Guild of Your Dreams

     Just before the launch of Cataclysm, I was honored to become a founder of Shenanigans Inc. Like most of us, over the years I have played in several different types of guilds, all of them special to me. I have played with social guilds, with raiding guilds, with brand new guilds looking to make a name for themselves, and with guilds with a great deal of history. In each one, I have learned something new about what a "guild" means.
     Shenanigans Inc is different. It is different for me because I was one of the founders, yes, but it is a good deal more than that. Shenanigans Inc represents what I believe a guild should be, and all too often isn't. It is more than a group of friends, more than a raid team, more than a shared bank full of stuff. We share the same approach to gaming, a philosophy that guides our behavior and makes us capable of doing what we want to do. The guild is a resource, and a tool, and a mechanism for growth.


How Shenanigans Came to Be

     The end of Wrath was bittersweet for me. I was member of a floundering guild that didn't believe in me, but at the same time, I was working to become a better player than ever before, and I had met with some truly extraordinary people. I spent months in an otherwise poisonous environment. Raiding had stagnated -- the idea of progression was laughable, but what was worse was the shift in attitude. Long time guild members peeled off one by one, and the replacements -- when we could find them -- never quite fit right. Either they did not have the skill, or they did not mesh with the rest of the team. Cliques arose. Older members resented that the new recruits weren't up to scratch. New officers never found the gravitas they needed to command respect. It was a bitter atmosphere, and more and more people became angry with the situation.
     But no one ever addressed that anger. We were silent raiders. The turmoil was always there, boiling just under the surface. The tension was palpable, laughter was foreign, and there was hardly any effort at communication for fear of unintentionally piercing the bubble. It made playing well difficult, but it made improvement impossible. How could we change what we were doing if we couldn't talk about it? How could we talk about it if we feared it would make it worse?
     It was a relief to be free of it. For too long, the idea of leaving the guild was out of the question, because it meant abandoning the friends we had made there, but it also meant agreeing to quit. I do not like admitting defeat. I have always believed that good intentions can overcome the worst of situations. I still believe that. But now I know that in order to do overcome these trials, everyone has to be willing to work on the problem.

Starting Fresh


      I was lucky to find four other people who shared my beliefs. Cataclysm was an opportunity for us -- to start fresh, to ride a narrative of success.

     But creating a guild was not enough. A guild tag is not enough to create a community. I knew -- we all knew -- that to stay together we had to stand for something. We wanted to make sure that all of the past drama never affected our success. We wanted to be able to react when something did go wrong, and make sure that we never made any new guildies as unhappy as we had been.
     It started with an e-mail. A note between the five of us, and idea of the kind of guild we wanted to be a part of. Everyone had ideas. We created a shared document that we could all edit, and the idea took on a life of its own. We spent a month writing what would become our guild charter.
     We started by talking about the kind of community we wanted. We debated how we would ensure that our members adhered to our vision, how we could institutionalize community. We decided that too many problems traced back to a lack of understanding, of communication. We didn't want to wait for things to fix themselves, we wanted actively seek out answers. For us, participation would be mandatory.
     We had stars in our eyes, but we were not naive. We know that people are imperfect, and that they mess up. No guild is without its drama. But we believe that a heartfelt apology can bridge that gap, that we can choose to work together, and not allow pettiness to rule us.

     It was a remarkable document. It grew from abstract ramblings to a binding code. We worked on it in spurts, both alone and together. We made notes in the margins, and talked about why we wanted something to be the way it was. We learned how to argue with civility, how to disagree with an idea and not a person, how to demonstrate our logic and concede to a better argument. In writing our charter, we proved that the kind of guild we wanted to be a part of was possible.
       I was very proud of the final draft, which I really should call the "current" draft, as I know we could easily amend and add to it as our guild matures. You can read it here, on our website. We want our guild to be the best that it can be, and we won't allow pride to stand in the way of a better idea. 

