From time to time we hear from someone that has been recently wronged by the use of meters.  I usually assume this person to be a casual player, since I can’t imagine a more hardcore player not embracing a system of measuring improvement and success, but I suppose that any type of player could develop a dislike of meters.

Lots of people have written blog posts about how awful meters are.  “Everyone uses them incorrectly”.  “HPS != DPS”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re healing recklessly or abandoning your assignments”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re causing more overheal for other healers”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re taking another healer’s job“.  “Pushing HPS means you’re more likely to stand in fire”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re going to snipe heals from other healers to intentionally prevent their heals from registering”.  “Pushing HPS means that the communists have won, there are no more French Fries, and the world is going to end”.

A few common arguments and replies to the meter bashers.

“If the boss is dead and everyone is alive in the end then I’m doing my job”

Raid success does not indicate individual success. If you’re on a basketball team and you miss all ten of the shots you take, but your team still wins you had a bad game. Winning does not change the fact that you had a poor performance and your other team members must have had good performances, in fact they needed to have even better performances than usual to counter your poor performance.

Raid success indicates enough combined individual success to achieve a kill. Raids contain players of varying levels of skill. A raid with a rogue doing 15k dps and one doing 5k dps will fare the same as a raid with two rogues doing 10k dps. Does this mean the 5k dps rogue is doing a good job because his job is to DPS and the boss died before the enrage… no.

Measuring healers by raid success means there are two types of healers, good healers and bad healers. 1 or 0, boss is dead or boss is alive. Grading yourself on a pass/fail scale is not helpful at all. If you took a course in school where the teacher would grade all tests with a PASS or FAIL grade, without marking individual answers as right or wrong you would never be able to know which problems you needed to focus more on. You wouldn’t know whether you passed with a 60 or a 100.

“If the boss is dead then my HPS doesn’t matter.  Get off my back jack!”

Why wouldn’t you approach a healer with low HPS, even after a kill? Yes the HPS was good enough THAT time, but maybe the raid group got lucky. And it is likely that on a harder encounter that healer will hinder the group. The measure of a good raid group is the constant need to improve themselves.

After the basketball player missed all their shots in the game, even though we won, you better believe that I’m going to talk to them and maybe have them practice shooting extra for the next week. Why wouldn’t you? Escaping by the skin of your teeth is NOT the way to build a strong and capable raid group. Approaching members who are performing poorly BEFORE their performance affects the group’s performance is the smart thing to do.

If your raid group notices that X healer’s HPS is really low and the raid leadership doesn’t step in to try and help that person then when you get to a hard encounter and X healer’s HPS is STILL low you’re going to be in a world of trouble.

Healing meters (HPS) simply measure what happened in terms of raw numbers during an encounter. If one person/class out performs another on the meters it probably means they’re contributing more to the success of the raid than another player. Certainly there are exceptions (mostly raid vs tank healing), but MANY times healers are grouped into a raid healing role, especially priests/druids/shaman. If the druid is doubling the priests HPS then the raid leader has every right in the world to want more druids in the raid compared to priests. Just like if a rogue was doing 15k dps and a mage was doing 7.5k, whether it is due to the mechanics of the encounter or the players involved one person is vastly outperforming the other person. If the encounter favors rogues or druids or anything the raid leader can stack that class to increase the likelihood of success.

“Using meters to measure a healer is just as dumb as using Gear Score or Achievement Checks”

No… this is nothing like basing quality of player on gearscore and achievements. Those things you can be carried through, in fact your “I’m a good healer cause the boss is dead and everyone is alive” theory is actually what the achievement check is based on. If the person completed X encounter it must mean they’re good! WRONG. They could have been carried through the encounter. This is just like assuming that because everyone lived during one of your raids all your healers are good.

Basing invites on achievements because someone would “know” the fight more than someone who had never experienced it makes a little more sense, but it won’t tell you what kind of healer that person will be.

Gearscore and achievements are things that are independent of skill. Gear is so easy to get now. Pugs stumble upon success while carrying bad players. What matters is what HAPPENS during an encounter. Meters measure what happened. They are gearscore and achievement busters. They show you who is carrying their weight and who is struggling and being carried.

When we recruit healers we do a brief armory gear/achievement check and then go right for the persons previous WOL reports. That’s where you find out whether someone is worthy of a trial.

“Too many players are buying into the fact that HPS matters when actually healing is a unique and special animal that must be judged without the use of meters.”

High HPS is definitely important. Being able to push HPS means you’re able to push the correct buttons. You cannot achieve high HPS if you are dead, if you are overhealing too much, or if you do not know the encounter. WoW is all about jumping, dodging, avoiding, and playing the mini-games Blizzard programs into each encounter… all while pushing the theoretical maximum output your class is capable of. Pressing the correct buttons is not enough. Anyone can press rejuv or shield spam a raid. What produces high HPS is being able to continue this “best” cast order or priority, to be able to maintain this performance during the heat of the battle. Many players break down when the situation gets hectic or when they haven’t yet mastered the mechanics of an encounter, they halt their healing or their performance slips drastically. HPS measures these things. And it is important to measure for each encounter because different healers, players, and classes will have difficulty with different encounters. As a raid leader it is often your responsiblity to field the team most capable of beating an encounter.

Of course it matters what a healers role is during a fight. But the meters will often tell you which healing roles are important. If the raid healers are crushing the tank healers during an encounter then raid healing is probably the focus for the fight. You’ll always want to have 1-2 tank healers, but the majority of your healers will be raid healers most of the time. During a constant damage fight like Sindragosa or Blood Queen you need healers that can push high numbers and react quickly to changing situations.

