Unbearably HoT

It happens. Guilds are halfheartedly disbanding as raid numbers dwindle, leaving longtime home-realms to reroll elsewhere or igniting at that one, final flashpoint and exploding. Why? Maybe folks have seen what they want to see, and have moved on. Perhaps other games have lured people away. Maybe the gap between the BT/Hyjal release and the opening of the Sunwell may have tired early T6 farmers, that guilds farming BT/Hyjal may not have been prepared for Sunwell’s ramped up difficulty, that general summer ennui set in as vacations and finals rolled through, and that with Wrath of the Lich King looming on the horizon, many would rather just sit back and start preparing for the storm. I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last.


And I’ve had it. It takes a lot more than minor discontent to burn-out someone who’s been progression raiding for over two years. I waited a little while for the dust to settle, take care of some real life concerns and, you know, get my rogue to 60, but here, in list format, is why I quit Singularity and took a break from progression raiding.


Loss of Core Raiders and Attendance Issues
Over the past few months, we had (not entirely out of the ordinary) moments of great shame, and moments of great triumph. We freed Kalecgos, destroyed Brutallus, survived Felmyst and even managed to start in on some rather discouraging Twins attempts. Meanwhile, we were practically bleeding raiders. Geared, competent apps were growing fewer and farther between, and with a sudden explosion of real life issues (marriage, familial difficulties, school), we lost a solid portion of our officer core as well.


In my opinion, some of those folks were the people who really pulled everyone together and focused our efforts to the knife-point necessary to dissect encounters. They were incredibly vocal, critical people, and more importantly, they had the officer tag that allowed them to enforce what they said. The final loss of our raid leader and GM (who actually re-rolled to play with Juggernaut) nearly nailed the coffin-lid shut—on both the guild and my desire to raid. People can’t just be given the officer tag and be expected to lead—authority and trust are two essential qualities that have to be developed over time. Rapidly attempting to metamorphose raiders into new officers didn’t quite work as I had hoped, and my outlook on the situation grew progressively bleaker.


Attitude
I have always considered myself a valuable asset to any raid group: I’m punctual, I’m prepared, I’m a superior player with quick reflexes, and I add a certain, wildly inappropriate something to a raid group. Let’s call it “levity”. As any leader knows, there’s a time and a place for goofing off, and there’s a lot to be said for boosting morale. Generally speaking, I have a knack for doing and knowing just that. It’s not exactly a designated job, but when I’d returned to raiding after my week off, I got a surprising flurry of tells from folks asserting that things had been “boring” without me around. That’s cool. That’s my goal, so to speak.


Unfortunately, not everyone else has this same mentality. If there’s something to complain about, it’ll be complained about, and if they can show up late and play like a half-assed retard, they’ll do that as well. If they can get away with it. Certainly this doesn’t apply to everyone, and perhaps the people who did fall into that pattern had some kind of real life issue to work out. But when that sort of behavior largely goes unnoticed or unpunished in a situation where 24 other people are counting on you, it’s unacceptable. It generates resentment, both toward the leadership and toward your fellow players, spreading like a disease cloud of malcontent.


So when someone like me, who just a few months ago attempted to drive morale and progression with a massive consumable gathering expedition, suddenly finds herself bitter and frustrated and dreading logging on to a veritable shitstorm of ill-geared apps and people who seemingly don’t care anymore, what happens? It dragged on me. I got angry. I found fewer reasons to justify the mental exhaustion from raiding 10:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on work nights. I unwittingly allowed my own irritation to bleed over in-game, and that, in my opinion, was also unacceptable and needed to change.


Raid Role
Many folks have periodically written about why tanks have such a high burn-out rate. While you can say the same thing about almost any class role, tanking isn’t easy. Let me rephrase that—effective tanking isn’t easy. There is a very high reliance on proper rotations, optimizing TPS output, utilizations of life-saving cooldowns, gear, quick-decision making, and…everyone else. I won’t digress into a tanking discussion here, but whether or not you have an official raid leading role, as the tank, you are often situated there. You lead, quite literally. You often pull. You manage mobs and their respective positions to the raid. You save all the people who mismanage aggro and the healers keeping you alive. And best of all, you’re in a prime position to screw up, repeatedly, and have everyone watch you do it.


