December 2013 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Without Burdens

December 15, 2013 by Belghast

Of Holiday Parties

This morning I am slowly eating my oatmeal and trying to make my head stop throbbing. I feel like I have a “hangover” but I didn’t even drink last night. I think this means I am now officially “old”. Last night was the Christmas party for my group at work. I think I said it yesterday, but we are the only group that actually likes each other enough to hold a party. It has been years since I have felt the way about a group of people that I do about these people. Quite honestly I probably never have felt exactly the same, but my very first work environment was a similar “family” feel.

The highlight of the evening was dirty santa, which for folks who do not know what that means. Gift exchange with the ability to steal from others. The best gift was… a large thing of crown royal, a pair of captain america underoos, and a package of fake moustaches. I cannot and nor do I really want to picture the scenario that was planned with that combination of items… but it was needless to say hillarious. Even better… someone had inadvertedly brought a Captain America mask and shield… the underoos were donated to the winner for the full effect. I brought some legos, and they were hotly contested… as were the call of duty mega blocks that were brought.

Probably the coolest item of the night was one I ended up winning initially but then was quickly stolen from me. The “Boozequet” was a floral bouquet made up of individual shots. The creator had hot glued the individually sealed shot drinks onto floral wire and then arranged all of them in a bouquet. Extremely clever, I told the creator that she should market it and I am sure during this time of the year she would get a lot of business. She even made a cute little “drunk santa” tub for the base of the arrangement. The whole night was pretty amazing. I go through this “I don’t want to go” phase right before any party, because my body rejects being around lots of people. However when I actually do go I have a blast.’

Without Burdens

I really do not have a lot of gaming news today. When you have a big event going on in the evening the entirety of the day tends to be dominated by planning and preparing for it. My day yesterday was either planning or waiting to play for the holiday party. As a result I didn’t get into anything that I could not rapidly exit if needed. That meant my only real options were LFR. After some moving stuff around I managed to get my ilevel high enough to queue for Vale of the Eternal Spring, the first section of Siege of Orgrimmar. In fact currently I am sitting at 502 with a 450 ring still equipped that I have not been able to replace. I am proud of myself because I got there on this alt without “actual raiding” and without leaning on Burden of Eternity gear at all.

Why does this matter? Well a Burden of Eternity is one of those things from the timeless isle that is either a super rare drop, or super costly (50,000 timeless coins). When you apply it to the gear tokens that drop from the island it transforms what would have been a 496 ilevel item to a 535 ilevel item. The problem is, just like the normal tokens there is no control whatsoever on what stat package you will get. This creates a lot of odd situations like tanking items with no avoidance stats on them. I personally find the burden gear to be a bit of a crutch, and what I mean by that is… I cannot seem to make my brain ignore the fact that it is higher ilevel and instead evaluate the stats of an item. Many 502 items will be better for your character than these 535 items just because of the particular stat distribution and the inclusion of gem slots.

Having these extremely high ilevel but not very optimized items just confuses the mix for me. I have or have had quite a few of these on Belgrave my main, and in each case I find it really hard to make myself abandon them for a better itemized but lower ilevel item. This is the double edged sword of ilevel after all… the number does not adequately represent how well a player is geared. I could have a bunch of extremely high ilevel items equipped that are functionally useless for my class. On my shaman I admit that I equipped a healing trinket that I got from a random loot bag… just to get my ilevel up high enough to be able to run Vale of the Eternal spring. I am sure there are lots of other people out there doing the same. I like the feeling of seeing my gear score going up incrementally, but I feel like as a gauge of quality it has never really been valid.

A Quiet Day

This has to be the slowest I have taken to eat my oatmeal in the morning. I blame the multiple directions my head seems to be spinning right now. As a result of my present state… I am hoping for an extremely quiet day. Far as I know we don’t really have much of anything to do today, so my hope is that other than doing laundry I can pretty much sit on my comfy couch and relax. Said relaxation is probably going to involve a lot of LFR for a shot at shiny shiny loot drops. Now that my paladin can queue for Siege I want to get him all the way through to Downfall. I also should run my shaman, dk and druid through as well. Who knows how much I will actually get accomplished but needless to say I will be enjoying my day today.

