 I’ve been really busy this last week or so. Haven’t got as much beta testing done as I’d have liked, but there are only so many hours in the day when I can play the game. Many times, I can write articles or forums posts most easily. I wanted to highlight a few key things. EJ For over a year and a half, Suno has been maintaining the DK tank thread at Elitist Jerks. He’s done well and I August 17th, 2010 | One comment |
 From: Addons, Guild management, Raid leadership in general |  Tags: ej, kahorie, leadership, raid leader, rawr  I’ve noticed these topics being discussed more recently: burnout, slacking raiders, low attendance, and poor morale. Pre-expansion, it’s something we all expected. The summer in the northern hemisphere also correlates with raiding problem, since for some reason beyond my comprehension, people want to go outdoors and not play WoW. True geeks have no life outside their cave. Jokes aside, the impact of all these factors can be personal and upsetting. It’s also inconvenient. Finding a new guild can be August 9th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Guild management | Tags: addiction, burnout, casual, leadership, morale  I hope everyone knows about this not-so-obvious tooltip. It shows which bosses have been killed when you enter an existing raid ID. You put your mouse over the number of bosses killed, and a panel appears below which names them. You can take a screenshot (like I did), so that you don’t have to remember if you later need to repeat its status to other people.  We’re chatting in my guild forums about killing the Lich King last night, and the question was asked how tough that fight is relative to others in WoW history. I haven’t killed every boss (didn’t do much Black Temple, for example, and no Sunwell at all, since my casual guild at the time was behind on progression). I answered the reason it’s a hard fight is because it’s a Type C in Tobold’s classification. To recap, saving you to June 11th, 2010 | One comment |
From: Boss strategies | Tags: leadership, lich king, performance, raid, raid leader, strategy  My guild, Axis of Dath’remar, a 10-man raiding guild of one night a week, tonight, finally killed the Lich King. I was so very happy about it. Axis is made up of a former hardcore guys who’ve now got the balance right, like four-day a week raiders in previous expansions. I must say our raid leader Dakas is superb, and this makes a big difference. He’s constantly calling ‘defile coming, away from middle’, or the reverse, making the decision June 11th, 2010 | 15 comments |
From: Raid leadership in general | Tags: leadership, lich king, raid, raid leader, strategy As the pre-expansion malaise thickens, as some guilds fold after killing or failing to kill the Lich King, as summer for the northern hemisphere ruins raiding attendance and as the environment and economy continue to get screwed-over by humans, oh and as volcanic dust continues to interrupt European trade and tourism… people are beginning to look for a new guild. I am not looking to change guild. In fact, I just told the guys of my commitment to my May 18th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Guild management | Tags: guild, leadership, progression, raid, rankings, recruitment, roster, situational awareness Vox Immortalis have released some new video guides to compliment their already-extensive stable. Video guide to heroic Putricide is on youtube: They also recently added Heroic Putricide as well as the Dances with Oozes, Flu Shot Shortage, and Full House achievements. Visit their channel for a full list. Registered users can also download high-res versions. May 17th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Boss strategies | Tags: achievements, guide, hard mode, icc, strategy I just came out of an Ulduar 10 PUG. When I noticed it on trade chat, LF1M healer, I thought that’d be fun (and no waiting, since Character data not available. was the last slot required). Before that I’d just been passing time. In fact, just doing that alone is worth comment. I thought “hmm what should I do tonight, I’ve a few hours free”. I did the random daily of course, then actually sat and stared at the Mostly, people have trouble saying exactly what they mean. Language is a complex thing. Encoding your message successfully in words can be difficult. Then, the receiver needs to take what you have said in words, and then decode what you were trying to say: ideally, they should seek first to understand, but that doesn’t happen as much as we’d all like. A good listener will compensate for the difficulty in expression by working with you to get the meaning from what you May 7th, 2010 | 9 comments |
From: Guild management | Tags: books, conversation, debate, dialogue, forums, intelligence Today I am absolutely delighted to have an interview with the GM of the world #1 (by achievement) strict 10 guild, Vox Immortalis. He’s also a Tauren warrior tank. Whilst he’s not a DK, at least he’s a Tauren, bonus points for that. Vox Immortalis also produce a lot of video content, and I’ve embedded two here and there are links to some others (such as when discussing their DK tank). In the interview we cover a lot of ground, including:
Regarding strict 10 rankings, there are a few #1 ranked guilds, depending on what you measure. That doesn’t diminish the awesome accomplishments of Vox Immortalis, nor the other top guilds From Chaos, Requiem of the Ebon Rose or Phoenicis. April 25th, 2010 | 11 comments |
From: Interviews | Tags: hard mode, hardcore, interview, leadership, mumble, raid, recruitment, strict 10 To recap: the Lich King fight has three phases where you are in the centre, and between each of them are transition phases when you move to the edge. Moving between the phases also requires a strategy Each time you are in the center he gains a new ability or two like Spell “Soul Reaper” not found. whilst other abilities remain, like Infest. On the second edge-phase he spawns more raging spirits than the first time. The clever design feature here April 23rd, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Boss strategies | Tags: icc, lich king, raging spirits, strategy, tank, transition One of my favourite strategy bloggers, NER, has now done her Lich King strat. As usual, it’s written with the attention to detail that a raid leader needs. For example, on Defile and how to learn it. NER says everyone needs to have the Lich King as their focus, and must have the focus’ target shown in their