Prot Warrior Dps (How to put out 3000dps+)

One of the most frequently searched for terms on our blog is prot warrior dps. As outlined in a previous post, with the changes to warrior mechanics in 3.0 we are now entirely capable of doing considerable amounts of damage to a boss, as well as fulfilling our primary responsibilities as tanks.

So just how do you go about pulling out the big numbers?

I’ll use Patchwerk as an example. With 0 movement, 0 fight mechanics and 0 positioning involved, it’s the perfect canvas to start working on your rotation and gear choice.

Get your gear on.

Gearing for the fight is the biggest illustration of just how important threat stats are. The first priority for threat is expertise, up until you reach the soft cap (dodges removed) of 26. After that, stack hit and expertise where possible – the hit cap is 8% and the expertise cap is 57 at which point you will *never* miss a boss with special attacks. Obviously missing a 7k shield slam will impact fairly severely on your result, so both of these stats are important.

Once you’re sitting at the expertise and hit cap, or as close to it as you can reasonably get, start to stack block value, strength and attack power. Attack power increases the base damage of most of your moves, block value increases the damage you do with shield slams (a massive source of damage and threat), and AP increases both.

Obviously you shouldn’t lose 70 block value for 4 expertise rating, but generally the priority for threat stats is exp > hit > block/AP/str. Don’t compromise on your survivability too much if your healers can’t handle it – wiping a raid because you are using full dps gear is irresponsible.

Crit is also beneficial to have, but your main source for this stat will be through the Mirror of Truth and a ranged weapon slot.

The set of gear I used last week on Patchwerk was http://www.chardev.org/?template=136686

Notice the high damage, fast weapon for frequent heroic strikes. As far as the spec goes, the one I have there hits most of the bases – deep wounds is a sizeable tps and dps increase. Ideally I’d like to work cruelty in there, but it has been proven on tankspot.com that Armored to the Teeth has better returns than 3% crit, and if you lose any more points from Protection you won’t be able to get shockwave.

Top dps rotation

The rotation used during the fight is the standard prot warrior priority list of

Shield Slam > Revenge > Conc Blow > Shockwave

Devastates are thrown in whenever there is a spare global cooldown. In place of devastate, heroic thrown and rend can be used on – HT on cooldown, rend whenever it drops. Ideally these two abilities are thrown in on the Global Cooldown directly before a Sword and Board proc, since using it before that wastes the chance of a devastate to proc S&B. In practice however this is quite hard to do, and won’t have a significant impact on your dps if you can’t.

Thunderclap, comm shout and demo shout shouldn’t be used if possible, as they will have a negative impact on your overall tps/performance.

Finally, every single attack you do should ideally be a yellow attack. You can turn white swings into specials by queueing a heroic strike at every opportunity – they’ll do twice the damage, crit for heaps more, and you will never miss one. Unless you have some ridiculous amount of avoidance you will always have a full rage bar on Patchwerk, so don’t worry about managing rage and go for it!

The Game Plan

Engage the boss. Use a rage potion before the pull to ensure you have enough rage to queue a heroic strike + shield slam right off the bat. Settle in to your normal rotation. Hopefully the raid leader has told you when he will blow a heroism – using speed potions and/or the Mark of Norgannon on use effect can ensure you have the equivalent of a heroism for nearly the better part of a fight.

Trinkets which increase your dps should be used early – these generally have a two minute cooldown, so you should be able to use them twice during the fight.

After that, there’s nothing else to it! The strategy for increasing dps on Patchwerk above, while considered a gimmick, can help you work on a rotation and test different pieces of gear easily. It’s also insanely fun, as evidenced by the existance of a thread on tankspot.com dedicated to tracking the highest Patchwerk dps scores (yours truely debuting at number 18).

The above method and gear set resulted in 3250dps as a prot warrior, without an enhancement shaman, thorns or feral druid for important buffs. Doing more dps than half the pug mages on your server is amazingly fun, and adds a bit of challenge and competition to the faceroll that is Naxx. Apply what you get out of the Patchwerk dps benchmark to other bosses, and soon you’ll be pumping out more threat and dps just by virtue of having spent time concentrating on your rotation and gear.

Positive Leadership

I was doing some reading in my spare time last night, and came across a paper entitled “The Impact of Positive Leadership” from the Gallup Management Journal.

This paper discusses the importance and implications of positivity in organisations. As a direct quote from the paper:

Over the past decade, scientists have explored the impact of positive-to-negative interaction ratios in our work and personal life. And they have found that this ratio can be used to predict — with remarkable accuracy — everything from workplace performance to divorce. This work began with noted psychologist John Gottman’s exploration of positive-to-negative ratios in marriages. Using a 5:1 ratio, which Gottman dubbed “the magic ratio,” he and his colleagues predicted whether 700 newlywed couples would stay together or divorce by scoring their positive and negative interactions in one 15-minute conversation between each husband and wife. Ten years later, the follow-up revealed that they had predicted divorce with 94% accuracy.

So what is the optimal positive-to-negative ratio in organizations? A recent study by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and mathematician Marcial Losada found that work teams with a PNR greater than 3:1 were significantly more productive than workgroups that did not reach this ratio. Positive emotions, however, need to be grounded in reality: Their research also uncovered an upper limit for positive-to-negative ratios of 13:1. When workgroups exceed that PNR, things are likely to worsen; completely blind optimism can be counterproductive — and downright annoying — in some cases.

But managers shouldn’t worry about breaking the upper limit. The levels of positive emotions in most organizations are woefully inadequate and leave substantial room for improvement.

I then set to thinking about how our guild is as far as positivity goes, and how I am personally.

The Example

In our guild, and most others I imagine, when bosses are dying fast and you’re obviously making progress there are no problems. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s uplifted. It’s rare that you see player turnover when you’re killing bosses regularly at the top of your server. Here positive leadership isn’t really something you need to focus on, since having happy officers and raid leaders sort of comes with it.

Where actively seeking to persue positive leadership does come into play however, is for those times when you have seemed to hit a brick wall. Guilds progressing through Tempest Keep at the release of the content had a notoriously difficult time killing Kael’Thas. This was a problem to so much of an extent that KT was known as “the guild killer” for a very long time. I put it to you, the reader, that at least some and probably a good part of these guild break ups over KT were because of leadership issues. To use a current example, guilds like ours who are working on Sartharion 3D.

Blizzard devs have said that attempting the fight at the moment is roughly equivalent to Sunwell difficulty. It requires an extremely high quality of players, whether you’re dps, a healer or a tank. There are a million things that can go wrong; a healer dying to a void zone can often be cause to wipe just by itself. And so many guilds, like ours at the moment, are finding that they seem to have hit a wall. Last night we spent 3 hours wiping on an attempt with no visible progress over the previous week.

