To make it clear: all the voices on this blog live in the same head. The blog subtitle should give it away, but in case that wasn’t clear…

Still, we try to make it flow as if there were a team of distinct individuals living and blogging here. It’s a little game, of sorts, that may or may not have some intrinsic value, at least to me.

The one thing that kills this suspension of disbelief – for me, anyway – is posting an entry as, say, Flora, getting comments, and then seeing my mustachioed countenance looking back from her comment box. Well, that’s my gravatar, what am I to do?

Gravatars are cool, but they’re tied to email addresses, and I’m not that thrilled by obtaining and maintaining twelve (at current count) email addresses.

GMail, however, for whatever reason, has an answer.

If you look at the most recent post, you’ll notice that Jasra’s responded to one comment, and she has her own gravatar. If you had admin access, like I do, you’d see that she has an unusual email address: grimmtooth+jasra at gmail. This is my email – grimmtooth at gmail – with her name added with a plus sign.

Turns out you can do that with any name, and most email-keyed services do indeed see these different email addresses as unique to each other. Thus, Flora and Jas both currently have gravatars, and more will be added as needed. They could even have their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts if I really wanted to get silly.

There are other benefits, too. For example, I can filter emails to my toons based on the t0-address, and then sort them accordingly.

Naturally, this assumes you use gmail. If not, you’re on your own.

I hope this proves useful to some of the other bloggish-rp-ish beings out there. Happy blogging!

With the Name Change feature, it’s possible to lose track of people in your Friends List in-game. Who’s that “Squiggish” person, and why is he or she in my flist, anyway?

Here’s a little trick to help keep track: use the “note” feature to record the original name you friended them under.  There will still be plenty of room for other stuff, as needed. It’s no guarantee you’ll remember the person, but at least you’ll have a better chance.

The Paladin of Paladins, He Who Dances In Knightly Armor, the master of the spin, jump, and bounce, is back!

I can never get enough of Shepiwot. Mostly because he annoys the dickens out of Flora.

Now he adds vehicular brainslaughter and spinning parachutes to his resume. Well played, sir. Well played.

HOW TO PALADIN XXXI

K over at More Dots!^2 has a great article on Group Etiquette up. The final section – “Raid Marks/Kill Order and Other Party Irritations” – contains the most universal content of that article. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it deserved its own article, because it doesn’t merely deal with group etiquette. If the things discussed there aren’t adhered to, you probably end up with a wipe, it’s that simple.

I commented over there on one thing I might have a slight disagreement with, but it’s situational, and I don’t think it needs a lot of chewing on, being both minor in nature and a matter of opinion.

What I’d like to do is reinforce that content with this to highlight the importance of what K’s saying.

It’s about control.

Now, there are some that might have a low opinion of us raiding types, but the thing about raiding is that if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. In the same way that PvP is not for everyone, good raiding has its challenges, too, and not everyone is built to deal well with them.

Foremost of these challenges is control. Control of the boss – and occasional adds – being paramount. The MT has to keep control of the boss by aggro management. Healers enable this by keeping the MT alive. And DPS make it pay off by killing the boss without pulling aggro. Pull aggro, and control is lost, and it all comes crashing down.

Control is more important than anything else.  If you lose control, DPS doesn’t matter, and healing doesn’t matter, because the boss is hitting people that aren’t prepared to be hit by the boss. If your OT isn’t on an add, s/he might get control back, and that is good, but that’s like relying on the same parachute for 30 years without a backup. Personally, I prefer not to take that risk. Keep control of the situation and work as a team.

K hits every nail on the head here, and probably says it all a lot better than I. The etiquette portions are icing on the cake, and also well worth the read.

Let’s have a word about groups, and the roles within a group.

Whether raiding or just running an instance, each encounter requires a group to employ certain roles for each member. These roles are universal, no matter what makeup you have individually.

If the people in your raid or party fill these roles properly, you will have a successful outing. If your group doesn’t at least implicitly understand, however, it may be a long day.

The three roles in any group in WoW are as follows:

• The Tank – This is the person that controls the fight so that everyone else can do what they do best.
• The Healer – The healer’s main task is to keep the tank up so that the fight remains under control.
• DPS – The damage dealers of the party, they burn down the bad guys, the sooner the better.

The Tank

Let’s start with the biggest punching bag of them all: the tank. This is the gal that stands up there letting the bad guys smack ‘er in the face, deliberately taking abuse so that everyone else can kill things.

The tank’s role can be best described as CONTROL. Control of the boss or mob or whatever; keeping that mob in a position that allows (a) healers to heal the whole party and (b) the DPS roles to kill the boss, fast.

What a tank generally uses to control a fight is “aggro”. This mysterious force is a measure of the anger that the mob feels towards the tank. The more aggro, the better, because that means that the fight will go smoothly as long as the tank doesn’t die.

