What is a Raid Spec?

So Larisa wanted me to make another post and since a recent discussion in the guild about people not speccing correctly to benefit the raid I thought I write a post about my view on the subject.

So your guild is serious about raiding and expects everyone to spec to benefit the raid and progress of the guild, what is the correct way to spec then?

First let me say that this is mostly focused on T6 content and most benefit for the raid, some people just dont have fun with certain specs and might be more beneficial if they play something they like. The following post is what I would go after as raidleader picking a team to raid BT or MH.

Player skill > Spec
So this rogue is mutilate and tops of our dmg charts, does it mean that mutilate is the best raidspec? No, it doesnt. It just means that he severly outgears you or is just so much better playing mutilate than the other rogues is at playing combat swords. If he switched to combat swords with equal or even slightly worse swords he would do more damage. The best raidspecs is just simply math, what spec/rotation/gear will give the best effect. Skill makes a diffrence, gear makes a diffrence, but when those is equal there is always 1 spec that provides the greatest benefit.


Druid
Druids can be viable in all 3 specs actually, 1 boomkin can be in with the casters to boost them enough to earn a spot. You can really use a feral tank and a feral is great to boost the hunters in a dps group. And resto is just amazing healers.

Hunter
First hunter should normally be a surivival hunter provided he has enough agility gear, 1k agility raidbuffed is a good starting number for T6 content. At 1k agility he provides around 600 dps extra for a normal 5 melee + 2 tanks+ another hunter. All the rest of the hunters should be BM spec for maximum dps.
Marksman hunters should go back to pvp.

Mage
Ok, I admit that mage knowledge is a weak link of mine since its the class I have never played seriously. From what I have seen from an outside view is basicly arcane spec if you provide them with alot of mana, otherwise Fire+icy veins spec. As you go higher in content you want all your mages to go fire.

Paladin
Another class that actually all 3 specs is valid. 1 Prot pally is needed to have for many encounters, 1 ret pally can give enough boost to a melee group to earn a spot and holy spec is a good healer, holy it the only spec you can take more than one of though.

Priest
First priest in raid should spec divine spirit and is now hereafter refered to as DS bitch of the raid, the gimped healing is more than made up by the benefit from DS. At no point should more than 1 DS be allowed in the raid though. Shadow is a incredibly useful spec even it has fairly gimp dps, a raid can use up to 2 shadow spec. Holy spec is an great healing spec and you can have several in the raid.

Rogue
Combat swords. There is only one spec for rogues that is valid and now that everyone can easily grind BGs for S2 swords there is no need to spec otherwise because of which weapons you have. Dragonstrike and Badge fist is better weapons os can be valid in a fist/mace+sword spec build but sword spec is much better and as soon as you get a decent sword you should switch. Sub and Mutilate rogues is for pvp only.

Shaman
First shaman should be enhancement, the benefit for the melee group is huge. Even a 2nd enhancement in tank group is very valid because they also pump out very decent dps on their own. 1 elemental is somewhat valid in a caster group, but usally you can get almost as much benefit from having a resto shaman in that group, but if you have someone that really wants to play elemental let him because shaman buffs is huge. You want to keep every shaman you have. Resto shamans is amazing healers. Up to a total of 5 shamans in the raid is really useful.

Warlock
1 warlock can be curse bitch, basicly speccing malediction for an extra 3% dmg from casters on single targets. This is a valid gimp spec but not as essential as an arms warrior or survival hunter. The diffrence in dps compared to a destro warlock is big enough that it wont pay off on all fights but it will in a majority of the bossfights. Depends a bit on raidsetup of course and number of casters. All remaining warlocks should be destro+sac spec.

Warrior
First warrior should be arms spec for blood frenzy buff, 4% extra on physical dps is a great boost for the raid. 1 fury warrior can be worth it if there is room in melee group, but if there aint room and you cant give him windfury its not worth taking. 1 Prot warrior is very needed, there is many fights where warriors makes better tanks than the alternatives.


Utilty spec
The gimp specs that benefit the raid most is in order
Survival Hunter
Arms Warrior
DS priest
Malediction Warlock

Be nice to these people since the giving the joy of topping meters to help the raids, also remember that a 2nd person speccing like this is absolutely no benefit for the raid, none of those buffs stack with each other.

Phat Loot and How You Get It

So how does the old loot-whore Zakesh look on the diffrent ways to divide the spoils after one of these trips where a bunch of aggresive people go and start a genocide on some creatures thats the hate-object of the day.

