By now, your vent chat has surely filled with the pleasant rumble of excitement and chatter about 4.2. New raid content and the promise of wiping your way to victory await millions of eager raiders in the Firelands. All of that slogging through hard modes will finally pay dividends to your most reliable raiders when they step forth into a brand new raid instance. But what about the rest of your raiders, the ones who aren’t consistent or dedicated?
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One recent Blue Post discussed some of the ways that Blizzard has imparted a sense of responsibility to damage dealing classes in raid instances. Slorkuz’s full post had some interesting points about the necessity for damage dealers to respond to mechanics quickly or risk wiping the raid. For instance, Valiona and Theralion have several mechanics that put a tremendous amount of responsibility on the DPS. If your damage dealers fail to respond effectively, chances are you’ll fail the encounter. Further, he partially attributed the difficulty of current raids to the responsibility that is put on the shoulders of DPS in many encounters.
While I agree in principal that putting more responsibility on the shoulders of damage dealers introduces more interesting raid mechanics and shows damage dealers how the other half lives, I think there are some faults with the current approach. One of the major differences between tanks, healers and DPS is that tanks and healers ALWAYS have responsibility in raids and instances. It’s built so deeply into their roles that they are familiar with the burden that hangs around their necks. If a tank/healer make a mistake, everyone else suffers.
DPS on the other hand is rarely put into such a position. If a DPS makes a mistake, the majority of encounters will continue on with very little interruption. There is rarely a time when a DPS is directly responsible for the lives of others in game. As a result, DPS has very little experience with that kind of burden. That’s why new encounters that demand that damage dealers perform crucial tasks are so challenging for raids. You’re asking someone who is used to hanging around the margins to step into the spotlight…and the costs are high when they fail.
Even with that criticism in place, I applaud Blizzard’s effort to try and attribute more accountability to DPS. It often feels like the neglected leg of the stool as an encounter can progress with mediocre DPS but most encounters cannot progress with mediocre heals and tanking. I just wish that Blizzard would associate an opportunity cost to the performance of your DPS rather than a failure penalty. For instance, Blizzard could alter the Engulfing Magic debuff in Valiona and Theralion to a AOE damage debuff instead of a direct damage debuff. This could take some of the teeth out of the encounter while keeping the burden on DPS to move.
Guild Management is a thankless and unpaid job. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t leverage what you’ve learned managing your guild in WOW for a job in real life. Below are some skills that guild management uses in game that are applicable in the real world job market.
Conflict Resolution
A large part of guild management comes down to conflict resolution. At its most basic level, this could mean that you’re settling a disagreement between two or more players. At its most advanced level, you’ll be addressing complex issues that are related to some of the core principles behind your guild. These could include players upset about your raid policies, loot distribution etc. Your ability to effectively manage these situations can be the difference between helping players understand why your policies exist to having raiders be shown the door. Effective management of all varieties of conflict uses the right tool for the right job (oftentimes, the right tool can be more time intensive…which is the reason why you see poorly run guilds have lots of fluctuation in their rosters).
Managing conflict amongst employees uses the exact same tools. Firing anyone is always considered to be the last resort and should only be a conclusion that you reach after having exhausted all other (often time intensive) avenues.
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There are a handful of stereotypes that populate most every raid roster. Below is a quick list of some of the most obvious ones.
The Professor
You’ve seen this raider before. He’s more than happy to talk ad nauseum about the mechanics of a fight. He clears his voice before entering into his speech about the finer points of the fight mechanics and helpfully corrects those who misspoke before him. “That fire actually ticks every 2 seconds…not every 3 seconds. Ironically, the damage is nature damage, not fire damage…”. You can almost hear the weary sighs that follow these useful proclamations. However, this pearl of knowledge would not be complete without the Professor dying to the mechanic that he just explained over vent. He may know every facet of information about the fire mechanic itself..but he is helpless when it comes to not standing in it. A strict vent policy and a wealth of patience will go a long way with this raider type.
The Executor
This player forms the silent majority in the raid (hopefully). He doesn’t frequently talk on vent and rarely pipes up in raid chat. They let their performance speak for themselves. You can usually find these players forming the back bone of your DPS/HPS. Find and stock your raid with these players.
