World of Warcraft encore

[pika]

eh, I quit playing when I ran out of stuff I could do on my own. I played a dreaded " Off spec " which meant I was scum undeserving of raiding since I couldn't fulfill a group need... which brings me to my next point.. the few times I was allowed to raid it wasn't all that fun, it was " No don't play like you, play like we tell you, otherwise we all die " .. basically it felt to much like work.. so mostly I just played by myself.. and un-guilded, at that cause I got tired of being asked for " Donations " to pay for the raiders repair bills.. as if I cared if the guild was downing bosses or not.. best part was listening to them bitch on Vent about wiping for the 10th time on Heigan...

The game just stopped being fun a few weeks after hitting 80.. And I quite frankly got tired of paying when I was only doing the same 25 daily quests every day.

I've not made up my mind if I intend to come back when Cataclysm comes out or not..

[Inigima]

eh, I quit playing when I ran out of stuff I could do on my own. I played a dreaded " Off spec " which meant I was scum undeserving of raiding since I couldn't fulfill a group need... which brings me to my next point.. the few times I was allowed to raid it wasn't all that fun, it was " No don't play like you, play like we tell you, otherwise we all die " .. basically it felt to much like work.. so mostly I just played by myself.. and un-guilded, at that cause I got tired of being asked for " Donations " to pay for the raiders repair bills.. as if I cared if the guild was downing bosses or not.. best part was listening to them bitch on Vent about wiping for the 10th time on Heigan...

Respectfully, you don't sound like someone I'd want to raid with either. Raiding is a team endeavor and your tactics must match the fight. If you're not a team player, you won't be wanted.

EDIT: And if you're playing in a way that makes you do a shitty job of your role, same thing. I don't care if you feel like doing your rotation in a way that isn't a perfect min/max, but if you're doing 1200 DPS instead of the 3700 DPS you could be doing, I'm gonna care a lot, and so's the rest of your raid, because you're making everyone else's role harder.

[Poobah]

Respectfully, you don't sound like someone I'd want to raid with either. Raiding is a team endeavor and your tactics must match the fight. If you're not a team player, you won't be wanted.

EDIT: And if you're playing in a way that makes you do a shitty job of your role, same thing. I don't care if you feel like doing your rotation in a way that isn't a perfect min/max, but if you're doing 1200 DPS instead of the 3700 DPS you could be doing, I'm gonna care a lot, and so's the rest of your raid, because you're making everyone else's role harder.

Yep, raiding is a team sport. If you don't like meshing into a team then it really isn't for you.

[pika]

I have no problem with people who want to treat it like a competitive sport and take orders and whatever.. so long as they are happy... It just would be nice if blizzards concept of casual gamer wasn't " Oh well they can pvp .. or do dailies " and thats it..

I had a pretty nice Fury warrior (all but one piece of the dreadnought armor)for a while after WOTLK first came out.. my raiding problems mostly started when they Nerfed fury warriors.. I've got no problem with rotations and stuff.. I just don't like being told constantly to tank when I'm not geared or specced for it.. and just flat out don't like doing it... And then to have my spot constantly given away cause I won't change my entire play style..

Of course had I the chance to do it all over again back in 2005.. I'd have just rolled a hunter and been done with it.. But the players guide it comes with is wonderfully vague about what each class is supposed to do.. " and warriors are the best all around beginners class " ..

[Shryke]

You read the manual?

Damn....

[pika]

You read the manual?

Damn....

how else was I supposed to know how to play?

[Shryke]

Manuals haven't been a good source of information on a game for at least 10 years.

Go to website.

[Inigima]

I have no problem with people who want to treat it like a competitive sport and take orders and whatever.. so long as they are happy... It just would be nice if blizzards concept of casual gamer wasn't " Oh well they can pvp .. or do dailies " and thats it..

It's a multiplayer game. If you don't want to play with others, you should look elsewhere.

I had a pretty nice Fury warrior (all but one piece of the dreadnought armor)for a while after WOTLK first came out.. my raiding problems mostly started when they Nerfed fury warriors.. I've got no problem with rotations and stuff.. I just don't like being told constantly to tank when I'm not geared or specced for it.. and just flat out don't like doing it... And then to have my spot constantly given away cause I won't change my entire play style..

Yeah, being told to play a role that isn't yours sucks. Maybe the people you were playing with were just dicks.

[BlueRose]

Funny, Rabbits, I'm a fury warrior too, except that I love tanking and am stuck with DPS instead.

