3.2 Druid form impressions.

Long time no post!

Inactive in wow for a few months, and have an active account for a short while prior to returning to university, so I thought I would give my 2c on the new druid forms.

Kitty fo:
Ok… lots of dangly bits, and looking rather… shiny (My models were the white ones because I have white hair.)

Impressions: Transveti-kittie. Took a little getting used to but I actually really like this colour and style of form. Ive always been one for having characters with white hair, or white mounts, or white pets – this seems like an extension of it. It’s a colour scheme that seems to fit right in in Ashenvale. It would have beeen nice to be able to customize somewhat though… be able to choose wristbands, or feathery strap on things rather than have them come as standard (Hey, if theyre implementing bear armour, then whats stopping them?) I mean – I was in ashenvale with the wife on her hunter. She had a Moonstalker (one of the Darkshore cats) and I literally looked like its bitch fighting along side it…

Bear form
Immediate impression: Chubby Funster.

There is something about the bear form, the extra plumpness in the face, that inane grin you would get from the retarded animal in a Disney cartoon... I imagine it spends all day strutting its stuff with its feathery elbow bands reciting to everyone: “Its just so super to be a bear!” and flicking its hair.

Personality match: The retarded Lion King hyena (Ed?) crossed with dumbo.

Random song lyrics pop to mind…

“Its so super to be a bear
Styling all my lovely hair
Prancing about to the bear tanking song.

Yes it’s so fun to be this class
Just look at my gigantic ass
As Im up the front doing the tanky spank
Oh please don’t hit my pretty face,
With your gignantic fekking mace
It may be tough but I don’t like the way my make up runs.
Oh you can spank my hairy ass
But you know youll let me pass
Cos im so super, a super duper bear."

I should probably stop before Blizz finishes organizing the firing squad…

Impressions of the changes: Very nice looking forms, but they make the alliance druids look literally – like Care-Bears. I cant wait to see the new Moonkin forms, I imagine bubble-wrap and baby oil are involved somehow.

I give in... How was your patch day?

How was your patch?

Overall for myself, it was an entertaining evening.

Priest:
I started off by hitting the mailbox with my priest, and reaping the rewards of my herb farming and glyph mass production with my priest, then hit the trainer. I bought dual spec, hit one side up Discipline and the other Shadow. Realise now that the talent preview is an interface option… so next time I login I need to respec my shadow tree as I just mooshed it together to try.

Ulduar:
I logged into my mage, talented up and with a few of the guildies hit up Ulduar. After the best part of an hour from scheduled start, everyone was setup and ready to go, we went over tactics, jumped in our vehicles and zoomed off to clear up some trash. This was awesome fun – I recommend everyone try it, even if your not going to take on the boss.

We sidled up to the boss, and with a rough draft of tactics went on in to see how it would play out.

Splat. 60% wipe. Not bad for a clueless first try.

Second time around he bugged and one of the Siege Engines “lagged out” for about 10 seconds whilst being pummeled. Wipe at 75%

Third try ended up being our last as… well… It broke. We went in, one of the vehicles was too close behind when it got targeted, got flattened, quick path to a 70% wipe, but it was a much cleaner fight.

The Crash:
At this point we were unable to re-enter the instance, and were stood outside with hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of other players. (All Choo-Chooing, Argh! The noise was frightening!) We decided to go gank Malygos since we had a powerful group – but it turned out that the instance servers were completely borked and nothing was running, so we called it there and went on our merry way.

Back to Glyphing I went. I still have money streaming in from Auction House sales, and so far I have gone from a balance of 1400 gold to 1700 Gold – and that’s AFTER buying dual spec and some training to max out new skills, so a good 1300 gold profit and counting.


Dual spec:
I only have one Dual specced character, and at the moment I don’t see any point in doing it any other way – and even then, I feel I may have wasted my money.

My priests Discipline abilities got a mojor boost – almost every ability is more powerful. Stackable devine Inspiration (each crit adds a bubble for 30% of the heal value, and I can stack them now up to a 10k Bubble!) cheaper faster and more powerful heals, targetable AOE heals as Discipline… Its looking good.

Shadow – I cant see me using this spec often at the moment. I pull about 1700 unbuffed DPS which I guess isn’t too bad considering im wearing like 2 items from heroics, 2 from Naxx 10 and the rest is quest rewards or level 78 craftables. When grinding Im more prone to AOE grind with Holy Nova – especially now its mana cost has been reduced!

Cant help but think Holy might have been a good secondary spec… but I have little desire to use Circle Of Healing – especially now I have improved AOE heal abilities on my priest – who wasn’t struggling before hand with AOE healing anyway… (49% healing on Loetheb with a pally and another disc priest – both better geared, whilst maintaining 3 bubbles on the tanky types to keep em standing… One death… That’s why Im not concerned with the group heal abilites of Disc.)

Summary:
Overall I am enjoying some of the features of the patch, and for a while, Ulduar will provide much entertainment. We are confident Flame Leviathan will go down in a couple of tries tonight – it’s a surprisingly simple fight if you break it down to individual tasks instead of trying to take the whole thing in. Basically Kite and DPS. Two people get launched to take out the turrets on the FL, and the choppers run around dropping tar in its path, and picking up the catapaulted people once they are done. No big rush at the moment, it should be one-shottable – it’s the next boss that will be the problem, from what I read – he is currently bugged.


-V

Naxxramas Step 1: Anub'rekhan

Long time no post. With the release of Ulduar and the launch of patch 3.1 today, I figured instead of posting the usual mash of info you can get on just about any other wow blog... I would try my hand at some guides to Naxx bosses. Why? Because I was bored at work, thats why!

Anub’rekhan – First boss in Arachnid Quarter

Quirks:

Locust Swarm:
Every few minutes the boss will initiate a locust swarm. Everyone within 30 yards starts receiving heavy damage, and is unable to do anything but move, therefore, everyone but the tank must be clear of the boss as this goes off.

Crypt Fiend:
A crypt fiend will spawn during the locust swarms. These will be taken down ASAP.

Corpse Scarabs:
Periodically corpse scarabs will spawn from the corpses of the Crypt Fiends. They need taken down ASAP. Whilst individually they are not very tough and don’t hit very hard – they still disrupt casting and when enough of them get nibbling, they can quickly take down a soft target. They also spawn from the corpses of players as soon as they die, which often leads to an exponential wipe.

Main tanks job:
The boss is tanked in the doorway that he is standing in. Every couple of minutes he casts locust swarm – when he does this you must run to the doorway at the opposite side of the room, against the wall behind the ooze pit. Heroic: Boss moves faster so you need to be on the ball and start running quicker. Speed enhancements or an intervene target are useful for inexperienced kiters.

Off-Tank(s) job:
Crypt Fiends will spawn during the kite phases, they need to be tanked and nuked down ASAP. When no Crypt Fiend is around, the offtank guards the corpse of the crypt fiend and will attempt to tank any Corpse Scarabs that spawn off it. Heroic: The fight starts with 2 Crypt Fiends flanking the boss. These are pulled to the centre of the green circle and killed.

