My Holy Setup and Macros

Alright, I've been bouncing around Holy playstyle for a bit now, and I think I've come up with a setup that's making me happy. This is what I'm currently doing in game. I'm not 100% sure it's what is recommended by Elitist Jerks, et al. Last time I looked at EJ, they seem to have gotten distracted by trying to find the maximum possible rate of Holy Power generation. Which, to me, is sort of missing the forest for the trees.

So this is my current setup.

Talent Spec

Current spec and Glyphs: 31/5/5

I take the Word of Glory points, skip Tower of Radiance, and put 1 point in Blessed Life.

Spells

On the Word of Glory side, WoG is really good for tank healing. Even if it does less healing than Light of Dawn, it's much easier to keep a tank up with it. I put Beacon on one tank, and mainly focus the other tank.

Healing-wise, my seal is Seal of Insight naturally. My main rotation is 3pt WoG (or LoD if need more raid healing), then Holy Shock, then a HS-DL macro:

/castsequence Holy Light, Holy Light, Divine Light

What I've found is that if I only use HL as a filler, I spend almost no mana, but it seems to need a little more punch. If I try and use DL as a filler, I go dry very fast. The 2:1 ratio of HL:DL seems to drain mana at a nice rate, while doing a solid amount of healing.

Of course, if you need to bust out DL or FoL for intense healing you still can. I've macro'd Guardian of Ancient Kings with DL, so that the emergency heals start together.

/cast Guardian of Ancient Kings
/cast Divine Light

I've also macro'd my trinkets and Divine Protection to Holy Shock, to get maximum use out of them.

The last macro I use is Holy Radiance and Divine Favor or Avenging Wrath.

/castrandom Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath
/cast Holy Radiance

What this does is trigger one of Divine Favor or Avenging Wrath. It casts whichever one is not on cooldown, or randomly picks one if both are available. I find it's good for spreading out your CDs, while still ensuring that your Holy Radiances are boosted.

Edit: As people have indicated in the comments, this does not work as I intended. The /castrandom can choose the spell on CD, and if that happens then it won't choose a different spell until it casts the original spell.

So that's healing spells. Also don't forget Blessing of Sacrifice and Judge often. I definitely need to improve the amount I judge.

Stats and Gear

Main stat is Intellect. Intellect flask and food.

Secondary stat order: Spirit > Haste > Crit > Mastery.

Reforge Mastery then Crit to Spirit then Haste. Enchants focuses on stats as presented, but get Run Speed to boots.

For gems, I think the stat bonuses are worth it this time around, so red Int gems, orange Int/Haste gems, and blue Int/Spi gems.

Personally, I don't worry about specific gear pieces, just upgrade whenever possible.

Conclusions

So that's my current Holy setup for raids. It seems pretty decent so far.

Heroic Difficulty

Judging from the comments on the last post, I think some people may have misconstrued my sentiments about heroic difficulty. Here's my real thoughts:

Heroics need to be nerfed.

Just so you understand, I've pugged every single heroic. I had full i346 before I got a single piece of raid loot.

Heroics are hard and challenging. But they need to be nerfed.

Why? Because of the space heroics currently occupy in the game. Heroics are a necessary stepping stone to raids. If people fall off the path in heroics, before they ever get to raiding, raiding will be a disaster this expansion. What's the point of 4.1 with new raid tiers if the majority of the playerbase is struggling with heroics?

The decision to release raids with Cataclysm was a total mistake. If raids had not released, heroics would not be a stepping stone, they would be the current endgame. And they are pitch-perfect difficulty to be endgame for a couple months.

But with the route Blizzard took, heroics are not endgame, they're a mere stepping stone to endgame. And they are too difficult for a stepping stone, given the probable timespan to the next major patch. Thus they need to be nerfed to match the proper difficulty for their placement.

Catering to Casuals

So Blizzard is toning down some of the heroics in the upcoming 4.0.6. Personally, I didn't think they were that bad. I've done them all, usually in a PuG. It's not a guaranteed success every run, sometimes you just wipe. But my PuGs have been pretty decent. Still, I wouldn't mind not wincing whenever I see the Stonecore loading screen.

But one nerf is a nerf too far. A veritable slap in the face for all of Blizzard's dedicated players.

The final rope swing while fighting Vanessa VanCleef has been removed. Players no longer need to swing off of the boat at the end of phase 3.

I've broken out the Elitist Jerks spreadsheets, and run numerous sims, and can say with confidence that this nerf results in a 17% decrease in fun for this fight (19% for rogues).

