So You Want to be a Raider? Part One

What is this guide?

This is a guide to help new players prepare for raiding in World of Warcraft. This guide is aimed at players who have never raided before, but are interested in joining a raid guild and seeing this side of WoW.

What does this guide not cover?

This is not a guide to joining a high end raid guild currently working on an instance like Naxxramas. Following this guide will not get you into Death and Taxes. The advice is aimed at players looking to join a raid guild working on Molten Core.

This is also not a guide to turning your current guild into a raiding guild. For more information on that topic, I would suggest asking in the WoW Guild Relations forum.

Finally, the Burning Crusade expansion will be coming out fairly soon, and may make parts of this guide obsolete.

What are the endgame instances in WoW?

Currently, the non-raid endgame instances in WoW are (listed in rough order of difficulty):

Blackrock Depths (5-man)
Lower Blackrock Spire (tuned for 5, can do with 10)
Dire Maul (5-man)
Scholomance (5-man)
Stratholme (5-man)
Upper Blackrock Spire (10-man)

All of the above instances you can do on a regular basis without joining a raid guild. Simply look for pickup groups in the LookingForGroups channel.

The raid instances are (again, in rough order of difficulty):

Zul'Gurub (20-man)
Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (20-man)
Molten Core (40-man)
Onyxia (40-man)
Blackwing Lair (40-man)
Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (40-man)
Naxxaramus (40-man)

These are the instances that you join a raid guild for. There are also several world bosses (Kazzak, Azuregos, Emerald Dragons) wandering around which require a raid to defeat.

Why do I need to join a raid guild?

Structure and Numbers. Raiding requires the cooperation of a significant number of people. Currently raids are made up of 20 or 40 Level 60s. Getting 20 or 40 people to work together for several hours at a time on a regular basis requires a specialized structure for support. As well, in addition to sheer numbers, raids need a balance of classes.

Most levelling guilds lack the structure, numbers or class balance to field raids on a regular basis. Therefore, if you wish to raid, it is my advice to seek out and join a raiding guild.

Why should I raid?

1. Loot. Raid instances offer the best loot in the game. Part of the fun of this game is making your character more and more powerful, and at level 60, loot is the means by which character progression is expressed.

2. New experiences. Raiding is a very different experience than the rest of the game. There is a thrill which comes from coming up with a plan to defeat the boss, and then executing that plan successfully.

3. Killing dragons is always fun.

What's the difference between raids and other instances?

Raid boss fights are much more intricate than fights found in other instances. Each boss fight is like a different little puzzle which your raid has to figure out. In my opinion, the pre-60 fight that is most like a raid boss fight is Archaedas in Uldaman.

Am I skilled enough to raid?

I'll let you in on a little secret: Raiding is not that hard. If you can do the 5/10-man dungeons, you are more than good enough to raid. The vast majority of raiders are just as skilled as you. They just happen to be in raid guilds.

There are other qualities which are as important as skill. A good raider is also dependable when it comes to showing up for raids, keeps her cool when wiping and getting frustrated, and is willing to follow orders.

What do I need to start raiding?

Each individual raid guild will have their own requirements. Here are some guidelines that should prepare you for most entry level raid guilds:

1. Level 60 (Purchase all your skills!)
2. 300 First Aid
3. Attuned to Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Onyxia
4. Decent gear for your class role
5. Download and install the CT_RaidAssist, CT_BossMods, and Decursive mods
6. Download and install Teamspeak and Ventrillo

Why do I need to be level 60?

All raid instances are tuned for level 60 characters. It is easiest to level to 60 and then start raiding.

Also, it is important to purchase all your skills. You never know when you might need a specific skill. I was once in a raid guild with a paladin who refused to purchase Greater Blessing of Salvation. That was very annoying.

300 First Aid?

Yes. Being able to bandage yourself is a huge boon for the healers, as it provides healing for no mana and no effort on their part. Get 300 First Aid, and keep a stack of Heavy Runecloth Bandages on you. Your healers will love you, and impressing the healers is a good way to stay alive.

As well, it's fairly easy to get to 300 First Aid. All you need are a few stacks of cloth.

What are attunements?

To enter Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Onyxia, you need to complete quests found in the 5/10-man dungeons. You should seek out and complete these quests as soon as possible.

You also need attunement to enter Naxxramas, but that is expensive, and is not an immediate concern.

What sort of gear do I need?

You generally should be geared mostly in blues from the 5/10-man dungeons. The best pre-raid gear is found in those instances listed above. In particular, Dire Maul is a good place for gear.

For most classes, Dungeon 1 set pieces (Lightforge, Devout, Shadowcraft, etc.) are good enough for early raiding. The major exception is the warrior class. A Warrior needs tanking gear (+def, +sta, +dodge/parry/block, high armor) as her primary role in raids is that of a tank.

Blues purchased off the Auction House tends to be very expensive. You can purchase greens to fill out your collection, but for the most part, instance blues will serve you better. The one exception is Abyssal Cloth/Plate/etc. Those are very good.

You do not need your Dungeon 2 set to start raiding. However, getting the first three pieces of Dungeon 2 is fairly easy, and they provide solid upgrades.

Don't go overboard trying to find the best gear possible. Epics found on raids will replace your gear eventually. Just try and put a decent set together before you start raiding.

The last element of gear to keep an eye out for is resistance gear. In raids, you will need fire/nature/frost resistance gear for certain fights. Try and accumulate such gear while you are collecting your regular gear. Again, don't go crazy, the best resist gear tends to be found on raids in any case, but anything you can collect will help.

Why do I need mods?

You don't absolutely need these mods, but a lot of guilds require them. As well, they make raiding life easier. Download them and try them out, but make sure you can play without them. Don't rely on them to play the game for you.

Why do I need Ventrillo/Teamspeak?

Again, these programs are not absolutely necessary. Most guilds find that voice communication allows for easier coordination of the raid. You don't need a microphone, but you should able to listen in.

If for some reason you cannot use Vent/Teamspeak (perhaps a physical disability), let your guild know, and most of them will do their best to accommodate you.

What should my talent spec for raiding be?

There are many strong opinions on what talents a raider should take. Every class generally has one talent tree, or several talents, that are specifically designed for raiding. You should be flexible, and willing to respec if needed (note that on your application to raid guilds).

That being said, I would advise attending a raid or two before respeccing. You have your current spec for a reason. Respeccing with an understanding of why you need to change will serve you better than choosing spec X because the internet said X was the best spec for raiding.

As well, sometimes it is important to see what the raid needs, and use that to determine what spec you should take. For example, if none of the other paladins have Improved Blessing of Might, maybe you should consider a spec which incorporates it.

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Alright, I'm tired of writing. That's Part One. I'll try to write Part Two later this week, addressing finding a raid guild and what to do on a raid.

If you have any questions that should be answered, post them, and I'll work them into Part Two.

Updates

I've started my guild, and have been recruiting. I did manage to recruit a few people, and so the Winter Court is up to about 5 60s. I've gone on UBRS with a couple of them, and am actually very happy with the quality of members. If we can get 35 more like them, we will do extremely well.

On the down side, I think I've made a couple of mistakes already. First, I changed raid dates. There's a very interesting discussion in the comments of the previous post, and I agree with the side that says you should have fixed, predictive raid dates. Yet I switched my raid dates from Mon/Wed/Thurs/Sun to Mon/Fri/Sat/Sun. Basically, real life interfered. My work hours will be unpredictable for the next little while, so focusing around the weekend will allow me to be present more often. As well, it is fairly early in the guild lifespan, so it shouldn't have much of an impact.

The second mistake was recruiting a few non-60s. I've been thinking about this a lot, and while the non-60s are good players, they are playing a different game than the rest of us. There are two games in WoW, levels 1-59, and level 60. I think a guild needs to focus on the game it is playing, and have players that share in that goal. Rather than recruiting 50s early, it may be better in the long run to wait until they hit 60 and realize that they are playing the second game.

Of course, I'm going to keep my current non-60s. It would be terribly unfair to boot them. However, I think I'm going to make being level 60 a requirement of joining from now on.

The Winter Court

Well, I think I've finished a lot of the basic structure for my new guild, the Winter Court.

Now all I need is actual members. :)

Any critiques or comments regarding the charter, raiding rules, loot system, or application template would be appreciated. I'm pretty sure I've missed something important.

Crossroads

I think I'm going to leave off examining Burning Crusade changes until after things settle down. The Protection tree has already gotten more changes since my last post.

In the mean time, I decided to spec Retribution. I'm now 5/11/35. It's amusing, but not really that different from the other builds. Somehow, regardless of what talents I take, it always feels more or less the same. The only talent I really miss is Spiritual Focus. (Please, Blizzard, move it back to Tier 1!)

In other news, I'm not having much luck with my search for a guild. I really don't want to apply to an MC or starting guild. That kind of sounds bad, like I'm only in it for the loot. However, I'm scared of joining an MC guild, getting up to Ragnaros, and then watching the guild implode. I've already done that twice now.

The problem is that, in my opinion, most starting raiding guilds have deficiencies in structure that lead to the implosion. The officers are generally new to raiding, and while they are doing their best, they lack experience. Structural mistakes are often subtle, and look good at first glance. A great example is a very fair DKP system that proves too complex for the officers to handle. Administration overhead is one element that is too often overlooked by raiders.

And it's not like I can walk in to a guild, and tell them that they are doing X wrong, and that X should be changed. I'd resent that if it happened to me.

But then, if I believe that I do know what a good structure is like, I need to put my money where my mouth is. To that end, I'm starting a raiding guild.

The big problem though, is that there's currently a grand total of one member in my guild (well,proto-guild, I still have to get signatures for the charter). And I have no real idea how I'm going to recruit. I don't really know any unguilded people, so it's going to be pure selling to strangers, which is really hard for me.

Oh well, it should be interesting. If anyone on Skywall Alliance wants to join the Winter Court, feel free to look me up. :)

(I'll post a link to the webpage when I finish it.)

Burning Crusade Paladins: Protection

Blizzard has released some of the new spells and talents in the expansion. I'm going to take a look at each tree and give some thoughts on the new spells and talents. I'm going to start with Protection.

