My MoP Wish List - Part 3: A 10 vs 25 Fix

In part one of My MoP Wish List looked at some ways that Blizzard could improve the gem system to create greater demand for all the gem colors. Part two, primarily looked at what I would like to see changed in the Moonkin play style.

When they announced that 10mans and 25mans would share a lockout and drop the same loot almost two years ago, I got worried. As much as I liked my WotLK 10man group, I prefer the 25man format for progression raiding, and it was obvious two years ago that 25man raids would struggle under this new design. The organizational advantages of a 10man raid alone would push many guilds to the 10man format, and the predictions made of 25mans slow death are coming true. If Blizzard wants to preserve the 25man format, they are going to need to make some changes to prevent the slide into 10mans.

The Numbers:
* All WoW Progress numbers in this post were pulled as of 2/6/12.

I think it's commonly accepted that participation in 25man raiding is in decline, but wanted to look at the numbers just to see how much. And to be clear, I realize that that not all of these comparisons are Apple to Apple, but I do think it shows how dramatic the decline has been.

This isn't a fair comparison, but lets look at the ICC numbers compared to the T11 25man first. According to WoW Progress 16,103 guilds killed Heroic Marrowgar in ICC, and 4,698 guilds killed Heroic Halfus on 25man in T11. That implies a 70% decline in 25man guilds with the start of Cata. However, since 10man raiding wasn't equal to 25mans in ICC, the ICC number is obviously inflated. Also, ICC was up for a year as the main tier of content, while T11 was the main tier for only 6 months and it's impossible to say how many of the guilds in the ICC number existed at the end of WotLK. All that said I think it's fair to say that a lot of players jumped from the 25man format to the 10man format at the start of Cata for what ever reason.

However, I'm sure some of you would argue that that doesn't really show a decline in 25man raiding. It could be argued that it shows that people didn't really want to raid 25mans during ICC but had to for the greater rewards. I have to agree that is definitely part of the issue. We can debate how much that contributed to the, but it's definitely part of it and makes those numbers unreliable. Fortunately I have some better numbers that really show the decline of 25man raiding.

I've taken the easiest heroic boss from each tier and compared number of kills in 25man to the total number of kills on either mode to see what the participation in 25man is. Here are the numbers:

	25man	10man	Total	25man %
Halfus	4,698	22,219	26,917	17.45%
Shannox	4,108	26,994	31,102	13.21%
Morchok	2,128	16,735	18,863	11.28%

I think these numbers point to the decline of 25man raiding very clearly. As you can see the kill rates on 25man have declined with each tier of new content going from 17.45% in T11, to 13.21% in T12, to 11.28 % in T13.

There have been some balancing issues between the 25man and 10man formats, but I don't think any of these bosses are significantly harder on 25man then they are on 10man or vice versa. If anything, I would say that these numbers underestimate the decline of 25man raid since I think it could easily be argued that 25man raiders as a whole are probably more progression focused then 10man raiders as a whole.

Cause of the Decline:

I would like to blame the decline on difficulty imbalances between 10s and 25s, but I can't do that. A lot of 25 man raiders like to claim that 10s are easier, but the numbers don't really show that. Take a look at the heroic Kill percentages:

	25man Cnt	25man %	10man Cnt	10man %
Morchok	2,128	48.32%	16,375	37.17%
Zon'ozz	583	13.24%	3,761	8.35%
Yor'sahj	802	18.21%	7,683	17.06%
Hagara	1,156	26.25%	2,896	6.43%
Ultraxion	447	10.15%	5,019	11.14%
Blackhorn	293	6.65%	1174	2.61%
Spine	137	3.11%	357	0.79%
Madness	104	2.36%	134	0.30%

On all but one of the T13 heroic fights 25man guilds as a whole have killed these bosses more then 10man guilds. I do think that the 10man percentages are depressed a little due to the fact that "casual" raiders are more likely to raid 10mans and therefore inflate the total number of 10man guilds bringing down their percentage. However, that can't explain away all of the differences. Hagara is clearly easier on 25man with a 26.25% kill rate in 25man guilds compared to just 6.43% among 10man guilds. On the flip side Ultraxion is clearly easier in the 10man format and I would argue that Yor'sahj is probably easier on 10man as well.

Obviously Blizzards balancing hasn't been perfect when comparing 10man to 25man, but it doesn't appear to be benefiting one format over another in a significant way, and if it is it's benefiting 25man guilds. Clearly, poor balancing is not the cause of 25man's decline.

In my opinion 25man's decline is primarily due to a lack of significant rewards to make up for the 10mans organizational advantages. Yes, 25mans do have a small loot advantage, but that really isn't that significant. Here we are two months into the patch and my guild is already sharding some gear on heroic. Additional gear isn't much of a motivator because if you raid for an entire patch you are likely to get almost everything you want from the bosses you kill regularly. Additional, Valor points are an even bigger joke since they've taken Tier gear out of the Valor system making the Valor points almost valueless in terms of raiding.

Since the only real reason to continue to raid 25mans over 10mans currently is personal preference, it is clear that 25mans are going to continue to decline because of 10mans organizational advantages.

Can it be Fixed:

To honest, I would be entirely OK if Blizzard came out and said that they were eliminating 10man raids for MoP, but there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of that happening (as much as I would like it), so I hope they are looking for other solutions.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of good ideas in this regard. I still like the suggestion I made two years ago to have gems and other raiding mats drop almost exclusively from 25man raids. After a year of Cata 25man raiding I think there are a couple of "easy" changes that think could make 25s more attractive.

1. Better Rare Mount Drops: It's funny. If you kill heroic Rag on 10man you have a 100% drop chance to get one [Smoldering Egg of Millagazor]. If you kill heroic Rag on 25man you still have a 100% drop chance to get one [Smoldering Egg of Millagazor]. I don't care how they do it but this should be balanced.



2. More Epic Gems: When I suggested two years ago that 25mans should be the only source of epic gems, many of you disagreed, and I can understand why. That said, I don't see a problem with 25man kills dropping more Motes of Darkness and Essence of Corrupted Deathwing. Why not give 25man kills two of each instead of just one?



3. Free Flasks & Free Food: The organizational difficulties of 25man raids largely falls on the leaders of the raid. In an effort to reduce the organizational pressure on a 25man raid's leaders they could provide free food and flasks that only work in 25man raids. If the raid leaders didn't need to coordinate Cauldrons or Feasts they may be more willing to deal with the other organization issues of the 25man format.

TL-DR:

When Blizzard announced that they were going to have 10mans and 25mans drop the same level of gear, many people (including myself) predicted this would result in the slow death of the 25man format. Unfortunately, that prediction is coming true. 25man kills as a percentage of total kills has declined with each new tier in this expansion.

The cause of this decline does not appear to be due to balancing issues, but seems to rest solely on the fact that 10mans are easier to organize especially when they are created out of the ashes of a dead 25man guild. To counter the 10man's advantage, Blizzard needs to find a way to reward 25man raiders and their leaders that doesn't give the 25man format an unfair advantage. The best solution would be one that would reduce the organizational requirements of a 25man raid like eliminating the need for cauldrons or feasts in the 25man format.

Epic Gems in Cata = A Failure

Quick Announcement: I'm trying to be more active on twitter. If you want to follow me, my ID is @graylo.

Last night my guild killed Heroic Hagara for the second time and not one, but two [Girdle of the Grotesque] dropped. As I'm sure most of you know, this is the BiS moonkin belt, and I was quite happy when I was awarded one of them. Then I had a revelation.

The GotG has two Red sockets and gains a prismatic socket once you apply the belt buckle. Since it is a BiS item I would expect it to be gemmed with epic quality gems even if they are a bit expensive, because I'm not going to replace it. Then I have to consider the reality of the situation.

The mean price of Queen's Ruby's on my server is 7,000g. Sure the price varies a little bit, but even the lowest I've seen them on my server is still 5,500g and that is in no way common. In short, I have to spend at least 16,500g just to gem my belt the way it should. You can buy epic items for less then that.

It's clear to me that the current system is broken. So, how did we get here, and how can we fix it?

A Quick History:

In The Burning Crusade (when the JC profession was introduced) epic gems were mined from special mining nodes in the Black Temple and Mount Hyjal raid instances. Eventually they could be purchased with badges.

Pros:

• It supplied epic gems directly to the main group of players interested in having epic gems: hardcore progression raiders.


• Allowed the guild to allocate gems based upon need.

Cons:

• PvPers had extremely limited access to the epic gems, and but they were pretty much required at the higher levels of competition
• Aquiring the gems was a 25man effort, but single players could cause havoc with ninja looting and favoritism

In Wrath of the Lich King, epic gems were prospected from uncommon ores. Alchemists could also transmute superior gems in to epic gems once a day with some additional mats.
Pros:

• Epic gems were highly accessible for all players.


• Players controlled both the supply and demand sides of the gem market.

Cons:

• Epic gems were so accessible that it crippled the market for blue quality gems.

T
his is pure speculation but here is what I think happened. In TBC, Blizzard introduced epic gems as a reward for high progression, but in the end weren't accessible enough. First, things first the guilds who mined them horded them for their own needs. On top of that, obtaining the gems was a 25man effort, but one or two people cause big problems by ninja mining the nodes or a GM playing favorites with the gems. There were other issues as well, but I think all of them revolve around the epic gems not being accessible enough.

So in WotLK, Blizzard created an entirely new system that was completely driven by the ingame economy. Players determined the supply by mining/prospecting ore or doing transmutes, and as a result Epic gems were probably too accessible in Blizzards mind. During WotLK, epic gems were fairly cheap. Players completely regemmed gear within a week or two of their introduction and the market for blue quality gems was crippled. As a result Blizzard felt the need to create a new system for Cata which leads us to......

