(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their status in the raiding game means that they’re Right. They label other people noobs, and the silly thing is that people believe them. “I have this awesome item, you don’t, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t.” This frustrates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very personable, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the original WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was looking for a more relaxed playtime requirement while still playing at a high level. A perfect fit!

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(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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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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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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Many guilds have outright terrible names. Ok, not terrible, just terribly bland. They’re all stamped from the same lame press: X of Y.

• Seekers of Truth
• Champions of Honor
• Seekers of Honor
• Defenders of Glory
• Champions of Truth
• Seekers of Glory
• Defenders of Truth
• Champions of Glory
• Defenders of Champions
• Protectors of Italian Virginity (kidding, this one would actually be ok)
  

Tell me that you haven’t seen dozens of these guilds lingering around. In my experience, they’re always recruiting. Their GM quotes Gladiator or other epic movies in his sig. I can just keep piling these stereotypes on, we’ve all seen people like this. They attach weight to the name of a group of people.

Next time I start a guild, I’m going to call my guild “X of Y”. Seriously.

The problem with most joke names is that nothing is funny after two days. Just like most tattoos aren’t cool in just a couple of years. What’s cool and funny now is never cool the fifth time you explain it. However, I suspect that as you see another guild form with a name like Harbringers of Misfortune, you might get another chuckle that will keep this joke fresh.

At least a guild with a stale joke name can be disbanded and reformed with a newer joke name… unlike those sad souls stuck with tribal tattoos.

In the meantime, I have an unguilded alt who’s about to start a new guild. It’ll be right up there with the Bankadins.

My casual/raiding guild is starting to build up to 25-man content. They’re raiding with a bunch of ex-guildies who have drifted through a handful of other guilds before running out of options and trying to start their own. This splinter guild doesn’t have enough people to raid even Kara, never mind their goal of beginning 25-man content, so they proposed an alliance to start the 25-man track.

There’s enthusiasm in my guild. New content! For many people in the guild, this will be their first big raid ever. For others, this would be a way to relive the glory days (cough) of Molten Core/Onyxia. The 25-man track is the big boy raid track! Whee!

There are a few problems, though.

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When I was raid lead in vanilla wow, I arranged and lead many many runs on Molten Core, a few on Blackwing Lair, and many in Zul’Gurub and AQ20. When news of The Burning Crusade’s reduction in raid size came out, that the new raids would be 25 and 10, I cheered. My guild thought I was being sarcastic (a reasonable guess), but honestly I was thrilled. I still am. Larger raids are for masochists.

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