I’ve been raiding for about 3 years on one character or another, and in that time I’ve come up with a list of “pet peeves” when it comes to raiders and things that they do. I am sure that some of you will think I’m being a bit harsh, but honestly, these things bug me.

I’ve been in two raiding guilds which were pretty different during raids from the start. Guild number one was mainly comprised of old school PVPers or Raiders who wanted a new casual raiding atmosphere with their friends, rather than the “Raiding as Job” atmosphere of some raiding guilds. We were casual in the sense that we didn’t have rules on how many raids you had to make it to or anything like that. But in an instance, we were anything but casual. It was go time, and we were ready for business.

Guild number two was pretty much comprised of people new to the raiding scene or people who had previously raided casually. There were a few former hardcore players, but mostly it was people new to raiding. This is where most of the Pet Peeves come into play. People who don’t quite get it, or just don’t care I guess. People not taking things seriously, can be a problem when trying to progress even through easy content such as Naxx.

So, here’s a list of things I hate during raids, in no particular order other than how they popped into my head.

AFK: If you leave after every boss, and show up just as the Raid Leader is describing the next fight. You might get some dirty whispers from Officers. If you have to go “2 min bio” and don’t show up for 20 minutes, yea… that’s not cool. Going AFK, other than during Loot distribution, or when the RL has called for a stoppage of play is, in my opinion, not good. We had some people who would skip trash entirely and only come back when the boss was about to be pulled. Those people do not raid with us anymore.

Talking to hear yourself talk: We all have one of them. Those people who log on to vent or teamspeak just before raid time, and never shut up. My most despised type of person. Talking just to hear themselves talk. The ones who ask the stupid questions or make the stupid comments. We have this one guy who constantly blathers on about this or that. And God Forbid someone Kill Mr. Bigglesworth. It’s 5 minutes of him demanding to be told who did it, and 5 more of him asking if it really changed the KT fight in any way when you kill the cat, and then 5 minutes of him questioning the existence of the cat on Wednesday because someone killed it already on Tuesday. This sparks a debate between the blathering fools, one of whom claims that someone killed KT between attempts in a run he was in, and KT’s total health went up on the next try. The other of whom claims to have only been able to kill KT after the cat’s been killed. We’ve been hearing this argument every Tuesday and Wednesday for 3 months. Shut the %$@ up!

Magetank:  We also all have one of these, you read blogs, so you’re more than likely not him. .5 seconds into any fight, this mage just lays into the Trash with an AOE, or hits the Boss with his biggest, highest threat spell, and winds up tanking the boss for a few seconds, the few that it takes for the tank to run to him. No matter how many times it’s happened, this Mage never changes his tactics, The healers generally just let him die and go on with business as usual. He never learns.

Warlock Tank: See Mage Tank.

Calling for heals: Whether you be Tank or DPS, if you call out for heals, you’ll probably make my blood boil. I am a healer. it’s ALL I do. There are 4 other people in this raid who all do the same thing. We all have Grid, or some other raid frame which shows us that you are taking damage. We all have an agro indicator on this raid frame as well. We probably knew that you needed heals before you even knew that the mob was looking at you. WE KNOW that you need heals.

Oh, you mean that’s what I’m supposed to do when your health bar shrinks? Really? I’m new at this. Can you come show me what to do? Rest assured, the healers know that you need to be healed. Pipe down Junior.

Calling for heals on others: It’s usually a Main Tank or Raid Leader who does this, but I swear, If I hear “MageX needs some love” one more time over vent I’m going to stop healing you AND the damn mage who grabbed agro from you because he’s an idiot, for the rest of the fight. Just as in the last topic, I KNOW who needs heals, and probably did before you did. Please do not tell me how to do my job. Honestly the only time I want a Raid leader or Tank to tell me how to heal is if I have an assignment and that asignment keeps failing, then I’ll take all the constructive criticism possible, But if MageX goes down to 50% health, keep your Yap shut. We’ll get to it, and if we don’t, well maybe he’ll learn not to AOE .5 sconds into a trash pull. Because honestly, with five Naxx25 trash mobs on him, any heals I throw on him will just put me at the top of the threat list once he Iceblocks or dies, so I’d rather not have 2 dead raiders on my hands. I’ll let you pull them off him.

