Gruul’s on Friday
Perhaps setting ourselves up for dismal failure, the StormSeekers hope to venture into Gruul’s Lair this Friday at 8 P.M. Eastern time.
With the incredibly large amount of guilds further progressed and the ease with which quality raiding equipment can be obtained, taking down the tier 4 raid bosses should be a snap! But it won’t be.
The first hurdle we have to clear is getting 25 people. Recently, we haven’t been able to run Karazhan without three to five non-guild members. Often, these PuG members are beneficial to our raid and I have no problem bringing them in (except as tanks. I don’t want to pug a tank). A lot of people say they want to run Kara and raid, but few bother to show up at raid time. Consequently, we have a couple of tanks and healers and dpsers basically ready to hit tier 5. But only a half-dozen or so. The rest of our membership flits in to WoW from time-to-time, expects to raid, doesn’t put in the effort and goes away for a while. The perils of the casual guild, I suppose.
Even if we had 25 people, we’re going to have a time of it trying to get 25 of the right people. I don’t know if we have a mage with the right gear to mage-tank. I don’t think we have any hunters with an NR set, nor a panzerkin. I don’t know if we can scrounge up 7-8 healers.
On top of that, the guild leader hasn’t been playing much (real-life commitments and all) and I haven’t been party to any discussions of strategy and composition if there have been any. We don’t have any sign-ups for this event. We haven’t had any active discussion of this event. It isn’t going to happen because no one has put in the work to push it forward. Even if it does, we will mostly have people undergeared who haven’t read the strategies or watched videos and it will be a long and painful night of wipes.
On the off chance that we do go, I have some things I need to get done before:
- Get a Belt of Natural Power crafted. I picked up the vortexes and need to farm about 5 primal life then track down a crafter. Short of the t6 belt, this will be the best I can get (not that I can get the t6 belt).
- Crank out seven more badges and pick up the new badge chest (Embrace of Everlasting Prowess). It’s such a huge upgrade from my current Heavy Clefthoof Vest it’s unreal.
- Hit up dailies on some of my characters: I need the gold to regem a bunch of gear.
- Try and work up fishing so I can do fishing dailies. Not because I care about fishing, but because the gem (Eye of the Sea) would be nice in at least one slot.
After that, I need to start hitting the battlegrounds hard again. With Arena Season 4 starting next Tuesday, I’ll be able to pick up a couple pieces of the Season 2 gear (spaulders and helm which replace the season 1 spaulders and helm I currently use) and pick up the Merciless Gladiator’s Maul for my DPS set. I’ll need thirty Arathi Basin tokens, twenty Alterac Valley tokens and 29K honor over what I have.
Anyone playing on Argent Dawn that wants to hit up Gruul’s Lair and enjoy a night of frustration and probably screaming on vent, let me know!
A note: I hope the wowhead links work. I finally got around to editing the header.php file but I’m at work, so none of this loads for me.
After Action Review: 5 hour Karazhan
Stormseekers raided Karazhan last night, as we do every Friday. We only started twenty minutes late, we had a 30 minute afk healer, and ran two hours late, but we got everything but Illhoof. Had we started on time and everyone stayed, it would have been a little over four hours, start to finish. The question is: how can we improve upon this?
Our raid time is supposed to be 8 - 11, with invites starting at 7:45. I think this is reasonable, but, oh, I dunno, people that want to raid should be on the character they want to raid on when invites start. that would help. We’re slowly building a base of non-guild players that have run with us and are likely yo do so in the future; contacting them before 8 and getting them invited and summoned will help too.
We cleared Attumen, Moroes, and Opera (Romulo and Julianne) in under an hour. This was pretty good for us. We were decent on chain pulling, but we can do better than we did. The second half was pulled too slowly. If we have two people in the raid who are tanking, they should just about always both be tanking. I would really like to see us pulling until the boss and only stopping there to drink and redo any short buffs.
