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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsFrom our readers: Is my Ulduar-clearing guild holding me back?
by Amanda Dean 
May 17th 2009 at 4:00PM
I'd like to take a minute to address the concerns of one of our readers. Since my return to WoW Insider, I've been focusing on sanity, progression, and congruence. Dear WoW Insider:
I need help, and I figure between me and that guy in the last Breakfast Topic, I'd have more than a good chance of you guys having suggestions to my current dilemma.
I'm fairly new to WoW, having started in December 2008, after a long stint on FFXI. I was glad I made the move, and I haven't looked back. I toyed with a few classes before settling on a blood elf rogue. I zoomed through classic, Burning Crusade and have now made Northrend my home.
I hit 80 a couple of months ago, and although many guilds have offered for me to join along the way, I always replied that my brother's guild was going to take me in as soon as I turned 80. I've been with them on a few heroics and even saw the inside of Sunwell as my first raid ever, although I must confess all that left me feeling a little bit bewildered as I didn't really know what was happening most of the time. I was constantly asking for help, asking where I should stand and what not. While most of the guild was really nice and understanding (and still are), I'm feeling a little bit out of my depth. Most of the guild members are very experienced, as you can imagine. Some of them are on their second or third alts clearing Naxxramas, and most of the guild are working on Ulduar progression.
I guess my question is whether I have perhaps joined a guild that's a bit too advanced for me. I keep wondering if my gear's up to scratch, or even if it is, what content I should be aiming to clear. I would love to do more heroics, see the inside of different dungeons, but I don't think the interests of most guild members are in line with mine. If you can help this poor newbie rogue out, I'd greatly appreciate it. Is my guild holding me back?
Cheers,
Wil
Hi Wil,
Thank you for taking the time to write to us. It sounds like you need a little bit of guidance. Without looking at your armory profile, I can't tell you where your gear is. I would like to point out, however, that gear is not the only factor in being a great endgame WoW player.
The first thing you should do is learn your class inside and out. This means spending some time outside of game to do your research. There are many great websites that can help you find the right spec, and teach you about rotation. Be sure to keep up with changes to your class and other mechanics. Bookmarks sites that you find useful and be sure to revisit them, but make sure the advice that you're getting is timely.
Consider the flexibility you will need as situations change, and what you and your class bring to an instance or a raid. You may even ask a more progressed Rogue to mentor you.
Learn what gear stats you should be looking for. For most DPSers in my guild I encourage hit rating above all other stats. Attack power is great, but unless you are hit capped, you will find yourself missing things very forcefully. Once you've determined the stats that you're looking for, make a list of the gear that you need. Start by picking up regular instance and heroic gear and then consider raiding.
Your DPS is an indicator of what content you should be running. If you're pulling around 1000 DPS you're probably best off in regular instances. While there is no absolute minimum requirement for DPS in heroics, 1500 is about what it takes to pull your weight. Many groups will accept 1800 for Naxx 10 and 2000 for Naxx 25. Gearing up through Naxx will prepare you for further raid progression. Learn to walk before you try to run.
Your brother's guild may be the right place for your brother, but not necessarily the right place for you. Ask yourself if you meet the guild's needs, and the guild meets yours. It doesn't sound like you're nearly ready for Ulduar. If they are not running heroics and older raid content, you may never be able to catch up. It's possible that you need to make a change. Consider goals, progression, activity times, composition, and general membership.
For love, for honor, for pony,
mandy
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Fan stuff, Guilds, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 5)
Reuben May 17th 2009 5:13PM
I'm 77, and seriously started playing in January. Between real life obligations (college and such) I couldn't imagine reaching 80 in two months.
Manic Soul May 17th 2009 5:32PM
There's no standard for speed...you reach 80 when you reach it. The important thing is that you don't make it a priority over the other things in your life, and have fun playing the game and getting there, otherwise it's easy to get burned out.
AJ May 17th 2009 5:39PM
It's all relative, those of us with jobs and families and other commitments will always level "Slow", but often because we don't have as much playtime we don't waste our in game time and hit cap in a relatively low /played time.
Emophia May 17th 2009 6:51PM
I started playing in the beginning of January this year and my first character hit 80 today.
brammage May 17th 2009 6:54PM
Time to level in terms of months is pretty meaningless. There are players who put in 16 hours a day, and there are players who put in a couple of hours a week.
Time /played at 80 is a reasonable basis for comparison.
Rob Wynne May 17th 2009 7:20PM
I started up a paladin in Feburary, and he's currently 76, and that's being squeezed into the free time I have between raiding 4 nights a week and running two other alts in dedicated groups once a week each.
Depending on your class and spec, you can fairly rip through the first sixty levels in the time you can blink. (Of course, it's hard to make that kind of speed if you're doing it for the first time, because you don't know where the stuff you need to do is from having it done it a half-dozen times before.
