Over 10 pages of strategy discussion, many links to motivational and inspirational videos, sign outs, maternity leave, no-shows, recruits, numerous composition and spec adjustments, and mediocre (but hilarious) celebrity impersonations. A fight this hard runs the gamut of emotions for a team this large, and looking back, it all makes sense that it would play out in exactly this fashion.

Stage 1 – Denial

While preparing for a difficult encounter you look at the logs, parses, and post-mortem blog posts of those that came before you. Your goal during all of this is to ultimately learn from the mistakes of others. You don’t want to make the same silly mistake someone else did, so your first thought when starting is “it won’t take us nearly as long to kill him!”

We have the strategy, we know the benchmarks, and we know that it will be hard, but 400 pulls? C’mon. By this point you might have spent two or three nights in Sulfuron Keep; seeing deep into phase 2 with possibly 1 or 2 clean seed clears. Your confidence is high because “the seeds are the hardest part, right?”

Wrong.

Stage 2 – Anger

By this point you are a couple weeks into the encounter. Your previous farm content is taking almost no time since Ragnaros has made the earlier bosses in the instance seem like child’s play (nerfs aside). This means that 90% of raid week is standing in front of Ragnaros.You’re starting to get a lot of good “looks” at Phase 3, but tweedle-dee, tweedle-dumb, and tweedle-really-dumb keep exploding at some point.

Sometimes it’s a lava wave. Sometimes they moved too far into one section of World in Flames. Sometimes they moved a little latelagged and got crushed by falling seeds. Whatever the reason, everyone is ready to reach through their Ethernet cord and strangle them. Seemingly perfect attempts are being thrown away when someone “misses” a heal, forgets to stun, or runs blazing heat all over the place.

It’s no surprise that Blizzard named a boss in this instance Rageface.

Stage 3 – Bargaining

Progress is being made! Your raid is on the precipice of Phase 4 progression as you start moving faster and faster through Phase 3. Despite the shenanigans involved with knocking back meteors and people running the wrong way, you have seen Phase 3 end. Never in your life have you seen such a beautiful pair of legs made of fiery magma.

But that’s all the further you get. The tweedle-triplets (and they are different almost every attempt) keep eating your battle rezzes before you even leave Phase 2! Those extra deaths are costing you valuable time so that’s when the bounties start. You mess up, you pay. Conversely, if you meet this goal the guild will pay you back! With this incentive structure in place, the chances of getting further have increased greatly…

For now.

Stage 4 – Depression

More weeks have passed. More resets of barely seeing Phase 4, or seeing Phase 4 with an immediate meteor explosion have passed. Even worse, there have been nights where it seems like the raid is trying harder to keep Rag alive than help kill him.

You sit for a half hour after the raid and just look at the logs; a list of 5-7 minute attempts that were just utter disasters. How are you ever going to kill this boss? It takes over 13 minutes! The attempt tracker is counting up like the national debt with no end in sight. The bounties and rewards haven’t done much and the only progression that seems to happen is one or two attempts a night…at most.

The biggest indicator that you have reached this phase is when seemingly small errors or missteps get blown out proportion. Raiders start sniping back and forth about mundane things, the cracks in everyone’s sanity start to widen. Little does everyone know that just beyond the hardest of all stages lies the one reason we keep coming back for raids night in and night out.

Stage 5 – Acceptance

Nobody ever knows when it’s going to come, but they know it when they see it. I like to call it the “click” moment. It’s the moment when working on an encounter that it just feels like it’s over. For some reason the panic washes away and the entire raid just gets it. As you can see I’m using a lot of things in “quotes” and italics because none of this is tangible.

The entire group just finally accepts, internally, that it’s time to finish the fight. The entire raid will hinge on one glorious, sure to be tight, attempt. The 1% wipe is damaging to a raid group’s psyche. The mental difference between a kill and a wipe on a boss the magnitude of a heroic Ragnaros is huge. Maybe I was over-confident or maybe it’s because I’ve been doing this so long, but I could feel that “click” last Sunday when the percents starting ticking down.

15% became 9%. 9% became 5%. 5% crawled down to 1%. You start gripping your mouse so tight that you feel like you might crush it if the fight goes any longer. Your eyes are trained on the boss’ hp bar…and suddenly…

Achievement Spam

Bring on the Dragon Soul.

Though his mind is not for rent, don’t put him down as arrogant. His reserve a quiet defense, riding out the day’s events.

There is a plague quickly gaining momentum across blogs and comment threads that is all, but unexpected in the age of feed readers, article snippets, and “every voice counts, especially mine!”

Everyone wants to get through everything as quickly as possible so they can move onto the next topic. Little attention is paid to the voice or context, and instead it’s a quick skim and regurgitation of talking points.

“Tt seems like this person is being whiny and complaining about how hard rag is…well BOO HOO, suck it up, pansy! Fights are supposed to be hard, you’re just one of those lazy people that want everything nerfed! We can’t have that. To the comments!”

A few days ago Beru posted a little something about whether or not a 400+ pull Heroic Rag is an inherently “fun” design. It’s a very well written and detailed account of our current progress on the fight and some of the painful realities of completing the hardest content in the game. It’s less about whether or not a fight that takes 400 pulls is fun, so much as it is about how un-fun this particular boss happens to be.

Heroic Rag is tough, very tough. It’s a reality we all accepted upon stepping up to him to go after the very prestigious Firelord title (last fight of the tier, who gives a crap about the gear really?). Instead of what was intended to be a discussion on the design of the uber-difficult, it spawned some ludicrous comments and an even more ludicrous Reddit thread that I won’t bother to link or give credit to.

First some facts (gee, facts…).

• Beru is a “she.” Taking the 1 minute to click About on a blog you’ve never read would tell you that (there’s even a picture).
• Monolith is a pre-nerf, 6/7 Heroic Mode guild. Not, as one commenter put it, “scrub guild that was handed everything.” I feel kind of petty pointing that out, but it puts this whole thing into context.
• Monolith was also a 13/13 Tier 11 guild (not to mention a Day 1 Vanilla guild), so “waiting for nerfs” and “can’t handle difficult content” is all bull crap.

Easy vs. Fun

This tier has produced a new contender to the “casual = terrible” theme, and that’s the “fun=easy” theme. Apparently, if you have a hard time on a fight, and declare “that wasn’t very fun” you automatically are demanding that Blizzard nerf the fight and make it easier for you.

If only people that think like that could realize how dreadfully ignorant they are.

It is entirely possible for an encounter to be ball-busting, and also truly be an enjoyable experience. Problems with Rag aside, many of the encounters in Firelands were both difficult and very enjoyable on repeat/farm tries. Overall in this expansion, a majority of the encounters have included unique and engaging mechanics.

I’m not here to defend the content though, I’m here to defend the folks (like my Raid Leader) that would dare call into question the fact that a mind-numbing 15 minute odyssey isn’t very fun.

And again, I’m not against super difficult content, in fact, I love the stuff. Trying to direct a raid through it is another animal, but if you post a raid for the hardest achievement, for the hardest encounter, in the hardest instance, I’ll be there 15 minutes early with my strat notes in hand.

Hell I grew up on crap like this:

We don’t automatically hate fights and want them nerfed because we would like them to be a little bit more fun to wipe on. It’s all part of trying to make raiding better overall, as a game. I know you didn’t enjoy “every second” of your Rag progress. As much as you might want to sit on Mt. Pious and declare “just get rid of all your ‘bads’!”, I guarantee there were people in your raid who blew up your frost patch and made you want to throw your chair out the window.

