Sunday, April 24, 2011

Loot Wars and Raider Alts

It's really hard to explain things in a blog post. So many things can be misread or misinterpreted. I'm going to try to be as coherent as possible while trying to sound objective and fair. I have been mulling over this particular post for a while and I feel enough time has passed to explain my feelings about the situation. No names will be mentioned except for myself.

As some of you may already know, a few weeks back I was raiding on my Holy Paladin. This was mainly due to the disappearance of one of our main tanks. He had some pretty bad weather and power/internet was knocked out for a long period of time. We weren't quite sure if/when he would be back. Not only was he one of our tanks, but our only paladin in the raid.

Paladins provide quite a large variety of buffs for raids through Auras and Blessings. Next to shamans, paladins are probably one of the more mandatory classes to bring for 10-man progression because they have so many buffs integrated into the class and merge well with any raid composition. The 2 buffs my raid team was now deprived of was Resistance Aura and Blessing of Might, the 2 buffs that make healing much easier.

Resistance Aura provides a large amount of magical damage reduction (up to 25%) and overrides the resistance provided by Mark of the Wild and Blessing of Kings (up to 14% give or take). That additional 11% can mean the difference between a clear or a wipe, depending on how well-geared/skilled your healers are. Less damage means your healer's jobs are easier which means a greater chance to clear content. This also allows for a little more margin for error.

Blessing of Might provides an additional 10% attack power bonus and 346 Mp5 for mana users. We had a survival hunter in the group, so the attack power bonus would be overridden anyway. 346 Mp5 is ALOT of mana regen. In a time where mana bars are already tight, every buff that increases your regen or extends your mana bar is extremely important for any healer.

So with our protection paladin out of commission we were lacking 2 important buffs. We had no shaman in the group, so mana totem was out of the question. Shamans can also provide a Resistance Totem which is the same as Resistance Aura. But we needed a tank.

With no protection paladin in sight on our server, we then turned to ANY tank, which is better than nothing. We found a protection warrior that was a GM from a fairly reputable guild that ended up falling apart due to people not showing up/no progression/etc. We already had a protection warrior, but we couldn't really be picky at this point. We took him in and he ended up doing very well (can't say the same for the rest of us).

Our new raid composition:

Tanks:
Protection Warrior
Protection Warrior

DPS:
Fire Mage
Survival Hunter
Survival Hunter
Destruction Warlock
Feral Druid

Healers:
Discipline Priest
Holy Priest
Restoration Druid

So our first night of raiding with this new setup wasn't very good. Lacking both Resistance Aura and Might was extremely noticeable by all the healers. On fights where I should have a decent amount of mana left after boss fights, I was running on fumes. Even switching from Intellect-based flasks and food to Spirit-based ones didn't have any noticeable difference. On top of that damage was noticeably higher. All in all it wasn't a very good first impression for our new tank. Something needed to change.

I spoke to my GM and co-GM and we all unanimously agreed something needed to change. We had a couple of options:
  • My GM (Prot Warrior) offered to get his Prot Pally geared. It was level 85, but just in craptastic gear. A nice solution but a time consuming one. For progression reasons this wasn't the best use of time, especially since my GM had recently been going back to school and doesn't spend much time online other than to raid.
  • Our Destruction Warlock could keep the Felhunter out. The felpuppy provides Fel Intelligence which gives the Mp5 buff and a small buff to our mana pool, but it would be at the sacrifice of her personal DPS. We tried this and saw about a 2-3k drop in her dps. It didn't seem bad at first, but the fights were a bit longer then they should have been which still strained the healers.
  • I could bring in my already-geared-for-raiding Holy Pally. This was the fastest and easiest solution. By bringing in the paladin we would get our Might and Resistance back. We would lose the Holy Priest and our burst AoE healing would suffer, but we would have strong single target heals. Plus our Discipline Priest still provides everything a Holy Priest provides except for Lightwell.
We went with the third option. We blew through all of our farm bosses with ease and even downed 2 progression bosses in the same night. It was an amazing evening. It really was needed because the previous week was wrecked with "lolpulls" and screaming into pillows.

During the 3-weeks on my pally I received exactly 1 piece of loot, the leggings off of Halfus Wyrmbreaker. This piece of loot would have been d/e'd if my priest was in raid. On the last week, the BoE staff from BoT trash dropped. As many of you know, this staff is BiS for Holy priests. I whispered my GM if I could roll on it since I felt I was sacrificing my priest gear for the better of the raid team. I wasn't sure he received my whisper, so I didn't roll. Our Restoration Druid rolled and got the staff since our Priest wasn't interested. Apparently my GM didn't see my whisper and said that I could roll for it next raid.

Well some lines of communication got crossed. Not only did the Druid not need the staff (I guess he lost too much haste) but he sold it for the raid team to make flasks and pots, not knowing there was someone else interested. /sigh

No biggie. I'm a big boy. Loot is loot and it drops all the time. People make mistakes. I will patiently wait for the next staff to drop.

Next Week:  
Good news- Our pally tank is back.  
Bad news- Our mage is leaving WoW for a while for RL.

More Good news- Our pally tank has an enhance shammy that is geared! So we bring in his shammy. Even better, I can bring the priest back in again since we have Mana Totem. All is well!

Or so I thought.

The second week my priest has been back, one of our DPS wanted to bring in an alt to roll on the BoE staff. I explained that mainspecs will always have priority over alts, no matter how much loot they get and to just be aware of that. This has always been an understanding for our raid team. I then continued to let this person know that I was interested in this staff and that because my priest is mainspec, I have priority. This clearly didn't bode well for the person.

They claimed this new alt would be their new main, and then proceeded to attack me and accuse me of doing the same thing with my holy paladin, all before our raid started.

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to ruin the night for everyone. But I was really close to ripping this person a new ass.


I want to be clear on the difference in needs between our alts.



Raid-Requested Alts
My Holy Paladin was brought in for raid composition reasons. It would have hurt our progression had we kept my priest in and just ignored the problem. People would have just gotten more frustrated. Instead we made what would have been a miserable week into a fantastic progression week that lifted everyone's spirits.

Voluntary Alts
The DPS alt fell under this category. This alt was not needed in any way. It was purely voluntary and thus rules were applied like any other alt. Claiming this as your new main wouldn't make any difference. People have been waiting weeks for certain items to drop off of bosses/trash. I'm not going to stand for someone to just bring in a new toon and feel they can roll on items that other people still need for farm bosses. This person's main had every piece of gear available on the farm bosses already and they had nothing more to gain, so they decided to bring in an alt.

I hope you all understand what I'm getting at. This next week is the first week since the "incident" occurred and I'm a little skeptical how it will turn out. I still stand by my feelings on the situation and when the time comes I will hold my ground if necessary.

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