The end of the beginning.

Yep, it happened. Those who've looked for my armoury recently will not have found it because it's no longer there; I'm now a horrid Alliance player who packed up from Kilrogg and joined The Flaming Ruby on the Argent Dawn RP server. This, to many, will be a shock - I ran the Eye of Nerzhul for two and a half years, very successfully, and I loved the people I had around me. Unfortunately, though, such a long period of single-handed leadership takes its toll and when I found myself pulling in a direction that the membership at large didn't want, then something had to give.

As gut-wrenching as it was, I had to pass my guild on to people who were more in tune with the social roots the guild should perhaps never have left, and that most of my members hoped the guild could maintain. I cannot thank enough all of those who have supported both the guild and myself over the last two and a half years, especially those responsible for giving me some of the most wonderful memories to take with me. The Eye of Nerzhul will always hold a very special place in my heart and, at its peak, it embodied the very best aspects of what a guild should be; a community of friends enjoying the game together.

But we move on. I should thank Emelia, the GM of The Flaming Ruby, for inviting me into what looks to be a great choice for my new home. I was lucky enough to be invited for their first kill of Nefarian last night, and it was wonderful to just be able to raid without having to worry about how people were playing. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy leading raids and think I'm pretty good at it; but it's absolutely no fun having to moan at your friends who you know for certain are trying their best.

And it's on that subject that we find today's topic:

How does one best fit into a new guild?

This is, in truth, the second time I've done it. The first was on my priest alt who I wanted the chance to raid with back during Icecrown, so I jumped to the Alliance side of Kilrogg and joined a guild that had a decent enough 10 man team. I didn't do it so well. I behaved like a bit of a child, truth be told - as I wasn't on my main, I ended up picking faults with the guild tanks instead of just being the supportive player that I should have been. While this was supposed to be constructive, it must have come out as incredibly obnoxious and unhelpful. I suppose I hid behind the fact that I was playing on an alt, and used that as an excuse for not bothering to compete with the other healers and picking on the tanks. Ultimately, I wasn't looking for a new home and was selfishly trying to complete some content. What I thought was "constructive criticism" was, to them, elitist snobbery that they didn't have to put up with. To their eternal credit, they did put up with it and I cannot be more humbled by their choice to do so.

This time, however, is completely different. I AM looking for a new home, one where I want to be popular and be a valuable contributor to a successful raid team. There is no hiding place whatsoever as I'm on my main character, the one I play best, and will be judged on my ability to tank and to fit into an already successful raid. This, to my amazement, is nerve-wracking; I've no idea how good their normal tanks are, so cannot gauge how I'm performing in comparison. Often, tanks are the best players in a guild, so it's a lot to live up to. This is especially true when you consider that tanks are also usually long-term servants of the guild who've spent a long time building both rapport and trust with their fellow raiders.

And this is the key point; if you're joining a new guild, especially to raid as a tank, what is most important is how you come across to your guildmates and NOT how they come across to you.

You are going to be compared to their normal/current tanks.
You are going to have to potentially fit in with a new system.
You are going to have to accept that your way is less important than their way.
You are going to have to accept that your reputation hangs on how you play.

But more than anything else:

You are going to have to accept that how YOU view your behaviour may not be how your new guild views it.

A new raid will probably hold trust and friendship with their tanks, something it takes time to build. No matter how good a player you are, the new people you're playing with will need time to properly get to know you and how you do things. It's more important that the new guy works around his new team mates, but I'm talking more about how you personally perform as a tank, with all your little idioms and idiosyncrasies in tow. If you consider at all times how you look to your guild mates and always try to play your best (NO COASTING!), then you can hopefully get a positive response.

At time of writing, I cannot tell you how this will all pan out for me. I'll be providing updates no doubt, but we'll have to wait and see if my new guild think I'm cutting it. At the end of the day I'm just trying to be as helpful, reliable, honest and available as I can be, and trying to perform as highly as possible when I'm "in the chair".

Wish me luck. :)

The value of "threat stats".

