Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

So you’ve been playing World of Warcraft for a while and have decided to make a fresh start and reroll on a new server.  How do you decide which server will be right for you? 

I’m assuming you’ve already decided on a server type, a faction, and have some idea of the play style and class(es) you enjoy.  If not take a look at WoW Insider’s current WoW Rookie column.  If you’re new to WoW, welcome here!

Server population affects a number of parts of the game.  A more highly populated server will have more people to play with, but also more people competing for the same resources.  WarcraftRealms is a census of the population on the different servers. Since it’s based on people submitting data rather than Blizzard numbers, it’s not 100% accurate but it can give you a pretty good picture of realm populations. If you’re playing on a PvP server, be sure to check out the Horde/Alliance ratio to have a rough idea of how often you’ll get ganked.

Your server’s time zone is also worth noting.  If you want to play with others pick a server where prime time (roughly 6-11 PM) matches your play schedule.  If not, pick one where it doesn’t. 

These two factors should narrow you list down to a dozen servers or so. Now it’s time to dig down a little further.

If you’re interested in endgame PvE look at WoWProgress to see how progressed a server is.  It will be easier to get into raiding on a server with many raiding guilds.  If PvP is more your thing, look at SK Gaming’s Arena Rankings or Warcraft Realm’s Battlegrounds page.  More teams/wins means more opportunities for you to get in on the fun.

Another factor to consider is the personality of your server. All servers will have loathsome jerks and terrific people.  However, there are some servers where one or the other predominate.  Take a look at the description for your server on WoWWiki’s Realms List.  I shudder to recommend it, but it might be worth looking at the Official Realm Forums.  You want to look at the reactions to announcements of accomplishments.  Is the announcer congratulated or mocked?Hopefully this will give you some idea of the kinds of personalities you may be dealing with.  Remember that mostly it’s the the scum of the server that post on the realm forums. 

I hope this will help you in your search for a new server.  Have fun!

(Inspired by Calling all Horde!! from Skeleton Jack)

I like this idea from Tobold blogs from the hip - WoW Insider:
“Every boss in the raid dungeon gets between two and five random boss abilities, with no way to find out what the boss does except for fighting him.” I think it would make instancing and raiding a lot more interesting if bosses were more unpredictable. The downside would be that some of the more interesting scripted encounters would be taken out. Mind you even the most interesting scripted encounter gets dull after a couple times through.

Greedy goblin has come up with A humble suggestion for making a dynamic version of World of Warcraft that would make raiding easier as time passes while keeping it tough for the hardcore. I especially like the idea that there would be a record of how hard a raid boss was then you defeated it.

So far my favorite part of Wrath is the new cooking recipes.  The new instances are well done.  The quests are amusing and well-planned.  Nevertheless I like the new food and fishing for it best. 

I really don’t know if I’m going to make it to raiding in Wrath.  I like the new quests and stuff but I’m finding leveling frustrating and leveling has always been one of my favorite parts of WoW.  I suspect that I have some unconscious expectations that aren’t being met and so far I haven’t managed to track down the cause of my dissatisfaction.

I don’t have much to add to this Things Every Warrior Tank Thinks Every Non-Tank Should Know. Mostly I’m making a note of it for when we get back into raiding again in Wrath and a new raider joins us.

Starman makes some good points on the use of
Stats: Devil or Angel?. We always post WoW Web Stats for our raids. We have some new raiders joining us, so I need to make sure to emphasize the use of stats as a teaching tool rather than simply a race to the biggest numbers.

A Dwarf Priest discusses Two Tools For Raid Stacking that will help raid leaders take advantage of all the new buffs. I’m probably going to use InTheBuff as I prefer in-game tools.

One of the things I’m not looking forward to in Wrath is re-calibrating all my addons, particularly those for evaluating gear. I know the theorycrafters are going nuts figuring out what the new values are, but I liked knowing the relative values of one point of defense versus one point of parry. Ah well, this way things stay interesting.

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.

A while back guilds were selling Zul’Aman Bear mount runs for a five to ten thousand gold.  You show up, pay your gold, and the bear mount is yours at the end of the timed run.  With the pre-Wrath path this mount is no longer going to be available, so I imagine business is brisk.

