What's DKP?

Ok this occured to me when I was writing the last post and so I thought I would write a small piece about it.

Loot Rules change between players and instances and guilds depending on your play style and the difficulty of the content.

Open Rolls are usually used in 5-man and 10-man instances. This just means that you are given the opportunity to press a button for either NEED or GREED for an item. Most players at the top levels know to press Need only when the item in question can immediately be equipped and benefit the player more than the item they currently have equipped in that slot. Greed is simply for, oh thats a nice item I might use if ....., or I want the gold for selling it if now one else needs it.

Now, when we come to the harder 25-man raids the items that drop are quite valuable to many people in the raid group and to help out with fairness and making sure that everyone gets loots that will benefit the whole group, we have a way of keeping track of who's been investing the time in the guild and should get priority. This is called DKP - or Dragon Kill Points. You can research how this came about elsewhere there is plenty written on the subject.

In my guild we use a zero sum way of tracking based on our timer. So basically, we've assigned values for the items based on their level and where they come from. Each week we count up the amounts spent on the loot that dropped, divide it by the number of hours raiding and the number of raiders then apply that number to everyone who raided a given night. The reason we break it into the whole timer is that some nights are 'farm' content (lots of loot dropping) and others are 'learning' (maybe nothing drops). We like to reward both equally for the time they're investing.

Bidding on an item simply means you whisper the Master Looter that you are interested in an item. He/She looks at the table to see who of the people interested, has the most DKP and assigns that person the item. Obviously it's more complex than that but that's the basics. So when the timer is calculated, the cost of an item is subtracted from the person who got it and distributed to the entire raiding group.

Loot Incoming!

Two new pieces for me this weekend. Of course my dkp took a real hit in this one.

• First and foremost Staff of Immaculate Recovery. This staff is probably the best healing staff save one, prior to Sunwell Plateau. Of course I then had to farm a few primals to finish gathering the materials for the Major Healing enchant. EEK, the cost of these in the Auction House is unbelievable. I'm certainly not paying those prices.
• Secondly I got my 3rd piece of T6 gear. The token dropped from the Council and I got the nod. Picked up my Mantle of Absolution in Hyjal from the token vendor there and then gemmed it with two Royal Amethyst our guild leader was kind enough to cut for me.

It was a nice end to a trying week.

Here's a link to a picture of the staff. It's truely a beautiful thing. /sigh

Is Season 4 Too Late...

I'd like to provide you with a link to this great article I found on Ten Ton Hammer. It's regarding PVP (Player versus Player) Arenas and the content currently available in World of Warcraft.

Personally I'm in love with raiding and that's where I want to be but this article is great for those who are more interested in PVP.
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In the World of Warcraft player vs player (PvP) scene, there is nothing more competitive than the arenas. This is where players strive to out rank each other for amazing rewards. When a season starts players push to reach a high team ranking to earn enough points to get the items they need to upgrade to move even higher in the ranking system. After a while though they have all the pieces that they can upgrade and are left in limbo until the next season starts.

[Click Here] for the full article

We WERE Prepared.

We've finally done it!! We killed Illidan! Wow, what a great feeling. After suffering wipe after wipe, our strategies and efforts finally all came together and we took him down on our third try of the night.

Then, while everyone was rejoicing, the strangest thing happened that turned our joyous party on its ear. One of our most consistent raiders announced that he was leaving the guild.

I don't know about people sometimes. Maybe it was just the timing, but talk about stealing away our thunder! Not only that, but his departure came without warning, and he hadn't even discussed it with the guild leader... just "this is hard, bye /gquit."

Hmmm... well, he is now with the #1 guild on the server and I know they talk to our people all the time trying to recruit, so I guess it really isn't all that surprising. It just diminished the event ... somehow.

However...

We Killed Illidan!!!!