Calling for my rez: It’s MY Battle Rez, I’ll use it when I see fit, not on Mr MageX who’s too dumb to understand Threat. My Rez is held for one thing, the Raid Leader, or officer in charge of such things telling me, me specifically, to rez a particular person. It’s not that I can’t think for myself, or don’t want to for that matter. It’s because that’s how it’s done. There are people in charge of this Raid Outfit, and if you’re not one of them STFU and stay dead. On a parallell track, if it’s after a wipe and the rest of the raid’s running back… release and run back. You’re not special. You should have released when the raid Leader told us to in the first place, but you were probably AFK, so you didn’t hear him, and if you scroll up the page a bit, you’ll see that going AFK won’t win you any favors from me.

Calling Curses/diseases: This one’s new and it’s very specific. Noth throws out Curses. I, as a Druid, am well versed in the removal of curses and poisons. I even have them appear in a specific location on my screen. When they happen, I automatically stop what I’m doing and remove them. I’m sorry my single target remove Curse spell isn’t fast enough for you, but there were 6 curses up. it’s going to take me time to get them all off. But seriously dude If you see them disappearing, don’t tell me that “there’s still a curse on MageX” because obviously we’re getting there. We’re going down the list. We’re not going to leave one curse up out of spite or stupidity. And seriously, why isn’t MageX removing his own Curse?

Calling boss mechanics: If you’re not the Raid Leader, shut up about Charges swapping, or webwraps, or locust swarms… Hell, even if you ARE the raid leader. DBM does it for me, and after the first time you see a mechanic, you should be able to point it out to yourself anyway. watch the timer, then when it gets to 0, look at your debuffs. it it changed from positive to negative, MOVE. If it didn’t, don’t. Why do 15 people out of 25 feel the need to call this out each and every time it happens? And for that matter, why aren’t the other 10 people calling it out too? Are they all like me, or are they the idiots who need it called out? The jury’s out on that one.

“Mark the guy I’m supposed to follow”: Seriously? Seriously? You’ve been doing the Heigan dance for three months. You still need to follow someone? Get out of my raid. Go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. This game is too hard for you.

Rolling offspec on mainspec loot: This is the worst, because it takes a special kind of idiot to do it. “Oh, well nobody else seems to want it, I’ll just roll offspec on that wand. that way I don’t have to spend any DKP, or lower my EPGP ratio or whatever” Yeahhh… no. We’re going to charge you for it. You’re wearing a BLUE wand. you’re telling me that this wand is a Downgrade? I think not. If the guy who put together your “BIS gear list” for you is on the loot council, you might not want to try to pull this crap.

Wow. I’m reading through this and realizing that five of eleven are all the same person. Wow. Also realizing, I may have some anger issues. I’m taking some time off of raiding until I calm down a bit.

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Queklain over at The Stoppable Force has tagged me for this silly image meme. But there’s more to the story than that! There’s always more to a story! So here it is.

Queklain was tagged by Anna and Siha, who in turn were tagged by Spicy Tunas & Bell, who were both tagged by:   Braids, who was tagged by:  Critical QQ, who was tagged by: Gnomeageddon, who was tagged by: Mairia, who Started the thing by being tagged by her Sister!!!

Edit: It seems I was also Tagged by Aertimus over at HoTs Tree! Thanks Aertimus!

Funny how these things go. It’s almost like 6 degrees of Screenshot Separation…

But enough about that. I’ve looked through the blogs of people who’ve been tagged and responded, there’s Quite a few! So, to add to the Madness!

Here is my addition to the challenge. Now, My screenshots are not stored in multiple folders. I only have one, so, what I’m going to do here is simple… ignore that part of the challenge, and just choose the sixth image. Now, That’s an interesting notion. sixth image when the folder is sorted HOW?

Sorted by file name? Ascending or descending? Sorted by Date taken? Ascending or Descending? Sorted by size, Ascending, Descending? Let’s pick one. Sorted…. By Size, Descending.. it’s the sixth option for sorting that I could come up with. So there it is.

image edited to protect the noobish

Well, that’s no fun it’s an Automatic Screenshot of a Bosskill taken by an addon. Looks like I’ll have to filter those out of the list… This may take some time.

