raiding – Raiding With Lisia

elitist jerks

Not all that long ago, something happened to me while raiding with my guild. The situation has been resolved, but the reason I want to write about it is that it touches on what this blog is all about, i.e. the “casual hardcore” experience.

I consider myself very lucky to have found a guild that is all about inclusiveness. We may not progress as fast as some other guilds, but everybody has a great time, and we all do our best, whatever our best may be. I won’t lie; sometimes I get impatient. I hate wiping over and over to the same mechanics; I get frustrated when people don’t seem to be maximizing their gear; I really believe in consistency of attendance. But I generally try to keep that to myself, and if things aren’t moving fast enough for me, there’s no longer anything stopping me from finding a group that’s further along, while continuing to help my guild progress. That’s what I did with HFC and it’s worked out fine (aside from maybe burning me out a little bit).

I raided with my current guild for two expansions before throwing my main toon in there, so I got to know some of the core members very well. There have been some new faces this xpac, but everyone has that same easygoing attitude, which I really appreciate. However, we’ve also added some people to our twice-weekly raids who are from another guild on another server. I have no idea why at least some of them have been raiding with us, but it started out with maybe four or five people and has grown to 10 or 11. At the same time, some of our own guildies who were not able to be there earlier have returned. So we’ve got 20-25 people there most nights at this point. My biggest issue has been that sometimes people from the other guild will roll need on tier pieces and then not return, when some members of my guild haven’t been getting the rolls, and I did raise the point to our guild leader and our main tank finally, which did improve things.

At any rate, the other night we were waiting for one of our guildies, who has a new healer he’s trying to gear, to show up before we killed Mannoroth, who drops the one piece that toon didn’t already have. To kill time, we decided to kill Zakuun. We were pulling the last demon that’s in his room, and I pulled the boss by accident with an errant Barrage. This was not a big deal; most of us are overgeared, and we just ran out and reset the boss. I am pretty sure nobody died, but even if they did, you can mount up right outside the room and repair, and many of us have repair mounts for people to use.

But one person, who had only been with us once before, sneered that there was no reason to use Barrage on a single target fight anyway. Now actually, this is just not true. I watch Azortharion, who in my opinion is the best hunter in WoW (even if you disagree, he’s statistically one of the top), and he recommends Barrage in HFC single target fights because you’re rarely able to stand still long enough for Powershot to be more effective. I will often, if DPS isn’t actually an issue, open with Barrage because I’m not all that likely to use it later in the fight. So I pointed this out. He said “It’s not better than Aimed Shot.” At the time, I was thinking he meant Powershot, but of course I actually do use Aimed Shot all the time.

Now, this guy’s DPS is better than mine, sure. I can get the exact same numbers he does, but I often don’t. But that said, other than him, my DPS is higher than anyone else’s in the guild (well, except my husband’s if he’s not tanking), But it didn’t even matter on this fight, and frankly, it wouldn’t matter on any fight we were planning to do that night, because two hunters doing 72K DPS weren’t going to make the difference between downing and not downing the last two bosses in Normal HFC.

I work constantly on my DPS. I could probably work harder than I do, but I work 40 hours a week, have a family, and have a chronic illness, so I do have other priorities. I’m also in my 50’s and my reflexes definitely aren’t that of a person in their 20’s. My guild knows all this, but of course, this guy did not. So I whispered the guy from his server/guild who had brought all these new people in and asked him to tell the new guy to please STFU because I did not need this.

They (apparently) had a whispered conversation about me, because all of a sudden the guy I’d whispered sent me a whisper which said “I don’t get why some people get insulted instead of wanting to improve.” It turned out that the whisper was meant for his elitist pal, about me. When I asked him where he got off, he told me he was sorry he’d mistyped, but really, he didn’t get why I should be upset when his friend was just trying to help.

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I don’t believe “help” should be delivered in a snarky tone. If Mr. Elite wanted to help, he would have sent me a whisper saying “I see you are using Barrage a lot. Can I offer some advice?” Like him, I’ve cleared Heroic HFC, and I wasn’t carried. My raid leader in that group did, in fact, have some suggestions for me, such as switching to Marksmanship from Beast Mastery, that he he delivered in a kind and polite way. So I wasn’t buying it. At that point, particularly since I was also in Officer Chat in my guild telling them what was going on, and having several people initially disbelieve me when I said the second guy was now saying less than nice things to me, I ended up leaving. I suppose you could say I rage quit, but when I later discussed it with our GM, he said that he didn’t feel that it was a rage quit under the circumstances. I’m pretty grateful for that, because it’s not a thing I typically do. But I did feel pretty bad about it, because while I’d assumed that everyone would just go on without me, it actually broke up the raid for the night.

