It’s been proven time and time again that for every PvE rogue spec (Combat and Mutilate), the rogue could get better personal DPS by using some other glyph but the Glyph of Tricks of the Trade actually results in a much higher raid DPS. A rogue that is willing to take a personal hit on the meters while at the same time pushing somebody else ahead by another couple percent or more is more likely to be the same rogue who spends energy on interrupts, defensive cooldowns and debuffing.

And if you do ever run into a rogue who doesn’t have Tricks of the Trade glyphed? Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuunnnnnnnn!!!

Well that’s interesting….

I loved the down ranking / mana management play style for healers which became necessity in Vanilla.  I think that down ranking developed an unfair reputation as being too easy while the mana management naysayers would always complain about having to stand around not casting to gain mana.  To counter the first argument of down ranking being “easy”, it was only easy in the fact that you could choose the spell/tool which best fit the requirements of the situation.  I had three ranks of Heal (1,2,3), two ranks of Flash Heal (4,7), and three ranks of Greater Heal (1,3,5) on my bar  … wow I did those ranks by memory.  Each spell gave me varied levels of healing and speed.  This definitely made healing easier, but only in the same way using a screwdriver on a screw is easy than using a hammer for a carpenter.  Down ranking allowed you to use the most appropriate tool for the situation.

Mana management and the five second rule allowed for someone to stop casting and regen mana.  This was a “boring” play style because it “promotes doing nothing”, that’s as far from the truth as you can get.  Any good healer in Vanilla used stop casting macros or stopped casts on their own when they were unneeded.  So when I spent 15-20s regenning mana out of the 5 second rule it wasn’t because I wasn’t casting any spells or engaged in the encounter, it was because I had strung together a number of cancelled casts and/or used inner focus and clear casting procs.  In fact I’d venture to say that I cast MORE spells and was MORE honed in on the incoming damage and healing requirements of an encounter because I was constantly casting and stop casting spells, lettings casts complete when necessary and cancelling when the healing wasn’t needed.

This was an engaging system which gave you multiple tools and a very healthy set of risk/reward choices which ultimately required intense concentration and understanding of the encounter mechanics.

Sure, you could mindlessly spam Heal rank 2 and never go OOM, but spamming a 1k slow heal wasn’t always best for every situation.  You could also platoon healers and heal in “waves”, spending half your time afk regenning mana, but practicing constant casting with cancelling would result in a much more successful and fun play experience

You could do either of those things, but if you did you really didn’t heal as well as you could have.  That’s a fact.  And it’s the misconceptions spread by those “bad” play styles which led to Blizzard killing down ranking in the first place.

I look forward to a system and philosophy which attempts to mimic down ranking.  However I wonder whether simply introducing one spell will accomplish this.

The best spell in Vanilla was Heal rank 2.  This was the smallest/slowest spell which still benefited 100% from spell power on gear, back then blizzard used a funky system based on the level you learned the spell and your current level to calculate how each spell scaled with SP.

Here is a post I made almost 4 years ago about down ranking and Heal 2.

Matron – Jun 12 2006 LoD Priest Boards

“What is a second worth to you?

In WoW a second as a healer is sometimes all it takes to watch your tank go from full health to zero health. It’s scary how fast it happens sometimes.

However, on most occasions there are multiple healers on the MT, so they’ll be getting heals from a number of people. It’s in these cases where you really have to ask yourself how much a second is worth to you as a priest?

My point is as follows. Priests have two spells that they cast, at least two lengths of spells. 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds. Recently I’ve become quite enamored with the 2.5 second spells for a number of reasons.

My main goal as a healer is to fire off as many 1,000 point heals as I can. 1,000 is a decent goal and about what the max rank flash heal will do. So I needed to find a 2.5 second spell that heals for about the same. You won’t find it under the greater heals, they’re much too big. But if you look all the way back to your “Heal” spell you’ll find that around rank 2 you’ll start healing for 1,000 hp again. You learned this spell around level 20, but it’s a most useful tool at level 60 as well.

The difference between rank 2 Heal and rank 7 Flash heal? One second and 206 mana.

Rank 2 Heal – 174 mana – 2.5 seconds
Flash Heal 7 – 380 mana – 1.5 seconds

So here’s what you’re doing when you cast flash heal, you’re paying over double the mana cost for 1 second off your heal time. Now this is appropriate in certain situations, such as a crit on the main tank, but for 90% of the healing you’ll be doing in MC or BWL that one second is not needed.

