I think most are aware that it can be done with almost anything, but there’s two things at play.
People want the highest chance to be invited to a Raid, so they’ll choose the classes and specs that people want. Second issue is people want the fastest easiest route to gear. Adding on 30 minutes of raid time is something people do not want.
One thing I was fooled of over the years was this whole mentality of “it feels better to work for what have you have” when it comes to WoW loot. But the truth is the majority want quick and ez purples.
That’s why blizzard eventually gave away free epics in future expansions. It’s what people wanted. They still do.
Its one thing to inform someone of a mistake, but acting all smug and condescending about it and dragging it on for multiple posts out of nowhere is just cringe lol
Nobody cares, and trying to turn a minor typo or grammatical mistake into a “gotcha” moment just reeks of petty desperation with a hint of narcissism, especially when it is completely out of context and was the very first comment you made in this thread
You know the “Ackchyually” meme is supposed to be a negative caricature of insufferable people that do the exact kind of thing you’re doing in this thread right?
There is “super sweaty” and then there is “playing with people who understand the game”
If you understand the game, then you understand how world buffs and debuff limits affect the different classes. Warriors and mages benefit the most from world buffs while hunters benefit the least. Warlocks and shadow priests are punished the most by the debuff limit.
End result is that you stack warriors and mages at the expense of warlocks and hunters if you are going to use world buffs. That’s just the smart thing to do.
This is just copying what the speed clear guilds from private servers did. Pretty boring, but other than that there is nothing wrong with it. I would be more impressed with just about anything else though.
You don’t need to do this to 15/15 Naxx. You aren’t suggesting that are you?
Maybe you added the SoM comment after. Yes that’s fine, SoM way sounds decent to me. No Classic Era wasn’t designed to leave out Hunters and Warlocks, that’s a player choice following guilds like Onslaught et al.
Practically, yes. Good players will not want to join your group if you’re stacking hunters and warlocks because world buffs + debuff limit incentivizes warriors and mages above all else.
The game is actually well balanced and there is a lot of room for off-meta builds… but world buffs are so powerful that they eliminate that aspect completely. SoM was the only time I ever saw a guild “LFM Ranged DPS for Naxx” and that’s because no world buffs means you actually need to balance your raids. You can’t just stack melee.
Right, you then have to tell people “No sorry we can’t take any more of that spec right now”, or rotate people in, instead of “That’s not min-max so we don’t take that at all”.
Telling people no is part of raid management. If people start drama over it then there are ways to deal with that too.
No, that’s not fine. That comes down to leadership telling people not to play in PVP spec. Showing up as PVE meme specs is not the same as being too cheap or lazy to swap from PVP specs. I’d bench someone who kept showing up as PVP spec that and not listen to lame “but I do more damage than this other guy” excuses.
Right. It takes stronger leadership.
Not that I’m saying leadership can’t follow set standards of what to bring. Most do.
Also, there are certainly players who don’t want to “carry” and that’s a whole raid team thought thing. If 38/40 of the raiders want to follow the standard it would be wrong to just bring meme spec players in. It may even look like favoritism, and thats bad.
The groups doing Naxx in 1.5 hours likely are greatly made up of players who want to follow the standard. So that’s fine. It’s just that following the standard is not required.
A player who wants to go against the grain needs to find a brand new team to run with or fill a gap in a desperate teams roster. Once the rapport with the other raiders is there many won’t care that a ret pally or shadow priest is on the team doing less dps if he’s been making friends. This is harder in a pug.
I do think that no one should simply expect to be slotted.
I forgot that my Classic guild was bringing 5-6 locks because they were with us for a while. in addition to the enhance shammy and the 2 feral druids. This was with WBs mattering. Why? … because we liked who we played with.
That same guild is still going in Wrath and is now having people play what the spreadsheet recommends and recruiting from what the spreadsheet says. It got more tryhard by TBCC with following the standard. Personally, I just didn’t find myself having as much fun with following all those min max guidelines, and some of the really fun to be around people quit the game because they didn’t like it either. So even though on paper the guild “looked like” it was doing better (although never top or anything) it was like it lost some of what made it fun to be in, IMO.
I actually find myself respecting a player a lot more who loves their meme spec, will play it the very best they can, and then will go out of their way to find a group to accept them. That’s a lot more challenging than showing you are “good” or “smart” by following everyone else.
6 warlocks is reasonable in MC/BWL, even in world buffed classic with its debuff limit, because mages can’t play fire yet.
