Onyxia 25

Oh, my God, that was like soooo 3 patches ago. I know, I ran Onyxia back then on my shaman and rocked the place. The first day it was out, on the very first attempt at killing the almighty dragon I got the achievement for the speed kill. And that was shortly after I had begun my gear transition from PvP only to PvE only. It was easy, a loot pinata, if you will, and all you needed to know were the tactics for downing her. Oh, and the loot… similar to ToC loot but class and spec erm… specific? Yes, please! No more having to roll higher than the hunter that /roll ed just because it’s a mail item and, as we all know, all loot is hunter loot.

Fast forward to today. My DK, ok geared, entry level ICC to be more precise, joined a PuG for Onyxia 25. I whisper my achievement, GS (-.-) and accept the invite. Immediately I search for other DKs, Retribution Paladins and Warriors, because i only need the 2h sword. Crit and Expertise? Yes, please! Just a glance showed me 5 death knights, including myself, a warrior and a paladin. Small chances but hey, it’s the last day before the reset so why not give it a whack?

After waiting for some 20ish minutes for the raid to fill we go in, clear trash and start buffing, what you would normally expect from a raid, PuG or not. One priest healer said brb 2 minutes, we wait 5 and then start the encounter. What we did not think about was to do a headcount. Everybody got summoned, I’m sure of that because I usually do it myself and only need a dedicated clicker and this time it was no exception. So we go in, P1 goes by smoothly and we start the transition to P2, ya kno, the part where as melee you run behind her and try to squeeze a few more blows.

Adds spawn, tanks pick them up, the ranged group is doing its thing, AoE fest going on down on the ground. Swiftly we reach the 50% mark when one tank goes down. That, of course, lead to a wipe, the other two tanks were far off and couldn’t pick the adds up fast enough. Ok, one try went south, replace the healer and let’s do better on the next. Am I assuming to much that this would be the normal attitude?

I was, apparently. Immediately after we zoned in again after running from the spirit healer all three tanks dropped group. Then two healers plus the AFK one which was kicked immediately after we wiped. Immediately after, a bung of DPS dropped too. The raid leader, through this all, was in Dalaran, searching for replacements, and was patient enough to stick around until the empty spots were filled. The reason I mentioned the headcount earlier was that upon analizing recount we noticed that 2 DKs weren’t on there. Mouseover in raid frame and we saw that they were in Undercity, respectively Durotar. They had gone through all the ready checks and clicked Yes. Why they would do this boggles my mind, I cannot for the life of me figure it out.

Anywho, half an hour later, numbers bolstered we line up and buff again, ready to take on Mother O. The new group is littered with druids, 3 tanks, 2 healers, 1 feral and 2 boomkins but we take what we’re offered and can’t afford being too picky. Onward again, wipe again but this time we made it through to P3 where we wiped because as soon as Onyxia landed almost all the DPS rushed to her and adds chewed the tank’s and healers’ faces off. Half the raid dropped group instantly and the other half soon after.

Is it something fundamentally wrong to wipe? As long as I can think back, this is almost normal, you die once, regroup, try again. Everybody in that group had some stakes in this otherwise there were a lot easier ways to pick up 3 Triumph Emblems. Is it a lower tolerance to failiure that’s involved? Are all elitists and if they are, why did we wipe?

The answer, I believe, is a lot simpler than this and has a lot to do with good players caring for the community. Everybody in the raid, as I remember, was in a guild. It is impossible to reach the current level cap without any interaction with another human being. And while it is no longer dominant, there is a community of players that actually give a crap and try to help others, either by tells ingame or on guild chat, or even on the WoW forums. If you meet such a player in a random heroic he will not only pull his weight, but rather pull the whole group’s weight as well. He will be the tank that outdamages 2 DPS, the DPS that does over 50% off total damage or the healer that will heal your ass off through the incredibly slow paced run.

When grouped with such a player, seeing him excell and pick up their slack, they think it’s ok to not give it the best shot they possibly can. They are used to being carried and will think that it is their God given right to do sub-par DPS. Usually tanks and healers do not fall under this category and they only come in two flavors: the ones that outright suck and you can usually spot by the weird gear choices and gems/enchants and those that do their goddamn jobs.

