Guild Introspection: Who you really are
I’ve always wondered about my guild’s “image” on the server. I have always considered us the less than mature yet determined/focused raiding guild, but introspection is unreliable. Sure my recruitment macro says “raiding focused, adult 10 man guild” but I mean how serious does everyone take that? I wish I knew how people saw us as a guild.
I know when I pug (before the LFG tool), I would go through a thought process before delivering that invite. Am I trying to recruit? (omitted. unrelated to this post). If I’m not trying to find a new guildmate and I’m just looking to get a heroic done, I always check the guild of the players that reply. If I get three whispers, I’m going to avoid <arrogant douche guild> and <terribad can’t pug VoA> but pick up <mediocre clearing ICC> because he’s probably got some gear, and some humility. more
I’m always fascinated by the social aspects of this game (and the internet in general), so please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts on the subject.
Explained: My thought process is a little more complex, as there are many factors to judge, <super leet non-douchey guild> might be a good option, but its a hit or miss, as I could get somebody that’s a “friends and family” rank and they just be terribad.
Dealing with an overfilled roster
With the release of patch 3.3, raiding has a new life. People are logging in again, and raids are getting roflpwnt. I am (as I’m sure every guild leader is) having to deal with a certain problem.
When times are slow and people just aren’t logging on, you might recruit a few new faces to fill in the gaps. Then when new content arrives and everyone decides to log on, you are left with one major problem: Roster overload. In this post I’ll be going over my exact strategy for recruitment, raid invites, and how I handle this particular issue.
In Fury Untold we don’t have a raiding requirement. I don’t want people to look at WoW like a job, so they have freedom to show up when they want or not when they don’t. The other side to this coin is they have to understand that I am going to keep a “healthy” enough roster to ensure that even if a few people don’t show up, we are still likely to be able to raid. Its the give and take of this type of system. I try to keep a few extra of everything: tanks, heals, and dps. This mostly sorts things out, but if everyone isn’t so understanding of why they aren’t getting into raids then you can have a problem.
How you handle raid invites, and making the process clear to everyone is very important. In Fury Untold, I value attendance and dependability over pretty much everything. If someone is putting forth the effort to show up to every raid, even after they out-gear it, I give them extra special brownie points. For the people who just gear their toon, then stop raiding till the next content patch take bottom of the list in my book. We are a guild and we need to operate as such. Just because you don’t need anything from the last tier’s raid instance, doesn’t mean everyone is in the same situation.
One thing that comes up a lot is integrating new members into a roster when there may be a little overlap. When I’m doing invites for a raid I consider new players as a sort of “clean slate”, whereas they don’t have any marks against them. So if I’ve got a guy that has been in the guild for a month, but has shown up to 3 raids a week every time, and a guy whose been in the guild for a year, but only shows up once in a while, I’m going to take the new guy with a good record. What this accomplishes is encourage the things I’m looking for in a raider: dependability, consistency, attendance. If your raiders are going to throw a fit and cry about not getting a raid invite when they know your invite policy, and what they’ve done to deserve being benched, then they might as well take their attitude and go cry in another guild. I have a very short patience for people who are self centered and do nothing but cause drama with it.
My last point for this post is what to do after the invites have gone out, and how to encourage people to show up each time, even if they didn’t get an invite this raid. We use EPGP and I offer a % of EP awards to people on standby. They have to be online (on any character, alt are ok) to sign their main up for EP gains, and they have to do so after every award. My point here being that you need to make logging on worthwhile, even if they aren’t included in the raid.
My third opinion.
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.
Raid accountability
One of the things that can test a 10 man raid the most is one in which has a binary result of live or die. Examples of what I’m talking about are mechanics like KT’s Frost Blast (testing your healers), his Shadow Fissure (testing everyone), and Mimiron’s Rocket Strike (testing everone).
Mechanics like this test the spacial awareness of your entire raid. The reason these are such strong factors to go by is that for other mechanics (fire and similar effects), is that if your person isn’t paying attention and doesn’t move out of the way, a healer can usually save them if they are going above and beyond their call of duty. When JoeWarlock decides to stand in the fire on Razorscale, FurryMcDruid can save him by diverting a good chunk of his attention away long enough for him to realize he’s burning alive, however in Mimiron if you don’t move for a Rocket Strike, you’re dead.
This is especially important in a 10 man raid environment. In a 25 man raid, if one player dies, that is a loss of 4% to your raid size. In 10 man its a 10% loss overall, but could be one third of your healer team or 50% of your tank team. Losses like this are hard to tolerate in a small raid and are the cause of a fair amount of wipes. For progression content its absolutely necessary to bring your first string raiders. In situations like this its better to bring your more competent raiders (with awareness and fight knowledge) than your uber DPS that can’t seem to stay alive.
Building your roster
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.
Blog direction
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.
3.2 Emblem changes revisted
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.
The Raider Investment
Stemming from this post on World of Matticus, I decided to lay down my viewpoint on the relationship between a raider and his raid.
When we raid, we get loot. This is obvious. That loot is an electronic manifestation of our effort that we’ve spent that night, meaning that the time, gold, and energy we spent to get to that boss and successfully kill him is represented by the items he drops.
An effective loot system should be in place to reward the players that deserve those items. What are the criteria for “deserving” a piece of loot? Seniority, performance, and attendance are the three categories that I go by in Fury Untold. Don’t let me trick you, I do not use a “loot council”, as I think that 90% of loot councils are twisted systems often renamed “favorites council”. We utilize EPGP, however I do prioritize raid invites based on those three factors, so as long as you 1) show up 2) pull your weight and 3) aren’t a new guy (which is honestly prioritized really low), you’re golden for a raid spot, therefore getting you in the pipes for “rewards”.
The reason I call this an investment, is because more and more often, I see guild’s stuck in the progression curve* that are simply used as jumping off points for other guilds. Their primary player base is geared, so any items that drop go to the “new guy” and once he’s full purple and gets bored, he moves on to a guild that can offer him the next tier of content (like the previous guild should have). The previous guild’s time and effort have gone to waste, those items are gone, and you’re in essence feeding the fire for another guild’s raiding.
* stuck in the progression curve – Farming the previous tier of content without any real viability at advancement, due to a lack of motivation, leadership, guild population, or any other factor.
Blizzard’s folly
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.
Upcoming changes
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.