Player Liability

First let me say I r a bad blogger. Its been a week since my last post and though I have a list of excuses I'm not going to use any of them. My experiences over the last week, however, have lead me to the topic of Player Liability.

It is no news that there is an increasing amount of raid burnout in the last month or so. In fact I have been feeling a little bit of that myself when it comes to progressing in Ulduar. I've given this a lot of thought over the last week and I think the reason, at least for me, is that raiding relies heavily on good players. "Thank you Captain Obvious." I'm sure you are saying to yourself. In truth though I think we are facing similar events (or so I'm told) as to what happened after the release of Burning Crusade.

It is no secret that during the MC Vanilla WoW age, that you could very very easily carry bad players. I've heard stories of people just going afk on follow while watching a movie or eating dinner. Then the Golden Age of raiding came about in Burning Crusade. Kara didn't require 40 people to raid... it required 10. More then that though it required 10 skilled players. This meant that a lot of guilds had to "trim the fat" of their core raiding team and remove those players who weren't capable.

However, some guilds refused to do this. Over time they gradually lost more and more people because the bad players in the guild, who very well could be the social core of the guild, were still let into the early raids. Frustration ensues when the content became too difficult leading to the downfall of guilds.

Enter Wrath of the Lich King

The beginning of WotLK saw a similar move in player base, but for entirely different reasons. Many guilds lost members due to the content being so easy, that they lost the desire to raid entirely. Many guilds broke up in wake of this, those that didn't though supplemented their groups with new players who had the heart and desire to raid.

These new recruits may very well have been a mixed bag. You get some very good players in with some very bad players but since the difficulty scale in Naxx was much lower, it allowed the lesser skills to raid with the guild fairly successfully. I'm sure most of the officers knew who the lesser skilled players were but since the bosses were still dying, who cares? The fact that there is an achievement for running Naxx 10 with less then 9 players tells you that Naxx had an inherently low difficulty tune.

Then when everyone was comfortable in the guild... 3.1 was released. Ulduar is a fairly well tuned instance. Some bosses are much easier then others, but it is still a step up from Naxx. This especially holds true on 25 man. Here, unfortunately, is the rub. By 3.1 there is a good chance that some of your very dedicated and social members are deeply embedded into your raid group. Chances are if you didn't have strict standards on your 10 and 25 man Naxx raids... some of these are less then stellar players.

Player liability comes about when those raiders start posing a threat to the progress of the guild (or raid group in my situation). The leadership is afraid or unwilling to kick a member who has shown up ready and diligent for months of Naxx despite the fact that their poor performance is not only dragging down the raid, but also causing wipes.

Ala Katmandue

This isn't meant to be a slam against Kat... as a person. As a tank though... where do I begin? Katmandue is a warrior tank that has been with the raid group since well before I ever joined. When I joined they had been farming Naxx 25 for awhile. Kobeck and I showed that we knew what we were doing and were quickly adopted into their core raid group. You could tell during those raids that Katmandue was not the greatest tank. He had issues during more complicated fights and managing cooldowns effectively.

He was, however, geared out the ass by the time Ulduar came out. Ulduar really started to show the quality... or lack thereof... of a player he was. He had issues picking up trash on razorscale, or taunting at the right times leading to our tank dying. On ignis we wiped countless times because one of the adds he was supposed to be tanking decided the healers tasted better. He would taunt other tanks constructs and we had to overcompensate for his lacking by running with 3 offtanks for ignis.

Thankfully XT and Kologarn don't require much in the ways of an offtank, so those fights never gave us an issue. But Auriaya did. He would consistently fail to pick up the adds and generate enough threat so they could be burned quickly. As a result he was put on Auriaya where he never once would use thunderclap or demo shout for the debuff to reduce the damage... or even use cds at all for that matter. When he was placed on the 3rd and 4th kill target for the cats he would then use mocking blow on Auriaya (god knows why) which would cause her to turn just enough to cast her frontal aoe cone killing off one or 2 people in the process.

