What the PuG!?

In the last couple weeks, I've been in PuGs for just about every raid, except Sunwell. Some have been successful, some haven't. But it's still amazing to me that they exist. On a server where the top Alliance guild was selling chances at tier pieces mere weeks after first downing the bosses themselves, and most of the inhabitants are just looking to get "epicced out" - regardless of the stats on the gear, it's somewhat refreshing to see people have complete PuG runs where rolls are simply mainspec first, then offspec.

All this freely available gear has set rumblings in the foundations of some guilds. I've seen a few 25-mans break into 10-mans, 10-man guilds split into arena teams, and arena teams disintegrate into individual battlegrounders. Of course, this might just be the result of pre-expansion restlessness spreading wanderlust that makes people test the waters of what they can accomplish on their own.

I have some very mixed feelings about these PuGs. On one hand, they get the bosses down (sometimes), and that's where the phat lootz come from. On the other hand, they're terrible players who are so sub-optimal at their roles that even after the patch boss nerfs, wipes are vastly more common than boss kills. So while I enjoy reaping the benefits of killing bosses in Black Temple, it helps to have a movie to watch during downtime, and maybe a game of solitaire going to keep my clicking finger from locking up.

On the whole, I think that more PuGs can only be good. They stimulate the interest in raids and heroics, and keep the game from becoming stale. But I'd like to see a return of attunements with the increase in PuGs. As easy as this game is, some people just aren't good enough at it to perform at the level required to do high-level content. To me, this is the challenge of game design: invent a natural content progression that cultivates building skills that will help you later in the game. Of course, this would effectively "lock out" some people from the end of progression, but I'm conceited enough to believe that I can perform well enough to make it to the "end."

This ties in to how I think that progression should depend on skill intead of raid size, but that's a whole different post. Perhaps later this week.

In the mean time, enjoy the free PHAT EPIXX L00TZ0RZ flowing out of PuGs.

WTS!: In-Game Loot Distribution

We're all familiar with the typical loot options in the game. I think the two that get used the most are Group Loot and Master Looter. I don't know anyone who uses Round Robin or Need Before Greed, and Free-For-All is pretty much a gimmick option for running lowbies through things, or similar off situations. I would like to see implementation of a loot system by Blizzard for raids, so there is a "standard" method - even if Blizzard makes it optional.

In my mind, a player should have an "edge" when rolling on items for his spec and professions, as well as when he hasn't received any loot from a boss (or raid) over multiple kills. Of course, this can't "carry over" between guilds, so each raid would have to be tagged for a guild or as "PuG" when entering, and each player would have a running tab of what amounts to DKP with each guild he runs with, while PuGs remain how they are now.

As an example of the mechanics, let's say that the bias for a player who can use an item is +5 to a roll, and the bias for not having won something yet is another +5 per boss. So in your Sunwell raid, the engineering goggle upgrade for your character's class and spec drops, and you haven't won any loot for 5 kills. So you have a total of 30 points to add to your roll. What I'm suggesting isn't a straight addition, but simply an increase of top roll - so (/roll 1-130) instead of the normal (/roll 1-100). These additional points would be "spent" on a winning roll, but retained on a losing roll. This puts a soft cap on the amount that you can effectively use, and so encourages people to roll often without making any points over a certain number useless.

This also leaves a large part of the loot to chance. The roll isn't being sold to the highest bidder, it's being biased toward the unlucky. There is still the chance for someone to show up, roll 100 on everything and leave, or for a dedicated raid member to lose every roll, even though he has a bonus of 500, but these are very unlikely situations.

Of course, a huge dilemma with this is that there is no "standard" system now, so how can Blizzard choose one to impose? That's why I suggest that it only be mandatory in a PuG setting, and can be turned off in a raid to allow a guild to use whatever system they're already using. I don't really expect to see this anytime soon, but here's hoping!

Just Say "No" to PuGs?

I've taken to PuGing Kara with my warrior lately. He still needs 40-odd badges, and can get a few offspec upgrades in there as well. What I'd really like to do is see him in ZA, but he's nowhere near as geared as my druid and with the new content coming soon, it'd be a waste to have a "geared enough" tank in there in place of an "awesomely geared" tank.

With that said, are PuGs getting better now, or just more geared? I haven't had a Kara run not make it to Shade (even though that's about when everyone just gives up because it requires more than button-mashing) in a few weeks, and we've even gotten Illhoof down a couple times. I'd like to think that my hotness that is tanking makes a huge difference in that, but it's more likely that the gear level of the group is going up on average.

