Halion Loot and strategy items to note

Welcome to Kalecgos 2.0 with your very own colorful fire to stand in. Tankspot strategy guide (although i think the accent on the guy at Horde review is nicer 😉

Spells of note:

Fiery Combustion
Unlimited range
Instant

Engulfs an enemy target in flame, dealing 4000 Fire damage every 2 sec. Every time Fiery Combustion deals damage, it generates a Mark of Combustion charge on the target. When Combustion fades or is dispelled, it unleashes a patch of fire proportional in size to the number of charges present at the time. Either curse or magic removal may cleanse this affliction.

Soul Consumption
Unlimited range
Instant

Engulfs an enemy target in dark energy, dealing 4000 Shadow damage every 2 sec. Every time Soul Consumption deals damage, it generates a Mark of Consumption charge on the target. When Consumption fades or is dispelled, it unleashes a dark explosion proportional to the number of charges present at the time. Either curse or magic removal may cleanse this affliction.

Lewt Lewt Lewt, joyous lewt!!

why i am even bothering to look up the new Halion Heroic loot, i don’t know. With my guild at 11/12 in heroic ICC, and the fairest DKP loot distribution method I have ever experienced, I have more BIS stuff than a girl could wish for now. but nonetheless, i will post.

A nice cloak…

Cloak of Burning Dusk	compared to BIS	Frostbinder’s Shredded Cape
Cloak of Burning Dusk Heroic Binds when picked up Back 189 Armor +83 Stamina +83 Intellect Red Socket Requires Level 80 Item Level 284 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 65. Equip: Improves haste rating by 73. Equip: Increases spell power by 118. Sell Price: 7 93 15		Frostbinder’s Shredded Cape Heroic Binds when picked up Back 185 Armor +78 Stamina +78 Intellect Yellow Socket Socket Bonus: +5 Spell Power Requires Level 80 Item Level 277 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 68 (1.48% @ L80). Equip: Improves haste rating by 60 (1.83% @ L80). Equip: Increases spell power by 110. Sell Price: 8 12 16

Some Bracers….

Bracers of Fiery Night	compared to BIS ( i am stuck with the icky icy spirit ones)	Death Surgeon’s Sleeves
Bracers of Fiery Night Heroic Binds when picked up Wrist Cloth 165 Armor +83 Stamina +83 Intellect Red Socket Durability 35 / 35 Requires Level 80 Item Level 284 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 65. Equip: Improves haste rating by 73. Equip: Increases spell power by 118. Sell Price: 5 67 6		Death Surgeon’s Sleeves Heroic Binds when picked up Wrist Cloth 162 Armor +78 Stamina +78 Intellect +68 Spirit Blue Socket Socket Bonus: +5 Spell Power Durability 35 / 35 Requires Level 80 Item Level 277 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 60 (1.31% @ L80). Equip: Increases spell power by 110. Sell Price: 5 51 49

a good ring….

Ring of Phased Regeneration	compared to BIS ring	Ring of Rapid Ascent
Ring of Phased Regeneration Heroic Binds when picked up Unique-Equipped Finger +83 Stamina +83 Intellect Red Socket Requires Level 80 Item Level 284 Equip: Improves haste rating by 65. Equip: Restores 36 mana per 5 sec. Equip: Increases spell power by 118. Sell Price: 7 56 23		Ring of Rapid Ascent Heroic Binds when picked up Unique-Equipped Finger +78 Stamina +78 Intellect Blue Socket Socket Bonus: +5 Spell Power Requires Level 80 Item Level 277 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 68 (1.48% @ L80). Equip: Improves haste rating by 60 (1.83% @ L80). Equip: Increases spell power by 110. Sell Price: 7 56 23

Trinket Palooza….

Glowing Twilight Scale	compared to current BIS trink	Althor’s Abacus
Glowing Twilight Scale Heroic Binds when picked up Unique Trinket Requires Level 80 Item Level 284 Equip: Increases spell power by 215. Use: For the next 15 sec, each time your direct healing spells heal a target you cause the target of your heal to heal themselves and friends within 10 yards for 402 each sec for 6 sec. Sell Price: 11 39 40		Althor’s Abacus Heroic Binds when picked up Unique Trinket Requires Level 80 Item Level 277 Equip: Increases spell power by 201. Equip: Each time your spells heal a target you have a chance to cause another nearby friendly target to be instantly healed for 6280 to 7298. Sell Price: 11 39 40

the leather stuff:

Phaseshifter’s Bracers	compared to BIS	Bracers of Eternal Dreaming
Phaseshifter’s Bracers Heroic Binds when picked up Wrist Leather 311 Armor +83 Stamina +83 Intellect Yellow Socket Durability 40 / 40 Requires Level 80 Item Level 284 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 73. Equip: Improves haste rating by 65. Equip: Increases spell power by 118. Sell Price: 6 63 49		Bracers of Eternal Dreaming Heroic Binds when picked up Wrist Leather 304 Armor +78 Stamina +78 Intellect +68 Spirit Blue Socket Socket Bonus: +5 Spell Power Durability 40 / 40 Requires Level 80 Item Level 277 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 60 (1.31% @ L80). Equip: Increases spell power by 110. Sell Price: 6 99 46

On a VERY interesting note:

Charred Twilight Scale
Heroic
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Requires Level 80
Item Level 284

Equip: Improves haste rating by 184.

Equip: Your damaging spells have a chance to grant 861 spell power for 15 sec.
Sell Price: 11 39 40

giggle/rant/sob of the day

Reading this post about healing the Lich King fight and I come across the humorous line,

“if for some reason you still run with a group of window lickers that still don’t understand the benefits and abilities of a discipline priest, this fight alone should change their mind.”

I cant help but laugh. I mean, I cry a little too, but I am laughing. My guildies certainly don’t think they are window lickers (in fact some of them kinda have a high opinion of themselves), but there are still far too many of the influential people in this guild that honestly think they are carrying the guild disc priest. You know.. the one who is always so low low low on direct healing numbers.

It’s not like I am a bad. I do my part, I research the fights before we get to a new boss and I don’t make any more mistakes than anyone else. Plus I am a priest, I survive some crazy stuff due to my CD’s and burst healing. But because the default healing chart that comes with Recount is only for direct heals, and mitigation is a new concept to most WoW players, there are some who look at that chart or any deviation in my performance as proof I am not pulling my weight. Human psychology dictates that once a person is convinced that another is a bad at something, even if this person isn’t any better or worse than any other, the person in question must work ten times harder to disprove the erroneous opinion. Any mistake or error on their part is normally magnified ten times worse as proof of their earlier (and in this case wrong) opinion.

On the two non-disc friendly fights I keep my head above water. On BQ I float in the upper middle of the chart and on dreamwalker I just focus on tank healing, PI the Pally, and feel grateful I am not sent out of the room in shame. But in the rest of the fights my output varies from leading with as much as 44% of the overall healing to being head to head, toe to toe with the two other top healers in the guild.

But it doesn’t make for a fun evening when you are being doubted and constantly under fire. From being called out  in vent by an officer about my low healing output in Dreamwalker, to having one guild member recently flip out and Gquit during a raid after telling me that the only reason I am in this guild is that people feel sorry for me, it’s a nightly struggle to just keep my sanity over what I know I am contributing. The worst time I have of it is in my ten man group where every week I have to gently but firmly point out that whatever heroic encounter we are learning at the moment would not be better done with me as a Holy Priest. Usually posting the Heal+absorb meter quiets the demands for me to stop being a Disc Scrubb, but the ensuing comments from showing just how much further ahead my output is on the meter switches to resentful statements like “gee wish I only had to spam one button to top meters” (a resto drood said that last week) and “you can tell a healer is good based on their direct heals”,  and my personal all-time favorite, “your legendary mace is healing for you, so absorbs don’t count on the meters”. You really cant win if people don’t want to change.

All this would come to naught if it weren’t for two really awesome officers in my guild. Without these two people having my back, I probably wouldn’t have made it past the first month with this guild. They lobby constantly to educate others on how a Disc Priest heals, and always show support for me when the other officers question my abilities and direct heal numbers. And to be quite honest, not everyone feels this way. Most guildies understand that a disc priest’s most beneficial utilities to a raid wont show up on a direct heal meter, and the others trust the healing lead who advocates on my behalf.

That said, I think it’s disheartening that my two friends have to work so hard for tolerance of such a necessary raid healing class at a time in the expansion when everyone should know what the other classes can do, and show team support even if they don’t. But there you have it. People are people and they will always fuss and fidget about everything under the sun.

She cant be serious?

Every time a new Spiritual Guidance article comes out, I rush over to WoW.com full of hope that there is something interesting and informative being published. But lately, that joy is tarnished into wondering if the author has gotten the facts right on yet another rehash of the same old priest mash. Unfortunately, it’s not showing any signs of changing for the better. =(

This time the latest how-to article for Priests is aimed at mediocre min-maxxing as the most practical ways to spec in late Xpac content like ICC. To be fair, Dawn always posts a disclaimer that some people may see things differently than she does or remember things in a different way. But one teeny line saying “YMMV” doesn’t give a proper journalistic neutral tone to a gigantic post about the way she states the priest class works. I am not sure if its her absolute statements about “how things are” or her over-confidence and then missed marks on theory-crafting, but I rarely see eye to eye with the way she presents the priest class.

Call me cranky, but I think after so many months of this she’d start learning how to not make so many absolute statements and start accepting that this game and the class is more complex than most people have time to sift through. Her job is to explain things and give us insight – not dumb it down and get it wrong. Most topics presented in the Spiritual Guidance column seem like unusual interpretations of threads long ago discussed on Plusheal.com or strange histories that don’t jive with the way most of us old timers remember things. I am not sure how she can get things wrong when most of what she is writing about has already been blogged to death on most other Healing sites.

Some of the best content she has published is clear in her great sense of humor. She is wonderful about making jokes and creating cool names for the Disc Healer. That, in and of itself is why I keep coming back. I really really *want* to like her. Unfortunately, some of the worst is bragging about her gear score, links to her personal blog, and “follow me” links for her twitter.

I’d like to see something new, not another regurgitation of the same old same old grabbed hastily from various websites that the community already reads. Fact checking, and making sure what you post is mathematically accurate and plausible is a nice step too. I also wish I had more strength of limb and life and had the energy to cheerfully and politely give a counter point to what I see as the worst interpretations she presents as facts. But I can’t. I only have so much time, so much energy and so much patience. My health comes first.

Its getting annoying Dawn. Please start making sense.

* Added on 4/20/2010 while researching more about Dawn, in an effort to understand her better, I came across this post between her and zusterke this morning. this shows the girl has her stuff together. Now.. the question remains, how do we get her to show she knows what she knows in her column.

Lord of the Rings Online – my perspective

“We can not get out. They have taken the Bridge and the Second Hall. Frár and Lóni and Náli fell there. The pool is up to the wall at the Westgate. The Watcher in the water took Óin. We can not get out. The end comes. Drums, drums in the deep. They are coming.” ~ Ori, Book of Mazarbul

If you think that the above quote is exciting, then you already have an idea about how you will feel the minute you step into the game. From the very first “how to play” newbie tutorial, Lord of The Rings Online throws you into the role of a hero and lands you deep into the action right away. I loved how the makers of the game wed you to the lore and the storyline so quickly. Typical newb quests, such as killing ten goblins doesn’t seem so redundant when you are doing it to save your town from a second invasion like the one you just lived through.

I started off with a recommended starter character on Silverlode and was really happy with the ease that I picked up the game play. I absolutely loved the fact that they made a main healing class, the Minstrel, one of the easiest to learn. I quickly rolled a cool Elf Minstrel and ran around in pure bliss delivering Jack Black style Epic Rock-n-Roll riffs to slay the evil in the land. I tried a Hobbit Hunter on Brandywine for a little while, and then went back to Silverlode for my third character, an Elf Rune-keeper. Rune-keepers are billed as an “advanced class” but I found it very easy to play. The Rune-keeper is basically a mage with hots.. yes.. heals over time spells.. i know.. its crazy.. but there it is. I envisioned the night the devs came up with this class: it had to have been conceived either at the end of a long night after a particularly successful office party, or perhaps on some zen hippy retreat designed to inspire creativity through herbal brownies. I mean its crazy cool… its a freaking MAGE WITH HOTS for crying out loud. OMGZ… its wonderful and fun and enhances survivability in crazy situations. Which.. if you read on, you will see happens sometimes.

One of the coolest things about this game is, early on, is that its hard to get killed as a low level player if you are doing things the way you are supposed to. Many people make it to level 15 and beyond without dying once, and they even hand out titles every five levels to encourage the mini-competition. I made it to 16 on my Mini before Strider killed me in a group instance (I didn’t know it was for groups only – I may have been so giddy about meeting Strider I may have skipped reading some of the quest text), and I got to 12 on my Rune-keeper before a random questor died with a string of mobs chasing him out of some ruins. The evil Goblins chasing the now-dead player turned back and spotted me trying to squeeze by. I think I heard a “squee” of glee as they smushed me into bits. You see.. that’s one of the drawbacks to this game. Hostile NPC’s in the leveling zones don’t just tamely run back to their patrol points like they do in WoW if they aggro on something. They tend to chase you for for an unbelievably long time as you run screaming in terror across a zone. When they finally do give up and run back, if someone wanders into their return path, they take them out too. The concept gets a little painful if you try to just ride through a bunch of mobs to get to your questing area. Like most MMO’s, a player can pick up adds like velcro as they sail past them on their mount. But in LoTRO the questing zones are huge and spread out, and these mobs just don’t seem to want to give up. You can end up with a chain of a dozen mobs taking pot-shots on you if you try to blow through their turf. Same thing happens if you try to back out of a bad pull and back into a pat or a respawn. Things respawn VERY fast in this game. You will end up running half way to Bree before you get clear of them, or just end up being overwhelmed.

But us healers aren’t scared of death. We see it all the time. In fact we LAUGH in the face of death as we heal our friends to full health and save the day.. or something like that. In LoTRO death isn’t too bad either. The first time you scrubb it up and die, you get a choice of ressing right on the spot, or “retreating” a ways away to a graveyard (which is a cool circle of stones). If you choose to revive on the spot, you get a cool down that doesn’t let you do insta-revive again for a few hours. Subsequent deaths before the cool down is up send you directly to the circle of stones.

Some of the mechanics of the game are a little different and it took this WoW girl some time getting used to them. There is a glowing ring above a level appropriate quest giver’s head, and it glows a little redder if the NPC is ready to receive your quest. I found it hard to tell the difference until I got rather close, but some people have no problem with it. As well, if a NPC is a trainer or a Stable Master guy (you can rent fast transport between major areas, like the gryphons in WoW, only by land), the glowing ring is totally obscured by the square icon over their head which denotes that they are a utility NPC. Luckily there is a VERY good map system that allows you to set, or filter out Point’s of Interest (much like EQMaps addon) so you can see only quest givers or receivers in either your mini map or your main map or both. Its easy to set it up just how you like.

Aggro. You know and I know it ain’t cool. And its *ALWAYS* important to know which mobs are gonna flip out if you get near them and which ones don’t. Well, in the ten days I played this game I couldn’t figure it out. Other than “Signature” mobs, which are like micro bosses for solo questing and have a bright red outline around their nameplates and a red bar instead of a green life bar, there wasn’t any visual difference between hostile mobs and neutral mobs. Some Mobs with normal green life bars attacked me, and ones with yellow life bars sometimes did too. And they sometimes didn’t. It wasn’t easy to tell what they’d do. Generally if it was labeled “baby” or “young” bear/goblin/spider/whatever, it didn’t attack. But it sometimes could threaten to attack and if you didn’t move away fast enough. If you just stood there, it would taunt, then charge you. Oh! and the graphic when a mob went for you was rather cute.. It was this little puff of steam exploding over their head like they had just blew their top and were thinking, “That’s IT!! That hobbit’s getting a right good butt kicking!”.

That brings me to my next point. The graphics are amazing. No, really, they are. The bears really acted like bears; swimming in the rivers and standing up and sitting, etc. The trees moved slightly in the wind, and not all the leaves at the same time like a stiff solid object, but the leaves and branches flowed like wind was moving them around. I think the only graphics I wasn’t pleased with was the hair on the avatars. But since most people cover it with helmets anyway, Its kinda a wash. Another thing I should mention, on busy days when a lot of people were online, the connection for processing the data to my client was a little jittery and occasionally my camera would spin out of control and I’d find myself pointing a different direction – or worse – I once ended up with my camera pointing at the bottom side of my mount. Not a pretty sight.

Anyway, amazing graphics mean people need somewhat current computers to play this game. Which guarantees if you make it to end game raiding in LoTRO, there wont be a lot of mysterious DC’s in raid which are usually blamed on ISP’s and not ever on aging NIC’s and inferior memory cards. The UI is completely customizable and you can re size and move every element like chat screens, name plates, action bars, and warning windows, to a different place on your screen. And while its not as versatile nor convenient as many of the mods I run in World of Warcraft, it does mean that you don’t have to suffer with the type on the screen too small or the name plates on the far bleeding edges of your screen or other UI elements that people like to customize. I found the NPC selling system to be clunky and time consuming, but it was nice to be able to repair almost everywhere I went. I couldn’t access the AH or the Mail as a trial so I cant comment about that here, but I hear the AH is very pricey. A nice thing with the NPC vendors is that they let you lock items so you don’t accidentally sell things. As well, you can also sort and filter your sell-able items in your bags according to quality so you can get the bits and pieces we call vendor trash out of your bags faster. The fact that I didn’t discover this feature until about nine days into my trial is a little annoying, but not everyone is going to agree on which features are intuitive and which aren’t.

And lastly, I bring out the best point of LoTRO.. the community. With few exceptions, it seemed like a real great group of mature, serious MMO players inhabited Middle Earth. They came across to me as helpful and seemed fully engaged in the game, not hyper focused on besting each other with coolness and put downs. It was a nice change from the atmosphere that pervades WoW at times and only once or twice did I run across someone bragging about how cool they were in another game or ninjaing farming nodes and mobs. Most players seemed willing to help answer questions in chat, and when you could find enough people online, the chat channels were populated with people looking for groups to run things. I ran across lots of players with (mostly) lore-appropriate names like Linaric (the Elf Minstrel) and Miarien (Elf Rune-keeper), although there was a share of normal generic MMO names too. Didn’t see a single avatar called roflcopterpwnstarr though. Even LoTRO’s guild names seemed neat. I was impressed by the names I came across that ran the gamut from Silverlode’s famous casual guild called, “Fat Smokin’ Hobbits” to top raiding guilds named “Grey Host”. However, some days the newbie zones on the two servers on which I played were like a ghost town. On particularly lonesome days, I could hear the echoes in trade chat when someone asked a question and you’d go hours without seeing another player if you were out in the wild. While this makes for superior farming (all the lodes are mine!!) and solo questing, it sucks if you want to advance in the game past level 20 with the optimal character traits and skills. From what I was able to understand in the Lorebook, the way the LoTRO is laid out the devs keep you invested in the story by making completing the main quest line mandatory. Which, unfortunately, have group instance runs.

So, the question remains.. will I subscribe to LoTRO? Would I be willing to stop raiding in WoW to play there full time? Yes and no. I definitely will be coming back to LoTRO to play as a casual player. Even now I cant stop thinking about the game, and my trial ran out five days ago. I loved the story lines, feel entwined in the main plot and remain hopeful I can find a Kinship (Guild) that will want to help a scrubby healer with a few grouping quests and move me along in my leveling journey.

Will I leave WoW for this game when I reach level cap? At this point I can firmly say no. I will not. Although I have been told that the high level zones have more players, from what I saw in Bree and the Shire, LoTRO just doesn’t look like it has enough subscribers playing this game to make raiding on a full scale level a viable thing for me. Hardcore raiding is just as important to me as Casual-style questing and I love to fully explore every facet of the games I play. When I raid I **really** like pushing new content, getting world first titles and wiping endlessly… i mean.. ‘learning’ the fights before everyone else has written their guides and made their videos. I thrive on it to be honest. And unfortunately, I had a hard enough time meeting leveling players to chat with and make friends during my ten day LoTRO stint. Maybe I should delay the decision, but as things stand now, I cant imagine how empty things will be if I hit end game and wanted to start the gear grind in order to raid. Maybe subscriptions will pick up. Maybe the end zone areas really are dripping with awesome raiding and fellowship (groups)opportunities.

Maybe… Maybe… Maybe.

I am determined to find out ;D

Death is defeated. At last Azeroth can breathe free…

It feels pretty nice to have gotten this achievement completed at last. Ulduar 10 man and 25man is 100% complete for me. Next goal is the Argent Defender Title which comes from Trial of the Grand Crusader’s ‘A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity’ achievement.

Effective habits of world class guilds

Last night was another progression night on The Lich King. We hit ICC about 8pm and were up on the King’s platform by 8:20. It was a great night full of hopeful optimism. Everyone was primed. Everyone expected a quick kill. When we had left off on the Lk on Thursday, we had been successfully hitting the end of phase three and everyone was just finalizing the learning process. It seemed that all that stood in our way was perfecting Val’kyr positioning.

So, when we got up there, we learned the big change from Thursday was we had a new Main Tank learning the fight. The DK who had been respeccing  to Tank this fight cheerfully stepped aside and the Bear Tank who rolled in off vacation took his spot. I was really impressed with how fast our beloved Bear was learning the stages and positioning, and he rarely made the same mistake twice. He really is a great Tank. After about two hours of learning the ropes and other minor readjustments, it really felt like we were back on track with where we stopped last Thursday.  The Raid Leader was asked if we could take a break, but decided we didn’t need it because with a little more persistence and some luck, he felt that we’d have that fight down.

Well, as to be expected, the player base got more and more fatigued, and avoidable mistakes started happening.  For the first time we hit the end of Phase three and immediately wiped to Endless Winter and the cone shadow damage thingie (only ten of us in the raid had the kill on 10man and we were all caught off guard). Occasionally we lost key people to spell misses for Necrotic Plague. Val’kyr positioning got crazy when one of the raiders who was being helpful and marking collapse points for part of the night ran out of Elune Stones. Several people got tense as we tried to gather on the side of the middle without using any defining marks and started speaking over each other in vent to “go here” and “MOVE to the SIDE” forgetting that only they knew which “here” or “the side” they were talking about.

Well, to say the least, it was a challenging night. But I think that our experience is pretty typical of most top-end guilds and no better or worse than most. However, over the last five years of playing this game, I have met some pretty smart strategists and gamers. From conversations with these brilliant people, and from being one of the few players still around who has killed every single boss in this game and seen the same old mechanics repeated in new fights many many times over, you pick stuff up, you know? You have either seen it done or heard about it, and from running with new people on different realms you learn that there is always more than one good way to do anything.

One of the things I love about this game is it’s excellent combat structure and the ability to use your brain over brawn to complete many of the encounters. The best of the best raiders out there use as many “crutches” as possible to simplify and streamline encounters so their excellent player base can do what they do best: down the encounters FAST. So, I thought I would share some basic concepts about techniques that I have learned over my five years of raiding that would have helped last night’s raid – and might have even got us the kill we wanted last night. And yes, I offered all these suggestions to an officer before I posted these here.

Here is my list of four ideas that would have helped us kill the Lich King sooner

A) Most people know that Healers do not stack hit gear. Dispels and Cure/Abolish’s can and do miss which causes dispels to occasionally.. well.. miss. I have seen log files showing misses can happen up to 34% of the time DESPITE what people think they should do. The blue posters on the forums know about this and they gently remind us that its all part of the RNG; some fights will be better than other fights and the tooltip for Abolish Disease clearly states that the spell is an “attempt”. As well, not all spells that land on a player are level 80 spells. One of Blizzard’s little fun tricks is to have a level 83 spell land on a player, thus requiring hit gear to avoid the miss RNG. Repeating the mistake of expecting classes that aren’t hit capped to perform mission-critical dispels such as Fusion Punch on the Steelbreaker tank, removing the Mind Control in the pre-nerfed Yogg, and curing the Necrotic Plague disease the Lich King fight is leaving too much RNG to chance. While healers are fine for most dispel jobs, such as Faction Champs in ToGC, or Hodir’s Freeze, if you want a sure kill on the progression fight, raid leaders should request that hit capped DPS like a a ret pally, shaman or a shadow priest be put on that critical job. Greyson over at Fusion (a top 50 Guild) got a chuckle when I told him that most guilds don’t make anyone but healers do that job.

B) Not using raid symbols or flares or Elune Stones to mark positions on a new boss fight just makes the encounter harder for everyone REGARDLESS of skill or aptitude. Might uses them, (a top 20 Guild) and in many world first videos I see these things thrown all over the boss’s floor or floating over player’s heads or whatever. Easily seen markers are not a crutch for bad players, and regarding them as such is just simple egotism that has no place in a top end guild. Symbols and markers are put in the game to help us. They make scanning the raid and repositioning faster for excellent players, and allows the less experienced players to keep up with the rest of the raid and not hold people back due to learning curve confusion.

C) Slotting someone new, no matter how talented they are, into the most critical spot of a complex, multi-stage progression boss fight that is still being learned and expecting them to not stumble or wipe the raid as they learn the fight is not matching expectations to experience and reality. No one, no matter how great they are, can walk into a boss fight as epic as the last boss in an expansion, and perform it perfectly without a few hits and misses. Well, maybe Chuck Norris can, but real humans cant. Failing to match expectations (of a quick kill) to experience (newbie) by training the new person about the positioning and the way the mechanics work with a few attempts as DPS, or by taking them on a ten man run before launching them into your 25man progression fight, is not fair to the rest of your team. Which leads me to my next point..

D) Denying modest breaks and expecting response times and reactions to be as fresh four hours later as they were at the beginning of a night is bad leadership and somewhat neglectful of the health of your raiders and the loyalty they place in your hands. Repeating the same pattern by only allowing breaks on farm nights, and not on progression nights when top performance and raid-aware game play is super important can be detrimental to fast progression. Announce when the breaks will happen, and start raids on time. If someone is still in IF or /afk when we pull, or needs to go back to the bank because they forgot whatever, be brave and drop-them-from-the-raid. Really. You can do it, and you know what? Guild members will benefit by seeing the effort to be prepared and on-time being rewarded by being slotted for runs. Plus the guild itself will gain a reputation for being punctual that will attract raiders who are mature and responsible. I know several top 100 guilds that take 20 minute breaks on progression nights. Its the farm nights that are usually the fast get-in-kill-them-all-and-get-out sort of nights.