Are you an Alliance DPSer looking for a new sassy, stable, "casualcore" home for ICC?
Check out my guild, Machiavellis Cat!

The great tragedy of healing is that the better your team gets, the more boring it becomes. It’s been said many times that while DPS can strive for bigger and better results on farm bosses, healers just see their numbers dwindle. Easy farm content leads to boredom, and in my guild bored healers lead to trouble. All of us enjoy the crazy chaotic fights with lots of running and stuff to do. Healychat after the first couple of Festergut wipes read like wide-eyed kids in a candy store: “Did you see that? There’s so much raid damage. It’s .. it’s AWESOME.”

This is particularly applicable to LFG pugs at the moment. Given a halfway decent tank, I can get away with Prayer of Mending and a shield or two, leaving me to space out and spin around in my chair for half the instance. So what’s an overgeared healer to do? SMITE!

I know a lot of healers queue up with DPS gear and specs now to help out with damage, but I’m not that brave. I burn through mana really quickly in my shadow set, and my hotbars and keybindings are all wrong for the kind of panicked “oh shit” healing that might be required. Besides, you never know how good your next Heroic tank will be. Instead, I like playing the Battle Priest, Smiter Extraordinaire. I’ve beaten DPS on many a pull, which is vastly more entertaining than dancing in the back of the room.

The secret to healer dps is this macro, which you probably already have in use somewhere:

/cast [harm,nodead][target=targettarget,harm,nodead] SpellName

Set up all your offensive spells to use this macro. Now you can DPS a mob without ever leaving your friendly target — instead it will hit your target of target. I use this to pop shadow word: pain, devouring plague, and shadow word: death on a boss as much as possible (assuming you can give up the GCDs). Hey, every bit helps, and I’m pretty sure my 200 DPS on Rotface was what put us over the top. Totally.

Anyway, this can be used with smite too, which is your friend on pugs. Throw SW:P on anything, and pop devouring plague and SW:D on the big baddie. Is there a single target? PoM and shield your tank, and Smite away! Is it a pack pull? Oh, you lucky dog, it’s MIND SEAR time. I love mind sear. I love it so much. All the tanks in my guild can testify to my love of mind sear, as it’s killed them each at least once. (What? I can’t stop and heal you, I’m clearly MIND SEARING. Duh.)

It helps to have a bit of +hit. I have 70 incidentally from a wand and offhand in my main gearset, which is good enough for me. The hit cap for Heroic bosses is about 130 for Alliance and 160 for Horde, not that it’s a huge concern.

A well geared healy priest can easily pull down 1-2k DPS during a Heroic (again, assuming a good tank), which means that you will clear the instance that much faster. Being a Heroic Battle Priest and occasionally beating Mr. Mouthy Noob Hunter on the charts has made LFG much, much more fun.

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Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic: Feed it a WoW macro, and it will explain what the heck is going on in those many square brackets. Oh, clever website!

Healing, WotLK LFG, priest

Almost a year ago I posted a screenie of us wiping on Sarth-3D and talked about the various elements of my UI. It seemed to me that an update was in order, so for a change here is a screenie of us wiping to Heroic Anub!

The style is pretty strongly inspired by the Parasol Edition of Tapestry UI, but the fundamental elements haven’t changed over the last year. I have a middle stack of buttons, Grid, and user frames, and a big black text box in the corner. There are a few changes under the hood, however.

Out: Pitbull, In: Stuf
Pitbull was always a huge memory hog, so I was happy to find a suitable replacement in Stuf. One thing both mods suffer from is too many options — given infinite time and patience, you could make your user frames look like almost anything. Pitbull addressed that somewhat with the in-game template features, while with Stuf you just overwrite the LUA file. It can be tough to source attractive frame files, though, and it’s a little intimidating for someone with limited mod experience. Once you get it set up, it looks good and has very low overhead.

Out: Buffalo, In: Satrina Buff Frames
I enjoyed my cute tiny buff/debuff icons for years, but at some point during a couple tiers of LK raiding I got tired of having to squint to see how long I had left on Thaddius’ polarity and such. I could have just set up Buffalo to do that, but I figured I may as well take the opportunity to finally update to a more current add-on. SBF does everything you would expect, with low overhead, and a few extras. (I like being able to turn off things like Heroic Presence, for example.)

Out: BigWigs, In: Deadly Boss Mods
Huge upgrade. DBM has, in my experience, more complex timer available and gives more information to the player than BigWigs. Additionally, DBM works in some 5-man situations (it will time Make It Count for example) and by default has timers for important events in Battlegrounds like graveyard captures. No contest, DBM wins.