Spells:

Righteous Defense
Come to the defense of a friendly target, commanding up to 3 enemies attacking the target to attack the Paladin instead.

The AoE taunt. Looks solid. Pretty good for our role of "protectors of the cloth". If you enable Target-of-Target, it will be trivial to use to taunt a specific mob as well.

Seal of Justice - Rank 2
Fills the Paladin with the spirit of justice for 30 sec, giving each melee attack a chance to stun for 2 sec. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 10 sec, preventing them from fleeing and limiting their movement speed. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

The new Seal of Justice depends a great deal on what "limiting their movement speed" means. If it's an out and out reduction in speed, like Hamstring, this is a great boost. However, it's also possible that it just means that you can't use speed boost abilities to increase your speed past 100%. In that case, it's a small boost, but may be useful with your own permanent speed increases like Pursuit of Justice. Hopefully the side effect of being immune to Fear while affected by Judgement of Justice has been removed.

Talents

Stoicism
Increases your resistance to Stun effects by an additional 10% and reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by an additional 30%.

This is a decent 2pt PvP talent. Nothing amazing, but the anti-dispel is nice as purge-happy shamans are annoying.

Improved Resistance Auras
Your Resistance Auras also reduce all spell damage taken by an additional 5%.

This is an all-star talent. 2pts for 5% less damage is really good.

Improved Divine Shield
Reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield spell by 1 min and reduces the attack speed penalty by 100%.

LOL. Sometimes, I love Blizzard. Everyone complains about paladin bubbles, so they give us a talent that makes them even better. Again, much more useful in PvP than PvE.

Ardent Defender
When you have less than 20% health, all damage taken is reduced by 50%.

Now this is an intriguing talent. The paladin boards seem to disdain this talent, but I think it may be good for tanking. The key to this talent is to ask, if I am tanking, when will I be at less than 20% health?

Given that most bosses do steady dps and additional spike damage in the form of special abilities, if you drop to less than 20% health, it probably means that you were just critted by a special ability. In that case, Redoubt will proc and combined with Holy Shield, means that you probably push criticals off the combat table, meaning the next few attacks will not crit. So blocks and half damage should be enough to buy your healers the few seconds they need to complete their big heals.

However, I'm not really sure how this will work in actual play, and it will be very interesting to watch. In PvP, I don't think it will help all that much. It might buy you one or two seconds, but I don't think it will be worth the 5 points for a primary PvP'er, give that you might get dropped from 30% to 0% quite easily, and this talent will do nothing to help.

Weapon Expertise
Increases your weapon skill with all weapons by 10.

Decent talent. Reduces the number of glancing blows and misses against end-game bosses, which will help a lot in generating threat. Again, mainly PvE.

Avenger's Shield
Hurls a holy shield at the enemy, dealing 270 to 330 Holy damage, dazing them and then jumping to nearby enemies. Affects 3 total targets.

The Captain America move! If this talent has a half-way decent animation, I am probably going to spec Protection. This is everything a 41-point talent should be. Fun, unique, and stylish. And it dazes people! Which means you use it to slow runners.

Actually, let's be honest, I'm going to be using this whenever the cooldown is up. About the only downside is that you can't use it to pull. Although you are a Protection Paladin, so pulling 3 mobs at a time isn't that big a deal.

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My final verdict is that the new Protection tree is very good. The mid-level has been fleshed out with useful talents, and the end talents are solid. Plus you get to throw your shield at people! The only real downside is that the first tier of Protection is still a little lackluster, especially compared to Holy or Retribution.

Patch 1.12 Experiences

I haven't had a lot of time to play WoW in the last week or so. I did take a quick look at some of the new things in the latest patch.

• World PvP - seems interesting. Probably will be a lot more fun on a PvP server. Nothing much was happening on Skywall when I checked in. In EPL, the Alliance had already capped all the towers. It's going to really hard for me to complete the 'Capture the Towers' quest at this rate.


• Cross-server Battlegrounds - Awesome. Wait times have plummeted Alliance-side. I hear it's a little buggy, but it seemed to be working well enough.


• Battleground Improvements - The automatic raids is really nice. I'm actually seeing some leadership from the highest ranked people in the BGs, and that is a vast improvement. And I don't have to worry about healing or Blessing of Sacrificing non-raid members.


• Scrolling Combat Text - Pretty good. Looks like a nice, clean implementation. The one item of info I really miss, however, is the amount you healed someone else for, with the overheal separated out. That was a really useful piece of information.


• Seal of the Crusader - SotC is currently bugged like crazy. It's giving me slightly more than double the amount of bonus Attack Power that it gave pre-1.12. I think that it is adding some +AP bonuses twice. Ah well, should be fun until Blizzard fixes it.

All in all, it was a pretty small patch. Maybe this means that the expansion is not far off.

Options for Raid Guilds

A lot of existing raid guilds are worried because the new raid cap means that they will have to change their structure to meet the new requirements. Here is a listing of the options as I see them.

1. Stop recruiting and let attrition reduce the guild size.

All guilds suffer attrition. People leave for real life or other options. During the levelling from 60-70, you'll probably have some natural attrition, decreasing the numbers in the guild. This might leave you at the proper size, and it might not. If it doesn't, you'll have to use one of the other options

2. Cut the weakest people in the guild.

Identify your weakest players and cut them. This gets you down to the required size, and preserves the strongest part of your guild. However, it's painful to have to leave your friends. As well, this decision is ruthless and may cause a lot of drama.

3. Recruit more and run two raids.

If you recruit a few more people, you will have enough to run two raids. However, running two raids is a lot of administrative work. Splitting people up into an "A" Team and a "B" Team may also cause bad feelings, as people on the "B" Team will feel slighted.

This might be interesting in a winged dungeon, though. Team A could work on one wing, and Team B could work on another wing. The two raids could swap strategies as they defeat bosses, making it easier for the other team.

4. Introduce rotations.

Instead of each person raiding 5 nights a week, each person raids 4 nights, allowing everyone to raid, though at a lesser rate than previous. The advantage is that everyone remains together. Some people may dislike sitting out, though. Progression will also be much slower, as it will take longer to gear everyone up and for everyone to learn the encounters.

5. Set up an Guild Arena PvP team.

Take 4-10 people who like PvP and set them up as an Arena team. While the rest of the guild raids, the Arena team goes out and PvPs. Then when a PvP season ends, the Arena team takes their new toys and is folded back into the raiding team, and a new PvP team is set up.

Advantage is that the people who are not raiding are doing their own thing. They are upholding the guild name and reputation on the battlefield. As well, it provides a nice opportunity for people to experience PvP as a solid team. It gives people an opportunity to mix things up. Hardcore raid for a while, then hardcore PvP. There may be a hiccup in guild quality at the end of each season as people come back to the raiding group, as you have to gear and train the PvP'ers.

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Personally, I think I would go with a mixture of attrition and PvP Arena teams. I think it would be the easiest, depending on the length of a PvP season. It gives people an opportunity to try different things and get different gear. Also, it'll give your raiders a chance to go off-spec, and indulge their inner Shadow Priest/Feral Druid/etc. to their heart's content.

As well, I am quite partial to the notion of having a team specifically carry the guild banner in PvP. A good guild has to maintain a certain reputation after all.

Thoughts? Any other ideas on what a raiding guild should do?

25-Man Raids

Time to take on the current hot topic in WoW circles: the new 25-man raid cap.

Unsurprisingly, I think this is a good idea. I have always maintained that the single hardest thing about raiding is the transition from levelling guild to raiding guild. Reducing the number of 60s required is a great help for a new guild to achieve critical mass. I think this change will go a long way to seeing more people trying out the raiding scene, and I think that it is a good thing.

Raiding is fun, and I would love to see more players get a chance to realize that.

Secondly, I don't think the current raiding ecosystem is healthy. Maybe I've just been unlucky, but it doesn't seem like raiding guilds are particularly stable, especially ones that are not on the top tier. There's been some research that beyond 50 people, guild cohesion drops dramatically. I think this is true. Smaller guilds are more tightly knit. Even the top tier guilds seem to be constantly recruiting.

Also, this division into raiding guild and levelling guild is not healthy either. When I levelled my warlock, I deliberately turned down guild invites. I wanted to raid, and I didn't want to join a guild and then leave them at 60 for a raiding guild. Realistically though--unless I was incredibly lucky--that is probably what I would have to do. I think a game that forces this choice on people is flawed. Ideally, I should be able to join a guild, level with them, and move into raiding together. With 40-man raids, I do not think this is truely possible.

However, there is a price to pay for this change, and I don't think that we should make light of it. The current raiding guilds are going to have to change, and maybe make some painful decisions. And I do feel bad for them. It will really suck to have to reduce your raiding force by 15 members, or attempt to juggle 2 raids. Hopefully, guild churn during the expansion--either attrition while levelling or older players coming back or people rolling Blood Elves/Draenai--will lessen the magnitude of change needed.

In my view, though, the new cap will result in many more guilds and players attempting and using raid content, and so the price is worth paying.

A Bad Explorer

Continuing the discussion of Bartle Player Types.

I think a bad Explorer is one who hoards knowledge, and delights in seeing other people fail because they lack it.

Blood Elf Paladins and Faction Imbalance

It looks like I was wrong about Horde Paladins and Alliance Shamans being a joke. Too bad. While this move does solve the mechanical imbalance between the two factions, it does so in the least elegant way possible. (Not to mention that the whining has already started about racial abilities.) I'm kind of disappointed in Blizzard, and I still think that making the two sides less unique is a bad move in the long term.

However, a more interesting question is whether this move (and Blood Elves/Draenai in general) will solve the more pressing problem of numerical imbalance. In many ways, the Horde's biggest problem in raiding is lack of numbers. The Alliance has a much bigger pool of recruits to sustain the raiding guilds, and high end Alliance guilds have the option of feeding on lower guilds. But why is there an imbalance in the first place?

If you look at this article at PlayOn, you can see that the Alliance:Horde ratio stays fairly steady. However, there is a significant difference between server types. On PvE/RP servers, the ratio is 2 Alliance for every 1 Horde. But on a PvP server, the ration is 1 Alliance for every 1 Horde. Why is there such a difference?