"Expertise is twice as good as hit up until the soft cap at 26; at that point, their relative value is the same until their respective hard caps."

Remember that mantra from Wrath of the Lich King? I do. I also remember expertise being our best threat stat by a mile and always making sure I was at the soft cap of 26 to avoid my attacks being dodged. If you want to know what's changed, the short answer is this:

Nothing.

But on the other hand, the debate about whether or not it's worth stacking hit and/or expertise at the expense of damage mitigation still abounds. For that reason, it's worth revisiting the value of reforging/gemming/enchanting for threat stats and pointing out a couple of things that actually have changed since our days at the foot of the Citadel.

To start with, here's rule number one.

Forget about expertise.

There, I said it - and while people will be choking back on whatever they were eating or drinking, it's worth repeating.

Forget about expertise.

Expertise is by far and away your best threat stat. However, no warrior should be having even the slightest issue with threat in current raid content because of Vengeance. Essentially, the point in stacking expertise is nullified altogether. Yes, you will do more threat if you soft cap out your expertise but there is literally no point in doing so because your threat concerns are taken care of and other stats will be better. At this point in the game, stacking expertise has only slightly more point than the ridiculous practice of trying to stack strength. And, yes - I've seen some tanks gemming for strength.

Next up, then, is the other threat stat; hit rating. Were hit rating purely another threat stat, then we'd be viewing it the same way we do expertise - Vengeance is taking care of your threat issues, so you don't need help there. Add that to the fact that taunts can no longer miss and you're running straight into an alley where hit rating has no real value.

Except for the fact that hit rating is not purely another threat stat; it serves another purpose. That purpose, namely, is to interrupt via the use of Shield Bash and, if you're running in a 10 man guild, you may well find that such utility is absolutely invaluable in current content. Numerous encounters are made significantly easier by having the tank himself deal with interrupts, thus releasing your DPS players from the responsibility. Halfus Wyrmbreaker, the Elementium Monstrosity, Cho'gall, the Omnotron Defence Council, Maloriak and Nefarian (a full 50% of the raid bosses in this tier) are just some examples of where the ability to interrupt on the part of the tank is unbelievably helpful. Even on 25 man content, being able to rely on your tank to do some interrupting can make planning out an encounter a far simpler task. Naturally, the addition of the talent Drums of War makes this even easier as it costs you the sum total of nothing to bash your way to a cleaner kill.

TL;DR?

If you're in a 25 man guild, your priority on stats should look like this:

Mastery, parry, dodge, hit rating, expertise.

If you're in a 10 man guild, give serious consideration to:

Hit rating, mastery, parry, dodge, expertise.

It's totally understood that this will not be the fit for everyone. Your 25 man raid may want you to interrupt to make things easier, just as your 10 man raid may always have a DPS shaman that can do the job for you; a shaman can... Well... Do pretty much everything. Equally, it's worth noting that this is a warrior inclined post because death knights, for example, value things differently when considering Death Strike.

But it's more than worth stating the clear value of hit rating in content where taunts can't miss and threat isn't an issue, because such an unfair evaluation could be the difference between you being the tank everyone wants, and being the tank that negatively impacts on another team mate.

Utility is good. Make the most of it.

Zellviren "the Exalted".

This topic is inspired by this blue post and the repercussions of it. Yes, what I'm talking about today was intended by Blizzard.

In short, if you earned the title "the Exalted" during Wrath of the Lich King you may well have had it removed because the requirements have changed.

Let me start by saying that this is an absolutely reprehensible decision, and I can find no justification for it whatsoever. Does it affect me because I had 50 reputations at Exalted anyway? Directly, no. But indirectly, it has upset several of my guild members who loved the title very much. Also, it affects me because it is a very worrying development in the way Blizzard views things. The post is basically saying that, come next expansion, the bar is going to go up again and those who are under that threshold are (once again) going to lose their title.

