The first thing to consider is that my raid team is a progression focused group in a social guild. We raid 6 hours a week over 2 nights so we're not the type to switch people in on fights or demand a super high attendance. However, we do expect full effort on fights both in and out of game.
Some spots were obvious choices as they are long time raiders with the guild, some players are just too awesome to leave out and sometimes that has meant juggling the team to accommodate all the people worthy. As an example I have 3 awesome healers I raid with meaning I am 1 of 4 healers in a 10 man that is a bit excessive but we get round that by using rotation and I accept the fact that I can't heal all the time so get lumped into the off -healer group.
Another factor to consider is availability, I have crappy shifts that prevent me raiding for 3 weeks straight every 8 weeks, one of my ranged DPS can only raid every other week and one of my healers has seemingly erratic shifts which at times causes issues if it clashes with one of my 3 weeks and a random absence by another healer. Thankfully despite all these challenges, our raid team has got off the blocks every week this expansion and things look to be staying that way as we are now a quarter of the way through the the second year of the expansion.
Performance is another key factor in deciding who you use to fill those spots and here performance becomes very subjective, DPS players always assume that the only thing that maters are the raw DPS output figures. In an ideal world this would be true and in many top end guilds that ideal is a reality. However, I prefer to take dependable people who can get the job done, by which I mean I prefer to take someone that does competitive DPS and does things right than a DPS king that has bad positional sense, stands in the fire, dies too quickly and consumes the one battle res I have available, doesn't listen on TS/Vent/Mumble, doesn't read strats, shows up late (or worse, not at all) and in general causes me a crap ton of stress.
The last thing I consider is possibly the most important which is their personality. I want to raid with people I can depend on. I need them to be there when the team needs them to be there, someone that promises to be there then doesn't show up is not someone I want to raid with, I need them to do the job assigned to them, I need them to fit in with the other members of the team. That doesn't mean I have to consider everyone I raid with to be my best friend (although that is always a goal) but I do need to be able to respect them as a person and a player. Thankfully everyone I have on my raid team scores VERY highly on this at the minute.
If you raid lead or have a say in who is in the your raid team, how do you choose your team? If you're not able to choose your raid team mates, how would you choose them if you could? I'd love to know your thoughts.
If you wish to use these, please feel free to do so but please do not claim them as your own.
Got a screenshot of something odd
that happened when you attempted something the game designers hadn't
thought of? Or maybe you just have a screenshot that made you laugh, if
so, I'd love to it so please leave link in the comments.
If
you're into running old content for fun and like having a laugh with
crazy wow addicts and are looking for a new home come give
Exhumed on Shadowsong EU a look. In addition to our social side we have 2
raid teams and an RBG team.
The
flex team has killed Garrosh and is always looking for more players to
help kick us over to normal raiding. We are working on our PVP team as
well (currently ranked #1 no Shadowsong EU).
Our "progression" team is
currently 14/14 (but not recruiting).
For more information or to apply to join, visit our website.more »
Above is the drawing my son gave me as a present today. Money could not have bought me a more special present. (Well OK maybe if we had millions in the budget he could have).more »
Well Christmas is upon us again. So I thought I'd treat you all to a Christmas Card as my weekly screenshot.
I'd like to apologise for the lack of written content I have posted recently but I'm going through a busy phase in real life and in game I'm very busy with guild acivities. This has also aligned badly with a bit of writer's block, which so soon after BlizzCon is a bit puzzling, maybe it has something to do with Hearthstone activity.
Anyway, I am still playing WoW, so hopefully this nasty phase will end soon.
Got a screenshot of something odd that happened when you attempted something the game designers hadn't thought of? Or maybe you just have a screenshot that made you laugh, if so, I'd love to it so please leave link in the comments.
If you're into running old content for fun and like having a laugh with crazy amatuer wow addicts and are looking for a new home come give Exhumed on Shadowsong EU a look. In addition to our social side we have 2 raid teams and an RBG team.
The flex team has killed Garrosh and is always looking for more players to help kick us over to normal raiding and our "progression" team is currently 14/14 (but not recruiting) and are working on our PVP team as well (currently ranked #1 no Shadowsong EU and top 1000 in the EU.
For more information or to apply to join, visit our website.
One of the many things I hate in PVP is the hunter's monkey pet, not because it hurts more than others but the god forsaken noise it makes while beating on me! This week I encountered a hunter that not only had a monkey pet, but focused on me the whole freaking battleground and I spent 20 mminutes with that bloody noise ringing in my ears. To make matters worse, when he unleashed Stampede, every pet was that bloody monkey!
Got a screenshot of something odd that happened when you attempted something the game designers hadn't thought of? Or maybe you just have a screenshot that made you laugh, if so, I'd love to it so please leave link in the comments.