It’s ok. We’ve all been there. Adversity is part of overcoming great challenges. It isn’t going to be fun 100% of the time, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to address it so that the really unfun parts aren’t so painful in the next tier.

Improvements

So that point, I want to at least give some ways in which I think Rag could retain it’s “uber difficult” status, but spread more of that difficulty over the entire encounter.

Another HP nerf

The phase 1-3 mechanics are very bleh. There isn’t a whole lot of difficulty difference between 2 and 3 seed explosions (likewise with magma traps). Intermissions remain the same length, but overall the whole fight is shorter, placing emphasis on mastery of mechanics rather than your endurance to repeat them.

But…that may trivialize the meteors…

Meteor killing mechanics in p3 (and p4 transition)
Moving this meteor killing portion of the fight still encourages players to meet the DPS check of 2 meteors, but gives them the ability to remove them from the already confusing and complicated p4. Since Rag’s overall health pool is lower, you will have some grace time to do whatever is needed to take those meteors down.

Will this make p4 ultimately easier? Of course, so…

Lengthen P4, slightly
Emphasize this portion of the fight and increase it’s difficult by upping how much health Rag regenerates (perhaps…50%?…damnit man I’m a Blogger not an Game Designer).

Moving and positioning in frost: still important, and difficult

Roots/Hammer/Kiting: Same as before

Deluge/Dreadflame: Will possibly be even more difficult considering the increased length of the phase.

I think the result might end up being an “easier” fight, but how much easier are we talking? If it took you 400 pulls, would this version take 300? or maybe 275?  I still think that’s plenty challenging for the Lord of Fire when you consider just how long it actually takes to pull a boss over 200 times. We know heroic modes are here to stay, so all I ask the devs is just to create some new mechanics, and emphasize those over things from normal we’ve already seen.

Can’t wait to blast this when he finally goes down…

(I really need to Orc-ify my banner)

After my post closing the doors on Blood Red Moon’s raiding days, I sat for about a week contemplating what to do. Sell my characters? Just level some more alts and do a 10 man in the truest form of “casual”?  Turns out I did the exact opposite and went right back to raiding.

Moving to a new guild is never easy. Nine raiders from our roster moved on to other guilds (all but two staying on Alliance). The others have either left the game or transitioned to a “non-raiding” play style.

As I mentioned, two players moved to the horde side. One of those was me, as I’m now healing with Beruthiel and the good folks in <Monolith> on Llane. This upcoming week will be my fifth reset with Monolith, and it’s been nothing short of a great time.

I wanted to refrain from blogging or posting about the experience until I passed my trial period. I thought it would be bad form to talk about it while I was still a probationary guildie. That’s all done with, so let the complaining begin…just kidding.

Joining a new guild is like this scene from the 13^th Warrior:

(Aside from the whole…insulting mothers part…most of the time)

Guilds have their own terms they’ve picked and used over the many hours spent raiding together. Whether that’s what to say when you’re drinking a concentration potion, or remembering that the Horde doesn’t have that thing called “Heroism”, it’s all sort of foreign at the beginning.

Over time, you eventually start picking up on it. In the beginning, every voice in vent is either male or female. Tabbing in and out of the game to catch “who the heck was that?” or identifying the resident “doesn’t talk on vent” person (every guild seems to have one) helps, but really you just need to listen.

Let me repeat that for those joining new guilds: listen.

The best thing to do as a new member of any guild is to be seen and not heard. Follow instructions, stick to your assignment, and let your actions speak for you. For myself, I was coming in to a guild that had defeated several bosses that I had never done. The last thing you ever want be is the new guy that wipes the raid on farm content, but it happens (something that I did on the first pull of Heroic Baleroc one night).

Ask questions pertaining to your job or assignment, but other than that, listen and observe. As long as you don’t make a habit of being “that guy”, everything will work out.

Currently we’re working hard on Heroic Ragnaros, the only boss of new content I’ve (so far) had the pleasure of learning alongside my new guild mates. And what a boss it is to be the first one. We’ve seen the legs a few times, and we’re inching along at a good pace on the fight. The further we get, the more time we spend on each attempt. With each attempt we learn a new and unique way to royally screw over the raid.

The fight that it best compares to, in my opinion, is Firefighter (25 Man). That being said, the difficulty, timing, and overall mechanics are much harder to deal with as a raid.

He’ll go down, and it will be a huge accomplishment when it happens.

(Pretend there’s a long boring diatribe about raid nerfs here. You can also pretend to leave angry comments)

Too Much Free Time

It seems I’ve discovered tons of free time now that my in-game responsibilities have dropped significantly. Other than trying my best to get the elemental side of my game into shape, some things outside of the game have drawn my interest.

Hockey

My inline team is back in action with a 2-1 record through 3 games. After last summer’s defeat in the championship, we lost a couple of our better players and dropped down a division (to the ground, as they say). If you’ve PvPed in WoW seriously, you can relate at least a little bit to this.

While I don’t PvP (at all), hockey is a good analog for that gaming style. I play at a pretty low level of the game, but working on “the little things” is very important to me after being away from the organized side of the sport for going on 5 years now.  Taking an hour a day, 3 days a week to just practice passing, carrying the puck, and receiving passes, helps a lot. I don’t take myself too seriously (it is just rec league after all!), but if I miss a pass or flub a shot, my competitive side makes me want to work that kink out of my game.

Sports/PvP/Raiding are all about reading and reacting to situations. If this guy goes here, what am I going to do? If a magma trap lands on me right now where am I going to go? Thinking out a boss fight or any game a few steps in advance removes the reaction time involved in making those decisions.

Focus and anticipation. Don’t be where the puck is, be where the puck is going.

When I’m working on a new phase or a new boss fight, I’ll record several wipes and splice the video together. If you watch yourself while you aren’t playing you can pick out big mistakes. Maybe I’ll move here if this happens, or if these cooldowns line up, I’ll make sure and do this.

Almost every movement I make during a boss fight is planned out. How far I can go, how long I can let someone hang at low hp, or what risks I’m taking by moving to a particular location. There are always ways to get better at the game, and many of them are time spent outside of that game.

Diablo 3

Through a stroke of luck (and a good friend), I’ve managed to sneak in some play time on the Diablo 3 beta. It lets you go through the first Act and all of the character classes are available. If you put aside the silly debates about not being able to pause the game or the real money auction house, what you find underneath is a truly awesome ARPG.

The new skill system brings a very “D&D” like feel to the game, giving you access to new abilities as you gain levels, while taking away the tedium of making sure you spend every single talent and attribute point exactly correct.

Combining resource generation skills with the proper buffs and cooldowns brings a new level of constantly changing strategy to the game. You can only use a subset of your abilities at one time, so it puts the onus on the player to figure out the best combination. While one set may be effective for control/aoe, another set will allow for much stronger single target damage (you can change any time, for new cost, and even in combat).

I played through the beta once on each class with my usual Diablo playing style: explore the whole map, kill every monster, open every chest, and break every barrel (Level 9 is the highest you’ll get on a single play through).

The unique resources make each class very different and fun in their own way. While the Sorcerer benefits from controlling mobs, grouping, and AoEing them down, Barbarians thrive on leaping into the middle and crushing opponents in a bloody storm of swinging weapons.

If you haven’t ventured into the action RPG genre before, I highly recommend Diablo 3 when it releases…sometime in 2012. There should be plenty of awesome info at Blizzcon…which is now only 2 weeks away!

I am not an elitist. I am not judging anyone or their progress. I’m trying to play the Devil’s Advocate role here and ask some honest questions. Blizzard’s side is always the tough one to defend.