Healers jobs:
The healers will be allocated to either heal the MT or to raid heal/heal the off-tank(s). They will usually be stood with the ranged DPS although in some cases one may be positioned behind the pit of green goo for the main tank to Intervene (if a warrior) both are fairly easy jobs as long as the tank doesn’t kite too slowly, and the ranged space out to avoid being hit with the bosses spike attack. Heroic: As Normal but there will be multiple healers on the MT and stray corpse scarabs are more hazardous. If you get any on you – stand in the AOE that’s flying around so someone else peels the aggro off you.

Melee DPS:
Priority kill order: Crypt Fiend > Corpse Scarab > Anub’rekhan. The melee must stay clear of the boss during the locust swarms. As soon as the timer is up or your called out – retreat to the ranged group and prepare to fight adds. Melee will focus on the Crypt fiends whenever they spawn. Scarabs will generally be AOEd by the casters – but every little helps, especially for any strays.

Ranged DPS:
Same kill priority as the melee – they must also try to space out a bit as the boss does a spike trap AOE which hits anything in its path between the boss and the target, and anyone in the vicinity of the target. The spike hits quite hard and throws you into the air causing further fall damage. Excessive numbers of people being thrown into the air or hit at the wrong time has caused wipes as corpse scarabs erupt from anyone that dies, rapidly taking out the group.

Rant of the week. Tier tokens.

Today, Im going to rant a bit about tier tokens.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these lil’ buggers. Love to have em, hate the way blizzard seems to drop one that cant be used by our raid makeups.

Perhaps its raid composition, perhaps it’s the groups lumped into who can roll for each tier token – but most likely both.

Call it bad recruitment or raid makeup, but here is an example of one of our raids – last nights to be precise:

6 Death Knights (4 Blood, 2 Unholy)
5 Druids (2 Feral, 2 Boomkins, 1 Tree)
4 Rogues
1 Mage
3 Warriors (2 Prot, 1 Fury)
2 Shaman (Both Resto)
2 Paladins (1 Prot, 1 Holy)
1 Hunter
1 Priest (Holy)

It probably shows a decent distribution of the more popular classes in the game. DK, Druid and Rogue. We were lacking the sign ups to have a more varied group, so this is what we had to (quite successfully) roll with.

If you know the tier tokens you know exactly where this rant is heading…

3 Tier token types, 3 or 4 classes per token.

For some reason, the token that has 4 classes on rolls in Death Knights, Druids, Rogues and Mages. That’s 16/25 people in the group after the same tier tokens! In a more balanced raid group, this would not be a problem, but even in 10-mans we have this same distribution problem.

Whats worse, until a few of weeks ago we had no raiding Hunters, Paladins or Warlocks… and in the space of one week we seen 8 tier tokens drop. ALL CONQUEROR. (1 x 25 man OS, 2 x 10 man OS, 1x VOA and 2x 10man Naxx groups.)

I seriously wonder if it wasn’t a case of GM vengeance. Our guild leader put in a complaint after a couple of runs of seeing only these tokens drop when we didn’t have anyone that can use, and they just gave her the slopey shoulder “visit our forums!”. Whatever…

Anyway, I don’t know how other guilds raids are distributed but I think that they should consider splitting that “Of The Champion” (I think) tier token in two.

Its obvious DK’s in their overpowered state are going to be the most popular, and no raid group is ever going to get the perfect distribution of players unless they have 25 hand picked raiders in a raid guild and they’re always available. Druids seem to be everywhere just now, rogues were always popular purely because they are fun, and there are a number of mages about despite us seeming to have a defecit of raiding ones.

If its just us – then there are surely others in a similar position, even if it’s a different distribution of classes (say all hunters warlocks and paladins) in which case perhaps a more “class sensitive” drop rate would be appropriate. E.G if 50% of the raid is in token A’s roll range, 25% is in B’s and 25% is in C’s – then have that be the ratios in which the tokens drop… because having 100% on 8 items when theres 0% able to roll is retarded.

And yes… this is coming from someone who happens to have picked up most of his tier tokens almost first time every time they have dropped. (7.5 gloves + shoulders, seen the pants drop once and chest drop once.) So if you think im bitching cos Im not getting gear, thats not the case :p

On a lighter note… got a yummy chest piece off Heigan last night. Just hope the 7.5 chest is still an upgrade because its been an objective of mine to get the Full Frostfire set since the days of raiding Molten Core, and Ill cry if I have to roll over someone to downgrade into it :p.

-V

Dual speccing, good for mages?

So, I hear that training the ability to Dual-spec is going to cost in the region of 500-1000 Gold.

This sounds fair enough. For hybrid classes this is a damn good investment – especially if they plan to do a lot of solo or PVP work alongside their tanking or healing duties, but my concern is: is it worth it for a mage?

For myself, once I settle into a spec, I don’t tend to change unless there are major nerfs to a spec, or buffs to another that justify some experimentation. I think I have had half a dozen major respecs over the life of my mage. From Levelling in fire to frost at about 50 which I continued into raiding MC until TBC came out. Half way through outland I became Arcane, and when I started raiding I became arcane frost (40/0/21 spec I believe). I leveled as frost through Northrend then Went frostfire for raiding, changing to Arcane when the spec got buffed, and since then back to Fire.

If I done PVP I could take arcane as a spec for that, as it still has many powerful instant nukes – and my main spell for PVP always ends up being Arcane Missiles because players cant escape it…

For grinding mobs, frost is/was very powerful (at least until the Blizzard snare Nerf – not tried it since.)

I am sticking to fire or frostfire for raiding (I am mid decision on how to spec for the raids, but its going to be a fire/frost combination with either fireballs or frostfire as the primary nuke.)

If Dual speccing was introduced a month ago – I would have been a fool not to take it as I have spent a good 500g+ in the last week or two due to jumping about specs due to Blizzards flip-flopping with Arcane, to the point where its damage output is consistently lower than what I was originally doing with frostfire. /facepalm. Its been fun and educational but it mightily pissed me off.

I think for the time being my mage is a raid + farm junky. Fire or Frostfire is a viable soloing/grinding spec (quick nukes and good AOE ability due to empowering my blizzards.) aswell as the highest DPS spec I have access to.

For me… I don’t see me coughing up, at least not until I find an excuse to run with a second spec.

It is a different story for my priest however… a) she does inscription, b) I originally wanted to heal, but am not shadow for leveling and if I ever get her into raiding, it will likely be as a shadow priest. I will most likely be doing regular respecs to fill in the roles needed – and I have the ability to do it on the move. For her, I will definitely be coughing up – even if it ends up being holy or Discipline that I change between for different fights if I end up healing.

There is no argument that dual speccing definitely benefits hybrids more than anyone else (If a priest can be considered a hybrid) more than the pure classes, which feel severely nerfed right now I think. (Mage + rogue + warlock+hunter.) you have an alternative to your norm for grinding/raiding/pvp’ing, but that’s about it.

-V

Dual specs incoming at last?

Im sure this info is all over the place now, but here is what info I have gathered from my fellow bloggers on dual specs. (Subject to change or wiping at any point in time, especially if it looks good.)

