Resto Nation

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time in game lately and that has lead me to spend less time blogging about. I’ve had a few things to say and now with the new patch, even more. I’d like to get back into the swing of things by talking about what I like about new content and what I don’t.

What I like is probably the easiest to explain. The instances in Icecrown and the new raid are beautiful. I really think that Blizz dropped the ball on the Tournament and I think they have made up for it in ICC. The lore is deep, the graphics are stunning, and fights are complex and interesting. Of course there are new shiny gear epics to get as well.

The new LFG system is also a straight-up home run. It took 5 years, but Blizz finally got it right.

So far after the first week I’m pretty happy with my progression. My 10 man has cleared all available content and picked a couple of achievements. My 25 man has downed Lord Marrowgar. I’d like to clear all 4 released bosses in 25s, but for some reason content is always harder for us there than in 10s. Either way, for the first week this will do.

What I don’t like about new content is a little more complex, but it can be boiled down to basically unfinished old content. I am completionist and when things are not complete I am not happy.

My biggest disappointment is Ulduar. 25 mans were always dismal in there and it saddens me that my 7 shards of Val’nyr will most likely never see the other 23. I’ve learned to live with the loss of the legendary, albeit begrudgingly, but it’s 10 mans that I’m really not happy about.

We’ve cleared Firefighter, the hardest 10 man fight in the game, but we’ve only put one hour in on Algalon and failed. He sat there for weeks waiting to be tried, but we were too busy with “current content”. Alas to date I have no “Starcaller” and no Rusted Proto-Drake (we just need Yogg+1). I want them both badly even now, two content patches later.

Any fail idiot can grind gear or get an occasional drop in a 25 man, so gear score means almost nothing to me. For me titles like Starcaller and the Glory Drakes are what really let the top-level raiders show off. My team deserved to have them, but getting in there and doing it feels like pulling teeth.

At the end of the day I’m happy running the new content. It’s pretty and fun. I just really hope that my team doesn’t let the low hanging fruit we’ve worked so hard for pass us by in the name of gear score. The gear will come. The Drakes won’t be there forever…

I often find myself saying that Covenant is a casual raiding guild with delusions of being hardcore. This is not actually true. After pondering our existence for some time the best that I can come up with is the oft-used oxymoron “casually hardcore”.

Most folks who take the time to think about it consider a person’s, and by extension guild’s, playtime in WoW to exist on a continuum. At one end you have the ultra casual. These folks play the game at their leisure. They probably don’t raid and love to play alts. Their ultimate goal is relaxed fun at their own pace. At the other end you have high structured, completive, goal driven guilds. These players dedicate themselves to the game above all else and strive for world first progression kills. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being playing hide and seek in Silvermoon and ten being guilds like Ensidia and Premonition, I’d say we are a seven. This is a precarious place to be. Because of lax recruiting rules, guild mergers, and other things we have three levels of players in the guild. We also have three ten man groups A, B, and C.

Note: The levels of player are not always indicative of which ten man group they are on as these groups formed organically.

The players in the first level are more of 8 to 9 on the scale. They are goal driven students of the game. They push themselves to complete the top level of 10-man content and min-max their toons. They are the mentors and leaders of the guild. These players are driven by gear, achievements, server progression, and bragging rights. They are Type A personality people.

The players in the second level are more of a 6-8 on the scale. They have many of the same goals as players in the first group but have been held back for various reasons. Time, real-life issues, issues in previous guilds have all put these players slightly behind the bleeding edge. They are also very goal driven and given the proper resources will join the first level of the hardcore in time.

The players in the third level are more in the 4-6 range. They aren’t min-maxers and generally have a lower level of play. This is either due to a lack of knowledge or a desire to play the game on a more casual level. This way of play is not bad, but it does not lend itself to successful raiding. Players at the third level who seek out knowledge to improve there play either on their own or through a mentor quickly move into level 2. These players also tend to be very loyal.

