PSA: On the Business End of a Battle Res

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Priestly service announcement.

If you are on the receiving end of a battle res, can you do all of us healers a favor?

Give us a 2 second warning when you take it

Especially true if it’s on an encounter like Ultraxtion where the damage is just pulsing and non-stop. Give us a buffer to target you and spam spells on you so that when you do take the res, one of our spells will stick and bring you out of non-lethal range. It lets the Discipline Priests shield you, it lets the Paladins Holy Shock you, it allows Druids and Shamans to Nature’s Swiftness + some heal you, and Holy Priests can Surge of Light proc + Flash Heal you.

Any other healers irritated by this? In an age where we have a finite number of Rebirths and stuff available, we need to make sure we don’t waste that stuff unnecessarily.

Introducing Mattivision: Heroic Hagara

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Heroic Hagara 25 man, Holy Priest PoV

Past kill videos I’ve recorded for the guild involved epic music. Since I upgraded my internet connection with faster upstream, I now have the ability to stream and record. I’ll be streaming my guild’s progressing through heroic Dragon Soul on a raid nightly basis. Something I’ve always want to do was offer more insight on healing from a microscopic perspective. Sites like Learn2Raid and WoWhead offer great information on what your raid needs to do. What I want to do here is focus more on the player and how one could handle the different challenges that occur against bosses. So as a test run, I recorded a VOD of our raid group against heroic Hagara. I tried to commentate and narrate what was going on and what my train of thought was at the time.

Anyway, take a look and let me know what you think.

You can tune in Monday, Tuesdays, and Thursday nights just before 6 PM PST to my Own3d page. Will be streaming it later tonight. Heroic Morchok goodness! Also if you want to join in, there’s a little chat button when the stream is live in the middle there. I’ll try to respond to any questions, but no promises.

And yeah, I need to make some adjustments to the sound. I lowered game sound to 20% and dropped Mumble chatter to about 25%. Nothing I can do about the keyboard pounding though. Love my Black Widow. Wish I could get a muffler for it or something.

Caverns of Times: Where’s the Horde Perspectives?

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Beat Mass Effect 3. Such a glorious game and a fantastic conclusion to the series. I can now go back to defending Azeroth and Demacia.

Before you question my allegiance to the Alliance, know that it hasn’t changed. I happened to be reminiscing about my experiences in Warcraft’s 1, 2 and 3. Naturally, my mind drifted over to WoW and I started thinking to myself what awesome missions in the RTS games would translate as either instances or raids. Thinking about the ones presently in the game made me realize that that was a distinct lack of actual Horde storylines.

Culling of Stratholme? Original Alliance mission under Arthas dedicated to levelling the citizenry.

Escape from Durnholdee? You were playing as Alliance infiltrating Alliance camps in order to break Thrall out (I guess that’s the closest one gets to Horde).

Opening the Dark Portal? Sort of independent, protecting Medivh.

Mount Hyjal? Mixed operation. Same with End Time and Hour of Twilight

Well of Eternity, I believe everyone had to play Elves.

There are so many crucial moments in the Warcraft RTS that I feel would make an awesome instance to explore. All of us players who are old enough to remember Warcraft 1 (I think I was like 6 or 7) and the subsequent releases can remember some of those chilling moments in the game where… it just got real. I think we could use some Horde representation in there too (as in, having our character models adjusted to reflect the story like how we tend to either be portrayed as humans or elves).

Lothar’s Parlay

I believe this was one area of the game that received a retcon (Lore players can help me out). The original Warcraft 2 mission had Lothar get assassinated as he was on his way to negotiate with Doomhammer. But then it got changed to a death match style encounter with Doomhammer himself or that Doomhammer had help from Horde forces. If it’s the latter, it would make a great instance.

Now we Alliance players know that there’s no way that Doomhammer could’ve solo’d Lothar, right? It makes much more sense that Doomhammer wussed out and called up his cronies who just happened to be standing in the bushes nearby waiting to ambush him.

It makes sense!

Plus it gives players the chance to take on Lothar in a boss environment.

Strike at Karazhan

Lothar leads a strike team into Karazhan to kill Medivh. I think this would be a fantastic raid instance. Looking back on it, Karazhan was a pretty fun place. They can do the Stratholme treatment (take a destroyed instance and recreate it to what it looked like originally). Some of the rooms would probably have to be enlarged to accommodate 25 or so people.

