O Noes They’re Nerfing Content!

…again.  Remember when they did this before? Even ignoring the ICC Buff, there was The Great BC Content Nerf that dropped boss health. Suddenly the evil wind chime was actually killable by more than 1 guild on the entire god damned server!  Obviously this isn’t Sunwell, but you could argue that the nerfs meant ‘more’ back then.

In case you were wondering, the world didn’t end then, and it won’t end now.

I fail to grasp why people are getting their knickers in a twist over it. If you haven’t beaten the content by the time the nerf hits (and psst, it’s not that soon), then guess what?  Your penis wasn’t really that big anyway.

@Faidtastic said earlier, “Across the board raid nerf is ridiculous, T10 for Justice Points would self-nerf them, anyone who needed further nerfs shouldn’t be raiding.” 

Last I checked they weren’t taking away boss mechanics–just making them hurt a little less. A nerf will not magically allow all of The Bads to clear all the (by then, OLD) content, just made things a bit easier for those of us who take things a bit slower.

Of course I’d be surprised if SiB hasn’t downed every boss on normal mode well before then anyway–we only have two to go. In that case the nerf isn’t really about us (the 10 man normal crews) either, and our mighty penii remain satisfyingly large. It’s for alt runs and puggers and guilds who aren’t as blessed with attendance as we are.

And if you’re already doing heroic modes, why do you care? This isn’t about you.

I’m not even going to touch the ‘shouldn’t be raiding’ comment.  Just not gonna.

UNBUNCH YOUR KNICKERS AND QQ LESS.

ETA:  I don’t really mean to pick on Faidtastic with this post, his comment was just there in my Twitter feed being all…easily accesable and quotable.

Your Optimal Isn’t Mine

I was going through my feed reader’s backlog when I ran across this post from Blessing of Kings. This is always a topic that will get my knickers in a bunch, so let’s get started, shall we?

High-skill players almost always use the optimal spec or strategy. There are a few exceptions, but they are very rare. The vast majority of the time, someone with a non-optimal spec turns out to be a low-skill player.

Encouraging medium or low skill players to feel that they are a “special snowflake” and don’t need to use more optimal builds dooms them and their group to mediocrity and failure. You have enough trouble with lack of skill, why further handicap yourself with a sub-optimal build?

And even the high-skill player with the sub-optimal spec does her group a disservice. If the high-skill player switched to the optimal spec, odds are she would play at an even higher level.

I always resent the whole “you’re holding everyone else back” flavor these discussions take on.  Sure, in a situation where you’re doing hardmodes, I can understand, and there’s truth to it–in that situation.

But, ladies and gentlemen, World of Warcraft is a game. We play games to have fun.  If I love raiding but the spec/class I enjoy most is (we’ll go with my favorite example) Beast Mastery Hunter, and BM hunter isn’t the current top spec, does that mean I shouldn’t have get to raid?

Of course not.

Does that mean that because I happen to enjoy something not the Flavor of the Month, that I am a less than stellar player?  Not at all.  I  know several people that are very excellent players and chose, at some point or other, sub-optimal specs. If you haven’t been so lucky then you’ve been looking in the wrong place, for there’s plenty of them–in guilds like mine.

My guild is full of people playing non-optimal builds.  For a guild that raids only twice a week, we’re still clearing content at a reasonable rate. I dare you to ask anyone in SiB if they think they are doomed to an existance of mediocrity and failure. 

We may not have a place in your Epic Guild of Awesome Leetness and Hardmodes, but we are not lesser players for it. We’re just over here enjoying playing our game the way we find most fun, and collecting shiny purples for it.

You’re more than welcome to play your perfectly valid interpertation of the game over in your corner, but the holier than thou attitude could do with a nerf.

Quit Your Bitching

You know the type.  “No one RPs with meeeeee.  No one loves me, they just ignore me, QQ!”

I don’t know about you, but on my RP server, I’m in 3 different OOC chat channels.  3.  Two of them can get pretty chatty, and stack /g on that and chances are good to middling that I miss stuff.   I assume that everyone else is in roughly the same situation, so if I log on and poke for RP and nothing happens, it’s pointless to get upset.  

Even if that’s not the case–whining is not going to make people want to RP with you.  Logging off in a huff isn’t going to make people RP with you. 

One of the major problems with RP servers is that new people can’t find RP.  Why is that?  Because everyone is sticking to their cliques in their little channels, perhaps?

