Call A Doctor, Expansionitus!

Tuesday night I log in ready to assault Black Temple.

When time for the raid rolled around, we were looking a bit short, especially in the healer department. I did a double take as my Pally Power dutifully reported a complete lack of Roguery in our midst. Lack of healers would be rough. Lack of Rogues would pretty much mean RoS would be impossible.

It seems Expansionitis has hit Dominion.

boredom with early bosses
I know many people don’t find the early bosses in Black Temple exciting anymore and many people have gotten all the loot they could want from them, but we still have to kill them to get the harder bosses people do find exciting and from which people do want loot.

For me, I was on because I enjoy raiding. It’s fun (or I wouldn’t do it). Loot is fun too and I love getting a new piece of armor for my character, but ultimately it’s raiding that I enjoy. It’s joining forces with 24 other people on my team and facing down the monsters and Bosses ahead of us.

It’s also the opportunity I have to tank which is my favorite thing to do in game. You don’t get to tank a lot playing solo. (Actually, you tank everything solo, but it's not quite the same thing).

dkp system contributes
I think another contributor to our lack of attendance last night may be our loot system. I’ve stated on other occasions that I’m not a huge fan of our loot system. However, it is the system that Dominion uses and the one I’ve agreed to use. Please don’t take this as me complaining out our loot system. My goal here is only to point out that the loot system, regardless of my feelings about it, may be a contributor to our lack of attendance.

We run a positive sum DKP system. This system is similar to zero-sum dkp, but it allows the guild to add points to the system for anything and everything, including attendance, contributions of gold, gems, etc to the guild bank, and progression. As with zero-sum, each item is worth a certain number of points, and when a player receives a drop, the item’s value is subtracted from her total. Main spec upgrades cost up to 180 DKP under our system. Players may go below zero. These systems tend to get very, very inflated, and the gap between the bottom and the top can be just crazy.

For instance, the top of our leaderboard has between 4000 to 7000 DKP. Some of our newer members have less than 100. Those at the top have absolutely earned their place. Some of them have been raiding with Dominion for almost a year solid.

If you are curious I’m 52nd on the DKP list with just over 600. I’m still behind a guy who last raided in April. To be fair, I only attend 75% of our raids so that contributes to my personal position as well.

Just to reiterate, because I don’t want to be misunderstood, don’t read this as me complaining about the loot system. This was only meant to demonstrate the kind of gap that can exist in this kind of system.

Because of the large gaps, most people’s position in the loot food chain is well established. The 1st place player would need to loot over 10 pieces of gear with the 2nd place person not receiving any, and assuming no contribution by either player, for 2nd place to pass first place. That's what I mean by the position in the food chain being established. Let me say again, I feel those people have earned their place through months and months and months of consistent raiding.

But you combine a lack of incentive from the DKP system with boredom with familiar content with an imminent expansion and you get what we had last night: A called raid.
While waiting to see if we could form up the raid a little later, I headed over to the Netherwing mines to work on my Netherwing Rep which is still at Neutral. I was lucky enough to find one of our Mages, Kho who was also working on his Netherwing Rep.

AoE tank + AoE farming class = Lots of Dead Mobs. We both got a Netherwing Egg and over 30 Netherwing Crystals each. Kho was also able to mine some Nethercite ore.
It was quite eye opening for Kho as he watched me dispatch 10 in about the same time as I could kill 1. My DPS solo is proportional to the number of mobs hitting me. With just 1, I do about 200 DPS. With 10, I do about 800 DPS. I try really, really hard to never fight anything just 1v1.

We turned in our quests and ported to Ironforge after the raid was officially called off.
Only time will tell if last night was an aberration or the sign of things to come.

Comments

Adlib said…
I hear ya. I think we're starting to get a little of that in our guild as well. We have a lot of people messing around on the PTR as well as in the Beta. In order to try to fuel more attempts on Illidan, we've gone to a more "selective" process on who we bring to farming raids to speed things along during the week. The problem is, we're all bored. Granted, I have a wedding next month to get ready for, but even so, I'd rather not go if I didn't have to, but then we have new people who end up wiping continuously on bosses we've been farming for months. That puts us behind, and then people get burned out and frustrated.

I hope things pick up for you guys soon!

Btw, nice use of the "Fireproof" logo/movie earlier. :)
Anonymous said…
Raist here:)

I feel you're pain..we havent stepped foot in bt for 3 weeks now .
The day the date for litch was announced..we had 16 people online /sigh
Anonymous said…
I have long said that DKP is a redundant and outdated loot system.

The only loot system I will ever use is loot council, the only problem with loot council is if you have corrupt officers. However, if you have that, you have bigger problems.
Anonymous said…
We were starting to get a bit of it, but we had been helping another guld & borrowing their instances when they were finished with them but it all came to a head and we suddenly got a dozen new undergeared recruits. They want early/middle bt. We want Illidan and sunwell and its all good.

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