Imagine fighting Moroes with 25 people.

Will pass on Chess though.

Assassination of King Llane

Oh man. I don’t know if you’d plan this out as a raid or as a 5 man. Concept would your party assisting and clearing the way for Garona to infiltrate the throne room and help her take out King Llane. We can check out what Old Stormwind looked like without all the canals and stuff.

Others

Breaking Illidan out of the Watchers prison – An escort instance similar to Durnholde. You’d need to infiltrate the Watchers prison and bust him out.

Andorhal – Memory’s fuzzy here, but there was an Undead level in Warcraft 3 where Arthas killed Uther.

Theramore – The Horde mini-campaign in the Frozen Throne had the final level where Rexxar and the Horde assaulted Theramore to subdue Admiral Proudmoore.

I’m not as familiar with the universe in the books or in the comics, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s any moments that in any of them that might translate well into the game.

Whatever the case, here’s to having more Caverns of Time stuff in Mists! They’re starting to run out of room in there actually. I wonder when they’re going to create another floor. It’s about time the Bronze Dragonflight did some renovating.

Hagara down! (Old news)

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Hard mode Hagara is definitely a fun fight. Our kill night week was marked with a guild first. It’s never happened before in our history. Something so unprecedented, so unexpected and uncharacteristic.

We scored a progression kill while I was in a Shadow spec

Don’t worry, don’t worry! When we started learning it, I was still healing!

Right now we’re working, on that Yor’sahj guy. Our best attempts saw him hit the mid 30% range with 2 minutes left to go. We’re going to come real close to hitting that enrage timer. I’m a little behind on my Shadow gear (and I just activated my 2 piece bonus yesterday and am still looking for ways to increase that DPS higher). And yes, the reason I’m still Shadow is that we have a fair number of healers. On our next attempts, we’re going to try to run the play with 5 healers instead of 6 and hope that it’ll be just enough power.

We’ve lost several players in the past few weeks to real life, I’m afraid. If you’re looking for a stable guild for the next expansion (or just a group of players to hang out with any play other games like League of Legends and Starcraft 2 with), do check us out. I changed the URL and everything to be more reflective of what we are now.

Since BlizzCon’s been cancelled this year, the crew still wanted to meet up. If there’s anything I personally look forward to, it’s meeting up with the rest of my fellow crazy gamers once a year (and only once a year). We’ve settled on Vegas in late October as the time to hang out.

Such activities will include:

  • IRL need rolling (I love Craps)
  • Go Karting (Conquest Cup, 50cc, no blue shell)
  • Entertainment (Whenever I meet up with these people, there’s always a new chapter in the Matticus saga)
  • Relaxing (Eating, drinking and lounging around)

An Interview with Ferrel, Author of The Guild Leader’s Companion

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After reviewing The Guild Leader’s Companion, I wanted to gain a little more insight from Ferrel about guild leadership.

How about a brief introduction about who you are and what you do?

Hello there! I’m Adam Trzonkowski but most people know me as Ferrel.

First and foremost I’m a raid junkie and guild leader. I’ve been raiding since around 1999 and leading the same guild (in its numerous forms) since about 2004/2005. Somewhere in that stretch of time I started to write on our guild website and eventually morphed that into Epic Slant, my design and leadership blog. That is where I found my inspiration to start my novels. In that place we call reality I’m just a boring engineer.

What were the factors that motivated you to become a guild leader?

I never really wanted to be a guild leader. I did have the privilege of dealing with a few horrible ones. When I got to Iniquity in EQ2 the officers saw potential in me and asked for me to be an officer. I agreed and eventually we decided to bump our absent, non-raiding, non-max-level, paying-a-teenager-to-level-his-character guild leader out of office. We talked it over and I drew the long (or short) straw.

Can you share any good lesson-learning stories throughout your years as an officer or as a guild leader?

I guess the story that I tell the most is a really personal one. It basically teaches the lesson of never giving up. In the early EQ2 days we were raiding Darathar. Our guild was the only one working on him on the server and very few had killed him worldwide. We had been pretty unlucky on gear drops and our main tank was missing this one bracelet that literally reduced all damage types (the only item like it at the time). We had been working on him eight hours a day for a week and our morale was low.