First of all I do think loot is important, after you are max level and skills, it's with loot that you improve and make your character better and that is for me a big part of game. The socializing its what makes the game enjoyable and even why you go online on the slow days, but on its own it wouldnt be enough, not for me atleast.

So when you get a big group of people together and I´m guessing that a big part of them is there because they want loot or rep (that gives loot) how to you make all of them happy or atleast satisfied since most of them probably wont get anything that specific night?

There is a couple of diffrent lootsystem out there, but most of them is a variant of DKP, loot council, suicide kings(which can be argued is just another dkp system) or random roll.

Random Roll
People just do some kind of /roll and winner gets the loot. Some system gives modifiers to your rolls or just allow certain people to roll.

Pros:
*Easy, specially with a pug or when you have outsiders from another guild in your raid.
*Its usally dont start much drama because there aint no specific player to blame

Cons:
*Its random, some people might not get their upgrades for a long time
*People tends to roll on everything they might need insted of just the best upgrades

Suicide Kings
Basicly you put everyone thats gonna raid with you in a big list, usally randomized when you start, when something drops you go from top to bottom if people want the item. The person who is highest on the list that wants the item gets it and drops to the bottom of the list. It's a variant of the DKP in that it rewards that people has been to the raid and then you spend 100% of your dkp to get an item

Pros:
*People only goes for the best upgrades they can get
*Its easy to maintain for the raidleaders
*New raiders/casual players can usally catch up quick

Cons:
*People tends to pass on upgrades because they wait for the absolute best upgrade
*Its easier for the people at the bottom of the list to get many items because all the top ones dont want to lose their spot.
*All items is valued the same.

Loot Council
You have a set group of people that decide on each item who deserves/benefits from it the most, usally officers of the guild.

Pros:
*Properly used it can be very fair
*It doesnt take any maintenance outside raids
*People who really needs an upgrade gets it
*You can reward people that go that extra mile for the raid

Cons:
*Often perceived to be unfair by ones not getting loot
*Tends to lead to drama because its opinion based
*Requires a big understanding on all classes mechanics and the raiders upgrade paths for the people in the loot council
*Can take much time away from your raidtime
*Very hard to be impartial for the council members

DKP
Dragon Kill Points, basicly a point system where you can reward people for boss kills, time spent in raid, showing up on time and for sticking it out on wipe nights. The points is then either payed for in certain fixed prices, fixed percents or with bidding to get loot.

Pros:
*Rewards consitent raiders
*People can choose themselves how much an upgrade is worth to them
*Everyone earns loot based on their measurable effort for the raid

Cons:
*Its impartial to people bringing diffrent value to the raid
*Takes alot of maintenance outside raid
*Colluding can cheapen the system


Lets draw politics into the mix
Many has drawn a parell between communism (loot council) and capitalism (dkp). Communism like loot council is a beautiful idea, but due to human nature it doesnt work very well in practice. Capitalism on the other hand is cold, hard and rewards those that can work the system. I do like the comparsion and finds it to be an interresting idea, but I dont agree that its 100% correct. We are all humans and as such we draw human flaws with us into the game. Greed, bias, envy and whole lot of other bad qualities is things that might always show up, even in people who we didnt expect to have them. There is also of course good qualities that offsets the bad ones, but the bad ones is the ones that tend to mess things up. If loot council and dkp really was like communism and capitalism we should expect loot council to be out of fashion very soon. Or is it maybe easier to implent communism in a fictional world over the real thing?


The 2 most popular system is definitly loot council and dkp in some form. Both systems can work very well for the right guilds but it differs alot which works for each guild.

Why oh Why Loot Council?
Loot council requires that the people in the council has the complete trust and respect from the other guildmembers, they dont have to like them, just think that they is impartial enough. Impartial can be really hard, I dont know if anyone can say they dont have guildmembers that they dont get along with or just dont think they bring much to the guild. Things like that tends to affect your descision and even if they dont affect your descisions its very easy for other people to think that they do. As another point, diffrent people may have very diffrent opinions about what people brings to the raid. If you know that someone tries really trying and doing everything they can do be better, but still performs worse than the guy who dont care how do you compare that in a fair way. If you dont know either of course you gonna give it to the guy who dont care, but if you do know them, its probably hard to not let stuff like that affect you.
It tends to favor the ones that is noticed the most rather than the quiet ones.

