Karazhan

Guest Post: A First Look at a Feeder Guild

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This is a guest post from Galadria. She represents half of the knowledge from the Light and the Dark.

We’ll start with a sample scenario. You are a member of l33t Guild, part of the raid core. Your guild is farming the lower bosses of TK/SSC and trying to down Vashj and Kael to get into Hyjal/BT. Since most of your raid core doesn’t need gear out of T4 content, it’s basically PUG. Whoever can throw a run together does whenever they happen to be in the mood. Since the raid core doesn’t want to have wipe fests, when they do farm that content (for badges or off spec gear) they tend to do it with each other so they can blow through it quickly. One day JoeRogue; who has been raiding in Kara for a while and gone on a few runs of Gruul and Mag, asks that oft dreaded question in Gchat:

    “How come I never get to raid?”

This sets off a fevered discussion with much flaming from the raid core and much grousing from lower echelons of the guild. The core raiders don’t want to hear it, they’ve put in the time and effort to be where they are. The lower ranked players feel shafted, they never get a chance at better gear or to show the raid leaders that they can play competently.

Overlooking the fact that there seems to be a bunch of whining, it shows a problem I think a lot of guild at this level have. The guild is split between those that are part of the progression raiding and well geared, and those that are just getting Kara keyed or just out of Kara, and learning how to raid. These two groups have different needs from the guild. Both groups need structured, scheduled raid time for their level of content, lead by a competent RL to make things go smoothly. They just need different content.

Requirements

Kara (1-2 nights), Gruul (1 night), Mag (1 night), SSC (probably 2 nights), TK (probably 2 nights). If you stacked groups correctly, you could do Kara in 1 night and Gruul and Mag in the same night. That’s still 6 nights of scheduled raiding! I don’t see many guild leaders (in average guilds) being able to handle that.

As I see it you have a few options:

Option 1

Let the lower level players fend for themselves. They can probably make in-guild PUG Kara/ZA runs without much problem but Gruul/Mag is going to be a lot for some random person with a little initiative to get together. This may lead to unhappy players in your lower ranks. However, since they’re not part of your progression team you may not care if they come or go but I tend to think that’s kind of a crappy way to deal with the situation.

Option 2

Another option is to be up front with this group and tell them that you will not be scheduling any events at their level of progression and if they want to experience that content they should find a guild at their level to grow with. This is tough since a lot of these people will be friends of members of your raid core. I think it’s good to be up front and honest, and you’re doing them a favor by letting them know that you are not able to meet their needs. It can be up to them to find someone who can.

Option 3

What I think is the best option is to establish what I call the Feeder Guild. This can be a separate entity or a sub-set of your existing guild. This guild becomes a leveling and early raiding guild that prepares your lower level players for higher content. This option will take more work at the beginning to get started, but will be worth it in the end.

You’ll need to find someone (or a couple of people) who have the organizational skills and the drive to run the show. This person should be outfitted with the resources and responsibilities to organize your lower level raids for those that need/want them. It’s also a good idea to get a few of your higher level raiders willing to help out. Even a few above level players can make a huge difference in how smooth a raid goes. If you don’t have anyone willing to help, you can consider offering a small amount of DKP for an incentive with a weekly limit.

This is also a great way for your Raid Core to get their alts into the lower level raids. Just about every 70 raider that I know has and alt (or 5) and most of them have been at it long enough to have another 70. They always seem to ask to take their alts on Kara runs. Here’s a great opportunity to get them access into regular runs of lower level raids.

Splitting the raiding responsibilities between 2 groups means a manageable 2-4 nights of raiding for each group.

Each group can also handle loot individually. I know a lot of guilds tend to throw DKP out the window for lower level raids. Then the guy who’s been playing with your guild for a while can get unlucky on a roll and loose loot he’s been waiting for to a guy who just joined looking for some quick purples.

As with everything else, this is a highly personal situation. What works for one guild will not necessarily work for another. You may be really picky about who gets a ginvite and don’t have this problem since you don’t let anyone in that’s not geared well enough. You may let everyone and their dog into the guild, but don’t really care if they get any raid time. If however, you do have a similar situation, consider this solution.

One Shotting Heroics: The Secret

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The Dark Knight BatmanThis post isn’t really a response to Brendan’s guest post a few days back. It’s my perspective on the Heroic at Honored issue that was continued by Amava.

As long as you have the desire to progress and to succeed, then I am confident that you’ll do fine in Heroics. Veteran players like myself who levelled to 70 within 2 weeks of TBC’s release ended up learning every encounter the hard way. The first time I did Shadow Labyrinth, it took two hours and trash reclears just to kill Murmer for our one frag. I didn’t even want to think about Heroics at the time.

