Posts with tag wipes

OK, I'll admit that headline was perhaps an overly blunt way to phrase this particular question. Let's try it again: Do you enjoy the actual process of progression raiding? Plenty of raiders claim to love pushing progression, but I'm not sure all of them enjoy fumbling for a strategy and dying and racking up mistake after mistake and death after death as the night wears on. I know some players do, though. I know that because I'm one of them.

I love a good wipe. There's an art to it, after all. I love the process of running back to the raid site, mulling over what went wrong. I enjoy the frantic whispers with other players ("Did you see what happened right before the boss rose up? Do you think if everybody moved apart right then that we could avoid some of those issues?"). I relish that moment when the creative thinkers tentatively offer up some harebrained maneuver (most certainly not something already laid out on any strat site or YouTube video) that turns out to be solid gold. I've even enjoyed wipes caused by players having problems with their execution; as long as they're improving with each attempt, I'm totally cool holding their hand along the way.

I'll admit that there comes a point in a night of wiping when patience wears thin and it's time to call the raid. Still, that doesn't mean I don't look forward to the next opportunity to puzzle and manhandle my way through new content with a group of guildmates and friends. (All of this assumes a group of known friends; I don't know of anyone who would enjoy wiping in LFR mode.)

My fondness for wiping uphill five miles through the snow is probably not one that's shared by the majority of the playerbase, but I've been wrong about these things before. Who here loves to wipe? Do we have any odd birds here who, even more than the thrill of victory, enjoy the process of picking up the pieces of an encounter and trying them again in a different configuration?

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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, available from No Starch Press.

Ah, meter padding. It's an age-old tradition dating back to Molten Core. Vanilla raiders will remember the Core Hound packs between Lucifron and Magmadar. You had to kill them all within a certain amount of time or they would begin to rez each other. That meant the hounds that were "dead" could still take damage. Rather than finishing off the last few, some DPSers would simply spam AoE on the pile of dead bodies -- meter padding at its finest!

This week, a raid leader asks how he can get his DPSers to stop causing wipes by padding the meters in Dragon Soul.

Hi Scott,

I was recently promoted to raid leader in my guild and while I consider my guild to be fairly good, we do have one fairly serious problem. The good old meter padding. We initially managed to kill madness and spine at the 5% nerf, but since then blizzard has increased the nerf to 30% and when we have to ask our dps to simply stand around and not attack, they simply choose not to listen which sometimes leads to a wipe.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

One of the great things about expansions is all the "firsts" we get to experience. For example: my first 310% flight speed, my first time flying in the old world, my first archaeology artifact -- there are so many fantastic things that come with an expansion! However, there are also some rude awakenings. I was surprised when frost came back as a mage leveling spec. I was also taken aback at just how quickly I perished when I tried to take on more than one mob. Let me paint a picture for you.

Here we have this overconfident fire mage coming into Mount Hyjal for the first time. She grabs some quests and heads out to kill some fire elementals. She tags one, and puts Living Bomb up. It proceeds to make a lot of elementals angry with her. She shrugs off the multitude of fiery beings heading her way -- "I'll just AoE them down." That doesn't bode well. Slowly, her life force ebbs away, she gets weaker and weaker, there's a darkness coming over her, and then she's just ... gone.

I stare at my screen. Did that really just happen? Did I seriously just die to my first Cataclysm mob? I quickly look around the room; awww crud, yes, my husband saw that. Well, that's a bit embarrassing! I then take some time to see what the other mages in the area are running as. "Ahem, well I guess I'll go spec frost now ..."

I'm curious where and when the rest of you saw your first Cataclysm demise. Was it due to overconfidence or a wrong spec? Did you make it without dying until your first dungeon?

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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, available from No Starch Press.

Wipes are a fact of life. Everyone wipes. How you deal with these situations can be crucial to your guild's success. Some guilds cultivate an environment based on blame, where everyone's first thought after a wipe is, "Who messed up?" Sometimes, it's easy to figure out who is at fault: Someone with a spore goes the wrong way, or someone gets mind-controlled by the Blood Queen after failing to bite his assignment. When it's not easy to figure out, some guilds use a different strategy for assigning blame. Here is one such case:

I have a real dilemma.

