Weekend (3 Oct) - Cata Confusion Called FRL&DDS

Weekend (3 Oct) - Cata Confusion Called FRL&DDS

At the bottom of this post is an explanation of the "Flexible Raid Lock and Dynamic Difficulty System" (FRL&DDS) coming in Patch 4.01. But first, the more important stuff starts here:

Our ICC25 co-op raid on Friday got off a few minutes late as we tried to locate a third tank. Wild's guild still only provides a handful of raiders to this venture (seven on this night). The BH guild would have to fill in with PUGs to get their raid off the ground without the help of MM, but still, I wish our guild could offer more raiders than we do currently.

Our healing team is still druid heavy, with three druids, a paladin, a shaman, and a priest. The BH guild's best druid healer, however, was pressed into service as a tank, putting some additional responsibilities on Wild as the lead druid healer for the night. Our third tank was a warrior with modest gear that we would have to pay close attention to. He was a good ICC10 tank, but he was a bit uncertain how he would fare in ICC25.

Clearing the initial trash was a kind of crazy, fun mess. We kept aggroing multiple mob groups, and no one could quite figure out why. But we just kept plowing forward and although raiders died we never wiped. It was chaotic, but entertaining.

We swept through the first wing of ICC with no difficulty. All four bosses went down, with Marrowgar and the Gunship done on Heroic difficulty. Another week and another drop of the one trinket Wild lusts after [Althor's Abacus] and another night of bad dice.

Usually we would then go after Festergut and Rotface. The new raid leader for this week, however, decided to change the pattern. He wanted to go straight to Dreamwalker, which was cool. Wild has only seen the Dreamwalker fight in 25 man once, and Wild stayed outside the portal and healed the raid that one time (back in the FS guild days). The raid leader wanted the three best healers in the raid to go into the portal, and that included Wild.

What I wasn't expecting was that most of the raid were seeing this fight for the first time. While us healers were doing our thing in the portal, the rest of the raid outside was having to undergo a rather serious learning curve. For the first couple of attempts Wild helped heal raiders when coming out of the portal. That cut down Wild's total healing on Dreamwalker but helped keep people alive. One of the other portal healers whispered Wild and asked that I heal only Dreamwalker. The two healers outside the portal needed to figure out how to keep the raid alive. The three of us have to do everything we can to rescue the dragon.

So Wild focused on maximizing his heals on the dragon - and locating a portal each time they spawned. And in 25 man that proved to be a real challenge. In 10 man ICC, three portals spawn, and they always spawn near the front of the dragon. Getting into position to enter a portal was relatively easy. In 25 man a lot more portals form, but they can be anywhere. "Anywhere" from Wild's perspective is wherever Wild isn't. No matter where Wild positioned himself, there never seemed to be any nearby, and Wild wasted precious time finding one and getting to it.

Inside the portal Wild was his usual klutzy self, gathering as many orbs as I could while flapping about like an uprooted tree caught in a tornado. I probably looked pretty funny to the other two healers in the portal (a shaman and a paladin), but Wild held his own against his better geared peers. No matter how hard I tried, though, Wild couldn't out-heal them, which as a druid I should have been able to do.

We were persistent, spending our entire evening on this one encounter, and taking six shots at it in between tweaking and learning. There is a great deal more to this fight in 25 man than 10 man, but I think we made great strides.

Wild was looking forward to continuing our raid on Saturday night. However, we came up short on raiders and the raid was called. Five raiders who had signed up for Saturday and had attended the Friday raid did not show up, two of them from the MM guild. That was a bit embarrassing for our guild, to have 2 of 7 not show, while the BH guild had 3 out of 18 not show up. We did consider asking PUGs to fill in, but decided that it wasn't worth asking five PUGs to lock into a raid that was only going to hit a couple of bosses.

There was another gorilla in the room, too. The rumors are getting hot that Patch 4.01 will be released this coming Tuesday. If that happens a lot will change for both players and for raiding. Wild sees the guild workings of three guilds (FS, MM, and BH) and only FS has done any visible thinking about how to manage the changes to raiding that are coming.

In a prior post I covered some of the major changes hitting us with Patch 4.01. This next section talks specifically about how raiding will be affected.

In the first of likely many WTF?! announcements, Blizzard introduced the "Flexible Raid Lock and Dynamic Difficulty System" coming in Patch 4.01. Any new system that takes that many words to describe it in just the title sends little alarm bells ringing in my ears. This system is supposed to be the bridge between the way current raiding works and the way it will work in Cata. The explanation of how it works took eight paragraphs and innumerable clarifications. After 61 pages of comments and confusion from players, Blizzard summarized things by saying it'll all make sense once we actually see it. The new system is only going to affect Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum, which are the two newest raids and the ones most played.

