This is not an easy encounter, and as you wipe and try again over and over, you’ll tweak your rotation, your movement and your general style on the fight.

I am going to assume that you know the general tactics for this fight – there is no need for me to go through them cause, after all, the main way to be useful on Lich King is to know what the hell you’re doing!

Phase 1

First of all, you should position yourself in a position where A) You try to avoid standing on too many people, to avoid having a lot of the raid moving due to shadow traps, B) Where you can actually reach the Lich King and whatever else you need, and C) Where you can deliver the Necrotic Plague to the Horror if you need to, before it kills you off. This will wary a bit depending on how your guild does the fight, but in our guild we had all the ranged inside the metal circle, and the melee and tanks moving outside of it. The Horrors were off to the left.

When he activates, shoot off your treants. You’ll use these many times during the fight, just for added damage and to help later on. Normally, I would use my Starfall right of the bat, but I do hold back on it until my first eclipse procs. There are two reasons for that: Usually by this time, one or both of my trinkets have procced, giving added damage, and because the Ghouls will start to pop up. Obviously, the stars going on the Ghouls will only splash for 25% damage to the Lich King, but it is still a lot of damage that goes around in that little lump of mobs, and you get 20 stars out rather than 10 if it was just the Lich King alone. With the added damage from the trinkets, it all racks up. I don’t worry too much about damage on Ghouls – you might pull aggro on one, but this shouldn’t be a problem. Looking at the damage done solely on Lich King in phase 1 (thus discounting any damage on the Ghouls), I am usually matching the rest of the top DPS’ers.

Continue your normal rotation. After a minute, your Starfall is ready, and by then you should have positioned yourself so that the Starfall will hit Lich King but not the Shambling Horrors – you don’t want to waste stars on the Horrors. As always, move when you throw up a DOT, just for that one GCD, and you should eventually be in a good position.

On our fights, we get into the phase transition just before the two minute mark. My Starfall is usually ready shortly after the first Raging Spirit spawns, which helps to nuke it down. My treants will be off cooldown as the phase transition ends, and I send them on the last Raging Spirit to beat it down.

Phase 2

This phase has a lot of movement. Throw DOTs up whenever you move to maximise the damage. Do NOT use Typhoon, however. It will cause diminishing returns on the Valkyrs, and make your stunners unable to keep them from the edge.

If you use your Starfall when the Valkyrs have just landed, and if they are next to each other, you’ll splash a lot of damage on to them. Unfortunately, your Starfall won’t be up for the next batch of Valkyrs, until after they are halfway to the edge. I usually just use my Starfall on each second wave of Valkyrs. Be mindful though, the Valkyrs floating up ahead will eat more of your stars, so if you can, try to position yourself away from them rather than below them.

It’s important to remember to use your treants. I forget it often. If a stunner gets grabbed, or if shit hits the fan, the extra damage on your Valkyr can save the day. Once the Valkyr is down, move the treants over to Lich King, or any other Valkyr that is still fondling your guildie.

Another really important thing to note is to not DPS Valkyrs more than you have to. You can generally switch off the Valkyr at 55% and let your DOTs and Languish finish it off, as long as your guildie isn’t at risk of being dropped over the edge. Any casts you do at a Valkyr under 50% is wasted damage, and let me tell you, you don’t really have that luxury on this fight.

Phase transition comes, and we move on to…

Phase 3

You’ve made it past the biggest hurdle on this fight, but a bit still remains. When you just move back on the platform, remember that you will still have 1-2 Raging Spirits alive. Don’t waste time attacking the Lich King, you need these down to free up your raid. Nuke them down, and nuke them hard, and remember to continue nuking them once you get out of the Frostmourne room.

Inside the Frostmourne room, you can’t really stand still and nuke the spirits. But you do have two very useful tools for clearing them out. Pop Starfall as soon as you get into the Frostmourne room, and it will take out a lot of the spirits. I mean, a lot. After that, use Typhoon towards the center of the room to clear out a handful more spirits. The more you kill of them, the less explosions your raid will have to deal with.

