Too Much Gear...

I might be in a small minority here, apart from the elitist Vanilla crew, but I think there is far too much gear in the game right now.


It's everywhere!


And it just flows in with virtually no effort needed on the player's part at all, you can conceivably run the exact same content over and over again for ever-increasing rewards.


Now this isn't such a big deal, is it?
So what if you can gear up infinitely from World Quests or whatever?
It doesn't hurt anyone, does it?


Of course it doesn't, it is completely fine.


The issue is the massive disparity in difficulty across the different gearing paths, particularly Mythic plus.


I have a couple of characters at 120 now who have never entered a dungeon or raid but are sitting in the high 370s on ilvl, which would be even higher if I bothered to do the Darkshore Warfront every time it comes around.


But what do you do next?
Say you have reached the heady heights of 380ilvl by picking up incremental gains on WQs with a couple of pieces from Warfronts plus the higher level rewards of the emissary quests.
Easily achievable without relying on the RNG gods for a lucky warforge or anything.


Where do you go to further progress your character?


1.  Just carry on.
The WQs system hasn't let you down so far so why change?  Well, it slows drastically as you get nearer to 385ilvl.  Only the Emissary rewards offer anything over 370ilvl so you are waiting for those and praying they give you the right slots or waiting for that Darkshore Warfront to roll around again (and hoping it isn't a fecking cloak for the 3rd time in a row! Not bitter... )


2.  Raiding!
Already out-gearing LFR by some distance, it would have to be Normal mode to offer any sort of upgrades.  Preferably Heroic for a nice juicy 400ilvl piece or two.
Probably start on Normal mode though.


3.  Mythic Plus.
The endless content cycle of the same dungeons marginally more difficult each time you run them.


This is where I think the problem lies.
Raiding Normal mode and any kind of M+ that would offer an ilvl upgrade are an order of magnitude more difficult than the gearing up to that point.


How are you supposed to proceed?
You outgear the most natural next step in difficulty and the curve rises incredibly steeply from that point onwards.
In reality, you are looking at +6 or +7 at that gear level to offer a reasonable chance of upgrade but going straight there from Darkshore Warfront would be brutal!


Normal mode raids aren't quite as severe but they are also nowhere near as accessible, obviously requiring a bigger team and greater time commitment.


My Shaman needs +10 dungeons for any kind of upgrade and they are still very difficult but that is at the top end of gearing and you expect it to be difficult, a step between Heroic and Mythic raiding.


I can't work out where the real problem is...
Does the easy WQ gear scale too high? 
Does the difficulty of M+ scale too quickly?


The 'curve' seems wrong to me, to gain experience in M+ it feels like you have to run content you outgear.  Or not necessarily outgear the content, but outgear the rewards from that content.
(I think I said Outgear too many times in that sentence, the word is losing all meaning.)


So do you go from WQs to +7 Shrine of the Storm Hell or do you spend time learning the dungeons with little to no hope of any gear rewards?


The time and effort required for WQs seems massively disproportionate to the rewards, especially when compared with Mythic plus.


How to fix it?
Maybe the lower end of M+ should offer higher rewards and it just scales more slowly, possibly a jump in gear rewards with each affix added?


A narrower gear curve across M+ would definitely help... People would still want +10 at the top end for the max reward and weekly chest but if it started at 385ilvl for +2, I think it would make for much smoother progression from WQs.


Any ideas?

Quick Catch Up...

Hello,


Been a while... again...


Much has changed since I last posted.


We killed Mythic G'Huun, it took far longer than it should have done but we got there in the end.
It was a constant stream of individual errors and poor, blinkered play that dragged it out for us.  Each error is punished to the max and two early in an attempt meant a wipe, as did any error by the orb-runners.


This meant progress was always stop-start.  It didn't flow like it normally does where, once you have mastered a phase, you rarely fail there again so our attempts in P3 were disjointed and rarely consecutive.


This was trotted out as an excuse for failure in P3 but I disagreed.
P3 on Mythic is very similar to P3 on Heroic, there is a little dance that flows nicely and repeats over and over through the phase.
It had been quite a while since we did it on Heroic (and the loot was crap so it wasn't one of those bosses you went back to over and over again) but, to me, it was Raiding 101: Don't Stand in the Fire!


Anyway, the errors in P1 and P2 never really went away and it took me a long time to get through to everyone that P3 was about survival rather than dps but we eventually got there and G'Huun died with a couple of weeks to spare.


Any enthusiasm I had for the game had completely gone by this point and I stepped down as both Raider and Raid Leader. 
I attempted to step down as Officer too but was convinced to stay on, even though I wouldn't be particularly active in the guild.