Mentorship Matters

December 15, 2013December 14, 2013 by Belghast

Hot BBQ Sauce

This is one of those mornings where I have consumed breakfast and am really struggling to get started on the whole writing thing. At least when I was doing NaNoWriMo there was a clear point to begin with again. However in the case of thinking thoughts about things… I don’t have the clear starting place. It is still cold as hell here in Oklahoma. I really wish that my Canadian friends would take this weather back. Cyfer one of the many Canadians in my life said it was an early Christmas present… and no re-gifting. I keep wondering what the postage is on a tornado.

Today is a bit messed up and I think that might be part of the problem. We have my group at work’s Christmas party tonight. It is a minor miracle that we actually like each other enough to have annual get-togethers like this. I am pretty certain we are the only group in our department that has one. Since that is looming over my head it makes everything else I do today feel like I can’t really get involved in much of anything. I had to wake up relatively early this morning and handle raw pork so that they could have pulled pork this evening. Nothing says cold like handing meat fresh from the refrigerator.

Actually doing something potentially cool this year. We got a 3 mini crock pot thingy with individual temperature settings. Since I prefer my pulled pork with hot bbq sauce, it bums me out a bit when I have to shoot down the middle and go for a mild and sweet sauce when I am making it for guests. So this time I am using our biggest crockpot to cook the pork and then am going to divide it up into the smaller pots. Will have one flavored with hot, one with regular and one with hickory bbq sauce for a variety. This way each of us can have a flavor of our choice, and it will let the timid easily experiment without committing to too much heat.

Mentorship Matters

Yesterday in the comments of the blog one of my good friends Scarybooster made an excellent suggestion, and then later Athelia added some tweaks. In raid guilds it is common to have class officers that see to the tutelage of new members of that class to make sure they are doing things as they should. This works great in the case of a raid guild, because winning is generally the ultimate goal. However in the case of House Stalwart, a social guild this paradigm doesn’t exactly work. Most of our members don’t want someone telling them how to play their class, and for good reason. However I still see a specific need for someone to turn to that is able to answer core questions about their spec.

So I took the ideas they provided and spun it around a bit. Last night I introduced the Mentor Program on the forums. For those without Stalwart Online forum accounts, I will preface it here.

How to Qualify

Be a Member of House Stalwart of at least Stalwart rank or higher.
Be maximum level in a given spec (this is currently level 90 in World of Warcraft)
Be willing to answer questions from players and explain the inner workings of your class and spec in simple terms
Be willing to provide outside resources that the players can study
Be extremely patient

What Benefits do You Get?

A Sense of Accomplishment From Watching Players Improve In Your Chosen Spec
Admiration and Respect of Your Guild Members for Giving of Your Time
A Special Mentor Rank (pending you are not already of higher rank)

I have taken what is normally a hierarchy system in raid guilds and turned it into an opt in service. As a result the mentors get recognized easily by the special guild rank, and in the guild note it would say what specific spec they are a mentor for. Ultimately my whole goal with a lot of my changes is to encourage engagement between the members of the guild. The more engaged a player is the more involved they are in the guild as a whole.

Looking for Scribes

Additionally yesterday I announced that we were looking for guild scribes. I can’t be everywhere all of the time. As a result I have requested help in keeping the guild front page updated with nifty things that people are doing. Doesn’t matter if it is a raid victory, random farming of world bosses, soloing a raid, or hosting an in game event. If House Stalwart members are involved I want to know about it. My hope is that folks will write a paragraph or two blurb and send along with it some screenshots that I can then use to adorn the frontpage.

One of our newer members Gueraloca has been helping me out with trying to gather up a census of our guild. When you have almost 900 characters in the guild, everything becomes daunting. As a result Guera is helping me connect the dots between alts and mains. If you are a member of Stalwart please check out her thread on the forums and fill in the alt/main information. The final goal of this process is to have neatly organized guild notes. That in itself will be a pretty massive undertaking, but the goal is to build them in a way so the addons that link alts and mains can work off of them.

