Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

The Sons of Hodir rep grind is at least as annoying as I expected it to be.  I’m barely into friendly and I hate them all.  The quests are very poorly set up and allow for ninja looting of quest items.  I’m going to be dropping a lot of cash at the Auction House buying rep.  At least they could have given us two factions with shoulder enchants.

Still no Bear Tank Pawn scale, but if you’re sick of waiting this is where I’m going to start research for building one: Recognizing Bear Loot.

Gevlon of Greedy Goblin discusses loot distribution.  This time of transition as we move into the new expansion is a great time for thinking about this kind of thing.  As always, Gevlon manages to come up with an original take on the subject - one firmly founded in the practical wisdom of Goblin philosophy.  

Zero sum gold: People bid for the loot with gold, highest bidder distributes the money equally between the raiders. So if you win a Karazhan loot with 1000G bid, you have to pay 100G to everyone else (and 100 to yourself). This way the others get something too, just like in zero sum DKP but with the difference, that money is not bound to the guild, you can spend it wherever you want. So

• It encourages preparation and demanding others to prepare, since no loot or money if no kill.
• If you kill, you surely get something (money or loot)
• Encourages farming or business, since you have better chance to loot if you have more money.
• Allows PuG-ed people to come and equally participate.
• Encourages participation in bosskills where you don’t want loot (since you get money).
• Encourages well-geared players to stay in guild, since while they can’t get loot until the guild downs their boss, in the meantime you get very rich. This point is extremely important for the guild’s tank-keeping potential. Tanks are needed to be geared for the bosses, so little or no drop for them. But this way they are saved for farming which is hard for tanks.
• No mod, administration, or tables needed (though 24 trades can be a pain, it can be decreased by giving all the money to the raid leader who distributes it at raidend.)

This is the goblin way!
By the way someone can say that "encourage farming" can backfire, people will spend more time farming (or worse, buying) gold, than preparation for raid. I don’t see it a problem. The system encourage people to check for the preparation of others, if the raid is unprepared, no loot or money. It’s true that the guy with the more money will get the loot, but he distributes this money, so next time you will be the guy with the more money.

The big thing I don’t like about this system is that it may encourage gold buying.  Even if the others don’t buy gold, when you’re dealing with limited playtime and you’re bidding against someone who plays 12 hours a day, you’re going to lose.  What happens when a warrior-only item drops and there’s only one warrior in the raid - does the warrior get away with bidding 1g for the item?  I’m sure there are other problems I’ve missed too.

Anyone have any thoughts on how the problems with this loot distribution system could be overcome?  I’d bet there’s a solution out there in real world economics.

Life of a Nin had a post On Raiders and raiding which discusses summer slumps in raiding and lack of progress.  He mentions the idea of a large scale raiding alliance as a possible solution.  You stay in your guild, but raid with people from the raiding alliance at the times that work for you on the raids you want to run.  One example of this in action is Leftovers Community Raiding.  For further reading, see the WoW Insider article. 

I really like the idea, but thinking about the overhead scares me.  The loot system would have to be 100% impartial.  If you have the points or win the roll you get it.  If there is even the slightest room for favoritism the whole thing would fall apart. 

How are troublemakers handled?  In the relatively small guilds I’ve been in, there have been a number of disruptive people.  Sometimes it was just a bad night.  Sometimes it was a regular occurrence.  How do they avoid blacklisting someone for having a bad night while keeping the troublemakers from stirring things up?

It looks like Leftovers is an Alliance group on a role-playing server.  Looking at their setup tempts me to pull Flint out of retirement and give it a try.  Sadly, Flint would lose the provable distinction of having leveled on a PvP server as a holy priest.  I’m also not sure if I want to get into raiding on him again.  It’s definitely something to think about. 

It’s strange but I think if I were to resume playing my priest, Flint, I could do a better job than I did when he was my main character.  It would take me a bit to get back into the swing of healing and my first few runs would doubtless be scary things.  However, I think I have a better grasp of how to play than I did back then.

