raid

Which Raiding Aspect of 2.4 are you Looking Forward To? [NEW POLL]

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Image courtesy of thanx from SXC

The PTRs are chugging along. Every day there are new builds and new changes that are matched by restored abilities (such as the warlock buff). Most of the heckling now revolves around class balancing and the like. The changes to the 25 man raids are aimed at helping every guild at any level to progress in the game as much as possible before the next expansion arrives.

What are you looking forward to in raids?

So, this is a really large patch! There’s no way I can squeeze every change onto my side poll. Therefore, I’m condensing it to raid related changes only.

Increase in gold drops from 25 man bosses

This is a huge boon for players like me who don’t have the time or the energy to farm on a regular basis. It will help offset repair bills somewhat. I was told 25 man bosses would drop 500g resulting in 25 per player. On the other hand, there’s a screenshot out there in existence with Brutalis dropping 250g (10 per player).

Additional set token drops from 25 man bosses

I wonder now if they’ll end up increasing the amount of loot that drops from non-set token dropping bosses to equalize the amount of loot they provide. The extra token drops will help in terms of progression, that’s for sure.

Removal of attunements in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple

There’s been a ton of reactions to the removal of attunements. I killed Kael several weeks ago and all I’m about to get is some lousy title. I can kind of understand where players are coming from about their wasted time and such. To be honest, I’m looking forward to this change the most. Why? Because then I won’t ever have to step back into SSC and TK to attune ONE more player EVERY week. A lot of blogs I’ve read haven’t even mentioned that. I guess they’re too focused on the individual to think of the whole. Just think about all that time that is now freed up without having to go back into the T5 areas.

New raid instance and challenges

The last real world event we had was Naxx, wasn’t it? Even then, I never really participated that much. It’s nice to have another world event to participate in again as well as a new raiding instance.

Shiny new purples

Don’t kid yourself. There’s a small loot whore in every single one of us. We all want the best gear in the game. There’s a ton of new badge loot, faction rewards, and raid drops.

Honourable Mention

Druid nerfs

I was going to list druid nerfs as a possible 6th option. Somehow, I don’t think that would go over very well with several of my esteemed blogging colleagues. I might wake up one morning and find one of my wings on my shoulders shredded or something. Who knows what druids do for pranks anyway?

If what you’re looking forward to isn’t listed on the poll, then by all means leave a comment stating what you can’t wait to see!

Which Raiding Aspect of 2.4 are you Looking Forward to the Most?

  • All those new shiny purples! (30%, 136 Votes)
  • Additional set tokens from 25 man bosses! (27%, 122 Votes)
  • New raid instance and challenge! (25%, 110 Votes)
  • Removal of attunements into Mount Hyjal and Black Temple! (11%, 49 Votes)
  • Increase in Gold drops from 25 man bosses! (7%, 29 Votes)

Total Voters: 446

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PTR Report: Mixing Healing and DPS Items

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PTR Report

In the past, I’ve always preached and encouraged players to take loot that’s a minor upgrade for them if no one’s needed it. It appears Blizzard has listened. After checking out the changes on MMO Champion again, something struck me as odd. The best items in the game now appear to be from vendors instead of just as boss drops. The only way to acquire them is to upgrade pieces from boss kills with a Sun Mote.

Confusing? Let me try again.

Old School

You can skimp out on gear from Karazhan and then pick it up at Gruul’s. I’ve long often thought about different ways I could get the best loot faster. For example, in SSC, I would skip out on the T5 legs for 30+ DKP and save it for the T5 helm on Vashj. I’d let the competing classes around me get their leg tokens first because I figured once they all get it, sooner or later I’d get mine at an inexpensive rate. It makes sense because our Guild would kill Fathom Lord more often then they would Kill Vashj.

New School

There’s a bunch of awesome phat loot from Sunwell. However, not all of it’s immediately accessible. There’s an awesome leggings called Pantaloons of Calming Strife. As you can see, it’s meant for Priests. There’s also another pair of leggings called Pantaloons of Growing Strife. That pair is catered towards DPS.