I played with my main tank and one of our main DPS in person and on the fifth night the tank looked at me and said, “We’re not going to win. We don’t have the gear. It is time to call it.” This was a tough thing to deal with. I’m in person with two friends. I took the approach I think is right. I looked at him and said, “That is too bad because we’re going to kill him with what we have so buck up and get back to it.” He and the DPS were obviously upset with me but I felt like we had to do it. The best part is, we killed him that night!

In your mind, what is the single most important aspect a truly brilliant guild leader needs to possess?

Positivism at all times. Players respond far better to a positive leader than a negative one. If you are positive and confident your members will be, too. Positive raid teams and guilds last far longer. Believe me, I know. I used to think being a guild leader meant being Furor or that “more DoTs” guy. The truth is, they’re doing it horribly wrong.

What is the optimal method when it comes to delivering feedback for underperforming players? How do you squeeze more out of them?

To be honest, at this point, I don’t do individual counselling anymore. We use a completely positive method in Iniquity now so to be honest, we do everything at the macro level now. If the DPS is short I just tell them I have faith they can do more and ask them to. Thus far, every time I ask, they give it to me. I praise what we do right, ask for more, and we succeed.

What is your biggest frustration or pet peeve when it comes to leading guilds?

I really dislike the attitude of people that assume guild leadership isn’t leadership. I’ve seen someone “take exception” to using the term guild leader. I’ve managed people in MMORPGs and in reality and all of the skills are the exact same. If it weren’t for MMORPGs I would have never become a leader in reality. The skills transferred so successfully that my raid career has impacted my engineering career in completely positive ways.

Have you had a chance to try out SWTOR?

I was in the beta and was not impressed at all. The game was good; I’m not suggesting otherwise. It just wasn’t “new.” It was just prototypical MMO + Star Wars. I’m also horribly addicted to Rift’s class system. I play healers and I loathe being backed into a corner as someone who can’t do anything but heal. Rift lets me raid heal and smash face. 

Let’s talk about the book, the Guild Leader’s Companion. One of the golden rules you mentioned is that you can never please everyone all of the time. What is the next best achievable goal after that?

The most important goal is to achieve your own (realistic) happiness. That sounds selfish but how can you lead and be positive if you’re miserable? Once you’re happy and positive you can start trying to keep the majority of the guild feeling the same way. That tends to work well and if someone gets upset they find solace in their guild mates.

What are your thoughts on multi gaming organizations/guilds?

It takes a huge commitment but is just taking guilds to another level. Perfectly fine and fun if you’re willing to put in the work. We focus on a more intimate group so it wouldn’t work for us but I think a good guild is a good guild whether it is in one game or twelve.

You mention that one of the big obstacles in MMOs is the fact that egos can often get in the way. How would you recommend dealing with them?

Lead by example. If you and your officers have an ego it rubs off on others. I don’t have a public ego anymore. When I screw up I call it. I make fun of myself. I tease my officers when we mess up. It takes the level of tension down so much. We also focus on the macro level as I said. It is hard to get an ego when we praise the team rather than the individuals.

And finally, the Guild Leader’s Companion has been out for a while now. What other projects are you working on (if any)? Can you share anything?

The Guild Leader’s Companion was my first book and I’m both proud and ashamed of it. I have had a lot of growth as a leader, writer, and publisher since I wrote it. On the last one (publisher) I would say a TON of growth. I want to go back through the GLC and change it up some. I’m actually working on that now with a fusion book. It is more of a book on leadership and team building that is applicable to MMORPGs and uses them as examples but works in any place. One of the curious things about the GLC was that some of the business people in my office liked it enough that they wanted a “non-gaming” version. I hope to meet them halfway.

Beyond that I just finished up The Raider’s Companion (it is actually available now). That is my effort to teach new players how to raid and show old raiders new tricks. We get set in our ways and eventually something new comes along that makes us go, “wow, I wish I had known that.” I’m offering a different perspective on raiding because at this point I’ve done almost all of it. I’ve been a server-first raider. I’ve been a world competitor. I’ve been ultra-casual. I’ve been ten-man. Now I’m current-tier-content. All of those different experiences gave me the chance to borrow what I feel works from each. I also know I can learn more! So I wrote The Raider’s Companion to share my experiences and stimulate ideas.

Thank you for the opportunity, Ferrel!

Friends, be sure to congratulate him on his recent engagement! Remember to check out and subscribe to his blog!