Here’s the thing, though: you don’t come in my house, where I’ve been raiding with this group for literally years, and start making snarky comments. If you’re new to a group, doesn’t matter if you know stuff better than other people, you keep quiet in voice chat. If you feel someone’s screwing up, you talk to the raid leader or, perhaps, just message the person directly and let them decide if they want your “advice” or not.

As I said to my GM later on – and he agreed – if it hadn’t been me, he was going to anger somebody else at some point, because I was not the only one he was addressing his snark to. So even though I don’t feel great about the fact I quit the raid (which was an emotional response to a LOT of stuff, not just his remarks and what was going on in game), I don’t necessarily feel bad about it either, because it’s clear that I was speaking for a lot of other people and their frustrations.

We’ll be raiding again on Wednesday, and I have no idea what the composition of the group will be. My GM actually offered to toss everyone from the other server/guild out, and I told him that the only thing I wanted was that this one guy not be invited back, so we’ll see. By the time I post this, it will have already happened.

(Update: the second guy, who also has a toon in our guild, was there, along with the other members of his guild who have been with us for a while. Not surprisinly, the elitist eejit, and the other extraneous members of that server/guild, were not.)

Adding On

In a recent interview with the Girls Gone WoW podcast, I mentioned (all too briefly) that I like to use addons when I play, and mentioned a couple. Raven (if I recall correctly) didn’t really agree with everything I said, but what I really wish is that I’d actually gotten more time to discuss the topic at hand (“casual hardcore” raiding, which is the subject of this entire blog) and the addons I use. That’s not their fault though, and the show was really a lot of fun.

But since this is my blog and I do have the ability to do so, I will go into addons a bit more. First of all, I’ve used a replacement for Blizzard’s raid frames since, I think, 2009, long before I started to actually raid. My current favorite raid frame replacement is actually a full UI replacement, ElvUI. I cannot recommend it enough. In addition to the base UI mod, I use the following addons, which I install through the TukUI client rather than Curse (which I use for all my other addons besides ElvUI and its mods):

Cecile Meter Overlay
Dragon Overlay
ElvUI Autolog
ElvUI Channel Alerts
ElvUI Color Tags
ElvUI Extra Action Bars
ElvUI Priest AoE
Location Plus
New Openables
Raid Buffs Checker

I also download ElvuiStillEnhanced (WoD) from Curse because for some reason it’s not maintained on the main site.

None of these, or even ElvUI itself, is anything I would consider necessary for successful raiding. I just really like the UI and I like a lot of the mods as they make my (playing) life better personally. Raid Buffs Checker is really great though, since I can see at a quick glance what raid buffs I do and don’t have, and (if I’m playing MM Hunter, as is often the case) I know if I need to provide a specific buff with Lone Wolf.

Following is a list of addons (I use Curse to download them) that I consider useful for raiding, in order of importance, along with a short description:

