Preform Leaders Revealed: 6 Ways to Attract Players into your Organized BG Group

Some large creature attacking Theramore

It’s Arathi Basin weekend! I had a total blast last night in this PvP preform. Nowadays, it seems that the only way to win or get any real meaningful honor is in premade groups. I’ve been in my fair share of preforms. Some of them fall apart after 1 or 2 rounds. Others continue going for several hours with a core of people that stay consistent. Usually these PvP groups consist of well geared and knowledgeable players. But like an army, these players need direction in order to be focused into a machine. My preform leader (let’s call him K) was different from other preform leaders. I’ll tell you why.

Embrace Challenge

More often than not, most preforms I participated in had leaders constantly queue between AB and EoTS (tThat’s AB and Eye of the Storm) in the hopes of running into a pickup group. Over time, the amount of honor stemming from easy wins is mitigated by the endless amount of queuing and re queuing. The first thing I noticed about K was that he was willing and eager to go up against other premades. Others in the groups had their doubts, but after we trounced a Tichondrius preform those doubts were erased.

His secret? He didn’t limit his scouting to just what servers the other team was from. He opened the player listing and identified the amount of potential healers they had. That Tichon group only showed 2 druids, 1 Priest, and 1 Paladin. Every other class was DPS only. While there was no guarantee that those 4 players were all healers, it was reassuring to know that they were all the healers they had possible. They were identified and promptly annihilated.

Flexibility

Good commanders lay out and spell out what the purpose of each group is. Great commanders rarely follow them.

K devises 4-1 initial setups against non-preforms and 3-2 setups against preforms. The numbers refer to the amount of nodes that we aim for after the gates open. But after the dust settles and the smoke clears from the initial rush, K rarely forces groups to go to their assigned places. In fact, from his perch in stables, he’s able to direct players to where they are needed most depending on calls. K doesn’t follow the plans that he lays out. He reacts to situations with whatever players are nearby

Enforcement

When K asks for players to come in, he checks them to make sure he’s getting a player that he wants. He ensures that the player coming in is able to fulfill a requirement that we need (DPS, healer, +150 resil). At the moment, armory is down so he had to resort to other players visually inspecting the ones who wanted to get in. It’s his way of helping to ensure that we get quality geared players who aren’t going to get squished. Almost everyone in the raid had 10.5k health unbuffed. I don’t know about you, but I found that reassuring. I think Megan would approve.

Not only that, but he also enforced usage of voice communication. No vent, no group invite.

Repetition

He tried to keep group makeup the same as much as possible. This helped us get to know each other a little better. I noticed that I continued to be paired with Rogues and Warriors. I responded by dropping WF (at least for the Warriors since I’m not sure if Rogues want poisons instead) and Heroisms on first contact. The warriors noticed that I generally stay out of sight when I heal. I’d hide behind some foliage, heal from the blacksmith hut, or even in the water to remain inconspicuous and to not draw attention to myself. They made sure they fought far enough away so I could heal in peace but close enough to intercept any dirty Rogues that found my hiding spot.

K would repeatedly drill players to not only relay that there were horde coming but to how many people were coming. He held them accountable when they failed to pass out necessary information. If K knows the amount of horde that are attacking, then he can respond with a number of our guys to help repel the threat. He verbally calls out players to go to a particular node. He doesn’t ask for volunteers, he assigns them. By doing this, he doesn’t over commit anymore than he has to.

Vocal

K is almost always talking the whole time on vent. He encourages everyone to speak up if they notice something at all. He actively participates and leads. If taking one node clearly isn’t working, he’ll direct people to a different point. If he notices a lot pf players coming to a tower, he’ll relay it too. He repeats everything seen in raid chat for us players who are too busy to read it. If there’s a lull in the battleground, he checks in with every guard at every node to see if everything is okay (some people are shy). There is always a steady stream of useful and relevant information coming to us all the time from him and other players. Everyone else picks up from that and they volunteer any thing that might be of value (ie, 1 guard at farm, looks like a Priest). We know what’s going on where. This allows us to react quicker in anticipation of K’s instructions.