Something I did notice however, was the difference between this week and the previous one. On our first night of proper attempts, there was a positive mood. We saw we were progressing, everyone was upbeat, and everyone wanted to focus 100% to get the boss down. This week we seemed like we were getting nowhere, and would continue to get nowhere. Players and the officers were getting frustrated and voices continued to get more strained over teamspeak. Towards the end of the night, there was complete silence.

The Theory.

Positivity in leadership is something that you need to actively work on, and actively manage, because it doesn’t come naturally to anyone. There is a real person behind every character on the screen, and that extends to raid leaders and officers as well. We get pissed off, we get frustrated, we get exactly the same feelings as any other member of our guild. The difference with management however, is that we have a responsibility to manage this not just for ourselves but for the raid as well. You can be pissed off, you can punch walls and scream at your family pet. But if you want to manage people, you can’t take this out on them or promote a negative environment because you WILL affect the performance of your raid.

To go back to an age old adage, if you can’t say something positive, don’t say anything at all (ok I bastardised it a little). You can point out issues without making people feel like they’re wasting their time, and you can give constructive critiscm in a positive way.

An example of negativity:

You guys are fucking useless. It’s nights like this that make me wonder whether you even know how to play. We’re calling the raid an hour short because you guys can’t press 1-1-2, we might as well all go app to some casual guild.

An example of positivity:

We’ve obviously got a few issues here which we need to sort out. We’re going to call it here, have a look at what we can do and why things are going wrong, and come back next week and knock this guy over.

Both of these sentences get the same message across; clearly though, one leads to people feeling like shit and not wanting to come back the next week, and one encourages players to look at what they can do better to help the raid.

Beyond your own behaviour and attitude, you also need to help the atmosphere in the rest of your guild. Tell that feral druid that we can do this, encourage them away from a negative outlook. Make a joke every now and then – something which our guild officers and raid leader are very good at – and lighten the mood. Don’t tolerate negativity from your guild any more than you would from yourself.

The benefits of positive leadership

Positive leadership has several benefits. Overall for the guild it maintains high morale and keeps people wanting to log in for progression nights. It reduces player turnover through making the atmosphere and environment a better place to be. During a raid it avoids the slow spiral downwards that we occasionally see on progression nights, where everyone is frustrated and snapping at each other. Most importantly, it makes people feel like they *can* do this, that they’re not wasting 3 nights a week with a guild that will never be competitive on a server level.

Demonstrating positive leadership as in the paper above can have nothing but a positive effect on your organisation (read:raid). This doesn’t mean blind optimism is going to do you any good, but as in my examples above there is clearly a right and wrong way to go about things. You can give criticism constructively, or you can sucuumb to your feelings, hinder your raid’s performance and delay your kill of that crucial boss. I’m not saying you can’t get pissed off or frustrated. But as an officer and a manager, you simply cannot let your personal feelings effect the rest of your guild. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone, but it’s something I want to – and in fact need to – work towards as an officer.

Learning from your mistakes

Tonight our guild nearly got “The Undying” achievement. I say nearly, because with 0 deaths on every other boss, I died on Maexxna.

There was some screaming of expletives from me, there are a few bruised knuckles afterwards as well. But after the initial shock of getting so close to a significant achievement, what I’m left with is far worse. I’m pissed off and angry, and extremely disappointed. I know it’s only a game, and I know there are heaps of problems far worse, but I consider myself a good tank. I’m not perfect though, and I hate that. I’ve been replaying what happened and what I could have done to stop it over and over again in my head. Should I have anticipated the enrage and popped something other than a minor trinket? Should I have called for dps to stop? Should I have made sure everyone knew that the enrage was coming? Unfortunately the answer to all those things is yes. But this is not just an emo tank post though, because through it all I realised something.

Through it all, I’m glad that I’ve taken something like this as hard as I have. I don’t want to be the kind of player that doesn’t get pissed off when things like this happen. I don’t want to expect anything less than the best from myself. I’m a competitive player, I dont like to lose. And what I realised tonight, is that this is the kind of player I want in my guild.

Players who don’t give a fuck will never be competitive in a raid environment, nor will players who blame others for their mistakes, or don’t know the ins and outs of their class. No one is perfect, true, but in a game like this perfection is what you should be striving for. The bottom line is, why should you expect anything less from the people you play with than you do from yourself?

This applies directly to guild management and especially guild recruitment. No one is born a good player, no one is inherently any less capable than anyone else. Some people learn faster, sure, but in the end, if you have a player who puts as much work as they possibly can into their character and raiding, they will end up being an asset to your guild, independent of quantitative performance measures like their current dps. Just turning up isn’t enough, these players do things like

1) Never miss a raid without an exceptional reason
2) Research their class and role extensively in their own time, which will show
3) Get upset when they stuff up
4) Get upset when others stuff up
5) Are competitive and driven to see the guild better itself

These five factors combined will make for an excellent player. Of course, it’s quite rare to find people like that in the general populace, but I guarantee that most of the players in the top guilds in the world match these criteria. What you can look for is people on a sliding scale judged by these criteria. People who match none of these are the people who simply don’t give a fuck, and although they might put out top dps or be excellent healers at the time, they will not be around for the long term, and they’re not doing your guild any long term good. As I wrote in a previous post, part of succeeding in progression raiding is reducing your player turnover, and if someone cares enough that they spend an hour after a raid looking at logs to find out where they went wrong, you can bet they’re probably invested enough in your guild to stick it out in the long run.

As for me, it was a bit of a wake up call. I’m not going to blame anyone but myself for me dying when we were so close, because as long as there were still things I could have done to stop it, it was all on me. Letting nine other people down isn’t a great feeling, and it’s given me drive to work 110% harder on getting it right first time, every time. The one thing that gives me small comfort is I know that a few other people in the run feel the same way, and as long as there are people like that in the runs and in the guild, we’re going to keep getting better and better. I have things now that I need to work on, and next week we’re going to nail it.

Know Your Classes

Nothing infuriates me more than a tank or leader who doesn’t know their classes. I’m not just talking about knowing how to play their own class, but knowing how all the others play their class. It is one of the most important factors of guild leadership that most leaders tend to forget or overlook.

One of the main benefits of knowing how all the classes work is that you will be able to plan and organise your raids/groups and strategies based on the composition of your classes – enabling you to either bring the best out of your players, and/or identify what players need to improve/change to make the best out of their class. It also helps you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your raiding team – allowing you to modify the raid structure, recruit to fill gaps, or even getting a particular player to re-spec.

The other benefit is of course, having knowledge of all the class abilities, it puts you in a better position to give advice to newer/inexperienced players – one of the responsibilities of guild leadership (to offer and provide help/assistance). Knowledge of the capabilities each class has to offer can also improve your own personal playing skill as you can change your playstyle to complement the abilities of other classes; which is very useful especially when you don’t have a varied composition to pick from (e.g in a 5/10-man where spots are limited).