If you are having a lot of wipes to Lich Kings enrage timer, however, you might want to save your Starfall for him. The damage you do will be lower (because you only get out 10 stars), but it will help your raid if you are lacking DPS to beat the enrage. Remember to minimize your movement and put up DOTs whenever you move. If you about to get pulled into the Frostmourne room, and Lich King is pulled to the middle, you don’t have to run close and hug him – simply stand there and nuke, you’ll spawn close to him after the room event ends.

However, after hitting the enrage timer several times in a row, we revised our strategy and had a good 1-2 minutes until the enrage timer. It’s really more about execution and getting the most out of the fight, than it is about damage – especially when Paragon did it with a 5% buff, and we have a 30% buff.

—

The Lich King encounter is very, very difficult. So difficult that I cry with laughter anytime someone says that the game is too easy. And while I choke on my own breath, I am hit with a profound feeling of dread as I realise that I will, eventually, face those horrors again.

Do not despair if you have to wipe a lot of times. Let me rephrase that: A lot, lot, lot, lot, lot of times. Keep revising and improving your performance. If these tips helps on your tries, then great. If you are using a different strategy to kill the Lich King, then maybe this post will spark a bit of creativity. If you have any other tips, put them below!

- QQ

Tonight, after another four hours of wiping, on our very last try for the night, Arthas Menethil, The Lich King, died on heroic 25 man. This week, we finally had several phase three wipes, and after some agonising 20% wipes to the enrage timers, he fell down and took a mouthful of ice to the face!

If you want to see the log from the fight, you can find it here! It should go to show that moonkins aren’t really that useless *wink*

Our guild is the 424th guild to kill him, and our world rank is now 397! That’s not bad, considering we were around rank 398 when we were at 11/12 HC. In any case, we are all very happy about getting him down.

Oh, by the way, regarding Invincible’s Reins…

• Wild Mushroom changed, only 3 mushrooms can be placed at one time (Down from 5).
• Cyclone cast time increased to 2 sec. Up from 1.5 sec.
• Faerie Fire now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Insect Swarm now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Starfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Entangling Roots now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Thorns now lasts 20 sec, down from 10 minutes. Damage increased by 1400% (Deals 447 damage instead of 32)
• Moonfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Wrath now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Moonkin Form now increases Nature and Arcane spell damage by 10%.
• Starlight Wrath now reduces cast time by 0.15/0.25/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)

First off, props to the creative way to make us want to stay in moonkin form. Ah well, we don’t really need anything fancy to do that, the “you get more damage here” sign will do the trick.

A lot of our spells have gotten increased range. In our case, it seems like a generic 40 yard range, but this is not the case for all classes! It would seem like some spells, for all classes, are capped at 30 yards where others have a 40 yard range. This is interesting because it means I can nuke a warlock from 40 yards range, but he would have to walk 10 yards to be close enough to cast a fear. Not a bad way to force people to make the decision between nuking, healing or CCing.

Starligth Wrath was buffed, which makes sense, while Wild Mushroom was nerfed to 3 shrooms at any one time. Lets take a moment to write up a long blog post about Shrooms being nerfed, so that we.. wait, nevermind. We don’t know the amount of damage it does, how it plays into our rotation, what glyphs it will have and so on. I guess we’ll just wait and see instead.

Lastly, a very interesting change to thorns: It is now a defensive spell. Defensive in the way of saying “If you touch me, you’re going to hurt!”. It is a fine way to do some extra damage, especially if you are either AOE grinding, tanking a bunch of mobs, or if you are being ganked by a rogue. It is no longer a weak retribution aura, but an offensive defense spell, which should give us a bit of fun.

- QQ

For a while now, I have had this nagging worry that Blizzard would somehow swing around and pull “a resto” on us, and remove moonkin form from our spellbooks. Or make it a use ability like they are doing with restoration druids. Thankfully, Ghostcrawler mentioned the other day that they stand firm in the belief that balance druids are defined by their moonkin form.

