Raid Etiquette

Raiding is a feat of coordination. You and eleven (or sometimes 23) other people are getting together to complete monumental tasks that take a lot of working together and relying on one another to accomplish. It can be difficult to get this many people together and coordinated, but it's exhilarating when it works. It's like a sport, where all the members have their thing to do and do that for the team to the best of their ability. With a little effort from each teammate, everything can work very smoothly. However, when people aren't putting in any effort to make things work, then things fall apart and we end up wasting 11 (or 23) other people's time.

Sign up. It is much easier to get a raid together when we get enough people signed up. It wastes a whole lot less of our precious time together if we don't have to be searching for people in order to be able to go.

Show up. A little early, please. When you sign up, you are saying, “I will go if you will have me.” When your raid leader confirms you, then it's like shaking hands and saying we have a deal. For raid leaders: confirm people a couple days in advance if you have that option. Sometimes this is simply not possible due to low sign-ups, but confirming people lets them know what they're doing so they can plan ahead.

Be ready.

• Familiarize yourself with the encounter. If you've never been to an instance before, then read up on it. Ask your fellows questions beforehand. Ask the leader questions. The raid leader will explain the strategy for the evening, but these instructions will make a lot more sense if you've familiarized yourself with the upcoming raid.

• Have your equipment in good order. Make sure everything is repaired and that you are bringing the right weapons with the right damage type(s). Make sure you are traited properly.

• Bring plenty of consumables. This includes, but is not limited to, hope tokens, scrolls, pots (morale, poison, and status remedies), stat food, restorative food, and resistance soups.

• Over the long term, optimize your character. This means raising your virtues, earning all your class traits, finding that super cool gear you always wanted. It means figuring out what your role is in raids (often quite different from solo or small fellowship, and even more fine-tuned than full fellowship instances), and optimizing your ability to do that. If you're not a dps class, then don't spec for dps. Figure out what you are most needed for, and be able to deliver.

Be available. Don't be doing something else beforehand that has any chance of running over time. When your raid leader is starting to coordinate everyone, be amenable.

Be present and attentive. Don't be chatting in other channels, don't be in other windows or watching television or chatting on the phone. Do be in the raid channel and voice program (if specified). Do have your 'say' chat visible also, because that's where you get to see what actions the bad guys are announcing that they are doing. Do listen to the strat talk and don't be afraid to be involved. It's best that everyone be on the same page about what's going on.

Don't be distracting to others. Music is nice, but not when raid instructions are being delivered. Jokes and banter are fun, but too much of that stuff interferes with communication. Off-topic conversations signal that you enjoy your company, which is absolutely terrific, but it also signals to the raid leader that you are not taking this seriously, which can be dismaying for those involved in coordinating the event you are disrupting.

Try to keep your AFKing to the designated break times. Everyone needs a break from time to time. If everyone takes a break at a different time, this becomes counter-productive. For example, in a 12-man raid, if each person takes one 5-minute break, that's an hour of down time. However, if we are a little bit coordinated about our break time and all take our breaks at the same time, then that's only 5 minutes of down time – a savings of 55 minutes! Let your leader signal when a break time will occur.

Don't hog the air waves. Speak up when it's critical and shush otherwise. Keep your broadcasts short and to the point – especially during boss fights. Sometimes several critical things are happening simultaneously that your teammates need to know about, so make sure you are letting others be heard. Use push-to-talk so that your background noise doesn't trigger at the wrong time. If you're using a mic in sync with speakers, then turn your game sounds down or off so that they don't drown you out when you are telling us important stuff. Plus, many people turn their player voice volume way up so that they can hear everything. Hearing your battle-sounds through your mic at a max-cranked volume can be painful.

My computer killed me

Okay, so it didn't really kill 'me', but it is responsible for the first and only death of my warden character on LotRO. I had taken her (level 36 at the time) to do an epic escort quest to save Dori from being held captive in an enemy stronghold. In the middle of this, my computer locked up, but the game kept playing from the server's side and my character, I think (I couldn't see anything happening) stood there and did absolutely nothing while the bad guys surrounding her sliced, hacked and stabbed her to death with their almost trivially weak little axes.