I'm an officer, one of six, in a semi-serious raiding guild. We have 30 core raiders who raid with us, and one of them until recently was one of our druid healers, and the issue surrounding him is my dilemma. A little background information on the guild, since it is relevant, is that we have a strict rule involving loot due to some people in the past who have abused our requirement for Vent in that they wouldn't use it, or they'd log in but leave their headsets off. This caused a lot of problems with wipes and caused the officers, GM and co-GM to agree that a rule would be made that was you must be in Vent and actively listening at all times during a raid in order to be eligible for loot. This is what caused the initial problem.

The player of this druid healer I mentioned before applied to our guild and told us on the application that he is deaf.

This is probably a good question to revisit since we're heading into a patch where lots and lots of us will be running pickup raids and groups. Souldreamer on WoW Ladies LJ asks: "just when do you give up on a raid?" It's a good question, and unfortunately, the answer probably depends on the raid itself. If, going in, you're not sure just how much DPS the raid can do, and your healer says he's actually specced prot, and you were planning on going to bed anyway, one wipe is probably enough to call it. On the other hand, if you've dropped a few bosses and have an issue with the tank losing aggro for a second on a boss, you'll probably go back for another few wipes just to see.

Do any of you have an actual policy? I tend to not get involved in PuGs at all if I think there's a chance they won't make it -- there are too many fish in the sea, and too many other things for me to work on rather than beating my head up against a boss. But maybe it would be good to set up a rule that most of us can agree on, something like, "three wipes and you're out." That might save a lot of time and frustration in the new Dungeon system.

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Patch 3.1 is looming ever closer, and things are about to change in a big way. Today I'll be discussing how the patch is going to affect your professions, and how you can take advantage of this by maximizing your profits on the Auction House.

Players have become increasingly bored with raiding because the content that was released with the expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, was too quickly conquered. Across the board, players are showing up to raids on an inconsistent basis, and many people now spend much of their time on the Public Test Realm playing through Ulduar.

This has contributed to falling prices on the Auction House for raiding materials and consumables, because not only have many people stopped raiding, many others have decided to save their gold and raid without being buffed to the gills.

What should you do in these tight times? Aside from the things for which you are currently saving, the patch will bring with it a 1000g bill to learn how to dual spec, costs to fund raid wipes, bring new consumables, and enchant and gem new gear.

By learning what to sell and purchase and when, you can minimize your post-patch costs and make some gold while you're at it.

No matter what you do in the World of Warcraft, you risk stepping into a sludge pool of drama. From arguments about class mechanics to heated discussions with trolls, to distribution of loot, it is impossible to avoid conflict.

In my personal gaming experience, I would have to say that most of the time I become upset, angry, annoyed or feel the need to take a time out, it is because I chose to run a dungeon with a pick-up group. Whether I'm tanking or healing, I inevitably run into people who seem to have no regard for other players.

As an example, I have a strong policy about my resurrection ability. I feel that if you die, whether from a stupid mistake of your own or a legitimate reason, you deserve to be resurrected.

On the other hand, if the entire party wipes, and no one had a soulstone or self-resurrection available, I believe everyone should run.

Sure, if you have to hit the washroom or someone comes to the door, I'll run with everyone else and pick you up after, and that's no problem.

Larisa over at The Pink Pigtail Inn mused on an interesting question the other day: Should you pay for the wipes you cause? Her feeling is not only that you shouldn't, but that the mere fact of offering to pay is offensive to her, like offering hush-money or a bribe. Instead, she says, apologize quickly and confess what you did so that others can learn from your mistakes.

I agree with the idea of the mistake-maker apologizing and confessing immediately. This technique also works in real life situations. (I wish it was heeded more often in politics, too.) Further, I vigorously disapprove of ham-fisted reactions from over-zealous raid leaders or guild leaders. Overreacting by /gkicking people (as one of the commenters related) in normal guilds is completely ridiculous. (If you joined a guild who wants to make world's firsts or server-firsts, then you know what you're getting into.) If you are the raid leader then you need to take responsibility for the team you put on the floor. In life, work, politics, and gaming, the buck stops with leadership. Leaders need to pick the right team and remind people who they know are not as experienced or strong in the particular raid situation about tactics, strategy, and common mistakes. Or else they need to chill the heck out. In fact, from a certain point of view, it's not the person who caused the wipe who should pay repair bills: it's the raid leader.

