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.