I've no idea what the post means by "grandfathering", so someone will need to explain that to me. But if we're moving into a game where my rewards are going to be stripped away, I'm off. I can understand why the requirements would change over time; if there were 40 factions at launch with a threshold of 35, it's no achievement at all in a world with 80 available factions. Therefore, I can understand a raising of the bar for those coming to the game in its current state. However, what we have here is a complete disregard for the people who completed the feat while it was current content and, therefore, challenging.

I couldn't give a fig for how hard it is NOW. What I care about is the fact I completed the achievement when it was still challenging, required a significant time investment and half the work didn't come passively. Were I to have been on 49 reputations and lost the title yesterday (as one of my server chums was), that would have been enough to have me seriously considering giving the game up.

Because someone chose to grind reputations once for a title they thought was cool, does not necessarily mean they are willing to go through it again.

What's wrong with setting a percentage of available factions each expansion and leaving it at that?

In the original WoW, you needed 20 to get the title.
When TGA launched, you needed 30 to get the title.
When WotLK launched, you needed 40 to get the title.
When Cataclysm launched, you needed 50 to get the title.
When the next expansion lands, you need 60 to get the title.

The key word here is "get" - once you've got it, it's yours.

I reckon most people could get on board with the above being the case because the same amount of dedicated reputation grinding would be required each expansion. But the practice of taking away a title someone has already EARNED, and may not wish to earn again, has absolutely no defence. I've no doubt the usual claptrap will come out of the blues about the title meaning something, but does it mean any less when someone earned it when it was challenging? Of course not. The bottom line is that Blizzard want people to spend more time doing things they may not want to do, just to get something they've already earned. Good going.

And by the way:

If you've earned Loremaster, I'd have a nervous look over your shoulder. Don't think it's applicable? Read this:

"We think "Loremaster" is a really awesome title. With Cataclysm we added a bunch of new quests though, and we want the title to keep pace so that it's always representative of someone that's completed a considerable number of quests throughout the life of the game, even as we add more.

We did consider offering multiple titles for the various tiers, but "Loremaster" fits so perfectly and we wanted to avoid a potentially infinite string of titles like "the Fairly Loremaster", "the Nigh Loremaster", "the Mostly Loremaster", etc. We also considered grandfathering in those who had already earned it but think that this title can be a unique testament to the continued efforts of quest hunters and keep the same value as we introduce more quests and push the requirements up to match.

It's different than every other title in the way we're raising it with a new bar to meet, and I do apologize that it wasn't communicated clearly beforehand that it was going to be functioning this way."

All I did was change the titles around and substitute "rep" for "quest". In short, the exact same argument can be made for removing Loremaster. Something you may have spent a large amount of time earning previously will get removed because it happens to be easier in a later incarnation of the game.

I can't believe how much this bothers me. In the end, the entire canon of titles and achievements are cheapened by the fact Blizzard are happy to remove them without any justification.

Disgusting.

The point of heroic dungeons.

Sorry, guys. It’s another long one. :(

A whole bunch has been made of heroic dungeons recently. Since the launch of Cataclsym, players have been quick to pass judgement on what they think the good or bad points are. In the main, it’s generally considered that the difference in difficulty between normal dungeons and their heroic counterparts is too large, with ultra-casual (or ultra-bad, depending on your view) players simply finding the going too tough. Naturally, players who got through them within a week simply can’t see what the fuss is all about and, in fact, think the content should be harder.

Personally, looking at heroics as a complete set, I just find there to be huge disparity amongst them; the Stonecore or Grim Batol, say, are much harder than the Vortex Pinnacle or Halls of Origination. If you’ve started doing the heroic achievements for the shiny drake, you’ll know that the problem is even more pronounced here – some achievements you get by accident, while others like Headed South or To the Ground! are a veritable nightmare.

Eventually, a blog post by Ghostcrawler tried to explain the design intent to a growingly restless community and this caused a backlash in and of itself. I don’t think Mr. Street was trying to placate people, I think he only wanted to express what he thought the role of the heroic dungeon was and how we, as players, fitted into that plan. Unfortunately, half the community (as in, the half who were struggling) took this as an insult and the forum fights began.

