Is the LFR expected or optional?

I was reading and posting in an online forum on a WoW-related topic.  In the discussion, someone spilled the beans about the ending of the Dragon Soul raid and storyline.  Another person said, “Dude, put SPOILER ALERT on that so we know not to read it if we haven’t done it yet.”

At this point, the person who had asked for the spolier alert was raked over the coals in the way that WoW trolls really know how.  They accused him of being a failure at the game because, at this point, only a total loser has not cleared the Dragon Soul in the LFR.

I stepped in to disagree, saying that I preferred to raid with my guild and so I, also, have not done the LFR raids yet.

Then the tide of opinion turned against me, saying that I should be running LFR to get gear to help with normal mode raiding.  The fact that it is super-easy was the main argument for its necessity.

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I feel like I’m part of a dying breed in WoW.  The main joy of raiding for me is playing with my long-time gaming friends.  There is no thrill in loot.  Loot lost its appeal to me back in BC when epic purple gear became more common than rare blue-level gear.  My joy comes from the shared experience of overcoming the obstacle that the devs have set before us.  For that reason, I’d much rather run the raid in normal mode, using gear I got in normal mode Firelands and by running heroics.

Basically, I see the LFR as a nice alternate path for those who want/need it.  I don’t see it as a necessary part of the gearing-up process.

Am I the minority here?

I’m OK with the Firelands nerfs

As the fallout from the nerfs trickles through the blogosphere, and I read about how trivial the content is now and how terrible it is that the nerf bat came so quickly, I am going to weigh in here on the side of support for Blizzard.  These nerfs are good for my guild, and I think that my guild is fairly average in the wide spectrum of WoW guilds that raid.  If its good for my guild, it must also be good for a lot of other guilds.

We’ve stalled in T12.  It sounds like I’m making excuses, but these fights play to our weaknesses.  My guild has always had trouble with highly technical fights, going back to Thaddius and Heigen in Naxxramas, Rotface in ICC, and the Double Dragons in BoT.  In past raids, for every technical “stand here then here then move here” kind of fight, there were also some fights that just measured throughput or skill at using your class abilities.  We excelled at some and struggled with others.  Firelands mostly seems to have “dance” fights with lots of target switching and little room for error.  Its not our strong suit.

As a result we’re stalled at 3/7 in there.   Some weeks we only get Shannox and are blocked by Beth’tilac and Rhyolith.

We’ve stalled in previous raid tiers as well.  However, Firelands feels… different.  In the past when we would stall, there was the feeling that if we all just got one more gear upgrade, or maybe just got one good break to fall our way, then we’d find success.  That expectation of success being just out of reach would keep us coming back and back and back.  For example, we wiped on the Lich King over 60 times, and it never got old or boring.

Firelands hasn’t given that feeling.  Wipes on Rhyolith don’t usually feel like we’re teetering on the cusp of success.  It doesn’t feel like one more upgrade or one good break would make the difference.  We just get annoyed at the fight mechanics.  Its much like Heigan back in the Naxx days, when people would wipe doing the dance, and no amount of gear could fix that.  So it is with the current content.  It has become frustrating.

For guilds like mine, this nerf will bring a fresh feeling to the raid.  Perhaps you don’t insta-die from every misstep.  Perhaps if one dps misses his spot and is killed, the raid can still pull out the victory.

Does that make it easy-mode?  Perhaps.  Does it diminish our accomplishments?  In some eyes, certainly.  However, given the choice between killing the nerfed bosses, or gradually having our raid team lose interest due to frustration, I’ll take the nerfs.

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Edit: I will admit that I am puzzled as to why Blizzard doesn’t implement a more gradual nerf the way they did in ICC.

OK, now I’m happy

In a post last week, I mentioned how we were 11/12 in current tier raid bosses, and how I felt like we hadn’t accomplished our goals.

Now there is a huge weight off my shoulders.  In preparation for tonight, we cleared the first five BWD bosses on Thursday, setting us up for a big finale to the current tier of raiding.

Our goal: in a single night before patch 4.2 lands, learn the Nefarian fight, practice it, and defeat him.

Our result: success!

It was a really tricky night.  We ended up with a very melee heavy raid with only a hunter and a mage for ranged dps.  That meant that pushing two crackles in Phase 2 was out of the question.  Instead, we decided to go with no crackles in Phase 2 and pushed quickly to Phase 3, starting Phase 3 with Nef at about 75%.