The one constant through all three levels in Covenant seems to be a desire to shift further towards the hardcore end of the spectrum. With the institution of DKP and recent forming of a third 10 man group this seems to be working well.

However a lack of a solid recruiting and application process as well as not having a system of negative incentives is hold us back from the top levels of play. These also seem to be a ways off so that could stunt growth in progression. However in the meantime the focus on balancing the needs and wants of all three kinds of players is more important to the heath and viability of the guild.

As players move up the levels and progress in their own toons the guild will progress better in content and we can make the call as to whether or not we want to ratchet up the intensity. We can’t become a hardcore progression guild overnight, but the path is visible. We just need to survive the process. As the GM is it my job to see that we do.

After a three month hiatus, I have returned to the blogosphere. This is not a sudden choice but in fact has been a long time coming. Some things needed to change for me to pick up the pen again and now I am ready to start anew.

The first thing that needed to go was the old the blog title. At the time I made it I thought it was witty, but I grew to not like it. I thought it was bulky and didn’t convey the essence of what I wanted my site to be about. I had good readership so for a long time I did not change it. Now, with the death of the guild <NO DRAMA> the name is completely dead to me. For the record, I also never liked the guild name.

I have been toying with the name Resto Nation since June and thought it would be appropriate, easy to remember, and just slightly witty. It’s a much better fit. The things I really enjoy in WoW are healing and leadership. That is what this blog will be about from now on.

Playing all four healing classes at level cap I feel I have a very strong grasp of the topic. I am also not only the GM of <Covenant>, I am the healing lead for raids. I spend a great deal of time researching the classes, specs, and gear that help keep nubcakes alive, even when they are standing in fire. This will be a forum to help me share that knowledge.

The thing that really brought me back to blogging was that I remembered why these sites are needed. Being a GM is a difficult, time consuming, and often thankless job. No one can really understand what it takes until you try and run a 25 man raiding guild with 130-150 toons. Often times it can leave you feeling frustrated, upset, and quite alone.

Other blogs have given me solace and understanding when I feel I am alone. I discovered they have almost the exact same problems that I have, sometimes it is so similar I think they are writing about me.  The knowledge that these issues are common is comforting. Having a sounding board of other folks in your situation is very helpful. Learning from other peoples success and mistakes is priceless.

I’d like to thank a few of these folks publicly. Starman from Casual Raid Leader, Matticus from World of Matticus, and Amber from I Like Bubbles have all made my life better. I feel your pain and understand.

So now it is time for me to give back. Hopefully I can help out other players out there or at least give them comfort that they are not alone. I’ll be here for a while so stop by and hello. You now have one more star to help guide the ship.

Heya everybody! I’m back!

So it’s been a little over a month and a lot has happened. Well, that’s kind of an Understatement.

Covenant has grown into a thriving 25 man raiding guild. We have had many guild firsts and the gear reset has given our progression a quick kick in the ass. We have many new toons who are working out splendidly and the old folks are doing well too.

Personally, inthe past month I have grown into the GM role and finished my 4th toon, The Priest. My healer collection is now complete. The new toon has given me hours of fun and I’m sure there are more to come.

Since so much has happened in the past month, here are some sceenshots to sum it up. Stay tuned there will be more back here shortly.

Guild First Heroic Auriaya

Guild First 25 Man Beasts of Northrend

Soop in a Tank

Toon #4: Priest Dings 80

I have a lot to do in WoW. Playing three characters with plans for a fourth is quite time consuming. I have to-do lists, goals, and thoughts everyday about how to spend the limited time I have in-game. That makes days like today even more special.

Because of medical reasons, the person who could most accurately be described as my over-seer was not in the office today and I was free to get lunch by myself for the first time is a while. I went to Whole Foods for a salad like I usually do when I fly solo, except this time I decided to take my laptop.

The market has a decent and free wireless connection and I was able to post up and play WoW while I ate my lunch. This has improved my day significantly. Normally I am stuck bored at work pining to leave so I can hit the gym and play WoW. Playing for 45 min at lunch gave me a much need break from the monotony and many even make me more productive this afternoon.

