My intention has always been to eventually have 1 character of each class at level 70. I've never really thought about how to spec them.
So here's my attempt at pre-speccing my alts before they are built and to see if I can end up with a good overall picture that will help me cover all that goodness that wow can throw at me.
The main orientation is solo play, every character should be viable to grind some (with the possible exception of the healer) and do decently in 5-mans. This is definitely not a 25 man raid oriented group.
In my previous post I already pointed out the need for 1 dps, 1 tank and one healer and I came to the conclusion that the following line-up would be best suited for my needs:
1. Capsize: affliction warlock
2. Capstone: protection paladin
3. Capibara: Restoration druid
this leaves me with: a shaman, a priest, a warrior, a rogue, a mage and a hunter
I am already decided on my priest going shadow for mana battery goodness and some nice overall utility ( I guess he'd count as dps but meh). And the mage will end up DPS either way and in the long run I'd really like him to be arcane/ frost or arcane / fire
4. Capacitate: Shadow Priest
5. Capitulate: Arcane Mage
I will most likely end up using the rogue for the stealth aspect. sneaking into places and whacking the occasional low-level boss and doing some farming so it would definitely have to be a solo pve spec which suggests either combat or a combat / assassination blend.
6. Capone: Combat/Assassination Rogue
The warrior is a bit of a tough choice. I could use another tank to have a bit of balance between my paladin but the paladin should cover most of my tanking needs and I really don't see the viability of prot if you need to go do a bit of grinding every now and then. I guess this settles the debate on fury for now.
7. Capeesh: Fury Warrior
The hunter isn't too hard. Beast Mastery sounds a fun way to go at least in the beginning with a potential spec into survival later down the line. Odds are this character will never see much group play and is one of the only classes that uses pets extensively so I might as well focus on that.
8. Capricious: Beast Mastery / survival Hunter
Last but not least the shaman which is a toss up between enhancement and elemental. I have plenty of melee as well as magic DPS at this point so it's really based on what will feel better. For the moment I opt out of having mana issues and so this will end up solidly in enhancement.
9. Capow: Enhancement Shaman
And there we have it. The easy part is done. Now for the levelling which I am sure will make for a few interesting blog posts in the future.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Karazhan and the expected impact
It has finally happened. Not so much because of the attunement removal in 2.4 but simply because the guild finally is ready for it. Karazhan... our first raid on Kara has taken place and I think the raid is currently on Curator.
It's hard to say what's going on though, news from the raid group is few and far between and even listening in on raid chat doesn't give a clear picture of what's going on.
They seem to be having fun, making progress and that's all that really should matter to them but in the meantime the rest of the guild is already starting to get that 'recently deceased' feel to it.
With the healers and officers tied up in kara and there already being a low amount of healers in the guild it seems that my soloing days I thought were on the decline are back stronger than ever.
Time to re-focus. It's a fair assumption to think that they will never invite me to Kara (at least not within the next month or two) and even if they do go out looking for DPS then there's enough of it around to make it easy to miss the opportunity to sign up.
Whilst I wait for my pity run through Kara it's time to build what I like to call the 'triumvirat'.
Every party has 3 corner stones. DPS, Healing and Tanking. Despite my legion of alts I don't have anything on level 70 able to do the tanking job or the healing job so the goal is quite simple: grow a tank and grow a healer.
I already have a ranged DPS in my affliction lock. So that's covered.
For tanking there's the trusty bear, the cut and dried prot warrior or the paladin. Since I will probably run in an off-tank role or in 5-mans I'd say the paladin is my best pick. A good deal of aoe tanking capacity, coupled with plate armor and some decent emergency buttons make this my preferred choice for 5-mans.
on to the healer, once again the paladin but also the priest, druid and shaman are options. I don't necessarily want to use a paladin as a healer because he will be my tank and I am no fan of the respeccing and collecting double/triple gear sets (or rolling 2 characters of the same class for that matter). The priest has a very interesting option for going shadow and being a mana battery so he's probably not my pick either. That leaves the shaman's chain healing and totems vs the druid's HOT approach in which case I opt for the unique approach to healing of the tree.
So to name the lineup that will get a boost in the coming future:
Ranged DPS: Capsize (affliction warlock)
Tank: Capstone (Prot Paladin)
Healer: Capibara (Resto Druid)
It's hard to say what's going on though, news from the raid group is few and far between and even listening in on raid chat doesn't give a clear picture of what's going on.
They seem to be having fun, making progress and that's all that really should matter to them but in the meantime the rest of the guild is already starting to get that 'recently deceased' feel to it.
With the healers and officers tied up in kara and there already being a low amount of healers in the guild it seems that my soloing days I thought were on the decline are back stronger than ever.
Time to re-focus. It's a fair assumption to think that they will never invite me to Kara (at least not within the next month or two) and even if they do go out looking for DPS then there's enough of it around to make it easy to miss the opportunity to sign up.
Whilst I wait for my pity run through Kara it's time to build what I like to call the 'triumvirat'.
Every party has 3 corner stones. DPS, Healing and Tanking. Despite my legion of alts I don't have anything on level 70 able to do the tanking job or the healing job so the goal is quite simple: grow a tank and grow a healer.
I already have a ranged DPS in my affliction lock. So that's covered.
For tanking there's the trusty bear, the cut and dried prot warrior or the paladin. Since I will probably run in an off-tank role or in 5-mans I'd say the paladin is my best pick. A good deal of aoe tanking capacity, coupled with plate armor and some decent emergency buttons make this my preferred choice for 5-mans.
on to the healer, once again the paladin but also the priest, druid and shaman are options. I don't necessarily want to use a paladin as a healer because he will be my tank and I am no fan of the respeccing and collecting double/triple gear sets (or rolling 2 characters of the same class for that matter). The priest has a very interesting option for going shadow and being a mana battery so he's probably not my pick either. That leaves the shaman's chain healing and totems vs the druid's HOT approach in which case I opt for the unique approach to healing of the tree.
So to name the lineup that will get a boost in the coming future:
Ranged DPS: Capsize (affliction warlock)
Tank: Capstone (Prot Paladin)
Healer: Capibara (Resto Druid)
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The legality of RTM
Well there we have it. The inevitable post about real money transfers and the implied legalities / illegalities of such.
Now I am no lawyer, and good lawyers that actually have half a clue about intellectual property in combination with RTM in online worlds are rare (as unusual as that may be for a lawyering field).
Still, having worked in the field of software development over the last 10 years next to having it as a hobby has taught me a fair share about intellectual property, money transfers and whatnot.
I remember the olden days where diablo2 items were sold en-masse on Ebay, I also remember how quickly that got stopped.
But what's the truth? what's the deal? Is it illegal or is it just plain annoying?
I am not going to elaborate on the impact of gold-selling and account selling on the economy of a MMO because either way 'value items' do not leave the system easily anyway (see castranova's analysis of ultima online's open / closed economy).