Viva La Artisan

December 13, 2013 by Belghast

Rebuilding the Core

Last night I tackled one of the harder aspects of getting a guild back on its feet, at least as far as infrastructure is concerned. Stalwart of course had been trucking along without much of a formal structure, but there were signs of stress as many fractures had formed over the years I had been gone. One of my first steps in trying to right the ship was trying to build a coalition of officers representing different parts of the guild and pulling them together into one team. Essentially I was looking for the players that were already reaching out and engaging other guild members. At the same time I was looking for individuals with keen insight and a level head.

After much consternation about my choices, I finally developed a strategy. Essentially in House Stalwart there are two major raid groups that represent the thrust of where the guild is going. Unfortunately many times these two teams are going in completely opposite directions. My hope was to find a way to represent both forces equally on this officers council of sort that I was building. From Team “Nothing Can Go Wrong” I have tagged Athelia and Arria, both of which are extremely positive forces in the guild. Additionally both have shown a level head and extremely excellent judgment skills. They are constantly engaging other players and the wealth of their game experience is something we can always use.

Then from Team “Leftovers” I brought in Gamad and Shorty. Shorty and I have a long history together, and he has always been one of those players that is willing to give the shirt off his own back to help someone out. Additionally he is a whizkid with the auction house and will be helping liquidate some of our overstuffed guild bank to help buffer our repair money. Gamad is relatively new to the guild, in the grand scheme of things, but in that time I have seen her continued to grow and reach out to new players. She has always been willing to step in and help when help is needed. Additionally I have seen that she is a peacemaker and mediator, and will help out greatly in smoothing over the rough spots.

Finally you have myself and Rylacus the person who so valiantly “kept the lights on” over the last year or so. Together we represent the legacy player, the folks who have been around since vanilla and most of them in House Stalwart since that time or at least Burning Crusade. We are the ones who remember the way things used to be, and have the roadmap to return us to glory. This mix of newer voices and older voices should mesh together to create something greater than the individual parts. There is still a lot more work to be done, but I feel more confident in moving forward now that I have the key pieces in place. There is another one of these “legacy” officers that I still need to talk to, to gauge if they still want to fill that role or not. But last night made me quite a bit more confident about the total outcome of these changes.

Viva La Artisan

Another big change that I am wanting to implement in the next few days is the Artisan rank. At one point I had one of these, but it never really worked out quite like I had wanted it to. Essentially back then I would choose a single crafter for each profession, but that process ended up ignoring a lot of people who want to contribute to the guild. My plan is to make the entire process much more transparent and open this time around. My goal is to create an application process through our forums that allows individuals to sign up to fill the duty of “crafting for the guild”. What I mean by this is that they would have expanded access to the guild crafting coffers, but have the responsibility of filling in the gaps when someone needs gear. The artisan rank would make it clear to identify just who could craft gear for players.

The other major responsibility that comes with the rank is to create a “shop” of sorts on the forums. It will be the responsibility of guild crafters to create a post outlining the major things they can create with their professions. Additionally I expect these Artisans to watch the forums for any item requests and then respond back in a timely fashion as to whether or not they can provide the service. I am going to have to figure out the logistics of this whole program, but over the years I have had more guild members wanting to know how they can help out. Buffering the leveling process by providing new gear, especially as someone reaches the level cap is a massively valuable service. I know Shorty for example already provides new players “care packages” of things like bags… and this has been entirely of his own initiative. I can only imagine what could come of a more organized system.

Bring on the Warband

Finally I am wanting to work out the details of organizing the raid groups within the guild. I am staunchly against a “raider” rank, because singling someone out just because they raid as somehow better just feels morally wrong. What I do want to create however is transparency in who is actually organizing and leading the raids. As a result one of the various guild ranks will be turned into a “Raid Leader” designation. This serves two very simple purposes. Firstly it will control access to the raid materials tab in the guild bank. However more importantly this will clearly identify who a guild member can approach about joining in the raid. Additionally I would like to get someone from each raid to maintain a thread on the forums outlining what the raid does, when they raid, who exactly someone can talk to about joining.

