I noticed lately that there are a lot of new tanks using the lfd tool. Actually, since the last weekend, and barring any guild groups that i may have joined, every LFD pug group comes with a new, or barely new tank. Some are new tanks due to switching specs, and learning the ropes on a character that normall DPS or heals. others are leveling up thier 80 and are slowly learning the fights from the point of view of a tank. this is great.
What i can deduce from this trend is that more and more dps will finally get to see what its like for a tank in a heroic setting. Although some dps may only see tanks as, simply, another dps with less damage but more armor. okay, less damage in most cases. but definitely with more armor. dps do see tanks as more like them and less like healers. in a way, this is true. and it brings a lot of people to switch specs or finally level that level 80 warrior they havent touched in six months.
but what does this all mean to the rest of us? this is not an influx of new tanks. no, if it was an influx to the already flowing and always dynamic tanking population of our battlegroup, then i am sure the dps queue times will drop from 30 minutes to 20, or even 15... maybe 10! but it hasnt. "always dynamic" is key, since i believe the population flow of tanks using the whole LFD tool adheres to the FIFO method of inventory management. or whatever accounting-related methodologies relates.
FIFO is simply an acronym for first-in-first-out. to help me illustrate, let's backtrack several months. shortly after the expansion hit, there was a big shakeup in the community as to who does what role. really, as some wrath tanks found out that they just arent the tanks they're cut out to be in wrath (and subsequently rolled dps) or the healers who had infinite mana in wrath simply couldnt handle the increased difficulty of healing Throne of the Tides... normal, people began switching around specs and characters in order to find the right fit for them. Some, however, moved from wrath to cata without much of a problem, including tanks and healers. DPS adjusted from spamming AoE spells to actually using a priority system. The planets may have alligned sometime during the past few months, but i was unaware. People were actually doing what they're supposed to--what they're designed to do. And those were the ones first in.
The tank would walk into a dungeon as a tank, with a tank's mentality and skillset. The same goes for the healers, who have since learned to cope with limited mana, expensive heals and sometimes stupid dps. The dps, likewise, learned that some folks really had to be crowd controlled, standing in bursting purple crap is bad and damage reduction cooldowns are just as important as damage increasing cooldowns. Interrupts skyrocketed to an all-time high. They played through the instances, got gear, got better, understood fights, learned what their limits are, when they can stand in bad and when they need to really run away. They learned fight mechanics and figured out what they had to do in their own role to make the encounter a successful encounter.
Then they moved on to heroics. Random dungeons that used to take 15 minutes in wrath now take about an hour in cata... or more. in any event, these guys eventually get better gear, earn rep gear and fill out the remaining slots with justice point gear. they move on to raiding or slow down on the heroic grind. they dont need anything else from JPs. they might need chaos orbs or something to improve their offspec gear, but the end result remains--they slowly stop running heroic pugs. they are the first outs.
The first ins and the first outs are one and the same. The process is cycled through so that the tanks, who started off with some 300-333 tanking gear became fully geared with 345's, some 359 rep and raid gear. And eventually, running the same heroics over again will not give them any significant gain. There is nothing left to upgrade through heroics or justice points. and so they leave the LFD population. they may end up coming back on an alt just to dps, or to heal. or maybe even to tank. but they do come back one way or another.
Let's assume for a moment that the rate of flow, or flow of tanks coming in (and ultimately going out) to use the LFD system is faster than the flow of DPS going through the system. i believe this to actually be the case due to the population imbalance of tanks to dps. lets use tanks to dps as our only comparison. you can also use healers in this, but the result will still be the same. tanks, who usually get instant queues will ultimately gain all the gear they need faster than healers or dps, even if they get absolutely zero drops from heroic pugs, they'll still get JPs which will turn into gear eventually. a tank can usually just gear himself up through the LFD in less than a week of play. no waiting. so they gear up and leave the population, a dare say, 200% faster than a dps who has to wait 30 minutes in the queue (and i wont even talk about the wait if the group turns out bad, its a double penalty for the dps).
So after a week, the tank leaves the LFD population. but the DPS is still there. see the problem? He'll be fully geared in about two weeks if he diligently waits. Maybe longer if he walks away to pee, only to come back and find out that he has missed his queue. then, he has to start all over. but lets not count all the little variables prolonging the dps' plight. lets just say he takes 2x longer to gear up. then, he'll be out of the LFD population cycle. okay. that's not so bad. but lets not forget the initial problem as to why he has these long waits in the first place. the entire wow population using the LFD is not exactly 1 tank for every 3 dps. its 1 tank for every 30 dps. or more. 30 is my guess.
Tangent: One solution to this is to change the group composition. Instead of three damage dealers, we can have four or five. this will make the groups a 6 or 7 man duneon experience. now 6 has a nice ring to it because it's an even number, but 7 is a little more obscure. we like multiples, and the fact that 7 is a prime number makes it that much more of an odd choice. in any case, this can solve the "flow" as well as the population imbalance in regards to dungeon groups.
Back to the topic at hand. what is the topic, btw? who knows. i was trying to talk about the significance of how the new tanks now are really just that, new. and i was trying to show how this came about, with FIFO and flow rates and population ratios and things like that. okay. got it.
Anyway, i am on my fourth DPS to level up to 85 (and consequently, to gear up until i cant go any further with heroics) and running her through normal dungeons. its a mage, level 81, tearing up the place with her sheep and blast wave and all that great stuff. but just for the orbs, i run heroics on my dps. the 30 minute waits remain. when we finally do get the group, half of the time the tank will say they're new, or learning, or never done this as tank or in a heroic. etc.
What i see is this. That after about six months since the expansion, the dps pool has finally cycled and they have now finally begain to gear their alts (some of which are tanks). Now this dps pool will include all the people who are comfortable as dps, leveling their various dps characters, and having finally run out of dps characters, are willing to finally level that tank they never had a chance to touch (because dps is sooo much fun, or that tanking is soooo much work, or whatevers).
I know... all that typing just to illustrate a flawed analysis and faulty hypothesis. but hey, its thursday, my boss is out of the office and i have nothing to do. have a great day everyone!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Quick Monday Update
I got a few things done over the weekend. But none of it is really important.
1. Healed another PUG on my druid.
2. Tanked for a guild group heroic. it was fun. but tanking is a bit too stressful for the rewards, atm.
3. DPS'd mindlessly still. but tried my best to avoid the fires.
4. Went and did a much smoother ICC. YES, ICC. as in Ice Crown Citadel. It was 25mans and going for heroic and acheivements. Hey, for the non-raiders, this is a nice change of pace from constant heroics. dont hate.
5. My archeology skill went up by 15, then i decided to gag myself with chloroform.
6. BH gave me a pvp neck, which i gave to my gf because she pvp's more than i do.
7. Sunday night became Glee Marathon night. Wow got pretty boring, really.
8. Contemplated making alliance toons. /barf
9. Deleted several never-played characters (all of which were alliance, on my first server).
10. Contemplated what to do. what to do.
Really, there's not much else for me to do in this game. some folks say raid, but i say i dont have the concentrated time necessary for 3 hours of raiding. I have no problems with 30-minute heroics, then a break. but this game is made for many different types of people. I think its best to take the parts that work for me and run with it. well i guess things are dulling down. honestly, the only other thing to really do is go through levels 1-60 again and experience the "new" world. that, and experience things from the alliance point of view. i guess i can make a new character. but if im questing, i think it will be best to make a character just to play by myself. my gf will want to level up asap, and that's great and all, but i already have five 85s and seven 80s. i really dont need to be in a hurry.
What didnt happen that i wish did happen:
1. Anzu drops his mount.
2. Keal drops his white chicken.
3. Alar drops ashes.
4. Attuman drops midnight.
5. Maly drops an azure drake.
6. Skadi drops a blue proto drake.
7. I get bitten in blood queen without fucking up the bites (note to self, if your target doesnt get bit, maybe he's already bitten). And how the hell, after the 7th week, can we NOT finally get the mount??? /sadness.
Have a great day everyone.
1. Healed another PUG on my druid.
2. Tanked for a guild group heroic. it was fun. but tanking is a bit too stressful for the rewards, atm.
3. DPS'd mindlessly still. but tried my best to avoid the fires.
4. Went and did a much smoother ICC. YES, ICC. as in Ice Crown Citadel. It was 25mans and going for heroic and acheivements. Hey, for the non-raiders, this is a nice change of pace from constant heroics. dont hate.
5. My archeology skill went up by 15, then i decided to gag myself with chloroform.
6. BH gave me a pvp neck, which i gave to my gf because she pvp's more than i do.
7. Sunday night became Glee Marathon night. Wow got pretty boring, really.
8. Contemplated making alliance toons. /barf
9. Deleted several never-played characters (all of which were alliance, on my first server).
10. Contemplated what to do. what to do.
Really, there's not much else for me to do in this game. some folks say raid, but i say i dont have the concentrated time necessary for 3 hours of raiding. I have no problems with 30-minute heroics, then a break. but this game is made for many different types of people. I think its best to take the parts that work for me and run with it. well i guess things are dulling down. honestly, the only other thing to really do is go through levels 1-60 again and experience the "new" world. that, and experience things from the alliance point of view. i guess i can make a new character. but if im questing, i think it will be best to make a character just to play by myself. my gf will want to level up asap, and that's great and all, but i already have five 85s and seven 80s. i really dont need to be in a hurry.
What didnt happen that i wish did happen:
1. Anzu drops his mount.
2. Keal drops his white chicken.
3. Alar drops ashes.
4. Attuman drops midnight.
5. Maly drops an azure drake.
6. Skadi drops a blue proto drake.
7. I get bitten in blood queen without fucking up the bites (note to self, if your target doesnt get bit, maybe he's already bitten). And how the hell, after the 7th week, can we NOT finally get the mount??? /sadness.
Have a great day everyone.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Joys of Healing Heroic PUGs
First one, Heroic Vortex Pinnacle!
I picked up healing once again! yay. now this blog can actually be useful for once (if you can read through all the QQ, that is). my first experience was with a few guildies and one pugger, which wasnt so bad. we had a raiding healer with us but she was asked to dps so i can practic some healing. we zoned into vortex pinnacle with me, my gf in her dk, a guildie tank, and a guildie shaman who's dpsing the fight. it was pretty intense up through the first boss. my gf took minimal damage, the tank took a lot of damage (and fell off the ledge several times) and the guildie shaman was doing pretty well as dps. after the first pull, i was pretty much OOM. everyone was alive, but i was OOM. You know that pull with the air elementals? all five of them? one was bound, so there were four at once hitting the tank. luckily, he was probably able to heal himself.
I got a little better with mana conservation after the first pull. We go down the first ramp, with each pull costing me about half my mana instead of all my mana. we slowly pushed towards the first boss and i actually drank, took mana potions and innervated myself after each pull. oh the fun of being mana starved!
at the first boss, i was at 50% mana going in. apparently my guildie figured i needed extra healing stress on my first time back! in any case, the damage was normalized after the first cyclone pull, and no one died. i was sitting at <10% mana for half the fight, but during that half of the fight, i really didnt need to heal much. I didnt even need to go treeoflife either, which is good because they look sooooo goofy healing.
anyway i was having a blast keeping the tank and the group up. it seemed that, not only were my heals hitting for a lot less and the mana costs were a lot more, the tank and group were taking a whole lot more damage than what i remembered in wrath. or maybe it was because everyone was overgeared in wrath. now although i was constantly healing in wrath dungeons (ABC of healing--Always Be Casting), i would usually never drop below 50% mana and my healing usually compensates for a lot of aoe damage that happens even in dungeons like H.HoR, or H.PoS. But in Cata heroics, my healing spells feel weak and overpriced, even for a decent group, where the tank knew how to tank and the dps knew how to stay out of bad, i still felt that my nourish wasnt helping much, my swiftmend (which used to be emergency) didnt do much, and my swiftness+HT (my other emergency) didnt really put much health back at all. i am not one of those who think tranquility is an emergency spell. sure it might be for 5-mans and some druids love it, but i find it very limiting. the amount of healing might be lovely, but channeling the spell limits me so much, i find it almost unusable, especially when i tried using it for a while, i'd break the channeling prematurely to do another, more important heal.