Using my status as a serious Internet pundit, I demand that Blizzard revert this nerf! If they don't, I will threaten to quit (but not actually quit--let's not go crazy here).

(Seriously, what's up with this change?)

Tol Barad

Blizzard has a very interesting post on Tol Barad today. It turns out that Blizzard deliberately made it easier to defend, because they didn't want it to just flip sides, and to make capturing it a more momentous event.

Of course they made it too hard, and they increased the rewards to 10x for the attacking team. Which promptly led to win-trading to maximize honor gained for both sides. Blizzard recently reduced the honor for winning, and Tol Barad seems more or less back to normal.

On a side-note, its interesting to note that the reverse scenario does not produce win-trading, while still encouraging people to fight hard. If defending is harder than attacking, but defending has 10x rewards, you don't get win-trading. This is because winning as defense keeps you in the defensive position. But it doesn't accomplish the goal of making captures a momentous event. It makes a successful defense a momentous event.

First, I really wonder if fiddling with rewards will ever produce the result they want. Can motivation to win really outweigh the mechanical advantage, especially in an ad hoc group?

A commenter at MMO-Champion described the situation as two extremes: either the defending faction always holds Tol Barad, or Tol Barad switches every battle. Blizzard is aiming for something in-between. But it seems like this genre always ends up hugging one extreme or the other, so I'm not sure if Blizzard can hit the mark.

My solution to Tol Barad, given Blizzard's goals, is to leave the map weighted in favor of defense. Then I would add a stacking buff (a la ICC) to the attacking side, Attacker's Resolve. Each time the attackers fail to capture the island, the buff increases. When they do capture the island, the buff resets and goes to the other faction. The amount of honor the defense gets for winning would scale with the buff.

What this does is ensure that eventually the mechanical advantage goes from defender to attacker. It might take a while, and the exact point where the switchover happens is uncertain. Meanwhile, the defenders are always attracted by the honor gain, especially when the buff starts to get high. That means that more attackers can join the battle, since it's one-for-one.

But the defense still needs to win to gain the honor, they can't throw the game, and the attackers are less likely to throw the game because the defenders would remain in the desired position.

(It's possible that a server would come to an agreement to always switch when the buff reaches a certain point, but it's almost impossible to prevent that without making the reward zero-sum. You could remove the reward increase, but that might encourage defenders to stop showing up after a certain point.)

Basically Tol Barad would boil down to an equation. When does:

Attacker Skill + Attacker's Resolve Buff = Defender Skill + Defender Map Advantage

It might be a different point for each server, or be different for different times of the day. But eventually, the attackers would win, and the island would change hands. There would always be hope that this battle would be the tipping point.

Light of Dawn versus Word of Glory

Before this week, I tended to use Word of Glory almost exclusively. Especially with the 40% nerf, it seemed like Light of Dawn didn't really match up. But then I took a look at logs from a raid night. It turned out that WoG didn't actually do that much healing, less than 10% of my total.

It was somewhat concerning, especially when you consider that the standard Holy Paladin build spends 4 talent points and a Prime Glyph to support that single spell. So I experimented with a build that eschews the WoG points, and cast Light of Dawn exclusively.

I think it actually worked out better in terms of total healing done, at least for 25-man raids. It was okay in heroics, but I liked WoG a little better there.

Side Notes:

• Blessed Life contributed about 10% extra Holy Power (70 points to Holy Shock's 736).
• Word of Glory contributed more (170 points) but it meant that I was mostly using Word of Glory. Light of Dawn's total healing was still higher, even with less Holy Power.
• Tower of Radiance barely contributed any points (11 tonight). Partially that's due to my healing style, but right now it's looking like a terrible waste of talent points.
• I've changed my mind on Haste versus Crit. I forgot that one spell, Holy Radiance, does have a straight HPM benefit from Haste. And Holy Radiance does a ton of healing.
• As well, healing feels "snappier" with a lot of haste. It just seems to play better, even if you are spending mana at a faster rate.

So I'm still thinking about the best Holy playstyle. So far, I much prefer using Light of Dawn as the Holy Power finisher, rather than Word of Glory.

I'm considering trying a build like 31/3/7, and seeing how that works.

A Johnny Moment with DK Tanks

WoW theorycraft is pretty straightforward. However, occasionally you stumble across something clever and unusual. Something Johnny would appreciate.

I had one such moment when looking at Death Knight tank theorycraft recently.