Additionally I want there to be a clear “you must be this tall” line drawn for each group. Item level is a double edged razor, but with it you can size up some basic requirements as to how well geared someone needs to be to be able to compete in the content. I am by no means saying that there needs to be an automatic system of entry. I do not want to get into the business of determining who can raid and who can not. I do however want the raid groups within House Stalwart to be much more transparent on how one gains entry. Additionally I feel as though if you enter one of the raid groups in good faith that you should remain loyal to that team.

There has been some bad blood in the past as various individuals have transitioned between the teams without adequately informing the leadership of their previous team. I want this to stop, we are one guild with a shared mission of trying to make the game a better place for all of us. My hope is that by exposing the raid groups and the processes for entry, that it will be extremely clear how transitions should work. Additionally I would like to see rosters posted of the current members of each raid, that way there can be no doubt in when someone is encroaching on the domain of the other raid. I am not saying there can be no transfers of lineup… I just want the entire process to work more transparently.

And Then I Actually Played…

I won’t lie… most of my night last night was spent dealing with various guild business in trying to create this new vision. Additionally I spent more than a bit of my time counseling players and trying to smooth over rough spots. Shortly after I had talked to Arria and brought him into he council he designed to run a heroic scenario. I took a break from leveling Gloam to do so, as my Paladin still had not finished the quest that guarantees a 500+ epic of some sort. The biggest struggle in gearing my alts has been on trying to get a weapon. I had heard from many friends that weapons DO actually drop from the loot bag you get from your daily heroic scenario. Problem is so far in all of the scenarios I had run I had not actually seen this happen.

So I went into the run expecting to get a few valor points, but not really expecting much from it. I am so thankful I took the break from my rogue because I walked out with a shiny Immaculate Pandaren Hammer of the Earthshaker. This actually is about the ideal weapon for a retribution Paladin, so I can finally stop sucking it up with my 450 weapon in LFR. It was a fun little run but I failed miserably at tanking the pirate boss with the saber. I had never actually used it, and I was trying to move out of the fire while hitting the cooldown and just got oneshot. On my deathknight I never use the saber and simply move out of range. So we missed the bonus by a few seconds, and I feel bad about it… but everyone that was with me was fine with it. They were happy to see I managed to pull a weapon. Now I just need to get the same success with my shaman… twice.

Faffing Pays Off

December 12, 2013 by Belghast

Administrata

As part of my return to the leadership of House Stalwart, there is a ton of base level clean-up that I need to do. One of the first pieces I decided to tackle was shifting any character that has not been online in the last year to “retired” status. So many guilds kick the inactive, but I have never really liked that concept. It feels harsh since in my experience so many people renew their subscription on a whim. Logging back in to a friendly guild that has missed them, is a much more enjoyable experience than finding out they have been booted out into the cold.

This is compounded now by the concept of guild faction, that was added in with Cataclysm. Booting a character from a guild has serious repercussions for the player. It takes awhile to get to exalted with a guild, especially at maximum level… so punting folks out and making them potentially redo all that faction work just seems cruel. Setting them to retired rank seems like a good solution, since I have stripped that rank of all bank privileges to protect the guild from someone getting hacked, but if someone does return for a length of time I can bump them back up to an active rank.

I had originally planned on doing this for anyone that had been gone for over 6 months… but ended up calling it quits after finishing with the “1 year” folks. It took me what felt like an hour to get that far through the list. I can only imagine what it is going to be line when I redo every single one of the almost 900 characters guild notes. One of my goals is to do a guild census of sorts… get to know every single person that is in the guild that joined during my 2 year absence. Part of this is to set accurate guild notes that follow a pattern so that you can use addons like Prat to merge the two in chat.

WoW Bucket List

One of the concepts that I have latched on over the last few weeks is the idea of a WoW Bucket List. The first time I had actually seen this in a formalized form was over on Cuppyville, where she proudly lists her WoW Bucket List in the top menu of her site. I don’t quite have my formalized enough for that, but I have started a Google Docs Spreadsheet and as I think of things have begun adding them to it. Always in the past when I have left WoW, it has been because I “ran out of things to do”. I say that in quotes, because really that was never the case in actuality. There are far too many things to do to have ever been “done” with the game.

