I HATE the new raid paradigm of making raids easier and pushing them out faster. It lessens the sense of accomplishment when you kill a new boss. I have written rants on this before, but WotLK has been all about messin’ with the middle-of-the-road guilds like mine. I can’t enjoy killing normal mode bosses, because it’s not “real”. And I can’t enjoy killing hard mode bosses, because we’ve already done 70% of the fight on normal mode, so it’s not “real” either. I bolded that because it really deserves emphasis. What exactly motivates me to keep raiding?

This system is just stressing out dedicated raiders, and most guild leaders I know are tearing out their hair. I feel under pressure to make us progress faster than ever before so we can “keep up”, and yet people are burning out and quitting faster than ever before because farming four versions of Jaraxxus each week (back when ToC was the top raid) is boring as hell.

Not to mention Blizz has completely screwed over guilds in so many ways in LK. I see so many posts that say, “Why should I bother getting a guild? I can pug raids and groups.” Even more so with this buff and the subsequent versions! (True, we can turn this buff off, but will most guildies approve? A quick straw poll this morning showed that most of my officers want to keep it, seeing as we’re “behind” and there’s no tangible benefit to removing the buff aside from some pride. Argh.)

Sorry, I know I’m ranting, but MAN this expansion has just made me really angry at WoW. Guilds are, I would argue, the number one source of player retention. How many people keep logging on for the people they play with, instead of logging on for the sheer joy of the game? I see folks say all the time that they would quit except for their friends online. And yet Blizzard seems pretty insistent on making running a moderate raiding guild as difficult and unpleasant as possible.

Stop rushing us, stop nerfing our team’s sense of accomplishment. Take your pity buff, Blizzard, and shove it up your collective bottoms.

Save and Share:

My new virtual market has taken off, helped by the release of the new arena season and the frost wing of ICC. As I mentioned before, the bread and butter of my business is basic consumables — ore, cloth, food, herbs, enchanting mats. I’ve gotten better about buying in bulk when the prices take a downturn, and having faith that they’ll pick up again in another week or two.

Having this extra gold liquidity, though, means I can also dabble in more expensive items. Right now my auctions include epic recipes, pricey gem cuts, and lots of level 80 blues, which sell better than anticipated. Having patience and a good sense of the market helps a lot when laying out this kind of gold, as well as lots of experience with the game. It also means that I can jump on extra good deals I see in trade channel, such as the person selling 40 stacks of Lichbloom at a deeply discounted price. What am I going to do with 40 stacks of Lichbloom? I.. um.. did I mention it was really cheap? No more questions!

I’ve also learned what items I will not flip, whether it’s out of financial or moral concerns. I know people make a pretty good WoW living selling vendor items at exorbitant prices, but I turn up my nose at a lot of that business. And I refuse to do that gross thing suggested by another blog where you post 100 arrows at the same price at 1000 and then snicker when someone buys them (or similar methods). I will relist vendor items I come across with a little “convenience fee” — a good example is the cooking recipes sold by that dude waaaaaaaay down in the corner of Westfall — but I roll my eyes when I see Refreshing Spring Water for 20 gold a piece.

Now I have the not-unpleasant task of deciding what, if anything, I want to buy with some of this gold! I’ve already picked up a Leaping Hatchling and Orb of Deception at bargain basement prices (one benefit of stalking the Auction House), and funded getting my alts close to max level crafting and riding skills. I’ve decided against a motorcycle, I think. They’re awfully cool, but just don’t fit into whatever limited RP vision I have for Liore. Perhaps a passenger mammoth? Eh…

What I really want is a giant chicken mount, so I can call it Chicken Boo. (”It’s a chicken, I tell ya! A giant chicken!”)

_____________________________________

An exciting Cats management secret: If you want to join my guild, don’t have a character name that starts with X. When I set up our loot tracking module for the website, years ago, I cheerfully hard coded in a special setting for ex-members which I cleverly denoted by putting ‘X’ in front of their name.

Looking at it this weekend, while working on another part of the site, I realized that I am not to be trusted with 2am application design. I’m not sorry enough to fix it though, so just change your character name, okay? Thanks.

PS: Looking for a bear or DK tank!

Save and Share:

Dear Guild,

AUGH, where did you all go? Three weeks ago we had 35+ signups for Tuesday and Thursday raid nights, and this week we BARELY have 25, and that includes a totally excessive eight healers*. Here I was thinking that once the holidays were over we had at least four months of good solid raiding before the summer bullshit starts again, but I guess I was wrong.