I mean, how many times has a rogue pulled agro and taken a single shot from a mob and then the tank regains control? In this situation the rogue isn’t going to be taking any more damage for a while, it was a freak occurrence that they pulled agro at all. Why pay double mana to heal them one second faster?

My point is this… there are many times where one second doesn’t matter at all for healers. There isn’t any reason to pay TWICE the mana cost for the same amount of healing. You’re paying for the quickness of flash heal when you don’t need it.

If you start using Heal rank 2, you’ll see that your mana pool goes a lot farther than it once did, especially on boss fights that are long. Geddon, Golemagg, Domo, Rags, Kurinaxx, Rajaxx, the Drakes, Chrom, Nef…. All very long fights where going oom early is a really bad thing. Instead of holding back on healing, to save mana, instead switch methods. It’ll allow you to heal and conserve mana.”

Here is the problem I see with introduction of a 2.5s Heal spell… combined with haste and the upcoming slowing of raid damage, it is going to murder Flash Heal.  Heal2 murdered FH in Vanilla, why heal the same amount for more than twice the mana cost?  Damage didn’t come fast enough that 1s mattered.

Given haste levels the difference between FH and Heal is going to be LESS than one second.  In what meaningful situation will you require a 1s heal rather than a 1.6s heal which costs far less mana?  Never!

So by introducing a slower smaller spell Blizzard is going to kill Flash Heal.  I’m of the GH school of thought, I prefer a slightly slower but more powerful/efficient spell to expensive and “quick” spells, so I don’t really mind our focus moving away from flash heal.

But if Blizzard really wants to make healing more dynamic and interesting introducing this one spell is not the way to do it.  What made Vanilla interesting was that I had 8 single target spells of varying levels of healing, mana efficiency, and speed on my bar.  Often times damage would become more intense as a boss soft enraged or healers died and I’d simply move up a few ranks of a spell, sacrificing mana/efficiency for larger HPS.  Other times I’d get a good string of regen/rng and be able to amp up my rank usage to get rid of some excess mana.  When I was low on mana I could down rank even further, continuing to cast spells, but maintaining a steady mana pace which would last me til the end of an encounter.  I wouldn’t ever STOP casting, I’d only just shift gears a bid depending on the damage and mana situations.

In Cata I fear we’ll only really be using 3 spells in GH, Heal and maaaybe Flash Heal rather than the 3 Heals, 7 Flash heals, and 5 Greater Heals we could choose from in Vanilla.  Three spells does not offer the same flexibility and pacing opportunities which 15 spells do and I don’t believe that single target-wise we’ll really be gaining a new “tool” in Heal, we’ll just be replacing FH entirely.

More thoughts on Cata changes later in the week as my cynicism subsides.

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.

Patch 3.3.3 is now on the PTR and with it come some changes to rogues. These changes are very likely to be the last we’ll see before Cataclysm. Blizzard says that they’re never truly satisfied with anything but the fact remains that rogues are in a pretty good place right now. Since the last round of nerfs, the caterwauling about our damage being OP has subsided to it’s usual low rumble and while there are a few fights that penalize us more than other classes (*cough* Sindragosa *cough*), it’s not anything we can’t learn to just deal with.

The changes are pretty interesting, let’s take a look.

• Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

This is the only real change for raiding rogues; it’s the 4-piece tier 8 bonus now made baseline. (For those wondering, the 4 piece tier 8 bonus is being changed to give +20% damage to Rupture.) Feral druids have had this for some time and rogues were jealous. During T8 content rogues ran with as high of a Rupture uptime as possible but as gear levels increased we all saw the writing on the wall. Once we were out of T8 content our other abilities which scaled better than a crit-less Rupture would force Rupture out of our rotation. Anyone who was reading my ranting in the LoD forums will remember me talking about how I’d be dropping Rupture from my talents/glyphs/rotation as soon as we were out of Ulduar. And I did.

Now that a crit-ing Rupture could become baseline we have to look at it again. If you’ve not been following the discussion on the web, I’ll sum it up for you.

1. Assassination builds have become far too dependent on the Envenom buff for DPS to lose any of it’s uptime to Rupture. Blizzard would have to buff the hell out of Rupture’s scaling and likewise nerf Envenom for Assassination to take the talents and use it.
2. Combat builds aren’t as cut and dry. Keeping the same strategy of gearing and gem’ing for Armor Penetration but changing talents and glyphs to support Rupture, Combat builds can get a 3% or possibly greater buff on fights where you can use Rupture, i.e. static fights with long lived mobs. On fights that aren’t as static and you can’t use the Rupture talents and glyphs it’s only about a 1% loss. Basically, giving up a small about of burst damage for some sustained damage. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but since the gearing is almost identical and each character can run two specs and glyph sets… well, you do the math.