There are folks that are decidedly in the “don’t care/undecided” camp. That’s where I sit. The fact that I’m in a well progressed guild has little to do with that. I’ve missed content many times in the past, and have benefitted from nerfs in my raiding career (ICC % nerfs in particular). I’m also on record saying that a normal mode instance clear is minimum benchmark for anyone that considers themselves a “raiding guild,” so I won’t dispute that either.

First, let’s break it down. To this point raiders have been conditioned to assume they have about 6 months in a zone as current content. When Blizzard decides to nerf that content after 3 months, folks are obviously going to say “too early.”

But is it really too early?  Firelands was announced that it would only be 7 bosses, and there were many concerns that we would clear and linger in this content too long. Previous raid content was cited (ICC!) as an example of how wrong Blizzard can be. So for a tier that’s half as long as it’s predecessor, it’s somewhat appropriate that you’ve been given half as long to complete it (completely ignoring things like how much money you paid for the expansion).

The number of resets, number of bosses, and boss difficulty are the only constants here. The variables:

Skill: Thousands of guilds at every level of progression

Time: Different raiding schedules that can cover anywhere from 1 day a week for 3 hours to 5 days a week and 20 hours.

With number 2 in mind, how can anyone say how long is appropriate for a tier to remain un-nerfed? Are we considering Normal and Heroics as two separate kinds of raiding, or are we treating heroics as fights 8-14? If bosses are balanced around “average number of pulls before a kill,” does that shed more light on nerf timing? It seems the complaints are mostly based in they’ve never done this before!

That has no bearing on whether it’s the right or wrong decision. This game changes a lot.

In previous tiers, Blizzard toyed with the number of pulls in a very finite way with the “you get X wipes on this boss before you are locked out” gate system. It was fairly universal that no one liked being told how much they could play, so they removed it. Some never hit that max number. Some blew through it by Wednesday at 10pm.

If you are in the camp that is angry that Blizzard is nerfing the content too early, since everyone is speculating, what if the nerfs only get you from 2/7 heroic to 4/7 before 4.3? Or, what if you just barely finish the content before 4.3?

Again, I’m not judging anyone here. Those are honest questions that I don’t think people are asking themselves. If it turns out that the nerf is so significant that anyone currently at 1/7 Heroic is 7/7 by October, complain away.

There is one indisputable fact in all of this: no matter how much or how little the content is nerfed, everyone that tries will not finish the content before 4.3. There is a number Blizzard is happy with, and they clearly were not going to meet it.

We can all agree that a fight like Heroic Ragnaros is incredibly difficult. Does it have to be so difficult that you spend 2-3 months clearing to him and then the next 2-3 months just on him? Wouldn’t it be ok if the curve was a little smoother? That’s where the criticism should lie, not in nerf timing. Every tier we hear the same thing from the Paragons and Premonition: This is the hardest tier EVER!

Just because the puzzle has 50,000 pieces the size of thumb-tacs, doesn’t mean it’s a fun one to put together. Boy is it challenging though, woo-wee!

A quick questionnaire:

Do you consider heroic raiding “additional challenge” or simply, in an N encounter instance, encounters N+1 through 2*N?

Are you in favor of a sliding or constant difficulty level in raiding? (i.e. progressively nerfed over the life of the instance) Do you think this affects Normal and Heroic mode raid versions?

If Blizzard scheduled the nerfs before the tier began, would you be ok with the amount time you had “pre-nerf”?

Considering the above, would you change your guild philosophy/goals/players to stay or get above the “pre-nerf” line if it existed?

And like a single domino, that falls while the rest stay vertical, we’re fed these empty fairy tales. Will you believe them?–Rise Against, Disparity By Design

The 24th of August, 2011, the day of Blood Red Moon’s final raid as a guild.

At some point or another we’ve all thought about what we would say when it was all said and done. When you sit down to put it in black and white the words escape you. A fighter taps out when he sees that his chances of victory have been wiped out. That if he continues, the only result would be catastrophic injury. Last Thursday, we tapped out.

Through this post I hope to provide what I’ve tried to do over the year and I half I spent blogging: a look from the inside.

What this isn’t

This isn’t a post where I’m going to detail the drastic changes in my life that have forced me out of the game. If anything raiding is easier to fit in my schedule these days.

There wasn’t any guild splitting drama, and there weren’t any bosses that cock-blocked us into raiding submission.

As I looked over our final raiding roster of 23, those that remained have either been in BRM for 2 or more years or are good friends/SO’s of those players. We’ve had a strong core for this entire expansion, starting with over 30 raiders from the first day of Cataclysm. The problem was that we could never keep above the churn, which leads me to what did actually happen.

(Apple) Turnover

Recruitment has been brutal in Cataclysm. Brutal with a giant bold capital B. The numerous threads, the trade chat posts, the endless hours going through recruitment forums and meta-recruitment sites was just enough to keep us going. About every 3 weeks we would run into some roster issues when attendance, scheduling, and recruitment all conspired for some extra abscenses.

I haven’t looked all the way back to January, but my estimate is that 75% of our recruits this expansion have been from other guilds doing what we just did: stopped raiding. Some of their raiders wanted to keep going so they looked for another guild to latch onto. We absorbed raiders from 3 other raiding guilds just on our server. Now, with BRM exiting the scene, only 2 alliance 25 man raiding guilds remain on Zul’jin.

Lacking Loyalty

Call it bad luck, call it my fault for possibly not integrating them better, but we had so many folks join for a week or two then bounce for what they deemed “a more progression-focused guild.”  I would listen to gripes about how many wipes it would take us to down a boss or how slow recruitment has been. Even though we were rolling in the top 250 US, from their point of view this was my fault.

I wasn’t trying hard enough, I wasn’t recruiting or trying to recruit new players. People always want to quickly “replace the bads” or “get more warlocks”, but if you’ve ever raid/guild led you know that it isn’t that easy. At some point you have to decide to value loyalty, even if it means accepting a slightly lower level of performance.

That decision turns the more “progression minded” players off.

Then on the other end of that (players that are loyal but below average performance-wise), are loyal to their own guilds and the ones, like my final 23, that will stick around until the lights are turned off.

Server transfers, faction changes, 10 man, 25 man, normal, and heroic. A multitude of choices to fit exactly what you want. If the guild you picked out isn’t fitting, bounce to the next one. You are no longer limited to your server (even faction) for your guild choice. That’s obviously a good thing from the applicant’s perspective, but for the average 25 man raiding guild it’s an impossible situation.

This isn’t even mentioning the fact that a raider can see the progression of every guild in the world at any time, as well as their recruitment needs. Look through the list until you find your class, apply.

Bottom line: If you don’t catch lightning in a bottle and shake out the boss kills, the churn will begin. You must quickly recover or your losses aren’t too crippling (i.e. no tanks), you can keep rolling, keep attracting recruits, and keep raiding.

We were never able to get back off the mat.

Heroic Mode

For those that got to do it, The Burning Crusade is often held in high regard. “It was hard” is usually the most common refrain. However, none of the Tier 4, 5 or 6 bosses (Sunwell aside) were any harder than the bosses that inhabit Tier 11 and 12.

Our guild, like many, sat in the middle ground where normal modes weren’t exactly a pushover. I look back on TBC fondly because it was the last time when finishing the instance meant finishing the instance.

The addition of heroic mode dealt a significant blow to our motivation. It wasn’t because the bosses were too hard, it just never sat well with me. Like some shellfish that wasn’t cooked all the way through, something just never felt right. From Ulduar on through Firelands the heroic modes felt like a nuisance. While Rhyolith felt like a boss that needed put in his place, Heroic Rhyolith felt like “hey asshole, I’ve already killed you once, just give me my loot.”