The Silent Failure
These players are the source of constant headaches for raid leadership. “Catnap, please move out of that fire…Catnap, you there…CATNAP!!”. This player will silently fail all night long and is seemingly immune to any efforts that you may make to try and help him avoid dying. Fear these players and try your hardest to weed them out of your raid team.
The Helpful Raider
This player is a shrewd operator, spending his night sending out whispers to other players that they feel are under-performing. Their feedback could range from anything to an impromptu examination of your rotation to an in depth analysis of your talent choices. Maybe this player knows what he’s talking about…but the receiving player hasn’t asked for, nor wants to hear any of this critique. These players can be an irritant to the raid and should have an eye kept on them.
A recent focus of many of my posts has been the amount of content that Blizzard has been releasing, how that amount compares to what they’ve done in the past and the potential reasons why the content has slowed. I think many players feel like there simply isn’t enough content with this expansion and the sentiment that Blizzard is not moving fast enough/producing enough to address players’ concerns is a fairly common opinion expressed on the forums.
That said, it’s always been a principal of mine that you can’t simply criticize something that you see as flawed without providing a solution to the problem. It would be easy to say that the solution is “Hire more artists and engineers!” and call it a day. It feels like we can offer up a more thoughtful solution that is in line with Blizzard’s previous attempts at creating content.
For better or worse, Wrath of the Lich King offered up content to players that they had already seen before. Naxxarams and Onyxia both made triumphant returns and helped to flesh out the amount of raiding content that Blizzard had to offer to players. I propose something similar; there are tons of old instances and raids that are no longer being used. Blizzard could simply start at the oldest raid content and begin tuning it for level 85 raiders. All of the gear in the instances could have their stats adjusted to be in line with gear at level 85.
The advantages to this approach are pretty straight forward. Blizzard wouldn’t have to create any new assets/ animations, encounters or mechanics for any of the fights. The majority of the work would come from tuning the encounters to ensure that new abilities and talents don’t overpower old content. Tuning would also have to be done to ensure that many of the hyper difficult encounters from Vanilla WOW and TBC are not too challenging for players.
The disadvantages to this approach are pretty obvious as well. The main issue here is that many players have seen and played through this content when it was relevant. I personally played through all of the content in TBC and there are some fights that still give me nightmares when I think back (Kael’thas being at the top of the list). Additionally, some may argue that this is simply a band aid over a much more significant problem. Namely, Blizzard’s production pipeline has significantly slowed down and there isn’t much indication that its going to improve.
The approach taken by other games is to allow players to create their own content and then crowd source that content so that the best material is showcased for players (see City of Heroes). What do you all think? Are you disgusted by the notion of playing through old content again or would you rather have more content at the expense of originality?
One item that has gotten a lot of buzz on the PTR is Fandral’s Flamescythe. This item allows Druids to turn into a flaming cat while in Feral form! This is incredibly cool for Druids and I’ve got the feeling that many raiding guilds are going to be up to their ears with flame cats once 4.2 hits. Check out the video here.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, this item got me thinking about the amount of attention and care that they give to specific classes in game. While it’s nice for Druids to get this kind of individualized attention, it makes me wonder why all classes don’t have a dedicated team of artists and engineers devoted to adding slight graphical tweaks to classes? After all, how difficult is it to create and animate assets for existing characters in the game?
For instance, one of my wish list items for Warlocks has been to add in green flames for all Warlock fire attacks. Essentially, this boils down to changing the colors that are already in game for existing spells and abilities. Alternately, what Death Knight wouldn’t want to change the color of their eyes or what Shadow Priest wouldn’t want to alter the color of their Shadow Aura? It feels like with a minimal amount of effort, Blizzard could implement these slight changes and add some interesting choice to classes (Role Players would probably lose their minds for these alterations).
What all of this wool gathering comes down to is what are players’ expectations for $15 a month and what is Blizzard prepared to deliver? For me, some slight visual changes would go a long way towards keeping the graphics fresh and interesting and with the sluggish content release schedule, it could help appease players that would otherwise leave. What small visual changes would you make to your favorite classes?
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