If you can’t find RP, go make it.  Do something radical and go sit in the Park (or whatever the horde equililant is).  Yes, I KNOW the Park is Goldshire minus the naked people.  That’s because the “saner” RPers avoid it, and perpetuate the cycle.  

Sit in front of the AH and RP people watching.  Sit in Darnassus and fish.  Do something!  Not only will you increase your chance of getting RP, but you might make a new friend.  Or a new enemy! You could also make a good impression on someone new to the srever, or lift the despair of someone old on the srever who was swearing that RP was dead!  Even better yet, you’ll be around when someone else in one of your channels pipes up and asks, “Hey, anyone for RP?”

You can say “Sure, come join us in Ironforge!”  This gets a much better response than “No one wanted to RP with me EARLIER!  /emocutut.”  Fancy that.

More on the Leveling Tank

I’m going to quote liberally from Tam’s post here.  I think Tam said it all better than I can to begin with, but I’m going to chime in anyway.  Because I have nothing else good to post.  :P

I’m not putting on my Dumbing It Down For the Casuals hat, or getting elitist about the virtues of things being hard, but overgearing everything – as one currently does what with heirlooms and the ability shift associated with tacking 20 more levels onto the end of a game – does make you incredibly complacent. …The sad thing is, I suspect I could get quite a long way without really knowing all that much about tanking.

The other day I remember thinking a tank was rather squishy, inspected him at the end of the run and realised he was nowhere near def-cap and wearing just about the worst itemized set of ungemmed blues and purples I had ever seen. I know skill is not about gear but wearing the right gear, even if it’s not the best gear, is some kind of indicator.

…Heirlooms compensate a bit at this level but I have no idea from what dank hole of ineptitude the average pre-80 Northrend tank has crawled. And it’s all such banal failure as well – stupid things like massively over-pulling, not controlling the mobs at all, getting knocked back into other mobs, pulling when I’m on a mana break. I resent these wipes because they’re completely unnecessary.

The difference is, I suppose, that nobody is geared enough to compensate, so we’re expected to play like we know what the hell we’re doing. And I can’t work out if it’s laziness, a genuine failure to adapt from running heroics at 80 in ICC gear, or the fact that nobody has really had to learn how to do their bloody job because they could previously rely on rolling over stuff with heirlooms and AoE!lol.

That’s it, in a nutshell.  That is why I am not healing pugs on my druid right now.  I step into a pug and am effectively slapped in the face with failure more often than not, from tanks who have LOLed through Outlands.  That in an of itself is not a terrible thing–every one of us gets a rude awakening now and again and have to tighten up your skills (see: me, tanking heroics on my warrior).  I love helping people.  If you’re clueless but nice, I’ll do everything I can to make your life easier.  But so many of these fresh into Northrend tanks are outwardly hostile for reasons that escape me. 

 This game is an MMO.  That means there’s OTHER PEOPLE playing with you.  That means that maybe, maybe, you should extend some small amount of effort in playing with the OTHER PEOPLE so that you don’t make the entire experience SUCK.  Why the fuck should you need a GUIDE to tell you that you should not pull while your healer is drinking?  Or that if you die when you pull two groups, you should only pull one?  Common sense, anybody?  Consideration?  Situational awareness?  Bueller?

How about not doing a job you don’t have adequete gear for?  I leveled as a tank, on multiple toons.  One of them even treated it as her secondary spec  (see: druid).  There is tanking gear out there.  There are greens of the Champion.  There is, in other words, no real excuse for being a paladin and tanking with SP leather.  AND pulling while I’m drinking.  AND standing in the bosses Casting of Supreme Ouch.  I’ve tanked UK when undergeared, it was no fucking joke when Wrath came out and is probably no fucking joke even now. 

Go suck it up in the DPS queue until you have the gear, okay?  Skill comes with practice, but it’s much easier to learn when you’re not at high risk of dying.  Tanking is gear dependent.  Please stop trying to escape this fact at the cost of others.  Or in the very least…say something in the start and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be surprised.

Why I Continue to Play

I am definitely someone who plays for the people, not the purples.  I have dragged many of my WoW-friendships outside of the game–onto Twitter, onto gtalk, into IRL.  We do talk about the game a lot, but sometimes we have rather heated debates over mundane topics.  Like, oh, salad dressing.