It is near impossible to measure which healers save people from “fatal” damage. That’s a favorite argument of meter bashers. “Well while everyone focuses on meters I’m healing the people that really need it”. I guess… So while the other healers are just pussy footing around you’re the one saving everyone? That’s more primadonna than the meter watchers =P

My thinking is that it takes skill and mastery of ones class to push high HPS during encounters with many moving parts. Players able to achieve high numbers are also more likely to be players that can react quickly to saving people in dire situations. Another part of being a great healer is being able to go from “healing-machine” 100% efficiency maximum output to situational “save that guy” healing by breaking your routine AND THEN swapping right back into the healing-machine mentality without missing a beat.

“People that look at meters are selfish heartless people who should shunned from society!”

What if the people that focus on meters and measured improvement/comparison are actually people that are very pleasant? What if the only difference between the nice raiders that you enjoy the game with and these people is that these people want to be able to improve their play, not just for themselves but because they have a deep sense of responsibility and caring towards the other members of the raid.

Heck, maybe the meter bashers are the JERKS! They don’t even care about their fellow raid members enough to make a sincere effort to improve themselves. They just play for themselves and don’t care about the raid members! JERKS!

Broad character attacks based on the usage of meters are fun!

“People that push HPS are bad for the raid because their focus is on other things.  They’ll probably just die in fire”

That or they’ve elevated their game to a point where they’re able to dodge the same amount of fire as you and I, but maintain a higher HPS at the same time!  You don’t have to focus on one or the other.  In fact if they do die in fire their HPS goes to zero and that will be reflected on the meters.

In reality the meter watchers are probably some of the people with the firmest grasp of encounter mechanics.  Part of pushing their personal performance involves mastering the mechanics of the fight so that they can continue to maximize their output.  If they don’t master the mechanics they will slip on the meters, since this is their perfered form of measurement that would be unacceptable to them and they’d work to master the mechanics.

As I mentioned earlier many encounters require you to be able to alter your positioning or spell selection momentarily.  The best healers are able to do this and quickly regain their bearings, falling back into their “best” rotation.  Healers that get overwhelmed when they’re the target of Pact, Oozes, Ice Blocks or Ghosts are not going to be the same healers focusing on meters.

If you’re good at meters then you’re probably good at encounter mechanics, it just makes sense.

“Pushing meters or ‘sniping’ heals is bad for the raid group.  It means you’re lowering other people’s healing in a blatant attempt to beat them.”

There’s always a lot of talk about heal “sniping” when it comes to meters.  The argument is that meter watchers are figuring out who the other healers are about to heal and then healing that person first…  This is a stupid argument.

First this would require you to have an addon to track other healer’s targets and spell usage.  These addons exist and some people use them.

Secondly you’d have to take your queues on who to heal from this addon.  This means that rather than watching green bars and reacting to damage I’d instead be waiting for other healers to react to green bars, then watch them start a heal, react to their heal by choosing their same target and casting a heal that gets off quicker than theres. 

Most spells are instant or in the 1.5s range these days.  If it takes me 1s to realize someone needs a heal and 1.5s to heal them that’s 2.5s to swap and heal a target.  If I’m adding in a middle step, waiting for someone else to recognize a need for a heal, myself recognizing they’re about to cast a heal, and then healing the person I’m building in an extra 1s AT LEAST.  A meter watcher would get better results simply reacting faster to the GREEN BARS not the addon which shows which healers are casting what spells.

And this is exactly why people push high HPS, they react quickly to the green bars.  They have the right spells ready and apply them faster than the people who are slower to react.

This argument is also dumb because a ton of healing is preventative or pre-cast.  A druid rolling Rejuv isn’t sniping heals, they’re just casting HoTs on everyone.  Breaking their Rejuv rotation to cast a nourish on a target after reacting to another healer casting a spell would lose them HPS.

Silly.

“Healers have different assignments.  It’s impossible to compare healers like DPS”

This is only true for raid healers vs. tank healers.  If the tank healers have the tanks locked down then the raid healers are free for HPS comparison.  In 25 mans there are often 4-5 raid healers who can be compared fairly.  Maybe one class is just exceptional on an encounter, that doesn’t change the fact that their HPS is higher!  If a raid leader has the chance to pick between a resto druid and a flash of light raid healing paladin on the BQ encounter then you bet they’d pick the druid.  Same roles can be compared.  And you’re put in same roles often.

“Pushing meters means that there is less for other healers to do.  They might get bored or feel like they’re not important parts of the team”

Okay.  WoW is played by people, people are emotional.  That’s the nature of the beast.  Certain things are acceptable to get upset about.  If loot isn’t distributed fairly, if someone is being called out publically and in an inappropriate manner, if someone sits too often…  But if someone comes to me and complains that another healer in the raid is healing too much… well that’s not something I’m prepared to address.  That’s the old “He’s working too fast and making the rest of us look bad” argument which we hear about from time to time in failing businesses.

This isn’t the union.  You don’t have your allocated healing to do.  Healing is a competitive game.  This is why, for the most part, I don’t assign raid healers by group.  If someone is capable of pushing outside the bounds of their assignment I’m not going to limit them just because another healer needs something to do.

Flip it around.  How bored would the superb healers be if you forced them to heal their 1/5 of the raid group and nothing more?

“Meters are often used incorrectly.  I was on dispel duty and so my HPS was lower than X person”

If you take a ruler and measure the width of your keyboard, but read the ruler incorrectly, whose fault is it?  The ruler’s?  The keyboard’s?

