Every so often you get these bad PUGs. You bitch about them to your friends, and if they’re too horrendous, you drop group. Hell, every so often, you might even get terrible PUGs.

And then you get ones like this.

Setting: Nexus. Actors: A poor random DK, an elemental shaman. Then this huntard to shame all huntards, and a paladin from his guild. And poor Lumi who had to queue as tank today because I was in a hurry to get the heroic done.

So we start off, it’s all going well, I’m asked to pull more, etc, etc. In one of these big pulls, I get a whisper:

“Druid innervate me”

Boggled, I glance at the party frames. Yes, this request is indeed, coming from the hunter. That’s fine, maybe he’s asking on behalf of the healer or something… except, nah, the healer hasn’t even spent 50% of his mana pool. However, the hunter is maybe on 25% mana. So I sort of ignore the request – I couldn’t innervate even if I wanted to, it would have been suicide to drop form with six mobs beating on me.

After the pull, in party chat, the paladin goes:

“Durid u know what innervate means?”

Um, excuse me?

Was a tank, honestly expected to, during a pull, drop form, Innervate a hunter, and go back to tanking presumably with zero rage? You know, the class that gets Aspect of the Viper at level 20 to accommodate all their mana needs?

I replied that the hunter, perhaps, could make use of this spell to regenerate mana between pulls, instead of expecting a tank to Innervate in the middle of a pull, lose all her rage, and more than likely cause a wipe.

“Teamplayer lol”

Um. Okay.

Now at this point, perhaps you might guess that this hunter had never trained said aspect and didn’t even know what it meant. I mean, I’d be sort of okay with it, perhaps even lend him some drinks and teach what the Aspect does, be on our merry way. Nope, this sadly wasn’t the case.

This hunter wouldn’t to pop Aspect of the Viper, because, wait for this…

…he didn’t want to lose DPS. It was just so much more practical for him to receive an Innervate every cooldown, you see, instead of changing aspects between pulls. He was making the most numbarz on the metarz, so this made the most sense. Except, this whole thing wasn’t explained as politely as I put it here, sprinkled with random “lol”s and explanations as to why I was bad from his pocket paladin.

At that point I wouldn’t Innervate this guy if Tyrande herself asked me to, and I mentioned this was likely the stupidest thing I’d heard from a hunter in four years of playing (and I’ve heard a lot). Yeah, I was well pissed.

He asked for an explanation of why this was stupid, which I ignored because I was trying to tank Anomalus.

And then they began a game of  “Hey, if we aren’t able to get her to give us an Innervate, let’s start in on her tanking abilities!”

[Party][Paladin]: lol im a much better tank than this
[Party][Paladin]: in my mainspec

Note that at this point I:

• Haven’t lost aggro to anyone
• Haven’t caused a wipe
• Have handled much bigger pulls than usual
• Am pulling 2k DPS while tanking

In response, I went “Really? Feel free to do that now, then!” and dropped group.

Honestly, it was way too early in the morning to put up with that bullshit, even if I was pressed for time. So I thought to myself “perhaps the next time they’re waiting in LFG for twenty minutes to get a tank, they can contemplate where they went wrong  to cause this tank shortage”.

But that’d probably be too much to hope for.

For everyone.

The vote kick system, in theory, is an excellent idea. Someone’s messing up your heroic run, so you can cast a vote to remove them. It takes three people out of the remaining four to agree to remove the person in question, and since  you cannot whisper people cross-realm, it’s hard to negotiate a vote kick behind the scenes. You can’t remove people until their dungeon cooldown debuff runs out, so that stops the *inspect* “OMG HE HAS BLUES!?!?! KICK NOW” kind of crazies. However, in its current incarnation, the system seems to be designed to punish people who perform, while rewarding those who don’t.

As I’ve mentioned, you can’t cast a vote to kick someone who still has the dungeon cooldown debuff. That’s all good, but no sane group needs fifteen minutes to discern whether someone’s going to be a good addition to the group. The people who are so bad that they need to be weeded out as soon as possible – you can smell those in about a minute. Full T9 but no gems, no enchants? Yup. The hunter with a 71/0/0 spec and spellpower mail? I don’t need to carry this guy for 15 minutes.

I’ll stop here and explain something – there will be people reading this and going “WTF, how about if you try to teach them instead of lolkick?” I’m big on personal responsibility. There are a ton of resources on the internet that explain how to play, gear, gem and enchant any spec of any class. Anyone who’s somehow managed to get to level 80 and wants to be a part of group play should be researching how to do that effectively.

