Down to the Wire

With only a few hours until wow-5.0 lands and everyone has to re-learn their character abilities...

What Hunter Class Leads Look For in Raider Apps

I'm the hunter class leader for my guild.  This was a bigger deal when we were actively raiding 25mans.  Now it's just a level of leader within the guild.  But I do evaluate applications for raiders.  For a ten-man raid, we like to have 15 or more active raiders so we can have a good group on any particular night.  People are absent some nights and you want to keep a balance of tanks, heals, and damage.  So we try to keep a few hunters on the raiding roster -- active or non.  We take posted applications ("apps") for raider positions.

When I look at an app, I want to see it written well.  It isn't a resume, but it is a reflection of the person behind it.  Will the person mix well?

After that, I go through a little checklist.

I look at the gear.  Does it all make sense?  Is it what they should be wearing at that stage of the game?  If they haven't done any FL content, have they done what they could with normal Valor points?  Have they done what they can with rewards from dailies?  AH items?  Rep?  Specifically, do they have the iLevel 365 items?  The two rings.  The boots.  The cloak. How are they progressing on the three tier-12 items?  The bracers?  The neck?

Then I look at gems and enchants.  Do they have the appropriate bonuses for BS, LW, Ench, JC, etc?  Are they using Agility gems unless they get a +20 agility socket bonus?  Do they have the helm and shoulder rep enchants?  Do they have the right meta gem?  Did they get a belt buckle?  The enchants don't need to be the most expensive versions, but really those prices are coming down a lot.

Then I look at talents.  Are they completely nuts, or is it a reasonable approximation of a good spec?

Then if things look okay so far, I look at their reforging.  I load them up in femaledwarf.com and/or askmrrobot.com.  I really like to see their hit really close to 100%.  I want to see mastery sacrificed for crit and haste.

And finally, to know what they know, I look at what boss kills they've done and how many times they've done them.

In a nutshell for the TL;DR crowd:

• Decent written app.
• Badge gear.
• Dailies / Rep gear.
• Proper gems.
• Proper enchants and rep enchants.
• Reasonable talents.
• Good reforging.
• Bosses they farmed.

RIP Halion

Once again, real life intervened and left our 25man raid quite short.  I think we had about 17.  So we formed a 10man and visited Halion.  About half the group had been there on Tuesday.  (Tuesday is our official 10man night.)  We got him very close a number of times.  We got to phase 3 each time.  Keeping the damage even was a bit tricky.  We had one floater and then a death.  I was happy to have gotten killshots on her in both realms. We finally got the smack-down on her not too late in the night.

I was running as Survival for the only source of replenishment.  It wasn't a bad thing not needing to try to do steady shots in the shadow realm.

Not This Website

I redesigned my guild's website.

If you hate Javascript for some reason, you might hate this. I did write it from scratch so it is clean and light-weight.

I'm not overly-proud of it. The graphics aren't the best. The use of graphics instead of text adds some heft. PNGs aren't universally accepted as awesome.

But hey, the DKP CGI was quick and looks pretty decent. And it's a helluva lot better than what was there before.

http://www.atonementguild.com/

Achievements?

I was browsing my recent achievements on my iPhone Wow app. (More on that app later.) I was a little surprised that it didn't show my achievements from Friday. I checked wowarmory.com, from whom the app gets its data, and it didn't have them either.

wowarmory.com lists Call of the Crusade and More Dots! from my Thursday runs. It shows nothing from Friday. We were doing some wacky/dumb achievements Friday. The kind of things you might not want to do again: Rubble and Roll, and Nine Lives. We also had a couple reasonable ones: FL w/two towers, and the Assembly of Iron to get a Archivum Data Disc. We also got a bunch of other achievements that I already had.

So where'd the achievements go?

Not the Best Selection of PUGs

The other night, I was giving a remote (cross-country) lecture to a group of 40 college students. The topic was some open source software I had a hand in creating. I was using LiveMeeting and also had a camera aimed at me. It was fun.

I was doing it from my home office. It ended exactly at raid start time. So I flipped over, and yes of course I was late and the raid was full. Okay, not un-expected.

They did Onyxia-25, ToC-25, and then VoA-25. All the places I need both Triumph badges from, and where my only gear ups are from. This is the second week they've done this on Wednesday and I missed them both. So, I decided to try and PUG them and the daily.

VoA-25 is usually easy for me to PUG. Win Wintergrasp and get in as high dps. I average about 6k dps there. Well, I suspected it wouldn't go well at the beginning. We had four hunters, so I resigned myself to no loot. I was inspecting them and noticed one was in mostly greens. Even his weapons and bow. (How do you even do that?) I was thinking that maybe he was joking around so I checked his spec, and it was.. well, confused. I did what I never do, and whispered to the RL. I was impressed that he was kicked. It turns out, that night must have been brand-new-80 night because we wiped many times in VoA. But we got a half-dozen people achievements on all the bosses... At least I had a fellow dps'er in a similar raiding guild to bemoan it all.

Heroic Halls of Stone was the daily. Yes, I wanted more Triumph badges. To summarize it: four wipes, I was responsible for >50% of the damage done, eventually I went BM pet-tank spec and tank-heal-dps'd the last boss. It was 1.5hours of pain and grief. We skipped the optional bosses. "No, I don't think I feel like we need to go back and do them. Thanks for the group through."