No dummy, it’s your fault.  If your raid leader can’t properly read a ruler then maybe you need a new raid group.  Let me tell you, after 5 years of raid leading I can guarantee that leading a raid is harder than reading a ruler.

Meters are a tool.  It isn’t the meters fault that people can’t read them properly.

The Early Raiding Scene

It’s pretty hilarious to reminisce at just how backwater the early raiding scene was on Scarlet Crusade.  However, I think that in a way this actually helped Ladies of Destiny survive.  In the very beginning, LoD was a huge guild in terms of numbers (my “interview process” was literally just me whispering some random level 10 person who I needed to talk to in order to get invited, and then instantly having a guild invite pop up on my screen).  But over time I guess Matron must have developed some sort of standards, because we developed into a relatively small guild that had a handful of the server’s best players, but could never dream of fielding a full 40 man Molten Core raid.  As Matron alluded to in his post, the threat of losing our better players to the more advanced guilds was a constant theme for that first year of LoD’s existence.  Luckily for us, even the “more advanced guilds” on Scarlet Crusade would’ve made the current Ladies of Destiny look like Ensidia:

• Empire – The first attempted Alliance raiding guild was led by the Night Elf Rogue, on again off again Moonwink lovah, and overall uber-doosh, Vaan.  He ended up luring away several of our former guild members, including Angie, Hoa, Moonikki, Sirena, and most notably Wildelia.  Empire ended up flaming out extremely quickly when Vaan’s leadership turned out to rival that of Huntmaster’s in NC Gaming.  Matron’s heart remained broken for several years though, until Wildelia finally came back to LoD in TBC
• Emerald Lords – Another attempted raiding guild which flamed out rather quickly.  They actually took several LoD members on their MC runs (including myself), but never tried to recruit anyone away.  My first few MC raids were with them.  If I had to sum up their raids in one sentence, I’d have to go with “they once spent 15 minutes arguing over whether we should do random rolls on greens which were upgrades for people, or just DE them to save time”.  Yes, GREENS!  The guild blew up after a particularly brutal night of wiping repeatedly from trying to pull Lucifron without getting imps from the cave, or a pack of corehounds at the same time.  Good times!
• Archon – Archon started raiding around the same time as Emerald Lords, with infinitely better results.  Luckily for LoD, they had no interest in any of our members, as they were succeeding very well on their own.  We have several former Archon members in LoD today, and we generally always had a good relation with them (with the notable except of Tarja getting BANT from their TBC community raids for making Nightmusic cry)
• Haven – This was a new guild that started having some success in Onyxia, and was somewhat of a threat to poach LoD members, but never did to my knowledge.  All I really remember was one night when Emarori got really mad at me because I wanted to go to their Onyxia raid instead of run her thru quests, with the logic that “you can do level 60 stuff whenever you want, but how often will we have a full night to do Stranglethorn Vale quests?”.  I ended up telling them that I couldn’t go that night because I had promised my girlfriend that I would help her with quests – they never invited me back even though they continued inviting several other LoD members for a month or two afterwards.  Yes I’m still bitter :(
• Eternal - I was there for the very first raid of this new upstart guild led by a bald hooligan Priest named Baynoor.  The difference in attitudes between them and Emerald Lords was night and day.  Every time we wiped on a single core hound or lava surger, that was a great attempt guys, we almost had it!  When the the initial trash respawned before we even made it to the imp caves (much less to Lucifron), that was a great job guys, we learned alot tonight!  Even when the Hunter named Hakhu who had gone the entire raid DPSing while naked, went into great detail about how he would have more fun dry humping his grandmother, and then hearthed out and gquit mid-raid, people just laughed it off and no one yelled at anyone.
• Dark Heaven – Just when we were building our Zul’gurub group into a strong force of ~20 consistent raiders, a disgruntled faction of raiders from Archon split off to form DH, taking several of our non-LoD raiders, including Pung, Ningning, Veyl, Whitefox.  We always had a love/hate relationship with DH, and they played a huge role in the beginning days of LoD’s 40 man raiding.  I’m sure Matron will want to say more about that tomorrow though.

Finding Our Way in Zul’gurub

Maybe I digressed too much about other guilds on the server, but I suppose that’s ok since this is also the Scarlet Crusade 5th anniversary.  But anyways, like I said, in that first year Ladies of Destiny was mostly a small guild with some really good players, but not even enough to fill a 20 man Zul’gurub raid.  It’s fun to look back at just how noob we were back then though:

