f13.net

To all raiders out there. Patch 1.9.3 brought the introduction of a out-of-combat rezzing nerf in WoW. ooc rezzing should no longer be possible on bosses in Molten Core and other raid instances.

From the patch log:

Raid & Dungeons
- Molten Core:  It should now be very difficult to remain out of combat while fighting the bosses in Molten Core.

Well according to players on the official boards this has also led to a number of serious bugs and nerfs for several calss specifica talents and skills.

See this (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-dungeons&T=351625&P=1) thread for details.

An excerpt:
"Using Hunters to pull and Feign Death if it goes wrong: BROKEN. Now the whole raid will die.

Player suiciding on an accidental or bad pull: BROKEN. Now the whole raid will die.

Rogues and Hunters escaping combat as their class skills specifically ALLOW, for example, when the raid begins to wipe: BROKEN. Now they get put back into combat immediately.

Warrior off-tanks using Charge to initiate their portion of the battle: BROKEN. Now they cannot use Charge after anyone else engages."

Hunters can not feign death a bad pull and if a hunter FDs during a wipe the boss will be evade bugged until the hunter stands up againg. If the hunter does stand up the boss will kill him. Same with rogues.

Also a boss will aggro across the whole instance so when you wipe on Golemagg and there are already players at the entrance he will run through the entire instance training all mobs on your unsuspecting players waiting for the port.

Yeah I wondered what was up with the whole "you are in combat" thing when I tried to charge a mob last night.   Looks like their "brilliant" idea to fix the combat-rezzing "problem" was a half-baked as any of SOE's back in EQ.   

"Hey guys, they're not playing the way we want.  They're holding folks back so they can rez in the middle instead of waiting on the 30 minute rezzes on the 3-4 druids they have."

"Well we can't have that.. let's just flag THE WHOLE RAID in-combat. Surely there won't be any side effects to that."

If find this idea oddly amusing :D

Rogues can die for all I care, wouldn't care about hunters if ours didn't buy expensive arrows all the time to help the raid DPS. The no charging, the one person wiping the whole raid due to accidental aggro, and the aggoring from across the instance sucks though. They should have done something like a trigger that disables the regular ressing abilities within the zone, or a zone-wide debuff or large-radius aura that stops those spells from working. Anything but just putting everything in combat.

And, er, you know, Fuck You Too, and whatnot.

This is just another nail in the already 90% Metal coffin lid that is Rogues Vanish ability.

Ah well, my warrior is 56 now and I'm not really looking back...

It's been like this in BWL for the last few months. You get used to it.

BWL is funny tho.  It's like watching a Special Needs school take a field trip to a minefield.

Excuse me, but it wouldn't be SO MUCH SIMPLER to put in-combat the pally or druid after the first OOC res?

The whole idea is that you are not supposed to be able to escape combat with Bosses. And you are not supposed to be allowed to have one priest hang back and rez 2/3 of your raid as they die.  Bosses are battles of attrition, not zergfests where you get to keep bringing people back in.

Doesent matter if your class skill allows you to get away scott free while everyone else bites the repair bill. Sorry, but the bosses should be smart enough to "see through" your little tricks.

 I do aggree that it is rather dumb to flag EVERYONE, regardless of where they are in the zone, should combat with a boss begin.  of course, accidental boss aggro should reward the raid with a wipe (how the heck do you accidently aggro a boss anyhow?)

Maybe they could have some kind of "if boss is engaged" flag anyone who casts a beneficial spell on another character script?

Me too, but I'm a sadistic bastard. Especially when it makes raiders suffer.

The other night, it was getting late, and I drifted off and woke up with my fingers on the keys, running straight at Gehennas while the raid leader shouted in my ear over Ventrilo.  I guess I can't do that any more, lest I wipe the raid.

I agree with the second comment.  Isn't that how PvP flagging works?

HI GUYS I DO THIS REALLY TOUGH AND WHATNOT AND IF YOU DIDN'T GET YOUR CATASS ON TIME LIKE ME TOUGH BREAKS NOOBS.

Jesus, fuck you. I do the MC raiding grind and all that. We don't need OOC rezzing to do it but why in God's name would you advocate the ONLY THING TO DO TO ADVANCE YOUR CHARACTER AT 60 being harder? That's fucking retarded.

Calantus is our special little WoW Raider Buddy.

If he raids enough he'll get a designer job on World of Starcraft.

If you "playing" WoW's raiding game, you are already have had heaping mounds of retardedness, what's another teaspoon?

I called dibs first. First I've got to figure out how to become the guild mouthpiece and then write some really "kickass" ranter style updates.  Yes, my plans are finally coming to fruition.

Modern Angel, did you read anything he said or did you go from 0 to froth just based on poster name?

