It’s been a week since my last blog post, and I am really feeling horrible over the massive lapse.  I would love to say it is purely due to the fact that I have had quite a bit on my plate, which I have.   That however does not really cover it entirely.  I just have lacked the basic “oomph” to sit down at the keyboard and compose anything worth reading.  So what you are getting now may or may not be worth reading, just be warned.

I am going to blame the root cause of my lapse on the holiday.  Through a concordance of events brought on my the shitty economy, I was forced to take a furlough day as part of the normal 4th vacation.  The result gave me a nice long 4 day weekend, and a very compressed 3 day work week.  So last week I really did not have the time to do my normal lunch time posting, and while on vacation I lacked the fundamental “give a shit” to actually think cogent thoughts.

I think a good part of it as well is as the week drug on there were so many things to write about.  There have been so many announcements of late that reflect some pretty ground breaking changes to the way the game will be played from now on.  The end result has been at least for me a bit of a “deer caught in the headlights” effect.  Too many things to write about, is often times just as bad as nothing to write about.  So cover me, as I attempt to charge into something that makes sense.

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this Wall

Last week brought forth the announcement of many things, but probably the most shocking was the Faction-Change service. The quick summary of this is that players will be able to, for a fee, change the faction of one of their characters.  As part of this, they will be able to choose which class they will be transitioning too pending its a valid race/class combination, so no Human Shaman or Tauren Paladins.  This undoes several stances that blizzard has taken in the past on this concept, and pushes them one step in the right direction as far as I am concerned.  However my notion is this, why stop there…  why not take the step I have been waiting for and finally tear down the faction wall.

The Faction Wall is the artificial barrier between the alliance and horde factions restricting players form interacting in anything but the most basic or violent ways.  This barrier has been one of my biggest complaints about the game in general over time.  Previous titles like the Everquest series have always allowed players from opposite factions to group together for a common cause, even giving players in EQ2 the ability to formally defect to the other faction without any severe character changes.  The invisible wall between factions allows for both sides of the fence to benefit from the server population as a whole, instead of creating the ever present horde “underprivileged” that comes from generally lower populations.

This concept really strikes a chord for me because of the past history of my guild House Stalwart.  As a group we began to organize, months prior to the release of WoW on a game agnostic forum.  We gathered together all the players from multiple games, to unite under one banner for the new game we all planned to switch to.  However as we decided which characters we would be playing, there was a clear divide between players who were definitely alliance and those who were most certainly horde.

As a hedge fix we tried to start two guilds on two different servers, planning tentatively to split time between the two.  However as we all got higher in levels, each became more attached to one server or another.  The result caused the lions share of players to end up in House Stalwart on Argent Dawn, and a much smaller number to remain on Silverhand in the Burning Scar.  The Horde faction was eventually forced to merge into a larger guild, due to a simple lack of warm bodies available to do anything.  The artificial wall between the factions had successfully cleaved our gaming group in two.

Were the faction boundary not artificially imposed upon the game, we would still have remained a strong unified force.  Sure each of us would be forced to bank in a different town than some of the guild, but the end result would be that both horde and alliance players could group and quest together relieving the burden somewhat of under population.  To this day I still have a good number of friends that play horde on my server, and have rolled alts in an vague attempt to play with them.  However I know, that I will never fully integrate into that society because my home is still alliance.  But it would have been amazing, were our two guilds able to help one another out.

Warders beware

In other news, my 10 man Ulduar group is still going well.  We seem to have finally found a stable group that works really well together.  Gone are the days of not knowing who I would invite for the last half of the raid, and in it’s place is a stable group of 10 players who work well together.  I can not put into words how much fun I am having with these folks.  First we have the amazing healing trio of Aigie the priest, Ysinnia the tree, and Elemiuse the resto shaman.  Add onto it the tanking team of myself, Ornquist the Tankadin, and our swing hitting Euron the Deathknight who can deliver serious dps or survivability depending on the situation.  Layer onto this already potent mix our dual mage threats Dallian and Pinkygirl, the best hunter on the planet Thalen, and our resident crack dealer Kinral, and we have without a doubt the most versatile group I have managed to run with.