It’s not my responsibility in a random heroic to teach someone the basics of their class, and if we stopped so that every newbie we got in our group could get a lecture of “How To Play Class X 101″? The number of heroics I can get done every day would be about halved. I don’t mean one can never ask questions or receive advice from more experienced people, but if you haven’t bothered to at least get the basics down? You haven’t bothered, why should we?

Going back to the point, so you have one of these people in your group, and you want to remove them after a couple of pulls. You can’t. Worse, perhaps you have a non-participant, which seems to be a trend these days. You get someone joining and going AFK without saying a word, putting another character on follow. There’s nothing you can do.

Most people finish the majority of an instance, if not all of it, in the 15 minutes it takes to be able to vote kick someone. No one wants to wait around just to be able to remove the troublemaker and get a replacement. Everyone’d rather just move on one man short. And most people are counting on… precisely this. So what if you’re put on ignore? Plenty more where this PUG came from, just collect your badges while going about other business.

And again, let’s say you have that semi-AFK huntard who pulled barely 400 DPS through the entire thing. You’re almost at the last boss and the timer is about to run out. You could initiate a vote kick, but most people would think, what’s the point? The instance has been smooth, no one died, just let the guy get some emblems.

The point is that you just carried someone — and if he didn’t know he was bad, he didn’t learn. If he learned, or already knew, that he was not up to standards, who cares? There was no penalty, he did the heroic fine, so he doesn’t really need to improve, does he? He’ll just join another party, secure in the knowledge that his playstyle is just fine. Congrats, the lack of a solid vote kick system just encouraged another “noob” to stay a noob.

So how to fix? First off, it’s clear that 15 minutes’ wait to be able to vote kick is way too long. Lowering it down to 5 minutes is fair – 5 minutes are enough to know whether someone is an asset or a liability. It also encourages people to perform right off the bat.

Second, the implementation of a Deserter-like debuff for being AFK too long. Again, the principle is simple – if you need an AFK of longer than five minutes in a heroic, you don’t belong in there. IRL > badges, sort it out before joining a group.

Third – the way people think! It’s not wrong to vote kick people for legitimate reasons, but I see people feeling like this very, very frequently on wow_ladies, dear_gnome, or other blogs. There are many posts that basically go “This player was not up to standards, and it really annoyed me, but I was too shy to start a vote kick.” You don’t have to carry anyone who isn’t up to par. You don’t have to feel bad for them because “we’re so close to the end”. The system doesn’t even tell others who initiated a kick. Again, not kicking them will encourage them to stay bad, and you don’t want that!

There has been a massive ongoing discussion on LJ’s wow_ladies, which can basically summed up as follows:

Let’s say you’re randoming a heroic as a tank or healer, and you ended up in a group with a couple of DPSers who are not pulling their weight, but the instance is going smoothly. Do you comment on it, or do you let it pass because it’s all good anyway?

I’ll sum up my stance with an anecdote from the other day.

Lumi ended up in a heroic Strat group through the random dungeon option. I was tanking. Lumi was fairly well geared at that point, rocking an unbuffed 38ish thousand HP, and other appropriate stats. The healer was one of the top guilds on Grim Batol, with the best raid gear one could get. It looks all fine to me, we go ahead and begin.

Meathook seems to take his sweet time dying, and I take a look at Skada. I’ve done an average of 1300 DPS and I’m right there on top of damage done. Um, really now?

After Meathook died, I inspected my fellow group mates. All of them were in a hodgepodge of greens and blues, with the occasional ilvl200 epic thrown in. This much is fine. What wasn’t fine was the all the empty sockets glaring at me from their gear, as well as the lack of enchants even on the higher quality pieces. Really, how do you win an epic helm that is leaps and bounds better than any of your other pieces, and then think to yourself  “Nvm, don’t need to socket or enchant that”? How can anyone not afford all of three gold needed to buy a green quality gem from the AH?

I asked my group members to please up their DPS as they were all really low (DK, arms warrior, and hunter, for the record). The responses ranged from “We haven’t even wiped, what’s your problem?” “I’m a new 80, lol” to “I’m an alt”.

Does one need to wipe in an instance to notice that they have to get better? Why is it that most people don’t bother to go above that minimum “do this, else we’ll wipe” threshold, and think that this is fair to everyone else in the group? Since when is “I’m a new 80″ or “I’m an alt” an excuse for subpar performance in a heroic?