UI. Here’s an extract from the strat guide. Defile has a 1.5s cast time (this is important) and when cast will drop I recently had a major pain in the ass with my authenticator fob. Eventually realised its battery must have been fading, and it had got out of sync with the Blizzard server, so would just give me wrong codes and then lead to me locking myself out when I tried to log on. One of the three MTs in our guild just got hacked. He’s naked, guild bank largely empty, etc. Tickets raised now for restoration of all that. I wrote up a rant about Paranition, the first guild in the world to be sponsored by a deodorant. Stupid April Fools’ joke. As you know, I just got forums going. That took quite some time to implement, and a lot of planning and thinking beforehand. I wasn’t playing WoW then but was doing stuff for it, or about it. How much time do you think Tekkub, Shadowed, Shazear, ‘Kahorie‘ or Ciderhelm spend with their addons, Rawr, simulator or official fan site? How about the time Whitetooth invested in calculating the diminishing returns and cap on miss? A remarkable thing about WoW The guild I’m in, Axis, killed Blood Princes 10 last night. Last week, we got Putricide (I missed that one, had real-life stuff intercept me). We only raid once a week from 8pm til midnight. There’s a second raid night for alts. We don’t have a competitive stance in progression, which would be pretty silly for a raid guild of one night, yet are the most progressed in Icecrown amongst 10-man only Horde guilds on our little server. We’re March 5th, 2010 | 7 comments |
From: Raid leadership in general | Tags: blood princes, leadership, raid, strategy When you are briefing a raid team on a fight they have not seen before, or one which they’re not very familiar, you shouldn’t be too wordy. Before the first pull I like everyone to have watched a fight video, which you’d linked in guild forums some days before. Ideally you’ve agreed on a strategy framework, if there are alternative methods. On the night, I think you should give a brief description of the fight, then go in a This endeavour is to make a film about raiding. Below is an HD promotional video made, featuring Darksend from Tankspot, and others. You can pledge a few dollars to help get a real film produced about our hobby by clicking on this mini-ad: Youtube video embedded after the break. Blood Legion, on their Lich King kill announcement, said: We’d like to mention that this kill wouldn’t have been possible without the near-zero latency voice chat of a newly-discovered Ventrillo alternative that we just started using, called Mumble. We encourage players to try out this new software! That’s a very high accolade. It’s not an off-hand comment. I hadn’t even heard of Mumble. It’s an open source, very low latency voice comms system. Here’s their home page. It’s been February 7th, 2010 | 10 comments |
From: Observe, orient, decide, act | Tags: leadership, raid, teamspeak, ventrilo, voice The Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a remarkable theoretical and proven phenomena. I didn’t know they’d proven it: is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence. Basically, people are so stupid they don’t even realise they’re stupid. Read a lot more here, where I came across it. I don’t think I need to say a lot February 7th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Raid leadership in general | Tags: intelligence, leadership, personality, theory Instead of writing my own guide, I’ll compile references to those already written. I have an index of the guides from those sites most people use, plus have tried to include key posts from the blogging community. » continue reading January 20th, 2010 | 4 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Boss strategies, Raid and 5-man guides | Tags: blood princes, deathwhisper, festergut, gunship, icc, icecrown citadel, lana'thel, lich king, marrowgar, putricide, rotface, saurfang, sindragosa, valithria I read a number of blogs. You can download a file containing them all from my sidebar, which can import to Google Reader. I sometimes read on the train, or like today, when I’m back at work for the first day of the new year and cannot be stuffed to do anything much. So, I did some catching-up with blogs. Here are some of the best posts selected from all the writers I follow, with a bias to content January 5th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Boss strategies, Gear and stats, General chat | Tags: boss, gear list, Guild management, other bloggers, pick order, strategies, tank I’m in a discussion about world of logs at the moment. Forum writer ‘opdk’ started some analysis between frost and blood tanks, using WoL, with some side-by-side data he had. I had earlier asked for help to analyse [Acclimation] and the two interests have converged. See the thread. Look around dk.info for some of his other data munging. Hopefully it’ll lead to some more solid analysis on the value of acclimation (and then [Spell Deflection] too) as damage-reducing talents. January 4th, 2010 | 16 comments |
From: Addons, Analysis | Tags: absorbs, acclimation, Analysis, wol, world of logs Yesterdays post asking ‘whether DKs are being benched’ appears to have two root causes:
If you haven’t looked over the discussion, it’s a good read; and Honor’s comment could have been a post in its own right. Encounters which favour one tank over anotherDKs did have their time in the limelight with Sarth3D, where the (now defunct) Unholy-Vot3W spec reigned supreme. That spec has been ‘balanced’ away to obscure memory, so it doesn’t work anymore, but looked a bit like this. Block-tanks have theirs on Anub. I’d forgotten about Vezax, but Honors hadn’t and nor had Ghostcrawler. November 19th, 2009 | 13 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, Raid leadership in general | Tags: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, mmorpg design, raid, tank |
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Raid mentor
I was watching the interview series celebrating 5 years of Wow and 15 of Warcraft. (I’d never played Warcraft, saw it a few times over shoulders, but RTS never grabbed me).
Frank Pearce (he’s a co-founder) reminded me of something I’d forgotten about raiding: the advantage of having an experienced raid mentor. He talked about Molten Core, hear from him here if you’d like, and how on his own guild’s first attempt at MC they had someone help them
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