 

I feel that the best way to learn about ANY class is to actually sit down and play it – although it is not necessarily possible if you don’t have many hours to devote to the game due to RL commitments. Level alts if you have the time (I have dabbled in all the classes before and played them to at least mid-level), there is no better way of learning than self-experience.

Of course the other way (if you don’t have the time to level alts) is to read up/find out about other classes. Get to know the various abilities of different classes (not just what they do, but what they are called) and how they work. Talk to your guildies who play each particular class to learn from those who are the most familiar. Experiment/experience playing with every different class/role to see their abilities in action. (Dungeons).

Get to know your classes. It makes you a more effective leader and could even benefit your own playstyle.

The Light and How to Swing It

This guide is my take on being a Protection Paladin (PvE), supported with additional information from external sources. It is NOT a be all and end all guide; as a lot of it is based on my experience and personal opinion. If you’re looking for an in-depth technical guide with endless calculations, figures and numbers, then this wouldn’t be the best guide for you, as the main intent is to break down the essential elements of Prot Pally-ing so that players new to the class/spec or non-paladins can understand what we’re about.

Tanking Basics

This is not limited to Paladins only; it also applies for every other tanking class. Your 2 main roles as a tank are to:

•    Hold Aggro on your assigned mob/boss – Threat it like you mean it or someone is gonna die.
•    Stayin’ Alive – It is as much the tank’s responsibility as the healers to stay alive; this is where gearing, oh-shit moves (Lay on Hands, etc) and techniques (moving the boss, etc) come in.

The difference between mitigation and avoidance – While it is not necessary to understand the numbers behind these 2 stats, it is important to grasp the concept of each:

Mitigation – The amount of damage reduction when hit. The things which fall into this category are:

• Armor (Reduces physical dmg taken)
• Block Value (Increases the dmg blocked when you block)

Avoidance – The chance to completely avoid being hit. The formula for calculating avoidance is [Parry + Dodge + % from defense + 5% miss]. You basically want this figure to be as high as possible. The things which fall into this category are:

•    Parry (Parry an attack with your weapon skillfully)
•    Dodge (Dodge an attack physically by jumping aside or ducking your head)
•    Miss (Enemy misses you – he wasn’t hit capped)

In a raid situation – all mitigation does is reduce the total overall dmg taken, whereas Avoidance reduces the total number of hits you actually take. Therefore Avoidance > Mitigation in terms of staying alive. i.e. Its better to dodge a 10K hit from a boss than to be hit for it and mitigate only a % of it. To put it in simple English: When you’re plummeting towards the ground, Mitigation breaks your fall, Avoidance opens your parachute.

Changes from Burning Crusade

•   Spellpower no longer a necessity on gear – The new 3 point talent (Touched by the Light) converts 30% of your total stamina into Spellpower, and the new 51 point talent/ability (Hammer of the Righteous) is based on Weapon DPS rather than Spellpower.
•   High Threat moves – The new high threat moves make it easier to pick-up mobs/stay high on threat allowing Prot Pallies to function as OTs. The moves in question are Hammer of the Righteous and Shield of Righteousness (Basically a Shield Slam)
•   Our very own Shield Wall – Divine Protection changed to now provide 50% damage reduction for 12 seconds. No longer shares a cooldown with Divine Shield, but both abilities cause and are affected by Forbearance.
•   Crushing Blows eliminated from raids – The level difference required for crushing blows has been increased; these no longer appear in raids. We no longer have to chase for the 102.4 mark to avoid crushing blows, and can instead focus on stacking more Stam and Avoidance
•   Single Target Taunt (NEW) – Added in the recent patch; removes the problem of not being able to taunt adds off the MT (without getting the Boss/MT’s mobs)

Main Tanking Abilities/Spells

Righteous Defense – 40 yard AoE Taunt. Taunts target and 2 other mobs off friendly player. The only drawback to this spell is you A) cannot choose which mobs to taunt (if there are more than 3) B) You may taunt the MT’s (if you’re the OT) target; which is bad/annoying especially if it’s the boss.

Hand of Reckoning – 30 yard Single Target Taunt. Taunts target to attack you (Does a bit of Holy Dmg).

Seal of Vengeance (Corruption for Horde) – The improved Seal of Vengeance (DoT Seal) now applies the stacking DoT (up to 5) on every hit instead of chance to apply on every hit; essentially this means it is now better than Seal of Righteousness (Direct Damage Seal) and is a direct replacement.

Seal of the Matyr (Blood for Horde) – The extension of this spell to Alliance adds more flexibility to Prot Pallies. Essentially it’s a seal that causes you to take % of the dmg you are dealing – great for 5/10mans which you out-gear (Losing hp = getting healed = getting mana back from Spiritual Attunement) and 25man situations where you don’t take much dmg (Trash or Weak Bosses). It is a good seal to use when you’re taking so little damage, you are not getting any mana return from being healed. Seal of Wisdom might be a safer way to restore mana, but your threat per second will suffer for it.

Judgement (split into 3 separate spells) – Judgement of Light may be useful at times but I usually prefer using only Judgement of Wisdom as a Prot Pally with no mana will die/wipe the raid.

Avenger’s Shield – Possibly the most iconic of a Prot Pally’s spells. Throws your shield at target; hits up to 3. (Does not break CC)

Hammer of the Righteous – One of the most essential spells (makes a good opening move). Causes High Threat, hits up to 3. (Note: Will apply the Seal of Vengeance/Corruption DoT on CC so make sure you don’t use it near CC or that your CCers are on the ball)

Holy Shield – Increases your block rating and causes dmg to your attacker everytime you block (Physical). While it used to be a necessary ability to have up to avoid being crushed; it is now relegated to a Threat Ability rather than mitigation.

Shield of Righteousness – Works exactly like shield slam. High threat, scales with block value. Good for picking-up mobs as an opening move or for keeping up on threat in a 2nd-on-threat OT situation.

Divine Protection – The spell you get before Divine Shield (Bubble) is now our version of Shield Wall (Reduces dmg from all sources by 50% while its up). Good for “Oh Shit” situations.

Lay on Hands – While Pallies STILL don’t have a last stand; this kind of makes up for it in that you can get full health instantly if you cast it on yourself; and with the mana return, it makes it more viable in a raid situation (your threat won’t be affected) – You could also cast it on a healer to give them health and mana back (and some mana to you if you have the Glyph) but I’d rather save it for myself as a “Oh Shit” move.

Gear Choices

Due to the removal of Spellpower as the most important stat (Since you now get it from Stam), Prot Pally gearing is now very similar to Prot Warrior gearing (Hit the def cap, stam stam stam stam stam) with the exception being because our threat is still based on spellpower, the more stam = the more threat (on a basic level). I am not going to list SPECIFIC pieces of gear here, I am just going to talk about the philosophy to help you ascertain which piece of gear is better than what.

