Month: May 2008

Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

(Related post: Take the Group Role)

The following statements are all true for raiding guilds:

  • The health of a PvE guild is dictated by its ability to progress through the game's content at the guild's expected rate.
  • Groups and raids live or die based on being able to assemble, launch, and progress. A successful raid has all three roles (tank, heal, damage) filled to sufficient levels.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in a typical successful raid is something like 2/3/5.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in total available, raid-ready players on my server (and I have no reason to think this is unique) is along the lines of 2/3/25. I just made these numbers up, but this is what I've seen. You can always, always find another damage-person to come along.
  • Officers are invested in their guild's continued existence and success.

The logical sum of these points is that officers of PvE raid guilds, even casual ones, should take up the roles that are most needed to keep their guild raiding, namely tanks and healers. Even if the character is not their main, they should have an alt ready to step into one of these needed roles should someone decide to retire from the game, lather up with crazy sauce, or just hit the next stop on the progression train.

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Rock Band is better than Guitar Hero

Since I bought Rock Band (RB) for my PS3 a few months ago, Guitar Hero 3 (GH3) grew roots on the shelf. GH3 was my first fake-music game, and I enjoyed it very much. But the same source who prodded me to try Guitar Hero implored me to try Rock Band. And sure enough, I liked it more.

The multiplayer in RB would have been enough all by itself. Having my buddy over to jam on "March of the Pigs"? My wife singing "Call Me" at the top of her lungs? All of us laughing and cursing at how hard Boston music is to play and sing? You just can't put a price on that.

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Not Pushing the Button

I'm a healer. I have other toons: a raid-ready tank that I love to play, a couple of decent dps toons. But in my heart, I love being a healer.

I've recently realized that people who are annoying tend to die more often in raids where I'm healing.

For example, my guild's current offtank is as annoying as hell. He's the living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect… I could go into great depth, and I very well might in a future piece, but suffice to say that there is often an undercurrent of private tells deriding him during every raid he participates in. However, our guild is like a family, and he's the weird cousin who makes it to every cookout. His availability is decent, he's not completely terrible at his class/role, and he tries to be friendly even if he lacks the social skills to pull it off. But there are all-too-frequent occasions where I wish I had a button I could push that gives him an anonymous electrical jolt in his real-life chair.

Actually, as it turns out, there's a little button that I don't push that does the same thing. It's actually a series of buttons, each of them bound to healing spells. He dies more than average.

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Drama is Inevitable

Like most people, I learned the hard way about second chances at relationships–backsliding, regression relationships, whatever you want to call it. Namely that they don't work, despite the fact that regression sex might sound like just what you need after a series of terrible first dates. However, unless one of you has been in a coma or similarly life-changing event, inevitably the crazy in your ex or the behavior that brought out the crazy in you (or both) manifests again… and then you finally wake to find yourself stuck in a supremely depressing place: exactly the same kind of unhappy situation you were in before, except you're older and you have demonstrably not learned your lesson. You're connected again to this person who makes you unhappy.

Then you somehow break it off. Whether you've extricated yourself via your own force of will or via external causes, you're free of this person and you now have some ability to see this kind of situation coming again. When faced with future backsliding, eventually you either:

  1. Realize that the number of seconds you have on this planet is finite, and perhaps regression sex-and-crazy this isn't the best way to spend those seconds. You opt out from that person.
  2. Let them back into your guild.

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Small Group Raiding in WotLK

As Blizzard announced last week, every WotLK raid will have a small-raid (10-man) option.

So if there are (guessing) four endgame raids at launch, each will have a 10 and 25 man version, creating a completely parallel path to the current 25-man raiding standard. Every subsequent patched-in raid will follow the same design. No more of this "two raids for small group raiding, eight raids for big group raiding". All 10-man raids will be able to physically visit every raid instance, see every boss, gear up and progress along a similar path, and ultimately see the entire expansion.

This is like ice cream in digital form. Strike that, this is like a pack of ice cream wolves wearing ice cream shoulder-cannons running through the streets, shooting ice cream fireworks everywhere. This is simply the best news since the game was released.

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