Getting a bear mount that way does not appeal to me.  The only toon I would have considered it for is my dwarf hunter.  He’s had a bear pet from the start so having a bear mount would be fun.  Sadly he’s level 40ish and hasn’t been played for almost two years so he’s not likely to get one. 

I hope that Blizzard has some kind of equivalent accomplishment based mount in Wrath.  If I’m still raiding when they bring it in, I think there’s a good chance that our raid team could get it. 

Crutch’s So You Think You Can Blog? week 2 entry is Songs for a Musical Karazhan.  I know my raid group always appreciates it when I sing to them and now there will be more musicality!  Mwhahahahaha!!!!! 

&quotWhat sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.&quot — (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)

I was reading an article on how an economics experiment managed to get worked to pick a lot more strawberries.  The line that struck me was:

Again, workers prioritized money over social ties, abandoning groups of friends to ally themselves with the most productive co-workers who would accept them.

To me this sounds a lot like guild hopping in World of Warcraft. The desire for rewards or for proof that you excel at the game often trumps social networks.

I’ve found that this is one of the most frustrating things about being a raid leader.  Everyone has a cutoff point at which the new epics are not worth the social cost to obtain them.  For some people reaching endgame or raiding for 3 hours straight costs them too much time that they’d rather spend socializing outside the game.  Once some people reach a certain level of gearing they stop playing or greatly cut back on their play time or roll another alt.  Still others form social networks that are specifically aimed at beating the final boss or getting that legendary gear.  As each person reaches their cutoff point, they have broken ties with those whose cutoff point was earlier and they are breaking ties with those whose cutoff point is higher.  Trying to balance cutoff points for a group is tricky and leads to hurt feelings.

For a while there was a potion sickness effect in the beta of Wrath of the Lich King that kept people from consuming more than one potion per fight.  I really hope this mechanic makes it into the actual game. 

For those of you who didn’t raid before Burning Crusade, it wasn’t uncommon to have six or more elixir buffs up for progression raiding.  Raiding was an even more expensive proposition then.  Elixirs were then divided into Battle and Guardian elixirs and you could only have one of each or a flask up.  There was a great hue and cry that raid bosses would be impossible to beat.  Shockingly enough, the sky didn’t fall and there was still plenty of raiding and downing of raid bosses.

Anything that reduces the cost of raiding is fine by me!

Blessing of Kings discusses Blizzard on Healers in Raids.  Essentially it looks as though for 25s you will still need about 1/3 of the players to be healers.  As Rohan points out, this doesn’t match at all with the number of people who are interested in healing. 

Our little guild of about 10 has three people who had experience raid healing before we rerolled.  All three of us rolled non-healing classes.  Two of the former healers have toons we’re willing to heal with, but it’s definitely not my first choice of spec.  From what I can tell, it’s the same thing for the other guild in our alliance - people will heal but they’d prefer other roles. 

Warcraft is a game - there’s only so long that people are willing to play a less-fun role even if it’s an essential one.  Personally I expect to burn out on Wrath raiding much more quickly than I did on Burning Crusade raiding.  The scramble to find people to fill out the needed roles is a pain and I don’t want to do it anymore. 

Matticus provides a nice overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each of WoW’s healing classes in Assigning Healing Strategy - Part 1: Recognizing Class Strengths. This is important for for heal leads and for raid leads. I’ve raid healed on 2 of the healing classes, but it’s very helpful to have each healing class’ role in a raid laid out so neatly.

Life of a Nin has a very nice writeup On Comparing tank classes. He gives a quick overview of the pluses and minuses of each tanking class and where you would use each of the classes. For another perspective on the same subject, see WoWWikki’s Tank article and the articles for each tanking class.

Hopefully someone will do a series like this for DPS classes.

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. 

Just over a year ago (roughly June 30, 2007), Justin, Faith, Dave, Jaimie, and I rolled up toons on the Quel’dorei server to play together.  Jamie and had had our raiding guild on Andorhal fall apart and we were looking for a fresh start.  Dave and Faith were somewhat new to World of Warcraft so we figured we’d all start off at the same place and level together.  We actually stuck to that pretty much all the way to 70.  There were times when someone would pull a level or so ahead, but we stayed pretty close level-wise. 