I’m going to pick up the discussion at my problem with all this; that Blizzard has created this problem from the outset; there is a problem with LFD; the role of the heroic dungeon is questionable. So, how did Blizzard cause this?

From the moment you pick a race, class, name and look, the “Risk/Reward” cycle is broken. Levelling is, quite simply, utterly unchallenging in any way, shape or form. The nonchalant removal of group quests has meant that soloing content is the norm, LFD has provided a way of getting a dungeon group you don’t have to socially interact with, and the dungeons themselves are an absolute dawdle to get through. By the time you hit Outland you could have been playing for a week, quite literally, and learned absolutely nothing about the wider game. Yes, the new questing zones are fun (the Forsaken lore is fantastic), but the “Risk/Reward” cycle has been entirely dispensed with; there is absolutely no risk, and rewards are thrown around like confetti. Outland can be gotten through quickly, as can Northrend, and the fact the new Cataclysm zones didn’t have a single quest line that required grouping up absolutely sickened me.

So what?

Consider you’re a new player levelling through the game and you’ve dinged 85, now looking to develop your character further and make him more powerful. Some quest rewards are okay, but you can hit up dungeons freely in order to plug any gaps. So far, so good. Maybe you’ve been alert throughout the process and paid attention to a crafting profession of some kind, and this gives you the opportunity of upgrading a few more pieces. Sounds awesome. Your next step is a heroic dungeon to fill out those slots with at least item level 346 gear.

A heroic dungeon that will require coordination, group members knowing their roles, communication, reliable output/performance, understanding of gear set up and an appreciation of how to deal with boss mechanics.

In short, it will require a lot of things that you know absolutely nothing about.

The game has told you what the next step is, but has utterly failed to prepare you to take that next step. What’s worse is that you’re being thrown into this miasma of difficulty with people who may well have wildly different expectations of what’s coming up and what is required from people.

This brings me nicely to the LFD tool.

In my view, the best thing Blizzard could do would be to either entirely revamp the LFD tool, or to remove it. The problems are manifold:

1) Long queues due to no tanks.
2) Anonymity, leading to behavioural issues.
3) An utterly stupid gear check.
4) The “Vote Kick” system doesn’t work.
5) Two vastly different types of player in the queue.

Due to the perceived difficulty with heroics at the moment, most tanks will avoid queuing if they possibly can. This makes for long queues, meaning DPS players will ask guild tanks to go with them where available and the problem is compounded. Players will often have sat around a long time before getting into a dungeon and are not in a great mood due to it. When you throw in the anonymity of the LFD, you’re looking at players who are either short on time thanks to the queue and want to move quickly, or desperately want to get the most out of the dungeon that they can due to it being their shot of the day and no guarantee of success. Ninja looting and “gogogogogogogo”, enter stage right; patience and consideration for new players to endgame, exit stage left.

We then arrive at the absurd gear check for entering heroics, and I for one cannot fathom who thought this was a cool idea. It doesn’t make an iota of sense. A Holy paladin with a mish-mash of healing, PvP and DPS gear (some mail or cloth) is going to perform better than someone who’s picked itemized lower level quest rewards intelligently, and gone to the trouble of enchanting and gemming them? Yeah, right. What would be so wrong with empowering the group itself to make a decision on someone when they zone in or see their first attempt at output? Oh, yeah – the vote kick option is a poorly implemented shambles, as is the dungeon finder cooldown that is applied carte blanche, with no consideration given to those who choose to leave for legitimate reasons.

Honestly, I can see where Blizzard wanted to go with the LFD. And let’s be honest; it’s a great notion to be able to avoid people missing dungeons because there aren’t enough people online on their server. But the whole thing has been executed very, very badly and, when accompanied by the lack of preparation for new players, makes the LFD tool an absolute hotbed of frustration, failure and contempt.

Lastly, though, we come to the role of the heroic dungeon. I’ve got to admit, I /facepalmed when I read what the point of heroic dungeons was because it was always going to cause anxiety. You can predict what I’m going to say, so I’ll waste no time:

What was wrong with the dungeon progression ideology during The Burning Crusade?

