Posts with tag raiding

Debuffs help us beat bosses, but not all debuffs are created equal. Over WoW's eight years, debuffs have dealt extra damage, prevented damage, healed us, given us mana, slowed boss attacks, sped up our own, and helped us to hit harder.

Some are more powerful than others, but today those concerns are meaningless. Applying every possible debuff and keeping it active is a critical component to success.

Believe it or not, however, there was a time when your raid leader would yell at you for doing exactly that. Your weaker debuffs weren't just considered useless -- using them was a dire liability.

Eight is not enough

Vanilla WoW had an interesting, longstanding, and highly criticized technical limitation. A raid of any size could only apply a maximum of eight debuffs to a boss. As you can imagine, forty-player raids had many, many debuffs at their disposal, but only eight could ever be active at one time.

To make things worse, the game didn't differentiate between debuffs. The latest one that was applied would knock off the oldest one, regardless of type or power. It's not difficult to figure out how this could become a huge problem.

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.

Like any group that runs an organized activity, raiding guilds need rules. Rules define expectations, set boundaries for behavior that might cause problems, and establish consequences when a member hurts the team. The latter part is often tricky. The week's email asks, What do you do when someone breaks the rules?

Hello,

I have a question about guild management.

Coming into MoP raiding we have afew new people and we've written up our rules on the forums such as being on time, gemmed/enchanted/flasked, etc to make it clear to everyone what we expect from our raiders. One challenge that we currently have is coming up with consequences for breaking these rules. Our guild roster isn't large enough to always bench someone from coming to raid and while we're all gearing up denying someone gear seems to just make things harder for everyone else overall. If occurrences are excessive we will recruit to replace the person, but otherwise we need some good consequences for rule infractions.

Our very own Olivia Grace recently sat down with Gamebreaker.tv to discuss player complaints about the obligation that many raiders out there feel to run LFR each week, a topic that has been hotly debated in, among other places, this thread on the official forums with the ghastly Zarhym naturally representing Blizzard.

In the video, Olivia raises a good point that many people may not immediately realize – the game isn't forcing you to run LFR every week, it is the social pressures of being in a competitive raiding guild, the very nature of which makes it basically mandatory to seek every advantage you can to edge out your competition. And while many players cite a myriad of issues with LFR, few offer any real, workable solutions. I have seen a couple non-workable solutions, however, so let's briefly discuss them.

Originally, HoF and Terrace were intended to launch together - the change in the schedule was made to stagger their releases more. Seems like a good idea to me, as it gives more chances to clear the new raids before the release of yet more content.

Bethaera - Heart of Fear Now Live & Raid Schedule

The latest Normal difficulty Mists of Pandaria Raid Dungeon is now available: Heart of Fear. Raid Finder and Heroic difficulties will be available Tuesday, November 6.

Raid Finder will unlock bosses in Heart of Fear over time, and all Heart of Fear bosses will be unlocked and available Tuesday, November 13. To access the new Raid Finder dungeons, you will need a minimum item level (ilevel) requirement of 470.

Here is the current schedule for these Raid releases:
Tuesday, October 30- Normal Heart of Fear
Tuesday, November 6- Heroic Heart of Fear and first half of Heart of Fear on Raid Finder
Tuesday,November 13- Second half of Heart of Fear on Raid Finder and Normal Terrace of Endless Spring
Tuesday, November 20: Heroic Terrace of Endless Spring and Terrace of Endless Spring on Raid Finder

All raids/difficulties will still be fully accessible by November 20, as we had always intended, but we're staggering the release a bit more.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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Even with a week that was jammed to the rafters with non-WoW issues for me to deal with, I paid attention to the news, and one of the biggest stories was the news that Korean realms are going to split the 10 and 25 man raid lockouts in patch 5.1. Now, I have opinions about this, because despite my notorious preference for 25 over 10 man raiding, I'm not completely behind this change. I was surprised to realize this, actually, but reading the announcement got me thinking.