We really would need to be more ruthless with invites. Tanks need not just the mitigation to survive, but the threat for the heavy hitting dps to burn things down without restraint. Some of our dps is threat capped, even with Salvation. I think we need two separate groups: a one-night clear group racing to clear Kara faster every week with the best we can bring, and then our second group focusing on a two-night clear to gear newer members and useful alts. We cannot afford to bring someone in a dps slot when they are only hitting ~350 average dps. Personally, I’m aiming for 500 dps in dps classes. I don’t think this is unreasonable for a group trying to chain-pull and clear Kara in one night. Not if these are the people who are running Kara for badges because the only upgrades are in 25 man content.
Personally, I need to stop bringing Lushere (my druid tank) to Karazhan as DPS. Sure, I can put out a respectable 600 dps, but it’s offspec for me, and in less than excellent gear. Tanking, I am more than prepared and have no problem doing 800-1000 TPS. That should be a nice ceiling for anyone we’re bringing. It’s pretty rare for anyone to be over 1000 dps in our raids. Heck, it’s rare for anyone to be over 700, but we do have a couple of people.
But while I am dpsing, I need to work on my rotation. It was a bit weak and I was off by 25-50 average dps. I wasn’t keeping Rip up as much as I should have. That was due to not paying enough attention and poor positioning choices. Since I was leading the raid, I spent a lot of time planning and marking pulls while we were killing. I need to get more fluid using the camera to look around and using hotkeys to attack the current target and set hotkeys for marking. Hotkeying marking would shorten the time in-between pulls also.
So, for the internets: how do you do one-night, three hour Kara clears? What group comp do you think is mandatory? What dps levels? what tanking stats (armor/health/threat) would you consider minimum for this sort of fast-clear?
It’s not fair!
I have killed Curator many, many times on my Druid and have never seen the T4 druid token drop.
I have killed Curator once on my shadow priest, and the token drops. I was the only one in that raid that could use them.
WTB Malorne gloves tonight, kthxbai.
Somehow I ended up in charge
I have been promoted to Druid Class Lead for my guild, and at least half-time raid leader. It’s strange to be responsible for so many decisions: who goes to the raid, what bosses do we skip because we have a group that cannot do it, who gets what if we have drops.
Aside from those little concerns of the raid, what should I be doing now that I have power and authority? While it would be satisfying to gkick a few people, I don’t think I have the ability to do that, and our ethos as a guild doesn’t support that sort of behavior. We’re casual.
I am definitely going to be trying to forge our diverse troops into a raiding force. Unfortunately, we don’t have people consistently showing up for our Karazhan raids. Too many of our dpsers respecced to tanks (which we didn’t need) or don’t do enough dps. Some of that problem is with gear: if they showed up for Kara that would be ameliorated. Some of it is with Skill, and that’s a harder issue.
The role of the Class Lead, as I understand it, is to be the expert and guide in preparing guild members for raiding. This is critical moving into 25 man content, or ZA. I don’t care how good your gear is, if you are an enhancement shaman stacking stamina gear and casting lightning bolts while using 1.8 speed weapons, you’re dps will be too low to be useful. If you’re a retadin and spend the whole night on vent waxing rhapsodic about how great ret dps is, please be above the tank. As things stand, ret dps still needs to dps, or go home.
Skill can trump gear, to a certain extent. A player who knows how to use their class to the fullest can overcome deficiencies in their gear. I’ve seen blue-geared shaman out-dpsing epic mages. I’ve seen green/blue paladins out-heal epic paladins. We don’t need to train theses people, just help them get the tools, the gear, they need to excel.
The ones who, no matter how many epics we hand over, cannot keep up, they need to learn, quickly, or we need to look at our priorities in raiding. We cannot progress without people performing their best. The people who can do that need to be at the core (hopefully they are the entirety). How to handle the rest is where the raid ethos and the casual guild ethos aren’t meshing right now. If we get into Gruul’s, and our DPS needs to do an average of 500+ dps, someone only doing 300 is a hindrance if there is someone else for that slot.
