I have been playing with my 80 alts more often. They are mainly on Ravenholdt (RH) but i do have two 80s now on Ysondre (YS) which i do enjoy playing.
Ysondre, US, Horde
On YS, i mainly enjoy playing my paladin because i have yet to have any decent gear, yet im able to do decently on dps. although i often do have problems with dps, as my hit isnt all that great, i am slowly building up my gear to more easily dps in raids. but currently, i have a mix of outland instance blues, some ilevel200 items from heroics, and a pair of pants, ilevel219, from forge of souls. I also got those same pants for my DK, who's also in YS with decent ilevel200 gear. he's kicking butt with about 2.5k dps. all in naxx-ready gear. i might see a boost to 3k dps as i get more gear from normal toc, fos, pos, and hor. i think my main goal will be to run those instances for now as i know the heroic versions are quite a challenge. i dont even feel like i do well in heroics yet, even though my gear and output matches the output of a person who's normally geared for heroics anyway. i really wish i can downgrade my triumph emblems to get some heroism gear, just for purity's sake, but i know that's illogical. mainly because, although i have no problems with dps right now, i know that if i want to do any kind of raiding in icc, i'll have to suck it up and buy some of those emblem gear that i an putting off. big numbers dont mean much to me if i cant make big numbers with my low level gear. and i mean low compared to the current wow population now (who's all decked out in triumph gear, minimum).
my philosophy is this, that is is better to be stagnant in gear, and still improve on my dps through rotations, watching procs, positioning my character, learning when and where i can use certain abilities, etc. once i am able to max out my output and effectiveness, then, and only then will i be willing to upgrade my gear. i think it is much better to improve the player before i improve the gear. think of it this way. if im doing subpar dps, getting gear will only artificially improve my dps. i dont actually get better, although my numbers may state otherwise. and i think this is the problem here. people think that when they get better gear, they will be able to perform better. but they're performing just the same. the numbers might be different, but the type of play remains unchanged. although this IS an improvement now matter how you look at it, it is not maximum potential.
i know people can argue that once you hit a cap on gear, you can also practice on the dummies and things to pull of better damage. but i find some issues with this. one, the only real place you can do this is at the target dummies.
(1) and target dummies can only help you perfect your rotations, but it will not help you improvise during a fight. but it doesnt help you with encounters. it does help you "know" your rotations and spells so that when things go bad in raids, your muscle memory will allow you to never skip a beat.
(2) if you run heroics a lot in 6k GS gear, you might pull off 5k dps overall. in this case, you wont really have time to actually develop a full blown rotation either. so heroics arent a great place to learn your skill anyway, being so high above its level.
(3) tank and spank bosses, depending on who it is (koralon, patchwerk, saurafang) all are good, but you also want to max effectiveness in other encounters as well. additionally, koralon has fires you must step out of, which is awesome. and saurafang has adds you need to deal with. all of these are a great learning tool but leave little room for error. and since people are risk adverse to begin with, i dont find people trying new things, new rotations, new potions, new trinkets, etc on these encounters as much as on target dummies.
With 1 and 3, there's very good opportunity to improve in your skills. but 2 does not offer much opportunity to actually know your character that well. cakewalks usually make people more clumsy about their class anyway. which is why i choose not to upgrade my character's gear because i know heroics (specifically taking twice as long to kill trash and bosses than having t9 gear) will help me develop my play much more than a once a week session with suarafang and banging away at non-responsive target dummies. dont get me wrong tho, they do help. but i find that being "appropriately" geared for heroics make the heroic runs that much more rewarding. an sure, when i do find myself maxing out on my character's dps, i then will look to gear as the only other alternative to improving dps. thats right. exhaust all other options before upgrading gear. i honestly dont intend to buy t9 gear or t10 gear until i've gone through and gotten everything from heroics.
So that's my deal on YS server. a dk and a paladin, both dps, trying to dish out as much dps as orcishly and elvishly possible before resorting to the most obvious form of advancement--gear.
Ravenholdt, US, Horde
Life with my new guild isnt too exciting. i think everyone's blaming this pre-expansion slump and summer vacation thing on low attendence. actually, i've seen lots of people in our guild. the only problem is that there's not a lot of people available for raids when raids are announced. last week two of the three 10mans needed to be cancelled because of low attendance. actually, the weekend raid, which i signed up for, included me and one other member. that was cancelled. i didnt know much about the weekday raids, but i think the "Main" group ended up stopping at Sindragosa. the "alt" group never made it off the ground and was cancelled.
But other than that, my guild seems pretty cool. there are a few players willing to do heroics with me, which is cool, but i really dont have much of a need for triumph emblems on any of my toons (except maybe for Diinky, who wouldnt mind more tier pieces, although the 4pc bonus is still iffy). thats in regards to t9 gear. but rejuv critting does add a little excitement. I did spend a lot more time on RH over the weekend, and it was just to be able to pug a few things with other guildies. hopefully i will get to know them more. hopefully. its one of those things i have to ease into, you know? friendships are built slowly and through adversity. its been only a week and there hasnt been any form of adversity thus far. i'll have to see if i really want to stay, although i do enjoy the people so far (although only 1 out of 10 people actually talk). i'll have to see what goes on on vent, as i do believe much of the conversation and chatter happens in private or in vent. so we'll have to see.