Back to the MS, as Gevlon likes to call them. They have gathered the good gear and boast with their incredible GS, they write stuff like L2P n00b and join the Anal [ability] bandwagon. And they drop group when they notice that in a particular raid it is expected of them to pull their own weight.

Elton John said: “It’s a sad, sad, situation/ And it’s getting more and more absurd”. This fits like a glove. I don’t know how this can be avoided in the future but I’m afraid that no amount of work Blizzard can put into the game will fix it. Because they can’t. And I fear that this will be the downfall of the game, once those good players quit due to burnout or whatever reason.

Big News, Everyone!

Not a lot of posts lately, mostly because IRL sucks and keeps intervening. But enough of the whining, let’s go back to what World of Warcraft is all about: “I love my mother but not nearly as much as WoW,” to paraphrase a local football supporter’s chant. And speaking of, I had a stunning revelation during TBC at one point, when I was leveling my brother’s mage through Hellfire (thus making it the 4th character I took through the Outlands): If your mum sends you to get some water and you’re thinking what is closer, Scryers or Aldor, you’re playing too much.

Now on to the big news released today: shared lock-outs for the same raid for both 10 and 25 man versions.

What this means: To put it in the words of Blizzard, you cannot down a boss twice in a week. No more running 10 man for starter gear so you can go join the 25 man version, where the real money’s at.. if it were a professional sport. There’s also another announcement, saying that you’ll be able to choose what bosses you want to kill normally and which ones you want to try your hand on the heroic version.

With this comes the clarification of loot: the same items will be dropped from both versions of the raid, just more of them on 25. To translate this in current terms, if right now a boss drops 2 epix on 10 man and 3 on 25, the latter will change to drop 5 epix. All of the same ilvl, that will, by the way, cease to be. I guess GS will be out and one can only praise the Lord for this bit.

This will make a huge impact on the game, as much as the first raids being accessible in quest blues. Like I have stated many a times before, I am in a small guild that revolves around 10 mans. This change alone will be our bread and butter. Sure, you can never see an item drop but that’s bad luck and won’t cause the same frustration like the one from knowing that you’re not able to field 25 players that you can count on. It’s a lot easier to live with fortune than with your inability, if I may call it that (be it work, low tolerance to stupidity or whatnot) to get a shot in at the good stuff.

Then again, if some things never change, each raid boss will have a ~10 item drops possible, 15 on 25 man. Not counting here Sartharion with the 1, 2 and 3D option. You will still have a better chance of seeing an item drop on 25 man but with numbers comes demand. Better chance to have it drop on 25 but better chance of winning it on 10, to summarize loot options.

I like it, and I like it a whole lot. The bomb Blizz dropped on us does indeed mean that, as Hinenuitepo put it, 10 man guilds will no longer feel like second class citizens. Which I do when I run around in circles in the mecca of narcissism, Dalaran, being able to eyeball those ilvl277 epix on other players, knowing that I will never have one.

In other news, the ICC buff will increase after today’s maintenance to 15%. I think I have a problem with this. 10% is a good enough buff, on par with tweaking a raid boss or 12 to be a tad more accessible. For what is twaking, I ask of thee, if not having a boss hit for x% less or not as often by making his melee swing .5 seconds longer. At least in my mind that’s how it’s done, after careful consideration and a ton of legitimate feedback from the gaming community.

I’m late to jump on the bandwagon but hey, I wasn’t blogging at the time. 30% buff in the end? My God that’s enormous. Imagine a nice and round 10k DPS fella that walking in and getting this buff. Chances are that on 10 K he’s already able to carry a bunch of alts, you only need some 6-7 K to down the bosses that are a DPS race. He’s picking up others’ slack of lack of gear. With the buff he’ll do some 13K DPS. Almost counts as two people, making 9 man ICC a possibility and not something that you laugh at the idea of. Then again, if he is in a guild that was able to gear him up to pull the damage bar so high, imagine that there are others like him in the same group. I know my logic is flawed in many ways with this but effectively with the 30% buff you could go by with only 3 DPS, 2 tanks and 2 healers. A 3rd healer would be obsolete and could only be brought along for the gear upgrades and for him to have a look-see at what raid healing is all about, without him being a liability in case he chokes.