That being said, other than watching your own damage output scale directly with TPS, doing everything correctly as a tank still doesn’t guarantee success. As Lycentia loves to say, “Tanking is watching everyone else fail around you.” While the amount of tanks necessary for any given encounter varies, most guilds have a much smaller pool of tanks than they do healers or DPS. Fewer tanks means stricter attendance and a heavier reliance on a small group of people: if a rogue can’t make it one night, you sub in more DPS. If one of your only FR tanks for Illidan can’t make it, you’re in trouble. A lot of time and effort goes into training and gearing tanks, and a lot of people take that for granted. It is, arguably, the most stressful non-officer position in a raid, and even considering leaving saddled me with some rather impressive guilt. A friend actually told me:

If you didn’t want to put up with everyone’s bullshit, you shouldn’t have rolled a tank. Leaving kind of bones everyone.

Relatively shocked, I responded with:

So by virtue of me playing a tank, I am thus held to some invisible higher standard than every other class? That I should continue to play even when I’m not having fun anymore just because I happen to be a tank?

Needless to say, the conversation ended there when both of us realized how dumb it sounded. But those expectations do exist, and I steadily grew tired of them.


Conclusion
That’s essentially the lion’s share of my reasoning for stepping back for awhile and focusing on general makeouts and high fives. I harbor no ill-will toward Singularity at all, especially since many of my friends still play there, and I have no intentions of transferring. Doomhammer is “it”, but it is currently my intention to prepare for competitive 10-man progression raiding in WotLK. With that in mind, myself and the other two tanks who left (along with a few friends) have created a new guild, with a new “charter”, so to speak, to move toward that goal.


I present to you:

DREAD LOBSTER


Recruiting will actually happen soon. Extensive class knowledge, tolerance for multisyllabic words and deliberately unreasonable requests a must. If this is something you’re seriously interested in, talk to me.

Focusing on progression is admittedly tiresome. As long as you keep farming, keep pushing and make measurable headway on new content, you can let yourself get sucked into the whole process without feeling too strained. Unfortunately, everyone stumbles. It’s been a long time since I felt considerably frustrated on any particular raid-boss and had to resign myself to the fact that this could take…awhile. Not since C’thun.


Sunwell can be particularly unforgiving about making mistakes. Screwing up a portal rotation or standing too close to someone else when one spawns can spell disaster. Losing any particular player on Brutallus might mean you’re too short on damage or healing and won’t make the enrage. Failing to Mass Dispel or run away from an Encapsulate victim during the Felmyst encounter…you get the idea. But they’re still easy in comparison to the challenge the Eredar Twins has presented.


Does it help we’re running with too much melee and too few healers? No, not at all. I even had the remarkably unpleasant experience of respeccing Resto the other night for a gangbang wipefest on the Twins. I haven’t been resto since before 2.4 and found things working…a little differently than I remembered. That, coupled with gear that was suddenly sub-par, woefully unenchanted and ungemmed, made for a teeth grindingly good time. And by good time, I mean I went to bed in a dour mood with a massive headache. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for learning, but when we’re running with spur-of-the-moment healers and trying to make progress, it’s hard to expect much.


So we’re cockblocked, well and truly. While we at one point had eight million and twelve mages and warlocks, we now have too-few casters and flurry of assorted melee. The casters are being Shadow Furied into oblivion, piss-poor reaction times to the Conflagration debuff wipe us in seconds and no one seems to be watching their threat at all. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone’s paying attention. I’m sick of everyone discussing the fucking hockey playoffs when everyone is trying to focus, and thus I’m going to pretend that they’re not trying hard enough rather than assume everyone is mentally retarded.


The best I can do is fine-tune my own approach and attitude, and hope that sets some sort of example. HAHAHAHAHA. But right now, it seems like Conflagration is reliably targeting whoever is third on aggro, so we’re hotfixing our approach by using three tanks on Sacrolash as an attempt to control the burn (so to speak). I anticipate better attempts tonight. Since I’m not tanking as of yet on that encounter and (let’s be honest) a rogue or fury warrior better fills my DPS role, I’ll probably be sitting for awhile or going back to healing until we can muscle our way though the tough spots. The catch? I’ll probably be healing on my badge-pimped paladin, Dorkasaurus.


Thus, in the near future, I might be scooping up T6 epics that’d otherwise be sharded for the millionth time in BT and Hyjal and switching back and forth between the healer and tank perspective. In the meantime, I’m busily rearranging and resocketing my various sets of tank gear for maximum soak, dodge and threat generation (fashion show coming soon to a theater near you) and starting to rework my UI for a more efficient healing set up (because healing with Perfect Raid was a nightmare), and any and all suggestions are welcome—I’m even thinking of trying out the Grid/Clique combo.


That’s all I’ve got right now—I’m preoccupied by those Eredar ho’s and our current inability to coordinate well enough to kill them. And remember:

Don’t forget to check out the 5-7-5 Haiku Contest!