Flint was my first max level character (twice).  It’s not surprising that I would make some really noobish mistakes, such as the time I mind controlled a Dark Iron dwarf in Gnomergon, ran him over the nearest ledge, and watched in horror as he pulled most of the rest of the instance. The simple fact that I’ve had more practice means that I play better.

There are a lot of resources out there that I didn’t know about on Flint.  Heck, there are a lot of resources out there that didn’t exist when I was playing Flint.  Loot lists, message boards, theorycrafting, rotations, macros, and strategy guides have all helped tremendously.  Now I know why I shouldn’t be rolling on that spell crit mace against a paladin.  I did a decent amount of research while playing Flint, but nothing compared to the research I’m doing now. 

Having leveled a warrior, paladin, and hunter to max level and getting a warlock, shaman, and druid a decent chunk of the way there means that I have a better idea how the different classes are played.  There was one warrior that annoyed the crap out of me because he wouldn’t watch mana bars at all.  Now I know why he loved to chain pull and I am aware that I don’t NEED to have full mana for every trash mob pull in an instance.

Raid leading has taught me even more about the different classes and how to get people to work together.  I was good at healing my group, but terrible at carrying out any other heal assignment.  I would get nervous whenever someone’s health would drop and would toss out heals to unassigned targets.  That’s fine every once in a while, but not as a general practice.  I’ve learned to trust my teammates to do their jobs while I focus on doing mine.

Now I want to roll up a priest to apply the lessons that I’ve learned.  Maybe I’ll do that once my other toons make it up to 70 (or next time I want another alt). 

I won the Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable from Moroes while healing on my paladin for our second group. I switched back to prot to speed run some five mans and discovered midrun that I’d forgotten to gem it. Oops! Maintankadin :: Gems and Enchantments: A short guide confirmed that I should be gemming this up for stamina. Now to find a couple of Solid Empyrean Sapphires to gem it up.

We have a couple of people in our guild alliance who are interested in raid leading.  I thought I’d give them a hand by pointing out some useful posts and tips.

Strategies

As a raid leader, your key task is to provide a strategy for raids.  I find that Bosskillers generally provides solid guides.  The nicest thing about his site is the links to other guides, including video guides.  I’ve found that Pillage has a lot of very detailed guides.  What makes Pillage’s guides so useful is that they cover trash mobs as well.  When you don’t need a full guide - just something to refresh your memory - WoWWiki is the place to go.

Addons

There are a number of addons out there that make life easier for a raid leader.  Here are a few that I’ve found particularly useful.

ORA2 provides information about the raid’s status, cooldowns, main tanks, main assists, and so on.  A lot of the functionality has been rolled into the default UI, but ORA2 provides a better interface and some enhanced functionality.

RaidBuffStatus gives a complete overview of the Raid’s Buff Status.  Does the hunter have an aspect up?  Did that freshly resurrected warlock get a new int buff?  Is someone ignoring your pleas for full raid buffs before a tough boss?  Did people "forget" consumables again?  A quick Ctrl-Click and you can whisper the buffer to remind them.  If you feel like being less discreet about it, you can let the raid know who’s slacking off.  About the only things this doesn’t seem to track are weapon buffs (oils/blacksmith stones), healthstones, and soulstones. 

Deadly Boss Mods and BigWigs provide critical information for boss fights.  As raid leader you need to know when a boss is about to use their special abilities and these addons help you keep track of that. 

GuildRaidSnapShot in combination with our guild site lets you do two very useful things.  First it keeps track of who was at a raid.  Second, it tracks the epics that drop.  If you install this addon, it will prompt you for a DKP value, just leave the field blank and hit enter.  After a raid, you will have to go to our site and upload the snapshot.  Once you have uploaded the snapshot, you can click on the "Purge" button the pops up next time you log in.

There are addons to help you with marking targets - I personally find it just as easy to keybind the symbols and use that.

Loot Systems

Now we start to get into the really messy stuff.  What makes loot systems messy is that we try to make them fair. 

Is it fair that the priest who’s been there for every raid, supplied consumables and enchants to everyone, and has played with great skill loses a roll for a cloth belt to a PUGed shaman who happens to be resto for this week’s raid but is going back to enhancement next week? 

