Recently our guild has been trying to get people to farm up shadow resist pots for loatheb. I have a feeling that less than half of the people have even made an attempt at it, even though we told them about two weeks ago to prepare. We said to get around twenty greater shadow resist pots. Our guild leader threatened with DKP docks but i don't feel it is/will be effective because if they don't wanna get docked for not having pots that night, they will not log on. The overall mentality of some of our members hasnt been all that well lately, some people dont want to try new content because of repair costs, time, and the cost of consumables. I know once we start doing well on a boss, people will suddenly start to show up. My question is what do you feel is the most effective way to get people to farm pots and log on for new content without knowing we will down that boss the same night?
Why not use the guild bank to finance the costs? Sell raid spots for BWL runs if you need money.
Actually, why do so many guilds insist on having their individual members pay for repair bills, consumables, etc?? Seems counter-intuitive for raiding.
Anyone that doesn't have the required number of potions gets raidkicked and/or DKP-docked.
Anyone that no-shows is put on the fast track to being cut for future runs. Habitual no-shows result in habitual cutting.
We cut people who don't show up to break new ground. People that help make progress get the first slots in any raiding we do, including BC's 25-mans. You don't show up to help us break ground now, you won't be raiding with the A-team in BC.
Telling people that they'll get dropped if they don't get their rears in gear is a great way to motivate 'em.
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Why not use the guild bank to finance the costs? Sell raid spots for BWL runs if you need money.
Actually, why do so many guilds insist on having their individual members pay for repair bills, consumables, etc?? Seems counter-intuitive for raiding.
One reason is that it fosters responsible consumable usage and tends to make people a bit smarter about how they play. I will care a lot less about pulling aggro and getting pulverized if the scratch is coming out of the guild bank. I'll be popping greater prot pots like candy if I don't have to pay for them - often wasting them.
Money really isn't hard to come by, and it's not unreasonable to ask people to take personal responsibility for their preparedness. We finance tank repairs on really bad nights, and the guild bank pays for all our flasks, but "normal" repairs and relatively accessible consumables are each person's personal responsibility.
Also, making your guild bank officer handle that for a 40-man raid several times per week sucks hardcore. :)
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For Loatheb, I spoke with friends in 3 different guilds that each mentioned it was better to perfect your strategy without consumables, and then go all out when you feel you have the strategy perfected. It doesn't seem to accomplish a whole lot more just wasting consumables while getting groups in the right spot and the right time.
For the overall issue of farming consumables, we regularly take 4-5 days off from raiding about every 6-8 weeks. We usually only raid 4-5 days a week, but the breaks have allowed people to not only farm, but also recharge. We have a lot of working adults with families that just don't have that extra time if we don't take a small break.
If you can get to Loatheb in two nights of Naxx clearing, see if you can take a 2-3 day break. For instance, if you raid Wed, Thurs, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, clear to Loatheb by Thursday, and then come back for attempts on Sunday or Monday.
Originally Posted by Praetorian
My sole vanity as a raid leader is to give myself an spriest at the expense of my fellow resto shamans. But they have better gear than I do, so fuck them.
Really simple each raid tell them they have to have so many Shadow Protection Potions by such and such date and do an raitem. So start them out small and slowly have them increase the amount and don't give them DKP or sit them or that day if they don't meet the requirements. But having a single number the attempt day is a sure sign of oh I don't have the stuff so I'm not going to login.
in the past i've not given DKP to people without the proper protection pots for fights where they're needed, but i really don't find that especially effective. if your raid wants to kill a boss enough, they'll come prepared. encouraging the proper attitude is leaps and bounds more effective than threats and penalties.
Not everyone has the time to keep up with the required repairs / consumables NEEDED for Naxx. And with Naxx's release so close to AQ's finish, I feel that a lot of raiders were not repaired for a 16 boss learning-grind.
On the other hand, most guilds will have members that are willing to farm a great deal, with incentive. Reward those members with bonus DKP, BWL / MC gold, etc.
Kicking members from raids sounds great, if one has a deep roster. And having to recruit every week is going to pay its own toll. That's not to say one shouldn't still keep track of who only shows for farm nights, but one could be walking a fine line of halting progression all the same. That's just been my personal experience. And rewarding hard workers over discouraging lousy workers has worked better, in those cases.
For Loatheb, I spoke with friends in 3 different guilds that each mentioned it was better to perfect your strategy without consumables, and then go all out when you feel you have the strategy perfected. It doesn't seem to accomplish a whole lot more just wasting consumables while getting groups in the right spot and the right time.
This is probably what you want to look into first. Its very hard to motivate people to farm for something they haven't seen before just because you read you'll need x of this pot and y of this pot to kill this next boss somewhere on the internet. Chances are you won't be killing Loatheb on your first night in anyway, so tell everyone you're gonna go in and spend a few hours probing the fight out with no pots one night, and do that. Set some benchmarks for dps and once you work out your healing and spore rotations, tell people the only thing that's keeping them from killing the boss is now shadow pots (which would be the truth) and I think you'll find yourself in a completely different situation.
