Technically, account sharing is a bannable offense, no ifs, ands, or buts. If your brother, best friend, coworker, or Fred from the soccer league who sometimes drops by your house after practice for a couple cold ones want to play some WoW, they have to get their own account. If they play on your account, and Blizzard finds out, they can shut you down for it.Posts with tag wipe
"It wasn't me": Account sharing and excuses
Technically, account sharing is a bannable offense, no ifs, ands, or buts. If your brother, best friend, coworker, or Fred from the soccer league who sometimes drops by your house after practice for a couple cold ones want to play some WoW, they have to get their own account. If they play on your account, and Blizzard finds out, they can shut you down for it.Continue reading "It wasn't me": Account sharing and excuses
Ready Check: On wipes and wiping
Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. It's not easy, though...
Let's take a look at the problems and challenges arising from wipe nights, or even a failed try or two at something on farm.
The epic raid AFK
There are few things more frustrating in the game than a person going AFK in the middle of a fight. Sometimes there are good reasons, and sometimes the reasons are...less than adequate. But no matter what, we all have an epic AFK story that makes us laugh and cry all at the same time.The ultimate AFK (so far) in my WoW career happened while we were on Illidan last week. Uly, a good Mage in our guild, was standing with the ranged group dpsing Illidan during phase 1. He was a little high on threat, so he switched to his wand. Nothing wrong there.
So he's standing there, wanding away as I'm moving Illidan across the terrace to avoid the fire. It looks like he's doing his job. He get the parasites.
"Uly," the raid leader calls out.
A second goes by.
"Uly, move," calls the class lead.
Another moment.
"Oh $!@# he's AFK."
Hail Mandy: The Druid's Soulstone
We've all wiped in an instance from time to time. It is significantly easier to keep going when a rezzer has a self-rez ability so the group doesn't have to waste time running back to the instance. Soulstone and Reincarnation are wonderful things. The Druid's Rebirth spell can also be used occasionally to save the party the walk of shame back to the instance.
I call this maneuver the "Hail Mandy." I started doing this when I was multiboxing my Paladin and Druid. When the Paladin, who was tanking, died and the Druid was going down, I would cast rebirth on the Pally. Then after the Druid was killed and the mobs reset, I would accept the rez. This allowed me to raise both characters and start back up on my merry, dualboxing way- just like using a Soulstone.
Breakfast Topic: Wipeout Poll
It's amazing to me exactly how hard instances can be. Not the mobs, but the group. We've all been in ugh-PUGs before. Some players don't understand how to use their class or play nicely in an instance. That's only on regular dungeons; heroics have their own set of potential disasters. Sometimes you just have to give up.
Putting a group together for instance can be extremely difficult, and sometimes you have to take what you can get. While there are many excellent tanks out there, the shortage on my server makes for slim pickings. Folks who think that pulling aggro off the tank is an honor make up another problem. I am occasionally guilty of trying to heal and DPS at the same time. I'll admit to causing a wipe or two because of it.
Calling the wipe... and what happens next
World of Matticus has an interesting piece up about a touchy subject in raidleading: calling the wipe. It's a tough job leading the raid. Everyone's there to down the boss, yes, but especially when learning a fight, a raidleader has to balance a lot of different priorities-- are potions used or not? Who rezzes after a wipe? How are the healers balanced? And when things go really bad, they have to decide, sometimes on a moment's notice, whether to call a wipe and reset the encounter, or try to push onward. Everyone knows what's possible-- everyone's seen a fight where the last Mage left is able to get one last fireball off and finish off the boss-- but the raidleader has to look at reality and make that call.Now, Matticus is actually pretty gung-ho about things-- he says not to wipe unless you're down to your last healer and you've only got one rez left. I agree that there are times when soulstones should be popped (if we have enough locks, we'll usually soulstone our main healer, and so if aggro ever gets lost, he pops right back up again), but if you're on the first attempt of the day, there's nothing wrong with saving a few rezzes and repair payments. Especially in a place like Gruul's Lair on High King Maulgar, where it's easy to get out when things go south, there's no reason to fight when two tanks drop on a bad pull. Just run, save the money, and come back when HKM has reset.
But Matticus is dead on about what happens after a wipe is actually called.
A sacrifice for the victory!