• DKP - So we read that the really good guilds don’t just do random rolls on loot.  We knew you were supposed to earn points for showing up, and spend them on loot… but I think that’s about as far as we knew how it worked.  I think our original system was that you earned 1 point for each boss killed, and blue gear cost 5 points, and epic gear cost 20 points.  But then we realized that the blue gear wasn’t all that great so we made it free.  Then eventually we realized that epics rarely dropped and that everyone had a shitload of points.  So then we increased the cost of epics, until we realized that everyone who ran ZG the most had negative points.  Also, some nights Tarja kept track of the DKP, other nights Matron did, other nights Anowyyn did – there was no master list anywhere, just the up to date current tally on the website.  Eventually we realized that whenever Matron said he would keep track of DKP, that night usually never got updated and ended up not counting.  So pretty quickly we moved to a system where I kept track of everything using a master spreadsheet, and Matron hasn’t been allowed to go near DKP since
• Bijous/Coins - Everyone needed to collect bijous and coins for their ZG setpieces.  Since there was no such thing as guildbanks (and even if there was, only half the people were from LoD), so we passed them out individually at the end of each raid rather than doing the logical thing and saving them all until people have the other mats needed for their setpieces.  I don’t remember our first system at all, the only thing I remember was that Muttonboy NEVER won the roll on anything, as if it was some huge cosmic joke.  We eventually changed it to a system where everyone rolled after the raid, and then we would pick which coins we wanted, in order of who rolled highest.  It was unnecessarily time consuming and silly, but people got the stuff they needed so I guess it got the job done
• Learning to play – Matron and Faranon thought they were coming up with some novel concept when they “invented” the tank switch for the Spider boss.  Tarja and Miyuki had no idea that Paladins were allowed to stand there and do nothing but heal, without meleeing stuff.  Silverluna was considered one of our better DPS even though she was so busy talking on vent that 75% of her DPS was autoshot.  Darreck actually got stuck in a cage by the Tiger boss. Muttonboy would die a dozen times a night, despite blowing thru a stack or two of Invulnerability Potions.  We cleared an entire wing of trash using the strategy of “Emarori gets naked and enslaves 1 mob, other mobs kill it, warlock dies and gets rezzed – repeat times 20″.  Moving out of the gas cloud on the Snake boss was something that we eventually realized was a good idea, after several weeks of killing the boss.  It was literally impossible to get the entire raid to run past the mobs near the first bridge without aggroing them.  Matron couldn’t even run across the bridge without falling off, even with no mobs nearby.  Matron continued taking rezzes on Bloodlord and taunting the boss even though he had died over 10 times and his gear was completely red.  Few people had Damage Meter mods, so the overall damage/healing done for the entire raid was always posted in raidchat for everyone who didn’t have them.  Threat meters?   Those didn’t even exist yet!  So yeah, I think we’ve come a looooong way since those days!

Year 1 – 2005

Our story begins, as all good WoW stories do, in Goldshire. 

Scarlet Crusade was opened on Feb 22^nd 2005 as one of a handful of new RP servers.  I had originally started playing on Bleeding Hollow and was frustrated at falling behind the pace of most of the other players.  Back in Vanilla WoW, at least the early days, leveling was the game.  You were your level.  Your level gave you power.  It brought with it a sense of awe and wonder.  So starting on a new server, even in level with everyone else, was an attractive proposition.

Why Ladies of Destiny

RP servers have a shelf life.  As the server ages the number of people still engaging in RP falls off.  People become more interested in other aspects of the game… pvp, raiding, alting etc.  But on day one of a new RP server the role playing is alive and well.  I knew I wanted to start a guild of my own, the previous guild I was in on my old server was really poorly run and I figured since I had hit level 35 on my mage I pretty much knew everything I needed to know about WoW, right?

Tapping into the RPness of Scarlet Crusade was part of my plan to start.  Establishing Ladies of Destiny as a female toon online guild gave it an identity and theme, without being too exclusionary.  Little did I know that this rule would govern and mold the guild for the next three years, not to mention invite many interesting questions about its origins.

Recruitment

Okay, I promised Goldshire… and most of what I did to start the guild happened in Goldshire (mind out of the gutter please).  It was the #1 hot spot for finding new talent! (mind out of the… aww never mind) 

Here’s where my genius as a guild leader really becomes apparent.  When the server first started I employed the same type of recruitment that all new guilds use these days… the tried and true method of General and Trade channel spam…  God I hate myself.  I was a little bit obsessed with wanting to be a really large and influential guild on the server.  I had one main “rival” guild in my quest for  eing a big guild, The Red Hand, and I can’t count how many /who Red Hands I’d do a day, comparing their guild roster size to LoD’s.

Looking back I wonder what my guildies must have thought of their guild leader.  On the one hand you had a very specific theme and identity being established, with an RP base and a female toon only rule, which couldn’t possibly be the brain child of a guy.  On the other hand you had a megalomaniac guild leader using every trick in the book to gain members, creating imaginary and unreciprocated competition with other guilds for members, obsessed with size… total give away…  I am dumb.

So all that aside getting new members was imperative!  The coolest thing about a guild in Vanilla was having a tabard, right?  So the first thing I did was take donations from our earliest members and get a tabard asap.  This was a major recruiting tool!  Do not underestimate how important it was to have a colorful cover for the mish mash of gear you wear in those early levels.  Not to mention it gives you an identity as part of a group when everyone on the server is basically searching for a place to call home.

The other major recruiting tool was the fact that I was a tailor.  Tailors made bags.  Bags hold stuff.  People need to hold stuff.  It was that simple.  That first week I just sat in Goldshire every day, having guild members come to me and give me their linen to be made into bags.

The game used to be a whole lot simpler.  Bags and Tabards, shot-gun recruitment in the trade/general channels… this is how great guilds were formed.

A comedy of errors and luck in these first few years, as you will see.

Another interesting note about recruiting in those early days – As I mentioned earlier, level meant everything in WoW.  Any time you met someone that played WoW you’d ask two questions “Do you play Horde or Alliance?” and “What level are you?”, these questions were even more important than “What class are you?”  or “What kind of gear do you have?”.  So if a guild had a very high (omg level 40!) level player in these early days it was a mark of honor.  You’d root these people on in guild chat as they leveled.  They’d act as mascots, as figureheads of sorts.  “Oh LoD has a level 53 hunter!”

Unfortunately the types of players that sprinted out in front of everyone else when leveling turn out to be the anti-social misfits of our society.