There is a lot of grapejuice going around these days about moonkin form being useless in its current state. One argument is about the buffs it brings. We are already sharing all of our buffs with several other classes. So is everyone else. That it continues in Cataclysm is just fine, that’s really how it should be. Every buff should be covered by many classes – it has been Blizzard’s philosophy since Wrath of the Lich King came out, and people seem to think themselves useless if other people can provide the same buffs as them. For the rest of us, we are brought as another buff insurance and the damage we bring.

Sure, 5% haste is provided by other classes in Cataclysm, and there is merit to that argument. In its current state, it would actually allow us to do whatever we like when it comes to being in moonkin form. It would seem really pointless to have a form if we could simply decide to ditch it when were in a raid group. But that is probably going to change. We will get something that buffs us, like moonkin form buffs our intellect and mana regeneration on the live servers.

What would be fun could be further modifiers to our abilities, or if it had a chance to empower us with “Spirit of the Owlbeast”. How about SotO being a proc that empowers the next ability to increase the damage of the next spell by x% or which will automaticly cast the next spell on every enemy within 15 yards of your target. Imagine the AOE we could whip up with that?

I don’t know what Blizzard will do about moonkin form. I am confident that they will make us something spiffy, something that will keep us in moonkin form. And as for the talents, I’m hoping that they will give us some focus soon, much like the lines of the focus we’ve seen them give paladins and the like.

It’s still beta. Everything will be fine.

So rather than to shy away, I took it as a challenge and set out to solo Molten Core. And well, the place is cleared now, although not with a bit of trouble. Some bosses were easy, some were hard, some nearly made me give up. And I’ll admit, there was a single boss that I needed some help with.

But I went into Molten Core with my usual PvE gear and spec, armed with a bunch of reagents and 4 stacks of water. I figured I would write down a guide for soloing the bosses as moonkin, and maybe we can tweak it a bit.

General pointers

You won’t be able to get through Molten Core without healing. Thankfully, we are able to heal while we do damage, and most of the things you meet inside won’t do too much damage. Before any pull, put up a rejuv and regrowth. This should keep you going for a good 20+ seconds before you start dropping below 90%, and you have ample time to swap out and cast the spells again.

Use your thorns and Mark of the Wild, even a flask if you want to speed things up, but if you are decently geared it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Trash mobs

Most of the trash mobs should not pose any problem, cause you can stealth right past them. The Core Hounds can detect you, and are quite good at it, so you should rather kill them off instead of trying to sneak past them. If they catch you, you’ll have to kill them anyways. Molten Giants and Lava Surgers are not much of a problem. Just throw your HOTs up before a pull, and focus down one.

One kind of mob does pose a bit of a threat: Fire Lords. They will spawn pesky little Lava Spawns, which will duplicate if you don’t kill them, and Lava Spawns will silence you. Nuke them down quickly, there aren’t that many of them.

Lastly, the Core Hound packs before Lucifron and Magmadar needs some special attention. If you don’t kill them at the same time, they will start respawning. Hurricane should do the trick for you, though, and if one isn’t going down as fast as the others, you can kickstart the killing with Starfall.

Lucifron

After clearing one pack of Core Hounds, you should be able to pull Lucifron. Always pull with your treants, and let them take a bit of the heat in the beginning. Nuke down his adds first, and whenever you get a curse on you, remove it. They won’t do much damage, except for the occasional 2000 damage curse, and you can easely heal through everything.

Magmadar

After clearing the rest of the Core Hound packs, you can pull Magmadar. Don’t use your Starfall until after the first fear, and be sure to refresh your HOTs before they run out. He doesn’t do much damage, but if he does fear you and your HOTs are off, you might be at a risk. Other than that, you shouldn’t fear much from his laughable 300 DPS fire dot.

Gehennas

Another fairly easy boss. Nuke down his adds, decurse yourself whenever the healing debuff comes up, and move out of fire. Done deal.

Garr

Now here’s a problem. Garr actually wiped me a good five times before I got him down. The main problem are his adds, which does a lot of damage, swings very quickly, and explodes upon death. And for some reason, my Hurricane never did more than around 1000 damage to each. With 60.000 health, you’d need 60 hurricane ticks to get them down.