The rest of the changes have to do with the perennially neglected Subtlety tree. Even GC himself says that no tree in all of WoW has it as bad off as Subtlety. It’s been a running joke for years and that’s sad. Subtlety is a lot of fun to play. In fact if you look at Subtlety, you can get a feel for how talent trees in Cataclysm will look. There are lots of talents in there that don’t just bump your damage by X%. A lot of the talents in Subtlety are just fun and unique.

And there-in lies the problem. The Subtlety tree is too much fun. There, I said it. If Blizzard buffed Subtlety to be even close to raid viable, every rogue without exception would flock to it, no question in my mind about that. And with all that said, they’re buffing Subtlety… slightly.

• Slaughter from the Shadows now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks and reduces the energy cost of Backstab and Ambush by 4/8/12/16/20, up from 3/6/9/12/15.
• Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown by 5/10 sec and energy cost by 5/10 of your Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 3 min.
• Waylay now affects your Ambush and Backstab hits (Old – Only Ambush critical hits). Movement speed bonus reduced from 70% to 50%.
• Hemorrhage now deals 160% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.
• Ghostly Strike now deals 180% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.

First off, the Hemorrhage and Ghostly Strike changes are long overdue. Subtlety has always had an identity crisis about what kind of weapon tree it is and this is just to make it clear. Subtlety is a dagger tree. There’s also a straight up damage increase as well as some energy cost and cooldown reduction in there.

Honestly, this looks like Blizzard’s attempt to give rogues a PvP tree again. Blizzard might love hybrid classes but they hate hybrid specs; Blizzard wants everyone to go 51 points into a tree in both PvE and PvP. Contrary to this, rogues have been running a Mutilate/Prep build for PvP since the dawn of time. Everything in rogue PvP is balanced around it and Blizzard can’t get us away from it.

Is Subtlety PvP viable with these changes? Probably. Subtlety has been on the fringe of breaking into PvP for some time and this looks like it might push it into the mainstream. I highly doubt it will de-throne Mut/Prep but stranger things have happened.

Is Subtlety PvE viable with these changes? Ask again later. Right now the general consensus is “no” but things on the PTR change all the time and there are some hidden benefits to Subtlety. First off, it has the ability to change targets as well as Combat and it’s mobility is unrivaled by any class/spec in the game. Talented with the new Filthy Tricks, Shadowstep becomes a 20 second teleport that costs no energy and give a 20% damage boost to your next attack. Right now all eyes are on 10/10/51 to be the best shot at raid viable Subtlety but for all that mobility and fun the damage is still sub-par and the rotation would make a feral druid want to tear their hair out.

Honestly though? I’d love to see Subtlety make it into raiding. That would be awesome. I’ll be on the PTR as much as I can this weekend to try it out and will report back what I find.

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…

What separates the “hard core” gamer from the more casual one is not necessarily the amount of time devoted to playing the game, but rather the willingness to tolerate failure and try again.

On the face of it, this phrase is just a re-tooling of the “if at first you don’t succeed” motto but if we take a closer look we can see that there’s a lot more going on in here when we apply it to an MMO. Specifically, when talking about an MMO you need to be able to tolerate the failures of others as well as your own. Everyone is going to individually make mistakes or fail but when you add another 9 or 24 people into the mix it changes everything. Most notably, our relative perception of failure.

Suddenly, everyone is failing so much more than you are. In fact, I’d venture to say that in a 25man raid, “other players” are failing 24 times more often than you. And that’s where the real gamers prevail, the gamers who know that the more people you add to the mix, the more often failure will show it’s ugly head.

Raids are going to wipe – a lot – and a good portion of the time it’s going to have nothing to do with you and there’s nothing that you specifically could have done. It’s out of your hands. How you choose to deal with your own failures and more importantly the failures of others will define you as a gamer and as a person.

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!

Everybody has alts (alternate characters). You may only have one lonely little bank alt or a server of max-level behemoths on both sides of the faction fence but if you play WoW you have alts. For a very long time, Tinwhisker was my only character. Leveling in vanilla WoW wasn’t terribly difficult (although it was more difficult than it is now) but I was busy learning one class in a new game already. The thought of another character was a bit overwhelming. Eventually though, I rolled my first bank toon.

