[Offtopic] What a night

The new guild seems to be working out pretty well, in case you were at all curious. On Tuesday we continued our attempts on 25-Firefighter and managed to get it down after only an hour, which left us time to start work on hardmode Yogg.

It also meant that Algalon-25 was unlocked.

Last night we intended to work on Algalon, then go to ToC and work on hard modes there. We specifically moved our Algalon-10 attempts up to give people some experience at the encounter beforehand who hadn't seen it.

And in our first hour of attempts, Algalon died! Last pull, with only two people alive at the end (gogo Ardent Defender and Guardian Spirit), DoTs finished him off through the last big bang; we weren't sure that we got him until he just kinda stood there and looked emo. I'm amazed at this; having one hour to work on him and getting him down in that time is really outstanding, even if having all that gear from ToC helped and it wasn't what you'd call the most impressive kill shot. That was realm first, so now Fellhoof is sporting the groovy title "Celestial Defender". That's probably my favorite one since Hand of A'dal.

ETA: Here's a great log of how much damage was done after basically everyone in the universe died a horrible death. All I can say is that rip is AWESOME. And I should've just refreshed rakes.

I was expecting people to not be on their game after that awesomeness, but we then proceeded to go to ToC and one-shot beasts, kill Jaraxxus after a few attempts and one-shot Faction Champs on heroic - the last two were also progression for us. We got a few attempts in at heroic Twins before we were overcome with pain and huge amounts of ball jokes.

Pretty incredible work for a guild that does 8 hours of raiding a week.

Finally, to end the night, I was promoted from a trial membership to full-time.

I've talked about it before, when people felt like things were on, everyone was in a good mood, etc - and this was one of those nights. I felt like this when Fire and Blood downed Kael'Thas for the first time, too. It's a rare joy, and it doesn't happen often, but when it does it makes you understand how great raiding can be.

Next week we're going back to Ulduar to finish off some of the hardmodes that people have missed and then work on Yogg+1, the last major hardmode that has yet to be completed there. If this week is any indicator, that means we'll have time to work on Twins again. Twins is a really interesting fight; much like vehicles a lot of your success has nothing to do with how you play your toon and everything to do with managing the balls. Unlike vehicles, this somehow is way less frustrating to deal with and is downright fun. I also like it because it's not the kind of fight you'll ever really be able to brute force; it will require strategy, and the strategy is definitely going to make a huge difference in quality. I'm anxiously awaiting Bellwether's report on how she dealt with the fight.

[General] The return?

Earlier this week I brought up that I hadn't been posting and raiding all that much, and it was likely that I'd be going away soon. Well...things have changed.

First off, really, thank you all for the kind words and support. I'm very proud to have so many people who have gained value from my writing, and it means a great deal that you'd say so. I wasn't trying to gain sympathy or praise, but it certainly was nice to hear. :)

Second, after talking it over with my wife more and looking around, we think we may have found a solution (similar to what DTC suggested) - move to a different server with a different raiding schedule that isn't raiding as often. After doing some searching for guilds looking for a feral, I found what I hope will be a great home for a while: Casually Serious. They're a very progression-oriented guild that looks for similar people - people who are interested in doing very well and harder content, but don't have as much time due to real life considerations. I've been given a trial with them, and as of now I'm over on Balnazzar. Hopefully it will go well. I've never really raided with anyone other than Fire and Blood, so it's going to be interesting to see what it's like. I'm nervous and optimistic. But it means that I do have much more personal motivation to get loot lists and the like done, do more theorycrafting and raid analysis, and will likely have quite a bit of interesting things to say in the near (and hopefully far) future.

Saying that I was leaving to Fire and Blood was really difficult. I've raided with those real-life friends for basically all of my wow time, and we built a guild together that accomplished a great deal of success and fun. I've had my difficulties now and again, but that's normal with any group. I do know that without them, I would never have started writing. I would never have raided, and I would never have enjoyed it so much. I owe them a great deal, and words aren't going to be able to express that debt. I hope that we'll stay in touch and that I can pop on to QD now and then and crack bad jokes. And maybe when things change in my personal life, I'll be able to go back to 4 day a week raids and playing nonstop. I don't know if that's just wishful thinking. We'll see.