The interesting thing about this is that when I restored my computer to function and logged back into that character, I saw this:

1. Character selection screen (posted location: Nan Amlug West)
2. Loading screen
3. My warden, standing in the stronghold by herself. Time elapsed: maybe one second
4. Another loading screen
5. My warden, standing in a rez circle (posted location: Kingsfell)

The interesting thing is, the game spew said that Dori had been defeated, and that I had succumbed to my wounds, but it didn't say I had been defeated. It also did not give me the standard 'defeat tooltip' that every character sees upon their first death.

So perhaps my character did NOT die. I am conflicted about whether I can still say I have never killed my character, since I technically didn't, and the game may also not think so either, given the weird behaviour exhibited. It's really tough to say. I did wake up in a rez circle. I did not see my warden die. I did 'succumb to my wounds'. I did not get incapacitated.

Apostrophes don't make you look smarter

Remember in grade school how you learned about making things plural? It was mostly pretty easy - you just had to tack a letter 's' to the end of your noun and voila: plural! Sure, there were the occasional words that required you to add 'es' instead of just 's', but that was no big deal, right? Life was pretty good back then. Grammar was easy stuff and you were its master.

Oh, but then there was that epically dark day when you learned about possession and your world just sort of imploded. Why would they use your precious letter 's' for an entirely different function than plurals? Who thought up this mess? The only way to differentiate between plurals and possessives were these pesky little tick marks hovering oh so innocuously, mocking the previously perfect system. That day shall forever haunt you as the day apostrophes ruined everything. Possessives got tricky when you had to remember different rules for who was owning what and how many things were owned. That's when the two 's' worlds really collided: when plural things were possessed, possibly by plural owners.

As an aside, that's also when the whole there/their/they're fiasco erupted.

From that day onward, the letter 's' has been subjected to all kinds of misery, and the once-functional apostrophe started being strewn about. People just sort of forgot that you don't need an apostrophe to pluralize a word, even if the word is really weird. If a particular word is sort of new or unfamiliar to you, or colloquial, or spelled funny, these are not reasons to add an apostrophe. If you're talking about a decade, it's the '80s, not the 80's (the reason there is an apostrophe at the beginning of '80s is because it is short for 1980s, and the apostrophe takes the place of the chopped off 19).

Even though you learned about apostrophes after you learned about plurals, thereby making apostrophes the more advanced of the two concepts, and even though apostrophes are the more tricky to use, you absolutely do not look smarter when you use them where none are necessary. Trust me on this.

Gotta love these ads

<--- This is one of many ads I saw today. What caught my eye was the minus sign. I was thinking it might be fun to take them up on their offer and have them pay me $4.95 as well as the 1000G, and I don't even play WoW. But, five bucks is five bucks, right? I could have a lot of fun and sign up for a million gold. that would be $4,950.00 to me, then. A pretty decent living, but why stop there? I could order a billion gold, or a trillion, and really make a fine living. Of course, then there'd be the problem of what the heck would I do with game money in a game I don't even play?



*disclaimer: I don't cheat or advocate cheating. This post is purely to make fun of a typo, and while I don't usually stoop to pointing and laughing, these companies pretty much deserve it, because this kind of cheatery is despicable.

Unique!

So, I googled my name this morning, for kicks. It's amazing the stuff that comes up. For instance, I learned today that there is only one person with my name in all of Canada.

Skirmish Tips and Tricks

I'm no expert at skirmishes. I am in the process of learning all kinds of things about skirmishes, and with any learning process comes encounters with various problems. Following are some tactics I've developed to overcome various problems I've run into.

Problem: My soldier initiates fights before I've had a chance to do some crowd control.
Tip: Run backwards toward the fight. This puts your soldier the farthest away from the skirmish. Then do your CC while everyone is still positioned favorably. The non-CCed baddies will rush up to you, and your soldier can wallop them to her heart's content.

Problem: The NPCs keep doing ____ which I don't like.
Tip: Let 'em run out of power. Then all they can do is auto-attack, which, while still potentially a problem, is better than letting them have their full arsenal of actions you don't like.

Problem: I can't do the optional encounter without becoming overwhelmed!
Tip: get yourself into a position where you are in a fight with several baddies and no lieutenants, and then pull the optional encounter, and focus on that one. As long as those other baddies are still alive, I've found the next fight won't start. This is better than having both the encounter and a lieutenant in your face.