I honestly hoped for a return to the glory days of PvE but, alas, I was left disappointed. During the Golden Age of PvE (the “GAP” as I like to call it), heroic dungeons were designed so that those who hadn’t the time or inclination to raid could still play compelling PvE content that was engaging, challenging and rewarding. You moved from levelling dungeons, to level-cap dungeons, then to heroic dungeons and/or raids. In Wrath of the Lich King, the role of the heroic dungeon changed dramatically, and so the attitude of the playerbase changed with it. We were now confronted with a progression path that went from levelling dungeons that were far too easy, level-cap dungeons that were far too easy, heroic dungeons that became far too easy and then raids. Heroic dungeons became an extra step in the chain instead of viable endgame, something that meant the difficulty of them had to be retuned accordingly. This philosophy has continued into Cataclysm and has forced Blizzard into rather a contradictory corner.

You see, for better or for worse, Blizzard got it right in Wrath of the Lich King and they’re now turning their back on the customers they got during said expansion.

The argument now goes that normal level-cap dungeons shouldn’t be hard because they’re merely a gear stepping-stone for heroics; this is where the “challenge” should lie. You then transfer that to the WotLK raid application and see the same thing; raids shouldn’t be hard because they’re merely a gear stepping-stone for heroic raids. That’s okay, I can go with that. You were expected to complete normal dungeons to work on heroics, so you should be expected to complete normal raids before working on their heroic counterpart.

In Cataclysm, however, you are no longer expected to complete normal raids. Whether you like it or not, there is such a thing as a “casual raider” and in the main they simply won’t have a skilled enough roster to enjoy normal raid content. The reward (two epics per night, maybe four, that may not be better than your crafted/reputation ones) is simply not worth the risk of spending a night wiping and making everyone miserable. I know of many, many guilds (including my own) who have hit this wall and the overall atmosphere in them has changed – in some cases, quite abruptly. Guilds that once had an inclusive and vibrant roster that enjoyed playing content together have, in many cases, segregated into cliques of “cans” and “cannots”. I speak from personal experience here, and managing this is less fun than masturbating with a cheese grater.

Some readers will be thinking this is a tangent, but it’s not. The role of the heroic dungeon and the first tier raid are inexorably linked. You see, back during the GAP, heroic dungeon bosses were, in some cases, of raid difficulty – any warrior who tried tanking the Shattered Halls back then will know what I’m talking about. This meant that it wasn’t uncommon to see people in early Karazhan or Gruul gear that hadn’t killed Murmur or Kargath Bladefist. Because heroic dungeons were on a par with tier four raids, they were valid content up until you were pushing your way into the Serpentshrine Cavern or Tempest Keep.

Now, as soon as you hit that first raid, heroic dungeons are no longer relevant to you.

At this stage, there is absolutely no need whatsoever for me to go into a heroic dungeon. I’ve done them all multiple times, I cannot get any drops that would be an upgrade, I need no reputation gains from them and I’m at the cap for Justice Points. I would be much happier not doing heroics at all anymore, unless I was going in to help guildies. But alas. In order to falsely elongate content, Blizzard has made the continued grinding of pointless instances a necessity by giving us Valor Points for completing them. I’m extremely unlikely to hit the weekly cap from downing raid bosses, which means I’m stuck doing a heroic every day in order to stack up points. I don’t want to do them, I have no need for them, but I’m compelled to do it because it’s still valid character development.

Herein lies the rub:

Players with absolutely no business in heroic dungeons, and who do not want to be there, are being asked to queue with people who DO have a need for them and DO want to be there.

When the two are grouped together, is anyone honestly shocked that there is collision? What makes this even more maddening is that the developers themselves say they want to remove the grind from the game, but subversively enforce the worst kind of grinding there is. It’s frankly ludicrous.

