Forgive me readers for I have sinned…  it has been 4 days since my last confession.  Friday was an extremely busy day for me, and then we had our long memorial day weekend here in the united states.  During which time I had zero desire to sit down and think of something worth reading.  I have all these “rainy day” topics in my head, but have been unable to bring myself to sit down and actually formulate them.

To further my sinning, I have begun to play a deathknight.  This is only a sin for those who know me well, and have heard me lament the fact that so many players abandoned “useful” classes to level a deathknight.  I lost my tanking partner in crime, an amazing feral druid named Sanctifi, to the dark class.  In addition to that we lost our best healing shaman to a deathknight.  However both were very open and up front about this, and both have become the two deathknights I look up to the most.  I patterned my DK after Roisen, at least in that I am leveling blood spec for maximum survivability.

I have to say that right now, leveling as a deathknight is much like I typed IDDQD in my chat window and turned entered “Degreelessness Mode”.  I started the weekend at 56 and as of last night was halfway through 64.  Right now he has taken the spot that the boomkin had, of my favorite non-raid activity.  If I keep this obsession up I will end up with a fourth 80 before I know it.  Yesterday I was happily playing along and “accidentally dinged”.  You can tell I am enjoying myself, when I am not watching the xp bar at all.  I need to slow down a bit, I have blown past my “leveling buddy”.

Dealing with the Guilt

As the main tank of our guild and raid, I carry with me a large package of responsibility, and with that comes a large degree of guilt and pressure.  Last night we had planned a second night of 10 man ulduar, in an attempt to push on and get Assembly of Iron and maybe Auriaya.  However yesterday I woke up with immense back pain, which I attribute to the extremely uncomfortable chair I was forced to sit in at the lake on Sunday.  As the day drug on the pain got worse, and when we arrived home from the movies yesterday afternoon, I took one Flexeril that I had from a previous back injury.

It completely knocked me on my ass.  I tried laying down for a bit before raid time, which caused me to get online a few minutes late, but this really had zero effect.  As I stand there, in the rooms just prior to the Assembly of Iron trash, I was quite literally unable to keep my eyes open.  I knew that without a doubt I would wipe the raid multiple times that night.  A few players noted that they too were not really feeling up to raiding, so I thought that if I stepped up to the plate and announced that I just couldn’t handle it, the raid would eventually dissolve. 

I am finding out this morning that this was not the case.  So this morning I am dealing with a severe case of guilt as I abandoned the raid, and the other players who were also not feeling up to raiding, apparently swallowed it down and pushed onwards.  So for other players who bring to the table a key role in a raid…  how do you handle the guilt when you can’t make it?  I still feel like me stepping out was the best option both for me and the raid, but I can’t seem to get past the sense that I failed as a whole.  Had I known the drug was going to have such a serious effect I would have just dealt with the pain.

Dealing with the Obsolescence

The other thing I am struggling with this morning is the general feeling of being obsolete.  It is really hard not to feel like the fate of the raid rests on your shoulders.  When you are reminded of the fact that your presence really doesn’t matter that much, it is kind of hard to swallow.  Last night, not only did the raid move on without a hitch in my absence, but they apparently downed a brand new boss.  Which of course, dropped a new piece of tanking gear, giving our off tank one more piece of gear ahead of me.  So this morning I am also struggling with that feeling that maybe my raid doesn’t need me at all. 

There are times I feel pretty bulletproof, but there are also times that I feel like I am wearing paper armor.  I am one of those players that strives to make sure I have the best possible gear for every situation.  It feels like, especially in Ulduar, that our class is even more gear dependant than it has been in the past.  With the crappy luck that I have had recently in getting the upgrades that I really need to remain viable, I am feeling very outmoded and ready for the recycle bin.

I should be excited and happy, that I have somehow managed to build a raid that is self healing and can keep moving along happily in my absence.  On so many levels I am, because I am proud of the fact that we have so many leaders in Stalwart, that any one of them can pick up the slack when something goes wrong.  But at the same time, it is very much a blow to my ego.  How dare the world not grind to a halt when I can’t be there!  I say that in joking, but at the same time, it is a bit disheartening that things went so smoothly without me.

Leading by Example

I felt it was important to make a post like this.  I have posted a good deal of raid and guild advice in the last few weeks.  All of it has been nurtured and compiled over years of leading a guild and raid.  But by the same token, I think its important for you the public, to see that even though the final product comes together smoothly, I have the same fears and doubts that every player has.  I am by no means special in any way other than the fact that I have a good bunch of loyal friends who will seemingly follow me to the gates of hell itself.

