Trying to keep the faith
If you’ve been following me on twitter (and hell, even here on the blog) I’ve been pretty down about my guild lately as it pertains to raiding. There’s been a few issues of nascent drama in addition to some very annoying attendance issues that have nearly cost us the ability to raid for the last two weeks. The problem isn’t so much we don’t have people, it’s that the people we do have are being fickle about showing up or have had scheduling issues (I myself had to miss the raid Wednesday because of a scheduling issue).
In one sense, the problem could be solved with recruiting, but the problem remains that there are capable people in guild, and we just need them to show up. I guess our first step is to work on getting those people to log in and get some of the lesser geared people into raids. We’re probably going to change the raid schedule from three three-hour days to two four-hour days, so we don’t have a stretch of raid nights that may be untenable for some folks. We’ll see how that goes.
In the meantime I’m going to console myself with the knowledge that the core of the guild is strong, and made up of awesome people. Half of our ICC raid core weren’t even in guild during Naxx, so if we eventually have to build up again, it’s not the end of the world.
Some funny things form guild chat last night, so I may take comfort in the hilarity of the people I am blessed to raid with.
Slyke when he was asked for his gearscore when trying to get into a ToGC-10 pug:
And Zilga (a healer) from the attempts we put in on Dreamwalker last night:
Speaking of Dreamwalker …
Interesting fight. We tried it for the two hours or so we could and mostly got the hang of the adds, but we need to work on them a bit more. I really can’t offer any observations other than the Blazing Skeletons hurt like a mother, and need to die asap, and dps really needs to be on the ball with target switches. The fight reminds me a lot of when we were first trying Deathwhisper and the adds seemed unmanageable. Once we figure out what to kill when and how, it’ll go a lot smoother.
Ultimately though I regret trying Dreamwalker last night. We should have built on our experience with Putricide or Blood Queen rather than splitting our progression three ways.
Whack goes the nerf bat
Just to revisit this topic again briefly–I’m going to reiterate my lack of surprised that we were nerfed. I saw this coming earlier this week, the warning signs were all there.
The one thing that bothers me about the nerf (other than how it was just sprung on us in the middle of the night) is that Blizzard thinks that other tanks are “fine”. Specifically, warriors. Warriors right now are at the bottom of the heap across most, if not all metrics, and have very little to show for it. I don’t understand Blizz’s mentality that if a tank can tank a boss then they are fine. Tank survival should be the same across all four classes, much like how pure dps classes are more or less balanced against other pure dpsers.
The situation is now that the tank classes are a lot more balanced than they were a week ago, but warriors are still coming up short. They need some serious loving.
I can’t imagine there will be anymore Paladin nerfs in the near future, so don’t worry that we’re in the crosshairs or something. If any other changes are to be made they might involve making Seal of Command require a two-hander so Prot can’t use it anymore (thus, sadly, killing heroics spec). Beyond that… I just can’t see it.
But then again, I can’t imagine why Blizzard would be so willfully blind to how behind Warriors are in EH, dps, etc. So, who knows?
Armory Feed
If you start recruiting tanks, I’d like to hear about it.
Hah, I remember you saying that on twitter. I highly doubt the furor over pally tanks will subside at all. Through the couple sites that I looked at that were posting it, people could care less that we lost a percentage of our health. They want AD gone and they want consecrate neutered(even though as a bunch of pallies have point out, that isn’t the problem).
Noooo don’t take away my seal of command for Tanking!!
Gruv’s last blog ..Fabrizio Hiatus until further notice..
So what if, instead of a tank setup with SoComm, the new setup is a Ret spec with a 2h and tank gear?
I understand the current heroic/trash build is outstanding for threat and dps while simultaneously packing enough survivability to avoid any problems on raid trash and farm bosses.
I know some of my guildies will Ret-tank heroics, but I have no idea how their survivability looks against raid trash – or even when carrying several undergeared people through a heroic. I’ve only heard of this type of thing done for the Daily Random overgeared-smash-and-grab. I do know I’ve seen some mildly surprising dips in our DK’s health when he tanks a heroic in dps spec, Frost Presence, and maybe some tank gear.
Oh no Rhi! You’ve been hacked! Demo snuck on and wrote a few extra paragraphs!