I used four total Greater Shadow Protection Potions in the entire learning phase and first kill of Loatheb. People who can't even manage enough pots for those handful of pot attempts you'll actually do after learning/leashing the fight are worthless.
In our case it's usually a fairly simple principle, if it's being learned, we provide you. If it's learned, you provide yourself. We don't do fancy things like point docking, if you don't have the requisite consumables for a boss on farm that does need certain consumables, you just get removed from the raid and replaced with someone who does have them.
What we see as required consumables does tend to change as we get more comfortable with a boss; for instance, we used to require Fire Protection potions for Ragnaros, but that consumable requirement became more and more lenient and eventually disappeared. Same with other cases like it. Huhuran changed from "You must use a potion" to "You should take a potion in case your healer gets silenced", etc.
Than again, we more often have trouble getting a full group for farm content than for new content, since most of us play for fun and running a certain place for the fiftieth time tends to lose it attraction, so we're probably on a bit of a different footing than a lot of players.
Our guild has a pretty lucrative donation system. We have a list we post every week that lists the needs of the guild and the DKP value for each item, and we cap the amount you can earn / week. Generally it's about the value of killing two final bosses in any wing. To keep our DKP system from getting horribly inflated, we standardized the value of every boss in Naxx (independent of what loot may or may not drop) such that people were spending slightly more than was earned by the raid.
Since Naxx has come out, the competitive nature in all of us has come out, and we have a lot of guildies donating at the cap every single week. We still ask everyone to bring their own DPS pots (I'm a hunter, so mongoose and mageblood generally), but we provide things like GSPP and flasks when needed. When we were first preparing to kill Loatheb, the guild farmed up about 1400 GSPP in a couple weeks. Once we get what we think we need, we take it off the donation list.
Another good thing about this system is we almost never have to get onto people or dock them for being unprepared. Some week people slack (maybe even for legitimate reasons), and this system allows us to compensate for that.
Don't get Orioh wrong, we had no intention of using pots on Loatheb just to learn it. The intent was that people needed to farm the pots so that there was no delay between "ok yah we're good we can kill him now" and "ok guys pot up".
He's really trying to describe the effect of the GMOTD: "Have 20 Shadow Pots by next Thurs. 5 DKP dock per pot you're missing"
Yesterday a surprisingly large number of people didn't log in at all the entire night.(normally for a raid night we have over 60 online, 10 or so will be on the waitlist)
We just recently started a more direct incentive program -- one of our members had been really going above and beyond. He's an old Ultima Online player and -loves- farming (a mindset I just don't have, but he really seems to honestly like to farm up things). So, we started selling things like AQ20 skillbooks, extra ZG dolls, etc.. And giving him gold. Just directly giving him gold, to cover his expenses, to make more pots, whatever he wanted to do.
23:40:55> [Illidan Stormrage's] [Shear] was blocked by [Castille].
We just recently started a more direct incentive program -- one of our members had been really going above and beyond. He's an old Ultima Online player and -loves- farming (a mindset I just don't have, but he really seems to honestly like to farm up things). So, we started selling things like AQ20 skillbooks, extra ZG dolls, etc.. And giving him gold. Just directly giving him gold, to cover his expenses, to make more pots, whatever he wanted to do.
WTB that guy!
Something else to mention. A guild on our server gets the DM Tribute Buffs before going after Loatheb every week. It's basically their insurance policy to get him down.
Originally Posted by Praetorian
My sole vanity as a raid leader is to give myself an spriest at the expense of my fellow resto shamans. But they have better gear than I do, so fuck them.
Loatheb is definitely best practiced 'offline' with no spp's.
That said this is one of the situations where a loot council is very good compared to straight dkp.
On our early loatheb kills we have handed out atleast one of the pairs of pants to a strong donater and announced very clearly why the person got the item. No one can rationally argue against a loot decision when you say "Person X donated 600 fadeleaf grats them"
One of the nice side effects of the nax token system is that there is plenty of loot to go around and it is not overly 'streaky' since the loot tables are small. Giving someone T3 pants first instead of 4-5 weeks later really does not imbalance the whole system. In BWL giving someone a BP first that they might not have gotten until 3rd-4th could easily result in a change of 4 months and it was a tricky situation.
Honestly, the best way I can think of to convince folks to show up prepared is to track attendance, and base loot elgibility off of it. You take your first attendance check at raid start, and do an inventory check at the same time. Being on time for the raid isn't good enough if you're not prepared, so anyone who *isn't* prepared doesn't get on the attendance check. The first time the guy with 200dkp loses an item to the guy with -200 dkp because they 200dkp guy doesn't meet your required attendance threshold, they'll reconsider showing up prepared.
