Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

The Rebirth

December 11, 2013 by Belghast

The Founding

Back in 2004 House Stalwart was born out of a bunch of friends getting together and planning a community for the launch of the newest up and coming MMO… the World of Warcraft. Over those years we’ve had a somewhat bumpy and often storied past, but at the core the guild remained based on a few core tenets and a shared sense of ethics. It was a set of values that spanned from game to game, and some of my proudest moments were when one of my random guild members would do something awesome out in the world… and news of it would get back to me. I had built a really awesome thing, and people were happy in it.

The problem was that at the time I was not really happy in the game any longer. The yoke of leadership was chafing, and towards the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, the guild pretty much went on autopilot. With the release of Cataclysm we went through a lot of major changes, as the shift of focus went away from a non guild based raid, to actually raiding as a guild. In the process we gobbled up four or five different guilds that had been feeding the Duranub Raiding Company. As a result of this upheaval was a lot of social strife, as various groups that were not entirely used to sharing the same guild had to cohabitate.

The Fracture

As this happened I got more distant myself, because I simply was not enjoying the game anymore. When I got into the beta of a game called Rift I grabbed on with both hands, and tried my damnedest to recreate the magic of House Stalwart over there as well. There was a big leaving as folks flaked off to join me in Rift. It didn’t last of course, but it was enough to pull a good number of people away form the WoW guild. When Star Wars the Old Republic released another big chunk of players flaked away, and each time something new came out the cycle would happen again. I had set the events in motion and it had left the guild in a state of chaos.

In many ways House Stalwart was somewhat of a failed state when I returned for my brief stint during the launch of Mists of Pandaria. Guild chat was deathly quiet, there was a significant fracture in the guild forming that I talked about the other day, and as a whole the entire place was filled with people that did not know who I was. The number of things I would need to do to fix what was wrong with the guild just felt staggering. I did a few minor adjustments, but for the most part I assumed that since the guild was running itself, that this must be what the players had come to expect. The place no longer felt like home, so after a few months of personally getting bored with WoW again… I left.

The Hope

When I came back recently something had changed, either in me or in the guild itself. I saw a glimmer of the greatness we once had. Additionally I saw a lot of problems that I thought could be fixed. I was reluctant to take back the yoke of leadership, because quite simply I was not sure if I would be around for long. I expected this stint in the game to go much like the last, with me getting tired of it all and going elsewhere. I had daily conversations with Rylacus the steward I had placed over the guild after my return during Pandaria, and almost always they ended up with some discussion of me taking back the leadership. To be truthful when he handed back the highest rank on Monday I was still very reluctant to do so.

When Rylacus agreed to take over, it was to keep the lights on and things moving forward. We had an agreement that if any of the heavy lifting needed to be done, or any drama arose that it would be me that dealt with it. Over the year of him at the helm, he did a phenomenal job of maintaining the status quo and keeping the guild moving forward. I would honestly say that the guild itself experienced a bit of a renaissance with his hands off approach, and we are more active now than I have seen in years. However as a guild on autopilot for over two years, there has also been a lot of discord and resentment that had set in.

The Problem

The other night a long time guild member sent me a tell in game and wanted to talk to me, as the founder about the guild policies. He said that he wondered about the recruitment policy, and whether or not we ever looked back and reflected upon whether or not an invite was a good one. I spouted off the well rehearsed lines I have always said, but as I was saying them… I realized that no really we did not any more. Then he hit me with a statement that cut through to my heart like a razor. He wanted to talk to me about the “falling guild standards”, and I guess I had realized this was happening but until he came to me and talked to me about it… I was in a bit of a state of denial. Things were in fact far worse than I had let myself believe.

In particularly a lot of the recent strife has centered around a recent invite, the nephew of a long time member. Generally what happens in this case is that I bring up the issue with the sponsor, and if they cannot deal with it we remove the person from the guild. I had gotten lax to be honest, and without that guild master tag… I imagined that it is no longer my duty to police the guild. The reason why I took up the tag in the first place all those years ago, is because no one else was going to create the type of guild I wanted to exist in. As I sat there over the weekend, I realized that once again… no one was going to step in to fix the wrongs in the guild if I did not step up and do it myself.