Omg, Why DKP?
Dkp on the other hand is complety fair and free of every bias because it just measure if you show up on time and how long you spend in the raid. Your people that raid alot get better loot than the ones who dont show up as much so you get more value out of good items. On the other hand the guy who do 500 dps each fight gets as much as the guy that does 1200 dps as long as he shows up as much. But the thing is that if you bring that guy it has to be for a reason, like you dont have anyone else and then you wouldnt be able to raid without him either. You can still reward people with signups and how you assign diffrent jobs, but its harder to do with dkp. Another problem with dkp is colluding, that 2 or more players reach an agreement to not compete for loot and choose in between themself who should get what so they have more points to spend on stuff they compete with others for. This is a problem with attitude in the guild and usally not easy to remove.

My final thoughts
I’m a big fan of DKP mostly because I know for a fact that you need all those 25people to be able to raid and in some way they should be rewarded for it. And even if people dont get loot that evening they still see their dkp points increase so they feel they have gotten something out of the evening while with loot council its harder to see the benefits of loot councils favor.

I have raided with both and I for me I have felt most comfortable with dkp.

Missing First Time Kills

I first started to write a post called ”why I hate mages”, not that I do hate them but Larisa has asked me to write a post why I never played a mage but every other class and that name felt fun. Well the post ended up a whole lot more negative than I intended because I’m in a bad mood. So I decided against posting it for now.

Why am I pissed then?

Well after weeks of trying my guild finally killed Kalcegos in sunwell. Being that it was Sunday and due to work I cant attend Sunday raids I missed this first kill and it really ticks me off. On one hand Im happy that he is dead and the guild is going forward but still its really annoying in missing those first kills, thats the feelings you play for, that big rush when something you fought about for a long time finally comes true.

We have had more issues with this boss than any other boss since C’thun, we have spent maybe 7-8 complete raiddays on him alone and most of it has been without any progress at all. Basicly fight going fine and then Boom, tank dead. Or some keyplayer missing a port and wiping their group or giving us another portal and messing everything up. When we struggled with Kael’thas atleast we always made progress and the we know why we wiped. What makes this fight so special is that it more than any other fight so far is dependent on every healer being able to function on their own, maybe we havnt trained on that enough earlier.

On Saturdays raid we finally started to see tries going solid into the 20% and felt like it was close, but even though we called last attempt and canadian last attempt and then tried one attempt after that we couldnt pull it off Saturday.

Well yesterday apparently they killed him after almost 5 hours of wiping on the canadian last attempt of the day. Now I feel cheated on the experience and also a bit guilty over being pissed about it. Feels really egoistic of me to not being able to be happy for the rest of them. Well I am egoistical normally but sometimes I like to pretend I’m not, ok.

This also means that I’m missing out on this weeks Illidan kill since we have only focused on sunwell, unless I want to try to really skip sleep tonight.. hmm.. tempting.. If I get a few hours of sleep after work, then I have to go chase a ball for 2hours, then maybe 2 hours sleep more than raiding and then maybe 2 hours more of sleeping. Sounds doable..maybe..

Skipping T5 content and moving directly into T6 content

So, I’m Zakesh and according to most people the best theorycrafter and wow-player that ever existed, wait that just me saying that.. oh well. My main toon is a rogue on the US-Stormrage server with around 200 days /played who is currently trying to learn sunwell, but I have also raided with pretty much every class at some point(all but mage actually). I have also claimed that I can take any class into competing for top damage and I still believe that, with the exception av priest, but everyone loves shadowpriests anyway so I would probably be forgiven. Funny thing is that even if I’m highly competive about dps is that beside my rogue raiding that I have raided more as a healer than as other forms of dps. I guess because it can be kind of relaxing to do something completly diffrent. I see something here in the contract about max 10 rows of selfboosting, damnit, guess I have to move on.

Anyway I’m here to be a guestwriter and counterpoint to larisas usual blogging. While Larisa talks about how much the morale improved of our latest kill, I’m probably deep into mathcalculations about if I should try to use first lifetap 30 or 50 sec into the fight.

As a starting subject I got "Skipping T5 content and moving directly into T6 content".