Now, I’m at the stage where a guild that was sculpted in the furnace of Wrath of the Lich King is creaking because of the design intent in Cataclysm. I can accept the decisions, but the pressure on me as a GM to provide meaningful content for my whole guild is causing me to burn out and lose patience much too quickly. I love the game generally, I love the friendships I’ve made in it, I love the achievements we’ve marked and I love the guild I created and manage. I also completely appreciate that it’s too late for Cataclysm to see any changes as that particular ship has sailed.

However, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will be my last expansion if these issues are not looked at seriously by the company that I, and many like me, are paying a lot of money to. I understand acutely that there are myriad problems involved, that my voice is only one from 13 million and that it’s very difficult to define “fun” when the term itself is subjective. But please, give the following points some consideration:

1) The levelling experience really needs toughening up in order to better prepare players for endgame. Quests are too easy to complete, there’s too many of them and the rewards for completing them are too good. Perhaps make it so that powerful blue quest rewards are only available for completing quest lines that require you to group up. There’s an incentive to engage socially there, but no requirement. Choice is good. Some of the most fun I ever had in this game was the Cipher of Damnation quest line in Shadowmoon Valley. You’ve no idea how much I pine for that level of quality to come up again.

2) Levelling dungeons need to be tuned so that they can actually kill players. Major mechanics need buffed so that they can’t be either ignored or simply laughed off by a healer. Giving bosses a bit more health just isn’t a solution. I would also be inclined to lower the experience income and remove the goody bag at the end; it’s just money for old rope.

3) Level cap dungeons could be made harder, with loot tuned up to recognise the fact. If you want to gear up for raids, you should be able to farm dungeons for the gear you need instead of relying on once-a-day RNG that can see you returning to the same instance for weeks on end. Also, build them like the Halls of Origination – plenty of bosses, but plenty of opportunities to skip.

4) Heroic dungeons could be harder, on level par with entry tier raids. At the very least, make the latter encounters steadily more difficult. Most can recall the Karazhan attunement that started in level-cap instances, but demanded the death of the early heroic bosses Darkweaver Syth and Grand Warlock Nethekurse. Separate loot tables should be used for levelling dungeons being dragged up (see Tempest Keep Vs, say, the Blood Furnace), with final bosses dropping raid quality loot that is specific and often difficult to come up with in raids themselves (examples could be Terrokk’s Shadowstaff or The Sun Eater).

5) Normal raids could be slightly easier and less punitive on imperfect raid set ups or more casual guilds. Later bosses should retain their difficulty as a marker for heroic raids. I don’t think the current tier is that hard, but the margin for error has been completely removed and I think more leeway should be given in earlier encounters. Obviously the loot would be better than dungeon loot and heroic loot, but on par with what you’ll find when defeating heroic dungeon final bosses.

6) Heroic raids are for the server first guilds and, of course, the top 100. Very few players will ever get involved in these while they’re current, so it’s okay to go wild (so to speak). Optional encounters with titles, such as Algalon the Observer or Lady Sinestra, are wonderful ways of recognising exceptional performance beyond what’s on the loot tables.

Anyway, I’m going to finish there – this will have taken up ten minutes of your time already.

I am completely onboard with much of the commentary I’ve seen since the launch of Cataclysm and, even if I disagree, I try to see both sides of the argument. For me, the content has left me feeling cold and a bit frustrated due to the impact on my guild, and I honestly hoped the bizarre practice of farming content I have no reason to farm had gone out with WotLK. I was also hoping for epic loot to be harder to come by, but that hasn’t really materialized either.

This isn’t a threat post, or an “I quit” post – that’s not really my style. But for someone like me, who loves playing PvE content with my friends, I want to have the best possible experience, with content that is engaging and enjoyable. I didn’t raid the entirety of the GAP because I wasn’t good enough, but I still adored much of what Outland had to offer because of the gradual increase in difficulty and the design hopes for the content.

If you agree with any of this, I’m glad and I hope some of it’s borne in mind. If you disagree, that’s also fine and I’ll try to understand why if you talk about it sensibly and maturely.

Meantime, I’ll see ya – I’ve got Valor Points to grind.