• Level 80 players only. (May change later.)
• Two specs only (May change later. Great for true hybrids that may want to tank, heal dps, PVP etc etc.)
• Respeccing will take place at a Lexicon of power (In citys or summoned by a scribe, much like Soul Wells or perverted wardrobes/summoning stones.)
• Your secondary spec will be saved, and you can view it at any point in time. (My interperetation of how this will work: what your current spec, glyphs and hotbar layout is will be saved as your alternative spec, for a quick change back later.)
• Glyphs will be displayed along with your talent tree now as they are tied.
• Glyphs will change along with your spec. (If saved)
• Hotbars will change along with your spec. (If saved)
• Gear wont be “saved” as such, but blizzard will be including its own version of Outfitter/Item rack which will allow you to quickly switch between saved gear sets.
• Hunters will get an ability to access stables remotely with a cooldown. (Primarily for when dual speccing into or out of Beast mastery to swap your exotic pets in and out.)
• Pets talent trees will reset every time you change spec, instead of it being remembered. An inconvenience, but as compensation pet respecs are free.
• And, for me: The biggest change to smile about – When doing your talent points – you need to “save” to apply the changes. Yey! No more 50G cock ups when you mis-click a talent you don’t want. (It will still happen, but you can review your talents before accepting)

The changes are more suited to hybrid classes, but everyone will benefit, be it a change in attack style, (for me, arcane or frostfire builds, or maybe frost for aoe grinding them shoveltusks or boosting in lower level instances.) for PVP or for a specific encounter.

It will take setting up, and some changes are again, something that should have been done at the launch of Vanilla WOW – not 4 years down the line, but overall – I think this will help us out a lot.

Damn. Now I really want to get a group of 5 druids going as a leveling group for fun :p can all hop between tanking, melee, casting or healing whenever we feel like it! Hehe. (Well, 4 druids and a rogue would be more flexible, but still!)

-V

More on 3.09

Im probably coming across as a whiney biatch whenever I am talking about the latest changes. I do apologise.

There are some changes I like (See BRK's latest comments on BM changes!)

Whilst I do agree that there have been a lot of changes since "vanilla WoW" - I think the game is in a much better state today than it was back then. Gameplay is smoother, encounters more interesting, content is more thoroughly thought out, scenery, graphics and indeed, most classes have done nothing but improve over time, I think that lately there have been too many changes snuck in at the last moment without mentioning.

Explosive shot stealth Nerf + Arcane Barrage stealth Nerf being the two that are on my mind right now.

A slight drop in DPS is not the end of the world, but as proven with my ramblings over the last few posts - it does paint a dark picture for those involved when (mis)handled in the manner it was.

Communication from Blizzard is good... but that doesnt mean we, the community, will forgive such slippages that dont even get mentioned until some player outs them with in game tests, and asks what happened.

Where is Hello-kitty island anyway...

-V

3.09 testings.

Went into game last night and tested my shot rotation with the changes.

Overall there was only a small drop in my damage between from my Arcane blasts stacks effect on my arcane missiles. Arcane barrage got a severe kick in the teeth though.

On a target dummy not burning cooldowns I went from about 2400-2800DPS to 1800-2200DPS.

I ended OS 25 with 2700 DPS, normally I would be getting closer to 3300.

Suffice to say in the end I decided to re-try Frostfire (2000-2400 on the dummies without cooldowns)

It seems pretty inconsistent at the moment, ill see how Naxx goes if Im in this week. I had 3.3k after the arachnid quarter as arcane pre-patch. Shall see how Frostfire goes with my new gear. I am tempted to return to arcane, but I have already respecced and re-glyphed twice to try to get a decent rotation, spending some 200G and intend to give it a chance.

I ticketed Blizz about – at the very least they should have offered a free respec with the changes… A little QQ… But come on – the changes screwed over the spec I was using, or at least I think it did… this in turn forced me to spend hours checking and chopping and changing glyphs and talents, I just wanna scream.

Just gotta wait for the opinions from others to flood into the blogs I follow, maybe someone will come up with a work around that doesn’t involve the arcane blast AND arcane missiles glyphs (I like my healy evocation and my super mage armour L)

I wonder if they plan to do anything with the other mage specs. Mages to tend to pull rather low DPS for their gear levels compared to most other classes. (e.g DKs in same gear levels doing double the damage :p but that’s to be expected, it’s a hero class after all.)

-V

P.S – The Ice Stone has melted!

Blizzards constant shanges sending them down the tubes?

Today, Im gonna ramble.

I mean properly ramble :p

Browsing blogs and viewing peoples opinions on patches 3.09, and 3.1, and talking to friends in game *waves*, are Blizzard digging themselves a hole?

Siha, at Banana shoulders recent post talks about some of the changes being implemented to Paladins.

Summary: Untested, inconsiderate, premature.

Mages?

They want to nerf the PVP capabilities of the arcane mage. Ok, I can see that. They don’t want to nerf PVE. Ok, I can see that too, they are overpowered.

2 Minute evocation back to 4 minute evocation?

Class becomes UNPLAYABLE.

It only clicked when reading SpicyTunas blog and chatting with friends over Teamspeak, the way Arcane is played is hard and fast, burning evocations and mana gems like crazy to keep on casting.

I trigger my evocation when I hit about 4k Mana, then a gem when im back down about 6k from my Mana cap (I have 21k mana raid buffed). I usually always end up around 1-3k mana when my evocation is up again.

I don’t usually get time for a third evocation unless it’s a technical boss fight that involves a lot of moving around (ergo, not casting, regenerating mana on the move and not needing it as badly anyway! (441 Mana regen in combat 556out of 5SR for me. (I think))

If I need a mana potion in a boss fight, its going badly. This is with a 2 minute evocation.

Again… 4 minute evocation? That leaves me stood there for two minutes wanding… screw that! Frostfire here I come again I think. Arcane is no longer feasible for PVE again if this is true and goes ahead.

Replenishment requirements:

Guess what? We have cleared 10 man naxx repeatedly, and are half way through 25 man naxx, without a single “replenishment” class in the guild that raids. When the mana regen changes go ahead, even with the new additions of replenishment options, we wont have any (Im NOT nerfing 1k off of my dps to give people back a pitiful amount of mana from frost…) The changes to be frank, may very well screw over our raiding viability, despite the quality of the members.
Im sure there has been outcry on the forums, but we all know blizzard Nerfs first and “fixes” later. Just look at hunters.

Poor bastids had a perfectly reasonable spec get nerfed into the ground, then have Blizz turn round, apologise for making a mistake, and promise to repair BM back to a reasonable level. All through the PTR testing for this, BM hunters were crying out that it was too much, but nobody cared up in Blizz HQ. (And looksie, some of those fixes come with 3.09 - untested...)

There is a good 11 Million players on WOW, maybe more – that’s a good 1 Million + per class on average. Every time your class gets nerfed to the ground the players have 4 options.

- Suck it up, biatch. (Many players are not bothered about operating at 100% or ar oblivious to their capabilities anyway)
- Reroll another class
- Respec to something else
- Quit playing.

Many will suck it up, perform poorly in comparison to others, and then probably end up taking one of the other 3 options out of desparation.

Rerolling? How long for? Your no longer at end game, your missing the end content with your raiding friends, your behind the curve, your gonna get replaced before you get to 80. To boot, its guaranteed that at some point the class you just were will get buffed back up to OP for a period.