Any monkey can set up macros detailing vent information and assignments. But it takes a true Donkey Kong to deliver wins consistently. If you ever get into an organized group led by a player who is keenly aware of what’s going on, you be sure to add him to your Friends list. If you’re looking to run your own organized groups, set yourself apart from everyone else and earn a reputation. Great commanders are far and few.

Do you participate in organized BG’s often? What has your experience been like? Are you a leader or a follower? What keeps you coming back?


On another note, does anyone know what that big fish is that’s attacking Theramore? It’s gotta be new. Check out that screenshot at the beginning.

Your Tank Died. Want to Know Why?

Here’s the story. You’re healing a raid group on a boss like Nightbane. Things are going steady and smoothly. Then your tank drops from 80% to0. WTF just happened?

No more will you wonder why.

Enter Recount

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Recount. It’s a diagnostic mod that has a ton of features and tools which can help track an assortment of information and display it graphically or output it as text. It keeps track of information like:

  • Damage done
  • DPS
  • Healing done
  • Dispels (what you dispel)
  • Dispelled (what you’ve been dispelled by)
  • Deaths
  • Interrupts
  • Ressers
  • Activity
  • Mana, Energy, or Rage Gained
  • CC Breakers
  • DOT Uptime
  • HOT Uptime
  • Spells Used

Tracking Deaths

This is the main reason why I use Recount. If I can determine why my tank or assignment died, then I can take measures to prevent it from happening again. There’s also this "peace of mind" factor. By knowing why my tank died, I can either accept responsibility or say that there was nothing I could’ve possibly done.

Recount death tracking in raid

Take the above image as an example. Chamelion is one of the tanks for Gruul and he died. Within the space of 2 seconds, he went from 90% to 0%. From this image, I know that Chamelion absorbed almost 17000 damage under half a second. It would’ve been very difficult for healers to react that quickly to that kind of damage. I have the peace of mind knowing that there would’ve not been anything for me to do (PW: Shield and a Prayer of Mending would’ve been eaten).

Do I have your attention now? Good. Want to learn more about it? Keep reading. However, there is a downside (scroll to the bottom).

Usage

Let me show you how to use it. It’s fairly intuitive (for some). I’ll start with the Death tracker. This is one of many different possible windows that you can switch through.

How many times did you die? Here you go!

From top left to top right, you’ll see several different icons. There’s icons that show horn, gear, page, xpage, left, right, and the X.

Horn: This controls output properties. You can relay information into Guild chat, officer, raid, party, say, current target, player name, or special channels that you are in (custom channels). Using the top slider, I can control how many people to report in whatever channel I like. Note that I can only do one chat channel at a time. I cannot broadcast in Guild and Officer chat simultaneously. If I want to broadcast in both, I’ll have to do them one after the other.

If I want to whisper to a certain person, then I check the box next to "whisper", type the name on the bottom, and press report.

Window where you can choose which channel to output information

Gear: This opens the detail window of the particular tracker that you have open. Each tracker has it’s own specific set of options. I’ll write more about this later.

Page: You can control which chunk of data to look at. Here’s a screenshot below. I can include cumulative data up to the point where I’m at, echo the current fight, or examine individual encounters.

The window where you can choose which part of the fight to look at

Xpage: This button resets all information that you’ve collected up to this point.

Left/Right: Using these buttons, you can cycle through the different windows.

X: Closes the Recount window but it still tracks data in the background.

Death Tracker in Detail

The death counter here allows you to track the amount of times that players have died. Not only that, it can show you why they died. Press the detail button (looks like a gear) brings the following window up. On the left side, I can choose which mob killed me. On the bottom, I can filter what kind of information I want to look at. In this case, I’m looking at any information that’s relevant to me EXCEPT for Heals. From the timeline, I can see that it took me about 14 seconds to die from Akil’zon.

Tracking deaths in Recount window

You can also select which deaths you want to echo and display. Pressing the little horn icon lets you echo what you have in front of you to whatever channel you want (See above).

Anyway, there’s simply too many features in Recount to be covered in one article alone. Over the next week or two, I plan to break down certain features of Recount that apply to us healers and officers. Maybe I’ll skim the rest.