But here’s the catch.

For DPS casters, you have to get a sunmote AND Pantaloons of Calming Strife first before you can go to a vendor and “upgrade” it. Surely those aren’t the only DPS caster pants in Sunwell. But as a player in a Guild using DKP, I can no longer enjoy my monopoly on healing cloth.

Oh well. C’est La Vie!

Raiding Horror Stories and the Opportunity it Brings

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Cracking a 25 man raid roster is not the easiest thing to do in the world, especially when it’s been set in stone for a while. Every now and then, a slot or two will open up which could allow any other player in the guild to fill it. They just have to be given the opportunity to step into it. Benching a raider is a strong message to deliver and it should only be used sparingly if that player’s performance is not up to par. On the other hand, it allows another person the chance to replace them. But when do you determine who gets to sit and who gets to go? Surely the following will help you shape your opinion.

Stories

Every Guild has their AFK stories. Every Guild has their horror wipe stories. These are all true stories, I guarantee you. They’ve been collected from friends and colleagues of mine as well as my personal experience.

We clearing to Kael and as we enter the room, one of our mages appeared to be quite fidgety. So he starts strafing left and right because the raid leaders is going over trash or something. Before you know it, the mage goes from the raid group to the middle of a kael trash group and promptly dies. Turns out his blink key was bound to his “f” key. I can say with absolute confidence that he no longer has blink bound to a key.

We’re doing Al’ar and it’s phase 1. It’s right after a flame quill and one of our tanks goes rushing up the platform to pick up Al’ar. He grabs him and oversteps the platform and falls off the edge. Goodbye Charlie.

FPS problems are a plague for some players because it drastically affects their ability to perform. During the Pre TBC era, there was a boss called Baron. He’s essentially like Solarian. Every now and then, a person gets a debuff and he explodes taking out people around him within a certain radius. There was this player who raided with about 3 FPS. Now at the time, it’s a 1 in 40 chance of who gets the debuff. Sure enough, he gets chosen. His bomb warning is processed too slow which leads to a slow reaction time which leads to him literally taking out half the raid. Does anyone believe in lightning striking twice? Yup, minutes later he gets debuffed again and blows up another half of the raid. The policy now was that this 1 player gets his OWN position without anyone around him. You can’t make this stuff. You just can’t.

There’s this Gruul’s run. The Guild’s in the ready position. Out of no where, this Paladin darts straight ahead right into Gruul. Over vent you hear cries of “WTF” and “OMG”! And then there was silence. The Paladin sheepishly says “Sorry guys, that was my kid on my lap and he was just smashing the keyboard!”

Players who alt tab back in the game when they hear “Shatter” over vent during Gruul.

There was this Gruul’s run. While the main tank was on High King, one of the Paladins DI’d the main tank! Naturally you can kind of guess what happened.

Opportunity

For the GM’s

There’s going to be players in Guild’s that display similar behavior or rationality like the ones I mentioned above. This is a GREAT time for you to try out that new guy in your Guild. You know, the one that joined a few days ago. He’s shown up on time and ready to go. He expects to get shot down but he waits outside the instance logged off in the event hes needed.

Give them that opportunity.

For the new guy

This is your chance to show of your ability and skills. Don’t squander it. If you’re ever unsure of anything, ask. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Work hard and you’ll get your shot soon enough. Turn over in Guilds can be low but they are by no means non-existent. There’s always a player that has to leave at some point and there are always going to be players to take their spot.

Here’s a brilliant example right here. Ryan Shannon is hockey player with the Canucks. He hasn’t fully transitioned to the big club. He’s usually on the farm team (minor leagues). Whenever there’s an injury on the Canucks or if there’s a hole in the lineup for some reason, players are called up from the farm team to help fill their positions. Sometimes, you just never know what they’re going to do. You just have to pray that they’re going to do their job and do it well.

In this case, Shannon not only does the job well, he looks good doing it. Remember, minor leaguer called up to play in the big leagues.