Over the past five years I have had to just accept that occasionally a quarter of our core raid signups will disappear into the mist. And honestly, every time it becomes more and more difficult to be motivated to fill those spots. Why should I bother? People will just disappear again. And again. And again. It starts to feel a little infinite and depressing after a while.

This time it’s particularly painful because we were doing SO WELL. You are all pretty damn amazing players, when you’re actually THERE. At some point around the holidays we had a kickass raid group and we were .. not a world first guild, but we were going to be pretty dang competitive. It felt really good, like it was time for the casualcore nerds to shine! And now we’re back behind the pack, plinking at Professor Putricide.

My favorite part of this dance is a month from now when y’all come back from where ever you are and find the raid is partially staffed with New Guys. New Guys who are in YOUR spot. And man, quite a few of you will not be pleased about that, and then you will send me cranky PMs and I will make a very squinchy face when I read them. Finding new people is a lot of work. I have to advertise, respond to questions in-game and on the forums, conduct interviews, get feedback from our people, help the new dude get settled with rules and culture, analyze performance logs, and then conduct the Membership Discussion should they make it that far. By the time they’ve made it to their second or third raid with us, I am not very inclined to push them aside for the guy who disappeared without warning for a month.

Seriously, what does it take? We had progression, we have a pretty damn awesome guild culture, leadership with open door policies, limited time commitment (6-9 hours a week!). All I need is for people who said they would come on raids to.. actually come on raids. I’m not paid to do this, remember. I’m a volunteer, just like you. Sure, I get the benefits of being guild leader, but I also do a lot more work and am expected to care a lot more than anyone else. That’s fine, as long as I’m also getting what I want out of the game, and one of those things is progression raiding.

This morning, when faced with yet another round of real life events and apathy and frantic recruitment posts across the internet, I am not sure why I bother.

Love, Cranky Liore.

* Dear healers: you sign up for everything, and I love you for it. I wish we could kill new bosses routinely with 8 healers, because I would take you all on every run.

Save and Share:

Finish levelling professions on Lunedi
Thanks to this guide and some mat donations from a guildie, I got Lunedi’s mining and jewelcrafting up over 400 this weekend. She’s just starting to mine saronite from Sholazar Basin, and will soon be fighting it out with everyone else for titanium, which I can prospect for blue gems to level JC!

Organize daily profession stuff
Continuing my gold-making plans from last week, I’m trying to make better use of my professions. Liore has an epic gem transmute each day that I should take advantage of, plus unlimited meta gems. Lunedi should do the JC daily every day, and make icy prisms when I get to that point. I have a level 70 tailor/enchanter who should really get her shatters and specialty cloth cooldown timers sorted. And on that idea..

Switch Liore to Transmute Spec
Liore has been Potion Spec since the beginning of time. Back in the day, being able to make my own mana potions was extremely cost efficient. It’s still pretty handy for the first few months of any new expansion, but overall I’d be better suited by being able to proc extra transmutes.

One Light In The Darkness (10s)
Both me and another healer just need this achievement to get our Ulduar drakes. I have a timer up to the Keepers saved — ask for help with this from the guild!

Get Exalted with Keepers of Time
Find some poor suck– um, helper to run Heroic Black Morass a few times. How am I just short of exalted with KoT, anyway? It feels like I ran BM a million, billion times to help people get keyed for Karazhan.

Get the Perky Pug on Liore!
Oof. While the LFG system was top of my daily priorities when it debuted, I admit I have been slacking a bit as of late. It’s also really tempting to just run with guildies instead of puggies, but that does not get me any closer to an adorable doggy of my own! Just 19 more random people to go…

Send mats from Guild Vault for flasks
Find a nice elixir master.

Repost all auctions on Friday morning
I’m going away for the weekend, so I’m listing everything my banker owns on Friday morning on a 48-hour timer. Let’s see how much gold I’ve REALLY made with this AH mogul thing.

Evaluate new recruit
Check the logs tomorrow morning.

Read up on new ICC bosses, kill Putricide
Argh, Putricide! 16% last week.. assuming people are on the ball, I think we’d have it… except our Abom driver is away for work this week. Figure out if we should wait until Monday (traditionally a weak roster night), or power through with a better roster but novice abom driver on Thursday.

Save and Share:

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be the rightful winner of a Battered Hilt during a LFG random. Everyone in the party froze when it dropped, and after giving each other the stinkeye we all agreed to roll need. Usually I am quite strict about need being “need this for an upgrade on this character right now” (and I had passed on another Hilt the week before during a guild run for that very reason), but in all honesty on a pug who doesn’t NEED 20,000g? I need to not have to farm again for a very long time, thanks.