Yah, and these unintended changes suck.  Won't hurt the guild I'm in, but I feel for the people learning MC.  For us it's just faster pulls, a hunter that has to stay awake and the possibility of a overpull/adds/wipe due to someone not paying attention where they're walking.  OOC rezzing IMO needs to go (I thought the tactic is fucking cheesey and dislike when my guild does it), but it's been in game long enough that they need to take their time and figure out a better solution than the half assed bandaid they worked up.

Oddly enough though, I didn't notice any of this in BWL from Ebonroc to Nefarian last night.  I was able to stay OOC when I had to. Guess it's just MC.

The OOC Rezzing "fix" is good in principle- it could be used to trivialize several encounters, or to get through them with a raid that didn't have a real strategy or much experience.  The side-affects are not nice though; the sensitive pull at around Garr's room has much higher stakes now, I s'pose.

That said, a hunter can FD until everyone's dead and the mob is disengaged; that'll still work.  No luck for rogues however. 

Interestingly, we were able to rezz in some cases while people were engaged during a post-patch BWL clear.  I think there may be some holes.

No, I read what he said.

So here's the situation.

1) If you want to advance your character, you must raid at 60. That's fine. If I hated raiding I wouldn't play the game. I'm not married to ANY game.

2) WoW's raid game is honestly fairly accessible as far as MMOGs with raids go. Cool. So you can raid without being the uber catass guild. Mine certainly isn't.

So the more laid back guilds start raiding. They hit MC, might do Onyxia and they can do those things WITHOUT saying "no more than three rogues, more mages please, only two druids SORRY THAT YOU'VE BEEN IN THE GUILD SINCE DAY ONE YOU STAY HOME BECAUSE OF CLASS BALANCE."

So it's not the bye bye OOC that sets me off. It's that the bugs (if they are indeed bugs; let's not forget that Blizz has been silent thus far and the vanish/FD changes may be intentional) render rogues and hunters even more useless than they already were. The "casual-raiding" guilds, like mine, are fucked if they stay. That nice MC clear we did last weekend with nine rogues because that's what we had online? Thing of the past.

Anything that forces me from class balance lite into x of y sorry original member, you're useless pisses me off. And I feel really bad for those guilds that are just starting MC. The whole thing just changed.

Cue raider's argument of "Why are you going to MC now, noob?"

Keeping in mind that I'm a non raider:

I don't understand how the changes affect Rogues and Hunters that much.  Hunters are still a ranged DPS class and Rogues are still a melee dps class.  You still need dps classes to damage the bosses fast enough to win.. right?

Were hunter ONLY FD pulling, and then that was it.. nothing else.. just sit out the rest of the fight?  And how does a rogue losing vanish affect them?  Were they using it to pull and vanishing in the case of a bad pull, or is there something I'm missing?  In the case of either of those things (rogues pulling and hunters pulling), I don't understand how that could affect MULTIPLE of the same class.  Don't you tend to have only 1 puller ever in the entire raid?

Are these changes really trivilizing the role of some classes to the degree that is being stated here?  Or are they something that we'll gnash our teeth about for around 12 hours before giving up and learning new ways to do these things that the developers never dreamed of?

You're completely over-reacting to a flippant, insignificant, jokingly (I assume) made comment. 

Vanish is now kind of broken in Molten Core.  Yippee, skippy, think this somehow affects how many rogues we'll take? Yah, I'll pass up taking second place MC DPS, thus making the run slower. Because if Johnystabsalot wander off, he's going to die.  Take your meds.

No, nerfing Vanish / FD doesn't damage rogue or hunter viability in raids to any appreciable degree.  In the most extreme case, it's a couple more rezzes to do, and maybe a couple gold out of their pockets.

I never liked the OOC ressing personally. I didn't mind if other people used it, but whenever my raid used it I always felt like the strat was dirty. Like we were saying "we don't wanna figure out the fight, lets just ress people when they die due to our failures". That said, I never called for it to be removed, and I didn't mention even a hint of satisfaction at OOC being taken out. I didn't state my position on OOC at all infact because there's no point, we haven't used OOC since learning Baron so the removal of OOC ressing do not affect me at all.

What I did gloss over is that rogues can go ahead and incur the same repair costs as the rest of the raid for all I care. I would never have called for it to be taken away because I'm not petty enough to resent someone else spending less money in my raid than me just because of an ability they had, and I'm not cheering over it. What I am saying is that what rogues are dealing with is how it's been for 7/9 classes and they can now deal with it like we all have been. Hunters I have sympathy for because a lot of them spend an awful lot of money on arrows and I always saw their FD ability as a way of making up for that.

The only mildly offencive thing I said was rogues can die for all I care, the rest was all in sympathy for the annoying side effects the changes brought, so... yeah.