Best in Show: Power Auras
Oh, Power Auras. Tough to set up, but once you do you will possibly never find a mod that is so useful to every class in so many ways. “All” Power Auras does is put the symbol of your choice (including size and color) on the screen at a pre-set time or condition. For example, see that little green symbol to the left of my body in the screenie? That means I have three stacks of Serendipity up. It’s just a simple graphic that goes red, yellow, or green appropriately, but it makes a huge difference as to the next spell I cast. The flexibility to add even more clear, concise symbols to my game play in the future, in any way I need, makes this a pretty powerful add-on.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hmm, one tiny change in my philosophy of add-ons I guess: I just noticed that I’m not running a DPS meter in the 2009 raid screenie, whereas it has a place of prominence in my UI now. How odd. Did I turn it off for the shot in an attempt to be modest? Or was I actually not running one? Perhaps I’ve gotten more numbers-focused in the last year.

Technical Issues mods

Look, let’s just put this in big bold letters up front so everyone knows where I stand: DO NOT NERF PLAGUE WORKS FOR A LONG TIME. Thank you.

I should hasten to add that we haven’t killed any of the three new bosses yet, so I am hardly speaking from a position of uber superiority. In fact, we wiped to Festergut 11 times on Tuesday, getting him as low as 3% once. And when we kill him tonight, as I suspect we will if everyone is on the ball, it will feel really good.

Everyone who has ever raided knows how good a first boss kill can feel. That rush is proportionate to how much work you put in to killing him. I remember after five weeks of slogging away on Kael, I literally teared up when he finally died. That feeling when the boss you’ve been banging your head against falls down and Vent erupts in cheers — that’s the rush of raiding. I like to improve my character and hang with my friends, but that boss kill is the real kernel of raid satisfaction.

That satisfaction has been sorely missed by “average” raid guilds such as mine.

Oh sure, there are Heroic modes, and we do a fair number of them. Some are unique fights in their own right, like Sarth-3D, and very challenging. But most are just the same old boss you have already fought three different ways, only with everything scaled up. I killed Gormok in normal 10s, heroic 10s, normal 25s, and now I can kill him while he hits the tank for 40k? Awesome. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not very interesting.

Meanwhile, normal modes in ToC-25 were so easy that we were clearing the place in an hour by our third run. I remember when we would be all excited to get a screenie of us standing around the corpse of a new boss, but with ToC it was hard to feel like we’d actually done something until we just finished the place. Even the first wing of ICC was a little underwhelming, at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, the boss mechanics are interesting, the setting is neat, and I get to shackle things, but none of the kills gave that sense of accomplishment.

Then along came the Plague Works. It was incredibly fun: fresh new content, and a boss that at our level requires solid concentration, effort, and teamwork from everyone involved. Our team has been buzzing since Tuesday, too. People are analyzing the raid logs, posting on the strategy threads, and shoring up any holes in their gear. There are places to go and things to kill.

Back in TBC we were very happy to have a new boss down every two weeks. Fourteen days! And we liked it! I understand that Blizzard wants to get away from elaborate fights like our five week effort to kill Kael’Thas, and I’m not entirely opposed to that. But give us some challenge. Give us a reason to be good (and get better) at what we do. Give us the occasional morsel of fresh content that we can’t just brute force into the ground, and I suspect that you, my dear Blizz, will find many satisfied customers. For the moment, I am one of them.

Raiding Ruminations ICC, raiding, rants

As discussed previously, I am really picky about who I invite to the guild, and my methods are possibly equally mysterious. For me, gut instinct has the greatest weight in recruitment decisions, even more so than previous experience or gear or even application personality. If I think something is off, then 99% of the time that person is completely sunk for an invite. And if my gut is telling me that they’d be right

So given my fairly arbitrary recruitment standards (”Do they make Liore happy?”), it might be surprising that there are a few things someone can do to not even be considered as an applicant.