The Current Problem:

The current problem can easily be broken into two sections: Supply and Demand.

Demand side:
The problem with gem demand, is that it is heavily skewed towards red gems at the moment. DPS and Healing are the two most common roles played in the game at the moment and almost all of them favor the stats provided by red gems (Int, Str, & Agi). On top of that, Blizzard likes to give players their best stats in the last tier of an expansion. As a result, the T13 year, has significantly more red sockets then previous tiers which reduces the demand for hybrid gem colors like purple and orange.

In short, 90% of the players in a raid want red gems, but only 17% of them will get one on average (assuming the distribution is equal). As a result, red gems are extremely expensive, but the other five gems are relatively cheap. Here are the mean prices on my server as an example.

Red	Blue	Yellow	Green	Orange	Purple
7,000g	599b	1385g	999g	2060g	1325g

Ultimately this is a problem Blizzard created 2 years ago when the started designing the Cataclysm expansion, and can't really be fixed until the next expansion even if blizzard wanted to.

Supply side:
The Cata system for epic gems does have several positives. For example, every player who kills a boss on normal or heroic levels has a chance to get an epic gem. The supply isn't controlled by the guild, and players have a choice to use it them selves or sell it for gold.

This system does eliminate some of the core problems of the previous two systems, but it's too random and inflexible to meet the players needs in a reasonable way. It creates a surplus of all colors except red, and an extreme shortage of red gems which increases prices to unreasonable levels.

The good news is, that changing the supply should be easy, and Blizzard has several options if they so desired to make a change.

1. Change Drop Rates: There is no rule that says all gems have to have an equal chance to drop from the Geodes. I bet it wouldn't be difficult for Blizzard to modify the drop rates. They could make epic gems more common on the more common Geode, or they could change it so that red gems are favored over the other 5 options for both types of Geode. My guess is that Blizzard could easily implement this with a hotfix.


2. Eliminate the Geodes: Blizzard could eliminate the geodes all together and allow players to buy the gems directly, instead of buying a random chance at an epic gem.


3. Enable Gem Transmutes: If I remember correctly there were some transmutation patters for gems in the 4.3 ptr, but they never made it to the live release. This would allow blizzard to maintain the randomness of the geode, but still give players a way to modify supply, even if it's with a weekly cooldown.

Conclusions:

As much as I would like them to, I doubt Blizzard will make a change at this point. Prices will come down as people are getting less gear upgrades, and more gems are being created. That said, when I talk to players, this epic gem situation is a common source of frustration. Since we are entering the lull between expansions when burn out among players is high, I think it would be a good idea for Blizzard to take a look at this issue and try and reduce some of those frustrations.

Is the Firelands to Easy?

If you take a quick look at WoWProgress.com you will see that 18 guilds went 6/7 in the first week that Hard Modes were available. Predictablely this has some players saying that Firelands is too easy, and we already have a blue response to this claim.

I am endlessly intrigued to find players judging the difficulty of the encounters and how long lived the content is by how pro players, some of the most skilled and focused players in the world, engage the content. It's a little like judging the difficulty of juggling eight chainsaws by what the best jugglers in the world can accomplish. Sure, it might be easy for them, but when was the last time you tried it?

The content wasn't designed to be 'quick'. It was designed to be epic, engaging, challenging and fun. It can accomplish those goals without being punishing.(src)

Call me a homer if you want, but I agree with Blizzard's take on this situation. I find it difficult to judge an entire tier on the progression of a few elite guilds. Here are my reasons why.

Elite Players vs. The Rest of Us:

Let me ask you this. What if a new golf course was opened in your area and as a promotion they had Tiger Woods come and play an early round to generate publicity. Would you say that the course was too easy if Tiger Woods hit 15 under par in that round? If the course was designed to be a championship level course then probably, but if it's intended to service the local population then maybe not.

If the WoW endgame was intended to test the most elite players then I would agree that Firelands is too easy, but that isn't the case. The raid encounters are designed with a broader population in mind.

The funnier part of this argument in my opinion is that as far as I know, the members of Paragon and the other 17 guilds that are 6/7 aren't the ones making this argument as of yet. If they want to say that Firelands is too easy, just as Ensidia did after Tier 7 content WotLK, then they may have a point since they've seen most of the content. However, many of the players I see complaining aren't even close to the 6/7 standard. I always think it's funny when players complain that they are bored or that content is to easy, when they haven't completed the content that is available to them. It's little like when my children tell me they don't like a food when they haven't even tasted it yet.

How Did They Get to 6/7 HM?

It’s also important to ask is how those guilds got to 6/7 in one week. We should remember that the Elite Guilds like Paragon approach new content much differently than a vast majority of guilds do.

PTR Experience: First and foremost, the Elite Guilds were on the PTR when most of the guilds are not. Tuesday July 5th wasn't the first time those guilds had seen these fights. So the first question is did they really get 6/7 after just one week of trying or do you have to consider the time they spent on the PTR. It's true that the PTR versions of these fights are not exactly the same as the Live versions, but the basic mechanics are the same. Adjusting to these modifications shouldn't be as difficult as learning the fight from scratch like a majority of guilds. I think it's very telling that the one fight that wasn't tested on the PTR is the only fight that wasn't killed last week.

Raiding Schedule: It's also very important to consider the elite guilds raid schedule. Blood Legion was already 2/7 Hard Modes before I left work last Tuesday. The elite guilds take extraordinary measures to get World Firsts at the start of a new raiding tier. They take of work and raid very long hours to try and get to kills first. I guarantee you that all 18 of those guilds at 6/7 raided at least 30 or 4o hours last week, and I would be willing to bet that many of them raided more than 60 hours last week. At the same time, most "Hardcore" guilds raid less then 20 hours a week now. Since the elite guilds put in significantly more hours you can't really compare the progression of more normal guilds to the elite guild, because their first week of raiding was equivalent to three weeks of raiding for the other guilds

Exploiting Staghelm: Being at the bleeding edge of content means that you encounter bugs and such before anyone else. Most of the time this isn't a good thing, every so often a guild comes up with a strategy that Blizzard hasn't thought of that significantly reduces the fight's difficulty. And in Firelands we have that situation with Majordomo Staghelm.

In case you hadn't heard there is a new Strategy that basically turns Majordomo Staghelm in to Patchwerk. If you've done the fight you know that it's a big dance switching him between forms with lots of stacking and spreading out. The longer he says in one form the more damage he deals and the more you switch him the more damage he deals. So the basic strat is to keep him in one form as long as you can take it and then switch.

In the new strat, guilds have used a Beast Master Hunter to tank the boss in Scorpion form with his pet. The Scorpion form's Flame Scythe is considered AoE damage and therefore didn't hit the pet. Every one else stands behind the boss doing as much DPS as possible without pulling threat off the pet. This basically takes every single one of the bosses abilities off the table. You don't have Cat form, Human form, or Flame Scythe. Since the raid is stacked behind the boss and not taking damage they also get full stacks of Concentration without any difficulty and can do 100% more damage. Literally, the fight is all about not pulling threat at this point.

Obviously this is a VERY clever strategy, but it's also clearly an exploit (though I doubt anyone will get banned for it). I guarantee you Blizzard won't be happy that someone discovered a way to completely avoid all of the bosses abilities and turn the fight into a tank and spank. I guarantee you that in the next few days you will see a hotfix that allows pets to get hit by Flame Scythe or something to that effect. So it's important to remember that some of the guilds that got to 6/7 this week got there because they used a strategy that most likely won't be available to the rest of us this week.

What Haven't We Seen?

WoW is six and a half years old, and in that time Blizzard has created hundreds of raid bosses. If you consider 5-mans that number goes even higher. At this point it's got to be difficult for Blizzard to come up with new abilities and fight mechanics that we haven't seen before or can't immediately throw into a bucket on how to deal with it. We have addons like Deadly Boss Mods and Power Auras that help us to know when we are standing in something bad or if there is an ability coming up that we need to avoid. If a mob needs to be kited or interrupted we have our go-to classes and players who we know can handle the job.

This isn't to say that Blizzard can't or won't come up with new and unique mechanics that will throw us for a loop. However, we as a player base are more educated about fight mechanics than we ever were in the past. When Blizzard throws a new ability at us most of the time it fits one of the standard buckets that informs us on how to deal with it. As a result high progression raiders are able to adapt to these new abilities more quickly than people who have not played as long or raided as much.

More 4.2 First Impressions:

I wanted this to be longer and its own post last week, but due to work issues that ship sailed. Anyway here are some quick thoughts on the other bosses in Firelands.

Alysrazor: I've done both aspects of this fight. I've been in the air and on the ground. From the ground it's a fairly standard fight. From the air, it's something completely new. To be honest I've found managing an Eclipse rotation while in the air to be quite difficult. Moving and casting the normal rotation at the same time is strange enough, but having to focusing on where the next Ring of Fire is took some of my attention away from making sure I was casting the correct spell.

Overall, I think it's a good fight, and I find the air phase very challenging. My main complaint would be that the Rings of Fire are a little difficult to see given that the entire zone is pretty much orange and they blend in pretty well to the scenery. I would like Blizzard to make them a little more visible.

Baleroc: It's probably different from the point of view of a tank or healer, but as a DPS I found this tank to be very disappointing. There's absolutely nothing to it as a DPSer. If your soaking a crystal all you have to do is make sure you keep the rotation straight. Other then that all you have to so is make sure your not near one of the spawn points and to make sure your not spread out to much to make the soaker's job difficult. Very simple in my opinion, and the heroic version doesn't sound all that impressive either.