So anyway, all of the above means that this week I have lots of spare time and lots of spare gold. My mission was clear: become an Auction House mogul. Buy low, sell high, have a big money fight with all my friends. This may surprise you, dear reader, but after some effort I learned that apparently buying low and selling high is trickier than you might think! I know! Go fig!

I can’t really give ‘helpful gold-making tips’, because I am a very unreliable source. I will say that I started out with 1000g in seed money and had 750g in profitable auctions close yesterday (gross, not net). However, I turned right around and sunk everything back into inventory so I can’t really tell how well I’m doing overall. I can say that I’ve had a lot of fun so far, which I suppose is the point.

The constant, stable income is in level 80 crafting professions. Jewelcrafting and Inscription seem to basically be licenses to print money with a little research, and I have a level 70 tailorbot who has been quite profitable. Enchanting is less awesome with the LFG system, but still good. Alchemists should be using their epic gem transmute every day. Keep an eye on mat prices, and stock up when they’re low.

The alternative to making money with your professions is flipping. This works best, I think, when you are available to log in during weird hours, such as late at night or early in the morning. With mods you can search for auctions that are about to end and slip in a bid. Items such as herbs, ore, and enchanting mats sell constantly, hundreds each day on each server, so you cannot go wrong by picking some up for under market value. It WILL sell eventually. In truth, the flipper’s motto is “buy low and sell normal”. Go for the sure thing, and go for it in bulk.

And don’t undervalue bidding on stuff! It’s not sexy or flashy or exciting, and it doesn’t appeal to my need for immediate gratification, but holy cow you can find some good prices. Be patient, bid on all those profession goods with the 1s start, and a small percentage of them will show up in your mailbox. There is something really satisfying about having a 50s bid go through and then turning around and selling the item back for 30g. It seems sneaky. I like it!

The big lesson I have to learn now is how to sit on inventory. I don’t have to flip everything immediately, and in fact would benefit in many ways by waiting until the price on, say, Lichbloom goes back up to its usual ridiculous number. I suspect I’ll get better at this over time as I learn the ways of the marketplace.

I will keep y’all updated as to my success. Oh, and Uldumites… go buy a bunch of stuff off the AH, okay? Thanks.

Save and Share:

This is particularly applicable to LFG pugs at the moment. Given a halfway decent tank, I can get away with Prayer of Mending and a shield or two, leaving me to space out and spin around in my chair for half the instance. So what’s an overgeared healer to do? SMITE!

I know a lot of healers queue up with DPS gear and specs now to help out with damage, but I’m not that brave. I burn through mana really quickly in my shadow set, and my hotbars and keybindings are all wrong for the kind of panicked “oh shit” healing that might be required. Besides, you never know how good your next Heroic tank will be. Instead, I like playing the Battle Priest, Smiter Extraordinaire. I’ve beaten DPS on many a pull, which is vastly more entertaining than dancing in the back of the room.

The secret to healer dps is this macro, which you probably already have in use somewhere:

/cast [harm,nodead][target=targettarget,harm,nodead] SpellName

Set up all your offensive spells to use this macro. Now you can DPS a mob without ever leaving your friendly target — instead it will hit your target of target. I use this to pop shadow word: pain, devouring plague, and shadow word: death on a boss as much as possible (assuming you can give up the GCDs). Hey, every bit helps, and I’m pretty sure my 200 DPS on Rotface was what put us over the top. Totally.

Anyway, this can be used with smite too, which is your friend on pugs. Throw SW:P on anything, and pop devouring plague and SW:D on the big baddie. Is there a single target? PoM and shield your tank, and Smite away! Is it a pack pull? Oh, you lucky dog, it’s MIND SEAR time. I love mind sear. I love it so much. All the tanks in my guild can testify to my love of mind sear, as it’s killed them each at least once. (What? I can’t stop and heal you, I’m clearly MIND SEARING. Duh.)

It helps to have a bit of +hit. I have 70 incidentally from a wand and offhand in my main gearset, which is good enough for me. The hit cap for Heroic bosses is about 130 for Alliance and 160 for Horde, not that it’s a huge concern.

A well geared healy priest can easily pull down 1-2k DPS during a Heroic (again, assuming a good tank), which means that you will clear the instance that much faster. Being a Heroic Battle Priest and occasionally beating Mr. Mouthy Noob Hunter on the charts has made LFG much, much more fun.

———————————————-

Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic: Feed it a WoW macro, and it will explain what the heck is going on in those many square brackets. Oh, clever website!

Save and Share:

The style is pretty strongly inspired by the Parasol Edition of Tapestry UI, but the fundamental elements haven’t changed over the last year. I have a middle stack of buttons, Grid, and user frames, and a big black text box in the corner. There are a few changes under the hood, however.