The Bad Thing About Recount

I’m going to copy and paste the author’s own words and warnings about Recount.

Warning – Recount can use a decent amount of memory at default settings due to saving of DPS and other stats every second. These can be disabled if not used in the options under filter by unclicking checkmarks under the stopwatch. Memory usage though shouldn’t effect your performance though.

In other words, it’s a HUGE resource hog. Try it out and see if you can handle it. If you notice yourself lagging a lot during Raids, disable it immediately.

Download Recount:

Curse.com

Just For the Sake of Evidence

Wager with Hankwilliams

Also as a reminder in case I forget. I wonder if that breaches the TOS. I suspect that there will be a lot of gold changing hands tomorrow (maybe). The Superbowl isn’t even here yet!

My Recount piece is almost done. Hopefully it’ll be up sometime around 1 AM.

Unique Equipped Doesn’t Mean 1 Per Character

You’ve seen these items drop in some heroic instances. They’re these epic high powered gems that used to say Unique on them. I had a Luminous Fire Opal drop twice in heroic Shattered Halls last night. Sadly my Resto Shaman only got one because some Enhancement Shaman I know need rolled on the other one. This Enhancement Shaman, to my knowledge, has no INTENTION of healing or going resto *GLARE*. I could’ve used 2 of these Fire Opals *sniff*.

Definition of Unique-Equipped Courtesy of WoW Wiki

If an item says it is “Unique-Equipped”, it means that you can have only one of those items equipped at any one time. You can have as many as you see fit in your inventory, but only one actually equipped to one of your items.

This is mostly to prevent absurd overpowering of characters with amazing gems, but still allows them to craft and sell them to others even when they already have one.

I know I’m not able to socket the same epic gem on the same item. I can put it on separate pieces. The definition on WoWWiki confuses me though. From what it says, if I were to socket Luminous Fire Opal on my pants and my chest I can’t equip both of them at the same time?

Ergh, if only I had both of them to socket then I could determine it for myself! 🙁

Thus ends my QQ post.


Blog updates

Archives

Solved my Archives problem for the time being. Thinking ahead, I know that eventually my archives will stretch for a long time since that’s how WordPress organizes it. Instead of just showing months on a sidebar or on the bottom, I transferred it so that it now has it’s own page. It’s even got a search (as if my world needs more search boxes). I’m considering doing away with either the search on the bottom or the one on the side.

Front Page

Do you use Twitter? I’ve been using it for a while and now you can follow me on it. I added a plugin that displays recent “tweets” which includes new blog posts (for those that don’t use any kind of RSS reader) converted into a tiny URL. My original plan was to display excerpts of my latest post (up to 50 characters or something) in that same spot. But technical problems have forced my hand and Twitter is my plan B.

Categories

Have to fix these sooner or later *sigh*.

Plugins

I know there’s a lot of WordPress bloggers that read my page. I was thinking about doing a piece on the weekends compiling all the plugins that power World of Matticus. Definitely not WoW related. That’s why I was going to put it up on the weekend.

Recount

My cousin’s in town and she’s leaving tomorrow. After I get home from dinner with the family, I want to write up a piece on this amazing addon. It will either be up tonight or up tomorrow morning. If you’re a raid officer or leader or healer, then pay attention to this piece because it will definitely be of interest to you!

The Problem With Enchanting: Part 2 (Supply)

I recently wrote a piece several days back on the problems with enchanting your items from the demand side. There’s also some issues from the supply side. We’re the only profession that’s not able to put any finished products on the auction house. Blacksmithers can put up their crafted items. Alchemists can put up potions and flasks. Leatherworkers and tailors have their own BoE blues. Even Jewelcrafters can put up gem cuts.

But enchanters? We need to pay house calls to players who want our services individually. Only face to face can we earn any gold.

Rumor has it that this will be changed some time in the future. I’m not sure of any details at the moment, but I’m thinking what they’ll allow us to do is create Enchanting “scrolls” that can be applied to items. It would be similar to a silver spellthread or those other leg patches. This way, we’ve got something tangible that we can then put on the auction house. If they want to prevent twinking on certain levels, it would be easy to do by adding a level requirement for the item or the user of the enchant.

We can only hope.