Other commenters on Larisa's post offered different payment plan ideas. One suggested a tax on all the loot acquired in the raid. Another suggested that before the raid even begins, raiders should pay an ante to participate, thereby socializing the costs of what might happen. Of course, there is the ever-popular solution of letting the guild pay for repairs afterwards, too. But as another commenter pointed out, repair bills and buff flasks for a 25-man raid can run a guild nearly 400G per run. My feeling is that as long as everyone goes into the raid knowing those taxes are being imposed, it sounds like a fine idea. Or, realizing that mistakes are going to be made, even by the most experienced and savvy players, we could all act like we realize that raising gold is as much a part of the game as raiding, questing, or grinding, and suck up our own repair bills, regardless of who caused the wipe.

[Via The Pink Pigtail Inn]

About 3 months ago I got my first pet. His name is Max, and is a grey domestic short hair cat. He was a stray that was scratching at my apartment door on a very cold November evening. At the time it was decided that he was just going to stick around for the night, but he grew on us so quickly that we weren't able to let him go. He now is a happy member of my family, and just like the rest of them, he has to put up with me playing World of Warcraft.

Except, it's not really "putting up with" WoW, it's more like "intensely interested in what's going on." Max will often times spend the whole four hours of the night's raid spread across the desk staring at my computer screen. He'll react to the sounds, the bright flashes of light, and occasionally even other in game cats. When someone says "lol" and their character laughs, he'll jump and stare down the speaker the laugh came from.

Many raiders and machinima fans will be disappointed to learn that Stage6, one of the best purveyors of high quality DivX videos, will be shutting down. Moo announced yesterday in her his WoW Moviewatch the shut down will take place this Thursday. This is a big blow to not only the WoW community due to all the superb WoW videos hosted there, but also to the larger DivX community.

If you're like me, you probably have half a dozen boss videos that you either need to watch, or do watch after wipes to learn from them. Stage6 has an option to save these videos to your hard disk, and it looks like after this Thursday, that will be the only way to enjoy them.

In light of the closure of Stage6, what video sites will you use to get high quality boss and strategy videos from?

Edit: A sincere apology to Moo for my gender mistake. Having not met any of my fellow bloggers in real life yet, I mistakenly assumed Moo was a masculine identity. /red-in-the-face. /apologize.

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

It happens to the best of us: We tried our best, and it wasn't good enough. We're no longer epic heroes bravely marching into battle but broken corpses littering the cave of some huge, slobbering monster or the fortified hideout of a powerful villain. We've all been there, and it always sucks (though it can occasionally be hilarious). As an officer and/or raid leader, what you do next can determine whether you find yourself in the same place all over again -- or standing victorious over the fallen body of your foe, sparkling with purple-ly epic awesomeness.

This week's question asks about wiping.

What is a good post-wipe process? I feel that we often just wipe and throw ourselves at an encounter -- rather than pausing and debriefing on what caused us to struggle.

-- Ciacco, Malygos, 70 human rogue

It starts out innocently enough. The tank loses aggro, the healer goes down, the rest of the group falls like dominos. It happens. Regroup, head back in, try again. But then it happens another time, then another time. What in Elune's name is going on?

Is the tank undergeared? Is the healer running out of mana too soon? Does the mage have to open with his biggest nuke? It could be one thing or a lot of things. But one thing's for sure: this 90 minute run through an instance is starting to look like a 4 hour death fest with a repair bill kicker.

So, I ask you this, gentle readers. When faced with a non-functional group, how do you get out? Nicely? Bluntly? Oops, my kid kicked the power cord? What's the classiest exit line you've seen or used? The funniest?

Mostly, full group or raid wipes are lame. Really, really lame. But sometimes, every once in a while, you'll have a wipe come along that is so spectacular, so fun, and so memorable, that it almost makes the repair costs worth it.

So let's hear your best wipe story. The shot above wasn't actually a wipe (we finished the Tiger boss in ZG with one solitary hunter left, and it was awesome), but my guild will always joke about the time our Warlock lead accidentally fell off the bridge in MC and onto the head of Golemagg-- who then proceeded to make his way all the way around the instance, grabbing every lava pack and puppy on the way, and crushing every single one of us out of existence. TS was just full of people screaming, yelling, and laughing the whole time. Oh, the Horde-anity!