Deadly Boss Mods/DBM (all modules) – unless you really, really, really know the fight cold, including knowing when to tell OTHER people to do things, you should have DBM installed, and in fact many raid leaders require it. DBM tells you when when something is happening that you have to pay attention to, both with voice warnings and text on your screen, and it’s highly configurable. If you’re the tank and/or raid leader, you get even more options, such as pull countdowns, countable interrupts, and so on. It’s useful in situations out of raid too, but for raids I consider it imperative.
GTFO – Stands for Get the F Out, and what it does is play a (configurable) annoying sound when you’re standing in stuff, or close to stuff, or taking damage from stuff. Not absolutely necessary, but very helpful.
Omen Threat Meter – Gives you a graphic and/or plays a sound if your threat is getting high. Mostly useful if you’re always grabbing aggro, or think you might, or want to make sure you DO have it.
Weak Auras 2 – highly configurable interface for letting you know when you have to do something. It’s not all that easy to use, but there are tutorials, plus it’s easy to find scripts to import. So for instance you can have a set of icons on your screen to show you how long you’ve got till a certain buff/spell wears off, or a bar showing you cast time for a spell on your target, or whatever. For the latter, it’s true that DBM has a lot of the same functionality, but sometimes more warnings are better than not.
Bitten’s Spellflash (all modules) – flashes the next spell or spells you should cast for optimal performance, based on SimC theorycrafting. Hitting the flashing buttons has certainly improved my deeps on my hunter, plus on classes that I don’t know as well, has helped me learn them.
OmniCC – This is probably duplicated in something in ElvUI, actually, but I’ve had it installed for a long time, and if you don’t use ElvUI it’s definitely useful. Puts the cooldown for your spells on your action buttons so you know how long you’ve got till CD.
MikScrollingBattleText – Cool looking and configurable, easy to see, scrolling text for buffs and debuffs and such. As a bonus, comes with configurable sounds for when cooldowns pop. Can sound quite hilarious but the point is to alert you to something you might have missed. As I said above, the more of that the better.
Pet Attack – for classes with pets, lets you know if your pet is not attacking.
Pet Selector – for hunters, tells you what pet will provide the most useful buffs for your party.
Recount (and/or) Skada – I have both installed but use only Skada currently as it’s less of a resource hog. Gives you a report on how much damage or healing party members are doing, with various configurable types of reporting and so on. I’ve put it lower on the list simply because it doesn’t provide any utility itself; it’s mainly useful so you know how well or badly you (or others) are doing. If you’re the raid leader you definitely want to have it up. As a healer, I use the DPS meter so that I know who to rez if several DPS have died.
Who Pulled? – Mainly useful so you know who to blame.
Decursive – I actually use this a LOT, because my healing class doesn’t have a mass dispel so I can only dispel one at at time anyway. Allows you to remove curses, poison, diseases, and so on if your class is able to do so, with a click (or you can macro-ize it). Saves action bar use. I put it low on the list because it’s only really important to have if you’re a healing class.
BonusRollPreview – In the last two expansions, there have been “bonus tokens” that you can spend on an extra roll for gear (or gold). This addon gives you a drop-down menu to show you what all the possible gear is, if you don’t happen to know.
Afterlife Crowd Control – Warns you when crowd control is about to break.
AskMrRobot – Allows you to import your current gear profile into the AskMrRobot site so that you can maximize your gear (according to their theorycrafting method).
Pawn – if you’re not sure whether the drop you just got is better than what you’re wearing, Pawn can help you decide.

Following is an audio clip of my husband and I discussing the addons we use for raiding. My husband, Ouro, is our guild’s raid leader and one of the tanks, and while he hasn’t been playing as long as I have, he’s really good with his Paladin.

What Does It Take?

I had a discussion with my husband a while ago about what, if anything, should be the minimum that a person “should” do in order to raid. We were not in full agreement.

On my main, Lisia, I have the legendary ring (upgraded a few times), plus as of last week I have the heroic tier set and the normal class trinket. I also have the heirloom trinket from mythic dungeons (I have several of them actually), and the cleave trinket that the council group drops, although I don’t have the Censer trinket at this point (bad RNG). I’ve downed Heroic Archie with my group, many of whom are actually better geared (although I’m catching up).

My healer is a little less well geared. I don’t have tier gear (other than LFR) on her, though I do have the ring. This is because I actually thought I was going to be replaced as a healer, which I was okay with, so I stopped working on her. However, I’m still needed in that capacity, so I’ve been going on gear runs, although nothing I need is dropping for me.

Anyway, that was sort of the crux of our discussion. What does it take, to be a raider? My husband feels that, if you want to raid, you’re a raider, and you should be able to come along.

I’m not 100% opposed to that way of thinking. I do believe that, if you want to raid, you should be given a chance, and in this xpac it’s easier because you don’t have a set number of people you can allow, meaning that not everyone has to have superior gear.

But where we diverge is my feeling that if you want to continue to raid you should be willing to follow certain guidelines which will make progression easier. For instance, you should have or be getting the legendary ring. You should have or be working on a tier set. All or almost all of your gear should be epic. All or almost all of your gear should be maximally upgraded. Your talents, while in the raid group, should be chosen for maximum raid utility, not your personal convenience. And if you’re not doing all that, my question would be why are you raiding?

But my husband pointed out, and he’s not wrong, that it’s a slippery slope. If someone doesn’t have the time to put into getting the ring – and it is a time sink, though thankfully there’s no insistence on PVP like last xpac – but they show up every week and put their all into learning the fights, does that mean they should be tossed off the team? On my old team, that would have been a yes, at least for the main raid team. But on both the teams I’m in now, nobody has even asked if I had the ring. On both teams we’re doing okay, and the main reason for that is that we’re working in synergy, regardless of gear level. We’re a TEAM.