At our normal raid quitting time we had gotten Nef under 10% and we could taste victory.  Typically we are strict about ending raids on time.  However, that quitting time is largely because of me, being the old man of the group and also being on the east coast of the US, and usually having to wake up at 5:30 AM.  Today, though, I am on vacation, and so I gave my ok to push on and the rest of the raid enthusiastically agreed.

A couple of attempts later, we managed to burn him to the ground.

As old as my guild is, this is the first time that we have cleared all raid content before it was nerfed or we outgeared it.  Its a huge moment of success in the history of the guild.  Normally I don’t brag on the guild in the blog, but I’m exploding with pride and I just have to let it out.

Most of us got our fancy new titles, and we were also able to purchase our Dark Phoenix Mounts.

Now we can happily move on to Firelands raids, satisfied with our current progress.

I also feel like this is a success for casual guilds.  The current raid tier has been widely discussed as being too hard for casuals.  My guild does have a core of pretty intense players, and that core is the engine that drives our raid team.  But overall we are a very casual bunch.  Our raid composition changes from week to week.  We have no attendance requirements.  We /roll for loot.  We have a mostly open admission policy with no applications.  We have people from age 12 to 60+, and maintain a family-friendly atmosphere.

Because of this, I take pride in our success.  We’re certainly not the only casual guild to succeed.  Seeing as this is the only guild I have ever been in, its the only one that matters to me.

Happy patch day, everyone!

 

Accomplishments

We’re 11/12 in T11 raid bosses!

What does that mean?  It means different things to different people.  Wrath really re-trained me on the meaning of raid accomplishments.  I need to appreciate the game again.

In Burning Crusade, there were not a whole lot of guilds that progressed through all of the available raid content.  Most guilds were Karazhan guilds – staying at the introductory raid level.  Many guilds or guild alliances moved up to Gruul/Magtheridon raids.  Fewer made it through SSC and TK, and fewer still made it through Black Temple.  Simply killing a boss was often a big deal, and clearing a raid tier was a huge achievement.

Wrath changed the paradigm.  With a myriad of ways to get gear, you could skip raid tiers.  Then with infinite tank threat and infinite healer mana most raids quickly became puggable.  Thus, a much larger portion of guilds were able to clear current raid content.  Simply killing bosses was not that big a deal, and clearing raid tiers was ho-hum.

Now things have shifted to a middle ground.  There are still various paths to get gear, so you’re not locked out of any raid content due to gear.  However, the raids are tougher and the game a bit harder, so pugs are less successful and it is harder to carry lesser players.  As a result, fewer guilds are making it through raid content.

I am musing on this because my guild just killed Al-akir.  As indicated at the start of the post, that makes us 11/12 in the current tier of raids.  This is rarified air for us.  Our guild has been around since vanilla, and we have never cleared a current tier of raids before the new tier was released.

So here we stand, one week before Firelands comes, and only Nefarian standing in our way of clearing all available (non-heroic) content.  We have two nights of raiding scheduled before the patch.  One night will be used to clear BWD and do some learning attempts on Nef, and the second night will be dedicated to taking on Nefarian.

What does all of this have to do with Wrath attitudes?  I think that I am not fully appreciative of what we have done.  Inside, I feel like we are still behind the curve, which is a holdover from Wrath attitudes.  I need to let it sink in that we are well ahead of the typical guild here.  Only 24,500 guilds have killed Al’akir, which is less than half of the guilds that have downed Magmaw.

I’m not trying to toot my own horn.  I’m just being introspective.  When we finally killed Al’akir last night, I didn’t yell with happiness, but rather let out a sigh of relief.  Back in the Karazhan days we were all so happy when we killed a raid boss for the first time.  Has Wrath ruined that for me permanently?

I think that if we get Nef this week I’ll actually be happy.

Time flies when you’re not posting

Wow – its been two weeks without a post.

There hasn’t been much to talk about.

Rogues

I think some rogues are disappointed to see the current state of dps.  For many of us, we are of the opinion that the so-called “pure dps” classes (rogue, mage, warlock, hunter) should out-damage the hybrid classes.  I know that there is much disagreement on that point, but its a fairly commonly-held opinion.

Right now, according to stateofdps.com, shadow priests are at the top of the pile.  Balance druids and unholy death knights are also ahead of rogues on that list.  Keep in mind that list is just from the top 200 World of Logs parses, so there is plenty of variation in individual guilds and raids.

In my guild’s raids, our shadow priest is definitely giving me a run.  If I’m not right on my game he’ll pass me in dps.  On some fights, like Conclave of Wind with a lot of movement and target switching, he has already passed me.