I am very much the type of person who will admit when I don’t know an answer.  Often times I don’t know, or don’t even know where to look.  However I am always willing to work through things as they come along.  Right now I feel guilty for abandoning my raid for the good of my own health, but I know that it was the right decision as I hit the pillow at 8 pm and didn’t wake for a second until the alarm went off this morning at 5 am.  Right now I feel obsolete because of the shitty luck I have had with gear, and the success that the raid has had without me.  However I know that many players simply feel more comfortable on the nights they are there, and that while things go successfully, they don’t necessarily go smoothly.  Me making this post, is in a way working through the issues I don’t know the solutions to publically. 

Every now and then you have a day when your normal pattern goes out the window.  This is one of those days.  I’ve juggled meetings, fires, phone calls, and all the while trying to wrap up one of my projects for a meeting at 4 pm.  Normally I spend my lunch hour devising my daily post and then writing it up when I get back into the office. 

Some days I set out in the morning knowing roughly what I am going to write about, other days the spark of inspiration comes to me throughout the course of the morning or during my lunch excursion.  Today… the spark has failed to find me.  I considered licking my Jeep’s battery at lunch for a “jolt” of inspiration, but I didn’t figure the raid wanted to take the chance of me going into cardiac arrest when we have so much to clear.  So here I sit, trying to steal a few minutes of time to sit down and compose anything worth while for my readers.  I have already typed two whole paragraphs so I seem to be actually doing this.

Forgotten-ramas

Last night was pretty frantic.  I had a slew of errands to run, involving the dreaded act of shopping.  I carefully juggling a list of items to buy at the grocery store, hurriedly put them away and made a plate to eat, all the while trying not to pass out from the heat.  When I finally sat down, frustrated and surly, I was looking forward to a quiet evening doing nothing much.  Alas this was not apparently the plan.

Last Sunday I had tried to help a friend get his other guilds 25 man Naxxramas run off the ground.  Unfortunately 11 am on a Sunday is a piss poor time to try and plan a raid on Argent Dawn.  After standing around for an hour trying to make people appear magically out of the ether, something I do quite often if you have read many of my posts.  They finally called the raid, and now here comes the tricky part, agreed that they would shoot for Wednesday, a part that I had apparently completely blocked out of my memory.

So imagine how utterly confused I was when I logged in last night to a barrage of tells from Lenwen, informing me of how many they were able to get so far for “the raid”.  So in my attempt to be a good friend, I resolved to spending my evening in a raid group.  The positive however is that I would be taking my relatively newly minted boomkin, Loamis.  After about 45 minutes of haranguing players to join the effort we entered the zone.

For Honor

It was for honor’s sake that I kept my word and attended the raid last night, and it was apt that the guild leading the raid was in fact named “For Honor”.  I have had minimal exposure to them, but so far I have to say they are a pretty like minded guild.  Shalomz was the raid lead, and did a great job keeping us moving along quickly, and at the same time still doing a great job healing while trying to juggle loot master responsibilities. 

They currently really only raid 10 man instances, other than trying to pug together a 25 man Naxxramas.  While we had a few players that I would label as terribad last night, all of the “For Honor” players seemed to really know their classes and be able to perform the roles assigned.  We had a few weak links in the healing and tanking teams, but overall the night went pretty smoothly given the very late start.  Really hoping that a few of the players take up my offer and apply to Duranub.  We could use the infusion of fresh players and fresh ideas…  especially some fresh caster dps.

R.I.P. WoW Insider

Late Tuesday, the beloved WoW news sight transitioned from WoWInsider.com to more flashy WoW.com.  With it went the clean and easy to read layout, that was replaced by a cluttered and confused one.  No longer is the site a pure news venture, but instead a bizarre WoW Social Networking/Twitter clone.  It would be hard for me to put into words how much I dislike the fact that they took this direction. 

However, now that they have, we the formerly loyal readers will have to adjust.  With the horrible layout comes a bunch of fairly slick features.  If you notice on the sidebar, there is a new wow.com profile link.  This links to my new Belghast profile page, which is much like your standard facebook-era social networking page.  The core functionality that will be the make or break feature of the design is the incorporation of an addon that promises to give you the ability to post twitter like “micro blog” entries from inside the wow interface. 

In additional to user written entries it also keeps a running log of various status changes in game, in the vein of keeping your friends updated on what you are doing.  Because of the raid last night, I did not really get time to set up the UI portion, but the blogger WoWGrrl has a good example of the type of feed you get with normal play. I hope to get my addon set up and feeding data by raid time.  The service offering reminds me of a much more verbose version of Raptr.com, which by all notions should have become a much bigger player in the “social gaming” community than it ever did.