There are however 2 quintessential truths to the matter:
1. By selling gold/items/characters for real money you are breaking the TOS / EULA of blizzard.
2. By selling gold/items/characters for real money you are selling the intellectual poroperty of Blizzard.
You can argue about number one. Company terms of services are hard reads, seldomly easy to interpret and very subjective when they actually do make it to court.
However number 2 is beyond argumentation even though most people do not understand it. Anything you work for in-game and everything you achieve doesn't become yours. You pay a certain fee a month to be able to use services blizzard provides for you. Your character, the items on your character and the gold you 'have' are in fact not actually yours but property of blizzard (as defined by intellectual property laws).
So if you are actively selling your stuff online you are in fact selling someone else's property which in fact is illegal and subject to litigation from blizzard's side.
That's it... that's all there is to say about the matter. I leave it up to you to make assumptions or imply things like if it were actually your property it'd be subject to taxation and so on and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that your 15$ a month buy you nothing except the right to use Blizzard's intellectual property on Blizzard's servers. Anyone presuming otherwise and claiming any form of ownership and the sales rights attached to such ownership is plain and simply wrong.
Now I am no lawyer, and good lawyers that actually have half a clue about intellectual property in combination with RTM in online worlds are rare (as unusual as that may be for a lawyering field).
Still, having worked in the field of software development over the last 10 years next to having it as a hobby has taught me a fair share about intellectual property, money transfers and whatnot.
I remember the olden days where diablo2 items were sold en-masse on Ebay, I also remember how quickly that got stopped.
But what's the truth? what's the deal? Is it illegal or is it just plain annoying?
I am not going to elaborate on the impact of gold-selling and account selling on the economy of a MMO because either way 'value items' do not leave the system easily anyway (see castranova's analysis of ultima online's open / closed economy).
There are however 2 quintessential truths to the matter:
1. By selling gold/items/characters for real money you are breaking the TOS / EULA of blizzard.
2. By selling gold/items/characters for real money you are selling the intellectual poroperty of Blizzard.
You can argue about number one. Company terms of services are hard reads, seldomly easy to interpret and very subjective when they actually do make it to court.
However number 2 is beyond argumentation even though most people do not understand it. Anything you work for in-game and everything you achieve doesn't become yours. You pay a certain fee a month to be able to use services blizzard provides for you. Your character, the items on your character and the gold you 'have' are in fact not actually yours but property of blizzard (as defined by intellectual property laws).
So if you are actively selling your stuff online you are in fact selling someone else's property which in fact is illegal and subject to litigation from blizzard's side.
That's it... that's all there is to say about the matter. I leave it up to you to make assumptions or imply things like if it were actually your property it'd be subject to taxation and so on and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that your 15$ a month buy you nothing except the right to use Blizzard's intellectual property on Blizzard's servers. Anyone presuming otherwise and claiming any form of ownership and the sales rights attached to such ownership is plain and simply wrong.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Do you reckon(ing)?
With the advent of my paladin (alt, although I dont subscribe to the term alt) I've been doing some of the arbitrary reading recommended for a protection paladin class and ran into multiple discussions about how reckoning procs can cause an increased amount of parries from a mob (usually a boss), resulting in the swift demize of the paladin.
Now I am no wizard in theorycraft and in general I like to fly by the seat of my pants and a spot of reading here and there but if it actually is a problem that reckoning procs cause increased amount of parries that turn into a so-called dreaded insta-gib then I ask the simple question: How do warriors tank anything then?
The questions arises purely from the vantage point of the amount of parryable attacks each class is capable off. Warriors have a ton of abilities that can be parried, paladins have practically none since most damage is through 'passive' return damage or magic, like exorcism, seals, consecrate and shield returned damage.
None of these outside the standard paladin melee (auto)attack can be parried.
So unless reckoning speeds up your attack well beyond the attack rate of a warrior there's no reason to believe that haste induced parry gibs are actually a significant problem (or at least more of a warrior issue than a paladin one).
Much like any parry though it can increase spike damage. The more you hit a mob the more you increase the chance the mob will parry and thus the more damage you can receive over a percievable timespan.
In the meantime even a parry can be blocked, and since paladins were made to block every blocked parry means extra damage to the enemy and more importantly extra threat.
So it stands to reason that reckoning is not a bad thing, perhaps slightly dangerous in straight up single boss fights, but much more useful when the targets are numerous which they generally are.
But reckoning at 5/5 is expensive so I did some more looking around to see how much you could actually scrape off of the talent without losing the bulk of its effect.
And voila a bit of digging on maintankadin and I was faced with a nice little graph that shows reckoning uptime depending on the amount of targets. Turns out that there is virtually no difference between 4/5 and 5/5 reckoning in terms of uptime and 3/5 is really close to what you could hope to achieve as well.
2/5 however shows a significantly lower uptime and of course 1/5 is abysmall (but arguably better than nothing).
See the graphs here.
Looking at the most common 4-8 target range you could say that with 3/5 reckoning it would be up 50% of the time and with 4/5 reckoning about 65% of the time and only marginally more with 5/5.
So there's definitely call for dropping at least 1 point out of reckoning and if you don't mind an approximate 10% loss of reckoning uptime for your average group of mobs then you can easily go 3/5.
A godsend for those of us who want to take reckoning but can't find the points anymore to pick it up.
Now I am no wizard in theorycraft and in general I like to fly by the seat of my pants and a spot of reading here and there but if it actually is a problem that reckoning procs cause increased amount of parries that turn into a so-called dreaded insta-gib then I ask the simple question: How do warriors tank anything then?
The questions arises purely from the vantage point of the amount of parryable attacks each class is capable off. Warriors have a ton of abilities that can be parried, paladins have practically none since most damage is through 'passive' return damage or magic, like exorcism, seals, consecrate and shield returned damage.
None of these outside the standard paladin melee (auto)attack can be parried.
So unless reckoning speeds up your attack well beyond the attack rate of a warrior there's no reason to believe that haste induced parry gibs are actually a significant problem (or at least more of a warrior issue than a paladin one).
Much like any parry though it can increase spike damage. The more you hit a mob the more you increase the chance the mob will parry and thus the more damage you can receive over a percievable timespan.
In the meantime even a parry can be blocked, and since paladins were made to block every blocked parry means extra damage to the enemy and more importantly extra threat.
So it stands to reason that reckoning is not a bad thing, perhaps slightly dangerous in straight up single boss fights, but much more useful when the targets are numerous which they generally are.
But reckoning at 5/5 is expensive so I did some more looking around to see how much you could actually scrape off of the talent without losing the bulk of its effect.
And voila a bit of digging on maintankadin and I was faced with a nice little graph that shows reckoning uptime depending on the amount of targets. Turns out that there is virtually no difference between 4/5 and 5/5 reckoning in terms of uptime and 3/5 is really close to what you could hope to achieve as well.
2/5 however shows a significantly lower uptime and of course 1/5 is abysmall (but arguably better than nothing).
See the graphs here.
Looking at the most common 4-8 target range you could say that with 3/5 reckoning it would be up 50% of the time and with 4/5 reckoning about 65% of the time and only marginally more with 5/5.