Anyway, later this week (possibly today) you'll see the Cat listing for gear. I'm going to use the wowhead system instead of Rawr this time (so unlike what I did for bears) and fill in the gaps as it gets more data. Most of the heroic 25-man stuff has dropped and is in the DB anyway, so it shouldn't have much more than the insanity tribute and some of the heroic Anub'arak loot. I will try and indicate when I don't have data where I think something should fall, too. If there is anything else you'd like to see or you have any questions, let me know.

[Offtopic]Pimp my UI epilogue: the results

In a previous post I showed the horrors of my prior UI. And...it was bad. Okay, it wasn't as bad as it could've been, but it was pretty atrocious. Thanks to a lot of tips and some great examples of things, I bring you the new hotness.

Before:


And after:


The buttons have been made a bit smaller, prettified with buttonfacade, and reduced to a total of four sets of bartender buttons. The bag and menu buttons have been hidden and only show up not in combat and when mouseovered, at the top of the screen. Omen, recount, and the chat window are all in the bottom viewport area, as is a square map (courtesy of squeenix). All map buttons have been removed, and are either part of FuBar (at the top) or have keyboard shortcuts to access (like the map). Decursive sits to the far left, as does ora2 normally. The HUD has been removed, and instead pitbull is used for player, target and target/target data. This is combined with the display parts of feralbynight to show cooldowns, combo points, lacerate stacks, mangle time and other bleeds. SCT displays minimal information and filters incoming heals out, displaying only damage intake (which is mostly to give me an idea of what the flow of combat is looking like on an intuitive level). TimeToDie is there to also give better information on how long I have (it's been moved slightly since this pic, but you can see it on top of the targettarget frame.

My buffs are provided by satrina buff frames, and are at the top of the screen going along the top, fairly small (I don't tend to look at them often) and skinned via buttonfacade. My debuffs (not shown) are below my character, also done via SBF. Target buffs and debuffs are done via pitbull. Target-target only has debuffs; this is primarily to allow for easy tank switching on things like Gormok and # of impales.

After doing this I changed a couple more things, so that errors I don't care about (particularly rage/energy ones) are no longer displayed, buffs gained are displayed not as big messages, and the tooltip is moved to be a bit less annoyingly placed.

Things I still don't like are the size of the raid frame space; when I'm not in a raid, this takes up a lot of room that looks kind of ugly. I'll be playing with this in the future, likely removing all of xperl completely. The floating combat damage is a bit large too, and I think I'll tone that down a skosh. I may also remove recount now that I have time to die, or at least move it somewhere that isn't dedicated. It's not that useful a tool for using during combat. Decursive is also another annoying addon that I don't like the position of. With grid and clique, I suspect I can remove it completely, but that takes time. Still it's eons better than what I had before and is very good for giving me exactly the information I need quickly and in the center of the screen while minimizing the amount of space that's taken up.

[Druid, Offtopic] Oh HELL YES

From today's latest PTR notes:

Swift Flight Form: Druids who have acquired a mount able to go 310% flight speed will now also go that speed while in this form.

Damn, I've missed you, Idol of Flying fast. And while I enjoy my Plagued Proto-drake and the giant trail of farts it leaves behind, the only reason I use it is because it's 10% faster.

Awesome. This patch is full of love for the druid. Sure, there's a nerf to cat DPS. And a nerf to bear avoidance. But between new tauren cat forms, new tauren bear forms, and speedier flight forms? Good times.

Also, I'd strongly recommend any and all druids that haven't done so to get the PTR and check out their forms. Even in video it really doesn't do the things justice.

[Offtopic] Players > skill > gear?

Warning: this won't be all that math-centric. This will be entirely anecdotal and based on my personal experience. There may not be a single spreadsheet even mentioned in the whole thing. It's downright personal, even.

A while back, Kiluia asked for some of the more interesting things I've been asked on this blog. And it wasn't even about math:

Thanks for a great writeup of a great set of comments from a great post!