One of my friends decided to join a raiding guild as opposed to a "social" guild that raids. well actually i'll call my guild a casual guild that raids. we're not too social.
SO anyway, she joins and hates it. but i tell her to keep on keeping on as its only been one day. although she does feel a bit lonely, its expected as the new guildie. although it is a raiding guild, there are some pretty friendly people in the guild. so although she might think they're unfriendly or cold to her at first, its really because they've already developed in their friendships and spend a lot of their time communicating in private chat or in vent. plus, she joined on a monday, which is an offday for many people. i thinks he really does need to give it a chance to really evaluate if she really wants to stay. there's no point in joining and quitting in a day. and even if she's in another guild, it doesnt stop her from having alts in a different guild. she can log on to her raider during raids and log on to her alt/leveler/main when she's not raiding. but i know, sometimes we're attached to our characters. i dont know what she'll do. i hope she has fun. but sometimes in order to get what she wants, she needs to suck it up a little. i wish her the best. sometimes the rewards are worth the sacrifices. blah blah blah.
i think i'll want to level my priest and warrior now. i have two friends leveling mages. one has reached northrend and will probably hit 80 in a week. the other is a bit slower leveling and i think that's who i want to level with this time. she's hit 58 and is ready to do ramps and bf several times. so i'll go with her on one of my characters. probably my rogue, who's 62, until she reaches 64. once she reaches 64, we can level up with my warrior, as he is 65 and ready to tank.
i made the tank over a year ago when i made a deal with a friend of mine to level the characters together. this friend, instead, decided to level up to 80 without me. kind of annoyed me when she specifically said she'll level the character with me. anyway, when she started doing all the quests in zangarmarsh thereby leaving me to solo many of those quests on my own, i easily grew tired of it and played other characters. she was a healer/dps hybrid troll shaman and was able to easily get into instances as a healer. by the time she was about three levels above me, i just gave up and decided not to play the warrior anymore. after some other unrelated events, we stopped talking to each other. so there he sits. my warrior at 65 with no leveling buddy... until NOW!! yay. thanks buddy!! you rock!! just dont outlevel me like my old friend did. it will be a sad day when i have to stop playing the warrior again.
and so that's my ramblings for today. Yes, this is my lunch break and i think im entitled to ramble on as much as i want. lol. jk. anyway, i hope to NOT have to go to a third realm, but i may if my gf ever plays and chooses alliance. but she's got some project going on now and will probably be at it for another month before she tires of it. only time will tell.
Showing posts with label pugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pugs. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tanking and Gemming for the Asshats
This is a little related to the previous post, which is why i titled the post that way. but... it is not entirely. What i do like to talk about is the issue of tanks. No, not asshat tanks, but asshat healers or dps who look at a tank's health and decide that they have a crap tank. what i mean is this...
I zone into an instance and see four other players, one of which is the tank. now the very first thing i look at is who's the tank, and so i can set my focus on him. i rarely look at his HP if im dps, but i will glance at it if i was healing him. His health will give me a guage of exactly how much attention i have to give to him while healing the instance. that's basically it. i dont check his gear to see if he's crit immune, or check to see if he's even got the right types of gear on. i just take it by faith that the tank knows what he's doing, no matter the level of HP he may have.
Why do i say this is because i oftentimes find people commenting on the tank's health as the determining factor as to how well an instance will go, or if there are hiccups, who the first person to blame would be if we were to have to point fingers. of course, in a bad pull, the tank will usually die first, or if the tank has abilities on cooldown, the dps and healer may die before the tank has the opportunity to grab aggro. this happened to me the other night where adds aggroed and went straight for the AoE-ing dps and i couldnt do anything to stop them for maybe 4-5 seconds.
New tank
When people do see a tank with say, 25k health, a few things go through their minds, im sure. and one of these things is that the tank is "new". new to what? well, for a lot of people, they may assume the tank is "new" to tanking itself. a person new to tanking may be a liability for the group, as the dps and healer may feel like guinea pigs at this point. but the fact of the matter is everyone's learning, we just dont want them to learn while pugging with us, ESPECIALLY if they're tanks. correct? i mean we can deal with bad dps, or bad healing (even bad healing has its limits), but bad tanking is a no no. a new tanks, 25k health tanks all somehow equate to possibly bad tanks.