Majordomo Staghelm: I've said in the past that my favorite fight of all time is Shade of Aran in Karazhan, and the dance of the Staghelm encounter reminds me of the dance of the Aran encounter. I like having the stack phase and then the spread phase. I like having to manage Searing Seeds and the Burning Orbs. All in all I like this fight.

Ragnaros: I have to say that this is a classic final boss encounter. It has multiple phases that build on each other. Lots of abilities to deal with. I think it has a good balance of complexity and difficulty and is a good fight. I'm not at all disappointed that my guild cleared it in the first week (without any PTR testing experience). As a guild who went 13/13 in tier 11 I think we should be able to pick up the normal modes quickly.

Heroic Shannox: Heroic Shannox was a little disappointing for me. I expected us to get him quicker. We spent about two hours using the wrong strat because we thought it was more like the normal version. Once we figured that out the fight went more smoothly. In generally I think it's a good fight for moonkin because it doesn't require a ton of movement, and our high amounts of damage reduction allow us to eat the immolation traps.

Heroic Rhyolith: We didn't kill this boss this week, but I think I've gotten a good impression of the fight. The heroic version is more complicated than I expected it to be. It's another good fight for moonkin if you can multi-dot and uses your utility well. Fungal Growth and Typhoon are great for dealing with the Obsidians. Our main issue was figuring out the steering and I think we figured that out and the end of our attempts this week. Hopefully he will go down quickly this week.

Stars' "World First"

If you haven't seen it already, MMO-Champion is reporting that the Taiwanese guild Stars has gotten the world first kill on Heroic mode Shannox yesterday. This is quite surprising. Not because Stars isn't a good guild. They are a very good guild, proven by their world first Yogg +0 kill back in WotLK. This is surprising because Firelands heroic modes shouldn't be available until next week. Apparently Stars had their raid ID reset by having the raid team faction transferring after they killed Ragnaros on normal mode.

After reading the post I had a lot of thoughts right away, but after reading some of the comments on the post I felt the need to address the idiocy that followed.

World First (*):

I haven't seen any indications that they did anything to exploit the actual fight. So yes, by most definitions this is a world first, but that doesn't mean it's significant. Finishing first in a race when you are the only one running isn't all that impressive. I am sure that Heroic Shannox is a difficult fight, but I am also sure that we will see several heroic mode kills next week when many more guilds have access to them. At the very least this is a kill with an asterisk, and no one is saying "awe shucks, Stars beat us to that one."

I also question how much do early heroic kills really matter? I am by no means saying that the early heroic modes are easy, but no one is measuring the T11 progression race by who got the first kill on Halfus. In fact, I bet that a lot of you couldn't tell me who got the first Heroic Halfus kill without looking at WoW Progress or guessing one of the five obvious names and getting lucky. At the same time, I think that a lot more of you would be able to tell me who got the world first Sinestra kill without looking or guessing. The fact of the matter is that the progression race isn't measured by how you start, but by how you finish. So, even if this kill of Shannox wasn't controversial, it still probably wouldn't be all that important in the long run because this tier is going to be measure by who kills Ragnaros first.

However, while I don't think a lot of the elite guilds are all that upset about being beaten to a world first Shannox kill, I guarantee you that they are upset that Stars has gotten access to heroic gear a week earlier then everyone else. It's true that player skill is more important than gear in general, but at these elite levels of play the differences in skill are very small, so little advantages like having slightly better gear could have a significant impact on who gets that world first Ragnaros kill.

After considering all of this, I don't understand why Stars would change factions to get a new raid ID. The best case scenario is that Blizzard takes no action against them, and they get to keep the gear they gained as a result. However, the primary reward for winning the progression race is respect, but by winning the race this way they would ultimately lose the respect of their peers. Worst case scenario, is that Blizzard bans them for some period of time and takes away their gear and achievements. If this is the case then they are out the money they spent to transfer and possibly lose a raid week depending on how long the ban is for. To me it looks like they had very little to gain, but a lot to lose.

Exploit vs "Clever Use of Game Mechanics"

In my opinion, this will probably go down as an exploit. Some people are arguing that this isn't an exploit because Stars was just using the processes that Blizzard put in place. However, I have a hard time seeing how this would fall under the "Clever use of Game Mechanics" category.

It's important to note that "Clever use of Game Mechanics" doesn't mean that if it's possible it's allowed. There are a plenty of examples of players being banned for things that were possible. The most prominent example is Ensidia being banned for their World First kill of Normal Lich King, when they used Saronite Bombs to cause the platform to reform and trivialize phase 2 of the encounter. So, how is this different then Paragon stacking their raid with 13 feral druids to kill heroic Nafarian?

In my opinion, "Clever use of Game Mechanics" is best defined as using game, class, and encounter mechanics in an intended way, but producing unintended results. The Ensidia LK example violates this definition because the outer platforms were not intended to reform during that phase, and the Saronite bombs caused the encounter to behave in an unintended way.

The Paragon/Nefarian example is different, because all of the mechanics were used as intended. The Stolen Power buff is intended to increase the player’s damage output. Players are expected to use this increased damage to complete the encounter. Feral Druids are expected to use Rip as a part of their DPS rotation. Rip is intended to be a very efficient ability that does a lot of damage over an extended period of time, and the damage Rip did with the Stolen Power buff was mathematically and mechanically consistent with how Rip interacts with other buffs and debuffs. They used game mechanics as intended which when combined produced unintended results. What's interesting is that Stars did something very similar to this where their world first Yogg +0 kill by stacking Warlocks

Finally, while we can debate the line between exploit and "Clever use of Game Mechanics," history gives us a good example of how Blizzard will likely view Stars' actions. Back in ToC Ensidia, transferred servers mid lockout to reset their ID and get an additional 50 attempts. I don't think Ensidia got punished in that situation, but Blizzard did take steps to prevent it from happening again in the future. That sent a clear message to all guilds that Blizzard doesn't view this type of action acceptable. Don't be surprised if Blizzard reacts more harshly this time to discourage this activity from happening again in the future.

Crazy Theories and Rationalizations:

These are just suggestions that I wanted to address that didn't really fit somewhere above.

Greedy Blizzard: One of the crazier suggestions in the MMO thread is that Blizzard allowed this to happen because they are greedy and want the faction transfer fees. Lets do some quick math.

It costs 30 dollars to change factions and lets assume that Stars transferred 30 players and plan to change back to their original faction next week. That means it would cost Stars $1,800 to faction change their entire raid team twice. Now lets assume that the top 100 25man guilds would do the same thing to complete for world firsts, and that there are three major content patches a year. In this scenario Blizzard would earn an extra 540k dollars a year in revenue. On it's own that sounds like a lot, but lets think about it another way.

World of Warcraft has over 11 million accounts. Each of those accounts pay a monthly fee of at least 13 dollars. This means that over a year Blizzard has over 1.7 billion dollars in revenue a year in subscription fees alone. I know that every little bit counts, but do you think Blizzard is going to risk taking bad press and a negative player reaction for just 540k dollars? If you do, your crazy.

Time Zone Disadvantage: Another common response is that the US and European guilds have had a day or two advantage due to the servers they play on. Therefore this is just turnabout is fair play that the Taiwanese get an advantage for once.

It's very true that in the short term US guild definitely have an advantage in these early kills, but how does that justify breaking the rules? As I said above these short term milestones aren't all that significant. The really significant world firsts generally take at least a month to complete, and in that time frame that extra day or two isn't all that significant.

The time zone situation is what it is and has been this way for years. Claiming that this is just turnabout is fair play is a little like an embezzler claiming that what they were doing is ok because they've been underpaid for years. In the end this argument is just an attempt to rationalize their actions that were clearly against the spirit of the rules if not a blatant violation of the rules.

First Impressions of 4.2

The patch is now two days old. I've done some raiding, I did a few dailies also, and I haven't written a post in over a week. That means it's time for me give my first impressions of this patch.

Trash:

"Oh my god there is a lot of trash" was my first impression of the Firelands instance. It actually wasn't so bad when I got past Shannox, but it seemed like we were killing trash forever just to get him to spawn. Combine that with the Starfall buff that was causing it to hit trash not in combat and it got hairy at times. Unfortunately for me I discovered this sad fact when we were standing near the death turtles. That was not a good time.

All in all none of the trash packs weren't too bad on there own, and they dropped lots of patterns for us, but the quantity of them was overwhelming. I didn't count at the time, but we killed at least a dozen packs of trash (and probably more) before Shannox spawned. I'm glad that they increased the respawn rate on that center trash to four hours, but that's not enough in my opinion. They need to thin it out a little bit and have Shannox spawn more quickly. As it is, I think it's worse then the BoT trash, which is not a the way you want to start an instance in my opinion.

Shannox:

Going in to the night I thought Shannox would be the easiest boss we tried. Turned out he was the most difficult of the three we attempted. The fact that all of the mobs are now untauntable threw us for a little bit of a loop like most guilds. We also used only two tanks when it sounds like a lot of guilds were using 3 or 4. However, none of that really impacts me directly.

From my perspective, I had this vision of multi doting nirvana going into the fight. Yes, there is a strong don't stand in the fire element, but that generally isn't a problem for me so I wasn't expecting big issues. It didn't work out that way. First off, the traps are tiny. When one was put directly on me I could barely see the teeth around my feet. If a trap is put in front of me, I might not see it at all due to being an overweight moonkin. As a result I got trapped a lot more then I like to admit. Second, my guild is very heavy on DoT classes. We have two moonkin, two shadow priest, and four warlocks. Not all of them were in raid at the same time, but having so many multi-doters meant we didn't have as many people consistently on Rageface as we thought and it made Face Rage a little more difficult then expected. You wouldn't think getting a 30k hit on him with an increased crit rate would be that difficult, but with only a couple DD classes, range issues, and traps it proved to be more difficult then expected.