Starfall is a nice help, but the adds are too spead in the beginning. If you pull with starfall, it wont do much damage overall, because they are too far away from each other. Send in your treants to get the mobs closer, fire up your starfall, start hurricaning and hope for the best. On this, my initial kill, it was a very close call, but thankfully I got through it. I might revise my tactic a bit next time I give it a go.

Shazzrah

Was very easy. Stealth through over to him and watch out for the Core Hound and Baron Geddon. Simply nuke down Shazzrah, but avoid using Starfall, as it will surely pull a bunch of trash packs and lead to a quick demise.

Baron Geddon

Oh dear, what a pain. He took quite a few tries, probably nearly 10, and with the long run back, it was a dreadful fight. Geddon poses a few problems:

Geddon throws you up into the air, and when you hit the ground, you take fall damage based on a percentage of your health. This can be somewhat negated by pulling him all the way into the tunnel and place yourself in a crack where you will hit the wall above you quickly. You’ll still take a lot of damage, though.

His Living Bomb, which is what throws you into the air, scales in damage based on your +damage. So you can imagine that, if this was balanced around having 300 spellpower, your 4-5000 spellpower will hurt like hell. You should keep rejuv and regrowth up all the time, and probably use nourish and lifebloom to get yourself up.

He casts inferno, which does increased damage over 6 seconds. When he does this, run away from melee range, because it will take away a lot of your health.

Lastly, he slowly burns your mana, so the fight is limited to whenever you run out of mana. You need your mana to damage and to heal and to switching back into moonkin form. Geddon does pure magical damage, but you want the mana regen from moonkin form to get ahead of the mana burn. Eventually, either you will run out of mana, or he will run out of health.

Sulfuron

Not a very difficult boss, just an annoying one. He has four adds, which will heal each other when one goes to low health. You won’t be able to AOE them all down reliably. Instead, nuke down one and use starfall when it goes below 50%, and you should be able to get the first one down before it gets a heal. After that, its just a question of continuing this, and eventually you’ll be able to kill the healers off before they heal each other. After that, Sulfuron gets nuked down.

Place yourself way in the back of the cave, so you don’t pull all of the trash packs when you pop it.

Golemagg

Alright, time for honesty. I couldn’t solo Golemagg. When his hounds are close, they will attack faster and with increased damage. I got him to 75% before he killed me. So I brought in a paladin friend, which made everything a lot easier. Yagamoth tells me that he pulled it off, but this was with a crazy list of trinkets and resto gear, and all sorts of PvP items I don’t have. If he wants to, he can elaborate on his method for killing Golemagg below.

Majordomo Executus

This is not a terribly difficult fight, but you should keep your HOTs up vigerously. Barkskin and AOE will help you nuke them all down fairly quickly, but they will from time to time teleport you to the fire pit in the center, and you’ll have to run out of it with your HOTs running.

Ragnaros

The Dreaded Firelord is.. not so dreaded. In fact, he is fairly easy to get by if you’ve made it this far. Stand yourself with your back agaist the wall closest to him, and his fire bomb wont throw you away. Keep your HOTs up, use your treants to keep him focused a bit in the beginning, and nuke. Nuke. NUKE.

At best, you should be able to nuke him down before he submerges, and you won’t have to deal with his adds. If they spawn, you should be able to swap into bear form and swipe them down, but if you nuke him hard enough, he should go down without any problems.

Congrats!

You have now soloed Molten Core. Well, almost. We cheated a bit on Golemagg, but maybe we can figure out something. Ill definately go back and solo Molten Core again, cause this first solo netted me the very expensive +30 SP enchanting formula, which goes for several thousands of gold. And hey, is there anything more badass than a moonkin wielding the Hand of Ragnaros?

- QQ

To begin with, I changed the theme of the blog and added the changing gallery at the top of the front page to let people in on what the site was about. That was all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t enough. I set out to find something bigger…

It was apparent to me that I needed some moonkin on my site, something that would catch the eye of visitors. And as you can see now, I have certainly made some changes. After searching through dozens of artists making World of Warcraft fan art (and there are a lot, let me tell you that), I stumbled upon one who’s pen strokes spoke to me. At the very least, this seemed to be the person I could work with towards what I wanted. As it turned out, what I wanted wasn’t nearly as good as what I got!