Notable on that list at the State of Dps web site, assassination is still ahead of combat in every fight except Halfus Wyrmbreaker.  Presumably that because of the combat BF cleave running up big numbers when downing the adds.  Also of note: subtlety is at the bottom of every list, and they couldn’t even find enough sub rogues to make a good statistical sample.

I’m still running combat for heroics and assassination for raids.  I can’t bring myself to even try the sub spec.

Guild

We’re at the point of decision making with our guild.  We want to do 25-man raiding.  Really we do.  We try almost every week.  But we have a lot more success in our 10-man raids.

If it was just about loot, loot, and more loot we’d switch to 10-man raids in a minute.  There’s more to the game than loot, though.  There’s camaraderie and the chance to play with friends.  There are more than 9 other people that I’d like to raid with, so we keep banging our heads against the wall trying to find 25 people who can work together.  Still, its getting close to the frustration point for many of our players.

My guild is still keeping up with the daily XP cap.  We’re at level 17 which got us the G-Mail perk.  We also got the recipe for the Seafood Magnifique Feast.  We have over 1100 guild achievement points, which puts us at #3 on our server.  Since we don’t push raid progression, that’s a nice measure of our dedication.  We have not lost too many people due to apathy.  I suspect that we might lose a couple to Rift, but we’ll have to wait and see.

My Playtime

I barely run heroics on my rogue now.  They have certainly become easier now that gear has caught up with dungeon difficulty and people have learned the fights.  I have not had many failpugs in the past couple of weeks.  I still cannot get a ranged weapon or wrist drop, though, and its starting to annoy me.

I’ve leveled a paladin tank.  I really hate tanking heroics.  Well, mostly I hate marking targets.  So, instead of getting heroic drops I geared him up the old-fashioned way – I bought him stuff.  I spent over 20k buying BoE and crafted items on the AH.  He’s geared enough that I was able to off-tank a Halfus Wyrmbreaker kill, so I guess that’s acceptable.  The only problem with this gearing method is that I don’t have any reputations high enough to buy him an arcanum or any other goodies.

I’m now working on a shadow priest.  I eventually plan to switch him to Disc and heal, but for leveling its shadow all the way.  Wow, he does a ton of damage.  Its easily faster than leveling on my rogue was.  I don’t even have to stop for mana.  I’m actually pulling 2-3 mobs at a time just to make things interesting.  That’s weird for a clothie toon.

Auction House

The glyph market has almost completely dried up.  I’m just making enough to break even with my weekly raiding costs, and with buying gear for my alts.  I may have to start looking for other gold-making markets now.

That’s all that is going on with me right now.

Boo! Blizzard takes away Guild XP from achievements

Last night, on the first night of play in a brand new expansion, I was in Deadmines on a level 80 character.  Not heroic Deadmines – regular Deadmines.

One of the amazing things about WoW is the way it can appeal to many different playstyles.  When a person logs on they can do so with the intent of:

• raiding
• questing
• instancing
• farming
• playing the auction house for gold
• leveling professions
• leveling alts
• getting achievements
• being social

And, until yesterday, there was one more option…

• leveling your guild

Of all the things that excited me about Cataclysm, the guild leveling was the big star.  I had every intention of doing anything I could to get my guild to level and start getting perks for my guildmates.  The daily cap on Guild XP was reached by about 6 AM, so the other option (I thought) was to get guild achievements which (until yesterday) were supposed to be able to exceed the daily cap.

With that in mind, one of the first things I did in the game was to get a group of four officers to start blitzing old instances and get some “Guild Run” achievements.

We sprinted through Deadmines and got the achievement splash for it.  After all the “grats” I checked the guild XP meter and it hadn’t changed.  We did Shadowfang Keep and got the achievement, and again no change.

I turned to the internet and found the blue post about guild achievements.

We have decided to remove the added bonus of gaining Guild Experience from Guild Achievements earned. This change will realign Guild Achievements with our philosophy held for normal Achievements, which are intended to be predominantly their own reward (barring the rare exception of special achievements that grant an additional reward.) Previously, the experience reward had been seen as an additional side bonus and not something that should have been significantly skewing the advancement of guilds. During the beta, we greatly increased leveling speed across the board and since most characters were copied from templates, guild experience from Achievements didn’t seem imbalanced. It has become clear that an imbalance does exist and should be addressed to ensure that guilds progress at the rates expected within the daily Guild Experience limits.

Ouch.