New 80
There are many who have been in the game for a while leveling their alt tank and barely reached 80. there are also others who have joined the game several months earlier and have finally made it to 80, ready to tank heroics. i've encountered many people who do 2k dps, heal wonderfully and tank like leetsauce who have just dinged 80 that day, the day before, or somethind during the same week. last week i had the experience of seeing one party member say, i just dinged 80 today, with three more people saying how they're new to 80 as well. i was the only one who couldnt say that. instead, i said i dinged 80 a year ago.
it was kind of refreshing to see fresh new 80s running heroics and not judging each other. what's funny, or sad, is that it's usually always the raiders who seem to compare and belittle everyone else. now i am not saying every raider does it. what i am saying is that when it does happen, its more likely than not, a raiding individual pugging his daily random heroic for his frosties.
So these tanks with 25k-ish health who just dinged 80 are often criticized for their low health, but my contention is why? that's usually what tanks had the day they started heroics when wrath came out. and that's a somewhat middle-ground. i started tanking at 23k health. and before ulduar hit, i had maybe 28k health at most. i struggled to even get close to 30k health. but now we see tanks with 40k health and think that everyone, upon reaching 80, should have those numbers. its almost infuriating to see people who really do not have any idea how overboard that number is. i mean think of it this way, if a new 80 tank were to tank normal utgarde keep or nexus, that's basically what a 40k health tank is like doing heroics.
The Fallacy of HP
I just came across a post this morning about effective health found here. Think Tank on Armor. He thinks about armor pretty much the same way i think about avoidance. it basically increases your effective health. now he has a pretty detailed example of how it relates to healing, and i cannot agree with him more about that. although in heroics, the amount of overpowered healing can bsically negate his claims, in raids, it is quite different. armor is king. avoidance is queen. and HP is the jester.... according to me.
Before we go on, i'd like to tell you my stand on HP. its subpar. it really is. anyone telling you to stack stamina as long as you have the minimum defense rating has no idea what he's talking about. it does make sense on its own tho. if you take everything else out of the equation, of course, the more stamina you have, the more damage you can take. but we live in a very multi-faceted world (of warcraft) and therefore, we have to take many other factors into consideration.
Note: the following examples will not include hard numbers but will describe the basic concept of the stats i will be talking about. if you want exact numbers please go to sites like elitist jerks or tankspot.
Mitigation: What Armor Does. the person who prioritizes armor when gearing will see a lot less damage per hit. overall, he might have more damage if he doesnt have enough avoidance. assuming that he's being healed sufficiently, his armor is negating a fair amount of the hits. the more armor he has, the less damage he takes per hit.
Example. Lets suppose a mob does an auto attack for 10k health. Lets suppose he only does auto attacks.
If the person taking the hits has zero armor on, each attack will damage him by 10k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 4th hit.
Lets say the person puts on armor (all other things being equal, including health, i know, not realistic, but this is to prove a point) so that he will negate 50% of the damage made to him.
If the person has armor to negate 50% damage, each attack will damage him by 5k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 8th hit.
Now consider that each hit from the mob takes 1 second. if he had zero armor, he would die in 4 seconds. if he had 50% damage mitigation from armor, he will die after 8 seconds. (i just made a quick example of TTL, or time to live).
Armor increases TTL, reduces damage taken per hit and makes life for the healers a whole lot easier.
See how armor works there? HP isnt really the "end all" of all tanking stats. by all means no. lets move on to the next item.
Avoidance: Total Avoidance is the sum of several stats, including Dodge, Parry, and Block. These stats are the basis of helping a tank NOT take damage. What i mean is a dodged attach will hit for zero damage. a parried attack will hit for zero damage. block is a different animal and has its own damage reduction amounts and things. but we know for sure one thing, dodge and parry negates 100% of any hit.
So lets take block out of the equation to make things simpler and pretend we're talking about DK tanks or bear tanks.
Lets take the tank from the Armor example and say he has 40k health, with 50% damage mitigation from armor. that is what we'll work with.
Lets say it's a DK with a dodge percentage of 24% and a parry percentage of 21%. This gives the DK a total of 45% avoidance.
This means that 45% of the mobs attack will not hit the dk at all. With some math here, we can estimate that per swing, the mob will get about 2750 damage. since each swing is 1 second apart, the tank will essentially take 2750 damage per second. with a tank of 40k health, it will take the mob 14.55 seconds to kill the tank.
Now 14.55 seconds is better than 8 seconds (armor only) and a whole lot better than 4 seconds (no mitigation).
Note/Edit: Please note that avoidance is on "chance per swing" and not an actual percentage of damage reduction. because of this, if you get unlucky and get hit on all swings, your TTL will actually be 8 seconds. If you're lucky and are missed on all swings, your TTL will be indefinite, or forever. Because of this reasoning, a more statistical analysis will have to be done, as in, if each hit from a boss has a 45% chance to miss (55% chance to land), what's the probability that the tank will survive for 15 seconds? i believe this will result in some z-score and bell curve with deviations and such. but if all swings were to be distributed evenly, i would give the tank about 15 seconds to live. again, more complex (and more accurate) calculations can be fould elsewhere. i am merely giving an overview, showing the basic concept.