The most amazing thing is that this group has seemingly fallen into place entirely by accident.  After weeks of various spots in the run being a complete and total crapshoot, this lineup has just finally stuck.  Sure I could have cherry picked a some higher DPS in a few places, or min-maxed the balance to the nth degree, but what this group brings to the table that shatters everything else is amazing teamwork.  The group just meshes, has excellent situational awareness, and is able to think of its feet.  Every week I truly look forward to the 10 man nights with great gusto.

In the few weeks with this arrangement we have made short work of Auriaya, Hodir, and last night Freya.  In addition to this we put in some very solid tries on Thorim so I have no doubt we will be able to down him soon.  I am giving you notice now Mimiron, we are coming for you soon.  I guess finally our 10 man feels like it has some legs on it, and for that I am extremely happy.  I can only hope that soon our 25 man group will solidify like this, and those nights would feel more enjoyable and far less like herding cats.

Yes I realize that it can by no stretch of the word be deemed as spring anymore, but it was the most evocative title I could come up with.  I’ve been going through a good deal of “cleaning” in real life, trying to get the house in order and backyard in a state that is anything other than a disgrace to our crystal clear blue pool.  The whole process has put me in a mood to “clean house” in the virtual world as well.

There are a good deal of chores that, if you are like me, you just put off until you otherwise can’t anymore.  Two things that have been sticking out like a sore thumb is the maintenance of member ranks, and the maintenance of the guild bank.  These on top of some much needed maintenance to over overall policies, are in dire need of attention.  Like everything, I thought I would attempt to post some of my thoughts in order to spur all of you into tackling those items you have been leaving alone too.

Ushering out the Old

House Stalwart does not remove members, and this has been a point of pride for me.  We have members who have quite literally not been online in 4 years, and these are individuals I know in person.  However it is a simple fact that accounts that have not been active in some time are just a treasure waiting for an account hacker to find.  If one of these nefarious individuals were to get a hold of a privileged account, you could find yourself in a position with all of your guilds worldly positions gone in a blink of an eye.  I don’t know anyone who keeps an accurate record of all of the guild banks tabs, so as a result you would most likely be unable to recover the majority of it from blizzard.

This said I have implemented a guild rank called “inactive” that is one up from the default rank of the guild.  Once a month roughly, I have been going through the accounts in our guild looking for any account that has been active for a year.  When this occurs I bump them down to the inactive rank, which has no rights whatsoever to the guild bank, or guild permissions in general.  The problem with this process is I have been extremely lax when it referred to inactive officers.

We currently have several officers who are either on hiatus, or otherwise unaccounted for and each of them is a true disaster waiting to happen.  So as a result tonight when I get home, I am demoting every officer that is currently inactive, and promoting a few new ones to take their places. The guild is a living entity, and its important that you prune your ranks from time to time to make sure that it stays safe and current.  While I know personally I am most liable to leave close friends with the honorific title of “Regent” (our officer rank), it is important that you push these things aside and do what is best for the guild.

Checking Permissions

Another activity that should be considered is deciding whether or not your permission scheme for your guild is too strict or too lax for your current situation.  For us we have 2 tabs that are considered to be “Free For All”, and the last 4 tabs to be officer access only.   For the most part this works well, and our default rank of yeoman, has no access to any of the tabs at all.  This gives new members a bit of a trial period before they can wreak havoc.  You might ask why this permission less default rank is so important.

Stalwart is very much a unique entity.  We are one of the remaining “day one” guilds on the US Argent Dawn server, however we have never really had a “traditional” recruitment policy.  Simply put, we are both always recruiting and never recruiting.  House Stalwart is only open to players who already know a member, and all of our members of any long standing have the ability to do guild invites.  This has lead us to grow in a very organic method, and while we are flush with raiders, kept a very tight knit family atmosphere. 