The Fish Feast Effect

In closing, I present to you the fish feast effect.  When I presented the quandary, that I was busy and uninspired… Bellwether at 4Haelz suggested that I write about the Fish Feast effect.  Basically the general Fish Feast Effect happens only to the players who are responsible enough to bring their own class based stat food to a raid.  As soon as one or more of these players choose to each their own food, in an obsessive act of preparation for the coming fight, a fish feast will be “donated” to the raid. 

It is a truism that no fish feast may be laid down until at least one playing, preferably one of the more anal retentive players, has begun to eat their own food.  Bonus points are given if you can time the Fish Feast so that they have begun to eat, but not yet received the well fed buff.  It is also necessary that no less than one druid in bear or moonkin form must eat so that it places their butt firmly on top of the recently grounded platter, thereby making it difficult for additional players to benefit from the “feast”. 

 

Keep an open eye, and always observe the fish feast effect

Sometimes you just have those nights when the stars are aligned against you.  Last night was one of these nights, that for a whole series of events that could not be avoided lead to a very painful experience.  All of the members in attendance performed to the best of their abilities, paid attention on all encounters, worked amazingly well as a team…  the problem is there simply were not enough of them available.  We had to PUG in 6 players who were massively under geared for the encounters we were doing, and as a result performed much like extremely under geared players.

With the onset of summer this seems to be coming to be more and more of an issue.  Duranub is made up of mostly “30 something’s” with honest to god lives outside of the game.  As a result things come up that make them unavailable at times.  Lately these have been happening in clusters, where we either have a feast of great players available, or we are having to scrape hard to be able to pull together any raid at all.  Nothing is more frustrating than desperately working your friends list and social channels trying to make those last few players magically appear.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

So here we stand at a very difficult decision point.  We need to somehow bridge this gap in our membership, so that we can continue to keep moving forward.  We have never really recruited members openly.  Our raid has been one that has grown organically through our network of friends and family, growing as players came available and fit well with our mixture of personalities.  However there has been a rash of players needing to hang up their hat temporarily, encountering everything from spousal aggro to complete and total system meltdowns.  With each absence from the group our pool of alternate players has been stretched thinner forcing us to take players who are either underperforming or not quite on the gear level of the encounters we face.

The biggest question standing before us is, where do you find good players?  It’s often hard to find dedicated and skilled players who are at the same time not mercenaries or elitist jerks.  We have carefully fit players for our overall group dynamic as a whole, often times taking players who mean well and are hard workers over players who are genius players but know it.  I’ve always been a cautious warden of the mixture of personalities our raid has, and the thought of moving to open cattle call recruiting really concerns me.

A Few Good Men… Women… Peoples?

No matter how distasteful recruitment is to me, we have to do something, and do it quickly.  We have all worked and fought too hard to make this raid work, to let it start to flicker out through lapses in attendance.  We have a lot of positives on our side.  Our loot system is very open to new players allowing them to often times win gear on their first outing.  The fact that we raid separate from guilds, and later in the evening appeals to many older social gamers, who are like me unwilling to leave their guild just to raid.  All this paired, with the fact that we are fairly successful considering we only raid 5 hours per week should put us in the positive column for many of the players that would fit our group dynamic.

Right now we are trying to furiously work all our contacts and reel in any players who have been waiting in the wings for something to open up.  On top of this, we posted on WoW Headhunter, a nifty tool for fielding incoming applications.  It allows players to apply directly through there and offers some cool tools for promoting your recruitment drive, which I am embedding below.

In addition to WoW headhunter, I re-upped my recruitment post on WoWRaid.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on who you are looking at it, their UI appears to be broken and even though I only clicked the four bosses we had downed in Ulduar, it is giving us credit for clearing the zone.  We had actually already received one player through this tool, but unfortunately he was quite a bit under geared for Ulduar.  This is one of the weaknesses we have.  Since we only have 5 hours of official raiding time, there is no time to farm old content for the purpose of gearing up new members.  I fear we are going to have to do some kind of official “un-official” 25 man Naxxramas weekly as we try and gear up a new crop of players.

 

If you are on the Argent Dawn server and looking for a good place to hang your hat, please consider applying.

There is not a single player who can honestly state that they enjoy a night filled with wipes.  However a good failure can often times do more for your raid than an easy win.  When you steamroll content, much like players did in Naxxramas, there were little to no lessons learned.  However in the face of a hard fought battle, it presents the opportunity for players to truly evaluate their own role in the raid, and how best they can modify their actions to provide that elusive win.  Most raid groups see failure as a bad thing, but in the light of new content, I see how we fail as being far more important than how we succeed.

I present to you the concept of how to “fail” successfully.  My goal in this post is to outline some of the basic processes that a good raid should go through as they present content that is obviously kicking their butts.  Like anything in this game, or life in general, failure gives you the opportunity to fully understand why things are going wrong and as a result give you insight in how to fix the issues at hand. 