All in all, I thought it was a good fight, but not quite what I expected going in.

Lord Rhyolith:

As a moonkin I found this fight to be quite annoying, and lot simpler then I expected. Our biggest problem of the night was accidental pulls. Without those we would have had him down in just two or three pulls. After that the big issue was multi-dotting the legs. We thought that doting both legs would increase the damage without making the boss harder to turn. We were wrong. Once we stopped doting the legs the fight was easy. My job was just to kill the adds, and once his shell came off it was a simple tank and spank.

As add dps I found the fight to be quite boring. I had quite a bit of down time waiting for adds to spawn, and the burn phase didn't feel all that threatening. On the other hand, the GM of my guild (who is also a moonkin) really liked the fight. He was helping with the steering of the boss and I can see how that could be a lot of fun.

Beth'tilic:

After reading a few strats and looking at the boss abilities I thought this one would be hard. The fight has two levels with lots of adds. I though the coordination of the fight would cause a lot of headaches, and it did until we realized a couple things.

Our first issue was controlling the Drones and the Spiderlings. We didn't organize our efforts much at the start. The spiderlings were getting to the drone, and all hell was breaking lose. To fix this we started trying to control the Spiderlings from their spawn point, and Moonkin are pretty well designed for this. With the typhoon knockback and Fungal Growth we can slow down the spiders quite a bit. The problem then became DPS on the spiderlings. Since I was starting at zero power my mushrooms, typhoon, dots and hurricane were weak, and there is no good way to get to solar quickly. As a result I had a hard time getting my set of spiderlings down in time. I'm sure with more practice I could get it, but it wasn't obvious to start.

Then we realized the second important fact. DPS on Beth'tilic doesn't matter in the first stage of the fight. Once we left all of the DPS on the ground and only sent a tank and a few healers into the web it was easy. The second stage was once again a simple tank and spank.

Lunar Shower:

First of all, there is a nice discussion going on at EJ regarding Lunar Shower. I suggest you check it out if you haven't already.

Originally I had expected to keep Lunar Shower since, I didn't have a good idea of what to spend the talent points on, but after realizing that Shannox would be a first boss of the night I ended up dropping it to improve my multi dot potential.

Obviously I can't make any lasting conclusions based on three normal bosses, but the impression I got from my first night of Firelands raiding was that using or dropping LS didn't really matter a ton. Not having it on Shannox made multi doting easier, but Shannox was more about control and personal responsibility rather then DPS so multi-doting wasn't critical and may have caused a little tunneling. On Lord Rhyolith, the fragments can be dotted, but they don't last that long, so dotting might not be ideal. Other then those adds the fight is completely single target. Beth'tilic has plenty of mobs that can be dotted, but my role in the fight was centered around control rather then DPS. On the other hand having Lunar shower to proc Solar Eclipse in the beginning could have helped. At this point I'm still up in the air.

The Pre-4.2 Blog Post

All signs point to the Firelands being released next week. Therefore it's probably a good time to take a look back and remind everyone what's coming with the new patch and to update my guides.

Lunar Shower:

• While under the effects of Lunar Shower, Moonfire generates 8 Solar Energy, and Sunfire generates 8 Lunar Energy. The amount of Lunar/Solar Energy gained does not change based on the number of points spent in the talent, or stacks of Lunar Shower. Those druids who wish to delay transition in or out of an Eclipse state should now cast the one of their two basic attacks which will not move the Eclipse bar (either Starfire or Wrath)

After 4.2 Lunar Shower will still increase your Movement DPS potential, but it how has the above caveat attached. There has been a lot of talk about this change, so I won't make a big detailed comment.

This change has turned Lunar Shower into a "blah" talent. On movement heavy fights having the moving DPS will be nice despite the asymmetric way it generates power. On multi target fights it definitely makes sense to drop Lunar shower to make multi-doting easier. However, I suspect that most fights will fall between those two possibilities and won't have much of an impact one way or the other. At this point I am not planning to spec out of it, because I don't have a better way to spend those points. That said, I will drop it in a heart beat for any fight that favors multi-doting.

Nuke Buffs and 4T11 Nerf:

• The 4-piece Balance druid tier 11 PvE set bonus, Astral Alignment, now provides a total of 15% critical strike chance with 3 charges, decreasing by 5% per charge, instead of 99% decreasing by 33% per charge. This change was made because the set bonus proved so valuable it was not possible to upgrade out of the set into tier 12. To compensate, changes have been made to Starfire and Wrath.
• Starfire damage has been increased by approximately 23%.
• Wrath damage has been increased by approximately 23%.

This is the other big change of this patch cycle. In an effort to prevent a Tier 8 situation, Blizzard nerfed the 4T11 set bonus so that players would upgrade their gear in tier 12.

I am a big fan of this change. I didn't like how Astral Alignment complicated our casting rotation and the net result of these changes should be an overall buff. This change also simplifies our glyphing strategies a little bit. Glyph of Starfire is falling to the bottom of the pack. Glyph of Wrath will be best for single target situations and Glyph of Starsurge will be better when Starfall can be fully utilized.

One final thing, I've seen some people question what impact this change will have on how we use Starsurge. As far as I can tell it won't have any impact on Starsurge. At this point I will still be casting Starsurge on Cooldown no matter what phase of my rotation I am in, because Starsurge is still our highest DPET nuke.

Other Changes:

• Innervate now grants an ally target 5% of his or her maximum mana over 10 seconds, but still grants 20% of the druid's maximum mana over 10 seconds when self-cast.
• Glyph of Innervate now causes the druid to gain 10% of his or her maximum mana over 10 seconds when Innervate is used on a friendly target, in addition to Innervate's base effect.

Blizzard thought that healers were getting to much mana from Innervate so they nerfed Innervate for everyone but the druid casting it. The change to the glyph is intended to be a neutral change where where the druid casting it gets the same mount of mana before and after the patch.

• Wild Mushroom: Detonate can now also trigger Earth and Moon, in addition to Starfire and Wrath.
• Earth and Moon's duration has been increased to 15 seconds, up from 12.

My guess is that this change is being made to make life a little easier on 10mans, and improves moonkin utility a little. I doubt this will have any impact on 25man raiding, but this is a big boost for 10man guilds that don't have a DK or Lock able to apply the spell power debuff.

• Fungal Growth spell visual effect has been updated to be less visually intrusive and more aesthetic.
• Solar Beam has a new spell effect.

The Solar Beam graphic is still a little blinding, but these are two good quality of life changes.

• Many crowd control abilities no longer cause creatures to attack players when they are cast.
• Entangling Roots and the equivalent spell triggered by Nature's Grasp no longer deal damage.

Another quality of life change designed to help 5man dungeon groups. Should make CCing in raids a little easier as well, but druids aren't major CCers in general.

Gear Guide Updates:

Overall, the updates to the gear guide are what you would expect. I would like to bring your attention to the point for point valuation of Hit Rating/Spirit.

How we value Hit Rating and Spirit is highly dynamic with regards to gear level. Since the amount of hit rating we need is capped at 1743, it's point for point valuation below that cap goes up dramatically as our Int, Haste, Crit, and Mastery increased. Since we are moving from T11 to T12, I am assuming a higher gear level when I evaluate the options and the value of Hit Rating/Spirit increased dramatically. By the end of the tier I expect it will be more valuable then Int on a point for point basis below the cap.

Please keep that in mind while reviewing the list. As always you can't take every item at the top of the list because that valuation is based upon a high valuation of Hit Rating. It is up to you to manage your Hit Cap and to make the right choices to stay as close to it as possible.

Raiding Guide Updates:

The raid guide didn't change all that much, but there were a few changes that needed to be made to accurately reflect the 4.2 raiding environment.

• Talent Section: I now treat Lunar Shower as an optional talent.
• Glyphs: I limited the third Prime Glyph choices to the Glyph of Wrath and Glyph of Starsurge since Glyph of Starfire has fallen behind. I also updated the Major Glyph section to include a few more situational choices.
• Professions: This section was changed to account for the longer internal cooldown on the Lightweave buff. I also was a bit harsh on the Engineering buff and have adjusted my valuation as a result. Finally, I added a small section on the Race choices available to Druids.

10 vs 25: A Year Later

A little over a year ago I wrote a series of posts about Blizzard combining the 10man and 25man formats into a single lockout with the same loot and other rewards. As I'm sure many of you guys remember, those posts generated a lot of comments. Some people agreed with me, most disagreed. In the end the nay sayers where predicting doom and gloom, while the 10man fans were predicting sunshine and rainbows.

For obvious reasons, it was impossible to say who was going to be right and who was going to be wrong, but here we are a year later with 6months of Cataclysm under our belt and the first tier of Cataclysm raiding nearing a close. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my reaction and the reaction of some of my commenters and see what ended up happening.

Quick Disclaimer: I'm assuming that tensions over this issue (and the way I titled one of my posts) have calmed down quite a bit over the past year. I don't expect any of the drama that resulted last time. However, in an effort to prevent any issue I want to acknowledge one thing. Most of my "evidence" comes from personal experience or observations I've seen on the servers I've played. I do use some numbers from WoWProgress.com, but none of it is scientific.