Come Naxx? Mages are fire, ignite scales especially well with world buffs, those locks can’t use DoT’s due to the debuff limit, and mages just outclass locks.
We raided with a lot of the same people from MC - Naxx 40 and we didn’t bench long-time raiders for being the wrong class or make them change specs.
A few people in our leadership wanted to push harder in TBCC and so followed the spreadsheets to slot the 25 there and put the worst players on team 2 (who ended up quitting when team 2 dissolved). Enough people were happy with that arrangement that the guild is still here.
You don’t see that stuff on Era because it’s a permanent Naxx server with world buffs and a debuff limit. You don’t have that progression period where locks are useful in MC/BWL and then again in TBC.
I just wanted to say that I watched that whole video last night after you linked it in the other thread. It’s good and goes over a lot of things I’ve been pondering lately. Thanks for sharing it.
You can be a meme spec you just have to be the guild/raid leader’s girlfriend, there’s usually a slot for that. Most of them are shadowpriest or moonkin.
But really anyone who has actually been a guild officer or raid leader knows why. People try to be good natured and let people meme. Then your runs start getting longer and longer as more people goof around. And you start wiping more. Then the good players who want to perform leave the guild because they don’t want to play with memers, they want to parse, and they dont like wasting their consumables. And people resent the memers and guild officers for allowing it. If you let some people meme and not others the people who cant resent you now also. Now you don’t have good players who can parse and your runs are even longer and wipes happen, you have to take a bunch of casuals to fill the raid half of whom dont speak english, you stop finishing raids, so more people stop showing up.
Its selection, if you allow people to clown it degenerates over time until your guild/raid blows up. good players don’t want to waste time while people clown around, particularly in later raids like naxx where you need to use expensive consumes. It only works if the raid has a strong core of people that wont leave and/or are friends in real life, and only if its a small number of people and everyone else is a strong player. Not so many situations like that.
The casual/memer types have always complained about it or tried to rationalize it, but its just toxic to a raid environment where you have 30+ other people who dont want to waste time and consumes so you can clown around.
People also dont seem to get that the huge parses happen because the boss fights are really short when you’re stacked with strong dps. If a boss fight is 30s you spend the whole fight in death wish on a warrior, whereas if its 1m you’re only in death wish for 50% of the fight and that dilutes your parse. So if you want to perform highly you need to be in a raid with other people who perform highly also. All the good players want this, so you’re going to end up with few good players if you let a bunch of people meme, and then not only will the fights be longer you will wipe a lot and fail to finish the raid.
I was a MT/RL and an officer/GM and what you are saying is true but nuanced.
I’m not riding someone’s case about the enchant on their bracers if they are doing their assignment and not dying to stupid stuff. As long as they are making a solid contribution to the raid we don’t have an issue. Don’t have to be top parse, just doing the fight the way we asked you to and trying. It is usually not these guys fault that you wiped. Wrong spec or undergeared but teachable is no problem.
Usually it is the DPS who are somehow simultaneously bad at staying alive to do DPS and at the same time quite full of themselves for being “so good at the game” that are your big problem. If this person is influential in your guild the best thing to do is to take a group from the first paragraph, bench these idiots, and let them realize the raid was easier without them. Probably cause a guild split but maybe worth it.
So the takeaway for me is simply this. Either be hardcore with very strict requirements that are black and white and no wiggle room or be casual. You can’t be both without it blowing up eventually.
So I ran a guild that lasted three years from Wrath - MoP when I had to step out due to a new baby. Running that first guild was a huge learning curve.
Then I was, not really wanting it, soon promoted to officer and later took the default guild leader when no one else wanted it in my Classic guild, until I passed it over to an officer who is doing a great job still. I was there for another three years.
So I know how to run guilds that last for a long time.
The secret to having a raid group that does not blow up is all about understanding your raid group, especially your core team, and creating the right kind of environment. It can be about fostering an environment full of people who like to min-max and who are categorically “good” or it can be about messing around a bit more. Either one is ok.
There isn’t one right way and I think my drive to keep replying to these comments is based on being a bit annoyed that there’s this concept that in a game like Classic there is only one correct way to do things, and you absolutely have to follow this bland script or you’re done. That’s just not true.
Of course, you don’t slot your girlfriend in as a meme spec. That’s raid group suicide.
With that all being said I’m not surprised that guilds mostly want to follow a set standard of what to bring in Era. Personally, I wouldn’t even want to try to raid as a meme spec.