The thing about that being true that I don't understand is how I still manage to get in a group with at least the other tank in nothing but quest greens. And how Kara senses that this person needs gear so drops nothing but that person's spec/class loot.

I ended up running the show Sunday night, since I was apparently the only one who had been inside Kara before. We started with 4 (Count them! FOUR!) Ret pallies, so when we hit Maiden we only had a small issue with Holy Fire almost killing our healers. All our dps could cleanse it from themselves.

By the time we got to Curator though, we had lost all of the paladins, and the dps were having a hard time coping without Blessing of Salvation. I think we degenerated into name-calling and POM-pyroing around the 3rd flare from Curator, and called it after struggling with Illhoof, but killing him finally.

As frustrating as this was, in a normal PuG, or just a few months ago, I wouldn't have expected to get farther than Moroes. And this was all done with an offtank who effectively doubled his tanking gear value by picking up 3 pieces. Oh, and he thought that this [Good Luck Charm] was for rogues. I just about left the group after that comment.

The bottom line is that PuGs are geared enough now to accommodate just about any heroic or Kara. PuGing ZA probably would get a boss or two down. As long as you're willing to put up with a few wipes and don't expect anything spectacular, you can probably get a group for anything now that nobody's raiding.

Holding Pattern

In talking with my brother about the coming expansion and what we want from WoW, it came up that once we get to see end-game (with the new 10-man raids) there really isn't a reason to keep playing. Sure, we could join a larger guild and do the same raids for better gear, but it loses it's charm after a while. I know that doing Kara for the last year solid has sort of burned me out, but I still enjoy going in with friends.

I think that this ties in with my dislike for PuGs. I just came out of a Kara PuG tonight that took 6! hours. . . and we didn't even kill Prince or Netherspite. I don't like grouping up with people who really don't care about doing well themselves, as long as the group is good enough to get them their l33t 3p1x that they can show off.

I like the trend that Blizzard is heading toward with the 10-man raids. It means that every person's contribution matters four times as much as when Molten Core and Onyxia (and the old, er, current Naxx!) were the big things to be doing. But while my contribution is more than it used to be in a raid, that also means that the guy who's in full S3 but can still only put out 400 dps also has his contribution amplified by 4 times what it used to be.

I would very much like to play a game with my friends and family that is like World of Warcraft, without having to deal with all the idiots who populate its servers. The appeal of "private" servers is becoming greater every time I have to deal with some moron who either can't communicate in my language, or can't communicate well enough to assure me that they understand what I want them to do in a particular fight.

I know that this is supposed to be a Massively Multiplayer RPG, but sometimes more just isn't better. What I would like to see from a game is something where individual ability is appreciated more than the ability to wrangle a mass of people together and have them sit through something for 20-40 hours per week. My view of raiding might be severely skewed, but the only "raiding" guild I was in required 4 hours a night, 4 nights a week of raiding, and that you bring all your buff items with you (food, flasks, elixirs, potions, etc.). This meant that if I wanted to see endgame content, I had to first go out and farm for things that I wouldn't otherwise use and then I had to endure hours of what passed for progression that mostly consisted of everyone complaining about how so-and-so took too long, or was afk for something, or whatever. I only got about 3 or 4 hours of actual boss-killing and raiding out of the 16 that were required, and spend another 3 or 4 preparing myself for those. So 20 hours a week spent just to boast(?) that I had seen MH and BT.

In a sense, I like the approach that Blizzard had when World of Warcraft was first released and only 5% (or whatever) of the population of the server saw the inside of Naxxramas. Make the encounters difficult. Make the skill of the player count. Make it even more worth it to hone your tradeskills to max level, and get the rare plans/schematics/recipes/formulas/designs/patterns. That way, when someone says "I have full T9" it actually means that they're good, not that they got into a good guild.

Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword. It means that to get these awesome items that I want, I have to be good at what I do. Not only do I have to be good, but the friends and family that I play with (who range from the equivalent of a 10-year-old girl gamer to the really cool father of a friend who really doesn't know that much about gaming) also have to be good. And for them, being that good at a game just isn't fun; it's work.

Anyway, maybe I'll put down the keyboard (for gaming! I still need it to publish my inner secrets about life, the universe, and everything) and take up cribbage instead. At the very least it'll help me build tighter relationships with people that I currently forsake to kill demons and alien orcs.

Low Population Servers: Pros and Cons

I decided last night to level engineering on my warrior. I know - I must be mad to level engineering, especially this close to an expansion release. The truth is that it's an upgrade to him. His professions before were skinning/herbalism and I don't have a leatherworker, so I figured that dropping skinning for something productive couldn't hurt.