You cannot have too much aggro on the designated tank. More aggro than is needed will not cause more damage to the tank. 1% aggro lead is as good as 1000% in this case.

The important thing for the tank to remember is that she has to generate more aggro than her healers, or rocks fall and everybody dies.

The important thing for DPS to remember is that generating more aggro than the tank is a bad thing.

Notice how I worded that. These are very important things to remember.

1. A healer will generate aggro by healing. The less healing that is needed, the less aggro that the priest will generate. Since the priest has no control over how much damage the tank takes, it is up to the tank to (a) be tough and (b) be provocative (to the beasties) so that the healer can keep her health topped off without worrying about attracting the mob.
2. On the other hand, DPS has complete control over the aggro that they are generating, and should be aware of it at all times. If edging to the top, you mitigate, or you die. Omen is your friend.

The Healer

The next leg of the triangle is the healer. The healer’s main job is to keep the tank upright and healthy. DPS can be healed if the tank is healthy, but not before. Actually, see this post for more thoughts on who gets healed, and when, before I confuse things more.

The healer has very few aggro management tools at hand, and thus requires as much help as possible. He has to keep the tanks upright, and that means lots of healing. However, this generates aggro against the healer, so the less able that the tank is, the more likely that the healer will be wearing the mob.

Priests, especially, are squishy and have very few hit points. This is bad.

The DPS

A tank and a healer can only do so much. While these two roles anchor and control the fight, everybody else more or less falls into the role of DPS, or damage.

DPS’ primary mission is to damage the enemy until it is dead, and to do so without killing the group.

Everybody says that DPS is easy. That pointing a gun and going “pew pew” requires one button, or at best two.

Well, uh, not quite. Any idiot can do that.

But a well-schooled DPSer will have more than one or two things going on, and those things are vital.

1. Damage the enemy. This is your raison d’etre in the game. You DPS, therefore you am. Your job is to provide massive amounts of sustained damage over time¹ .
2. However, if your damage causes the mob to come for you instead of the tank, we have lost control. Therefore, your second job, which preempts #1, is to ensure that the tank retains aggro over you.
3. And finally, you may be called upon to take one for the team. What if the priest starts to generate more aggro than the tank, then the mob breaks from the tank, and goes running right towards him? If you can, you get the mob’s attention and proceed to lick the floor, possibly saving your teammates’ certain death. How you do this is variable, of course. The equation is simple: dead healer < dead warlock.

The Compleat Triangle

So our triangle consists of: control, healing, and damage. If any of these fail, the raid dies.

• If the tank loses aggro, the priest will most likely get it next. Wipe.
• If the healer dies, or runs out of mana, the tank will die, then we lose control. Wipe.
• If the DPS fails or falls, then eventually the healer will run out of mana, then the tank dies, then we lose control. Wipe.

As you may have noticed, “Control” is probably the key to the whole affair. Your party or raid can take a lot of abuse as long as the mob stays where it is supposed to. Things go According to Plan.

What is all boils down to is two things:

• Knowing your role and how to fulfill it. For example, most DPS classes have aggro mitigation tools. Use them.
• Maintain mental discipline. It is easy to get lazy and fall back to a formula. That will get you so far before it wipes the raid. For example, crowd control unexpectedly breaks, and the mob heads straight for the priest. Will the hunter have the wherewithal to put his pet on the mob for the few seconds needed to get the situation under control, or the mage use Frost Nova? A trained and disciplined mind will be able to react with skill and confidence.

The Fourth Leg

Speaking of CC, there is a fourth aspect to any fight that is an outgrowth of the “Control” let, and that is “crowd control”. I don’t really count it as separate since it is pretty much the control aspect that we’re looking at here. The differences are that (a) the tank is not the one doing the controlling, and (b) there are many, unique ways for it to break. I will not go into each individually at this point, but I think that any person that knows his or her class, understands the role, and is vigilant will do as well as can be expected.

I will say, however, that the biggest risk here is unexpected breaks caused by your team mates. So be careful, learn your own side, and then train them how to work with it.

1. Borrowing a bit from BRK [↩]

My alt action the past few days has been on Illume, my until-recently-specced-arcane mage. I’ve been playing around with mage specs for leveling. I know that Frost is considered by many to be the best leveling spec out there thanks to the massive AoE damage, but it just wasn’t doing it for me. I’m thinking maybe Arcane for endgame, but right now I’ve respecced to Fire.

Which means that I got Pyroblast and a few other spells. Now, I was originally specced fire, and seemed to remember Pyro being more effective, and lo and behold I was right. For, when I respecced, I forgot to go in a retrain my skills, of which there were several higher levels of Pyro and others. How I survived the pirates is beyond me to figure.

So important safety tip, kids – always train!

Picked up a nice hat while grinding. Like it?