Something I forgot to mention that someone briefly touched on is the idea that people need to understand why they need a given consumable. If you tell a player to go farm 20 GSPP 'because you say so' odds are they won't feel like it's needed, or they won't understand how important it is. It's best to handle that sort of encounter by doing some dry runs one night so people can say to themselves "He does a lot of shadow damage every 30 seconds". This way when the night is over you can tell everyone they need to farm those consumables to mitigate the effects they've seen first hand. It also allows them to make judgement calls relating to their class / spec in regard to how many and what consumables they actually need to bring.
Something I forgot to mention that someone briefly touched on is the idea that people need to understand why they need a given consumable. If you tell a player to go farm 20 GSPP 'because you say so' odds are they won't feel like it's needed, or they won't understand how important it is. It's best to handle that sort of encounter by doing some dry runs one night so people can say to themselves "He does a lot of shadow damage every 30 seconds". This way when the night is over you can tell everyone they need to farm those consumables to mitigate the effects they've seen first hand. It also allows them to make judgement calls relating to their class / spec in regard to how many and what consumables they actually need to bring.
My post on this got ignored, but I'm gonna give this a quote because this is huge. You really do need people to understand why they need to spend 3 hours in SM running from zone-in to zone-in.
Nurru made a good point. Going along with that is warning everyone as early as possible and regularly. We warned everyone over a month in advance that 20 GSPP was going to be the minimum. We made sure everyone understood that unlike other fights, GSPP is required just to get into the game. Not having them is equivalent to showing up without any of your gear.
Then we started a semi-socialist program to help those that didn't have herbalism. Specifically, we set up a bank toon with some gold. Herbalists could send a stack of gravemoss or fadeleaf COD to the toon and receive slightly below Allakhazam prices, then we sold pots off of the bank for 10g per stack, much cheaper than the AH. This basically gave a decent incentive to our herbalists to farm extra stuff without the feeling of being somebody's bitch because it was for "the good of the guild", and non-herbalists could buy pots pretty cheap. In fact, prices were set so that herbalists could (although none took up on this possibility) sell herbs then buy pots and make about 5g per stack of pots for their own personal use.
The toon took 2-3 weeks to be fruitful. Ours topped out around 375 GSPPs, and because of everyone's personal farming, is still sitting up around 290 pots. Many people had farmed 40-100 pots on their own.
We have been fairly successful with competitions when we need something specific to try out new encounters. Just announce that the person that donates the largest number of whatever it maybe (last time it was Large Brilliant Shards since we needed to get people cloaks res-enchanted) will get a dkp-bonus or a fancy item or so. It's a bit unfair to the people who don't have the particular skill to get shards or herbs or whatever, but it will eventually even out if you hold these competitions fairly often, and you get loads and loads of mats.
You can ofc make the competition proffessionfair by saying that the person who donated stuff for the largest amount of gold wins and then sell all the stuff on AH and buy the mat you need, but that is harder to administrate and since AH prices tend to fluctuate, not very fair either in the end.
Don't get Orioh wrong, we had no intention of using pots on Loatheb just to learn it. The intent was that people needed to farm the pots so that there was no delay between "ok yah we're good we can kill him now" and "ok guys pot up".
He's really trying to describe the effect of the GMOTD: "Have 20 Shadow Pots by next Thurs. 5 DKP dock per pot you're missing"
Yesterday a surprisingly large number of people didn't log in at all the entire night.(normally for a raid night we have over 60 online, 10 or so will be on the waitlist)
Malan change it so people who are on ready to raid and have mats get the bonus rather than those who dont get the penalty.
Malan change it so people who are on ready to raid and have mats get the bonus rather than those who dont get the penalty.
I was just about to say that!
Give them a bonus dkp, or an attendency bonus. Positive Bonuses are always more effective than negative ones. And you can always give a negative inflation to the system for the amount of dkp you just handed out as a bonus.
For example, our guild gives a 10dkp bonus for bringing our own materials to nax raids, while items are worth 60 dkp. Mind you the list of requirements is quite huge (includes a flask) and gets used quite often. But this means that the motivated people are there with there potions (about 20 members) and it ensures they'll get the items first aswell.
My little bro's guild was having a problem with this too. They already had a system in place which linked a very simplified version of DKP (that intentionally inflated and never went down) to invites. The higher your DKP, the more likely you were to get an invite.
So they just linked rewards for potion/flask turn-ins to this system. The end result was that the hardcore raiders farmed pots/flasks to keep their spots and the more dedicated casual-raiders farmed pots/flasks to solidify their raid spot over the other casauls.
(Yes, their DKP system looks flawed. But they put in a lot of little details to balance it that it isn't worth getting into)
As for my own guild, we don't seem to have the problem. But I mostly attribute that to an alchemist cadre that goes above and beyond. (and we have only just started Naxx)
10/27/06, 1:43 PM
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