Respec? An action, we have all seen. Beast mastery went from being the biggest chunk of hunter specs to the lowest. (Another blogger put up a chart on pre 3.08 and post 3.08 hunter stats, Ill try to find it.) Ok, kudos to them. How many of these hunters decided to just stop playing instead of re-rolling? Well – to put it bluntly, I know 2 active hunters, both pissed off with the way their class is just now. They don’t play them very often. (One has given up now I think about it.) Hunters used to be one of the most common classes, now I barely ever see them - especially in raids.

Quit playing? I don’t see me doing this any time soon, im too much of an altoholic to let such changes affect me. I love the game for the adventure and social aspect, and the challenges of trying my best whenever I can, BUT… Look at SWG. Blizzard are seriously heading towards NGE status. Classes are becoming unrecognizable, changes are becoming bigger and bigger, and some changes are being stealthed in without even a patch note or warning. This is bad business. Very bad. Communication is king, and GhostCrawler cant reach everyone by simply spamming a forum. (Many posts will be picked out and relayed by reliable bloggers, and wow insider, this is the only way I get such information - but I do get some 200 items a day into my feed reader to go over...)

Are they getting desperate? Is activision digging in their claws too deeply? Some of the changes are things that have been QQd over for 4 years, such as hunter ammo pouches.

Result: Blizzard are removing them completely. No hunter I have spoken to is actually in favour of this. They have had their character a long time, and have accepted the inconvenience of 4 bags, and ammo costs. At most they think maybe Blizz should have added a bag slot specifically for ammo, so that hunters get the normal 5 bags. They fully expect this change to break their class before they fix it. Bag space is great, but its only a problem if your unorganised in the first place.

As per my recent post on this change… What about the warlocks? They have to carry a couple of bags worth of soulshards (even with a soul-shard bag, they often need spares for raiding.) or a dedicated bag, putting them in the same situation as hunters.

Sure, they have their perverted wardrobe to summon people now – that saves them a couple of shards, and looks pretty funky – but they still have to carry shards to pop one up every time someone has to run off for repairs, reagents, gear change, respec, or is too slow to get summoned by the summoning stone outside instance.

(Big bonus though – you can go straight into the instance and summon everyone from there! No more Tauren on proto drakes getting in the way…)

They still need to create soulwells, soulshards, firestones, use shards for some spells and abilities, and have a backup since it can be hard to gather them in raids. Especially in pugs where you often get kicked if your DPS isn’t too high, and the speed mobs go down to AOE your basically going to be standing there draining souls and doing no DPS otherwise you miss the opportunity. DPS = poo, out on arse you go. Simple changes could be as little as allowing shards to be double stacked, or stacked in 5’s – but Im willing to bet that they would sooner do away with shards entirely, or put them on a currency or rune type system so they don’t take bag space at all. (Or as mentioned for hunters, make it a separate consumables bag so you can still carry all the normal crap we all do.)

Anyway, that’s my rant. (For now.) Im not really pissed off, (Except maybe that I have spent about 2 hours a week for the last month re-testing shot rotations in anticipation to yet another arcane nerf.) I still enjoy the game immensely - I wouldn’t be addicted to it if I didn’t. I’m enjoying the challenges, socializing and playing with all my characters, but in all honesty, I see Blizzivision making some critical errors as the game advances that I am positive will drive players away.

I would put money on the population dropping to about 8 Million by July, as players bleed off – even with new raid content incoming. Too many people are family/group players, who would stop playing if a friend/family member/spouse does – so although you may only lose 5% of the hunters who cancel their account with a bad change (50,000 people = a good half a million £ a month of your profits blizz…) – they would take at a guess, one person each with them to another game. (Looksie, you just lost a million a month in subscriptions.) Theres 9 other classes out there waiting to get targeted...

Be smart about it…

-V

3.09. More changes, more testing to be done. *harrumph*

Just caught some info on patch 3.09 which is due to go live this week, and as a result:

More theory crafting and rotation tests.

/facepalm

Why do you do this to me blizz? All I wanna do is provide good DPS for my comrades!!!

Ok, let’s get into it.

Here’s the changes:

Spells:

1. Arcane power damage bonus halved, and cooldown halved. (10% bonus damage, 1min CD -Needs confirmation. This could be painful on the mana bar, since Arcane Power causes your spells to cost more mana… if it’s the same mana consumption, you now have this triggered every minute eating through your mana faster…)
2. Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power = 15s cooldown, POM = 1.5s cooldown. (Means you cant POM something within 15s of using an AP, and I’m not sure, but does this mean POM activates the global cooldown? … That doesn’t sound like it’s a very useful spell any more, except for Pom pyro PVP players. (Say that 10x as fast as ya can!))
3. POM cooldown reduced from 3Min to 2Min – nice for PVP mages!

Glyphs:

1. Glyph of Arcane Missiles = +25% crit damage to arcane missiles (old glyph added 5 yards to the cast range)
2. Glyph of Mana gem = 40% bonus mana when chomping on a gem, was 10% (Nice!)
3. Glyph of Arcane Blast – Damage bonus reduced from 5% to 3%. (Has this not already been implemented??)

Looking at the above, I think I would be a fool not to take the Arcane Missiles glyph, this has 2 effects:

1. I lose my Glyph of Mage Armour, or my Glyph of Evocation. Both fantastic glyphs. *pouts*
2. If the experimentations with shot rotation prove that Ill be using Arcane Missiles more, then I will most likely need to talent into Arcane Missiles. Dang! I only used that on a missile barrage proc previously

Currently rotation:

Arcane Blast x3 (54% damage bonus (45% on arcane missiles with the current bug that stops the Arcane Blast Glyph affecting Arcane Missiles.)
Arcane Barrage (consumes the damage bonus, hits hard.)
Arcane Missiles any time that arcane barrage procs, followed with a Barrage tap.

I predict that with the change:

New rotation:

Arcane blast x3 (39% bonus damage with glyph instead of 54% L )
Arcane Missiles (consumes the buff, hopefully the glyph bug will be fixed or its only 30% bonus damage from the buff.)
Arcane barrage tap, then repeat.

What do I expect to see?

Overall I expect to see a drop to my DPS – this is expected, Arcane is overpowered in comparison to the other specs, and this is Blizzards attempt to bring it down to size. The drop in DPS will come from less damage bonus from stacking Arcane Blast, and the cast time for Arcane Missiles when we don’t have a Missile Barrage proc. On the other hand, I think this will be a bit more mana efficient since less spells are being spammed out.

One thing I would try to pay particular attention to: Clearcasting procs…

+50% crit chance on a clearcast spell, and the spell costing no mana. If you are very very lucky your 3rd Arcane Blast will trigger this. In that event, your Arcane missiles costs 0 mana, has (in my case) an 80% crit chance, a 39% damage bonus and when it crits: it crits for 275% damage instead of 250% - which could prove vurry nice… (I may be off with the % here, but I think talented arcane does 250% crit damage instead of the usual 200% talented damage, and 150% untalented crit damage.)

If after testing, the Arcane Blast glyph is still not working for arcane missiles, and this rotation proves the best: I’m going to drop the Arcane Blast glyph. That 9% bonus damage is never going to get seen unless I keep my current shot rotation. Keep the mana regen or heal-ocation glyphs as they are fantastic utility. Unfortunately this will be un-testable until the patch goes live.

