10man/25man disparity

We managed to get faction champions down on 25 this weekend, and downed Twin Val'kyr after as well. Tonight we still have Anub to go. We also cleared ToC with our 10man and worked up to Freya, and we will be extending the instance lock for the first time this week so we can get extra time in on Mims hard next week.

I got my first trophy of triumph as well. Which got me and Thror discussing about these things.

In a full clear 10man ToC on normal and heroic you have a chance to win max 5 tropies. This is if you actually clear the place with 50 attempts left in the pocket (attempts left divided by 10 gives number of tropies in tribute chest), since all of these tropies come from the tribute chest.

In a full clear 25man ToC on normal and heroic you have a chance to win max 5 tropies on normal, then 5 tier tokens on heroic. And this is without anything in the tribute.

Theoretically once you can clear the whole hard mode without losing attempts this makes that 25s get about 3 times as many as 10, which is ok, since the 25s have more people.

However, until you can do this, and you're in a 10man pure guild, and you cannot do a perfect hard mode (which I assume to be pretty impossible for most guilds in the beginning), you will get 1 or 2 tropies on 10, and still 10 tropies on 25.

Sticking this back in numbers:
10 players, 1 tropy = 10 % of your raid with a tier piece per week
25 players, 5 trophies + 5 tier pieces + at least 1 from chest = over 40% of your raid with a tier piece per week

I can understand that Blizzard didn't want the 25s to gear themselves up through the 10s too easily, but please allow the 10s to gear up through the 10s at least. This disparity is a bit too much to my taste.

Besides that, not only do 10s get less loot, they also get worse loot. I keep wondering why since there are plenty of fights that are actually harder on 10 then they are on 25, simply because of the lack of extra bodies.

I mean fair enough, a 25man is harder to organize than a 10man. But if Blizzard wants to reward that, the extra loot should go to the raidleader. They are the ones organizing.

Until then it would be nice if Blizzard would stop seeing the 25s as more important and recognize the 10s for what they are. Good steady raid instances, that are just as hard to clear, only hard in different ways.

I wuvs my tanks!

While I had wanted to talk about faction change, and I actually did switch my dranei shammie to a perky troll with pink braids, I am going to talk about something else first.

After this post on Aggro Junkie I was suddenly inspired to write about a different subject, so I figured I would just run with it, and go with faction change some other time.

My road to becoming a healer.
I started World of Warcraft as a warlock. A cute gnomie I figured would be cool to play. So while Thror started his pallie, I ran around being a destro lock. We both got our horsies at 40 that way. (this was in Vanilla, so yay for warlock and pallie horsies back then).

I played my warlock till 60, and on the side I was levelling a hunter. The warlock was my main in the guild, and for the longest time my hunter was in a different, much smaller guild. I had made friends there which I wasn't ready to give up. The solution eventually came in introducing the people from my hunter's tiny guild to FP and they merged happily.

TBC came and I ran my warlock through the gates of the burning legion, and started running around in Hellfire. My hunter followed only slowly. Thror and I went through Hellfire together, but halfway through Zangarmarsh something happened, and I suddenly lost the feel for my warlock.

At that same time I had started levelling a shammie, I felt I had to do the whole dranei thing at least once, so why wouldn't I also play the new alliance class. She raced through content, it was amazing how fast I could level an enhancement shammie.

She reached 80 before my warlock did, and I announced an official main change. I would be the dual wielding axing shammie. It was great.

Until we started raiding.

Though I did pretty darn good on my shammie, my group needed healers more and more often, and I was asked more to heal on my shaman. I didn't like it.

Shaman healing was slow, and clunky compared to the fast paced enhance spec. Chain healing took forever, and chain heal was the only way to go back then. Besides that, I felt mostly like a walking trinket, since my totems seem to be the most important thing I brought to a raid. Of course it wasn't so, but everything I did on my shammie as a healer seem to take forever compared to what buttons I could press on my shammie as enhance.

So one day I sat down, and started thinking. I spoke to my then raidleader, and said that I wouldn't mind switching to become a healer, but not on the shaman. If I would have to heal, I would do it on my priest.

Problem... My priest was only 43 or so at that point. And we needed healers now.

I put my shoulders under it, and started levelling. Within a week not only did my priest level to 70, she was also ready to start healing Kara. (And yes, I did have a job and other things to go to. )

I was sold. I was addicted. I was a healer.

I couldn't have done all this without having several tanks very ready to run me through dungeons, help me level, and help me get gear. She was lucky enough to get a pretty okish healing set kitted out through the level 70 dungeons, and my tanks were patient enough to run me through.

The tank/healer relationship
The moment you start levelling a healer you start developing a bond with your tanks. The tank's first responsibility is to keep the healers alive, and the healer's firs priority is to keep the tank alive.

I ask my tanks things about their role and class, so I can do a better job, so I can heal them better. And in return they keep an eye on not running out of los. And the first thing that a tank will do when additional mobs run in is make sure the healer is free from agro so they can do their job.

Communication is key, and not only the business like communication. As I've progressed in content, it became more and more important to know my tanks. To know how they would react to situations. To know how much health they had, and how much damage they would be able to mitigate, dodge, and block.