But anyway, my healing sucks, my mana efficiency sucks and my hope in all treekind began to erode.
and then the tank tells us he was tanking in healing gear. <.<
(oh and that i was also doing a great job for the first time back... right.)
So after he put his tanking gear back on, healing felt a lot better. even though i had craptastic healing touch and swiftmends, i found it a whole lot easier to heal. the fights became more mana efficient where i was able to heal several pulls without having to drink (except for those two pulls where we attack swirling wind things. its just fun trying to keep everyone up because damage was just everywhere.
Overall, boss fights were easy to heal, trash was a bit harder to heal and tanks in healing gear is pretty hard to heal... but not impossible. I welcome all the dps-geared tanks to come and give me a workout. well okay, maybe not. but at least i know if there are some who do come to tank with a couple of pieces of dps gear, i guess its okay. we'll be fine so long as they know how to tank.
And then, there is Heroic Stonecore.
After my first (mainly) successful stint at healing again, i decided to try my luck without my guildies. i grabbed my gf and we went on our way to another random heroic queue. My second try at healing heroics turned out to be stonecore. now every instance has their own bane, but this one has seven. yes seven. Four bosses and three types of trash groups that really makes this difficult. the first type is the group of five trash with Millhouse Manastorm. The second is the trash rock elemental. the third is the cultist trash after slabhide. add to that the meandering sentinels and the ogre and you have some of the most hated trash pulls in all of Cata.
First thing's first, the tank did not want to CC anything. after every pull, i was pretty low on mana. however, he did mark Millhouse with a Skull, so he wasnt completely clueless. but even there, i had to let one guy die. sorry ele shaman. you were good. but i cant keep everyone up.
on to the first boss and i was actually glad we were done with trash pulls. the boss was great until he did his crystal spit thing and out came the shards. my gf tried to blood boil them but did not get any help from any of the other dps. it all seemed like they were focusing on the boss. Death and decay has a long CD, so my gf could possible DnD down every other group of shards, but not every group.
So the first boss fight ended up with a wipe. first my gf dies, then one of the dps, then the other. the tank was last to die. he completely ignored the shards, or any other of the borers that were still running around. i dont know if he knew his team was in trouble. but i kinda figured he didnt like saving the day much. in any case, with nothing to save me from the shards, i died, then him. of course, he left the group. but that's okay. he wasnt a great tank anyway. someone who cant call out cc after the first pull, seeing that the healer was OOM, or help pick up deadly flying geods doesnt really deserve to move on in the instance. There wasnt even a word about who should do what. in any case, we figured most of it out for the second pull, which happened about 4 minutes later due to waiting for another tank. the short wait continues to prove my point that queuing while already in a dungeon is faster than queuing after you leave the group. but people still leave group whenever a tank would leave. too bad for them.
in any case, now that we know the shaman and priest (the other two dps) will not be assed to help with the geod shards, my gf decided to blood boil them on her own. any stray ones left will not pose much of a challenge to me. our second try was successful with a new warrior tank. people stayed out of the rumble/dust on the ground and adds were picked up pronto.
Anyway, moving on to the next trash pull. No one knows how to jump, aparently. Well i guess no one really knows that earthquak sucks. but then the priest got reminded that he can levitate people and so damage on the second rock dude was a bit less. still, the melee still took a lot of damage. but this wasnt due to the earthquakes as much as it was due to the shards. it looks as if these guys are able to summon one shard at a time, which blows up and kills people. but alas, the ranged dps, both of then, werent keen on this and we ended up getting hit by those shards several times. i actually spammed moonfire to get rid of two.
The dragon boss was easy peasy. everyone know crystal storm. everyone knew to get out of lava. everyone knew to stay away from the stupid shadows that shows you where the stalagmites will drop. and somehow, most of the people i was healing were in my LOS! a smooth fight, to say the least.
And then we get on to wiping on trash before Ozruk. I know ozruk. he's no softy. but the trash before him is pretty annoying. sentinels, omg they suck. so the first pull ended up being a two-group pull. how often does this happen? like every time i go there. someone always figures there's plenty of time to kill the sentinels. well one was able to get away and call for help. So two groups and two dead dps. not sure who anymore, but i knew there were some casualties. Oh and THAT pull forced me to finally pull out my tree form. Wow, the ugliness. You know my first post on this site ever? i take it back. I dont wanna be any kinda tree, ever.
So anyway, we get to Ozruk and the tank proceeds to "learn" the fight. obviously, only the tank was learning the fight. the other two ranged dps (magic dps right??) were not learning jack. they were paralized the whole duration of paralysis, which caused them 50k damage each time. and how often does he cast that? before every shatter, right? so each fight had a LOT of damage. the dps would suck below 5k dps because of the duration of the paralyze and the melee having to run out of shatter. so this was going to be a long fight no matter. what's very interesting is that each time i did a moonfire to get a dot on me, it didnt work. What i found out was that warriors' shield slam is able to dispell the spell reflect from Ozruk. well that was probably what caused the wipes all five times. Then i said im done and left.
At the end, the tank did learn to tank Ozruk well. The healer, well he figured he'd read up on why we failed (and found out). And the ranged dps who kept getting paralized? well i hope they find better groups where the healer and tank werent clueless to the mechanics.
I remember now why i stopped healing (and tanking) for a while. The job is almost a chore. i do like tanking and i do like healing. but when it comes to relaxing every night after work, i'd like to relax. and even if i die several times in an instance as dps, it's not as stressful of a death since, more likely than not, my existence in a group is trivialized by 67% anyway. and if you count total DPS, probably 80%.
I picked up healing once again! yay. now this blog can actually be useful for once (if you can read through all the QQ, that is). my first experience was with a few guildies and one pugger, which wasnt so bad. we had a raiding healer with us but she was asked to dps so i can practic some healing. we zoned into vortex pinnacle with me, my gf in her dk, a guildie tank, and a guildie shaman who's dpsing the fight. it was pretty intense up through the first boss. my gf took minimal damage, the tank took a lot of damage (and fell off the ledge several times) and the guildie shaman was doing pretty well as dps. after the first pull, i was pretty much OOM. everyone was alive, but i was OOM. You know that pull with the air elementals? all five of them? one was bound, so there were four at once hitting the tank. luckily, he was probably able to heal himself.
I got a little better with mana conservation after the first pull. We go down the first ramp, with each pull costing me about half my mana instead of all my mana. we slowly pushed towards the first boss and i actually drank, took mana potions and innervated myself after each pull. oh the fun of being mana starved!
at the first boss, i was at 50% mana going in. apparently my guildie figured i needed extra healing stress on my first time back! in any case, the damage was normalized after the first cyclone pull, and no one died. i was sitting at <10% mana for half the fight, but during that half of the fight, i really didnt need to heal much. I didnt even need to go treeoflife either, which is good because they look sooooo goofy healing.
anyway i was having a blast keeping the tank and the group up. it seemed that, not only were my heals hitting for a lot less and the mana costs were a lot more, the tank and group were taking a whole lot more damage than what i remembered in wrath. or maybe it was because everyone was overgeared in wrath. now although i was constantly healing in wrath dungeons (ABC of healing--Always Be Casting), i would usually never drop below 50% mana and my healing usually compensates for a lot of aoe damage that happens even in dungeons like H.HoR, or H.PoS. But in Cata heroics, my healing spells feel weak and overpriced, even for a decent group, where the tank knew how to tank and the dps knew how to stay out of bad, i still felt that my nourish wasnt helping much, my swiftmend (which used to be emergency) didnt do much, and my swiftness+HT (my other emergency) didnt really put much health back at all. i am not one of those who think tranquility is an emergency spell. sure it might be for 5-mans and some druids love it, but i find it very limiting. the amount of healing might be lovely, but channeling the spell limits me so much, i find it almost unusable, especially when i tried using it for a while, i'd break the channeling prematurely to do another, more important heal.
But anyway, my healing sucks, my mana efficiency sucks and my hope in all treekind began to erode.
and then the tank tells us he was tanking in healing gear. <.<
(oh and that i was also doing a great job for the first time back... right.)
So after he put his tanking gear back on, healing felt a lot better. even though i had craptastic healing touch and swiftmends, i found it a whole lot easier to heal. the fights became more mana efficient where i was able to heal several pulls without having to drink (except for those two pulls where we attack swirling wind things. its just fun trying to keep everyone up because damage was just everywhere.
Overall, boss fights were easy to heal, trash was a bit harder to heal and tanks in healing gear is pretty hard to heal... but not impossible. I welcome all the dps-geared tanks to come and give me a workout. well okay, maybe not. but at least i know if there are some who do come to tank with a couple of pieces of dps gear, i guess its okay. we'll be fine so long as they know how to tank.
And then, there is Heroic Stonecore.
After my first (mainly) successful stint at healing again, i decided to try my luck without my guildies. i grabbed my gf and we went on our way to another random heroic queue. My second try at healing heroics turned out to be stonecore. now every instance has their own bane, but this one has seven. yes seven. Four bosses and three types of trash groups that really makes this difficult. the first type is the group of five trash with Millhouse Manastorm. The second is the trash rock elemental. the third is the cultist trash after slabhide. add to that the meandering sentinels and the ogre and you have some of the most hated trash pulls in all of Cata.
First thing's first, the tank did not want to CC anything. after every pull, i was pretty low on mana. however, he did mark Millhouse with a Skull, so he wasnt completely clueless. but even there, i had to let one guy die. sorry ele shaman. you were good. but i cant keep everyone up.
on to the first boss and i was actually glad we were done with trash pulls. the boss was great until he did his crystal spit thing and out came the shards. my gf tried to blood boil them but did not get any help from any of the other dps. it all seemed like they were focusing on the boss. Death and decay has a long CD, so my gf could possible DnD down every other group of shards, but not every group.
So the first boss fight ended up with a wipe. first my gf dies, then one of the dps, then the other. the tank was last to die. he completely ignored the shards, or any other of the borers that were still running around. i dont know if he knew his team was in trouble. but i kinda figured he didnt like saving the day much. in any case, with nothing to save me from the shards, i died, then him. of course, he left the group. but that's okay. he wasnt a great tank anyway. someone who cant call out cc after the first pull, seeing that the healer was OOM, or help pick up deadly flying geods doesnt really deserve to move on in the instance. There wasnt even a word about who should do what. in any case, we figured most of it out for the second pull, which happened about 4 minutes later due to waiting for another tank. the short wait continues to prove my point that queuing while already in a dungeon is faster than queuing after you leave the group. but people still leave group whenever a tank would leave. too bad for them.
in any case, now that we know the shaman and priest (the other two dps) will not be assed to help with the geod shards, my gf decided to blood boil them on her own. any stray ones left will not pose much of a challenge to me. our second try was successful with a new warrior tank. people stayed out of the rumble/dust on the ground and adds were picked up pronto.
Anyway, moving on to the next trash pull. No one knows how to jump, aparently. Well i guess no one really knows that earthquak sucks. but then the priest got reminded that he can levitate people and so damage on the second rock dude was a bit less. still, the melee still took a lot of damage. but this wasnt due to the earthquakes as much as it was due to the shards. it looks as if these guys are able to summon one shard at a time, which blows up and kills people. but alas, the ranged dps, both of then, werent keen on this and we ended up getting hit by those shards several times. i actually spammed moonfire to get rid of two.
The dragon boss was easy peasy. everyone know crystal storm. everyone knew to get out of lava. everyone knew to stay away from the stupid shadows that shows you where the stalagmites will drop. and somehow, most of the people i was healing were in my LOS! a smooth fight, to say the least.
And then we get on to wiping on trash before Ozruk. I know ozruk. he's no softy. but the trash before him is pretty annoying. sentinels, omg they suck. so the first pull ended up being a two-group pull. how often does this happen? like every time i go there. someone always figures there's plenty of time to kill the sentinels. well one was able to get away and call for help. So two groups and two dead dps. not sure who anymore, but i knew there were some casualties. Oh and THAT pull forced me to finally pull out my tree form. Wow, the ugliness. You know my first post on this site ever? i take it back. I dont wanna be any kinda tree, ever.