The reason this hits me so hard is that it actually took away an entire mode of gameplay.  It actually removes one of the options from the list I made above.  Chasing guild achievements was about the most exciting thing about the expansion for me, and was going to be my primary activity for the first week of the expansion.  Now I can only help my guild by questing and instancing, which is back to the same-old-WoW.

As far as I can tell, any sizable guild will level at the same rate as all the other sizable guilds, because we’ll reach our daily cap every day.  Will that mean that my guild and, say, Premonition will be at the same level?  That makes no sense.  It doesn’t hurt anyone for some guilds to level faster than others.

Blizzard gets a big thumbs-down from me on that one.

Guild leveling and lack of achievements.

I remember when achievements were first introduced, at the end of the Burning Crusade cycle.  The morning after the patch as each person logged on we all got blasted with achievement spam.

When new achievements are introduced, there are always some that you had previously completed.  So you “earn” those achievements retroactively, and they appear the first time you log on, and also informing everyone in the guild.

Today I logged on and expected to see both personal achievement spam as well as guild achievement spam.  I mean, I play a lot and have done a lot in the game and so do a lot of my guildies.  There must be something in the new achievements that we have already accomplished.

Nope.

Logged on and saw not one new achievement for me, and not one achievement for my guild.

That’s good design.  We’re going to have to work for those achievements.

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As far as guild leveling goes, as of 6:30 AM today we had already almost reached the daily guild XP cap.  That’s a low cap and could seriously slow down the guild leveling process.

Except that guild achievements don’t count toward the cap.

So I have a new plan.  Rather than fly right into the new zones, I want to put together a guild team and go run a lot of old content to hit the guild achievements.  We can level up quickly that way and get some perks.

Now, the question is… will I be able to find a few people to pull themselves away from the new shiney stuff into order to blitz through old instances?  We’ll see.

 

My Plan for Cataclysm Raiding

As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, my guild is a social guild that raids.  We have on our roster somewhere between 35-40 raid-capable players, but only about 15-18 of them are the type who would go out of their way to log on specifically to make it to a scheduled raid.  The rest will happily raid if they happen to be online at raid time – the ultimate in “casual,” I suppose.

Also, there are widely varying levels of ability, ranging from a few players who could probably compete for a spot in a Top Guild^TM to others who barely beat the tanks in dps.

A lot of other guilds in this situation would have cut their raids down to 10-man a long time ago, leaving a very elite core group that could compete for server progression.  That’s not our guild.  We like the company and the social atmosphere.  We like giving opportunity to new raiders.  We like raiding with no pressure.  We love to share in the glee that a new raider feels when he gets his first loot from a raid boss.

And we’ve found a good balance between 10 and 25 man raids.  Our core team does 10-man runs during the week and has cleared ICC and a couple of hard modes.  On the other hand, our 25 man raids go on weekends and can routinely get the first 7 bosses of ICC down, but not much else.

And, for the most part, we’re happy this way.

But…

mean-old Deathwing threatens to change all that when he ushers in Cataclysm.  The shared 10- and 25-man lockouts would eliminate our current raiding method, since our core players can’t do 10 man during the week and 25 man on the weekend.

I think I’ve found a solution.  The key is that there should be be four raids available at launch, instead of just two like when Wrath came out.  (I’m including Obsidian Sanctum in the Wrath count, but I don’t count Malygos… one boss with no trash does not make for a fun raid)

From what I’ve seen, Cataclysm is shipping with four raids – Grim Batol, The Firelands, Skywall, and Blackwing Descent.

My guild has two nights of 25-man raiding per week.  I envision a system where we schedule one or two 25-man raids for our two nights, depending how long the raid instances are.  That will be announced in advance, and players will be told not to get saved to either of those raids during the week.  However, the other two unscheduled raids are fair game for whatever: 10-man runs, pugs, etc…

Then we can switch off from one week to the next.

For example,

• For Week One we can schedule 25-man Grim Batol and/or Skywall.
• That leaves The Firelands and Blackwing Descent free for people to pug, or run in a guild 10-man for faster progression and achievements.
• In Week Two we can schedule 25-man Firelands and/or Blackwing Descent
• That would leave Grim Batol and Skywall available for people to pug or run in 10-mans.
• and so on…

This depends on a lot of factors, including the relative difficulty of the raids, their length, gear requirements, and our ability to coordinate our players.

However, if we can get this to work, then we won’t have to choose between 10 and 25 man.  We can still straddle that line between the two, just like we always have.  Sure, our progression will be slow, but that’s no different than our current situation and that doesn’t bother us.