To me, all of those responses indicated a gratuitous lack of respect. As one of my friends put it, manners don’t seem to be included in the new patches. You are disrespecting your group members when you’re in a heroic with unenchanted, ungemmed gear, with full knowledge that you don’t belong there, not trying to squeeze out the best DPS you have. You are telling strangers “I know I’m not good enough, so please carry me through this, okay?” in an extremely cheeky way.

I have a friend. She dinged 80 a couple of days ago, a moonkin who had to reroll EU from US, leaving two years of investment in her character. Even while she was leveling, she was planning out her gear at 80, ranking pieces, eyeballing things she could cheaply buy from the AH. She had a set of gemmed, enchanted gear waiting for her as soon as she dinged 80, a mix of blues and cheap 200-219 epics. The results? ~1800 DPS sustained on a target dummy the day she dinged. She had 1600ish spellpower at this point and was fully hitcapped.

This, my friends, is how you respect others.

The four of us, our little friends group, take her along to heroic runs now. Most of the time she’s dead last on the meters. Does it bother any of us? Hell no. We all outgear her by miles, but even more important than that, she has already done the best she can to improve her gear, tweak her rotation, and to get herself to an acceptable level for heroics. The rest can come with time. She has shown respect for herself and for everyone else she’s going to be grouped with, and that goes much, much further than any epic loot can ever take her.

In the same vein, if everyone in my Strat group had bothered to enchant and gem the shinies they had? Even if they did less damage than Lumi afterwards? I wouldn’t care. Not at all. They’ve already shown some respect, so I’d gladly “carry” those people. We were all new to 80 once. No one is expected to do 3k+ DPS sustained the day they hit 80.

If you’re ever a fresh 80 on any character out to do heroics, ask yourself this question: “If everyone’s gear, performance and knowledge were equal to my own, would we able to get through this instance smoothly?” The answer you want to this question is a resounding yes. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. If the answer is anything but yes, go back and try again until it is.

This whole debacle does, though, get the goat of all the people who legitimately earned their gear when people don’t bother, which is part of where the whole casual/elitist debate stems from. Here’s news, guys – when you don’t bother making some effort towards pulling your weight before grouping with other people? That’s not being casual.

Casual is not an excuse for being bad. Casual is when you have limited time to devote to the game, and I’m pretty sure you can still conjure up some respect for others with that limited time. You’re oh so busy with whatever things you do in real life, and can’t be bothered to read a wiki page or one forum thread before you engage in group play? Fine. Then you don’t really belong in group play, so don’t be surprised or hurt when you get removed. You can take a few minutes to read up on your class and the instances, spec properly, gem properly, enchant properly. There are a great many “casual” people out there who do that, moonkin!friend being just one of them.

When you’re playing in a group, in a MMO no less, you make an implied promise to others that you’ll perform your assigned role to the best of your ability. You end up taking on responsibilities, and not fulfilling those responsibilities shows a great lack of respect towards the people you play with – and this is what gets me and a lot of the people who kicked you out of their party.

Dear 70-79 AV players of Rampage,

If your healer is repeatedly faceplanting while trying to heal Balinda… I somehow don’t reckon the problem is the healing, you know?

I’m sure you guys feel totally awesome because you’re top of damage done, but yeah, Balinda still isn’t dead, and she won’t be dead for a looong while because in this bracket she’s impossible to get down without multiple healers. She outlevels all of you by at least four levels, and she hits like a truck.

Incidentally, so does her water elemental that no one cares about at level 80. I’m getting Frostbolted for 2k a pop, and I only have 11k health.

So it makes you look slightly bad at this game when you charge right in and furiously smash your damage dealing buttons, die after I die because none of you could be bothered to get the elemental off me, then yell in/bg “OMG, healer fail at Balinda AGAIN.”

In conclusion, L2P.

Love,
Baby!tree Starlet, who heals her little branches off every match, trying to keep all of you ungrateful DKs and rets happy.

I’ve been getting back into lowbie battlegrounds.

I’ve made the decision to level Lainie, my 19 twink rogue, a while back. However, this doesn’t keep me from lingering in every bracket and battleground I can. Outfitted with the heirloom shoulders, chest, weapons, plus her leftover twink gear in the rest of the slots, she can still hold her own.

One of the most important things lowbie battlegrounds does is to give you perspective. As you’re playing without many class defining abilities, you definitely get an appreciation for them. Have a DOT on? Can’t Cloak, sorry, have to deal. Sprint, Evasion, Vanish on cooldown? Either gotta spec combat or wait for the cooldown to run out. Have no stuns, no Blind? Learn to Gouge and bandage.