Every so often one of our members is a poor judge of character, and as a result this default permission less rank acts as a safety net between the guild as a whole and new members.  So as part of your guild spring cleaning I urge you to map out exactly what your permissions are, and determine whether or not they still meet the needs of your guild.  It is almost every day that you can read on the forums about some poor guild being robbed blind by a less than honorable individual.  It is important as you the guild leader and officers to set up a scheme to protect against such attacks from outside…  and in the case of hacking, making sure that when someone is compromised they can only do so much damage.

Clearing the Clutter

Our guild bank overruneth…  quite literally.  We seem to always be short on the items that players actually need, and long on the miscellaneous crap that nobody seems to need.  If you are not watching it, things like the 15 stacks of Pygmy Suckerfish can creep in and just take up needless space.  So as a result it is once more time to clear out the clutter and debris from the corners of the bank.

Lucky for us, we have had a member step up and offer her services to help us sift through what is good and auction house the rest.  But the basic idea is to get together with your officers and determine, which items are actually needed, or rare enough to warrant saving, and which items are now outdated or simply junk.  The old items should either be offloaded to an individual alt bank, or shipped to the auction house as fodder for the guild bank funds.  For example, we have had some blues stacking up in the bank that have quite literally been there since January.  If no one is using them, then there is no need to keep them around, and as such should be auction housed before they become “last years fashions”.

Another prime example is that we tend to keep ready eat stat food on hand, as we have several cooks in the guild.  Problem is, we have a good number of outlands recipes that nobody actually wants.  So our basic idea is to make these into care packages for players in the guild who have alts in the level ranges of this food.  This serves two purposes.  Firstly it clears out the bank freeing up space for better items, and secondly it gives players a little added benefit to level those characters.

Everyone wants Free Enchants

One of the problems that we have been having is that we simply cannot keep enchanting materials on hand.  They seem to fly out the door faster than they arrive. The key issues, is that very few people actually donate the materials, and everyone wants to tap upon the resources sitting in the guild bank.  This has lead me to become a pit bull when it comes to enchanting material requests, forcing me to check the logs and see whether or not this is a player who has been actively donating to the guild bank or not.

One of our procedural tweaks we are looking at is to auto loot all green items to a disenchanter for breaking down and storing in the guild bank.  In the past we have always let greens go to the luck of the draw, to help players out with repair bills.  However as the donation of materials has come to a halt, we have literally 2-3 players carrying the entire raids material needs.  It is completely unfair to ask a handful of players to support the whole guild.

This however is a symptom of a larger issue that I don’t quite know how to deal with.  As with everything in life, 10 percent of the players do 90 percent of the work.  This carries to guild bank donations as well, and other than imposing some kind of a formal system I am really not sure how to fix this issue.  I would be curious to find out how other players handle the guild bank, and requests for items.  More importantly, I would be interested to know how guilds handle the restocking of the bank once items are taken.

Material Sharing only works when everyone shares

As you all noticed, I did not manage to get a blog post up yesterday.  For some reason it seems to often be Thursday that I massively fail at getting one out the door.  Around here it was fairly busy, and I was furiously working on something that caused me to not even pop my head out long enough to eat lunch.  So needless to say thinking of anything to write about was quickly replaced with, must survive day so I can get some food.

Stubborn is an Art form

Over the last few weeks we have managed to accumulate some new blood for the raid, both in the form of players who are ready to step up to the plate and perform, and those who will need some gearing help.  This has been like a breath of fresh air for us all, and provided some much needed balance.  Duranub continues the slogan used by one of our former incarnations, the Late Night Raiders…  a durable pack of nubs.  However, I think we should probably change this to somehow indicate just how stubborn we are.