Burnout was definitely starting to take its turn on me. Even though half the raid was talking about him behind his back... no one would say anything to the leaders. Ok. I'll admit the one night I drank a little and started calling him out on stuff... which ultimately lead us to the events of this past weekend. The silence that was kept has been broken and while Katmandue isn't banned from raiding with us... he now knows without a doubt that he has a lot of work ahead of him. After some fruitless attempts on Hodir 25, a similar warning went out to everyone in the raid.

Concentrate and focus or gtfo.

So do you have any instances of Player Liability in your guild or raid group? One of the hardest things to do is to call someone out or to bring your frustrations to the raid leaders... but this is the most important thing you do. If someone isn't doing their job then you won't be the only one to feel this way. Often times you will lose more people by keeping that one liability in your raid group then sacrificing his feelings and letting him go.

Weekend Report

Well my wife went to visit her mother this weekend across the country. So where did that leave me on the weekend? Yep you guessed it. Sitting in front of the computer getting my raid on. Friday night consisted mainly of my normal 25 man raiding team heading into Ulduar.

Funny how my last post was about to heal or not to heal... because, this week due to a few of our normal crew heading on vacation, I was stuck switching to my Resto heal and getting into the chain heal groove. We started with VoA quickly downing Emalon and Archavon which netted me tier 8.5 gloves.... the enhancement version... Ah well being the only shaman in the raid was worth something I guess.

From there we headed into Ulduar and downed FL without issue and moved onto XT.... where for the first time in I don't remember when we wiped. A little regrouping and we killed him to move on to Kologarn. Maybe it was the large number of new pugs that we had but things weren't going as smoothly as usual and we wiped on him once before running across his corpse. We doubled back and took out razorscale to end the night... knowing we just didn't have the right group to go forward.

Saturday saw my baby mages first trip into Naxx and not just Naxx but Naxx 25. So how does a brand spanking new level 80 mage with a few epics and a bunch of blues/greens? Well see for yourself.

Yep 3600 dps. (Ok I rounded up...) Patchwerk being the best choice for measuring DPS I chose him. We downed Spider, Plague, and Patch in construct before too many people had to go. I got a pair of boots and some emblems out of the deal so can't complain too much.

Finished out Saturday by heading back into Ulduar on Saravid. We again had some issues finding healers but at least downed Ignis and Auriya again. Really a slow week in Ulduar 25 which is kind of disappointing. I hope this isn't leading into some form of summer slump. We are headed back in to work on some watchers on 10 man tonight so, if nothing else, I have that.

Sunday was a rather interesting day to say the least. Around mid afternoon I got the itch to work on my DK a bit. So I was in lfg when a group advertised that they needed a dps for Naxx 10. I told them I could hop on my mage and did so. I grabbed the invite and headed to Naxx. The group seemed fairly balanced and geared sufficiently yet I got an ominous feeling when I zoned in and got the message that I would be saved to the instance. The leader hadn't mentioned this to me before hand but I figured my mage needed whatever could drop anyway so I stayed.

I wish I hadn't. Zoned in and got a summon to thaddius room. The guy explaining the fight sounded like he was on a voice modulation or something and it was extremely annoying. We started the fight and the first thing I noticed was the guy tanking Feugen standing right next to the stairs just barely in range to avoid the discharge. I yelled for him to move back on vent and he did so. Then the switch came.... or at least it was supposed too...

Our tank swapped over to the other side... but the tank from that side never arrived over at ours. I believe he got disconnected or something to that effect but Feugen quickly turned to begin killing the dps... including me leading quickly to a wipe. Then one by one people started leaving... and the disconnected tank couldn't log back on. Eventually everyone was gone and I gave up. Saved to an instance for absolutely nothing. Wonderful.

Despite the poor events that just occurred I once again was on my DK in lfg when I saw someone looking for an offtank for Naxx 10. Why not? I said and told them I could come on my paladin. Interestingly enough neither groups did a gear check but I was invited anyway. I've maintanked most of Naxx on my paladin but have yet to finish all of Naxx on her.

Anyway I switched over and got invited into the group. Which at the moment only had 5 people. I flew to dragonblight and was alt tabbed while they were getting people. At one point I looked and they had 8 people. Someone said we should just run with 8 for the achievement. I almost jokingly responded with "Ya we could do it! " and proceeded to alt tab again. Well about 30 seconds later I tabbed back in to not only find that everyone was in agreement... but that everyone was already zoned in but me.