You have such a small toolbox that you have to keep racking your brains to make yourself useful. I often find myself scanning my bars frantically, trying to find a spell that would come in handy for the current situation. It’s a fun exercise, and makes you feel like such a pro when you remember you’re an engineer and own bombs that will get the pesky melee off your flag carrier.

Overall, in my very humble opinion, it has the potential to make you a much better player.

In other observations – snares are brutal at this level. Absolutely brutal. There is no way to get out of them, save for a trinket – healers, dispels, BoFs, all of those are dreams. Being human, I’m still luckier than others with a two minute trinket, but they’re fairly easy to reapply anyway. I can also Vanish as a last resort, but again, two spells on two and three minute cooldowns don’t really help when it takes a warrior one GCD to reapply Hamstring. In fact, a warrior who tab Hamstrings or a shaman with Earthbind Totem can easily keep everyone off their flag carrier. I’ve been kited to the other end of the map by a shaman who used Earthbind and Frost Shock freely, and it was not pretty.

I’m used to always having a snare out at level 80. Dispel it, shapeshift out, pop your trinket, slow your foes too. Snares don’t matter that much when everyone has one or more, and multiple outs. They make the world’s difference when the opposing team is assisting their FC with a field of totems and Frost Nova, and you can’t do anything but watch the druid travelform away.

Probably the best thing about battlegrounds at this level, though, is the existence of hybrids.

I love hybrids. I’ve leveled five of them to above 70. However, once hybrids are past a certain level, for all intents and purposes, they’re no longer hybrids. They’re DPSers, tanks or healers, depending on what they’ve specced in. They have a massive toolbox  – but a big part of it is either not viable to use, or in the case of feral druids, downright inaccessible while they’re performing their class role.

In the lower brackets, this distinction doesn’t exist. No matter what spec that paladin is, he can toss a couple of Holy Lights around without using a gigantic amount of mana to heal for piddly amounts. The flag carrying feral can toss around roots and HoTs without thinking “it’s not worth the mana I use to shapeshift”.

When I was leveling Kielle, my night elf priest, I spent a good chunk of time playing 20-29 battlegrounds having the time of my life. I wore WSG/AB reward gear, some good quested/instanced blues I had managed to obtain, and whatever greens I could afford from the AH. She was my main on Grim Batol at that point, so I couldn’t afford to twink her any more than that. The best piece of gear she had was probably her level 28 AB boots, on which I’d sprung for 12 stamina. I had a pretty standard shadow spec for the level, only with 2/2 Healing Focus.

I was pretty much a star.

I stood a good chance against twinks and non-twinks – because I was a decently geared hybrid. With an AOE fear and a ranged snare at my disposal. I could heal almost as well as an at-level holy or disc priest, but I could also do more damage than they did, and need I mention again that my signature damage spell had a ranged snare component? Which was channeled, so going around corners did not break it?

I’ve never loved my class as much as I did at that point. With Shadowmeld, Mind Flay, a multitude of DOTs and Psychic Scream, I was a champion flag defender. Tossing around bubbles, heals and dispels, I could play FC support like nobody’s business. I could do everything that my class had promised I could do. And I could do all of them well enough to make a difference.

I would recommend everyone, battleground fans and haters alike, to take a lowbie character and put them through battlegrounds. No matter how much you feel you know the class, you will learn many new things and develop a new appreciation for your underused class abilities.

Miss Medicina has come up with a healing questionnaire on her blog to get some cross-promotion going among smaller healing bloggers. She also has an extremely pretty blog design, but that’s another thing entirely. Anyway, here are my answers.