So there's definitely call for dropping at least 1 point out of reckoning and if you don't mind an approximate 10% loss of reckoning uptime for your average group of mobs then you can easily go 3/5.
A godsend for those of us who want to take reckoning but can't find the points anymore to pick it up.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Levelling the casual way
Well it's been a while since I made my last post but since I don't have any readers I think all of them will happily forgive the transgression.
Today we will kick of with what I would like to call a very very condensed levelling guide that will simply show the progression of zones as we slowly climb the level ladder.
Premise
The idea of casual levelling is to make decent progress in a short time but without having to constantly look for a group, do a lot of travelling or bite your teeth out on mobs that are too difficult for your level. The idea is to avoid complexity alltogether and as a result we will simply put forth 4 basic ideas to make our life as easy as possible:
1. We kill mobs that con green (i.e. are a certain amount of levels below you)
2. We skip instances, group quests and extensive fetch quests that send you all over the place
3. We download 1 addon and use it (Questhelper)
4. We have lots of bagspace
The above is almost self-explanatory. The idea is to only kill things that are substantially weaker than us because this will reduce the amount that we have to sit around and drink/eat and it will allow us to kill mobs faster which in turn means more loot and more xp.
We also don't want to be bogged down by group quests or instances. It's true that instances give better loot but the risk of failure is also substantially higher. Generally between waiting for an instance / group quest group to assemble and the increased risk of not making it past the first boss you end up wasting more time than you are winning with it (unless you can get a group the second you want one).
This is true until about lvl 60 after which you should definitely consider doing instances in outland as your gear becomes substantially more important than it is from 1 - 60.
The last 2 things you will need is a little addon called questhelper available from cursegaming.com and other mod sites and a significant amount of bagspace. Questhelper is not perfect but it will display all current quest locations on your ingame map making travelling to the location you need to go to to complete the quest a piece of cake.
Bagspace on the other hand is crucial. The more bagspace you have the more you can stay out in the field. A very cost-efficient startup for bagspace is either mageweave bags or runecloth bags. Anything more than that is of course great but substantially more expensive. Runecloth and mageweave bags are relatively cheap and have the advantage that they can be sent to alts once you do get an upgrade. Most other bags are bind on equip making them untransferrable once you get an upgrade.
From 1-60 the only thing really worth buying are bags and banking slots to hold bags. Between that and your skills you will be spending a chunk of gold already and there's really no reason to buy anything from the AH in terms of gear because it will be outdated in mere levels.
Onwards
Oh... this guide will be for horde only. Still starting from about level 20 most areas are accessible to both alliance and horde so even our dear mortal enemies might find some use in the setup below.
Levels 1-10
Stick to your starting areas, each starting area is well thought out and has enough quests to keep you levelling on a nice constant pace. Levels 1-10 will fly by very fast.
Zones in order of difficulty (where applicable):
Durator
Tirisfal Glades
Mulgore
Eversong Woods
Stick to these zones until mobs start conning green or you run out of quests that are easy to do.
Levels 11-19
Nothing special here, for horde the useable zones are somewhat far apart but remember that you can go from undercity to silvermoon via the teleporter in undercity.
Zones in order of difficulty:
Silverpine Forest
Ghostlands
The Barrens
Once again try to stick to the zones until you're out of quests or mobs start conning gray. If you want to skip the barrens in order to preserve braincells you will be forgiven.
Levels 20-29
The barrens should still be usueable well into level 20.
Zones in order of difficulty
The Barrens
Stonetalon Mountans
Ashenvale Forest
Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles
Hilsbrad foothills and thousand needles will carry you over into the next level segment.
Levels 30-39
Nothing special here but start noting the order of the zones below since the ones at the end of the list will definitely be harder than the ones at the beginning. yes I did say sorted by difficulty :P
Zones in order of difficulty
Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles
Alterac Mountains
Arathi Highlands
Desolace
Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh
Levels 40-49
Lots of overlap starting as early as stranglethorn vale.
Zones in order of difficulty
Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh
Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands
Levels 50-59
Once again a lot of overlap with previous zones.
Zones in order of difficulty
Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands
Un'goro crater
Felwood
Western Plaguelands
Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus
Levels 55-65
Note the level overlap here from 55-65.
Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus
Deadwind Pass (not too much to do here)
The overall idea is to stick to a zone till you either run out of quests or mobs start going gray. If mobs are pre-dominantly yellow then go back one zone and see if you can finish off some more stuff there.
I have used this method for my latest pally and he's levelling very comfortably and gets to do all the pleasant and easy quests in almost every zone.
The level recommendations I have given above are a simple indication of what you should be to consider those zones. Adjust accordingly if you want to fight more greens or more yellows respectively but make sure you leave the zone when 1/3rd of your targets con gray.
I'll leave you to your own devices in outland since the levelling is fairly straight forward there. However if you can put off going to outland till you hit level 60 you will end up with more gold in the bank at the end of the line due to the fact that quests start giving gold at lvl 70.
Outland levelling is also different from the aspect that you should focus on gear and not on getting to 70 but opinions may vary on that so I simply refuse to comment on outland progression.
Today we will kick of with what I would like to call a very very condensed levelling guide that will simply show the progression of zones as we slowly climb the level ladder.
Premise
The idea of casual levelling is to make decent progress in a short time but without having to constantly look for a group, do a lot of travelling or bite your teeth out on mobs that are too difficult for your level. The idea is to avoid complexity alltogether and as a result we will simply put forth 4 basic ideas to make our life as easy as possible:
1. We kill mobs that con green (i.e. are a certain amount of levels below you)
2. We skip instances, group quests and extensive fetch quests that send you all over the place
3. We download 1 addon and use it (Questhelper)
4. We have lots of bagspace
The above is almost self-explanatory. The idea is to only kill things that are substantially weaker than us because this will reduce the amount that we have to sit around and drink/eat and it will allow us to kill mobs faster which in turn means more loot and more xp.
We also don't want to be bogged down by group quests or instances. It's true that instances give better loot but the risk of failure is also substantially higher. Generally between waiting for an instance / group quest group to assemble and the increased risk of not making it past the first boss you end up wasting more time than you are winning with it (unless you can get a group the second you want one).
This is true until about lvl 60 after which you should definitely consider doing instances in outland as your gear becomes substantially more important than it is from 1 - 60.
The last 2 things you will need is a little addon called questhelper available from cursegaming.com and other mod sites and a significant amount of bagspace. Questhelper is not perfect but it will display all current quest locations on your ingame map making travelling to the location you need to go to to complete the quest a piece of cake.
Bagspace on the other hand is crucial. The more bagspace you have the more you can stay out in the field. A very cost-efficient startup for bagspace is either mageweave bags or runecloth bags. Anything more than that is of course great but substantially more expensive. Runecloth and mageweave bags are relatively cheap and have the advantage that they can be sent to alts once you do get an upgrade. Most other bags are bind on equip making them untransferrable once you get an upgrade.
From 1-60 the only thing really worth buying are bags and banking slots to hold bags. Between that and your skills you will be spending a chunk of gold already and there's really no reason to buy anything from the AH in terms of gear because it will be outdated in mere levels.