Blizzard may preach the motto of take the player not the class, but we have as a whole proven the truism and faults of that statement.  In general, duranub has HORRIBLE class balance.  We’ve had too many protection warrior tanks, too many healing priests, a truly silly number of mages, and in the past more than half of our dps comprised of melee.  We have struggled through a complete and total lack of balance, on all grouping fronts, making us work much harder to progress than we really need to.  Combine this with the fact that we only have 5 hours of raid time per week to devote to our 25 mans, it gives us a progression speed that at times feels like cold molasses.

The Shifting Sands

This past week we had a few things shift into place.  Firstly we lost one of our protection warriors to a guild with some easier progression.  I’ve always had mixed feelings regarding leaving a raid, considering I have turned down numerous raid spots with “easymode” farmed gear to continue to tank for my friends.  In the case of our warrior, they very much signed up to tank.  However due to the specifics of Ulduar, and various sundry connection issues were relegated to a swing tank role, spending most of their time dpsing.  This lead to an unhappy raid life, and as a result they moved on to tank another tanking position.

While this would have normally been a crippling blow to a raid, an odd concordance of events saw one of our past raiders become available on their already 10/25 Naxx geared Tankadin.  So while we lost one of our seasoned players, we brought another one back into the fold and added some much needed balance to the tanking camp.  Having already tanked my 10 man on Wednesday and our 25 man on Thursday, I have to say Ornquist is doing an amazing job assimilating into an already complex raid. 

We don’t exactly have a good track record with past Tankadins.  Our first was an adept tank, but turned out to be very mercenary and sold his skills to the highest bidder, along with some BoE loot on the Auction House.  Our second was an impetuous child, and left nothing but drama in his wake, eventually taking his toys and going home when we didn’t allow him to switch mains for the 4th time.  So all those past experiences behind us, I am just praying Orn is “the one”.

Adding it all up

When you take the tanking balance and throw in that we just added more healing diversity, in the form of a new tree druid, resto shaman, and some prospects for paladins, we wind up all the sudden with a better class balance than we have ever had in Wrath.  The change is balance is very noticeable.  All the sudden all of the fights seem more manageable.  Tanking and Healing both have become much more stable, and in spite of new players having to learn/re-learn the fights we had an amazing week.

Wednesday night my 10 man group had without a doubt our most successful single night ever.  We had a bit of trouble locking down healing, but when players finally became available we got underway about 45 minutes after our normal start time.  We pushed through the content, and even with some re-education on the part of new healers and a new tank we made an extremely fast path through the zone.  At the end of the night we had spent roughly 2 hours in the zone and cleared Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya. 

This sets us up to give Hodir some serious work on Monday, and hopefully some tries on Freya as well.  More than anything I think it was the fresh players giving us a better mix of classes that allowed us to start moving a at fast clip once more.  Blizzard might preach, take the player not the class, but in practice it means…  take the class or you are going to fight your ass off and suffer retarded repair bills and retarded difficulty.

Cat Scratch Fever

Tuesday we were able too clear a good deal of content in our 25 man raid.  We had a few issues, firstly the hardship imposed by a tank leaving with short notice meant we had to push one of our deathknights who has been in a primary dps role since ulduar, into tanking once more.  This combined with an influx of new players who had either not seen the fights, or not done them the way we do, caused several encounters to be far more difficult than they should have been.  However we still managed to clear Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn which left the path to Auriaya wide open for Thursday.

Last night instead of doing a farmed encounter as a warm-up, we dove straight into attempts on the catwoman.  We had a good deal of early bobbles, but these were mostly caused by the fact that we were completely changing the way the fight would be tanked with the addition of a new, stronger, AOE tank.  After several wipes we settled on the pull strategy of me tanking the titan like normal, our newly acquired tankadin handling 3 of the adds, while our deathknight pulled a single cat to the side in order to reduce the total damage the pack of 3 would be dealing to our tankadin.

Once we locked down on this, immediately we could get through the pull with little difficulty.  I believe we managed to get her down to 50% or so on our first try with this strategy. The second piece of the puzzle that clicked into place, was not so politely at times, reminding the players to clump up on top of the tankadin at all times.  This allowed us to avoid the shadow dot placed by the feral defenders and mitigated a good deal of the pounces.  All the sudden the fight became more healable and before I knew it we were staring down the barrel of 20% life left on the titan.