Xalit has a good question in the WoW LJ: which boss do you always die on? Being a Shaman, I'm pretty good at not dying (in boss fights where we don't wipe, at least)-- I'm far enough away from the battle to avoid crazy AoE, and the fact that I don't top either the heal or the DPS meters means I'm pretty far down on the aggro lists.But even more common than me dying every battle is our main healer. He always seems to bite the dust during a battle, whether we win or wipe-- even on a trash fight, he's usually the first to go. And our guildleader, a DPS Mage, was the butt of a joke for a while in the guild-- we laughed that he had to die for us to beat the boss. If he didn't die, the boss didn't get the sacrifice he needed, and we didn't get the loot.
I don't know that it ever got to the point where we were actually killing him during the fight just to make sure a down happened, but I'm sure it was joked about. Are there any fights you've been to where, even with a victory, someone just can't stay alive for some reason?
Ask WoW Insider: To wipe or not to wipe?
Our own Barb, who usually runs the Friday afternoon Ask WoW Insider column, is off speaking prestigiously at a very prestigious conference (go Barb!) today. So instead, I'm going to step in, and put your considerable brainpower, dear readers, to work deciphering what I think is a pretty philosophical conceit. Ken asks, very succintly:A quick one for you, the boss is down but everyone died... Is it a wipe?What do you think? You kill the boss, but everyone in your UI is dead. I'll even make it tougher-- everyone who had a soulstone or an ankh in the fight has used it, so the only way you're going to get that loot is if someone runs back. Wipe, or not a wipe? Is it possible to both wipe and down a boss, or does "wipe" expressly imply failure? And if not, what do you call both death and success?
If you've got a question, silly or serious, pensive or practical, that you'd like to ask the readers of WoW Insider, sent it to ask AT wowinsider DOT com.
Get in line! Rezzing order and you
So someone moved, someone pulled aggro, someone didn't heal fast enough, or you just don't have the DPS. It's a wipe. Everyone's dead on the ground, and the raidleader calls for a Shaman to pop, or for someone to use their soulstone. I'm a resto Shaman, so this happens to me pretty often: I Reincarnate and I'm standing over 24 dead people. Who do I rez first?Obviously, the first people I go for are those who have a rez to use, so we can do some chain rezzing. Priests, other Shamans, and Paladins. But after that? Caralynn lays it out: while your first instinct may be to rez your MT or your friends, you should really be rezzing pet and buff classes before melee.
Which makes great sense. Warlocks and Hunters need to drink and resurrect their pets, and that's a lot of time wasted if you rez them last. Mages and Druids use all kinds of mana casting those buffs, so they usually have to drink, rebuff after a wipe, and then drink again. And Warriors and Rogues are easy to refill-- Rage doesn't refill, and I wish my mana filled up as quickly as Energy did.
So it's Other Rezzers > Pet Classes > Buffers > and then Melee. There are other schools of thought on this (one player says to rez RL girls first, wink wink say no more), but this plan seems to be the best. Plus, Caralynn points out that this has the added bonus of not having melee standing around trying to pull while clothies are rebuffing. If you time it right, everyone can be ready to go again at the same time. And this time, watch that aggro!
Breakfast Topic: A wipe to remember
Mostly, full group or raid wipes are lame. Really, really lame. But sometimes, every once in a while, you'll have a wipe come along that is so spectacular, so fun, and so memorable, that it almost makes the repair costs worth it.
So let's hear your best wipe story. The shot above wasn't actually a wipe (we finished the Tiger boss in ZG with one solitary hunter left, and it was awesome), but my guild will always joke about the time our Warlock lead accidentally fell off the bridge in MC and onto the head of Golemagg-- who then proceeded to make his way all the way around the instance, grabbing every lava pack and puppy on the way, and crushing every single one of us out of existence. TS was just full of people screaming, yelling, and laughing the whole time. Oh, the Horde-anity!
50 DKP Dives -- the new Leeroy
The words "50 DKP MINUS" are becoming somewhat legendary even in non-WoW circles, but have you ever wondered about the guy who originally uttered them? Wagner James Au has interviewed Dives, leader of the Wipe Club, and the interview contains some real insight into the life of this particular raid leader.Turns out that, for those following the Onyxia Wipe closely, Crushim didn't actually get -50 DKP once the situation was explained. Thank goodness for that then.
Subscribe