By the way, I know I can’t be the only raider with some stories to share. I’d love to hear your funniest wipes (or most stupidest). So how about it GMW, Karthis, Phaelia, or Galadria?

Silly SSC Mistakes

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I’ll have to skip out on my usual digest post this week sadly. It’s exam week and as a result, lower time spent. Don’t expect anything else until Tuesday evening.

This is the kind of stuff that can easily turn a 3 hour run into a 6 hour run. Kudos to the folks at Fallen Heroes for allowing us to borrow their instance (Lurker down). In this really short post for today, I’m going to let you in on some of the stupidest mistakes that top tier raiding guilds can make. You look at these errors and mistakes and it seems so plainly obvious. But when you’re actually in there in the heat of the moment, things can go from bad to oh crap at any given moment. We popped into SSC due to the lack of manpower for Hyjal ops.

Hydross

Wipe 1: Shadow Priest stood on the wrong side of the “line of scrimmage”. He didn’t wait the requisite 3+ seconds for our tank to secure Hydross. Sure enough, Hydross crossed and we pulled 8 elementals. Positioning is oh so very important! Make sure you stand on the side that Hydross is on. At least if you pull, you won’t make 4 new friends!

Tidewalker

Wipe 2: Simple miscommunication here did us in. We were at the 27% mark and our bear tank was going to mosey Tidewalker up from his spot and tuck him into the side between the pillar and the wall. Problem? Healer’s didn’t hear the tank. Yeah the onus was probably on our end to move up with him. By the time we realized what happened, he had already parked himself out of line of sight and took several shots to the face. He did call out that he was moving him in vent. Unfortunately, no one heard him. So if you’re in charge of calling out a particularly relevant and important piece of information, make sure you speak up. If you call it out and don’t so much as get an acknowledgment, yell it louder until you do.

Fathom-Lord

Wipe 3: My fault but my hands were absolutely tied. I think the worse time to get a disconnect in WoW is DURING a pull. What makes this worse is that I’m the only healer on the Hunter tank. You can kind of imagine how that worked out. I noticed too late that we were standing around much to long and vent was far too quiet. This was right after a ready check, as well. It just goes to show that players can fail under the most ordinary and routine of situations.

Leotheras

Wipe 4: Oddly enough, we didn’t even wipe to Leo personally. We wiped to his 3 cronies in front that kept him in place. True it had been about 6 – 8 weeks since we last foray’d into SSC. We also had 3 players that we’re trying to key up to increase utility. Like a bunch of sheep, several of the players stacked up in one area attempting to DPS down Leo’s mobs. What they forgot were the AOE mind blasts that those mobs cast. Every once in a while, players need to be reminded that they are not supermen. Just because you’ve picked up flashy T6 level gear does not mean you can stop doing the simple lessons that kept you alive in the first place. In this case, it was to take down 1 at a time.

Lady Vashj

Wipe 5: We breezed through most of phase 1 and half of phase 2 with no real difficulties. As luck would have it, we hit a crimp in our plans when our Strider kiting Warlock bit the bullet and went down. Our Shadow Priest took a multishot to the face. I also think we lost a mage there at some point. It all took place within a space of 10 seconds. The boss took a note of that and called a wipe immediately so that everyone could run to the stairs. What he erred out on was that our Shadow Priest got the call for a battle res and our warlock chewed down a soul stone to get back up. What was a deficit of 3 players was now of 1 player. We might have had an outside chance for that. I think what happened here was that our Raid Leader made a judgment call far too early without ascertaining what kind of resources were free to get the dead players back in action.

Wipe 6: This one takes the cake for the most stupidest wipe of the night. We forgot to change it from group loot to FFA loot. The first core was only lootable by our MT who is busy trying to stave off the Naga’s coming up those stairs. By the time he got to it, it had already despawned. Repeat that another 2 times and you can see that we were way behind the game on that one and would have been eventually overwhelmed. There are encounters where FFA looting is a requirement. Make sure you check to see if the encounter you are doing is one of them!