I was able to get all of my banking, mailing, auctions, and gear buying done for the day in quick order. This usually takes me about an hour when I first log in every evening. With this out of the way I’ll have more time level my shaman when I get to the hotel before raiding on both the Tree and Kora.

I need to find a way to handle my mail and auctions every day at lunch… So much WoW… So little time…

Now I just need to find a way to craft Netherweave Bags faster…

I was doing some post-mortem analysis on last nights raids with another NO DRAMA officer this afternoon and the topic of10-man healing came up. As I was answering some of his questions I got to thinking about Raid Healing, DPSers,  and Recount.

A healers use of Recount tells a lot about them, their motivations, and often what they are doing wrong. Healers (and raid healing in general) are also misunderstood by many DPSers. Recount does not help this.

I’d like to take this oppertunity to shed a little light on raid healing in 10-man progression in general and the use of Recount. I hope his helps.

The first thing that it is important to understand is…

LearnToPray’s Golden Rule of Raid Healing :

1. If the Tank dies it is the Healer’s fault.

2. If the Healer dies it is the Tank’s fault.

3. If the DPS dies it is the DPS’s fault.

This rules applies pretty much only to threat but it is true 9 times out of 10. The main exception being infinite range raid damage phases like XT-002 Deconstructor’s Tantrum and KT’s Ice Block.

The next thing to understand is heal priority. This is the De Facto 10-man priority:

Special Assignment (ie Slag Pot or Kologarn’s Grip) > Self > Tanks > Other Healers > DPS

So barring extra mechanics the highest priority DPS starts at #6. They do not like this. However it is the right call.

With 5 DPS who gets the first heal? This is where decisions about life and death are made. A good healing team will know each other and have a good idea of who is going to heal whom. However, if one of the healers in unavailable or a number of other factors occur a healer must decide on the spot.

This is what separates good healers from bad healers and makes great healers irreplaceable. Healers should ALWAYS have Recount running. Recount should ALWAYS be on Damage Done for the current fight. This shows you the top toons’ total damage on the boss as well as their DPS.

Your choice is now made for you. If DPS A has 3K DPS and DPS B has 1.5K DPS and both are at 15% health, DPS A gets the heal while DPS 2 eats the floor. This also gives DPSers a reason other than e-peen to top the charts.

As a healer you should be a inherently selfless team player. This is not always true. Healers who try and “top the charts” through Effective Heals or Lowest Overheals are not playing correctly and will hurt the raid by trying to be “better”.

As long as you don’t run out of mana, over healing is never a problem. Waiting to heal and under-healing to is a problem.

Assignment sniping, stepping on HoTs, and going OoM from spamming group heals all increase your Effective Heals at the expense of better play.

Healers with huge e-peens also tend to cause drama and get their feelings hurt. In rare cases healers will let other players die out of spite on a progression run. If I ever hear of this or know it is happening, that player is dead to me. They will be immediately gkicked, ignored, and banned for life. I have zero tolerance with that.

Another reason to not measure healers by only Recount numbers is beacause it is the same as DPS. Healers do two things: Heal (add numbers back to HP), and Mitigate (prevent numbers from being subtracted from HP). Recount only tracks Heals not Mitigation, which is actually better. This kills the overall numbers of Discipline specced Priests and 52 / 17 / 2 specced Holy Paladins.

Due to Beacon of Light and Glyph of Holy Light Holy Paladins also run an average of 50-60 % overheal. Resto Shamans also have large overheal with Chain Heal being the 3 or 4 closest toons. Druids do as well as their HoTs are commonly sniped and Living Seed is almost always and overheal.

I hope this post makes healers not already in the know better and the rest of the raid more understanding and knowledgeable.

