PvE vs. PvP

I’m still spending some time considering my options recently regarding what to do in game and with my current guild. I think I’m getting better at not feeling obligated to go to raids or be a part of that “make it happen” mentality. On the other hand, I log out before it’s time and I’ve been pretty frustrated overall so there’s no way in hell I was going anyway.

I’ve recently been contacted by a couple of guilds and one right now is standing out as a pretty good possibility. The one concern I have is that it is on a PvP server.

I’m not an avid PvP’er.  About 14 months ago I hit the battlegrounds pretty hard because I had hit 70 a couple months prior, had switched from Prot to Holy, had no healing gear, and sucked at regular instances let alone heroics. So I found PvP gear that I could grind. Initially it was a lot of fun, even though Alliance sucked at everything except AV. After grinding it for a month and getting my upgrades, I was pretty much burned out of PvP and I’ve never been a fan of just randomly attacking flagged Horde.

I did recently try out Wintergrasp and the new beach battleground (see not an avid PvP’er, can’t even remember the name) and enjoyed it.  The introduction of machines and sieges is kinda fun.

So my question for those of you that have played on PvP and PvE realms, is a PvP realm bad for someone who doesn’t care much for PvP (i.e. is the ganking bad or can you still farm, quest, wait at stones, etc. without too much problem) and is primarily a PvE raider?

A Newbie Raider’s Guide: Raid Etiquette

Raid Leaders often take for granted that everyone understands raiding like they do. What they forget is that “once upon a time”, they were just as ignorant…

[Guild] [Raid Leader]: Invites coming in 10 seconds to all level 80s. Please leave your groups.
[Guild] [Raid Member]: one sec almost at last boss need 5 minutes

How often have you seen this?

Etiquette is defined as “the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life” by Merriam-Webster.

Let’s define raid etiquette as “the conduct or procedure required by the raiding guild to be observed in raids.”

If you’re new to raiding you may have never thought about there being any kind of raid etiquette, but there is. Each guild handles it differently; some are laid back while others are stringent. But if you happen to follow these guidelines you will do well in any raiding guild.

Sign Up For Raids

Different guilds have different requirements for getting invited to raids. Most guilds have some sort of signup so they can plan ahead. These can be found either on website calendars, in-game calendars, or just by logging on at the right time. Make sure you follow whatever guild procedure is set in place.

Read Strategies & Watch Videos

You should always read boss strategies and watch videos before raids until you are familiar with the fights yourself. Some raiders feel it is unnecessary because someone can always explain the fight. Explaining the fight and seeing the fight are entirely different. It isn’t that you can’t succeed by having it explained to you, but the explanations make a lot more sense when you’ve at least seen it once.

Websites like TankSpot and BossKillers are great places to find strategies. Tankspot has several well done videos.

Be Prepared

I’ve already talked about this, but remember to have all your necessary raid items purchased and in your bags before the invites go out. Also remember to have your armor fully repaired. Have alternate gear in your bags and ready in case you have to switch up on different boss fights.

Buy anything you need ahead of time and not at the time of invites. Having to track down repairs, go to the AH, or run to your bank “really quick” takes longer than you think.

I recently read somewhere and unfortunately I cannot remember where, but some people even have “raiding bags”. They keep a bag with an appropriate amount of buffs, reagents, off spec gear, etc. in a particular bag in their bank and switch it out right before invites. This isn’t something I’ve done in the past, but something I’ll be doing in the future.

Plan Ahead

In the example above, someone is in an instance trying to finish up when raid invites are going out. A few guilds may be OK with this, but most I know are not. If you want to go to a raid, you need to plan ahead and make sure that you are not tied up with something when invites come out. The best rule of thumb is if you can’t finish up with what you’re doing 15 minutes before invite, don’t do it.

Wait At Stone

There will always be people who need summons to the stone and the first couple of people there should immediately begin summoning. It is good policy to make sure that you are already at the stone at the time of invite. Do not wait for summons! First, it will impress the raid leaders that you are always ready. Second, you help get the raid going by doing the summoning.