Let me see if I can explain this.

The Current System: The way things work now, the 10 man and 25 man raids are completely separate. Wild has a 10 man ICC group that I play in as well as a 25 man ICC. Once you kill the first boss in a raid, you are locked to that raid. Raid locks are identified by a unique ID number tied to the raid leader. In determining who can get into a raid (ie, is not locked), a player either must have no raid ID associated with his toon or he has to have the same raid ID as the raid leader. For example, once Wild kills the first boss in ICC10, I can't join any other ICC10 man raid except that one until the raid resets each Tuesday. Wild can still go to his ICC25 raid and kill Marrowgar again, since that is a completely separate raid. Even the loot tables are different for the two raids. If Wild missed the first night's ICC10 raid and they killed the first four bosses, Wild could still join the raid on the second night. Wild would lose any chance of downing the first four bosses for that week since the raid I was going to lock myself to has already done them. But Wild could help kill all the bosses after that. Raids can also switch back and forth between Normal and Heroic modes for each boss encounter as long as there is a Kingslayer (someone who has killed the Lich King) in the raid. Wild's 25 man ICC, for example, typically kills Marrowgar and Gunship on Heroic and the other bosses on Normal.

The Cata System: The NEW raids such as Blackrock Caverns (BRC) that will arrive with Cata will still have 10 and 25 man versions. These new raids, however, will have the same loot table and will share the same lockout. The only difference from a loot perspective is that the 25 man raid will drop more gear than the 10 man, but it will still be the same loot. It's the new shared lockout that has everyone wringing their hands. No longer will players be able to run different raids, one for 10 man and one for 25 man, since going to either will set a single raid ID for both. In effect, it means that instead of being able to kill bosses twice each week, they can only be killed once each week.

So far so good, but here's where it gets complicated. The new system is not very flexible, and would seem to lock raiding guilds into doing either 10 or 25 man, and given the additional effort to put a 25 man together might kill that option all together. Who wants to get locked to a failed 25 man raid when there is no fall back to the ten man? So Blizzard added flexibility - and complexity. Under the new system we'll be allowed to join different raids; ie, we are not "locked" to that first raid. So if Wild joined one raid and killed the first two bosses, and that raid folded, then Wild could go join someone else's raid and keep going, and it doesn't matter that Wild started with a 10 man and then joined a 25 man. There are conditions, however. Blizzard doesn't want us killing the same boss more than once per week. This is the key. All the complicated rules around this change are intended to let raiders move around in different raids while not allowing them to be in a raid where they would encounter a boss more than once. Here's the second key: Blizzard doesn't want anyone being able to go "backwards" when they switch raids. Let's say Wild killed the first boss in BRC and that was the only boss downed. Wild then switches to another raid, but they have already killed the first three bosses and are on the fourth. Wild can still join the group, but doing so would add the second and third bosses to Wild's list of "completed" bosses for the week. In other words, Wild would have to give up those kills for the week. It's not even that simple, though. There are also rules governing when moving from 10 to 25 and 25 to 10 can occur, and even more complicated rules on how that will work when switching to Heroic modes. I'm not going to explain them, since no one but Blizzard claims to understand them.

The Patch 4.01 System: Blizzard wants us to learn the Cata raid system before Cata is released. In other words, they know this is going to be painful and a lot of players are going to be angry and upset, and Blizz doesn't want that associated with their big release. So they are going to force the new system on two existing raids, ICC and RS, trying to mush two different systems into one. There are two significant problems with this that players and guilds are just going to have to figure out how to live with. The first is that the loot tables won't change, so 25 man will still have better loot than 10 man, even though players won't be able to raid them both in the same week anymore. Second, many guilds are now working on the high end accomplishments of both 10 and 25 man raids (achievements and a very special quest line to get a legendary weapon called Frostmourne). Under this interim system guild raiders would not be able to do both. It may be small consolation that this kluged together system only lasts in the period between the release of patch 4.01 and Cata. We will all be struggling to figure it out while Blizz tweaks and twists it to prepare for Cata.

And Patch 4.01 may come as soon as this coming Tuesday.

PS - For those who noticed, I did not post anything about the Thursday night ICC10 G1 run. We had a rough night with our cat and Wild didn't get a chance to raid.