I loved the spirit of your piece - it was clear you were having a good time, and having fun with the post, and your friends in game.

One thing I would love to see even more than math and hard facts. Whats the role of the player in the game?

Recently, our guild struggled to complete the last 2 bosses in 10-man naxx for the first time. Many many wipes on each, then the kill. Well, last night I was able to lead my own raid. So I hand picked a bunch of people I trusted, and we one-shotted these 2 bosses, to our own amazement & joy. Most of us, myself included, had never seen those bosses. I was well prepared and suprememly confident we'd succeed. Some felt burned from the guild's previous experiences... Then we tried eye of eternity: same experience of prior burn. People were saying "its really hard, we're gonna wipe a lot" Didnt really want to try it. Again, I put out the same attitude. We did 60% on our very first attempt. (previously they managed 95% after many wipes)

So our gear was very similar to the other group's. The only real difference was that I hand picked people I trusted, and I did everything I could to inspire them. And everyone player played really well. In an evening, the guild's perception of naxx & malygos flipped right over.

Those uber-guilds that steamroll content in a couple of days? No one ever discusses their experiences. Clearly, its not about their gear, nor their specs, or whether their classes are broken or not. It HAS to be about the players. They blatantly have no interest in the issues the rest of us noobs spend long lunch-hours discussing.

So tell me more about your experiences of how important the players are. The players who are broken. The players who are OP. The players who learn an encounter as it unfolds for the very first time. The players who cant follow a simple direction no matter how big the deadly boss mods letters are flashing. How do you choose who to bring to a raid based upon the players, assuming you have the luxury to do so? For example, I didnt invite our top guild DPSer, even though he's top every time, better geared than most, and he knows all the content much better from a previous guild. Why? Because he's an arrogant fool who creates a chaotic, fragmented vibe every time he speaks.

Please please please! I'm convinced these issues are the core of success in wow. Tell us more about them from your own experiences. Change names to protect the (not very) innocent! It's the core of the game; we all know it, but we never discuss it.

Kiluia's absolutely right. This isn't something anyone ever brings up regularly on tanking forums or EJ, but it's something you see more on your realm forums and guild comments so I think it's pretty widespread. Ultimately, how successful or bad you'll be is very much dependent on the people playing the game with you. Part of it is how good they are at playing, but another part is who it actually is. And even more than that, a lot of it is how well they're doing at that moment.

I'm sure most of you have been there, but I'll give an example. My wife and I tried to do a 10-man Ulduar the other night. Our raid leader was really nice, knew that I couldn't do it early, scheduled a later-night one so that we could both do it. It'd be the first time since we had our son that we had really raided together for more than an hour. It'd also be our first time seeing Ulduar on 10 man and for most of it, at all.

I was asked to lead it over the raid leader.

And it was not a good time. We wiped on Flame Leviathan as we ended up pulling before we were in position and FL would target people who wouldn't run away. My wife and I had an inkling of what to do, but knowing the path and walking the path are two very different things. There was yelling on vent. There was frustration - isn't this the easiest encounter in an ezmode raid? But we got it together and did it again, and succeeded...and I couldn't even loot the boss.

Then we did Razorscale, and once again - people dying, standing in fires, wipe. This was a fight that I had actually done before, and it was much easier than 25-man - but we still failed due to me being killed when Razorscale officially landed and getting no heals. Bah.

XT went amusingly; we didn't realize that he had trash packs, so when we got him to 75%, his trash comes out with the bots he summons and proceeds to obliterate us. Oops. We killed him after that on a messy kill with only 5 people left alive.

Then Kologarn. Kologarn isn't a hard fight at all, and on 10-man the damage isn't huge. Yet we wiped over and over again. A tank would die, a person with the laser beam would get stuck on the door, the rubble would pwn someone, someone would die in the grip, healers would die or be too slow, etc, etc. Just people weren't getting it together.

We finally ended on Iron Council, and we did better than Kologarn - only a few wipes. Wipes mostly because of interrupts just not working out. A wipe because the person who was supposed to decurse me was stunning another mob and didn't say. A couple wipes from other tank death. Etc, etc.