The Solution

After much soul searching, I accepted the guild leadership of House Stalwart in World of Warcraft on Monday night. I had originally intended to ease my reforms into the guild, but last night things reached a crescendo ending with the quitting of a long time member. I managed to talk the member back from the brink and they rejoined… but as a result my first act was to lock down a few of the functions in the guild at least temporarily, and to remove the most negative of the influences from the guild. Over the coming weeks I will be identifying every single one of our 869 current members. I want to know who they are, where they came from, who they are connected to… and most importantly if they are a positive influence in the guild.

I had already been working hard with mixed results on trying to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots, but I feel like there is a lot more work to be done on that front. I am trying to exist in both worlds and get the two sides talking and interacting regularly… and in some ways this is working, but in others… there is still a lot of resentment to work through. When I kicked the questionable member from the guild last night, I had a chorus of private messages thanking me. Many of the members simply thought that no one cared about that sort of thing anymore. No one had been complaining about anything to myself or Rylacus until that one brave member stood up and said “this is a problem” and shook me back to reality.

The Rebirth

My ultimate hope is that we can turn the tide and bring back House Stalwart to its glory days. The chapters in the various other games that I have founded have clung tightly to the original tenets, but the original guild strayed from the path. My biggest hope is that in writing this, and reaching out to the members… is that they now know that I do care, and I do want things to be better. I want players to interact and communicate regularly filling my screen with happy green spam. I think last night I took the first steps along a long path that will usher several positive changes. I hope that folks now realize that my door is always open, and if they have any issue… be it game related or otherwise that they can talk to me at any time.

We used to jokingly call ourselves the “Little Guild that Could”, and over the years that “Little” part changed drastically, but I feel that spirit remained in place. It felt like as a whole we were pulling towards some shared goal. This is the magic that I want to revitalize in the guild, the fact that we are not just a tag to wear over our heads but instead a large extended family. This tapestry is woven out of so many different personalities and play styles… but together we have always been something more. I am back, because I love these people and I have missed them. I want to be the leader I used to be, the leader they deserve. I played WoW for over 7 years without fail… and after two years of wandering around nomadic… I have simply gotten tired of all the jumping. I feel like I have come home, but there is going to be a lot of work to return the guild to the home I want it to be for us all.

The Messy Breakup

December 10, 2013 by Belghast

Winter Wonderland

Over the night we got another dusting of snow, and as a result I had to once again dig my jeep out before coming to work. Firstly… Cold is not one of those things that Belghasts do best… especially a 70 lb lighter Belghast. This morning as I was getting ready the weatherman said something to the effect that it has been over 150 hours since we had been above freezing. As I was clearing my vehicle it was 20* outside with a wind chill of significantly less. I realize this is nothing like the –27* that my Canadian friends have been experiencing this week, but still… it is in the realm of “effing cold”. I have been wearing a fleece jacket and then a big winter coat on top of that.

All of the car clearing caused me to get up and around significantly later than I had planned, and as a result I am getting this started significantly later. Supposedly we will experience some melt this afternoon as temperatures finally go above freezing. Thursday is supposed to be in the 40s… which seriously feels like short and t-shirt weather as compared to this. There is no way I could actually survive in a Winter climate. The irony is… as much as I dislike snow in real life, I tend to love zones that have a winter theme in games. I love Winterspring, Icecrown and Storm Peaks. I feel like I would enjoy snow if it were not for that whole cold thing.

The Messy Breakup

The other day I talked about how I may have been wrong to avoid the looking for group tool and pugging in general. From 71 to 80 I had a really great run of 26 dungeons without much issue at all. It was a clean and efficient way to level. However upon entering the Cataclysm dungeon queue system that all changed. The first group I got was Blackrock Caverns. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and was more than geared enough for the content. As a result it went quickly and smoothly and I thought that maybe just maybe my luck would hold until I was able to level into the Pandaria content. This however was not the case, or at least not the case for very long.

My next queue was Throne of the Tides, and within moments of stepping through the doors we began a horrific wipe fest that ended with most of the party rage quitting after the tank failed miserably at the first boss encounter. As a rogue I ended up tanking most of the adds, and was able to pop cooldowns and all that wonderful stuff to at least down both of the casters. However the tank just seemed to lack the hitpoints and avoidance/mitigation to survive in the instance. It was not until the third, fourth and fifth bad queue of Throne of the Tides that I started to notice a pattern. They were all wearing the 1-80 Heirloom gear.