I frantically threw my buffs up on myself and while the druid main tank was chain pulling, got the other blessings where they needed to be.

"This can't work... can it?" I was asking myself.

Everyone knew the fights and was geared appropriately... but no one was decked out in all naxx 25 or uld 25 gear could this really work? On top of that we weren't going to use vent because the leader said it was stupid and we didn't need it.

Well going from wiping on one boss on my mage with a full group to running Naxx with 8 people was quite the stretch. We not only cleared... but demolished Military wing. The highest dps topped out at around 3k with everyone else at around 2500 yet we still managed all the fights with little difficulty. We started working on Plague wing after that and even got the Safety Dance achievement on Heigan. Unfortunately the druid main tank had to go at that point. He gave me 2 stoneblood flasks (even though I had a bunch on me and was using them) and complemented me on what a great job I had done.

Well we were gonna get another dps but figured since Loatheb only took one tank anyway we would just continue on. And we did just that. The druid healer that we had switched to feral spec and dpsed that fight with our holy priest solo healing the 7 of us.

Energized then that we looked at what we had left. Construct needed atleast 2 tanks for Patch and Gluth but Spider only really needed a second tank for Anub. Well once again our priest showed his skill in solo healing Anub with the druid switching to bear form to pick up the add.

Due to only one healer we chose for me to kite the boss during the insect swarm, which I hadn't seen done since the first week in Naxx. This added a new and fun element and have to say worked out pretty darn well. Thus the first boss in spider went down and we moved onto the second. Well there was no way one healer could keep up 2 tanks and the raid for Faerlina. So the druid went back to Resto and we decided to just burn the adds and eat the enrage.

I have to say that was one of the most intense fights I have done in a long time. Using an ironsheild pot in the beginning and rotating CD's as much as possible really made for an intense battle. We proved too powerfull and she gave me her sword since no one else could use or wanted it.

We moved on to Maexxena who's enrage was easily managed by the use of CD's and that point we called it a night.

A lot of people are really against pugging because of the example of what happened to Gandreolf. Yet sometimes you find gems like the group I found with Llina.

To heal or not to heal..

If you have read my blog at all (I know pretty dumb assumption) you will know that when it comes to progression raiding I mainly play on my Elemental shaman. No this isn't a post about whether I want to switch to resto full time or not.

This post is mostly about dps... more specifically hybrid dps. When you are a dps in a raid or what have you, your goal is to do as much damage as humanly possible without pulling aggro or dying. That's it. You aren't there to tank or look pretty or heal.... well that last part can be tricky. As a hunter/warrior/mage/warlock etc. all you can do is dish out damage.

What about hybrids though? Are you an Elemental shaman, Shadow priest, or Balance druid? How bout a ret pally, feral druid or enhancement shaman? Yes, you are there to kill stuff. The thing is... there are these other buttons that like... heal stuff. Am I supposed to be using those to you know... heal?

I find myself in raids a lot pondering these questions. I've been in fights where a well placed heal can save a tank, and in return, save the raid. But then I've also been in fights where there was a 1% wipe against an enrage timer, and a little extra dps would have killed the boss.

So where do you draw the line? When things go sour do you step up and try and heal? Or do you pray your healers can take care of things and focus on blowing stuff up. Personally I don't know the answer to this because it changes. Making the right choice between saving a tank or tossing out that extra lightning bolt is what separates a good hybrid dps from a great one.

I'm plagued with choices like this when I raid on my shaman. On some fights the line is gray for instance on Auriya on the pull the tanks take a TON of damage. They take a ton of damage from the 4 cat adds the faster they die the sooner they start taking less damage. So what do you do? You could heal the tank hoping the other dps can kill the adds fast enough or you yourself dps like crazy and try and burn the adds down and hope a healer doesn't slip.

In that situation there really is no 100% right answer and you have to play on the edge of your seat because often times the best choice is both. Tossing out a chain heal followed by a lava burst then getting that lesser healing wave off... it is intense but that is what raiding is about. Playing to the maximum of you and your classes ability.