So anyway, we get to Ozruk and the tank proceeds to "learn" the fight. obviously, only the tank was learning the fight. the other two ranged dps (magic dps right??) were not learning jack. they were paralized the whole duration of paralysis, which caused them 50k damage each time. and how often does he cast that? before every shatter, right? so each fight had a LOT of damage. the dps would suck below 5k dps because of the duration of the paralyze and the melee having to run out of shatter. so this was going to be a long fight no matter. what's very interesting is that each time i did a moonfire to get a dot on me, it didnt work. What i found out was that warriors' shield slam is able to dispell the spell reflect from Ozruk. well that was probably what caused the wipes all five times. Then i said im done and left.
At the end, the tank did learn to tank Ozruk well. The healer, well he figured he'd read up on why we failed (and found out). And the ranged dps who kept getting paralized? well i hope they find better groups where the healer and tank werent clueless to the mechanics.
I remember now why i stopped healing (and tanking) for a while. The job is almost a chore. i do like tanking and i do like healing. but when it comes to relaxing every night after work, i'd like to relax. and even if i die several times in an instance as dps, it's not as stressful of a death since, more likely than not, my existence in a group is trivialized by 67% anyway. and if you count total DPS, probably 80%.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Thoughts on a few topics
On Looking For Dummies:
Er... i mean dungeon. LFD has been nice to me as of late. My groups have been wrought with much annoyances, mostly from guild groups. What i mean is this. I zone in with my gf to a random dungeon group and find three people of the same guild. of course, we're queueing as DPS b/c tanking and healing roles are ridiculously unrewarding (we feel like babysitters, really).
Now these guild groups will do one of two things. They either really suck, or they're really good with a chip on their shoulders. Both experiences suck hairy donkey balls. For the suckage teams, they usually either all quit when they cant do the first boss, or, continue to press on. After about five wipes or so, they declare that the two dps who arent in their guild must suck because we're not carrying them enough. In both cases everyone drops group. the first case better than the last because at least, we wouldnt have wasted our time after five+ wipes just to get to boss #2. I would have waited the three minutes to wait for a new random group of strangers if they were going to quit anyway.
The group of assholes who will check your gear, spec and credit report will continually chat while playing. they'll tell you that your gear sucks (why am i doing heroics anyway? to get gear, moron), or that our talent spec isnt optimal (for what? EJ's suggestion for raiding? dont be a tool, use your brains). These are the groups who have tanks that cannot keep their healers alive, ignore any kind of CC's and even some very obvious mob/boss mechanics. It also can include pets who aggro, mages who dont realize their sheeped mob has them on top of their aggro meter, boomkins who like to use typhoon for no fucking reason other than "its cool," and hunters who still dont know how misdirect works.
A little bit of background on why i like dps: It's less stress. It's fun, actually. and i do play this game for fun. The whole reason why it's fun is because there is less blame, basically, when anyone dies. there's less responsibilities. If i miss an interrupt, the healer needs to work harder. If i miss a decurse, the healer needs to work harder. If i stand in bad, the healer might have to work harder. And if i die because i stood in poop, well, it's my own damn fault. I know that. I do not have any responsibilities to anyone really. Even though i have CC duties, decurse duties, aggro responsibilities, etc, they are not as pressing as a tank's or healer's duties.
For the tank, he has to make sure all the mobs that are supposed to be tanked are on him and not on others, that there is a kill order and that nothing touches the healer (treat the healer like your wifey, basically). Variables such as bad CCer's, CC breakers, and randomtargetingHuntard or rainoffireonlyLock or noMindFreezeDK makes this difficult. The 5k dps, fully geared ilevel 246 dont know how to play their class or with a group damage dealer is a little bit of dead weight but can be worked around. but being stupid like the above may cause more stress than enjoyment.
For the healer, same as above. but it is as so much a problem if you dont mind letting a few of the dps die sometimes. however, the first comments from the dps isnt that it was their fault or that they were being dumb, but that it was the healer's fault for not healing them when they do stand in bad.
In any case, the main problems the tanks and healers have are with bad dps. that's basically it. And when me and my girlfriend went dps, we actually wanted to improve the quality of some of the dps'ers out there who pug. But its a chore still and is mainly due to the random groups mentioned above. Now there are idiot tanks and idiot healers out there still. Far more idiot tanks than there are idiot healers though.
So what was i trying to say? Oh yea, LFD has been relatively good to me recently. but now i feel there's a dark cloud looming (cliche, i know).
On Call to Arms:
I have many thoughts regarding this new feature. I've mentioned my thoughts on what will happen through this system in another blog entry, but i wanted to think out loud for a bit right now regarding what i'll personally do with this feature. Although is it somewhat of a nice feature, i'll probably not use it when queueing for random heroics. Here are some of my reasons:
1. I have to queue by myself. Most of my play is with my girlfriend and half of the time i'd rather play with my guildies anyway. queueing up by myself robs my guildies of the benefits of being in a guild. they're there for the social, group aspect of the game. These have many benefits including grouping with people you know or like. In this situation, i will not be doing that. I cant if i want the goodie bag.
2. A feature like this will only encourage the hybrid spec'ed classes to switch from their usual dps or healing role and queue as a tank for the benefit (or detriment) of those they dont know. This, to me, is faulty reasoning. You're putting chocolate flavored bandaids on an infection. It's not the right treatment for the problem. Although we'll get shorter queues, there will be people who will queue as tanks and not be good at it. Although we can say they're just learning, maybe they will be better off learning in normal dungeons. at least there, there's a little more room for mistakes and overall noobery. In any case, there will be a huge influx (i may be exaggerating here) of dps'ers, who not only will have quick queue times but will now have even more incentive to queue as tanks, who will know almost nothing about tanking running into the instance, wiping the group several times, then leaves, only to really waste everybody's time. I am not saying there arent people who will learn to be good tanks. Maybe some will learn to be awesome tanks. But grouping with a good tank, or a decent tank learning more about their role is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I do hate to drop group just because the tank sucks and no /kick attemp are successful, but hell, if the penalties for dps to drop group isnt already bad, this will just make it almost unbearable to the point where i might find a 30 minute deserter debuff PLUS a 30 minute queue after that very, very desirable.
3. The hybrid class also will exacerbate an already-existing proplem of ninja rolling on offspec gear. I've been to many dungeons where the paladin tank rolls on healing gear, the DK tank rolls on dps gear and the DPS warrior rolls on tanking gear. and this happens even when the guy with the main spec rolls need on an item. sometimes the person who actually needs the item wins it. Sometimes not. i'll get angrier if the ninja gets it, but its a bad experience whether the ninja gets it or not. Ninjas are still ninjas. Successfully ninja-ing something doesnt make it different. In any case, now we have people who's main specs are DPS, queueing as tanks, and rolling on DPS gear. Although this has happened many times to both me and my girlfriend before, i can predict that this will happen even more once Call to Arms get implimented.
I know. the new system gets a whole lot of QQ from me. and basically the entire blog entry today is one big qq session big enough to fill up a lake with all these tears. but....
I am trying to find good things to say about playing this game. And i end up with not much.
On Counting:
One thing i see across the internet is this silly little breakdown of groups:
In a 5man dungeon setting, 1 of the five players are tanks. that's 20%.
In a raid setting, 2.5 of the players are tanks. Whether its 10man or 25man, its usually the same. so 25% or 10%, your pick.
And then they conclude that there are only so many tanks, blah blah blah. and that's why the world is full of dps and short on tanks.
On those who count this way, please stop. There's NOTHING to keep these tanks, who tank in raids to dps in heroics for points. There's nothing to keep the DPS in raids to switch to a tanking spec and tank heroics. There's also NOTHING that will keep 100% of the raiders from jumping on their alts and playing whatever class, sometimes tanks, they like when they're not raiding. Please dont do these stupid calculations and say that the role population distribution of the whole MMO is based on the role population distribution of the raid.
On Common Sense:
And just because someone doesnt tank doesnt mean they cant. Although, many people who choose to DPS do so because they cant heal or tank, some dps may actually prefer damage dealing and some dps may actually do better as damage dealing, although their ability may span across several roles and classes. There are some excellent DPS out there who do well as tanks. There are some excellent DPS out there who are excellent tanks. There are some craptastic DPS out there who are excellent tanks. Perhaps the role they chose isnt really linked to ability. I am not trying to contradict my own blog post, but although there are people who may be encouraged to tank, and they probably are very good at it too, there will be those who will screw up the whole experience for them. Again, i just dont think blizz has it down right when deciding on this new Call to Arms thing. Sure, it will encourage those who havent tanked in a while to tank, but i do believe it will cause more problems than it's worth.
Er... i mean dungeon. LFD has been nice to me as of late. My groups have been wrought with much annoyances, mostly from guild groups. What i mean is this. I zone in with my gf to a random dungeon group and find three people of the same guild. of course, we're queueing as DPS b/c tanking and healing roles are ridiculously unrewarding (we feel like babysitters, really).
Now these guild groups will do one of two things. They either really suck, or they're really good with a chip on their shoulders. Both experiences suck hairy donkey balls. For the suckage teams, they usually either all quit when they cant do the first boss, or, continue to press on. After about five wipes or so, they declare that the two dps who arent in their guild must suck because we're not carrying them enough. In both cases everyone drops group. the first case better than the last because at least, we wouldnt have wasted our time after five+ wipes just to get to boss #2. I would have waited the three minutes to wait for a new random group of strangers if they were going to quit anyway.
The group of assholes who will check your gear, spec and credit report will continually chat while playing. they'll tell you that your gear sucks (why am i doing heroics anyway? to get gear, moron), or that our talent spec isnt optimal (for what? EJ's suggestion for raiding? dont be a tool, use your brains). These are the groups who have tanks that cannot keep their healers alive, ignore any kind of CC's and even some very obvious mob/boss mechanics. It also can include pets who aggro, mages who dont realize their sheeped mob has them on top of their aggro meter, boomkins who like to use typhoon for no fucking reason other than "its cool," and hunters who still dont know how misdirect works.
A little bit of background on why i like dps: It's less stress. It's fun, actually. and i do play this game for fun. The whole reason why it's fun is because there is less blame, basically, when anyone dies. there's less responsibilities. If i miss an interrupt, the healer needs to work harder. If i miss a decurse, the healer needs to work harder. If i stand in bad, the healer might have to work harder. And if i die because i stood in poop, well, it's my own damn fault. I know that. I do not have any responsibilities to anyone really. Even though i have CC duties, decurse duties, aggro responsibilities, etc, they are not as pressing as a tank's or healer's duties.
For the tank, he has to make sure all the mobs that are supposed to be tanked are on him and not on others, that there is a kill order and that nothing touches the healer (treat the healer like your wifey, basically). Variables such as bad CCer's, CC breakers, and randomtargetingHuntard or rainoffireonlyLock or noMindFreezeDK makes this difficult. The 5k dps, fully geared ilevel 246 dont know how to play their class or with a group damage dealer is a little bit of dead weight but can be worked around. but being stupid like the above may cause more stress than enjoyment.
For the healer, same as above. but it is as so much a problem if you dont mind letting a few of the dps die sometimes. however, the first comments from the dps isnt that it was their fault or that they were being dumb, but that it was the healer's fault for not healing them when they do stand in bad.
In any case, the main problems the tanks and healers have are with bad dps. that's basically it. And when me and my girlfriend went dps, we actually wanted to improve the quality of some of the dps'ers out there who pug. But its a chore still and is mainly due to the random groups mentioned above. Now there are idiot tanks and idiot healers out there still. Far more idiot tanks than there are idiot healers though.
So what was i trying to say? Oh yea, LFD has been relatively good to me recently. but now i feel there's a dark cloud looming (cliche, i know).
On Call to Arms:
I have many thoughts regarding this new feature. I've mentioned my thoughts on what will happen through this system in another blog entry, but i wanted to think out loud for a bit right now regarding what i'll personally do with this feature. Although is it somewhat of a nice feature, i'll probably not use it when queueing for random heroics. Here are some of my reasons:
1. I have to queue by myself. Most of my play is with my girlfriend and half of the time i'd rather play with my guildies anyway. queueing up by myself robs my guildies of the benefits of being in a guild. they're there for the social, group aspect of the game. These have many benefits including grouping with people you know or like. In this situation, i will not be doing that. I cant if i want the goodie bag.