Is it fair when a new rogue loses a str/agi/attack power dagger to a priest who likes the way it looks but who has been around long enough to have the points needed to bid on it?  These are the types of situations that loot systems are intended to regulate.

Thus far, we’ve been using need/greed rolls for loot.  It’s the simplest system to implement, but as in the priest example above, it can lead to gross unfairness. 

Here are some overviews of loot systems.
DKP Loot Systems
Other Loot Systems
Saraid Article on DKP

We’re going to stick with rolls for now, but this is something we really need to think about particularly as we move into 25 person raids. 

WoW Web Stats

WoW Web Stats is a very useful tool.  I don’t place a lot of faith in Damage/Healing meters. (How to top the healing meters )  However, they can provide some feedback.  If you’re DPS and you’re not staying ahead of the holy priest, there’s a problem.  If you’re a prot warrior and you have 3 times as many shield slams as revenges, there’s a problem (hangs head in shame).  Big Red Kitty has a guide to an earlier version of WoW Web Stats - just jump down to step 10 as a lot has changed for the previous 9 steps. 

I will post a detailed guide for anyone who needs to upload a WoW Web Stats Report.

Player Gear/Spec Evaluation

We haven’t made a big deal out of spec, all we ask is that raiders be specced for their role.  Don’t show up in a resto spec and plan to DPS.  Don’t show up looking to tank as a paladin without Holy Shield.  Do a search on WoW Wiki for [class] builds to see some of the standard builds.  Go to Elitist Jerks to see what are key talents for a given class/spec.  If someone wants to fill a role while not having speced for it, they can expect to be greeted with skepticism and will have to work harder to prove themselves.  (Off specs can work, I knew a holy paladin who was an amazing tank in the pre-BC days when paladins were only supposed to be cleansebots.) 

Some quick evaluations tools are be.imba and WoW Heroes.  These are very valuable to raid leaders.  These tools will let you know that Raider X is geared up enough to run Black Temple while Raider Y isn’t geared up enough for Karazhan.  Note that these tools depend on what is visible in the armory and that they are only estimates.  If your prot warrior logs out in his DPS gear, he’s going to have a terrible score.  As Warshrike demonstrated last week, a DPS that’s undergeared for Kara can still rock the damage charts in Zul’Aman when played by a skilled player. 

THE END

There’s more to be said, but this should give you a good start.  I have a lot of fun raid leading and I hope you do too!

I got the last few badges for my cloak last night and now Tristam is decked out head to toe in epic gear.

It was a fun run (except for Prince). We sped through and went from Moroes to Prince in 3.5 hours. We downed Moroes, Opera (Romulo and Julianne), Curator, Shade of Aran, Netherspite, Chess, and Prince. The fights were smooth as could be except for Prince and oddly enough Chess. We lost at Chess for the first time ever. (I figure since I took the Warchief I jinxed it.) We had a lot of melee DPS so Prince was rough. It took us a couple tries but we got him.

Justin brought his rogue last night and made out like a bandit. I think his rogue now has more Kara loot than his warlock who’s been raiding for the last four months. Of course, now I expect his rogue to put out as much DPS as his warlock.

Every time someone talks about how much S4 loot is better than T6 gear, God ganks little Timmy and takes away his white kitten.

And feeds it to Magtheridon.

metaquotes: mephron (in worldofwarcraft) on PvP gear vs. dungeon loot

Loot Rank for WoW looks like another useful tool. I like this one because it lets you rank the stats that matter to you as well as specifying where loot can be obtained. Then it gives you a top-ten list of the gear that matches your preferences.

For example, hit rating matters to my hunter because she’s not hit capped. At the moment, hit rating is pretty important. Once I get 15ish more hit rating, it won’t matter anymore. My hunter may do 5 mans, but will most likely not be seeing any Kara or badge loot (let alone Black Temple loot). I can restrict my search on those criteria.

Note that using a pre-made template from the forums then tweaking it is a good way of getting some quick answers.

A Dwarf Priest has a detailed guide to using Loot Rank.