Pixelated Executioner: …but other than caesar, there is no dressing more wonderful than blue cheese. MY BUFFALO WINGS MUST BE TREATED TO THE BEST, DAMMIT.
Me:  …
RANCH
RANCH IS THE ONE AND ONLY GOD OF DRESSINGS
Pixelated:  BLASPHEMER! YOU WILL BURN FOR ALL ETERNITY! TURN, FOUL HERETIC! TURN!!!!

Life is better with CAPS OF (FAUX) RAEG.   My life would be a lot more boring without these nutty WoW people in it.

The biggest shame is not recording the 3 am vent conversation about the state of Evee’s testicles…

Gemming SP vs Int

While I was playing blog reader catch up the other day, I stumbled across a post that touched upon disc priest gemming.  I don’t remember which post it was, unfortunatley, but I did save the link to the PlusHeals forum thread on the matter, here.

I’m a little late to the party, here, but I felt like touching upon it regardless.

Rather than saying “if you don’t have mana problems gem SP” instead we should be advising people that “if you don’t have mana problems you need to cast more spells until you do have mana problems”… pushing people towards a state of OOMness will increase their throughput much faster than advising them to socket an extra 100-150 SP.

The INT that people socket won’t even make much of a difference in terms of regen, again gems are only going to provide 150-200 stat points. However advising people to socket SP if they don’t have mana problems tells people that their current level of casting is acceptable/optimal, when in reality 99% of priests aren’t casting using every gcd.

Emphasis mine. 

I gem nearly straight SP, the exception being whatever gems I need for my meta and maybe one or two other WTF gems because I…just seem to do that, sometimes. 

I spam cast, because I’m I’m a spaz who can’t stand the thought of twiddling my thumbs.  Oh, and being a FoL Pally spammer for years has something to do with it, too.

And, with the exception of a few fights (Fester, Twilight Sparkle Party), I very seldom go OOM.  Oh, and gunship, because I do laps around the melee group casting Holy Nova, but that’s not a valid strategy by any means.  That’s just me being bored.

Am I really that special?  Do that many priests really sit around with a thumb up their ass?  As a tank healer, how can you even do that? The tank is always taking damage!  Even if he’s at full health I’m often casting, because crits = soap bubbles, and soap bubbles = free health for my tank.   If it’s not a fight where I’m worried about dips in the tanks health, then I’m bubbling the raid.   If you’re raid bubbling, well, there’s always something to be done.  

Taking haste out of the equation, since I’m over the soft haste cap, I’m left with two choices:  cast bigger heals but go OOM faster, or cast smaller heals and go OOM more slowly.

But I already said I don’t tend to go OOM.  Even when I was trailing into ICC as one of the most undergeared healers we had, I never drained myself dry down to the last trick except on Fester.  So taking THAT out of the equation…gee, bigger heals or smaller heals?

I think I’ll take bigger heals! 

If you’re tank healing, you don’t always have the luxery  of getting in a few more casts.  You need a heal as quick and as big as you can manage, and no you cant’ always squeeze in a GHeal.  So what do you want?  A big fat FH or some big fat penance ticks!  How do you get bigger, fatter heals?  Spell power!

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that if you want to gem int, you’ve got an paladin infection in your brain…

I’m so button happy that I snipe bubbles on the raid from our second disc priest ALL THE TIME.  I’M SORRY SHIMMER.   >.>

Thoughts on Gearscore

I don’t know what my gearscore is.

I don’t care what my gearscore is.

I don’t ask anyone what their gearscore is. 

Gearscore doesn’t tell you what someone’s skill level is.  It doesn’t tell you how much DPS they can actually do.  It doesn’t tell you that they’re not a douchebag.  It doesn’t tell you that they know how to gem, or spec, or enchant what gear they do have.  It doesn’t tell you how much thought they’ve put into everything.

In other words, it doesn’t tell you a single.  Damn.  Thing-except how big your penis is and how many emblems you’ve farmed tormenting pugs in random heroics.

And your penis is not helping me out here.

I’d much rather take a look at someone’s gear and take a look at their enchants, gems, and general gear choices.  If I see a DK with a SP gem, then I know I’m in trouble in a whole different way than “oh he only has a GS of 2”.  There’s a difference between recently dinged and ignorant.  I’d like to know what I’m really dealing with, you know? 

So in short: gearscore can go die in a fire.