Also Modern angel, the changes to vanish and FD only affect your ability to avoid dying in the event of a wipe. Rogues and hunters can still wipe/reduce aggro (there's debate as to what it does, and I don't know for sure) with those abilities which is their main utility during the fight. All it means is you lose 1g on a wipe instead of getting out of it scott free. Does that suck for the rogue/hunter? I'm sure it does. Does it make them less effective or worthwhile to the raid? No. So your 9 rogue group will be just as effective as before. Maybe even moreso now that the rogues can go ahead and blow vanish during the fight instead of saving it incase you lose.


EDIT: So now I see where you misread me. When I said they can go ahead die I meant they can go ahead and die, literally, in the event of a wipe. And I was saying I would say the same for hunters but they spend money on arrows so they usually spent the same if not more than the rest of the raid during the average run even without dying. It wasn't meant in a "rgues can go to hell for all I care" kinda way.

Pika Wha?

Hunters are as useless as Engineering. Stop reading the WoW boards, they're warping your brain.

It does because it slows... it... down... even... more.

A bad wipe with nine rogues who could previously vanish means nine more rezzes. Rez, drink, rez, drink, more time. We're already fragile enough in alot of raid situations.

And believe you me my invective would be toned down if I hadn't seen numerous Long Live King Raidtard posts from Calantus repeatedly.

Cry more, noob.

Well I've never understood people hating on rogues on raids anyway (beyond jokingly). They're the first people we go to when we want more DPS. Last raid we had was a ZG with 5 rogues.

I'll agree with that. I play a rogue and a warrior. As I've become more experienced in MC I die alot less. First several times in there? On my back constantly. I do think there are alot of bad rogues who still think crit gear is king in an aggro management situation.

I'm puzzled as to why, after this long after release, it had to be fixed RIGHT NOW without any public testing. It's dumb. What was so pressing about it that it couldn't wait until test realm time?

And I saw your edit, Cal. I understand now and we should never fight again. "They can die like everyone else" is not a silly raid munchkin comment.

The descent into EQ Jr. continues.

The knee-jerk bandaid fixes do give me a nasty case of deja vu. Maybe it's just a glitch in the matrix. 

Glitch, my ass.  Replace a few nouns and you could be talking about Hate.  I smell Tigole.

If there's ever a need for a "zone break-in", I think I'll track Tigole down and club him to death with my laptop.

All I know is that we're doing a mini-MC tonight to clear a few bosses so as to free up some time on Friday for Rags beating. I'm not looking forward to our first Garr at the entrance bug.

Oh holy hel I have found a sig!

Just please remember these few posts next October/December.  You can convert my award to ISK and deliver to my EVE acct, thanks.


It begins.

I have a long cancelled EVE account lying dormant. I'll gladly ship out some in game cash when and if Blizzard crosses that invisible line between fun and nnot fun for me.

It might be after I accidentally vanish and cause an evade bug tonight. We'll see.

Not the rule, but I won't turn down ISK.

You can still talk in /ra or /gu so if you wipe on Garr and have people waiting at zone in, tell them to zone the fuck out.

And they'll certainly be told to walk out. But maybe not tonight or next week someone is going to zone while not paying attention and pull everything from Sulfuron on down to the door. And it's going to be awesome.

Out of interest, does a hunter doing an FD and drinking during a boss encounter cause an evade now? Did they apply these "fixes" across the board, thus making FD largely useless in the game? If a hunter does an FD in a raid group that includes other hunters, do all their traps break now, in the manner that FD breaks a hunter's own trap?

I'm going to guess it is that broken, since the hunter boards are offline.

hehe

I know nothing about hunters, but none of the original complaints in the thread happened on my Sunken Temple run last night..

We had 2 tanks, the MT would charge and get aggro, then the MA would still be out of combat, charge, and call out the assist.  I have nurfed HUD, and until I assisted and cast my first DoT, it would still have me flagged as out of combat (nurfed goes from mostly transparent to solid when you get flagged in combat, so it's easy to tell)..

We also had been having the "still in combat" bug a lot recently (so that we had to wait for the next encounter until it finally, 30 secs to a min later allowed the tank to charge), but we didn't have it one single time last night.

So basically, in ST I tested these 2 things from the original post:


And neither of them happened.

Further.. I saw nothing that indicated I was flagged in combat in ST until *I* attacked, so I assume that at least the FD thing will not affect the rest of the game (i.e. a hunter gets a bad pull.. FDs.. the mobs return to their normal place because no one else is flagged).. But as far as aggro clearing from the hunter/rogue when they FD/vanish.. no idea.. we didn't have a hunter or a rogue, and I didn't have a way to test either.. :)

I am still mystified as to why this has become such a big deal.  I mean, it ONLY effects boss fights.

The only way this should become a problem is if someone accidentally aggros a boss.
The only legitimate bug / irritation is the inability for any warrior after the first to charge to quickly pick up initial target.