So first, we made the logo. So far, it has just been some English Old Text font with some shading effects. My artist, Ginny “Immamoonkin” Higerd suggested a logo where we incorporated moons and eclipses into the logo, the result of which you see at the top of the page. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and a very moonkin-y one at that. I am probably going to tweak the colors of it a bit to make it sit better on the page, but the overall image is absolutely gorgeous.

I had an idea to have a background feature some moonkins. Then Ginny was all like “Well, what if we have a moonkin write a book?”. This quickly turned out to become one of the most freaking awesome pieces of WoW graphics I have ever seen: Myself, sitting by the fire, writing in a huge book!

I cannot find the words about how pleased I am with how it turned out. It looks absolutely nerdgasmic. And as such, the site has been updated, moonkinyfied and is now looking more spiffy than ever! There are a few easter eggs hidden around on the background, so if you are ever bored, try and see if you can spot them.

If you like what you see, you should definitely check out Ginny’s page on magicalmelonball.com, which redirects to her Devian Art page. It has a ton of cool images she has drawn, and if you fancy yourself a little image, I’m sure she can work something out for you.

If you want to take a look at the background, click below for the full size image!

I’ve been in a lot of guilds over the years. Some, because I was having a fresh start on a new server and a new character. Others because I needed a change of pace or perhaps a guild with focus other content.

So how do you do it? How do you find that perfect guild?

Setting down your priorities

Before searching for a new guild, you need to know what you are looking for. What kind of guild are you in the market for? A small social guild that does 10 man runs, or a hardcore, top of the line progression guild? How often do you want to raid, a single night each week or do you want to do five raids per reset? There is a lot of things you need to consider.

If you don’t, you may end up in a guild that doesn’t quite fit your needs. It might work out for a while, but you’ll eventually end up looking for something else, something that fits your style better. It’s important to be aware of this before you start searching for a guild, or else you’ll have to redo the whole process again later.

This is also a good time for some soul searching. If you want a good relationship with any guild you join, you need to be able to stand up to the requirements. Don’t go applying for a 5-nights-a-week guild that requires an 80% attendance, if you know that you realisticly can’t meet these requirements.

If time simply does not permit you to raid five nights a week, do not despair. There might be other guilds out there that can achieve what you want in much shorter time.

Finding the guild

Now that you know what to look for, its time to go looking. Depending on your funds and personal ties on the server, you may be able to expand your search to any server in your region. Sometimes there is simply not the guild for you on the server you are currently playing on. I know that switching servers can be difficult, especially when you have been on a server long enough to make a lot of friends. But don’t let it deter you. New friends can be made, and with Real ID, its very easy to keep in touch with old friends.

Start by looking on your realm forums. Any serious guild usually has a thread with their recruitment. Failing that, most realm forums has a pretty updated list of guilds and links to their websites, and it is on the websites that you can find out if they are recruiting your class.

You can also take a look at the official “Looking for alliance/horde players”. This can be a messy and confusing place, because you’ll have guilds searching for a full roster, others only looking for one particular class. Use the search term for “balance druid” and/or “moonkin”, and start sifting through the search results. Once you have a few that are open to moonkins, see if they fit your schedule, your needs and your wishes.

A few of the times when I’ve been looking for a guild, however, I have done everything backwards. I and a friend of mine once wanted to move to the more dedicated guilds, and we made an open post on the official forums. It was not an actual application, but rather a notice of who we are, what we are looking for, and a request for anyone that might be interested in us to drop us a link to their website for us to take a look at. We actually found a rather awesome guild through that. I can’t find the original post on the WoW forums, because it’s long forgotten now, but I found it’s twin on MMO-champion’s forums. Read it here.

Applying to a guild

You’ve found a guild that you are interested in. Great. The guild might even be looking for a moonkin druid. Awesome. Ask yourself if you can see yourself under their raiding hours and the loot distribution system they are using. Find out if they are active, and double check their progress on Wow-progress.com. If everything checks out, you are ready to make an application.