So basically I was focused on recruiting as many people as possible, with almost zero requirements outside of being a female toon, and I was targeting a sub-section of WoW society that probably can’t play well with others.  This led to a few occasions of drama, which I’ve since stricken from my memory, and lots of guild defections as the high level players from all the different guilds banded together to form one doomed super guild of social misfits.

Whew, the early days.

Losing Guildies

I hate losing members.  As people leveled to 60 everyone started to identify what they wanted to spend their time doing.  With the release of Warsong Gulch some LoD members spent all of their time pvping and waiting in queue.  Other members tried to finish their dungeon sets from Strat and Scholo.  Still others, the best geared or perhaps the most connected of us would be invited to fill raids with larger guilds.  What I hated to have happen was X guild approach a guildie and offer them something that LoD couldn’t, a spot on a stable wsg team or an invite from a “serious” raiding guild.  The only way to stop this from happening was to provide these same opportunities for LoD members within the guild. 

It was an early lesson in how WoW works, those that provide the opportunities hold the power in most any situation.  This rule would play out a few times during LoD’s history.

Raiding

LoD sort of missed the boat in terms of early MC raiding, in fact only a few guilds on the server even zoned into MC when it first came out.  What really defined LoD and what it was to become was Zul Gurub.

Blizzard’s first twenty person instance came along just in time to see many of us finishing our dungeon sets and looking for a challenge.  I remember forming up to raid ZG four or five nights a week.  That wasn’t because we were hardcore and clearing the instance or anything, in fact it was the opposite.  We were hardcore casuals that targeted a boss or two each night.  We’d work on a boss for a few nights in a row before downing him.  Some bosses we spent weeks working on!

We also didn’t raid with entire LoD groups at this time.  We probably pugged a good half of the group, which allowed us to make some fantastic friends along the way.  Unlike most pugs we’d try to invite the same people back each night, eventually forming a semi-regular group which just zoned into ZG every night and had a blast.  We met Pungs, Ning-nings, Eclypses, Darrecks, Wolvis, Faranons, Muttonboys, Jaedes, and Dineas.  I think a lot of people enjoyed raiding with us because we were fun and fair when running raids.

ZG really turned us into a guild in the true sense of the word.  Rather than just adding a green chat channel, being in LoD finally meant that you were a part of something.  For the first time we were working together on difficult encounters as a team.  Seeing someone else get a drop was almost as rewarding as getting one of your own.  Everyone was chatting on vent (somehow we were almost half women, for those wondering) and having a blast.

MMOs require a certain dedication.  Some people can motivate themselves by world rank or gear.  For most others playing the game means enjoying time with friends.  Many people hit a wall in MMOs and there is a critical point where they need to find a group to become a part of or else they just quit and move onto the next game.  I know for many of us ZG raiding was the time period where our interest in the game and each other took hold.  Those few months of raiding are probably responsible for more current WoW addicts than we’d like to take credit for.

ZG was also the instance where we were introduced to some of the simple responsibilities which come from running a raid.  How do we assign loot to a group of people that may vary each night?  How do we give away bijous or coins so that people can get the items they need?  Which bosses do we focus on?  Who do we invite?

It was all a grand experiment and for the most part we did a great job.  People were understanding if something didn’t work right the first time.  It was the perfect way to ease into raiding and establish a group of people that liked spending time together.

There’s more that happened in that first year… an early alliance with Dark Heaven… and from that an eventual alliance with The Fel Watch and Twilights Legacy.  Those stories play a bigger part in 2006 so I’ll leave those for tomorrow.

For now I’m reminded of my high school motto Tenui Nec Dimittam, which means “Take hold and never let go”.  I think these early days of LoD and ZG were the time when the game and guild took hold of many of us and has never let us go.

Humble beginnings…

We all know how it goes in raid guilds.  When you’re raiding and things are dying people are happy.  When you’re not raiding and when things aren’t dying people are unhappy.  It’s basically that simple.  There are many different flavors of drama, but most of all of gets solved, or ignored, if raids happen and stuff dies.

So it’s leadership’s responsibility to make sure that raids happen and bosses are killed, preferably making worthwhile progress each week.

When guilds struggle it’s typically for the following reasons

1.  Nobody is showing up – Your guild killed Yogg in Ulduar and right when you were trying to figure out which hardmode to start out with first, Blizzard rescued you from a decision with another raid instance in ToC.  Now you’re completing ToC 25 each week, on your first raid day of the week, with an average attendance of 30 people… but when you schedule ToGC 25 on the second raid night you’re only getting 18 people to log on.  On rare nights you do get enough to venture into ToGC 25, people are magically needing to leave after 3-4 wipes.

2.  Your guild is in above their heads – Your guild just finished ToC 25, people are excited about trying ToGC 25 and breaking into the “hardcore” raiding scene.  After three weeks of wiping to Gormok, making valiant switches to 3 tanks to keep the debuff from stacking up too high, swapping to 7 healers to handle the heavy tank damage, and subbing in more or less DPS to compensate, you just haven’t found the answer.  Your guild members start to resent that rogue who is only doing 2500 DPS and still doesn’t have a shoulder enchant.  You assign class mentors, post strat videos on your website, and debate minutiae until you’re blue in the face.  Nothing is helping.  This invariably leads to Problem #1.

More progressed guilds suffer from those two factors, but to a much lesser degree.  Chances are that people in progression guilds won’t cherry pick logon days, and if they do they’ll soon find themselves out of the guild or riding the bench.  And chances are that skill won’t be as much of a factor with most of your raid group given the content Blizzard is currently putting out.