Out: Pitbull, In: Stuf
Pitbull was always a huge memory hog, so I was happy to find a suitable replacement in Stuf. One thing both mods suffer from is too many options — given infinite time and patience, you could make your user frames look like almost anything. Pitbull addressed that somewhat with the in-game template features, while with Stuf you just overwrite the LUA file. It can be tough to source attractive frame files, though, and it’s a little intimidating for someone with limited mod experience. Once you get it set up, it looks good and has very low overhead.

Out: Buffalo, In: Satrina Buff Frames
I enjoyed my cute tiny buff/debuff icons for years, but at some point during a couple tiers of LK raiding I got tired of having to squint to see how long I had left on Thaddius’ polarity and such. I could have just set up Buffalo to do that, but I figured I may as well take the opportunity to finally update to a more current add-on. SBF does everything you would expect, with low overhead, and a few extras. (I like being able to turn off things like Heroic Presence, for example.)

Out: BigWigs, In: Deadly Boss Mods
Huge upgrade. DBM has, in my experience, more complex timer available and gives more information to the player than BigWigs. Additionally, DBM works in some 5-man situations (it will time Make It Count for example) and by default has timers for important events in Battlegrounds like graveyard captures. No contest, DBM wins.

Best in Show: Power Auras
Oh, Power Auras. Tough to set up, but once you do you will possibly never find a mod that is so useful to every class in so many ways. “All” Power Auras does is put the symbol of your choice (including size and color) on the screen at a pre-set time or condition. For example, see that little green symbol to the left of my body in the screenie? That means I have three stacks of Serendipity up. It’s just a simple graphic that goes red, yellow, or green appropriately, but it makes a huge difference as to the next spell I cast. The flexibility to add even more clear, concise symbols to my game play in the future, in any way I need, makes this a pretty powerful add-on.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hmm, one tiny change in my philosophy of add-ons I guess: I just noticed that I’m not running a DPS meter in the 2009 raid screenie, whereas it has a place of prominence in my UI now. How odd. Did I turn it off for the shot in an attempt to be modest? Or was I actually not running one? Perhaps I’ve gotten more numbers-focused in the last year.

Save and Share:

I should hasten to add that we haven’t killed any of the three new bosses yet, so I am hardly speaking from a position of uber superiority. In fact, we wiped to Festergut 11 times on Tuesday, getting him as low as 3% once. And when we kill him tonight, as I suspect we will if everyone is on the ball, it will feel really good.

Everyone who has ever raided knows how good a first boss kill can feel. That rush is proportionate to how much work you put in to killing him. I remember after five weeks of slogging away on Kael, I literally teared up when he finally died. That feeling when the boss you’ve been banging your head against falls down and Vent erupts in cheers — that’s the rush of raiding. I like to improve my character and hang with my friends, but that boss kill is the real kernel of raid satisfaction.

That satisfaction has been sorely missed by “average” raid guilds such as mine.

Oh sure, there are Heroic modes, and we do a fair number of them. Some are unique fights in their own right, like Sarth-3D, and very challenging. But most are just the same old boss you have already fought three different ways, only with everything scaled up. I killed Gormok in normal 10s, heroic 10s, normal 25s, and now I can kill him while he hits the tank for 40k? Awesome. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not very interesting.

Meanwhile, normal modes in ToC-25 were so easy that we were clearing the place in an hour by our third run. I remember when we would be all excited to get a screenie of us standing around the corpse of a new boss, but with ToC it was hard to feel like we’d actually done something until we just finished the place. Even the first wing of ICC was a little underwhelming, at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, the boss mechanics are interesting, the setting is neat, and I get to shackle things, but none of the kills gave that sense of accomplishment.

Then along came the Plague Works. It was incredibly fun: fresh new content, and a boss that at our level requires solid concentration, effort, and teamwork from everyone involved. Our team has been buzzing since Tuesday, too. People are analyzing the raid logs, posting on the strategy threads, and shoring up any holes in their gear. There are places to go and things to kill.

Back in TBC we were very happy to have a new boss down every two weeks. Fourteen days! And we liked it! I understand that Blizzard wants to get away from elaborate fights like our five week effort to kill Kael’Thas, and I’m not entirely opposed to that. But give us some challenge. Give us a reason to be good (and get better) at what we do. Give us the occasional morsel of fresh content that we can’t just brute force into the ground, and I suspect that you, my dear Blizz, will find many satisfied customers. For the moment, I am one of them.

Save and Share:

So given my fairly arbitrary recruitment standards (”Do they make Liore happy?”), it might be surprising that there are a few things someone can do to not even be considered as an applicant.