Well, she wasn’t intentionally a bank toon. I rolled a priest because I had seen shadow priests running around and thought that Shadowform and Mind Flay were pretty awesome. I mean, even today I think that looks pretty darn cool. Unfortunately I really hadn’t gotten my head around WoW yet (I was a slow learner) and when she reached level 12 she stayed in Stormwind. Eventually I made her into a bank alt though I had never known what one was before. I had a level 12 bank alt for all of vanilla, all of Burning Crusade, and the first part of Wrath of the Lich King.

When Burning Crusade hit, I immediately got Tinwhisker to 70 and was raiding Karazhan. Besides that, I was excited about the new starting zones and started my Blood Elf Mage to try one of them out. Before I knew it, I had gotten her to 70, then the Draenei Paladin and got her to 70, then the abandoned Night Elf hunter made 70. Actually, once I started leveling, it all happened so fast I’m not really sure how long it took.

That was when I discovered what alts were for.

Having an alt makes you better on your main. No two ways about it, that is absolutely correct and I’ll tell you why. It’s because when you see a fight from a different perspective, you learn more about it than you would from a single perspective. In Burning Crusade, my paladin tank and hunter gave me insight on fight mechanics I didn’t have to think about on Tin. There are a multitude of fight mechanics that you’re never aware of if you only play a single class in a raid. Most of the time that isn’t important but there are quite a few times where something happens and you have to deviate from the plan a bit. Now you’re the melee standing at ranged and you have no idea what’s being hurled your direction.

Imagine you’re a healer on General Vezzax, standing in melee healing as you always do. BOOM! Uh-oh, there aren’t enough ranged out there anymore! Somebody needs to get out there and run with the groups. Do you run out there and save the raid like a pro or hope somebody else will do it because you have no idea how it’s done?

Matron touched on this when he was talking about reps, when you’re on your main you can often ignore lots of things without consequence when it’s all going well but when things go wrong and you’re out of your element, there’s the potential for real disaster. Going through the same (or similar) fights on alts means you’re being exposed to new mechanics and new situations. When those situations come up, you’re muich better prepared for them.

Right now I’m going through ICC on my main and also on my shadow priest alt. Her gearscore is fantastic but closer inspection reveals she’s more than 100 hit rating over the cap and suffering from other problems (gearscore is just one step above useless in my book). That is often the fate of alts but having to work a little harder on an alt is the best thing ever. You actually learn the fights from multiple perspectives; things you can faceroll on your main become nail-biters on an alt. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to see what actually happens instead of looking at some mobs but crack for five minutes.

But what if you don’t have an alt that can do the same fights?

Not everyone has alts that can raid with the mains, in fact, most people don’t. LoD is a top tier guild and part of that is that most members do. Blizzard isn’t stupid though. There isn’t a single mechanic in any raid that can’t be found in multiple heroics or elsewhere in daily quests. From boss abilities to vehicle content, it’s all there. It’s all a matter of having that alt and Blizzard has made leveling incredibly easy to do.

If you’re reading this and you have a max level alt that you play on a regular basis, good for you. I really hope you can see how knowing how to play in different roles and perspectives makes you a better player. If you don’t have an alt, go make one. I guarantee it will make you a better player. Find another class you like and play it; I can’t stress how much better you’ll be because of it.

A recurring theme on WoW forums that I’ve seen since the days of Molten Core, is uninformed raiders complaining about Damage Meter mods and how they hurt the raid.  The truth is that damage meters are a tool, much like a hammer.  When used properly, a hammer can help you build some very cool stuff that you never could’ve built with your bare hands.  Or when used irresponsibly, a hammer can smash your thumbs or poke your eye out.

The most popular damage meter addon is probably Recount.  Another option which I’m told is much less CPU intensive is Skada.  I would consider it essential to run one of these mods (or something similar) while raiding, but this is especially true if you have any hand in the raid leadership, or even if you just want to be able to discuss fight strategies and analyze what happened on the previous attempt without accidentally making a fool of yourself.  However, you will learn very little from simply looking at, say, the Damage Done meter, without analyzing the context in which those numbers were obtained.  The true usefulness of these addons is dependent on digging a little deeper than what you immediately see on the surface.  Here I’ll discuss some examples of how I use Recount for the first 7 bosses in Icecrown Citadel (i.e. Storming the Citadel and Plagueworks sections), emphasizing only DPS classes and ignoring Tanks/Healers.

