Hanging out

I spent the evening wrapping Xmas presents and preparing for our holiday travels, but did pop on very late for a few minutes to do the JC and a few other dailies.

I was very happy to hear the Badger group took down Kel'thuzad without undue trouble before I got on. 2x full Naxx-10 clears is nice. I've got January 6 penciled in for a Heroic raid night. Probably Sartharian and then a little Naxx if Sarth is as easy as advertised.

I've noticed I'm having a lot of conversations about DKP with people lately, not really my favorite topic. Then when I popped in on the remaining Badger group people on vent, Bloc pointed out in jest that we'd hardly spoken since he got "demoted" to the second group. Hmm. Well, first, I really did make a conscious effort to avoid the groups getting labeled first/second (or A/B) by going with Bear and Badger, but I guess that would never be perfectly successful. And honestly, there was a little concern early on that we hadn't distributed the dps very evenly, but I think we've seen that isn't an issue. I was never worried about the tanks or healers (only that a few of us were slow to level for various reasons). But having both groups clear Naxx is just about the same amount of time should settle any issues about first/second (Bear got their earlier by calendar days by raiding more often, I think the 2 groups ran about the same number of raids to get there).

But what really dawned on me afterwards is that if I want to have conversations about more interesting things than DKP, I should be more active about seeking out better conversations. On non-raid nights, I've tended to just kick around and not even bother getting on vent. But maybe I'll start making an effort to run around checking in with people. There is some danger to guild cohesion of running in 2 groups like this, but I don't think it'd be hard to head off.

Running 25s should help a lot too. And maybe we'll start looking for opportunities to swap up some people across the 2 Naxx-10 groups as well. I think it's easy to overlook what we have going here -- a decent sized guild of strong raiders and the makings of a really good team for the Heroic raid instances. This isn't l8raid anymore. We aren't going to be struggling to fill or relying on new people who don't know the encounters or are undergeared. People used to drift in and out of l8raid, which meant the DKP system was really important. It shouldn't be that way anymore.

The crux of a lot of the DKP questions is whether we should have the same DKP for 10s and 25s. I'm inclined to have one pool for a two main reasons. First, it's a lot simpler to administer. Second, if somebody has been unlucky in the 10s, I think they should get priority in the 25s.

I see two potential problems that could arise. First, people could 'game' the system by passing over small upgrades in the 10s to save points for the best-in-slot item from the 25s. This is really only a problem if we discover the people passing on small ups can't effectively do their jobs in the 25s. Currently, I don't anticipate this being a problem (partly because Naxx is not that hard) but we'll have to see. Second, somebody could stockpile DKP in the 10s, grab a bunch of best-in-slot loot from the 25s and then leave the guild to raid elsewhere. I don't think that's going to be a problem either.

There's a side issue in that one DKP pool makes people hesitant to take off-spec gear. On one hand, that means people work harder to optimize their main spec (good). On the other hand, the flexibility of people being able to respec might be handy for maintaining class balance in the 25s. Maybe we'll re-introduce the 1/2 price offspec loot option in the 10s after a bit.

Another funny side issue is that people could basically all end up trying to farm DKP in the 10s for use in the 25s. Note that if everybody does this, nobody gets any DKP because everything gets sharded. At that point, maybe we cancel the 10s and spend all week in the 25s. Or just run 10s when we have some newer toons to gear up (who would take loot and generate DKP). I suspect this issue will self-correct quickly.

So we'll see. I'll probably get on late and hang out a little again tonight. I won't stay up late so that I won't risk being tired for driving tomorrow. Fingers crossed that I can dig up enough bandwidth over vacation to at least check in daily for the JC quest and a /wave.