I’m in a rather progressed guild, and we get all manner of applications. Some are from really awesome players, and others are from people who… well, might be better off searching for something near their experience and gear level. If your character is wearing full 232 tier 9, you might have a hard time convincing an 11/12 ICC heroic guild to take you on. It’s not undoable, but you should probably be very realistic about your experience and what you can produce with your gear. Sure, gear is not everything, but applications are all about selling yourself, not unlike a job application, and if a guild has a choice between a 232 balance druid and a 277 moonkin of awesome, it’s not hard to guess who they are going to go for.

If the guild you are applying to have an application template, it is absolutely crucial that you follow this. Nothing will get your application scrapped faster than writing “olol, I’m just gonna skip this question”. They have this question in their template because it is important to them. There is no cutting corners when it comes to guild applications.

Always be thorough. You don’t have to write half a book on each question, but you should rather write complete answers rather than short ones. Guilds like to know what kind of player they are dealing with, and the more you tell them, the better they will be able to evaluate your application.

If you have any shortcomings, be it in gear or experience, be sure to point out just why this “doesn’t matter”, how “you have read up on all the tactics despite not having been able to put them to the test” and let them know how “you are quick to pick up on new things”. Obviously, don’t tell people this if your usual habit is to be 20 minutes late, wipe on Marrowgar and then go AFK while tactics are being explained.

Once your application is posted, check back at it as often as you can. If it is an open application, people will usually ask questions, and if you show some initiative and answer them quickly, you will show your dedication to the application.

If you need some inspiration, take a look at the application I sent to The Hungering Cold when I applied to them. They asked a bunch of questions, and I followed up with answers, and eventually I was invited to join the guild. You can find the application here!

Getting settled

Alright, you got into the new guild – awesome! Do yourself a favour and “embed” yourself in the guild as soon as you can. There will be a lot of new, interesting people to get to know, and the sooner you put yourself out there, the better. Be sure to say hi when you are invited to the guild, and if you have a microphone – and the guild has an active ventrilo server – log on and say hi to them as well. There is nothing more fun than joining a new guild and get to know your new comrades.

In the first few weeks, be sure to be diligent. Be on time, be prepared, and do as you should. Obviously, this should carry on forever, but the first few weeks are absolutely important. Don’t slack, and you’ll be off to a good start in your new guild!

You’re all set. I hope you find a good place to do your raidings. If you are in the market for a new guild, you might even want to check out The Hungering Cold‘s recruitment. We are probably full on moonkins though, unless you are as outstanding as myself

- QQ

It wasn’t easy to pick a winner, it truly wasn’t. And as I already stated back in the original thread, I would pick a winner based on effort, and not skill alone. The winner, however, made a drawing that cracked a smile on my face, about a problem we all face every week, an issue that spurs enormous amounts of jealousy, at least on my part.

The winner is…

BARTOL!

To see the rest of the submissions, check out the original Draw a Druid article!

The obvious choice, of course, is to bring the classes that can perform well, and at the same time give the group a wide range of buffs. I mean, you wouldn’t want to take a class just for its damage, right? And I’ve begun to wonder, why would anyone really bother to bring a mage? I mean, all they give the group is an intellect buff that we can get from warlocks instead, a crit buff on the target that warlocks can bring, and a personal crit buff that they usually give to each other. I mean, lets be fair, how useful are they?

Obviously, this is gibberish. And yet, I find myself cupping my face from time to time, when I see comments such as “Why bring a moonkin?”.

It seems that moonkins around the Azeroth can’t really shake the feeling that they are bad. They aren’t. In fact, current moonkins are performing quite well on the meters. Heck, I know I am at least.

The buff argument is old and tiresome by now. Why bring a moonkin when other classes bring the same buffs? Well, lets turn that argument around and ask, why bring other classes when moonkins bring all the buffs? Lets be fair, moonkins are a freaking battery of raid buffs, and while you can cover them with other classes, you need a good handful of those to get the same amount of buffs.

