Ok, so now after a long thought process after the release of 3.2, I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I don’t so much mind that Blizzard revamped the Emblem system to make older content more appealing to “geared” players, however I feel the addition of the daily heroic (and soon to be weekly raid) quests are bad for the game.

I don’t want to feel that I must run old content to get current tier gear. I think the addition of EoTriumph’s to the weekly raid heroic was a mistake, and should have just been two extra conquests. If you run one ToC lockout, you get 15 Emblems of Triumph. Doing the daily heroic each day, net’s you 14 EoTs each week.

I think its perfectly reasonable to offer “free access” to the previous tier of gear, having heroic emblems be Conquest and ToC dropping Triumph.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not being elitist. ToC isn’t hard and its pugged several times a day on my realm (I usually pug it 2-3 times a week on my alts), but I don’t feel that a players gear progression should be held to how many heroics he runs each week.

*rant over*

PS – Trying to get up the material for my Tank Grid/UI post, but having started a new job, I’m a little inundated with work right now.

Building and succeeding as a ten man raiding guild can be a challenge. One of the downsides to raiding at this size is that roster flexibility is very difficult to overcome.

Whether it’s a short-term absence or a new spot to fill, ten man groups struggle with roster problems much more than larger raid teams. One healer out can make or break a night, same with any person really. Keeping a tight roster with minimal sidelining is always preferred, as it keeps the maximum percentage of your guild in the raid and comfortable with each other. However things aren’t always perfect.

Overcoming the slow nights can be handled in a few ways. Keeping a surplus on your roster, dual speccing, or revisting content.

Keeping extra seats on your raid roster is going to give you the flexibilty to take people that are the best for the job, however keeping those people around is going to mean benching someone when the time comes that everyone shows up (frequently). Depending on your looting system, a “standby” reward is an excellent way to keep the people on the bench happy while they BG, farm, or whatever occupies them on these nights.

With 3.1 bringing dual spec’ing, it’s much easier to fill holes in your roster in the event that you’ve got a person out. This is going to ease the amount of “extras” you need to recruit. Instead of having to recruit an extra tank, two dps, and two healers, you can say that on any given night you might have two people out. With actual roster composition aside, this could mean that you need to keep 3 people on the bench, tank/dps, tank/heal, heal/dps for an ideal coverage.

The last “option” for overcoming roster shortages involves running old content. As with any farm content, it usually takes less heals and/or tanks to cover the instance and since these are the most common roles to have shortages taking a night off and mowing over some easy bosses can be a way to keep people active. This also provides you with time to get some alts and newer raiders into the action and get them some gear to catch up to your core raiding team.

One thing I’ve always kind of lacked with this site is a clear focus as to what I’m posting about. I love guild management, as well as WoW sociology/player psychology discussion. With the recent changes I’ve made in my own guild, I’ve decided to take my experiences and share them here. I’m going to try to keep this blog focused on 10 man raiding and guild management in that atmosphere. I’m going to try to cover a wide range of topics and keep things fresh. I’ve got a few posts already in mind, so look out, you might get one later today if I get motivated before the realms come back up.

After reading the first few pages of this thread, the raid leader in me came out and got a new perspective on the upcoming Emblem of Conquest changes in patch 3.2 “Call of the Crusade”.

This post in particular has really struck the nail on the head. One of the problems I’ve run into recently (now that Naxx25 has officially been dropped), is roster change and the inevitable issue with gearing up new raiders. With the changes to Emblems, new raiders can effectively “catch up” to (current tier)-1, so in essence they are ready to start the content. The only issue I have with this kind of gearing is that weapons are not available (outside of raid drops) past iLvl 200. This means physical dps classes are going to trail behind a bit with this system, as they are more dependent on their actual weapons than casters, healers, and tanks.

Hopefully this will be a positive change, and hopefully won’t reduce guilds to their “weekly farm of Naxx25″ being the highlight of the week.

Today the patch notes for the upcoming 3.2 patch, The Call of the Crusade, were released. These are the first round of notes, and will likely change a fair bit before this goes live. I’ll be going over a few highlights from the list here, particularly things that pertain to raiding, and raid tanking, as those are my primary focus.

Emblem System Changes:

• Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders’ Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
• Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
• The Heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.
• The existing achievements to collect 1, 25, 50, etc. Emblems of Heroism, Valor, and Conquest have been converted to Feats of Strength since Heroism and Valor Emblems are no longer attainable.

I hate that this is first on the list of discussion, but I don’t really feel like rearranging it. This is by far my biggest issue with this patch. Blizzard’s whole implementation of the tiered Emblem system was to prevent players from falling back into The Burning Crusade’s issue of getting high-tier end-game quality gear, from farming tokens out of low-tier dungeons. Extending on my earlier post, this is just going to turn some guilds into farm guilds that gear people up for the next tier, but aren’t actually running that tier of content. Now while there isn’t a TON of gear to be had from EoC, you can still purchase T8 pieces from the vendor, and in my opinion getting T8 from heroics is a poor move on Blizzard’s part. Additionally the Emblem of Triumph rewards from the two daily dungeon quests is a further watering down of the system. You’ll be able to purchase Tier NINE gear from a Tier SEVEN level instance.