I think the explanation lies in the Bartle player types. Killers are far more likely to roll on a PvP server. After all, their entire reason to play is to challenge and defeat other players, and PvP offers far more opportunity for that than PvE. So the difference in Alliance:Horde ratios can be explained with the theory that Killers are more likely to roll Horde than non-Killers.

This sort of makes intuitive sense as well. The Horde races project power. They are larger and more brutish. While not precisely evil, they are more likely to be the 'monster' races in other games. So it's kind of natural that a Killer would gravitate towards the Horde.

So why don't the non-Killers like the Horde? There are several possible explanations:

1. Alliance has better PvE racials that attract the Achiever. While this is true, it's very subtle, and really only raises it's head at level 60. As well, the ratios are very steady, and if this was strictly true, we should see the ratio for Alliance rising as more Achievers switch over. Instead, the steady ratio indicates to me that new players are making characters at the same ratio, before they really understand the mechanics.

2. Alliance races are prettier and do not project power. Perhaps non-Killers prefer playing prettier races. In the case of the Socializer, it may be deliberate to get away from Killers.

3. Non-Killers prefer to play the 'good guys'. Maybe a greater amount of people would prefer to what are normally the good guys, rather than the bad guys. As well, the Alliance has Paladins, which are viewed as extremely good characters.

It could also be a combination of things. As well, a lot of people simply follow their friends, so one person who feels strongly about race could influence the choice of a whole bunch of people. My first character was Horde, and I made it because an Achiever friend was playing Horde, and he made his because a Killer friend insisted on playing Horde. One Killer made a choice that dragged multiple Achievers and Explorers along.

But in any case, the important question is 'Can Blood Elves attract a greater portion of non-Killers to the Horde?'

I am not too sure of the answer. Blood Elves are clearly a 'pretty' race, so that may hold a greater attraction. But their racials appear to be more PvP oriented. And a greater mistake may be that they are evil in the mythos. They have paladins, but the paladins are 'evil' paladins (torturing an angel/Naaru and whatnot). If the motivator to play Alliance is to play the good guys, the Blood Elves don't help in that regard.

The problem is that it is fairly obvious why the Horde is more attractive to Killers. But it is less obvious why the Alliance is more attractive to non-Killers, and that will make a huge difference in whether the expansion numerically balances the two factions.

Personally, I would have made the Blood Elves an obviously 'good' race, and if they had paladins, to make the paladins truely good paladins. (The Lore, as Blizzard has proven, is fairly easy to manipulate.) At the same time, the Draenai could have been left as their original evil-ish selves. That way, the people who want to play the good side end up on Horde, in addition to the people looking at mechanics and racial looks.

Bartle's Players Who Suit Muds

I'm working on a rather long post, and I find that I need to provide background information. So rather than trying to work it into the post, I'm talking about it here. Plus, it's an interesting topic in and of itself.

Dr. Richard Bartle wrote a paper, Players Who Suit Muds, back in 1990. Though taken from old-school text muds, a lot of it is still relevant today.

In his paper, Dr. Bartle divides players into four categories:

Achievers - people seek to beat the game, by amassing loot or gear or killing bosses.

Explorers - people who try and find out as much about the game as possible.

Socializers - people who's main interests are in interacting with other players.

Killers - people who seek to defeat other players.

Of course, this is a bit simplistic, as most people have elements of each of the four player types. But usually one style is dominant.

For example, I'm pretty close to pure Explorer, as I'm pretty sure most of my posts have demonstrated. I get my enjoyment from learning about the game, doing new things, and seeing what makes things tick. I do have a bit of Achiever, as I like getting new loot, but I'm pretty far down on the Socializer or Killer scale.

Also, none of these archetypes are inherently good or bad. Your awesome raid leader is an Achiever, the guy who comes up with useful new strategies or advice is an Explorer, the guildmaster who holds the guild together is a Socializer, the best PvP'er in the battleground is a Killer. Loot whores are bad Achievers, drama queens are bad Socializers, griefers are bad Killers. I'm not entirely sure what a bad Explorer would be, maybe someone who refuses to help with old content.

Dr. Bartle's paper is a very interesting read, as he describes the different types in more detail, and the effect each type has on the others. I found that I could look at the personalities and arguments in the game in a different light. Of course, since I am an Explorer, this is the kind of stuff that appeals to me. :)

So which archetype are you?

Ninja!

I had my first real ninja yesterday. I was on a Strat Live run, and [Pattern: Truefaith Vestments] dropped. As there was no priest in the group, we decided to free roll it. After the roll, which I won, a warlock looted the pattern and hearthed.

So I contacted an officer in his guild. It turned out that it was the warlock's brother who was playing the character, and the real warlock sent me some gold in an effort to make up for the ninja, which I shared with the other group members. It's possible that he could have been lying, but I didn't really care.

Apparently the warlock was a tailor, and the warlock's brother learned the pattern for him, which amused me greatly.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. In my mind, it just reinforces the notion that the whole "pass on blues and epics and discuss" is a bad idea. Need/Greed takes care of the vast majority of cases.

As another random observation, the group was really competent for a pickup group. I think dropping the instance cap to 5 has done a lot of good for people's skill levels.

Nefarian, Lord of Blackrock Spire

I've been killing a lot of new bosses these last couple days. Yesterday we downed the Prophet Skeram in AQ40, and got in some attempts on Battleguard Sartura. Today we blew through Blackwing Lair, one-shotting every boss up to Nefarian. Nef himself took two attempts, but he went down nicely on the second one.

Of the new fights, the Nefarian fight was probably the best, followed by Skeram. Vael was pretty interesting, but I got Burning Adrenaline fairly early and died. I was sad that Vael did not do the "Forgive me Coriel, your death only adds to my failure" line, as I probably died too close to an earlier death. But still, it's a neat fight, and I always like fighting dragons.

As for Nef, it's fun being a paladin. I don't have an Onyxia Scale Cloak, but I survived the Shadowflame with a bubble. Also, the paladin class call is a joke. So we stop fighting for a few seconds, it's not that much of a problem. Nef should Hammer of Justice the main tank or something. That would be funny.

Also, I got to melee-heal a fair bit in the last half of BWL: Ebonroc, Chromaggus, and Nefarian. Meleeing on Chromaggus in particular is very helpful, as JoWisdom helps keep the mana up for Cleanse. We had the Timelapse/Corrosive Acid breaths. I really wish I had a single point in Lasting Judgement, though. It would make keeping up Judgements so much easier.

So far, my verdict on BWL is that it is extremely melee-friendly for paladins, as is Skeram and everything up to Sartura. The Sartura fight itself, I'm not so sure about. Paladins meleeing with Seal of Justice, and HoJ rotations might be a good idea, at least on Sartura herself. The AoE from the adds may be too much. Most strats I've seen keep the rogues off the adds, and if the rogues don't go in, it's probably a bad idea for the paladins to. In any case, I think it was only the guild's second attempt at her, so we were basically just learning how the fight works.

Of course, I predict responses saying that paladins should not melee in anything beyond Sartura. It's amusing how the "Paladins Should Not Melee" parts of this game always coincide with the parts I have not done yet. :)

Ah well. It's been a fun couple of days. Hopefully I'll get a chance to kill Ragnaros sometime soon.

Ossiran the Unscarred

I got into an AQ20 run with the prospective guild today. They had already cleared the first couple of bosses, so we pretty much went straight to the final boss, Ossiran the Unscarred. Ossiran is a really cool fight.

There are these crystals which weaken him which spawn in semi-random places in the room. You have to have someone find the next crystal, then the tanks drag him to it, and activate it before he goes into supreme mode and wipes the raid. Everytime you weaken him with a crystal, he becomes extra vulnerable to a specific type of damage. (There are also whirlwinds flying around, but I'm not really sure I understand what that was about.)

It's a cool fight because there is a lot of running around. The raid is constantly trying to keep themselves between Ossiran and the next crystal. It kind of reminds me a bit of Warsong Gulch, and the way you need to heal the flag carrier as she runs past you.

Quite honestly, I love the 20-man zones. Blizzard really outdid themselves here. If the expansion was all 20-mans, with this level of quality, I think this would be the perfect game. It's especially good for hybrids, because there's a lot more opportunity to shift roles. I did some judging, some melee, and some healing (though mostly healing on Ossiran).

Oh, and I got epix! Ossiran dropped [Mantle of the Horusath], and I won the roll! I love getting loot the first time I beat a fight. Somehow it makes it more special.

Honestly, these days are what make WoW fun. An interesting fight, the thrill of victory, and mad lootz. What more can you ask for?

Influence of the Lead Guild

One of the interesting things about Skywall, at least compared to the other servers I have been on, is that the endgame guilds do not have spec requirements. They also have very low gear requirements. Additionally very few of them have extensive loot restrictions. The majority that I've looked at have open loot, but frown on passing on set pieces, or will force people to take them.

This is very different than many of my previous servers. Off-specs, like feral druids or shadow priests, are disdained, and many guilds require people to have a certain spec. Additionally, high end guilds tended to have very high gear requirements, especially when it came to resistances. Finally, class restrictions on gear were the norm, especially when it comes to dps vs hybrid gear.

So why is Skywall different? I think it's mostly due to the influence of the lead guild on the server. The lead guild, or the guild that has advanced the most in the end game, is a guild called Rebirth. Rebirth believes very strongly in the viability of off-specs in raiding. Additionally, their gear requirements are pretty low, though they are very discriminating in actually guilding people after trials. And they don't seem to have loot restrictions.

The lead guild, in many ways, sets the tone for the server. A classical economist might say that this is because of competition. A lower guild cannot set higher requirements than the lead guild, because that would drive better players towards the lead guild.

I'm not sure that is quite right. A lot of guilds have spec/gear/loot restrictions because the guild believes that it is necessary for progression. They get the idea that it is necessary from the lead guild. An appeal to authority, as it were. If the lead guild requires specs, than we probably should as well. People try to imitate people who are successful.

On Skywall though, Rebirth serves as a counter-example. Guilds that want to be successful on Skywall try to imitate Rebirth, and that means that they tend to avoid spec/gear/loot restrictions.