2. A feature like this will only encourage the hybrid spec'ed classes to switch from their usual dps or healing role and queue as a tank for the benefit (or detriment) of those they dont know. This, to me, is faulty reasoning. You're putting chocolate flavored bandaids on an infection. It's not the right treatment for the problem. Although we'll get shorter queues, there will be people who will queue as tanks and not be good at it. Although we can say they're just learning, maybe they will be better off learning in normal dungeons. at least there, there's a little more room for mistakes and overall noobery. In any case, there will be a huge influx (i may be exaggerating here) of dps'ers, who not only will have quick queue times but will now have even more incentive to queue as tanks, who will know almost nothing about tanking running into the instance, wiping the group several times, then leaves, only to really waste everybody's time. I am not saying there arent people who will learn to be good tanks. Maybe some will learn to be awesome tanks. But grouping with a good tank, or a decent tank learning more about their role is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I do hate to drop group just because the tank sucks and no /kick attemp are successful, but hell, if the penalties for dps to drop group isnt already bad, this will just make it almost unbearable to the point where i might find a 30 minute deserter debuff PLUS a 30 minute queue after that very, very desirable.
3. The hybrid class also will exacerbate an already-existing proplem of ninja rolling on offspec gear. I've been to many dungeons where the paladin tank rolls on healing gear, the DK tank rolls on dps gear and the DPS warrior rolls on tanking gear. and this happens even when the guy with the main spec rolls need on an item. sometimes the person who actually needs the item wins it. Sometimes not. i'll get angrier if the ninja gets it, but its a bad experience whether the ninja gets it or not. Ninjas are still ninjas. Successfully ninja-ing something doesnt make it different. In any case, now we have people who's main specs are DPS, queueing as tanks, and rolling on DPS gear. Although this has happened many times to both me and my girlfriend before, i can predict that this will happen even more once Call to Arms get implimented.
I know. the new system gets a whole lot of QQ from me. and basically the entire blog entry today is one big qq session big enough to fill up a lake with all these tears. but....
I am trying to find good things to say about playing this game. And i end up with not much.
On Counting:
One thing i see across the internet is this silly little breakdown of groups:
In a 5man dungeon setting, 1 of the five players are tanks. that's 20%.
In a raid setting, 2.5 of the players are tanks. Whether its 10man or 25man, its usually the same. so 25% or 10%, your pick.
And then they conclude that there are only so many tanks, blah blah blah. and that's why the world is full of dps and short on tanks.
On those who count this way, please stop. There's NOTHING to keep these tanks, who tank in raids to dps in heroics for points. There's nothing to keep the DPS in raids to switch to a tanking spec and tank heroics. There's also NOTHING that will keep 100% of the raiders from jumping on their alts and playing whatever class, sometimes tanks, they like when they're not raiding. Please dont do these stupid calculations and say that the role population distribution of the whole MMO is based on the role population distribution of the raid.
On Common Sense:
And just because someone doesnt tank doesnt mean they cant. Although, many people who choose to DPS do so because they cant heal or tank, some dps may actually prefer damage dealing and some dps may actually do better as damage dealing, although their ability may span across several roles and classes. There are some excellent DPS out there who do well as tanks. There are some excellent DPS out there who are excellent tanks. There are some craptastic DPS out there who are excellent tanks. Perhaps the role they chose isnt really linked to ability. I am not trying to contradict my own blog post, but although there are people who may be encouraged to tank, and they probably are very good at it too, there will be those who will screw up the whole experience for them. Again, i just dont think blizz has it down right when deciding on this new Call to Arms thing. Sure, it will encourage those who havent tanked in a while to tank, but i do believe it will cause more problems than it's worth.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Bread and Circuses
I heard news today of an upcoming change in 4.1 which made me thought a little. Bliz announced that they will give rewards to the least represented role in an LFD. This reward will probably be in the form of a goodie bag (remember those during your 20th time in SM:GY??) and will include mounts and non-combat pets as possible rewards. Possible, because it doesnt have to be. For sure these least represented classes will be given extra gold. The pets, maybe. the mounts, maybe. So it's good news right?
Well not really. Let me list my reasons why i dont think this will work out well.
1. Call to Arms will always be on. Call to arms is an announcement in the LFD tool that will tell everyone who wants to queue what role is in high demand. Lets not kid ourselves in the least bit and just state the obvious: Call to Arms will always be on. and Call to Arms will state that we have a shortage of tanks. It will never say we have a shortage of healers and, god forbid, damage dealers. And it will encourage those who do not tank to try to maybe tank for the rewards. This means that any tank, or any hybrid/tribrid class that wants to tank will be given the oppurtunity to get a mount or a pet.
2. What this will lead to is, not just more people tanking, but more baddies tanking. The LFD system is already rife with bad tanks, bad healers and bad dps (although sometimes bad healers can be countered with a good tank and bad dps is often carried by good dps) but of the three, the one that carries the most weight is the tank. If we get a bad tank, the group usually stalls after the first pull or two, gets frustrated, and often disbands. There will be some stubborn groups who will hold out until the tank decides he's had enough failure and leaves. It is quite often due to the misconception that we'll have to wait 30 more minutes for a new tank if we kick the current baddie. This is not the case, but often, people are quite reluctant to kick the tank no matter how bad he might be. In any case, we'll have shorter queues because many people will want to tank. But this may not necessarily lead to the same "quality" of dungeon groups we see today. But i guess, being somewhere doing an instance is better than being nowhere waiting for a queue to pop.
3. There is a possibility of gaining a rare pet or mount. This is bad? Hopefully, this will be as rare as getting an Azure drake from the Oculus random some time ago, which did encourage people to actually do the instance (and such an easy instance it was by then, i dont know how people didnt like it). But i am basically QQing about this one. I used to log on to my death knight every other day or so to run through Stratholme for the Baron's deathcharger. I did this for at least six months and one day i decided to stop. Then, on a random day i decided to run through that dungeon once more and BAM!! i got a horse! that's about nine months of farming. although i'd only run it about four days a week, but in those four days are quite possibly 20 runs. I picked up his runeblade three times! Now, when cataclysm hit and people were actually able to do Stratholme as a random dungeon i kinda felt i was cheated. Not only that, the drop rate was increased by a little bit. I felt cheated still. I bet this is the case for all those who gained "Light of The Dawn" or "Bane of the Fallen King" before Cata. They must have felt cheated that every other Joe is wearing their title now. Might as well bring back the PvP titles and the BC titles while we're at it (Hand of A'dal, anyone?). Now we'll have people with what? a blue protodrake? a white hawkstrider? a ravenlord? Midnight? how about that deathcharger huh? These are all the mounts i am currently farming. Deathcharger again? well i do have alts. =P and every other week or so i run with my guild to get the OS3D drake. at least with that one, everyone gets a fair /roll.
4. More tanks = More dungeons being run = more JPs gained by everyone in a shorter amount of time. What else will this mean? a flood of gems into the AH. For the non-jc'ers this might be a good thing since i can easily grab an inferno ruby from the AH at low low prices and have someone cut it for me for a small fee. But this will add to the already sinking JC market where yellow, green and orange gems are already hitting 10g and where Demonseyes are dirt cheap. The only contender still making us any gold? Inferno Rubies, which has dropped almost 50% in the last two weeks. Crazy influx of cheap Elementium FTL. Prices were down by almost 50% last week. So what does this mean for the gem market? people will begin to drop out. cut gems will be scarce again. Even the herbs and cloth and things will not be bought as much as we will buy gems with Justice points. What else would you do when you have all the heirloom gear you need and all the justice point gear you need? you buy gems to enchant your gear or sell for gold. right?
In any case, although Call to Arms may sound like an awesome change to the LFD tool, it will cause a lot of anger, stress and dissatisfaction with the game as we know it, hence the title, Bread and Circuses. Bliz is only trying to make things look good on the surface (shorten the queue times for DPS), essentially throwing bread at us and giving us entertainment. But we all know it will only make things worse. and look, we're already angry at ninjas, stressed at prissy tanks and dissatified with our non-sex lives as it is. lets not make it worse, yea? thanks bliz!
Well not really. Let me list my reasons why i dont think this will work out well.
1. Call to Arms will always be on. Call to arms is an announcement in the LFD tool that will tell everyone who wants to queue what role is in high demand. Lets not kid ourselves in the least bit and just state the obvious: Call to Arms will always be on. and Call to Arms will state that we have a shortage of tanks. It will never say we have a shortage of healers and, god forbid, damage dealers. And it will encourage those who do not tank to try to maybe tank for the rewards. This means that any tank, or any hybrid/tribrid class that wants to tank will be given the oppurtunity to get a mount or a pet.
2. What this will lead to is, not just more people tanking, but more baddies tanking. The LFD system is already rife with bad tanks, bad healers and bad dps (although sometimes bad healers can be countered with a good tank and bad dps is often carried by good dps) but of the three, the one that carries the most weight is the tank. If we get a bad tank, the group usually stalls after the first pull or two, gets frustrated, and often disbands. There will be some stubborn groups who will hold out until the tank decides he's had enough failure and leaves. It is quite often due to the misconception that we'll have to wait 30 more minutes for a new tank if we kick the current baddie. This is not the case, but often, people are quite reluctant to kick the tank no matter how bad he might be. In any case, we'll have shorter queues because many people will want to tank. But this may not necessarily lead to the same "quality" of dungeon groups we see today. But i guess, being somewhere doing an instance is better than being nowhere waiting for a queue to pop.
3. There is a possibility of gaining a rare pet or mount. This is bad? Hopefully, this will be as rare as getting an Azure drake from the Oculus random some time ago, which did encourage people to actually do the instance (and such an easy instance it was by then, i dont know how people didnt like it). But i am basically QQing about this one. I used to log on to my death knight every other day or so to run through Stratholme for the Baron's deathcharger. I did this for at least six months and one day i decided to stop. Then, on a random day i decided to run through that dungeon once more and BAM!! i got a horse! that's about nine months of farming. although i'd only run it about four days a week, but in those four days are quite possibly 20 runs. I picked up his runeblade three times! Now, when cataclysm hit and people were actually able to do Stratholme as a random dungeon i kinda felt i was cheated. Not only that, the drop rate was increased by a little bit. I felt cheated still. I bet this is the case for all those who gained "Light of The Dawn" or "Bane of the Fallen King" before Cata. They must have felt cheated that every other Joe is wearing their title now. Might as well bring back the PvP titles and the BC titles while we're at it (Hand of A'dal, anyone?). Now we'll have people with what? a blue protodrake? a white hawkstrider? a ravenlord? Midnight? how about that deathcharger huh? These are all the mounts i am currently farming. Deathcharger again? well i do have alts. =P and every other week or so i run with my guild to get the OS3D drake. at least with that one, everyone gets a fair /roll.
4. More tanks = More dungeons being run = more JPs gained by everyone in a shorter amount of time. What else will this mean? a flood of gems into the AH. For the non-jc'ers this might be a good thing since i can easily grab an inferno ruby from the AH at low low prices and have someone cut it for me for a small fee. But this will add to the already sinking JC market where yellow, green and orange gems are already hitting 10g and where Demonseyes are dirt cheap. The only contender still making us any gold? Inferno Rubies, which has dropped almost 50% in the last two weeks. Crazy influx of cheap Elementium FTL. Prices were down by almost 50% last week. So what does this mean for the gem market? people will begin to drop out. cut gems will be scarce again. Even the herbs and cloth and things will not be bought as much as we will buy gems with Justice points. What else would you do when you have all the heirloom gear you need and all the justice point gear you need? you buy gems to enchant your gear or sell for gold. right?
In any case, although Call to Arms may sound like an awesome change to the LFD tool, it will cause a lot of anger, stress and dissatisfaction with the game as we know it, hence the title, Bread and Circuses. Bliz is only trying to make things look good on the surface (shorten the queue times for DPS), essentially throwing bread at us and giving us entertainment. But we all know it will only make things worse. and look, we're already angry at ninjas, stressed at prissy tanks and dissatified with our non-sex lives as it is. lets not make it worse, yea? thanks bliz!
Friday, April 1, 2011
Another one gone.
