Rez the people who can help get the rest of the raid up as quickly as possible first. Rez the people who need time to get ready second. Rez the people who need the least time last. You can save enough time this way to get in more attempts, avoid re-clearing trash, or keep a night of farm content from drawing out much longer than it should.
Luv,
Wyn
Image courtesy of dbking
Making the first move and first impression counts when you’re looking to join a Guild. Excellent Guildmasters (I prefer General Managers) have a way of cutting through the random crap that applicants throw at them. They’re able to translate what applicants say and interpret them in a more precise way. As my Guild’s first line of defense against “R-Tards”, I’ve seen my share of bad opening introductions from players that were interested. Here’s 10:
The best opening lines to make to a GM or their representative is to say something similar to:
Hi, my name is __________, I would like to raid as a __________ spec and I have experience up to this encounter in the game.
For a much better insight into the application and mental thought processes of GMs, I strongly advise you read Chick GM’s post about the very same subject in more detail.
Post inspired by Guy Kawasaki