One interesting area where lower guilds do not follow the lead guild is loot systems. The fact that a lead guild uses a specific loot system doesn't seem to influence the lower guilds. Each guild seems to come up with it's own system, and what the other guilds do has less impact. Every server I have been on displays this pattern.

My guess is that the loot system is evaluated on fairness as well as progression, and people feel more able to evaluate fairness than progression. If you ask, "Does having off-specs help us to progress?", you can point to the lead guild for evidence. But if you ask, "Is this loot system fair?", the answer hinges much more on the internal structure of the loot system than what the lead guild does.

In conclusion, the lead guild has a lot of influence on progression-related matters. If a question relates to progression, very often a guild's answer will be the same as the lead guild's answer. However, if the question moves away from progression, the lead guild's influence lessens dramatically.

Blackwing Lair

I switched servers with Coriel again, this time to Skywall. Skywall is a PST server, so guild raid times are a lot more convenient for me. I've applied to a raiding guild, and today they took me on a run to Blackwing Lair.

Blackwing Lair is pretty neat. We wiped several times on Razorgore, but then killed him. I sat out Vael for one of their guildies, but got back in for the Suppression Room and Broodlord. We then killed Firemaw, and called it a night. I forget what loot dropped, but none of it was useful for paladins.

The fights are pretty interesting. I mostly healed, spamming FoL Ranks 1 or 6. I like the Suppression Room. When I got back in, I wasn't assigned a Greater Blessing, so I got to go nuts with Blessing of Sacrifice and Blessing of Protection (the 3 minute cooldown is really useful while running the gauntlet). Sacrifice really adds up. I almost killed myself a couple times as I had Sacrifices on eight or so targets. After that I tried to be more discriminating. :)

I still think that meleeing-healing is the way to go, though. Honestly, I don't think I ever fell below half mana, and I'm sure I had significant overhealing. And my gear is under-par. Rather than spamming FoL-1, melee-healing with FoL-6 still seems to be a much more efficient use of a paladin. It may be that this raid was geared more than normal, or more experienced, but I don't think the full potential of the paladins is being realized. Nothing in this half of BWL has made me reconsider the notion that paladins should be meleeing.

So far, I really like BWL, and hopefully I will get to see more of it. It's much more interesting and chaotic than Molten Core. I also kind of regret missing the Vael fight, as it's supposed to be quite unique.

I Call Shenanigans

I'll go out on a limb and declare the Blood Elf Paladin/Draenei Shaman a practical joke by the Blizzard team.

If both factions are the same, you cut down replayability of this game. If you decrease replayability, you reduce the length of time a player spends subscribed to WoW. If people are subscribed for a shorter time, Blizzard makes less money.

Right now, if a player tires of playing Alliance, they can roll Horde. Because the Horde have Shamans, the experience of the game, both in PvE and PvP, is different for each faction. If both factions have all classes, there is much less incentive to roll a new character, and more incentive to simply quit.

The majority of players do not raid, and thus are unaffected by faction imbalance. Solving faction imbalance in a way which reduces replayability for the majority of subscribers will negatively affect Blizzard's bottom line.

MMO's require subscriber retention. It is their entire reason for being. I believe there is no way any sane cost/benefit analysis would show that improving high-end raiding balance is worth the cost of decreased length of subscription time for a majority of the players.

That's just the financial reasons. I'm not even going to get into the damage this move would do to Blizzard's reputation as the masters of faction balance (see StarCraft).

Or the shattering of the balance of the 1-59 game, which most people believe is superior to the raiding game. Seriously, it's already hard enough finding a primary healer for a lower-level instance. How much harder will it be when only 2 of 9 classes are primary healers?

High-end raiding balance is simply not worth this price.

Tanking Idea: Fear Immunity

Okay, here's a random idea to help improve factional balance AND help us tank.

1. Take Fear Ward away from dwarf priests, and give it to Troll Priests.
2. Make paladins immune to Fear.

Now, Horde gets easy mode on bosses that fear. Instead of having to stance-dance, their priests can Fear Ward them like Alliance does now.

Alliance-side, because paladins are immune to Fear, they become a viable choice for tanking Fear-based encounters like Magmadar and Onyxia. (Or you can have a stance-dancing warrior, but the paladin has an actual advantage.)

This choice also makes thematic sense. Paladins are stalwart defenders of the light. Being immune to fear fits that vision of the paladin.

As well, it shores up one of our big weaknesses in PvP. Because of our lack of speed and range, Fear hurts us far more than any other class. A fight between a paladin and a warlock/priest actually becomes interesting now.

Edit: Okay, as the comments are indicating, a passive immunity to Fear is probably too extreme. How about a self-buff/debuff that breaks Fear and grants immunity for 10s, but increases damage taken by 10%? Maybe make it 'Unyielding Faith', and have the talent be "Improved Unyielding Faith", reduce damage taken by 2/4%?

Update to Factional Imbalance

Well, looks like I was wrong. Possibility #3 (an unbalanced game) was correct.

As an aside, it's funny how Blizzard always releases controversial changes on a Friday. Changes that will be positively received come out earlier in the week.

More thoughts to come later.

Edit: It could also be a complex joke. Blizzard did something similar with the wisps. But that was on April's Fools Day. The problem is that Blood Elf Paladins/Draenai Shamans are too close to an actual solution for any faction balance problems that may exist.

A Bit More on Faction Imbalance

Azreal posted a very detailed and interesting comment to the post about faction imbalance. It's well worth reading, and I'm still chewing on a lot of the nuances. However, I'd like to zero in on one idea:

Each encounter requires you do a set amount of DPS in a certain time frame in a controlled environment.

Here are my thoughts:

1. For this game to be at all balanced, a Horde raid must be able to do the same raid-wide DPS as an Alliance raid.

2. However, a single Alliance DPS class can always do more damage than a single Horde DPS class. If the encounter is threat-limited, Blessing of Salvation enables the extra damage. If the encounter is not threat-limited, Blessing of Wisdom, Might, and Kings allow for more DPS than the shaman totem equivalents.

The only way to reconcile statements 1 and 2 is for the Horde raid to get additional DPS from another source. The only possible source that a Horde raid can draw DPS from, which the Alliance cannot also tap, is shamans.

So there are three possibilities:

1. Shamans are expected to add some DPS.

OR

2. Shaman Totems enable as much extra DPS as Paladin Blessings.

OR

3. Blizzard has deliberately made an unbalanced game.

I'm pretty sure that we are all in agreement that Possibility #2 is wrong.

As for Possibility #3, I do not think that Blizzard--the makers of Starcraft--would think that making a game with two factions, where one faction is strictly better than the other faction, is a good idea.

So by a process of elimination, the only possibility left is that Blizzard expects shamans to add DPS. I do not see any other logical explanation for raid and class design.

Crazy Talent Idea

1. Move Repentence to 31pt Protection.
2. Drop Holy Shield to 21pt Protection.
3. Drop Blessing of Sanctuary to 11pt Protection.
4. Move Blessing of Kings to 11pt Retribution.
5. Move Seal of Command to 31pt Retribution AND increase it to 100% of weapon damage (with 7ppm).

Reasoning:

Seal of Command is the talent with the single greatest effect on paladin gameplay. It changes the weapons you try to acquire, and pretty much becomes the default Seal for most situations. The way it changes our gameplay is worthy of a 31pt talent.

However, SoC as it stands is not powerful enough for 31pts. Increasing the damage dealt makes it a seriously powerful option, but requires a heavy investment in Retribution. It becomes our 'Shadowform', if you will.

As well, the increase is mitigated somewhat by moving Repentence to Protection. So no extra stunned JoC. As well, Protection becomes stronger, and Holy Shield becomes more accessible. Additionally, both Blessings are far easier to acquire for raids.

The change also improves the viability of Protection builds. Now the bottom half of Protection is roughly equal to Retribution, so 31/20/0 ~ 31/0/20. And 30/21/0 is also a decent build. Reckoning builds get the added boost of Repentence, making them seriously viable once more.

Indeed, even 0/21/30 has the potential of being an interesting build. Holy Shield + Vengeance + Improved Retribution Aura has some interesting possibilities.

In many ways, the current placement of SoC warps the paladin class. It is too good, too fast. Making it better, but more costly, frees up a lot of potential for new and unique builds.

Is Blizzard Playing the Same Game?

This entire post is completely hypothetical. A thought experiment, if you will.

The Raid and Dungeon forums are currently in an uproar over the slated nerf to Windfury Totem. It is a general consensus that Alliance raiding is easier than Horde raiding, and that shamans are less powerful than paladins in PvE. So to nerf Windfury Totem, which is used by Horde tanks to increase rage and threat, seems nonsensical. If you add this nerf to both the shaman and paladin reviews, it almost begs the question, is Blizzard playing the same game as the rest of us?

Well, what if Blizzard isn't?

In all the discussions on the forums, the only items being taken into consideration are blessings, totems, and heals. All other aspects of the two classes are ignored. In a 40-man raid, the player base assumes that there are 15 healers, who stand in the back, buff and heal. Gregthegreat on the paladin forum summed it up best: "A paladin is better than a shaman because a paladin emulates a priest better."

But what if Blizzard does not have that same assumption? What if they assume that there are only 10 or so full-time healers, and shamans and paladins are meleeing/casting and spot healing? And that their raid design takes into account the additional paladin/shaman damage when they balance the two factions.

I think that a lot of Blizzard's actions regarding the shaman and paladin make more sense when looked at through this lens. If Blizzard believes that the existing optimum raid strategy for paladins is to melee, how are they going to react to calls to improve meleeing? I think they would be confused, and make minor changes, shuffling things around. Which pretty much describes the paladin review. After all, if meleeing is already the best strategy, making meleeing better just breaks things.

I believe that Blizzard tests its content, with raids from both factions. That proposed changes are the result of the internal testing. But if the internal testing makes fundamentally different assumptions than the player base, there will be a disconnect between what the internal team believes is necessary, and what the player base believes is necessary.

From my own personal experience, 15 healers *is* excessive for the majority of fights. 10 healers, with additional spot healing from meleeing paladins, is good enough for most fights. And if that holds Alliance side, it should also hold Horde side.

