Well, to be quite honest, logs help A LOT in helping determine what is going wrong and how to fix it. Before we got Bane, we had to go through logs and figure out issues that were happening with healing, tank threat and CD usage. A lot of this work was done outside of raids, brought to the next raid and then iterated upon from there. Logs will be very useful if you take the time to use them and analyze them. I am happy to help out if needed here; feel free to ask.
A lot of fight mechanic things need to be reinforced over and over again until it “clicks” for the raid as a whole (from my experience). If tank threat is an issue, MDing/TotT always help, but sometimes it’s just an issue with their rotation. DPS need to be able to go all out on fights like these, so having to throttle there due to threat should be a last resort.
As for mechanics such as Shamblings/Ragings, a lot of that can be small mistakes such as dispelling too early or tanks not grabbing snap aggro, or RNG issues like a plague stack disappearing or a Raging gibbing someone as soon as they pop. Having a Disc priest picked up by Val’kyrs has wiped raids on LK an incredible number of times. Your raid has to be resilient enough to stick through that.
Anyway, I highly suggest you start analyzing logs. It’s helped me in more ways than I can enumerate here. Good luck, and hopefully your vacation will help alleviate your burnout on this fight.
This is my feeling entirely–if I get EP for waiting, then it’s reasonable to expect me to hang at the entrance. If I get nothing, but I’m likely to be subbed in, maybe. If I get nothing, and I get subbed in once a month, well, warlock summon me, because I got shit to do.
More Friday evening/afternoon random PUG asshattery today…
Signed onto my human Death Knight on Windrunner (all my Alliance toons are on Windrunner) and queued up for a random heroic PUG. After the first random group failed because one DPS didn’t join, I got into a Halls of Lightning in-progress group.
The group had just taken down the second boss, and was heading into the halls with the statues that come to life. Well, from the start a warrior DPS was on the tank’s (a druid) case. “What are you doing?” “That’s not how you tank”, etc.
Frankly, I don’t know why the tank put up with it for so long. We made it past the next-to-last boss, and entered the halls towards Loken. Well, as we made our way through that hall (I can’t remember the name of that part), the warrior DPS died twice to those ‘spinner’ dwarves - the ones that do heaps of damage if you don’t move away from them.
Well, this set the warrior off even more “You’re a terrible tank”, blah blah. Apparently he felt that the tank should have somehow been keeping him from dying, even though those spinner dwarves hit everyone around them, and the only defense is to move away from them.
I guess the tank felt that he’d put up with enough sh*t. He changed to cat form and started running around the room, grabbing aggro on as many of the remaining mobs as he could. I saw what was going to happen, and quickly clicked on “Leave party” before the mobs reached us and we all died. Saved myself some gold in repair money there.
Tanking’s a hard job, and I feel that players who are willing to do it shouldn’t have to put up with abuse from other players who don’t even know when they’re supposed to move away. Sheesh.
It all depends on the guild’s requirements. For a hardcore guild, if you’re on standby (i.e., you may be needed at some point and/or are getting some kind of DKP credit for being available), that means you need to follow whatever the guild’s rules are, whether that’s having your raiding toon parked at the entrance or whatnot. Yes, they probably do (and should, if it’s 25-man) have a Warlock, but if they’re in combat, they can’t summon. Anybody who might be called in shouldn’t get into anything they can’t immediately drop out of.
Historically, I usually spend standby time farming mats or questing on alts (or offline reading), staying in Vent so that I can be contacted if necessary.
Craft the pants anyway (assuming you mean Pillars of Might). All that armor makes them *godly *for tanks.
Sounds like you’d definitely hate a hardcore raiding guild, then–it’s not unheard of for people to have to sit on standby for hours, then come in and use their entire week’s lockout for just one boss. That’s one of the joys/frustrations of WoW–finding people who match your own goals and philosophies for playing the game.
There were some learning wipes, which are fine, but there were also some just plain stupid wipes, which are not. IMO we should have had her in no more than 3-4 attempts.
Frustrated, yeah, but reasonably so. There was no unconstructive yelling, and sometimes people need the constructive kind.
Ahem:
Translation: It’s exactly what I was expecting.
