An End to Madness

Deathwing is dead.

Actually, he's been dead for a couple of weeks now. I'm just damned tardy in my progression updates these days.

My guild, Mountain Top, cleared normal Dragon Soul for the first time just before the 5% Power of the Aspects nerf hit at the end of January. Sadly, I wasn't there due to a family crisis, but I'm proud that our guild managed to down Dragon Soul before it's difficulty was reduced. And we managed it despite losing key members of the team and not having a regular raid night.

Did I mention we're recruiting?

I got my own first Deathwing kill on the first week after the nerfs, and am going in again tonight for my third. We've also begun working on Heroic Morchok, whom we got down to 10% on our first night before time constraints forced us to kill him on normal difficulty so we had enough time left to clear the instance that night.

At the beginning of this expansion I set a raiding goal for myself; I wanted to clear each raiding tier while it was current, something that I didn't manage to do in Wrath of the Lich King. With Deathwing's demise at the hands of my Shaman I have now managed to accomplish that on the last two of the three raiding tiers this expansion.

I view Raiding Progression as a very personal thing. As much as I share the accomplishments with my guild and couldn't do it without them, I look at the raid bosses I've downed as my measuring stick as to how well I've experienced the content and how I am personally progressing. I was enormously disappointed that I didn't clear all of Tier 11 while it was current, only going 9/12; I didn't get Nefarian or either of the Throne of the Four Winds encounters down before 4.2 brought the nerfbat to them. Despite that disappointment, I'm very happy to have accomplished what I have done.

ON DIFFICULTY

I promised myself that I would not make this post a discussion on the difficulty level but I need to at least mention that compared to Lich King, Nefarian or Ragnaros, Madness of Deathwing was a hell of a lot easier. It didn't take my guild very many attempts to finally kill him. I think I saw about five pulls on normal difficulty before I got my first kill. Even Ragnaros after the savage nerfs that he received seemed more difficult than Madness.

The question that I pose to you, dear reader, is: Was the Madness of Deathwing encounter inherently easier than previous end boss encounters, or did it simply seem easier because the vast majority of us had already seen and defeated a simplified version of it on the Raid Finder?

On Flexibility, Emotional Attachment and Mister Spock. With Ice Cream!

"Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death." - Anthony Lawlor, A Home For The Soul

Those of you who follow this blog closely and spend just a little too much time obsessing over it (and you know who you are) may have noticed that there has been a distinct lack of Paladin related posts around here recently. In fact, looking back at my archives the last post that talked about Paladins specifically was way back in July.

There is a good reason for this: I'm not raiding with my Paladin any longer.


A DISCLAIMER

You know, I started this post with the best of intentions: A short, to-the-point post about what I've been up to in WoW and why I'm not posting about or playing my Paladin. Half-way through it turned into something completely different. I guess you and I will both find out what the hell I'm talking about when we get to the end because I have no idea where this is going any more than you do. Maybe there will be Ice Cream and Whisky. Goodness, that would be nice, wouldn't it?


SHAMAN: The new Battle Medic? At least this one's actually a Dwarf.

With Dragon Soul on the PTR, I was approached by our Guild Master who asked me a question that took me by surprise: Would I be willing to switch my raiding main in order to help with raid healing? It turns out that our guild is so full of main-spec Holy Paladins that it is a little bit like a large, overfilled doughnut—taking a bite of which will get Holy Paladin goop all over your shirt. And that shit is hard to get out.

In the interests of trying to avoid a 10-man raid with three Holy Paladin healers—which would strain just about anybody's tolerance for egocentrics in a raid, I imagine—I switched my Raiding Main to my (then) newly 85 Restoration Shaman.

My GM's reasoning was pretty straightforward: Dragon Soul looked to be a very raid healing intensive series of fights and even with the strength of the 4.3 Holy Radiance changes it seemed as if our normal Paladin/Paladin/Priest setup wouldn't be ideal. This was made especially clear when we found that some of the fights would require only two healers, and neither Paladin had a DPS off-spec. My Shaman provided my GM with a different option.

So, the week before Dragon Soul opened I was running through Firelands, healing on my Shaman. I admit, it felt odd at first. Even though I had levelled her completely through dungeons I was woefully unprepared to take her on a raid. My understanding of the subtleties of the class were at a very basic level, my UI was not set up properly and her gear was, shall we say, eclectic; an odd mix of items cobbled together from every possible source and not powerful enough to even qualify her for the new Looking For Raid feature.