Unfortunately, some of our schedules shifted around the time we hit 70 so we haven’t been doing as much as a group.  On the other hand, it’s been fun to pull in new people to sub for whoever can’t make it.  Shortly after hitting 70 we started raiding Karazhan with The Train.  Our latest big accomplishment was downing Gruul.  It was a lot of fun never having to look for a group to do instances with.  I suspect that if Pox Arcanum had been around when we started, we would have joined them.

I’m not sure where we’re headed from here.  Jaimie, Justin, and I have leveled alts to 70.  Dave has one most of the way there (level Dave level!).  We have the option of raiding pretty much as often as we want to.  When Wrath of the Lich King comes out, we’ll have to decide if we want to go back to leveling as a group or just scatter and gather back up at 80.  I’m hoping that we level as a group again.  Those of use who want to race to 80 have alts we can do it on.  We’ll see what happens when Wrath comes out.

Our guild alliance went into Gruul’s lair last night for the first time and cleared the whole thing. It was a very impressive performance. High King Maulgar took us three tries (plus one premature pull). Gruul himself only took us two tries. It was amazingly smooth for our first 25 man run. This was the first time that many of the raiders had ever run anything bigger than 10 mans. About a third of the raiders had run Gruul’s before on other characters, so that helped. We had to PUG 5 people to fill out the raid and they performed their roles admirably.

The progress that has been made is incredible. When we rerolled on Quel’dorei, my goals were to get to 70, run the 5 mans and maybe hit a few heroics. Now we’ve done almost all the heroics, cleared Karazhan in a night, downed 3 of the six Zul’Aman bosses (so far), and cleared Gruul’s our first night there. Sleep Deprived and The Train have worked together admirably for over 5 months now and we’re still going strong.

I recently ran Blackrock Spire with some 55ish people from our guild alliance. We ran Upper Blackrock Spire, then Lower Blackrock Spire. It was fun to see the old place again. I have a lot of memories of running it back when 60 was the level cap.

One fine day when I was questing in Felwood on my priest, I got a whisper for a pick up group for Upper Balckrock Spire. Three pulls in and I got the first piece of my Devout set, the Devout Belt. As the only priest, it was mine!

We ran Upper Blackrock Spire many times as a guild. One of the first times we downed the end boss, Jaimie’s mage was the last one standing. We got a screenshot of the kill and Tinder soloing Drak was a guild legend.

For a sadder memory, Lower Blackrock Spire saw the death of our second guild. (We were only in the first one for a week when most of the guild switched.) In the middle of a run, just as we were pulling the giant wolves, our guild master logged on, promoted the druid in our group to GM, then logged off. A week or two later, our guild disbanded and we joined Legion of the Dragon - our first raiding guild.

PlusHeal, a new healing community, has a nice list of the Healing Gear Drops from Kara for all the healing classes. My paladin respecs every week from prot to holy and back so it’s good to know what gear I’m looking for.

Our guild alliance has downed two more Zul’Aman bosses. We downed the eagle boss and the lynx boss for the first time last night. The timer for the bear boss went off while we were fighting him, so we’re getting awfully close for that too. We’re making very steady, solid progress. I would estimate that in another month or two we should be through the whole thing.

The problem is that we’re running out of content. Between the two guilds we can field a total of 25 raiding players. However, it’s rare that we have more than a dozen raiders on at a time. It’s hard enough filling out the 10s raids, let alone the 25s. Once we clear Zul’Aman, I expect that we’ll be clearing it weekly. Assuming another month to get the timed runs, we’re looking at 3 months and we’ll be done with the challenges we can take on. If Wrath isn’t on the near horizon by the end of October, we’re going to be stuck running the same things over and over.

There is hope - The Train is actively recruiting and has picked up some quality players in the last while. If there is enough recruiting, we may move on to 25s. The rest of Zul’Aman may prove more challenging than I anticipate, which would keep us busy a while longer. Who knows, Wrath may even be out this year and we’ll have a ton of new stuff to play with.