Lord Marrowgar

- Marrowgar is a pretty straightforward fight, and is a decent boss for judging the strength of each DPS player based on the Damage Done meter.  However, the one extra detail you must examine a little closer is Damage Done to Bone Spikes.  Anyone who has very little damage done to Bone Spikes (or no damage whatsoever) is not pulling their weight in the raid, regardless of how much DPS they did to Marrowgar.  However, the cutoff for “very little damage” will depend on many factors.  For example, if you position your raid right behind Marrowgar then melee should have much more Bone Spike damage than casters – but if you spread out all over the room then melee/casters should all be contributing evenly to Bone Spike damage.  Also, if this fight is farm content and the spikes are blowing up in under 5 seconds then it’s acceptable for casters to not help with Bone Spikes, but if this fight is still challenging or if spikes are staying up for 10+ seconds, then you should really consider sitting any DPS out who are not pulling their weight on the spikes.

- As far as analyzing failures on this fight, Recount isn’t all that necessary since basically anything you die to on this fight as a DPS is your own fault (with the exception of dying to a 10+ second Bone Spike, but this would be so obvious that you shouldn’t need to analyze the Death meter to notice it)

Lady Deathwhisper

- Lady Deathwhisper is one of the few cases where the “Damage Meters are useless!” crowd would actually have a good point.  Anyone DPSing the boss in Phase 1 will have much higher DPS, even though P1 boss damage is probably the least important aspect of the fight.  So the total Damage Done is pretty meaningless unless you are only comparing two people who had the exact same job in phase 1.  Even comparing just the Damage Done to Cult Fanatics/Adherants isn’t necessarily useful, except for spotting people who are  ignoring their particular assignment.  Probably the only way to get any relevant information about DPS players’ performance on this fight is to reset the meter for Phase 2 only, but even then you need to also check the Interrupt meter and realize that people handling the frostbolt interrupts will be lower on the Damage Done meter thru no fault of their own.

- Other uses of Recount on this fight include a) the Dispels meter to find out which people are not decursing, and slap them on the noggin, b) Interrupts meter in Phase 2, or c) Death meter to analyze why people died (there are many possible sources of death on this fight which are completely not your fault – but if you died to Death and Decay, a Vengeful Blast from the Ghosts, or an aggro pull on the boss, then these are your own fault)

Gunship Battle

- I don’t really care what you do on this fight as long as you don’t go AFK inside the cabin where you still take damage but can’t get healed (lookin at you, Asgeroth!).  Analyzing Recount on this fight would be like analyzing the Chess Event in Karazhan, no one cares.

Deathbringer Saurfang

- Saurfang is an excellent fight for judging DPS players’ performance.  Melee classes can be judged strictly by the Damage Done meter on this fight.  For Ranged classes (including Hunters plus the Caster DPS), the relevant metric for judging their performance is mostly the Damage Done to Blood Beasts.  If you really needed to judge the strength of a particular Ranged DPS player (like say an applicant on a farm content trial run), you might consider instructing them to ignore Blood Beasts and only nuke the boss, so that you can compare apples to apples when you review the logs later.

- One of the main causes of wipes on this fight is if melee DPS or the tanks get aggro on Blood Beasts and give Saurfang a ton of energy.  In cases like this, I switch Recount to the Damage Taken meter, and start checking each melee/tank to see how much damage they took from Blood Beasts.  Then when you find out who the culprit is, you can switch back to the Damage Done meter, click on that person, and check out the breakdown of their damage done to Blood Beasts, to tell them which ability they need to make sure to not use when the adds spawn.  The most common culprits are Hammer of the Righteous from Prot Paladins, Maul from Feral Druids, Consecrate/Divine Storm from Ret Paladins while using Avenging Wrath, and Whirlwind crits from Fury Warriors leaving Deep Wounds.

Festergut

- Festergut is the best fight in ICC for judging DPS players’ performance, but like Saurfang, the fight heavily favors melee DPS.  This fight is even better than Saurfang for judging melee DPS, since there is no concern about hitting Blood Beasts with AOE moves.  It is possible to completely remove the “melee bias” on this fight by having Ranged DPS stand at melee, but most guilds prefer to stick healers at melee instead since the tanks can take some large damage spikes.

