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

I was talking to a good friend of mine this morning about “alting”, or the playing of characters other than your primary focus.  She was talking about her inability to seriously play any character other than her “main”, and that when she has alted before, it was more a shift of focus and that the new character quickly became her new “main”.  It got me thinking about the whole debate about mains and alts, and the various attitudes players have towards the two terms.

One of the key traits that you need in any leadership role is the ability to place yourself in the shoes of others, and understand who it is that they view the world.  Knowing and understanding how your players approach the game, gives you a greater understanding of their prime motivations, desires, strengths and ultimately weaknesses.

During the last five years playing WoW, I have noticed that there are three basic archetypes that exist in the way players view the main/alt relationship.  I will do my best to outline each of them and their unique spin on the world as I see it.

The Main

The Main is a very unique player. They tend to focus on one character entirely, and in many ways see that character as the virtual embodiment of themselves.  Their sole purpose in the game is to better their single character, and will do anything within their powers to progress.  These tend to be very driven players, and are often motivated by collecting items, gaining achievements, and accomplishing new goals.

The Main archetype gets very frustrated when dealing with players and their alts.  They don’t fully understand why anyone would choose to play a character other than their main, so they are quick to get annoyed when progression is stifled for the purpose of other players “alts”. 

The significant weakness of the Main archetype is that, while they are the most dedicated to their individual character, they are also the most susceptible to burn out.  When experiencing a period of significant stagnation, they do not have the ability to shift focus to another character and as a result begin to question why they are playing the game in the first place.  This can be seen with the players that rejoin WoW at each expansion, and then go on hiatus once they have reached a plateau.  This same basic action happens within raids as well, certain players are only there during the progression, but disappear once the initial challenge is gone.

The Progressionist

The next archetype is similar to the main, with a few key differences.  The Progressionist tends to have one character that is their primary focus.  When that character reaches a point where progression becomes slowed, either through raid lockouts, or inability to raid, they shift focus to an alt.  When this new focus reaches its natural plateau, the focus shifts again to a new character leaving a string of very well geared max level characters in their wake.

This personally is the category I fit into.  I focus on my main, in this case my Protection Warrior Belghast, and when he reaches a plateau where I can no longer progress other than through raiding, I begin to shift focus to a new character.  For me personally this was my Retribution Paladin Exeter, and when he maxed out and could only be progressed through raiding, I pushed up my Balance Druid Loamis. 

Much like the Main, the Progressionist tends to be very focused on each new character, doing their level best to master the class, and gear them as well as could be expected for a non-primary class.  This leads to these players being very good switch hitters, in that they can swap to alts if need be to fill necessary roles, but prefer progression on their primary character when at all possible.

The progressionist tends to get annoyed by rampant altism, but understands the desire to play characters other than your primary focus.  So as a result, sits somewhere in the middle of the archetypal spectrum being able to unit both sides of the chasm.  I feel the majority of these “alts” start out of a need to have a character for the “downtime” between scheduled and focused raiding.  Personally I find it favorable to have the ability to have multiple raid lockouts for each week, and I often times use my alts to go on instance runs with friends of the guild, and as a result network with new players.

The Altist

The Altist in its truest form is a player who refuses to designate between characters being mains or alts.  Many times the altism starts from a desire to be self sufficient, and the need to level up characters to unlock higher tiers of abilities like tradeskills.  However as the player levels each character, they become more and more attached to the point at which each additional class becomes interchangeable with the older ones.  I think the root of altism comes from a desire to do everything at once, and a fear of missing out on some aspect of the game that they might not be able to experience otherwise.

We have had multiple players in the guild that have maximum level characters of each and every class.  One of the most extreme cases of being an altist that I have seen, involved a player that would get no more than one level higher than any of his other characters.  The result was that he would rotate putting one single level on each character, slowly leveling them all up within range of each other.  While this functioned well, and kept all the trade skills and gear acquisition within the same level of each other, it made for very slow progression as a whole.

The key weakness of this method is that the altist tends to be the jack of all trades…  master of none.  They become acceptable players on each and every character they play, but tend not to really shine at any of them, as they lack the key focus it takes to truly master all of the nuances of one class.  In the best case scenario they seem to shoot for the middle, and in the worst case scenario they are the warm bodies that hold back progression.  I’ve known a few altists that did an great job at everything they touched, but they tend to be the exception not the rule.  The general lack of focus, tends to carry through to the raiding as well, and ends up with a player that may or may not accept assignments with the gravity you are expecting. 

The natural chasm forms between the Main and the Altist, since neither seem to be able to understand the others point of view.  To the Altist, the desire to play multiple characters is so ingrained that it seems truly foreign to ONLY progress one character at a time.  it is always best to lay some ground rules, when you know there is a rampant altist in your midst.  However, know that forcing an Altist to declare a primary character, will always lead to discomfort from that player on the whole.

Closing

Each individual archetype has strengths and weaknesses, and as a leader it is important to be able to recognize them.  Being able to exercise the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses, will require a good deal of planning on your part ahead of time.  Being able to chose from multiple characters that each player brings to the table, helps you tweak the balance of a raid group.  Having a character who is driven and focused on one class, makes them the natural source of detailed information on the working of that individual class.  Each of the above types can offer some very solid things to a guild or raid, if you can utilize them properly.