Progression / Hard-core guilds have their own unique problems including

3.  Your guild is bored – LoD hadn’t really gotten to this point in previous expansions because we were never on the cutting edge of progression.  We always had more instances and encounters to look forward to.  Each new kill served as a gateway to the next bigger and better boss.  However once you’re guild starts to catch up to Blizzard’s content releases and finishes current content well before the next promised instance boredom becomes a huge problem.  A lot of people think that hardcore players raid for gear, which is true to a degree, but mostly they raid because they’re rabid for new challenges and encounters.  Once you reach the end of the line, with nothing to look forward to, it becomes harder and harder to keep your raid group interested.

4.  You don’t have the right group comp – When you’re a progression guild you often need to min/max your raid composition for certain encounters.  As much as Blizzard has tried to make it so that you’re bringing the player and not the class it still stands that some classes just excel on certain encounters.  If you’re trying to tank heal Algalon with resto druids or AoE down Anub adds with volley you’re probably going to fail.  Top guilds keep large rosters and create group comps which give them the best chance to down bosses.  LoD has had to actively recruit a number of classes and specs during the past year.  Our 5 hunters (before Misdirect buffs) just couldn’t cut it on Anub and we needed more heavy AoE melee.  We looked for another holy paladin to cross beacon heal our two Anub tanks and provide another BoP for our kiting strat.

5.  You have burn outs – Realistically the average raider raids with LoD for 6-12 months.  We certainly have people that have been with us for many years, but for the most part we overturn about 40% of our raid group every 2-3 tiers of content.  Progression raiding requires you to show up and perform at a high level week in and week out.  For most people this simply becomes difficult given RL responsibilities.  The same characteristics which make LoD raiders good players (attention to detail, intelligence, dedication) also find those people in jobs with more responsibility or in school to become doctors or lawyers.  Important stuff that they need to put aside at times.  Over the course of a year a raiding guild is going to be about 1000 hours of raiding (10 + 25 mans), which translates into half of the time most of us spend at work each year.  People burn out.  It happens.

The Solution -

The solution for all of these problems, for both the casual and hardcore guilds, is recruitment.  I see a lot of guilds that simply refuse to recruit players, feeling as though they’re so unique that they couldn’t possibly find like minded individuals that would join their guild.

“We’re a friends and family guild!”

Make new friends!

“We’d rather give our players a chance before we recruit other people”

Once you recruit someone they become “your” player!

“We just don’t feel like other people would fit in well with us”

News flash:  WoW has 15 million players, you can find a million people that you’d get along with!

The reason I’m so adamant about recruitment is because I’ve seen such positive results from opening recruitment and being proactive about adding good players.  For a long time LoD had a pretty closed borders type of atmosphere.  We raided with people in our guild, only really invited friends of other players, and created guild alliances to bolster our numbers.  I’m not really sure why we took this stance, but we definitely fit into that “we’re small and unique and wonderful, we don’t want evil new people!”

We even made it into some hard content in Vanilla using this philosophy.

Once BC hit the real turning point for our raiding situation and status came when we became more aggressive and open about recruitment.  We’d post recruitment threads on the realm forums, encourage our players to have their friends apply to the guild, and keep our ears to the ground when guilds fell apart on the server.  Every time a guild collapsed, however sad it was for that group of people, it would infuse us with 4-6 new players that brought experience and passion for raiding with them.  For the most part these guilds were below us in progression, so these players were often taking a substantial leap forward in content, but guilds of any progression level always have cream at the top and skilled players.

Recruitment also helped LoD form a new image and direction.  In Vanilla we kept our progress on the down low, finishing a very quiet 4th-5th on the server, and it really hurt the server’s perception of us.  Not a lot of people knew that we had progressed so far and nobody was looking to join the guild.  The number of applications we received when we weren’t advertising was very low.  Rather than recruiting friends and family members, with various focuses, we were now looking at adding raiders.

With the infusion of new, capable, and enthusiastic raiders we were able to transform into a more serious raiding guild and end BC well into Sunwell.

Recruiting solves a ton of problems within guilds.  Complacency, laziness, attendance, and energy levels can improve by adding new people.  If your guild is struggling and you don’t know what else to do, looking inwards is often a lot less effective than looking out for some help.

Recruit!

The ten mans didn’t seem to have a very difficult enrage timer, I know my ten man group didn’t even get our best DPSers bitten.  The 25 DOES have a difficult enrage timer, or at least an unforgiving one.  A single vampire death will most likely cause you to wipe.  You need every person’s dps and you need every person to spread the debuff to the next person.

Our raid comp was

6 healers
2 tanks
17 dps

G1 (melee)-
MT (Feral)
HP blob (Prot Pally)
Ret Paladin
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior

G2 (melee)-
Rogue
Unholy DK
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior
Frost DK

G3 (ranged)-
Ele Shaman
Warlock
Rogue
Hunter
Moonkin

G4 (ranged)-
Mage
Spriest
Warlock
Holy Priest
Hunter

G5 (healers)-
Holy Priest
All Powerful Disc Priest
Tree
Holy Pally
Holy Pally

• Group 1 was positioned on her left leg
• Group 2 was positioned on her right leg
• Group 3 was on the left side of the room at range
• Group 4 was on the right side of the room at range
• Group 5 was mostly healers and positioned in the back middle of the room (cheating forward as needed for range issues)
• We left the CENTER and OUTSIDES of the room clear for links and fire

Bite Order

One big pain in the ass about this encounter is the bite order.  Yes, you can assign a specific bite order and follow it, but that’s too much typing and thinking!  Plus it isn’t very adaptable and might cause confusion if you do subs at any point, or week to week for that matter.  I don’t want to spend 30 minutes setting up this fight every week.

