The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]

No class is globally better at PvP than every other class. WoW PvP is a huge rock-paper-scissor game, where there’s an answer for every move, or in WoW’s case, Class A always feels overpowered to an opponent of Class B, Class B over Class C, and Class C over Class A. (except expanded out to an 11-way graph) While no class is universally dominant in PvP, some builds are universally better than other builds in that environment.

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The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]

Your ability to solo partially determines the experience you’ll have in groups. If you have an easy time in the leveling game, you are going to have a more difficult experience in the endgame/group game. The following list goes from easy-to-solo to hard-to-solo.

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The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]

It occurred to me that people who haven’t been grouping or raiding a lot don’t know what role various classes have in a raid, or of class design in general. You can go read the page on the worldofwarcraft website, but they make every class sound equally great at everything. That’s just not the reality of it. So I can keep complaining about how many people get stuck between little knowledge and expanded knowledge, or I can take my shot at fixing it via explanation.

If you don’t know how a particular character or spec of a character fits into the group game that follows the leveling game, this is for you.

It’s possible to find out everything I’m about to write from various places online, but as far as I know, there’s not one place where it’s all connected. Most articles are written from the point of view of one class or another; every guide is written by that class, for that class.

This is going to be the top level view, how raid leaders (and possibly Blizzard designers) look at classes and their role in the game.

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I realized in my last article, I used the reference “25th person” without explaining what it meant. In my time as raid lead, it became a shorthand for the most underperforming person in the raid. A raid lead typically knows this as they’re assembling the raid.

“Hey, Lisa wants to come along to Gruul tonight.”

“We already have a 25th person.”

The Nth person is someone the rest of the raid plays around in order to make sure the common jobs get done. Good healers cover for the bad healer, strong dps makes up for weak dps, everyone covers for the tank who can’t remember to use their cooldowns, etc. This person, for whatever reason, just doesn’t help in raids that much.

You’re counting up from the bottom, so in a 10-man raid Lisa would be the 10th person.

Of course, if you’re bringing multiple people who need to be played around, you could have a 24th person, 23rd person… but there gets to be a point where somebody has to know what they’re doing. Unless you’re talking battlegrounds, in which case it’d probably be easier to count good people from the top.

(Important Safety Tip: Raid leaders should only use this language to each other, strictly behind the curtain. I do not advise referring to anyone like this publicly. Although, I would like to hear how that goes. I think it’d be funny, in a dark way.)

(Related post: Raiding does not mean Skilled)

World of Warcraft, and every game like it, is really two different games. I first read this thought at Penny Arcade (can’t find where because their search function is weak). Basically, you have the levelling game where you start at L1 and then play until max level (currently L70), and then the game that happens after the levelling game, which is filled with group activities of all sorts as you improve your max level character.

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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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I’ve been reading Tobold and Potshot lately. They’re talking about loot and game design as it relates to endgame guilds, specifically guild hopping and progression problems due to it. I haven’t seen a decent explanation of the problem, but as a guild officer/leader I’ve seen it in action twice now, once with the original WoW endgame and now with the TBC endgame. I don’t have a solution, but I can frame the problem.

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expansion hits, when there’s limited collective endgame exploration. All the content is new and fresh, then I find myself grouping with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the progression roller coaster. It’s glorious! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to happen, and a tiered system begins to form.

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(Previous article)

While it’s a bad idea to link your damage meters over a common chat channel, it’s a very bad idea to link your damage report if you’re a damage dealer and you’re that one dps’er who consistently does less damage than the tank. What you’re trying to say is that you outperform the healer at doing damage, but what you’re really saying is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep everyone alive and also do 30% of the damage that I’m doing.”

The healer’s damage is basically like the rock bottom of damage performance in a raid. Healing does zero damage. You are also saying that you don’t understand groups enough to know what the different roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spamming down. This is a chain of thought that will immediately lead others to group with you less, because veterans will sense that this is probably the tip of the iceberg:

• you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when someone tries to tell you how your character works
• you don’t understand or don’t care about crowd control
• you cry and blame someone every time you die
• you go afk without warning
• you complain about repair costs
• you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
• you use curse words in a way that’s not interesting, relevant, or funny

Not everyone is all of these, but usually these character flaws don’t come in single servings. Most people went to the all you can eat Buffet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a single damage meter post said. And incidentally, this person lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

I healed through Magister’s Terrace this weekend to get a couple of friendly guildies ready for MrT heroic. My wife, in the next room, said “What’s wrong?” I hadn’t even realized I sighed. “This new recruit just spammed his damage meters after our first wipe.”

I had forgotten about this little slice of the game. Of course, now my blissful ignorance has been shattered, but it’s a good topic of discussion.

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I have to admit that my most coveted drop that I want from Magister’s Terrace is the phoenix minipet. Minipets are probably the silliest thing in World of Warcraft. A non-combat pet. Window dressing.

For my wife, I think minipets are about 20% of why she plays the entire game. When I passed on the rumor of minipet bags, she was thrilled. She is that person who has 20 minipets, in her inventory. Chickens, robots, elephants, glowing balls of light, bugs, old chewing gum, and a ball of string. I have a mere dozen. Only four on my inventory at a time (less on my bagspace-starved warrior, he only gets three) Our love of minipets is strong, and it turns out that we are not alone.

The best minipets have a noise you hear when you click on it. Like with Willy, you get a groan. Mechanical chicken, you get a robotic clucking noise. And so on. It’s something fun you can do if you’re on a raid and the raid leader has to explain an encounter you know to the new person.

Come to think of it, the baby panda is partially what sold my wife on the game in the first place. You have these majestic, imposing characters, with huge shoulder armor and glowing effects and fearsome weapons and so on. And then you have a humble prairie chicken pecking the ground next to you. There’s something about that pairing that’s just perfect. Before we got her a computer of her own (and a game client of her own), my wife and I would play together, with her riding shotgun. We chatted up someone in Ironforge who had a baby panda. “That’s so cool!” “Yeah, but he doesn’t really do much.” And at that moment, the baby panda took a nap, laying down with the green zzz over its head. We laughed for a solid ten minutes. That was the beginning.

Minipets factor into our guild’s raid strategy as well. When we encounter difficulty on a new boss, the wipes can get tedious. Someone always suggests different minipets, and everyone in the raid says “Ah yes. Minipets.” A different contingent of (useless) minipets will certainly make this attempt much easier. Like I said, we’re casual/raiding, and we should probably be talking more about whatever’s killing us, but how can you turn down a guaranteed smile and laugh before rushing in to die again?

You can’t. It’s just one of the silly parts of WoW that make it fun.