Weapons

Essentially instead of Spellpower Weapons (in the past), you want the Tanking Weapons (the ones with high dps, stam and defense/avoidance) – which basically means you want whatever the warrior tanks want. Exceptions can be made in the form of dps weapons (Rogue Swords basically ) if you have enough defense/stam elsewhere. The best weapon Enchant imo would be either Spellpower (for more raw threat) or the new +75stam to Weapon one.

Block

Block Rating and Block Value are important stats to a Prot Pally, as your threat will scale directly with both of these values. This is why Paladins will benefit more from a block item than warriors.
 

• Block Rating – This affects Holy Shield and Blessing of Sanctuary as you will deal dmg when struck; this translates to threat. You should almost always have Holy Shield up when threating, and Blessing of Sanctuary (when possible in raids) is good to have up as well (This is situational in 5mans if you are the only Pally – Kings is great in general but Sanc when you are constantly taking a lot of dmg due to gear or AoE so it puts less of a strain on your healers).
• Block Value – This affects Shield of Righteousness (its dmg scales with block value) which should be one of the main spells in your tanking rotation anyway. It has only a minor role in Mitigation; think about “Boss hits you for 10000(100 blocked).” and you’ll understand.

It is important to remember than block in essence is a Mitigation stat; for prot pallies it is also a Threat stat (Apart from spellpower). So while it is important, it certainly isn’t all you need.

Avoidance

While Block remains important, we still cannot ignore avoidance (Dodge/Parry) as this affects survivability which is one of the main aspects of tanking. There is not much advice to be given here except to “Reach for the Skies”.

Hit/Expertise

The hit cap is the same as other classes – and with the combination of spell and melee hit, it is much easier to cope with than in the past (where you needed both spell hit and melee hit for different abilities).

Expertise only affects your Seals and Seal Effects (and your white dmg); since the effect they do is applied on melee hit and the rest of your spells are holy damage – as such is not too important in terms of threat generation, as the dmg from your physical hits/seals is not the biggest part of your TPS. Some Expertise is better than none tho

Basic Tanking Concept

Playing a Protection Pally isn’t as hard as it seems. It basically revolves around managing cooldowns. All your tanking spells have a cooldown of some sort (ranging from a few seconds to 20mins (Lay on Hands)). To put it into perspective:

Pally Tanking Spells/Abilities – Cooldown (seconds)

Judgement of Wisdom/Light/Justice – 10 (8 with talent)
Hammer of the Righteous – 6
Shield of Righteousness – 6
Holy Shield – 8
Consecration – 8 (10 with Glyph)
Avenger’s Shield – 30
Divine Protection – 5 minutes (4 with talent)
Lay on Hands – 20 minutes

The trick is to make sure all (apart from Divine Protection and Lay on Hands) your tanking spells are on cooldown while you are tanking (i.e. are in use). The rotation you use is based on the situation (e.g. Taking consecrate out of your rotation where there is CC about, etc). Its about managing your cooldowns to ensure you have as many in use as possible i.e. refreshing Holy Shield when it goes down, casting Judgement whenever it is up, etc.

Of course you could just arrange your spells in numeric order on your keyboard (arranged by the length of their cooldowns) and just faceroll (from left to right or vice versa)…but…y’know…;P

Personally I don’t have a fixed rotation (it is situational depending on the encounter/mobs), but I always like to open with Hammer of the Righteous or Shield of Righteousness (the high threat gives you a little headstart in threat). Note that this is just how I do things and may not be the best way for you.

Prot Warrior Tanking Guide 1.0

This guide was written primarily to help out a few friends who wanted to know quickly what tanking was all about. It’s more a collation of the information you can find on the internet, and as such is a bit of a high level summary – if you want to delve deeper into the mechanics or workings of some of the things discussed here, I would strongly suggest visiting www.tankspot.com/forums and checking out the guides there.

Please note: Since I am a prot warrior, the words prot warrior and tank are used interchangeably in this guide, and it is written from the point of view of a prot warrior. For a guide on paladin tanks, check out thelighttank’s excellent guide, coming soon.

Quick Summary of things covered here:

The role of a tank.
Types of threat.
Situational Gearing
Prot warrior tanking rotation.
Why threat is important
Avoidance vs Mitigation
Keybindings
Managing Rage
Gearing for threat.
Gearing for Avoidance.
So what kind of avoidance stats should I aim for?
So what kind of threat stats should I aim for?

The role of a tank.

The role of a tank traditionally has been two things:
1. To stay alive the best he can
2. To put out threat and hold the attention of a mob.

With the way protection warrior tanking is currently set up, these two goals are diametrically opposed. To put out maximum threat you will have no survivability, and to live the longest you will have to sacrifice threat. The role of the tank is to balance and choose on a sliding scale of these two objectives where he wants to be.

Furthermore in Wrath, there has been a third objective added:
3. Do damage to the boss.

The changes that Blizzard made to protection warriors in Wrath (discussed later) meant that we were now capable of putting out significant amounts of damage while tanking. Single mob threat can get up to and even exceed 3.5k dps on certain fights, and multi-target threat can scale far more depending how many mobs you are tanking. For dps race fights, prot warrior dps can contribute significantly to the outcome.

Types of threat.

There are two kinds of threat – reactive and proactive threat.

Reactive threat comes from abilities that you have no control over, and is primarily generated by being hit. Thorns aura, retribution aura, the prot talent damage shield. These are all examples of reactive threat, and apart from choosing a spec and ensuring you have buffs, you can’t really affect the threat put out by these things.

Proactive threat on the other hand, comes from abilities that you as a player choose to use. Proactive threat depends on your gear choices, your rotation, and your individual skill. The vast majority of the threat you put out will be proactive.

Situational Gearing

A good tank will never, ever use just one set of gear. Can you get by with just one? Of course. But if you want to be the best tank you can be, and squeeze every last drop of performance out of your class and spec, you need to be smart. Protection warriors are by their nature one of the most gear dependent classes. Whether you avoid a hit or not doesn’t come down to your skill as a player – it comes down to how much avoidance you’ve stacked on your gear. Whether you’re capable of generating significant threat is dependent on whether you are hit and exp capped, or have 0 of each. Your gear and gear choices affect everything you do, and so being mindful of this can drastically affect your success as a tank.

No fight in the game is exactly the same. As a tank, and even moreso if you’re the main tank, you need to know every fight inside out, back to front. You need to know how much damage will be income, how fast a boss swings, whether there are any features of the fight that will make you take more or less damage. These factors will influence the gear you put on. Since no two fights are exactly the same, every single time you face a progression boss you need to re-evaluate your gear, and make sure that what you’re wearing is what gives you the best chance of success.