She's nicely geared now, although there are still some problem spots due to some very bad loot luck in Dragon Soul. I'm not sure why, but in our raids the only Tier Token that ever drops is Vanquisher tokens—we literally had a new Death Knight alt get his 4 piece in a single night, and the only reason he got each token was because all the other Vanquisher eligible players already had theirs. Meanwhile, I, along with a lot of other people in my raid group, are organizing strange voodoo rituals to influence the gods to drop something—anything that we can use. Now, I know that no one really cares about other people's loot problems, but that night made me want to roll a Druid just so I could actually get a drop.

THE SPOCK PRINCIPLE: The Needs of the Many, blah blah blah

Imagine, if you will, a dwarf lying on a brown leather couch, a worried expression showing through his beard and his armour poking holes in the leather and setting it smouldering because the shoulder piece is on fire, which for some inexplicable reason is perfectly normal. Next to him, seated at a comfortable armchair is a bald man with a white goatee neatly trimmed into a point and a notepad on his lap. He leans over towards the dwarf, and in a thick German accent asks, "Und how doez ziz make you feel?"

A long time ago I wrote an article entitled What Makes a Main?, in which it I talked about the emotional connection to a character as the fundamental element that determines which character would be a person's "Main Character". While that criteria certainly wouldn't apply to everyone (there are people who change their mains constantly due to many different factors, for instance), but it is absolutely true of me. My Holy Paladin is my main because I am emotionally invested in him, both in terms of character as well as the play-style and mythos of the Paladin. My Paladin just feels right.

So when Mylindara asked me to switch for the good of the raid, I felt a little conflicted. From a dispassionate point of view he made a lot of sense because even while temporarily undergeared, my Shaman brought something to the raid that we were lacking. Emotionally, however, my main is still my Paladin, and is the character that I am most interested in playing and progressing. Not only that, but I enjoy healing on the Paladin more than the Shaman.

So the real question that I, or anyone in a similar situation must ask themselves is: When does the needs of the group trump the desires of the individual? Should we always be selfless in order to help the group, or is it alright to say "No" so we can play the game the way we want to? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one when the ultimate goal of the game is individual entertainment? What would Spock do?


FLEXIBILITY: When is it okay to take one for the team?

I think the answer greatly depends on what type of player a person is. I believe that there are two extremes to this question where the answer is obvious and unchanging, and then there is a vast grey area in between where a large percentage of the player base sits.

The Activity-Centric people amongst us will look at this question as absurd because min-maxing every aspect of an encounter is fundamental to their play-style. Changing their character to bring that one extra buff or cooldown to the raid in order to gain any advantage—regardless of how small—is far more important than the attachment to a certain character or class. For them the emotional need is to progress at a personal level, and which character they do it on is only a secondary consideration; a tool used to achieve the desired end.

"Please don't shoot me"

The other extreme is the Character-Centric people. These folks form an incredibly strong emotional attachment to their characters, and asking them to switch their Main Character—or even to change their character's hair-style—is like asking them to shoot a puppy. It'll break their heart and the aftermath will be very messy to clean up. Not to mention that I like puppies, and well, shooting them is just wrong. I mean, look at those eyes.

The vast majority of us, I think, fall somewhere in the middle. I have always considered myself more of the activity-centric type, but again, if I am to be truly honest with all of you, I tend to let myself get attached to my characters quite a bit and was a little bit annoyed when I was asked to not bring my preferred character to the main raids. There is a constant battle raging between the two sides when I'm making the decisions as to what to play.

In the end I made the change and the raid team is the better for it, I think. We have a good core of raiding healers now, with a lot more flexibility than we would have had otherwise. I may not be playing the character I would like, but the decision was right because the activity, in this case, was more important than my personal need to play the character.

And I suppose that's the fundamental answer to the question of when it's okay to make a personal sacrifice for the team, and the answer is a lot more simple than the length of this post would suggest. Simply put, if the goal is more important than which character accomplishes it, make the change and be happy about it.

Now, as I'm writing this I'm thinking to myself, "Damn, you've really outdone yourself in stating the blindingly obvious. Should we do a section talking about the different ways water is wet? Way to spend 1400 words talking drivel, dumbass".

