Tag Archives: world of warcraft

Prepping – Not the Doomsday Kind

The success or failure of your raid can be directly attributed to how well you prepare for a specific boss and how well a raid leader prepares their raid.

Why spend time preparing for a boss? This sounds like work, its just a game.

  • Preparing for raids saves lots of potentially lost time wiping to a boss.
  • It saves a lot of frustration
  • Ensures each raid member is on the same page when it comes to the strategy.

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There’s a ton of resources available to each raider. Back in my day, we never had strategy websites, friends giving us tips, combat-logging tools, videos, or cooldown spreadsheets.  These days, there are multiple competing websites and guides that explain each aspect of an encounter. There is zero excuse one of your raiders is not ready for an encounter or you aren’t!

  • When preparing for a Normal/Heroic encounter, take a glance at the Dungeon Journal. Blizzard has finally given a good basic overview of the encounter and your relevant job.  Dungeon Journal is more tailored towards LFR/Normal difficulties but it will give you a glimpse of what you should be interrupting, avoiding, tanking, or dispelling.
  • Strategy Websites – Icy-Veins, or Manaflask, Noxxic(Kidding), and a number of others have general boss strats and explanations with videos and diagrams. They go in-depth with bosses of all difficulties and are generally made by people that have experience on those bosses and defeated them. Reading through the strats and abilities on these websites is one of the most useful tools.
  • Youtube – There are so many guide and kill videos available to you. You’ll find any videos with a voiceover explaining each mechanic and how to deal with it accordingly. Click Here  for an example of the video resources to defeating Brackenspore. Just do take note at the date the video was published. Some are from Beta and the abilities have been changed since testing.
  • Get advice from experienced players! If you’re not in a top 5 World guild, you have friends, streams that will share their knowledge of a specific encounter. They’ll give you tips, suggestions, and what worked for them. Save potential wipes by learning from the mistakes of other guilds.
  • Logs Logs Logs. Unless a guild is a top world guild, they have no business making their logs private. Those logs are free for you to look at. Look at composition makeups, how many healers guilds have brought, and which dps are best for that raid encounter. Look at spell breakdowns of healers, ability and cooldown usage. If you’re a priest and you’re only casting 90 Power Word: Shields during a 9 minute segment, and other priests are casting 200, you know exactly why they are pushing those much higher numbers.
  • Once you have your strat planned out, many encounters require major cooldowns to be used at appropriate times. Set these up in advance! Here is our cooldown spreadsheet for Highmaul.  And Here is our spreadsheet for Siege of Orgimmar.
  • I’ve seen Powerpoint presentations for raid strats, and lots and lots of graphics. Use MSPaint if you have any semblence of artistic skills:

Likewise you may want to use a nicer website like

8. And finally nothing beats actual experience on a raid boss. If you played in the Beta, you may have had many attempts on these bosses. Otherwise PTR is great for learning and experiencing new encounters. Many of you raided with Death Jesters last night and tested the first few bosses.

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These points are the very basics I would expect of Heroic/Mythic raiders.

Remember that people are auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners. Use what resources reflect your style of learning. And raid leaders, remember to adapt your strats, your preparation to all three styles. But nothing will ever be as beneficial as having experience on a raid encounter.

At the end of the day, we’re real people with real lives and limited time. Do what you can to prepare, and understand that you’re wasting the time of 9-29 other people by not knowing the mechanics of a fight.

 

Tales of Noobery and Staying Motivated

Noob Sparty

You can do it. The only thing stopping you, is not trying.

Many of you have started watching our stream, taken much of the advice and applied it. You’ve gone from LFR zeroes, to LFR heroes, to normal/heroic raiders, to mythic raiders. I’m proud of that! I’m proud of all of you putting in the effort to improve yourselves. To learn how to research and use resources. To learn how to use Logs to critique your play.

We have a 70 year old grandmother that was a Heroic/Mythic raider. She completed her legendary quest, raid led, guild led. If a 70 year old lady(I’m sure she’s nice), can avoid the fire, so can you.