I was looking at DK tank builds, and came up with a nice Blood/Unholy build. Then I popped over to Elitist Jerks to see how far off accepted theorycraft I was. I was surprised to the see that the suggested DK tank build went 6 points into the Frost tree to pick up Lichborne.

Spending 6 points to pick up a fear break seemed unusually situational to me. So I kept reading. And it turns out the real reason behind Lichborne is kind of cool.

Lichborne turns you into an undead for 10 seconds. Death Coil can be used to heal undead. And [Glyph of Death's Embrace] makes the heal very cheap.

It all gets combined into a macro that essentially turns Lichborne into a quasi-tank cooldown, helping the DK to heal herself back up after a big hit:

#showtooltip Lichborne
/cast Lichborne;
/cast [@player] Death Coil

Pretty clever, in my opinion. A moment for Johnnies to appreciate.

Tips for Holy Paladins in Heroics

Through a combination of pugging, guild runs, and quasi-guild runs, I've managed to do all the heroics in Cataclysm. They're really good, and moderately hard. They really reward knowing the fight and executing correctly. Here are some tips that may help Holy paladins working on instances.

1. Cleanse - Seriously, Cleanse early, Cleanse often. Cleanse is expensive, so you do have to watch for debuffs that stack faster than you can Cleanse. If you're doing heroics exclusively, I'd strongly suggest Glyph of Cleanse.


2. Run First, Heal After - If you are ever presented with the choice of running to avoid a fight mechanic, or finishing your cast, choose to run. Fight mechanics are far more likely to kill people than straight up damage. As well, practice healing while moving with Holy Shock and Word of Glory.


3. Use Cooldowns - Get into the habit of using your cooldowns religiously. We have 5 cooldowns, in addition to any trinkets: Lay On Hands, Blessing of Sacrifice, Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath, and Guardian of Ancient Kings.
   
   Hand of Sacrifice is pretty strong now. You get a lot of self-healing with Protector of the Innocent, so it usually does not hurt to use it on the tank liberally. I like using it at the start of trash pulls when it's up.
   
   Use the shorter cooldowns on trash. They'll come back up in time for the bosses. I generally like alternating Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath on trash pulls. Use cooldowns at the start of the pull, when you have the most mobs beating on the tank.
   
   Lay on Hands is very powerful. It essentially resets a tank's health to full, and gives you a chunk of mana with the Glyph. Use it aggressively on boss fights, especially when it feels like you've fallen behind.
   
   Guardian of the Ancient Kings casts the same single-target spell on the same target that you do. Ideally, you want to use Divine Light to maximize the healing done when your Guardian is up. I like popping GoAK at about 20%-ish, to stabilize the fight and bring it home. But use it aggressively and early if you need to.
   
   I also don't like overlapping cooldowns. Unlike DPS, it feels like you get more time with stronger heals if you spread them out.
   
   Use cooldowns aggressively, and don't be afraid to "waste" them.


4. Resistance Aura - My aura of choice is Resistance Aura. Things just seem more stable when Resistance Aura is up. As well, you can use Aura Mastery as an extra cooldown during periods of mass damage. I do switch to Devotion Aura if there is no Fire, Shadow or Frost damage in the fight, but that's pretty rare. Raid damage tends to be magical.


5. Judge Often - try and judge as often as you can, especially on adds. It's extra damage and helps keep your mana high.


6. Use Holy Radiance to Move Faster - The talent Speed of Light increases your run speed when you cast Holy Radiance. A lot of times, the entire group will need to move because they are taking damage. If you pop Holy Radiance as you start moving, not only will you heal people as they take damage, but you will move out of the fire that much faster.

Those are some tips for paladin healing in heroics. The biggest thing though, is familiarity with the fights. Once you know what to do, they become a lot easier.

Any other tips for Holy Paladins?

Haste Versus Crit for Holy Paladins

In all the theorycraft for Holy paladins I've seen so far, everyone automatically values Haste above Critical Strike chance. I'm not really sure I follow this logic.

Haste improves your Healing-Per-Second (HpS). But it also hurts your Mana-Spent-Per-Second (MpS), and does not change your Healing-Per-Mana (HpM). Crit, on the other hand, improves your HpS and HpM, but does not change your MpS, at least not directly.

Right now, it seems to me that the real limit on healing is mana. Therefore we should be valuing stats which improve HpM above all else.