Those feelings were never expressed verbally or even consciously. I was never able to decide whether our relatively smooth normal mode clears were because normal modes were easy or that we were more motivated for the first time clear.

The two most demoralizing things for a raid?

1) Calling a raid

2) “We’re going to finish on normal mode”

Pre-heroic modes you finished your week on the last boss in your progression order. With heroic modes, you have to budget time and make sure that you bail on heroic mode with enough time to clear out your farm content. If dropping back to normal mode was tough on morale, not finishing your farm content is just throwing gasoline on the fire.

The Decision

In lieu of a raid Thursday the officers held a meeting to discuss the future of the guild. That previous week we were 16% short of a Heroic: Beth’tilac kill. The next week we slowly lost 3 DPS and 2 tanks, dropping our total active roster blow what will even fill a 25 man raid.

The task ahead was daunting, but for us this would be the 4th time we were met with a critical roster situation.

I laid the situation out bluntly and when the question was returned “Sov, how are you feeling about this?”, I had to be honest: my tank is simply empty. My raid leader fuel tank has been completely depleted. It ran out about 2 weeks into Firelands. All of a sudden the fire inside that burns, that keeps you going, that lights up and pumps the adrenaline as you’re logging in for the night was snuffed out.

At a time, things like recruitment decisions, guild financials, and bench swaps didn’t affect me. They were just part of the job. As I’ve written about before, many of a raid leader’s choices boil down to deciding who gets to have fun tonight. Which 5 (or 3, or 1) of the people that set aside time in their lives gets to not have any fun.

Twenty-four folks in the raid are then having fun. The raid leader gets to see the disappointed tells and sighs.

It’s part of being a raid leader, but it’s something I’m no longer interested in doing. If you asked me right now if I would ever raid lead again, the answer would be an emphatic no.

When people ask for advice when starting a raiding team, my answer of “don’t do it, just join one” is 100% sincere. Will I ever raid again? That’s a question I can’t answer right now. What I’ve learned about myself over the past 4.5 years is that I’m comfortable providing some positive motivation to my teammates while being a strong, consistent, and flexible player.

The way to make a successful raiding team is simple: find 10 of your closest IRL friends, make 2 of them tank, and go for it. Make a pact: if one you quits, you all quit.

Before I move into the conclusion of this post, I want to make  something absolutely clear: I am not bitter about what the game has become or it’s current state. There is no reason to begrudge those that still lead great guilds, still remain successful and complete challenges at their chosen pace. As games like this evolve in their later years, there will be casualties. I’m sad that we were one of those, but cannot be disappointed with our 6 year run as a guild.

Regrets

I regret that I didn’t get into the wow blogging/podcasting community until the end of Tier 10. There is so much I could have written about back in the day when the golden years of raiding were still rolling along. You never realize how good you have it, or how unique a situation you’re in. There will never be another time in MMOs like early MC and BWL, and that makes me a little sad.

I regret that I could never get my raiding teams over the hump and complete that final encounter. We left Sinestra, Heroic Lich King, Tribute to Insanity, No Light Yogg, Immortal, and the last 3 bosses of Sunwell up. Heroic Lich King in particular and that’s a title that I never wanted after 4.0. I didn’t deserve it and I stuck to my guns on that.

Though I love my guildmates dearly, I regret that I never got to raid on the horde side. I feel like I missed out and maybe before WoW finally goes by the wayside, my dream of playing an Orc Shaman seriously will be realized.

I regret all the times I had to call a raid or guilt someone into raiding so that we didn’t have to call a raid. Those rarely ever happened, but it always made me lose a little sleep at night.

What I don’t regret

I don’t regret the countless hours, days, and months I spent on my Shaman and Hunter (despite the many players that dubbed wow as a “waste of their life”). I learned a lot of things about myself, about being a leader, and about breaking down some really difficult logistical issues.

More importantly, I became best friends with people that, if not for WoW, we would have never met.

For 12 hours a week we would laugh, cry, and celebrate. Cracking jokes, sharing stories, and supporting each other through tough times. Those in-game interactions led to the legendary BRM gatherings that, if I had a time machine, I would go back to in a second. We are a family by anyone’s definition.

To everyone

Those that have read even one of my posts or listened to me on the podcast, I can’t thank you enough. Reading comments and tweets from everyone is so great and overwhelming to me.  Blizzcon will give me the opportunity to meet even more of the great folks I’ve come into contact with through this blog and the wow community.

Speaking of the WoW community. Can we agree that the abbreviation for heroic mode should be HM and not HC?

You always imagine that the end will come in a glorious moment of triumph. My guild lead predecessor handed me the reins after a kill of Heroic: Anub’arak. I will step aside at 2/7 in Heroic Firelands. My raiding career will start and end with the Firelord Ragnaros, and that’s as perfect as it can get for me.

This movie, according to the director and those publicizing it, was supposed to do that. In my mind they missed the mark, and by a long-shot.

The Setup

First of all, what happened since this?

and this :

All left on the cutting room floor.

The connection between myself and the movie is pretty obvious: I’m a raid leader. I’ve spent the last 6 years doing that, and even longer playing games in the MMO genre. I am unable to remember the number of times that I’ve attempted to explain how playing an MMO is different from other games. The number has gotten so high that I don’t even bother doing it anymore. Made-up excuses are just easier (and go over much better).

When I first heard about the project to craft “The Raid” and it’s grass-roots funding, start-up style approach, I was intrigued.

Trying to make people understand that 95% of all raiders aren’t basement dwelling super nerds with no jobs, no lives, and no significant others is an impossible stigma to overcome on a world-wide level. That being said, if you can convince your immediate non-gaming peer group, that’s a big victory.

I donated to the raid at the “Uncommon” level, and I tracked the process. The emails and preview videos teased something that never came to fruition.

Cinematography

From a pure presentation aspect, I was incredibly impressed by “The Raid.” The title sequence was amazingly well done and if I had to guess, took up a bulk of the production costs. I’ll reference this later on as it heavily ties into my discussion on the actual content of the movie.

Everything else, from the HD interview shots, to the split-screen webcam footage and even the “between wipe” footage synced with the game was all cut and put together well. You didn’t feel like you were sitting and watching a Youtube video and the movie was structured as a progression through the instance. As the topics got deeper, the raid team got deeper into the instance.

Blizzard’s fine voice work and boss models were highlighted well, turning what the community knows as a boring fight (Gunship) into the most epic looking of the encounters.

Unfortunately, it needed another 30 minutes. It felt rushed and there were clearly many things cut out. Why focus on just one guild when there are thousands you can pick from to give commentary? The vision seemed too focused on the idea of capturing webcam footage.

Point of View?

As a big fan of documentaries (and movies in general), I wanted to approach watching “The Raid” as if I never touched World of Warcraft. By the claims of the director, that was the goal. Create something to highlight what makes raiding great, in an attempt to remove some of the stigma associated with it. There are some great documentaries about this sort of thing already out there. Most recently, The King of Kong, a documentary about competitive arcade Donkey Kong.

Take note of something very important in that trailer: conflict and characters. The movie is about playing Donkey Kong, but what draws you into the picture are the characters: Billy Mitchell and Steve Weibe. You want to see what Billy Mitchell is going to do. You want Steve to win (unless you’re like me and root for the bad guy!).

The underlying conflict setup in “The Raid” is defeating the Lich King. This is emphasized throughout the film.

The Lich King is a badass.

The Lich King is the leader of the zombies.