Fact is, ever since Blizzard’s “bring the player, not the class” concept was put into play, no class – except for maybe a paladin for Kings and a shaman for Bloodlust – has been needed. They have been nice to have, but you can usually get by just the same.

A single moonkin can give the whole raid 3% hit, 3% haste, 5% spell crit, 13% spell damage, a minor armor debuff, +stats and a hit debuff on the target. In order to get all of these buffs, you would have to bring:

A retribution paladin
An elemental shaman
A warlock forcing him to cast Curse of Weakness)
A hunter, forcing him to use Scorpid Sting
A warlock or a death knight
A shadow priest

A moonkin will cover buffs from at least six other people, just by being in the raid and attacking the target. That’s pretty damn huge. And the fact is, you can turn the table on a lot of these classes. Why bring a hunter when you can get their buffs from a druid and a death knight? Why bring a rogue when you can get misdirects from hunters? Why bring a death knight when you can get the buffs from a shaman? Why bring a mage when it doesn’t really add anything?

Do you see what I’m getting at? Buffs will usually be covered by 2-3 people in the raid, and this is good. They all provide their buffs in different ways, and you are making sure that if the raid is split up, or people die, the buffs are then replaced by those of another class. And if anything, moonkins should be ranked fairly high because of their multitude of caster buffs.

So why should you bring a moonkin? Well, for the damage, of course. Moonkins nowadays, at least those with similar gear and equal skill, are doing just fine on the meters. I know I am. Moonkins are not at the top of the meters, but neither is 24 other people in the raid group. There are usually 2-3 people – often the Shadowmourne wielding players – who are well ahead, followed by the core of the raid group, 10-12 players who are pretty close in damage. As long as you are somewhere within this range, everything is fine.

Don’t get your hair in a twist just because there are a few thousand DPS between you and the top, it doesn’t really matter. If you are pulling 13.000 DPS, who cares if a few people in your raid is managing to pull off 15.000 DPS? Enrage timers are not a problem, in fact, they have never been as long as you execute the tactics correctly, and they certainly aren’t with a 30% buff in Icecrown Citadel.

So why would you bring a moonkin? Why bring several? Because we do perfectly fine damage, and we are yet another source of the multitude of buffs you receive in a raid group. We often run with two moonkins, because we are both competent players that can pull our weight. Heck, I wouldn’t flinch if there was a 3 moonkin raid, but this would usually cause an outroar by the ignorants. Yet at the same time, nobody bothers to question the four mages in the group, despite the fact that they hardly bring anything to the group in terms of buffs, and that their damage is pretty much on par with every other caster.

Why bring a moonkin? Because you can!

- QQ

None the less, I’ve seen a good representation of guilds and how they handle loot. Some are fair, some are not. Some are simple and work really well, and others are really complicated without achieving anything.

I’d like to go through the most common systems of distributing loot (read: The one’s I’ve dealt with) and how they work. Who knows, maybe one of them will speak to you and your guild.

Dragon Kill Points

DKP started back in Everquest. There were only two end-game bosses to kill, Dragons, and killing them moved you up the list for loot. Getting loot would reduce your DKP and so on and so forth. I never played Everquest, but at the very least, the system has transfered into World of Warcraft, and we are very affected by it today.

DKP in its most basic form is both fair and unfair. The more you raid, the more you kill, the more points you earn. If you have the most points, you win the item, and then you lose points. It’s fairly simple to grasp, and while it is a system that rewards perseverence, it punishes newcomers. If you join a guild with year old members, they will be so far ahead of you that you wont see an item unless all the others have it.

Sure, it is fair that people, who has worked longer to get where they are, should get their upgrades first, but this causes a gap between the old members and the new, when all the old ones are in really awesome gear, and the new ones aren’t. Half of your raid group will be much further ahead, and the other half will be struggling to keep up, and that doesn’t make for a balanced raid group. Some choose to reset DKP after each level of raiding, but that turns the gun back at the older members, who suddenly does not get reckognition for all the hard work they’ve put in.

DKP works, but it is certainly not a perfect system. It’s favored by most, but can quickly become very messy to deal with, and will almost certainly punish one part of your raid group.