I didnt know how to play at all when I started either. It took me a while to discover that I had 3 talent trees......

[Fenryng]

It took me a while to discover that I had 3 talent trees......

Wait.

There are....three?

:-)

[emberling]

Yeah, I'm not really up on the specifics of every class, but I'm under the impression that almost every spec is 'good enough' for whatever role it's intended to fill, unless you're on the absolute cutting-edge, or otherwise super hardcore about being the best. Which you clearly aren't, and that's fine.

And those few specs that do 'suck' - I think sub rogues are one, and I think one of the mage trees - aren't alternate roles or anything, so while there's certainly a playstyle difference between subtlety and assassination or whatever, or Arms and Fury for warriors (which last I heard were both quite good), you're still basically doing the same thing.

But seriously, telling someone in a guild or other steady raid group that they have to be a tank is a horrible idea. Depending on group makeup, it could be reasonable to expect someone to have a tank offspec for flexibility, but forcing it as a main spec - not smart. The tank is the role that really requires the most dedication, planning, and preparation by far. Bad DPS can be carried by other good DPS. Bad healing can often be compensated for with good tanking (mostly via gear, but min/maxing gear is part of the process). But bad tanking wipes the raid. And in most encounters, it's much more vital for the tanks to have full understanding of the fight than anyone else, to know what and when to pick up and where to put it.

Now, it's totally feasible to have a poor tank and still succeed, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a main tank in a raid that didn't really know and love that shit. And if you're main speccing tanking because you're being told to by your group, there's no way that they're not going to eventually expect you to MT something, and that's just not going to be successful unless it's what you want to do, or unless you want to succeed enough that you're willing to put in the effort anyway.

For what it's worth, I love tanking, but I do my utmost to avoid MTing or leading raids whenever possible, because it's just extra stress and accountability that doesn't add anything to my enjoyment. For this reason I usually set up DPS as my 'main spec' - assuming there are other competent tanks available - so that I'll maintain a tank gear level below that of the best tanks among my peers and consequently won't be expected to MT stuff. This plan has a minor flaw in that I tend to be so good at DPS that, given the gear level I would reach having it as my 'main spec', I often would get asked to stay DPS even when I felt like tanking. :uhoh:

Preemptive defense of my potentially controversial assertion that the MT role is more demanding than healing:

First, there's obviously a huge variety of encounters in the game and this doesn't hold true for all of them, most notably that occasionally a DPS or two is called upon to do something out of the ordinary (like kiting) that is as crucial as tanking or healing, but it holds true in broad strokes.

In order to defeat a basic encounter, it's certainly a combination of tanking, healing, and DPS that is required, with a minimum amount necessary of each one, and above that level, for the most part, failures in one area can be compensated by success in another. Again, on the most simplistic level, using 10-man raid proportions, the healing and tanking falls on the shoulders of two individuals each while the DPS is spread between six. The specific pressure on each of the DPS is much lower because there's more opportunity for their failure to be compensated by outstanding success by another player in the same role. So at this basic level, both healing and tanking are relatively high-stress (equally so) while DPS is low-stress.

That's not the whole story, though. A rather large proportion of encounters only require a single tank for much of the fight, or only tax a single tank's gear level, increasing the stress on the MT. Almost every encounter requires some knowledge of its mechanics for the tanks (what adds spawn and when, when to taunt things off other tanks, where to stand) while the healers typically only have to worry about generalities like not standing in fire and making health bars go up (yes, a detailed knowledge of the boss's attacks helps greatly in planning, but below the cutting edge, you don't need that kind of thing). And it falls on the tanks - particularly the main tank - to pace the raid and keep it moving as fast as it can without failing, while healers (and DPS) are perfectly able to alt-tab during lulls as long as they can still see WoW well enough to switch back as soon as stuff starts happening again.

As such, the main tank is certainly the most stressful position, requiring the most dedication, planning, and optimization, though I think healer is probably more stressful than offtank.

[Weak With The Dawn]

It doesn't matter if you're doing 10K dps, if you're running spikes through the raid and dying because you stood in the fire then bitched about not getting heals then you shouldn't be getting an invite. On the flipside, if you can switch targets as soon as the priority target spawns, get out of the fire before you get two stacks of the DoT, avoid the big green clouds and all the rest of that situational awareness stuff, then even if you're only pulling 3K DPS the only thing you're lacking to be a good solid raider is gear (or a good rotation/skill priority list).