Cheryl May 17th 2009 8:54PM
Levelling to 80 is relative to what you can do, your jobs, your life and your experience in mmorpgs, the type of server you are on etc. I levelled myself to 80 in 2 months, and that is slow by the standards of many friends i know. yet my other friend took a grand long 2 years to hit even 70. :D
artifex May 17th 2009 9:51PM
I started at the end of October, and reached 80 in March. My friend was pushing me to go faster, but I kept wanting to slow down and read the quests, etc. I find myself going back to finish Loremaster and a bunch of other non-endgame stuff now, and I'm losing much of my desire to go raiding seriously (unless it's BC stuff, which almost never happens on my server). So, to me, the answer is, yes you can certainly go faster (you can do it in 2 weeks or less, if you really have the time and inclination) but why? There's tons of storylines and other content there if you're willing to take the time.
artifex May 17th 2009 10:00PM
Oh, I forgot to mention: My friend who got me into the game and pushed me to go faster, because, as he said, Blizzard only cares about endgame any more and that's where everyone else is? He quit a couple weeks ago, burnt out. He mailed me everything that wasn't nailed down on his main and alt, and instead of holding a fire sale to pay for fast flying on my main, I made bigger bags for my alts and filled their guild bank, planning ahead for another alt who could take advantage of the windfall :)
Daelan May 17th 2009 11:17PM
It depends on how much you play, how well you know the content, how much help you have available to you, and just how much you want to focus on grinding levels as fast as possible over everything else.
My last 80 took about 12 days /played, completely solo, to ding 80 from level 1.
But that's because I know Azeroth and Outland inside and out and know where to find quest givers and which quests to take and which quests to skip based on how quick and XP efficient they are, I use Quest Helper to further help optimize my questing, I don't bother with trades until I hit 80, I don't bother with leveling instances, I have plenty of gold saved from months of having 5 alts burn through Shattered Sun Dailys to finance buying things like green hills pages and gear upgrades, and basically I just focus on burning through levels as fast as possible without taking a breath to do anything else.
And if I had someone with an 80 run me through instances and powerlevel me, or used heirloom shoulders, or RAF, or any of a number of things to help power level I could easily shave several more days off.
It all just depends on how much time you put in and how you want to spend it.
thevitruvianman May 18th 2009 11:25AM
I think it took me about 4 months to do 1-70 back when I levelled my first character during the burning crusade. It took me 1 month to do 70-80 when WoTLK came out, but I was doing a very demanding postgrad course at the time and I didn't have lots of spare time for playing WoW.
5 months to do 1-80 doesn't seem very fast at all to me, especially considering the recent buffs to levelling speed. It sounds to me that this guy took his time and levelled at a reasonably casual pace, which in my opinion is the best way to do it on your first character.
Ezzy May 17th 2009 4:21PM
A RL friend of mine started playing and wanted to join the guild I was in. I told him that he would be better off finding his own way. I did not want him to feel left out if he couldn't do the new content we were doing, but did not want to burden my guildmates with my noob friend. (Not that there is anything wrong with being a noob...we were all one at one point.) He has found a guild to call home.
Tell your brother thank you for the help. But I would find a guild that would be at the level you are at. If you don't want to jump ship just yet, pug more instances. I am sure you will gain the experience you are seeking.
Chri May 18th 2009 11:43AM
I agree.
Find your own guild and gain some independence. You can always just try it out for a few months and see what you learn.
Had a warrior tank leave my old guild way back in the days of tier 4 when we moved from Kara to Gruul/Mag. He said he didn't think he was ready for 25 man tanking. At the time I thought he was crazy (it's all tier 4 and we'd been running Kara like forever) but in hindsight not everyone takes the same amount of time to get comfortable performing their role in a raid - and jumping up to a new level of content can put a lot of pressure on even the most experienced player.
smapdor May 17th 2009 4:23PM
As a rogue you don't want to be white hit capped, you sacrifice too much to get there, but you do want to be yellow hit capped and poison hit capped. 315 is the magic number, assuming precision but no other hit modifiers.
soul May 17th 2009 4:23PM
I would say stay with the guild. It seems like it's a really solid one. If they don't run heroics or naxx anymore, you can always pug them and get some gear. Right now you just need time to catch up gear-wise and fully learn your class. Spend some time at ElitistJerks.com, read their forums, ask questions. I'm pretty sure you won't regret it once you catch up to the rest of the guild =)
Eddy May 17th 2009 7:03PM
It may be 'really solid' and doing great progression, but maybe that's not best for everyone. I know at 70 I had a lot more fun doing easy runs of Kara just for a good time, messing around with my friends and cracking jokes on vent, than I did of wiping all night in Hyjal (I was geared for ZA and did a fair amount of that too.) Not everyone is best served by awesome progression.