Granted there are grey areas between the archetypes above, just as there are grey areas in everything.  But some prior knowledge of these traits makes managing situations when they arise far easier.  Understanding the basic mindset that each player comes from, only serves to allow you to formulate better solutions in the future.

Last Friday I had a blog post featured on Wow.com.  Granted this is not the first time my blog has been mentioned, in the past It was just a minor link.  This time however they did a pretty flattering write-up on my GroupCraft series of posts from the last few weeks.  I have to say I was pretty shocked and amazed, and truth be told still more than a bit taken back by the mention.

As a result I got "wow-dot-comed”, which for a Warcraft blog is much akin to getting “slashdotted”.  For the weekend my readership shot up by over 900%, which equates to over 16,000 unique users.  I am unable to wrap my head around this notion fully yet, but on the most basic level I guess this means I am doing something right.  Hopefully folks can deal with the rambling topics that fit their way in-between my informative ones.

Honor Thine Campfire

Well it is once again time for the Midsummer Fire Festival, and boys and girls find themselves running around like mad trying to either honor or put out bonfires.  I started in on the first bit of this early yesterday morning, and by the end of the day had completed the Eastern Kingdom achievements.  I figured that if I broke it down into several smaller chunks I would not suffer from the hatred and loathing that so many of the previous events have ushered in for me.

In truth, I don’t really mind events like this one.  Sure it takes large blocks of physical time to visit all of the bonfires, but it is purely based on player effort and not luck.  It also gives me time to sit back and revisit the old world, a place where I rarely travel anymore save for the trips to the Ironforge auction house.  Sunday I was taken back by the sheer marvel of what various pieces of the old world meant to me as I leveled through out.  The game world in warcraft is truly amazing if we just take the time to notice it in our rush to get somewhere else.

I’m hoping to get some guild help on the stealing the flame quests which take you into opposing faction capitols.  That appears to be the only real stumbling block for me, since I play on a server where PVP only exists if forced by the players.  Wowhead has a great blog entry, with links to quests and locations of all the bonfires, which should prove useful to any player trying to complete all this madness.

Now for the massive disappointment.  It appears that the Lord Ahune event has remained completely unchanged.  I realize its probably unrealistic to expect blizzard to go back and updated every one of these “boss” encounters to be viable for the latest expansion.  Based on the fact that they DID update the loottable for the Headless Horseman between his last two appearance, I did however expect that there be something either added or modified to the event.  Based on early reports, the items dropping seem to be exactly the same as the previous year.  Oh well at the very least this gives players a shot at getting a Scorchling pet if they did not get one last year.

360 Degrees of Not WoW

One of the things I have been trying to do lately, in order to stave off burnout is to do something OTHER than play wow on a pretty regular basis.  Previously I had written about taking a weekend away from the game, to explore Fallout 3…  which I might still add is amazing.  With my recent Birthday I indulged in the purchase of a doodad I have been wanting for a long while.  So I am finally joining the rest of the gaming public by starting to play an XBox 360.

Believe it or not, I have never played ANY Xbox titles be it classic or 360 prior to this Sunday.  I had been a console junkie for years, and have every major console platform leading up to the PS2.  However around that time, I fell off the planet as far as these titles were concerned.  Yes this does in fact coincide with my entrance into the dark world of MMO gaming.  I’ve recovered some of these roots with my PSP, and playing my PS2 while at the lake and otherwise unwired.

I attempted to make a brief foray into the console world once more with the Wii.  While it is ridiculously fun, it doesn’t really provide the true “gamer” experience I once savored so much.  Many of the titles seem to be more gimmick than game play.  So I am looking to Microsoft and the Xbox to give me back some of that console diversion I was missing.  The fact that I could stream movies 24/7 through it with a Netflix subscription was a very solid secondary reason. 

However I now find myself far more interested in the XBox Live Arcade titles than the shiny disc games.  Carcassonne has already accounted for many lost hours of strategic goodness.  I have to give an apology to Ysinnia of Limb From Limb…  I have given her immense amounts of crap over the years for her husband’s “bored game” nights.  It was them who introduced me to this great game, when I was up visiting family in the area they live.  While I won’t guarantee more crap in the future…  I am having to eat crow now because the game is amazing, and even more amazingly translated onto the Xbox.

I figure I will eventually add a xbox gamertag link on the side panel of this site, but for the time being if anyone out there wants to friend me I am “eXeterTBC”.  I am playing Street Fighter 4 offline right now, as I attempt to remember how to play the SF franchise with a certain measure of skill.  I have to admit that it was rarely disarming when I first booted up the game, to keep getting spammed with challenges from live players.  I kept trying to sit down and play a nice computer match, only to get my ass kicked over and over by a kick who has unlocked Akuma.  After a few minutes I figured out how to turn that option off and was back to pleasantly beating the game and unlocking characters for myself.

Humbled

I feel once more like I need to take a quick moment to thank all of you who helped make this blog a success.  I am overwhelmed on a daily basis by the regular readers and support I have gotten from the WoW Blog community.  I will do my best to continue to write something worth reading, if you continue to read it.

 

Thanks