Everyone is so certain that guilds will have to choose between 10 and 25 man raiding.  I don’t see it.  So… what are the flaws in my idea?

No Pressure

I didn’t realize how obsessed I’d become.

In the weeks before my guild finally downed the Lich King, I was online a LOT.  I would make sure to log in every night without fail by 8:30 and stay on until midnight, on the off chance that a raid would happen that might get me some gear upgrade or Emblems or anything.

I passed up on chances to go out to the movies with my wife if a raid was happening.  I scheduled all of my weeknights around my WoW time.

Its not as bad as it sounds.  I’m a teacher, so over the summer I have a lot of unscheduled time.  I didn’t shirk my family or job or do anything damaging or unhealthy.  I just really, really wanted to do whatever I could to finish ICC.

Now that the task is complete, all the pressure is off.  I’ve taken a couple of nights off this week to watch TV or do some reading – something I hadn’t done in a while.  I’ve still been logging in most evenings, but I can log on a little later and log off a little earlier without worry that I am going to miss out on something.

This is not one of those “I’m leaving until Cataclysm” posts.  Far from it.  I still have Loremaster to finish, plus I’m working on getting rep with some old world and BC factions.  I’m still working my inscription business and prepping my stockpiles for Cataclysm.

In addition, it would be selfish for me to stop playing now.  Yes, my guild killed LK, but that only got the Kingslayer title for 10 of us.  There are a lot more players in the guild who want that title, so I would be remiss if I didn’t help them.

Plus, I need that title on my MAIN rather than my tank alt.

But its nice to be relieved of that pressure.

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As an aside, I’ll just say something about the idea of dropping your subscription until Cataclysm.

I guess I must be extremely lucky to be in the guild I’m in.  The people in my guild are truly my friends, even though I’ve never met most of them in Real Life.  I’d log into the game just to hang with them even if there were no content to do.

In my situation, I can’t imagine dropping my WoW subscription.  It would be like cutting off a huge piece of my social life.

For all the people who can casually drop their subscription for months at a time, I feel a little bad for them.  I guess they aren’t as attached to their guild or guildmates as I am.  Its not a criticism of those people, but rather a statement of how fortunate I am to have such a good group of friends in game.

Lich King

You know what’s good about the design of the Lich King fight?  It doesn’t matter how much Wrynn buffs your raid.  You still have to do it right or you’ll die.  There aren’t many fights in ICC that manage that feat of design.  Putricide to an extent, and Sindragosa for certain.  But the other fights?  They still need some strategy, but with the 30% buff a lot of the details can be overlooked or even ignored without penalty.

My guild finally got around to killing the Lich King.  We got past Sindragosa some time ago, and had cleared the rest of ICC well before that.  The strategy for Arthas had eluded us until this week when it just clicked, as often happens on these technical fights.

It doesn’t matter how much health you have, if the Val’kyr drops you off the edge then you’re dead.  If you stand in a Defile then the raid wipes.  If the Infest doesn’t get healed away quickly then its unhealable.

What the Wrynn buff does provide is the ability to kill the Val’kyr a little faster, maybe make the heals hit a little harder, maybe let the tank survive a hit that would have killed him otherwise.  It makes the fight more forgiving, but still far from trivial.

Our success brings me happiness, pride and sadness. My happiness is for my guild.  We have a very talented core, but our casual approach to the game has always kept us a little behind the most current progression.  This is the first time that we have killed the hardest available content, even if it took us a long, long time to get around to it.  I’m glad that my group of friends and I have had the opportunity to experience all that WoW has to offer.

My pride comes from the fact that I tanked the fight.  I had almost no experience tanking pre-ICC.  When one of our our main tanks stopped playing WoW, I took my paladin tank from tanking heroics to tanking ToC to defeating the Lich King in a very short time.  I’m glad I was able to do that, for the sake of my guild, since we are very short on tanks.  I felt like I did a good job and that my lack of tanking experience didn’t become a liability.

My sadness is from having the Kingslayer title on a character other than my main.  I really want the achievement to go to Dinaer, so we now need to gear up another tank and get him/her the experience so that he/she can take my place in the fight and let me in there on my rogue. I’m not going to display the Kingslayer title on my paladin until I get it on my main.

Maybe I need to write a tankadin guide to the fight  =)   That would be a change of pace.

Congratulations the The Dragons (Sen’jin-US) on defeating Arthas!  On to heroic modes!