It was somewhere about here that bad things started happening.  For some reason, on many new boss kills for Duranub, we have what I call a race to the bottom.  About 5-6% we began a slow wipe of the raid, we lost healers, the main tank (me), and slowly each of the two off tanks.  Finally a deft use of evasion bought us the time that the remaining dps needed to push her down all the way.  It was far from pretty, but by god I will take it.  I think next week will go much smoother, as from 50%-20% people really seemed to speed up.  As a whole we were extremely low on dps, considering some of our heaviest hitters were out of town.  So once you put them back in the mix I think we will have a farmable fight.

Cloak of the Makers – Unbreakable Chestguard – Sandals of the Ancient Keeper

I managed to pick up the chest piece which I thought was extremely awesome.  I am not sure what has happened but for some reason over the last few weeks the gear has just finally began dropping.  Granted we have not even seen the much coveted Titanguard, somehow without me really noticing it, I have upgraded almost all my slots to ulduar gear.  In the last few weeks I’ve managed to pick up… Titanstone Pendant – Saronite Plated Legguards – Shieldwall of the Breaker – Greaves of the Stonewarder.  All of which has greatly buffed my survival and it combined with the fact that our healing has regulated a bit, make me feel far less squishy.

Stealth Nerf:  Repairs?

Okay it has been a truly great week for myself and Duranub, but there has been one hidden benefit of it all.  I’ve complained about the insane amount my repair bills have been.  Prior to this week they had been roughly 20g per death, which by any count was insane.  In fact I have had people writing in to argue with me, that formulaically that would be impossible…  however regardless of what math and logic tell us, they were in fact 20 freakin gold per death.  Tuesday evening a miracle happened.

I’ve gotten in the habit of repairing every time I run back into the instance after a wipe, this helps me not think about the hundreds of gold the night will be costing me.  After our very first wipe of the night, I looked down and noticed something strange.  My repair bill, was only 9g, and this trend has continued.  I seem to have had my repair insanity nerfed… which is an awesome thing.

Granted I am still hurting for cash, after months of 20g per death being the norm, but maybe just maybe I can begin to make a little bit of leeway.  After asking around, this seems to have only really effected plate wearers, as the only player that really noticed a difference was one of my tankadin friends.  If anyone has found reference to this phenomena I would love to see it in writing, but as of this posting I have not found any mention of a repair bill nerf. 

I just hope the trend continues

Well once again its a Wednesday, which is quickly becoming my favorite day of the week.  Why you might ask?  For the last few weeks we have been running 10 man Ulduar on Wednesday nights, and there is a certain package of hope when confronting a fresh instance.  For me, the 10 man dynamic makes for a much more enjoyable grouping experience.  While we are still serious about what we are doing, the 10 man group I run with always seems so much more laid back than our 25 man raid. 

I think most of this is simply logistics, trying to get 24 other players all moving in the same direction is as I have related before, like herding cats.  In the 10 man dynamic, we tend to take a group of players that as a whole work better together, and are closer friends.  So the banter is quick and friendly, and the pace is a bit swifter.  If there is a god, we will be able to pull together the group at the normal start time and maybe just maybe get Hodir down and start working on Freya.

Things in the 25 man front are looking more hopeful as well.  Last night was a bit rough, but mostly because we had some Ulduar virgins with us.  But the positive of this is we had some fresh blood finally coming in.  We managed to lose one of our tanks this week, but in a very serendipitous fashion I found a replacement in one of the stalwarts returning to the game.  In the grand scheme of things, adding a Tankadin to our stable, will mean much better balance.  In addition to this, we added several new healers…  that weren’t priest!  You all know my love of priests, but adding some more druids and shaman to the raid will help balance out the healing as a whole.

What is a HitList?