Zero Sum

Someone got the brilliant idea to make a points system, where adding all the numbers together would equal zero. When you get an item in a Zero Sum system, the points you spend is distributed equally to the 24 other people in your raid. The idea of this loot system is to make sure that everybody gets item at an equal pace.

Unfortunately, this system can fail at a moments notice. While it does distribute loot fairly, it only does so if the group is always the same 25 people. New people introduced to this system is screwed, because when they get items – that the oldies already have – the older guild members will have such a big lead in items that it will take a long time for new members to ever reach the same level of gear.

Not to mention the fact that the whole Zero Sum idea breaks as soon as one person stops raiding. What are you going to do, delete the points and have a non-Zero Sum system with a quirky distribution method, or divide -452 points between 30 raiders?

Rolling

Rolling is the game of gods. Or people with a lot of luck. Sure, rolling seems fair. It treats everybody equally, and why shouldn’t it, everybody chipped in on the kill. Unfortunately, rolling treats everybody equally, so the old players, who has done the fight and executed it perfectly, are now rolling on an even footing with people who died 1 minute into the encounter, or pulled aggro off an add.

Rolling is fine for some groups. PUGs and 10 mans, where people don’t know each other and probably never will, are fine places to use rolling, but for any serious sort of raid group or guild, you might want to steer away from this. It can cause some ill feelings if someone happens to get three lucky rolls in a night, and even though chance predicts that it will all even out eventually, it wont seem that way on that particular raid night. And if you start making restrictions on how many times a person can roll for an item, then you are taking the statistical chance out of the equation, and the system might as well be changed to something else.

Loot council

I was in a guild that had loot council once. This is a great system if it is executed correctly, but it is a delicate system, filled with mistrust and disappointments. I was lucky enough to have a council concerned with the well being of the raid group as a whole, trying to make sure that everybody got their upgrades as they needed it, and for the most part it works. The only problem is when somebody feels that they are more entitled to an item than someone else is, and there is not much to do about it but to sit back and take it.

I’ve heard of other “loot council” systems where the council were more concerned about the councils performance and gear than that of the raids, and when you are striving to be in a progression guild, you sometimes just have to take the bullet and accept it. Generally, guilds acting this way wont last very long, but if you start suspecting some foul play, my only advice to you is to get out, and get out fast!

EPGP

In my current guild, I was introduced to a new distribution system: EPGP. It is a little complicated to get into, but it is probably the most fair system I have ever encountered. EPGP has three components:

EP: Effort points – Gained by attending raids, killing bosses, being on time or on backup or the like. EP can be awarded for just about anything.
GP: Gear points – Gained when you get new items. GP is different depending on the kind of item, the item level and the like.
PR: Priority – Your EP divived by your GP gives you your PR, and your position in line for new items. PR shows how “much items” you have gotten for the effort you have put into the guilds progress. When you get new items, your GP will go up, and in turn reducing your PR. When you attend a raid, you gain EP, increasing your PR.

It is a system that changes constantly, after every raid. It is very difficult to really get ahead, but it will still reward people who has been in the guild longer. But not forever. EPGP usually has a weekly decay of 10%. This does nothing to change your PR, because your EP and GP are reduced by 10% each, meaning your PR will be the same. But the system ensures that even new people will recieve their first item after a couple of raids, two weeks at most, and after 10 weeks tops, a new member will be perfectly on par with everybody else.

Once its set up, it pretty much acts on its own accord. It announces items in a special interface where raiders can call out an item for main spec, offspec, a minor increase or simply pass on the items. If you have the most PR, it means you’re next in line for the item, and then you get moved down the line. If the item is particulary valuable, you’ll move further down to balance out the system. I’ve been pleasantly suprised with how the system handles new people as well as old guildies, treating everybody equally and as fair as possible. It doesn’t exclude new people, but allows for oldies to still recieve the items they have earned before the new people are fully incorporated in the guild. And when they are, everybody is equal.

Whatever system you are running with, consider if this is the best for your guild. Maybe there are other systems that fits your guild better.

- QQ