Pay Attention

Nothing is more frustrating to a raid leader than someone who doesn’t pay attention. When raid leaders speak you must listen. An example of this is the Grand Widow Faerlina fight in Naxx. It seems that every time this fight is explained to new dps, at least one of those dps will kill the adds early because they didn’t hear they weren’t supposed to.

Pay attention! Don’t be the person that has to have something explained to them twice. If you didn’t understand the first time, ask for further clarification quickly.

Keep Your Trap Shut

Shhh!

There’s a time and a place for screwing around in a raid. Depending on your guild joking around, goofing off, etc. during trash pulls or between pulls may be perfectly acceptable. Speaking up on vent may also. But most raiding guilds I know of tell you to “keep your trap shut” unless you are an officer, raid leader, or have been directly addressed by said officers or raider leaders.

This isn’t because those people like to hear themselves talk, although some do, it’s because we need the channels clear to give orders as things progress. Hard to tell someone to get out of the fire, cast a battle-rez, pick up the mob that got away, or switch dps targets when people are chattering away.

If you are allowed to talk or type in raid chat, keep your comments and talk about the raid. There should be no talking about how you need to get a new video card, which is the best, and how much they cost. Those are topics for other times. Raiding time is for raiding, not socializing.

AFK

The dreaded AFK. My personal pet peeve. There’s a time and a place for AFKs and it’s not during raids.

If a raiding session goes on long, the raid leader will call for periodic bio breaks. If a raid leader hasn’t called a break, then don’t go AFK.

There are times when you will have to go AFK; someone’s at the door, phone calls, one child cracked another upside the head with a lightsaber, wife aggro, and the house is on fire are all legitimate reasons to go AFK. But there is an etiquette to AFK as well.

First, when announcing you need to go AFK, give a reason. I’m not asking for your personal history or disgusting details like “I have explosive diarrhea”. I just need a legitimate reason for why you’re going. No reason at all makes it difficult to predict when you’ll be back.

Second, when announcing you need to go AFK, give a realistic time frame. For your information, “brb” is not a time frame! “One sec” is not a time frame! Give a realistic amount of time. It’s amazing how many “brb”s turn into 20 minute AFKs.

Third, you need to understand that if you are going to go AFK longer than 5 minutes, you absolutely must let the raid know so they can decide whether to replace you. Flasks, elixirs, food buffs, and other buffs are burning! You’re wasting valuable time and it isn’t just 5 minutes. It’s 5 minutes multiplied by the number of people in raid!!! Don’t be surprised or upset if you’re replaced or they killed the boss without you.

Common Sense

Bottom line, if you think it wastes your time, don’t do that to others. Treat them the way you want to be treated. Use your common sense and if you don’t have any find someone that does and have him or her tell you what to do.

A Newbie Raider’s Guide: Raiding Is Expensive

Raid Leaders often take for granted that everyone understands raiding like they do. What they forget is that “once upon a time”, they were just as ignorant…

How much gold do you have?

Ky!

What?

You can’t ask that! That’s pretty personal information. I know it’s a game, but you don’t just go around asking people how much money they have!

Why not?

/sigh

Raiding Is Expensive

It never ceases to amaze me how often people complain about repairs. Clothies complain about the 20-30 gold repairs and plate-wearers complain about the 100-120 gold repairs. On bad nights, feel free to multiply that by 2 or 3!

But guess what my would-be raider?! RAIDING IS EXPENSIVE!!!

You need gold not only for repairs, but for:

• Food
• Runic Mana/Health Potions
• Elixirs – Guardian and Battle
• Flasks – in lieu of elixirs (I carry both)
• Scrolls -most people forget these or they’re trumped by buffs
• Gems
• Enchants
• Reagents
• Etc.

It always surprises me how we focus on the repairs and often forget the other costs. Remember it’s money that makes things happen!

It’s Money That Makes [Raiding] Go ‘Round!