The Lich King is a really hard boss. And so on.

This is never quantified. In King of Kong they break down how long an average game lasts, what score the average person puts up versus what the world record is and so on. How hard is the Lich King, specifically hard mode, needed to be shown by saying “0.1% of all players can defeat this boss.” “It on average takes this much time.”

Someone who has never played World of Warcraft has no concept of any of this. When you say “we breezed through heroic modes and got to 8/12″ to a non-WoW player, you might as well have said “I gobbly-gooked the berry schnitzel on top of the watermelon unicorn bibbly bop.”

Inside Job was able to make the financial crisis understandable to a grocery store clerk whose largest financial stake is his/her free checking account. We needed more info-graphics, more numbers, and more explanation of terminology. The trailers and preview movies talked about raiding, not about just Icecrown Citadel and the Lich King. While those were snippets of interviews, there needed to be a narrator that tied everything together.

Investment

“The Raid” did a severe injustice to guild leaders everywhere. This is surprising considering the guild involved in the production. Before I start this section let me just state that this is not an indictment of 10 man raiding. I am not calling 10 man raiding inferior or insulting those that do it.

Choosing a 10 man raiding team subset of a 25 man raiding guild was likely the wrong way to go about a project like this. As everyone knows, the actual game of WoW is not super challenging. Each person’s job is pretty straightforward. The issues arise with coordinating all those people and having them all play correctly at the same time, every time. Combine that with scheduling, roster needs, burnout, and intra-guild drama, and you have a recipe for a months-long progression cycle.

The members of Double Dragon were careful to talk about the fact that they raid 4 nights, 4 hours each night and that they often have to break social engagements. That’s not uncommon for any of us. What was never emphasized or brought home was why. Why is it more important for you to show up for 9/24 other people than it is to go watch 1 of 82 hockey games or go to the bar that night?

In the opening credits we see several players going about their lives and getting ready for something. They’re getting ready to raid. You see folks from clearly different walks of (seemingly normal) life. Why wasn’t this talked about more than just a quick “we have players from demographic A,B,C, AND D! See, everyone raids!”

No, I can’t see, you didn’t show me. For once I actually agree with Youtube comments:

Am I the only person who thinks this video promotes the typical WoW player stereotypes?

…somehow this…made raiding even less cool.

You can talk about how people depend on one another or that you need to organize tanks, dps, and healers, or that it takes a lot of managerial skills, but you need to show it. It would be uncomfortable for those involved in the documentary to show things like:

Post-Raid Vent Conversation

Everything that happens in raiding happens in those 2am discussions about how the raid night went. Should we take another healer. This person isn’t cutting it. We need to make more cauldrons. How are we going to recruit another tank?

Recruitment

Interviews with prospective raiders and new guildies would be compelling for non-WoW players. Why does this need to happen and how do you find new players? Why do people want to join your guild? What happens when someone fails their trial? Footage of cutting someone.

A Raid Leader In Solace

The most trying times for any guild is a hard night of wipes. Nights where the raid just doesn’t meet your expectations and it’s one small failure after another. Sitting alone in your home with a beer just staring at logs, trying to figure out what wrong. All the things that go through your mind and how that affects you the next day.

The heart-felt pep talks. The close wipes.

All of this, again, would be uncomfortable, but that’s what documentaries do. If you sign up, you sign away your privacy to an extent. Reality is what becomes compelling footage. This film was not a documentary, it was an interview about Icecrown Citadel that would only be palatable to folks that have some experience with World of Warcraft that no longer holds up because of it’s focus on specific content.

They structured the movie as a series of topics:

1. What is raiding?
2. What is a boss fight?
3. How games affect your life
4. Time Spent Raiding/Gaming Addiction
5. Gamer Stigma/Raiding Stigma
6. What do you get from raiding
7. Applying strategy (the most brief of the segments)
8. Vent Chat & Social Dynamics
9. Morale
10. The Lich King is defeated

The problem is, nobody that is watching this cared if they beat the Lich King or not. It looks like they’re really excited about it, but at no time did I see where the struggle was or why I should be rooting for them. Maybe that wasn’t the idea, but then maybe this shouldn’t have been called a documentary film.

“The Raid” should have focused on a larger guild over the course of a tier. There is no need to record and document everyone in the raid. Focus on some core players and follow their trials and tribulations over about 6 months. Document literally everything. Show what they do outside of WoW. Interview people over vent or have them send video they recorded themselves.

People care very little about the quality as long as the content is there. You can edit home movies and make them into compelling pieces of a film…if there is an actual story arc and plot.

Act I: Our Raid. What makes it tick.

Act Transition: Starting up the dungeon

Act II: General Progression, normal mode stuff, showing some winning, recruiting new players, maybe cutting someone.

Act II Conflict: Pick one. Main Tank quits, healer quits, guild leader steps down, whatever it is that impedes progress. It happens to everyone.

Act III: The Final Battle. Focusing on the preparations, the wipes, the close wipes, and…

Climax: The victory. What that means, is it a server first (it should be)? This is where following a guild like Premonition or vodka would be beneficial to the story. This is also why the very first preview video looked interesting: it included players from top guilds that have done literally the hardest things in the game since Vanilla.

Resolution: It keeps going, there’s another instance, this is what we do, we bond, we love each other. Maybe a guild meet-up with some reminiscing.

All of this is told through the point of view of maybe 4 key players:

1. The Raid Leader
2. A Main Tank
3. A Main Healer
4. Chart Topping Super DPS

Roughly speaking, but you need some characters. You need personalities, especially if you are trying to convey to non-WoW players that they are doing is valid, important, and maybe something that you would like to do as well.

A Post-Review Wrap-Up

First up, I want to apologize. I’ve sourced some recent Oscar-caliber film making to make a point, which is unfair to those involved. Living up to that standard is nearly impossible. However, i’ve seen movies about Parking Lots that are engrossing. It can be done. Some of this is  due to misplaced expectations. You imagine how you want the movie to play out in your head and then when that doesn’t happen you are disappointed even though the movie may have been a fine production.

I’m certainly guilty of that here, but we could have had more (for less money). A movie that set out to show off raiding really didn’t do anything positive for raiding, in my opinion. It was disjointed and skipped over topics that are incredibly important, specifically regarding the time between raids.

Raiding was compared to two different things by two different people: stamp collecting, and a World Cup victory. Both of these are horrible analogies.

A stamp collection doesn’t fit at all because people don’t look down on raiders or WoW players because it’s a silly hobby. They look down on it because of the time investment. If someone wants to go out to eat, but I can’t because I’m raiding, they don’t understand that there are 24 other people waiting and that just dropping with no notice is rude. “The Raid” never got into depth about why that is. No, saying “because people are counting on me” doesn’t cut it. Show me.

Going the other direction, it is not on the level of the World Cup. Not even Paragon’s world firsts are on that level of lifetime commitment, excellence, and sacrifice.

Raiding is a team sport and should be presented as such. It should be portrayed in a way that makes the time investment seem valuable to anyone. For those of us that are invested in it, you don’t need to convince us. Perhaps I’m being overly critical, as this isn’t going to be shown at primetime on NBC. However it’s also something that I can’t even pass to facebook or G+ friends and say “hey! THIS is what raiding is about.”

Would this movie help them understand? Because that’s who you need to reach. You need to convince your friends and family.

“The Raid” wiped at about 30%. The execution just wasn’t there.

Below is just a (barely edited) copy of the notes I took while watching:

Intent according to the film-maker:
Helping people that have no idea understand the complexities and social constructs inside of MMO gaming.