-Poobs

I wish more people understood this. We were in Ony 25 and my Guild Leader (on his mage) was throwing his DPS stats all around like he was the best player in the guild until one of our PuGs had the balls to remind him that most of it was Whelp AoE since he died during the first Deep Breath.

It's the same mentality of people who show DPS charts after every trash pull, that's great, you have some good potential, but show me you can raid. High DPS is great, but raiding is really about coordination and knowing your team.

We almost wiped twice on Beasts too - the fight ended with a mage and a resto shammy left standing; with the mage trying to burn Icehowl down before his daze ran out :lol:

That my friend, is positively epic!

[Mack Kilimaro]

So, our first ToGC 10 kill of anything was 3 weeks ago. We spent our first raid night this week wiping for an hour on GC Northrend Beasts without killing them.

Tonight we proceeded to 2-shot the Beasts, then get first Grand Crusader kills of Jaraxxus (2-shot), Faction Champions, and Twin Val'kyr. That was pretty fucking sweet.

Took a look at heroic Anub'arak and I have no idea how that shit is ever going to happen... ever. But I've been surprised before.

[Inigima]

Welp, finally got Malygos (EoE 10) down tonight :) Got my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title out of the deal, too, and my 10 key/heart quest done from it. Only took 3 tries tonight with a group almost entirely pugged (I knew one guy I invited to replace someone who left). Helps to have a tank who knows the fight well and a group that takes direction, plus a few really solid people who know the score.

[The Winged Shadow]

After wiping weeks after weeks on Heroic Icehowl (cause people can't seem to move out of it's way for whatever reason), we suddenly plowed through to Heroic Twins :) .

But then just about all the ranged (and we had about 5 ranged dps - 2 lock, 2 mage and a hunter) started QQ-ing about being assigned to soak and started coming up with all sorts of reasons as to why their class would be bad at soaking etc etc. And just about all of them refused to grab some shadow resist for our next run :( . Hopefully the RL will fix it up with them. It would suck coming all this way and getting stuck on Twins cause people wanted to be on top of meters :unsure:

Faction Champs was heaps of fun, even through we wiped on it a half dozen times. I got stuck locking down Mage cause it was screwing people up big time. At first i had trouble with it since it kept Blinking all my stuns and i had to travel a long way to get to it (most of the time through or around frost traps), and by the time i reach him he gets a sheep or arcane blast off, but it was EZ-mode after i switched to combat, specced Throwing Specialization and bought a throwing weapon for Deadly Throw. I can see why Blizz removed the interrupt effect from pvp-gloves and it makes me drool just thinking about how OP it would've been when FoK was on it. :drool:

[Poobah]

Still having issues with TotGC10.

People keep making those small mistakes which wipe the raid and cost us another 5-10 minutes, so we just aren't getting enough time/attempts at Anub'arak. Nonetheless with less than optimum groups we made it to the bug last night and had a good go at him. After a while some of our less experienced people were getting a feel for the fight. We really have phase 2 down solidly which is great, though unfortunately we need bigger numbers in recount because while we can just about make it to phase 3 in one burrow phase that costs us our Bloodlust so damage on p3 is very slow. It didn't help that we didn't have a hunter last night for aspect of the wild, so I had to waste my air totem slot on nature resist which cost us a crap-tonne of dps as our top three dps that night were all melee.

Could I ask, how many healers and dps are people using on Anub 10H? At the moment we are using two tanks, two healers, five dps and one offspec shadow-priest who sort of off-heals in phase 3. I really think we need to get by with two healers in phase 3 and have six dedicated dps, but I'm not sure we can get to him without three healers.

[RaceBannon42]

Had to deal with More guild drama. Had one player decide to transfer after I took away their abilty to use an avatar on the guild forums. This was necessitated because they had taken a yearbook photo of a former guildmate, cut their face in half and used it as their avatar. The result of this was the former guildmate whispering me in game during a boss fight about how they vitally needed to talk to me about it.

Sometimes I hate being the GM so much. :/

On a positive note we got a few of the more pointless achievements in Ulduar last night. That made some people happy. And I raked in the Hunter loot on Mandy's alt ToC10 run. Got Boots and shoulders which were small upgrades, but I got the Darkmaw Crossbow from Anub, which is pretty huge as I still was using the Drake Mounted Crossbow from Utgaard Keep. Its an almost 50% dps upgrade on the weapon.

[Poobah]

We tend to run with 2 tanks and 3 healers, but we use 2 healers sometimes depending on what we have available.