Personal Experience:

The Concern: My first reaction was very negative. Most of my 10man experiences in WotLK were very positive. My groups were filled with 25man raiders so we overgeared the content, and we had a lot of funny joking around in a way that wasn't really possible in the 25man raid. After a little thought I still had my doubts, but I also saw some of the potential of the change. I could man a chance to raid an alt in a meaningful way or just sleep more once the allure of the 10man rewards was removed.

The Result: A year later and a year wiser, I must say my second reaction was much more correct then my first. When I wrote my first reaction post the best days of my 10man groups were behind me. My 10man group like my guild saw a lot of turn over and we had trouble building a group. We did eventually end up killing heroic Lich King, but that was only after a massive effort from a few dedicated players and was months after it should have happened. In the end, it was the people that made my 10man experience so great, and that couldn't last forever.

The second reality is that I don't have much of an interest in maintaining that type of schedule anymore. To do the 10mans, I was staying up to one or two in the morning several nights a week. On the other nights it wasn't unusual for me to stay up late leveling an alt, crafting for my AH businesses, or doing some other activity. I didn't sleep a whole lot and it had an impact on my life in the game and in my normal life. There are still nights where I stay up very late playing the game, but not having the 10man raid has removed the obligation to doing so. If I stay up late one night, it's likely that I will go to bed early the next. My play time is much more balanced now, and that is probably for the best.

Balancing: Can 10man Equal 25man?

The Concern: I and many other 25man supporters questioned if Blizzard could balance the 10man and 25man formats to be relatively equal. While the gear ilevel difference was the main balancing difference between the two formats in WotLK, it wasn't the only difference. Converting a 25man raid to a 10man or vice versa isn't a simple fix where you just have to adjust a bosses total health. Spread out mechanics favor smaller groups because they have more space to work with. It's unavoidable that Room design and boss abilities will have different levels of significance for different sized groups. Some mechanics will be easier for 10mans because they have more room to spread out or fewer targets to deal with. Other mechanics will be easier for 25mans because they have more people to fill the needed rolls and players are allowed to specialize their responsibilities more. Skeptics like me were unsure if Blizzard could counteract these inevitable balancing differences between the two formats.

The Result: With Tier 11 raiding, Blizzard did a pretty good job. I've done very few fights in the 10man format, but what I'm told by people who have raided in both formats is that the lead up bosses are fairly well balanced, but there are/were a few balancing issues with the end bosses. Nefarian and Cho'gall were much tougher in the 10man format and had their damage nerfed significantly in patch 4.1. On the other hand Al'Akir is significantly easier in the 10man format, and several 25man guilds have gone in and killed Al'Akir on 10man to get the kill and ranking just as some of us skeptics worried might happen.

All in all, I can't really expect Blizzard to do a better job then they did. This type of thing is never going to be perfect the first time. I'm also pleased that they errorred on the side of 10mans being to hard (though I don't know if this was by choice). The fact that 10mans were a bit harder on some of the end bosses may have prevented a mass exodus of progression guilds switching to the 10 format.

Destabilization of Guilds:

The Concern: Organizing 10 to 15 people is easier then organizing 25 to 35. There are a lot of tasks involved in running a guild/raid that just get harder with the addition of more people. It's more people you have to evaluate, it's more people you have manage, it's more whispers and PMs you have to respond to. The question was, why would a GM stick with the 25man format when they can get the same rewards from the 10man format with less work and few problems. Not only that, but a 25man GM could take his best 10-15 players and form a more successful 10man they they could have at the 25man level. It seems like a perfect situation for guilds to abandon the 25man format for the more accessible but similarly rewarding 10man format.

The Result: There has definitely been some movement away from 25mans to 10mans. In the past six months I've seen several 25man guilds reform as 10 man guilds due to recruiting and other issues. I've also seen very few new 25man guilds form, but I've seen many recruiting posts for newly formed 10man guilds.

That said the 25man format definitely isn't dead. Progression raiding still seems to favor the 25man format, while 10man seems to be favored by casual raiding. Looking at numbers from WoWProgress this division is clear. Of the top 100 guilds in the world only five are 10man guilds and of those only one is in the top fifty. The 25man format also has a much higher participation rate in the heroic modes then the 10man format. This is probably an indication that many of the historically successful progression guilds have stuck with the 25man format.

The question now is how is this going to change in the future. Is the 25man format still in decline or has has it stabilized? How many of the 25man guilds in WoWProgress are dead guilds that failed after a couple of months of raiding and won't be active in Firelands? It's going to be really interesting to see the progression numbers at the end of Tier 12 progression cycle. It's my guess that 25mans will still be the dominate format in progression raiding for a couple of progression cycles. However, it's quite possible that the 10man progression guilds needed the Tier 11 cycle to get organized and come out and take the T12 raids by storm and dominate the 25man format.

Seven Bosses

Seven bosses. That is all Tier 12 raiding will consist of.

To be honest I'm a bit shocked, and judging from the forums there are a lot of people who share my surprise. Almost every tier of raiding has included ten or more bosses, and seemed to want to follow that trend judging from the comments they made prior to cataclysm about smaller but more numerous raid instances.

While I am surprised by the change of direction, I am not really disappointed. At this point, I'm not happy either, but it has potential. The question is can Blizzard pull it off. With this post I would like to talk about some of the issues and give my opinion on why this could be great and what pitfalls blizzard has to avoid.

The Reasons:

Bashiok has made several posts on the forums trying to explain the new direction and answer some questions. In the end he gave two reasons for the change.

• "We're concentrating our efforts into a smaller number of fights so that each fight is bigger and better,"(src)



• "I mean that's a tough situation because our feeling is simply that people shouldn't be forced to play the game more than a couple nights a week to keep up on progression."(src)

The Positive:

If I'm giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt, I like both of those reasons.

I've played this game for a very long time. I still enjoy it, but I have to admit that I don't have the same level of interest I did three or four years ago. I still want to progress and see all of the content, but I can't spend 5 or more nights a week doing it. Even if I could I don't think I would want to. I like spending time with my family, watching movies, and reading books. Ultimately I would love to have a schedule like the elite guilds that raid a lot at the start of new content, but scale back to just one or two nights a week once they get everything on farm. With just seven bosses, that type of schedule might be possible for me in the near future.

Another impact of playing this game for as many years as I have is that some of the fights become a little repetitive. How many dragons have I killed with breath's and tail whips? How many puddles have I seen that I'm not supposed to stand it? While there are several new and unique mechanics in Cataclysm raiding, I don't think any of the fights are ground breakingly original. If cutting the number of raids by 5 or 5 allows Blizzard to focus it's attention on what's left and create something true new and unique I am more then willing to make that trade.

The Doubt - Defining Quality:

I would definitely prefer Quality over Quantity, but Quality is a very subjective term. Judging from some of the other comments made by Bashiok, I'm not sure we agree on what quality is, or at least what type of quality is most important. For example, take this quote:

We're also spending a lot of time making the Firelands bosses as awesome as possible - - creating unique models, animations, effects, sounds, etc. etc. Previously a lot of bosses were larger versions of existing models

I realize this is not an exhaustive list but it worries me that all of the attributes he talked about were superficial. Don't get me wrong I like looking at pretty pictures from time to time, but they get old quickly. Never once have I heard anyone say, "You know what? The Lich King looks awesome. Let's go clear ICC tonight." Pretty pictures are nice, but they don't draw people to the content over and over again. That responsibility is left to the Encounter Designers.

The good news is that the Encounter Designers and Graphic Artists are two different groups (I think). So if the artists have more time to work on the Graphics, then the Encounter Designers should have more time to work on the encounters. Everyone wins right?

I hope so, but I have my doubts. In my opinion Blizzard hasn't had a really innovative encounter in this tier of content. Some of you may disagree and point to the Sound meter on Atramedes or the Corruption meter on Cho'gall, but there really not that innovative. They are basically "Don't Fail" meters. If you figure out the mechanics and don't stand in the fire then they are a non-issue.

My worry is that this increased "Quality" Blizzard is trying to sell to us is just the same old fights with new graphics. If that's the case then in my opinion we are trading a lot of quantity for not that much Quality.

The Doubt - A ToC Example:

For the record, Trial of the Crusader is in my opinion the worst raid instance Blizzard has ever designed. The normal modes were way too easy. My guild one shot most of them and pugs were fairly successful fairly soon after its release. The hard modes on the other had were significantly harder, and may have been a little to hard. This created a huge gap in progression. On top of that, the hard modes were almost identical to the normal modes. In most cases the only difference was the boss hit harder and had more hit points.

In my experience this is a fairly common opinion, and some players are trying to draw a correlation between ToC and the Firelands since both have relatively few bosses. To be honest I think that is a ridiculous effort. The fact that ToC was bad doesn't have any direct impact on Firelands other then to provide an example of what not to do, but that doesn't mean ToC is irrelevant either.

First, of all it shows that Blizzard is capable of laying an egg. They can say that Firelands is going to be "EPIC" and "AWESOME" all they want, but that doesn't make it true. They have to do the work, and ToC shows that they aren't always successful.

The second lesson from ToC is that a small raid instance doesn't necessarily mean a short raid week. The heroic version of ToC was hard. My guild at the time could clear normal ToC very quickly but we would spend months working on the Heroic mode. We didn't clear it after a couple months and have short raids until ICC was released. We worked our butt off right up until ICC was released.

This leads to another possibility. If Blizzard feels the pressure to make these fights last then they may be significantly harder then what we are used to. In the end that means more wipes, fewer kills, and the same amount of time spent raiding as we would have if there were 12 bosses instead of 7.