Validation of hobby:

Collecting stamps? No. That doesn’t fit

Doing stuff other people can’t do. I can skate, some people can’t do that, that doesn’t make me special.

4 nights at 4 hours is pretty much the upper limit these days, they seem to brush it off.

The fact that the people in the video can’t even explain to their out of game friends that they are raiding is proof enough this needs to go deep

This doc does nothing to shed a light on how raiding is in any way positive…just “the kill.” Why MMOs get a bad rap, that’s easy.

Needed way more insight into how people live their life outside of the game.

The World Cup Level achievement analogy is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard in a film of any kind. That’s simply ridiculous.

There was no need to censor things, that may have been just gamebreaker?

Talking about heroic modes and “8/12″, no one has any idea what that means. No one knows what heroic modes mean, no one knows what any of that is.

Explanation of things that are “frustrating”, very disjointed.

Nobody knows what wiping means.

The mechanics of lich king and why they are hard MEAN NOTHING to someone that doesn’t play wow.

This is about a 10 man raiding group…no focus on organization

The 10% jokes are meaningless and anti-climatic. Trying to show the game is pointless in this setting, at least manufacture some drama.

There’s a storm hitting us in 6 hours…and we’re gonna find out whose who.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Borsk, Resto Shaman extraordinaire (second use of an -aire suffix in one blog post, new record).

What is your primary group healing environment?

Exclusively 25 man raids with a focus on heroic progression. Occasionally at the start of the tier I’ll wander into a 10 man, but that’s pretty rare.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

This tends to change from tier to tier, but I would say at the moment it’s Greater Healing Wave. That seems like an odd choice since it’s just a regular old big single-target jammy. Healing Rain is fun, but can be very limited on fights where the raid is encourage to spread out or fights with a lot of movement. Our “class-defining yet situational”  chain heal has become kind of weak this expansion. It does it’s job but it doesn’t pack the same punch it used to. I like to joke that the “chain” in chain heal means that I’m chained to the melee group.

Greater Healing Wave, combined with a healthy dose of mastery is a powerful raid and tank heal. Divine Light may pack a punch but an unleash earthliving-boosted GHW on a low health target is a sweet sweet feeling. It shines on Baleroc and can be useful on really any fight. I’ve been doing a ton of cast-cancel healing with this spell during Firelands.

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?

This goes to our old pal Healing Wave. It’s been relegated to pure filler status and generally if this is the spell you are deciding to cast, you can probably just throw a lightning bolt at the boss instead. It loses the quickness of a healing surge and doesn’t hit hard enough to be used as a tank heal.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?

Shamans have always been and still are the swiss army healers. We have a broad selection of heals ranging from area of effect, to single target instant, and back to big throughput again. While being exceptional at none of these jobs, all of them can be done incredibly well. Tank healing has been the one that has emerged most recently for our raids as we tend to bring a lot of druids and priests to heal.

We’ve always been the “heal the melee” team with healing rain boosting that this expansion. Now that Shamans have been given a solid mitigation cooldown, we can also take a place in a rotation during boss fights like Staghelm and Ragnaros.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?

 How can the best healers in the game have any weaknesses? This is a ridiculous question.

But really, our lack of anything that really sets us apart can prove to be a bit of a weakness in some cases. No beacon healing so a two-tank fight with a tank healing assignment can be a little grating with all the target switching and earth shield swapping.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?

As the raid leader and also someone that is incredibly ADD when I’m in my healing shoes, I love a raid healing assignment. It allows me to float around an lean on one part of my grid more than others if things are getting a little hairy. Naturally I’m always looking to see where the incoming damage is coming from.  If something happens to be going wrong I can always either move healers or move people (out of the fire).

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

When I was asked this during the Shaman Roundtable, I said Paladin because that meant that I would be “forced” into raid healing. However these days I would probably swing toward Druid or Priest simply because of versatility. In a 25 man raid we get to heal with everyone, so if I was raid healing it would be the latter: Priest or Druid, and if I were tank healing than Paladin.

That was awfully diplomatic!

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

Healing with another shaman can be a little frustrating at times. Coordinating Earth Shields, mana tides, and recognizing your own Riptides isn’t difficult, but it’s an added layer of complexity that can trip up two shamans that aren’t used to working with one another. This could also be because I’ve spent 85% of my time as the only resto shaman on our raiding team. Good shaman are just so few and far between.

What is your worst habit as a healer?

Getting off my assignment gets me into trouble all the time on multiple fronts. One: I’m always preaching to my healers to stay. on. assignment. if they are given one. I’m a big time healing cheater. That isn’t so much a trust issue, just a maximizing my time issue. I’ll wander around to the wrong places or put myself in bad situations. Sometimes you always want to be the hero.

You can never give someone real instruction on when it is and is not okay to do what they weren’t instructed. It’s all about feel and knowing exactly how much room for error you’re working with. Not everyone can handle that many things at once.

Good healing isn’t about preventing a fall, it’s about bracing for impact.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

Too many healers. People often overestimate  the number of healers they need for a particular encounter. Not to fault the others on our esteemed healing squad, but it’s always fun to see just how many you can pare down to before you are really strapped for GCDs (doing on of those fancy 2 healer heroic Atramedes kills sounds like a lot of fun). There is only one way to make a fight faster and that’s more DPS. The raid leader part of me always overrides the healing part. Needless to say, I’m a big fan healers with a DPS off spec.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?

The only way we could be more balanced is if they nerfed those pesky Paladins, Druids, and Priests so that I would look better on the meter for every fight.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

Mostly World of Logs. The big statistics for me are my Riptide uptime and active time during the fight. You don’t always need to have high HPS on a particular encounter because low raid damage can mean that people are actually playing pretty well. What you can control is making sure you are using every second of the fight to do something. If there is no one to heal then I’m throwing lightning bolts.  On almost every fight I try to make a recording of one portion or another just to get some game film on myself. This lets me identify lulls where I’m not doing anything. Often I find myself talking to the screen saying “CAST A HEALING RAIN, DAMNIT! IT’S OFF COOLDOWN!”

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? 

Chain heal spam. We don’t do it as much as we used to. Now that almost every fight as people spread over BFE, we have to take advantage of our strong single target heals (hence the emergence of Greater Healing Wave). My breakdowns typically fall under two categories: heavy Healing Rain or heavy Greater Healing Wave.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? 

Keeping track of everything. You have totems, an earth shield, your water shield, your targets, and your mana bar. The complaint you always here from newer healers is how quickly they run out of mana on every and in every instance. It turns out it’s because their gear is a little on the blue side and they’re panicking. I need to top everyone off as fast as I can! Healing Surge, Healing Surge, Healing Surge! Know the fights and keep it cool. Don’t be afraid to pop that Mana Tide or a mana potion.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?

For raid healing situations with a lot of raid damage you would see Healing Rain/Chain Heal at the top (Riptide shortly after). For tank healing it would 85% Greater Healing Wave with the rest being taken by Riptides and Earth Shield.

Haste or Crit and why? Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others? 

I strive for a good haste/mastery balance while ignoring crit entirely. At the moment I like my haste at about 1250-1300 with the rest being diverted into mastery (currently just above 16). This keeps my cast times lean and the Shaman mastery is one of the better ones now that every one of our heals can take advantage of it. 100k Greater healing Waves and 30k aggregated Rain ticks are fun to look at.

What healing class do you feel you understand least?

If you asked me anything about any of the classes, other than “what are their raid cooldowns and cooldown times”, I would be completely stumped. Shaman is the first and only healing class I’ve played in WoW. Everything else I know is very general (best suited, expected output, etc).