I have read that some opinions are that this is a PVP nerf without affecting PVE – but as far as I can see it, the effect on PVP is not that huge. (Little less burst damage, but more availability of it) an Arcane Powered POM PYRO is still more than feasible – you just have a 1.5s cooldown on the POM before you can activate AP (lob an Arcane barrage at the target maybe between activations? Assuming AP is not on the GCD)

3.1 Changes

Over at Wow-Insider they are detailing all the predicted 3.1 class changes.

There are a lot of neat and interested changes, that I may go over once they have finished dishing them out. The biggest one people are noticing:

Hunters no longer need ammo pouches, or ammo supplies. Woo! Bag slot!

But... Wheres the warlock soul shard goodness?

Sadpanda for warlocks?

-V

Huntering

So, my hunter hit 64 last night, and I have to say, I have been having a wail of a time with her. I have a number of alts on the go at the minute and don’t get to focus on anyone often, but I have been experimenting with my hunter.

I have 4 pets.

• Primary DPS pet: Cat (King Bangalash skin.) – Level 61

• Tanking/Grinding pet: Ape (Ucha Skin? (light brown, Un’goro crater cave monkey) – Level 61

• Retired Pet: Moth (pale one from Dranei start area.) – Level 58

• New toy: Devilsaur (White + pinkypurple striped one from Un ’goro crater) – Level 62

First thing you might note is that nothing is my level… This is due to me loving the Gorilladin AOE grind, up until about… 61. I then leveled my Cat up, had a little play around with the moth, then set out for an exotic to try out.

MY first stop was MC with a guild + pug group, but due to the seeming incompetence of a lot of the group, and their inability to follow instructions (or leave a group of 3 of us stand at the side playing with a corehound) I failed to get one. (High level hunter misdirecting onto me and a resto druid healing me. Worked a treat but someone ALWAYS came up thinking they would tank it, or that it would be helpful to stick their daggers in – despite repeated beggings and temper tantrums from me and the other hunter :p)

I wasn’t frustrated… honest.

Anyway, dropping that idea I opted to give a devilsaur a spin. Ive seen plenty about, and disliked the look of them, and the way they move. After a quick browse through petopia with my wife (she started a hunter and I was giving a little tutorial and guide through familys, talent trees etc etc. ) I stumbled across a pretty nice looking White one. (Me and my white pets :/ ) I had not seen this devilsaur before, and decided I would set off to try and tame one (It didn’t appear to be a rare.).

After a lengthly fight I land in Un’goro and start my search.

And I searched…

And searched……

What is it with these damned things? You turn your back for one second and they bite your ass off, but when you are actually LOOKING for one… None in sight, not even King Mosh.

I decided I would just grab a random pet for protection whilst I continued my hunt (at level 63 I was not exactly overpowered for some of the mobs in the zone. Especially if Mosh set about me without my noticing, and me being petless....)

I mouse over my mini map at the tracked beasts. “Devilsaur” blips up.

YESS!!!! I figure if nothing else Ill get practice at taming one that I don’t want to keep, so I ride over to it, and lo and behold… a 60 ft tall Devilsaur is stomping off in the opposite direction – and it’s the skin I am after!

I ride ahead, I drop a trap in a clear spot and am about to concussive shot it for the pull when it aggroes on me. Oh crap! Fear Beast! But before it gets off hes in the trap – I bang Tame Beast and close my eyes…. Then I open them and about fall of the chair in hysterics.

60 Ft Ice cube anyone?

Go get one!

-V

Edit: Hmm, I appear to have lost about 50% of this post, I will probably add the rest into a fresh post later.

Malygos bites the dust.

Smellygos downed.

I was pugged in to do Eye of Eternity (Normal) with some friends from another guild since I was not locked this week. Some 10 tries later, the big boy bites the dust.

Some notes on some of the tactics for when we hit it:

Phase 1:

• Tank kept the dragons head away from group. (Positioning on platform was not a big concern)
  
• Death Knights had a macro to yoink+root the sparks, although I did end up having to root a few.
  
• After vortex, everyone runs south whilst tank picks up Malygos.
  
• Everyone always stands in an electric field for damage bonus. If possible, double stack the fields.
  
• It took on average 3-4 minutes to get him into the air.
  
• Everyone went all out with the DPS when he took off, taking him to between 40% and 45% before he flies away. (At this point I evocate for phase 2.

Phase 2:

• Stay in bubbles, run to new ones as soon as they appear UNLESS a deep breath is imminent.
  
• 2 of the disc-folk will land, they’re tanked and spanked.
  
• 2 best melee take the disks, and go up to attack said disc-folk whilst the ranged attack from afar.
  
• Each time one dies, it drops a disk – and people hop on and get safely in the air.
  
• Once all disk-folk are dead, Phase 3 begins.

Phase 3:

Got here 3 out of the 10 times.

• First time was a quick wipe
  
• Second time we hit the enrage (were missing some DPS from a bad phase 2.)
  
• Third time we entered the phase with 3min 24 on the clock, and we got him down with about 30s left, and 2 down – so I would hazard a guess that in order to succeed here you need 3 minutes.
  
• As an aside, people tried to stick together, whilst 2 people healed.

To conclude: It was a very good trip, and gave me a good heads up on the requirements for the fight. I don’t think we have enough DPS that’s willing to attend at present. I am in the top 3 DPS in the guild as far as I am aware, and I was 4th on the damage meters (Highest DPS though, so it’s certainly viable) I can only think of a half a dozen people that would output enough damage for this fight in the guild, although as mentioned – highest DPS doesn’t = top slot on damage meters, its all about up-time... Or something like that!

Overall, it was a fun 2 hours :)

-V

Velk stars in: Once upon a Naxx wipe.

So there we were, in the Military quarter of Naxxramas watching the Instructor patrol around his initiates, barking commands at them, whilst our group hides round the corner out of sight and plans its attack.

For some unknown reason, in my boredom I cannot resist the overwhealming urge to stick on my pink Lunar Festival dress and cast Mirror image, screaming "Its time for a sexxy party!"

Not the smartest action when planning out how your going to ambush a powerful enemy. But I digress...

Those blasted mirror images... would you believe it they just took off straight for the Instructor, leaving me partying solo in a pink dress with some rather... perturbed guildies staring at me, as the Instructor flays my clones and comes running right for us...

Oh how we laughed... I have not heard so many people literally in tears of laughter on Teamspeak as we had that night. It wasnt done on purpose, but it will be damned hard to resist doing it again! I wish I had FRAPS...

-V

Arcane shot rotation update

With the changes to Arcane mages in the latest mini-patch abilities making my Arcane guide obsolete. (Well, the shot rotation part of it. Arcane Shatter is no longer possible and Arcane missiles is bugged to not take advantage of the Arcane Blast glyph) I have been experimenting to try to get the most out of my spec.

Of the many shot rotations, the one that proves the most reliable is a variation on the original:

Arcane Blast x3

Arcane Barrage

Repeat

Any time Missile Barrage procs fire it and end the volley with an Arcane Barrage.

We actually decided to try for the achievement on the second boss in Arachnid quarter, and this meant that the DPS went as hard as they could on the boss, whilst the tanks bounced the aggro between them across the room so the boss was running back and forth between them – I ended up using a modified rotation that was this:

Arcane Blast x4, Arcane Barrage – Missile Barrage on proc, tagged with Arcane Barrage.