There has been quite a few people packing up and leaving WoW or blogging lately. One of whom i enjoy reading often, Redhawks, has somehow hit it big (GRATS MAN!!!!). I'll be ordering my first CD via Amazon when his album lands. He's a rapper, aparently. I do enjoy meself some good rap. I just hope he doesnt kill any more classics while doing so!
But you know. this is April 1st..... =P
But you know. this is April 1st..... =P
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Practice in Oblivion
I just had to write a post today just to get this out of my system. Actually it is already out of my system, as many issues seem to fall off of me like water rolling off a duck's back. and i am writing this when i should be following up on a couple of closings and working on several reports actually say something--its not rolling off my back as it should. You guessed it, rant/story incoming!
Well me and my gf were out there gear-leveling our alts, me on my rogue and her on her DK. I barely had enough ilevel to enter heroics, 329 to be exact, as does she and we qued for our second or third heroic on those toons last night (the first we ever did on the rogue/dk set was throne of the tides with no other that i can recall of. so i am thinking this is our second heroic).
We sit for 30 minutes in queue, waiting, patiently. Actually i was trying to put together a computer fan, a box from ikea, a used USB cable, and make it into a cooling solution for my xbox. We were all a little occupied doing various things. Anyway, the queue pops and we get Deadmines. Back in the days we used to abbreviate it VC, for Van Cleef. but i am not sure if we're still using that term. Maybe DM, or Dire Maul fell off the face of the earth and no one mentions that as DM. DM. Anyway, lots of tangents today. sorry.
We zoned in and i checked out the three puggees. They were all from Sisters of Elune, tank had mainly tanking gear with some dps pieces (no no right there), healer had good gear but nothing fancy. spec looked OK but with no pain suppression? whaaa? oh and fury warrior was speced... fury, of course.
In we go, after the first readycheck (omg really?) we pulled the first ogre and his kobold. After the first pull i can tell we werent doing too well. Me and my gf were at 7k dps. pretty decent for entry level heroics, i thought. then i saw the warrior's dps at 3.2k. oh noes. But maybe he wasnt ready. plus, no one died. so off to the next pull and i jumped into the cannon. I shot everything up so the second pull, which included a whole bunch of kolbolds and an ogre was a farce. the cannon did all the work and the dps could have just stood there. that's fine. the next pull were the two ogres before the first boss. i couldnt sap so we pulled them together. take fell to about 15% health twice but recovered. healer went OOM. warrior did 3.4k dps! an increase, yay!
Then our first boss fight occured. again, me and my gf were doing about 6-7k dps while running around in circles, avoiding the fire wall and the electro-zones. actually i got caught in electro bomb zones several times because there was really no where else to go. I had to help the tank pick up adds with Tricks/FoK, which really really helped centralize damage. After about 20 seconds of fire wall, the warrior dies. then the healer. then the tank and everyone else. the tank asks what went wrong. no one replied. actually it was pretty obvious. healer died so we all died. duh, right? the 3.2k dps warrior could have just been dead since the start and it wouldnt have mattered.
Second attempt went better. Me and my gf both got the [Ready for Raiding] acheivement. i think a chestpiece dropped for me, which i was pretty happy about since it replaced a level 312 chest. we move on to trash. death happened when we pulled the two casters which i expected was bound to happen. but we rebounded because the second attempt had less mobs! on one pull, the healer died to a monkey. the tank died to the monkey too. then i realized what was happening and i clicked on the ball and chain to make the monkey turn friendly. after that, the tank made it an effort to make all the remaining monkeys friendly.
We get to the lumber room with the oaf/goblin and, of course, took two attempts. the first attempt was a little dull. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. we would have survived if the oaf didnt pick the healer to slam into the wall. besides that, the only real complaint i had was that no one picked up the goblin to attack. i guess it doesnt matter either way. but after the first wipe on him, the tank said hmmmm. and i replied with, "healer died in that attempt, if oaf picked someone else to ram into the wall, we would have been okay." the healer replied with "so blame the healer for everything". well, i call it like i see it. its nothing personal. anyway, i replied with basically instructions on how to do this well. "avoid the bombs, dps down the boss, switch to goblin when he jumps off, and if you're below 70% health when you get slammed in the wall, you die." the tank replies with "so you know everything about this fight". i took that as a snarky remark and said, "totally". no reply.
we went ahead and killed him this time. again, me and my gf were tops in dps. brand new heroic rats doing about 7k dps. and again, warrior was at 3.2k dps. tank was doing abotu 5k. healer was OOM.
We went on to wipe again. On trash. Once we got to the forge, it was it for me. we were there for a little over an hour and anything bullshit that anyone gave me will have me reply with less than pleasant words. We were at four wipes already, maybe more bc i could have lost count. but at least four. twice on boss and at least twice on trash.
We proceeded down the circular ramp towards the first reaver. The tank asked who wants to use the robot. i asked if anyone knows how (much better question, dont you think?). there was no reply. i asked my gf not to jump on the reaver, even though she has an idea of how to use it. i knew how to use it too, but i wanted the warrior, who was doing crap ass dps to get on the reaver. at least we'll maximize our potential that way. after a couple of minutes of just standing around, the warrior got the hint and jumped on the reaver. after we killed the enemy reaver, i would hop on to it to help out the fight before it self destructs. what i found out was amazing. the warrior stood with the tank, thereby receiving the cleave damage. by the time we got to the third reaver, the warrior's reaver bot died and he had to dps on foot. he also used steam jets or whatever that ability was to knock me back several times. i countered with a charge that stunned the enemy reaver. easy enough. after the last reaver died, the warrior got into his robot and the tank pulled Reaper.
Now things were going quite smoothly for the first 30 seconds of the fight. yes, it was bliss for that long. stay out of harvest, stay out of overdrive. easy. we did that. most of the fight was us running away with intervals of dps. this is how the fight should be. then from behind i get a slag attacking me, then i died. upon hitting my face with the keyboard, i saw several more slags moving up the ramp. good job warrior. We wipe, of course.
As i was zoning into the instance again, for the sixth time, the tank posts the dps meters. then says, i dont think we have enough dps for this fight. i was in disbelief that this guy could actually say that after we topped meters the entire fight. and his warrior buddy was on a reaver, so his dps didnt quite count. also, this is a heavy movement fight and dps is secondary to survival (a misnomer, since dps should ALWAYS be secondary to survival, but this fight exemplifies it). in any case, i replied with, "this is a two-dps fight". the tank replies with, "i know that but i dont think our dps is good enough". no shit. the dps cant dps with slags flowing in. in any case, i replied with something like this, "you're right, i do think you guys need to learn to play better before you queue for heroics again. peace out. "
then i left. my gf saw the rest of them leave so she left too. no one replied to me. no one could say much i guess.
in any case, why is this a problem? and why is my blog post title about another game? It is because the tank completely disregarded the fail of his teammates. as if, it was completely forgotten. of course, him and his friends could do no wrong and every little piece of failure that his team produced was lost to oblivion.
i dont know what planet these guys were from, but from the "dont blame me" attitude of the healer, to the snarky comments from the tank, to the utter disregard of incompetence from these three people or the ridiculously low dps from the fury dps warrior (you know the class that usually tops meters with their whirlwind?), i could not imagine the only response from the tank was that maybe the dps wasnt good enough for this fight.
No, the dps did suck. but it didnt suck because the rogue or the dk was doing bad dps, or that our total combined 15k dps (5k split between three people). the dps sucked because the warrior sucked donkey nuts. total was about 15k for all three dps. but the tank was doing 3k. we were doing 6k each. im sorry, but we can only carry so much fail. after a while it becomes a matter of, Gevlon told you so. and yes, im sitting there watching how M&S cannot figure out that maybe they are the problem and not the good players. It's people like these that make us wish we could play with our guildies more. at that time, it was 10pm PDT, or 1am EDT, so most of our guildies were sleeping.
Not once did i see a penance from the disc priest. not once did i see a prayer of mending fly around. very little will i see a PW:Shield come flying my way. I never saw a power word barrier, never saw hymn of hope, never saw inner focus, never saw a renew. the healer's major heals were greater heal and power word shield. no archangel either, tho he was specc'd into it.
The warrior was doing mainly auto-attacks (40% of damage) heroic strike and colossus smash. yep, that's it. maybe rend every once in a while and a thunder clap. but that's it.
The tank, on single bosses, hammer of the righteous (crusaderstrike, no?), little judgments, and very few shield of the righteous. add to that no inquisition. i cannot comment on whether he did use divine protection or ardent defender.
but how can a bunch of fail players get together and pretend like they're good without seeing that other people are doing amazingly better than them. yes, amazingly better compared to how they play. i mean if somoene was doing twice my damage, sometimes 3x my damage, wouldnt i want to know how he does it? maybe i can reproduce what he did next time around. that's how i see it. and how can i play a class and not take criticism? i mean the healer's response was basically, "yea blame the healer for everything." What's even more striking was that the tank would often say, "thats my fault" when it really wasnt his fault. it was the healer. i could come up with my own theories of why that is, but let me keep my theories to myself for now.
now i dont care if someone is bad as long as he is willing to listen to reason and learn from those who are doing better than him. five wipes before we get halfway into the instance is NOT good. and thinking that maybe its everyone else except for me is not "reason" or reasonable. perhaps it is you especially if the dps arent being stupid. maybe its you. or maybe its one of you. stop defending your failed friends. protecting them will not make them better. pretending that they are great players will only make them great players in their own world. but in a world where people are playing with each other, there is a matter of truth that must be accepted by all. you cant relegate all oberservations that's critical to you or your friends to oblivion. thus, i will not relegate your actions to mere disregard. i will regard your actions, your playstyle, your abilities and your replies to me. i will not pretend you guys dont suck. and i didnt. please do the same to your friends. you're only fooling yourselves and eventually, it will cause headaches for those unfortunate to party with you. i should have put you on ignore when i had the chance. too late now as i forgot all of their names. i only know them as the idiots from Sisters of Elune.
to you, poor souls, i pity you.
Well me and my gf were out there gear-leveling our alts, me on my rogue and her on her DK. I barely had enough ilevel to enter heroics, 329 to be exact, as does she and we qued for our second or third heroic on those toons last night (the first we ever did on the rogue/dk set was throne of the tides with no other that i can recall of. so i am thinking this is our second heroic).
We sit for 30 minutes in queue, waiting, patiently. Actually i was trying to put together a computer fan, a box from ikea, a used USB cable, and make it into a cooling solution for my xbox. We were all a little occupied doing various things. Anyway, the queue pops and we get Deadmines. Back in the days we used to abbreviate it VC, for Van Cleef. but i am not sure if we're still using that term. Maybe DM, or Dire Maul fell off the face of the earth and no one mentions that as DM. DM. Anyway, lots of tangents today. sorry.
We zoned in and i checked out the three puggees. They were all from Sisters of Elune, tank had mainly tanking gear with some dps pieces (no no right there), healer had good gear but nothing fancy. spec looked OK but with no pain suppression? whaaa? oh and fury warrior was speced... fury, of course.
In we go, after the first readycheck (omg really?) we pulled the first ogre and his kobold. After the first pull i can tell we werent doing too well. Me and my gf were at 7k dps. pretty decent for entry level heroics, i thought. then i saw the warrior's dps at 3.2k. oh noes. But maybe he wasnt ready. plus, no one died. so off to the next pull and i jumped into the cannon. I shot everything up so the second pull, which included a whole bunch of kolbolds and an ogre was a farce. the cannon did all the work and the dps could have just stood there. that's fine. the next pull were the two ogres before the first boss. i couldnt sap so we pulled them together. take fell to about 15% health twice but recovered. healer went OOM. warrior did 3.4k dps! an increase, yay!
Then our first boss fight occured. again, me and my gf were doing about 6-7k dps while running around in circles, avoiding the fire wall and the electro-zones. actually i got caught in electro bomb zones several times because there was really no where else to go. I had to help the tank pick up adds with Tricks/FoK, which really really helped centralize damage. After about 20 seconds of fire wall, the warrior dies. then the healer. then the tank and everyone else. the tank asks what went wrong. no one replied. actually it was pretty obvious. healer died so we all died. duh, right? the 3.2k dps warrior could have just been dead since the start and it wouldnt have mattered.