Ahhh! Now there’s a Great Screenshot! Maerdred, Level 1 Tauren, running through Mulgore with hundreds of his fellow Tauren for the Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan! What an awesome night that was! I got a few of my guildies to come over and we made our guild and ran along with all of the members of Moo. That big red X you see is my pal Stubbylurch who I played with in my old alliance guild. He’s got a 70-something in my horde guild also, but doesn’t really have the time to play him anymore. This screenshot brings back memories!

I’m going to go ahead and tag BRK for the fact that it was he who inspired my Screenshot!

I’ll also tag  LadyJess, Kestrel, Nibuca, and Ferarro(who has quickly become my favorite blogger, and who probably doesn’t even read me…) mainly because I haven’t seen any of them get tagged, and they’re all awesome Bloggers! Last, but CERTAINLY not least, I’m going to Tag Lizzie because she’s the best and my favorite guildie ever, and not just saying that because she’s one of the two who I met for the first time this summer when they were in town for a wedding!

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Maerdred’s just finished up the simple part of the move. and we’re here at the new home. I’m sure we’ll be tweaking over the next few days and weeks, But for now, Welcome! Sit back and relax. We’re not going anywhere for a while at least!

This starts a whole new era of Treebound cat, An era in which we hope to bring you much more content than you’ve probably gotten used to!

Thanks for visiting, and Come again!

~Maerdred and Maerrakech

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This is a Work In Progress!

Any and all comments are welcome.

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Today I’d like to toss my hat into the ring with the rest of the blogs which have written posts about loot systems over the past month. It seems loot has been a hot topic since Wrath came out, and my guild wasn’t immune to the bug.

In BC, we were such a new guild that we didn’t really have a real loot system set up. We pretty much were made up of a ragtag group of veterans, rerollers and newbies(notice I didn’t write noobies. there’s a difference), and only really got to Kara and ZA as a guild, so it was pretty much /roll on gear. With the advent of 25′s and “top tier” raiding in Naxx, we had to do something, so I suggested my former guild’s loot system.

Now, I feel some background is in order. My old guild was a high end raiding guild in Burning Crusade, and we went through about four different loot systems before settling on one. We tried this weird modified /roll system wherein people could pad their roll on the top or bottom end based upon class role or past experience. It didn’t last long and was really only used in ZG.

We tried DKP and that seemed to cause more loot drama with the people on the low end of the spectrum not understanding how it would even itself out as the people with high DKP bought gear. It caused a guild split and even an end to our raiding for an entire month while we rebuilt. Eventually we merged with an awesome guild and started taking 25′s down left and right.

Shortly after the merger we decided on a loot system which I still think is one of the most balanced and fair I have ever used. It’s a mixture of loot council and a sort of EPGP style loot ratio system which one of our officers dreamed up after researching EPGP. What we did was come up with a simplified system, the meat of which is a ratio of hours raided to loot taken.

Our system tracks how many hours each person has spent in a specific raid instance. How many raids has each person attended and how many main spec items has each person received.This information is broken down by raid instance and stored on a custom built website which was designed by one of our raiders, who was an officer in the old guild when he designed it initially(Thanks Drew!). We input each raid simply by listing the names of who was present, attaching a number of hours raided to each, and attaching whichever items each won. This data is then stored in the database and can be used instantly to compute a “Loot ratio” which is also shown on the website for all to see. We do this so that each and every member of the raid can see where they stand amongst their competition and to keep things honest. When 25 people are all looking at the data, it’s hard for a Master looter or Loot Council to fudge the numbers. We try to keep things as transparent as possible for fairness’ sake.

I mentioned a Loot council, and now I guess I have to explain that part also. The Loot council is added to it to allow us to break a tie, or hand out a highly desired item correctly. When a Loot ratio is very close, we can look at the hours raided to see if one person has a ratio of 7 because he’s only raided 7 hours and won one item, compared to someone who’s raided 35 hours and won 5 items. In that case, it’s up to the LC to decide whether to award it based upon Hours raided, 35 is more of an effort than 7. But, is that 7 hours over the course of 5 weeks, or 1 week? If it’s the former, the LC will probably vote in favor of the 35 hours. If the latter, we may sway towards a new member who’s stepped it up and been to every raid possible. In a case such as this, the LC will also look at size of upgrade. If Mr.35 is replacing a ilvl200 purple and Mr.7 is replacing an ilvl187 blue, we may sway it towards Mr.7. After all, that’s most likely going to turn out to be a larger upgrade to raid DPS in the long run.