Public Service Announcement

Simply put… the heirloom gear that caps out at level 80 is simply not viable for tanking the cataclysm instances. The problem is that Heirloom gear is itemized for the previous expansion. At 80 it is itemized like it is a low ilevel Wrath of the Lich King blue, which is significantly worse than the lowest ilevel Cataclysm green. Essentially the quested gear you get early on will be better than anything but epic gear from Wrath, and even then on most of my characters I was changing put purples for greens left and right, especially for tanking where the stamina matters so much. The above image shows the Polished Breastplate of Valor as compared to Hardened Obsidium Breastplate.

Taking away the fact that the Valor breastplate contains zero tanking stats, it has 391 less armor and 100 less stamina than a Cataclysm tanking green. The tanks that I see rolling into the level 80 dungeons wearing full heirloom gear simply do not have enough hit points to survive the level of damage that is being dealt by the encounters. That is even with getting out of all the things they are supposed to be getting out of. Essentially if you are reading this blog and leveling an up and coming tank, please god do not queue as a tank until you have switched out your level 80 heirloom gear with green quest gear at a minimum. Granted I am generally more diligent than the average player, and I did not queue at all for ANY dungeons until I had swapped my heirlooms out for quested items.

Gear Changing

To be truthful I logged in my leatherworker and crafted a full set of gear, and logged in my smith and made two blue axes… but that is probably going above and beyond what anyone should be expected to do. However in each expansion, that first zone gives you a complete set of gear including weapons and trinkets within the first few quests. Over the course of the evening you can go from relatively crappy gear to greens that are better than most of the raid content gear from the previous expansion. You can maybe limp by as a dps, but especially as a tank, the Cataclysm content is brutal on anyone who has not shifted out their entire set of items.

I seriously doubt that any of the offending tanks I ran into will actually read my blog, but here is hoping that maybe I catch a few people who simply did not realize that heirlooms are not itemized as the new expansion until you ding 61/71/81/86 etc. This is the problem with the “mudflation” that has set into blizzards system, there is always a massive jump in stats between expansions, and in the case of Wrath to Cataclysm… it is simply not sustainable for dungeon running. Hopefully in the post “Item Squish” world the change between expansions will not be nearly as traumatic to the player base. I am hoping once I managed to get to the next tier of dungeons this problem will for the most part go away, and I can once again return to leveling through instances. However in the meantime… I am questing my way through Hyjal for what feels like the billionth time.

A Tale of Two Raids

December 9, 2013 by Belghast

Ending Hibernation

I had to vary up my morning routine today, as today is the first day back after snowmageddon. Until yesterday afternoon we had not left the house since Thursday evening. Mostly we got out yesterday just to see how the main roads were. If we based things on our neighborhood we would think the world was still under a solid sheet of ice. However as we got out and about we saw that the majority of the major roads were well travelled. That is not to say that I did not drive slightly under the speed limit on the way in, and not to say that I still did not slip and slide quite a bit. However I made it into the office without issue.

It is funny how quiet the office is. I expected to see more people here, however it is just me and one of the server techs. The irony is that while we are both in the office, we have been chatting over our in office instant messenger rather than face to face. I guess that is a sign of our lines of work, we are used to doing everything remotely. Had they not made a big deal about having “no remote work” policy, I would have simply worked remotely on Friday, and potentially this morning as well. However as to not give the impression that I was getting away with something untoward… I simply took a day of vacation on Friday. Not wanting to take a second one, I made the commute in this morning.

A Tale of Two Raids

Last night was a pretty interesting night. Since we had not really left the house since Thursday, I lost all touch with what day of the week it was. I had been living in a haze slowly poking away at leveling my rogue, which ended the long weekend almost 82. So when I was messaged by my raid leader to ask if I would be attending the raid, it was honestly a bit shocking. I had completely lost track of the fact that it was in fact Sunday, a night that we normally raid. Earlier in the week it was uncertain if we would even be able to make the raid happen, but we managed to pull in a friend of mine to dps for us. While a bit rusty she is improving with every single boss fight.