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Elisse, human priest. I’m holy for PVE and disc for PVP.
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) A bit of everything, really. I’m not officially raiding, so I do 10s and 25s PUGs, the occasional heroic, and I love my battlegrounds.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. You project. Laser beams. On your allies. And those laser beams make little bubbles. It does not get any better than that. Aside from looking pretty, I love the fact that it’s channeled, so that some of the healing always goes through in that clutch moment even if you get interrupted.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Binding Heal. I know, it’s a shame. A priest of three years, I just never got into the habit of using it, and now it’s ended up just not being a spell I think of when I need to heal both myself and someone.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Being able to have many niches! We’re great raid healers when specced for it, great tank healers when specced for it, and we’re very viable in PVP.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Being so squishy. I can’t help but feel I’m a liability in fights where there is physical damage going around – like the melee hits from Gormok’s snobolds, or being in the arena on Thorim. Tanks can only help so much when I get healing aggro instantly.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Raid healing. I do keep a POM on the tanks all the time though, and my finger hovers over my GS macro for the oh shit moments.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Holy paladins. If I’m disc, I mitigate, they heal. If I’m holy, I take over the raid healing and they do the tank healing, which I’m incapable of doing effectively. Plus, they have delicious raidwide and personal cooldowns. Win-win all around.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Other holy priests. It’s no secret that priests are notoriously bad to stack, and two or more holy priests have never been a good healing team for any raid of appropriate size.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? I’d say overhealing, but it’s by and large irrelevant right now in the raiding game. Paying too much attention to the meters, I guess. Even though I’m fully aware that they aren’t a true reflection of a healer’s performance, a lot of people tend to evaluate healers solely based on the meters, especially in PUGs. This pressure in turn makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong if I’m not all the way up there.
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? “Heal me” and “healer fail”. If anyone died, healers are acutely aware of their fail, thank you. It’s not like we see damage and consciously choose not to heal it.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes. We’re jack of all trades when it comes to healing – when appropriately specced, we can do anything. Having two viable healing trees is quite the luxury. Other healing classes aren’t as lucky.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? First – is my assignment dead? If my assignment is dead, no matter how high on the meters I am, I’ve failed fairly hard. Second – am I in an appropriate place on the meters with regards to my assignment? If other healers assigned to the same role have healed twice as much as me, we have a problem. Otherwise, brag brag. If I’m out of mana, I make sure I check the overhealing meter as well.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? “Disc is an unacceptable spec for PvE” (no really, I’ve been kicked from groups/asked to go shadow on my backend Horde server for being disc), closely followed by “hey u priest y are u so low on meters u slackin” when I’m disc.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Using spells appropriately. Priests have a massive toolbox to deal with damage, but most new priests tend to use only a few spells, and then run around like a headless chicken when something out of the ordinary happens. We’re not only about CoH/PoM/Flash Heal (Or about Penance/Bubble/PoM for that matter).
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? High overhealing, high healing done. Overhealing doesn’t really matter in the content I tend to do, and I overgear most of it, so I spam freely. I’m in the top three in pretty much every 25-man I do, which I feel is where raid healers should be.
• Haste or Crit and why? After 20% crit, I go for haste all out. I primarily keep a bit of crit because it’s good regen and burst via SoL. In contrast, haste is a must have, because Serendipity is always down when you need it most.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Well, I’ve played all four healing classes. I actively research all four classes. There’s none of them I feel I understand least.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Grid and Clique are love. I have mouseover macros for most of my spells to use with Grid. I also have a Guardian Spirit macro which cancels whatever spell I’m casting and casts GS on my target immediately – I’ve found it to be extremely handy, as it often takes a split second to stop the spell you’re casting and GS a tank, which might mean the tank’s death.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I definitely try for balance – that’s because I do a bit of everything.

Go ahead, answer this questionnaire! How do you heal?

Well, I thought I’d contribute my bad PUG story of the week, and the raiding week has just started.

It all started when I saw an ad in trade advertising a TotC10 PUG. The guy doing the advertising was from one of the top guilds on the server, and supposedly, the group was 70% that guild – they just wanted 2 heals and a tank. Sounds like a good deal. I hopped on my priest, whispered the guy, and got invited.

The tank needed was eventually found, a DK from another top guild, and the original guild managed to dredge up a disc priest from their ranks, so we were ready to go.

We started. And promptly wiped on Beasts.

“What happened? TotC wipe, ugh!” cried the people from the uberleet guilds, most of whom were sporting Astral Walker titles. Turns out that not many people from the uberleet guilds were bothering to DPS down the snobolds, and both healers had one. The raid leader instructed them, and back we went.

And we wiped again – this time it was the paladin tank being clueless about the debuff management on Jormungars. There were more incredulous cries, and the other priest and DK left without a word.

The raid leader, making it clear how extremely disgusted he was that we had dared wipe in TotC, convinced the DK to come back, and they picked up yet another priest from their guild.

And then we wiped, and then we wiped some more. The paladin tank turning the worms towards the casters, no one caring about snobolds, people setting up camp in the fires, we had it all.

During one of the fights, my WoW crashed right at the start of the fight, and when I came back, my Grid was completely messed up, not giving accurate information, hell, not showing half the people at all. I hastily pulled out the standard raid frames, and tried to heal as best as I could. After we wiped, the disc priest piped up in the raid chat that I wasn’t pulling my weight – he was just below me on the meters and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

I whispered him and explained that my raid frames were messed up, it’ll be better next try, apologies.