Living the Dream


     Idealism is too exhausting to maintain every day. Nothing is ever perfect and shiny forever. But as I reflect on the past two months, I am incredibly proud to report that the system works.

     We raid three nights a week, and I am always excited to sign on and raid. We write strategies on our forums before we tackle a boss, and the next day we debate how we should change the strategy that didn't work. I write about how terrible I am at keeping up Improved Soul Fire, and coordinate when I need to change specs to cover different raid buffs. I read funny comics and beg people to help me with fishing achievements.
     Best of all, our evaluations were not a pipe dream. All ten raiders have their own threads, and there is not a single person who has failed to be honest about their own shortcomings. I have seen support and improvement come from these threads. I have been criticized and praised, and I have tried to do the same for other raiders, trying to make sure people know they are appreciated, and figure out what I can do to help someone become a better player, just like I am trying to be.
     Every morning, one of our raiders posts the logs from the previous night. It is a jumping off point for the discussion. It is exhilarating to see when our members rank top paress on World of Logs, and puts a microscope over every mistake and gap. We talk about our ideas while they are still fresh in our mind, and research what else we can do. It saves time when we next show up to raid. We never fail to discuss something we did wrong. We always do it better the next time.
     There are many days when I am unhappy with my raid or with parts of my guild. I spend hours thinking about what things make me mad, that I would change if I could -- with our raid strategy, with the way I interact with another person. But what makes this situation different is that this reflection is never self serving. I am expected to talk about my concerns -- not for some arbitrary purpose of the naive, but so that we can fix the problem. 

Why It Works

     A few days ago, I had a bad raid night. Someone said something that I thought was offensive, and I got so angry that I signed off. My raid team was incredibly upset with me, and I was upset with them. It was a bad night for everyone involved.
     It made me re-examine why I wanted to be a member of Shenanigans Inc. I want to be a member of a guild where I am happy. Where I have fun. Where we kill bosses. It sounds so easy, but we all know that it absolutely is not. The perfect guild does not exist. If I joined another guild, sooner or later they would disappoint me too.
     But if I stayed with Shenanigans, I could talk about what made me unhappy. My guildmates could try to make me feel better. We could change....together. I got angry because I thought they weren't practicing the kind of atmosphere we wanted to play in. But by signing off, I had violated the far more serious tenet that the only way to make a situation better was to talk about the solution.
     I was overcome with shame at the way I had behaved, and later with guilt for ruining an opportunity for progression. I took the time and apologized to each member of the team individually. My friends accepted me back with open arms. It was much, much more than I deserved for behaving so badly, and I commend their compassion. In doing so, they proved that they were more committed to the ideals of our guild than I had been. I am humbled that this episode has not shaken their faith in our capacity to stay true.
     Our next raid night, we killed Nefarian for the first time. It was incredibly satisfying to reap the reward after all of the work that went into it. All twelve kills were accomplished with the same ten people. No one person had given less than any other. Everyone had contributed something. It was a victory that was shared in a very profound way -- personal, and poignant.

     I don't think that this will be the end of all guild drama. I don't think that the ten of us will raid together forever, or that we will be empowered by this to blaze through heroic modes, or even that this next raid week will be very different. I am going to have to work hard to regain that lost trust. But I believe more strongly than ever that everyone is capable of working together. That you can choose to make it right, to have fun.
     There are a lot of reasons you love your guild. You love it for those indescribable moments of joy when someone makes a really great joke in vent. You love it for the pride you have when you kill a dragon. Invisible links binding you to people you haven't really met, but nonetheless have your back. I think that everyone secretly believes that their guild is the best, and they want everyone to know how special they are. They just can't find the words.
     I don't have the words either, but this much I know is true: Shenanigans Inc is the best guild for me.

Defender of a Shattered World

      My guild hates this screenshot, but what can I say? We are terrible at taking posed shots. This at least has the charm of spontaneity.