I already have a miner (well, one maxed, and one in the 250ish range) so getting the materials to level it isn't that big of a pain.

I didn't last too long before that idea was thoroughly purged from my mind. I was at about 200 engineering when I couldn't find enough stone from the minerals I was getting to make the blasting powder in the quantity I need. So I went to the auction house to just buy the extra I needed. This is when I started cursing my lower population server. There were exactly 0 of the stones I needed up for sale.

Now don't get me wrong - normally I love not having to fight over every single herb and mineral. I love being able to complete quests without having to push and shove my way to the front of the line to talk to a quest giver, or wait for hours to kill X of a particular thing in an area.

But when I can't get something on the auction house because there just aren't any, or I can't find someone to craft something because the person who got that rare drop recipe hasn't been on in a couple weeks, it makes me feel helpless about the situation. Sure, I can go farm up the stuff I need to level engineering; that isn't a big problem. But what about when I want someone to make me a meta gem that's only a world drop? How do I get something that I can't go out and farm myself? A more ethereal quality to the problem is getting groups. There are times I feel like pugging (I know, but I consider it my charity work for the year) and I can't get a group. Even on my tank or healer.

The whole point of having a MMORPG is the MMO part of that. Massively Multiplayer Online. So supposedly, I should be able to play with hundreds or thousands (or more!) people at once. And they can be across the world from me. But low population servers, whether they serve multiple nations or not, don't deliver on the most important part of the title: Massively. We can tell it's the most important because it's the first word of the genre. And because it's the only thing that makes it different than, oh, Final Fantasy XXVII or whatever the next big console RPG is.

I'm not sure how to combat this. Do you trade the convenience of being able to do what you want when you want for the ease of obtaining tradeskills? This isn't a problem for me most of the time, but when it is a problem, it gets severely frustrating very fast.

I'm hoping we can see some improvements to this with WotLK with people returning to the game for ZOMG NEW CONTENTS AND STUFF, but what's the sustainable answer to low population servers? The current band-aid of high server->low server transfers apparently isn't working, and I don't think I can afford hundreds of dollars to transfer all my siblings characters somewhere else.

The Problem with Random Drops. . .

is that they're random. But sometimes it doesn't seem that way.

For instance, my guild is comprised of my two brothers, my girlfriend's two sisters, and a couple of friends. This leaves us with at least one spot on our Kara runs that we need to fill every Sunday. Well, I say "need" but we really can 9-man it. It's just a good way to keep the pace and get it done in a reasonable amount of time. We have all the tanks and healers, so we just need one little dps to come along. Three of the last 4 weeks, however, when we pug we end up with someone so horrible that the healers out dps them on some fights. 

This in and of itself isn't as bad as the fact that the loot table seems to sense this and want to improve them somehow. Every boss drops something this 10th can use. We even had a hunter rolling on resto shammy gear because "I can wear it, too."

Even this last week, when we had to pug 3 and actually got people who know what they're doing, we ended up giving everything to an elemental shaman.

I guess I wouldn't care as much if we weren't trying to gear up a couple of alts. All of the mains in the guild are in full badge and/or PvP gear, so we don't need anything that Kara can drop (except those damn enchanting formulas!). But to go in every week and have gear drop that nobody can use except the 150 dps hunter is just frustrating.

The Secret of Not Wiping

Going through heroics this last week (and possibly the week before) with my warrior tanking has given me huge amounts of perspective on the game in general. Last time I leveled through heroics it was on my druid tank, and I thought that they were incredibly difficult at that level of gear. I felt that I was stuck between Kara and heroics, and neither one was really doable with the gear I had.

Looking back, though, I realize that I was fine gear-wise. It's very possible that I could have been so horrible that I just didn't have the skill to do things without being overgeared for them, or I could have just been running with completely hopeless groups. I prefer to think that it's the latter, just because I would hate to have been that bad.

I think the big motivator in the change has been my brother, a holy pally, who is more than willing to try anything, regardless of level. Of course now he has 2000 or so healing, so it makes it much easier for me to survive where I'm not supposed to be. :P

Just tonight I got my [Sun Eater] from heroic Mech to replace my [Inuuro's Blade], and we breezed through the instance -- even the fire lady boss we normally have a 50ish% success rate with. Now, my warrior is decked out in mostly blues so I'm not going to say that my tanking made all the difference, but at the same level of gear with my druid I was struggling to find decent tanking leather and running the same normal instance over and over for the one drop from the final boss that was a slight upgrade. Heroics were out of the question.

So either my skills have become so great that I should just start tanking Sunwell on my druid, or I've started running with better groups. We'll see what turns up from here.