What happened instead is I got frustrated and lost sight of the things I wanted to do once upon a time… but have long forgotten about. My theory is that in keeping this bucket list, I will be able to pick things off of it on those rainy days when I can’t think of anything worth doing. Now several of them do require lots of people to complete, like finishing off my Glory of the Icecrown Raider achievements that I am missing only a couple of sub achievements on. But I had a conversation with a guild member last night and we talked about having some sort of a rotating raid achievement night for old school content. I love ticking off these things, and its even better when you can help a whole group full of people check those goals off as well.

Some examples from mine are…

Complete Glory of the Pandaria Hero on Belgrave
Level Gloam to 90
Level Alchemy/Herbalism to 600 on Gloam
Farm Deathcharger’s Reins in Stratholme
~~Farm~~ ~~Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake~~ ~~in Stone Core~~

Bucket List Saves Day

One of the most amazing bloggers/podcasters… @AlternativeChat constantly extolls the virtues of “Faffing about”, that is doing the piddly little things that only really matter to you. After my hour of wrestling with the guild roster, I was not really in the mood to focus on anything much. I had originally planned on working on questing my way through Hyjal on Gloam, but as I logged in to do just that everything felt “hazy”. Normally this might have been one of those times that I logged out frustrated with not feeling like making “real progress”. However It was at this point my WoW Bucket List paid off. I looked at my long list of objectives and decided that last night would be a mount farming night, as I could chat freely while doing it.

Soloing old content is one of my biggest enjoyments in any game. There is so much nostalgia wrapped up in making your way through content that used to require a large group. You feel epic as you trounce monsters that used to trounce you regularly. Had I not raided every last bit of this content, I doubt I would have the massive shot of nostalgia that this gives me… but it almost always guarantees a smile on my face. As a result I started the evening in Tempest Keep, as a friend of mine and I made a contest of it over on our Mumble server. We started at roughly the same time and tried to see who could clear the dungeon first. Neither of us managed to get the fabled Ashes of Al’ar to drop… but last week another guild member did so it has renewed our interests.

From there I took a trip over to Utgarde Pinnacle to battle my old nemesis Skadi the Rutheless. Across the board the protodrake model is one of my favorite mount designs, and to the best of my knowledge the only two that are still available that I am missing… are the blue and yellow. While the concept of the Time-Lost Proto Drake intrigues me… and every time I have occasion to be in the area I fly the circuit of spawn points “just in case”… I do not have the fortitude to farm it. Instead I battle my old nemesis in an attempt to steal his mount whenever I have downtime. I both love and hate the fact that it is heroic, because it limits the amount of grinding I can realistically do in one sitting.

Faffing Pays Off

Upon failing once again to walk away with that ever elusive proto drake, I moved on to the next target which was The Stonecore. The second boss of the instance, Slabhide has an equal chance of dropping Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake on both Heroic and Normal. As a result I tend to farm this mount resetting the instance over and over until I reach the instance lockout timer. Honestly this is one of the least frustrating farms I have done in a game, as there is a warp gate immediately after the boss that can take you right back to the instance. So you clear your way down, fight Slabhide and warp back up to the start, zoning out and resetting it. It was on my fourth clear of the night that luck smiled upon me and I got to tick something off of my Bucket List.

Here is a gratuitous shot of me riding my new prize immediately after exiting The Stonecore. This is my very first of the “stone drake” mounts, as I never managed to complete the heroic achievement for Cataclysm. I ended up leaving only a few months into the expansion, and at that point achievements were just not a priority. I have quite a few of the things ticked off however, so it is on my bucket list of things to finish up. I have to say… the Stone Drake model may give the Proto Drake a run for its money. My absolute least favorite however is the Cloud Serpent model, which has seriously harmed my progress on all of the Pandaria achievements.

The moment I got my drake I had to tweet @AlternativeChat to share my moment of faffing paying off. My hope is that tonight I can return to progressing on Gloam, but if not I am sure I will just grab another thing from the list. Tuesday I had every intent to work on gloam as well but instead wound up running around the world with a pack of guildies farming the Zandalari Warbringers for an attempt at their mount. So to be honest… my primary plan is to work on Gloam, but I will as always be open to suggestions of alternative paths. Whatever option we end up choosing is completely fine by me, so long as we have fun doing it.