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?

Grid, Clique, mouse-over macros, Power Auras, and Totem Timers are my bread and butter. You can see these in action in any of our guild videos.

Tag?

I think I’m the last blogger to ever fill this out, and everyone I know has already filled it out. If you’re reading this and you’ve never done it, throw a comment down and let me know!

Firelands

To this point we’ve done all of normal mode Firelands (Ragnaros still alive however), and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by the encounters as a whole. Tier 11 was one of the more challenging and unique raiding tiers since Ulduar, so it’s good to see Blizzard isn’t running out of tricks. At first glance the new fights in Tier 12 seem very similar (some adds, some repeatable mechanics, burn phase), but all of them have some flavor that makes them their own.

In order of difficulty from hard to easy (in my humble opinion):

Alysrazor

My third favorite yet easily the hardest boss fight before Ragnaros for our raid team. Our third raid night of the tier saw us spending 20 attempts wiping to this boss. Incorrect strategy? Misplaced DPS? None. It was just poor execution. I wrote a forum post detailing the deaths and wipe-causes for every attempt with the overall message of “this ain’t gonna cut it.” Strategy changes aren’t required when you simply just need to focus up. This leads me to…

Majordomo Fandral Staghelm

Before Ragnaros, my favorite fight in Firelands (and that may change to best). It would immediately become my most hated boss if not for the cooldown changes that granted Druids a 3 minute Tranquility and Shamans a…well a cooldown at all. Rapid position changes, heavy personal responsibility, ground-targetted situational awareness, adds, healer coordination, and a little bit of micro-teamwork are all there. Everyone took the message that was sent after the Alysrazor debacle and applied it here. Seed fails were non-existant after a couple attempts and within 11 pulls he hit the floor (it may have been 6 pulls if not for a missed call by yours truly late in the fight).

Shannox

The fight that caught Tuesday raiders off guard as it was changed from it’s simplistic PTR version to a slightly more complicated  Live version. We spent a lot of time wiping the first night in on this boss mostly due to a strategy that didn’t work but we didn’t realize it. Moral of the story: read the Encounter Journal more closely. It turns out the fight is a good mixture of “watch your feet” and tank coordination. Killing him “just anywhere” gives it that outdoor-boss feel (Argh, Blizzard, bring back the outdoor bosses!).

Baleroc goes here but I’m putting him at the end.

Rhyolith

Oh Rhyolith, you are so very dumb, but as Eranthe said at one point during a raid “to be fair, Rhyolith is made of rocks.” The steering mechanic can grate a little on my nerves but that’s mostly related to excess cleaving or slow leg swaps. I feel like an aggressive yacht skipper yelling “left…Left….LEFT…HARD LEFT… no right…RIGHT OH GOD!” I hear the hotfixes have made him a little less ornery and random.

Beth’tilac

The laziest of the new bosses that I’m assuming gets a lot more interesting on heroic mode. Just a lot of spider adds with the added mechanic of being able to play Spiderman a couple times. On Normal mode, the “burn phase” isn’t all that dangerous. On our second pull ever we had a rough transition where Beth ate some spiders and healed from 58% to 78%. We wiped at 3 or 4%.

Healing Baleroc

We crafted a healing strategy based around 3 things:

1) Melee and Range Torment soakers needed specific assignments to keep them up

2) Consistent stack building

3) Proper tank mitigation (inspiration/ancestral fortitude)

We decided to do our swaps with ~5 seconds remaining on Baleroc’s blade cooldown. This would ensure that the next healing team had the most stacks and would be prepared to handle the jump in damage. With 3 teams of 2 we set up our rotation using a little baseball; Tank healers were up to bat, melee healers were on deck, and ranged healers were in the hole.

When a switch is called you move to the next group. Tanks healers leave the batters circle and return to healing range, range healers step on deck and heal melee, and melee healers step to the plate to swing bomb heals at the tank’s face.

None of this works, however, if you don’t switch on time. It is important that the switch call is at the correct spot, but it is 100x more important that everyone switches immediately without hesitating. Sometimes this leaves you with time left on your Vital Flame, but it doesn’t end up impacting the fight greatly. At the very end of the fight our tank was sporting 1,080,000 HP and I was sitting at 135 stacks of Vital Spark (44k riptides whhaaattt).

Personal Healing Strategy

Mana was brutal for me early on as I tried to use Healing Surge to build stacks quickly. That was just shortsighted since you only gain 1 stack of Vital Spark for every 3 stacks of torment. Riptide will also grant you stacks (or activate Vital Flame when tank healing). If you keep Tidal Waves up, Healing Wave isn’t much slower than Healing Surge and is far more efficient.

I would switch to GHW when the dps would climb over 10 stacks just to make sure they stayed up. I think as long as you are over 100 stacks at the end of the encounter (for us that was about 5:40 with a couple DPS deaths), you should be able to keep up with the tank damage.

• Cast canceling is something you’ll want to get in the habit of whenever you switch onto the tanks. You and your partner will be able to fill the tanks HP up very quickly so don’t waste casts.
• Pre-casting for Decimation Blade will allow you to line up your heals and keep the offtank upright with nearly no effort (see 3:06 in the video).

Don’t forget about the shards (or your raid leader will be very upset).

Overall, this is better than the last two “healer fights” (Chimaeron,Valithiria). I’m glad the healer fight is now in the standard raiding set of encounter types. Healers like to do a little more than just spam their raid frames.

Until next time, best of luck to everyone on their remaining normal mode fights and the eventual quest for a Heroic Ragnaros kill.

Not a creature was stirring, not even your mom.

My toons were logged out by the instance with care,

In hopes that the servers would be stable and fair.

The hunters were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of lava spiders pranced in their heads;

The horde with their warchief, and alliance with Wrynn,

Another battle for Hyjal is soon to begin.

From my vent server, the raid channel, their arose such a clatter,

I must have overslept, my presence does matter!

Away to the monitor I ran like The Flash,

And grabbed for my phone and its authenticator app.

The zone was ablaze with the fire plane’s glow,

Giving a dull red hue to the forest creatures below.

I need a group, a party, a raid, any takers?

There’s a Firelord, his hammer, and even a Flamewaker!

As a wily raid leader with his trusted friends,

I know, for a moment, that we’re sure to win.

More rapid than dragons my raiders they came,

and I ready checked, and the afk ones I called out by name;

“Now Talisman! now, Baba! now, Kro and Lazer!

On Rynor! on Azaa! on Izellah and Amsner!

To the front of the zone, let’s clear that trash

Now DPS! Heal! Hold aggro! Don’t crash!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,

So down through the instance the raiders they rode,

With Baleroc in their sights, and a new Majordomo.

But then, just like that, a moment of flack,

The rumblings and sirens of a mis-pulled trash pack.

As I called for cooldowns and queued up a heal,

Onto to the party rushed giants with zeal.

They were covered in fire from beard to toe,

and stomped and swung and clobbered every foe.

A batch of rocks they had flung at our back,

and I pleaded and begged “cut us some slack!”

Their eyes did not twinkle, the magma poured quickly,

The fire, in a movie, I would think may be pretty.

Their grins were disgusting, their orders were clear,

To dispatch of these raiders, the Firelord was near.

The Hammer of Sulfuruas he holds tight in his hand,

His minions and sons are set to burn up this land.

He has a broad face, and wingspan so vast,

You may wet your pants before completing a cast.

A tall, menacing, commander of fire,

And making of fun of his legs will only draw his ire.

With a swing of his arm and a shout to the ceiling,

Run hard, run fast, you know the feeling.

