(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!

One of our top dps’ers had levelled a priest to maximum level and was looking for a rundown of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short healing) He posted in our guild forums, asking how to manage mana, which spells were good where, the differences between instancing and raiding, and so on. The other primary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of general strategy and how to use the various tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emotional rebuttal to what we wrote. Her entire priest healing strategy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s concerned, it is the only spell anyone needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of passionate and anecdotal evidence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she downright took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basically framed her argument such that to disagree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Needless to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuckled about it, but I didn’t understand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the application to a mid-tier raiding guild?

The answer: Mary could succeed in raiding, because her other healers could heal around her. I remember this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t continue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25th person in some raid. They’re probably progressing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash healing self, and looking down at everyone who isn’t geared like she is.

The funniest part of this is that Mary could only ever find success in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raiding is supposedly a prestige environment. Raiders are serious business. They’re seen as elite players. I mean, these people have zomgepics that are simply inaccessible to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of players who by definition of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones pushing new content as it’s released, who write the wowwiki articles, and write and tune the spreadsheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a better term, scrubs who execute well-defined strategies. I’m not saying that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just saying that their position in raiding guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like everyone else.

(The title of this article really should have been “Mid-tier raiding and below does not necessarily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)

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.

This raid design change is a much, much larger change than shrinking large-group raids from 40-man to 25-man. This is huge. This is an attempt to change everything about endgame raiding, not just the encounter size. And although I know that my little essays are read by beautiful and intelligent people, and I know that Blizzard didn’t read my post on raid sizes, but… It’s just absurdly freakish that they’re doing exactly what I wished for, even though I didn’t think they would until WoW2. (That alone made me feel weird while writing this. If you’re reading, I love you too, Blizzard.)

I strongly suspect that this will create interesting (and for my guild, extremely welcome) social repercussions throughout endgame raiding culture. Mainly because the loot still won’t be the same. The 25-man versions will probably be a half-tier or full-tier higher than the 10-man versions. Oh no!

But really, who cares? This is good news for everyone involved, both large-group and small-group raiders. For my guild, if you’re the kind of person who absolutely needs the best loot, then neither of us is going to get what we want by you being a member of my guild. Yay! We’re filtering each other out! What difference does it make that my EndgameA loot isn’t as good as a parallel EndgameA loot? They both allow access to our next EndgameB. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Small-group raids can basically ignore 25-man raiding now, as they only have better loot, and not more encounters, more story, or more of anything except people.

But what about the “10-man is normal mode, 25-man is heroic mode” stigma? We’ll encourage it. Please, fictional-Mike, go swim through the constant churn and drama that is the hardcore raiding guild experience and leave my happy small-group guild and all those like it alone. We’re not hardcore enough for you, and we wish you luck and good fortune.

My guild will just continue on in our own little raiding utopia, recruiting friendly people and continuing to have fun. Except this time, we’ll be running all the content in the game. We don’t have to choose between social and exploration any more. We’ll see the final boss of WotLK. We’ll see the conclusion of every story thread.

Great days are ahead!

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.

Some guilds progress quickly while others progress slowly. Before long, you have some small percentage of guilds at the top level, a larger percentage slightly below them, and ultimately many at the bottom. Now let’s follow a person, Mike, through his ascent to the endgame.

First, Mike belongs to a leveling guild. He groups with and rides that guild up to the maximum level, but the guild doesn’t have the wherewithal to group up for the endgame content, for whatever reason. Ultimately, Mike decides that he wants to see some of this content, so he joins pick-up groups, and he finds that it’s fun. He does a little research and applies to an entry-level endgame guild. Mike is accepted! Wait, why is this endgame guild recruiting?

Entropy is constant in all guilds. A personal dispute can’t be resolved, or someone can’t afford to fix their computer, or they get divorced, or die, or become parents, or get sent to jail, or change jobs, or any number of other real-life reasons. Or they simply get bored with the game and never log in again. Regardless, even good people with no other issues leave the game. Every guild’s membership is never constant, and therefore every guild must constantly recruit.