It's true that you can't count on crit in the short term, but you can count on it in the long run. In the current environment, one heal isn't enough to restore someone to full health. In that environment, crit helps a lot. It buys you time, and allows you to get away with casting less spells. If you need three casts to bring someone up to full, and one of the first two spells crit, maybe you don't need to cast that third spell.

If you need high HpS, that's Flash of Light and Divine Light are for. Haste was awesome for the world when you absolutely need the heal to hit right now or the tank dies. But I find that I don't really encounter that situation, at least in heroics. Or if it's close to that, Holy Shock, Word of Glory, and Flash of Light are fast enough already.

What I've found in heroics is that I really, really want to see spells crit. A crit spell usually means that I don't have to cast a follow-up spell on that target, and I can move onto the next target in triage faster.

So that's my view on crit versus haste. As of right now, I think I'd rather take crit gear over haste gear. I just don't think the advantages of haste gear are of real value in the current healing environment.

A couple of caveats, though. I haven't tried any raids, so I don't know if this changes. Second, this is just haste versus crit. Spirit is still the best secondary stat, while I think the jury is still deliberating over Mastery.

Twilight Highlands, Heroic Grim Batol

So it seems that no one cares about spoilers, so I'll just not worry about them. I will tag posts with info about what will be spoiled.

This post contains minor spoilers about Twilight Highlands.

So I finished Twilight Highlands, which was an outstanding zone. Quite honestly, it redeemed the rest of the expansion for me. The Wildhammer questline was superb, as was the Maw of Madness line and the initial questline. Oh, and the dragon line. Actually, pretty much everything was awesome.

As well, I think that [The Worldbreaker] may quite possibly be the single finest quest in the game. The only word to describe that quest is elegance. That was immersion on so many levels. For me, it evoked the exact reaction in myself that it was intended to invoke in my character. Seriously, this was utterly brilliant, and would be extra-ordinarily hard to replicate in another medium.

With respect to Roger Ebert, WoW approached art right there.

Also, I did my first heroic dungeon today. I signed up for regular Grim Batol, which I hadn't done before, intending to do the dungeon quests. We did the first trash pack, and I thought that Grim Batol seemed a bit harder than the other instances. Then the tank said he was in Holy gear, so I figured that explained it. He changed to tanking gear, we keep going and it doesn't seem to get easier. Then someone says something, and I realize I accidentally signed up for Heroic Grim Batol!

It wasn't that bad. We wiped a bunch on the first and third bosses, but one-shot the second and fourth. Really, once you learn how to do the fights, they're pretty straightforward. Mana is a bit of an issue, but using a core of Holy Shock, Word of Glory and Holy Light, then sprinkling in Divine Light and Holy Radiance as necessary worked pretty well for me.

Cataclysm Impressions

So how was your first week of Cataclysm? I've hit 85 on Coriel, and have done Hyjal, Vashj'ir, Deepholm, and Uldum. I'm currently working on Twilight Highlands. I've done several of the normal dungeons, but haven't yet tried heroics.

For zones, Hyjal was pretty decent. There was one major story element I disliked, but other than that the zone was well done. I'll talk about that element in a future post. I did like that the "torture" quest in Hyjal introduced options, including the choice to kill or let the target go.

I didn't really like Vashj'ir. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it was the pervasive "blueness". The Battlemaiden quests were very nice. Upcoming raid boss, hopefully. :)

Deepholm was okay, but rather middle-of-the-road. I do find it interesting how Blizzard is moving to differentiate shaman from druids, lore-wise. Especially with the introduction of goblin shamans, shamanism appears to be moving in a more "muscular" direction. More about controlling the elements, rather than working with them.

Uldum was ... almost amazing. That's probably an odd reaction to have. The thing is that there is this trend I've noticed with Cataclysm quests (will talk about it in another post), but that trend is making quests less enjoyable for me, and it was quite pronounced in this zone.

The dungeons are interesting. The bosses are well done, and becoming more and more like mini-raid bosses than ever before. I rather like the new emphasis on healer mana. It's not a big issue early on, but becomes much more obvious in the 85 dungeons. It's also amazing what a big difference "aware" DPS makes to healing now. It's like night and day.

Also, ranged dps, please stop moving behind the paladin healer. Try and stand in between the healer and the tank.

However, I'm not sure I like getting mana back on Judgement. I know I've argued for it in the past, but after seeing it in play, I think I was wrong. It creates this feeling that I *have* to judge on cooldown, when I'd rather focus on keeping my group up. Especially with the Judgement cooldown being 8s. I don't mind Judging once every 20 to 30 seconds or once a minute like in previous expansions. It didn't seem to play such a large role in the healing rotation. But at 8 seconds, it quite spoils the rhythm of healing.