Hoping for a Real Difference:

What I hope this change will lead to is a real difference between normal modes and hard modes. Early on in the hard mode experiment the hard modes were quite a bit different then normal modes. For Example the Iron Council was a completely different fight depending on how you did it. Bosses like Freya gained a lot of new abilities as you tried the harder modes. Not all of the early hard modes were a hit, but on average they showed a lot more imagination then the hard modes that have been released since Ulduar.

Maybe there is some change on the horizon. In an interview with getbuffed.com Cory Stockton said "The raid culminates in a fight against Ragnaros. That fight specifically is pretty hardcore. The heroic version of the fight is actually completely different from the normal version. We really wanted to go all out on that and make sure Ragnaros had a really awesome cool unique feel." (src)

Hopefully this attitude goes beyond just he final boss in the instance. If having fewer bosses means that Blizzard can get farther away from the "hits harder and has more HP" model of Hard modes that they've been favoring this could be a real success.

My Thoughts on Multi-DoTing

Maybe I just hadn't noticed it prior to Cataclysm, but one of the hot topics for this expansion has been Multi-DoTing. A lot of people are looking at the WoL rankings and wondering how player X did so much DPS, and I am no different. In fact, I've paid more attention to the rankings then I ever have before, and I've wondered why in some cases the ranked players are doing so much more DPS then I am. As I filter through the logs I'm finding several reasons for the differences, but one of the more consistent reasons is Player X is Multi-DoTing or Multi-DoTing more successfully then I am.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience Multi-DoTing. I could make a lot of excuses about how it wasn't really necessary in TBC or WotLK, and could give you a lot of reasons why that is true. However, they are just excuses. There were times when Multi-DoTing would have helped but, I didn't recognize the possibility and didn't take the opportunity to learn the skill. As a result I'm a bit behind the 8-ball and trying to catch up.

In this post I want to talk about some of my strategies for Multi-DoTing. I am by no means an expert on this topic and I can't point to any parses to prove my Multi-DoTing leetness. I am still learning, and if you have any suggestions or thoughts please post them in the comments.

Multi-DoT vs DoT-AoE: What the hell am I talking about?

I saw a post on the internet some where, that I agreed with completely. I don't remember where it was, or who wrote it, and I unfortunately can't find it now. However, it talked a little bit about the difference between Multi-DoTing and DoT-AoE.

When Multi-DoTing, you are still using the standard Moonkin rotation, just with more DoT casts. You are still casting Starfire, Wrath, and Starsurge while trying to transition from one Eclipse to the other. The only difference is that you are casting twice as many DoTs because you are refreshing them on two targets (or possibly 3). You probably only have 2 or 3 targets, and they may be positioned in different parts of the room. This means that traditional multi-target DPS doesn't make sense. A good example of this is Valiona and Therlion or Heroic Magmaw.

With DoT-AoE, you are not using the standard Moonkin Rotation. You probably have 5 or more targets that have relatively low health. Your DoTs are really used as filler while you are waiting for your Wild Mushroom cooldown to come back up. If at all possible you are also probably tying to hold Solar Eclipse to maximize DPS since all Moonkin AoE and DoTs are buffed by Solar Eclipse. A good example of this Vile Swill in Heroic Maloriak or the Poison Bombs in Omnitron.

I wanted to make this distinction, because in this post I'm primarily focusing on Multi DoTing, rather then DoT-AoE. Multi-DoTing is where I am struggling, and if done well I think has a much greater impact on a fight then DoT-AoE does.

My Multi-DoTing Issues: I've noticed two main problems in my recent attempts to Multi-DoT.

• Tracking DoTs on Multiple Targets: I have Power Auras set up to track my DoTs on my current target and have used several different DoT Timers in the past, but I've never used anything that would track DoTs on multiple targets. I was having a hard time knowing when to refresh the DoTs on my second target.



• Switching Targets: Being able to change targets quickly is a key to solid DPS in any fight, but changing targets to Multi-DoT is a lot different then changing targets to DPS an Add or to focus on a different boss. When Multi-DoTing you are changing targets frequently with out the content of the fight changing to signal that change. I've found this to be a lot more difficult then just changing when a new add appears.

My Multi DoTing Solutions:

• Addons: My first thought is that there is probably an addon that can help me, but I have yet to find one I like. I've tried two addons to help me track DoTs on multiple targets. The first I used was Fortexorcist. It's an addon made for Warlocks, and I had heard good things about it. Unfortunately, it was not for me. I was overwhelmed by the amount of Set Up that was required and I didn't find it to be intuitive at all. The second addon I tried was Ellipsis, and it had the opposite problem. It works fairly well out of the box, but I found it to have limited set up options, and it tracked some silly things like Mark of the Wild if I was the one to cast it. In general, I thought the addons were a waste of time. They just gave me another thing look at on an already busy screen. As a result the went mostly unused. Plus they didn't provide any help targeting the multiple targets I wanted to target.



• Single Refresh Timer: Some of you may know RandomSmo from the WoW forums and the Moonkin Repository. He is now with Juggernaut on Mal'ganis and seemed to be doing very well Multi-DoTing. So I sent him an email and asked if he had any suggestions. He said that he used a single timer on one target and refreshed the DoTs on all targets based on that one timer. For fights like V&T this is great since the targets exist for the entire fight and are less likely to get out of sync, but would be less effective if the timing is less consistent.



• Boss Frames: The boss unit frames can be very helpful, but I found it very hard to pay attention to them when they are on the right edge of my screen. The good news is you can move them with an addon like Shadowed Unit Frames. I've moved them closer to the center of my screen and they are help fuil in a couple of ways. First, they can display your debuffs that are on the boss. This allows them to act as a bit of a DoT Timer if you need to see who had DoTs and who doesn't. Second, it also makes targeting the boss easy since you can click on the frame. Effective use of boss frames can solve both of my problems, but there is an issue. The boss frames only appear for bosses. Of course I don't want a frame for every add that my appear in a fight, but on a fight like Magmaw the target I'm Multi DoTing is not a boss so boss frames don't work in all Multi-DoTing situations.



• Macros: Traditionally I like to use macros when I need to change targets quickly, but I've found them to not be all that effective when Multi-DoTing. Usually when an add would spawn I would use the macro to target it, add use the same macro to switch back when the add died. For a macro to work with Multi-DoT you would need multiple macros since the extra targets don't die before you switch. I also thought about using mouseover macros or cast sequence macros, but those won't work due to the Moonfire/Sunfire macro issue. In short, I haven't found a good way to use macros in Multi-DoTing.



• Name Plates: With click targeting I have found Name Plates to be very helpful. They make clicking the right target much more helpful and with the default UI you can set them up to only show for hostile targets. They do have a couple of issues though. First, they move around to much when mobs are grouped close together, but that's really only a problem on trash I've found. Second, on fights with a lot of adds they can dominate your screen. Take Magmaw for example, The Parasite nameplates are all over my screen, I would like a way to filter them off for specific names if possible.

TL-DR: My Current Strategy

Learning how to Multi-DoT is clearly important if you are looking to maximize your DPS on a lot of encounters. I can't claim to have mastered the ability yet, but here is my current strategy. I've found the Boss Frames to be the biggest heal. They can give you an idea of the timing of your DoTs, and they make changing targets fairly easy. If I'm trying to Multi-DoT adds that don't have a boss frame, I am using Smo's single timer idea, and refreshing my DoTs on all targets at one time.

I've tried several addons to track DoTs on multiple targets but I didn't find any of them very helpful and they just cluttered my screen more. I found macros to be fairly unhelpful as well, since we can't macro due to the Moonfire/Sunfire macro issue, and needing multiple macros to switch targets back and forth.

If you have any suggestions or have a different system for Multi-DoTing, please post them in the comments. I would love to hear them.

Raid Tools: CompareBot

Over the years, I've gotten a lot of emails asking for help. People will send me their parses and ask why Moonkin X is doing better DPS then they are even though Moonkin X is similarly or lesser geared. I want to help these people, but the truth is most of the time it was difficult to find anything significant to point out.

I think most people will agree with me that WoL parses are not easy to interpret. It's not hard to navigate your way around a log, but it can be difficult to pull all of the relevant pieces together to get a fully developed picture of the situation. Tearing a parse a part to find the detail can take an hour or more. As a result most people only go for the low hanging fruit and as a result begin and end their analysis on the Damage Done tab. In the end they get very few answers because they are comparing apples to oranges or don't go deep enough to see what is driving those numbers.

In this post I want to introduce you to a tool that can help you analyze your parses and hopefully give you more information on how to improve your performance. That tool is CompareBot.

How to use CompareBot?

CompareBot is a tool that will summarize up to three parses and present the information in a way that is easy to compare and find discrepancies. The web site provides fairly simple and straight forward instructions on how to make the page work, but there are several different strategies you could use to analyze you performance.

Week to Week Analysis: You can compare yourself to yourself from week to week or from attempt to attempt. This could allow you to evaluate several different DPS strategies, or possibly identify why one attempt went really well while others did not.

The week to week analysis is nice because it limits or eliminates the impact of gear and strategy differences. The downside to this type of analysis is that it's limited by your own ability and imagination. If there is a fundamental flaw in your performance, you are unlikely to identify it by comparing yourself to just yourself.

Internal Peer Analysis: If your guild raids with multiple moonkin comparing yourself to the other moonkin in the raid can be very helpful, especially if they are performing better then you. Internal Peer Analysis is great because it limits the impact of strategy differences and other variables like fight length that can skew the results when comparing different attempts.

Internal Peer Analysis is limited by the ability and dedication of your guild mates and depends on your guild running multiple moonkin. If you're the best moonkin in your guild it could help you identify what they are doing wrong, but could do very little to help you.