To Sum Things Up
I know this has been a long post but i really wanted to go through just what exactly soaks up damage. i know that on a 1 to 1 ratio, health points can be seen and understood universally among everyone. if a mob hits a tank for 3k damage, that's 3k health gone. but what they do not see is that the mob usually hits everyone else for 8k damage and that the tank is often parrying or dodging attacks more than half of the time. they dont see that. dps usually does not see that. it is really only the tank and healers who really see this mechanic at work. why else would a boss 1hit a warlock to death? but dps doesnt see that and calls himself a squishy. sure, he's truly a squishy, but he doesnt exactly know why or how or what it all really means.
AND in order to help ease the minds of these misguided dps, the tanks do not take the time to explain all of this to the dps. instead, they appease the dps by gemming for stamina, enchanting for stamina, use health/stamina enhancing armorkits and drink elixirs of mighty fortitude. The tanks end up trying to make the dps and healers feel a little more at ease by enhancing the only number the dps and healers can actually see but because of this, they leave little room, if any, for other stats like armor and avoidance.
True, as people gear up, they will encounter gear with higher amounts of stamina and armor. so why bother when you already have 560 defense rating and a billion armor points? shouldnt they be entitled to spread out their stats with more stamina/health? well with better armor comes more stamina anyway, so the inverse can also be argued. why not gem defense when you now have more stamina? see what i did there?
But instead, i see bear tanks gemming for stamina. I see dk's gemming for stamina. i see paladins and warriors gemming for stamina. and as a healer, i always have to cringe at these tanks. i hate, as much as i complain about boring heroic runs, i hate healing 50k health tanks who stack stamina. i constantly have to heal them. there is really no break for me at all in heroics when healing these guys. this takes a toll on the healer (so the dps, although they feel really comfortable running along with a 50k health tank, they dont realize that there is less time and mana for me to heal them should they need any kind of healing) and when we get into harder fights where there's collateral damage, aoe damage, or just random damage, i find little time to heal the dps or myself.
ATTENTION ALL TANKS: THERE ARE BETTER STATS THAN STAMINA!!!
For bears:
Gem for Agility. Agility (Agi) will increase your armor. with the bear shapeshift multiplier to armor, you get even more armor per point of agi than the other plate wearing classes would.
Agi also increases your dodge percentage. this is your only aviodance stat, so beef (or bear) it up as much as you can with agi. Its really easy for bears. we only need one stat to deal with.
For plate wearers:
Gem for Defense even past the crit immune level (currently at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids). The more Defense (Def) you have, the more you're able to dodge and parry at the very least. not only will you increase your chance to avoid a hit, you're also giving yourself a Def buffer should you get a better piece of gear with less Def but having more Armor/Stam/Dodge/Parry/etc.
You cannot gem for Armor, but you can enchant and use armor kits for more armor. However, i would try to go for the best piece of gear with the highest built-in armor, gem for defense, enchant it with stats, armsman, or threat.
For both bears and plate wearers: There are plenty of resources online. I know things can be confusing and information can be scattered over the internet. but the information is out there. If you have any questions or need directions on where to go for your class, please feel free to reply and i will try my best to point you in the right direction.
Also, there is the argument about magical damage ignoring all armor and even avoidance. In this case, if armor and avoidance are negated, then a thinking person would indeed switch out his gear and use some magic resistance gear or stamina gear. Now if the fight was a mix of mostly physical hits with some magic damage, then the thinking person will have to evaluate which he prefers to mitigate and which would be more important to mitigate on the whole of the fight. you can always change gear after the fight to suit the needs of the next fight.
Again, to all tanks, there are better stats that just stamina. to all dps and maybe healers, there are much better ways to guage and judge a tank than by his health pool.
I zone into an instance and see four other players, one of which is the tank. now the very first thing i look at is who's the tank, and so i can set my focus on him. i rarely look at his HP if im dps, but i will glance at it if i was healing him. His health will give me a guage of exactly how much attention i have to give to him while healing the instance. that's basically it. i dont check his gear to see if he's crit immune, or check to see if he's even got the right types of gear on. i just take it by faith that the tank knows what he's doing, no matter the level of HP he may have.
Why do i say this is because i oftentimes find people commenting on the tank's health as the determining factor as to how well an instance will go, or if there are hiccups, who the first person to blame would be if we were to have to point fingers. of course, in a bad pull, the tank will usually die first, or if the tank has abilities on cooldown, the dps and healer may die before the tank has the opportunity to grab aggro. this happened to me the other night where adds aggroed and went straight for the AoE-ing dps and i couldnt do anything to stop them for maybe 4-5 seconds.
New tank
When people do see a tank with say, 25k health, a few things go through their minds, im sure. and one of these things is that the tank is "new". new to what? well, for a lot of people, they may assume the tank is "new" to tanking itself. a person new to tanking may be a liability for the group, as the dps and healer may feel like guinea pigs at this point. but the fact of the matter is everyone's learning, we just dont want them to learn while pugging with us, ESPECIALLY if they're tanks. correct? i mean we can deal with bad dps, or bad healing (even bad healing has its limits), but bad tanking is a no no. a new tanks, 25k health tanks all somehow equate to possibly bad tanks.