Our solution was quite simple

• 1:  Hunter in G3 gets bitten from being top dmg (this was just how it was happening as our DPS went all out)
• 2:  Hunter bites the ret paladin in G1 so that we have one ranged and one melee to better spread the bites
• 4:  Hunter bites mage in G4.  Ret paladin bites rogue in G2.  This spread the debuff so that each group 1,2,3,4 had one person with the bite.
• 8:  Each person bit someone in their group.  Assigning specifics at this point would be a lot of typing/planning.  Each group now has two DPS with bite and at least two DPS without.
• 16:  Each person bites an unbitten DPSer in their group.  Each group ends with 4 DPSers being bitten.

Here’s what this strategy did for us.

• Spread bites between ranged/melee first
• Spread bites across the room efficiently so that nobody was ever without a suitable bite target near them
• Made bites “planned” but adaptable – meaning that you set your first four and can easily switch them mid-fight if someone unexpected gets the first bite.  After those four nothing unexpected should really happen.
• People eventually planned a bite order within their group for the last two bites, but this was kept in-party.
• It maintained my sanity as a raid leader not having to get complex in our planning
• The first four specific people being planned allowed us to fear ward them

Fear Ward / Fear Breaking 

We were finding that the first air phase often coincided with two people (hunter + ret paladin) needing to bite the next two people (mage + rogue).  Not only was the biter being feared all over the place, but also the bitee was being feared away from the biter.  To make this transition go more smoothly we had fear ward usage on these four people.  If your raid doesn’t have four priests then you can use fear breaking class mechanics to facilitate this.  We also waited to use our fear wards until we were sure that the order went off without a hitch.  If someone unexpected got the first bite we’d simply adapt our fear wards to include that person as well.

This was one of those “hidden” issues that are nestled in encounters which you can’t really see until you’ve done them a few times.  We had no trouble with the second air phase and bite timers.

Other than bite order and fear issues you just need to

• Spread out in P2
• Use class cooldowns and health stones to survive the P2 raid damage
• Run purple fire out of the raid along the sides of the room
• Make sure you’re not standing near fire before a fear
• Run to the CENTER of the room if you get linked – Do not run to the other people, this just causes you to shift back and forth correcting your direction in reaction to what they’re doing.  Just pick a single point on the ground (the square at the center of the circle) and have everyone run to that.  You’ll end up together, promise.  Once you’re there do not move away before the debuff disappears.

• DPS and HEAL REALLY HARD

As a disc priest that meant 9x shield, 1x ProM.  Challenging!  I feel like a druid =(

Without further ado…

Reps IRL

One of my favorite sportswriters often talks about repetitions or “reps” and how it takes a certain number of reps before anyone can be good at anything.  He talks about how reps extend beyond sports and can be applied to ANYTHING you do in life.

“Reps are easy to understand: The more you do something, the better you will be.”

Whether its public speaking reps, screaming kid in the grocery store reps, manual transmission reps, or even the magical phraseology it takes to order a plain turkey sub without it turning into a 5 minute conversation about what condiments you DON’T want on your sandwich reps.  Everything gets easier the more you do it. 

You learn shortcuts, you learn tricks, you figure out what people want to hear or what they expect.  You learn to imagine people in their underwear to make your speech easier.  You learn to bring cheerios to the grocery store so that your kid can have something to munch on.  You learn to accelerate from a stopped position on a hill after stalling out a few times.  You learn that when ordering a plain sandwich the only words you should ever utter following the placement of your order are “PLAIN” and “NO”.  Do not name any ingredients which you don’t want on your sandwich, they will inevitably end up a part of it!

Some tasks are actually nigh impossible without reps.  Take shooting a basketball for instance.  While the hypothetical act of shooting is perfectly scientific and calculatable… point of release, distance, arc, angle, force, spin… in a real life situation you’re not given the time to make all of these calculations.  What you need to rely on is muscle memory.  That is, your hands and body performing an action based on many factors, without any thought.  When you’re in the middle of a game you don’t have time to think.  You often catch the ball and shoot.  The best shooters are the ones that have trained their hands and body to simply DO without thought.  Without reps you cannot shoot well.

Reps in WoW

Reps apply in World of Warcraft too.

The more you do something in game the better you become at it.  This works because most of the game is scripted.  Even pvp has short term scripts.  When I used to pvp as shadow back in Vanilla I could beat most any class because I had memorized the order of moves each class would use on me.  It just became a series of if-then checks you’d have to make.

Rogue:

• Cheap shot (eat it)
• Kidney Shot (trinket this longer stun)
• Shield + Shadow Word Pain + Vampiric Embrace (instants which can’t be kicked)
• Fear
• Mind Blast immediately  
• Hop away to create distance and time for Mind Blast, Fear, and PWS cooldowns
• Mind Flay spam (spell which can be kicked, so you cast while the target is at a distance)
• Mind Blast when it’s off cooldown, fill with Mind Flays
• Shield again as soon as weakened soul wears off

= Dead Rogue

Because each rep against a rogue was a learning experience, eventually I developed a pretty concrete cast sequence which made me rogue proof.  It required a lot of failure.  At first I wouldn’t cast PWS right away because who does that unless they’re really low?  But two PWS during the brief fight was almost always a difference maker.  Or I’d fear when I broke the kidney shot because that’s what you do when something is attacking you, right?  But if I do that then I waste a lot of the fear time casting instants which aren’t going to do much damage and which are interrupt-proof anyway.  Or I wouldn’t bother with VE, but along with the second shield that little bit of healing was often enough to let me outlast anyone else 1v1.  Or I’d trinket the cheap shot (omg I dunwannabestunned!) only to eat a really long kidney shot.