It also explains the Horde/Alliance disparity a bit. A paladin has a low amount of internal power, but gives a lot of power to her allies through buffs. A shaman has a higher amount of internal power, but gives less power to his allies. So if they both restrict their actions, the Horde raid suffers much more from the withdrawal of shaman power than the Alliance raid does from the loss of paladin power.

Now, I don't know if what I described in this thought experiment is true or not. For this to be true, the commonly held wisdom by the player base about raid roles--that paladins and shamans are primarily healers--is false. But a lot of Blizzard's actions simply do not make sense if the common wisdom is true. So we're left with two choices. Either the common wisdom is wrong, or Blizzard does not know what they are doing.

I'm sure I know what the cynical among you would pick. :)

Horde Edge in PvP

After PvPing for a bit, I've been reconsidering Horde vs. Alliance. I still think that the Horde have a slight advantage when it comes to mobility, and that Paladins are a little too vulnerable to interrupts/fear/shiny distractions. But for the most part, the factions are reasonably balanced against each other in PvP.

However, on average, the Horde are still better than the Alliance. As Horde, I win far more games than I lose. I think that this is because the Horde gets much more practice than the Alliance.

If I'm only on for an hour, as Horde I can get in three to four games. As Alliance, I'm lucky to even get one. So the average Horde gets a lot more practice at the BGs, and thus gets skilled in a faster time than the Alliance. I would estimate that a Horde Rank 6 plays as many games in a week as an Alliance Rank 10+.

As well, the fast queue times allow you to experiment or incorporate new ideas faster. If you have an idea to improve your play, you can instantaneously test it out. If it's a bad idea, and you lose the game, it doesn't matter, because the next game is right around the corner. The feedback cycle is much faster, and thus you can improve your skills faster.

As they say, practice makes perfect.

Fear Ward

On the topic of fearing paladins, I actually think that Fear Ward should be taken from dwarf priests and given to paladins. Race should be a mostly cosmetic choice, and Fear Ward is really unfair to the night elf and human priests. If it is given to paladins, it keeps it alliance-only, makes priests of difference races more equal, and shores up an excessive weakness for paladins. Honestly, I shouldn't have been able to toy with the paladins like I was (see previous post).

Paladins already lack speed and range, so Fear is really devasting to a paladin, removing them from combat for both the duration of the Fear and the amount of time it takes to return to melee range. As well, Fear Ward just seems like a paladin ability, helping the paladin and her allies stand strong in the face of terror.

The New Alterac Valley

So I've been PvPing a fair bit the last couple of days. I really like the new Alterac Valley. With all the NPCs cleared out, it goes much quicker and there's more opportunity for actual combat.

It has a really nice balance between offense and defense as well. If you go all offense, and just turn it into a race, you will lose. A few people on defense can delay the enemy advance sufficiently. I actually really like playing defense. It's fun spoiling people's plans. I take special pleasure in Fearing paladins. There was one paladin with Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, and I just kept fearing him constantly. I find I can also time the bubble quite well, and get a Fear to finish casting just when the bubble comes down. It's a great deal of fun.

(It's entirely possible that I am working out my frustrations with the paladin class in this manner.)

However, you can't have too many people on defense, or your offense stalls out. So there's a bit of a delicate balance there, which is quite nice. Horde seems roughly the same as Alliance, though for some reason the Alliance seems better at rushing and quickly capping a flag. I'm not sure why this would be, and it may just have been because the numbers were lopsided at the flags I was at.

As an aside, some of the Alliance are huge cheaters. I ran into a paladin in a tower killing guards through a wall. He was a terrible paladin though, and was dispatched post-haste. Another time I saw 2 alliance wall-climb the waterfall to get into the Horde base and ninja the Frostwolf Relief Hut. When playing as Alliance, I don't really recall ever seeing the Horde cheat (other than the jump into Dun Baldar North tower, which isn't really in the same league as it didn't really require any tricks).

Honestly, my warlock is crazy good in BGs, at least compared to my paladin. The only BG that is giving me trouble is WSG, and that is mainly because the Alliance honor farming raids hang out there, and the constant firing of Horde BGs means that the Horde side is very unstable, with people leaving and joining constantly. As well, I probably should have taken the slowing curse, which would help a great deal with flag runners.

I'm almost scared to see what the 'lock can do once I actually get decent gear.

Warlock Hits Level 60

My warlock hit level 60 today. Now I have 2 60s. Probably a sign I play this game too much.

Now the question of what should I do now. I need to gear the warlock up, as I'm still wearing level 40 gear. However, since I'm Horde and a DPS class, it occurs to me that PvP may be a viable path to getting some gear. Horde queue times are insanely short, on the order of 5 minutes or less. And PvP gear is pretty good PvE gear for warlocks, as it emphasizes +Int, +Sta, and +Damage.

However, PvP may take longer than instance running. And instance running offers a wider variety of gear. I can also complete quests and get gold.

But instance runnning does not guarantee drops, whereas PvP does. I'm not sure how quickly I can rank up, but I should be able to get the blue PvP gear. I don't think I'll be able to get the epic sets, but the blue set, combined with the AB/AV/WSG faction rewards, should be good enough to set me up for endgame.

And of course, I'm guildless, which means that any instances I run will be strictly pickup groups. That seems like a recipe for frustration.

I guess I'm leaning toward PvP. Maybe I'll try for a week or so, and see how much progress I can make.

World PvP at Level 59

World PvP is a lot more fun at high levels. My warlock is 59 now, and I'm reasonably confident I can put up a fight now. I still don't bother attacking people, but at least I can defend myself against most would-be gankers.

I was questing in Andorhal in Western Plaguelands, and a level 60 dwarf priest attacked me for some reason. He started casting spells, I started DOTs and fearing. Eventually he gave up and decided to run. I chased him all the way across the map, up to the Hearthglen Lumber Mill, before finally killing him. Good times.

Talent Trees

I really like the Warlock talent trees. They are very well designed, and the sheer variety of viable warlock builds is amazing. This is not to say that they are perfect, as there are some mediocre talents here and there, but the top end warlock talents are really strong.

There are different points in a tree where I think you can judge how good a talent tree really is. If you stopped after spending 20, 21, 30, or 31 points in the tree, can you get a good build? So let's look at the warlock trees, and how they stack up:

---

Affliction

20 pts - Yes, Nightfall/X builds are common
21 pts - No, Siphon Life generally isn't worth stopping at
30 pts - Yes, Shadow Mastery is a great talent
31 pts - Yes, Dark Pact is a staple levelling talent, and gets a serious look from early raiders

Demonology

20 pts - Yes, Dark Pact/20 is considered the best levelling build
21 pts - Yes, I'm currently running an Shadow Mastery/Demonic Sacrifice build
30 pts - Yes, Master Demonologist is possibly the high end raiding build
31 pts - Yes, Soul Link builds are considered the best in PvP

Destruction

20 pts - Yes, contains a lot of staple raiding talents
21 pts - Yes, a lot of builds, including the classic SM/Ruin
30 pts - No, I haven't seen too many builds that stop at Emberstorm
31 pts - Yes, Conflag builds exist

---

So what we can see is that each tree contains at least 3 of the 4 possible stopping points, leading to a large number of combinations. This gives the warlock class a tremendous variety of builds.

Now lets look at the paladin class:

---

Holy

20 pts - Yes, Illumination is really good
21 pts - Yes, Divine Favor is also really good
30 pts - Yes, Holy Power is also a good stopping point for healing paladins
31 pts - Yes, shockadins love Holy Shock

Protection

20 pts - No, seriously, this seems like a terrible place to stop
21 pts - Yes/No, in many ways just taking 21 points seems forced by raiding into a sub-par spec, just to get that extra Blessing
*25 pts - Yes, Reckoning is a stopping point
30 pts - No, heh, can't even imagine ending with 1H-spec
31 pts - Yes, this talent is the entire point of the Protection tree

Retribution

20 pts - Yes, enough talents to complement a 31 point build
21 pts - No, Sanctity Aura isn't good enough on it's own
30 pts - Yes, Vengeance is quite good
31 pts - Yes, Repentance is a solid talent

---

So as we can see, Holy is in really good shape. All four stopping points are completely viable. Retribution is in decent shape as well, with 3 of 4 stopping points. Protection on the other hand has 2, and one is in an awkward position.

Add to this the fact that Spiritual Focus is considered a must-have for paladins, and the number of builds are restricted and are weighted heavily towards to the Holy Tree. Realistically, the trees need to be a bit more balanced, with Protection or Retribution combinations being more viable.

Realistically there are only four paladin builds. Holy/Retribution, Retribution/Holy, Reckoning, or Protection/Holy. And the first two are far more popular than the last two. There needs to be more, and also more differention between builds in the same tree.

In fact, I think that only having two popular builds is bad for the community. It sets up a gulf between Holy paladins and Retribution paladins. In contrast, warlocks--with their multitude of builds--seem to regard differences in build and playstyle as far less of a dividing factor than paladins do.

Edit: After thinking about it a bit more, I think I need to expand on things. It's not just that the warlock trees have better stopping points, it's that choosing one stopping point over another makes a significant difference in playstyle. For example, take a warlock 30/20/0 build. If you put the extra point in Affliction (31/20/0), you get a Dark Pact build. If you put the extra point in Demonology (30/21/0), you get the SM/DS build. These two builds play very differently to each other, and where you put that last point matters a great deal, even if the previous 50 points are identical!

In contrast, take the common Retribution/Holy build (20/0/30). Here you have a choice of of Divine Favor or Repentence. But the one you choose does not matter all that much. It does not really change how you play. The build is dominated by the previous 50 points.

To be honest, the only ending paladin talent that really makes a significant playstyle change is Holy Shield. A build without Holy Shield plays very differently than a build with Holy Shield.

Instance Questing

Coriel is now guildless. Since I'm not really sure what to do, I'm trying to finish quests. Some of these quests I've had for months. It's always been a sad feeling for me to open the quest log and see quests that are still incomplete.

Today, I tried advertising for a 5-man Lower Blackrock Spire run. I've never actually gone on one of these, as everyone seems to prefer raiding it. Surprisingly, I was able to get a good, balanced group fairly quickly.