He found it appropriate to keep going on. He isn’t a paladin with Beacon. It was so hard to solo heal everything. Blah blah blah, his epeen is so big.

I wanted to point out that it’s not really solo healing when I’ve still done more healing than he did – but you know, there’s that thing that happens when you feel in the wrong, especially against someone who’s clearly more experienced then you are. I knew that our healing numbers should not have been so close together, and I knew he was more experienced than I was, so I was pretty much intimidated into shutting up.

Next try, we go again. I think I’m really going to be on top of my game this time (I’m not even sure how that happens, since you don’t just see damage and consciously choose not to heal it as a healer, but yeah). I’m going to outheal that disc priest by miles and show him how it’s done.

Then I get snobolded, and proceed to spend the majority of the fight doing nothing but casting CoH and PoM on cooldown, sprinkling a bit of Renew, and using Surge procs to try to heal people up. It’s a wonder we didn’t lose anyone.

They finally bother to kill the snobold, and then we promptly wipe because the DK tank AMS’s out of Burning Bile just as four poisoned people are running towards him.

People leave in rage and disgust at this point, and we disband, having killed a grand total of 0 bosses.

This PUG was actually the embodiment of the reason why high-end guilds usually get a bad name – it’s not only that they’re stuck up, it’s that they’re both stuck up, and firmly convinced that the content they have had to PUG is so easy, they can just tear up the how-to-play book and throw it away. Oh, we don’t have to kill snobolds – someone else will. We don’t need to stay out of the fire, healers have enough mana to heal. No need to pay attention to basic things such as “don’t turn a mob that spews poison towards your casters” or “don’t hit it before the tank”. We don’t need a good group balance, it’s just x instance. It’s only their guild raids that are hard and important, and it’s inevitably someone else’s fault when they die on such easy content.

On the other hand, I had another TotC10 PUG Tuesday night – a ton of people from no-name guilds, some people guildless, mediocre performance. We wiped once, and that was on Anub.

IRL, and actually playing the game, getting in the way of blogging these days. I do update my Twitter from time to time over here, though. Thanks for your patience!

Today, I had a discussion with a friend who is in a raiding guild, about a guild policy that they had. Their policy, as I gathered from my friend’s words and my own observation, is as follows:

On any and all raids, progression and farm alike, you may be pulled out of the raid for any boss, if the leaders feel they do not need your specific role or class at that moment. This might be for the rest of the instance, or just a few bosses, you may not be told anything definite. It might be a hardmode or normal, it might even be something you could have steamrolled in your current setup.

The policy seems to be that if there is a better option, that better option will be utilized, regardless of whether it is needed to beat the encounter. My friend spoke of this as if it was perfectly natural. (He did casually mention that if you kept signing up and were “very good”, eventually they would stop replacing you, perhaps assuming that this made it all okay. I inferred that “very good” should also refer to the state of your relationship with the people in charge.)

The other day, while I was “helping” this guild on a farm raid, I kept noticing that every boss attempt, a few people would hearth out or log off, and some new people would be summoned in. Knowing that the guild had problems with attendance, I had just assumed those people were filling in spots until the latecomers arrived, or maybe they were alts just helping, or maybe some of them had irl issues and had to go.

I was astonished when I realised it hadn’t been just those. Some of those people were simply being removed, because there was a better option online to beat an encounter they had on farm. Maybe they would be invited back, maybe they would not.

When I said that I could never commit four hours a day, three or four times a week, to raiding, knowing that I could be sat out on any content for an unknown amount of time if a better option came up, my friend responded “With this attitude, how will you find a better guild? I have been in many guilds, and most of them had this policy. You will not be able to get into any guild thinking like this.” He added, “If I am left out, I just go PVP and earn DKP by not even being in the raid. I don’t see why it is such a big deal.”

“Barring the fact that you set aside this time to raid, with an implied promise by the guild that you were being invited to raid – and now you’re spending it PVPing just in case you are needed again, when the boss would have been just as dead with you there?” I wanted to respond, but somehow managed to hold my tongue. He is rather protective of his guild.

I, of course, acknowledge that this policy and similar policies have a place. In an extremely high-end guild, or on progression content, or on farm content that is not manageable with the current setup. (Even on progression content, I know of many guilds who would rather make it work with the people who have signed up and stuck with the raid through the wipes, than bring in new people, but I digress.)

