Posts tagged raiding
MMO Reporter Episode 31
Jun 6th
In this episode Chris and I discuss Perfect World Purchasing Cryptic, game population trends, AoE – not area of effect, but rather Age of Empires, and more.
Summertime Slump
Jun 6th
The summer slump has officially hit. If you’re in any kind of raiding guild out there, you’ve probably noticed it as well. Signups start slacking, people sign on less and less, recruitment slows to a crawl, and it’s just generally harder to get anything done. I think I started REALLY feeling it over Memorial Day weekend, last week. We barely had enough people to make our 10-man raid, and this week it looks like we won’t be able to pull it off at all without dipping into alts or something horrifying like that. The problem there? We were looking at poking a hardmode (Halfus), and DEFINITELY planning on putting time in Nefarian as well.
My guild only raids 2 days a week, and in spite of that, as well as a VERY late start to the raiding game (the last week of January was our first week of raiding) we have managed to go 11/12 in normal modes. This week, the plan was to poke at Heroic Halfus on wednesday, and then start chipping away at Nef on thursday, but as it stands right now, one of our healers is going to be an alt, and we’re switching out one dps over another between days. Chances are, heroic halfus isn’t going to happen this week. As far as Nef goes… well.. we’ll just have to see from there.
Anyway, i’m not writing this week to just gripe about my raid leading woes. I’m actually curious how a lot of people deal with this. I understand that real life ALWAYS should come first, but how do guilds who aren’t at the top of the heap, progression-wise keep afloat amidst all the summer activities? Do 25 man groups drop to 10s? Do you simply overrecruit in the spring in hopes of retaining enough to keep things going? Especially with the Firelands looming on the horizon, I am desperately trying to keep from putting a temporary freeze on raids until then. I would love nothing more than to be able to have all the normal mode content clear before 4.2 comes out. It would be a big personal success for me, as a raid leader, but it would also be a huge success for the guild as a whole. Anyway, I would love to hear how you deal with summer retention in the comments. Have a great week everyone.
A raid leader’s brain
Apr 18th
I’ve been thinking a lot about my raid group. If you’ve followed my ramblings enough, then you know that I am the raid leader of a 10-man group that is moderately progressive, but more social than anything. There’s been a lot of discussion on twitter, on and off over the last month or so, about people’s varying raid leaders. Some people complain (all of my raiders know better than to complain on twitter :D), some people don’t understand why they do some things, others out and out disparage their raid leaders in general. While I do understand that sometimes… unpopular decisions are made, I wanted to glean a little insight into the chaos that is a raid leader’s mind.
First… Raid leading is a 7-day-a-week “job”. My specific guild only raids two nights a week, for three hours per night, but my responsibilities hardly end at 10pm thursday night. I’m in charge of making the signups, gear checks, posting final rosters, deciding the order we kill bosses… and I have a pretty light duty overall in that respect. Some guilds may use DKP or suicide kings to keep track of their loot system, but we just do a free roll, main-spec over off-spec. I am very lucky in the fact that I don’t run with a bunch of greedy loot hoovers, so I haven’t had to deal with any issues in that respect.
In my particular (probably non-unique) case, I have to keep track of who has gone recently, and who hasn’t. Luckily all of our signups are archived, so it’s not a huge deal. We’re no hardcore guild, so we don’t worry much about specific compositions for the sake of progression or anything like that. We have a pretty good success rate just working with what we have. Your mileage, of course, may vary. More >
Self-Evaluation
Mar 21st
Now that I have successfully beat back most (some) of my Dragon Age addiction, i’ve put some more time back into Warcraft lately. I want to talk a bit about raiding for a little bit, if I may. Now, as you may or may not know, I am the main tank and raid leader, and officer in a 10-man focused semi-progressive raiding guild. I say semi-progressive because we’re nowhere near the cutting edge of doing hard modes or anything like that. Right now we are sitting at 7 bosses down in normal mode.
I was having a discussion the other night with one of my other officers about the different roles that people play in the raid. It started out as a very enlightening sort of self-evaluation that he had given to our healing team, and then he turned it towards me as a tank. After pondering over it and giving some solid answers (and his counter-opinions), I turned it on myself again as a raid leader. I had a little more difficulty with this view of myself, because it’s a lot easier to gauge your skills (or lack thereof) with a tangible role like tanking or DPSing than it is in a more intangible position like that of a raid leader. Don’t misunderstand. There are some real tangible ways to tell if a raid leader is failing, like attrition, or people regularly trying to “take over”. But other than that, it’s really hard to look inward and say “I am a good raid leader.” There just aren’t as many… obvious signals of failing or succeeding leadership.
Back to my point, however. I think the officer I was speaking to brought up a very good discussion between the two of us. Self-evaluation is very important in anything you do in life, let alone in-game. I think that taking an honest look at yourself and deciding what you want to accomplish, and HOW to accomplish these goals, is half of the battle. This can apply to raiding, PvP, or casual play. Decide what you want to do, and then find a group of people that can help you accomplish what you want out of the game. Whether that be a new guild, a new raiding group, a new PvP group, or just little pieces of self-improvement.
By the way… I think i’m a good raid leader, thank you very much.
Raid Impressions
Jan 31st
I am a raider. If you’ve been following any of my articles, then that should come as no surprise to you. I am not, however, anything like a hardcore raid machine. I raid 2 nights a week, for 3 hours each night, and that’s all. With the holidays behind us, and the expansion almost 2 months old, I finally lead my guild into what some people would call a “real” raid. Not that Vault of Arc– I mean Baradin’s Hold isn’t a real raid… in the most technical sense it IS a raid. What I mean is a raid that requires more than a 20 minute time commitment.
Putting a call out through a large group of my friends, I had discovered a sort of odd way for progression to go “smoothly” in boss kills. Since there are three seperate raids out now, the general concensus is to take the first two bosses of two of those raids, and then proceed outward from there. So, we brought our finest weaponry and knocked on the door of Blackwing Descent. No one told me that the doorknobs would be electrified.
Now, as you can see, we weren’t entirely unsuccessful in the raid. There was, however, a *much* higher degree of resistance than I was expecting. I could literally HEAR my healers sweating. For that matter, *I* was sweating as the main tank. From the first trash pull until the first the time we hearthed out there was an electricity that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It would be dramatically understating it for me to say that raiding was fun… but OH GOD WAS IT FUN.
I would like to say that we had more success than just the two screenshots I have showing today, but thta’s not the case. Two boss kills, in 6 hours. Y’know what though? That’s perfectly fine by me. I am exceedingly proud of my raid group. We couldn’t manage to kill the 3rd boss, but we made SIGNIFICANT progress on him (Halfus Wyrmbreaker, in case you were curious), and I fully expect to have a killshot of him available for next week’s article.
I hope you guys don’t mind me gushing about my guild, or our raiding progress. That wasn’t the initial point I had in mind when I started writing this. I wanted to convey my difference of feelings about raiding, even so early into the “career” of this expansion, as compared to raiding in Wrath. I am excited. I am beyond excited. The fights are tuned heavily, and don’t forgive easily, but are not anywhere near impossible. Only two and a half bosses into this first raid tier and I just can’t wait to see what’s yet to come.