This is VERY mana heavy, the x3 rotation gets the buffs stacked, but then consumes it for the Arcane Barrage nuke. The fourth arcane blast costs too much mana to really use in most situations, but in this one it came in useful. The fourth Arcane Blast costs about 1200 mana to cost, and gets the full 45% (54% glyphed) bonus damage, and is very quick to cast. This is then followed up with the standard Arcane Barrage for a big cheap hit before restacking the buff.

If your very daring you could theoretically just keep spamming Arcane Blast, but I think I can only get 19 off whilst chain casting with my entire mana bar. (about 20k)

I don’t have figures for how much more DPS this provides, but we managed to get the boss down – although something we done stopped the achievement from being completed.

At the end of the run (4 bosses and onto Haigan the Unclean) I had a DPS in excess of 2800 – so I am still pulling about 400-600DPS extra on average, which is a good enough boost for me to stick with the spec. When they fix the bug with Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast glyph buff, then those missile barrage procs will hit harder as more often than not you fire it off with one or two arcane blast buffs on.

I was hitting 3k sustained DPS on some bosses – which is very nice in my opinion! Same bosses I was pulling about 2600-2800 with the previous spec on same bosses.

Oh, one other bonus of the spec: More instant casts. During the safety dance I actually continue to attack the boss with instant casts. In this spec I strafe through the dance alternating Ice Lance and Arcane Barrage at him on the platform – and at the end of each run dance run (when you get to the 4^th quarter, and turn back to run to the 1^st position and before you change direction again) I can squeeze off a missile barrage.

We will get him Friday. Everyone knows the dance – we just got unlucky, we only had one disease remover, and it was the priest who kept getting caught by the dance waves due to lag.

REALLY looking forward to Loetheb… When these spells crit, they crit mercilessly. Talking 7, 8, 9k for each Arcane Blast, 13-14k for the Arcane Barrage and 3-5k (I think) for each Arcane Missiles tick. (used to be over 6k with the glyph…)

-V

I can has an arcane monster?

Consider this a bit of a guide to Arcane. Below are as many hints and tips as I could pull together in my sitting last night.

I put together THIS spec last night after the raid. I grabbed the Arcane Blast glyph from the auction house. I let the tests commence.

Frost Fire Build results: 2200 DPS on one mana bar (this is blowing all cooldowns)

Shot rotation:

Activate macro that turns on Icy veins, combustion, trinket and Mirror Image.

Frostfire Bolt - Living Bomb - Frostfire Bolt - Fireblast - Frostfire Bolt - Frostfire Bolt - Living Bomb - repeat.

Throw in the free pyroblast whenever possible. This is the highest DPS shot rotation I have been able to work out (Dont stack scorch, it probably results in more DPS but I just dont work that way.)

Not too shabby. It can peak at 3k on Patchwerk with a warlock by my side.

Arcane test: 2600

Shot rotation:

Arcane Blast x3, Arcane Missiles (Or Missile Barrage which procs about half the time) and “Arcane Shatter” an Arcane Barrage alongside the final bolt. (this is tricky, I think I get it about half the time, but Im seeing the arcane barrage hit for up to 14k self-buffed for the cost of a global cooldown!)

I think I will stick with this spec for a while yet. With this damage boost off the cuff, once its optimized I expect to be regularly pulling 3k in a raid instead of 2.2k.

I got to give it a test run in Halls of Lightening heroic with some guildies – and my DPS was about 500 (that’s about 25%) higher than frostfire bolt build, and to evidence this – I was a clear 20% dps higher than the pally tank, when the last run I was only 5% in front of him (high damage AOE tanking is impressive!).

Arcane shot rotation tips:

This next section WAS going to be a follow up to the above, but its probably best fitting in here. Much of the base info, such as the shot rotation, is half-inched from Critical QQ. I consider him my instructor in such matters, and his experimentations have often had me respeccing to try new things out for myself. Much respect Sah /salute.

First things first, mana management.

In this spec you are going to have a massive mana pool. You are also going to have a number of tools at your disposal to keep you casting.

Your damage output and mana consumption vary directly with each other. The more damage you do, the faster you burn through your mana. Details included below will give some guidance to some mana regen techniques.

Spell Combo.

The most aggressive spell combo that I can see, is:

Arcane Blast x3, Arcane Missiles + Arcane Barrage (Technique dubbed Arcane Shatter by Euripides)

If you are not required to do max dps or your wanting to conserve mana, such as on long non-dps race boss fights (kael’thuzad for example?) you can reduce the mana burn by casting less arcane blasts. You do lose 20% damage bonus per arcane blast debuff stack you don’t put on, but each time you try to add to that stack the mana consumption gets huge.

From my own tests – I have managed to maintain almost 9 minutes of flat out aggressive casting – averaging 2500DPS on test. I had to slow my output when waiting for the last few seconds before being able to regenerate mana, but in a raid when you have mana tide totems, replenishment, shadow priest or a blessing of Wisdom – you will be able to hold out for longer with a good Mana regen technique.

Mana Regen Technique.

To sustain that length of aggressive casting, I needed to use all 3 mana gems, 2 mana potions (invisibility to drop from combat to start the pot timer cooldown) and I popped 4 evocations. Overall I done approximately 1.2 Million damage, that’s a good quarter of the health of most Naxx normal bosses. With some modifications to the technique I think it may just be viable to fight indefinitely – as long as you have a big enough supply of mana potions.

How to do it?

1) Mage armour:

I have a habit of always keeping mage armour up with the glyph of mage armour equipped– this provides 50% mana regen altogether. With this build the extra 30% mana regen whilst casting means that you are sat at 80% regen in combat (450 MP5 for me.)

2) Mana Gems

Make sure you have all 3 gems on you at all times – even if it means your having to stop casting mid fight to create a new stack of them, if it’s a long fight. Your mana pool will be so large, and your regen so good that you will regen the mana back during the gem creation cast time anyway, and if not, it wont dent your pool too badly – and will give you 12k+ of reserve mana.

3) Invisi-pot tactic.

When your evocation is on cooldown and your mana gem is on cooldown, feel free to pop a mana potion to get a chunk of mana back. Follow this up with invisibility to leave combat. This will start the potion cooldown timer – which I think is about 2 minutes.

Note: Invisibilitys cooldown is 5 minutes… it would have been possible to do this twice in that 9 minute period – which would have given me enough time to get a 5^th evocation off. If I paused to make more mana gems so they were ready, the cycle would start over – I would have been able to coast to the next evocation, and popped another invisi-pot cycle.

4) Aggressive use of evocation.

You will spend most of your time coasting between 75% and 5% mana – as soon as your evocation has cooled down and you are below 25% mana – Pop it! You want that cooldown to be ticking as soon as possible. It has a 2 minute cooldown.

With a slight juggling of talent points, it is more than feasible to have mana absorption in certain encounters, which will keep you going longer.

Overall, it’s a matter of practice – and a good supply of mana potions. I will test this tonight, my aim is to hit 15 minutes of non stop casting (aside from casting evocation or popping invisibility to reset the mana potion cooldown.)