It is a pretty straight-forward concept, but I think that everyone is going to approach it differently and everyone is going to have a different reaction to being asked to change the way they like to play the game. It all depends on the balance between the activity and the character within a person.

For me, the activity of seeing our raid progress smoothly won the day over my own desires to play the Paladin. So for now at least, the Battle Medic is a Shaman.

Have you ever been asked to play a class or role that you didn't prefer so your group could move forward? How would you react? What sort of balance to you have?


OH MY GAWD, WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THIS POST AGAIN?

Oh yes, Ice Cream and Whisky. Excellent.

There ya go. Ice Cream and Whisky all in one.
It doesn't get much better than that.

This Week in Raiding: Nerf Acceptance... Sort of

"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate." - Socrates

Yesterday, Blizzard announced that Dragon Soul would receive the first of a series of progressive Nerfs, starting on January 31st. They are starting with a 5% reduction in health and damage dealt to all mobs in the instance. As well, there will be a way to toggle the Nerfs off, similar to how Icecrown Citadel's buff worked.

Now, I'm sure that many of you are thinking to yourself, "Oh shit, here he goes again. Another vitriol filled post about how much nerfs sucks and how they're ruining the game. Where's the fucking exit?"

Well, stick around; I don't plan on spewing any Nerf hate today. No sir, not me. Nuh-uh.

Now, while I'm no fan of Nerfs (as you may recall from this post from September), I am in a zen-like state of acceptance with this round of adjustments for a couple of different reasons:

Firstly, Blizzard approached these changes differently than previously in that they made no attempt to hide the fact that they were coming. Even before Dragon Soul was released on the live servers, the developers told us that they would be nerfed at some point. As well, they are giving us almost two weeks of notice before they come into effect. Contrast this approach with the sudden onset of the Firelands changes and it makes them a lot easier to accept.

Secondly, they are gradual. Looking again at Firelands, the nerfs that were implemented were savage in their  scope and extraordinarily sudden in their implementation. Such is not the case with Dragon Soul. Starting with a 5% reduction in all damage and health is reasonable and won't have such a jarring effect as the Firelands changes did. Dragon Soul will not turn into pale shadow of itself overnight; the adjustment period will be slow as the nerfs are gradually but progressively increased over the next few months.

Thirdly, they can be completely turned off to experience the fights at full difficulty. This brings back the successful buff system that Blizzard put into place for ICC, whereby talking to an NPC will turn off the Nerfs so a raid group can see the fights at full difficulty. This is a tiny bone to the hardcore players out there in an attempt to keep them happy by giving them the option to make the instance the original difficulty.

However, while it's nice to have I doubt this feature will ever be used—even by the extreme hardcore amongst us. And the reason is that there is no benefit to turning off the buffs other than self-satisfaction. With no way to tell whether a boss was killed with the Nerf on or off, any boss kill after the nerfs are implemented are tainted from a progression standpoint. I can say that I am 7/7 in Firelands, but anyone can look at the date of my Ragnaros achievement and see that it occurred after the Great Nerfening of September. That kill is valued less on a potential guild application than it would be if it had been done the week before. Dragon Soul will be the same.

Lastly, Dragon Soul normal modes are easy enough that it felt nerfed right from the beginning. So in that context, what does another Nerf matter? It's hard to get upset when something goes from easy to slightly easier.

I do have some questions though:

Why a raid-wide nerf? I don't think that a raid-wide buff was needed, honestly. Some of the bosses in normal modes could certainly use some tweaking: Zon'ozz, Ultraxion and Warmaster Blackhorn being the three that gave our raid team the most trouble. I sincerely believe that it's better to balance specific fights that are overtuned rather than nerf the entire instance. If a specific encounter is tuned such that the majority of people with the appropriate gear level cannot beat the encounter then by all means it should be re-balanced to bring it in line, but I feel the raid-wide approach is a bit like using a jackhammer to open a can of beans.