Tonight we hosted Nohandsken.  He’s a quadriplegic gamer and streamer. We saw him do RBGs today with no hands. I’ve known heroic/mythic raiders, and guildies, that were unable to use an arm and were fantastic raiders. I’ve had players in my guild that were colorblind,  deaf and mute.  A guild and raid can accommodate and still clear bosses.

I’ve seen amazing raiders that were as young as 15, and as old as 60. There is absolutely zero reason you can’t be in that server first mythic guild. When we interviewed Shuttle from Blood Legion a couple months ago, he gave everyone a glimpse into what it takes to be in a guild of that caliber. How much time, dedication, and self-critique is necessary. And the most important part of it? Never stop improving. If you wipe on a boss, if you kill a boss, always see how you can do better next time. Better use of cooldowns? Less damage taken? Could you have made better movement or rotation decisions? Always strive to be better.

And we have our community of gamers and Warcraft players.

We all started somewhere. Warcraft may be your first MMO, or your third. But at some point, we were all Noobs.  We were that keyboard turning clicker. I know I was. I keyboard turned for years, I’ve only recently rebound my last ability – potions!

I want to share these noob moments that many of you submitted:

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And you see Death Jesters, a 10 year old mythic raiding guild was full of noobs as well:

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While we were all noobs, naïve, ignorant, there was someone that helped us along the way.  Be that person to someone else.  Help build our community.  I look at players that are better than me, and look to always improve myself, as a paladin, as a raid leader, and as a guild leader.

I’ve climbed a mountain when I’ve been terrified of heights. I’ve taught people to swim who were afraid of water on their faces. If you work at it enough, anything is possible.  That’s what I want everyone to get out of this blog and Coach’s Corner.  If you want something bad enough, get it.  Start somewhere, work hard, make mistakes, learn, and improve.  You’ll reach that goal.  Just don’t forget to have fun on the way.  It is a game after all.

 

Share your tales of noobery on our forums!

Finding the Perfect Guild

Perfect Guild!

Nobody likes looking for a guild,  just as nobody enjoys looking for a new job or new friends.  But this is just the predicament that so many people/players are in.  Many of you are simply not enjoying your time in Warcraft  because you’re not in the right guild.  This is a social game,  a massively multi-player game.  You can play solo, but there is so much more enjoyment from playing with friends.  People play for a bit, find nothing to do, nobody to hang out with and then quit out of boredom. There is SO much to do!  And there are so many people to do those things with!  So let me help you!

Looking for a guild can be a pretty daunting task,  but with a little bit of preparation beforehand,  you’ll make it easier on yourself.  Knowing what you’re looking for ahead of time will likely result in less frustration for you.

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So start asking yourself questions:

What kind of guild do I want? PVE or PVP focused?

PVE:

How hardcore do I want to be? Mythic Raider?

– Raiders come in all difficulties. Maybe your priorities have changed and it is no longer important to be a realm first raider.

How many days a week do I want to raid?

-A 5 day raid guild doesn’t necessarily do better than a 4 day raid guild. Looking at a guild’s rank is often indicative of this.

What days are my preferred raid days that I can stick with?

– Do I want my weekends free? I play hockey on Mondays so maybe any guild that raids Mondays is out of the question.

What kind of loot system do I prefer or do I even care about that?

– Is it a Loot Council, DKP, EPGP, Suicide Kings, Rolling?

Am I willing to server transfer? What about faction transfer?

– Can I afford the server transfer? Do I want to leave the best faction and join the rock-eating horde?

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Trade Chat

One of the most common places to find leveling or casual guilds. You will not find many serious guild posting in trade chat and there is a connotation of trade chat guilds being bad and they often fall apart. This isn’t  always the case. Trade chat is a really easy way to look for those early guilds that want to do dungeons and early raids together.

In between [Anal] and [Thunderfury]  spam, look for guilds like:

“<Cobra Kai Dojo> recruiting for all classes for our guild. We are a fun ninja guild that has plans to raid in the future. Full access to repairs, food, gems. Initiation: Must sweep the leg.”

These guilds often will not be the raiding guilds that are killing heroic/mythic bosses, but they’ll probably have a fairly good base to start learning encounters and the game.