1. You have a stupid name.
“Stupid” is defined as borderline offensive, horribly misspelled, or with an excessive number of umlauts. Yes, this probably isn’t fair, but there you go. I am a big English Major elitist bastard, and I would be really sad to see “XxDeathNightxX” running around with my guild tag. It should be noted that really awesome people can overcome this barrier to entry. In fact, a long time ago I reluctantly invited a fellow who was amazingly nice but.. oh.. that name. He’s been a guild officer for at least a couple of years now, so I think it worked out in the long run. /grin

2. You ask me what our website URL is, or something that is obviously on the site.
All guild leaders like to think that their guild is a unique and special snowflake. It doesn’t matter if it’s a raiding guild or a leveling guild or a PVP guild or whatever, we all think ours is the best around (or we wouldn’t be running it, right?). I certainly don’t want or ask for obsequiousness from apps, but I do like to see a basic acknowledgment that you want to join MY guild in particular. This means you shouldn’t ask me what our website URL is, or any information that is plainly listed on the front page of said site. You want to know our web address? Go type “Machiavellis Cat” or even just “Liore” into Google. You do know the name of our guild, right?

3. Don’t immediately launch into an angry story about how you were mistreated in your old guild.
I like to assume that most guild leaders are reasonable sorts who mean well. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but there you go. If you introduce yourself to me with a tirade about how you were never invited on raids because of the stupid core clique, or how you left when you didn’t get a drop that you deserved, or whatever, I am probably going to wonder how much of it was your fault. Also, weird questions like, “Do you have attention-seeking girls in your guild? I hate those,” while possibly genuine, will likely induce concern on my part. (If you have been burned by guilds in the past and want to avoid that, try asking positive questions instead of ranting. “What is your raid roster policy?” or “Are initiates eligible for loot?”.)

4. I don’t care about your GearScore.
I really, really don’t. I’ve never installed the mod, and I never will install the mod. I even have no idea what the GearScores are for Liore or Lunedi. So when you start your app with, “Recruit me, I’m a 5100 DK,” it means absolutely nothing. Your collective item level doesn’t really tell me whether you can choose your gear intelligently, what previous raid experience you have, or what kind of person you are. It does tell me that you’re possibly one of THOSE guys who is absurdly fixated on numbers and inclined to be a jerk about it.

5. “App? I don’t like filling out apps. Can’t you just invite me?”
No.

Most of this stuff is common sense, and I’m sure some of it is more important to me than to other guild leaders. Be polite, be genuine, and remember that guild leaders are human and just as prone to snap first impressions as everyone else.

Guild Management guildleading

So yesterday I wrote a little mini-manifesto to the guild, although I don’t think it was very shocking. It was just basically reminding people that 3.3 is here, and it was time to buckle down and knock this last raid instance out of the park.

The raiding in 3.2 was so terrible that I felt bad marching people through achievements and hard modes. I stood in that room three nights a week at least (25s and 10s), and even my infamously unlimited resources of guild cheerleadering were being taxed. It was pretty easy to just wipe out ToC, Ony, and VoA in 90 minutes and then tell everyone to go do something fun. Plus, some people don’t really dig achievements, and get a little shirty when they wipe for an hour to get some flashing lights and a noise that they don’t care about anyway. (Side note, but to those people I say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” You don’t like it, go talk to Blizz and tell them their new raiding paradigm is stupid.  Bosses don’t matter any more, per se. It’s all about achievements and hard modes. Personally, I like it.)

Anyway, previously the time requirement was a huge block to our competitive progress as a guild. As it stands now though the time demands of raiding are greatly diminished. After the holidays we will be raiding 9 hours a week (three nights at three hours) which should handily cover farming, progressing, and achievements. And no, server ranking isn’t everything, but it’s somewhat satisfying to see your guild name in lights, and it DOES help a lot with recruiting.

Without that time limitation, competitive progression relies upon player skill, teamwork, gear, and proper motivation from the gal upstairs… oh crap! That’s me! Hence the manifesto. So we started off our new achivement-happy stance by picking off “On A Boat” and “I’ve Gone and Made a Mess” on our second clear of ICC. The latter took a little strategy and a few wipes, and the former was chaos and madness and chanting “shootit shootit shootit shootit” at the cannoneers. The result of our little adventures?

Which, you know, doesn’t actually MEAN that much, except that we are a guild of determined spazzes with a rocket pack fixation. As a pally said, “WTF are other guilds doing right now? Underwater basketweaving?” All it took was a little motivation and 45 minutes of patience from the team, and we saw results unlike those we’ve ever seen before.

So to all you other ‘casualcore’ guilds out there: You don’t need time to be recognized as badass! This is kind of the dawn of our era. Knock that 3.2 lethargy out of your head, go forth, and achieve. As Newton — or was it Ghostcrawler? — said, a guild in motion tends to stay in motion.

Achievements, Guild Management, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, ICC, raiding