Problem: I can't see my fellows' soldiers' health bars. How can I heal them?
Tip: The coloured marking (looks like a 4-pointed star) under every soldier and NPC is a health indicator. Green means healthy, yellow means about half health, orange means desperately needs healing and invisible means your soldier/NPC bit the bullet so why are you still looking at the ground?
Tip: You can also target any of your fellows and their pets and soldiers (as well as your own!) by hitting certain hot keys, F1 through F6. Hitting the key multiple times cycles you through your fellow and his pet and/or soldier. F1 maps to you, and F2-F6 map to each of your fellows.

Problem: I need a couple more seconds to heal up/eat/prepare before the next fight!
Tip: Predict where the next fight is coming from, and run away from that spot. Your NPCs will be fine for a few seconds while you hide from combat and prepare.

Problem: I keep running out of power!
Okay, this hasn't happened to me but I keep reading how it is happening to others.
Tip: In non-solo skirmishes, do power-restoring FMs.
Tip: Bring a LM (What? Okay, so I'm biased. ;))
Tip: Try power-conserving stances/instruments/skills. Skirmishes have a big endurance factor to them.
Tip: Boost your will/fate/ICPR/OoCPR stats.
Tip: Allow your soldier and NPCs to do more of the dirty work. Possibly, place a hunter fire someplace where you are not likely to get caught in combat. Hang out there while the NPCs handle things for a few seconds. Be ready to rescue those NPCs when you do decide to join the fray.
Tip: Consumables are your friends! Bring the biggest, bestest blue potions you can get your hands on. Scrolls of battle/warding cut down on the amount of work you need to do. Food that restores power is handy, too, and of course, hope tokens never hurt.
Tip: Watch those lieutenants to see if they are doing something to your power.
Tip: Try a herbalist. Apparently they heal power as well as morale.

Soldiers vs Pets

I've been thinking about skirmishes and trying to figure out the nature of the beast, so that I can learn how to excel at them. I play a lore-master, primarily, which means that I am used to having a pet to do my bidding. I thought that surely my soldier would be the same kind of thing and that I had a leg up on how to deal with them. Well, I don't. Soldiers are a whole different thing, really. Here are some key differences:

Control
Your pet will obey a variety of commands, such as 'kill everything that can blink' or 'sit still no matter what'. You can't control your soldier. Your soldier is a free-'thinking' being who will do basically as she pleases. She is like your classic townsperson who has 'had it up to here' with the evils besieging her town. She's frothing at the mouth and raring to go and you don't have any ability to hold her back (other than not summoning her in the first place - a bad idea). She'll break your roots and mezzes and she won't care. She'll run up to the boss doing AoE if it suits her - you can only tell her to attack something else if you want her to stop that.

Positioning
As mentioned, you can tell your pet where to be. You can tell them to stay or follow. You can try to control your soldier's position, but you'll have to be clever about your own positioning to do this. I believe this depends on your soldier's role, but an example is the warrior, who insists on being in front of you. This translates to always being in front of you no matter which direction you are facing. She will run off ahead of you, so if you think there's something there to aggro, be prepared for her to begin the fight on her schedule (not yours).

**Handy trick: I've taken to backing toward fights, so that I am between my target and my soldier. That way, I can initiate the fight by mezzing my choice of targets (I don't have to face my target for that to work), and then the others rush toward me, and since my soldier is standing further from them than I am, and facing away from them, it buys me more time to drag them away from my mezzed target before she opens up her AoE attacks.

Relative Importance
Pets are important, but if you lose your pet, you will probably be okay. Soldiers are much more important in the land of skirmishes. You will constantly be outnumbered, and I am getting the impression that your soldier isn't just there to help you take the edge off of that. I believe the idea is that your soldier is supposed to be, in basic terms, your equal. If you're in a 3-man skirmish, then from what I've seen, it appears to be about the same environment as a full fellowship instance. A fellowship skirmish is more or less like a 12-man raid environment. I haven't tried a 12-man skirmish, but I bet it's like a 24-man raid. The key difference is that your soldiers don't communicate with you, and they don't have a whole lot of variety.

With all this in mind, I will be focusing my skirmish marks on getting my soldier up to my level, so she can be a formidable teammate rather than a throwaway helping hand.