What gear actually is the best, will very rarely be the same for two guilds. Sometimes your healers may be superheroes and are able to keep you up no matter what – gear for threat. Sometimes you have a week healing team, and need to go maximum avoidance just to survive. More likely it will be a balance between the two situations. Know your guild and your fellow players, and you’ll be able to make better judgements in these situations.

The currently accepted wisdom for gearing for a fight is to reach a comfortable amount of stamina, the amount you need to survive. After that, stack avoidance to make it easier on your healers, and/or threat if necessary.

As an example of a fight where standard gearing doesn’t work as well – Archimonde in Hyjal. Because of the nature of the fight with people running from doomfires, getting airbursted, etc, you cannot rely on your healers being there and available to give you a heal every single time you get hit. Gearing for maximum stamina won’t help, he hits for 10k. Threat isn’t an issue, since your dps are running too much to need a high threat ceiling. This is a fight where you gear for avoidance – the more avoidance you have, the more of a chance you have of surviving a situation where your healers are incapacitated.

As other examples:
High magic damage fights – gear pure stam, since you can’t avoid spells.
Dps race fights, with a short enrage timer – put on more threat.

The motto of this section is therefore to gear to the fight. Since you as a tank are so dependant on your gear to perform, think about what you’re doing in this area, and ensure it’s optimal to ensuring your raid’s success.

Prot warrior tanking rotation.

In patch 3.0, prot warrior threat was changed from coming from certain high threat moves, to largely coming from the damage component of your abilities. It’s the case then that most of your threat comes from doing damage, and so the rotation here can also be seen as a dps rotation.

By rotation here I mean loosely a ‘priority list’ of abilities to keep on cooldown. With the addition of talents like Sword and Board, we can’t stick to a fixed rotation anymore but must simply use cooldowns in an intelligent manner, from highest threat to lowest. The rotation on single target mobs, assuming you don’t have to keep debuffs up, loosely goes:

Shield Slam <- Revenge <- Concussion Blow <- Shockwave <- Heroic Throw <- Devastate

With Shield Slam being your highest threat/damage move, and devastate being your lowest. Shield slam and revenge should always be kept on cooldown as a matter of priority. If debuffs (Thunderclap, demo shout, etc) need to be kept up by you, try to weave them into your rotation when both of these, and preferably all non GC abilities are on cooldown (ie. When you can’t SS, rev, SW or Conc Blow). When multi-mob tanking, TC should be kept on cooldown at all times, as well as shockwave. What you use from there depends if you have a kill order or are just AoEing all the mobs. If you have a kill order, build threat on the first target as much as you need to so dps don’t pull it off you, then switch to the second target and so on. Of course, slapping a vigilance on your highest threat dpers can also help immensely.

The other ability which should be kept in mind is Heroic Strike. Heroic strike is a high threat move, which does significant damage as well through it’s high crit chance. Primarily Heroic Strike is used as a rage dump – when you have enough rage to be able to use it without dropping your primary rotation (as seen above). Usually I will heroic strike over 45 rage, and on many boss fights with virtually unlimited rage it can be a good way to produce more dps and threat. HS is an ‘on the next move’ ability, and so can be queued up while you’re still doing your standard rotation.

Following this priority list will ensure you are putting out the maximum threat you can from abilities.

Why threat is important

Threat is important not just so your dpsers can put out the maximum size columns on those recount reports. Ensuring that you have more threat than your dpsers lets them open up, and do the most damage they possibly can – the more damage they do, the sooner the mob dies and the fewer chances he has to smash your skull in. More threat means that you can start doing those timed achievements, and beating those enrage timers (think Thaddius). Threat is also the sign of a good tank, since it ensures that the damage is directed at you, and not at the mage that just pulled agro with a 10k frostfire bolt.

Avoidance vs Mitigation

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, and something which needs to be clarified.

Avoidance – Gives you a chance to completely avoid a hit
Mitigation – Reduces the overall amount of damage taken on a hit.

As per the definitions above, avoidance means you do not get hit at all. Stats which fall under avoidance stats are: a base 5% chance to be missed by a mob, dodge, parry and chance to be missed from defence. To get your total avoidance, add these four things together.

Mitigation includes such things as: armor, shield block value, shield block rating. Mitigation reduces the amount of damage taken on a hit. Armor reduces incoming raw damage by a certain amount, block value reduces part of that damage on a successful block, block rating gives you a chance to have a successful block. None of these things count as avoidance though, since you’re still taking damage.

Keybindings

I won’t try to convince you which keybindings to use here, since everyone is different. Use common sense though – don’t have devastate bound to ; when you move with your wasd keys. Two things you may want to consider having on your other hand though are heroic strike and concussion blow. Heroic strike so you can queue one up while still doing your rotation with your other hand. Concussion blow because it does not consume a global cooldown and therefore should ideally be used at the same time as one of your other abilities (shield slam, revenge, etc). Trying to press everything with the one hand will only result in lost time moving your finger from one to the other.

Managing Rage

Managing rage is an essential part of being a prot warrior. You need to ensure that you have enough rage or the capacity to generate enough at all times. If need be, yell at the disc priest who thinks it’s funny to use pain supression while you’re bubbled on trash. Manage your rotation so you’re not rage starved so much you miss a SS. If you’re moving quickly between groups, try to carry over some rage so you can get snap aggro on the next group. The key thing to remember here is to make sure you’ve always got enough rage to do your job – not blowing heroic strikes at 10 rage, etc.

Gearing for threat.

When gearing for threat, your stat priority looks something like this:

Expertise > hit > str > shield block value > AP

Expertise is by far the best stat to stack up until the dodge cap (~26), and is at least as good as hit for threat until the parry cap (~57). Expertise has the added bonus of removing the chance for a boss to get a parry hasted swing – a swing which is faster than usual after the mob parries one of your attacks. Parry haste is a leading cause of tank death, because it’s unpredictable spike damage.

After expertise hit is the best option, which increases your chance to hit a mob. For level 83 mobs (bosses etc), the hit cap for special attacks (ie. Your abilities) is +8% hit (262 hit). Hit ensures your special attacks don’t miss, and you don’t lose the threat from that 5k shield slam you just layed out.

Following that, stack strength because of it’s dual bonus of giving both Attack Power (2AP to every 1str), and sbv (1sbv to every 2str). Strength will also scale with buffs such as kings, making it superior to straight AP.

Shield Block Value is next on the list, and is important because it affects first and foremost our highest threat/damage move – Shield Slam. With crits of up to 10k on a raid boss, shield slam is a primary method of dps and threat. Shield block value can also affect such things as damage shield, and how much damage is absorbed when you block an attack.

Attack Power – Attack power is still important to the prot warrior since it now affects abilities such as shockwave, devastate and concussion blow – the more attack power you have, the harder you will hit. Straight AP doesn’t scale with buffs, and it is very very rare to find it on what could traditionally be called a tanking piece.

Gearing for Avoidance.