Why so fast? If, as Blizzard says, these Nerfs are being implemented because Raid Groups are hitting "brick walls" and not progressing, we now can gauge exactly what pace Blizzard expects their content to be cleared. These nerfs are appearing 9 weeks after Dragon Soul launched, meaning that Blizzard expects raiders to clear one boss per week at minimum before it considers them "stalled". Apparently, wiping on a boss for several weeks is now considered "hitting the wall" and "getting stuck on progression" and thereby grounds for nerfing the instance. Whereas in previous expansions wiping on a boss repeatedly was called "figuring out how to do shit" and an essential part of the learning process.

As with Firelands (which was nerfed in 12 weeks, giving slightly less than two weeks per boss), Blizzard isn't giving us enough time to figure things out. They continuously make more difficult and more elaborate dances in their encounters and are continually cutting short the time we have to learn them before getting heavy-handed with the nerfbat.

Kurn wrote an excellent article talking about the Dragon Soul nerfs and goes into a lot more detail on the timelines that previous instances have see in regards to difficulty changes. Check it out here: A Sigh of Resignation. She seems... uh... a little more angry about these nerfs than I am.


I AM THE PLAYER THESE NERFS ARE FOR

Matthew Rossi of WoW Insider shares an interesting statistic:

The Raid Finder is head and shoulders above normal mode raiding in terms of popularity. 35% of level 85 players have completed Raid Finder vs. 4% completing normal mode; that's a huge, huge shift. Keep in mind that Blizzard has more exacting statistics available internally, but this serves as an indicator of a trend.

On the surface, that is a shocking number. It seems like a lot of people have jumped in the Raid Finder at one point or another and have succeeded in killing Deathwing, far more than have done it on Normal difficulty. A 29% difference is significant, certainly, but let's think about this for a moment.

First of all, the statistic is for those players who have completed Dragon Soul by defeating the Madness of Deathwing encounter, something that can be done in the Raid Finder in an hour or two. Normal modes require a significantly larger investment in time, so it's not surprising that fewer people have completed it. Not only that, but divergent schedules of the raiders and other factors that aren't a concern in LFR can lead to slower progress. Nerfs can't fix that problem.

I don't know about your guild, but ours hasn't had enough time to even pull the Madness of Deathwing encounter yet after only 7 weeks of raiding, and yet I don't feel that we've hit a roadblock in our progression. In fact, at 7/8 I had thought we were making damned good progress towards our goal—until I heard about these nerfs that is. Now it seems that we're behind the curve and require some divine intervention from the developers.

I think Blizzard is making the classic mistake of underestimating it's user base. We're a resilient, intelligent bunch of people who are very good at figuring out what to do to get an encounter down given enough time.

I would be very interesting to see just how far people are getting in Dragon Soul without the nerfs. If 4% of level 85 characters have cleared Dragon Soul on normal, how many have gone 7/8 like me? How many are 4/8 and stuck on Ultraxion? How many are 2/8 and stuck on Zon'ozz? How many people just need more time to clear 8/8?

If specific encounters can be found that are causing the majority of the problems, then adjust those encounters to help those that are stuck and let the rest of us get back to work.


LEARNING TO ACCEPT REALITY

Frankly, I've come to accept that the days of the exquisitely difficult raid encounter are gone for good. No more will a raid encounter stubbornly refuse to yield to a dedicated and prepared raid group because the developers were feeling really evil when they designed it and just made that particular boss a massive son-of-a-bitch. The hard work, preparation and min-maxing that those encounters required are an out-dated mindset, apparently. And the raiders who enjoyed that type of challenge—the smart, resilient problem-solvers who think figuring out a problem is half the fun—are continually being marginalized.

If Blizzard feels that the raid is difficult enough that it is preventing people from completing it, then they should do what they feel is in the best interests of the health of their game. I can accept that.

Really, I don't much care what difficulty baseline Blizzard wants to set for it's raids. Whether it's incredibly hard, ridiculously easy or walking a fine tight-rope in between, I just want to complete the raid at the same difficulty level as the top-end guilds and everyone else. I don't want help and I don't want charity.

I'm not trying to sound elitist here. I don't consider myself a hardcore raider by any stretch of the imagination. I don't spend hours thinking about my spec or my gear or where I need to stand during an encounter. I have never run a gearing simulation and wouldn't know how to use a spreadsheet to tell me anything about WoW at all. All I do is show up and push buttons and dodge the fire until the boss dies.