Thats it.  All the other issues are nonfactors if your raidgroup is paying attention.  If someone trains Golemagg to the zoneline because of zone wide, they should be smacked for being afk while the rest of the raid was engaging a boss.

Not 100% sure, but if a Hunter or Rogue is the LAST person alive in the raid and pops their Out of Combat special, it should remove him from combat successfully (since there is no one else alive to keep the boss engaged).  Like I said, not sure tho.

The feighn evade bug would be because the hunter feighned to escape repair costs, and was put back into combat because the boss is still engaged.  The boss kills the rest of the stragglers, and then turns on the Hunter, who is now at the very bottom of his hate list, but cant attack him due to feighn "reporting" him as being dead, and so evades (target unreachable).

As to hunters / Rogues who used to Feighn / Vanish during long fights to eat/drink.  Suck it up.  Welcome to the game the rest of us have been playing since the servers went live.  To whoever said Hunters feighn was a balance against ammunition costs, I have to tell you that as a caster, Major Mana pots arent cheap.  Heck, the first thing i did when I realized that Hunters used bullets, and engineers make them, was to give my hunter toon Enginering / Mining.  Free ammo for the win.

Feighn / Vanish still wipes aggro, like it always has, you just get to die like a man (or woman) instead of playing possum / ninja smoke grenadeing your way to safety when the fight goes sour.

Maybe now people will actually pay attention to who has the Warlock Soulstones and Druids will become more valuable.

In the end, I still stand by the idea that you should NOT be able to be out of combat, in any form, during a boss fight.  These are BOSSES.  The big bad dudes of their lairs.  Realisticly speaking, the dude is not going to let you have a time out to eat/drink or ressurect someone (other then Battle Rez) while the fight goes on.  Sure, the AI isnt intelligent enough to realistically respond in an appropriate manner to prevent this, so such a bandaid patch was nessicary.  I mean, can you imagine how much fun it would be if they coded the mob AI to shout something like "HA, eating while your companions fight! For shame" and then 1 shot you if it detects you eating?  There are reasons pots / bandages and the like are in the game.

Shit, if there's ever a zone break-in with WoW, I'll join you to piss on his fucking still warm corpse afterwards.

If it's only invoked on boss encounters it's probably not a great tragedy. Of course if FD causes an evade on Onyxia, that could muck some folks up.

Like i said in my previous post, the only way FD should be causing bosses to bug out is if they eventually get stuck attempting to attack a FD'd player (which wont happen unless everyone else is dead).   Unless there is something screwy with mob aggro management that I am not aware of, feighn should work exactly as it alway has to clear aggro, it just wont let you feighn in the middle of a fight-gone-bad in the hopes of escaping repair bills.

Apparently its mostly just bogus information. FD is working as expected according to other hunters I know. They can save repair bills by feigning in the midst of a raid wipeout and the bosses reset just fine, they can feign and drink mid-fight. The only apparent change is that all members of the raid get ticked onto the hate list when a boss is pulled, so FD of a crap pull doesn't save them. People are probably reporting client timing issues, which can surface at any time - statistically some folks will have noticed them for the first time in 1.9.3.

If that's the case it's probably people who ran back, FD'd and then got back up again to watch the show. Of course they would have gotten aggro back, and they deserve it if they're gonna mess about like that. I also heard you can't feign and eat as the health will stop ticking once you get put into combat (when you get up). Drinking and using food that does both still works apparently, including restoring health in the case of double food. Vanish won't save you though, you'll get into combat again, stealth or not. Though I imagine if you were the LAST person and vanished it would probably reset the boss and you'd live.

Blizz forums blue response, via BluePlace here (http://blue.cardplace.com/cache/wow-dungeons/351625.htm).

Executive summary: Working as intended.

Cute.

No issues in MC last night which is about what I expected. I doubt it's going to change a ton of stuff for us except for the boss pulls. That bad pull of Shazzrah or Geddon into the Garr room? Bad news. Very bad news.

We were doing the last pull before Vexenos in ZG and the priest feared one of our players all the way into the high priest. Nobody healed him but of course he aggroed us and came over. He killed 1/3 of us with his chain holy lightning thingy and then aggroed someone who was beyond his room. Hakkar did his yell and Vexinos evade bugged... permanently. So yea, we can't kill Hakkar now.

Translation for the non-raiders:

Instances go away a half hour after the last person leaves them, afaik. We had to use that to reset Nefarian in BWL when we lost at a bad time before the last patch fixed him. I can't see ZG working any differently.

That's all that needs said. Tigole's involved in mechanics of the game. Unless you like being puched to the ground and then punched in the back of the head while you beg to be assfucked, WoW is not for you. And by "you" I mean anyone who isn't a sadder waste of life than a child molester.