New 80
There are many who have been in the game for a while leveling their alt tank and barely reached 80. there are also others who have joined the game several months earlier and have finally made it to 80, ready to tank heroics. i've encountered many people who do 2k dps, heal wonderfully and tank like leetsauce who have just dinged 80 that day, the day before, or somethind during the same week. last week i had the experience of seeing one party member say, i just dinged 80 today, with three more people saying how they're new to 80 as well. i was the only one who couldnt say that. instead, i said i dinged 80 a year ago.
it was kind of refreshing to see fresh new 80s running heroics and not judging each other. what's funny, or sad, is that it's usually always the raiders who seem to compare and belittle everyone else. now i am not saying every raider does it. what i am saying is that when it does happen, its more likely than not, a raiding individual pugging his daily random heroic for his frosties.
So these tanks with 25k-ish health who just dinged 80 are often criticized for their low health, but my contention is why? that's usually what tanks had the day they started heroics when wrath came out. and that's a somewhat middle-ground. i started tanking at 23k health. and before ulduar hit, i had maybe 28k health at most. i struggled to even get close to 30k health. but now we see tanks with 40k health and think that everyone, upon reaching 80, should have those numbers. its almost infuriating to see people who really do not have any idea how overboard that number is. i mean think of it this way, if a new 80 tank were to tank normal utgarde keep or nexus, that's basically what a 40k health tank is like doing heroics.
The Fallacy of HP
I just came across a post this morning about effective health found here. Think Tank on Armor. He thinks about armor pretty much the same way i think about avoidance. it basically increases your effective health. now he has a pretty detailed example of how it relates to healing, and i cannot agree with him more about that. although in heroics, the amount of overpowered healing can bsically negate his claims, in raids, it is quite different. armor is king. avoidance is queen. and HP is the jester.... according to me.
Before we go on, i'd like to tell you my stand on HP. its subpar. it really is. anyone telling you to stack stamina as long as you have the minimum defense rating has no idea what he's talking about. it does make sense on its own tho. if you take everything else out of the equation, of course, the more stamina you have, the more damage you can take. but we live in a very multi-faceted world (of warcraft) and therefore, we have to take many other factors into consideration.
Note: the following examples will not include hard numbers but will describe the basic concept of the stats i will be talking about. if you want exact numbers please go to sites like elitist jerks or tankspot.
Mitigation: What Armor Does. the person who prioritizes armor when gearing will see a lot less damage per hit. overall, he might have more damage if he doesnt have enough avoidance. assuming that he's being healed sufficiently, his armor is negating a fair amount of the hits. the more armor he has, the less damage he takes per hit.
Example. Lets suppose a mob does an auto attack for 10k health. Lets suppose he only does auto attacks.
If the person taking the hits has zero armor on, each attack will damage him by 10k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 4th hit.
Lets say the person puts on armor (all other things being equal, including health, i know, not realistic, but this is to prove a point) so that he will negate 50% of the damage made to him.
If the person has armor to negate 50% damage, each attack will damage him by 5k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 8th hit.
Now consider that each hit from the mob takes 1 second. if he had zero armor, he would die in 4 seconds. if he had 50% damage mitigation from armor, he will die after 8 seconds. (i just made a quick example of TTL, or time to live).
Armor increases TTL, reduces damage taken per hit and makes life for the healers a whole lot easier.
See how armor works there? HP isnt really the "end all" of all tanking stats. by all means no. lets move on to the next item.
Avoidance: Total Avoidance is the sum of several stats, including Dodge, Parry, and Block. These stats are the basis of helping a tank NOT take damage. What i mean is a dodged attach will hit for zero damage. a parried attack will hit for zero damage. block is a different animal and has its own damage reduction amounts and things. but we know for sure one thing, dodge and parry negates 100% of any hit.
So lets take block out of the equation to make things simpler and pretend we're talking about DK tanks or bear tanks.
Lets take the tank from the Armor example and say he has 40k health, with 50% damage mitigation from armor. that is what we'll work with.
Lets say it's a DK with a dodge percentage of 24% and a parry percentage of 21%. This gives the DK a total of 45% avoidance.
This means that 45% of the mobs attack will not hit the dk at all. With some math here, we can estimate that per swing, the mob will get about 2750 damage. since each swing is 1 second apart, the tank will essentially take 2750 damage per second. with a tank of 40k health, it will take the mob 14.55 seconds to kill the tank.
Now 14.55 seconds is better than 8 seconds (armor only) and a whole lot better than 4 seconds (no mitigation).
Note/Edit: Please note that avoidance is on "chance per swing" and not an actual percentage of damage reduction. because of this, if you get unlucky and get hit on all swings, your TTL will actually be 8 seconds. If you're lucky and are missed on all swings, your TTL will be indefinite, or forever. Because of this reasoning, a more statistical analysis will have to be done, as in, if each hit from a boss has a 45% chance to miss (55% chance to land), what's the probability that the tank will survive for 15 seconds? i believe this will result in some z-score and bell curve with deviations and such. but if all swings were to be distributed evenly, i would give the tank about 15 seconds to live. again, more complex (and more accurate) calculations can be fould elsewhere. i am merely giving an overview, showing the basic concept.