Over time I also got to know which abilities of theirs I can call on to save lives. Which abilties are their oh shit buttons, and how working together will make the experience so much more fun.

It did help that Thror went from healing to tanking in TBC and that I had a handy test subject available, but I could hardly expect there to be a paladin tank every time. So I started reading tanking blogs, and elitist jerks forums.

This is from my healer point of view, but I know that all good tanks have gone through the same from the other side. They need to know which abilities they can call on from a healer if they need it. They need to have complete trust in their healer(s) to keep them standing, and to allow them to do their job.

My tanks
To me personally dps is a way to let go of stress, rawr! But nowadays within a dungeon I can say that as long as one of the very good tanks I know comes along, we can basically bring any 3 people along to a heroic, and we'll make it. If need be the tank and myself will finish it together.

Of course dps is important. And the dps in my 10man (or in pugtastic nowadays for that matter) is very dear to me. Good dps makes the fight easier. The better the dps, the faster a fight goes, the less shit you have to deal with since there is less time for a mob to throw out shit.

In fact, the content that my 10man is currently working on couldn't be done without our outstanding dps. But the tank/healer relationship is special.

While I once thought about tanks as a meatshield way back when, something to make sure I could keep seeing the high numbers, as a healer my tanks are special to me.

My tanks are my big, cuddly protectors who keep me safe from harm. Who make sure that the raid lives, and who throw themselves in front of the raid to heroicly stand up against the big baddie.

They stand in front and shout out to the boss, "Hey dude, hit me, not my friends!"

I suggest that we create an international 'Wuv your tank' day, and give them a little extra love.

I wuvs my tanks!

Faction Change Available

Apparently the faction change feature that people have spoken about so often is already available in the US. So if I would want to change in my nightelf for an undead lady I could. Does make me wonder how many people would actually want to use it, and how you go about chosing your counterpart on the other side.

I guess horde has never seen this many belfs before? I'll get back to it in a post later on the day, will have to spend some time thing about it.

Things to check out in the meantime:

• Faction Change FAQ

In other news, some of the 5man ToC nonsensical stuff is going to be adressed in 3.2.2, woot!

Coliseum for Dummies: Twin Valkyrs

We did Twin Valkys last weekend in our 10, unfortunately faction champions proved an obstacle in our 25s, and so we skipped out of the rest of ToC and almost full cleared Ulduar with that group instead.

Tactics for the 25 are the same however, and from what I understood from the guild group who did get champions down on 25 they're as much of a pushover in 25s, as they are in 10s.

• Divide into 2 groups, each with a tank and healer(s)
• Group 1 stand at white portal, group 2 stand at black portal
• Click. Group 1 will have white circles underneath their feat, group 2 black circles
  
• Attack the Valkyr of the opposite color, next to the portal they are flying at
• Grab orbs of your color circle, avoid orbs of the opposite color
• When the vortex thing in the middle comes up, everybody should be the color of the vortex, so click on a portal to take that color (if you're already the right color you don't have to do anything)
• When a valkyr shields herself everybody (except tank and healer(s) of the other valkyr) needs to switch to the color of that valkyr and attack to get the shield down
• Rinse and repeat
  

Special tip: pick up manymany orbs, it's a lot of fun and you get to zoom around like a mad man. At 100 you get a special buff.

• Loot and full overview of abilities on MMO-Champion
  

This really is a fun fight, and on normal not hard at all. A relief after champions actually. Enjoy!

Project GenderBender by Rivs

Rivs has started out a small project. He started a female dranei and is now trying to figure out if gamers react differently to female gamers then they do to male gamers.

My personal experience is that it generally doesn't make too much of a difference, but sometimes you have those idiots...

It goes something like this:

"R u a grl irl?"

I don't know why, but the people who feel the need to ask these silly questions hardly ever seem to be able to type full words.

"Yup"

"Srsly?"

"Yup"

"Oh..."

By that time they run out of stuff to say or they start telling me how sexy I am.

"Ur so hot!"

"Really? you go for pixelated then?"

This is when you can almost hear them think what on earth that difficult word is.

"Huh?"

"Yah, go learn some English before you try to chat up intelligent females"

If it does get to this point, generally they are getting annoyed with me or they wander off. I've had from ignores to "Biotch" things happen.

Oh, and then there is the vent stories...

My native language isn't English, though I speak it fluently, so yes, I speak English with an accent. So sometimes there are men (rarely women) who feel they should comment on how sexy my accent is on vent. I pug, quite a bit, and in my guild I've never had this problem, but on the pug vents I still run into this sometimes.

And yaknow, if it would be once just to figure out where I come from, "Cool accent, where are you from?" type of deal, I would be totally cool with it. But there are a couple who keep drewling over it. I'm woman enough to ignore them. I am there to raid lead, but when it does get out of hand I do call them back and ask them to keep it in.

I also once had a guy who went completely off his rocker with the /lick command. I suddenly knew where to find the /slap command as well. Which is a thing I would actually do IRL as well. There are just things that I cannot accept.

Lets face it, most women know that they can expect some oddness from the male species out there once it's known that they have boobies. But generally it's not too bad, or if it does really bother you, all you have to do is say nothing ;)

It's an interesting project Rivs has going, go read it ^_^