Second attempt went better. Me and my gf both got the [Ready for Raiding] acheivement. i think a chestpiece dropped for me, which i was pretty happy about since it replaced a level 312 chest. we move on to trash. death happened when we pulled the two casters which i expected was bound to happen. but we rebounded because the second attempt had less mobs! on one pull, the healer died to a monkey. the tank died to the monkey too. then i realized what was happening and i clicked on the ball and chain to make the monkey turn friendly. after that, the tank made it an effort to make all the remaining monkeys friendly.
We get to the lumber room with the oaf/goblin and, of course, took two attempts. the first attempt was a little dull. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. we would have survived if the oaf didnt pick the healer to slam into the wall. besides that, the only real complaint i had was that no one picked up the goblin to attack. i guess it doesnt matter either way. but after the first wipe on him, the tank said hmmmm. and i replied with, "healer died in that attempt, if oaf picked someone else to ram into the wall, we would have been okay." the healer replied with "so blame the healer for everything". well, i call it like i see it. its nothing personal. anyway, i replied with basically instructions on how to do this well. "avoid the bombs, dps down the boss, switch to goblin when he jumps off, and if you're below 70% health when you get slammed in the wall, you die." the tank replies with "so you know everything about this fight". i took that as a snarky remark and said, "totally". no reply.
we went ahead and killed him this time. again, me and my gf were tops in dps. brand new heroic rats doing about 7k dps. and again, warrior was at 3.2k dps. tank was doing abotu 5k. healer was OOM.
We went on to wipe again. On trash. Once we got to the forge, it was it for me. we were there for a little over an hour and anything bullshit that anyone gave me will have me reply with less than pleasant words. We were at four wipes already, maybe more bc i could have lost count. but at least four. twice on boss and at least twice on trash.
We proceeded down the circular ramp towards the first reaver. The tank asked who wants to use the robot. i asked if anyone knows how (much better question, dont you think?). there was no reply. i asked my gf not to jump on the reaver, even though she has an idea of how to use it. i knew how to use it too, but i wanted the warrior, who was doing crap ass dps to get on the reaver. at least we'll maximize our potential that way. after a couple of minutes of just standing around, the warrior got the hint and jumped on the reaver. after we killed the enemy reaver, i would hop on to it to help out the fight before it self destructs. what i found out was amazing. the warrior stood with the tank, thereby receiving the cleave damage. by the time we got to the third reaver, the warrior's reaver bot died and he had to dps on foot. he also used steam jets or whatever that ability was to knock me back several times. i countered with a charge that stunned the enemy reaver. easy enough. after the last reaver died, the warrior got into his robot and the tank pulled Reaper.
Now things were going quite smoothly for the first 30 seconds of the fight. yes, it was bliss for that long. stay out of harvest, stay out of overdrive. easy. we did that. most of the fight was us running away with intervals of dps. this is how the fight should be. then from behind i get a slag attacking me, then i died. upon hitting my face with the keyboard, i saw several more slags moving up the ramp. good job warrior. We wipe, of course.
As i was zoning into the instance again, for the sixth time, the tank posts the dps meters. then says, i dont think we have enough dps for this fight. i was in disbelief that this guy could actually say that after we topped meters the entire fight. and his warrior buddy was on a reaver, so his dps didnt quite count. also, this is a heavy movement fight and dps is secondary to survival (a misnomer, since dps should ALWAYS be secondary to survival, but this fight exemplifies it). in any case, i replied with, "this is a two-dps fight". the tank replies with, "i know that but i dont think our dps is good enough". no shit. the dps cant dps with slags flowing in. in any case, i replied with something like this, "you're right, i do think you guys need to learn to play better before you queue for heroics again. peace out. "
then i left. my gf saw the rest of them leave so she left too. no one replied to me. no one could say much i guess.
in any case, why is this a problem? and why is my blog post title about another game? It is because the tank completely disregarded the fail of his teammates. as if, it was completely forgotten. of course, him and his friends could do no wrong and every little piece of failure that his team produced was lost to oblivion.
i dont know what planet these guys were from, but from the "dont blame me" attitude of the healer, to the snarky comments from the tank, to the utter disregard of incompetence from these three people or the ridiculously low dps from the fury dps warrior (you know the class that usually tops meters with their whirlwind?), i could not imagine the only response from the tank was that maybe the dps wasnt good enough for this fight.
No, the dps did suck. but it didnt suck because the rogue or the dk was doing bad dps, or that our total combined 15k dps (5k split between three people). the dps sucked because the warrior sucked donkey nuts. total was about 15k for all three dps. but the tank was doing 3k. we were doing 6k each. im sorry, but we can only carry so much fail. after a while it becomes a matter of, Gevlon told you so. and yes, im sitting there watching how M&S cannot figure out that maybe they are the problem and not the good players. It's people like these that make us wish we could play with our guildies more. at that time, it was 10pm PDT, or 1am EDT, so most of our guildies were sleeping.
Not once did i see a penance from the disc priest. not once did i see a prayer of mending fly around. very little will i see a PW:Shield come flying my way. I never saw a power word barrier, never saw hymn of hope, never saw inner focus, never saw a renew. the healer's major heals were greater heal and power word shield. no archangel either, tho he was specc'd into it.
The warrior was doing mainly auto-attacks (40% of damage) heroic strike and colossus smash. yep, that's it. maybe rend every once in a while and a thunder clap. but that's it.
The tank, on single bosses, hammer of the righteous (crusaderstrike, no?), little judgments, and very few shield of the righteous. add to that no inquisition. i cannot comment on whether he did use divine protection or ardent defender.
but how can a bunch of fail players get together and pretend like they're good without seeing that other people are doing amazingly better than them. yes, amazingly better compared to how they play. i mean if somoene was doing twice my damage, sometimes 3x my damage, wouldnt i want to know how he does it? maybe i can reproduce what he did next time around. that's how i see it. and how can i play a class and not take criticism? i mean the healer's response was basically, "yea blame the healer for everything." What's even more striking was that the tank would often say, "thats my fault" when it really wasnt his fault. it was the healer. i could come up with my own theories of why that is, but let me keep my theories to myself for now.
now i dont care if someone is bad as long as he is willing to listen to reason and learn from those who are doing better than him. five wipes before we get halfway into the instance is NOT good. and thinking that maybe its everyone else except for me is not "reason" or reasonable. perhaps it is you especially if the dps arent being stupid. maybe its you. or maybe its one of you. stop defending your failed friends. protecting them will not make them better. pretending that they are great players will only make them great players in their own world. but in a world where people are playing with each other, there is a matter of truth that must be accepted by all. you cant relegate all oberservations that's critical to you or your friends to oblivion. thus, i will not relegate your actions to mere disregard. i will regard your actions, your playstyle, your abilities and your replies to me. i will not pretend you guys dont suck. and i didnt. please do the same to your friends. you're only fooling yourselves and eventually, it will cause headaches for those unfortunate to party with you. i should have put you on ignore when i had the chance. too late now as i forgot all of their names. i only know them as the idiots from Sisters of Elune.
to you, poor souls, i pity you.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Learning the Combat portion of a Rogue
With the last post out of the way, i can finally get into the little nitty gritty on playing my rogue. This is not a guide, nor is it a primer of any sort on helping anyone learn the rogue class. this is just my experience so please, if you think im doing this wrong, please say something. =D
My initial experiences with rogues are that they are sneaky, elusive, and most of all, annoying. Ever level through Ashenvale, running from questgiver to objectives, only to be interrupted by a rogue who's bored? Ever read local defense and see that Cross Roads is under attack? its usually a rogue. Ever run around tarren mill, turning in quests and finding out that a rogue is having a great time sapping people? Ever enter a cave full of ogres and fighting through the ogres just to get to that one Khorium deposit but having it ninja'd by a rogue as you fight the mob guarding the node? Not too many good experiences with rogues i tell you.
But as i leveled my rogue, i find that they offer a pretty niche type of gameplay. The energy and combo point system makes playing a rogue a lot more complex while questing and significantly while in dungeons. The combo point system allows me to save up combo points for stronger finishers. The mob's health, their numbers, even their spell selections will determine which finishers i will have to use. Not only that, but the energy system is the only system in the game where timing is absolutely necessary. Spamming attacks isnt the rogue way. And rightly so, it shouldnt be since the whole character of being a rogue involves planning, timing and finesse. Button smashing might not be the best form of play. That is, unless you're playing shinobi.
Everyone knows the basics of a rogue. or at least i believe everyone does.
Energy: Rogues use energy to attack. Energy is used up when performing attacks. Energy replenishes at a certain rate. Missed attacks can refund a % of energy back.
Combo points: Rogues have two basic categories of attacks. One to produce combo points and the other to spend combo points. Both use up energy. Missed attacks can refund a % of energy back. Ideally, rogues will want to maximize their combo points (being 5) before using a finisher. Each finisher has its own effect (some do instant damage, others do damge over time, others make the target more vulnerable to melee damage, and still others cause your own attacks to speed up.
The basic combo point maker for Combat: Sinister Strike (SS) and Revealing Strike (RvS).
Sinister strike is your bread and butter attack. I use this attack more than any other attack. Revealing strikes are tossed in between, at least once per 5 point stack prior to an Eviscerate or Rupture. Revealing strikes will not do anything for Slice and Dice so using it before slice and dice is not essential. Although, if you use it as your 5th combo point move before slice and dice, revealing strikes will still be up since it has a 15 second duration. It basically buffs your finisher by 30%, so use once before you Evis or Rupt. Using it twice will do nothing but add another combo point (which SS can do) and reset the cooldown for Revealing Strike buff to 15 seconds. The 30% incraesed bonus to finishing moves does not change.
The basic finishers for Combat: Slice and Dice (SnD), Rupture and Eviscerate.
Slice and dice cases you to attack faster. use this first and always try to keep it active. some rogues start off with a 1-point SnD, which gives them a good 30 seconds or so. 5 points will give you 40 seconds of SnD. go with 1 point SnD. it ends up pretty easy to maintain.
Rupture causes a bleed on the target for a certain amount of time. the time is fixed, but the damage is different based on the number of combo points. with revealing strikes buff, it also ticks for more. Use this on bosses, or on long lasting mobs. there is no other benefit for this spell besides that you can keep doing damage while you're running around avoiding fires.
Eviscerate is often preferred over Rupture. The point is that many fights will have phases that take the boss out of the fight (basically immune) while we take care of adds, fires, dance, whatevers. in these instances, just Evis instead of Rupt. Getting all the damage at once may be more beneficial than going for a DoT that may not be allowed to last its whole duration.
The special finishers for Combat: Expose Armor, Recuperate, Kidney shot.
Expose armor is one of these spells that many other classes can do better. Plus, its only useful for physical damaging dps that having one magic dps in the mix will make this ability pretty much useless. you'll get more benefit if you just evis. Other classes can do it better because they dont have to waste too much of their resources to place this debuff on. Overall, this ability is very situational and almost never used.
Recuperate helps a lot when in high damage fights. Although you'll miss out on a finisher, it does make it easier for your healers to heal you. Finally, Kidney shot is one of those spells which i love to use on casters, especially the healing type casters. Open with cheapshot. When they come to and cast a heal, i kick. Then they cast another heal, i can blind. then i can kidney shot and basically finish them off. its not a stun "lock", as it was before, but it does keep the mob incapacitated long enough so that dps can kill him off.
Cooldowns for Combat: The two major offensive cooldowns for combat are Killing Spree (KS) and Adrenaline Rush (AR).
These two abilities are my two favorite reasons to go combat. It took me several levels of practicing and playing around to really figure out how these buffs work. but when i finally got them to work well, they became the "candy" to this whole fighting system.
Killing Spree causes me to jump from one mob to another (if one mob, then it just jumps five times to the same mob) doing pretty good damage. It seems to last about 3 seconds, but in those 3 seconds, it is amazing. added bonus to this is that the auto-attacks are still going. True, you might only get 3 auto-attacks off, even with slice and dice on, it doesnt change the outcome--dps boost. Of course, being that auto-attacks still goes off while KS is up, it makes it doubly fun to time it just right (ie. during slice and dice, while my energy is zero. Also, KS also works with Blade Flurry, so if there are two or more mobs in the fight, KS will also hit adjacent mobs, as well as the sped up auto attacks. So like i said, its candy.