Onwards
Oh... this guide will be for horde only. Still starting from about level 20 most areas are accessible to both alliance and horde so even our dear mortal enemies might find some use in the setup below.
Levels 1-10
Stick to your starting areas, each starting area is well thought out and has enough quests to keep you levelling on a nice constant pace. Levels 1-10 will fly by very fast.
Zones in order of difficulty (where applicable):
Durator
Tirisfal Glades
Mulgore
Eversong Woods
Stick to these zones until mobs start conning green or you run out of quests that are easy to do.
Levels 11-19
Nothing special here, for horde the useable zones are somewhat far apart but remember that you can go from undercity to silvermoon via the teleporter in undercity.
Zones in order of difficulty:
Silverpine Forest
Ghostlands
The Barrens
Once again try to stick to the zones until you're out of quests or mobs start conning gray. If you want to skip the barrens in order to preserve braincells you will be forgiven.
Levels 20-29
The barrens should still be usueable well into level 20.
Zones in order of difficulty
The Barrens
Stonetalon Mountans
Ashenvale Forest
Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles
Hilsbrad foothills and thousand needles will carry you over into the next level segment.
Levels 30-39
Nothing special here but start noting the order of the zones below since the ones at the end of the list will definitely be harder than the ones at the beginning. yes I did say sorted by difficulty :P
Zones in order of difficulty
Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles
Alterac Mountains
Arathi Highlands
Desolace
Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh
Levels 40-49
Lots of overlap starting as early as stranglethorn vale.
Zones in order of difficulty
Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh
Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands
Levels 50-59
Once again a lot of overlap with previous zones.
Zones in order of difficulty
Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands
Un'goro crater
Felwood
Western Plaguelands
Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus
Levels 55-65
Note the level overlap here from 55-65.
Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus
Deadwind Pass (not too much to do here)
The overall idea is to stick to a zone till you either run out of quests or mobs start going gray. If mobs are pre-dominantly yellow then go back one zone and see if you can finish off some more stuff there.
I have used this method for my latest pally and he's levelling very comfortably and gets to do all the pleasant and easy quests in almost every zone.
The level recommendations I have given above are a simple indication of what you should be to consider those zones. Adjust accordingly if you want to fight more greens or more yellows respectively but make sure you leave the zone when 1/3rd of your targets con gray.
I'll leave you to your own devices in outland since the levelling is fairly straight forward there. However if you can put off going to outland till you hit level 60 you will end up with more gold in the bank at the end of the line due to the fact that quests start giving gold at lvl 70.
Outland levelling is also different from the aspect that you should focus on gear and not on getting to 70 but opinions may vary on that so I simply refuse to comment on outland progression.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Warlock - Part II
My irregular posting habits nonwithstanding finally a new installment of the warlock.
Today we look at the affliction talent tree and the choices I made therein. With a little luck I'll find the time to summarize in a later post and show how you could potentially progress through the various talents.
Premise
Let's make a few base assumptions about what the affliction warlock is and what it isn't:
First and foremost an affliction warlock is focused on doing damage with damage over time spells. This means affliction warlocks do damage very, very slowly.
Incoming damage is not mitigated but absorbed and health is reclaimed through drain spells. The affliction lock is not a pet-based class.
Pets are there to provide utility in specific situations where you need some more tanking power (voidwalker), some extra damage or CC (succubus) or an infinite pool of mana (imp).
An affliction lock that relies heavily on his/her pet is gimped and is failing to see the true power of affliction.
An affliction lock _can_ effectively tank single targets and should not be afraid to do so (in fact it is often needed).
Affliction locks are excellent solo players and can really pile on the damage with boss mobs but are generally less useful in larger groups due to the fact that the dots don't have the time to finish ticking.
Affliction locks have 0 downtime.
Stats
Before we dive into talets a quick mention of stats. So far I've seen very little use for any stat except stamina and spell damage.
(shadow) Spell damage increases the power of all your dots and more importantly your drain effects. More spell damage means your siphon life and your drain life tick harder which in turn means you recover health faster.
Health can be converted to mana via life tap meaning that as long as you have a big enough pool of health and high enough spell damage you will never have to worry about int, spirit, mp5 and other such silliness.
Ignoring everything except spell damage first and stamina second gives you the advantage that your gear picks are very straight forward and by not spending any item budget on other stats you practically guarantee that you get the maximum possible amount of stamina and spell damage for your warlock.
Talents
Before we dive into the all important affliction talents lets take a look at demonology and destruction first and see what we can use from their in the lower tiers:
Demonology has very little to offer at the lower tiers but one talent stands out like a sore thumb namely demonic embrace.
Boosting your stamina at the expense of spirit is a good thing a very good thing since you will be investing heavily in stamina and an x% increase to it is exactly what we want. The tradeoff of losing some spirit is completely irrelevant because the stat means nothing to an affliction warlock (regen mana... ah yes that's why the gods gave us drain mana and drain soul).
5/5 here
Destruction on the other hand will provide us with the necessary improvements to our one solid direct damage spell namely shadow bolt and also gives us a shot at another instant damage spell shadowburn.
On tier 1:
Improved shadow bolt is favored over cataclysm here. Cheaper shadowbolts mean nothing since we will never run into 'real' mana issues and the extra damage resulting from shadow spells (i.e. all your dots) through shadow bolt crits is better even when your shadowbolt rarely crits.
5/5
On tier 2:
Bane is a clear winner. Shadow bolts are a slow cast as is, taking off a good .5 seconds doesn't sound like much but can make all the difference when trying to fire as many shadow bolts before having to re-apply dots (which is always more important).
5/5
Aftermath really means nothing. A chance to daze the target would be interesting if daze meant stun but it doesnt. It just slows the enemy down for 5 seconds which really doesn't help since you can still get hit casting shadowbolt and all your other spells are instants anyway.
On tier 3:
Plenty of choices here, shadowburn is too good to turn down.
Sure it eats soulshards but it is one of the few instant damage spells we have available and as a result makes an excellent filler for those times that you know your Shadow bolt won't finish casting in time. 1/1
Beyond shadowburn there is really only Devastation that is an interesting choice. More shadow bolt crits means your shadow spells do more damage to the target which is never bad. Still you could ask yourself if you really need this extra crit chance but if you have points to spare this will be a good place to dump them.
On to affliction
We will be putting a lot of points in affliction so as to avoid confusion I will simply give my comments on each and every affliction talent in the tree and the amount of points I dropped into it.
On tier 1:
Suppression helps your spells stick to the target. If you get a lot of resists you can either stack a whole bunch of spell-hit on your gear or drop points into suppression. Spell-hit items really don't come up with good combinations of stamina and spell damage very often so this talent can be very useful. There's no reason to max it, simply look at your situation and see how often your spells get resisted and apply 1,2 or maybe even 3 points to the talent.
2/5 and moving on.