The Larger the upgrade the larger the increase in DPS is a notion that the LC uses quite frequently, but it has to be used with caution. Could that ilvl 187 item have been easily replaced with a craft-able item, or a heroic drop, or even a Naxx10 item? Is this person not putting in the effort to get the best gear outside of raids? Or are they? LC has to take this into account also. After all is said and done, the Loot council wants to remain impartial and hand the gear out in such a way that it will help the guild as a whole. Helping someone who is not helping themselves, probably won’t help the raid, so we have to be very careful not to get lazy when these issues come up. Luckily, they are few and far between so far. As we gain members and hours grow things will crop up from time to time, but for now, we’ve been handing out over 90% of our loot based upon ratio alone.

So, now that I’ve gone over some of the finer points of how we want to hand out loot, Let’s go over our process. It’s pretty simple actually, and I’ll show it to you now. I am sure it’s done similarly all over the place, but Here’s how I do it.

Loot drops, I clear vent, announce the item to be bid upon and post the item in Raid Warning. After this happens, anyone who is interested in the item then will link in raid chat what they are looking to replace with it. After a few seconds, I will also announce, “10 more seconds” and click a chat macro which posts to /RW, “10 Seconds” and then counts internally and after 10 seconds posts “Done.” Only items linked between my initial Item link and the word “Done” will be accepted for competition. The names are read off to an officer who is alt tabbed to the Loot Website, who simply places a check in the check-box next to each name that is read off, clicks a “compare” button, and then clicks a “macro” button. The Macro button opens a new page with a simple Cut and paste macro on it which he can paste into a new macro and then post in officer chat. That macro looks just like this.

/o 25 Man, Tier 7 Raids
/o 35___8.75____Naieth
/o 30___7.5_____Moograine
/o 28___4_______Maerrakech

It lists the people who were interested, this happens to be a Mage, DK, and Druid who would be vying for a T7 piece I guess. The Macro shows simply, the number of hours, the Loot Ratio and the player’s name. The macro automatically sorts itself by Ratio. This macro allows the LC to simply state over vent, “This item is being awarded to Naieth who won with a Ratio of 8.75, over 7.5 and 4. Grats Naieth” We can then move on to the next item. Generally, all of this takes less than a minute per item.

As each item is handed out, I record it on the website, or someone else records it on the website, so that the next item which drops will have an accurate ratio attached to each raider. Hours are added to the site in whole numbers, and We round up. So at 30 minutes, we will consider all raid members to have earned 1 hour for use on the raid site. This way, I can fairly say that the next time an item drops, the loot ratio macro for these three will look like this:

/o 25 Man, Tier 7 Raids
/o 31___7.75_____Moograine
/o 36___7.2____Naieth
/o 29___4.14______Maerrakech

Fair, Simple, Fast. Those are the three things I most want out of a loot system, and so far I feel that with our Ratio/LC system, we’ve got just that. If anyone is interested in learning more about our system, feel free to email me using the contact link in the sidebar.

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My fellow Kohrruptioneers,

Last night we had a raid fall through and the officers called it 40 minutes after scheduled Start time. This is an unfortunate event, and I am deeply saddened by it. This does not, however, mean that I won’t accept it. It seems to me that after 12 people signed up for 10′s on Tuesday, and 18 People signed up for 25′s on Wednesday, we may have a crisis on our hands.

Our Guild policy states that you will not attain Knight rank, and therefore not receive Naxx25 invites, unless your gear meets a specific requirement. We are at a point where we do not have 25 people in the guild who meet this requirement. What that means is, either we break the rules which we wrote, or we do not go to Naxx25.

I suggest that we not go to Naxx 25.

Currently we are inviting people to 25′s who in my opinion, and the opinion of some others, have no reason to be there. The debate ranges from Undergeared people to Underperforming people to anything in between.