To Sum Things Up
I know this has been a long post but i really wanted to go through just what exactly soaks up damage. i know that on a 1 to 1 ratio, health points can be seen and understood universally among everyone. if a mob hits a tank for 3k damage, that's 3k health gone. but what they do not see is that the mob usually hits everyone else for 8k damage and that the tank is often parrying or dodging attacks more than half of the time. they dont see that. dps usually does not see that. it is really only the tank and healers who really see this mechanic at work. why else would a boss 1hit a warlock to death? but dps doesnt see that and calls himself a squishy. sure, he's truly a squishy, but he doesnt exactly know why or how or what it all really means.
AND in order to help ease the minds of these misguided dps, the tanks do not take the time to explain all of this to the dps. instead, they appease the dps by gemming for stamina, enchanting for stamina, use health/stamina enhancing armorkits and drink elixirs of mighty fortitude. The tanks end up trying to make the dps and healers feel a little more at ease by enhancing the only number the dps and healers can actually see but because of this, they leave little room, if any, for other stats like armor and avoidance.
True, as people gear up, they will encounter gear with higher amounts of stamina and armor. so why bother when you already have 560 defense rating and a billion armor points? shouldnt they be entitled to spread out their stats with more stamina/health? well with better armor comes more stamina anyway, so the inverse can also be argued. why not gem defense when you now have more stamina? see what i did there?
But instead, i see bear tanks gemming for stamina. I see dk's gemming for stamina. i see paladins and warriors gemming for stamina. and as a healer, i always have to cringe at these tanks. i hate, as much as i complain about boring heroic runs, i hate healing 50k health tanks who stack stamina. i constantly have to heal them. there is really no break for me at all in heroics when healing these guys. this takes a toll on the healer (so the dps, although they feel really comfortable running along with a 50k health tank, they dont realize that there is less time and mana for me to heal them should they need any kind of healing) and when we get into harder fights where there's collateral damage, aoe damage, or just random damage, i find little time to heal the dps or myself.
ATTENTION ALL TANKS: THERE ARE BETTER STATS THAN STAMINA!!!
For bears:
Gem for Agility. Agility (Agi) will increase your armor. with the bear shapeshift multiplier to armor, you get even more armor per point of agi than the other plate wearing classes would.
Agi also increases your dodge percentage. this is your only aviodance stat, so beef (or bear) it up as much as you can with agi. Its really easy for bears. we only need one stat to deal with.
For plate wearers:
Gem for Defense even past the crit immune level (currently at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids). The more Defense (Def) you have, the more you're able to dodge and parry at the very least. not only will you increase your chance to avoid a hit, you're also giving yourself a Def buffer should you get a better piece of gear with less Def but having more Armor/Stam/Dodge/Parry/etc.
You cannot gem for Armor, but you can enchant and use armor kits for more armor. However, i would try to go for the best piece of gear with the highest built-in armor, gem for defense, enchant it with stats, armsman, or threat.
For both bears and plate wearers: There are plenty of resources online. I know things can be confusing and information can be scattered over the internet. but the information is out there. If you have any questions or need directions on where to go for your class, please feel free to reply and i will try my best to point you in the right direction.
Also, there is the argument about magical damage ignoring all armor and even avoidance. In this case, if armor and avoidance are negated, then a thinking person would indeed switch out his gear and use some magic resistance gear or stamina gear. Now if the fight was a mix of mostly physical hits with some magic damage, then the thinking person will have to evaluate which he prefers to mitigate and which would be more important to mitigate on the whole of the fight. you can always change gear after the fight to suit the needs of the next fight.
Again, to all tanks, there are better stats that just stamina. to all dps and maybe healers, there are much better ways to guage and judge a tank than by his health pool.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
On Dealing with Asshats
1. http://paladinwithin.blogspot.com/2010/07/behavior-in-groups-towards-tanks.html
2. http://csahf.blogspot.com/2010/07/its-not-just-tanks-that-are-idiots-it.html
I am merely going to point to the above posts as the point and response of my post today. In both blog entries, the bloggers state specifically about their annoyances with other group members who decide that their group members play the game for their own benefit. I would gather that many of these guys are kids and not adults. but I could be wrong. this topic has been addressed previously in my posts about tanking and why it has tanked for me (tanked is a term used to describe something failing, dying, or droping. tanking in WoW is a term used to describe the activity of maintaining the computer enemy's "hate" towards you. the more hate they have for you, the more they will attack you and not the healer).
As many of you know, I play all roles in this game. There are three dps (named because of what they do, namely, they produce high damage per second (dps) for the group, as opposed to the tank and healer), one healer whose job is to heal everyone. EVERYONE. and a tank, who holds the attention of the computer mobs. So in heroics, as we call it, five people enter and attempt to be victorious in their endeavors there.