Other hard choices occur when the boss is low on health, and half the heals and dps are dead. Do you heal hoping you don't run out of mana before the dps can pull off the kill? Or do you throw as much dps at the boss watching as one by one people fall off?

I'm a very competitive person by nature. I love being at or near the top of the damage meter. Often time sacrificing dps to throw out some heals goes off completely notice and likely you will not see any thanks. Yet knowing that you made the right choice and that choice secured victory is one of the greatest feelings you can have.

What choice do you make?

Why do hackers have to ruin all the fun?

Last night I got together with Kobeck, my good friend irl, and some core members of the 25 man raid group, that we have been doing Ulduar with, to run 10 man ulduar. We started in VoA to destroy emalon which gave me the Tier 8 Enhancement Gloves.... too bad my spec is Elemental/Resto, being the only shaman though I got them anyhow. We killed Arch in under a minute and then headed to Ulduar.

We had attempted FL with 2 towers the week before but we had pugs and some bad communication, so this week we just decided to steamroll him. We went straight through XT and Kologarn after that and 2 shotted Auriaya for a 10 man first. We circled back to kill Ignis and Razorscale both of which were 1 shots. We start at 9:30 and it was nearing midnight which is when we usually end, but we decided we would go try and take out Iron council real quick.

After all the pace we had was really good and everyone was in really high spirits. We engage one of the giant thingy mahjigs guarding iron council and something happened.... ok I think it was my totems that were back a bit too far but we aggroed both of the giants and wiped soon after. Came back rebuffed and knocked over the giant (with me keeping an eye on my totems this time). During the fight though Kobeck, who was offtanking that night, got disconnected.

We were on vent waiting for him to get back when he says that his password doesn't seem to be working. As soon as he said that I had flash backs of when my account was hacked and the dread of the invalid password flashing across the screen.

I wheeled around just in time to notice Kobeck's character move ever so slightly. Then he ran left right turned around looking a little confused.... and started hearthing. I was 99% sure at this point that he was being hacked but I asked the fateful words anyway... I asked if he was logged in and he responded with no. "You are being hacked" I told him with a knot in my stomach.

The raid pretty much called it at that point and I quickly switched over to my Lanora my priest and Guild Leader of Shadow of Teldrassil. Kobeck is a really close friend of mine IRL so when left our last guild to start my own he was basically second in command. I quickly opened the guild control tab and demoted him down to the lowest rank that had no guild bank privileges.

Fortunately I managed to demote him before he had gotten to the bank (one of the hunters from raid was tracking his movements through dalaran.) I called him an ass and switched back to my Shaman who I had opened a ticket to a GM the instant I saw him hearthing.

It was really painful watching the hacker switch characters and move from the most valuable to the least from gold to gear to bank to badge items. I was offline when my account was hacked but several guild members at the time were on and I recall them talking about the hacker jumping though all of my characters. We relayed all of the information and movements to Kobeck over vent and you could hear the helplessness in his voice.

The ticket that I and several other raid members had put in said that they were currently experiencing high volume. So we waited. and waited. and waited. Around 1 am the status finally changed to you can expect to be serviced in approx 2 hours....

The other members gradually logged off as they had to work in the morning and what not. I stayed. Kobeck and I stayed on vent talking for the next 2 hours.... which turned into 3 hours... which finally changed the status to "Your ticket will be serviced soon." At this point it was 4 am. I had to be at work in 4 hours but I didn't care. The next hour and half waiting though proved a little too much and since I couldn't get out of work, (I don't think my friends wow account being hacked counts as a family emergency) I headed to bed for 2 hours of restless sleep.

I woke up this morning and Kobeck's DK was still under the control of the hacker. In fact the hacker was farming ore in Sholazar Basin with Kobeck's 450 mining and epic flying mount. I talked to Kobeck while at work through text messages and he did eventually regain control over his account. Hopefully he got rid of whatever he lost his account too.

And that's what worries me.... Kobeck is one of the very few people I know that is more intelligent then I am. He has a higher technical expertise when it comes to computers and he is very careful when it comes to the Internet and security. He thinks he may have picked up a script or something from the WoW official forums... makes me glad I really stay away from there.