      You'll notice a facelift going on around here. I'm especially proud of the banner, which was custom designed for my guild by Demonmaster Relmesh. I love it because the more you look at it, the more neat details you pick up on. I'm working on getting my warlock shenanigans filled out, as well as an epic raid guide with the Rage Starved Rocket Bear.

      Check the updated sig.

4.06 on the PTR: Changes to Improved Soulfire

     Of all the wacky changes on the current PTR, undoubtedly the most talked about is Improved Soulfire. On live, Improved Soulfire grants 15% haste after the cast of Soulfire. This is an enormous damage boost, mandatory for every raid spec, and of the highest priority in any rotation. In Patch 4.06, Improved Soulfire will be redesigned to give an 8% boost to fire and shadow damage (do warlocks do other kinds of damage?), and will be moved from Tier 2 of Destruction, reachable by all specs, to Tier 3, and only available to Destruction warlocks.

   The loss of 15% haste is devastating to warlocks across the board, as haste remains our most advantageous secondary stat. Affliction and Demonology in particular will feel the loss, as they both scale better with haste than Incinerate casting Destruction. While it looks like the buffs in other areas will actually keep all three specs competitive, the new design of this talent was unexpected.

     The redesign does not address the fundamental problem with Improved Soulfire: casting soulfire is fucking annoying. Soulfire has a really long cast, and it is not a part of anyone's normal rotation. (Well, okay, except Decimation.) The annoyance of taking so much time away from, you know, important things, is made worse by the fact that Improved Soulfire has an internal cooldown exactly equal to its duration -- you cannot refresh it, you have to wait for it to fall off before you can put it back up. For maximum uptime, warlocks would attempt to time the new cast to finish at the same time the previous effect fell off. Going through the effort of a hard cast of soulfire only to miss the refresh by a tenth of a second --and lose more time -- was frustrating to say the least. Was it an overall damage increase? Yes of course, otherwise we wouldn't bother. But it was awkward as hell.

    This is being addressed in part by reducing the internal cooldown to six seconds. Refreshing the effect will be much easier, and it should have a much higher, if not perfect, uptime throughout the fight. However, stopping to cast soulfire will still leave the Destruction rotation feeling clunky. We can only be grateful they pushed the talent deeper into the tree, and most of us won't have to bother with it.

   My hope for that talent had been that it would become a proc. Say, for example, that the haste buff could only be procced from Empowered Imp Soulfires, which could perhaps be procced from Imp Firebolt crits. It would throw our theorycrafters into chaos, of course, trying to determine how the uptime affected the optimal haste thresholds, but ultimately, warlocks would be stacking crit, to proc haste. The very idea is delicious. But alas, we are left with our silly long cast times and basically the fire equivalent of Shadow Embrace.
 
  There were a few other wonky changes. Fel Armor will soon no longer return health to us, which isn't too strange a change in and of itself, but instead, it will return mana, which is just...weird. Warlocks have never needed to worry about mana regeneration in the slightest -- that's what Life Tap is for. We understand that the less we need to Life Tap the more time we can spend casting, but even so, this is an odd addition.

     Demonlogy AoE has been nerfed (unsurprisingly) but their single target damage has been buffed. At time of posting, Demonology is sitting at the top of 4.06 simcrafts. We'll see how that goes.

Cataclysm Heroics

     Like most people, I am bloated with Cataclysm frenzy. I do dailies, I do heroics, I farm, and I even queue for Tol Barad. Which I never win, but it's the thought that counts.

    I've been enjoying the first tastes of the new raid instances. I've found them to be refreshingly intricate, they involve a lot more effort that "get out of the fire." Understanding of boss mechanics has become much more crucial. It's not enough to know the "what" to do, you have to understand why as well, or you run the risk of unintentionally sabotaging your group. You have to show up prepared.

     Which brings me to the most popular topic of discussion since Cataclysm went live: heroics are too hard.