External Peer Analysis: The great thing about External Peer Analysis is that the possibilities for review are endless. As long as the moonkin has a parse on WoL you can see how you stack up to them. You can compare yourself to a rival in another guild, or a well known moonkin like myself or Murmurs. Maybe you want to see what makes Lappè so good at Paragon, or find out why a particular moonkin has the number one ranking on WoL for Cho'gall.

This can be very helpful in identifying why the greats are great and where you are different, but you also have to be a little weary of the results. There are a lot of variables that can impact performance that are not easy to identify in a WoL parse. Strategy differences between guilds can have a big impact that won't show up in WoL gear differences can also be very difficult to quantify. The quality of other players in a raid you can have a significant impact on a player's
performance.

What should a Moonkin look for:

In this Link I compare myself to another moonkin in the raid. At first glance Rootcanal appears to be awesome, and I appear to suck. How else would he beat me by 3k DPS? Honestly, that was my first reaction when I saw this comparison. So I dove into it to see where the differences where.

1. Hits per Minute: The number one rule of DPS is to Always Be Casting, because the number one driver of DPS is how much you cast. Therefore, the first thing I would look at is the Hits per Minute of each spell. Looking at the total number of casts can be misleading because it's skewed by fight length, but Hits per Minute is a pretty good indication if someone has excessive amounts of down time between casts.
   
   Ticks per Minute is another good thing to look at for DoTs. Though you should be careful when comparing Ticks per Minute for a moonkin. How you utilize Nature's Grace could have an impact on the numbers you see.
   
   If you look at the example, Rootcanal and I compare fairly well. He beats me slightly on Wrath and Insect Swarm. There are also very slight differences on Starfire and Starsurge. However, I do a little better with the Moonfire/Sunfire combo spell. I am a little bit behind here, but the difference isn't huge and I doubt it's responsible for the 3k DPS difference.
   
   
2. Eclipse: As we all know Eclipse is drives moonkin DPS, therefore it is the next stop on my comparison. First off, ignore the uptime stat. Having a higher uptime isn't necessarily good, because you could have the buff up but casting a spell that it does not affect. What I would look at is the number of procs per minute. This number could be a little skewed by Euphoria procs, but it's the best indication we have of how well we transition from one Eclipse buff to the other.
   
   On the Buff tab of the comparison you can see that Rootcanal procced eclipse 9 times while I procced it just 8. This suggests that he may have been a little more efficient in his Eclipse Transitions then I was, but it is ever close.
   
   
3. Other Buffs: There are other buffs that can give you a hint as to what happened in a fight as well. Nature's Grace is another good indication of how well you transitioned from one Eclipse to another. Shooting Stars is RNG based, but it can also help to explain a DPS difference. I also like to look at it to compare the uptimes of Shooting Stars. This is a case of where a lower uptime is better because it shows that you are good at keeping Starsurge on cooldown. There also may be fight specific buffs that need to be managed
   
   In this example Rootcanal had Owlkin Frenzy and I didn't . He was also a little better at using Shooting Stars then I was, but for the most part we were about the same.
   

So why did Rootcanal beat me in DPS by 3k DPS? He did cast a tiny bit faster then I did and got an additional Eclipse proc, but I have a hard time believing that those differences resulted in a 3K dps difference.

There are three other reasons why he how performed me on this particular fight.

1. RNG: Look at the crit rates of Wrath and Starfire. My Crit rates were below average. His crit rates were above average. RNG is rarely the problem people like ot make it out to be, but every so often it does raise it's ugly head and bite someone. This is clearly one of those cases, and there is nothing I could have done about it.
   
   
2. Power Generator: He had twice as much uptime on the debuff as I did. It's hard to judge special buffs some times because it may or may not be your fault for not getting them. In this case, we had one spawn during a spread out phase of a fight. He was near it and I was not.
   
   
3. Gear: Honestly, I hate to list gear as a reason, because most of the time gear is used as an excuse to ignore the other reasons for poor performance. That said, it is a factor, and needs to be taken into account.
   

A Word of Caution:

I think you can see how powerful a tool CompareBot can be when used correctly. However, you have to be careful how you use it. Make sure you pick a relatively equal player for comparison. If your guild is 5/12 on normal modes it's may not be a good idea to go and compare yourself to Lappè of Paragon who is 13/13 on hardmodes. In this situation it could be hard to tell if the differences are gear based or performance based. I would also suggest that you use multiple people to compare yourself against.

A Look Back at Wrath of the Lich King

Cataclysm is being released in just over a month. The Balance tree seems to be finished for Cataclysm from Blizzards point of view. I've killed every 25man boss on hard mode and completed all of the meta achievements. I am officially in a holding pattern just waiting for Cataclysm.

Not only am I in a holding pattern in the game, but the blog is in a bit of a holding pattern as well. There just isn't much to talk about at the moment, and looking at the other moonkin bloggers they seem to feel the same way. I took a look back at what I wrote before WotLK came out to try and get some ideas, and the only one that popped out was my expansion in review post. So, lets take a look back at WotLK.

Favorite 5man:
The Nexus - To be honest I had a hard time picking my favorite 5man instance because none of hem really stuck out, but I always thought The Nexus was pretty well done. It had a decent length, and a nice variety of bosses with interesting mechanics. I wouldn't say I absolutely loved the instance, but if all the Cataclysm instance turned out like The Nexus I would be happy.


Least Favorite 5man: It's a Tie.
Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom - This one is a little funny because I actually listed Herald Volazj as a fun fight in my WotLK first impressions post two years ago. However, I have to include it as one of my least favorite instances, because every time it popped up on the LFD tool, I was disappointed. I could handle Oculus and Halls of Stone without a problem, but Old Kingdom was always a pain in the neck. I think it's because everyone seemed to do it a little differently. I never knew what bosses or trash we were doing, plus I suffered through some truly horrible tanks in this instance.

Trial of the Champion - Overall it was a horribly designed instance. I am not someone who is against vehicle fights, but the jousting mechanic sucked. It was a basic free-for-all that didn't really require any control or skill. When you finally got off the horses, the three mobs you had to kill were basic tank and spanks. Eadric the Pure and Confessor Paletress were only a slight improvement. The Black night did have a little flavor and complexity to him, but in my opinion it was too little too late. Combine this with massively long RP and this instance became incredibly boring.


Favorite Raid:
Ulduar - I didn't like everything about Ulduar, but it was easily the best designed Raid Instance in WotLK. Most of the bosses where well designed and there was great variety. The hard modes in most cases actually changed the way the fight worked. The fights were tuned really well. My biggest complaint about Ulduar is that ToC was released to early and pushed it to the back burner before a lot of good guilds had a chance to complete it.


Least Favorite Raid:
Naxxramus - Just so you get a better sense of where I'm coming from, I never raided Naxx before WotLK. My first experience with it was in early December 2008, but Naxx's two big problems became apparent very quickly.

First, Naxx was way to easy. I understand that it is a first tier raid, but other then a couple of bosses like Thadius it provided almost no challenge. This was before the addition of Hard Modes as a rule, so there is no way that so many guilds should have been able and clear the instance in it's first week of real attempts.

The second problem Naxxramus had was that it was a relic of an earlier time. Have you ever had a friend or parent tell you how great this old movie is and then not see what all the fuss is about when you actually watch it? That is how I feel about Naxxramus. I understand why they brought it back, I understand why it was great back in the day, but it clearly didn't live up to more current design standards. Most of the Naxx bosses had only one or two mechanics that you really had to pay attention to. If you take a look at Karazhan, Gruul and Mag, you can see that the fights were much more complicated. Naxx was great in its day, but on fortunately it's day had passed.

Favorite Fight:
Mimiron - Mimiron is probably going to top almost everyone's list, but I am having a hard time identifying a better fight. On normal mode it was a complicated four phase fight that required a lot of coordination. On hard mode, the addition of the fire made it insane. Having limited and unpredictable space forced the raid to think on the fly and adapt the strategy on an attempt by attempt basis. I was very frustrated at times with this fight, but it was also very satisfying.

Runner Up: Malygos - I know some of you will disagree with me on this but I thought Malygos was a great fight. Phase one was fun and interesting trying to manage the sparks for additional DPS. Phase 2 was a nice balancing act of keeping your self safe, but trying to kill the disks as fast as possible. Phase three was a great example of a vehicle fight done right in my opinion. It was a little difficult operating in a 3D environment but there were clear ways to succeed and clear ways to fail. Overall, a very well designed encounter in my opinion.

Least Favorite Fight:
Hodir - It's a little funny that my least favorite fight comes from my favorite raid instances, but the Hodir fight annoys me to no end. My problem with it was that there was no difference between normal mode and Hard mode. It really should have been called lazy mode and normal mode, because if you couldn't be bothered to figure out how the buffs worked and try and use them to your advantage then you were lazy. The other big problem was that it was easy to fail the hard mode but kill the boss on accident. There nothing like ruining a raid night because your DoTs kill a boss a couple of seconds to late.

Most Disappointing Fight:
Gunship - I could easily call Gunship my least favorite fight, but it fails so much that it deserves its own category. I think what's most disappointing about this fight is that it sounded awesome when they mentioned it at Blizzcon, but it turned out to be completely face roll. I think they were trying to make another fight like Karazhan's Chess encounter, but Gunship had several problems Chess didn't. First, a large number of players spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for adds to spawn. I was so bored on one of my kills I spent the entire time trying to see how high I could get on the horde boat as an Alliance Player. The second problem was that all of the mechanics lacked teeth. While the boss and some of the adds could hit hard there was much to worry about for the raid as a whole. Heck, you could stand in void zones and no one would care. Finally there was no reasonable way to fail the encounter other then a mistake by a key player like a tank.