So we went through LBRS, and did several quests. We didn't actually finish, as we wiped near the end. We'd been in the instance for a long while, and so we called it. It was a good group, and we used Need/Greed for loot, so we didn't have the traditional hassle that is loot in endgame raids. 99% of the time, Need/Greed covers everything, in my opinion. Making things more complicated is pointless. I was raid leader, and got to play with the targeting icons. Makes things so much easier, in many ways.

In any case, I cleared out about 4 quests from my log, which I'm actually really happy about. I'm a bit of a completionist, and I think I actually get more pleasure out of finishing a quest, then from getting a piece of new loot.

As well, 5-manning with a paladin is a ton of fun. You shift between damage and healing and judging and blessing non-stop. It's sort of a pity that Blizzard spends so much time on 40-man instances. I think that the 5-man zone is where World of Warcraft truely shines.

I also finished the Tablets of Mosh'aru questline (starts from Yek'ina the troll at Steamwheedle Port). Major style-points to Blizzard for that questline. It wove together many different elements into a polished whole. I really like the long questlines, and the stories that unfold.

It was a good day. I should do more questing.

Edit: Also, today I found and killed the Winterfall Runners with my warlock!

Winterfall Runners

I always run into them when travelling on the road in Winterfall.

I now have the quest to kill them.

I cannot find them anywhere.

Eternal Legend

Really good anime-style intro for Wow. My favorite parts are the tauren hunter in the desert and the fade into Ragnaros.

Debuff Priority System

Currently, you can only put a maximum of 16 debuffs (continuing negative effects) on any one target. This limit is often reached in raids, and so raid groups try and control the amount of debuffs put on a target. This is hard, because currently all debuffs are considered the same, and many common effects, such as Fireball, have a small attached debuff. If a 17th debuff lands, one of the existing debuffs--perhaps an important one--gets bumped off.

Blizzard is working on implementing a debuff priority system, so that minor debuffs do not replace greater ones. But this is obviously a large undertaking, so they are taking some time on it. So I thought I'd take a stab at what a debuff priority system should look like.

To my mind, there are four main categories of debuffs, listed below from most important to least important.

1. Controlled Enablers - These are debuffs which a player chooses to place on a target and grant some effect other than damage. Examples include Judgement of Wisdom or Curse of Elements.

2. Uncontrolled Enablers - These are effects which are randomly placed on a target, or are a side-effect of another spell, and grant an effect other than damage. Examples are effects like Vindication, the Thunderfury proc, or Shadow Weaving.

3. Controlled Damage - These are the classic damage-over-time spells, like Corruption.

4. Uncontrolled Damage - These are effects which add a bit of damage, but are more of a side-effect of another ability. The classic example is the Fireball DOT, or the warrior talent Deep Wounds.

Of course, there is a spectrum between controlled and uncontrolled damage. Some spells have both an initial component and a DOT component. Which category a spell should be in depends on how the total damage is divided.

I think that the four rough categories above are the basic elements of a debuff priority system. Controlled enablers are the most important, and should not be bumped off by spells from the lower categories. Uncontrolled enablers are the second-most important, and so on.

Controlled effects are more important than uncontrolled effects because the player deliberately chose to place them on the target. That choice should be respected. If a raid has too many controlled effects, and needs to reserve space for an uncontrolled effect, it is within their power to do so.

Enablers are more important than damage because the effects provided by the enabler are fairly unique. Damage can be compensated for from other sources. But an effect like Shadow Weaving is not easily replaced.

Combining these two rules gives the four categories above. At first glance, I think they seem pretty reasonable. There is a little fine-tuning within categories, and some ordering in the damage categories, but I think this debuff system would cover 99% of the cases in WoW.

But there are a lot of effects out there, and one important one may have slipped my mind. Is there any effect that would not fit nicely into this system?

Dead Guild Walking

I don't have much hope for my guild. Something like 90% of the raiding core has left. The remaining 10% are frantically recruiting. We're essentially going to be starting a new raiding guild, only under the old name.

I have no idea what I should do. I could stay, and help them rebuild. But I think that will take a long time. And there doesn't seem to be any inclination to correcting the structural flaws that, in my view, caused this rift. Rather, the leadership appears to be treating the problem as a social problem, as if it's merely a problem of sufficient numbers before we start raiding again. I am not sure that this is a prudent course of action. Of course, I'm not one of the guild leaders, so I may just be out of the loop.

I could leave and apply to another raiding guild. This guild allowed me to melee-heal, though, and I really don't want to healbot. As well, most other guilds on this server have an EST raid schedule, and I'm PST. In fact, the server is CST, but I think it got transfers from both EST and PST servers, which led to silliness.

A last option is to wait until character transfers open for this server, and go back to my old realm or another PST realm.

It would be easier if I felt loyalty to, or was good friends with, anyone in the guild. Then I could follow their lead and go and stay as they did. But I'm don't. I'm just a member who shows up and does my part. As well, I think neither side of the split was fully wrong or fully right. They both made mistakes, and both sides had their virtues. It would be easier if one side was absolutely wrong, because then I could just make a decision based on what they did.

Where did this guild go wrong? Looking back, I think it came down to a lack of order. Rules were not fully thought out and laid down properly. The leadership structure was unstable, basically split between three people. The split came when one officer was on an extended absence, and the other two officers had a serious disagreement.

The DKP system, while fair, was very complex, and burned out multiple DKP Officers. As well, the DKP system wasn't really auditable. You couldn't really keep track of your own DKP, and easily correct the officers when they made a mistake. Instead all you had was a vague sense that things weren't adding up. To be honest, I could never tell how much DKP I had, only in relative terms to the other paladins. Of course, this never mattered, as Lawbringer rarely dropped.

(The guild also had an annoying habit of /gkicking people as a joke, which I didn't like. Does being in the guild mean so little that being booted is a laughing matter?)

Of course, I'm a very lawful sort of person, and not all that good with people, so I may be seeing things through that lens. To me, rules create expectations, so one knows what is required of all parties. Otherwise, you have go by feeling and unspoken agreements. The trick, of course, is to have the exact amount of rules to create shared expections. Too many rules lead to inflexibility and stagnation. But this guild didn't really have enough rules. Or rather, enough rules spelling out the basics.

I kind of wish I had spoken up a bit earlier. Outlined my concerns. But you know how it is, when you're not part of the core that really runs things. You're hesitant to interfere with them, especially as people seem to be happy with how things are going, and things are actually going well. You don't really hear the different factions.

Oh well, regrets.

Guild Drama

My guild is going through some major drama at the moment. I'm not going to get into specifics, as I've seen some blogs descend into flamewars when someone posts something that another person feels is unfair.

However, we're up to Ragnaros, and it's this point that I think the greatest stress on a new raiding guild appears. I've seen several guilds run into trouble at this point. It really has nothing to do with Ragnaros, just that this is the point in time when the guild structure is really tested.

A guild has usually been in existence for a couple months, and for a lot of this time period guild members are proceeding in spite of any flaws in the guild structure. They are taking things on faith, that the officers will sort out flaws eventually. The officers, meanwhile, are mostly learning how to run a guild. Their solutions are jury-rigged, and fixes to mask the fundamental flaws in the initial structure. Sometimes a guildmaster is holding their guild together through pure force of personality.

Additionally, bad habits may have started in the guild, and the officers only realize that these habits are negatively affecting the guild far too late, after they have become entrenched. The problem is that most officers don't really know how to build a successful guild when they start. In a lot of ways, it's something that you can only learn by doing. And if you are an officer in a successful guild, why are you starting a new guild?

Eventually, though, faith runs out. And then a guild's core structure becomes tested. If it is good, the guild survives. If not, the guild either changes or dies.

Edit: To be clear, I don't think it's the Ragnaros fight that causes the problem. It's more that by the time you get to Ragnaros, you have MC on farm, loot is being to flow steadily.

It is at this point where deficiencies in structure begin to show up. People start wondering at percieved unfairness in loot distribution, problems with attendance, problems with rules, etc. At the start of MC, you're more willing to push through in spite of things like this, because it's new, and the high of downing bosses the first few times makes up for a lot.

Patch 1.11: Scourge Invasion

Patch 1.11 came out today. So far it looks pretty solid. I did the first couple Argent Dawn quests and got in some undead killing. Multiple paladins dropping Consecration and Holy Wrath is really fun. Of course, since it's the first day, the necropolises were beaten back really fast, disappointing some people who logged on later. Hopefully they will respawn fairly fast. I was fighting in the Burning Steppes and one of the Scourge one-shotted Volchan (60 elite giant that wanders around). That was highly amusing.

I really like the new mechanic where price is determined by reputation level. You have access to all the items, but it allows you to find your own sweet spot. It's much better than the old mechanic where you had to have reputation level X before you could get an item. I'm Revered with the Argent Dawn, so I'll probably stay at Revered, rather than attempt to get to Exalted.

As well, I like how items needed for the Scourge quests are sellable. You don't have to grind the items, you can buy it instead if you prefer. Or you can make money if none of the rewards interest you. I also like how items drop both inside and outside instances. Even the Craftsmanship quest can be auctioned. This way, if you get a Craftsmanship quest that you can't do, you can just AH it, or give it away. Basically, there's a lot of choice in how you can attain the rewards, and I like that.

There are also a lot of nice small touches in this patch. Spell icons on a non-main bar display a little red mark when out of range. Bind-on-pickup items look very different in the Rolling window. The new raid leader features are also nice. Also, repairing all the items in your inventory is a godsend, especially for paladins who switch between gear a lot. Another nice thing is that if you are inspecting someone else, the set pieces lists works properly.

As for the new epic dungeon Naxx, I'm not going to see it for a long time, so it doesn't really matter.

The one serious negative change is that the LookingForGroup channel is now global. I can't see how anyone thought this would be a good idea. It's sort of good for looking for high end instance groups, because you don't have to hang around in a main city, but it's absolutely terrible for every other situation possible. As well, since it's a chat channel, most of the chatter has nothing to do with Looking For Groups. I don't think I've ever left the LookingForGroup channel before today. The only hope is that people calm down, but still, if I'm in Plaguelands, I don't really care that people in Silithus are looking for groups to do Silithus quests.