Mana Regen Changes:

• Mana Regeneration: All items that provide “X mana per five seconds” have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.
• Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

I agree with this, in the current state, Intellect is a very nice stat for a healer (particularly Paladins), this coupled with the Divine Intellect nerf (15% to 10%) and Illumination (60% to 30%) should make paladins appreciate the mp5 a little more, and not be Holy Light spam bots.

DK Tanking Changes:

• Frost Presence: 10% bonus health reduced to 6% bonus stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
• Veteran of the Third War: Stamina bonus reduced to 1/2/3%.
• Toughness: This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.
• Unholy Blight: This talent has been redesigned. It no longer deals damage to nearby targets. Instead, when you deal damage with Death Coil, the target will take periodic damage for 10 seconds equal to 30% of the damage done by Death Coil. This damage accumulates in the same way as Ignite and Deep Wounds.

About time, DK’s are so completely overpowered at the moment. Stamina nerfs and armor nerfs are well deserved. Although I feel the nerf to IBF isnt enough, combined with AMS and AMZ (if specced) a DK still pulls WAY ahead on magic bosses (things like Mimiron’s Plasma Blast).

Now for the good stuff :)

Paladin Tanking Changes:

• Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
• Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
• Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker’s maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
• Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until canceled or death. Also canceled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
• Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Currently, any damage taken by the paladin while at 35% health or below is reduced. Instead, any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead set the paladin’s health to 10/20/30% of maximum.

Now I know I’m a little biased here, but I love these changes. Threat being where it is, I feel the Exorcism change is a great one (to keep me in my 9696 rotation against undead). Changing BoSanc into a Improved Blessing of Kings is a great way to consolidate the blessings and make Protection Paladins not feel so turn between the two when running overgeared content. Judgement of Light, finally, no more arguing with our holy/ret Paladins who gets to judge what. I’ll never be caught letting my RF run out in the midddle of a boss fight again either. Saving the best for last, An AD that cannot be leapfrogged and also a mini Divine Gaurdian. Awesome, just awesome.

All healer mechanics that increased the targets armor by a percentage have been modified to give a 10% damage reduction. Good mechanic change, I’m guessing eventually this would have pushed Feral’s to the armor cap, and also helps non-DK’s out a little on magic damage bosses.

All in all, I like the changes to the patch, but I’m still very disappointed in Blizzard for not keeping with the tiered emblem system. I hated having to farm kara week after week to get certain badge items. I wanted to be pushed to new content and rewarded for going above and beyond the first tier of raids. Hopefully this is something that will change in the time between PTR and live.

As I said in my last post, I love to review my site’s incoming search terms. One that has been coming up lately is TPS rotations for Paladins.

With WotLK, Paladins received a fairly large overhaul, mechanics-wise. We have a few more buttons to push, and combined with relatively short cooldowns on our core abilities, we have a set rotation, and occupies every global cooldown (GCD).

We have 5 abilities that occupy our rotation. These spells are split into 2 categories, dependent on the length of their cooldowns, 6 seconds and 9 seconds **.

9 seconds:

• Holy Shield
• Judgement
• Consecration

6 seconds:

• Shield of Righteousness
• Hammer of the Righteous

Now, the math behind this all revolves around the GCD being 1.5 seconds. Fortunately enough, 6 and 9 are both evenly divisible by the GCD. I’ll make a quick list of the CD’s here, so you can see the flow.

1. 0.0s Holy Shield (9)
2. 1.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
3. 3.0s Judgement (9)
4. 4.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)
5. 6.0s Consecrate (9)
6. 7.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
7. 9.0s Holy Shield (9)
8. 10.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)
9. 12.0s Judgement (9)
10. 13.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
11. 15.0s Consecrate (9)
12. 16.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)

Now I know this seems a little complicated, however, its really not. I’ve included a handy little video that will show you exactly how to do this. Please try to follow this order for these spells, as this is most effective for 1) getting Holy Shield up ASAP, and 2) best for immediate TPS generation.

Source for good stuffs!

** Ok, Holy Shield, and Consecrate aren’t really 9 sec CD’s, but you can treat them as such, Holy Shield has a 10 second duration, with a 8 second CD, so you’re not sacrificing any mitigation.

I’m going to try to edit a few blue posts into this when I’m not posting from my phone. =P

Recently Bluzzard has posted about Ulduar, specifically 10 man server first achievements. The essence of what was said is that it is not Blizzard’s intentions for guilds to raid 10 and 25 man raid concurrently. Seperate progression paths is what is intended.