1. You have a stupid name.
“Stupid” is defined as borderline offensive, horribly misspelled, or with an excessive number of umlauts. Yes, this probably isn’t fair, but there you go. I am a big English Major elitist bastard, and I would be really sad to see “XxDeathNightxX” running around with my guild tag. It should be noted that really awesome people can overcome this barrier to entry. In fact, a long time ago I reluctantly invited a fellow who was amazingly nice but.. oh.. that name. He’s been a guild officer for at least a couple of years now, so I think it worked out in the long run. /grin

2. You ask me what our website URL is, or something that is obviously on the site.
All guild leaders like to think that their guild is a unique and special snowflake. It doesn’t matter if it’s a raiding guild or a leveling guild or a PVP guild or whatever, we all think ours is the best around (or we wouldn’t be running it, right?). I certainly don’t want or ask for obsequiousness from apps, but I do like to see a basic acknowledgment that you want to join MY guild in particular. This means you shouldn’t ask me what our website URL is, or any information that is plainly listed on the front page of said site. You want to know our web address? Go type “Machiavellis Cat” or even just “Liore” into Google. You do know the name of our guild, right?

3. Don’t immediately launch into an angry story about how you were mistreated in your old guild.
I like to assume that most guild leaders are reasonable sorts who mean well. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but there you go. If you introduce yourself to me with a tirade about how you were never invited on raids because of the stupid core clique, or how you left when you didn’t get a drop that you deserved, or whatever, I am probably going to wonder how much of it was your fault. Also, weird questions like, “Do you have attention-seeking girls in your guild? I hate those,” while possibly genuine, will likely induce concern on my part. (If you have been burned by guilds in the past and want to avoid that, try asking positive questions instead of ranting. “What is your raid roster policy?” or “Are initiates eligible for loot?”.)

4. I don’t care about your GearScore.
I really, really don’t. I’ve never installed the mod, and I never will install the mod. I even have no idea what the GearScores are for Liore or Lunedi. So when you start your app with, “Recruit me, I’m a 5100 DK,” it means absolutely nothing. Your collective item level doesn’t really tell me whether you can choose your gear intelligently, what previous raid experience you have, or what kind of person you are. It does tell me that you’re possibly one of THOSE guys who is absurdly fixated on numbers and inclined to be a jerk about it.

5. “App? I don’t like filling out apps. Can’t you just invite me?”
No.

Most of this stuff is common sense, and I’m sure some of it is more important to me than to other guild leaders. Be polite, be genuine, and remember that guild leaders are human and just as prone to snap first impressions as everyone else.

Save and Share:

The raiding in 3.2 was so terrible that I felt bad marching people through achievements and hard modes. I stood in that room three nights a week at least (25s and 10s), and even my infamously unlimited resources of guild cheerleadering were being taxed. It was pretty easy to just wipe out ToC, Ony, and VoA in 90 minutes and then tell everyone to go do something fun. Plus, some people don’t really dig achievements, and get a little shirty when they wipe for an hour to get some flashing lights and a noise that they don’t care about anyway. (Side note, but to those people I say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” You don’t like it, go talk to Blizz and tell them their new raiding paradigm is stupid.  Bosses don’t matter any more, per se. It’s all about achievements and hard modes. Personally, I like it.)

Anyway, previously the time requirement was a huge block to our competitive progress as a guild. As it stands now though the time demands of raiding are greatly diminished. After the holidays we will be raiding 9 hours a week (three nights at three hours) which should handily cover farming, progressing, and achievements. And no, server ranking isn’t everything, but it’s somewhat satisfying to see your guild name in lights, and it DOES help a lot with recruiting.

Without that time limitation, competitive progression relies upon player skill, teamwork, gear, and proper motivation from the gal upstairs… oh crap! That’s me! Hence the manifesto. So we started off our new achivement-happy stance by picking off “On A Boat” and “I’ve Gone and Made a Mess” on our second clear of ICC. The latter took a little strategy and a few wipes, and the former was chaos and madness and chanting “shootit shootit shootit shootit” at the cannoneers. The result of our little adventures?

Which, you know, doesn’t actually MEAN that much, except that we are a guild of determined spazzes with a rocket pack fixation. As a pally said, “WTF are other guilds doing right now? Underwater basketweaving?” All it took was a little motivation and 45 minutes of patience from the team, and we saw results unlike those we’ve ever seen before.

So to all you other ‘casualcore’ guilds out there: You don’t need time to be recognized as badass! This is kind of the dawn of our era. Knock that 3.2 lethargy out of your head, go forth, and achieve. As Newton — or was it Ghostcrawler? — said, a guild in motion tends to stay in motion.

Save and Share: