Guilds in WoW

Since the point of this blog is to talk about my experience outside of a guild, I suppose it makes sense to discuss why I've made that choice. So, here we go.

There are a couple of reasons for the existence of guilds:

- Social contact: meeting new people, coordinating communication among people you know, providing a limited chat channel for people you, presumably, want to talk to.

- Ease of grouping: in theory, a guild would provide a group of people that you could team up with. More on this in WoW specifically later.

- Help with individual tasks: Grouping to level/and or powerleveling.

- Accomplishing goals too big or long-term for pickup groups: in WoW, this means raiding. I've seen people advertising Molten Core pickup groups, but they're not the norm.

I might be missing some aspects, but it seems to me that the above cover most of the possibilities. Now, for me half don't apply - first, I'm an antisocial bastard, and second, I'm not max level (or even close, since Burning Crusade) and so raiding is pretty much out of the question. (It might be possible to start raiding in the mid-high 50s in a few months, but right now everybody's exploring the BC content, it seems.)

Now, the other two just seem... problematic. In a level-based game like this, at any given point there is a "band" of content that's productive to you to experience. You can try stuff a bit harder, or a bit easier, but you won't actually progress running Deadmines at 50 or exploring the Plaguelands at 14. So at any given point, there are likewise a "band" of players in the right level ranges that are interested in running the same content.

There are a couple of ways guilds can help players in this kind of setup - they can be very large, and try to have plenty of players at all bands, so that the guild is basically a microcosm of the player population as a whole. This is only really helpful when these players are selected with some care - otherwise, you may as well just group with people at random. The problem is that selecting people with care implies a selection process, and that implies someone overseeing it - leadership, of some description. Now, it is certainly possible to have a dedicated staff of officers committed to making the guild membership friendly, helpful, etc... but most of the large general guilds I've seen are also the ones that recruit pretty much at random, and unless they have a REALLY cool tabard, that just doesn't seem worth it to me.

The other way to do it is to basically pick a "band" and grow the guild together - for example, getting 10-20 level 20ish folks, running instances and quests together, and getting the average level of the guild up as you go. The problem here, for me, is commitment - in order for this to work, you have to play pretty much exactly as much as your fellows. I can't commit to that - I'll play 40 hours in a week, then not play for a month, then give up sleep for three days, etc. So... I solo, and do pickup groups for instances, and it works ok. Maraudon was agony finding groups for, but I got through it, and got three blues from it.

It'd be different if there was a sidekick/exemplar system like City of... has - I'd cheerfully run Deadmines weekly to help out lowbies, and take lowbies with me on high level runs - but getting a system like that to work in an item-based game is vastly different than getting it to work in a game that has, functionally, no items at all. You'd have to make explicit the "meta-level" concept that Tobold talks about, and adjust the sidekicking to work relative to that.

From everything I've read, the "banding" happens even at max level, except it's extended to gear or "meta-levels" as well, and raid groups have the same problems - either be efficient, but struggle with keeping everyone on the same band, or be huge and hard to manage. The added quirk that "meta-levels" are gained by gear improvements, which are awarded by chance, fiat, or arcane DKP systems rather than automatically and fairly by playing the game, like xp is, makes it that much harder to keep people together.

Vacuuming the Cat

Respecced last night, for the first time (I'd use a freespec to go from a dagger assassination/combat build to a sword combat build, but otherwise hadn't tweaked it). I understand the logic behind picking a single spec... but I don't like it. I want to do high damage with high crits and no actual thought involved in gameplay, and after playing around with the tool for an hour and a half, the best spec for that was damn near even across the board. (The lvl 70 spec will be daggers, although at 56 it's non-specific - I don't actually HAVE a dagger right now.) Got that laid out, and immediately saw in Stormwind General "LF1M for Sunken Temple!"

Woohoo! Maybe I'll get a ST quest done!

...not.

We got in, killed the first two troll minibosses, wiped for some ungodly reason, then the tank discoed. We went a bit farther with only four, then the hunter bailed, although the tank came back. Found another hunter, made it outside to summon him, the tank discoed again, then the rogue discoed. Neither of them ever came back, so the three of us remaining hung around for a while in the LFG tool. I ran around the swamp killing swamp things for Mazen's Behest, so at least I got something done. (Yes, that's a level 41 quest. I'm a completist. Yes, I know.) I also found a crate of lost supplies for The Lost Supplies, which didn't give me any particularly useful rewards, but it was something to do.

The new spec actually looked pretty good, although it's hard to tell how much of the extra damage was coming from the new rank of Eviscerate and how much from my much more frequent crits. It certainly felt stronger.

Finally, after switching to BRD, not finding anybody willing to do that, and giving up, the group broke up. Wonderful. Just another Sunken Temple run.

I also found the alliance quest hub, which I'd somehow missed when it would have done me some good. I'll come back at some point, with one character or another. I wonder if the quests there give Exodar rep now?

After turning in the quests at Nethergarde, I couldn't face the idea of grinding, so I went back to Westfall to pick up a quest I'd forgotten about and run Deadmines again. This'll be the last time that running it will do me any good in enchanting, though - I'm about past the 1-20 materials range. It was fun anyway, though, and I got something I had always wanted - my very own parrot! Screw selling this at AH - it's MINE! ALL MINE! So now I have two birds - the chicken and this rare-drop parrot. I win!

Anyway, not a good day for xp, rep, or quest completion, but I got some very valuable cat-vacuuming done. Tonight I'll probably get about as much accomplished.

The Argent Dawn Grind, part 1

I've been stuck at 55 for a week or so. I blew the weekend dropping Herbalism in favor on Enchanting, just for kicks, then running Deadmines and Stocks to get lowbie greens to disenchant. Somehow I never get tired of the Deadmines... it's a fun instance, and eminently satisfying to blast through one- and two-shotting everything. Anyway, this got me up to 150 pretty quick, but didn't exactly net me much XP.

I'd like to do the Sunken Temple, but I can never seem to get in a full group, so, last night being Monday and a bad night for sitting LFG, I decided to just grind. I picked Argent Dawn because I happened to be in Stormwind, and knew there were a couple of quests I could do.

All Along the Watchtowers was easy enough, minus one minor aggro radius miscalculation that left me flat on my ass. Those 56 Elites seem a wee bit harder than one would expect.

I also did Target: Dalton's Tears, giving me two sets of cauldron drops to gather.

Then, I settled in to grind. I just hung out in Sorrow Hill, killing level 50-51 ghouls and skeletons. I swear the ghouls were designed to piss off rogues, with their 2 minute poisons. I decided to take advantage of my sword build and stood on the path and chucked knives at critters to pull them. It was... grindy. Not very exciting, not dreadfully profitable - one green gun, and one green enchant recipe, about 35 minion scourgestones, and enough cauldron/cloth drops for four or five turnins. But, you know, some days I'm in the mood to grind, and it wasn't THAT bad - I dinged both 56 and Friendly.

Maybe now I can actually take even-level quests, with my improved Eviscerate. We'll see.

Statement of Purpose

I've been playing WoW casually for a year or so, now, and finally made it to the 50s. All of a sudden, I'm awfully popular - I get guild invites all the time, utterly at random. I have no particular desire to be in a guild, but by all reports, the WoW endgame is not really feasible to solo.

Well, I'm going to try.

This blog is basically my WoW journal. I may, at some point, change my mind and join up with a guild - and I may, at that point, post about it. In the meantime, I'll just be chronicling my adventures.