There is a concept called “deep practice”, quickly gaining popularity in the sporting world.  It revolves around the concept of understanding your mistakes, diagnosing them, and then adjusting them in small batches until the whole activity becomes easier.  This same basic approach can quickly turn a fight that your raid cannot seem to grasp into a farmed encounter.

Diagnose the Problem

The first step in fixing and issue is understanding what caused it in the first place.  You need to quickly deconstruct the issue at hand.  View the situation quickly from all angles.  Did the tank take an unexpected burst of damage?  Did adds not get handled correctly?  Did players die to environmental damage or were not in the right place at the right time?  You need to take a critical eye at the previous attempt, outline what mistakes were made, and address them openly.

So many times this can break down a read into a flurry of accusations, where each player is certain they did nothing wrong.  It is important for everyone to be willing to evaluate their own performance as it pertains to that of the whole.  If for some reason, a player is getting overwhelmed in their role there is no shame in asking for some assistance.  Last week on XT, our mages were being overwhelmed by adds and unable to pour out enough damage to keep them cleared.  As soon as this key fault was identified we adjusted and came back the next attempt and pulled out a victory.

A willingness to view your own actions with an introspective eye is crucial.  You must be willing to accept faults as you make them, and at the same time be willing to adjust accordingly.  There have been many fights where the issue sat on my shoulders.  I don’t believe anyone thinks I am a lesser player for having screwed up.  But instead respected me, for admitting it freely and in turn trying to decide how to effect a change.

Brainstorm the Solution

Once the problem is understood, comes the hard phase of deciding how best to fix it.  One of the mistakes we made early in the process of Duranub, is to try and take all strategy discussion offline.  We have traditionally done this in channel separate from the raid, letting the strategists brainstorm a solution.  We are slowly trying to change this.  I believe now that it is key to involve as much of the raid as possible in the process.

The druid that rarely speaks up, might just have noticed something that the rest of the group has not.  Sometimes these little revelations provide the evidence that adds up to the answer.  Critical thinking is key in the process of crafting an alternate change.  Discuss the tanking, the dps, the add management, the healing, and the placement.  You can quickly determine which components were working well, and which need adjustments.

Be Flexible and Willing to Change

It’s hard to think for yourself sometimes.  In a game like WoW we get to draw on the experience of the players who have come before us, but at the same time these experiences can often times pollute our own thought processes.  If a strategy is not working for you, then its important that you are willing to adjust to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of your group.  One of the biggest lessons I have learned is there is no one right way. Reading Tankspot, WoWWiki, and StratFu can give you a basic understanding of the working parts, but ultimate you need tailor your strategy to fit your own group.

In a previous raid group, we struggled with a certain fight for over a month, in part because of the inflexibility of our strategy.  With bullheaded certainty we kept attacking the encounter with fervent certainty that we were “doing it right”.  Benjamin Franklin said that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.  The week our leadership finally accepted the concept that there might be an easier way, and adjusted to handling the adds in a different manner we got our first kill.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is only one means to an end.

Never Give Up

It’s easy to, as my father says, “Get your dobber in the dirt”, and stop trying as hard as you should be when things seem hopeless.  This is the natural response when presented with a task, that seems insurmountable.  Much like working a rubic’s cube, if you diagnose the problems, make adjustments and try again, sooner or later the pieces will slide together.  Many times when you fix one issue, it will lead to uncovering a problem that was somehow hidden.  The important part is your resolve to keep at the task at hand until all the issues are resolved.

As a programmer, I have never written a single piece of software that ran flawlessly the first time.  There are always little tweaks, changes, fixes, that come out through the process of debugging.  As a leader and member of your raid, you have to be willing to “debug” everything around you.  Start with yourself, and move outward, fixing each problem you see as you go. 

Often times you can spot an issue that you have already solved in the players around you.  As you give advice to your fellow players, its important that you do so in a gracious and non-judgmental fashion.  Many times players are “screwing up”, in the first place because they either do not understand the situation or their role in it.  Aggressively going after another player only causes them to close down to suggestions, and in the end leads to a disgruntled member who won’t be giving their all to the group.  As I have said before, raiding is a team sport, and its important that we all arrive together at the same place.

Always Remember

This is probably the most important part of the equation.  While things get a new coat of paint from time to time, there are very few truly new things.  Each encounter you see from this point on will have some connection to activates you have done in your past.  How many times have you heard a seasoned raider describe a current fight to working like an old world encounter with only a minor twist.  If you can reach a point where you can easily identify this connective tissue ahead of time, you will be able to adjust and more accurately build solutions.  Your experience counts, so its important for you to remember the problem as well as the solution.