Well if you are under 2mil skillpoints you might as well come play with us now, so you can stay caught up.  Trust me, the devs at Blizzard have shown a complete inability to do anything other then go down the trail blazed by EQ.  Sure they made the 1-60 game polished and nice, but raiding is raiding and the suck will only increase.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is a diluted fool.

Can I please have the greif title of "diluted fool"??

That would make my day.

If only I had the power.  What's your water-to-fool ratio at anyhow?

I blame the spellchecker??    :crying_panda:

Today, pretty diluted.  Other days the solution is stronger.

[cartman] seriously screw you guys [/cartman]

We waited 2 hours and it hadn't reset. It was fixed today though, so I imagine the GMs had to do something.

I think it's a bunch of crap; they had a bug up their ass to stop OOC ressing and so they fixed something in the most simple way avaliable that didn't break the game into a million pieces. They have no problem inconvieniencing people by introducing functionality reductions to fix a issue.

I'd like to say they did it to slow down advancement and the grinding of their content, but the fact is that this only slows down the casual raider trying to make it all the way through MC in one day for the first time. The uber guilds don't mess up pulls and have every boss on farm status. It may increase the time it takes for them to beat AQ by a week or two, but after that it's of no concequence to them.

With all that said, as a rogue, I think this is a bunch of shit. It's pretty clear the devs don't like rogues, as we or our gear have been repeatedly nerfed in every single patch for the last 6 months. This is just more of the same. Really, in general it's better to take a DPS war than a rogue... especially if your tanks have tier 2 weapons to keep aggro.

There's a reason this is my sig on my guild's forums:
_________________
o <---- Blizz Dev
|\_o <---- Rogue
// \

I just don't play my Rogue anymore.  I play a Warrior.  56 now.

I can't say I disagree violently with what you say.

Hence, levelling my mage now. Not that mages are teh ubar or anything but when my guild goes with a whopping four, thereby limiting our ranged damage on all those bosses that need it, well... yeah. Maybe it'll help with that Rags fight we just can't quite master.

How close are you in Rags, and what sort of fire resists are you up to? Once you've got an adequate FR on everybody, its just a matter of makng enough potions and getting the collapse right.

We were greatly helped by the realization that is is impossible to pull aggro with ranged. By telling our ranged guys (hunters, mages, warlocks) to go all out, it made our 1st sons kill possible.

Sure, a DPS warrior may be able to do comaprable damage to a rogue (provided they have UBER weapons.  A rogue with comparably UBER weapons will still outdamage you).  However, Said DPS warrior has a major disadvantage. Inability to LOSE aggro once he accidently takes it.  Vanish can and does save raids in some fights, when the rogue accidently over aggros and turns a boss.  Rogues and hunters still excell at what they do best.  Deal very high damage with the ability to totally controll their aggro state.

We got Rags down to... 29% this past weekend. Survived the first wave of sons sort of. Fact is that we're rogue heavy, very, very mage light. I'm pretty convinced that if we ditch a couple rogues for a couple more mages we can do it since ranged can go berserk. Collapse is getting better each time we do it, FR is where it needs to be.

Because we're not hardcore or anything we prize loyalty and longevity more than out and out class balance so there's not really anyone on the raiding rotation that we can tell to fuck off for another few mages. Hence me and another rogue levelling mages like mad. You get to a certain point where you want to see more content than get one more shiny for your class. So long as it's a class I enjoy (and I do enjoy mage) I could care less what I'm playing.

I am talking about end-game instances; MC, BWL, AQ.  With tier2 weapons (ones from rag/bwl), a warrior will outdamage a rogue. Admittedly a lot is becuase of execute and multiple mobs, but It's been calculated numerous times and is the root of the rogue's plight. The fact is most people are willing to trade a little less damage for the ability to actually take a few hits and the occasional cleave, not to mention stand-in tanks for mobs like vael that chew through 6+ warriors.

The thing about the end game is that the one rogue skill, the ability to shed aggro, is quickly becoming worthless. In the end-game, gaining aggro is quickly self-correcting (read: you die instantly). With a competent tank, you can snap the mob back and keep it long enough for the dps to throttle back. Shedding aggro is important, it's true, but it is becoming less so with every new instance they release. When even trash mobs do 4k/hit to rogues but only 2.5k/hit to warriors, the ability to call them in to do off tanking, and enough hit points to last long enough to actually get healed before they die, warriors are quickly becoming the clear choice.

Or you can go with hunters. They come equipped with a free epic weapon (the wonderful bow of the ancient keepers) so they don't have to fight over weapons with other classes. They get to "vanish" every 30 seconds instead of 5m, do pretty much the same damage, and don't have to stand in melee to eat aoe and cleaves.

Let's not forget both of them have abilities that help others in the party, battleshout and trueshot aura. Rogues help none but themselves.

My guild prefers to field 5 of each class, however, recently it's become 6 wars and 4 rogues. Recently it was 6 wars 6 hunters and 3 rogues, and people seemed to like it more because of the flexibility. We're being pushed out.