Improved Corruption can turn your slow casting corruption spell into an instant cast killer DoT. Since corruption isn't overwritten by any other dot except seed of corruption this is too good to not have on an instant cast. 5/5 no regrets here.
on tier 2:
Improved curse of weakness can boost your curse of weakness by up to 20% for 2 points resulting in something like 30 less DPS a target does to you at 70 without this skill it's about 25 less.
Well whoopdidoo, as an affliction lock you will have enough problems picking between curse of shadows, curse of doom, curse of agony, curse of tongues and other curses making this curse situational at best. Not worth improving in my opinion. 0/2 no love for you.
Improved drain soul returns up to 15% of your mana to you when you whack someone while drain soul is active. The threat reduction is gravy. Unfortunately drain soul by itself is horrible, the fact that it's the only way to get soulshards makes it a necessary evil. And since we're stuck using it anyway it may as well return 15% of your mana when you kill something.
2/2 for this skill, downrank your drain soul to level 1 and use it every time an enemy is down to 1 or 2% health to get a nice chunk of 'free' mana.
Improved life tap returns up to 20% more mana when life tapping. Affliction warlocks tap often, no wait... all the time. In fact you life tap so often that it is bound to be right smack dab in the middle of all your important spells which means you get to click on it even when you don't want to on a regular basis. 2/2 unless you can live off of dark pact alone (I know I can't).
Soul siphon is your friend. Soul siphon makes your drain life work better the more shadow spell effects are on the target (4% per effect). Considering all your dots and curses are shadow school spells you can easily end up draining targets that have 4 shadow effects on them resulting in a nice 16% more drain. Mutiply this by the amount of other people in your group that use shadow spells and you know why there's a 60% cap on this. 2/2 without a doubt.
On tier 3:
Improved Curse of Agony makes your curse of agony do more damage. More damage you say? That's wonderful... but wait... it's a curse. As a curse curse of agony has to contest with other curses like curse of tongues, weakness, exhausion, curse of doom and a whole bunch of others. So it really depends on how you use your curses. Additionally all the damage in curse of agony is backloaded. I.e. all the damage happens at the end, so the extra damage from this talent only really kicks in towards the end of the curse which doesn't always see completion. Situational at best, since I like all my other curses 0/2 points in this.
Fel Concentration prevents you from being interrupted during spell cast up to 70% of the time. You can't drain - tank anything without this spell. Even with this spell your drain life gets interrupted regularly and playing without it is like trying to get something from the trunk of your car while driving down the highway at 180km/h. 5/5 don't leave home without it.
Amplify Curse boost your curse of doom or curse of agony damage by 50% and also improve your next curse of exhaustion by 20%. While this talent is very much situational and on a long cooldown you'll never want to go without it again after you see an amplified curse of doom hit. For all the math impaired people like me that's about 4200 damage + 50% damage from your amplify curse plus something like 200% of your spell damage. For my poorly geared lock that comes down to 4200 + 2100 + (2*550) = 7400 damage for a curse of doom. Not too shabby for something that you can fire and forget. 1/1 No argument.
On Tier 4:
Grim Reach gives your affliction spells up to 20% more range. More range is nice but it doesn't affect your shadow bolt so you will be in range with your dots before you are in range with your shadowbolt. This is one of those skills you either love or hate. It does however make life easier when re-dotting feared enemies so for me it's clear: 2/2
Nightfall sweet nightfall. Procs every now and then when you damage your enemy and makes your next shadowbolt an instant cast. In lucky streaks you can have it trigger a whole bunch of times turning your shadowbolt into a true killer. The main drawback is that when the nightfall procs you have about 10 secs to pump out that additional shadowbolt which isn't always as easy as it sounds. If you're fast enough on the buttons then don't skip this skill, if you're not then don't skip this either but learn to be faster. 2/2 because warlocks really do work better during nightfall.
Empowered Corruption A lovely 36% extra damage on your corruption. If you invested the points to make it instant cast then strapping on another 36% worth of damage on it is definitely not a bad idea. With this 36% extra damage your corruption will almost be level playing field with unstable affliction meaning that this is now a serious DoT to consider. 3/3 for me
On tier 5:
Shadow Embrace causes some of your spells to trigger the shadow embrace 'debuff' on the enemy reducing the physical damage they do by up to 5%. Woot you'd say, 5% less physical damage doesn't really tickle my fancy especially when you can easily outdrain that damage. But wait... there's something we need to consider. Shadow embrace counts as a shadow effect on the target because it's a debuff and as such it adds another 4% to the power of our drain life via soul siphon. If you really love your tank make it 5/5 so you can save them some damage on instance bosses... but that means you really really have to love your tank. So 1/5 for me because 1 point is plenty and I only have so much love to spare.
Curse of exhaustion reduces the enemy speed by 30% or 50% with an amplify curse. A highly situational spell at best and more often than not overwritten with one of the more important curses. I'd recommend not taking it, but since I can't not pick up a shiny new spell for one point I invested 1/1 shame on me.
Shadow Mastery is a nice and straight forward skill that'll add up to 10% damage to your shadow spells. It's not necessary a lot, but since pretty much every spell in your arsenal is shadow based you can't really argue with this skill. 10% extra for your unstable affliction, corruption and curse of agony whilst draining life adds up quickly and shouldn't be ignored. 5/5
On tier 6:
Dark Pact takes some of your pet's mana and adds it to your own. Depending on your preferred pet dark pact is more or less effective. Voidwalkers will run out of mana quickly but dark pact and an imp on passive will pretty much ensure that you never run out of mana. Dark pact is a good alternative to constantly life tapping as it doesn't take your life away and with me being the imp lover I am that means I'll definitely put in the 1 point it needs. 1/1
Contagion increases the damage of corruption, seed of corruption and curse of agony by up to 5% and reduces the change that your spells are dispelled. Well this is a PVE build and I haven't seen all that many mobs actively dispelling my spells. The 5% damage increase doesn't sound too great for a 5 point investment and on top of that doesn't apply to all shadow spells but only to a few of which 2 can't be cast at the same time and the last is often replaced by other curses. Of course we have to look on the bright side and celebrate the damage increase somehow because without it... you don't get unstable afflction your final talent. 5/5
On tier 7:
Improved howl of Terror to reduce the casting time of your howl of terror right down to making it an instant cast spell. If you can get into the concept of dotting up a whole bunch of mobs and letting them gather around you before using this then you will find that howl of terror dot grinding is one of the most efficient ways for a lock to take down mobs. Completely unbeatable for solo grinding where there's a lot of space, completely useless in groups.
2/2 here for I am a soloing machine
Malediction improves the effect of your curse of shadows and your curse of elements by up to 3%. 3 points for 3% extra damage from curses that are highly situational? Sure curse of shadows is nice but euhm not 3 points worth of nice unless you're glued to a shadow priest friend and like to run with other locks. 0/3 for me.
On tier 8:
Unstable affliction is another dot worth adding to your arsenal. Get it and use it frequently. A good opener due to the fact that it is one of your spells that actually has casting time and if you're in groups won't draw aggro meaning you can get started sooner. At full capacity slightly better than curse of corruption in terms of damage. Returns a nice chunk of damage to the person crazy enough to try and dispel this. 1/1
Today we look at the affliction talent tree and the choices I made therein. With a little luck I'll find the time to summarize in a later post and show how you could potentially progress through the various talents.