The Heroics of now are much more manageable than they were before. I’m not going to say easier, because players still need to have a level of intelligence and gear required.

For example, in Heroic Sethekk Halls, the opening pull involving the two ghostly mobs? Both were immune to shackle, traps, and any kind of CC. I remember they would randomly drop aggro and charge our members. It was a nightmare just to be in that instance several months ago. Your tank had to be geared enough to withstand the massive amounts of damage, and skilled enough to hold aggro on two mobs simultaneously. Your healer had to be fast to sustain your tank. Having a Hunter was almost a requirement for Misdirect.

Trash in Karazhan have been nerfed enormously. What once took two nights can now almost be done within three hours. I remember a pack of trash that was outside of Maiden’s hallway leading towards the Opera Event. Those necro’s could not be shackled nor pally feared. You had to have two tanks on at all time getting aggro on both of them simultaneously so that when one tank got frozen, the mob wouldn’t run and charge a random player in the group.

I thought that was the hardest encounter I had ever faced at the time

It’s a habit of mine that I continually forget that heroic instances of post 2.3 are much more different than they were in pre 2.3.

Why Blizzard dropped the reputation level

1: Replay Value

They lowered it because it was difficult for players to find groups for Heroics. Only a fraction of all WoW players are raiding any kind of 25 man content. The 70’s who aren’t are typically in casual Guilds who do not have the kind of dedication or personnel to go the route of raiding but want to have fun doing challenging content. If they’re not interested and don’t have the time to PvP, what’s there left to do? 5 man instances are the only option left in order to acquire gear.

2: Patch Nerfs

There’s been four main patches since TBC was released. In every patch, there’s been nerf after nerf on various heroic instances. Each gradual reduction in difficult increases the margin of error that players have. That means more time to recover in case something bad goes wrong. It means the ability to take in players who have the brains but not necessarily the gear. Grinding to revered would have increased the chance that you would get the necessary dungeon gear to replace your preexisting greens and lower level blues.

3: Player Pool Increase

Even on a server as populated as Ner’Zuhl, it took me a long time to not only find tanks and DPSers, but to find players that had to have the key to go in. Now there are more people running heroics because they don’t have to spend the time necessary to grind the rep to get in. In my opinion, players that were kara geared or higher had no need to run heroics (other then badges for nether’s, etc). What was the point? Having T5 gear is better then badge gear. They could not justify the cost of badge runs with that of raids. Players that were far below that could not keep up with whatever their job was. This resulted in a small selection of players who had the NEED to go in and WERE sufficiently geared to go in.

Now heroics are such a piece of cake. I can breeze through them

What’s my secret?

I run with a Pally tank and a Mage. It makes it so easy for me to blog and read while I play WoW at the same time.

Leaving? But You Just Got Here!

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I have often wondered what drives people to do the things that they do. At about 10 PM, I saw someone advertise that they were looking for a healer to help fill out Kara. Nightbane and above were the only bosses left. I opted to join. I had nothing really going on and I was tired of reading. I brought in Saphfira to collect some badges along the way. We wiped three times against Nightbane and then cleared to Curator taking him down in the process.

Here’s where things got eyebrow raising.

One of the mages had to leave.
Then a druid just left the group and hearthed.
Subsequently, we lost a Priest due to a family emergency.
A rogue had to raid in 20 minutes.

WHAT THE HELL!?

I think we did pretty well for the most part. We wiped on Nightbane, people stayed. We killed Curator, people left. When you join a raid, there’s a level of expectancy that is involved. It’s expected that your next 2 or so hours will be free from any other activities or interruptions. Your Guild expects that. Pickup players expect that. What the heck’s the point of joining a Karazhan raid when you have to raid 30 minutes later? These people are on my blacklist and I’m sure they looked bad to everyone else. At least we cleared Prince. Then I checked the clock and it was 130 AM. I fell asleep.

But I didn’t leave my group hanging. I told them beforehand that I could guarantee awakeness until 130 AM. After that, all bets were off. I’m not as young as I used to be. I can’t stay up until 4 AM anymore.

Exam on Thursday and on Saturday. Reduced blogload this week. WTB guest posters.

Matt’s Three Stars: Week Ending November 16

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Akil’zon’s Gauntlet, EZ Mode: First star honors, GMW. First star. You are officially my hero(ine). This one gauntlet section alone took 40 gold off me. So what is her awesome tip that vaulted her past everyone else into first place? You’ll just have to click the link and find out yourself. It’s one of those forehead smacking “Oh duh” kind of things.