OH JESUS HELP ME, I CANNOT DISAGREE WITH ANYTHING HE SAID.

Yup.  You're right.

I cannot for the life of me understand WHY high end raid groups take rogues instead of hunters, mages, or, in fact, any other class.  And I AM a Rogue.

We're pointless.  The only thing that we're good for is making the priests giggle during the raid by watching how quickly they go down.

When I do a /who at night to see what people are up to I see our catass guilds taking three rogues into their raids, no more.

It might not be that they're only taking 3 rogues; rogue attendance has been shit for us for the past couple weeks or so.   I love rogues, when they pull aggro it usually doesn't mean the raid eating some sort of breath attack.  However, with all of the PBAOE attacks prevalent in the game, it gets a bit tiresome healing them.   Luckily we've got more hunters than we know what to do with.

And every guild is different, of course. I've gotten quite adept at surviving throughout MC with my rogue but that's not going to last forever. Not to mention it doesn't matter; I get my mage to 60 he's likely going to be retired. As it stands now there's no margin for error on the Domo fight. We have four mages that raid regularly. If even one goes down we're fucked on that fight.

That's what it boils down to, really: utility. Rogue dps is fine (though I would like to see eviscerate scale with weapon damage); it's the fact that dps is ALL WE CAN DO that is hurting us. Like I said, it's cool. I don't mind catassing a mage up to 60. I enjoy the class and, as I said, I'd rather see more content than clutch my rogue to my bosom and scream and cry. I just wish I'd known precisely HOW useless I was going to be when I started him up.

I love the sound of stealth classes bitching in the morning.

NO SYMPATHY FOR YOU FUCKERS!

And the crowd goes mild!

I complain only because we do one thing whereas every other class can do multiple things. I'm pretty content with the rogue with regards to that one thing.

These issues can only really be addressed in a "Jeff Kelly doesn't like WoW" thread.

Consider yourself suitably griefed. You watery, watery fool.

My guild just killed Ragnaros for the first time last night, if that helps the above discussion in any way. I hadn't raided since September, so I probably don't know enough about how we did what we did, but I count seven rogues in the CTRA listing.

It's definitely doable. Of course I'm slowly coming to the realization that my guild may very well not have its shit together. Something about thinking, deep down, that raiding and being a "friendly" guild (God I hate that term) are incompatible. To wit: some guy decides that he just not going to go get the fire resistance buff even though it was decided that's what we were going to do. It was wasting time, apparently. He's sitting in my Onyxia raid as I type this with nary a word said about it.

It's a goddamned shame that most guilds end up thinking they either have to be pricks or be lax with nothing in between.

It's a no-win situation. If you're not lax, you're seen as a prick by someone, somewhere. Particularly with so many newbies around in the game.  If you ARE lax, chances are you're just going to get used by pricks as a stepping stone.   Of course, these guys are easy to recognize if you're paying attention, but most 'lax' guilds don't care enough to do so.

Exactly.

My guild leadership is so terrified of some imaginary transiition to "raid guild" that people get away with more than they should. I'm of the mindset that if you're going to do the raid thing don't fuck around with it.

Instead, Mr. No FR Buff gets to do what he wants. Guy screamingon the forums about how utterly unfair doing Onyxia on a weekday is to him and we should reschedule doesn't get told that he should cut it out.

The other choice is joining a raiding guild and doing the every weeknight grind thing with puntative measures if you miss one due to, I don't know... sex or something.

There's a sweet spot in between which some guilds can hit. Unfortunately there's not a single one Horde side on my server. This is me kvetching about guild crumminess which is entirely ignorable.

What does getting the FR buff entail exactly? If it entails endless mindless grinding hours of faction somewhere I can rightly see where he'd tell you to step off. If it's something relatively simple, (say, an hour or two at most with guild support) then he's being a bit recalcitrant.

Steps necessary to get the FR Buff:

1. Get 15 People including priests into Blackrock-Spire
2. Let Priests mind control one of the Spellcasters
3. Apply Buff to Raid
4. repeat until all are buffed

Takes 20 minutes at the most

I'da kicked him from the guild right then and there, even though I'd also agree with him that it's largely a waste of time. If someone isn't going to follow directives they are deadweight and it's unfair for the rest of the guild to have to carry them. We have a frustrating split between those who are raiders first, and those who are "friendly guild" first and raiding second within the officers (3-way merge from a couple months back). It makes getting people kicked such a long and painful process. Today we finally got a hunter kicked after 2-3 weeks of trying and over a dozen hours of trying to convince the other side that he needs to go. Finally he does yet another thing stupid after we managed to force a "last warning, no really, we mean it this time" ultimatum on him and yet we STILL had to talk it over for like 4 hours. I can't see how purely "friendly guilds" get anything done in a raiding environment. The gaggle of idiots you'd have to put up with because nobody's ass gets kicked would kill me I think. -_-

Yep, what Jeff said.