He’ll speak not a word and dispatch you with ease,

And empty your health bars like you asked nicely “please.”

But if you are lucky to overcome this great boss,

You can call yourself one that has defeated Ragnaros.

And away to heroic you’ll fly for a challenge,

Achievements and more epics hang in the balance.

But when the tier is finished and the lava submerged,

One quote will remain: “By fire, be purged.”

Happy Patch Day, Everyone.

Any group looking to improve in their chosen field will look for weaknesses. There are always gaps and cracks that can be fixed. This is a post about  filling those cracks and making one of the biggest changes I’ve ever made to BRM. When talking about this change, it forced me to remind myself of one very important thing: making a change is easy. The people that will carry out the change and those affected will be the ones that decide if it is effective.

If I had recorded the announcement and subsequent discussion, I would have posted a transcript, but this my best work at rehashing what went down before our raid on June 14th.

Reflection

I can always go to The Wire for a good quote. This is one that’s stuck with me forever:

You don’t look at what you did before, you do the same shit all over.-McNulty

As a raider you have goals. As a raid leader you have expectations. Where do I want my guild to be? What is “good enough”? The tricky thing about being raid leader is that you are both player and coach. When this tier started we set the goal we’ve set for every tier: complete all content and achievements. We didn’t reach that. My personal goal was to do the same. Was it a case of not meeting goals or misplaced expectations? Both?

My player side was unsatisfied. The raid leader side of me was dejected. In the end, it’s the person in charge who has to answer for what his team has done. Unanticipated difficulty, anticipated but poorly handled recruitment needs, sudden loss of important role-players, and an overall lack of drive put us just out of reach of the truly rewarding encounters.

I wrote in my concession of Heroic Lich King post  that I was not upset with my raid’s progress, and I’m still not, but that doesn’t change the fact that we didn’t meet our ultimate goal. That ultimate goal is to be an efficient raid team that clears the content and also has a pretty damn good time doing it. One of our yearly guild meetups is coming up this weekend, in fact. Work is keeping me from this one, but a good number of old and new raiders will get to enjoy the company in person of the folks they share a vent channel with 12 hours a week.

That atmosphere is important to our members, but excelling at the raid game is just as important. Without the raiding, those gatherings would have never started.

The Cracks

So what went wrong? When dissecting a progression number, you start with the symptoms. If we want to complete all content before the next tier, where do we need to improve.

Attendance

Our best progression weeks happened when we started on time with a consistent dps crew, consistent healing crew, with role players in place. Re-teaching roles or adjusting to a lack of a specific ability (or abilities) can cost attempts. Not only just raid composition, but planning a raid week when progressing on heroic content can sometimes depend heavily on the availability of certain people. If they mysteriously aren’t there, you could setup a situation where you are wasting raid time.

Performance

Learning time from first pull to first kill was significantly longer on most bosses than it should have been. “Should” is a tricky gray area. Whose to say how long any boss “should” take? Figuring out why an attempt failed and discovering that after 15 attempts, two or three players don’t understand how to handle a fundamental mechanic (i.e. Shadow Conductor), you have  a problem.

Insufficient Goals and Priorities

This last one is the kicker that ties everything together and is what will lead us into the discussion on Loot Council.

Doh-KP

Heroic Nefarian could be called the final (dragon-sized) straw that exposed the weaknesses in my methods, with DKP being at the fore-front. Getting into a philosophical discussion about how humans respond to social engineering tactics like point rewards is a waste of time here. The simple fact is that DKP (and EPGP in a way) assigns a specific value to raid success: how much is rewarded for downing a boss.

You kill a boss, everyone involved gets points. You show up on time, you get points.

Those are raid rewards, not individual rewards. That model works great for quantifying a night on farm content. How about a learning night where nothing is killed? Failures are singular. Someone missed a kick. Someone allowed their healing assignment to drop, etc. You suddenly go from quantifying the value of success to placing value on a particular failure. You can take this further. What if 3 or 4 people play extremely poorly but you still win? They get to bid on loot too. That guy that stood in the fire next to you and needed 27 battle rezzes just out-bid you for a new weapon. You played perfect and maybe even helped someone with their assignment.

Your rules are your guide. The rules say that person may bid, so they must be allowed to bid.

Am I completely discounting DKP (and EPGP) as workable loot systems? No. On Episode 17 of the Matticast we discussed loot systems (5/9/11). I described our system as simple, easy to manage, and “over time” everyone that wanted loot, received it. For 5 years we used that system. For a new guild or one that is loosely formed, DKP is an un-objective, transparent system for awarding loot.

Achievement

For a guild dedicated to completing hard mode content, having the ability to subjectively judge the play of each player is very important. Further, it is important to take the focus off of collecting points and onto actually killing the boss. Once loot is off the table, the intentions of each player come into focus.

I’ve seen 10 tiers worth of gear go through my bags. Hundreds and hundreds of items. The only thing that stays with my character forever are the achievements. Killing Heroic: Magmaw meant more to me than any pair of gloves. Knowing that I was able to complete Heroic Chimaeron without letting any of my targets die was awesome. Getting a trinket just helps me do it a little better the next  time.

Directly rewarding the players that are dedicated to overcoming raid challenges was something that I wanted to improve.

It was time to clearly define what our goals were, how we were going to achieve them and what we expected from everyone. You can read them on our application forum. Accepting a raid invite is the acceptance of those rules. Our intentions are clear, the rules are very black and white.

The most common question I’ve been asked is “Do you think it will work?” That’s a question that I can’t answer (yet). I’ve given the officers and raiders very clear direction, but it will take extra effort on everyone’s part to see that we make it there.  I’ve seen changes come and go. Some with no effect, some with negative effects. Ultimately it is up to the raid.  Before we begin our assault on Tier 12 we’ll sit down and set our goals. They will be lofty again, but we’ll be reaching hard to get to them.

When the dust settled on Tier 11, we closed at 9/13. An awesome achievement considering our adversity, but there is always room for improvement.

A special thanks to Beruthiel and Blacksen for providing some guidance on Loot Council and how they implement it. It was very helpful to get a look at how guilds that have been using the system for a long time handle Loot Council and how it would be best implemented for BRM. They wrote me some very detailed emails, so I owe them at least 1 drink at Blizzcon (probably more).

Side Projects

This new blog theme got me on a web-design kick so I started transforming the guild-homepage into something that will allow us to increase our net presence a little as a guild. Look for BRM-created boss videos (maybe even guides) and some other goodies (BRM is on twitter @brmZJ). We’re still recruiting melee, holy paladins, and a tank.

A Better Parser

On Heroic Omnotron Defense System, we had a problem…one of our officers had a solution:

…The solution, as in so many things, was Perl. I wrote a Perl script called WBUE (Who Blew Up Electron?) that reads the wow combat log and looks for events that coincide with people, well… blowing up Electron. The heart of this Perl script was a small parser I wrote that only half-asses the job of understanding each line, but it was good enough for what I needed from the script…

That is a snippet from Eranthe, a BRM resto druid and officer, who has spawned a new project: a robust wow combat-log parser. She is documenting her programming adventure as well as Tree-Related things over at http://www.lifebloomretain.com/. Give her a read!

Matticast

The 4.2 mega-episode of the Matticast is now out. If you’re looking for tips on prepping your team or catching up on healer-specific changes, be sure to give it a listen. If you have anything you want us to talk about that we haven’t covered, email us (podcast ‘at’ worldofmatticus ‘dot’ com). We truly appreciate any and all comments. The listener response we’ve gotten through these first 22 episodes has been amazing.

The Matticast – Episode 22