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: 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: 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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(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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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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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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If you like to group in these big social MMORPG games, then choose the hard but essential role, whatever that role may be.

In World of Warcraft, my primary character is a healing priest. My close runner-up is a protection warrior. Say what you want about inability to solo, but every single time I log on, I’m asked to group. Every single time.

My dps friends tell me how hard it is to get a group, or how many groups get four players but never get that last person because they need either a tank or a healer and never end up finding one. I can imagine how they feel, but I do not understand these people. Once you have seen that groups always stall on tanks and healers, then why not just solve the problem? That’s how I started tanking, and I grew to enjoy it nearly as much as healing, and certainly more than dps’ing. Instancing is one of the most fun parts of the game, and when you’re a needed role, you have the ability to write your own ticket for grouping and raiding forevermore. But more than that, I enjoy the fact that I make groups any time I want.

Let me try an analogy. If you’re of legal age of consent and enjoy having sex, then when you go to an engineering college (typically around 6:1 male-to-female ratio), would you rather be a guy or a girl?

This analogy didn’t really pan out like I hoped. Let me try again.

Picture a loosely-organized football league where there are fifteen teams and only five quarterbacks. How do you think those five quarterbacks are treated when they show up at the field? That’s right, they get to have hot engineer sex as often as they want and they get to be choosy about what jersey they wear.

Just like tanks and healers do. This is your guild and your server.

The downside is that you solo at 30-80% the speed of a pure dps class. This isn’t as bad as you’ve heard, unless you’re absolutely in love with grinding. Even on my little protection warrior who’s dual-wielding, I can go fast enough if not fast. Just be sure that in all those instances you’re running that you grab unwanted dps gear that’s appropriate for your character. And honestly, if you’re not a complete social misfit, you’ll probably have game friends who will group with you for dailies or other solo content because you group with them. If you do love grinding (or you are a social misfit), then just have a dps alt. Who doesn’t have a hunter in their pocket nowadays?

I’m not saying that dps isn’t fun. It is, and it’s very relaxing as well. I have a hunter who I battleground with, and it’s a great time. But if grouping is what you like best, then why would you want to compete with the millions of other hunters/rogues/warlocks/mages/hybrid-dps spec people for the large number of damage spots in a raid/instance, when you can just walk into the big-leagues by being a role where demand is far greater than supply? My guild is perpetually short on tanks, we’ll take anyone with 9k base life and the ability to fog a mirror. I’m exaggerating, but dip into the Guild Recruitment channel and you’ll see this message in the first ten minutes:

X of Y is raiding Z content and is looking for a offtank/maintank/healer to join and “raid casually”/”raid five nights a week”/”oh god please join us, I don’t care if you’re an alt of another toon in another guild, just give some backup to drop cross-eyed-Joey the holy pally alt who still looks for his Mend Pet button”.

Heck, even my dps wife loves that I’m a tank/healer combo, because our group is already half-made whenever we want to run together. Her primary alt is a druid healer. And while she’s still warming up to healing, she loves the ease at which she can find a group.

So make your next alt project a tank or a healer, and get to the hot engineer sex.