     On one of my forum trolling visits, I read this article, in which the poster laments that a member of their group left in shame when their DPS was not up to par to kill a boss. Their compassion for the leaver is touching, however, the idea that a groups inability to carry a bad player -- in this case essentially four man current content -- indicates bad game design is ludicrous. This is, quite frankly, the entire point of the game. You would not take a player of level 80 into a level 85 instance. A player displaying the same damage output is no different. Players do not have the right to complete an instance. Games are, at their most basic level, creative mechanisms of effort and reward. You do not put in any effort, you do not reap the rewards. Showing up is not enough.

     This is not to say that games should be punishingly difficult. They are after all still tools of leisure. But their niche in that category shouldn't limit them to the single purpose of sunshine and rainbows.

     So yes, heroics are hard. But to say they are "too hard" undervalues the joy of conquering them. Without different strategies, mechanics, and fun fire to stand in, instances in WoW would be indistinguishable from each other -- just DPS with a different backdrop. As it is, every instance is a unique challenge and makes for different playstyles, pacing, and approaches. They are interesting. They are absolutely fun.

     I was disappointed that this particular thread was locked without a blue reply. I imagine the GMs are sick of the "QQ" and are ready for people to outgear the heroics so that we can hear the end of the complaints. But this thread touched me more than most, because the complaint wasn't quite that Blizzard should just give the players whatever they want, but rather it was full of pity for players who simply can't participate in the new game. They aren't bad people, these aren't the "l2p" trolls that make me die a little inside, they are simply...not interested. Part of me feels like people who can't be bothered to figure out how to put out more than 3k DPS at 85 just shouldn't play the game. They obviously aren't all that interested in playing, so why try? But abandonment of a game that you put, at the very least, leveling time into rings just as wrong in my heart. This begs the question, what are these players doing so wrong? Are they not pressing buttons fast enough? Are they spamming shadow bolt? How did we as community -- the introductory tool tips, their class trainer, Trade Chat, and everyone who grouped with this player along the way -- fail to teach them how to play?

    In the end, I am disappointed that this sympathetic forum poster didn't say anything to the under-performing DPS. They spoke as if there were only two options -- say nothing, or be an elitist prick. But there are ways to question other players about what they are doing that don't necessitate being mean. Sure, this player might be a little hurt if you suggest they are doing something wrong. That is natural. But I guarantee they will learn something from it, even if they don't immediately seem grateful or improve. There should be no disgrace in speaking up. As long as your intentions are good and you remain civil, this kind of interaction can be only positive. This is what the "M" in "MMO" stands for -- multi-player. We aren't playing with computers. We are playing with people who are capable of growth and improvement.

     This is what Blizzard is trying to teach us in Cataclysm. They are not trying to turn us all into high end raiders. They are simply raising the bar, a little bit at a time, to maintain the joy of a challenge. It's a moving finish line, you aren't supposed to "win." You are supposed to keep playing.

Succiu's Totally OCD Cataclysm Checklist

     As of this writing, we are 18 hours (and one minute) out from Servers Up! Cataclysm. I am psyched beyond all belief. In such cases, my enthusiasm manifests itself in overpreperation. This is usually right around the same time I drive my friends crazy with my ability to spit out really long sentences without the need for breath. I can whistle in. It's great.
     Ahem.
   
     1. 25 Quests Completed

     The fastest way to level in Cataclysm is to get a head start in Wrath. My quest log is full of 25 fully completed quests, including the Argent Dailies, Orgrim's Hammer Dailies, a few Deaths Rise, and one for the Frenzyheart and Sons of Hodir, which both boast one quest rewarding above average XP. If the amount of XP holds true to WoWHead's reports (and I am not sucking at math) these quests will give me a headstart of about half a million XP, or 36% of the XP needed for level 81. Not bad.
     I left Succiu logged out in Dun Niffelheim, after which she will take her Argent Tabard to Icecrown, fly south into Scholozar Basin, and take the zeppelin into Orgrimmar.
     While I intend to level in Vash'ir to avoid the crowds, I will initially head towards Mount Hyjal. Why, you ask? Arcanum of Hyjal. You're going to need it eventually.(Also keep your eye out for Therazane for your shoulder enchant, and the Dragonmaw Clan has some great caster gear.) You may as well get the required rep to buy their Tabard when the quests actually help you level. You only need to get to friendly to get the Tabard.