But how to get this agenda supported by the remainder of the leadership? What’s the hook? We have five or so people gearing up all their alts as the core of our two Karazhan raids. Most weeks we can’t get ten people from our guild into a raid, let alone run two entirely separate raids so we have, not just the character base, but the player base to move forward.
Matticus had this tweet:
95% of guild problems can be solved with a gkick. The remaining 5% can be solved with recruiting.
I think this problem is more the other ratio, but we do need to clean up our raiding ranks and make a more clear direction for people to earn spots in a raid. And we need enough people online to fill the spots with people who can do the job.
Killing Time
Another lengthy post and not enough no pretty pictures. TLDR: /whine, as a raid group we need to clean up our act, /whine. But scroll through and check out the links.
That’s what raiding has more or less come to mean for me. And I don’t mean killing in the sense of filling time before something important, but, rather, making it deadified and useless. Last night was our Kara run, started 45 minutes late (as usual) and ran an hour late (as usual). Perhaps I’m just crazy, but we have start times and end times for a reason: so that people know how to fit the raid into their schedule. For some people that really matters, and I’m one of them!
We also started the raid invites and had four tanks and no healers. Kara needs two tanks. We had four. I have to admit curiosity on how we ended up with four. the KaraT2 MT was on, as expected, the KaraT2 OT (supposedly me) on, the prot paladin who OTs when she shows up was on, and an arena-spec DPS warrior had respecced prot and was on. WTF?! We have so many tanks already, why would you give up a pretty guaranteed DPS spot (as one of two dps warriors) to join the tank corps which, at a quick count, is over 10 people!
I switched to my resto shaman and healed through Maiden, then swapped to my shadow priest to DPS/shackle the skeletons before Opera, then stayed in because the Resto Shaman that we picked up was freakin’ awesome and was solo healing just fine. Got Big Bad Wolf, I died immediately (hint: pulling while someone is still buffing and they get turned into Red Riding Hood = splatted spriest), then a mage died pretty quickly, too. The six people still not disconnected and alive finished it out and we disenchanted two epics, yay!
At a quick personal rundown, the only character I have any real interest in endgame got 0/16000 Violet Eye rep needed for exalted, 0/10 badges for the Waistguard of the Great Beast (I think that’s right), Edgewalker Longboots didn’t drop anyway. My shaman, resto for the moment, got the Bracers of the White Stag (a solid upgrade for her healing set) and 7 badges that will be unused, and my Shadow Priest got two badges that will be unused. This is worth my time, right?
To make this something other than just whining, I have to categorize problems and offer constructive suggestions for improving, yeah? Okay:
- Raid time: starting nearly an hour late is wasteful of everyone’s time. If the time or the night doesn’t work, which is consistently the case, we need to change that. If the run needs to be nine to midnight, change it so I’m not jumping in front of Karazhan no one is standing around while they could be doing something useful.