Finally, what do you think of spoilers? I know I've been intentionally vague in some of the descriptions above to avoid spoiling things. Personally, I hate spoilers with a vengeance. But at the same time, it's really hard to discuss stories without discussing the ending.

New Quest Mobs

The new "quest" mobs are rather interesting. Blizzard seems to have added a level in-between normal mobs and elite mobs. The new mobs are named, are the target of certain quests, and have a little exclamation mark beside their portrait.

So far, I've found that these mobs are reasonably challenging (at least for someone in quest greens, no heirlooms, and of roughly equal level). They aren't as hard as elites would be. The quest mobs generally have about twice as much health and one or two special moves. I don't think they do much more damage than a regular mob, the main difference I've noticed is that they last longer, which does make the fight more dangerous.

(Although my lowbie night elf mage got rocked hard by Ruuzel. Death grip + knockdowns on a short timer is harsh against a caster. I'll have to give it another try tonight.)

These quest mobs are clearly pitched as a small challenge for a solo player. A solo mini-boss, if you will, as opposed to elites which are aimed at groups. I think the new mob type is a good addition to the game.

Commentary on the Reputation System

From an Informational Pamphlet found in Westfall:

Give a man a tabard and he will pledge his undying loyalty to your cause. These men are now government sheep who care not for your hardships. They wear the tabard of their leader and care only for what he desires.

-V

Well played, Blizzard. Well played, indeed.

(The new Westfall is *awesome*. Don't read spoilers or anything, just go do it now.)

Inscription and the Player Market

One of the most interesting things happening in Cataclysm/4.0 is a change to Inscription. Glyphs are now permanent one-time purchases, but changing glyphs requires a [Vanishing Powder] (for 80 or lower) or a [Dust of Disappearance] (for 81+ characters).

What is really interesting is that both items can be crafted by scribes, but they are also sold by NPC vendors. Vanishing Powder is extremely cheap from the NPC, but it looks like a single Dust of Disappearance will cost 10g or so.

To me, it looks like Blizzard is experimenting with setting an upper bound on the player-to-player marketplace. If supply and demand lead to an auction house price of less than 10g, players will buy Dust of Disappearance from the marketplace. But if the price rises to above 10g, then people will switch to buying from the vendor.

This is really the first time that we have seen this behavior in WoW. Normally, NPCs serve as the lower bound for selling items on the AH. If the AH price of an item drops below the NPC price, you sell the item to the NPC instead.

I expect that Blizzard is doing this to keep the Auction House accessible to everyone. Buying and selling on the Auction House is fun, but if prices are too high, that makes the game less fun for the subset of the population with less gold. Theoretically, the upper bound serves as a brake, ensuring that no matter what happens to the market, necessary items are always available at a known maximum cost.

It's also possible that we may see a similar pattern for Enchanting Vellums. Currently there's only one type of vellum, and it is available from vendors for cheap. A second, higher-level vellum for an upper-bound price would mimic the same structure as glyph dusts.

Edit: I forgot one other aspect. On a low-population server, there are occasional shortages of items on the Auction House, just because there are fewer crafters, and the entire stock of an item gets bought out before a crafter can replenish it. When I played on Lethon, this would sometimes happen with flasks. It was never a permanent thing. Having the Dust being sold on an NPC guarantees that it is always available, that you are never completely blocked from changing glyphs.

New Starting Areas

Since I can't decide on what to do, I've just been making new characters and running through the first 5 levels in the new starting areas. They're very well done. A smooth introduction to the game, and several deft nods to experienced players.

Orc - They're introducing the human/orc conflict really early. It's an interesting choice. Otherwise very similar to the old version. Waking lazy peons is still the highlight of the early orc experience.

Dwarf - Nicely streamlined, with integration of the Dark Iron mages and warlocks. Of course, everyone rolled dwarf shaman. I don't think I saw a single dwarf mage or warlock.

Night Elf - They only make you run up to the top of the tree once, at the very end. And they give you a Slowfall buff so you can jump down! As well, the moonwell quest lore is now more in the game world, rather than quest text.

Tauren - The quillboar killed the Greatmother! I liked this the best of the starting areas I tried.