The thinking was that we're new to Rags and that it would be better to work on the collapse before passing out fire pots, flasks, getting the FR buff etc, etc. Now, I happened to agree with that assessment. I would rather the lesson learned be, "Fuck! I better haul ass to where I'm supposed to be because Sons hurt me BAD," than "Wow, this FR buff thing is pretty nice! So nice I don't have to go quite as fast."

But I'm not in charge. The guys in charge said let's do it, so we did it. Except for one guy who started bitching and whining on Vent, was told to stop being a tool and then decided to log off.

Now, 20 minutes, right? In theory but not my guild. See, my guild takes FOREVER to do anything. Remember: if you tell people to get it together and speed it up you're headed toward being a raiding guild and God knows that is a Very Bad Thing. So the FR buff doesn't take 20 minutes it takes 45. It was at near Keystone Cops levels of running around.

Epilogue: Douchebag Guy wins the Helmet of Ten Storms off of Onyxia last night. Hands are thrown in the air.

There's a sizable minority in the guild that's getting pretty weary of this sort of thing. WoW has very accessible raid content which you can do in chunks, isn't nearly as tough as the others and is actually pretty damned fun overall. The key to doing it, however, is to not fuck around while you're in there. You don't have to be the evil, evil raiding guild to experience it. You don't have to be dickheads or set down stringent attendance requirements. As I said, though, there's this invisible line which my guild (and I don't think we're alone in this by a long shot) is afraid to cross and instead of pleasing everybody it makes the whole thing an absurd ordeal pleasing nobody.

Ah, but here's where the other thing comes in. When you're on an older server and are anything but a healing class your options for joining another guild become increasingly narrow over time. This is especially true of Horde guilds where the population is smaller and a bit more stagnant. So you put in your time but you may end up coming to the slow, sinking realization that you've hitched your cart to the wrong horse. It may be bad where you're at but everyone else is set with what they need so you can't actually go anywhere.

I think that's why the new servers are so wildly popular. If you've never done endgame stuff in a Diku MMOG (and while I played them all I'd never done endgame stuff) you aren't certain what's involved. I think alot of folks are like me, realizing that they're stuck with a bunch of guys who just don't have their shit together and eventually just reroll on one of the new servers.  Thankfully I have a bit of an out: a few of our Horde guys are moonlighters from a guild with just about the right attitude I'm looking for on Alliance on the same server. I rolled a new toon last night. It involves going to 60 and whatnot but Alliance will be new and at least Molten Chore won't be a 7 hour ordeal anymore.*


*That's without a single wipe up to Rags and some semblance of chain pulling. Don't ask me.

I'm never going to get to raid if I have to wait till I got my 'shit together' :/

I don't have my shit together. I know that you don't have to go over boss strategy for five minutes before every single boss pull six months in, though. Looting also shouldn't take ten minutes.

5 minute explanations 6 months in? :-o

The thing I absolutely hated about DAOC:ToA was not so much the actual content itself; it was the fact that it took people _an hour_ to get to the place they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.  A few people can fuck things up for everyone by being late, not paying attention, fucking off, etc.  And there was no saving of a 4- or 6- hour long raid in the middle of it. 

When I started playing WoW, I had the idea that end game raiding would just suck for the same reasons, but that has not come to be - for me - and for that I hold the leaders of my guild responsible.  They have the headaches of dealing with a 250+ person organization (and they are welcome to them, I have enough headaches managing my two kids tyvm; no aspirations here to be a gl), and they do a wonderful job.  Not on time?  You don't get a spot on the raid.  Fuck around or AFK without notice on the raid?  Get warned and/or booted.  I don't have a problem with that.  It makes it possible for me to raid, since I have 4 hrs available rather than 6 or 8 or 10 or whatever some of those ToA raids took.

My guild is one of those Evil Raiding Guilds, but I'd rather be in an organized guild with grownups than a friendly guild that tolerates fuckups any day.  Of course there is still daily drama but it's a large group of people so it's to be expected.  When I've been on MC or BWL raids, I'm given clear directions about what I'm to do, where to be, and so on.  It's actually fun (something I never thought I'd hear myself saying about a long raid with a lot of people), not painful.

:Love_Letters:

Sorry, had to chime in again.

I went on a 15 man UBRS Raid at the weekend AND a 5 man BRD run.

The BRD was filled with excitement, teamwork, challenge, loot and - giving I wanted to make Dark Iron - objectives beyond the questing.

The UBRS run was a pointless 15 man zerg fest with no skill involved whatsoever where my Rogue literally spent minutes idling while I eat a pizza.

Once again I put it to you that there should be no need for Raid Groups.  They are prehistoric and should be done away with.  In WoW right now, I have my old D&D feeling back.