First off, I don't like the idea of giving 25 man raids better loot and uncoupling the lockouts. I think that goes too far in terms of setting 25 man raids on a pedestal. Believe it or not, what I personally want is a system where if you prefer 10 man raids, you can do them, and if you prefer 25 man raids, you can do them. It may not be possible for both raid sizes to be equally viable, but making it so you can run 10's and 25's on separate lockouts and then putting the better loot in 25's just cements 10's as the also-run raid size. Now, if you put better loot in 25's but keep the lockouts shared between them, the relative ease of organizing 10's and running them would balance that out to some extent, but I actually prefer the idea of separating the lockouts but not giving 25's better loot.

My server is a PvP server. It's one of the more balanced populations with a relatively healthy amount of players on both the Alliance and the Horde. Even before this expansion, you had to watch your back because you could be jumped at anytime by 3 Horde players (at least, that's how many it took to kill me). With the release of Mists of Pandaria, world bosses have made a return.

Back in the old days, there was generally an unspoken etiquette among competing raids looking to take down a world boss.

But this generation? Not a chance!

Now we have these filthy backstabbing Horde (or Alliance) players looking for every advantage they can get to wipe Alliance players and take over their efforts. Back in my day, they had the courtesy to simply let Ysondre, Emeriss or one of those other Emerald dragons wipe the raid for them!

My friends, if the Horde(or Alliance) want to fight dirty, then we can only respond in kind! Today I'm going to let you in on a few battle tactics to both defend yourselves and crush the Orcs and their allies!

The Korean World of Warcraft community site has published some interesting news regarding the future of raiding in patch 5.1. An update posted earlier today states that 10 and 25-man lockouts will not be shared. It looks like this change will apply to Korean realms only (for now). There's no mention if this change is going to affect realms in other regions. The item levels of loot in 25-man raids will be increased with this change. For example, Terrace on 10-man would drop ilevel 496 items whereas the 25-man would drop 504.

As a 25-man raider myself, I am greatly interested in this change. It's challenging to maintain a healthy 25-man raiding roster. While this change would benefit 25-man guilds, it would also have an impact on 10-man raid groups. Equal item level rewards meant that most players would choose the quickest and most efficient route.

What do you guys think of this as a possible solution to the whole 10 vs 25s issue? If you're raiding in a 10-man group right now, would this cause you to look for and apply to a 25-man guild?

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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If you're neatly tucked into an experienced raiding team, you're sure to have raid preparation down pat. Your guild almost certainly provides concrete gearing requirements for each of its raid teams and each step of raid progression, probably down to details such as item enhancements, specs and consumables. Even if you haven't updated those benchmarks for Mists, you're most likely breaking the new ground as a team with some idea of relative strength and value.

But if your raiding team is a newborn Mists-era group, these finer details might still be nebulous. And in an era when motivated pandaren and monks are already grinning happily at the doorstep of your raiding group, raid leaders have to recognize who's capable of picking up the slack of specific gearing or experience shortfalls and who's not.

Has your raiding team set Mists-era gear level thresholds? What about performance standards -- are raiders required to demonstrate DPS capabilities or document healing throughput or mana pools, or is Mists raiding still a brave new uncapped world? Would your team turn away someone with even a single piece of ungemmed or unenchanted gear, or is everyone still patching together a stable armor set? Is there an eagle-eyed officer distributing raid-level consumables and checking to be sure they're getting used?

At this point in the expansion, much of the prep work for raiding is happening individually outside of the raid. Are there dailies and activities your raid team expects raiders to be actively pushing forward in order to optimize their setups? If so, does that work seem more or less onerous than similar expectations in the past? Do you and your teammates feel as eager to dig in?

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When does a player who dips one toe into raiding via the raid finder accumulate so much raid group experience that he becomes a bona fide raider? Is that even something that can happen? I feel fairly confident that a good number of players will say it's not -- but if that's the case, then we'll have to stop putting performance expectations on raid finder players. We've all seen experienced raiders fussing and fuming about other players when they're running the raid finder, as if they expected polished gearing and gameplay from players for whom they refuse to allow it's even possible. Spot the disconnect?