Anyway hopefully within the next few days he will have the items and gold he lost fully restored and things can return a little bit back to normal.... but then nothing is really the same after you are hacked. You constantly live in fear regardless of how safe or protective you are.... that somehow everything you worked for can still be taken away.

So how did I spend 5 hours on my shaman while waiting in futility for the GM? (is futility a word? if not it should be) I worked on my fishing leveling from 278 fishing to 330 ish.

Character Spotlight Saravid

Saravid right now I would have to say is as close to a main as I have. Simply because she is who I raid progression content on.

I really don't tend to take a lot of screenshots, though I really want to include more on the blog. Looking through my folder most of the screenshots of my shaman are in raids from behind with the UI up. So I took this one just for the blog :D

History

Well my shaman was created to play with my best friend who got me into the game in the first place. The objective was for her and I to level together and only together. Which worked out really well up until we hit level 14.... and for the next year she remained at that level.

In October after months of talking about WoW my brother decided he wanted to start playing. So through recruit a friend he began playing and created his first character, a human paladin. With him leveling as protection and me leveling as elemental we soon realized how powerful a combination this was.

We 2 manned a lot of instances on our way to outlands with Refer a Friend giving us a huge boost in leveling speed. Even after the release of WotLK, I played on my shaman whenever opportunity arose. When we finally got to northrend though things began to stall out. My brother was getting bored with questing because of the fact that my shaman was so powerful things would often die before he had a chance to hit them.

So I told him that he should go Retribution and he did. This presented its own problems in that things died so fast it was no longer fun for me either. Also at the same time my Priest had just hit 80 and I really was enjoying playing with her. Stuck between leveling and raiding I told my brother to go ahead and level without me.

Saravid stayed level 73 for about 2 months till I finally got the desire to level with her. Shaking off the rust proved extremely easy and getting Lava Burst at level 75 insured my love for my shaman. I worked on getting my JC up as well and started doing the JC dailies. In fact, I had done so many of them that when the time came to hit 80... I could think of no better place..

That same day my shaman was in heroics pulling 2k dps in H UP. After a few weeks of trying to get into raids as dps with my guild (I had been raiding on my priest as a healer), and them trying to take a hard stance on turning the guild into some sort of hardcore raiding guild, I felt it was time to leave the guild behind.

The fact that a few days before one of my friends got me to join the 25 man group that she had been running with helped in making this decision pretty easily. A few weeks later I formed Shadow of Teldrassil with some close friends and family. The guild isn't raiding quite yet but maybe someday. In the meanwhile I run 25 mans every week on my shaman and bring the elemental pain.

As an aside to this post. Due to the rarity of Shamans, and even more so, elemental shaman blogs I contemplated for a long time creating one just for that. However, I realized that my nature wouldn't allow me to focus on just one character for a very long period of time so a blog of this nature seemed better placed.

Ding makes 5

So I was talking to one of the mages I raid with in 25 ulduar. We were talking about the lovely buff of focus magic, because he usually gives me the buff unless there are other mages. He has an elemental shaman as well and knows how often we crit and knows he can be guaranteed 100% up time on his end.

I told him I had a mage as well but he was only 78. Well... I got an itch to play him and he hit level 80 last night just before I went to bed. I was doing the quest to gather the fragments of Hodir's horn, as part of unlocking the dailies, and thankfully noticed the amount of XP I needed to level so was able to actually get some good screenshots.

I had a fairly good idea I would be hitting 80 over the weekend so earlier on Saturday I purchased the spellweave gloves for 165G (cheaper then the mats to make it) and bought more spellweave cloth to make the chest myself. Overall I spent around 400g. I also had the Chain of Latent Energies that I had won on my paladin in Naxx.


I've also been working on the Argent Tournament dailies since hitting 77 and reached champion level a few days ago. Today I will have enough tokens to pick up my chainsaw. Have I mentioned how much I love the Tournament? Finally while I was browsing the AH for an Offhand item I noticed that this book is now usable by people who don't have inscription. When I made this on my priest that wasn't the case but now I'm going to have to make one when I get on. The rest of the gear I'm going to have to probably get from running heroics, but considering that I was doing 1800 dps average on the training dummy last night I don't think that will be an issue.