- There isn’t much need for analyzing Death meters on this fight.  If you died during Pungeant Blight then that’s your fault for not getting innoculated 3 times, and if you died to anything else then you should’ve been healed thru it (exception being death by multiple people getting Vile Gas – then it’s a question of who didn’t spread out properly, which isn’t something Recount can tell you)

Rotface

- Rotface is actually one of the better fights in WoW for judging the true skill of a DPS player, since it is a single target DPS burn with tons of movement and stuff to avoid.  This fight doesn’t particularly favor melee or range, but instead mostly favors people who never have to run out with the Mutated Infection.  Unfortunately this means that you cannot draw much conclusion from a single good or a single bad DPS score, since there is so much RNG involved.  But you can learn ALOT about the DPS in your raid while wiping on this fight several times over the course of a progression night.  Your most skilled DPS will gravitate towards the top of the meters consistently, while your lesser skilled players (including “Patchwerk Pros”) will find themselves dying too often to do well on the Damage Done meters reliably.

- This fight is also one of the best examples of where the Death meter is very helpful, since there are so many ways to get yourself killed on this fight.  Sources of Avoidable Deaths that are always your fault:  Sticky Ooze/Ooze Flood, Unstable Ooze Explosion, melee hits from Rotface (all bets off if tank dies first).  Sources of death that are not really your fault:  Mutated Infection DoT damage (needs to be cleansed), melee hits from Big Oozes (need to be kited).

- Ironically, the Damage Taken meter is arguably of little use on this fight since the main sources of avoidable damage are not ALWAYS avoidable.  For example, normally any DPS player who takes a lot of damage from Slime Spray is failing horribly – but there actually are cases where you can get caught in a Slime Spray thru no fault of your own, if you have Mutated Infection and are running to the Big Ooze, or if you get sprayed on while spread out from the Ooze Explosion.  Also, it is normally the responsibility of the raid to prevent Radiating Ooze damage by avoiding the Big Ooze if it gets kited too close to the raid – but it is not uncommon to take 1-2 ticks of this damage aura if you run out with Mutated Infection and find that your Little Ooze is being stupid and not merging quickly.  Deaths to these two sources of damage generally require a closer inspection of the Death meter to really figure out what happened.

Professor Putricide

- Putricide is a very difficult fight to analyze meters for.  On one hand, the DPS requirements are steep, and squeezing every ounce of DPS out of your raid is critical, especially on the Volatile Ooze and Gas Cloud adds.  On the other hand, there is so much target switching involved that differences in class mechanics will often play a much larger role than differences in players’ skill.  Also, it is quite possible that players outputting the most DPS on adds may be positioning themselves too aggressively – which they can get away with if they don’t get targeted by the oozes, but which can cause serious problems for your raid if they do get chosen.  In my opinion, on this fight I think for the most part you just have to stack your raid with the players who generally performed the best on earlier fights which are easier to analyze than Putricide, and trust that they’ll do their jobs correctly.

- As far as analyzing the Death or Damage Taken meters, there isn’t a whole lot to find here.  One important thing to watch for is people taking too much unnecessary damage from Malleable Goo.  But beyond that, the main causes of deaths on this fight are either extremely obvious (like if you die to Gaseous Bloat/Ooze Adhesive, or if an Expunged Gas goes off on the raid), or are difficult to analyze what exactly went wrong if people died to the Volatile Ooze Eruption (which can be due to lack of DPS, or people not stacking correctly, or both)

Finally, A Word About Blame

If you’ve read this far, then you probably noticed a recurring theme of mine is analyzing who was “at fault” when people die to various sources of damage.  This is not just so you can go around pointing figures at people for making mistakes.  The point is that if you really want to judge the performance of a DPS player, then you need to take into account both how much damage they are doing on each particular fight, and also how well they keep themselves alive and avoid taking unnecessary damage.  Both of these factors are extremely important for judging DPS, as well as execution of “the little things” like damage on adds, interrupts, dispels, etc.

Finally, it is just a good habit to get into as a raider, to always analyze how you died on every fight, and to ask yourself whether the death was your fault.  If yes, then you need to figure out how you can learn from the mistake and prevent yourself from repeating it in the future.  And if not, then you want to ask yourself if there is anything you can change (either in the fight strategy or your playstyle on that fight) to make it easier on the healers/tanks who are struggling with that particular aspect of the fight – or if your death was just due to dumb luck and no adjustments are needed by anyone.

Part II for Crimson Halls and Frostwing Halls to be continued when I have more experience on these fights…