Chardev looks like it might be a useful site. I wish it had a way of filtering items by drop location (or at least showing the drop location on the tooltips). It does me no good to look at a lovely piece of Sunwell loot. (via The Hunter’s Mark » Elune Bless Death & Taxes)

The Badge Pick Order: 2.4 Edition - Warriors - TankingTips.com gives a nice breakdown of Badge loot and the order to get it in. I still haven’t completed normal Magister’s Terrace (first time due to lack of crowd control, second time it was just too late at night when we got Kael). I’m not totally sold on passing up the Gnomergon Auto-Blocker trinket.

A number of people have commented on the lack (or perceived lack) of tanks and healers for PUG groups. I have a 70 protection warrior, a 70 holy priest, and a 70 paladin who has gear for both healing and tanking (though I prefer tanking on her). Heck, if someone needs DPS I can bring my hunter. Why don’t I do more pick up groups?

I have no strong objection to PUGs in principle. I don’t mind playing with people I don’t know. Despite all the fun-suckers out there, there are a large number of good people who play WoW. I can live with running into the occasional jerk. Having a group of random people sync up and work well together is a lot of fun. Meeting new people can be great. There are plenty of opportunities for me to join a PUG group.

That being said, I haven’t joined a PUG in weeks, edging up into months. Why not?

First is simply time. On a normal weeknight I might play for up to five hours, 1-2 hours when I get home from work and 3 after the kids are in bed. For those first two hours I pretty much have to be able to drop what I’m doing at any point, so I do my Auction House scan, do as many dailies as I can stand, or generally putter around. I can’t run an instance during that time. Therefore the time I might be available for running PUGs is a maximum of 3 hours per night. If I need that time for farming mats, or getting gold, or grinding rep I’m not available to PUG.

This moves me on to my second reason for not doing PUGs. When I log in in the evening and actually have the time and inclination to run something, it’s rare that there isn’t a friend/guild member looking for a group. Why would I spurn someone I know for a random stranger? I have no lack of premade groups to join. It’s more fun to run with friends or at least with people you’ll probably get to run with again. There is a sense of camaraderie. You know what jokes are appropriate and which topics to avoid. If someone’s having an off night (or wins every single drop), it’s not a big deal - you’ll have your own chances to screw up and win big.

Third comes the sheer economics of PUGing. Last night I ran Heroic Sethekk to help get our 70 druid his epic flight form. We tried to skip a few too many mobs, screwed up on some pulls, and so on - nothing unusual for a new instance and a different than usual group makeup. My repair bills were about 25g. I didn’t have any gear drops and my total coin/grey drops were about 8g. It cost me 17g to do that run, not counting the gold I missed out on getting by not spending that time doing dailies. This was with a good solid group of people I know. I can’t imagine that most PUGs would wipe much less and the time commitment is roughly the same. Every time I PUG I can count on it costing me roughly 20g with a good group. Even if loot drops for me there is a far greater chance of a ninja looter with the lack of accountability in a PUG.

So why would I PUG? It takes time I don’t have, keeps me from spending time with friends, and costs me money. I’d like to meet more people but I already have about all the online friends I can keep up with. Our guild isn’t looking for new recruits. What’s in it for me?

I am amazingly pumped! Our guild alliance managed to down both Shade of Aran and Prince for the first time last night. We started our run at 9PM and managed to go through until about 1:30 AM. Kara is our oyster!

Our other tank couldn’t be there, so I was the solo tank. This gave me ample opportunities to screw up and I seized those opportunities (grin). I body pulled Curator, but we still one-shotted him. Shade went amazingly smoothly. On our first attempt at Prince, I body pulled moving into position. Our third (?) attempt was a heart-breaking wipe at 1%. Our fourth attempt was picture perfect - not one death.

I am very lucky to be running with such a good group. We have had no loot drama, no drama on who gets to raid and who doesn’t, and everyone performs their roles with panache.

Blessing of Kings tosses out the idea of just using Blizzard’s built-ins for a Fast Loot System. Need for your main spec set, greed for your off-spec set, pass otherwise, disenchant if everyone passes.