5) Icy Veins + Arcane Power rationing.

Icy Veins reduces the mana cost of spells during its duration by 20%. It also reduces cast time by 20% - overall this is a balance, but gives a burst of damage. In a fight where splash damage is flying, as Euripides recommends, you can use Icy Veins to “shield” your evocation so it doesn’t get interrupted.

Arcane Power gives a huge damage boost, but increases the mana cost significantly. If your running low, hold off on using this. In a DPS race fight the boss will go down within the time period you have before your riding too low in mana with no cooldowns available, so it shouldn’t make a big difference, but on a long fight where your riding close to OOM, its not worth popping as youll spend time doing no damage.

Maximising your damage output.

Ok, so that covers shot rotations, and keeping that blue bar with a useable % value. Now onto getting the most out of your abilities.

1) Torment the weak

In a lot of fights, this is a tricky thing to maintain – but you will have slow as a backup if no one else is snaring the target with frost effects or other abilities. When the enemy is snared, you gain 12% damage against the target. It’s certainly worth burning a global cooldown for every 15 seconds to get the target Slowed for this bonus damage.

2) Focus magic

I did not realize just how useful this spell was until the Halls of Lightening run. Unfortunately I was the only caster DPS, so I was a bit stumped where to put this, but my wife suggested her, and after doing so – it proved a wonderful spell. She is resto druid with a regrowth fetish, which has a ridiculously high crit rate – so whenever we are in a battle where plenty of healing is flying, I almost never seen the 3% crit bonus drop from me.

Since we had an aggressive and high geared pally tank, and a high geared healer, we were more often than not taking several groups at once, which really plied the healing out which resulted in a lot of crits. The impressive thing is, that the 2600+ DPS I pulled on this fight was without much AOE – I did a few test blizzards and arcane explosions, which done nice crit damage, but overall I single targeted the mobs and nuked them down fast.

3) Clearcast

This one is a bit trickier in the above shot rotation. When it procs, your next spell is free, and has a bonus 30% crit chance. If your quick enough, its best to use this for the highest mana spell you have – Arcane Missiles. (Or blizzard if its situationally advantageous)

In addition, it may be possible that an Arcane Barrage shatter can be pulled off that will benefit from this bonus. I do have a sneaking suspicion that casting anything consumes this buff, unlike the arcane blast debuff – which will likely be nerfed to do so in a future patch. I have seen Arcane Barrage land for over 14K damage though – self buffed – after a Missile Barrage proc, with each bolt having the ability to crit for over 6k damage (that’s 44k damage in under 2.5 seconds if you have all the missile bolts crit, and your lucky to get an Arcane Barrage off within the required time period of that spell.)

4) Missile Barrage at 3 Blasts.

Again, I may be mistaken, but my DPS did drop when not doing this. Make sure that when Missile Barrage procs – you don’t use it until you have all 3 arcane blasts up. The buff will wait for you. By firing it off with only one arcane blast buff (or none sometimes) I noticed a significant dip in my DPS purely because the Missile Barrage did not have the damage buff. It’s the same as a rogues combo points. They aint going anywhere, so don’t waste the energy trying to build another stack when the big damage comes from doing that 5 point eviscerate – here, its getting that 3 stack Missile and barrage combo (44k in 1.5 s under heroism and superman’s reflexes remember…). In addition, the Arcane Barrage would be wasted as without all that damage bonus stacked on its simply a glorified fire blast, so WAIT FOR THE STACKS. Missile barrage proc’s often enough.

Macros

There are only a few macros I use, although I can think of many more.

Nuke

My Nuke macro is one that simply activates all my cooldowns (except for POM) at once, so I can get huge burst damage every 2-3 minutes.

/Cast Arcane Power

/Cast Icy Veins

/Use Cannoneer’s fuselighter

/Cast Mirror Image

Theres a few more lines around that but I think the simple version above would work fine. This activates my Arcane Power, Icy Veins, any trinkets I have (I add them in when I equip them.) and Casts my mirror Image.

I am not sure if Mirror image benefits from all the other buffs you get like your water elemental does, but it means that I get it cast, since I always forget to use it otherwise, and it’s a nice couple of hundred DPS boost for the 15 seconds they are around.

Pom anything

Presence of mind does not have a lot of place in the shot rotation above, but there are a few utilities or situational spells that may benefit.

Simple macro:

/cast presence of mind

/cast

• Frostbolt.

In PVP this would snare (possible root) a target, and hopefully do a nice chunk of damage in the process. This lets you get some distance, whilst spamming Arcane Barrage at them with a 12% bonus damage.

• Polymorph

As little as crowd control is used nowadays, its coming back in the future. Having a button available for an instant polymorph can prove invaluable for that mis-timed sheeping, or when an add breaks loose in close proximity.

• Arcane Blast

Why not cut the cast time of your first arcane blast to 0? Gets the buff up, and gets you onto the next faster casting blast.

Icy Evocation

On some fights it may be more beneficial to hang onto your icy veins for your evocates to stop it getting interrupted. Its better to get the whole evocate, than that momentary burst to your DPS. A simple macro should solve this.

/Cast Icy Veins

/Cast Evocation

That’s the end of my little hints list, I shall post again with further test results, and any other goodies I gather.

Just for fun: Try doing an arcane shatter combo when under the effects of heroism and a missile barrage proc. I swear, the missile barrage cant take longer than about 1.5 seconds to complete – barely enough time to get lined up for the arcane barrage. I actually squealed in panic over TeamSpeak with the group when this happened. Twice. Missiles-Voomvoomvoomvoomvoom Aarrghh Barrage, blast blast blast Voomvoomvoomvoom aaargh! Barrage.

Suffice to say I also pulled aggro, but the add died in the next hit!

P.P.S – Blizzard! Sort the names out! It’s a nightmare trying to discuss Arcane Missiles, Missile Barrage and Arcane Barrage, without getting them mixed up and spending half an hour proofreading. (Yes, probably my own fault for such long ranty posts… that’s not the point! :p )

-V

Frostfire --> Arcane

I actually meant to put this post up yesterday, as I now have a follow up, but here it is!

Its been a long time since I delved into the arcane tree any depth, but after reading all the info from Euripides at Critical QQ – I decided to take the dive. After tonight’s raid, I plan to glyph up, respect and hit the target dummies.

Glyph of Arcane Blast stacks… I did not know this. That’s a 60% damage bonus to you when you have 3 stacks going. Throw in an arcane shatter combo with this (Arcane Missiles promptly interrupted at the end by Arcane Barrage) and both get the damage boost. With a Missile Barrage proc I would hazard a guess at 10k of damage from the missiles in 2.5 seconds, followed by a 10k crit Arcane Barrage.

Holy crap!

As FFB build, I do some nice damage. With a warlock at my side I can get 2.5k – 3k DPS on a tank and spank boss fight – regularly seeing Frostfire bolts and instant pyroblasts hitting in the region of 11k, with my fireblasts and Living Bomb detonations hitting 6-8k, or thereabouts.

I shall do some tests with FFB before changing, and record the data for all to see…

Do I sense a boost to my output in raids? *grin*

Hell… this is a PVP spec… I may even hit the battlegrounds!