The primary thing to do to gear for avoidance is to become uncrittable. A crit will deal double damage to you, so it is imperative that you remove it from the equation – when bosses hit for 10k, a crit can often spell instant death. You can remove your chance to be crit by getting 540 defence. Although I wont go into the maths of it here, you can no longer get crit after this magic number.

When gearing for avoidance, the stats to look out for are parry, dodge and defence. 18 points of defence on gear give you 1% avoidance total. 19 points of dodge on gear give you 1% avoidance. 24 points of parry give you 1% avoidance. At this point you might be thinking ‘well surely you should just try to stack as much dodge as possible then, since it’s the ‘cheapest’ stat? This would be the case, if it weren’t for diminishing returns.

Simply put, diminishing returns means that the effectiveness of a particular stat decreases on an exponential curve the more of that stat you have. If you had 40% dodge and only 10% parry, you would get vastly more avoidance from parry compared to the dodge. For this reason, you should pay attention to all of your stats – because of the itemization of the t7 content, it’s likely that you won’t have much of an option about this anyway.

A lot of people also assume that once you hit the defence cap to be uncrittable (540 def), defence does nothing for your. This isn’t true. More defence rating on your gear gives you leeway to swap in pieces without going under the defence cap. It also gives avoidance, with a small amount of dodge, parry, and added chance to be missed. You can see the additional chance to be missed from defence by hovering over the stat in your character pane.

So what kind of avoidance stats should I aim for?

As always, it depends on the situation. For a tank starting Naxx-10 with group members who have never been before, I would shoot for 50% avoidance, 26k hp. For Naxx-25 with an undergeared group, 55% with 28k unbuffed hp. Once you have a full raid of geared players, you can drop back to 50% avoidance and start focusing on threat stats.

So what kind of threat stats should I aim for?

The amount of threat you will need to put out varies depending on the gear level and skill of your raid. With an undergeared group, chances are they wont’ be able to do enough dps to produce enough threat to give you problems. With a fully Naxx-25 geared raid of players putting out 5k dps, you will need to have significant amounts of threat to ensure they’re not capped. Threat doesn’t matter if you can’t survive – make the job as easy as possible on your healers, reach a good amount of avoidance and stamina, then focus on threat.

In my experience, exp and hit only come into play after you have been in Naxx-10/Naxx-25 for a while, and your players are starting to get geared. Starting out, threat wasn’t an issue, and I in fact didn’t start worrying about it until about two months after our first full Naxx clear.

The role of a tank.

A tank is a leader, a person who needs to take charge. Even if you’re not the raid leader you have a responsibility to keep the raid running along, and set the pace of the content you’re tackling. You need to be 100% alert, 100% of the time. You will wipe the raid, and you will take time to learn some encounters. This is just part of being a tank, but unfortunately when you mess up, it’s painfully visible to everything – you’ve gotta be a fast learner to get over this. A tank, especially a main tank, doesn’t get the luxury of deciding not to go to a raid. When your guild gears you over other players, as they need to do to progress, its not your gear. It’s the raid’s gear, gear that they have given you to help them progress. You have a responsibility to the 24 other people you play with to fulfill that obligation, and be there week in and week out wiping and clearing content. A tank is competitive, and wants to be the best… just settling for ‘close enough’ is what gets your raid killed. If these things don’t sound like something you can do, maybe tanking isn’t for you.

Tanking is more than just pushing buttons. It’s about thought, intelligence, and perfection. Any idiot can go out there and stack five devastates on a mob, and be called a good tank. But the awesome ones, the ones that really shine do so much more. They know the fights like the back of their hand, they work on their rotation. They gear according to the fight, and are 100% aware of not only what’s going on with them, but with the raid and their surroundings too. The perfect tank positions his mobs to make it easier on the group, and is always watching for the loose one to go straight for the healer. You can become a good tank in a few weeks, but it takes a lot of practice, thought and experience to become a great one.

Guild Drama – The DOs and DON’Ts

Disclaimer – I am not qualified in Public/Human Relations, nor would I consider myself to be an expert, so take my words with a pinch of salt. This is all based on what I have experienced as a leader.

As I have mentioned in a previous post “Of Trouble-makers and Drama Queens”, this is something that every leader will inevitably run into (unless you choose to be blind to it at your guild’s own peril). Here are some DOs and DON’Ts with respect to handling Guild Drama that I have experienced in my time:

DO Listen. One of the most frustrating things to a member with a grievance/issue is not being heard, or having leaders that do not listen. The best way to resolve anything is to look at the issue from all points of view – which can only be done by listening. As an officer you need to be a role model to your members – listen to them, and there is a higher chance of them listening to you. 

DON’T Dictate, Disscuss. You are not a dictator, nor are you the law. The unique, voluntary nature of MMORPG guilds means that decisions need to keep the majority in mind (Sadly, you can’t please everybody); the people who disagree can easily switch loyalties. Try to discuss decisions before making them (amongst the other officers or even amongst the whole guild). Guildies are more likely to comply with rules that have been communicated beforehand rather than rules that are just decided on and announced.

DO Be Firm but Fair. You MUST enforce rules, yet at the same time you have to allow for mistakes. Being calculative and cruel just leaves you with an empty guild after everyone leaves. Yet on the other end of the scale being over-generous and too nice is an open invitation for people to climb all over your head and/or make use of you. Guild Management is about balance as much as it is about structure and organisation.

DON’T bury your head in the sand. Problems won’t go away on their own. Work to resolve them before they turn into a nightmare. The moment you hear a whisper of dissent you have to identify the problem and work to fix what’s wrong. Do not let bad behaviour go unpunished (or at least un-warned) or its a signal to others that the said behaviour is allowed/justified.

DO be understanding. People have reasons for doing what they do – if something is justifiable or within reason, don’t shut it down without discussing it in a reasonable manner first. I always maintain that RL > WoW – for example you can’t demand the same level of playtime and commitment from someone with a job, family and children as compared to a student who can afford the time to play all day. That said, people who take out their RL frustrations (job stress, family problems, etc) on their virtual counterparts shouldn’t be doing so and must be told to take their problems elsewhere.

DON’T let personal feelings/bias get in the way of decision making. Never take sides (even if they are your friends) in a dispute. Decisions must be made with justification and within reason – this will reduce opposition and general dissent. Remember that a single action can affect the entire guild even if no one says anything.

DO be resilient and determined in enforcement. Don’t give in to unreasonable pleas or to peer pressure unless the situation is unique and justifiable. A troublemaker who leaves or gets kicked for behaviour/breaking rules is very likely to start trouble again if you re-invite him. We had a problem with a particular member who was known to cause trouble when things didn’t go his way, and yet we re-invited him (about 4 times over) due to peer pressure only to have him cause more trouble (again) later. Remember that if it comes down to gkicking, its best to leave the trouble out.

