Hi all and time again for one of my blog posts as we move into a new expansion and a new raiding tier.
This one is about my hopes and expectations of the new tier which has become something of a tradition here at WW as we head in to a new expansion with my previous post on the subject to be found here: https://weekend-warriors.enjin.com/home/m/1372376/page/6#
I will again echo some of those points where we still haven’t really reached the goals we set and would like us to do better on this time around.
Time
Here we’ve gotten very sloppy of late and need to improve on the current trend of not all being on time for invites to allow for prompt clearing of trash. In truth we’re generally worse at this than we were back at the start of Legion and this needs to change as we’re going to be adopting a different policy in this expansion with regards to boss pull time. In the past we’ve waited until 16.00 for the first boss pull to allow any late-comers time to get here via summon and this has come to bite us in the ass with too many people thinking that being afk until 16.00 or not logging until then counts the same as being in raid, clearing trash. It doesn’t.
With this expansion and the return of Heroic mode for the progress team for the first month or more of raiding, we’ll be inviting at 15.45 at which time I expect people to be at the entrance to the raid. We’ll do one round of summons from those that accept the invite on first push and then it’s up to you to get there.
Once we have a viable 10+ we’ll enter, clear trash and head towards the first boss with what we have. We will no longer be summoning anyone at the boss before we pull and this pull will come as soon as we’re sorted with notes and markers, even if it’s before 16.00, so if you’re not there you’ll get locked out of the first boss.
For Mythic, you’ll get sat and replaced with someone who is online, alt or main.
The message is be on time or miss the first boss, do it too often and expect a warning before an eventual removal from the team.
Let’s fix this please, its a matter of proper respect for others and for best utilisation of the limited raid time we have available.
Farm
Now, here again is an area where previous words are as true today as they were then. We’re not getting enough Mythic farm done of the critical upper wing bosses that give the upgrades we need to confront the harder bosses before we fall into the temptation to extend lockouts and push progress on the next fight. This causes us not only to confront bosses at an average raid team ilvl that is not optimal for that fight, but also to adopt a sloppy attitude to reclears and repeat kills in general.
So, for BfA, my hope is that we’ll get to where we need to be in terms of concentration and execution of farm bosses so that every kill is a one or two shot and we can once more look to clear effectively and confidently on Saturday (until everyone is geared) and save Sunday for our progress target. There is no reason we can’t do this, but we can’t do it without the collective will to approach every fight with the respect it deserves and the end of the “Oh no, please not this boss, it’ll take all day…” mentality.
“They are all our bitches” is the attitude we need to have with every boss we’ve already killed and just get down to doing it right again, like the first time.
Attitude and Mechanics
Here I’m just going to more or less repost verbatim what I wrote last time as the issue is rather depressingly still the same.
I’ve touched on attitude a little above, but here as well it is important to remember that in our desire to push effective progress and efficient farming that we continue to have fun, maintain a positive and light air where people can breath and enjoy their raiding as well. In recent weeks it is true that patience has been somewhat thin on the ground as the expansion is old and many of us have been beating our heads against the same wall and the same failings week in and week out for the entire expansion (and the one before that, and the one before that…). This can wear a person down and it’s certainly true I have less patience than I once did with repeated failures on mechanics by people who do know better and those who should by now realise that grasping this aspect is much more important than how much damage or healing they do.
It never ceases to surprise me how many new recruits and even old hands think they’ll be judged in a raid context because they’re doing noticeably less damage/healing than a better geared, more experienced or simply more capable counterpart and yet don’t think that wiping the raid 10 times because they don’t move to a marker or properly handle a mechanic when told to clearly on forums, in raid and ad nauseam is a big problem worthy of frustration.
Damage you can improve with gear and familiarity, not being aware of your surroundings and heeding prompts of your boss mods is much harder for us to know when it will click, if ever.
So, when you see a player (or raid or role leader) get frustrated with failures on simple yet critical and non negotiable mechanics like soaking damage from other players or target switching you really need to understand that you’re looking into the mind of someone who some time in the past made a conscious choice to get this right first and who can’t understand those who never do the same until someone has said it 10 times and then pointed a finger at them.
As long as we keep in mind the need to be respectful, have fun and be lighthearted on trash and whilst we farm (and kill) bosses and not have a raid and 5 role leaders all being grumpy at the same time (or repeating each other) then there is no reason we can’t find a happy balance that keeps the attitude light and responsibility for failure shared rather than singular, as long as the players equally understand that their attitude to mechanics and how quickly and effectively they carry them out and repeat them is inextricably linked to the overall raid attitude and atmosphere.
Raid Times
Now, in this final part I’m going to outline a proposed change to our weekly raiding hours. For many years now we’ve raided 6 hours per weekend, with the addition in the last 3 years of an extra 15 minutes per day in the form of earlier invite time to allow for extra raid time on the bosses.
In reality, as we’ve seen, pulling the first boss at 16.00 on a non-farm day is pretty rare, we’re often left messing with notes and finding last minute replacements for those who are absent or late and this can slip back to 16.15 or even later on thankfully rare occasions. When you add to this 10 minute breaks that slip to 15 more often than not as we wait for one or two slackers and in reality we’re lucky to get 2.5 hours per day actually raiding, with only half of it what I’d call properly focused.
As we’ve seen in Legion and indeed in MoP and WoD before it, getting Cutting Edge isn’t easy, indeed it’s fair to say that it’s usually pushed out of our reach for a number of the above mentioned issues but also because 5 more or less effective raiding hours per week isn’t a lot to start with and doesn’t allow for any accidents we have along the way to be fixed and still stay on schedule.
If we want to improve the chances of getting CE we firstly need to do all the above with regards to time-keeping, efficiency in farming, changes in personal awareness and handling of mechanics but this will only get us part of the way there as we’ve found that maintaining that sort of focus all the way through an expansion is pretty hard when the expansion gets old.
This leaves us really with only one workable alternative to give us more real time on boss fights and that’s increasing the number of hours we raid per week.
Let me start by stating that adding a third raid day is not workable. We’re a weekend raid guild and we use both of those days already and weekday evening raids wouldn’t suit enough people to make them viable. Tried it in the past and even when we were raiding 10 man, we couldn’t get the people to make it viable.
No, the most workable alternative is to increase our raiding hours on Saturday and Sunday by thirty minutes each day taking doing invites at 15.45 and then raiding until 19.30. I say it’s workable as basically we already know that people are able to raid until 20.00 three months per year due to the summer raiding times. In summer, we’d then move raid times by 30 minutes instead of 1 hour to still finish at 20.00 whilst starting 30 minutes earlier than we do now at 16.15 instead of 16.45.
We could also add 5 minutes to the break time to allow a full 15 minute break if this helps people get any mid-raid chores done, or alternatively keep it at 10 and have a second break of 5 minutes later for bio needs.
This change would allow us to find an extra one and a half raid days per calendar month which over the life of a tier or expansion would mean quite a lot of extra raid time if we’re able to make the most of it.
As it’s not my intention to push people out of the raid team, if anyone has any insurmountable problems with the change then please get in touch with me privately and let me know and if there are enough people with issues we can look at it again.
At this stage however this is the plan and indeed, our first raids will have this timing in BfA so we can see what practical difference this will make.
Lastly, with raid opening in September, we’ll be resuming raiding on winter rather than summer raid times.
Thanks for reading.