Oh, note to self: Check the mind-flay macro for your priest! This stops mind-flays being overlapped and reduces mana wastage – it might work for arcane missiles + arcane barrage combos. (Barrage wont launch until missiles finishes channeling, assuming this doesn’t result in the buff dropping off.)

Glyphs:

Glyphs of Arcane Blast.

Glyph of mage armour. (got)

Glyph of Evocation.

Running a social/raiding guild (beware the WOT!)

Apologies, this is one hell of a text crit.

Our guild has the joyous tag of social/casual raiding guild. We have aspirations to see all content that is released, and if possible, complete it on heroic. Most of us are willing to put in two or three good raid nights a week, are quick learners and know our classes.

I have seen a lot of blog posts over the last week regarding this kind of guild, and how difficult it is to run them. I really must concur with these comments.

We have 105 accounts – often seeing 30+ players online, and having more raid signups than we know what to do with. We have received requests for extra groups, extra nights on the calendar, and are regularly prodded by potential new members who want to raid with us.

From a class balance side of things, we have too many tanks (many who are upset as they have not gotten into raids yet due to the fact they would be getting carried, and were still trying to learn most of the fights on many of the current regular raiders.) and are shy on active priests and hunters.

One of the many catches we have is that we are a “social guild” and therefore most people get along and form bonds, and many people get friends/family into the guild – from a social perspective, we can’t really turn any of them away. These friends/family members then expect to get in on raids, which mean we have too many people wanting to raid, and it’s a hell of a juggling match.

At the current moment in time we have two 10-man Naxx groups going, and we regularly raid 4 nights a week – with the core raiders (main tanks, healers and officers) having little choice but to attend all these raids to lead, deal out loot and assist (we tend to be the better geared due to doing just this, so need to help for successful takedowns.).

We were originally running with one, but with the amount of swap out's we were doing to get gear and experience, we put the second one up as soon as enough healers were raid ready. The first group rolled with the hardest hitting and most experienced people – the result being Sundays Naxx takedown. The second group had some of the experienced players, and a lot of new raiders – who basically had to start from scratch – in 3 nights they managed to clear the Arachnid quarter. Not too bad, but some of the second group were regulars of the first group, and it was a very depressing week of raiding considering.

From this week, we are evenly distributing the geared and experienced people between the two groups, with the hopes of getting quite far, and getting lost of shinys for people.

Logistically this is a nightmare. We have some 7 or 8 tanks signing, (can take 4) are often a little shy on healers, and have craploads of DPS sign – almost entirely Death knights + rogues and druids.

It is hard to keep everyone happy, try to maintain a balanced group and try to evenly distribute skill, I have seen my wife – who has taken it upon herself to do all this work even though I was the allocated raid officer, spend upwards of 6 hours at a time trying to pick and choose raiders, for each and every run.

The results have been relatively successful raids, with happy raiders, but some unhappy souls on the sidelines who never get picked because they need to do pre-Naxx gear ups, or there just wasn’t space to cram in that third rogue/DK/Druid.

In a couple of weeks we will hopefully be starting heroic Naxx – this will mean we can get in more people to an evenings raiding, with a little less fuss.

We now have EOE as well as OS to contend with in addition to Naxx, and as such a 4th raid night is often going to be up on the calendar, again, this means that most of us officers and healers will be required to attend.

Over the last few weeks we have also had a discussion on the go on whether or not we should use a DKP system or a /roll system with optional loot counseling. At the end of a week of voting, the /roll system won. This should lift a lot of potential burden from the raid leading in the form of not keeping track of scoring, but it can be expected that there will be the occasional bit of loot drama – but to be honest, anyone that does this regularly does not have the right demeanor for our guild. We regularly see people passing for others, or people loot counseling amongst themselves, but at the same time there is that one person that yells “Hey! I have a blue/green!” and expects the loot should automatically be theirs.

In my opinion everyone is equally entitled, it’s a matter of generosity if someone passes for them – since they could have a better item from other sources. The officers will only loot council in a fashion that means people don’t get gear that they wont use by accident, or if a critical upgrade for say a warrior or a healer drops, they can push it in their direction – although at this point there is nothing like that kicking about to worry about. One concern is that the most regular raiders (the hardcore who have always been there on time ready to go, for every run posted) who are the best geared and the most experienced want a DKP system (of 11 votes, 5 were for DKP. Yes, this is a bad turnout for a guild with our number of raiders – but we shall assume the rest don’t give a damn.)

From a personal standpoint, I would ideally like to raid for two nights a week, and have more time to do other things – even if its just leveling an alt. (I’m an altaholic :p) We are trying to avoid burnout of the healers and officers, especially with the pending release of Ulduar that’s going to do all sorts of nasty things to our raid schedule. (Gear up runs in Naxx, trying to do Naxx and Ulduar on alternating weeks, etc.) The only issue at hand whilst doing this is keeping people happy that want to raid, both their time schedules and raiding desires.

We are all very proud of the community we have managed to build, and the raiding success we have achieved with relatively lax raiding rules (limited min requirements, no obligation to attend, unless you sign, and a large player pool to pick and please.) we have achieved a lot with a group of under geared players. Up until last week, when we could take down Patchwerk because we had the healers, we were getting a spread of DPS from 1200-2200 – averaging probably about 1500, and still clearing most of the content.

Gear is improving. People are getting experience, and soon there will be new challenges. Where to go from here I wonder? It should be a fun adventure, I just hope it doesn’t result in too much stress, or forced raiding. We wish to remain true to our goals, but remain relaxed. Blizzard has tailored the new content to suit us perfectly, which I’m not complaining about, so anything is possible.

-V

Naxxramas clear

As of Sunday night – we beat Naxx!

Sapphiron proved a tough fight, even with the frost resistance gear all around. Eventually, it just clicked and people stopped dying. Sapphiron was tanked in the right position, the healers kept the tank up on landing, curses were removed, and no one got swiped or cleaved. A nice, clean fight.

Kael’Thuzad proved a cake walk in comparison. On our first attempt we got him to 19% - when all 3 healers were ice-blocked due to an accidental chaining of the frost tomb, that was the end.

The second try was about the same but we lost a tank and then eventually a healer didn’t get rescued in time from an ice-tomb.

The third try we screwed from the get go – we were a melee heavy group and some unlucky maneuvering resulted in most being tombed and dying, including both tanks.

Our final shot was much clearer, but it did take a while… two tanks, 3 healers, and two death knights were left standing, but the DPS was enough to bring him to his floaty-bits (knees?)

Even with only 2 ranged DPS the first phase was not a problem. In fact, the takedown attempt the off tank accidentally aggroed a side wing running to the central ring, thankfully just skellies (AOE FTW) the retradin suicided on an untanked abomination (we 9-manned Kael…) Me and the warlock took down the ghosts/banshees, and the rest threw everything they had at the skellies – I fire blasted when available and AOE’d any that got too close (hectic fight for this lil mage! I loved it!). After that it was simply the standard tank and spank (whilst maintaining a 10 yard safety gap, dodging energy zones, and having someone off tank adds as he “enrages” at 40%)

We will have an explorative shot at Eye of Eternity tonight, and see what we can learn. I think we are under geared to avoid the enrage timer, but if we can get to it – were sorted, and just need gear upgrades.

-V