When I was considering how to get my moose, before we joined the heroic team, I looked at what pug groups (aside from friendshipmoose) wanted. I didn’t make that cut at the time, because they wanted tier set, ring, a certain ilvl, and “ahead of the curve” for an earlier raid in the xpac. I had the ring and the ilvl, but not the tier set (at the time), and the only AHOC I had was from last xpac. Maybe I could have squeezed on, I don’t know. But now I’m set to get the mount and I didn’t have to prove anything, just show up and learn the fights, while making new friends in the process. Getting the tier set and upgrading my gear was a goal I set myself, not something anyone made me do, and the outcome is going to be the same.

So in the end, what does it take to be a raider? It’s not worth it to me to run with a team that has no heart and synergy, and while I still think gearing is important, I’ll take that heart any day. I count myself lucky to be a part of two fantastic teams, and I’m hoping we run together for a long, long time.

My Raiding Background

So who am i, to talk about raiding? Clearly I don’t belong to Method, so…

I haven’t been in raiding for long. As mentioned, I started playing right around the time WotLK came out. I was new to MMO gaming, and I took my time leveling, so it was at least the end of 2009 and possibly into 2010 before I hit level 80.

At that point the boyfriend who got me into WoW and I belonged to a nice and friendly guild that unfortunately later fell apart. We did do a lot of dungeons, including some heroics, but I don’t think there was ever any thought of raiding.

Raiding was different back then. LFG was just being developed, and there was no LFR to ease you into content or help you gear beyond heroics. It was something that really serious, really elite players did, and I dreamed of being that good. But I knew I wasn’t. I could maybe live through heroic dungeons, and in fact do quite decent DPS, but that was about it.

Cataclysm hit, and along the way, my boyfriend and I broke up and I married my current husband. I joined a new (to me) guild, leveled my main up to max, and ran heroics. LFR came out and I dipped my toe in. And then another new guildie told me his other guild was running 10 man Dragon Soul and could use another dps. I ran with them a few times, and I was hooked. I never actually finished Dragon Soul on any strength besides LFR (though obviously I’m farming it now), but I knew I loved raiding.

Pandaria, unfortunately, brought some life changes for me. My computer could no longer handle WoW graphics, plus for a while I didn’t have a really great Internet connection. I bought the xpac and leveled my main, but it was after SoO dropped before I really got back into things. With the encouragement of my guild, plus a new computer, I geared up and started flex raiding. Right around that time, my husband also started playing, and once he was max level we wanted to raid together.

My guild didn’t have a place for us on the main team (although I eventually downed Garrosh with them), but the other guild I’d raided with before had a spot, so I split my time between the two. Due to the lockout system in place at the time, this ended up causing me quite a bit of stress, but I made it work. My guild ended up downing Garrosh, with me on the team, less than a half hour before the WoD prepatch hit, and I got my wolf mount. I was really proud, but at the same time I felt like I wasn’t really good enough.

Early into WoD, my husband and I made the decision to leave the guild we were in and join the guild I’d been part time raiding with, and we’ve been really happy with them. Unfortunately, several core members have had RL aggro, and our progression has been a little slow, but I’m really happy to say that as of this writing we’re 11/13 Normal HFC. Last night we almost went to 12/13, so I’m confident we’ll be facing Archimonde soon.

With my guild, because we’ve temporarily lost one of our healers, I’ve geared up my resto druid and have been running with her. I don’t think anyone actually expected me to be any good at it, because I’d never done it before, but it turns out that I’m actually pretty decent. My biggest problem tends to be situational awareness, but I’m learning to keep one eye on raid frames and another eye on mid-screen so I can move out of stuff.

I’ve been running my main with another group (on a different server). They’ve already gone 13/13 H HFC but then started again with some new people (including us), so the present group is 12/13. We’re looking at facing H Archie tomorrow (as I write this), so I should have my moose soon! And then we’re going to be trying Mythic difficulty, which has me both scared and excited.

So that is where I’ve been and where I’m at in raiding. I don’t know really where that puts me. On the one hand I’m a lot more serious about raiding than a lot of people I know. On the other hand I’m not exactly server top. So what is that? Casual-plus? I’ll take it.