DON’T allow personal issues to be taken into the guild. Its none of our business to meddle in people’s personal affairs (unless we are directly involved), but nor is it their business to bring it into the game as we are not involved. Our guild almost self destructed when such an issue was allowed to blow up within the guild. Personal RL should stay out of the game. Period.

 

These are but some of the things you should and shouldn’t do when forced to deal with Guild Drama. The key thing to remember is – you are dealing with real people. Treat them the same way you treat real people. The People are the ones who make up the Guild, not just the leadership, raiders, etc.

The main point this post is trying to make: “Always try to look at all sides of an argument before trying to resolve it. Be firm but fair, and make sure your decision is justifiable and reasonable – Tolerate mistakes, but make sure the party/parties involved learn from them. If all else fails and you have to remove someone from the guild, don’t regret and relent after.”

Casual Raiding Guilds

The viability of casual raiding guilds in World of Warcraft is a topic that seems to come up a lot, with guilds asking whether they can have good raid progression and still maintain a casual atmosphere. Having more than a little first hand experience with this scenario, that question is probably best answered with an anecdote.

When I first joined my current guild way back when we were progressing through Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, they were billing themselves as a casual raiding guild. While we did have a raiding core, and actively recruited for raiding members, there were still something in the order of 200 accounts under the same guild tag, with friends, family, raiders and long term members all there under the same roof. For our level of progression at the time this worked well – black temple had been released around the time the guild had started raiding, so we weren’t competing on progression with the top guilds on the server.

The Trap: Conflicting Player Expectations

As time went on though, we started to see issues between the conflicting goals of the people in the guild. The people that just wanted to log on every now and then and talk to people, run a few heroics – they were fine. There were however other groups which caused issues:

- The casual players who expected a raid spot. These people wanted to come to our raids with ungemmed and unenchanted gear, had to have the strats explained, chatted during boss fights on Vent and have just as much of a shot at loot as the raiders who had spent months wiping in an instance to progress. They expected these things because we were a ‘casual raiding guild’, and they were just as much a part of the guild as anyone else right?

- The raiders who wanted progression. The guild lost far too many excellent, dedicated raiders because of a lack of progression. In a casual guild naturally you won’t be at the top of the server – you’ll generally find though that the players that have the drive to spend hours theorycrafting and who know their class inside out, the players who can perform – they naturally want to see a return for their effort. Often they would leave for more progressed guilds simply because they couldn’t continue to be held back by casual rules and slow progression, which is an issue for any raiding guild.

Between these two conflicting parties, we effectively shot ourselves in the foot as far as clearing content goes, and never did get to see the end of Sunwell. In a casual raiding guild, you simply cannot make the tough rules and decisions which keep a raid focused. For easy content like kara with badge gear, this wasn’t an issue. When you come to fights which are a significant challenge like Illidari Council in Black Temple however, you need a raiding team, you need them to be there 90% of the time, and you need a level of performance. Enforcing attendance requirements so you can take a consistant team each week isn’t possible in a casual guild, or at least not the definition of one as I understand it. Requiring your players put out baseline dps numbers likewise disqualifies you from being a casual guild. As soon as you start to enforce policies like that, you are a raiding guild.

So How do you define Raiding/Casual Guilds?

Raiding guilds recognise that end game content is often tough, and put into place policies and procedures to help their players overcome these challenges. They don’t necessarily have to raid 5 nights a week, but they have to be pushing their members to constantly get better. Raiding guilds have to be monitoring performance however basically, and ensuring that their players know the strats and their class. Raiding guild basically put more expectations on their players than those from your average PUG heroic group. Casual guilds however adopt a more lasseiz faire attitude towards raid content, and dont place as many expectations on their players. They are more focused on having fun than the competitive nature of the game, and if that involves a bit of raiding than so be it. Casual raiding guilds are however a little more tricky to define. Casual raiding guilds to me are guilds that want progression and to clear content in a short amount of time, but are unable/unwilling to adopt policies and rules which put the focus on this to the exclusion of other aspects of the game. It’s because of this lack of focus that the issues we are discussing today arise.

Solutions to the Casual Raiding Guild Issue.

As for our guild, we recognised these issues and took action to fix them. The solution which worked for us was to create a split off raiding guild to be able to enforce these policies. Every member of the raiding guild knows the expectations we have set for them, and is there to raid and clear content. Every member of the casual guild knows that if they expect to attend raids with the raiding team, they will need to put in a lot more than a few hours a week. This isn’t to say that the casual players can’t raid – they have been organising their own runs, and members from the raiding guild have been helping out in their free time.

What this solution achieves though is a dedicated focus and intention for each guild, which is what thelighttank spoke about in his previous post. Having a split focus like we did in TBC ultimately cost us a handful of excellent players, and placed unfair expectations on the casual ones. The two guilds share the same website, the same teamspeak, and use a seperate chat channel to communicate over instead of guild chat. While purely an administrative solution, our raiders have achieved towards the top of our server for progression in wrath, and will hopefully be making a top 5 entry for tier 8 content – for a guild which was ranked around 55th on the server when I joined, this is a great start.

On the flip side of the coin, another guild I was formerly in was maybe the more casual side of the casual raiding guild. These guys only ran 10 mans and heroics, and were a wonderful group of people. As one of the officers lamented when I left though, the guild had turned into a childrearing centre for raiders. They would stay with the guild through kara because of the wonderful atmosphere, and then once they had geared up began to want more, and so left for a raiding guild doing 25 man runs. The guild never actually managed to build up enough dedicated and geared players to even finish ZA before 3.0, because they were constantly being bled dry by the guilds who could offer more for people wanting to raid. This will ALWAYS be the situation in a casual raiding guild.

In summary, I really don’t believe there can be such a thing as a casual raiding guild as a long term solution. Although it may be working right now with tier 7 content, as soon as raiding begins to get harder and more demanding on the players casual raiding guilds will start to go under from the internal pressure of competing interests. We saw it during t5 and t6 content in TBC, and I would be very surprised if it didn’t happen again in Wrath. If you are a casual raiding guild it would be very rare to see a steady rate of progression – you might have a burst for a while as you recruit raiders, then have no new boss kills for three months once they start to get disgruntled and leave. As I pointed out in a previous post, managing player turnover is one of the most essential parts of raiding, and this is extremely difficult to do in a casual environment. You might see short term success, but eventually your guild atmosphere and players will gravitate towards wanting to raid or wanting to be more casual, and you as a leader will have to make the tough call when this happens.

7 Rules of Guild Leadership

Running a guild can be as hectic/stressful as a RL job; but the basic concepts are simple. With a basic set of “rules” to build on, you can then focus on what you really need to do – the day to day running, planning, and organising of your guild.

N.B. This list is not in order of importance, nor is it exhaustive; it is merely thought up from my opinion and experience.

Rule 1 – Define Your Guild.