It is my opinion, after seeing what both sides have had to say, that we should take a week or so off from Naxx25 and get as many people into heroics and Naxx 10 as possible. It is here where our members will Gain the experience needed for Progression raiding in the 25-man zones. Undergeared people can get the gear in a progressive fashion, rather than jumping from dungeon blues to T7.5 epics. And the Underperforming people can hone their skills in the Heroics and 10′s.

The argument is often tossed about that, “I geared on my own, so they should do the same.” I counter that statement with a simple bit of logic. Nobody raids alone. Nobody clears 80 heroics alone. We all had support when gearing ourselves, and why should we take that support away from people who started the process later than we did?

On the other side of the argument, nobody, especially me, is advocating “boosting”. When the guilds first members hit 80, they ran heroics together. They Ran Heroics with Pugs, they Ran Naxx with Pugs. They put in their time and they got the gear upgrades that were there to be had. They didn’t jump from 79 quest greens straight to Naxx25 Purples.

People who put in the hard work already can easily become resentful of those who come in later and get gear “handed to them”. I can see why people may feel this way, and I can even agree with them to some extent. Though my reasons may differ. In my eyes, handing a raid spot to a fresh 80, or handing gear to a fresh 80 is not going to help the player or the raid. All it is going to do is build a lazy attitude within that person. They will look at the progress that they’ve made and see how easy it was, and they won’t go out and do the work to get the best gems, or the best enchants, or the best consumables. They will expect to be carried.

This is an attitude which I do not want to see in any of our members. It is an attitude which I have no desire to have within my guild. Perhaps it will take some tough love and some teaching. But I believe that we can stave off this type of attitude.

At each raid I have been to I see people putting down a Fish feast. I see people cooking food for others. I see people making flasks for others. I also see people doing none of these things. I see people running without food buffs. I see people running with no enchants on their gear. I see people not flasking.

Let me put this right out there. The only time I should see anyone in the raid without a flask up is spider wing, and they should be our TOP raiders. People regularly putting up insane DPS numbers, People putting up high healing numbers. those people can get away with not flasking, but you know what… They’re the only ones I see who DO flask, the ones who have their own food buff. They’re the ones who have all of their gear enchanted and Gemmed.

The people who could afford not to do it, are the very ones who DO. That to me shows dedication. That shows a raider mentality. Until every one of the 25 people we have in that aid has the same mentality, we’re not going to progress. We’re going to get stuck on Patchwerk. We’re going to get stuck on Gluth. We’re going to get stuck on Thaddius.

Until everyone in the raid takes some responsibility for themselves, we’re not going to accomplish anything. Run your heroics. Run Naxx 10. Get the experience and the gear. Get the gems and enchants. Get the food and the flasks. Get it done. Do it for yourself. Do it for the raid. and do it for the Guild. If you don’t, you won’t succeed, and we won’t succeed.

For the people on the other end of the spectrum, Remember that you didn’t do it alone either. Just because you did it earlier doesn’t mean that you did it any better. Doesn’t mean that you’re exempt from helping others. You had help along the way, so don’t withhold help from others. Selfishness on either end of the spectrum is not what I want to see.

The fallacy of “I geared up on my own, so they can too” is that you didn’t do it alone at all. Why would you expect someone else to do so? Help them out.

I’m not saying that we should be boosting our new players. I’m merely suggesting that we all had support on our way up. Don’t forget to support those who come up after us. We are no better than they are for having gotten there earlier. The more that people realize this, the better off we’ll be as a guild.

In closing, I’d like to sum up. I am advocating that we take a week off from Naxx 25 so that we may help the guild in gathering the players necessary to succeed in Naxx 25. we have the players. what we need to do is cultivate them and get them ready to perform at their highest level with all of the tools which we used in the first place. Let’s be teachers, not just raiders. Nobody here did it all on their own, and nobody should be expected to. Let’s help each other to help the guild as a whole. Let’s not cut off our nose to spite our face.

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Someone, who knows who she is, is no longer AWESOME!!!

But really she is. because, well… she is.

This, my friends, is why you don’t react until you listen to the whole podcast…

Giant super rats are almost as awesome as she is… ALMOST.

This has been a public Service Announcement from Maerdred, of the Blog Azeroth Chat Channel.

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Refining my keyboard layout options and I have gotten to thinking.