These are all lessons you learn by DOING.  Reactions became automatic after a while.   You develop that muscle memory.  Its rogue muscle memory, just like free throw muscle memory.  Here is a rogue.  This is what I cast.  Dead rogue.  You can even hop around while doing it.

You can argue that PvE is even simpler (and by “you”, I mean all the pvpers who are like “omg pve is ezmode lolol”).  The encounters are almost always the same and once you figure out the mechanics to a fight it can become quite easy.  Getting 25 people all on the same page, executing their assignments, adds some complexity to it.

What makes a gimmick fight?

Sometimes Blizzard mixes things up by introducing “gimmick fights”, but if you think about it those fights are more accurately described as “things you don’t have reps on yet” fights.  Those fights work differently than anything you’ve ever seen before; you have no idea how to handle Malygos or Gorefiend because that hasn’t been a part of your game experience thus far.  Fortunately Blizzard gives you a daily which mirrors the Malygos drake abilities and some upstanding individual made a Teron flash mini-game which you could use to practice that gimmick.  People that didn’t understand these fights were encouraged to get in their reps using those tools.

Unfortunately we can’t just manufacture reps that easily a lot of the time.  You only have so many raid nights.  Your raid only has so much mental capital (read: sanity).  And sometimes (Teron, Rotface, Vaelastrasz) you can beat encounters without people in your raid even being chosen for the “important role”.  There’s nothing like discovering that Person X can’t do Teron ghosts on your 8^th week killing Teron.  

A REPrehensible Change

Reps are so important to raiding that Blizzard’s latest “let’s slow progression” concept is to LIMIT the reps available for each raid group.  If you can only attempt an encounter 10 times in a week that severely limits the amount of learning you can do as a group.  Gone are the days of wiping three nights a week to a boss, learning the ins and outs of a fight.  Blizzard’s encounters aren’t anywhere near as tough as the Sunwell days when it took you 2-3 weeks for most bosses, or 4-8 weeks for M’uru + KJ.  Those fights BROKE guilds.  I can’t count how many applications we get where someone “raided Sunwell, but my guild broke up at M’uru”.  These encounters were crushing.  We can argue about whether the change to easier encounters was good or bad, but that really isn’t important. 

Blizzard’s new way to ramp up difficulty is by limiting reps.

It’s sort of silly… imagine if your child wasn’t particularly gifted at math, yet studied very hard, and aced all their tests.  Then the teacher decided this was unfair, the other kids didn’t have time to study that hard.  If she made the test harder to challenge your Johnny then the other kids wouldn’t pass.  So what’s the solution?  Little Johnny is only allowed to study math one night a week!  No problem sets, no homework, no bringing his math book home.  No extra reps!

Reps are encouraged in real life, not so much by Blizzard.

More Reps!

So you need to cheat the system a bit.  Johnny might spend his lunch studying math, or swap his math book cover with his science book cover and sneak his book home at night.  What raid groups have to do is raid more… just as much, if not more, than they were when attempts weren’t limited.

Guilds are still spending three nights a week working on Putricide.  They’re clearing ICC on alts and doing 10 attempts with them first.  They’re doing 10 mans for experience.  And finally they’re going in with their 25 man main raids and doing these limited attempt bosses.  It’s the only way to get the reps people are so used to getting.  Not everyone is doing this of course, but the same guilds that would spend three nights a week on a boss in SW are definitely doing this.

LoD, Reps, and Alts

LoD has never been about brute forcing encounters, we’ve never spent 50+ wipes a week on fights.  But we’ve recently started a 2nd ICC 25 man run with alts to get a bit of practice on certain encounters.  It’s actually a great learning experience for our players.  By definition the alts aren’t as well geared as our mains, many using ilvl 232 and mixed pvp gear, so execution needs to be close to perfect.  When you can’t just brute force encounters with crazy dps/hps it forces you to learn mechanics and perform at a high level.  We still are doing a lot of learning on encounters during this alt run.

The first week the Plague Quarter was released we killed Rotface in a few attempts but all I could think to myself was “wow, I would have really preferred to wipe a few more times on this fight to get more practice”.  Crazy, right?  Sure the boss was dead, but the next week we wiped 3-4 times because we hadn’t learned the fight properly the first week.

Following those few extra Rotface wipes during our main raid we had our alt run focus on Rotface and learning the mechanics perfectly.  Reps reps reps.  It was a struggle, the encounter doesn’t get any easier with sub-par DPS.  But this handicap puts the focus on executing the fight.  Kiting slimes, proper movement around the room, avoiding damage… all things that our main raid probably doesn’t need to pay attention to because the fight doesn’t last that long.  Sure you can tell your players to focus on learning the fight, but until you take away their 258 gear and knock them out of their comfort zone you can’t really force them to play properly.

Reps make everything easier.  As a raid leader I’m looking for new and innovative ways to get the raid group practice on fights.  Blizzard has sort of forced our hand with the limited attempts, which spawned an alt run.  But the alt run has allowed us to practice fights which don’t even have limited attempts and learn them with handicapped characters.

How is your raid group getting practice or reps on encounters?  Do you run 10 + 25 mans?  Are you one of the guilds running alt runs to get Putricide or Blood Queen attempts?  Is this strategy cheap?  Has Blizzard gone about this the wrong way if guilds end up raiding just as much, if not more?