Gnome - Very well done. An interesting story, and lots of gnomish moments. Oddly, this was the hardest starting area. I almost died several times fighting troggs, as they hit hard and I kept getting attacked by multiples. They also have a knockdown, which didn't help. (I was playing a priest, so was a little squishy.) I did actually die during the final battle, as I got swarmed with little guys, and didn't use the special device properly, I guess. Still kind of shocked that I managed to die in the first five levels.

Haven't tried the others yet, but I probably will give the rest a whirl tomorrow.

The Shattering

So Blizzard came out with a major patch, and the servers came up ahead of schedule. Guess it really is the end of the world.

Kidding aside, props to the Blizzard operations team (or whatever they're called). Smoothest launch of a major patch (considering the entire world was remade) I've ever seen.

Though I'm kind of sad, I was planning a post which was nothing but an embedded video of Greyfoo's Happy Patch Day.

As for the actual patch day, I'm paralyzed by indecision. I rolled a dwarf shaman, then a night elf mage, then logged on Coriel and wandered around Stormwind looking at all the changes. (Harrison Jones is the archeology trainer!) I really like the Stormwind cemetery.

The redone class quests were interesting. No more Verigan's Fist! I think that shocked me more than all the other changes I saw. The new quest models are nice and shiny, but still, it's Verigan's Fist! Using the T1 helms for the level 50 quest is a nice touch, but Lawbringer is going to look so out of place.

I really can't decide between doing all the new quests on my main, just for all the achievements and lore, or rolling an alt and taking the alt through all the new content.

Edit: Also, welcome to all the new Tauren paladins out there!

Note to Commenters: Political Jabs

I do not like these small jabs at politicians or political parties in non-political conversations. They mar what are otherwise perfectly fine comments. I consider these jabs to be impolite and lacking in grace.

Accordingly, from now on I will be deleting any comments that contain unrelated political jabs, regardless of the quality of the rest of the comment.

Followup To Raiding Styles

From the comments on the last post.

Spinksville:

One issue with focus though is how new raiders will learn the ropes. It used to be that older learning instances were still in the rotation (so you'd join a guild which ran them). If people are coming straight in to the latest raid, where do the learning instances fit in?

I am beginning to wonder if new raiders actually need learning instances. I think that on the institutional, or guild level, learning instances are important. But for an individual raider, it seems like individual raiders can learn quickly when integrated into an already experienced group.

Yeah, they don't know the tricks and shortcuts. You can't go "This boss is like Chromaggus crossed with Illidari Council". But individuals not having done the learning instances doesn't seem to have significantly hurt, at least in my experience. It's actually kind of shocking to go into Ulduar with someone you think is an extremely experienced raider, and she starts picking up the basic achievements.

This is just the individual level, though, and on Normal modes. Exposure to the experienced group seems more important than exposure to previous content. However, I'm not sure throwing a group of people who have never raided before into ICC will really work.

Gevlon:

There are middle ways like: standard progression but every month all existing raids get a 5% ICC-like buff. So imagine the old MC-BWL-AQ40-Naxx way, but one year after start MC has a +60% heal, HP, damage buff and BWL has +30%.

I think this kind of cuts against the whole progression idea. The idea is that every group encounters content in more or less the same difficulty. I really don't see any difference between getting i251 gear and going back a tier vs a 60% buff.

If there's going to be a 60% buff, why bother making them do the old content at all? May as well just point them to the current content content and tell them to have at it.

Codi:

I don't understand how the WotLK raiding system helps people see more content by skipping to the last raid of the cycle.
...
In both styles, you are not seeing content. So I don't understand at all how that somehow becomes a part of equation.

The difference is in Wrath, you don't do earlier content by choice. Your ICC guild can always go back and run through Naxx and Ulduar for fun. Odds are you'd be able to complete it fairly easily. My own guild did Yogg+1, Yogg+0, and got someone a Valy'nar at the end of the expansion.

In Vanilla/TBC, the upstream content was pretty much blocked. Once a guild was stuck, it was stuck. There was no aspect of choice involved at all.

Kadaan:

If MC was dropping 6 items per boss instead of 3 when AQ40 came out, new players and less progressed guilds would have been able to catch up faster without getting a free skip-all-old-content pass.

I don't think I agree with this. In my experience, by the time your guild reaches a boss, you have enough loot to beat that boss (excluding edge cases with the Royalty guilds). Loot is very rarely the true stalling factor.

Now, you can use loot to overpower fight, but that generally requires loot from higher tiers. The current tier of loot is almost never enough. If you are stuck on a boss in a progression-style, the kill usually comes through improved execution or an improved strategy.