I moved my Shaman back to join some old friends who I was raiding with back when I started this blog.  The pace would be slower, more relaxed, and the requirement to do everything outside raiding wouldn't be there either.
I could go back to playing at my own pace, particularly important at this time when I wasn't enjoying the non-raid content.


It's not really working out as well as I had hoped, the grass isn't always greener...
I'm frustrated playing at the lower level, not by people playing poorly or anything, but by the almost complete lack of direction, organisation and planning.


On the plus side (no pun intended), I've really enjoyed doing Mythic+ dungeons with people on a similar level to me. 
I always felt behind the curve in the other guild, with people who are in specialist key-pushing teams essentially 'carrying' me through my weekly.  I didn't like that feeling at all!


Now I am actually learning the dungeons, the routes, the dangerous packs etc. for the first time since our foray into Challenge Modes back in WoD... same guild, same people... coincidence?


Haven't thought about those C-Mode runs in a while, looking back it was so much fun trying to work them out (with Darkmech's help) then execute our pulls perfectly. 
Restarting and practicing over and over, the challenge was perfectly balanced in my opinion and no gear rewards in sight (and all the better for it)!


Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?
The raiding experience of one guild and the dungeon experience of another?
I'm not sure. 
The Mythic guild runs plenty of M+ but they are pretty much a requirement to obtain the appropriate gear for the raids... it's not the lack of runs that is the issue, it is my own place in them. 
The fault lies with me for being behind the necessary experience level to complete these runs without feeling out of place.


I'm now gaining that experience but I needed to go through this process at the start of the expansion.


The thoughts that have been swirling round my mind are beginning to make more sense now I have put them down on 'paper', the path forward is becoming clearer...

Collect All the Things...

Despite all the negativity of my last few posts, there are some things in game I do actually enjoy.


I've never really been a collector... I've dabbled here and there but it's never been the actual collecting or filling a set that has appealed to me.
For example, back in the day I used to play a bit of Magic: The Gathering.
The collecting aspect only served to facilitate the building of decks for me. I wasn't remotely interested in a card to finish off a set and freely traded away anything I didn't need for whatever deck I was trying to build at that time.


So it is surprising that I find myself captivated by the Collections tab!


Much of my spare time, when not doing laps of Dazar'Alor/Boralus, has been spent in old raids picking up tier pieces for one appearance or another. 
Spread across most of my toons, not even collecting them all on my main or anything, just chasing whatever set I think looks pretty cool or different.


Maybe this was sparked by this awesome little thing in Legion but I also find it incredibly relaxing and love the memories that come flooding back.


Recently I was in Throne of Thunder for the first time in god knows how long, it's been so long I forgot how to get to the Isle of Thunder in the first place :)


I had such a good time in that raid - We didn't pull up any trees progress-wise, barely even touched Heroic iirc (no Mythic back then), but it was so much fun!
Dino-madness on Horridon, crazy turtle kicking on Tortos, flying around nests on Ji-Kun... I had a great time.


I don't think I've ever enjoyed raiding as much as I did in ToT, Mythic progression seems so serious in comparison.
I was the go-to guy back then which made a big difference, job needs doing and I'm there.
I was the one kicking the turtles, I was the one flying to nests (solo, was a nice challenge)... and I loved every minute of it.


Running through again at 120 had me constantly smiling as random moments sprang back into my mind - Didn't get the full set either so I'll be heading back again soon :)

Mythic Progression Coming to an End...?

As we continue to push towards G'Huun's end (8% - Getting there slowly) I still can't shake the malaise that has been hanging over my head for the past few months.


G'Huun itself is quite an interesting fight.  Unfortunately, it is dragged down by the crazy composition requirements that have been a feature throughout Uldir.


This time it is Warlocks... well, mostly Warlocks.
The fight has been nerfed so that you don't actually need 4 Warlocks now, although having less than 4 does restrict what classes you can bring to make up the rest of the team.


Anyway... we're closing in on the kill but held back by sloppy play in the earlier phases of the fight that frustrates me no end.
Why is it so difficult to get 'Mythic Raiders' to actually follow mechanics?
It's a constant struggle, like the default state of the raider is to stand still and shoot the boss (or jump and shoot the boss - BM Hunter) while my task is to convince, cajole, threaten them into doing anything else.


EVERY.
SINGLE.
BOSS.


It drives me insane!


The latest one is Blistering Boils.  They explode and the two nearest people get a debuff, pick up two debuffs (either at the same time or one after the other) and you are mind-controlled leaving your team no choice but to kill you.


So you have a little hokey cokey of people with the debuff moving away from new boils and people without the debuff moving towards them... in theory.
What we get is half the team just stood still regardless of the debuff.  It's blind luck whether or not we get through it half the time.


Why don't they get it??
Just do the f*cking mechanics!!


I know, deep in my heart, that the numbers don't really matter. 
It's the mechanics that win you the fight, get you the kill, but people just seem so absorbed by the numbers that they don't see it.
So they push back against any instruction that might lower their dps, or hps (healers tunnel vision worse than most but usually for better reasons) and we fail.
Then there is silence when I ask why nobody moved, why nobody soaked, why nobody actually did the mechanics.


I can't wait for it to be over.


But how over do I want it to be?


I'll be stepping down as Raid Leader, maybe Officer too, but I still enjoy the raiding.
The problem is... I only enjoy the raiding.
I don't enjoy the dungeons, rarely even doing one for the weekly.
I don't enjoy the islands, haven't done them for months.
World Quests... yeah, right.


My characters drop further and further behind.  It's not important at this stage of the tier but a new tier is on the horizon.
Do I want to force myself to complete that content just to keep up?


I'm sorely tempted by a more casual playstyle, forget the Cutting Edge achievements but only play the content I actually enjoy playing.


Decisions to make...

Freedom...

Had a great raid last night!

I haven't become an amazing Warlock overnight so I was still a bit rubbish.

And we didn't kill anything, just banged our heads against Mythrax for a few hours.

Still had a great night!

Because I wasn't Raid Leading.

I had missed the first two nights of progress on Mythrax plus couldn't get my microphone to work, so there was actually no option for me to be RL.  We've already set up my replacement to lead this boss anyway but it still added to my feeling of relaxation as we entered the raid.

For the first couple of pulls, the fight felt incredibly frantic as I tried to work things out and find my position in the arena.  All Ranged have to be spread for the majority of the fight so you need to find your space, then guard it and shoo away anyway who encroaches.

Once I had found a spot, it all settled down.  There are times when everything points your way and you spend more time running than fighting but usually the abilities are spread around the ranged team.
It's a recent nerf to the fight that has made one key ability only affect ranged which makes it more of a pain for me but thank god, because it would have been a nightmare if it affected the melee.  We had visions of Argus all over again.

Anyway, once I had a feel for the fight and my positioning, it calmed down and I could actually work at improving.  This is not something I feel like I have been able to do before now, leading took precedence over my own performance, I was just muddling through each fight trying to watch everyone else.

I realised that this is an aspect of raiding that I had really missed without even thinking about it, the gameplay min-maxing and the awesome sense of achievement as you improve until you eventually nail the fight... then cock it all up on the actual kill so you look like a moron on the kill vid but whatever.
Of course, that sense of achievement was replaced by the team nailing the fight and us getting the kill and, don't get me wrong, I loved that but I want the other feeling.

Am I just selfish?
Maybe I am, I certainly feel quite selfish at the moment.  I'm not a selfish player though, I'll still be offering to do the dirty jobs in the raid that wreck your dps.
Hmmm... that's not helping, still feel selfish.

I don't care, maybe it's just my time to be selfish.

Over Before It Began...

The tanking dream almost actually happened!

It was agreed, I would take over for the next tier of raiding and I had started to prepare... actually levelling a tank class (female blood elf paladin)!

Got to 120, started to gear up and even ran a couple of LFRs.  Tanking G'Huun, even on lfr, at 317ilvl is not recommended by the way.  The other bosses were all fine although Fetid Devourer hurt a bit, but on G'Huun it was impossible to keep me alive despite me rotating mitigation and cooldowns.
(Personally I think the healers could have done more as I wasn't getting much in the way of direct healing but I knew I was undergeared so left them to find a better tank)

Meanwhile, repeat kills on our Mythic team are proving almost as difficult as the first.  We even wiped on Taloc once, ok so our monk had forgotten to switch to tank spec but we still should have been able to kill it.
Some wipes on Mother that aren't easily explained, maybe too many people crossing at exactly the same moment so Spirit Link doesn't get chance to take effect?  Not sure, it's only ever 1 or 2 wipes anyway so not worth bothering too much.

The next 3 though are erratic to say the least, some weeks they take 1-2 attempts and some weeks it takes 10 or more! 
Except Fetid Devourer that is, which always takes 10+ but that's for another post.

With me falling out of love with the Warlock and the frustration of wiping to silly mistakes on bosses we have already killed multiple times, I've not been enjoying the raids very much.
Leading has been a real drag too, people know what to do on these fights but it is still a constant struggle to get them to do the right thing, to think about more than themselves in any given situation (Again Fetid, will have to do a Fetid post)

Our progress boss in now Zul but we barely get any time on him each week.  It's not a difficult boss for most of the raid but a few people have specific tasks that need some practice to get right, or at least get the timing down.
For the rest of us, it is pure Patchwerk!  Stand still and hit the boss as hard as you can to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, letting some rogues cheese you through the phase so you don't actually have to deal with any mechanics.
I hate it!
If Blizzard released the fight this way by design there would be uproar, yet we reduce it to this to make it easier.  And the more rogues you have, the easier it becomes.

Anyway, again a rant for another day.

We only have 3 rogues (some guilds gather as many as 6 or 7!) and 1 of them is an alt who, by his own admission, is completely shit at it.
'Only' having 3 rogues (2.5 really) means the dps check for our cheese strat is incredibly tight.

My Warlock is the lowest geared char in the raid, poorly itemised gear too as I stopped doing all of the extra-curricular activities needed to keep him up to date quite some time ago.
Give me some mechanics to deal with and I back myself to bridge the gap to higher-geared players but in a straight stand-up dps check? 
I was bottom of the pack quite consistently.
And in a bid to meet this tight dps check, I'm now riding the bench.
Sad times.

At first I wasn't really bothered.  I wasn't enjoying the raids anyway and I knew my dps was the lowest so it made sense.
The more I thought about it, the more bothered I was though.
It was actually poor execution of those few specific tasks that had slowed our progress, not my fractionally lower dps.
At the end of the day though, I just didn't like that I had let myself get into a position where I was the one being benched.

What to do about it?
Well, after a rant in our officer channel about identifying the real issues in a fight and cheese strats in general, I started thinking about what I wanted from the game these days.
Not normally one for introspection, it took me a while to sort through my thoughts...

I still want the challenge and thrill of Mythic raiding.
I also want to be relaxed and enjoy it.
I want to enjoy the extra stuff outside raids.

The answer was obvious and I should have known it from the start... Elemental Shaman!
Why did I ever doubt it?

Is It My Year?

Tap Tap.  Is this thing still on?

After my brief dalliance with the Arcane as Mage, I thought I had returned to my Shaman for good.  But no, this time I went even further and completely betrayed my Shamanistic roots by switching to Warlock for the new expansion!
Even worse... an Orc Warlock!

After such a betrayal, how could I come to post on this Shaman blog?
It just wouldn't be right.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it, let's move on :)

So why post now?
Well... I'M BACK!!
Yes, the Shaman is now a troll but he's back ready to take over in 8.1

Dismayed by the constantly poor position of the Shaman and the proposed changes for BfA, I was determined to play something which would be decent no matter what was thrown at it so chose the Warlock.

Demonology was the spec that really interested me so that's how I prepared and levelled, typically it was brokenly poor when the raids opened up (and before) so not really viable.

Affliction was the go-to spec for pretty much every situation so I reluctantly switched over.
The thing with Affliction is that it's all about those DoTs, and keeping those DoTs up takes a fair amount of concentration with all the other stuff going on.

This did not fit very well with me being raid leader...
Learning a new spec/class is one thing
Learning to raid with that spec is another
Learning to raid with that spec in new fights is another
Learning to raid with that spec while raid leading new fights is a whole other thing altogether!

I couldn't do it.

After every raid, I felt disappointed with my performance as both a Warlock and a Raid Leader.
I'm just not good enough to do that, I thought doing it from the start of the expansion might give me the time to become comfortable enough on the Warlock to allow it but it didn't.
I even had to ask for a night off raid-leading on one Heroic clear so I could do some half-decent dps and show the newer people in the guild that I could actually play the game.

It's a shame as I really thought I could do good things with the Warlock but don't really feel like I had the opportunity.
It was similar to the Mage, and a similar reason for switching back.  To be a decent RL, I need to be playing my Shaman!

Thankfully, the 8.1 changes are looking good for Elemental.  As long as the damage balancing is done properly (hahahaha), we should be fine.

That is the really sad part of this... my Shaman is only a few ilvls behind my Warlock now as I prepare for the change but even if I played it perfectly, I would still do more damage playing the Warlock as poorly as I do.

Ah well, I feel like the Warlock ship has sailed now.  It's Shaman time once more, which at least allows me to feel good about my play (and a bit better about my raid leading).

Or is it Shaman time?
The latest rumblings around the guild are that our main tank wants to switch back to his hunter!
Maybe it's time for me to step up!
I've boosted a paladin, sent her to Zuldazar and set her spec to Prot.
Ok, she's still 110 and I have no xp but...

Is it finally my year?