This would work in our guild as it stands for the following reasons. First we’re a small guild. With less than 10 players, it’s easy to take the attitude that what goes around comes around. About half of our guild knows each other in real life. Second we have a variety of classes - the current/up and coming overlaps are multiple hunters. One player has his hunter as his main and the other two hunters are the tank and healer’s alts, so they probably wouldn’t be there anyway. Mostly we simply don’t need one another’s gear. The DPS casters have some overlap but they’re husband and wife so they can fight it out amongst themselves *grin*. Third, about two-thirds of our guild has former or current raiding toons. If we were all about the shiny loots, we’d be playing on those toons and not working our way up to the bottom run of the raiding ladder again. We’ve been through loot drama and really don’t care enough about “+1 to total leetness” drops to cause drama about it.

That being said, I wonder if there could be a way of rewarding guildies for attendance other than drops? This is where I wish the guild system in WoW was a little more robust. What if there were items that could only be crafted by guilds that had cleared a given instance? Pre-BC the Onyxia Scale Cloak was an example of this kind of thing. Do something along the lines of Suicide Kings for only these guild-craftable items based on factors such as punctuality, preparedness, and presence. Maybe give the guildie at the top of the list a free craftable item of their choice at the end of every run? Alternately, do this for every guildie who has done X runs while prepared, punctual, and present? This will be easier when primal nethers are no longer BOP in 2.4.

Time Management for Raiding Guilds - TheorySpot is an interesting article.

When you choose to do the hardest content first as a matter of guild policy you give yourself more flexibility in two routes. First, if you are suffering on content before the weekend, you can motivate people prior to the next raid week by spending the Sunday and Monday before the next reset clearing easier content offering a lot of loot upgrades. Second, if you are very close to killing a boss, it gives the opportunity to push for that boss while spirits are high without disappointing too many people for skipping an earlier zone. Do you run the risk of not being able to kill an important boss such as Kael’thas or Lady Vashj? Yep. And it will hurt, too.

Most importantly, though, is being able to adapt your raid for progress. Planning and organizing consumables for the beginning of the week is a matter of preparation, not doctrine. The principle for progress here is that you are able to raid new content any time during the week as necessary; be prepared to have that incredible class makeup you need for Magtheridon or Mother immediately after an instance reset. Your goal is not rigid, but fluid — if class balance is great on Tuesday then raid new content on Tuesday; if it is weak Wednesday, go to your old content; if it’s good on Thursday, go back to new content and put the remainder of old content off until Monday. In other words, planning to raid early gives you and your raiders preparation to raid any time at all, since consumables, gear, strategies, and goals are in place at the instance reset.

Want an easy way to say this to your raid without settling into the mindset of a fixed schedule? Just say, “you show up, we’ll make the decision based on who we have and what our class balance is.” It’s that simple. Even if you have planned where you are going and are going to keep content frontloaded 90% of the time, it’s still truthful to say that your decision will be based on class balance.

Never push a great raid to old content at the beginning of the week. Wait for the rainy days to do that and, if there are none, take your great raid to clean house before the next reset.

If I’m reading this correctly he’s saying as much as possible you should be pushing on to new content. Only do farming runs when it’s raid time and there just aren’t the correct class balances to progress.

World of Matticus has a good post on Structuring Your Casual Raiding Guild. Here are a few snippets I found interesting. I think that lack of some of these positions contributed a lot to the dissolution of my raiding guild. It was largely a one-man show so when he quit it was over.

Choose officers based on what your Guild Leader lacks. “The bottom line is that these are individuals that your Guild leader can trust and depend on.”

(Raid Leaders) “call for what it is that they want to happen. They might want a sheep on square, a misdirect on skull, or a trap on circle. They don’t care who does it as long as it’s done. They have delegated duties down the chain of command.”

For loot distribution, “No matter what system is used, always ensure that Officer discretion can come into play at some point.”

Tobold is discussing different ways to make grouping in WoW more attractive and prominent pre-endgame (or at least pre-60).