Do Hard Modes change things?

One thing to consider is that Vanilla/TBC didn't have hard modes. It's quite possible that the guild-killer bosses we all know and love would really be a Hard Mode in the Wrath environment. Perhaps the Normal mode progression chain would be enough to keep guilds from stalling out.

Obviously a lot of the Aristocracy and Gentry guilds would leave Hard Modes unfinished when the next tier came out. And a new guild would probably ignore Hard Modes altogether until it got caught up. They would do Naxx-normal, Ulduar-normal, TotC-normal, and ICC-normal. There really isn't a Vael or a Vashj in that path to really get stuck on.

Other issues and thoughts

But that doesn't solve the recruitment issue. For a guild in the ICC tier, being able to recruit relatively new 80s is a huge boon. It makes life a lot easier than poaching from the TotC or Ulduar guilds would be. But if progression is in place, if you need to do TotC before ICC, then obviously an ICC guild must recruit someone in a TotC guild, or run old content to gear them up.

Maybe a different change would help. What if, when TotC came out, Naxx gear was automatically upgraded to Ulduar ilevel? And when ICC came out, Naxx and Ulduar gear was upgraded to TotC level? This would mean that Naxx and Ulduar are not entirely obsoleted. But perhaps Naxx would become the zone of choice, because it is easier than the other two but would provide the same reward.

Raiding: Progression or Single-Focus?

In Vanilla and TBC, the raiding endgame was based around the idea of progression. A guild did Molten Core first, and after they moved on to Blackwing Lair, then AQ40, and finally Naxxramas. This was the pattern guilds and players followed regardless of when they started. A new guild or raider was expected to start in Molten Core and move their way upwards.

In contrast, Wrath raiding was based around a different idea: focus on the current tier. In general, at any given time the community--including newer raiders and guilds--focused on the most recent tier. When TotC was released, that was what everyone did. When ICC came out, everyone went for ICC. You could essentially solo your way, gear-wise, to the entry point for the most recent tier.

So which style was better?

Progression Style

To me, they both have strengths and weaknesses. Progression felt natural and organic. You moved through the raids and as you got better you did harder raids. You experienced each tier of content in roughly the same difficulty as it was intended. There was this sense of "being on the path" which really doesn't exist any more.

But on the other hand, guilds often got stuck on the path. There would come a boss or point which you just could not beat with your current guild, and that was that. And very few guilds actually got a chance to see the last couple tiers. The vast majority of guilds stalled out a lot earlier.

Secondly, I don't think recruitment was healthy in the Progression era. In order to sustain itself, a guild had to pick up people at the same level or just below to keep going. That meant that the high-end guilds poached the better players from the tier of guilds below them, and that tier in turn poached from below them. Players were always moving up from guild to guild, because they had to join a better guild in order to see newer content.

I know that in Wrath, a lot of the Royalty guilds have been complaining that recruiting has gotten harder, but I have no sympathy for them. Previously, they had their pick of good players, because joining a Royalty guild was the only way a player could see content like Naxxramas. Now, a good player doesn't have to leave her guild just to see new content.

Current Tier Focus Style

The Wrath model also has strengths and weaknesses. It's greatest strength was that a much larger percentage of the player base got to see the newest content. If you raid at all in Wrath, you've gotten to see ICC, and quite possibly have gotten to see the Lich King. Compare that with the percentage that saw Kil'jaeden or Kel'thuzad.

Second, I think it may have made recruitment, and bringing in alts, easier for lower tier guilds. They didn't lose people to the high end guilds as often, and newer recruits can solo to a reasonable entry point for raiding. We don't have to carry people through a lower tier to gear them up like we used to.

I really think that it has also made raiding guilds that target a shorter number of raid days or more casual atmosphere a lot more viable than they were in Vanilla/TBC.

However, the Current Tier Focus style does have downsides. First, the lower tiers of raid content got obsoleted. Very few people do Naxx and Ulduar now. And that means that raiding isn't quite the shared experience that it used to be. For instance, all raiders in Vanilla went through Molten Core. If I say "Loot the Hound", every single person who raided in Vanilla understands me. Whereas if I comment about the Heigan dance, there are players in ICC right now who won't know what I am talking about.

Or difficulty-wise, pretty much everyone who did BWL understands the challenge of Razorgore or Vael, because we all did it at more or less the same difficulty. But someone who gets taken to Ulduar now, in full i264 gear, just doesn't experience it in the same fashion as those of us who did it when it was the current focus.