If you're into running old content for fun and like having a laugh with crazy amatuer wow addicts and are looking for a new home come give Exhumed on Shadowsong EU a look. In addition to our social side we have 2 raid teams and an RBG team.
The flex team has killed Garrosh and is always looking for more players to help kick us over to normal raiding and our "progression" team is currently 14/14 (but not recruiting) and are working on our PVP team as well (currently ranked #1 no Shadowsong EU and top 1000 in the EU.
For more information or to apply to join, visit our website.more »
Once again, Blizzard are trying to make world pvp happen and during BlizzCon they even admitted they have Rose Tinted Goggles over the Southshore vs Tarren Mill world PVP battles that used to happen in Vanilla and have for the past 8 years tried in vain to make it happen.
Vanilla patch 1.12 gave us silithyst which gave the faction to get 200 returns of silithyst dust a zone wide buff to Cenarion Circle rep including inside the AQ raids;
TBC gave us buffs for a faction winning the PVP objective;
Wrath removed the zone buff model and went for a world PVP zone, Wintergrasp with a battle occurring every 2hours 30 minutes the faction controlling the zone got access to a raid instance that dropped tier and PVP loot as well as phased mobs being visible ONLY to that faction;
Catclysm stuck with the world PVP theme and added daily quests as well as a raid as the reward for the controlling faction, the faction that controlled the zone got more dailies;
Mists removed the world PVP zone and put in world bosses that were faction taggable as well as some PVP dailies in daily questing zones;
Warlords of Draenor: Gives us a world PVP zone again...
On PVE servers none of these has brought about World PVP and in my opinion Blizzard have failed so many times you'd think they would have realised that it wasn't ever gonna work and they should learn from the wise words of Murozond from End Time, "To repeat the same action and expect different results is madness."
But why does their attempts fail to encourage us? Is it because players simply don't want to mix PVP into their PVP? Is it because the payers are now a little bit older and therefore more pushed for time? Either way people want PVP in the game in the form of battlegrounds, arenas and duels. The whole world PVP thing really doesn't seem to fit in with the casual friendly version of WoW we play today and I wish Blizz would stop wasting development time on such things and actually focus on balancing PVP and fixing the whole PVP gear issue as it is now impossible to quest in PVP gearas a healer because my offensive spells are about 10% of what they are in PVE gear (admittedly this is 30 ilevels higher too) and exactly the same as my level 80 TWINK priest.
I can't think of a solution to the issue beyond having no PVP gear and when entering a BG or Arena giving players a choice from a few sets of class armour with different focus on stats (e.g. a haste set, amastery set and a crit set) but that the raises the question of how to reward PVPers.
Do you want world PVP? If so what type of world PVP would you like? Do you want incentives to encourage world PVP? If so, what would you like as the incentive? more »
Firstly I'd like to apol.ogise for my lack of activity during the past 2 weeks but some thieving scumbags decided 2 weeks ago to steal the phone cables connecting my village to the local telephone exchange (some 8kms away) and it took it lot longer than it ought to to have them replaced. As I was also on leave from work I was left beached with no Internet until the day before my vacation ended /boo.
I realised during this time how dependent I am on the Internet during this outage and even buying a mobile dongle didn't help as I was getting a lowly 44kb/s download speed which apparently is too low to get a connection to Battle.net let alone run WoW and as I was having 5 minute waits for web pages I didn't bother even trying to much aside keep up with my guild forum.
Anyway, this post was meant to go up the day my Internet died and I am only now able to get it out so Sunday Screenshot on a Wednesday it is!
During one of our guild "mount farm" nights we decided to add ZG into the mix and found that 5 manning a level 85 boss at level 90 can cause the game to do some odd things.
Got a screenshot of something odd that happened when you attempted something the game designers hadn't thought of? Or maybe you just have a screenshot that made you laugh, if so, I'd love to it so please leave link in the comments.
If you're into running old content for fun and like having a laugh with crazy matuer wow addicts and are looking for a new home come give Exhumed on Shadowsong EU a look. In addition to our social side we have 2 raid teams and an RBG team.
The flex team has killed Garrosh and is always looking for more players to help kick us over to normal raiding and our "progression" team is currently 13/14 (but not recruiting) and are working on our PVP team as well. We're Shadowsong's only active RBG guild which means we're number 1!
For more information or to apply to join, visit our website.more »
Gruul decided now was a good time to show me his Kil'jaedenimpersonation
Today's screenshot is of a recent trip to Gruul's Lair on my paladin in his search for some Tier 4 armour. Upon death, Gruul assumed a rather familiar pose...more »
The stuff from BlizzCon is mostly good news imho. The new expansion isn't what I was expecting and the time travel but not time travel thing is something odd but we have a wibbly wobbly timey wimey time line already as a new char starts in a post-Cataclysm times but at levvel 60 moves back in time to Outlands until 68-70, then forwards to Northrend (but still pre-Cataclysmic) before until level 80 before returning back to post-Catatclysmic timeline until 90 as we quest through Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria zones.
Of my predictions only the very obvious were correct. They were:
I'll start with the 99.9% certainty, a new expansion;
We will not get a new playable race or a new class;
We will get new character models for all existing races except Goblins, Worgen and Pandaren;
We will level to 100;
We will get a 7th tier of talents;
Normal mode raids will adopt the flex technology allowing raid sizes to vary between a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25;
The expansion "highlights" are that Garrosh escapes and goes back in time to Draenor to and try to prevent Gul'dan drinking the blood of Mannorth and thereby preventing the Orcish demise and allowing him to build the Iron Horde, which will try to invade Azeroth.
This is a bit of a disappointment as it seems to be another Horde centric expansion and all focused around Orcs. But it is really too early in the whole process to really make a judgement so I'l give it the benefit of the doubt. As a lore freak though the whole expansion does sound like it could hit the right spots.
We have also been given a "Garrison". This is player housing and shows what the farm was the trial for. Garrisons contain buildings that "can have multiple tiers, specializations, offline progression, and more!" I am really hoping this is account bound so my alt army can share the base that Evlyxx will build. Th efarm has not been done on my alts and their garrison would definitely never get off the ground. I like this idea but only one per faction per realm please. We are getting seven dungeons, 4 for leveling and 3 heroic only. This is awful. Had they all been for leveling and then heroic it would be much better but as one of the heroic only ones is Upper Blackrock Spire that wouldn't work anyway. Mists saw 4 initial leveling dungeons with 2 added mid way through and that made that much better so seeing this number reduced when we're getting 10 levels simply doesn't cut it for me.
Moving on to end game, we have two Raids with 16 bosses plus World Bosses. This is awesome news and follows the trend started in Cataclysm and proved great in Mists. I just hope that we get a two raid teir later in the expansion this time around.
The raids come in four difficulties Raid Finder, Normal (currently known as Flex), Heroic (currently known as Normal) and Mythic (currently known as Heroic). Sounds great and makes sense renaming them. Raid Finder stays much as it is now, with the exception that if people drop from the group mid way through the boss will scale down to adapt to the new number in the group. Normal (WoD) and Heroic (WoD) difficulties will also be flexible with 10-25 players and cross realm enabled. Their loot will be the traditional style and bosses will drop 1 item per 5 players and if that produces 2.6 items a boss will drop 2 items and then have a 60% chance of dropping the third item.
These changes are brilliant and will help smaller raid guilds hugely. As a raid leader and officer in a guild that raids this makes me happy as I won't have to make decisions to leave anyone of our 15 person raid squad out of our progression focused team out of the raid team.
Mythic difficulty will be a 20 man raid group. This is NOT flex enabled and will work exactly as heroic raids do now. That is they have a defined raid id and players will not be able to join a second raid even if they have only killed the first boss of the raid.
The Mythic raid difficulty changes really are a kick in the teeth for me and our main raid team. We raid 6 hours a week and don't demand high attendance because we realise that people have family and work to do as well as play games. Considering this our progress is awesome and if we were to raid as much as most other guilds on our server would be pushing for the number 2 spot. But we currently run 10 man because we don't have the resources to manage a 20 man raid guild. Our server is also really tough to recruit on (maybe Connected Realms will change this) because we have too many guilds and too few skilled raiders on the server to go round.
Most of the expansion this change would have not had any impact on our team but we're currently 2 bosses away from heroics (Mythic come WoD) and that is liable to happen in the next month. Under the current system we'll be moving on to heroics soon. If we were in Warlords of Draenor we would have finished and be left with the option of farming the instance waiting for the next raid, bringing in alts to restore some form of challenge or simply declaring the game as beaten and stop raiding.
My biggest fear is that if we don't make the change and try to have a 20 man raid team I will lose most of my team and be left with the option of not raiding at the level I am now.
Something needs to be done and Rob Pardo's answers to questions similar to my concerns didn't give me the impression that Blizzard were liable to change this decision. Time will tell and at least we have time to make decisions, I just want Shadowsong to become a Connected Realm real soon so I can have the option of recruiting people now in preparation for the future. One thing is for certain, me and the officers in Exhumed are going to have to make some tough decisions in the next few months.
Anyway moaning over and lets look at something more positive! The new models look absolutely awesome and the fact that they have made them look so good while keeping the look and feel of the races is a testament to the graphics team. I just can't wait to see the remaining models, particularly the human models.
We don't yet know when or how the new character models will be released yet. It could be that Blizz have all of the completed race at launch, or they could add them every patch. Personally I hope they are added at launch but if only half the races are fully complete by then I'd rather see them launched then and get the ramaining races added later rather than delay them all.
It has also been confirmed that there will be no free re-customization for characters after new character models. This is something that I really can support as the models are so true to the originals it does seem pointless. But I'm sure if there is uproar at the new look I can see this decision being reversed. The bigger disappointment in this statement is that I don't believe that there will be any more character customisation than we already have which is a real shame as compared with games released in the past 5 years the Warcraft character models are so generic.
With BlizzCon 2013 almost here I thought it was time for me to make some predictions for Warcraft, some based on known fact others pure speculation on my part.
I'll start with the 99.9% certantity, a new expansion;
The expansion will be called "The Dark Below";
The focus of "The Dark Below" will be the Aqir and we will encounter them in subterranean Azeroth, much like the Old Kingdom and Azjol-Nerub instances we encountered in Northrend. This will give us a new area with connected zones without needing to add new land mass to the world of Azeroth;
We will not get a new playable race or a new class;
We will get new character models for all existing races except Goblins, Worgen and Pandaren;
Hunters, mages and rogues will get a major rework to make their specs more diverse much like warlocks had in Mists;
We will level to 100;
We will get a 7th tier of talents;
Abilities will become more spec based with several class abilities removed to reduce ability bloat we currently have on the action bars;
Guilds will be able to level to 30;
Guilds will be able to form alliances with other guilds;
Timeless Instances - will allow all players to queue for all dungeons not above the players level. Players higher than the dungeons level will be scaled down to the instances level;
There will be new 5 man dungeons, but no heroic versions;
LFR will remain but will be made easier and reward players with the equivalent of heroic 5 man content;
Flex raids will remain and effectively replace LFR as the introduction to raiding and remain a viable gearing up mechanism;
Normal mode raids will adopt the flex technology allowing raid sizes to vary between a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25;
Heroic mode raiding will be fixed at 10 and 25 man raid sizes;
Scenarios will be extended and be used for end of zone quests;
Connected realms will be extended and there will effectively be 4 realms in each region, a PVE realm, a PVP realm, an RP realm and an RP-PVP realm;
Annual Pass 2 will be announced, with the Fae Dragon mount, Diablo 3 expansion, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm as freebies thrown in to sweeten the deal and make people forget that the expansion release date of autumn 2014 is over a year since patch 5.4 and the Siege of Orgrimmar was released.
That concludes my predictions for next week's BlizzCon. I'd love to hear your predictions for Warcraft's future or your thoughts on mine.
Been a lot busy again lately but finally got some spare time to hit the leveling trail on my druid. Gone boomkin cos I can't do kitty at all and I've leveled my pally, death knight and warrior in the respective tank specs so I thought I'd be different.
Been having a whale of a time too but mastering that pesky rotation as boomkin is no easy feat. Therefore I had to put together a good boomkin Weak Aura set that enabled me to watch my dots and cast either Wrath or Sunfire while in the correct Eclipse.
As I think they're rather good, I thought I'd share them with the world! I have also ventured into the world of YouTube so you can actually see the Weak Auras in action (and to see how bad I am at being a boomkin, but that is a story for another day!
When importing make sure you manually copy and paste from the lower box on PasteBin, as whenever I try to import using their clipboard feature my strings get rejected despite it copying exactly the same text. Makes no sense but the manual method does work. For your convenience, I have posted these on Pastebin as well as this page but the copy paste from here is hit and miss and I would strongly recommend you use PasteBin if you get an import error.
Once again I'd like to thank TouchyMcFeel for his awesome Weak Aura tutorial videos on YouTube, you really should subscribe to his channel regardless of your Weak Aura abilities.
My other Weak Auras can also be found on PasteBin: Priests
Interested in joining me at Exhumed on Shadowsong EU?
Exhumed is a guild for the time challenged mature player. We're focused on raiding and PVP progression but won't penalise you if you put real life before the game.
We are currently recruiting for PVPers, healers for our 2nd raid team and social members.
By day I'm an IT Server analyst for a major telecoms compnay in the UK and I've been playing World of Warcraft since November 2005 when a pair of colleagues bullied me into playing! I have evolved into a raider (summer 2006), an auction house wheeler dealer (2007), a guild officer (2007), an altoholic (2008), a raid leader (2008), a Warcraft blogger (2010) and a PVPer (2012)
My main has, and always will be Evlyxx, a priest and I love to heal. I started as Holy in vanilla, dabbled with the shadow side during the middle part of Burning Crusade, before returning to Holy but I have been mostly Discipline since mid-Wrath.