If the fights are legitimately too hard, I'm all for nerfing them carefully and thoughtfully until they provide a good balance between challenge and accessibility to everyone. Everyone deserves to be able to play all aspects of this game, including Normal Mode raiding.

But I hope the developers never forget that there is a benefit to hard work. We as human beings learn from failure more than success. And while making raids simpler and easier is a good way to increase the overall number of raiders, allowing people to fail every once in a while—to truly have to work at something before succeeding—will make them better raiders.

Cross Realm Raiding and Crystal Ball Gazing

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” - Norman Maclean

Looming quite close, just over the metaphorical digital horizon, is Patch 4.3.2. A minor patch with a few tweaks, a few fixes and one new feature that, had it come a year ago, would have sent the WoW community into a frothy orgy of excitement: Cross-Realm Raiding.

People have been clamouring for the ability to Raid with their friends on different servers for ages, and it seemed like an idea that was inevitable ever since the cross-realm Looking For Dungeon system was introduced in Patch 3.3. And, of course, Patch 4.3 introduced the Looking For Raid system which allows raiding Dragon Soul with random cross-server people at a unique difficulty level. 

But what LFR does not address is the ability to form Raids to tackle normal and heroic difficulty modes with people who are not on your server. And while the current raid tier, Dragon Soul, will not be available initially, that's what this new Cross-Realm Raid system is designed to do.

KINDA LIKE KISSING YOUR SISTER

Unfortunately, excluding Dragon Soul leaves me a bit underwhelmed with cross-realm raiding. There will be no scouring Twitter to find a last minute replacement to fill in for your Mage who is being rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning leaving you one short for your regular raid night. No cross-server guild partnerships to form a 25-man raid out of two 10-man guilds. No Dragon Soul All-Star Raiding Dream Teams will form up spontaneously to crush the heroic modes.

Portrait of a Pissed-off Dragon Aspect

No, without the ability to run the current raid in a cross-server group, this feature will be an afterthought, and is probably the reason that it seems to have been welcomed by the WoW community with a resounding wave of meh. 

What it can be used for is to join LFR with a larger group than was previously available (yes, it's Dragon Soul, but only the watered down version), join a Battleground as a premade group, and to run through older tiers of raiding content.

Very useful stuff, and I think that the Battlegrounds feature especially will be used a lot. However, the system will never live up to it's potential until the current raid tier is able to be done with a cross-realm group. 

I can only speculate as to why they decided not to include it. Perhaps they felt that it would dilute the value of guilds. Maybe Blizzard didn't want people instantly transported to the raid instance as they are with LFR, thereby preserving the one, final reason people have for actually leaving the capital cities. It's possible as well that there is a technical reason, too, but most likely Blizzard decided to exclude Dragon Soul for a gameplay or balance reason.

Regardless, it seems that Blizzard is taking the cross-realm capabilities of WoW very seriously, and I imagine that seeing cross-realm raiding with no restrictions is only a matter of time. Which is great. I really look forward to the days ahead where the entire WoW population (faction permitting, of course) is at my disposal when I need to fill a hole in a raid. 

INSULATION FROM ISOLATION

However, once cross-realm raiding of current content goes live, how long until we have cross-realm mail? Cross-realm chat channels? Cross-realm universal auction houses? And eventually, are cross-realm guilds possible?

I am just indulging in some wild and completely unsupported speculation here, as Cross-Realm Guilds are certainly not a feature that anyone has even hinted at being on the horizon, but it seems as if it would be the next logical step in the direction that Blizzard is taking us. It would pretty much remove all the remaining barriers between the various different Realms and create a single cohesive WoW population. 

If this truly is the direction that Blizzard is moving, it may serve to be a very clever way to prolong the games life.

I think that it is clear that after being at the absolute top of the MMO world since 2004, there are more days behind WoW than there are in front of it, at least as the biggest and most relevant of the genre. Don't get me wrong, I don't think WoW is going to die any time soon, but I don't think it's possible that any game—even this one—has 14 years of staying power. Times change, games change, new games come out. Such is the way of the world as so will it be for WoW.

It is a certainty that at some point WoW will start to diminish in terms of active players. It will be slow and subtle but will eventually leave some servers as ghost towns, their capital cities echoing with the unheard cries of NPCs trying vainly to add colour to an empty world. I've always believed that the first definitive sign that WoW is truly on the downward slope is when Blizzard starts consolidating servers in order to keep the population of active players high enough to be viable.