As for adrenaline rush, this spell speeds up my energy regen, thus allowing for more SS, RvS, Evis, etc. during its duration. Much like Killing Spree, time it after SnD and when your energy is low (you dont want to be energy capped). You can use these two cooldowns back-to-back. It might not be as effective together, as KS will not produce combo points and the time you're jumping around through the shadows, you may end up being energy capped.
Utilities for Combat: Other utilities are Tricks of the Trade, Shiv, Feint, blind, Evasion, Cloak of Shadows and Vanish.
I suppose Recuperate can be utility but do keep in mind that it does require combo points.
Tricks of the Trade, or Tricks, or TotT is used prior or during a pull to redirect threat to someone else, usually the tank. Not only does it redirect threat, it also gives the target an increase in dps. this can be utilized several ways, but the most important way is to Tricks the tank. Upon tricksing the tank, the rogue will basically pull for the tank, or pull a stray mob to the tank. This is almost identical to the Hunter's Misdirect, where they use misdirect to pull for the tank. The second area where this is useful is during fights where you want to buff the main dps. Sure putting tricks on the tank will buff his 5k dps. but tricksing the hunter who's doing 10k dps will ultimately produce twice the damage from Tricks than the tank. Finally, two rogues can simply Tricks each other to give each other a damage buff. since the tricks is on each other, the threat transfer is almost transparent.
Shiv removes enrage. Shiv also adds poisons instantly and cannot be dodged. Although this ability does add combo points, i did not include this as a combo point ability. We use this ability more for the two reasons stated above--the combo point is an added bonus. One more thing to add about instantly applying poisons, this ability costs less the faster your offhand dagger is. so in a pinch, if you're seeing 5 stacks of your poisons about to expire, this ability may be preferred over waiting and gambling on your next offhand attack (or Main Gauche) to hit.
Feint is awesome. Say it with me, Feint is awesome! It reduces a lot of the AoE damage, 50% to be exact, that can cause a lot of fail and healer stress. This ability not only reduces your threat it increases your healer's love towards you. Please use it often to avoid those nasty AoEs, especially on boss fights where tanks dont know how to move mobs out of dark fissures, etc.
Blind is basically a stun for 10 seconds. Also interrupts casting. Kick is on CD? blind. Mobs is running for the healer and your Tricks is on CD? blind. Similar to a hunter's scattershot. We have a lot of similarities, dontchaknow?
Evasion, cloak of shadows, vanish.... they all have their uses. Evasion is useful when you grab aggro, or have to grab aggro for a while. Cloak of shadows will remove harmful debuffs (slows, poisons, dots) and Vanish will allow you to stealth immediately, even in combat. When you do have some kind of debuff on you, like say, a disease or faerie fire, use cloak of shadows first, then vanish. the disease ticks will break your stealth if you dont remove it first (you can tell i want to end this post already since this section is so short!!).
Blade Flurry: An ability that allows you to hit two targets instead of one but in return your energy regeneration slows. the ability can be glyphed so that energy regen doesnt take as big a hit, which is often a must if you're doing dungeons. for raids where much of the damage is to a single boss at a time, blade flurry may be useless. in any event, it is up to the player to decide whether blade flurry should be used, assuming more dps is always better, even on trash, or left out altogether. if you use blade flurry often, do consider glyphing. Blade flurry also works with Killing Spree. The reason this ability is set aside and mentioned on its own is because this is spell does not fall into any of the above categories. It's just an ability any rogue can turn on or off and any time really. in dungeons, i have this on after my first slice and dice. then i turn it off when there is only one mob remaining, or when there are two mobs who are not standing right next to each other. in these situations, the cleave effect will be wasted. (Cleave effect = hitting two or more players at once with a single hit or cleave or swipe). Overall, this is a very handy ability. Remember to tricks often, as the cleave can cause unwanted aggro.
Other tricks, tips, or corrections? please comment so i can improve. I've only played combat for the past 10 levels, but during those 10 levels i've actually figured several things already mentioned above. To summarize, i cant spam attacks. there is a basic category of spells but what makes rogues particulary fun to play are the utility spells, timing of cooldowns and weaving of differnt combinations and abilities. This is the major reason why i enjoy the rogue. my favorite classes are usually melee classes with the occasional healer (of course, druid healing preferred), so finding another fun melee class to play is motivational indeed. the only other melee class i think i still havent played is the enhancement shaman. one day i hope to write about it as well!
Note: not all spells and abilities are mentioned. either i havent found a reason to use them or they do not apply. If there are other abilities that i should also consider, or if the abilities i've mentioned can be expanded on, please comment. thanks!
My initial experiences with rogues are that they are sneaky, elusive, and most of all, annoying. Ever level through Ashenvale, running from questgiver to objectives, only to be interrupted by a rogue who's bored? Ever read local defense and see that Cross Roads is under attack? its usually a rogue. Ever run around tarren mill, turning in quests and finding out that a rogue is having a great time sapping people? Ever enter a cave full of ogres and fighting through the ogres just to get to that one Khorium deposit but having it ninja'd by a rogue as you fight the mob guarding the node? Not too many good experiences with rogues i tell you.
But as i leveled my rogue, i find that they offer a pretty niche type of gameplay. The energy and combo point system makes playing a rogue a lot more complex while questing and significantly while in dungeons. The combo point system allows me to save up combo points for stronger finishers. The mob's health, their numbers, even their spell selections will determine which finishers i will have to use. Not only that, but the energy system is the only system in the game where timing is absolutely necessary. Spamming attacks isnt the rogue way. And rightly so, it shouldnt be since the whole character of being a rogue involves planning, timing and finesse. Button smashing might not be the best form of play. That is, unless you're playing shinobi.
Everyone knows the basics of a rogue. or at least i believe everyone does.
Energy: Rogues use energy to attack. Energy is used up when performing attacks. Energy replenishes at a certain rate. Missed attacks can refund a % of energy back.
Combo points: Rogues have two basic categories of attacks. One to produce combo points and the other to spend combo points. Both use up energy. Missed attacks can refund a % of energy back. Ideally, rogues will want to maximize their combo points (being 5) before using a finisher. Each finisher has its own effect (some do instant damage, others do damge over time, others make the target more vulnerable to melee damage, and still others cause your own attacks to speed up.
The basic combo point maker for Combat: Sinister Strike (SS) and Revealing Strike (RvS).
Sinister strike is your bread and butter attack. I use this attack more than any other attack. Revealing strikes are tossed in between, at least once per 5 point stack prior to an Eviscerate or Rupture. Revealing strikes will not do anything for Slice and Dice so using it before slice and dice is not essential. Although, if you use it as your 5th combo point move before slice and dice, revealing strikes will still be up since it has a 15 second duration. It basically buffs your finisher by 30%, so use once before you Evis or Rupt. Using it twice will do nothing but add another combo point (which SS can do) and reset the cooldown for Revealing Strike buff to 15 seconds. The 30% incraesed bonus to finishing moves does not change.
The basic finishers for Combat: Slice and Dice (SnD), Rupture and Eviscerate.
Slice and dice cases you to attack faster. use this first and always try to keep it active. some rogues start off with a 1-point SnD, which gives them a good 30 seconds or so. 5 points will give you 40 seconds of SnD. go with 1 point SnD. it ends up pretty easy to maintain.
Rupture causes a bleed on the target for a certain amount of time. the time is fixed, but the damage is different based on the number of combo points. with revealing strikes buff, it also ticks for more. Use this on bosses, or on long lasting mobs. there is no other benefit for this spell besides that you can keep doing damage while you're running around avoiding fires.
Eviscerate is often preferred over Rupture. The point is that many fights will have phases that take the boss out of the fight (basically immune) while we take care of adds, fires, dance, whatevers. in these instances, just Evis instead of Rupt. Getting all the damage at once may be more beneficial than going for a DoT that may not be allowed to last its whole duration.
The special finishers for Combat: Expose Armor, Recuperate, Kidney shot.
Expose armor is one of these spells that many other classes can do better. Plus, its only useful for physical damaging dps that having one magic dps in the mix will make this ability pretty much useless. you'll get more benefit if you just evis. Other classes can do it better because they dont have to waste too much of their resources to place this debuff on. Overall, this ability is very situational and almost never used.
Recuperate helps a lot when in high damage fights. Although you'll miss out on a finisher, it does make it easier for your healers to heal you. Finally, Kidney shot is one of those spells which i love to use on casters, especially the healing type casters. Open with cheapshot. When they come to and cast a heal, i kick. Then they cast another heal, i can blind. then i can kidney shot and basically finish them off. its not a stun "lock", as it was before, but it does keep the mob incapacitated long enough so that dps can kill him off.
Cooldowns for Combat: The two major offensive cooldowns for combat are Killing Spree (KS) and Adrenaline Rush (AR).
These two abilities are my two favorite reasons to go combat. It took me several levels of practicing and playing around to really figure out how these buffs work. but when i finally got them to work well, they became the "candy" to this whole fighting system.
Killing Spree causes me to jump from one mob to another (if one mob, then it just jumps five times to the same mob) doing pretty good damage. It seems to last about 3 seconds, but in those 3 seconds, it is amazing. added bonus to this is that the auto-attacks are still going. True, you might only get 3 auto-attacks off, even with slice and dice on, it doesnt change the outcome--dps boost. Of course, being that auto-attacks still goes off while KS is up, it makes it doubly fun to time it just right (ie. during slice and dice, while my energy is zero. Also, KS also works with Blade Flurry, so if there are two or more mobs in the fight, KS will also hit adjacent mobs, as well as the sped up auto attacks. So like i said, its candy.
As for adrenaline rush, this spell speeds up my energy regen, thus allowing for more SS, RvS, Evis, etc. during its duration. Much like Killing Spree, time it after SnD and when your energy is low (you dont want to be energy capped). You can use these two cooldowns back-to-back. It might not be as effective together, as KS will not produce combo points and the time you're jumping around through the shadows, you may end up being energy capped.
Utilities for Combat: Other utilities are Tricks of the Trade, Shiv, Feint, blind, Evasion, Cloak of Shadows and Vanish.
I suppose Recuperate can be utility but do keep in mind that it does require combo points.
Tricks of the Trade, or Tricks, or TotT is used prior or during a pull to redirect threat to someone else, usually the tank. Not only does it redirect threat, it also gives the target an increase in dps. this can be utilized several ways, but the most important way is to Tricks the tank. Upon tricksing the tank, the rogue will basically pull for the tank, or pull a stray mob to the tank. This is almost identical to the Hunter's Misdirect, where they use misdirect to pull for the tank. The second area where this is useful is during fights where you want to buff the main dps. Sure putting tricks on the tank will buff his 5k dps. but tricksing the hunter who's doing 10k dps will ultimately produce twice the damage from Tricks than the tank. Finally, two rogues can simply Tricks each other to give each other a damage buff. since the tricks is on each other, the threat transfer is almost transparent.
Shiv removes enrage. Shiv also adds poisons instantly and cannot be dodged. Although this ability does add combo points, i did not include this as a combo point ability. We use this ability more for the two reasons stated above--the combo point is an added bonus. One more thing to add about instantly applying poisons, this ability costs less the faster your offhand dagger is. so in a pinch, if you're seeing 5 stacks of your poisons about to expire, this ability may be preferred over waiting and gambling on your next offhand attack (or Main Gauche) to hit.
Feint is awesome. Say it with me, Feint is awesome! It reduces a lot of the AoE damage, 50% to be exact, that can cause a lot of fail and healer stress. This ability not only reduces your threat it increases your healer's love towards you. Please use it often to avoid those nasty AoEs, especially on boss fights where tanks dont know how to move mobs out of dark fissures, etc.
Blind is basically a stun for 10 seconds. Also interrupts casting. Kick is on CD? blind. Mobs is running for the healer and your Tricks is on CD? blind. Similar to a hunter's scattershot. We have a lot of similarities, dontchaknow?