Oh, and one last thing: Yes, every time you ask, we already know you need heals…

Hi all. Busy day so I don’t have a lot of time to post, but I wanted to let everyone know that after some RL difficulties Siha from BananaShoulders.com has returned!

I can not begin to tell you how much I have learned about how to be a healadin from Siha. Her site is a wealth of great resources. If you’re a Holy Paladin you need to read this site at least twice a week.

Here are a couple links to some of her best posts:

Holy Paladin Pre-Raid Gear List

Gemming Your Holy Paladin

Holy Paladin Gear Enhancements 101

Spellpower and You: Gearing in WotLK

Running a guild is a logistically difficult thing to do. As Hibbleton said, it should come with a paycheck.

The great Stan Lee taught us all that “With great power comes great responsibility.” As a Senior Officer or Guild Leader you are directly responsible for other people’s fun. This is an incredible amount of power to have over people who you have never actually “met”. Being a raid leader compounds this even further.

To quote another famous man: “You can not be all things to all people.” This is also very true.

So with all this power and limited choice who do you save: the people in the bus dangling on the cliff or the folks swimming next to the capsized ferry? It’s a choice that no one wants to make. It is also the same choice that makes someone a leader.

NO DRAMA is at a crossroads. We were founded as a group of like-minded players who liked playing together. We became friends. Even as wannabe punk rocker in my youth I never had friends with names like Boagrious, Chorizo, Callinan, Soop, Tirill, and many others… That doesn’t even count Sephiroth, who I spent the entire summer after sophmore year trying to kill in FFVII.

The best part is I keep meeting more awesome folks. These humans are the reason I love NO DRAMA. Not the toons.

I guess in essence we were founded as a “social guild”. Then we tried to become a “progression raiding guild”. I am as guilty, if not more so, than anyone of this.

It was bound to happen. We are good. We are really good. The funny thing is, with a couple of exceptions, most of the members were not hardcore raiders in BC or Vanilla WoW. Some of us forget that. I forget that.

Naxxramas was very conducive to being a social guild who raids. Plus, there was just about 10 of us. So it worked out well.  Because of the way that Blizzard handles progression now. After we bested the 10 man version we wanted 25 man content. So we pugged alot and we grew. Because people liked us. To be honest we are very likable. Plus we have girls.

Soon we had enough for our own 25 man runs. Here is where issues crept in. 10 man logistics can be a little difficult but all in all it is fairly easy to organize 10 people. 25 people are hard to organize, especially when you don’t know them all as well as you’d like.

Loot drama is also bound to happen. 25 people + 4 items = 21 people (maybe more) with no items. People like shiny items. A loot council was setup to fix this. This is good and bad. But the mantle of leadership grew heavier.

The next step from the 25-man Naxx content is into 10-man Ulduar. This transition has not been as smooth. How do we raid a reasonable amount of time and get both Naxx 25 done as well as 2 10-man Ulduar groups. We need to prioritize.

The priority should be the people. To do that and still raid it feels like 2 10-man groups with alternates is the way to go. It starts to feel like managing a sports team at this point. However we need to act more like friends in a pickup league, not the NBA. We are not Ensida or Vodka. That is ok.

We need to find a balance between raiding and friendship. I don’t think you have to sacrifice one for the other.

In the end it is easy to forget that the toon is really a human. Especially when managing the toons in a team.  Communication is key. When you treat people like people and actually talk to them everyone wins.

The caveat is that these humans want to raid. We think it’s fun. So we can’t forget that either.

We need to  make NO DRAMA something people want to be a part of, and not just to raid. That is the real challenge, not raid schedules. Although those need to be made as well.

It is a beautiful, albeit delicate, balance and the leadership is the tipping point.

Welcome to the World of Win! Last night Shai and the rest of NO DRAMA went to Heroic Naxxramas and for the first time downed Thaddius. I am so very proud of everyone. We tried a new strategy of running straight through Thaddius, not around him. This worked like a charm. We lost a few people to jumps and charges, but almost everyone stayed up. The best part is we downed him after he enraged. A little more work and he too will be put on the farm.