This topic is something I probably should have covered in my recent GroupCraft series of posts, but it honestly did not fit cleanly into the topics.  One of the important things I covered in those posts, was that you should have a clear focus and a stated purpose.  When I hit maximum level I switch my focus to gearing my character, since my goal with any character is to get them to a “raidable” state.  So one of the methods that I employ to decide which instances I should run is to create a “HitList”.

Loosely defined, a HitList is a list of items you wish to acquire for your character and which boss/instance they drop in.  I generally sort my list by equipment slot, and from time to time I will choose a primary focus and an alternate.  This requires a good deal of research and there are many options on how to do this.  If you are a DPS based class your easiest option for figuring out where items drop is MaxDPS.  This website allows you to constrain what tiers of gear you have available, and then presents you with a list of options allowing for things like crafted gear and badge gear.

Another older resource that still has alot of good in it is Kaliban’s Class Loot lists.  During Burning Crusade, I practically lived on this site when it came to gearing my characters.  The layout of the website really is designed to support the collection of gear as you are leveling up, as the various dungeons are arranged by level order.  However you can still view the various dungeons normal and heroic loot tables by class.  They used to have this great flash gear chooser, that allowed you to constrain things based on what stats you were looking for, but it appears to be long dead.

Wowhead is a bit like Hard Mode for gear choosing, and by that I mean you are flooded with so much raw information that it takes a good deal of work to dissect it all.  Basically when I attempt to choose gear from Wowhead I use a series of constraints to limit down the data.  For an example of this process here is a link that I would use to look at Tanking Helms.  Let me walk you through the process I used to arrive at it…

• I selected from the browse menu:  Items > Armor > Plate > Head in order to only return only results for plate helms.
• I constrain by level required, as we are looking for gear to ready us for heroics and raiding, we only want level 80 gear…  so I type 80 in the first box for “Required Level:”
• I only want to return items usable by my class… so I selected Warrior
• I am going to add a filter, that will allow me to sort out any gear that simply does not make sense for me to use.  In order to do this, you either want to constrain by a stat you would NEVER use, or constrain by a stat that you would ALWAYS use.  For a warrior, I want to filter out any gear with spellpower on it, as this is the immediate designator that the gear was designed for a Paladin.  For a healing priest, filtering out Hit gear is a good idea for another example.
• Lastly I am going to use the “Create a Weight Scale” Optional tool.  To open the UI for this, you click the text.  From the dialog boxes I chose the preset for Warrior, Protection (Tanking), and left the default of Rare gems.  If you are doing this on a search NOT constrained to a specific slot, it is good to check the “Group by slot” box.

Click apply filter, and you are given a much shorter list of items to choose from.  Additionally, if you are looking for only Epic or Rare gear, you can change your selection for that as well.  The source column will give you in a quick glance where the item drops from.  Generally I keep a notepad document open and scribble down all the selections that I am making per slot.

Once you have your list of items and where they drop, you will start to see patterns in the list.  Certain zones will have more items you need than others, so as a rule those are the zones that you should be attacking first.  Now that you know where things drop that you need, you can start trying to get into groups going to those dungeons.  If you apply a focused approach to gearing, you can do what I have done many time and go from being a fresh level 80, to being a heroic ready player in a week or less of systematic gearing.

Elemental Mastery

Well it appears that I have inspired another friend to start blogging, and I have to say she has blown my website design completely out of the water.  The player in question is non other than Audrae, the friend of mine who drew the Chibi Belghast that adorns this sites header.  Completely Elemental is her take on the world of warcraft world, from the perspective of an elemental shaman. 

It’s a fledgling blog, so there is not a ton of content yet, but as always Rae expresses herself well.  I highly suggest you add her to list of blogs to read.  Normally I would say add her to your RSS reader, but in this case the site design is so beautifully rendered that it always seems like a crime NOT to read it from the website itself.  Considering the fact that she is feeming to post more today, I am hoping that she can keep up with the rigors of regular posting.

Now… I have to redesign my site