But aside from that, patch 1.11 looks pretty good so far.

Edit: Also, I'd just like to say that the anti-griefing measure with the new Flight Paths in Un'goro Crater and Ratchet was very stylish. Having a goblin as the Flight Master for both factions was an elegant solution.

PvP or PvE

One of the first choices you are faced with in Warcraft is what server to roll on. My first character, a warrior, was on a PvP server--mainly because other friends were playing there--then Coriel was made on a PvE server, and recently I've been levelling a warlock on the PvP server.

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with world PvP. Before I started playing WoW, I used to be a pretty hard-core PvP type of guy, even to the point of advocating perma-death. After all, if there are no consequences, what is the point of playing in a persistent world? Now, however, I've moved far away from that position, and probably into the "carebear" side of things.

In my view, a PvP server offers much higher highs, but also much lower lows.

My single favorite memory of WoW is a world PvP memory. My warrior and a priest friend were around level 30 and adventuring in Durnholde Keep in Hillsbrad at night. A level 30 rogue snuck up behind me, sapped me, and attacked the priest. She killed the priest, and I came out of the sap and charged her. She took off, leaping from roof to roof on the buildings in the Keep. We had a crazy, moonlit chase, jumping across rooftops, which ended when I mistimed a jump and fell off a roof, allowing her to make her escape.

But I remember thinking to myself, as I was leaping, that this was awesome. It was a good fight, against a skilled opponent of the same level. The chase was like something from a movie. This was an encounter that simply could not happen on a PvE server.

But then you have to balance that experience against all the times a 60 rogue has decloaked inside a town and slaughtered me. And then proceeded to corpse camp my body. Higher highs, but lower lows.

A PvE server on the other hand, is much more restful. On a PvP server, you always have to have your guard up, watching for the enemy. It's a very tiring playstyle. Sometimes it is nice to be able to quest in peace. As well, I like concentrating on one task at a time, and PvP interrupts that, making it annoying. Finally, a fair fight on a PvP server is rare, and something to be treasured. Realistically, the vast majority of world PvP consists of a high level character ganking a low level character.

So if I had to chose between a PvE or PvP game, I'd probably choose to play the PvE game. But I'm glad that WoW offers the choice.

Ideal Qualities of a Raid Guild

Mynia, of Archetype X, wrote a really good post on the ideal qualities of a raiding guild. As the thread will eventually disappear into the void, I'm reproducing it here.

Here are the most important things for me:

1) The people should be polite and respectful. Cursing is fine as long as you aren't cursing AT someone. If you respect the people in your group and know they are doing their very best then there is no need for the stereotypical yelling etc. If they aren't doing their best rethink if they should be there.

2) No hotheads please. The worst thing about raiding is it sometimes is stressful. You are spending hours wiping repeatedly on bosses to learn the encounter. Everyone needs to be mature enough to step away when frustrated. With the right attitude and respect for others even wiping for hours can still be fun and challenging instead of miserable. A good sense of humor also helps here.

3) Punctual.

3a) Everyone should be on time and prepared. 39 other people are waiting on you and for many people game time is valueable. If we are starting at 6 show up before 6. Not at 6 and not after 6.

3b) The raid leader should begin the raid on time, even if everyone isn't there. Most instances you can clear trash etc without the entire 40 present.

3c) The raid leader should also end the raid on time. If the raid is supposed to end at 10 then end it then. People need sleep and if raids run too long it hurts everything. Tired people are not as sharp and reflexes get slower. Tired people also might be late to work/school etc making said person unhappy in RL and make them not want to raid with you.

4) Recruitment.

4a) The recruiting process should be a long one. If your group is close knit and spends hours and hours raiding you need to be sure that this person wants in for the right reasons, fits the personality of the guild, has the same goals in game, and their RL schedule works with the appointed raiding times. Applications, causal instancing, trial runs, and then probationary status are all good ways to confirm if someone is a good fit. If it takes 3 weeks then it takes three weeks.

4b) Part of this process too is determining if the person understands his class well. Find out how they are specced and ask questions. Let them defend their build. If they know there stuff and put thought into it then they should do well.

4c) Look at their gear. Is it a random hodge-podge? Their gear is an indication. A motivated individual will spend their time farming good gear with stats and abilities that complement their build.

4d) Asking questions about alternate characters and knowledge of other classes is also a good thing. Playing other classes broadens your knowledge of the roles and importance of the other people in the raid and how they all work together. This is important, as the raid needs to work smoothly together and understand everyone elses role.

5) Your Guild.

5a) Don't overwhelm your guild with tons of people and don't over fill your classes. There is nothing more frustrating than having to sit out of a raid because there are like 100 people and only 40 spaces available. If you spend the right amount of time recruiting you shouldn't have issues with low attendence etc.

5b) Guilds with "mixed" types of players are more difficult to manage and its hard to make everyone happy. Stick to one focus if you want to raid. Everyone or 90% of your guild should be raiders.

5c) The rules of the guild should be clearly written and posted somewhere for reference. This includes recruitement processes, guild goals, processes for displinary action, attendance requirements, loot distribution rules, raid times/schedules etc. Miscommunication and undocumented "rules" are often points of contention.

6) Strategies.

6a) Stratages are fine, but if you use them be careful. Nothing adds more chaos to a new encounter than changing the strategy that everyone has studied mid fight. Be sure that everyone knows what the strategy for your next boss fight is and that everyone has read it. Have a plan B strategy as well, if the first plan really isn't working for you.

6b) There is no law that says you must beat the encounter the way that everyone else does it. Find the way that it works for your group and do it that way.

Those are the highlights anyway for me.

WoW Videos

A bit old, but still funny:

World of Warcraft Community Manager Meeting

My favorite WoW music video. Still the best one I've ever seen. Perfect song for the story:

Here Without You

Soulstones and PvP

I have a warlock alt on a PvP server. One of the interesting/annoying things about warlocks is that if you are killed in world PvP, you will almost always have your corpse camped.

Why? Because they know you have a soulstone. They are just waiting for you to resurrect, and they'll kill you again. You can't even release and run back, because they'll still be waiting at your body. It becomes a waiting game between them and the release timer.

So what does a warlock do? Personally, I minimize WoW, open a web browser, and make a blog entry.

Is +Heal a Mistake?

A very common complaint among healing classes is that upgrading their gear only helps them in one area of the game: raiding. This is in contrast to the DPS classes, where raid gear is often just as good for PvP and farming as it is for raiding.

Perhaps stepping back a bit will provide some perspective. As a caster levels, you often find gear with very specific bonuses: +Fire, +Frost, +Shadow, +Arcane, +Heal. However, as you get closer and closer to 60, the more specific bonuses tend to get subsumed into +damage/heal. At 60, there are essentially only two categories of gear that makes your spells more powerful: +damage/heal, and +heal.

So the gear naturally gets split up into two categories. Damage casters go for +damage/heal, while healers go for +heal. The problem, though, is that +heal does not help you pvp or solo. So healers would also like some +damage/heal gear to make them more effective in non-raiding situations. This starts fights with the damage casters who see +damage/heal as their gear, and healers being in less "need" of it.

Now, imagine if +heal had also disappeared as endgame approached. Or that you wake up tomorrow and every +heal bonus on epic items has been replaced by the equivalent (lower) amount of +damage/heal. What would that change? Obviously, healing spells would be significantly reduced in power. But now healer gear, such as class sets, help in all situations. There is no longer a divide between damage casters and healers, there are only casters. All of whom get the same rights as each other.

Honestly, I think that this would be a much better situation than what we have now. But it would probably be a lot of work to try to retune all the boss encounters to work with a reduced amount of +damage/heal. As unfortunate as it sounds, the best hope is to wait for the Burning Crusade expansion. In BC, Blizzard should phase out +heal as people reach level 70, much like they phased out +fire or +shadow. Then at level 70, all casters will be using +damage/heal, which will allow them to be effective in all areas of the game.

Loot Systems and the Human Factor

A lot of times, when people look at loot systems, they are concerned mostly with the "fairness" of the system. While fairness is important, there are other factors which are also very important. These include factors such as ease of administration, transparency, error detection, and error correction.

In particular, I think ease of administration is greatly undervalued by the WoW raiding community. Many loot systems are complex, and are not trivial to administer. Often they require you to keep track of 40 people, with people coming and going, and loot being distributed. And it's not an easy task, especially for game, where the officers would like to have fun too.

If you have a perfectly fair system, but it is so complex that the loot officer makes mistakes with it, is it still a fair system?

Even the system I proposed in the previous post is complex. Look at all the elements the loot officer must consider. She must make sure that she sees all the bids, which can be very hard when people are spamming raid chat. She must correctly identify both the top bid and the second-highest bid. She must confirm that both these people actually have the DKP that they are trying to bid with. One mistake in any of these areas, and the fairness that the system is striving for is thrown out the window.

And that's just the spending DKP side. There's still distributing DKP to consider, which is its own headache.

Lately, I find myself more and more attracted to loot systems that are robust and easy to administer, even if they can potentially be less fair than other systems. As long as the system is reasonably fair, I would say that it is good enough.

Pricing in Loot Systems

I've been reading this thread on Loot Systems in the Guild Relations forum. It's a pretty interesting read.

There are several issues to consider when designing a Loot Systems. One important one is pricing. There are two main ways of pricing items: fixed prices, or bidding. The problem with fixed pricing is that an item's true value really depends on a number of factors, including class, spec, amount of DKP, guild's progress in endgame, other options available, rarity, etc. At best, a fixed price can only approximate all these factors. For example, I do not have the Illumination talent, and as such, I value [Azuresong Mageblade] a lot less than a Holy paladin would.

As well, getting the price wrong makes your loot system act funny. For example, when my guild killed Onyxia for the first time, we set the price of Onyxia's Head at twice the amount of a Tier 1 set piece. Because no one had really built up significant DKP reserves yet, only one person was willing to take the Head (and I think he did it just so it didn't rot). Now, I'm not saying that the price was absolutely wrong, just at that specific point in time, people considered it to be overpriced. Now, when people have started building up DKP, more and more people are considering it reasonable.