Realm Forums

These forums used to be full of drama and ninja-looter accusations. But these days it is mostly recruitment, raid carries, CM carries and profession kit sales.  Realm forums are a much more effective way to find a raiding guild than trade chat.  Players that are a bit more serious about progression,  how much they value their time,  are more likely to have a recruitment template up for potential recruits to see.

Find your Realm forums here and look at all the guilds trying to recruit you!

Recruitment Forums

The official recruitment forums open up your guild possibilities even more. If you are willing to faction and server transfer you have so many more possibilities for finding the right raiding guild, or even pvp guild. If you’re on a medium population server right now… think of these forums as a hundred times larger.

Example:  If you’re doing some online dating, you’re increasing your search parameters to all of North America instead of just your farm town.

WoWProgress

This is one of the best tools to use to find a guild.  Most guilds, whether they be top raiding guilds or casual raiding guilds,  are using this website. It is very easy to use, just put in your own search parameters:

  • US or EU
  • Alliance or Horde
  • How many days you want to raid
  • What language your preferred guild speaks
  • What class you are
  • What spec your main character is
  • Click Go!

This sorts guilds based off your criteria based on their progression level.

Example:

Konrad is looking for a raiding guild.  He’s a 12/14 Protection paladin that likely has experience with Paragons Heroic as well.

He is clearly on EU based off his armory.  So at the top left under Guilds->Progress->West,  he would scroll down to EU.

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He is looking for a 25man guild and would click the appropriate link.

He has now sorted all 25man EU guilds.

Because he loves to eat rocks and loves the aesthetics of mud huts, he would choose the Horde faction.  He also wants to raid 3 days a week in an English speaking guild.  And finally he is a paladin, but protection.

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Once he hits Go, WoWprogress will sort all guilds that are looking for a protection paladin based off his criteria(3 days a week, Horde, English speaking). Those results look like this:

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Because he knows he’s an excellent player, and he doesn’t want to go back a few steps in progression, he’ll look for a guild that is at least 12/14.

That is 14 potential guilds that may be his dream guild. He’d now go through each of them and see if they were the right guild for him but he has saved himself hours of looking for a guild on the EU recruitment forums.

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If you’re an excellent player with a lot of experience,  these guilds should be courting you!  For Multiple recruitment places/sites,  make a template for yourself.  Sell yourself to your guild of choice and show them why you’re the player THEY want!

Make sure to include your musts for a guild:

What days you’re looking to raid,  what hours,  flexibility.  Include information about yourself, your previous guild histories, type of person and player you with type of humor.  Include your past progression and look at posting some of your logs.

Here is an example of a very basic recruitment ad.

Here is an example of a bad recruitment ad.

And Here  and Here  are examples of a pretty decent recruitment ad.

Whichever way you look for a guild,  your goal is to have many options available.  Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.  Apply to multiple guilds,  post a great template so multiple guilds are interested in you.  We’ll cover applying to guilds next week.

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Once you have many choices for guilds and numerous options, you can start narrowing them down.  Don’t always settle for an average guild.  Shoot for the stars!

Start research on these guilds and decide what else is important to you.

How important is the raid environment? What kind of raid environment do I want?

  • Some guilds run the top-down leadership system. Other guilds have more councils or discussion from their members.

Do I care about the guild’s values and integrity?

  • Does it matter to me that the guild treats people like garbage but kills bosses at a quick pace? W hat does that say about me?

How much do I value progression?

  • Is US 55th a big deal to me compared to US 65th?

Things to look for in a guild:

  • Guilds that have been around for a long time are much less likely to fall apart.
  • Find out if the guild is part of a ‘rebuilding’ phase.
  • Find out how long the leadership has been in place. Is it a newly promoted GM or different leadership team?
  • How do they handle drama? How often does it occur?
  • What kind of raid leading style do they have?
  • What else do they do outside of raiding?

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So, I want to encourage those of you that are bored or unhappy in their current situation, to look for the right guild.  Regardless of your progression,  your raiding background, or how long you’ve been playing.  That dream home, that community you’re looking for, is waiting for you.  Put in the effort and find it, you may be suprised at the outcome!