The mechanics of the group fight is simple. The tank will run into a group of mobs (computer controlled, mobile objects) and does his abilities to keep the mob's attention. then the dps will start their attack and take down the mob's health until it does. the healer will heal the tank primarily, himself secondly and the dps lastly. the idea behind this set of priority is simple. if the tank dies, the mobs will wipe the group. if the healer dies, the tank will eventually die and then the mobs will wipe the group. if the dps dies, then it just takes longer to kill the mobs.
Now this is how groups should work, with everyone doing their job to get to the bosses and complete the instance. the problem occurs when people, behind the veil of anonymity and the safety of their own home, decides to be jerks in the game and demand people to play the game their way. and with the invention of the random dungeon finder, this has gotten to the point where people sometimes forget that they are playing with four other human beings, especially when the human beings are from different servers.
The dungeon finder is a great invention, actually. it was made to put groups together automatically, so that the tank can just queue up as a tank, or the dps can queue up as dps, be automatically put into a group, and when the group has all the elements of being a group (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps), they get sent to a random dungeon. Now this process works within I set of realms, meaning the person I could be grouped with could be from a different realm than me. more often than not, this is the case. and because this is the case, there's almost no incentive for anyone who felt that they were being treated disrespectfully to hunt down the perpetrators. Instead, they just need to get over it, move on, vent, and add the idiot to the ignore list.
I know I've put several people on ignore before. they are not worth the hassle to party with again. they're usually from different servers, of course, as being on the same server would be too close for comfort and they would shut up. they're usually the people who can perform well, as in, be in great gear and produce high dps, or they have the more "important" role. my contention with this is that everyone has an important role. some people might think being the tank or the healer is more important than being a dps, but I find that each role has the same level of importance and each deserving the same levels of respect. what I don’t like are the tanks who think they are god's gift, or the healer who has to mention about how great their healing is (shamans usually =P) or the dps who does twice as much damage as everyone else. sometimes it's necessary to remind jerks that they are simply not that important. the above links show just how easy it is to really ignore the jerks, let him be the spoild child behind the computer and move on.
- bad tank? boot and get a new one. refuse to heal and have a dps switch specs/gear and tank instead.
- bad dps? boot. let him die a few times, then boot. or let him spice up the chat box before he leaves. let him pull with no healing or tank taunting. no one needs his pompous ass anyway.
- bad healer? boot. or get a new one. ignore his requests to gogogogogo. instead, take your time. it is, after all, to his best interest that the tank doesn’t die and at least one dps is alive to finish killing the mobs. otherwise, it would just take longer.
- run with friends. the "kick" feature is more highly used when playing with friends, especially with Immortelle. She's pretty kick-happy. She'll check your gear score and say to everyone, a 5k gear score mage should not be doing 4k dps. but then again, Immy does 6k dps just goofing off. as of writing, she and her guild is one boss away from "Light of the Dawn".
As mentioned above, there is a "kick" feature in instances where you can actually kick a player from the group. I say, use it! usually its saved up for when the group cant stand the idiot anymore. but sometimes I find that we tolerate them too much, which only encourages them to be even bigger jerks in their next instance. this is sort of a way to condoning their behavior. our apathy leads to their brazeness. sounds logical. because it is a game, many of us behind the computer screen will tolerate some asshattery here and there for the sake of time, or to save the trouble of finding a replacement. sometimes the boot needs to hit the butt quicker, and that asshat needs to be sent out of the dungeon. maybe if enough people deal with it this way, we will have less idiots demanding the group to play their way, or according to their standards.
I could mention stories of the many times I've come across asses in the game, but its really useless internet garbage no one really cares to read. you have enough examples from the above links. sometimes I dealt with it, other times I didn’t care much. many times, when I do decide to kick someone, its after I've had enough of their idiocy. there have been many times where I, when tanking, had to tell the dps or the healer if they didn’t like the speed of my pulls, they can pull and tank it themselves. that usually shuts them up. or they leave.
So with all that said, i think everyone will come across these idiots in time and when they do, they will know the possible ways to deal with the situation. when playing in a game where you're randomly added to a group there is bound to be differences, preferences and expectations. everyone plays this game differently, after all. you can group them into several different categories, but remeber that this is only the nature of the beast. people will need to realize that they arent playing with their guildies, or their friends. Rather, they are playing with strangers who may have different motives and goals than they do. it is up to us all to use the tools given to us in-game to deal with the people who we find unsavory, or jerks.
2. http://csahf.blogspot.com/2010/07/its-not-just-tanks-that-are-idiots-it.html
I am merely going to point to the above posts as the point and response of my post today. In both blog entries, the bloggers state specifically about their annoyances with other group members who decide that their group members play the game for their own benefit. I would gather that many of these guys are kids and not adults. but I could be wrong. this topic has been addressed previously in my posts about tanking and why it has tanked for me (tanked is a term used to describe something failing, dying, or droping. tanking in WoW is a term used to describe the activity of maintaining the computer enemy's "hate" towards you. the more hate they have for you, the more they will attack you and not the healer).