Yes, healers choke. I did, when I was resto, and even though I only healed 5 man heroics and the odd VoA 10 or 25 and Onyxia, i was a very emo healer, in the sense that I always thought that it was my fault if somebody died and that there was something I could have done and oh, why, cruel world. I mean fuck it, with the offset pieces I gathered along the way I have a pretty decent healing set and I might respec from enhancement to resto again. I know I have a bit of a healer heart in me, I always jump to top somebody off if I don’t think that the healer can manage it (even though he can and I’ve seen him do it).

Raid group part 1/10

Right, the “write post from work and then paste it on blog” thing that I’ve had going on is clearly not ‘working as intended’ ™, I just now got to edit the post from yesterday. And while this is yet another post written ducking behind all the other e-mails I have open (I do this to not get spotted and for it to bear some resemblance of productive corporate work) from whoevers, whatevers and banks, I’m trying to make myself believe that it will be the last one.

I know I said yesterday that I’d start with the presenting the members of my raiding group, so here goes nothing of interest. There will be a later post about ICC and I’m hoping that it will encompass both remaining fights of the first four.

I’ll start off with the Raid Leader and Guild Leader, or somebody I like calling intimately He Who Has More Alts Better Geared Up For ICC Than My Main, or HWHMABGUFICCTMM. I like it like that. What I can say I love about him (a very manly but not gayish love, mind you) is that when he’s online, he’s there for you. And he can do whatever the raid needs, tank (Padalin), heal (Druid) or DPS (Druid or DK, ranged/melee). I silently begrudge him for winning the T10 gloves on his DK in VoA when I rolled on them as well but not that much.

If I were to choose a role for him in our raid that would be, hands down, that of tank. He is a bloody good tank that never lost agro on anything ever I think. Not while I’ve been around and on my off-days there were rumors of me TAB targeting mobs instead of assisting. He doesn’t get to run with us in this role tho, his healing wiggly branches are much more needed. Hell’s the kind of RL that doesn’t talk a lot, doesn’t blow steam by slandering the ones that may have made a mistake and has the patience of a mountain. No loot drama occurring under his lead and if there happens to be an issue he will take the time to explain his decisions and actions. Story time:

Not so long ago we had to PuG a ranged DPS for our weekly run at ICC and it happened to be a SP that was under geared compared to the lot of us but adequately geared for the content. The Gunship Battle finishes and the dagger with MP5 drops. A little background now: The SP was doing ok but not great, the weapon would have been a clear upgrade for him. Hell had a healing staff ilvl 232 from ToC but he did have the OH from Lady D already, won on an OS roll a while back. I have the caster mace from Anub 25 like I said a while back and the guildie Mage that was running with us then for the first time had something in the ilvl 232 area.

The dagger had dropped before us a couple of times and each time we passed it to the appropriate healer that needed it, regarding of roll. Because it has fucking MP5 on it, that’s why. It would be an upgrade for me in terms of SP and haste, both of which I love dearly, and if I have to give up .5% of my exaggerated* crit chance so be it. I would not roll on this until absolutely nobody of a healy type needed it. So I didn’t but the SP, mage and Hell rolled and the SP rolled highest. After a short and chilled debate the dagger went the druid’s way (thank you, SP, for not being an ass and not dwelling on your thought of Guild prio when explained that it’s MS prio). Needless to say that we congratulated Hell and then proceeded to prepare for the Saurfang fight that was up next. Meanwhile I whispered whether he wanted to have the item enchanted, I had the mats on me and I was happy to do it, especially knowing how long he had wanted this item. While we don’t usually talk that much, or at least not as much as I talk to the other guild and raid members, we have a respect thingy going on. So he politely declined and linked me his enchanting, to show me that he could also do it. He then told me that he was hoping for the +spirit staff to drop off of Saur so he could trade the dagger to the SP.

And now back to the main broadcast. He is the silent yet deciding factor in the decision-making process, as he should be, given that he is the GL and all but he doesn’t step up that often when petty squabbles surface. That is not by far his cup of tea and there are others there to squash these in their infancy. More on this at a later date.

* Shamans were supposed to be around 25% crit chance in end game content if I understood correctly from a blue post a while back but they kind of exaggerated with Tiers of armor and this was blown out of proportion and subsequent patches and raid zones accommodated the higher number instead of tightening crit down a notch.