Afterwards I was stressed and demoralized, but not because of the raid. During the raid the baby would be upset or crying on and off, and while I was playing in another part of the house I could hear him. Even when I couldn't, I knew that my wife was playing with him in her arm, trying to do her best to pay attention to the raid and him simultaneously. Then I was trying to tell people what to do on fights I had never, ever seen before while other people are telling me what I'm doing wrong but not wanting to lead. I'm making mistakes left and right.

The people that came are usually pretty solid raiders. They've been through a lot of raiding in their WoW lives, they know what they're doing. But this night? We were off.

And we were off almost entirely because of me.

Another story, similar outcome. The night before the 3.1 patch came out, my wife had exactly one achievement left before getting her Glory of the Raider achievement: the 6-minute Malygos. This is one that she should already have had, but she died during the success and then released, which meant she didn't get credit for the achievement even though other people in the raid did. It sucked. But it was the last one she needed, and it was one others wanted as well. We had done it fairly easily before, with a melee-heavy group who all wanted it. Before that, another group had stacked the raid with ranged and done it with over a minute to spare. So I figured if I stacked the group with ranged, we'd have no problem. We brought a couple of people doing DPS in offspec too - they're good players, so I figured again, no problem.

That day, we had to put our dog to sleep. I took the day off to take her to the vet. I had to make the decision to put her down.

I watched her in her final moments. Just me.

And we knew that this was our last chance to get that achievement, so we pushed on. The whole family was miserable and heartbroken. In retrospect, we shouldn't have. Not because we owed it to the dog or anything; just that we weren't in a good position to do well at anything. But it was the last shot, and it was something of closure for my wife with WoW and raiding; her last goal before basically retiring.

What should've been an easy kill took us 3 hours. It took multiple swaps of people, many tries, people buffing us outside the instance. I sucked on phase 3. I sucked getting Maly in position. We didn't get sparks, or we didn't do well on DPS, or we just failed on doing dps as dragons or healing. I yelled, I fought, I argued. Again, it didn't work out almost entirely because of me and where I was at. My guildies were patient and understanding, and we got it done largely because they were willing to persevere and cope with my frustration and anger. But it wasn't easy for them.

The thing is, I know this isn't normal for me. We've had runs when for whatever reason I was the leader at the time, and it went great. Where I pushed people faster than they were used to and we got stuff done in record time and more smoothly than ever. Where we tried new raid ideas and they worked and were damn fun. I've had people say that they really didn't like it when I wasn't around, because things just went more smoothly with me there. I know that people were overjoyed when I came back from vacation and did flame tanking on Illidan; it was something I had researched, seen movies on, and I did a great job almost immediately on it and we made significantly more progression just from my returning than we had before. So it's not always me sucking. :)

Smooth runs happen first and foremost because of leadership. Some times those leaders have a great attitude, are positive and upbeat, and it just percolates down to everyone. It makes people better. Then comes everyone else. Some times people are just on that night. Some times they're positive and eager and doing great, loose and focused. And when you're with those people, you know things are going to work. You know that it's going to happen that night - a new achievement, a new boss down, a big win, a clean win.

Those are the nights where you don't need everyone to have the most skill you've ever seen. Those are the nights where even the terribads do great and the better players shine. And that's one of the times when raiding is really a joy.

This is the real secret between good raiding guilds and bad ones: good leadership. Good guilds tend to have better players and a core of players that have been around for a while and share similar goals and values. This is probably as important as good leadership for a raid in general; it means that the feeling of the guild doesn't significantly change, the goals don't change, the value doesn't change, and consistency is important. But leadership is what makes individual raids shine. And it doesn't need to be the raid leader that does this leadership; it can be a calming voice, someone who makes good decisions, who makes jokes and light of bad situations. Who handles things well or thinks well, or has simply done their research and can defuse stupid questions.