Premise
Let's make a few base assumptions about what the affliction warlock is and what it isn't:
First and foremost an affliction warlock is focused on doing damage with damage over time spells. This means affliction warlocks do damage very, very slowly.
Incoming damage is not mitigated but absorbed and health is reclaimed through drain spells. The affliction lock is not a pet-based class.
Pets are there to provide utility in specific situations where you need some more tanking power (voidwalker), some extra damage or CC (succubus) or an infinite pool of mana (imp).
An affliction lock that relies heavily on his/her pet is gimped and is failing to see the true power of affliction.
An affliction lock _can_ effectively tank single targets and should not be afraid to do so (in fact it is often needed).
Affliction locks are excellent solo players and can really pile on the damage with boss mobs but are generally less useful in larger groups due to the fact that the dots don't have the time to finish ticking.
Affliction locks have 0 downtime.
Stats
Before we dive into talets a quick mention of stats. So far I've seen very little use for any stat except stamina and spell damage.
(shadow) Spell damage increases the power of all your dots and more importantly your drain effects. More spell damage means your siphon life and your drain life tick harder which in turn means you recover health faster.
Health can be converted to mana via life tap meaning that as long as you have a big enough pool of health and high enough spell damage you will never have to worry about int, spirit, mp5 and other such silliness.
Ignoring everything except spell damage first and stamina second gives you the advantage that your gear picks are very straight forward and by not spending any item budget on other stats you practically guarantee that you get the maximum possible amount of stamina and spell damage for your warlock.
Talents
Before we dive into the all important affliction talents lets take a look at demonology and destruction first and see what we can use from their in the lower tiers:
Demonology has very little to offer at the lower tiers but one talent stands out like a sore thumb namely demonic embrace.
Boosting your stamina at the expense of spirit is a good thing a very good thing since you will be investing heavily in stamina and an x% increase to it is exactly what we want. The tradeoff of losing some spirit is completely irrelevant because the stat means nothing to an affliction warlock (regen mana... ah yes that's why the gods gave us drain mana and drain soul).
5/5 here
Destruction on the other hand will provide us with the necessary improvements to our one solid direct damage spell namely shadow bolt and also gives us a shot at another instant damage spell shadowburn.
On tier 1:
Improved shadow bolt is favored over cataclysm here. Cheaper shadowbolts mean nothing since we will never run into 'real' mana issues and the extra damage resulting from shadow spells (i.e. all your dots) through shadow bolt crits is better even when your shadowbolt rarely crits.
5/5
On tier 2:
Bane is a clear winner. Shadow bolts are a slow cast as is, taking off a good .5 seconds doesn't sound like much but can make all the difference when trying to fire as many shadow bolts before having to re-apply dots (which is always more important).
5/5
Aftermath really means nothing. A chance to daze the target would be interesting if daze meant stun but it doesnt. It just slows the enemy down for 5 seconds which really doesn't help since you can still get hit casting shadowbolt and all your other spells are instants anyway.
On tier 3:
Plenty of choices here, shadowburn is too good to turn down.
Sure it eats soulshards but it is one of the few instant damage spells we have available and as a result makes an excellent filler for those times that you know your Shadow bolt won't finish casting in time. 1/1
Beyond shadowburn there is really only Devastation that is an interesting choice. More shadow bolt crits means your shadow spells do more damage to the target which is never bad. Still you could ask yourself if you really need this extra crit chance but if you have points to spare this will be a good place to dump them.
On to affliction
We will be putting a lot of points in affliction so as to avoid confusion I will simply give my comments on each and every affliction talent in the tree and the amount of points I dropped into it.
On tier 1:
Suppression helps your spells stick to the target. If you get a lot of resists you can either stack a whole bunch of spell-hit on your gear or drop points into suppression. Spell-hit items really don't come up with good combinations of stamina and spell damage very often so this talent can be very useful. There's no reason to max it, simply look at your situation and see how often your spells get resisted and apply 1,2 or maybe even 3 points to the talent.
2/5 and moving on.
Improved Corruption can turn your slow casting corruption spell into an instant cast killer DoT. Since corruption isn't overwritten by any other dot except seed of corruption this is too good to not have on an instant cast. 5/5 no regrets here.
on tier 2:
Improved curse of weakness can boost your curse of weakness by up to 20% for 2 points resulting in something like 30 less DPS a target does to you at 70 without this skill it's about 25 less.
Well whoopdidoo, as an affliction lock you will have enough problems picking between curse of shadows, curse of doom, curse of agony, curse of tongues and other curses making this curse situational at best. Not worth improving in my opinion. 0/2 no love for you.
Improved drain soul returns up to 15% of your mana to you when you whack someone while drain soul is active. The threat reduction is gravy. Unfortunately drain soul by itself is horrible, the fact that it's the only way to get soulshards makes it a necessary evil. And since we're stuck using it anyway it may as well return 15% of your mana when you kill something.
2/2 for this skill, downrank your drain soul to level 1 and use it every time an enemy is down to 1 or 2% health to get a nice chunk of 'free' mana.
Improved life tap returns up to 20% more mana when life tapping. Affliction warlocks tap often, no wait... all the time. In fact you life tap so often that it is bound to be right smack dab in the middle of all your important spells which means you get to click on it even when you don't want to on a regular basis. 2/2 unless you can live off of dark pact alone (I know I can't).
Soul siphon is your friend. Soul siphon makes your drain life work better the more shadow spell effects are on the target (4% per effect). Considering all your dots and curses are shadow school spells you can easily end up draining targets that have 4 shadow effects on them resulting in a nice 16% more drain. Mutiply this by the amount of other people in your group that use shadow spells and you know why there's a 60% cap on this. 2/2 without a doubt.
On tier 3:
Improved Curse of Agony makes your curse of agony do more damage. More damage you say? That's wonderful... but wait... it's a curse. As a curse curse of agony has to contest with other curses like curse of tongues, weakness, exhausion, curse of doom and a whole bunch of others. So it really depends on how you use your curses. Additionally all the damage in curse of agony is backloaded. I.e. all the damage happens at the end, so the extra damage from this talent only really kicks in towards the end of the curse which doesn't always see completion. Situational at best, since I like all my other curses 0/2 points in this.
Fel Concentration prevents you from being interrupted during spell cast up to 70% of the time. You can't drain - tank anything without this spell. Even with this spell your drain life gets interrupted regularly and playing without it is like trying to get something from the trunk of your car while driving down the highway at 180km/h. 5/5 don't leave home without it.
Amplify Curse boost your curse of doom or curse of agony damage by 50% and also improve your next curse of exhaustion by 20%. While this talent is very much situational and on a long cooldown you'll never want to go without it again after you see an amplified curse of doom hit. For all the math impaired people like me that's about 4200 damage + 50% damage from your amplify curse plus something like 200% of your spell damage. For my poorly geared lock that comes down to 4200 + 2100 + (2*550) = 7400 damage for a curse of doom. Not too shabby for something that you can fire and forget. 1/1 No argument.