Stalwart has had something odd going on with raiding for some time. Essentially the guild has been a Tale of Two Raids. The non-guild-based raid group Duranub, had a pretty even mix of extremely high performing serious players, and not serious at all players that just wanted to raid for the sake of having fun. This lead to more than a few dramatic moments, so as 25 man raiding dissolved the groups fractured along those lines. During Cataclysm, we had no less than 5 ten mans that ranged from the super hardcore to the super casual. As attendance waned and folks left the game, myself included… the two groups that managed to hold together were that of the super hardcore, and the super casual.

When Pandaria released I quickly leveled Belgrave and Belgarou, and when it came time to raid I chose to bolster the super casual raid with my dps. The problem with that notion was the fact that the super casual raid lacked any form of reliable tanking. That unfortunately is one of those roles where you need your most talented players. Without a solid tank you get nowhere at all, and that is precisely what happened… they made little to no progression for a very long time. Seeing this floundering from a distance was a bit heartbreaking, but at that point I just did not have the patience to stick around and try and help out. I left wow once again, but this group persevered through sheer will of heart alone.

Warrior Returns

In the time I was away from the game, the Leftovers as they call themselves managed to recruit a stable tank Gamad, and the progress they have made was entirely thanks to her determination… and much drinking to manage to get through the struggles of working with the non-effective tank. Upon coming back I thought to myself… of all the groups that could use my help it was the Leftovers. So I have worked my little butt off to get geared enough to take a primary tanking slot. At this point I am sitting at 522 ilevel and for the most part can handle tanking almost anything out there right now. In the time I have been tanking with the group we have now cleared two new bosses, and are starting too work on a fourth. While we are still working our way through Throne of Thunder, it is nice to see steady movement forward again. At this point we are now done with the first wave of the dungeon and started work on the Tortos encounter last night.

This progress however might not have been. The under performing tank is back and available for raiding… and due to seniority and the fact that Gamad can out dps a good number of our dps… the Raid leader decided to put me with the under-performing tank for the night. Now I have to say, that the tank has some medical issues and is heavily medicated at all times. That said… it was still like trying to tank an instance with an easily distracted toddler. He was always off doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, and when it came time to do the first tank swap on the Troll Council fight… he was off dpsing something else. I have so much renewed appreciation for Gamad and what she has struggled with to this point. I have to say that if I have to co-tank with the other warrior very often, I will probably stop raiding. I knew it was bad, but I guess I had forgotten just how bad it was.

Slow But Steady

Thankfully the raid leader also saw how untenable the situation was, and quickly swapped the warrior to dps and Gamad back to tanking. From there we made a few attempts, each with their own adjustments and managed to kill the Troll Council. During this time sadly, the warrior had swapped specs but not gear… and ended up fury dpsing with a sword and shield. Basically when you are this inattentive it is time to just hang up your spurs and bow out of raiding for the good of the group. The leader whoever has struggled to make the group about family and friends, but there comes a point where keeping certain individuals hurts the overall spirit and morale of the whole. This is the sticky stuff that made me hate being a raid leader. There were many nights when I slotted people I didn’t really want to slot for the sake of social reason… not wanting to make a wife raid without her husband etc.

To be truthful this level of stress over variables you cannot quite control is much of the reason why I refuse to be a raid leader anymore. I got my fill of it over the three years I did it, and I commend the raid leader of Leftovers for his diligence to this point. That said the warriors return was a comedy of errors, and essentially if he is unable to pay enough attention to keep from charging headlong into the boss while we are clearing trash, it is probably time for him to stop raiding. That is not to say that I don’t think we should start doing something else that he CAN attend. I am thinking maybe a world boss night would fight the bill of letting the people who just do not have the ability to pay attention during raids, to feel like they are making progress along with family and friends. I don’t think we will ever be a progression based raid group, but without two stable tanks we might as well just do something else with our evenings.

A Positive Note

I feel like I have dwelled a lot on the bad during this post, but I want to end it on a positive note. Since my time in the raid we have completed two brand new encounters, and while we failed miserably at the fourth, we will do some adjusting next Friday and hopefully beat it in the face. Each of the wins has felt like it was sustainable. On the try we downed the council, no one actually died other than the hapless warrior. We completed it a man down, and everything felt very maintainable. This is a testament to just how good the high performing players in Leftovers are. I have no doubt that we will continue to progress our way through Throne of Thunder and hopefully complete the instance, gearing each of us to a state where we are ready to take on Seige of Orgrimmar before the expansion is released. I am personally pretty happy where we are, and how successful we have been.