Five minute explanations six months in, yes. Ostensibly for the one or two new people who might be there though it's actually to make the more casual players feel comfortable I think. My suggestion to open up a new raider channel to go over strategy in text was met with a question as to why nobody had stepped up to do it... even though I'd done that with five new people over the past few months. It's the little things that let you know you're on a ship bound for nowhere.

As to raids vs. five mans I enjoy them both equally. Depends on what flavor I'm in the mood for. Also remember that UBRS is actually keyed for ten man runs, not fiteen.

Wins? What system are you using to allocate loot?

Fair enough, but I've thought about it since posting and I reckon even with ten men it would be boring as hell.  The encounters just aren't any fun.

Wins is a bit misleading. He was top of the DKP list for shammies. He earned it, no arguments there, but he shouldn't have even been allowed on the raid after the shit he'd pulled earlier.

And UBRS is pretty boring. MC isn't bad; a little too much trash for my tastes. BWL, ZG (after the trash nerf) and AQ by all accounts are alot of fun. Your definition of fun will vary, as always.

It always kind of baffled me how someone in a "friends" guild could disrespect his friends so much that he'd waste their time like this consistantly. Not the kind of behaviour I look for in a freind really.

There actually IS a thin line, but there's also a few lines. You CAN be a friendly guild and raid, but you can't if raiding is going to be your main activity. Raiding can be a side activity so long as you:

1) Don't let people acting like spoiled brats about loot
2) Have policies in place for dispute resolution
3) Take a firm stand in raiding discipline

The whole "I'm not going to go get the buff" thing? Uh uh. In the friendly guild I ran in EQ, that shit wouldn't fly. I may not have required people to attend raids, but if you came, you damn sure better be doing what the raid leader said. In Vox raids, if you were going to be a dumbass and not get in the buff line or you did something stupid like fall down in the pits despite my having told you over and over where not to walk, you got to sit out the raid. We did no corpse recovery in the pits beforehand, and no one went unbuffed. Being friendly doesn't have to mean you are stupid. The worst parts we had were the loot arguments when crafting the loot policy (which got to unmanagable proportions when epic loot got involved) and people showing up late.

Raiding takes discipline. It isn't hard, but some people just don't seem to want to put in the effort, but still want the loot. That would be fine if no one else had to put in the effort either. But when 39 others are, you damn well better not be a fuckmonkey.

UBRS is a very crappily-designed Dungeon.  Strath/ Scholo are much, much better while still heavy on some of the suckitude. (Spawning Gandling and the Fatty area outside Baron being the worst two parts.)

ZG is a lot of fun, and you DO feel like it's a challenge at the boss encounters. (Until you get the strategy down and everyone knows what to do and when.. then it gets boring again.)  The few times I went to MC it felt way too much like an old EQ raid for my tastes.  Quick killing tons of trash mobs and being focused on getting your raid's ass so they don't respawn and wipe you isn't fun.. it's tedious bullshit.

That is EXACTLY my mindset, Haemish.

Here you say you zerged an instance and it was boring with no skill involved.

I would suggest taking less time if you want it to be more fun, but since you'd never convince people to do that for you, I will instead suggest you try an instance like ZG or BWL before deciding raiding is boring and takes no skill (in ZG, some encounters take more individual skill than any 5-man). Or can not if you just don't wanna raid period, but slamming raiding cause you zerged UBRS with 15 is pointless.

No, you missed what I was saying.  Or I wasn't clear because I've had no sleep.  I go ZG raiding with my Guild and it's a lot of fun - When we can get the numbers.

That's really my point.  Raiding above a certain number really really really cuts down the audience figures of that raid, if you see what I mean.  The UBRS Vs BRD was simply to show that it's not about it 'getting better' as you hit 60, but mostly the other way about.  I swear to God, my heart swelled in pride when we reached the Black Forge.  We slaughtered everything with not a wipe and we were PROUD.  That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Whereas, killing the bloodlord in ZG was 'Stand here and press this occasionally'.  It wasn't exciting.  UBRS was even worse because I may as well have had a wank.  The bat lady in ZG and the Snake Boss man are a little better (particularly the bat) because of the involving content.  I can't comment on the rest because, well, we suck.

But when I watch my wife and her MC group, I literally want to cry.  Half of them are there for nothing more than the items and they're having NO FUN at all.  I don't get it.  Now, of course, I'm told that to continue in my profession, I HAVE TO DO THAT.  Hmm.

:)

(I'm really making no sense.  I haven't slept in, er, 48 hours now....)

Making sense to me, Ironwood. I really wish that MC wasn't a neccessary step to do the other raids. It's no awful in my mind but not terribly good either. Pretty mediocre, sometimes boring. Unfortunately the FUN 40 man (BWL) requires MC first. Bleh.