The raid finder didn't only allow the so-called unwashed masses to claw their way up into pseudo-raiding. (See that lump in my cheek? That's my tongue.) It also allowed countless tautly stretched raiders to deflate with much relief, tour busing their way through the game's most epic sights and stories and then logging out for the rest of the week to kick back on the couch with a good movie and a homebrew. None of these players suddenly lost the skills and discipline they'd accumulated over years of guild raiding simply by dint of choosing to run the raid finder instead of running with a raid group. Conversely, the players coming into organized raiding via the raid finder are no different from raiders past in their ability to pick up raiding conventions as well as personal and group strategies from repeated exposure to these events.

We seem to be coming to the conclusion that the hardcore game is dead. So who's a raider in today's World of Warcraft? To make a final decision, we'd probably have to come to a consensus on what the purpose of the raid finder actually is. Even so, I'm sure we can agree that someone who runs the raid finder once or twice ever simply to see the sights is probably not considered a WoW raider. But what about someone who runs the raid finder regularly every week? Does that change if participation drops to every other week or less? Is being a raider more a matter of mindset, skill, or performance? Do you think we've simply concluded as a community that even regulars of the raid finder are simply not part of the raiding game? Tell us what the view is from your end of the swimming pool.

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I tank a lot. I moved back into tanking around March or so of this year, because a tank was needed, and I know how to tank. I've stayed a tank in Mists of Pandaria so far because the last thing anyone needs is another melee DPS, because I generally like tanking, and because the new tanking system has actually given me something to learn. What have I learned tanking so far? Well, lots of things, actually. Here's a few highlights.

• People will always want to be told what stat to stack. Saying "You should try and balance your mastery, dodge and parry, while keeping hit and expertise reasonable" is possibly the least popular thing you can tell people outside of telling them who to vote for.
• Shield Barrier is a lot easier to use than Shield Block, and especially in five man dungeons where you may not have a lot of rage to throw around on a pull. In a raid, you can usually time your rage acquisition to use Shield Block followed by Shield Barrier to smooth out incoming damage, but in a five man you're often tabbing around, gathering up adds, and in general using Revenge as your main rage acquisition move so you'll end up hitting Barrier for a cheap and easy damage absorb over Block. When I find myself with enough rage to hit Block, I do, but even then I usually follow it with a Barrier as soon as possible.
• I like the Glyph of Unending Rage a lot more than I expected to. Sure, it's a major glyph, but that extra 20 rage can actually come in handy. I like having the ability to bank rage in situations like Feng the Accursed and using it to blunt big damage spikes with a full rage bar Shield Block/Barrier combo.
• One of the biggest changes to tanking has nothing to do with the tank classes at all. The change to healer mana pools fixing them so that healers can't stack up a bigger mana pool means that we have to be more reactive than ever to incoming damage. The active mitigation system cannot be ignored: the more difficult the encounter the more you need to be on the ball with your Block and Barrier use and paying attention to cooldowns and mini-cooldowns like Demoralizing Shout and Demoralizing Banner.

So let's talk about tanking in Mists of Pandaria.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests.

Raids are out! If you're anything like me, you spent a good chunk of week 1 powering to 90 as fast as possible. With raids open in the second week of Mists of Pandaria, you are no doubt in the process of preparing to step inside Mogu'shan Vaults! Today we'll cover some of the pre-raid items you should be doing before taking on the Stone Guard.

Yes, we'll be going over Stone Guard healing tips, too!

Reputation grinds: Blizzard has generously nerfed the reputation requirements when it comes to purchasing select gear. Now you only need to be revered to purchase those delicious valor level items. If you managed to cap out your valor last week, you have the ability to pick up a neck piece from the Klaxxi (provided that you have been diligent with their dailies). As a bonus, many of these quests provide those Lesser Charm of Good Fortune which gives you an extra chance at loot in any raid difficulty level.