I really like this idea: Tobold’s MMORPG Blog: The flexible solution

We already have a faction of time travelers, why not add a new faction of level travelers? Whenever a higher level player would join a lower-level dungeon group, he would gain reputation points for every kill and badges from every boss to make up for the lack of interest in the low-level loot that drops. The players in the group that are actually of the level of the dungeon don’t get the points and badges, but the loot should be more interesting for them. The reputation and badges could then be used in the usual way to buy recipes and gear for the high-level characters which is actually useful at their high level.

Removing the group XP penalty and replacing it with a slight XP buff when grouping would be a good thing too. 99% of the time a group is not as efficient as a single person. When I sit down to play alone, I can begin playing immediately. When I play with my wife we have to meet up, then there are sometimes delays when one or the other of us gets sidetracked by gathering/a quest the other doesn’t have/life in general. When I play with my static group there is by definition always one person who is the last to be ready to go and that delays the other four. In a raid…well I won’t even touch on the exponential number of delays there, especially since most raids are at the level cap anyway. The leveling guides that I’ve seen all boast/recommend that solo is the way to go. Why not make it that playing with a good group levels you faster? It’s a lot more fun to play with others but trying to level that way, especially with any drop quests, sucks.

Loot distribution is one of those issues that keeps popping up in World of Warcraft.

I think the ideal system is some kind of totally impartial loot council where gear is assigned on a case by case basis for the good of the guild. Frankly I don’t trust myself to be that completely impartial. I know that if something dropped that would be any kind of upgrade of Jaimie, I would be tempted to just give it to her.

One possibility might be a random loot council. Select one person in guild to be the loot council chair. When a run starts, the chair rolls 2 (4?) times and the people in that spot in the raid are now the loot council, with the chair having the tiebreaker vote. When an item drops, those who want it for their main raiding spec whisper the chair with 1 and a link to their current item for that slot. Those who want it for their off spec whisper the chair with 2 and a link to their current item for that slot and spec. The council then assigns it on an as-needed basis with 1 having priority over 2. This has the advantage over a standard loot council of avoiding a loot council clique. Downsides are that it may be slow and you may get someone who can’t/won’t participate as one of the loot council. Alternatives would be to have multiple “static” members in the council.

Blue Priest has a good post on the categorization of WoW players in his post Hardcore something-or-other. Rather than focusing on what content you’ve seen, your honorable kills, the hours you play, he breaks it down by what interests you in the game. Thus you can be hardcore in some ways at level 20 and not hardcore in others despite having cleared Black Temple.

Here’s how I would rate myself using his scale.

1. Min-maxer: 70% - I will usually pass on significant upgrade if someone else wants it more. I have forgotten to upgrade gear for quite a while, e.g. my 63 paladin was still wearing level 45 bracers - oops. I do enjoy theorycraft, but not to the point where I need to squeeze out every last point of damage. I just want something that works decently for me. I will wear a dumb looking item if it has much better stats.
2. Economist: 40% I’d be on the casual end here, maybe edging towards hardcore. I do use Auctioneer and the Auction House pretty much daily but my AH dealings are very conservative.
3. Roleplayer: 70% I don’t have a backstory for my characters. My character names have to be appropriate ones, no IKillYous or DOTFearWins for me. In my mind, my characters have some definite preferences - Flint is a holy priest and that’s that.
4. Loot Luster: 40% Shinies are nice but if someone else wants I’ll usually pass.
5. Achiever: 80% I like maxing out my tradeskills (the major drain on my gold when levelling). I feel little compulsion to complete all quests. Random drop quests are the bane of my existence, and I will drop those quests if the drop rate isn’t acceptable to me. I like leveling characters. The reputation grinds don’t appeal to me.
6. Socializer: 40% I prefer to play with others, but I’m quite happy soloing through the levels too. Mostly I play with Jaimie so I’m not usually soloing anyway (except when she’s raiding or sleeping).
7. PvPer: 40% I’ll do up to a maximum of about 3 battlegrounds/night. Usually I’ll do the daily battleground quest and leave it at that. I have never been to arenas. I first leveled on a PvP server and the ganking got to me. I don’t get off on ganking lowbies, which more or less put me in a “pirates of Penzance” type situation. If my character can heal in battlegrounds, that’s often what I end up doing.

(blog found via Two and a Half Orcs)