The antithesis is that there are those who are just poisonous. They might be bad players, and those can't be brought to some things either. There are the bad players who don't listen to directions, who go out and wipe the raid because they fall off the ledge of Eredar Twins because they just couldn't be bothered to listen to someone. We've kicked people from the raid and from raiding for things like that. They're the ones that think that they can sit and eat food near the entrance while Kaz'Rogal marches up to them (and ignoring the raid leader), causing a wipe and 30 minutes wasted time. But they're not the real problems; they can just be replaced with less bad players. Heck, they're fun to talk about sometimes; we have many joys about laughing about dying to Walking Man (Thaladred from Kael'Thas).

No, the ones that cause problems are the ones that are always pessimistic about chances, the ones willing to point blame at others and directly insult them. The ones that get frustrated enough with those bad players to openly cause drama and divisiveness. The ones that will always argue with raid leaders and make suggestions regardless of whether it's asked for. The ones that will relish pointing out how much other players suck and keep harping on it. The ones who don't listen to directions no matter how many times their name is stated. Who don't have any problem holding up a raid for 30 minutes while they buy something from some guy in Orgrimmar for their own personal use.

The thing is, pretty much everyone at one point or another has done both things. You've been that voice of reason, made that awesome joke, or made that one suggestion that brought everything into place. Or you've been the one that couldn't stand that asshat who kept sucking, who kept mocking someone, who just couldn't follow directions to save your life. The difference is frequency. You know those who are on most of the time and those who aren't.

So how does FnB decide on who to bring? We try and get in as many people as is reasonable for a night. We try and emphasize whether or not someone needs an item or an achievement from a boss and whether or not they could reasonably win it via our loot system. We do a lot of swapping and juggling to keep people on backup in the game. And when we absolutely need to, we bring things primarily based on two aspects: how good the player is at execution of their job, and how much we like raiding with them.

But honestly? It's mostly the former. If we really need to work on something hard, we'll bring our 25 best players. Those aren't always the most positive ones, but they're still the best.

Is that right? I don't know, always. More often than not it works out, but sometimes I think sitting people because they're just not having a good night or are being real dicks would be warranted. And we've done that when we had to; putting the guild leader and the raid leader on ignore is not a good choice if you want to be in the raid, in case you're unclear of What Not To Do. It's a tough balance.

At the same time, I know of my old friends on the EU server who finally got tired of being forced to deal with 10 other asshats and just made a small guild of the people they get along with best. Are they as well-progressed as FnB? No. But they've done things that are incredible; they've 12-manned most Naxx-25 content. Are they the best players I've ever seen? Nope. But they get along so well and have such a good time together that it overcomes a lot.

So yeah, that's the big deal behind successful and unsuccessful raids. And we all know it. We just don't say anything, and we talk about tweaking our performance by 5% or maximizing our time to live, when in reality most of the time this isn't as crucial as whether or not you're a positive force in your raid.

I'm curious whether this'll create another shitstorm. Mostly, I'm curious about what other people's experiences are.

And tomorrow will be at least one post that's more mathy. I promise. :)

[Offtopic] Phat lewts

I got the best drop of all on Friday, March 20th.

Alaric James was born. He was 7 lbs, 20" and perfectly healthy, as is his mom. Everyone's doing great.

So if I don't blog much or answer questions all that quickly - you'll know why. I won't be raiding a whole lot in the upcoming months either, so...this is sort of a hiatus for the blog. I'll occasionally make the random mathematical post and I'll try and do the Ulduar gear list. No promises though.
Thanks to all for your well-wishes. :)

[Offtopic]Pimp My UI

A reader asked a while back if I'd share my UI. This was...well, it was akin to bringing home a date when I used to live in a friend's storage closet. It was a 8x8 room with no heat, no light, and right next to the Bathroom of Horror.

The UI...not so great.

But hey, I'll show it and then ask folks for input.