As many of you know, I play all roles in this game. There are three dps (named because of what they do, namely, they produce high damage per second (dps) for the group, as opposed to the tank and healer), one healer whose job is to heal everyone. EVERYONE. and a tank, who holds the attention of the computer mobs. So in heroics, as we call it, five people enter and attempt to be victorious in their endeavors there.
The mechanics of the group fight is simple. The tank will run into a group of mobs (computer controlled, mobile objects) and does his abilities to keep the mob's attention. then the dps will start their attack and take down the mob's health until it does. the healer will heal the tank primarily, himself secondly and the dps lastly. the idea behind this set of priority is simple. if the tank dies, the mobs will wipe the group. if the healer dies, the tank will eventually die and then the mobs will wipe the group. if the dps dies, then it just takes longer to kill the mobs.
Now this is how groups should work, with everyone doing their job to get to the bosses and complete the instance. the problem occurs when people, behind the veil of anonymity and the safety of their own home, decides to be jerks in the game and demand people to play the game their way. and with the invention of the random dungeon finder, this has gotten to the point where people sometimes forget that they are playing with four other human beings, especially when the human beings are from different servers.
The dungeon finder is a great invention, actually. it was made to put groups together automatically, so that the tank can just queue up as a tank, or the dps can queue up as dps, be automatically put into a group, and when the group has all the elements of being a group (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps), they get sent to a random dungeon. Now this process works within I set of realms, meaning the person I could be grouped with could be from a different realm than me. more often than not, this is the case. and because this is the case, there's almost no incentive for anyone who felt that they were being treated disrespectfully to hunt down the perpetrators. Instead, they just need to get over it, move on, vent, and add the idiot to the ignore list.
I know I've put several people on ignore before. they are not worth the hassle to party with again. they're usually from different servers, of course, as being on the same server would be too close for comfort and they would shut up. they're usually the people who can perform well, as in, be in great gear and produce high dps, or they have the more "important" role. my contention with this is that everyone has an important role. some people might think being the tank or the healer is more important than being a dps, but I find that each role has the same level of importance and each deserving the same levels of respect. what I don’t like are the tanks who think they are god's gift, or the healer who has to mention about how great their healing is (shamans usually =P) or the dps who does twice as much damage as everyone else. sometimes it's necessary to remind jerks that they are simply not that important. the above links show just how easy it is to really ignore the jerks, let him be the spoild child behind the computer and move on.
- bad tank? boot and get a new one. refuse to heal and have a dps switch specs/gear and tank instead.
- bad dps? boot. let him die a few times, then boot. or let him spice up the chat box before he leaves. let him pull with no healing or tank taunting. no one needs his pompous ass anyway.
- bad healer? boot. or get a new one. ignore his requests to gogogogogo. instead, take your time. it is, after all, to his best interest that the tank doesn’t die and at least one dps is alive to finish killing the mobs. otherwise, it would just take longer.
- run with friends. the "kick" feature is more highly used when playing with friends, especially with Immortelle. She's pretty kick-happy. She'll check your gear score and say to everyone, a 5k gear score mage should not be doing 4k dps. but then again, Immy does 6k dps just goofing off. as of writing, she and her guild is one boss away from "Light of the Dawn".
As mentioned above, there is a "kick" feature in instances where you can actually kick a player from the group. I say, use it! usually its saved up for when the group cant stand the idiot anymore. but sometimes I find that we tolerate them too much, which only encourages them to be even bigger jerks in their next instance. this is sort of a way to condoning their behavior. our apathy leads to their brazeness. sounds logical. because it is a game, many of us behind the computer screen will tolerate some asshattery here and there for the sake of time, or to save the trouble of finding a replacement. sometimes the boot needs to hit the butt quicker, and that asshat needs to be sent out of the dungeon. maybe if enough people deal with it this way, we will have less idiots demanding the group to play their way, or according to their standards.
I could mention stories of the many times I've come across asses in the game, but its really useless internet garbage no one really cares to read. you have enough examples from the above links. sometimes I dealt with it, other times I didn’t care much. many times, when I do decide to kick someone, its after I've had enough of their idiocy. there have been many times where I, when tanking, had to tell the dps or the healer if they didn’t like the speed of my pulls, they can pull and tank it themselves. that usually shuts them up. or they leave.
So with all that said, i think everyone will come across these idiots in time and when they do, they will know the possible ways to deal with the situation. when playing in a game where you're randomly added to a group there is bound to be differences, preferences and expectations. everyone plays this game differently, after all. you can group them into several different categories, but remeber that this is only the nature of the beast. people will need to realize that they arent playing with their guildies, or their friends. Rather, they are playing with strangers who may have different motives and goals than they do. it is up to us all to use the tools given to us in-game to deal with the people who we find unsavory, or jerks.
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