- Raid leadership: the team needs a Raid Leader, recently it has shuffled around a bit. A position of responsibility and little reward, I admit, but someone needs to be in charge, needs to be getting the right group composition, one person doing invites, etc. My personal experience finds the MT to be good for that role, as they are generally the person most responsible for the pulling and pacing, anyway, though it need not be. Our MT doesn’t seem to want the job and doesn’t talk
on vent, so I don’t think he would be best. But someone, and someone knowledgeable about Karazhan needs to do it. I would, but I’m an asshole and no one would like it. - Raid composition: Four tanks does not work. Four physical tanks is used for a couple of fights in 25 man content, right? Not Karazhan. Zero healers is a bad, bad thing. On balance, we need to recruit healers and some of our tanks need to be told “no.” Most of them have other level 70 alts and could do the run on another class. If we feel it necessary to have this many tanks and have them all active as raiders, we need to rotate through them (OT-MT-dps/alt-dps/alt) so that
no one tank is always relegated to an alt or a role they are not interested in. This is where the raid and guild leadership needs to think about priorities. If we have teams that are mean to be working
as teams, the rosters need to be consistent. Consistent groups mean better groups. Playing tank roulette is not going to further progression. - Gear: We don’t have any gear requirements at all. This has meantsome people who are very undergeared have been coming to Kara, and, ok,this isn’t always a big deal, but some of these people don’t seem to bedoing much to improve their gear level but in Karazhan. This is disrespectful. Most of the guild has spent their time in level 70instances and battlegrounds and heroics to get the gear they need to be competitive in their role. For people to be joining the raid and not be doing that… disrespectful. Slower runs, more durability loss,more wipes. The guild hasn’t been big on organizing gearing runs, but the LFG tool is in WoW for a reason-use it. Gear issues lead us to:
- Loot: Basically we do a loot council kind of system. Whoever gets the best upgrade out of an item gets it as, in theory, this buffs the raid the most. There are some issues with this. The people who
spend a ton of time working on their own to get solid gear are going to have better gear than those who don’t, and therefore got smaller upgrades from drops, if they even get upgrades and often then do not get the drops they are looking for. I don’t inherently favor DKP (I really like suicide kings), but the system we have does not work and penalizes the better geared player. Loot council could work if there really was a “team” of ten people who were all progressing though
this content at the same level and it was theorycrafted out, but “Well, it’s more of an upgrade for” without serious looking at specs and gear sets and gearing the core of the raid fails. To quote a quote (via the Pugnacious Priest: “and to quote someone else’s blog ( no idea whose, sorry) If the item was that much of an upgrade for them that it took priority over everyone else, then they didn’t belong there”
Back to the personal level, I’m at the point where I don’t think it’s worth it. For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m not having a good time in these raids. Except when I’m tanking. I’d really like to be main tanking, but it seems my tanking skills are unregarded by my guild mates and I end up DPSing while crittable tanks
(a pairing that should not exist in raid content) are on the mobs. SuraBear wrote a good piece about this, though it sounds like his guild wants him to tank (/target SuraBear /bow) but I think he really summarizes the issue for feral tanks well: “Now, don’t misread this. I can do DPS. I can do pretty good DPS, as a matter of fact. I just dont particularly WANT to.”
So, I’m not sure if I even plan on logging on for night two. I have to take Lushere on the off chance the T4 gloves drop and on the off chance that I get them. And on the off chance that the few other things I want might drop. Hanging out on Ralendra and leveling and begging to join the Sidhe Devils sounds like a whole lot more fun, though. i r conflicted.
Focus, determination, and ten freakin’ people
Logged onto Lushere last night for Stormseekers Team2 Karazhan raiding. I figured if a tank was needed, i’d go, otherwise there would be enough people I wouldn’t be needed anyway. It’s very disappointing on Fridays. We have quite a few people who claim to want to go to Kara, but when raid time comes up (8 P.M. EST, hasn’t changed) there are maybe five or so on.
We ended getting a full group at 8:45, and the plan is to cut the raid at 11. We took things a bit later than that. One shot Attumen, Moroes, Maiden. Wiped on trash because I pulled a stagehand and
got two performers as well. Had the group been prepared, I think we could have done it, but I wiped the raid. Unintentionally, I assure you. One-shot big bad wold, then headed to Curator. Two wipes at 12%-7%, one at 1% (someone said 6K health left, ouch) then we got him. I, feral tank, took Pauldrons of the Solace giver and we destroyed the T4 gloves for paladin/rogue/shaman. I am starting to hate that mechanical monstrosity. Got Nightbane down on try 2, and called the raid sometime around 12 or 12:30. Hopefully tonight we can get a group quicker and clear the rest of the bosses. I’ve never done Illhoof or Netherspite, and Illhoof has my damn staff!
Walked out of Kara:night one with the clothy shoulders and Stonebough Jerkin… my healing set is starting to look disturbingly purple. WTB loot I will use! I’m pretty sure the rest of them have at least one thing I want, so [fingers crossed].