Shai also got a shiny new hat, which was promptly replaced by another shiny new hat from Maxxena when we rolled through the lolfest that is the Arachnid Wing. Luckily my mentor in all things leafy is the 8th best geared Tree on Horde-side Undermine US (Shai is 102nd btw) .

GrimToll also dropped. That’s the first time I ever seen it. Two wings in one night is a great start. I think we can pull off the full clear this week if we stay motivated.

Speaking of server ranks, I was curious and looked up where Kora stands among her peers. Here is the result as if this afternoon:

Overall on Undermine US: 441

Horde-Side Undermine US:  154

Holy Paladin Undermine US: 27

Holy Paladin Horde-Side Undermine US: 11

<NO DRAMA> Undermine US: 1

Check out my enormous e-peen…

I am a die hard perfectionist when it comes to min/maxing and this is very exciting for me. Our servers raiding population is 4:1 in favor of the Alliance and I’m still wearing a cloak with no enchant… I’m pretty ok with where I’m at.

Enough about me. I also overhauled the blogs addon section today. There are many new updates to what I am using that are worth checking out. Be sure to checkout HideBlizzard if you are a Grid user.

I also plan on posting a weekly zip file of the addons I use, except for Bejeweled, Peggle, and LightHeaded in one updated package. Look for this very soon.

One last random note. One of my favorite WoW bloggers in the interwebs, Larisa from The Pink Pigtail Inn, posted a must read article that eliquantly explains why WoW is more than “Just a Game”. Excellent.

As NO DRAMA continues to expand and we venture further into 25-man content I am given pause to reflect on what makes 25-man raiding “Heroic”. I have come up with one answer: Leadership.

Two nights ago I was running 10-man Ulduar with more or less the same group that I have been since it was released. It was very smooth. Everyone knew what to do. They knew the fights, they knew their class, and they knew their role. Loot was even fair and basically decided by the group as soon as it dropped. All in all it was pleasant and fun.

Last night we did another 25-man run on The Arachnid Quarter in Naxx. Over all the run went well and we even started out with 21 toons and it was still not a problem. This concerns me.

Basically it is almost impossible to not pwn everything in the Arachnid with appropriately geared toons. The “Naxx is too easy” horse has been beaten to death, but it’s true. Ultimately we are running 25-man Naxx for three reasons:

1. We have not cleared it as a guild. This is simply because we were a 10-man guild for most of WoTLK and just recently have the manpower to do it.
2. Gear people up. It is not uncommon for new recruits in the guild to trade up 187 blues for 213 purples. Some of them have never even seen the inside of Naxx (10).
3. Prepare to run Ulduar (25).

It is this last point that concerns me.

Last night we walked into to Anub’Rehkan and had to explain the fight. I don’t think I’m being an asshole when I say you should know that fight. Seriously. In fact, even if you have never personally done the encounter you should always read the strat before a raid. It makes you a better raider.

Raid Composition is also important. You should not go into Naxx with 7 healers. It is overkill. You should also not go into Sartharion + 2 with five tanks. Two of the tanks are useless and that fight is a DPS race.

Unfortunately we are at a cusp. We have enough people to run 25 mans but the composition is off for main specs. Until we get more people we need to have tanks and healers leverage their dual specs.

The issue is that people who we can carry through Naxx will wipe the raid in Ulduar. Grobbulus and Thaddius are smaller examples of this.

As raid and guild leaders it is important to strike a balance where we can help people get better and gear up but at the same time not coddle them. On the flip side we need to be stricter with time so we can clear more content. Yet we want it to be fun, and rules and consequence make games less fun.

In the end it is much like herding cats. You can try and direct the cats, but really it is up to them what they want to do.

Raiders need to be informed, prepared, and motivated. As Leaders we need to be driven, but also helpful, understanding, and patient.

Anyone who ever said this game is just about pushing the same buttons over and over has obviously never raided.