I move with the keyboard AND mouse. Using the keyboard to move forward and back in many cases, and also to strafe during fights. This takes a full 6 keys to accomplish. I also use the mouse to move, utilizing the “back” button of the mouse to toggle autorun, and using the left and right buttons in conjunction to move as well. The Right button alone turns my character, and the left button alone turns my camera. This uses a full 9 buttons between my mouse and keyboard to perform movement functions within the game. I should probably cut that down.

One way to cut this down is to take away my strafe keys from the keyboard, though that would require me to use both hands to move if I wanted to strafe, holding the right button of the mouse down, while using “A” or “D” to strafe left or right. With the strafe keys of “Q” and “E” I can use my mouse for other things while strafing. Such as changing mouseover targets for healing, or toggling trinkets or clicking on dialog boxes, or any other task the mouse is used for.

Do I remove the Turn buttons from the keyboard and only utilize the mouse to turn? This also gives me two more keys to use for spells, but also requires me to only use my mouse to turn. I’d say this is probably the better of the two options, as I can see me using strafe much more often in a fight. Sartherion comes to mind. Strafing to the safe zone during flame walls. Using the strafe keys I am free to move the mouse anywhere I want and lay heals on targets while strafing. If I had to use my mouse to strafe, that would not be possible. I’d be as viable as a Paladin as a mobile healer.

Do I remove nothing and leave it as is? This doesn’t sound like a good idea if I plan to use the number pad of my Sidewinder keyboard for movement and spell casting. using 6 keys for movement leaves only 11 for spells. I use more than 11 spells regularly.

Or do I?

Currently, my bars are set up as such:

I generally spam 3, 4, and 2. My fingers move easily from “WASD” to 2, 3 and 4 for some reason, and not to 1. When I need it, ALT-4 is easy to get because my thumb winds up right next to the left Alt button, and my mind says 4 and Alt-4 are connected. When I really need it, Alt-1, 1 is a quick combo to hit. 5 winds up being an every 6 seconds spam, so I use it often, but not exclusively. 6, well.. that’s the red headed step child, isn’t it? 7 Is an emergency group heal, generally only used in bad trash pulls, Loetheb, Thaddius and Sapphiron fights. I’ve not gotten to KT(25) yet, so I’m not sure if I’ll use it there.

Barkskin, what can I say? I never use it. Same with roots. Why would I? My Rez’s and Innervate are generally clicked rather than keystrokes, so they get the ass-end of the keyboard.

So, I’d say what I really need for real estate is:

1, Alt1, 2, 3, 4, Alt4, 5, 6 for emergencies(but 2 works in all of those situations) and 7 So that’s 9 keys I’ll need for healing with 2 extra? Wow… I never would have guessed.

So, next up is to place the spells I want to use, and my movement keys into a workable layout for the Keypad.

The question is, Will my Bar Mod allow me to set up a 17 button bar in the configuration I want?

That’s for another post. For now, I have quite a bit to think about.

Of course Any and all constructive feedback is welcomed.

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Thanks to a suggestion from Kestrel I am now the proud owner of a brand new Microsoft Sidewinder X6 keyboard. It arrived Friday and I’ve already fallen in love with the Backlit keys. I can play in the dark and still see what keys I am hitting. Backlit keys was the most compelling feature of the keyboard for me, but to not utilize the movable numberpad would just be silly. So, My plan is to completely redo my bars layout to take into account the macro functionality of my new keyboard. The only question is, how?

The sidewinder keyboard has 90 programmable macro keys. I will never need that many, but I can see myself using the numpad there’s 17 keys there, and that’s more than I’ll need. So here’s my theory….

1,2,3,5 used for movement keys… I know I know.

then I can use numlock, /, *, -, 7, 8, 9, +, 4, 6, 0, . for spells or whatever… and in macro mode the Enter key is not enter, so add that one in too.

Hmm This might work. I’ll have to play with it tonight.

I’ll post pictures and all too. But that’s a whole other post.

Work in progress.

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I missed it! Yesterday was my One year Blogoversary! Hopefully this year will bring better things than last, Where I started out strong and pretty much fell into a muck and mire of posting poor quality articles at very sporadic timeframes.

Here’s to New beginnings! and Hopefully many more years to come!

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