Gold

So how do you ensure that you always have enough gold on hand? Well there are a number of ways:

• Quests – At level 80 regular quests often give upwards of 20g as a reward. Don’t forget Daily Quests as you need the rep anyway.
• Farming – Use your gathering professions to farm ore, herbs, and leathers. Sell it on the AH. Clear your bags. As you kill mobs pick up everything and vendor everything not of value. You’d be surprised at how fast it adds up. Get an enchanter to DE greens for you to sell on the AH.
• Professions – Find something you can make that sells on the AH. I’m not talking about the really expensive stuff that sells once in a while. I’m talking about the stuff that sells consistently even at lower prices. Sell enough of it and you’ll have a steady cash flow.
• Play the AH – Highly recommend you only do this if you know what you’re doing. What I mean by playing the AH is “buy low, sell high” among other things. If you’re interested in it, highly recommend you check out Gevlon’s site or The WoW Economist site.

Looks like a lot of work there Ky.

It is, but all is not lost! Here are at least three ways you can save some time and money.

Cooking & Fishing

Most people I know don’t even have their cooking maxed let alone have even touched their fishing skill since level 15. If this is you, be prepared to spend money. If not, you are already saving money. Do the daily cooking quest in Dalaran. All of them are pretty easy and you need the  Northern Spices to cook the best food buffs for raiding. As I’m leveling alts, I send all my Chilled Meat to my main. That way I never have to worry about going out and farming those.

I hated leveling fishing, but I enjoy it now. I think it’s because the only purpose way back when was to level. The purpose now is to get the food I need for raids. If you can’t bring yourself to fish, find someone you can make a trade with. Then again you may not need fish for whatever food buff you’ve chosen.

Wheel-and-Deal

Find someone you know and trust and work out a deal. Farm food buffs for them while they farm flasks and elixirs for you. Make scrolls for them while they make gems for you. See where I’m going? Work out a trade of some kind where someone excels at what you need and you excel at what they need.

Pick A Day

The best way I save time and money is by farming the items I can get. I spend 1-2 hours usually early Saturday morning getting enough items to last me for an entire week’s worth of raiding. That way I never have to worry about it, can come home, log in, and jump into raiding. I find that picking a day and time that’s set aside keeps me in the habit of always being ready.

You probably won’t find this to be the most exciting part of the game, but remember raiding isn’t just going in and downing bosses. There’s a lot of preparation involved and that preparation is expensive in both time and money. Good luck!

Calling It Quits?

Against better judgement I’m writing this post anyway. There are at least two officers in my guild that I believe read my blog and as such this could present issues for me, but it’ll be brought up soon anyway. To them I ask that they keep it to themselves for now as partly this is a rant and partly just a way to sort my thoughts.

The Setup

Every guild has issues, drama, problems, etc. No guild is spared these problems. As long as you have imperfect people you will have imperfect guilds.

<ICESTORM> is an amazing guild with amazing people! I love this guild. I have emotional attachment to it as I’ve been an instrumental part in making it happen. It’s been a lot of hard work full of stress, but full of rewards as well.

But is it time to move on?

The Problem

Over the past few months I’ve considered quitting as the stress of the guild approached the unbearable point. The last month or so has seen us lose a lot of the drama queens (officers and members alike). For the first time in months, I actually like logging on to Vent because I can actually talk to the members and not just the drama queens.

So why would I even think about /gquitting?

This last weekend we had an officer basically say he was going to /gquit if certain things didn’t happen which fortunately they did happen and we had a pretty good weekend as a guild. But that comment hit me pretty hard and hasn’t sat well with me since. Perhaps I’m not being fair, since I recently had a discussion with some officers regarding my own feelings of quitting, so I am feeling somewhat hypocritical.

I’ve had two main reasons for not quitting this guild and this particular officer is one of them. We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but I’ve always defended him.

I think what ended up bothering me the most about the comment about /gquitting was the enormous pressure I suddenly felt to make things work. Whenever someone complains to me about something, I immediately begin trying to figure out how to fix the problem. Maybe that’s why I work in construction? Anyway it felt extremely unfair to me and I wondered about whether or not I had put the same pressure on others when I expressed my displeasure. If I did, I apologize to them.