Every Guild needs a purpose, a goal, a direction. I often see guilds who want to be everything, trying to mix things that cannot be mixed (Raiding and Casual Playing), or have no purpose of direction due to lack of leadership committment. What does your guild want to be? (Hardcore? Raiding? Casual?) What would you like your guild to achieve? Having a clear goal to work towards gives you your limitations on how to run the guild and allows your members to have a shared vision (or enables you to recruit people with a similar vision).

Define and write-up a Mission Statement which clearly states your guild’s purpose, goals and values.

Rule 2 – Publish and Enforce Rules

Rules have to be put down in black and white with clear simple explanation (where necessary). Make sure all your members are aware on where to find the rules and that new members to the guild are made aware of the rules when they first join you.

Some essential rules are – Guild Policy, Loot Policy, Invite Policy, Grievance Policy and Disciplinary Policy. It is also extremely important that if you decide to implement a rule, to follow and enforce it yourself. Double Standards will only cause dissent amongst your members.

Rule 3 – Respect is Earned not Given

I cannot stress enough on this topic. Too many leaders make the mistake of using their authority and position of leadership to either order people around or to their own benefits. Some even abuse their position – which is betraying a position of trust and respect. You have to get your members to respect you before they will follow you willingly (To command an Army, you must first command its Respect).

Get to know your members, help them even if just by listening to them. The position of Officer or Guild Master is that of a role model, helping hand, and listening ear. Think of it as such and act accordingly.

Rule 4 – Teamwork in Leadership

I have found that the best way to run a guild is to have an officer team that discusses and votes on decisions – with the Guild Master having the deciding vote in the event of a tie. The Officer Team is the heart of any guild – it runs the guild and resolves issues.

As such, you need to work as a team – as more minds adds more opinions, thoughts, feedback and experience to the mix. You have to remember that unless you are all hardcore gaming addicts who can be on 24/7 – you cannot be online all the time and having constant Officer Presence not only keeps guild morale up (it shows that you are committed to running the guild) but enables you (the officer online at the time) to resolve any issues that crop up – from simple questions to policy to even guild drama. A team of committed, open minded and effective leaders can take a Guild very far.

Rule 5 – Power to the People

This is not just a game, nor is it a serious business organisation. It is a community; as such the opinions and ideas of your members should not be ignored completely either. There is nothing better than member feedback when it comes to running a guild – there is no other way to see if your policies and management decisions are being successful.

Encourage forum discussion, request for feedback (giving members the option to give feedback annonymously may help) or talk to your members individually to find out how they feel about the guild. Holding Guild Meetings (which involve the entire guild) is a very good way of listening to your members and gaining valuable feedback. Who knows, you may even get ideas on how to improve the guild through such sessions. Remember, this is a community, your members are as much a part of the guild as its leaders are.

Rule 6 – Be Open-minded

World of Warcraft is an ever developing, constantly changing community environment. Pay attention to what’s happening within the game and its community. Things like Game Development (upcoming changes, new content), Server Economy (the price of items), Player Availability (what guilds are short of) and Guild Status (which Guilds are doing what) are some of the factors that influence the community whether directly or indirectly. Having an open mind and a clear view of the overall pictures helps you to stay ahead of your game.

Don’t hesitate to change or improve on your guild policy to keep up with the times. Be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to manage your guild, and don’t be afraid to try out something new. Do not be afraid of failure either, because if you fail, you can always try again.

Rule 7 – Have Fun

Despite all the talk about community, World of Warcraft is a game which people play for entertainment, to relax, or even to take a step back from RL and let themselves go within a virtual world (a second life if you like). Fun is a very important factor in keeping your guild going. When its time to be serious (e.g. during raiding), by all means establish a strict routine or policy which gets things done; but don’t forget to have fun in the end! Too many guilds fall apart because the atmosphere is too serious or even dull.

Promote a sense of friendliness and family within your guild. Organise Fun Events like racing from point A to B, Duel competitions, etc. Maintaining a sense of fun will go a long way in keeping your guild going.

These are just some of the basic essentials you need to know to run a guild effectively. Of course there might be many any ways or methods in which to achieve success, I have just listed that which I feel is important to make running your guild a more fulfilling and enriching experience both for you and your members.

Carrying People Through Content

Just a quick post until i can get stuck into something proper later today.

One of the things that irritates me more than anything, anything else in the world as a tank and as a player is people who have just hit 80 spamming for heroics or worse yet, raids. As a tank you NEED to put in hours of work in normal instances and doing questlines. If you don’t hit that defense cap, and if you’re geared in dps gear or quest greens, you’ll probably die in your average group. As a healer you NEED to put in hours of work in normal instances, because if you can’t pump out the healing or you go oom the tank will die. And as a dps, you NEED to put in at least a little bit of work, because if you try to kill something which takes you forever, there’s more chance of either the tank or healer having problems.

As a tank who put those hours of effort in, when I saw a newly 80 deathknight for example yesterday, begging people in the guild to take her on runs and complaining why she couldn’t find a group, that really boiled my blood. If nothing else it’s disrespectful to the other people in the group – why is their time any less valuable than yours that they can spend their day making up for your lack of effort? There are no shortage of upgrades you can get through crafted gear, normal instances or questlines, so put the effort in.

Worse than people expecting to be carried through heroics are people wanting to be carried through raids. I remember all too well the ‘alt runs’ of kara we used to run – t6 tanks were there, the odd t6 healer was there, and the rest of the players had their last upgrade in Zangarmarsh at level 63. Those runs ended up in frustration for everyone involved, and generally weren’t pleasant. By contrast, the alt runs we did when people put some effort in, knew their class and had semi-decent gear were fast and painless. It may not be so much of an issue with the faceroll that is Naxxramas at the moment, but the key thing to take away from this is that you being there without putting effort in, makes everything harder and devalues the time of other people.

If I may digress, this leads to my thinking that keys for raids and heroics weren’t an entirely bad thing. In the Burning Crusade, if you saw a player looking for a group for a particular instance, you KNEW they put the work in. If they wanted to go to kara they had to do a multi-part key quest through half the game’s dungeons, if they wanted to do heroic they needed to spend at least a little time in the normal version to get revered rep. Blizzard removing keys and attunements has encouraged people to be lazy, and has promoted the worst version of the casual player – the one that doesn’t give a fuck and expects to have other people make up for their lack of effort. I’m not saying we need attunements like the ones for BT or Hyjal where you had to kill the final bosses in SSC and TK, but something to at least encourage people to get out and play. The other issue is that leaving content wide open to everyone (bar Malygos) has taken somewhat away from the natural progression of the game and left players without finite goals to work towards, but that’s an issue for another post.

So what do you guys think? Am I being too cantankerous about this, and does anyone not mind carrying a guildie through content to help them out? Or does this issue boil your blood like it does mine?