The other major downside is that this model is very sensitive to the amount of time that an instance exists as the current tier. It is very arguable that the Wrath experience would have been a lot better if Ulduar had lasted for 2-3 more months, TotC 1 less month, and ICC maybe 1-2 less months. TotC was actually the current instance for longer than Ulduar.

In the Progression style an instance was "current" for as long as you were working on it, which is pretty much the ideal amount of time. You want just enough time to beat it, and maybe farm it a couple of times to finish off your set, before the new instance opens. Unfortunately, that amount of time is completely different from group to group.

Conclusions

So which style would you pick? As much as I liked the Progression style, I would much rather have the Current Focus style. The people at Elitist Jerks are very much in favor of the Progression style, but I think they suffer from survivor bias. It was a lot less fun for those of us in the lower tier to get stuck and lose players to the upper guilds.

Or worse, to have to choose to leave the guild and people that you liked because you knew that if you didn't, you would not see new content at all. For all the flaws of the Current Focus style, pretty much every guild that raids regularly can see all the content that Blizzard creates.

Outvoted

I saw this Frostheim story making the rounds, and I've wanted to comment on it, but didn't really find the right words until today.

For those who don't know, Frostheim is some kind of hunter personality. He writes for WoW Insider occasionally, and runs Warcraft Hunter's Union, a big hunter guild. Apparently Frostheim joined a random Dungeon Finder group, saw that it was Old Kingdom, and announced in party chat that he did not have time to do the optional bosses. The other party members did not say anything. Later on, the other four went to do an optional boss. Frostheim went off on his own and attempted to solo the last boss. The boss managed to get the rest of the group into combat and the group wiped. Drama ensued.

In my view, there were three mistakes made during this fiasco:

1. Frostheim should not have signed up for a dungeon if he didn't have time to complete it.

2. The group should have decided about the optional bosses at the start and communicated that decision to everyone. Then people could leave if they were unhappy.

3. Frostheim should not have gone off from the rest of the group.

In any case, the main point I want to make is:

Sometimes, you get outvoted.

Sometimes, you're in a group, and the majority of the group wants to do something that you don't want to do. The right thing to do is either leave the group, or follow their lead.

There is no shame in losing the vote. "I wanted Y, but more people wanted X, so we did X" is okay. It leads to a functioning group or society. "I wanted Y, but more people wanted X, so I attempted to force them to do Y" just leads to strife.

But a lot of people seem to take being outvoted personally. Like it's a judgement on you as an individual, and it's vital for you to "win" at all costs. And this seems to be happening not only in WoW, but society at large.

For example, take all these schemes to introduce new voting systems like Single-Transferrable-Vote. I can't shake the feeling that the backers feel they can't win normally, and so are trying to rig the game so that they can magically win. We all know Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, so why try and make life more complicated?

Though, to be fair, I am unreasonably conservative on the subject of voting. I disapprove of absentee voting, computerized voting, machine voting, assisted voting, write-in candidates, punching holes in ballots, internet voting, non-secret voting, counting votes by machine, butterfly ballots, releasing results to the media before voting closes, and pretty much anything that is not going to a polling station and marking an X on a paper ballot beside the name of your preferred candidate.

Anyways, went a bit off-topic, but the point remains: when you're in a group, sometimes you get outvoted. You either leave the group, or you abide by the results. Of course, this isn't absolute if we're talking about something like slavery, but for the vast majority of life, it's a pretty good rule to follow.

Nostalgia and 10s vs 25s

As most readers know, I'm a 25-man raider. It's not that I dislike 10s, it's more that I just don't care about them. A lot of other people do care, though, enough that's it worthwhile to have 10-man raids exist.

But to me, 10-man raids are UBRS¹. I did UBRS a lot, before I started raiding. It was fun and all, but it was just UBRS.

25s are Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. The grail, the goal. When I think of 25s, it seems to tap into that line of instances.

I'm not really going anywhere with this train of thought. But really, I don't think there's any real, logical reason I prefer 25s to 10s.

I do think that for the Royalty guilds, the Paragons and Premonitions, 25s will provide a greater challenge than 10s. But for someone at my level, I think a tuned 10-man can be just as challenging as a 25-man.

I do like working within a sub-team, having a healer channel, etc. Yet it's also nice being part of the entire team.

But still, at the end of the day, 10s are UBRS and 25s are Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. The patterns laid down in our youth are hard to break.

1. Upper Blackrock Spire. But really, it's UBRS.