The guild in question is middle of the road by the server standards. Which was the reason why I looked into them to begin with, and which was the reason why this policy was a big surprise.

If an encounter is otherwise not defeatable, sitting out isn’t just selfless, it’s the only option. This situation comes up in every raiding guild. It is completely understandable. However, if people are frequently requested to sit out to obtain optimal makeup through content where the guild is beyond needing it – it really scares me that I’m seemingly the only person who has a problem with this.

If we take a general look, many guilds expect that you will fully dedicate yourself to the guild, and maintain this loyalty. You will be expected to keep certain attendance requirements, turn up on time repaired with needed consumables, read up on strategies, contribute to the guild bank, and various other rules that are laid down by the guild. It is all for “the guild”, this faceless entity that demands your time, effort and respect.

What most of these faceless entities don’t realise is that this is a two-way street. The guild and its members enter into an agreement, and both sides make implied promises to each other.

If members will be loyal to the guild and its aim, a good guild in turn is expected to be loyal to its members, and not just those who are favored by the GM and officers. If the members provide for the guild bank, the bank needs to provide for them. If members turn up when the raid is due to start, they expect that the raid is started on time, and ends on time. It should not only be the individual members that are expected to fulfill the promises they made when they filled out the application form.

I was in a 40 man raiding guild for roughly a year during vanilla. This was a guild that raided seven days a week, and had strict attendance requirements. Expectations from members, in attitude and skill, were high. You had to be punctual, you had to play well, you had to have read strategies and had to be able to follow commands. You were expected to have the best gear you could have outside of raids before you were even considered for a raid spot. Leaving before the raid was called was absolutely unheard of, being late always cost you DKP and a raid spot.

In return, the members knew that the guild would not just be a guild, it would be a true home for them. Most members knew each other very well and greeted each other by their real names. New babies, weddings, engagements were celebrated together. The camaraderie was encouraged by the guild leaders, who themselves were very close friends.

Loyal members who had to go on extended breaks always came back to the raid spots they left, even if that meant the guild would have to go with one or two less or a class for some time. We had a longtime member who had to be away for very long periods every summer. Everytime he came back he would promptly start signing to raids, and he would still be welcome with his old rank, in his old spot, as if he never left. He had stuck by the guild during rough times, and the guild was returning the favor.

My guild had an enhancement shaman. With a Sulfuras, which was awarded to him by the same guild. (You must realise that during vanilla WOW, a raiding enhancement shaman was more of a rarity than the actual legendary.) We even had a second one. We had an elemental one, too. We had a demonology warlock. We had arms and fury warriors. All of these were specs that no sane raiding guild would recruit at the time, yet my guild had them on their roster – the leaders being of the mind that the person behind the character is much more important than the character itself.

In exchange for the required donations to the bank, we got flasks, high end enchanting materials, and various recipes upon request. We were always required to do the best we could, on our own, nothing less was expected – but when we couldn’t, the guild bank was there to help.

Raid signups were on the website every week for the entire week. We would be expected to only sign for raids we were absolutely sure we could make, as soon as we humanly could. In exchange, lineups were often finalized one day in advance, at the latest a couple of hours before the raid – our leadership realised that those who were not chosen would want to know ahead of time so that they could plan their night differently. Those who sat out were not expected to be present at raid time. Notes of who had to sit out were kept, to ensure the rotation was fair.

I come from a guild culture like this. A guild where the members obeyed the rules laid out and made everything run smoothly. In exchange, we got more than a raid every night – we got an atmosphere where we were respected and loved as individuals and treated fairly. We had a 40-man raiding guild where the majority of the members were in harmony, and those that weren’t didn’t last long anyway.

My guild was not a nameless, faceless entity – it was the quiet rogue I lent some Greater Eternals to, it was my arrogant, talented demo warlock friend, it was the amazingly skilled mage officer who got our first 8/8 T2. It was the boisterous hunter with the Scottish accent, the bouncy Pakistani shaman, and the French mother of one. My guild was those people whose company I genuinely enjoyed, and those I meant something to as a person.

The guild was not perfect, but the basic premise was simple: Give effort and respect, and get effort and respect in return, no matter what your position in the guild.

In this case, again, it is all about respect. I found the guild’s attitude towards its members extremely disrespectful. If I commit my time and effort to raiding, I would like to know in advance whether I’m in or out. If I have to sit out for a boss once in a while because the encounter is undefeatable otherwise, no problem. Just let me know when I will be needed back. Doing it any other way implies that the members’ time is somehow not valuable.