Then I get picked up for a ToC-25 PUG. Advertised as "Be geared, have vent or know the fights very well." We had some people that weren't any of that. But we also had some of the most well-geared, amazing-in-their-mind, obnoxious, insulting, bitter, hyper-critical, self-important, raiders from the most cut-throat elitist guild. We got through faction champions but it took two hours. I was 2nd and 3rd damage done on the fights, though I was far under the gear of most of them. I took it as a learning experience. I don't want to experience it again.

As far as "loot" they beat last week's Onyxia-25 PUG where I was #1 damage done (by a large margin) on each of five attempts over an hour and we never brought her down. But as far as pain and PUGdom, it was a pleasant experience.

Atonement

I'm not a guild-hopper. I'm really anything but that. I spent two years in one and three in another. I really loved both guilds. I spent the past couple weeks in a ten man guild, made entirely of people who came from the previous guild.

We had about 15 good solid raiders in the 10-man guild to ensure it would succeed. None of us had any interest in recruiting any more. And then one, two, three of those people left or were out on extended unknown breaks. And in a very short period of time, raids dwindled to nothing. More people left. There had only been 8 raiders logging in at all in a week's time. I was alone in guild a few nights last week. There was nobody to talk to about it. Things weren't viable. The writing was on the wall. Maybe even in neon letters.

I was being asked to pug some raids. I was also being asked to join one of the most long-lived raiding guilds on the server. And asked and asked. The guild had eleven people I already knew. Some of whom I know their real names better than their character names. My work buddy also belonged to the guild years ago and told me the GM was great and the guild was a perfect match. However, my raiding friends weren't there. But they weren't anywhere anymore. There wasn't anyone to talk to about it in guild. There wasn't even anyone to see my /gquit.

Within about 30secs of accepting the ginvite I was receiving a raid invite and summon. I didn't do anything dumb, dps'd only what I should, when I should, and how fast I should, got Misdirects to the tanks (and not healers!), and tossed some good damage. I know the other competitive hunter pretty well. He is marksman and the class leader. He's exceptionally well geared and will probably put me to shame next time.

Now all I need to wrangle is the new raid night schedule.

My World of Raids

Life in Table for Ten is certainly different than Blade of Honor. It's smaller. I still know everyone and am friends with everyone. But there's no doubt it's smaller. We had a guild meeting and got the lay of the land. I now have friends all over the place. Many of these folks are in 25man raiding guilds. It's a little strange to think that I may know a lot of people in a guild that I've never done anything with.

We ran some stuff last night after the guild meeting. The Faction Champions continue to be a problem. I have to think it's because many people just don't have a PvP hat to slap on. Either that or we're missing something. And I can't dig through details because my auto-combat-logger addon wasn't configured to save for the 10man instance. I would like to see if we have enough purging, decursing, spell-stealing, etc. going on. I think some of it is just that some may not think about helping out others. The roles in PvP are a bit more overlapped and fluid than in PvE. We also seemed to lose dps off the bat a lot. For some reason in their canned mob logic, I rarely got CC'd and was usually the last alive. I'm not sure how many attempts we made, but it was about an 80g repair bill.

With an hour left to raid, we went into Ulduar and got a few achievements. Unbroken and Shutout was kinda nice. We'll do another one for towers up. I suppose we could have tried them together, but that probably should be a different stacked achievement. We also did Heartbreaker. Got it on our second try without reading strats, so I'm guessing it's pretty damn nerfed. The gun did not drop. The silly ring did.

Guild Changes

About three out of every four active guildies in Blade of Honor had already left by last night. This is the guild that I've been an officer in for approximately three years. When logging in, I was receiving far far too many whispers to respond to adequately. It was the classic "tell-hell". I guess this is what happens when a guild scatters and "/g" and "/o" are no longer adequate. (We've since begun forming a channel.)

In amongst the tells, I received a few kind requests from friends and old friends to join their guilds. It was humbling.

By Tuesday I had decided that I wanted to lay low in terms of responsibilities. I didn't want the completely new. I also knew I didn't want the isolation of guild-less-ness. So last night, I joined Table for Ten, run by my friend [Chrysom]. As it's name indicates; an expressly ten man raid guild. We will be focusing on progression before Wrath ends.

I am still interested in 25man raids, but it is often too difficult for many reasons. 25man raiding guilds want a little more time than I'm willing to put in. The accomplishments can be great, but far fewer than I might like.

Interestingly enough, my top 25man raiding guild choice runs on days I will most likely not be running guild 10man raids. I don't know if they have a policy on out-of-guild substitutes. But it might be possible to scratch that itch every once in a while. I know a few of them. And it would be nicer than out-right pugging.

I'm feeling pretty free and resilient about all this. I've caught glimpses of many guilds here and there. Their guild forums, pugging in their groups and raids, listening to them on vent. I've only been in three guilds before this. One I co-GM'd for a couple years. One was only a few months. But the last was the best guild I've experienced. RIP Blades. RIP.

Excitement Can Be Sad

So, today my guild of the past three years imploded. I guess it's been imploding for a day or two already. I won't go into details. It's not from crazy drama. It's mostly from real life pressures. But it's very sad for it to come to an end. I'm wondering who will turn out the lights.

While I was in the whisper zone with remaining members, I was also in a pug trying the new VoA boss, Koralon. Got him on the second try. I think all that made me do was crack a frown though.