The Pointless Debate Around Warden: Gwaendar has an excellent post displaying arguments about the futility of complaining over ‘lack of privacy’ issues in WoW. I agree with you wholeheartedly, sir! Blizzard is a gaming company. They don’t need to break into your computer to blackmail you with your porn stash. It’s unnecessary for them to look up your credit card billing statement (because most of it is involved with WoW in some way or other). If players don’t like programs that add cheat detection to their games, they can simply go play something else. I hear CS 1.6 still has rampant cheaters around. People think they’re so important in this game. They think that the world centers around them and that everyone cares what they have on their computer. They don’t want to be embarrassed or humiliated. Blizz has WAY more important things to do then to snoop through people’s computers. Unless you do something SUPER stupid (like form a plan to blow up Sears tower), there isn’t much that would justify them having to call the FBI. I’m pretty sure you’ll find a clause in the TOS that says they’ll cooperate with authorities if they have to, but it’s like that with any social networking website or service (Facebook especially). They don’t do it because they want to. They do it so they can cover their respective legal ass. You get the number two star in my book, buddy!

What Karazhan Taught Us: Here’s a rather humorous list brought to us by Rohan. These are the important lessons that’ve been taught to us by the various bosses in Karazhan. I think I’ll even expand on it:

  • Attumen taught us gear is important
  • Moroes taught us to have a plan B
  • Maiden taught us perseverance (three weeks on this boss before the nerf, I spent learning)
  • Opera taught us how to learn things on the fly
  • Curator taught us Curse of Doom (an inside joke with a certain warlock who did not realize they had curse of doom)
  • Nightbane taught us synchronized moving
  • Shade of Aran taught us awareness of our surroundings
  • Chess was recess in the school of Karazhan
  • Netherspite taught us the value of strategic withdrawal to strike another day
  • Prince taught us tactical positioning

Third star honors go to you, Rohan! =)

Minimum Class Stat Requirements for Karazhan

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A dear friend asked me for some help a few days ago. She wanted to know what the minimum requirements are for new players looking to enter Karazhan. I’m not looking for numbers that will take down Prince on the first try. What I want are respectable numbers that players of any class can shoot for. I’m looking for ABSOLUTE MINIMUMS HERE. These are the kinds of numbers that will down Attumen after one try, Moroes after three, Maiden after two, and Curator after fifteen because they don’t have the gear for it.

These are the numbers that she has so far. Any recommendations or adjustments? I’ve modified the numbers for opinions on Holy Priests and Shamans. When I get a chance, I’m going to begin perusing the blogs of my other colleagues to see if they have any information that I can add to this list. Even a simple confirmation of numbers would be nice to see, so don’t be shy! (Note: Don’t mind the colors. I copied it directly off a forum)

SUGGESTED MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS TO START KARAZHAN

Warrior

Tank(MT):
12000 Armor, 12000 hp, 490 def., 15-30% Dodge/Parry

DPS:
1700 ap, 70 hit, 33% crit

Druid

Tank:
415 def with 3/3 Survival of the fittest, 12000 hp, 30% Dodge, 20k armor
(As suggested by Karthis)
DPS:
600 dmg, 15% crit (caster form), 75 mp/5, 75 hit

Heal:
+1000 heals, 100 mp/5

Rogue

1300 – 1400 ap, 90 hit, 20% crit
As suggested by mesczante

Priest

Heal:
6000+ health, 7500 mana, +1000 healing, 100 mp5

DPS:
6000 mana, +650 dmg, + 3-5% hit
(As suggested by MK)

Hunter

BM:
8000 hp, 6000 mana, 1450 ap, 17.5% crit, 75 hit

MM:
8000 hp, 6000 mana, 1750 ap, 17.5% crit 75 hit

Shammy

Resto:
950 – 1000 heals, 110 mp/5, 10% crit

Elemental:
+500 dmg, 20% crit

Enhancement:
1000 – 1200 ap, 20% crit, 8% hit

Mage

+600 dmg, 90 hit, 25% crit, 6000 hp and 7000 mana
(As suggested by Calandris)

Pally

Tank:
102.5% Total avoidance (dodge/parry/block)
490 def, 10500 hp, +100-150 dmg

Heal:
1000-1200 heals, 80-100 mp/5, 8000-9000 mana, 15-20% holy crit

Warlock

Affliction: 7000 hp, 6000 mana, +600 dmg, 90 hit

Destro/Demon: 7000 hp, 6000 mana, +600 dmg, 90 hit, 20% crit

Again, your comments and opinions will be greatly appreciated.