To add salt to the wound, I pulled major wife-aggro on Saturday. To be fair, I was on almost all day long from about 7am to 11pm. I admit that I do spend an enormous amount of time playing and not enough time with my wife and kids. That’s something I’ve tried to correct by letting others sub for me on raids, working hard at getting raids to start on time, etc. and my wife has agreed I’ve gotten better, but Saturday was evidently upsetting. I seriously have to make more of an effort to be with my family and spend less time on trying to fix and run the guild.

Then last night I made the decision that I wouldn’t be raiding to spend time with the family. So I screwed around doing a few dailies and farming while waiting for dinner at which point I was going to log off. A discussion in Officer chat began about going back to finish up our 25 man Naxx. So it was announced in Guild Chat and it was asked who wanted to go.  About 6 people responded positively and the others didn’t respond. The response from one officer went something close to this:

[Guild] [Officer]: just another $#@%ed up week for raiding

Perhaps I’m not being fair, but I sorta lost it at this point. I whispered a friend and said something about the stress of keeping this officer happy is too much. I’m at the point where the server transfer is looking better every day. To which he responded that it’s an off night and it’s no big deal so no one should be upset about it.

Later on the discussion came up again in Officer chat about going, to which they were surprised that the 15 or so level 80 players that were on weren’t jumping at the chance to go to 25 man Naxx. Remember that we had a lot of help from some “elite” players and getting through this was almost guaranteed so I can see their point.

I couldn’t take it anymore however. I responded in Officer chat something to the effect of “we complain constantly of people not signing up for raids and yet there’s no raid posted…”, whispered my friend that I can’t take this anymore, and logged.

I’ve said it before that I shouldn’t go to any raid that isn’t posted out of principle, but I’ve always caved since I want to go, I want the guild to progress, and I feel this huge obligation to the others. On off nights I need to be able to leave at a moment’s notice for my family and if I end up in a raid I feel obligated to them over my family. That’s a pretty screwed up priority list!

The Dilemma

Here’s where I’m not sure what to do. I play this game for progress. I want to raid.

I’m not really into leveling a ton of alts, although I have one of every class and race. I would like to level each class to 80 for fun someday, but my main priority is to raid. To me alts are for fun, additional professions, filling in raiding holes periodically, but generally for screwing around with. I’m a firm believer that 99% of all players with alts are Jacks- and Jills-of-all-Trades, Masters-of-None. To the other 1% I say, “You lucky bastards!”

I enjoy running a guild. I like being a part of the decision making and trying to ensure that everything stays fair and things work for the guild. I have often turned down spots for raids when I really wanted to go because we had 3 other healers on at the time and I felt they needed a turn. I have 2 years to see this content before the next expansion and I can usually raid any day of the week.

So I’m in this guild because:

• I want to raid.
• I have friends here.
• I take pride in having been a part of starting this guild and in being a part of running it.

The way I see it, I have five choices:

• Continue as is, just letting them know that my time is more limited than usual, and begin stepping back from some of the day-to-day responsibilities that I’ve appointed myself (i.e. spam recruiting, as I did all weekend). Problem is can I really let go and let others’ frustrations run off like water on a duck’s back?
• Ask to be demoted to Raid Member and no longer shoulder the responsibilities of running the guild. Again, can I let it go? There’s a part of me that constantly wants to help, which is where the stress begins.
• Leave the guild and look for another. Not sure this is a real option for several reasons. Although joining another guild would alleviate the issue of constantly wanting to help fix things. I’m pretty sure I’d be stress free for some time.
• Look for another server. I’m on the East Coast on a Pacific Coast server (3 hours ahead makes for late raids). One of the reasons why finding another guild on this server isn’t ideal.
• Quit WoW. Yeah right, like that’s going to happen.  Worst case scenario I just play alts up to 80 and pug raids whenever I can, but I do really want to be part of a raiding guild.

I guess I don’t know the point of this post other than to get stuff off my chest. Makes me feel a little better to write it down. But at this point and at this frustration level, the server transfer is looking the most promising. I logged out last night to sleep on it and I’ll probably give it another night or two before making a final decision.

As it stands, if staying isn’t an option, then server transfer is most likely it. As such, I am curious about anyone’s experiences with server transfers and how they went about it though. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.