Eisengel May 18th 2009 7:27AM
I'd recommend staying with the guild for a while too. Luckily Rogue is one of the more mathy classes, and often you can answer the question, 'what is the best gear for spec X', or 'what spec, with maxed gear, give me the best DPS'. If you want to hang with these guys you'll need to sharpen your game a bit. If that isn't for you, by all means thank them and look for another guild that is a bit less experienced, however you can learn a lot from them.
If you want to stay with them, I would recommend you first find out if there are any Rogues in the guild, or if anyone has an alt-Rogue that is geared, then go to all their armory pages and make note of their specs and stats. Be sure to note things like weapon speed, hit, crit, and attack power and look at the specs they have. If you have armory data 4 or 5 Rogues in full raiding gear (not PvP or questing, they will likely be different) try to look at their stats and specs and see how their gear works with their spec. Why would this person have a fast weapon that does less damage? Why would the other have a slower weapon? Why would one have more crit and another more haste? If you can't answer the questions, no problem, just be sure you know what you don't know.
Then do some background work. Read through the Elitist Jerks Rogue forums, and search for Vulajin and read what you can of his and try to find his new spreadsheet. You may also want to look up shadowpanther.net, there is a ton of information there.
Revisit your list of questions. See if you can answer some of them now. Then, take the questions you answered and the ones you aren't sure of and talk to the players that play the Rogues. Ask them if you can have some time to discuss Rogue stuff with them, and spend maybe half an hour or so going over things with them. Be sure to ask about attack rotations and how to increase raid utility. If you have a class lead for Rogue by all means pester the living crap out of them... that's their job... to help out the Rogues. :^)
There is a lot to playing a Rogue, but unlike many other classes, most of it actually has a definite answer because of the way Rogues work. It just takes some time to learn it all.
Tilt May 17th 2009 4:26PM
I have someone SORT of like this in my guild, riding on the coattails of his brother. He has spent zero effort on his gear, as it's often unenchanted and ungemmed, whilst we're in Ulduar. He scrapes the bottom of the meters, yet we have no choice but to bring him. His actual gear level is decent, but he cannot pull a good level of DPS with it. We do 10-man Ulduar, and his DPS is always below the other melee dps, no matter what. I personally have pugged all sorts of heroic raids to better my gear because I know I want to do the best I can. Sure, it's only a game, but why not play to win?
Not only that, but he has zero situational awareness. He is constantly dying to various death zones on the ground, be it Sarth or KT or Mimiron's landmines or rockets. He refuses to look up encounters ahead of time and does not ask what to do when standing in front of the boss. So he ends up running around like the proverbial headless chicken.
He always rolls on any sort of plate, and weapons that our tanks could desperately use. He has no sense of what to do or what not to do. Fortunately it sounds like Wil is not like my chum in my guild, in that he recognizes that there's a disconnect between himself and the rest of the guild. That's the problem I'm having. Good for you, Wil!
artifex May 17th 2009 10:19PM
That sounds annoyingly bad for your raiding group. You guys should, honestly, take him aside and make positive suggestions about improving his gear, but then also do what was suggested in another raiding column a while back, and get the raid leader to grab the Failbot plugin.
I'd like to mention the following two websites to any fresh 80, or anyone else who needs some basic help with enhancing gear: http://be.imba.hu and http://www.wow-heroes.com . Each offers suggestions for gemming, enchantments and BIS tailored to what it sees you wearing in the armory, and a quick eyeball estimate as to how far that current gear will get you in endgame raids. They can at least act as a no-pressure starting point, even though you probably won't agree with everything they say when you get more experienced. (If anyone has something similar that suggests enhancements for the PVP side of things, please post it/them ☺)
Veknir May 18th 2009 5:07AM
There's a difference between someone trying to pull his weight (as the person in the article) or a nuisance that can't be bothered to put in any effort (like the guy in your guild apparently)
The main problem happening with friends/family joining the same guild is that guildies are reluctant to comment on their behaviour. Meaning they'll rather "compensate" for a mistake said person made (eg. heal through a stupid overaggro that would normally have killed him/her) instead of letting them die and learn the lesson, generally without even commenting on the mistake. This, obviously, is bad as the poor guy might be trying hard to learn, but can't really because nobody tells him what he's doing wrong.
Also, something I've noticed with my sister (and myself when I started out raiding) is that they often place the other, more experienced, guildmembers on a pedestal and totally stress out about messing up, generally with the result of them actually messing up in a really stupid way they wouldn't have if they had relaxed a bit more.
All I can say is, "chill". You might be in an Ulduar clearing guild but they're just humans, if you enjoy hardcore raiding then it is the guild for you. If you try your utmost to catch up with the others by learning as much as you can by yourself and asking and taking advice from more experienced members you will earn their respect and with it you'll feel a lot more at home in the guild.