There isn't much I can suggest for dps before P3, as that's probably just a matter of getting better gear, but try to make sure you get someone with a healing debuff for P3 (combat rogue, arms warrior, hunter), which helps a lot.

Yeah right now we really have just too few people who are geared. And as I've mentioned before guild leadership is loath to put us all together into one 10-man for fear of making another 10-man non-viable.

[PhelanArcetus]

Haven't played in about a week, owing to having been traveling from Wed. to Sun. and having D&D games Tues. & Sun.

My guild is somewhere between casual and hardcore. We're definitely casual in the amount of time we're interested in devoting to specific things (scheduled raids, generally). Some of our players are on nearly all the time (our top rogue is unemployed, to my knowledge has never even had a summer job, and his life basically consists of playing WoW and watching anime). Other people barely sign on for anything other than scheduled raids.

Within raids, we allow for too much downtime; loot is distributed relatively slowly often enough, and then someone decides to go afk while the loot irrelevant to them is distributed, which is a good time... except that they take 5 minutes rather than 2, and then someone else goes afk, and so on. But we've gotten to Anub10H, though we haven't downed him, and once we started devoting more than 20 minutes after ToC10 to ToC10H, we pushed through in good time.

One thing that I would argue towards healing being worse than tanking is that of our regular healers, 2/4 of them are feeling burned out and intending not to level healers in Cataclysm, at least for a while. Though in part that's a matter of not wanting to have to heal. Whereas I, at least, intend to level my warrior right quick, because I do love tanking.

On the B-team people doing less well, I've seen all sorts. Hell I have all sorts in guild. I've got the boomkin/mage who thinks she knows what she's doing (she does ok on her boomkin now that she was taught a rotation, but atrociously on her mage, even given that her gear isn't great yet; my DK with nothing above level 200 and most of it itemized suboptimally beat her easily). I've got the rogue who doesn't know what she's doing, and just wants to play for fun; she doesn't want to push, she doesn't want to do research to learn the rotation or spec; the epitome of a social member. (The guy who took over raid leading would rather bring her than deal with finding a pug from LFG even though the pug will almost certainly outperform her.) I've got the rogue with the somewhat old computer and absolutely lousy internet connection who would love not to stand in fire, thank you very much, but whose latency didn't give her much of a choice. (Since I was at her place this week, and her friend has, with the same company, better internet and a bunch of premium channels for $10 more, she's going to be calling and complaining for an improvement and/or a lower bill, which may result in an improvement in latency... though we think it's probably substandard wiring in her building, as her actual net performance is below standard cable levels.) We've also got people who try, but just aren't as skilled, and a few who haven't been able to play enough to keep their gear level on par.

And we've had problems dragging alts around, moreso than casuals. It's actually time, I want to try and discuss it tonight, to set up some sort of plan (assuming patch isn't this week) for doing ToC10N with alts. Not a full on alt run, but switching out some people, enough to get a few people some gearing, but not enough to make the run full of fail. My warrior has no purpose to ToC10N, except triumph emblems towards dps gear (and I almost never dps; I haven't been dps in an instance on him in several months, in fact). My paladin pretty much only needs healing gear (skewed by the relatively low value of armor penetration for Ret and the expertise requirements). And my DK, while I took her once, I just don't feel right bringing her again until she gets a couple of upgrades (especially a weapon). But we've already had our various healers trading out ever since we stopped bringing 3 healers.

I know people who will play whatever spec is most effective at their gear/content level. I know people who will not. I'm one of the latter. As an example, warriors are, supposedly, notably better as Arms until late Ulduar gearing, I believe, then Fury takes the lead. Well, one of my friends in fact did Arms until he reached the gear point where Fury took over, and then switched. He then proceeded to make statements like "that warrior should have enough gear to be Fury and therefore should be Fury", and, when I decided that I found Arms unenjoyable, his first question was regarding my gear. That was a nice little discussion on how apparently I hadn't worked hard enough on my interface to make Arms intuitive and easy, and probably also how bigger numbers would suffice to make me happy. My arguments included that having to put a lot of interface work in to allow the spec to be fun is not acceptable to me, that I simply didn't enjoy it, that there's no way I was going to put in a lot of time to ease playing a dps spec when I'm tanking 99.9995% of the time, and if I'm not enjoying the spec, there's no reason for me to play it.

[Poobah]

How much do we rely on our interfaces these days?

I'm pretty sure it's way too much.