Training Ground

Still over half an hour until the next Tol Barad encounter, so I have plenty of time to write down some thoughts on 5-man encounters. It is a subject that has been up on the forums quite a bit now and even come up on Mumble, along with some guildies. I am certain nobody is a stranger to the trend, lets bash bad players in 5s. After all, it makes you look good and powerful because you get to compare yourself against people with lower skill levels, not to mention earn free prestige amongst peers.

Here is the thing though and I will endeavor to say this as clearly as I can; it is wrong. Not only is simple, useless bravado but at the same time, you are just making yourself look like a tool. Why? Because most people will then go right off to moaning how there are no good players in the random queues. This bewilders me because if they go out of their way to piss on and kick the new players, how do they expect there to ever to be an improvement? Think about it, 5-mans are not that serious and while they are certainly more challenging then what they were in Wrath of the Lich King, you can just blow through them with little to no effort.

That means 5-man dungeons are the perfect training grounds for new players. In fact, they are the only training grounds available. Nobody learns to play their class while they level. They might pick up a few things while on the random dungeons queue before the level cap, or the top normal 5-mans dungeons but let us be realistic, at best you pick up a basic concept for your DPS or TPS rotations. You won’t learn about CC, LoS, complicated boss mechanics, survivability, or any other skills needed to be successful on a more serious level.

So if we are to have any hope of ever training new players, to actually expect them to excel at the game, we much allow them the opportunity to practice in those heroic 5-man dungeons. It will, beyond the shadow of a doubt slow down our valor point runs, ask us for patience as they figure stuff out, wipe a few times, pull back on DPS and push out more HPS, but it is simply a necessary hurtle that we cannot avoid. We seriously cannot expect people to just magically learn a game as complex as World of Warcraft, all the things that it has taken the rest of years to absorb.

Call to Arms: More Tanks

I had some pretty mixed feelings when I read this update on mmo front page. I can appreciate that Blizzard wants to and is attempting to somehow fix the lopsided role distribution that has been plaguing World of Warcraft for god knows how long but I have limited faith in the current attempt. There are more variables to the fact that fewer people want to play the tank role, and to an extent, the healer role, and those issues will not be solved by bribing people with shiny objects. Some probably will at least make an alt or something, just for the chance to farm those mounts but otherwise, I doubt the situation will change that much.

The fact is that playing a tank or a healer in a group is a thankless job. You will occasionally get the odd pat on the back by people who truly appreciate your effort and skill that goes into filling those roles, but the majority do not understand and others don’t even care. Particularly a new tank, who is still inexperienced, not sure of the best way of doing things, maybe has less off-the-bat threat burst, and definitely not the best gear, has to endure a long and rocky road to success. The abuse, the shit, and drama you have to endure are, in many cases, not worth it.

Even experienced tanks don’t generally run random 5-man dungeons, unless for their daily dose of valor points because no matter how good you are, people will get on your tits no matter what. Who would volunteer for that crap? Some of us, who love tanking and have managed to win the prize of a regular raid spot as tanks, but even we can’t be bothered after we’ve exhausted the benefits from that.

The good news is that Cataclysm, as an expansion, did move us towards the right direction. When we started, DPS had a major wakeup call. No more blitzing ahead of the tank, blowing cooldowns on trash pulls, and just mindlessly standing there and getting your rocks off on the damage meters. CC was necessary and in some cases, it still is and if the DPS aren’t paying attention during the heroic boss fights, they will die pure and simple. To my delight, I still get to watch bad players get it and it almost makes the emo aftermath worth it but this is not enough. We are fast out-gearing the content and things can only get worse from here. Already any semi-decent group can completely ignore CCs and just chain-pull the dungeons. As the required level of tactic and strategy goes down, the old problems will grow more severe.

Personally, I feel this is the main problem associated with the lack of tanks and healers and is something that Blizzard should spend more time addressing. If they acknowledge this, it does not show because they have not just ignored the issue, but made it worse by nerfing almost every 5-man dungeon in the game; trash removed, damage lowered, encounters have lost entire mechanics, etc. At that level, the game is increasingly more about the strong tanks and healers, whereas the DPS can pretty much do as they want, with little to no responsibility. I can think of numerous ways of creating encounters that actually challenge the DPS that would bring some measure of pressure on them to actually appreciate what the tanks and healers go through every day.

Well, we can only hope that Blizzard’s new dungeon design paradigms work as advertised but for this latest update, I simply do not see it solving anything.

A New Beginning

It is hard to describe how much I detested changing my guild but I would be lying if I said it had not been coming for quite a bit. I will not go into the details or specifics why I did this, but looking couple of weeks back now, I know I made the right decision. It is strange but, for the longest time, I unsure but now I am certain. By my side, my girlfriend also left the guild, something that made me quite pleased, although it wasn’t in anyway my plan.

So here we are, applied and got accepted to my old guild on Nordrassil and we’ve been included in the third raid team. I do feel we were extremely lucky to get into the same guild and what is more, the officer core here agreed to place us in the same raiding team. I really could not have things to work out better than this.

With this change, I decided was also time to update my blog and and breath some life into this place. I’ve hated the fact that I let it fall into such a state but I just could not find the time to keep blogging. Now I hope to change it and we are both looking forward with great anticipation. Raiding kicked off this week, which I was very excited about. The team was, apparently, dormant for a while, due to some members taking a break from the game, so both me and Atheqa are joining with a couple of old PF members, along with some new and less experienced raiders to form what seems to be a very solid 10-man group. Everybody knows what they are doing and despite some of our numbers having poor gear, we’ve done very well during our first two nights, one- and two shotting bosses with little to no preparation, other than a short strategy meeting before a pull.

Some of them have outright impressed me and definitely stands as landmarks  to the statement that players over gear and skill above everything else. E.g. kudos to my tank partner, Stegal who was able to learn just a whole bunch of tactics and mechanics with very little warning. Equally, I feel we have a very strong set of healers, able to keep us even after some rather glaring screw ups.

So all and all, I think we are in a very nice place right now. Who wouldn’t be psyched? :-)