However, what does it matter if your server is virtually abandoned if your guild is spread-out over 20 or 30 different servers? While it would be rather odd to go to Stormwind (or whatever the hang-out du jour is in the distant WoW future I'm describing) and have it deserted save for a single, lone naked Night Elf dancing on the mailbox, as long as there are enough people online on some server somewhere to do the group activities the game will have the appearance of vitality.

And in the end, in order for a game to survive it has to still be fun to play. WoW without people isn't fun. And the perception that there are loads of other people around ready to do something with is critical for any MMO to stay alive and vibrant. 

To that end, the cross-realm features that Blizzard has implemented, as well as those we can speculate that they might implement at some point are great steps to unify and enlarge the pool of players that a person can interact and play with, which will help the game survive and prosper for longer than it might otherwise. And as someone who plans to play this game for a long while yet, I think that is a great thing.

The Proof is in the Search Terms

Yesterday I posted my first impressions of the new Dragon Soul raid. It seems as though I am not alone in my fears that the level of difficulty is a little too far on the easy side; Twitter and the Blogosphere have been abuzz with debate about it.

However, bloggers and tweeters are not necessarily indicative of how the average WoW player reacts to the game. Even though I in no way consider myself a hardcore raider, just the fact that I write a blog means that I'm probably more hardcore about the game than the average player. I tend to read a lot and think a lot about the game.

So what does the non-blogger, non-twitterer think?

Well, there really is no way to know for sure. But we do have a way to see what people are asking the search engines, or at least see what questions are leading people here.

Here are some of the Search queries that have lead people to Battle Medic since the First Impressions post:

• dragon soul easiest raid ever
• dragon soul easy -demon
• dragon soul raid boss encounters
• dragon soul sared lot
• random ride drop in dragonsoul
• zandalari heroics harder than dragon soul

Clearly, this is an issue that is on the mind of a lot of people. The proof, as it were, is in the Search Terms.

As well, I thought I would share this one because it gave me a chuckle:

• a beacon of light hit my face when i say welcome to th

I would really like to know what he said to get a Beacon of Light in the face. We may never know. I bet it hurt, though.

UPDATE: Upon closer inspection of my Google Analytics, I managed to find the full search term from above: 

• a beacon of light hit my face when i say welcome to the dwarf race!

I'm still completely mystified as to why someone would type that into Google or what they were hoping to find, but in the event that this suddenly turns into the new, fashionable search-term de jour, I am at the top of the results. Go me!


2ND NIGHT IMPRESSIONS OF DRAGON SOUL

We went back to Dragon Soul last night to see how far we could get. As I suspected, our Raid Night was cut short again by Real Life issues. All told, over the two nights that we raided this week we managed a mere 4 1/2 hours total. Still, we got a fourth boss down last night and despite some add-on issues managed a few good pulls on Ultraxion.

Ultraxion (Image courtesy wowpedia.org)

To put things in perspective, it took us approximately 8 to 10 hours of raiding - in which we attempted 3 different bosses - to get our first kill in Firelands.

Our average pace in Firelands before the nerfs was to get one new boss down per week, excepting the first and last kills which took longer. Getting half of the new raid down in half the time it took us to kill one boss in the previous tier is a little alarming.

It's not as if we overgear the new raid, either. We're not loaded up with heroic Firelands gear; most of our raid team have 378 gear, and a few have even less than that. This week I was asked to bring my Shaman instead of my Paladin main in order to help with raid healing. My Shaman has a grand total of 3 raid kills to her name and wasn't even eligible for Looking For Raid based on the item level of her gear - not to mention that I don't have a lot of experience healing with her. At least two others in the group have a similar level of gear.

However, the level of difficulty does seem to climb as we get into the second part of the raid. Ultraxion is no joke. Timing is tricky, DPS requirements are high and everyone - particularly the healers - needs to know exactly what they're doing in order to get him down. And that trash before him is quite brutal in an oh-my-gawd-why-won't-this-end kind of way.

I'm actually glad that we encountered some resistance. I still think we'll be through Normal Modes very quickly, but at least a few of these bosses have some fight in them so as to make it interesting.

I just wish we could get a raid group together for a decent amount of time in a night.