Posts with tag heroic-raiding

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Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

In the wake of Blizzard's announcement that Mythic raiding would only support 20-player raids, 10-player Heroic guilds have been left wondering how they will adjust. This week, one guild member wants to know how to manage a successful alliance with another 10-player raiding guild.

Hi Scott,

I'm a member of a small 10-man heroic raiding guild. We have been worried about the changes to raiding that are coming in Warlords of Draenor, since we are a very close-knit guild of friends. Most of us have been raiding together since early Wrath. We haven't been looking forward to recruiting 10+ more people, so we were thinking of resigning ourselves to running the new Heroic (current Normal) content and hoping not to get bored or lose too many members to other guilds.

We recently received the offer of a guild alliance from another 10-man heroic guild on our server.

When Wrath launched in 2008, the last thing I ever expected to see was a decline in the number of druid tanks. We'd just come off a successful expansion of not being Innervate bots, and I thought we'd capitalize on a new set of talents and skills in Wrath to hold our own against the brand-new death knight. Not so: The population of feral (now guardian) druids went into freefall and has never really recovered, and at the time, protection paladins took a hit too.

My best guess remains that the popularity of the death knight and the protection warrior in early Wrath pushed a lot of druids and paladins out of tanking. We had more role options than they did, so respeccing to melee, heals, or ranged DPS was a better option than getting yourself or others benched. There were other things going on that probably didn't help much, but at the end of the day it was a numbers game that the bear and paladin simply lost. It was a vivid lesson that design decisions that don't necessarily have much to do with your class or role can wind up having a serious impact on them anyway.

Mythic raiding in Warlords of Draenor won't be the first time we've seen this particular raid size. Both vanilla Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj were 20-man raids. It also won't be the first time guilds were fractured by raid size changes, such as the vanilla to BC transition. Heroic raiders in both 10-man and 25-man guilds are wondering why neither of them was chosen to be the official raid size going forward. Why do both raid sizes need to have their teams disrupted?

Community Manager Lore chimed in on the forums to explain why Blizzard chose 20 as the magic number. Essentially, the problem with the 10-man raid size is they can't reasonably guarantee you will have a specific class to handle a unique mechanic. This isn't a problem in 25-man, but when you are trying to make both raid sizes equal in difficulty you cannot design mechanics which only work in 25-man.

Whether or not you can believe it, there are players right now who have not finished regular Dragon Soul. Some of them raid less often, some of them started later, some of them lost players, and some of them just raid more slowly than you.

And yes, you may be a better raider or have a better raid group than they do, a more skilled collection of people. You also might have a better class comp or have gotten lucky on a few occasions when they didn't. Some groups lost key players at the worst possible time, had real-life issues to contend with, or simply started later than everyone else.

Why do I bring this up? This forum thread on the EU forums, where Draztal ( who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite CMs) is constantly forced to deal with a mindset that does not seem to understand that each raiding group's experience is personal to that group and cannot always be extended to the game or all its players as a whole. Now, not every poster in that thread has that issue; there are some good ones in there, and you should read it. But it's a mindset I see over and over again.

The game is large, and no two raid groups have the same experience playing it. Some raid groups loved tier 11; others were bored or hated the fights. Some raids had fun in Firelands; others found it repetitive or disliked the zone's tendency to be all one color. (I still say Bastion of Twilight had exactly the same problem, but that was alleviated by its being one of three raids at launch.) Some folks have enjoyed Dragon Soul; others dislike the mechanics or the use of Wyrmrest art assets.

Having these differences of opinion is a fine thing and can be good for the game and its community -- when you acknowledge that they exist, and when you realize that your own strongly held opinion about the raid finder, heroic modes in raiding, or the superiority of this fight or that fight is rooted in personal experience to some extent and that experience will never be shared with everyone. That goes for things you love and things you hate equally.

<Paragon> was the first guild to successfully defeat Sinestra, the heroic-only boss of Bastion of Twilight. After what amounted to a difficult and sometimes buggy encounter, <Paragon> was victorious against Deathwing's consort. Be warned: There are spoilers for the encounter in the video.

The encounter itself looks hectic and challenging, with constant streams of adds and a pretty epic confrontation between Sinestra and an interesting lore figure from Twilight Highlands. <Method>, the second guild to down Sinestra, has also released their video, which can be seen here.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

"Normal" mode sounds so dull, doesn't it? Who would want to be "Normal" when you can be "Heroic" -- particularly when being Heroic garners better loot and, for healers specifically, a chance at the ultimate healing mace, Val'anyr. Most guilds on my server prefer the larger raids, and who can blame them? Normal mode is often seen as a fun distraction. Something for raiders to pass the time with, or gear up their alts in, when their guild isn't tackling the "real" version of the instance.

Sometimes Normal mode is easier. There's no question that fights like Vezax are much less complicated when you're only dealing with 10 players. It's certainly nice not having to worry about switching tanks on Kologarn or interrupting Auriaya's Sentinel Blast. But sometimes Normal is not easier. The margin of error is a lot thinner when one death means you've lost half your tanks, a half or a third of your healers, or 15-20% of your DPS. And it could be that your raid doesn't have a single battle rez, let alone three or four. Maybe that's why players prefer Heroic raids: Unless you're going after the more difficult hard-mode encounters, it's not the end of the world when you screw up and die.

This week, one guild leader asks, when most serious raiders only want to run Heroic raids, how can someone recruit for a Normal raiding guild?

Hi Scott,

I'm the GM of a reasonably-successful 10-man raiding guild (we're ranked in the top 90 US guilds according to GuildOx's "Strict 10-man" filter). Like many other guilds, we're seeing a decline in attendance lately (as per your most recent column, "Surviving summer"), and it's become obvious that we need to recruit 4-5 more people of various classes/specs so we can reliably run our scheduled raids without depending on 100% perfect attendance from anyone.