LoDBlog

Ah the ever changing landscape of an MMO. With every new major and minor patch these days it seems each class can expect something that comes along to affect them either directly or indirectly. A long time ago classes didn’t change much, you’d get a class review once in a blue moon but that’s about it. Now Blizzard is much more apt to tweak classes as they go; it’s still the same old conservative Blizzard but with a bit faster reflexes.

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. Read more »

So as part of the Ladies of Destiny 5th Anniversery blog series, I’ll be writing a response to each of Matron’s posts, to let you know everything he got wrong or important details that he left out!  There actually wasn’t a whole lot going on in that first year before we started running Molten Core in earnest, compared to nowadays.  I think the main general theme of that era is that it was just a completely different game back then.  We still took ourselves every bit as seriously as we do now, but man were we noobs!

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LoD celebrated our 5^th birthday on Feb 22^nd 2010.  As part of the celebration I’d like to take a trip down memory lane and go year by year, recounting the trials and tribulations, lessons and achievements, wins and losses, and try to capture what has made this guild home for so many during the years.  Our achievements stand in stark contrast with our humble beginnings and my inexperience.  In fact, I often wonder how we ever made it out of the woods to evolve into a highly successful raiding guild.

Year 1 – 2005

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

Gaming phrases are all over the place, some are good and some are bad but most are trying to convey something in a way that the reader will remember. There’s a good phrase that gets passed around on gaming forums, put into peoples signatures, and has even made it onto my much maligned Facebook page.

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.

The Problem –

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

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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. Read more »

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.

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LoD beat Blood Queen on Sunday night, not without a fair amount of practice.  As I detailed in my previous post, concerning raid reps, we used a 25 man alt run and 10 mans to get practice attempts in.  Those runs gave us a chance to see the mechanics in action and get a lot of our stupid deaths out of the way =P

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. Read more »

I’ve been slacking on posting, especially with the time I had over the holidays.  So I’m going to publically pledge to post at least once a week (on Fridays), else I’ll get a race change to a gnome priest in Cata.  Ick. 

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. 

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Ah, the age old problem of a movement heavy fight. Whether you have to move a lot to avoid damage or to switch targets the effect is the same. Back in the day a movement heavy fight very much favored ranged/caster DPS while static fights tended to favor melee. This isn’t nescessarily the case anymore as sometimes melee can move with the boss and continue to attack and many casters gain much from being able to stand and nuke.

I’m not going to debate which fight is better for melee and which is better for casters, I want to talk about what melee (and specifically rogues) can do to make the most out of a fight with heavy movement and/or target swapping. Read more »