If you read this blog every once in awhile or maybe even glanced through the About or Why sections, you probably know what sort of guild I’m in. If you don’t, here’s the quick and dirty overview:


Singularity is a relatively lenient progression guild on Doomhammer (US-PVE) with a long Pre BC history, currently dedicated to pushing progression on Sunwell Plateau. We kill internet dragons Sunday through Thursday, from 10 PM EST to 1:30 AM EST (server is MST). As of right now, we’re ranked second on the server for Alliance progression and third overall. We’re currently being cockblocked on the Eredar Twins, largely because we’re missing a few things. What?


Some raiders, obviously. A few folks with crushingly bad attitudes have moved on to things like Age of Conan (which admittedly, I still want to try) or casual raiding, and a few others have had to leave due to a number of highly understandable real life concerns. While we’re not crippled by any means, we don’t have an awful lot of leeway if someone can’t show up on a particular night , and badge gear on our alts only goes so far. THUS—Singularity has opened up for recruiting again to hopefully pick up some dedicated, skilled players to fill rank.


We want:

• 1 Holy Priest and 1 Shadow Priest
• 1 Holy Paladin
• 1 Warlock (possibly; not high need)
• 1 Enhancement Shaman
• 1 Rogue (maybe, if you rule at life)

What we expect:


From all of our apps, we expect near 100% raid attendance and insane performance. It isn’t enough to sit there and spam Shadowbolt or Chain Heal—we expect that you know your class inside and out and consistently work to better your play and better your part in the raid. Your gear must be of T6 quality or equivalent, or you have to be so radtacular that we want to gear you up.


What does equivalent gear mean? As an example—I’m not concerned with whether or not you have 3k plus heal or 12,000 mana; if you have shit for mana regen and less than 10k health raid buffed, don’t bother applying. If you’re a rogue with less than 300 +HIT? Resocket or go home. The difference between T6 gear and everything below it generally has to do with stats like STA, SPI, INT and the like. You have more of it, which is what we want. Stability. Survivability. If you don’t know how long you can spam Circle of Healing without potting, being innervated or anything like that before you go out of mana, try picking up a mod like Dr. Damage that’ll tell you.


Additionally, although exceptions can always be made, we prefer players who are 18+. We’re definitely an R-rated (if not NC-17) environment, and we don’t want to be babysitting or waiting on other kinds of obligations that young people should have—you know, like lots of makeouts, homework, school and serving your parents. It’s also pertinent to note that we’re all highly vocal and critical people, and if you can’t speak on Ventrilo, can’t deal with that kind of attitude or follow simple instructions, Singularity might not be the place for you.


But if you like rocking out, farming T6 content, pushing for Kil’jaedan and hanging with some wildly inappropriate cats, drop us a line at our website:


www.singguild.com


Feel free to comment with any questions, concerns, etc. here or talk to Runyarusco in game. As further incentive, I hear there might be some “twins” action if we take down those Eredar bitches. Man, those druids are crazy.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who took interest in my “State of the Raid Address”—I didn’t quite realize just how pertinent the topic of burnout-rate was right about now. The traffic that came through Unbearably HoT last night and this morning more than quadrupled the average and generated more discourse in more places than I could have hoped for.


Secondly, I don’t write for Girls Don’t Game anymore. After an apparent series of miscommunications, stylistic differences and being ninja removed from the community without any explanation, it was made more than clear that I was neither welcome nor appreciated there. Your support was, as always, fabulous, and my general gaming articles will have a new home soon.


Thirdly, I received a question in my inbox last week that I haven’t yet had the time to address asking what sort of add-ons I use and why—most notably, wondering what the name of the add-on was that set up my raid frames as a bar graph on the left hand side of my screen in the Brutallus video. Since I haven’t yet made the obligatory “What mods do I use, lol!!!” post, I’ll give it a shot before I delve back into raid mechanics and Hit v. Expertise.


To be honest, I’ve always been a little behind the wagon when it comes to installing add-ons: when Phaelia saw a screenshot of my UI, I think she almost died. I don’t want anything that’s going to turn into a resource hog, make things more difficult, clutter my UI even more than it already is, require me to hunt around excessively in order to update it or perform one stupid function and nothing else (like Oneway’s infamous Clam Opening mod). Regardless, I’m willing to concede that there are some add-ons out there that make my job a lot easier, and I have thus divided them into three categories for your viewing pleasure: SUCKS BUT I TOLERATE IT, PRETTY NEAT and BONERS.
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Over at MMO Champion, the forums are buzzing with the latest WotLK whispers, speculations and skeptics. Usually, I don’t pay attention. Trying to make predictions based on alpha release information is a little like trying to wick away information from a Sales bid: they’ve got an idea they’re really

But because I can’t help myself and, if I’m lucky, it’ll start some tremendous rumor that snowballs into other players using feral druids as mounts or priests getting holy form, I’ll indulge.