If I have any input at all, for the love of god, get a better website. It’s ugly and clunky. The Backseat deserves something that lives up to its awesomeness.
The correct method for dealing with a pain-in-the-ass not-as-awesome-as-he-thinks-he-is DPS is to kick him, not wipe the whole group. And if they already used their kick for the run: tough shit. The tank shouldn’t have had to have put up with the DPS’s whining, but the tank also shouldn’t have screwed over everyone else.
Yeah, I’m just not that committed. I like raiding, but I like to do other stuff, too. I think if I were to join a guild, it would have to be a casual guild that raids sometimes. It would be nice to get Kingslayer some day, but if that never happens, I’m still getting plenty of value for my $15/month. Even unguilded, I’m having no trouble getting in on VoA and the weekly.
Beyond those two, I dunno where to start with the whole raiding thing. My gear is at a point where I don’t think anything in Naxx would be an upgrade. Not sure about Ulduar, but I know Flame Leviathan doesn’t drop much of anything I’d want. Maybe a trinket on the 25 im-fracking-possible-for-mere-mortals setting. ICC pugs are a Catch 22 deal. They don’t want to take anyone with no experience, and it’s awfully hard to get experience when nobody will take a noob.
I guess I want to do more than I’m doing now, but not any of this bench warming stuff while the big boys play. I figure there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere…
Your best bet is to grind Emblems of Triumph and get your T9 pieces, while saving up your Frost badges (from daily heroic, weekly raid, VoA, random ICC PUGs, and whatever) for buying T10. Concentrate on Trial of the Crusader and ICC PUGs–don’t even bother with Naxx and Ulduar at this point. For the most part, the gear in there isn’t even worth the effort anymore if you want to do any serious current raiding. Find yourself a friendly tank (because they get insta-queues) and just chain-run heroics. Obviously T9 isn’t as good as T10, but it’s pretty good and you can decide when you get your frost badges whether you want to spend them on T10 (probably best, especially if you can get 2-piece, since mage 2-piece is quite good) or one-off pieces (not so great–many people spend them on trinkets, but the caster trinket is lousy.)
I’m 4/5 T9 now. Rocking about 5189 GS. Already bought the frost belt…Circle of Ossus, or something like that. The one without hit rating,since I’m over cap now. Not planning on going 5/5 T9 unless the pants drop and I win em. Wearing PVP pants at the moment. If the T10 pants haven’t dropped for me within the next two lockout cycles, I’ll probably buy em with frost emblems, because I get the upgrade without losing my 4 piece T9 bonus. Then the next piece will be trading the 4 piece T9 for 2 piece T10 and 2 piece T9.
And rambling on…
I’m kinda wondering if it is too easy to gear up in WoW these days. I was out of the game for well over a year. Came back about 5 weeks ago. In that time, I’ve gone from 73 to reasonably well geared 80. Been chain running heroics, playing a lot of hours, but still…it seems like a blink of an eye to get from where I started to where I am now. The same relative progress in good old EQ back in the day would’ve taken 6 months or more. If I was lucky.
They always do that near the end of an expansion. They did the same thing at the end of BC, which actually helped my mage get into a really good progression guild (I ground Badges of Justice until I was blue in the face to get the various items available on Quel’danas, and ended up with a pretty nice gearset with several T6-level items despite never having set foot in a T6-level raid).
Once Cataclysm comes out, it’ll be hard for awhile to gear up (and quite a shock to all the entitlement kiddies who think they should be decked out in purples two days after they hit 80–most heroics will be dropping blues in Cata, albeit better blues than Wrath, relatively speaking, and it won’t be at all uncommon to see raiding teams venturing into raids geared in a mix of blues and epics). But as time goes on, they’ll nerf things to make it easier for newer players to catch up to the folks who did the work to down the cutting-edge bosses while they were still cutting-edge.
Heh, sorry for sounding hopelessly vague and telling you things you already know :). I’m used to explaining this stuff to people who barely have a grip on computers, let alone mmorpgs.
Anyway, I’d just put out the ol’ feelers for a few of the alliance guilds listed here:
I’m sure there’s at least a few disgruntled raiders in those five or six guilds that are on par with yours. And while you’re on WoWprogress you can update your recruitment blurb too. Just login and click [update].