At Mike’s first endgame guild, he learns to group, and the guild is sweeping through EndgameA content and is trying to get through EndgameB content. Mike is getting loot upgrades at a decent rate in EndgameA, because the guild has that under control. The goals of Mike and the guild are in perfect alignment for this time. Let’s define these goals. Endgame guilds are easy:

• The goal of an endgame guild is to raise the total level of gear of its members so that they can explore the next level of content. The ability to run endgame content is dependent on both the size of the group and the collective loot level of that group. This means that taking a slightly-underequipped person is acceptable, because it’s better than the empty spot you have that threatens to kill your guild’s basic ability to raid.

Players are harder. Each endgame player is a combination of the following three goals:

1. A loot-driven player wants loot upgrades. Zomgepics.
2. A socially-driven player wants to play with their friends.
3. An exploration-driven player wants to see all the content available.

(There are obviously more goals, but bear with me for the purposes of this article.)

Mike participates and gets all the gear available at EndgameA content. After some variable amount of time (due to the randomness of loot drops), Mike has nothing left to gain from EndgameA. He finds that his guild’s progression on EndgameB–where progression is not easy and where the guild is currently stuck–is simply painful and too slow. Unfortunately for Mike’s guild, Mike would rather see new content or get loot sooner without the struggle of doing it the hard way. His goal ranking is: loot/exploration first and social last. The people in his guild don’t matter as much.

Luckily for Mike, there is another guild on the server which is exactly one step up in progression; they have EndgameB conquered and are working on EndgameC. The minimum requirement for gear to be successful in EndgameB content is EndgameA gear. Thanks to the random loot system, most of this new guild is still gearing up in EndgameB, so it’s fine for a new applicant to simply be in EndgameA gear. Thanks to the effort of his current guild, Mike has EndgameA gear! The door to his second endgame guild is open.

After some amount of sweating, Mike leaves EndgameA guild to join the more-progressed one. The new guild gladly looks the other way at how the player came to them. Who can be certain what happened? The new guild is hoping for the best, so they welcome Mike with open arms and a big cheer. After all, this new guild is trying to get through EndgameC and needs active participants, because they keep getting poached by EndgameD guilds, who are getting poached to EndgameE guilds. And so on.

The problem is that the best situation for people who are loot driven is to be in a guild where the average level of gear of its members is higher than his own. This grants access to higher level content without the difficult part of sweating through it the hard way. Loot-driven people like coasting easily through content. They like getting rewards for minimal effort.

As you can see, this leads directly to guild-hopping. And endgame guilds, in their state of constant recruitment, make the problem worse with their constant poaching of each other. If they don’t recruit this player, then some other guild will, and increase their chances of progression, which is just another guild to poach from them.

Thus, soon after endgame is explored by some, a guild stratification system sets in. A clear path through guilds emerges. Start in guild 1, jump to guild 2, then guild 3, and so on. This continues until the ladder is reset at the next expansion.

Blizzard has taken steps to combat this: reputation levels with instances; attunements; badges of justice; tier set tokens; exchanges for pve to pvp gear. Each has helped, but the problem is still there. The individual gets all the rewards, regardless of the relative efforts involved.

So while people say that Tobold’s “loot belongs to the guild” idea is crap, that’s not the point. There has to be a better way. Any suggestion is better than no suggestion.

In the meantime, the system churns on and the socially driven players who are close friends in an endgame guild–like mine–end up bitter that they’ve helped so many people up and along their own personal ladder, while the guild progresses very slowly because they hang on to a fraction of the people who pass through. Remember, we socially-driven people aren’t purely social, we want to get upgrades for our characters and see the next endgame, and the one after that. But we won’t give up friends just for loot or to visit another part of the game. Our only options are: 1) continue to hope that we can find enough like-minded people to get momentum to clear our current hurdle and experience the joy as a group; 2) give up on the endgame altogether. Giving up isn’t a good solution because raiding is fun. Seeing new content is fun. Clearing obstacles with your friends is fun.

So we loyal ones stick together and keep recruiting, hoping to find the rare person who values camaraderie over loot, while we quietly look forward to the next reset (the next expansion). The ladder won’t exist for a little while, and we can play in ideal environment, briefly.

I’m cheering all of you on, Tobold and Potshot and the rest.

(edited on May 2 for some grammar flubs)

(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.

The following quote has no definite attribution, but it’s good advice in general:

“It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

In World of Warcraft, this applies to damage meter reporting. Every raid diagnostic addon has a whisper/party/raid/guild broadcast feature. Whoever first thought of that should be killed! Despite that, these raid diagnostics and their ability to broadcast will exist forevermore and so: better to educate.

What came about very shortly after damagemeters-broadcast was invented was an eternal epeen contest between the dps’ers in raids.

“Who can top the damage meters?! Let’s export the results to raid chat after every boss attempt! After every wipe! Every raid!”

This damagemeter wanking was so strong in my guild’s Molten Core days that some characters would willfully skip the kill order just to have a longer uninterrupted damage stream on a target. Lunacy! Kill orders are critical in grouping. I’ll write more about it another time, but basically everything goes better when the damage dealers coordinate efforts. However, every class loses damage output while switching targets: melee has to run between targets, casters have to build up debuffs or whatever. It’s part of the game. But people were so wrapped up in epeen that they were actually trying to win at that stupid meter more than they were trying to win at the events. They’d push damage so hard that they’d pull aggro and wipe the raid, over and over, just to stay on top of the epeen meter. (Not multiple times in one raid, but once per raid) It wasn’t just one person; most of the damage dealers had been infected by damagemeter epeen madness.

I know that this wasn’t local to my guild, either. Every dps recruit had damagemeters, and they jumped right into the epeen contest.

It took us months to stamp that out. (Actually, most of those people left once TBC hit to form a hardcore raiding guild, which then naturally imploded after six months and then scattered to the winds. Real-life friends were on non-speaking terms with each other. Yay hardcore raiding! Later, I receive a tell, “lol you’re still on Aran?” “Yes, but I didn’t have to leave the server, and my friends are still my friends, and we still laugh with each other most every raid.”)

Anyway, I’ll speak for every healer and tank out there: nobody cares about your dps diagnostics. I mean, you wouldn’t want to see the following wipe out your chat box every few minutes, right?

Recount PANTS ranking:
1) Tank: PANTS
2) DPS1: PANTS
3) DPS2: PANTS
4) DPS3: NO PANTS
5) Healer: NO PANTS

Healing is best done with no pants, but I can’t speak for dps’ing. Would you want this spammed over your chat window? Your answer is what healers, tanks, and progression-minded dps think every time someone posts their epeen.

Virtually every raiding guild had to suffer through this. Most of the ones that I know realized that epeen and progression were counterproductive, and have some kind of policy on epeen spam.

I’m not picking on dps’ers, but I’ve only seen one healer ever spam healing numbers, and the rest of us whispered him so quickly that he couldn’t respond individually. “/ra Sorry!” Also, I’ve never seen a tank spam a damage breakdown. Maybe it’s something about the team-oriented mindset that tanks and healers must cultivate.

Also, this is nothing against raid diagnostics. I love them! Install them. Learn what they’re telling you. Use that information to improve your character. Discuss what you find with your peers. It’s even useful to challenge other players outside of a raid setting, “Warlocks, the mages/hunters/rogues are outdamaging each of you by 40% per person, and yet you have equivalent gear. What’s going on?” This can all be useful. You might help someone play better and have more fun! I personally use Recount and Recap every raid.

But have mercy. Keep your damn epeen out of my chat window.