I agree with this in theory, however I feel it’s implementation is extremely difficult. As the leader of a new guild, I am busy recruiting, trying to keep my guild happy, and give us something to do. By that, I mean that we’ve completely smashe most of the current raid content out there. Most every raider has all the gear they can obtain from our raids, so they look for where the next upgrade comes from: 25 man raids.

This leaves me with a problem. I’ve got a bunch of bored raiders on my hands, itching to get into raids we just don’t have the numbers to fill. Way to go Blizzard, this definately seems like a seperate progression path.

I blame this partially on the ease of content at the moment. Guilds have blown through the content so fast that it’s been farmed to death. Hopefully Ulduar will bring a new challenge, and maybe a few more recruits.

Although I still think that Blizzard’s idea that heroic raids are somehow harder to complete (maybe on the raid leader), and deserve better loot is a complete failure (at least with Naxxaramas). The two fights where this is true are Thaddius and Kel’thuzad, and this is only the case because they are proximity/coordination fights. Most of the fights, and achievements are vastly easier with 25 man. Sarth+drakes and Four Horsemen are examples of this.

In my opinion Blizzard shouldn’t award better loot, just more of it, to fit the raid size. This will keep them truely seperate progression paths, as there is no benefit to either path.

In WotLK, Blizzard changed their design philosophy regarding gear progression. Items dripping in 5 man heroics, are of equal “quality” as items dropped from ten man raids.

Now granted I see the design conflicts with the way they have set up the Emblems. If heroics and 10 man raids (referred to simply as raids further in this post) dropped differbt quality gear but the same Emblems, one would devaule the other. Either heroics would yield “over budget” Emblems, able to obtain raid quality gear at heroic level of effort, or raids your drop undervalued tokens that would be a waste of time.

However making them both drop equal gear and equal Emblems has it’s own issues. With heroic reset timers being 1 day and raid timers being 7 days, you can start to get a picture of what a new 80 is going to be doing more. Once the heroic gear is obtained, and (under the BC mantra) they are now “raid ready”, they are quickly let down that the raid gear is either a small upgrade at all or simply a side-grade (if at all). This leads to player boredom (I’ll touch on that subject in my already foreshadowed post regarding raid motivations). Once the bosses are killed once or twice the content stagnates and tension arises. Raid live off of progression (mostly).

My solutions to the problem are either:

1) increasing EoH item costs, and additionally rewarding better loot in raids/EoH, while also increasing the number of EoH dropped from raid bosses.

2) implementing a seperate Emblem for heroic content. This option would be more time consuming and isn’t really worth the effort.

To explore option 1 some more. Blizzard is introducing a new Emblem for new tiers of content. This will mostly settle the issue of 10 man raid rewards not competing with existing player gear. While I do think this is a good idea, I do not like having to live through 6 months of a single tier of content with people as frustrated and bored as they are.

We’ve got a few patches headed our way. Tomorrow, we are supposedly getting patch 3.0.9. This brings about a few class changes, some spell changes, and a few other minor things.

Now me being a paladin, I am greatly looking forward to 30-minute seals. I don’t know why this wasn’t changed back when shaman weapon imbues were lengthened.

When this came up, it made me think, why haven’t they made Righteous Fury undispellable? I think the largest reason is the position of Improved Righteous Fury in the protection talent tree. Its way too low for the benefit it gives. Making this undispellable would allow ret to have a permanent 6% damage reduction, since they will already be deep in prot for Imp HoJ.

The next patch to head our way, will likely be 3.1. Dev’s have already started releasing information about this patch. Lots of class changes, some bigger things have been announced. Replenishment has been given to more classes. I agree with Josh about the effects this has on raids. In my opinion, if Blizzard makes a buff “mandatory”, it should just be scrapped and baked in, like Blessing of Salvation was, and hopefully with 3.1 Blessing of Sanctuary. If I’m throwing together a 10 man for Ulduar, and I somehow, don’t have one of the 4 classes that give Replenishment in my optimal set up, I’m going to have to bench one of my good raiders simply to fill a buff slot. This goes against Blizzard’s “bring the player, not the class” mentality of Wrath of the Lich King.

Additionally in 3.1, Blizzard has announced Dual Specializations will be delivered. From what has been said by dev’s this will give you two talent specs that are your “permanent specs” and you can switch between these freely, in town and more than likely in the “prep time” for PvP matches. Now they have said it won’t be free out of town, but not prohibitively expensive, since people could just port/summon out of the instance and back to town.

For those interested, I am having a blast with the guild. Recruitment is creeping along and things are shaping up.

I’ve still got several aspects to iron out as far as detailed guild policies (refer back to my Guild Structure post). However, we hit OS and Naxx last night (with a few pugs) and did fairly well. Now if people could just learn the Heigan dance. :D

I’ve been lucky on my recruitment, I’ve gotten mostly good players, that are looking for what I’m trying to offer. Hopefully in the coming weeks we can get further in (and hopefully clear) Naxx and we can move on to Malygos. Only time will tell.

PS – Watch for a follow up post to my “Tanks: Egos and Epeens” post.