As you know, I’m writing a series of blog posts about the the history of my guild. The lessons I learned, and the things I’ve gone through in my time as a raider in this game. I’m going to spoil a few of those posts for you, because they contain lessons that I think are applicable here.
There are three things a guild needs in it’s members to be succesful with them. Skill compatability, Schedule compatability, and personality compatability.
Skill compatability means that the player must be able to play at least on the level that the guild requires of them. If the guild aspires to be a competative raiding guild, then they need their members to have the skills needed to make that happen. You can’t afford to take people who are specced 71 points into blood with spirit gems, even though they’re a nice person with 100% attendance.
Schedule compatability means that they need to make the guild’s raid times. For a long time I had a surfeit of ex momentum members in my guild who I thought were going to be a big boost. Turns out the reason why they came to us after momentum died was because they weren’t going to be able to make too many raids any more. I wasted a couple months trying to make things work with them before moving on.
Shifiting the raid times from 3-3s to 2-4s is probably a good thing. It’s easier to convince people to stay up an extra hour two nights a week, than it is to convince them to block out a third night for raiding. The question will then become, which two nights. That’s gonna be one of the tougher decisions to make, because that choice will heavily affect who’s going to continue to raid with you.
And last comes Personality compatability. They have to be able to fit in with the guild enough to not cause problems. They might be jerks, I have some jerks in my guild, but they’re MY jerks dammit. Some of this can be mitigated through hard work by the leaders trying to keep people settled, but you do need to monitor who gets along with who, and keep an eye out for a situation that you might need to pull the plug on.
The other important lesson to learn is that recruiting is a never ending process. Turnover is constant for all but a few special guilds. My 25 man raid team has 3 members left from my first runs into naxx. My pride and joy ten man A team? Two members left from our first run into Ulduar.
The important thing is to find the guild’s core. The indispensible players. I realized this when I had a sizable chunk of the people who I thought were important to the guild decide to faction transfer. Turns out I had them all replaced with players who were as good, and in most cases better, within 8 days of active recruiting. At that point, I sat down, looked at our roster, and figured out who’s TRULY indispensible in my guild. Turns out, out of a 90 distinct people in my guild, there’s 4 that I don’t think I could replace in less than two weeks. Myself, my Co-Tank, our super priest, and our great enhance shaman. Everyone else, while I love raiding with them, is not going to make or break our guild.
What you need to do is find the core of your guild, figure out what you need to do to keep them, and those will be your constraints. After that, it’s just a matter of opening up recruiting and finding other players who meet those requirements.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..Fail of the Lich King
I am not an expert on Warrior tanking by any means, but my understanding is that many successful arena teams with Warriors include Protection Warriors and they were just being a bit too successful. Hence, their current lack of DPS is partially tied to their Arena performance (where have we heard about PVP –> PVE nerfs before). Our guild’s main tank is a Warrior and me and another Pally tank being the OT’s in our 25 mans. I have yet to see a boss fight in Wrath where we have had a reason to switch out to a Pally tank, unless we needed additional DPS as myself and the other Pally tank are Holy off-spec.
Overall, I think the tanking classes are on fairly even ground. Unfortunately, the old standards and prejudices are still around and I frankly believe those that were once clearly on top miss those days. I know that I did not become a Pally tank because I thought it was easy or superior. Being once exclusively Holy, I just leveraged the fact that my toon is a hybrid and could fill more than role (and fell in love with that new role). I wish players would just focus on how to play their classes really well instead of complaining about how the grass is unjustly greener on the other side. As most of us know, its never that much greener, if at all, once you get there.
@J
There aren’t any personal biases involved when you look at the numbers. Warriors are clearly at a disadvantaged position when measured against ANY of the other tanking classes. Just because we were the MT back in the old days doesn’t mean that our plea for tanking balance is really an attempt to regain that supremacy.
By every metric we are worse off than you. The mere fact that despite those disadvantages we can still complete the content doesn’t make the imbalances right. I am not saying Warriors can’t tank everything in the game (hard modes remain to be seen) but that doesn’t make it fair that we are relatively underpowered.
Long story short, the fact that people aren’t dumping their Warriors for Paladin doesn’t in and of itself demonstrate that the tanks are balanced. Viable doesn’t equal balanced.
I’ve got to be honest, I’m kind of glad my guild isn’t the only one having issues with people not showing up to raids. However at the same time I know all too well how much it sucks, so I wish you the best of luck in resolving it!