The other option of setting prices is bidding. Bidding generally measures how much a player wants an item for her character. Items go to the player who is willing to pay the most for it. This is an amount which is closer to the item's true value at that point in time.

The problem with bidding is collusion. This is where an item is only valuable to a small subset of the players and that subset agrees to buy the item for a smaller amount than it's true value. They do this in order to save points for when they need to compete against the entire group of players. In WoW, collusion is really attractive because of set pieces. Set pieces provide a ready-made subset of players who know that their collusion will not be interfered with. So all the paladins might collude to spend very little on set pieces, saving their points to outbid the warriors for the uber-2H weapons.

In addition, a strong class-priority system on non-set items will also encourage collusion on those items. If paladins have priority on 2H weapons, there is a strong incentive to collude in order to maximize effectiveness when bidding on healing items available to multiple classes.

I think I prefer bidding systems, though. Allowing the player to determine the value of items for himself is the most effective option, in my view, and one that gives the most power to the player. As well, bidding systems tend to automatically counter problems with inflation, because value can also be expressed as percentage of your current total. If something costs 40 DKP, is it expensive or cheap? If you only have 50 DKP, it's expensive. If you have 500 DKP, it's cheap.

The problem then, is how to resolve collusion in a bidding system.

To resolve collusion, I think the best way is to separate out class sets from non-set items. When awarding DKP, give each player Set DKP, and Non-Set DKP. This way, colluding on set items does not give an advantage when bidding on non-set items. It also has the advantage of ensuring that players can save up for something special, while still improving themselves.

As well, I would not impose class priorities on non-set items, making collusion ineffective there. This has the added advantage of fitting into my philosophical beliefs on character improvement.

So my ideal loot system would feature Set DKP and Non-Set DKP, no class priorities, using a Vickrey Auction (single secret bid, winner pays price of the second highest bid) to determine the actual winner of the loot. I like the Vickrey Auction, because the optimal tactic is to bid your true valuation of the item.

Damage Meters

Another week, another MC run. This one didn't go quite as smoothly as the first, probably due to class imbalance. We had about 8 warriors, 8 paladins, and were very low on actual dps classes. We did get our 8 bosses, but we ran about 20 minutes over our scheduled time of 3 hours. We didn't get any paladin loot, but one of our paladins got a [Vendorstrike].

In any case, I got 3 melee DPS in my group, so I had to healbot most of the instance just to keep them alive. Oh well. I did try to get in some melee.

I also downloaded and tried out a DamageMeter for this raid, just to see if I could quantify my performance. I also respecced (yet again!) to 19/32/0. Curiously, I know (and DamageMeter confirmed it) that I do less DPS with this build, but it feels much more satisfying. I guess I really don't like the whole guessing-game that is Seal of Command.

Anyways, I'm not really sure how accurate the stats are. I have no idea if it synchronized itself with other people, or whatever. But I like my results, so I will pretend it's accurate. Here are some stats that I think are probably the important ones for paladins:

Damage Done: #30, 12% of lead
Healing Done: #2, 88% of lead
Curing Done: #4, 58% of lead
Net Healing: #6, 77% of lead
Overheal %: #40, 14%

Now, the position values are not that useful, mostly because who I'm comparing results to changes. But I'll leave them in just for comparison.

I think the numbers show that I healed a lot. 88% of lead is quite good, even if it drops to 77% when you consider that some of that was healing myself. The damage is low, but understandable in light of the healbotting with a 1H healing weapon. The curing amount is pretty weak. I need to be much closer to the top value. I think part of my problem is that Cleanse has a 30 yard range as opposed to the 40 yard heal range, so I am misjudging distances.

The overheal %, or amount of my heals which were wasted on a target with full health, was really good in comparison to the entire raid (including the non-healers somehow). However, 14% seems a bit high, especially as I wasn't healing tanks for a lot of it. I think the raid in general needs to work on our overhealing, and I would like to get my number down to less than 10%.

So basically, I need to do a bit more damage, heal a little bit less, and cleanse a little bit more. Sounds like a plan.

Interactivity

To me it seems like paladins don't have as wide a range of abilities as other classes. Every other non-dps class has a different set of abilities that it uses while soloing. This makes soloing as interactive as grouping. As well, the game enforces this difference through different means.

Paladins, on the other hand, only use a subset of their abilities while soloing. So soloing is far less interactive than grouping.

Look at warriors. For soloing, they have Battle and Berserker Stances, along with all the associated abilities only used in those stances. Then in group play, they have Defensive Stance and the high threat moves. The different forms enforce the different ability sets.

Druids have different forms (cat, bear, moonkin!) and abilities that they use while soloing. Then in groups, they use a different set of abilities to heal. Like the warrior, the different forms enforce the different ability sets.

Same with Priests. Soloing with a priest is interactive because of abilities like Smite, and various damage spells. Being a priest in a group uses a completely different set of spells. In the priest's case, the different ability sets is more enforced by threat. Mindblast is the perfect example. You don't cast Mindblast in group play because it's high threat. You cast it all the time in solo play.

Shamans have possibly the opposite problem from paladins. In solo play, they can use all their abilities, while in group play they generally use a smaller portion. I believe the game enforces the different ability sets by limiting their mana. A lot of their moves have a high mana cost, making those moves sub-optimal for group play, but perfectly fine while soloing.

A paladin, meanwhile, is pretty interactive in group play. Run in, judge, seal, auto-attack, and then start healing, cleansing, tactical buffing as needed. However, in solo play, it's: run in, judge, seal, auto-attack ... and that's it. The healing, cleansing, tactical buffing that makes paladins somewhat interactive in group play simply doesn't exist in solo play.

The paladin needs a set of moves that it can use in solo play, but CANNOT use in group play.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be that much hope for us. We have no forms, unlike the warrior and druid. We can't be limited by threat, unlike priests, because that would make us godlike tanks. And being limited by mana is at cross-purposes with our highly efficient heals.

Shamans vs Paladins

Onto a controversial topic: Shamans vs Paladins, which one is better? I've never played a shaman to any significant level, only fought against them in PvP, so my impressions of them may be flawed.

In PvE, my thoughts on which are better is a bit complicated. I think a group with paladins is better than a group with shamans. Most people would agree, and say it is because paladin buffs cover the entire raid, while shaman buffs only cover the group. I don't think this is true though. A normal 40-man Alliance raid gets 200 person-buffs (5 paladins x 40 people). A normal Horde raid gets 100 person-buffs (5 shamans x 5 people in party x 4 totems). So on a strict level, shamans give about half the buffs of paladins. However, shamans have far more flexibility with buffs. I believe that they have 16 different totems to chose from. In contrast, paladins only have 6 (and 2 of them are talents). Additionally, the tactical blessings erase the raid blessings, so they are rarely used.

The lower number of buffs is the price the shamans pay for flexibility. I actually think that in terms of number of buffs, Horde and Alliance are reasonably balanced. Alliance covers more people, but with limited choice. Horde covers less people, but has a lot more options available.

In my opinion, the reason an Alliance raid is stronger is because a single Blessing, Blessing of Salvation, is overpowered. Salvation basically allows the Alliance dps and healers to do 20-40% more damage or healing than the Horde equivalent, or never worry about pulling aggro. Quite honestly, Salvation spoils the Alliance. I find that Horde warriors and dps are far more tuned to the nuances of aggro. In fact, I think if you removed Salvation (and Tranquil Air Totem), an Alliance raid would be significantly underpowered compared to a Horde raid.

(As an aside, you often see Horde complaining on the message boards about Blessing of Kings, which amuses me. If you ranked the Blessings in order of importance, Kings is #4 behind Salvation, Wisdom, and Might. It's really only good for tanks, and while it's a strong Blessing, it's not necessary in the same manner as Salvation.)

In PvP, on the other hand, I think shamans are clearly more powerful. They do significant damage, and have a lot more options than a paladin does. Their greatest strength, however, is their mobility. This includes effects like Earthbind Totem. A good shaman has a lot more options that allow them to control the battlefield. The shaman's advantage in PvP is the fact that she has a wide variety of tools. The paladin's advantage is her survivability. A paladin has a few very powerful tools on long cooldowns. A Hammer of Justice may be strictly better than a Shock, but HoJ is once a minute and there is a choice of 3 different Shocks available every 6s.

In my opinion, mobility and flexibility trump survivability and rare powerful effects, especially in games with 30s ressurrection timers. The fact that a shaman can do more damage than a paladin is not what makes her superior. It is the arsenal of options available to a shaman that gives her power.

Comments from any shaman readers are appreciated.

Gorgeous MC Run Today

7 Paladins. 8 Bosses. 3 Hours. 0 Wipes. 1 Portal/Summon chain to get an Aqual Quintessence to put out the last rune.

(Yeah, we're noobs. :) )

I didn't get any loot but it was a ton of fun. The raid leader apparently decided that we were good enough, and started chain pulling like crazy. I don't think I was out of combat at all for the first 20 minutes. I only died once, I think, on Gehennas where I took a 3k Shadowbolt fairly early. I don't think I've ever survived that fight, for some reason. No idea what I'm doing wrong.

I ran around with my [Earthshaker] for the first half, and it was a great deal of fun. Too bad everything in MC is immune to stuns. Though now that I think about it, this could have been really bad during Lucifron when I was Mind Controlled ([Earthshaker] has an AoE stun proc). I'll have to remember that for next time.

The more I run with this guild, the more I feel that paladins meleeing is the best way to go for an Alliance raid. If our paladins had all been standing back and spamming Flash of Light, I think it would have gone much slower and not nearly as cleanly.

Also, a random thought about damage meters. I think an absolute ranking is misleading. For example, in today's raid, the #1 guy had slightly more than 5% of the total damage, and the #10 guy had slightly less than 5%. With such a small spread like that, position is very misleading. I think a much better metric would be % of the #1 person's damage. Someone being position #15 isn't that much of a problem if she's doing 90% of the top person's damage, but it is potentially an issue if she's doing 40%.

But then again, I don't think this guild cares too much about damage meters. As long as we're killing everything, life is good.