What follows are supposed data-mining hacks from WotLK’s alpha release to friends and family, which illustrate some class-defining new “talents”. Normally I’d only list what applies to druids, but let me set the tone with this particular gem from the warrior’s fury tree:

Titan’s Grip: Allows you to equip two-handed axes, maces and swords in one hand, but you attack (insert % here) slower than normal.

Listen, if Blizzard is genuinely dumb enough to let me run around with the Torch of the Damned in one-hand and Cataclysm’s Edge in the other, I’m main-switching back to my warrior. But now, the information most of you are probably hoping for:


Balance

1. Nature’s Fury: converts (insert % here) of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Wrath and Starfire spells have a (insert % here) chance of applying the Nature’s Fury debuff on the target. The Nature’s Fury debuff increases Nature and Arcane damage done to the target by 2%. Lasts 10 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
2. Starfall: you summon a flurry of stars from the sky on all targets within 30 yards of the caster, each doing (insert % here) Arcane damage, and an additional (insert % here) Arcane to all nearby targets within 10 yars. Maximum 20 stars. Lasts (insert time here).

Feral

1. Infected Wounds: Your Shred, Maul and Mangle attacks have a (insert % here) chance to cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed and casting speed of the target by (insert % here). Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts (jnsert time here).
2. Berserk: Removes all Stun, Fear, Snare and Movement Impairing Effects and increases your energy regeneration rate by 100% while in Cat form, and increases your total health by 20% while in Bear Form. After the effect ends, the health is lost. Effect lasts 20 seconds.

Restoration

1. Living Seed: When you gain a critical effect from your Swiftmend, Regrowth, Nourish or Healing Touch spell, you have a (insert % here) chance to plant a Living Seed on the target for (insert % here) of the amount healed. The Living Seed will bloom when the target is next attacked. Lasts (insert time here).
2. Flourish: Heals friendly party or raid members within (insert distance here) yards of the target for over (insert amount here). The healing is applied quickly at first, and slows down as Flourish reaches its full duration.

What do I think? I won’t dismiss the possibility of any of the above outright, since Blizzard has done retarded things before, but let’s take a closer look at the Feral talents first (since I don’t care about the lazer chicken, sorry).


Although Infected Wounds reads like a disease debuff that could then, presumably, be cleansed, it’s basically like hitting a target with Crippling and/or Mind Numbing poison simultaneously—except you know, raking them with your rabid claws. I see little use for this beyond PvP and might represent a diversion in the previously PvP neglected feral tree, but it also might allow a druid tank or DPSer to seriously assume the role of a rogue or warlock whose job it’d be to periodically apply a cast-time increase debuff on a target. Obviously, this “chance” to apply a debuff isn’t nearly as reliable as, say, Curse of Tongues, so I doubt the applicability even there.


As for Berserk, what we’re seeing is a long draught of Thistle Tea, Last Stand and the fear break that the name implies all rolled into one. I cannot possibly envision this as being anything other than an ability that everyone and their mother QQ’s about. How come? Warriors have a Last Stand, why not bear tanks? Warriors can stance dance—why can’t bears get some sort of ability that allow them to tank through a fearing mob without the use of Fear Ward, Tremor Totems and PvP trinkets? I’d argue that point, since I PvE extensively over PvP. But raid buffed, that’d bring my bear from roughly 23k HP to nearly 28k HP—and every single PvPer on the planet will get pissed that the already “overpowered” bear now has something like 5k more HP to cut through, even if it is for 20 seconds.


The two resto talents are actually sort of interesting, but only because it looks as though Blizzard (if datamined info can be trusted, and it can’t) is giving druids a PoM type ability in Living Seed and a CoH type ability in Flourish. I realize that neither seem to be as powerful as the regular priest abilities, but that kind of passive/AOE healing might mean that resto druids can occupy a bigger space in raiding scenarios. This, of course, isn’t to say that every other healing class won’t have something amazingly ridiculous that slides druid stacking the backburner again, but it represents a concession that Blizzard may understand what’s favoring stackingCoH priests and Chain Healing shamans right now for raid healing.


It’s fun to think about right now, but I’ve got to admit that one deep resto talent I’d like to see is this, offered by a fellow druid guildmate:

“I’d like to be able to have some Sprout ability where you grow apples, you know, like Healthstones, and then you pick it off yourself and throw it at someone’s skull to make them fucking eat it.”