     2. Empty Out Those Bags

     The more stuff you can carry, the longer you can stay away from an Innkeeper. While eventually you will need to see a vendor, the fewer trips you need the make, the less time you waste. Aside from the quest items needed to turn in the above, my bags contain only the essentials. Which brings me to...

     3. Bring It

     I have a full stack of health potions, mana potions, bandages, food, water, salmon, Frost Wyrm, and Elixir of Water Walking. Water Walking is probably my favorite. You cant imagine how often that comes in useful. I'm also carrying my PvP Trinket, my Disenchanting Rod, my fishing rod, and a stack of vanishing powder to switch out glyphs. And of course, my Argent Tabard and my Hearthstone.
     For the record, yes, I know I am insane. I know my Frost Wyrms and salmon probably aren't all that helpful, but hey. I had them. May as well use them and squeeze out a few more points of damage. A few seconds less between pulls, a few seconds closer to 85.

     4. Spec-tacular! 
   
     As predicted, I will be rolling into Cataclysm as Destruction. 80-82 are tuned for Wrath leveling gear, and Succiu is full 277 geared. Affliction is wonderful damage, and there is a lot to be said for running around DoTting things up and letting them fall around you, but it has a long ramp up time, and the difference even in DoTs wont be noticeable on these kinds of mobs. Destruction has a lot more upfront damage.
     My off-spec is raid-ready Demonology. This is for my five mans. I am lucky enough to have a close group of friends just as excited to level as I am. It includes a very trustworthy tank and queues will be fast enough I think I'll see more than a little bit of dungeons. Demonology will help me stay alive, give me damage, mobility, and CC.
     I'll be switching to Affliction around 83, which is where Blizzard expects you to have replaced all your Wrath gear.
     I already mentioned I'll be carrying a full stack of Vanishing Powder, and this is a very good reason to make sure you know all of your classes glyphs. Glyphs are easy to switch in and out nowadays, and you can really help yourself tackle some mobs (or groups of mobs) with the right glyphs. 

     5. Add-on Your Add-on
   
     Cataclysm isn't the only thing you need to download. Make sure all your add-ons are up to date. There shouldn't be too many changes since most of the Cataclysm content has already been implemented, but expect it to be messy anyway.
     I'd also recommend cleaning up your bars. If you have ever thought to yourself "I'd really like to change this keybind, but retraining my instincts is too hard!" this is a great time to try. Leveling doesn't have the same pressure as raiding, so if you mess up, it isn't as punishing. Not to mention, oh man, you get all kinds of crap on your bars that you might not need. And, since you'll be needing your CC a lot more frequently in Cataclysm than in Wrath, you might want to try to open up some of your high-priority keybinds for these spells.

     6. Out of Game

     Your preparation out of game is just as important, if not more so. If you are planning on being on right at servers up (3 AM for me, oh god) a nap might be a good idea. Comfortable clothes and a good chair can also make a big difference. I personally will be trading my contacts for glasses (nerd disguise!) and hiding my hair beneath an efficient headband.
     And then, of course, there is sustenance. Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine. Try to eat something that doesn't reinforce the pizza-bites stereotype (although it is warm, nourishing, and bites sized for ease of consumption with one hand on the keyboard...NO). Try some orange juice or some granola bars, and vitamins. You'll feel so much less icky.
     My beverage of choice? A big bottle of cold, fizzy, nose tickle-y Seltzer.



     So there it is. OCD? Oh god yes. Self-indulgent? More than I'll admit. But man, this is going to be a fun week. Check back on the weekend for my list of Raid Starter gear.