I can’t imagine agreeing to all these conditions that everyone who plays the game and deems themselves fit to raid agree to. I can’t think of myself in yet another guild, fulfilling my end of the agreement, with the guild barely attempting to fulfill theirs. I can’t fathom being in a guild where I’m just another priest who’s expendable if something better happens to log on, damn the loyalty I’ve shown.

But most of all, I could not understand my friend’s matter of fact demeanor, the way he looked down on me when he said “With this attitude, how will you find a better guild?”. Is this really the norm? Is this really what the current raiding scene is like? Shall I just give up and throw in the towel, because I will never find a guild “with this kind of attitude” – because apparently, having expectations from your guild besides “ok, kill these bosses and gief me epix” is not acceptable? Why is it that most guilds etch their requirements into the brains of their members but don’t bother to treat them as something slightly more valuable than dirt?

When I join a guild, I am willing to not only offer my services as a priest or a druid, but also respect, dedication, loyalty, maturity, understanding and friendship. These things are what many guilds out there claim they look for, and what every truly good player should be able to provide. And any guild, if they aspire to be a truly good guild, should perhaps consider that the price tags on such things are not simply a few epics, but much, much more.

So we’re rocking it again as rogue priest…

…and it’s so much more fun than I thought it would be. I just didn’t realise how much potential Wrath arenas have.

My issue used to be that I wanted to be able to stay alive. I didn’t want games where “zerg the priest” was a foolproof strategy 100%. It still isn’t quite balanced in that aspect (you, in fact, can zerg the priest to success no matter how hard Calissa tries to peel). But I imagine it’s better than how it used to be in previous seasons.

The best part of the whole “whoa son, you got WOTLK’d” deal is that it feels to me that very few teams are true countercomps. You always have a chance. There’s always the possibility that you will gib that unprepared healer, even through HoTs and shields, while the partner is in a CC chain.

I remember when warrior/druid used to be hard counter to rogue/priest, so much so that if we won a single one it was a cause for major celebration. Now when we go out against one, I feel we have a chance. It doesn’t have to be an autoloss because they can abolish Wound and DPS on leather. It’s easier to force cooldowns due to higher damage, which ultimately means we have more of a chance of putting them in a CC chain before I get worn out from spam healing.

I also love being able to spare the mana for more offense, because in most of the cases something will die before everyone is out of mana. The amount of damage people are able to dish out assures that. You might as well spend it while you have it to force a cooldown. Out of 70+ matches we played over three days, there were only 2 I can remember in which it came down to mana (and we won one and lost one). This is also why I ditched my beloved PWS glyph to glyph Smite, and so far, lovin’ it.

“They have both trinkets down.”
“Gib during next Blind yah?”
“Yeah Blinding in 3, 2, 1, gogogoog”
/receive Tricks
/cast Power Infusion
/cast Holy Fire
/spam Smite

I love having Perception and being able to get the opener. We do it quite a bit of the time. And you have no idea how many times mindless Holy Nova spam has denied someone the opener.

I also seem to be better than I was in TBC when I comes to SWD’ing sheeps, which has immensely helped with our win rate against mage/rogue.

We also see great variety in comps – used to be that you saw maybe ten different comps in a whole season of playing 2s and that was it. Now there’s everything ranging from double DK to ele shaman/moonkin.

I quite like the new rating system, too. First off, there’s a much greater sense of progress about it. You start from zero, so there’s nowhere to go but up. If you go 50/50 at the lower ratings, you’re still going to move up on the ladder, which didn’t happen in TBC. The fact that losing doesn’t carry a massive penalty keeps people playing, especially if you’re new, or like us, just haven’t played for a few seasons. Add to this the fact that there are few countercomps (and even if there are, you just don’t meet them to start off with since comps are so varied), and you have a recipe for success.

I’ve just been playing for a few days, with a win rate barely higher than 50%,  yet I’m rated high enough to afford four Furious pieces, and two Relentless offpieces. I like this in a way, because if you’re mediocre, which I admittedly very much am, you still have a chance to get rated stuff. On the other hand, if you’re new to arena, it will still take you quite a while to get someplace, so I’m still in two minds about the system.

I quite like the MMR aspect – there have been few fights where I felt I got outplayed by some guy going for glad. Point for point, in most matches I felt like I played with people skill equal or close to my own.

Probably due for more matches tonight, so we’ll wait and see. It would be amazing indeed if one day, I could land the T1 Relentless weapon… oh well, a girl can dream.