Background
Since the patch that removed attunment for T6 content there is a trend to jump directly into T6 content without finishing T5 content. Early bosses in Black Temple and Hyjal aint that hard while Vashj and KT is usally quite hard and complex in learning to execute. Some see this as cheating and skipping content where you could gear up and learn important mechanics. Other sees this as really unecessary work since you can just gear up from T6 content as well as T5 content as long as you can do both. What I think many is missing is how good gear you can get outside 25-man raiding now compared to when the first guilds did TK/SSC. The badge gear, beside being new and shiny goes alot faster to farm, you can get badges from quests and kara runs, any guild that is in TK/SSC most likely can clear kara in less than 3 hours for 22 badges. Zul'Aman, this instance has alot of loot that is T5-T5.5 value and if you are in SSC/TK you can probably get atleast 2 timers and clear the instance which gets you alot of value for each run. PvP gear is just a matter of time for T5 value items. All this is items that wasnt available 1.5 year ago so the guilds back then had to farm T5 content to be able to move on. Some specs that have really good gear from TK/SSC but not many pieces is really "needed". Exceptions that comes to mind is mage 2p T5. Probably is others as well but not many. As long as you raiders do 10 mans also, you shouldnt need the gear for the gearchecks atleast.

Time Constraint
Also there is the question of time, lets be honest, beside some occasional nostalgia trip noone is gonna enter any TBC raiding instance after wrath of the lich king comes out. So basicly you just have until the expansion release to experience as much as possible. If you fighting mid TK/SSC atm you most likely not gonna kill illidan before expansion but you have a choice of seeing a big part of BT or finishing TK/SSC. Starting T6 content gonna let you experience more bossfights but on the other hand the feeling on downing KT or Vashj is a whole lot better than killing supremus.

What would you learn from KT and Vashj that you cant learn from early fights in BT and Hyjal?
KT trains you in enduring a really long fight while still needing to clear certain dps-checks. You have to have 25 people focused for 15 min without potty breaks. Both fights but mostly Vasjk teach most of your raid to do things on their own without getting help from others. All must be able to click stuff in their inventory, make and use macros, check for 50ft high guys coming to bash you on the head while still doing your healing/dpsing/tanking. Doesnt sound to hard does it, but it can be quite tricky for some. Specially for us guys which about half the worlds population is convinced that we cant walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. This is the fights where we prove them wrong by using lots of diffrent buttons on our keyboards. Hm, that still didnt sound impressing, wonder why?

How far can you get in T6 content?
Well if you can kill anything in T5 content you can kill Rage Winterchill in hyjal. Its basicly get a prot paladin, survive trash, loot epics. Rest of Hyjal is mostly learning to do trash right to get clean tries at the bosses, once you figured out the mechanics none of the first 4 bosses should require that many tries to get past, in most cases getting to them is harder than taking down the boss. Najentus on the other hand is about having a functional raid where everyone is above 10k hp raidbuffed, and clicking on stuff in your inventory. After him you get to another bonusboss, Supremus, which you should kill in your first 3 attempts really. Same with Akama, its very likely you kill him within the first tries, simply mechanics, simply fight. Then Teron on the other hand require alot of execution and a decently geared tank, here is where you really find out if you have raidmembers who might not have what it takes. Getting to 4/5 MH, 4/9 BT is probably not gonna take you more than 2 months for a casual raiding group if you do it atleast twice a week. After that the difficulty steps up and it's a pretty big step to go further. But those first 8 bosses is definitly doable without huge geargrades.

Conclusion
What is my opinion on the matter then, I’m sure I’m biased enough that it shines through the rest of my writing, but I really think its ok to skip content that you dont really need to do. Some grumpy old man in me still goes, oh, we did it when it was really hard and unnerfed and had to farm that stupid morogrim for months before he finally dropped a sword, why shouldnt all those new young people go through the same pain as we did. Coming here in their new shiny tree gear and thinking they are cool and leafy. But I still think that most of us is here for the experience of exploring new content and getting as far as possible. If you have the gear needed to move on I think you should do it. I remember when working on naxx/aq we still had some runs back in MC because people wanted certain pieces, and no, I’m not talking about bindings here. There is a fear in many that they miss out on stuff if they dont kill a boss a certain amount of times. You dont, there is another item that looks almost the same on the next boss with just slightly better stats, it wont kill you to use that item insted.

Is there not something that would be better if we actually stayed and completed T5 content?
Well If I go from my own experience I know that the nerdscreaming was definitly louder when we killed Vashj over Illidan. When we killed Akama on the other hand it was more, oh, is he dead, where is the next one?