What do you call a raid without a healing coordinator?

……Funny!

Since wrath we have always had two healers with an outstanding commitment to knowing a fight inside out and the pressures each encounter puts on the healers. However one of those people has now quit wow, and who knows if or when he may return. That leaves one! Despite the fact he has fantastic raid attendance, sometimes people just cant make a raid, and last night, he couldn’t.

So, where did this leave us? Right up shit creek tbh.. we had 7 healers all asking the same question…. What do we do? Ive only really been in Ulduar once, and so im not an expert on the encounters, and so in the end we all chipped in, trying to work out the best assignments for each of the healers. Leading a raid, group, or healers is never an easy task, and one I don’t really welcome, but I think im going to take it upon myself to be more aware of the encounters, what happens, where damage spikes occur etc… with a view to fill in the void if ever required again. Its also important that you know what each of your team excels at, be it group healing or MT/OT. For further information on leadership, i refer you to Lodur.

Has anyone else had experience in leading a raid? How did you find it? If you don’t, what would you do to change the way healing is assigned in your guild?

Burn Out!

Those two little words. They are familiar to almost every wow player and due to the nature of the game will always exist. Today I wanted to talk a little about burn out, but for once, not my own personal feeling, but the overwhelming trend in the wow community at the moment.

Whether it be a guildy, or just another toon on the server, burn out affects us all, its that feeling of boredom or exhaustion grips us like a deathknight, and normally follows a long and meaningful grind of something, be it rep, pets, mounts or similar. For most wow players it means a break of some form from the game, sometimes a day or week, in others a month or two, and for some they simply never return.

I’ve suffered this burnout many times, and as you can see from some of my longer blog breaks I always come back with a new found energy and enthusiasm for the game.

At the moment though, burn out seems to be more prominent than ever in wow. Within our guild it seems to be affecting raiding more than anything, but I notice all over the blogsphere that people are taking a step back from wow! But why?

In many cases personal lives are more important and I completely accept that, changes in circumstances or family loss can affect your outlook on life and your priorities, but what about every one else that’s absent at the moment. Personally I think it’s a lot to do with the expansion, whether it be burnout from the grind, or the lack, absence, or disappointment of end game raiding.

The cynic in me says that people aren’t playing at the moment because end game has gotten to difficult for them, and that they’re waiting until Ulduar is nerfed or their guild has it on farm.

What ever the reasons may be, burnout is affecting players everywhere and is becoming an ever more worrying trend within wow.

I guess the reason for this post is more to do with my personal views than I had intended, whilst we don’t appear to have specific burnout issues in the guild we are struggling to put together a 25man raid each week, and the last 3 raid nights have been cancelled because of this. Its fair to say the last week was full of bank holidays across Europe which did not help our cause, but there is a more worrying picture emerging, and unless things change, we may be forced to postpone 25 man raiding indefinitely.

~Cav~

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wow that was a poorly constructed post, I completely lost track of what I wanted to say, but hopefully I got across a few points:

a) there’s an increasing number of players suffering from burnout
b) this is having an effect on my and in fact everyone’s ability to raid

The Nerf Stick: Friend or Foe?

Whilst I was writing my thoughts down on the 10 vs 25man argument I noted a post pop up in my reader from wow insider! Before I even read on I knew what they’re about to say!

That’s right, yet another nerf (hotfix) for Ulduar. Through reading some of the changes it appears on the face of things that Ulduar is getting easier and easier by the day. Of course until these changes actually go Live im just speculating on their impact, however I will be expecting a much easier ride in Ulduar once they have hit the servers.

Maybe im overreacting in my opposition to these “fixes” and maybe the encounters are currently “not as blizzard had intended” but I just wish they’d stop making everything easier. Instead of kills feeling like an achievement, they’re going to be meaningless urple farming once again!

On the bright side we will still have the “hard” mode to compete with, until of course they’re “fixed” aswell!

Ive made my feeling on Ulduar perfectly plain for all to see, but what do you think? Is Ulduar to hard, Is it a Guild breaker, or is it merely to much effort for people to put in?

10 vs 25: The Conundrum

Its fair to say that I have quite an open view on raiding, raid difficultly and whinny little bitches! And usually I would say that if you are struggling with content then its probably been pitched at just the right level (despite public opinion, raiding isn’t supposed to be a cake walk). However the more and more I look at the 25man content for Ulduar, the more and more I think there is a need to do some 10man content first.

From a healing perspective I am fairly confident in what I am doing and fairly confident that collectively we are not struggling to heal through the 25man content. However it is obvious to me that we are struggling to dps the things down! On every encounter thus far we have hit the enrage timer on multiple occasions. It is arguable that we are refining strategies and this will impact upon the time taken to kill something, but we are more often then not 20% away from killing stuff when It enrages!

As a guild we have decided that we are going to focus on the 25man content (for now), although 10man groups are going on each week, and to my knowledge are proving more successful. Given this, I would have thought it more sensible to focus on doing 2x10man raids on the allotted (official) raid nights! More to the point, how many raiding guilds did 10man Naxx first? I know we did! So why is Ulduar different, why do we think we can step straight into 25mans.

To argue this I have looked at the 10man content, and more importantly the rewards (gear) acquired, and I have to say, im not all that impressed! There were maybe one or two items I would currently consider to be upgrades, and I mean maybe! It’s debatable. If we applied that rule across the entire guild you would expect that we have a good level of healing/tanking/dps! So why is it that we struggle so much?

My guess is that we just not quite there yet…. And that a few weeks of further strategy refining is required (hopefully). With Thursday comes another fresh Instance for us to tackle, and hopefully some further progression will be achieved.

So, Ulduar was a (fairly) big jump from Naxx etc… How has you guild faired so far? Did you jump right in to the 25man content or have you been refining your strategies in the 10man (easy) mode?

The List

Practically anyone that knows me will tell you im lazy, flaky and crap at planning things out, and they’d all be wrong, I plan things plenty, I just don’t write anything down. Again, that’s probably not completely accurate, in fact every night with out fail I go home with at least two post-it-notes attached to my wallet. The information on these varies from "cook dinner" to titles of potential blog posts, but the one thing they all have in common is that they get lost. Before they hide from me though I usually get a chance to cross 1 or 2 of the jobs up, but needless to say, I completely forget the other 10,000 things I want/need/should be doing.

So, ive decided to come up with a list. A list of things that I still want to obtain or achieve in wow. This doesn’t including raiding as that’s just part of the working week, but instead smaller things that I can work on/through at my own pace.

Anyway, enough rambling, here we go!

• White polar bear!
• Complete all icecrown quests
• Exalted with with argent crusade
• Exalted with knights of ebon blade
• Exalted with timbermaw
• Investigate the argent tournament
• Try out the new fishing dailies
• Obtain 100 cooking tokens (you know what they’re for :P)
• Level Tayend to 80 (warrior)
• Level Masahashi to 80 (hunter)
• Level my Mage and Warlock to 80 (this may take a while as they are 13 and 35 respectively)
• Solo some BC instances
• Exalted with netherwing
• Exalted with skyguard
• Obtain 100 mounts
• Obtain 75 companions
• Complete some fishing achievements

That’s quite a comprehensive list of things id like to do over the coming months, however obviously completing the Wrath goals is my first priority and the rest will follow as and when I have a spare 5 years!

Seeing as at the moment I have only been logging in an hour before raids, which is just enough time to do 2 or 3 dailies, this list could take some time to complete. I’ll keep you posted on my progress

~Cav~