Best Moment:
Getting Immortal - Wrath of the Lich King is littered with horror stories about the Immortal achievement. I can probably only look back on it fondly because I eventually completed it while it was still relevant, but it was a monumental effort. We spent weeks on it, and had countless near misses with single deaths KT or some other stupid boss. We finally got it on April 1st just a couple of weeks before Ulduar was released and earned the T7 Meta mounts. It was an awesome feeling to complete that achievement, and clearly showed LoE was an awesome guild despite raiding half the time that most other guilds did.

A lot of people like to say Immortal was all about RNG. I agree that there is a decent chunk of RNG involved, but to say that it's all about RNG is just an excuse. When we failed one week, we figured out how not to fail like that again next week. If we couldn't trust some one to do what was needed they got sat. Overall, this achievement taught me to think about my own survival. I probably wouldn't be the raider I am today without it.

What Blizzard did right in WotLK:
Adding hard modes - The balance and design of Hard Modes hasn't always been right, but the concept is a home run in my opinion. I am not one of those people who thinks you have to be hardcore to see content, and with hard modes it's possible to provide difficult content for those interested in the progression race and regular content for those that just want to see content without being hardcore.

Balancing on the fly - Before WotLK the philosophy seemed to be that balancing should primarily happen when you release a new expansion. As a moonkin I would look at every patch hoping for a little buff here or a little buff their, but they rarely came. In WotLK the philosophy clearly changed, and it was for the better in my opinion. I love that, Blizzard was willing to make adjustment through out the expansion when they were needed. Now that we are on the door step to Cataclysm, I'm not worried that not all of the issues have been fixed. I'm now confident that Blizzard will continue to look at the problems and make adjustments when necessary.

What Blizzard did wrong in WotLK:
Wimping out on Hard modes - As I said above I think hard modes are a great addition to the game, but towards the end of the expansion Blizzard seemed to get lazy in their design. In Ulduar, doing a hard mode actually changed the fight. In most cases the bosses gained new abilities or a mechanic was added that changed the way the fight worked. After Ulduar most of the hard modes could be summed up in one statement: "The boss hits harder and more adds spawn." With a couple of exceptions the ICC strats didn't change much from normal mode to hard mode. So, all hard modes meant was that you were wiping to the thing you killed last week for 13 more ilevel points.

No sense of progression in WotLK raids - I'm having a hard time describing what I mean. In TBC, guilds progressed from Kara, Mag, and Gruul to SSC and TK, and then to Hyjal and BT. A guild could progress at its own pace and there was a purpose for completing content before moving on to the next one. In WotLK, once Ulduar was released Naxxramus was dead. As much as ToC sucked, it pretty much halted relevant Ulduar progression, and so one. Once a new patch comes out there is little incentive to go back and see the old content in anyway that is challenging.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Blizzard should go back to the big TBC style attunement quests, but I would like to see something that forces guilds and/or players to progress rather then start again as if the 3 month break they just took didn't happen. I think it would be possible to create a reasonable system with guild wide attunements and possibly restricting them to hard modes, but I think it's a little to easy to get into the highest level of progression currently.

Future Plans:
I do have a couple posts planned for the time between now and the release of Cataclysm. I hope to have a new gear guide up before the release of Cataclysm. My raid guide should also be fairly easy to update for level 85 and patch 4.0.3. I also have a post on Leveling guides written that I will post once I know a little bit more about the various 80-85 being sold. I'm also thinking about a couple of other pieces like "Blizzard's unfinished Moonkin business" and a "Cata preview" from my experiences on the Beta.

Why Hard Modes Need to Change

Please Note: This has been a good week for me. I've been called shallow, elitist, and a moron among other things. Well, now I'm about to put a cherry on top of the sundae. I'm sure parts of this post will piss some of you off. Just remember that these are my opinions and you are free to disagree. Insults however will not be tolerated. If you can't provide a thoughtful argument as to why you disagree with me, feel free not to comment.

Despite what some of my commenter say, I don't think I'm an elitist. I didn't get up set when they released all the badge gear in TBC that was equivalent to Black Temple gear. I didn't get upset when they made it so a new 80 could get a full set of T9 gear with just badges. And overall, I like the concept of hard modes.

I am all for everyone experiencing the content and story that raiding provides even though many people do not have the skill, time, or desire raid in a focused progression guild. I agree that it is unfair for Blizzard to spend millions of development dollars on an instance like Naxxramus that only a handful of raiders saw the first time it was released. Therefore, in concept Hard Modes are a fair balance. They give the progression focused players a challenge, and they give the experience focused players a way to see the content.

In theory it's a win/win, but I don't like the way they have been implemented in WotLK. I've already talked about what I think makes a good hard mode and a bad hard mode. In this post I will address what I think is wrong in the current hard mode structure, and take a look at ways I think hard modes can be improved.

What's wrong with current hard modes?

Blizzard has tried a lot of different things with hard modes in Wrath of the Lich King, but they seem to have come upon a favored format. With both ToC and ICC they released the normal mode first and then made the hard mode available when you cleared normal mode. So the raid progression path is normal mode, hard mode, normal mode, hard mode. This structure has a few problems.

First, it forces progression focused raiders to participate in watered down content that they don't necessarily find enjoyable. To illustrate my point let me use an example. When my guild was progressing through Ulduar we one or two shot Hodir on normal mode the first time we saw him. After the kill one of my guild leaders lamented that before hard modes Hodir would have had a 3minute enrage timer. Without the time restriction Hodir is basically a don't stand in the fire tank and spank. For a progression guild, not standing in the fire should not be a challenge, The real challenge of Hodir is using all of the various buffs to maximize DPS. (For the record,I realize we could have gone for the hard mode right away on Hodir. In fact we did on Flame Laviathan and Iron council. However, that does not seem possible going forward given how ICC and ToC were designed.)

Second, the normal mode acts as a stepping stone to the hard node and takes away some of the gravitas that I think an Hard Mode encounter should have. Lady Vashj is one of my all time favorite encounters because it was so challenging and it felt so good to finally kill her. Now imagine if you had to do that fight with only 2 shield generators and no Striders before you could do the full version. It's like being forced to read the Cliff Notes version of a book before you get to read the entire thing.

Finally, I don't think the current structure provides enough rewards for high achieving players or enough ways for players/guilds to distinguish themselves in the early days of new content. It also doesn't provide any incentive to go back and work on old content that you haven't completed. In the first two months of ICC it was near impossible to rank the guilds on any server because guilds could kill most if not all of the bosses available right away.

Since Blizzard is bending over backwards to make sure 10man raiders don't feel compelled to run content in a format they don't enjoy. Why should progression raiders be compelled to participate in a format of content they don't enjoy? Here are some changes I think Blizzard could make to fix the situation.

My Proposed Changes:

Allow two paths for hard mode attunement: I know attunment is a bad word for a lot of players, but hard modes already have an attunement process. Having to clear an instance on normal mode before being able to attempt the hard modes is an attunement. I propose that we allow guilds to attune themselves to hard modes in two ways. First they could clear the normal mode of the current instance as we currently have to do, or you could clear the prior instance on hard mode. Basically, if you want to attempt Heroic Marrowgar, you have to kill normal Lich King or heroic Anub. I am not proposing any attunements for normal modes.

I like this idea for two reasons. First, it allows progression guilds to skip the watered down versions of fights that they may not find enjoyable. Second it encourages guilds to complete content. When ICC was released there was only one guild on my server that had killed heroic anub. My guild killed him in the first week of ICC, but several of the progression guilds on my server skipped him for months, and I think that is a shame.

Release hard modes first: I like this idea, because it rewards high achieving guilds, and it helps to create a more distinct path to measure the quality of a guild and ultimately facilitates the progression race that many WoW players enjoy.

I know the casual raiders out there won't like this and I can hear the accusations of elitism already. No one wants to wait for content, especially when they know it is ready. That said, no one has a problem with letting the elite marathon runners start 30 minutes ahead of everyone else in the Boston Marathon. We don't hear a massive out cry from the runners starting later saying it is unfair.

I am sure that some of you will make the point that hard modes and normal modes could be released at the same time, which isn't a horrible idea either. However, I don't think it would provide enough of a separation. Releasing hards and normals at the same time would allow guilds to practice on normal with alts and then try the hard on mains after they figured out the mechanics. I also like the idea of rewarding achievement. Allowing progression guilds to see content a couple of weeks earlier would be a nice reward and provide some incentive for players to challenge themselves. If you only want experience content, then what does it matter if you wait a little longer?

My Vision:

To use ICC as the example, in my vision the hard versions of the first 4 bosses in ICC would be released first. If you haven't completed ToGC, you know have incentive to finish it up. If you have completed ToGC, you have two content to measure yourself against with out having to worry about other guilds cheating by practicing the fight in another format. A few weeks later the Plague Wing of ICC is released for hard modes and the normal mode of the first 4 bosses are released. The guilds that having completed ToGC now have new content. They can still move up to the heroic content by completing ToGC if they want to. The other wings would be released in a similar fashion. Eventually casual raiders would have access to the entire instance. Then they could try hard modes by either completing ToGC or by completing normal ICC.

TL-DR:

The current format of hard modes forces progression raiders to run content that they don't necessarily enjoy. The current format also provides little opportunity for guilds to distinguish themselves in the early days of new content and I think doesn't provide enough rewards.

With that in mind, I propose two changes to the current format. First, allow progression guilds to attune for hard modes by completing the previous hard modes as well as competing the current normal mode. Second, release the hard modes first to reward high achieving guilds and allow for a better way to measure the progression race that many players enjoy.