On Tier 4:
Grim Reach gives your affliction spells up to 20% more range. More range is nice but it doesn't affect your shadow bolt so you will be in range with your dots before you are in range with your shadowbolt. This is one of those skills you either love or hate. It does however make life easier when re-dotting feared enemies so for me it's clear: 2/2
Nightfall sweet nightfall. Procs every now and then when you damage your enemy and makes your next shadowbolt an instant cast. In lucky streaks you can have it trigger a whole bunch of times turning your shadowbolt into a true killer. The main drawback is that when the nightfall procs you have about 10 secs to pump out that additional shadowbolt which isn't always as easy as it sounds. If you're fast enough on the buttons then don't skip this skill, if you're not then don't skip this either but learn to be faster. 2/2 because warlocks really do work better during nightfall.
Empowered Corruption A lovely 36% extra damage on your corruption. If you invested the points to make it instant cast then strapping on another 36% worth of damage on it is definitely not a bad idea. With this 36% extra damage your corruption will almost be level playing field with unstable affliction meaning that this is now a serious DoT to consider. 3/3 for me
On tier 5:
Shadow Embrace causes some of your spells to trigger the shadow embrace 'debuff' on the enemy reducing the physical damage they do by up to 5%. Woot you'd say, 5% less physical damage doesn't really tickle my fancy especially when you can easily outdrain that damage. But wait... there's something we need to consider. Shadow embrace counts as a shadow effect on the target because it's a debuff and as such it adds another 4% to the power of our drain life via soul siphon. If you really love your tank make it 5/5 so you can save them some damage on instance bosses... but that means you really really have to love your tank. So 1/5 for me because 1 point is plenty and I only have so much love to spare.
Curse of exhaustion reduces the enemy speed by 30% or 50% with an amplify curse. A highly situational spell at best and more often than not overwritten with one of the more important curses. I'd recommend not taking it, but since I can't not pick up a shiny new spell for one point I invested 1/1 shame on me.
Shadow Mastery is a nice and straight forward skill that'll add up to 10% damage to your shadow spells. It's not necessary a lot, but since pretty much every spell in your arsenal is shadow based you can't really argue with this skill. 10% extra for your unstable affliction, corruption and curse of agony whilst draining life adds up quickly and shouldn't be ignored. 5/5
On tier 6:
Dark Pact takes some of your pet's mana and adds it to your own. Depending on your preferred pet dark pact is more or less effective. Voidwalkers will run out of mana quickly but dark pact and an imp on passive will pretty much ensure that you never run out of mana. Dark pact is a good alternative to constantly life tapping as it doesn't take your life away and with me being the imp lover I am that means I'll definitely put in the 1 point it needs. 1/1
Contagion increases the damage of corruption, seed of corruption and curse of agony by up to 5% and reduces the change that your spells are dispelled. Well this is a PVE build and I haven't seen all that many mobs actively dispelling my spells. The 5% damage increase doesn't sound too great for a 5 point investment and on top of that doesn't apply to all shadow spells but only to a few of which 2 can't be cast at the same time and the last is often replaced by other curses. Of course we have to look on the bright side and celebrate the damage increase somehow because without it... you don't get unstable afflction your final talent. 5/5
On tier 7:
Improved howl of Terror to reduce the casting time of your howl of terror right down to making it an instant cast spell. If you can get into the concept of dotting up a whole bunch of mobs and letting them gather around you before using this then you will find that howl of terror dot grinding is one of the most efficient ways for a lock to take down mobs. Completely unbeatable for solo grinding where there's a lot of space, completely useless in groups.
2/2 here for I am a soloing machine
Malediction improves the effect of your curse of shadows and your curse of elements by up to 3%. 3 points for 3% extra damage from curses that are highly situational? Sure curse of shadows is nice but euhm not 3 points worth of nice unless you're glued to a shadow priest friend and like to run with other locks. 0/3 for me.
On tier 8:
Unstable affliction is another dot worth adding to your arsenal. Get it and use it frequently. A good opener due to the fact that it is one of your spells that actually has casting time and if you're in groups won't draw aggro meaning you can get started sooner. At full capacity slightly better than curse of corruption in terms of damage. Returns a nice chunk of damage to the person crazy enough to try and dispel this. 1/1
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Guilds and intrinsic sub-structures
Ok ok the title was a little far fetched and made to be a little bit complex sounding but this post will actually be about guilds and various sub-structures in guilds so it's not completely off base.
The whole thing was brought on by one of our guild's resto shamans deciding to respect enhancing and skip town. The primary reason was that he didn't have enough to do as a healer. There was no real reason for him to leave because no one would've complained about him being an enhancing shaman for as long as he liked.
Still we're not here to judge the little bastard for his decision but to take a look at how to deal with the constant flux of members especially in the healer and tank department because well... I've never heard of a DPS shortage.
People will leave guilds. Reasoning is not important, some are selfish, some get a life, others are just burnt out or looking for attention but people will leave.
Assuming that you can't prevent people from leaving a guild the only realistic thing you can do is make sure that the gap that's left by the person leaving is filled as good as possible.
Sure you can ask people to respec, but more often than not this has it's own downsides: People playing a spec that they don't enjoy, people feeling 'forced' to do things they don't want to do and so forth and so on.
This doesn't leave much room for anything else except to work with new healers and train them as fast as possible but also leaves the possibility of motivating to provide healer/tank alts once in a while for the occasional raid / instance.
Sounds good, but too vague to actually be useable so lets see if we can come up with a basic scenario on how to make things work by looking at some very simple motivators.
1. Levelling is easier in a 'guild' group (or at the very least is generally more fun)
2. Levelling is more pleasant when at fixed intervals you have guaranteed upgrades
3. Motivation improves if there's other people taking an interest in your progress
4. Motivation improves if there's other people working on your progress (for example sending you pieces of gear while you are offline)
5. Character building is easier if there's someone who can lay out a basic guideline on how to do things
6. Character building is more pleasant if there are clear goals involved.
Properly motivated people will have more fun levelling, will be more likely to return whatever assistance they may have gotten and will generally be positive about their outlook on the guild.
Ok... all things that are still very obvious so lets dive a little deeper on how these various levels of motivations can be achieved.
0. All guild members should be motivated to have alts on various levels, if they pick up a new class commend them for the effort, offer them some simple crafted gear to start out or boost their coffers with a small offering of 10g (which is a lot to lower level chars).
1. Each and every day assign a few people (volunteers) to help other people level. Compensate them for this levelling activity via some arbitrary reward system (I.e. guild rank, some consumables, recouping the cost of not doing dailies, brownie points, hugs etc.) and some friendly comments for every person they manage to drag through the day.
2. Stop disenchanting BoEs. Bind on equip items can be guild banked, sent around to various people or even saved up. The disenchant value is never higher than the value of seeing someone get an item in their mailbox that they didn't ask for but can use anyway. Should there really be no takers for the items then and only then should it be disenchanted. you're better of losing bankspace and stockpiling items than to DE them. On a side note it is important to keep the guild bank 'clean' from trashy items (useless food, sharpening stones and whatnot) because it gives the impression that it is used as a trashbin.