Consumables: Have you been leveling your cooking and farming abilities with the Tillers? If not, Megan has a great introductory guide. We're looking to become Master of the Steamer due to their spirit food. For potions, arm yourself with stacks of Potion of Focus. Look for the safe periods in a fight where you can use these without getting interrupted. Finally, expect to spend some money on Flask of Falling Leaves. Gold Lotus prices are typically going to be really high. But you'll want that extra regen.

At the Mists of Pandaria launch event in Irvine last week, I had the opportunity to talk to Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft, about Mists of Pandaria's raids and dungeons, lessons learned from Cataclysm and beyond, and the road ahead.

WoW Insider: State your name and position!

Ion Hazzikostas: My name is Ion Hazzikostas and I am the lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft.

What does that job entail?

I'm the lead on the encounter team, which is self-explanatory; we make the dungeon and raid content, primarily. We're specialists in multiplayer PVE combat. On top of the dungeons and raids, we also help with outdoor raid bosses, scenario bosses, things like that.

What would you say that your biggest goal going into Mists of Pandaria was?

Particularly on the dungeon and raid front, to provide content for everybody, for all kinds of players. And we recognize that there's a massive spectrum of millions of people who are playing and enjoying World of Warcraft - a huge range of skill, frankly, and time commitment, the whole casual-hardcore spectrum people always talk about. And one of the things that we've been doing over the evolution of the game is to add additional difficulties, additional ways of consuming that content. So, you know, we now have LFR, normal, and heroic raids, and now we've introduced challenge modes, a sort of new tier of actually legitimately difficult five-player content. It's one of the biggest differences from Cataclysm at launch; one of the things we heard from people who were in guilds with friends and they'd say "these dungeons are awesome, we're having a lot of fun" ... but the people who queued up in Dungeon Finder would have a miserable time.

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.

You know things are bad in your guild when a newly appointed officer decides to leak private officer information to nonofficers. This week, an officer/raid leader seeks advice for a guild that feels like its sinking.

Hi Scott

I belong to a small social guild with less than 400 on the roster. Given that a lot of people have alts the number of players is going to be a lot less than that, though I'm not sure of the actual figure. Recently the GM posted on the MotD that the guild needed new officers and could people please send him recommendations. The next day I logged on and saw 4 people being congratulated on their promotion. I'm a senior officer in this guild and I had thought that it would go to a vote before anyone was promoted. . . .

I asked the GM why we needed more officers and what their responsibilities would be. His response was "we're down to 16 and need more for advisor's and to help the guild". None of the officers currently have specific duties and everything falls to three of the senior officers, myself and two others. Most of the officers don't even attend the meetings he promoted them to advise at.

This morning I logged on to drama as the new promotion (that I'd had reservations about) had leaked some officer notes to their friends in the guild. These notes I admit weren't flattering but they were accurate of their behaviour which is why there were there.

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.

Today we stand at the precipice of a new era. In less than 24 hours, Mists of Pandaria will usher in what could be called the Fifth Age of WoW. The long wait through 2012 has been hard on guilds, but that time is now over.

If your guild has made it this far, you should be proud of that, but this is not a time to rest. This is a time to ensure that your guild will thrive. In this new era, the best method to recruit players will not change: finding ways to set your guild apart from the dozens of others on your server. Here are four ways to do just that -- but be warned! These are not for the faint of heart.

1. Offer tutorial runs of the new dungeons. Blizzard's new guild mentoring program is a great idea, but just because your guild wasn't selected doesn't mean you can't be a force for good on your server. This strategy requires patient guild members who have run the dungeons in beta or who get a lot of practice in the early weeks of the expansion.

Start an initiative on your server in which, one night a week, you offer to run players through dungeons while teaching them the boss mechanics. Players will very much appreciate the chance to learn the runs in a low-stress and constructive environment rather than the merciless meat-grinder boot camp of the dungeon finder.