Woot! Finally got myself a nice new toy tonight! I am a happy Death Knight!
With that and my new belt, I am now the proud owner of a gearscore of just shy of 6700, making me the second most geared toon in my guild. And I’m an alt! (Though I’m technically not anymore, since I’ll be joining the main raid next week.)
No worries man, I know how it is. I do appreciate the time you took. I guess I was just wondering if there was some super secret kernel of knowledge you knew in recruiting the right players, but really I think it’s just a universal thing of having your guild’s achievements speak for itself and focusing on the qualities you want from the players in your guild as you recruit. I’ll just keep on keeping on, but I may have further questions for you down the line.
Thanks again, and yeah, I will probably be sending out those feelers this weekend. It’s just not the easiest conversation to have, especially cold.
Generally, most of my macros involve triggering an item before using an ability – like trinkets, haste gloves, and such. That way I don’t have to remember to use them, they’ll automatically be used whenever they’re available.
The only non-combat macro I sport is a /golfclap, for when I’m on a lowbie, come out of a Battleground flagged for PvP, and get jumped by a level 80.
Well, I’m guilded now. Took my first stab at ICC. Wasn’t pretty. We wiped twice on trash. Twice more on Lord Whatshisname. Got him to just under 50%. Meh. Eventually, I gonna wear that guy’s teeth as a necklace. But not tonight.
Getting that mindset and gelling the team when it’s new is hard–my alt-raid ICC10 group, experienced raiders all in 25-mans, are stuck on Saurfang in the alt-raid, which is only a few bosses in.
In this case it was literal. “Reserves” were expected to be sitting outside the instance with their thumbs up their asses; on my third non-raiding raiding day, I said “going to do my dailies and some questing, let me know if you need me” - and then I did! I didn’t even have a TV, few books, still had a ton of quests and dailies to do, yet I was expected to spend 10-15 hours a week sitting outside OS and Naxx while other people raided? It didn’t make much sense. Every other guild I’ve been in, people who want to be considered as reserves are expected to stay in the correct toon while the raid is on, or at least be in an easily-reachable alt doing stuff they can drop in seconds, but they’re not expected to be staring at the ram outside ICC until their eyes cross.
I got my fourth set piece and have been topping our DPS charts nicely. Got a replacement for the shoulders in storage, but I don’t want to lose that nifty 20% bonus to DPS (I don’t know how often it triggers, but often enough to show). Now I need me some upgrade tokens.
It’s kind of strange that for the longest time my main wasn’t wanted and now she’s pretty much required: hunters were pretty much something you only brought in if there wasn’t something else to grab; there are people who were so used to seeing me in my priest that they considered her the main, and times when she was much better equipped than the hunter. Some of the mechanics in ICC, combined with having only two raiding hunters in the guild (there are other level 80 hunters, but they’re alts) and quite a few healers, mean that now it’s the priest who isn’t getting any raiding mileage.
And the occasional green too.
I’ve just started a little mage on the red side; she’s 22 now. Most of the PUGgies I get, both on her and on my little paladin who’s doing random normals, think they are their own big brothers, pulling half the instance while the healer drinks. In my experience from the pallie, there’s a point at which it gets better, but what I do see is many people who have no mental flexibility. The notion that behavior which is fine in heroic HoL when the worst DPS is pumping out 7K may need to be toned down in Wailing Caverns zooms right above their heads. I do think that for the first weeks of Cata I’m going to be running a lot of guild instances, just to try and avoid those people a bit (and I may be the guildie with the highest PUG-tolerance).
Hahahahaha! Makig is now 80! Leveling up, particularly through Northrend, was a real blast.
Having reached 80 I managed to sneak in one lvl-80 normal dungeon. Wow, do people move fast. I also feel pretty flimsy. Before the healer caught on that I was a fresh 80, I actually bit it to random trash damage. It’s also good ego control to go from primary damage dealer in sub-80 dungeons back to struggling to keep up with the tank.
So, what’s the best way to gear up? My current plan is to keep running normal 5-mans until I get enough drops and emblems to be heroic-worthy. Are there any sweet questing or other gear sources I’m missing out on?
That’s one of the joys/frustrations of WoW–finding people who match your own goals and philosophies for playing the game.