From the top of the screen to the bottom:

Omen is in the upper left.
Mappy is used for the square map, and is in the upper right.
Decursive and Ora2 are the two things below Omen.
DBM generates the cooldowns at the top of the HUD.
IceHUD is what I use for my HUD; it's nice for showing combo points and energy in an easy way.
SCT is used to generate the text that wraps around my HUD. And as you can see in this shot, it would be nice to move the crit values away as well since I don't often care that I just got a big critical heal.
QBar is floating just above my raid frames. It's a mod that automatically adds quest items to a button for easy use. And it should move somewhere else.
Carbonite is hiding behind Recount, and is a great quest addon.
I use CT_Viewport for the view space mod that creates the black space at the bottom. This is oddly one of my most essential mods at this point. Having more actual screen space is critical.
Bartender is used for the bars.
XPerl is my raid and unit frame system. I have my character in the center, and my target and target-of-target close to the center. (and the debuffs are out of control, I know).
I use quartz to track debuffs that I use on the boss. I probably should use tellmewhen for this, but I didn't like how it tracked infected wounds.
Prat is the chat addon that displays things a bit more nicely.

In addition to all of that, I use CameraDistanceMaxFactor 5 to be zoomed WAAAAY out. I also use TellMeWhen to track my stuff when I'm in cat; this is clearly not here.

For the most part the UI is pretty functional. The raidframes take up all the space on the left side normally in a full raid; this was from my first Sarth3D 10 man kill, so there's only 10. The center of the screen displays a lot of information but is mostly uncluttered to actually see things. Only the corners are particularly obscured by information. Most of the screen is otherwise clear.

Things I absolutely hate, now that I'm looking at it while not playing:

1. Not having a widescreen monitor. Seriously, I fail. It's a great monitor that I love, but a widescreen would be awesome.
2. The empty space for the raid frames. I don't often use my raidframes anyway (mostly for brez/innervate and thorn use), and having that much wasted space is bugging me.
3. The Omen/Recount space is large and ugly, and not well integrated into the whole thing.
4. The debuffs on xperl are going nuts. I want to display important ones (like stacks on 4h) but this is ridiculous. And the debuffs on the boss are insane and spilling into the buttons.
5. The quartz timers aren't useful. TellMeWhen (like Marino pointed out) would likely be better and more intuitive. And they're just...kinda sitting out there.
6. The chat window is huge. I don't need to be able to read every string on one line.

So with those as my goals - what are y'alls suggestions? What can I look into to fix? Here are some constraints: I almost certainly am not going to switch out of xperl or bartender. Everything else is fair game.

Thanks!

[Offtopic]Picture meme thingy

I got tagged a while back by a couple folks for this meme, but sadly mine isn't all that interesting - that's basically because I got a new computer and a new install, so my screenshot folder isn't super hawt right now.


This was a screenshot I took after our first Felmyst kill. We had downed Brutallus just before the 3.0.2 patch hit, but sadly never got a chance to tackle Felmyst before the patch. So he was nerfed, and even then he was fairly difficult for us - at least the first week. The second week I think we 3-shotted him - and that apparently was because I'm the only person in my guild who watched the video on how to identify which side the breaths come on. They had tried a couple times, and then I log in and people in vent actually say "Felhoof, THANK GOD."

That was pretty amusing.

We went on to kill the rest of Sunwell post-nerf. The one I feel worst about missing was M'uru. M'uru was supposedly the hardest fight that Blizzard has ever done at least in terms of tuning, and I was very curious to see how our guild would handle it. It was also one of the places where a druid tank had a huge advantage; being able to hit max armor and 80% avoidance on the door adds meant the healing budget was much less, and being able to DPS in cat on phase 2 meant you may make the soft enrage. M'uru post-patch, by comparison, was a huge joke. With 30% less HP on everything and huge amounts of extra DPS via the new talent trees, there was no pressure at all, and the mechanics of the fight itself aren't that special if there's no pressure to perform. The ledge boss from Twins was harder.

Sorry that wasn't more interesting. Fortunately I have a couple of more interesting pics. For instance: what happens when you use baby spice on a motorcycle and a gigantic feast on a tauren?



Wee! I haz a minibike.

Okay, that's easy. But what about a flaming woman driving a minibike with a gigantic frog in the sidecar? Now that's impressive.



I'll start working on those UI posts here soon. :)

In terms of tagging, I nominate Gray Matter, Jacemora, Lazy Bear Musings and Flyv to find us the 6th screenshot in their screenshot folder and make up amusing shit about it.