Should Your Guild Use "Personal Loot"?

With the overhaul to the raid difficulty system, we saw the added loot option of "personal loot". Personal loot is how loot is distributed in the LFR difficulty, and was the unchangeable loot distribution method of flex. Now that "flex" is no longer a difficulty but rather both normal and heroic modes are flexible, personal loot has become a choosable option, just like group loot or master loot.

First, a bit of explanation:

Not Everything Will Go Perfectly - and That's OK

A few days ago, I noticed that I hadn't killed Garrosh on flex mode. My guild is 11/14H and I've killed him on normal several times, so I thought it was silly that I hadn't killed him on flex.

I joined a group in oqueue for a flex Garrosh kill. The group was incredibly stacked and the fight went flawlessly, we one shot him with a few inconsequential deaths. That's when I got my first heirloom.

Something Old and Something New, Something Green and Something Blue

they also came with mounts I'll never own

Currently on beta, it's possible to create level 100 characters for testing. They of course come equipped with gear - the lowest ilvl piece sits at 586 and the highest piece is 603, some items seem to be quest rewards with no level requirement, some of the pieces have a level 98 requirement, with an average ilvl of 591. 

If you've been raiding siege of orgrimmar for the last year, you'll notice how close that is in level to current gear. In fact, a fully upgraded piece of heroic warforged gear is 588. There are people who are a few points short of 590 on live, right this moment. On beta after completing a few quests on my copied level 90, I saw that the initial reward items really weren't even close to upgrades. What I'm getting at is, it looks like a lot of us may be using most of our current gear further into Draenor than we may have expected.

Class Swapping Dos and Don'ts

When expansions are on the horizon, we look at our favorite classes and at everything that will be changing about our game. A lot of people make decisions about whether they will be changing specs, changing classes, or whether they will be quitting or returning to the game. The difficult part about this is that we never really know how the game will be until we actually play it.

I'm not saying I'm not guilty of jumping to conclusions along with everyone else, but I try to take a step back and just relax. I'm used to my specc being revamped - balance has been mechanically overhauled every expansion since patch 1.12. The changes to talents in mists and removal of the use of a lot of my spells was dramatic. However, the ability pruning and some other coming warlords changes will be the biggest change I've dealt with in all these years so far. It's hard not to think about it, and it's hard not to be upset about it. I'm also not saying the disapproval and skepticism is not okay - it's just that we won't really know how things are going to go down until we experience it.

The Underdog Strife

I started playing World of Warcraft as a hunter during Vanilla. I began my first MMO adventure by experiencing what it was like to be passed over for groups because of the class I played. Hunters didn't have the best reputation and that's something that really hasn't entirely gone away - it isn't as prevalent as it was, but "huntard" started back in my day.

Basically, if you didn't know, Blizzard literally gave Hunters an enrage dispel in order to make them an attractive option to bring to raids. I was of course in a guild that was all right bringing me and other hunters to dungeons and raids. Strat and Scholo being 10 mans and UBRS being 15 man made it easy to bring hunters along, even though we were "useless and stole other classes' gear". This, along with my own natural perfectionist personality, drove me to be as knowledgeable and skilled as possible so that people would be happy to bring me along to dungeons instead of that mage or rogue.

Living with Altoholism

who's that pokemon?

There are a lot of ways to enjoy the experience of having alternative characters. Some people have just one or two alts that they dedicate a lot of love into, or they have tons of alts that they all tend to have a decent gear level. Some people can never manage to get an alt to max level, while others have more max level characters than I could even feasibly imagine leveling up.

Then there's me. I love leveling alts, but here's the thing - if I don't delete the alt before it hits max level, I'll gear it up for a week, farm it a transmog outfit, and move onto something else. It may be a little odd to level up alts just to delete them later, but I really enjoy the leveling experience with some classes, especially tanking low level dungeons.

As for the ones who were lucky enough to make it to max level before they got deleted, I log onto them periodically, but I can't figure out which one alt I really want to focus on. I thought it was my warlock, but not being able to heal or tank is frustrating.

I've had max level alts throughout every expansion, but usually not this many. Once I felt comfortable to start leveling alts during Mists, I leveled up my shaman, then my priest, then I leveled a warlock, which I had been trying to do for a long time. I really enjoyed the priest and warlock and those were my primary alts.

Then I leveled my hunter, then I leveled my paladin, then I leveled my warrior... and none of them really had an opportunity to flourish. Somewhere along the line I leveled up another druid - an alliance druid, primarily for [Double Agent], though also because I had never truly experienced the alliance side of leveling.

It's pretty weird playing a game for so long and then entering a city where you can't find the auction house, but moving on. I used my Warlords boost on a rogue, learned how to play him, ran LFR three times and now I just mail it all my lockboxes. I leveled a monk to 85 and couldn't bear to do Pandaria again, and now I have an 85 death knight with the same issue.

A Guild is More Than its Progression Ranking

My latest hiatus was unintentionally one of my longest, and it was rather recent. I had little control over my work schedule and had just moved. I had been having to post out of raids to cover shifts at work and finally decided to stop posting out every raid night and just post out of raiding. The same night that I decided to make that post, I got called into work.

After deciding I needed time to organize my life, I literally didn't even log on for at least a month. My instant detachment from the game after making the decision to stop was the first time I had felt that way. I played other video games and everything felt normal - like I hadn't even been playing this game for the past eight years. As quickly as I had detached from it was as quickly as I began playing again when I finally logged on again - months later. I had felt awful about leaving my guild, and what I found out after I came back made me feel even worse.

We had just gotten enough people to transition to a 25 man guild back during Throne of Thunder. When I came back, they were a 10 man again, recruiting various classes, including a balance druid. Some people I had liked a lot had stopped raiding or parted ways. I didn't feel I deserved my raid spot back, but I was playing every day and one day happened to be on during raid invites when I got invited. "Was that an accident?" I asked in guild chat.

"Are you available to join us? We're missing someone."