Lastly I was doing this quest last night. I was wondering... if I was controlling him if I could see where he was.

That's when I noticed the epic offhand he was using....

Weekend of Raids

This weekend I did an unusual amount of raiding for myself. Friday was pretty normal with going in to Ulduar 25 man with my regular group. The group I raid with isn't a guild run... or a guild alliance... its just a group of skilled players that raids together on a weekly basis... I have no clue what you would call that. But I digress.

Friday saw our normal clearing of the first few bosses in ulduar FL, Razor, XT, and Kolo. We also usually start with VoA if we have WG and so Emalon also went down. Was about a 2.5 hr raid in total I would say by the time we got everyone together.

This gave us Saturday to work on Auriaya. If you are familiar with Ulduar at all you will know why they say this fight is all about the pull but in case you don't here is why...

That is our DK tank dying in .42 seconds on the pull. In the end we switched to our MT paladin pulling while popping Divine Protection (bubblewall) while our ret pally hit Divine Sacrifice with Divine Shield for a 80% damage reduction. Even with all of that I would start out the figh spamming lesser healing wave on the tanks till the damage stabilized and I could go back to DPS.

We finished the fight by going to Ignis and smacking him down. We had killed him before, a few weeks back, but for some reason he has been giving us a lot of problems. Ok ok... I know the reason... we have a tank who is TERRIBLE at any fight that requires more then one brain cell. Basically he would lose adds to healer threat and not taunt for just long enough to lose 3-4 healers which would end the attempt.

We solved this by having our ret pally switch to protection and having 3 add tanks. Really sucks having to compensate so much for one persons short falls. Especially when that one person wins every. single. freaking. tank gear that drops and still sucks.

So here is the picture of the boss going down.

Because I took the screen shot so quick Recount hadn't refreshed here are the meters for the fight.













I included the healing meter too because I got stuck in the pot a lot and was spamming heals on myself (as anyone who heals should do). Usually I come out ahead of the other shaman in dps but I did over 100k healing during the fight which was time I wasn't dpsing.

Overall it is a fun fight though the flame jets can be very very annoying for casters.

As if that wasn't enough for one night... my friend whispered me and asked if I wanted to run Naxx 25 on my hunter with them. I said sure and switched over to my hunter and headed to Naxx. No sooner had I got there she informed me they already filled the slot even though they told her they would invite me.

....

Well I was itching to raid more anyway so I dropped myself in LFG for Naxx 10. Figured I could run for a bit and if my friend needed me and the group I was in wasn't going anywhere I could switch. After about 10 minutes I got a whisper and invite for a fresh Naxx 10 group.

Well cool I joined up got on vent and waited a bit for them to find the last healer. The leader of the group mentioned they could find a tank and he could switch to his priest. That's when I offered to switch to my paladin and tank. After all it is easy to find a dps. Well we found a dps before a healer so I switched to my paladin and he hopped on his priest.

We then proceeded to raid for the next 6 hours. We cleared construct first, then military, then plague. At that point I was exhausted and logged for the morning. Had some new people and some weak dps but in all it still went pretty smooth. I'm used to pugs having that slow pace especially when people come and go.

Gluth, 4H were both pretty interesting. We lost our main kiter after the first decimate. I ran to the back and began kiting and thanks to a hunter dropping frost trap was able to effectively do so till the next decimate. At that point I took over on gluth and he went to the back to pick up the adds. This proved enough to bring the big doggie down.

On 4H we lost our offtank healer to a meteor just as Baron went down. The offtank lived long enough for my healer to get there and take over while I went to the back. Only thing was that because the switch had happened not long before that my healer didn't let his stacks drop off and ended up dying when he got to 6. Thane died shortly thereafter and we headed to the back where the last healer was.

At this point I did what I could for healing spamming flash of light till my mana went dry popping divine plea and a mana pot. Just before the last horseman died the priest kicked the bucket leaving me, the other tank, and 2 dps alive. Was sloppy but worked. Guess thats why I love playing hybrids. Often times you can use all of your abilities to pull off a win where you should have wiped. Have any experiences like this?