3. Comment often and in a positive way to someone's progress. If you know someone just dinged tell them good job, take the opportunity to see if they need a hand with a few quests. The point is to at least pretend you care even if you couldn't care less you have to keep up with appearance.
4. Similar to 2, but extend your thought beyond that. Sure you could DE that BoE green or blue but before you do simply think about each item, each resource that you get and are considering turning into enchanting mats / gold. Can someone else use this? If the answer is yes then for heaven's sake pass the item along. If you're low on cash and have been giving out a lot of items approach the guild leader for some form of compensation which can always be arranged.
5. Appoint someone who is knowledgeable about a class to give brief instructions or to be the contact point for class questions. Post the appropriate guides in short versions on the forums and focus on providing knowledge through central places. The forum is an excellent place to display class builds, discuss them and figure out what works. There's nothing more annoying than to pick a new class levelling it to 40 and then figuring out you've been stacking the wrong stats and picking talents that don't do the job as well as others. People should not have to look elsewhere for basic information, basic information must be at hand at all times. Leave the math and the spell coefficient to the elitist jerks and focus on providing basic information on what works and what doesnt.
6. Tell people what they can expect for levelling the character they're levelling. If they won't be seeing the inside of specific instances that they're expecting to get in with their new char make sure they know this and offer them alternative goals. Don't ever let people wonder why they levelled a char to 70. Most people can figure out their own motivation, but add to it whenever you can.
The whole point of a guild is to work as a team on something that looks like progress and have fun doing so. Each and every guild member should be considered one of your alts and given the love that you would provide your alts with. Be that money, items or simply the occasional boost.
Will people abuse this help? Well of course, there are always greedy bastards who don't think beyond their own gain. But those people will eventually be found and removed, or will leave on their own accord.
Wasting 100 BoE items on someone who leaves hurts, but it will also build up a coherent and loyal core of guildmembers and improve motivation dramatically.
Perhaps my lacking wow experience made me draw the wrong conclusion, but in all fairness there really is no point to a guild if the guild doesn't operate as one person (with lots of split personalities).
The whole thing was brought on by one of our guild's resto shamans deciding to respect enhancing and skip town. The primary reason was that he didn't have enough to do as a healer. There was no real reason for him to leave because no one would've complained about him being an enhancing shaman for as long as he liked.
Still we're not here to judge the little bastard for his decision but to take a look at how to deal with the constant flux of members especially in the healer and tank department because well... I've never heard of a DPS shortage.
People will leave guilds. Reasoning is not important, some are selfish, some get a life, others are just burnt out or looking for attention but people will leave.
Assuming that you can't prevent people from leaving a guild the only realistic thing you can do is make sure that the gap that's left by the person leaving is filled as good as possible.
Sure you can ask people to respec, but more often than not this has it's own downsides: People playing a spec that they don't enjoy, people feeling 'forced' to do things they don't want to do and so forth and so on.
This doesn't leave much room for anything else except to work with new healers and train them as fast as possible but also leaves the possibility of motivating to provide healer/tank alts once in a while for the occasional raid / instance.
Sounds good, but too vague to actually be useable so lets see if we can come up with a basic scenario on how to make things work by looking at some very simple motivators.
1. Levelling is easier in a 'guild' group (or at the very least is generally more fun)
2. Levelling is more pleasant when at fixed intervals you have guaranteed upgrades
3. Motivation improves if there's other people taking an interest in your progress
4. Motivation improves if there's other people working on your progress (for example sending you pieces of gear while you are offline)
5. Character building is easier if there's someone who can lay out a basic guideline on how to do things
6. Character building is more pleasant if there are clear goals involved.
Properly motivated people will have more fun levelling, will be more likely to return whatever assistance they may have gotten and will generally be positive about their outlook on the guild.
Ok... all things that are still very obvious so lets dive a little deeper on how these various levels of motivations can be achieved.
0. All guild members should be motivated to have alts on various levels, if they pick up a new class commend them for the effort, offer them some simple crafted gear to start out or boost their coffers with a small offering of 10g (which is a lot to lower level chars).
1. Each and every day assign a few people (volunteers) to help other people level. Compensate them for this levelling activity via some arbitrary reward system (I.e. guild rank, some consumables, recouping the cost of not doing dailies, brownie points, hugs etc.) and some friendly comments for every person they manage to drag through the day.
2. Stop disenchanting BoEs. Bind on equip items can be guild banked, sent around to various people or even saved up. The disenchant value is never higher than the value of seeing someone get an item in their mailbox that they didn't ask for but can use anyway. Should there really be no takers for the items then and only then should it be disenchanted. you're better of losing bankspace and stockpiling items than to DE them. On a side note it is important to keep the guild bank 'clean' from trashy items (useless food, sharpening stones and whatnot) because it gives the impression that it is used as a trashbin.
3. Comment often and in a positive way to someone's progress. If you know someone just dinged tell them good job, take the opportunity to see if they need a hand with a few quests. The point is to at least pretend you care even if you couldn't care less you have to keep up with appearance.
4. Similar to 2, but extend your thought beyond that. Sure you could DE that BoE green or blue but before you do simply think about each item, each resource that you get and are considering turning into enchanting mats / gold. Can someone else use this? If the answer is yes then for heaven's sake pass the item along. If you're low on cash and have been giving out a lot of items approach the guild leader for some form of compensation which can always be arranged.
5. Appoint someone who is knowledgeable about a class to give brief instructions or to be the contact point for class questions. Post the appropriate guides in short versions on the forums and focus on providing knowledge through central places. The forum is an excellent place to display class builds, discuss them and figure out what works. There's nothing more annoying than to pick a new class levelling it to 40 and then figuring out you've been stacking the wrong stats and picking talents that don't do the job as well as others. People should not have to look elsewhere for basic information, basic information must be at hand at all times. Leave the math and the spell coefficient to the elitist jerks and focus on providing basic information on what works and what doesnt.
6. Tell people what they can expect for levelling the character they're levelling. If they won't be seeing the inside of specific instances that they're expecting to get in with their new char make sure they know this and offer them alternative goals. Don't ever let people wonder why they levelled a char to 70. Most people can figure out their own motivation, but add to it whenever you can.
The whole point of a guild is to work as a team on something that looks like progress and have fun doing so. Each and every guild member should be considered one of your alts and given the love that you would provide your alts with. Be that money, items or simply the occasional boost.
Will people abuse this help? Well of course, there are always greedy bastards who don't think beyond their own gain. But those people will eventually be found and removed, or will leave on their own accord.
Wasting 100 BoE items on someone who leaves hurts, but it will also build up a coherent and loyal core of guildmembers and improve motivation dramatically.
Perhaps my lacking wow experience made me draw the wrong conclusion, but in all fairness there really is no point to a guild if the guild doesn't operate as one person (with lots of split personalities).
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