Evasion, cloak of shadows, vanish.... they all have their uses. Evasion is useful when you grab aggro, or have to grab aggro for a while. Cloak of shadows will remove harmful debuffs (slows, poisons, dots) and Vanish will allow you to stealth immediately, even in combat. When you do have some kind of debuff on you, like say, a disease or faerie fire, use cloak of shadows first, then vanish. the disease ticks will break your stealth if you dont remove it first (you can tell i want to end this post already since this section is so short!!).
Blade Flurry: An ability that allows you to hit two targets instead of one but in return your energy regeneration slows. the ability can be glyphed so that energy regen doesnt take as big a hit, which is often a must if you're doing dungeons. for raids where much of the damage is to a single boss at a time, blade flurry may be useless. in any event, it is up to the player to decide whether blade flurry should be used, assuming more dps is always better, even on trash, or left out altogether. if you use blade flurry often, do consider glyphing. Blade flurry also works with Killing Spree. The reason this ability is set aside and mentioned on its own is because this is spell does not fall into any of the above categories. It's just an ability any rogue can turn on or off and any time really. in dungeons, i have this on after my first slice and dice. then i turn it off when there is only one mob remaining, or when there are two mobs who are not standing right next to each other. in these situations, the cleave effect will be wasted. (Cleave effect = hitting two or more players at once with a single hit or cleave or swipe). Overall, this is a very handy ability. Remember to tricks often, as the cleave can cause unwanted aggro.
Other tricks, tips, or corrections? please comment so i can improve. I've only played combat for the past 10 levels, but during those 10 levels i've actually figured several things already mentioned above. To summarize, i cant spam attacks. there is a basic category of spells but what makes rogues particulary fun to play are the utility spells, timing of cooldowns and weaving of differnt combinations and abilities. This is the major reason why i enjoy the rogue. my favorite classes are usually melee classes with the occasional healer (of course, druid healing preferred), so finding another fun melee class to play is motivational indeed. the only other melee class i think i still havent played is the enhancement shaman. one day i hope to write about it as well!
Note: not all spells and abilities are mentioned. either i havent found a reason to use them or they do not apply. If there are other abilities that i should also consider, or if the abilities i've mentioned can be expanded on, please comment. thanks!
The Rogue Experiment
I have a rogue. His name is Bruno (post character re-customization). He's been leveling on and off for the past several years. Although i've never really taken any sustained interest in playing a rogue, i find that since i've leveled up through Northrend and now in Cata stages, i've begun to actually like my rogue more and more.
Perhaps the problem, in the beginning, is that i had a druid who leveled as Feral and about 80% of the rogue's major attacks and fight mechanics are copied directly on to the feral druid "cat" form style of play. From openers to finishing moves, to even combo point makers, they all seem so very similar. For example, Hemmorage = mangle, backstab = ravage, sinister strike = claw, maim = kidney shot, etc. After levels and levels of playing a rogue, it felt almost the same as leveling a feral druid. And i've told myself many times that i would probably never want to level a feral druid again.
Maybe the problem wasnt just the similarities these two classes/specs have, but also the differences make playing a rogue seem a little limiting to me. For one, as a druid i can simply switch into bear form and tank should a pull go bad. As a rogue, my only option is really to blind one, then switch back. When the blind wears off, its time to evasion aura. If things go really bad, i can vanish and start over. Now after the fight, my druid will heal, stealth and move on to the next mob almost seamlessly. With the rogue, i'll sit there eating or waiting for my health to replenish. Simple differences like that does make a difference when deciding what's more "fun" to play. Back then, i was unhappy with the way rogues cannot heal themselves apart from bandages and how they always have to remember to coat their daggers with poisons. Also the complexity of weapon choices with different specs also turned me off a little regarding this class. With a feral druid, pretty much any weapon is good, with the added bonus that you will never have to learn that weapon skill. of course, weapon skill is now built into your level and makes it easier to switch between swords, maces and daggers for rogues.
Now i dont want to make this post about Feral Druid Cats vs. Rogues of all Specs, but a background needs to be included somewhere. When Wrath of the Lich King hit, i went from feral dps to feral bear tank and never looked back at feral dps. in fact, i tried dpsing once or twice again and never enjoyed it. So there you have it. For the longest time, i have always felt that i am playing the rogue class with some limitations and would be better off playing feral dps. then, since i've already played feral dps, i never really cared to level up a melee dps class that relied on energy again. Well now im sitting here writing about energy-bassed rogue dps.
Actual Rogue-related Stuff
In any case, it has been an experience trying to get used to the rogue class. I leveled several months ago from 60-70 and found that Subtlety was quite simple and boring. I had to attack from behind constantly and realized that 50% of my damage comes from the first 5 seconds of play. The remaining damage just trickles resulting in a DPS in the first 5 seconds of 5k, then after a 15-20 second fight, it goes down to less than 1k. Sad huh? that's what i thought. I was a little dismayed but i figued i could work this to my own advantage. In outland dungeon fights where im stacked with delicate bloodstones, fights last 10 seconds max. and even boss fights dont last too long either. I was satisfied with 1k dps at level 65 anyway since most dps classes barely get to break the 1k
Enter northrend and things changed a little. Mobs have more health so fights last a little longer. Thats good and bad. Although it does favor the rogue in terms of dps in longer fights, it doesnt favor a subtlety rogue, who's usually great at opening damage but fails at sustained damage in the long run. So after several dungeons between 69 and 72, i was resigned to doing lowest dps in all dungeon fights. This did lead to days of non-play on my rogue and eventually, loss of play completely.
Then one day, my gf decides to level up a death knight and i leveled with her when she hit 70. The experience was relatively the same so i decided to switch specs and grab different weapons. Although i knew that Sub wasnt ideal for dungeon play, i really liked the idea of shadowstep. Keeping hemmorage up to buff rupture was simply familiar to me when i was playing a feral druid. Playing combat simplified things a little. one, i had no "buff" to maintain besides slice and dice, and two, i never really had to stealth. =D
As a combat rogue, my main concern was to activate slice and dice, rupture if the fight will be long, otherwise, eviscerate. my combo maker is sinister strike, which can be used from any direction (further simplification). Now there are a few items that are tossed into this spec that acually makes it different from Sub. I have two cooldowns to play with and one toggle-able ability that allows me to cleave. And those are the difference. But those differences make leveling a rogue so awesome this time around.
Bruno is now level 82 and working on leveling through vashjir. He basically sat in LFD queue for the first level and a half since hitting level 80.
Perhaps the problem, in the beginning, is that i had a druid who leveled as Feral and about 80% of the rogue's major attacks and fight mechanics are copied directly on to the feral druid "cat" form style of play. From openers to finishing moves, to even combo point makers, they all seem so very similar. For example, Hemmorage = mangle, backstab = ravage, sinister strike = claw, maim = kidney shot, etc. After levels and levels of playing a rogue, it felt almost the same as leveling a feral druid. And i've told myself many times that i would probably never want to level a feral druid again.
Maybe the problem wasnt just the similarities these two classes/specs have, but also the differences make playing a rogue seem a little limiting to me. For one, as a druid i can simply switch into bear form and tank should a pull go bad. As a rogue, my only option is really to blind one, then switch back. When the blind wears off, its time to evasion aura. If things go really bad, i can vanish and start over. Now after the fight, my druid will heal, stealth and move on to the next mob almost seamlessly. With the rogue, i'll sit there eating or waiting for my health to replenish. Simple differences like that does make a difference when deciding what's more "fun" to play. Back then, i was unhappy with the way rogues cannot heal themselves apart from bandages and how they always have to remember to coat their daggers with poisons. Also the complexity of weapon choices with different specs also turned me off a little regarding this class. With a feral druid, pretty much any weapon is good, with the added bonus that you will never have to learn that weapon skill. of course, weapon skill is now built into your level and makes it easier to switch between swords, maces and daggers for rogues.
Now i dont want to make this post about Feral Druid Cats vs. Rogues of all Specs, but a background needs to be included somewhere. When Wrath of the Lich King hit, i went from feral dps to feral bear tank and never looked back at feral dps. in fact, i tried dpsing once or twice again and never enjoyed it. So there you have it. For the longest time, i have always felt that i am playing the rogue class with some limitations and would be better off playing feral dps. then, since i've already played feral dps, i never really cared to level up a melee dps class that relied on energy again. Well now im sitting here writing about energy-bassed rogue dps.
Actual Rogue-related Stuff
In any case, it has been an experience trying to get used to the rogue class. I leveled several months ago from 60-70 and found that Subtlety was quite simple and boring. I had to attack from behind constantly and realized that 50% of my damage comes from the first 5 seconds of play. The remaining damage just trickles resulting in a DPS in the first 5 seconds of 5k, then after a 15-20 second fight, it goes down to less than 1k. Sad huh? that's what i thought. I was a little dismayed but i figued i could work this to my own advantage. In outland dungeon fights where im stacked with delicate bloodstones, fights last 10 seconds max. and even boss fights dont last too long either. I was satisfied with 1k dps at level 65 anyway since most dps classes barely get to break the 1k
Enter northrend and things changed a little. Mobs have more health so fights last a little longer. Thats good and bad. Although it does favor the rogue in terms of dps in longer fights, it doesnt favor a subtlety rogue, who's usually great at opening damage but fails at sustained damage in the long run. So after several dungeons between 69 and 72, i was resigned to doing lowest dps in all dungeon fights. This did lead to days of non-play on my rogue and eventually, loss of play completely.
Then one day, my gf decides to level up a death knight and i leveled with her when she hit 70. The experience was relatively the same so i decided to switch specs and grab different weapons. Although i knew that Sub wasnt ideal for dungeon play, i really liked the idea of shadowstep. Keeping hemmorage up to buff rupture was simply familiar to me when i was playing a feral druid. Playing combat simplified things a little. one, i had no "buff" to maintain besides slice and dice, and two, i never really had to stealth. =D
As a combat rogue, my main concern was to activate slice and dice, rupture if the fight will be long, otherwise, eviscerate. my combo maker is sinister strike, which can be used from any direction (further simplification). Now there are a few items that are tossed into this spec that acually makes it different from Sub. I have two cooldowns to play with and one toggle-able ability that allows me to cleave. And those are the difference. But those differences make leveling a rogue so awesome this time around.
Bruno is now level 82 and working on leveling through vashjir. He basically sat in LFD queue for the first level and a half since hitting level 80.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Still Here
First I'd like to apologize for my absence. I've actually been really unmotivated to write lately. I've also been working a lot more at work than usual. And when i do have the few minutes to write, nothing comes to mind. Call it what you will, bloggers' block, dryspell, dissatisfaction with the current state of coffee (starbucks wants to buy peet's, wtfno!), the weather, high gas prices, or dysentery, i havent really had any solid thoughts that i'd like to share with anyone. heck, when i play wow i dont even think of how online social behavior shape the community's perception of harder heroics (though basically everyone think they suck, but heroics are supposed to be hard, correct?). anyway. just saying. wow bores me. im in auto mode right now. what am i doing?
1. Half-heartedly doing dailies. yes, dailies for the fourth year in a row. dailies to get some cool gear and some enchants. of course, i'll get a different enchant depending on faction. but stealing food from dwarves get boring after the 5th day. and i dont even get to eat any of it.
2. Half-heartedly doing dailies. what? yea, the cooking, fishing, jewelcrafting... even the daily transmutes and research/discoveries. i missed a few researches on my scribe last week. i missed a JC daily or two last week (and i have two JCers). i missed a few xmutes, and when i do them, i dont even visit uldum or hyjal anymore, i just do them in orgrimmar and get a random element.
3. Automatically relisting gems twice daily. Most of my gold is made from JC, or from disenchanting the JC stuff and making enchants. well my enchants arent selling so i have a bunch of unenchanted rings and neclaces sitting in the mailbox. my "green" gems are sitting in my xmute character waiting to be changed to "blue" gems and metas. im always out of red gems and have way too many green gems. i've given up selling green gems for now, as no one seem to want sensei's, vivid, etc dream emeralds anymore.
4. I'm leveling a rogue. yes, another melee dps. i do miss having the instant attacks with very little cooldowns, providing me double the dps of my rogue usually. im doing half of what most people do, until i use my cooldowns. it sucks leveling as a rogue. i mean i get to a mob, get enough combo points to cast slice and dice, then try to build more combo points and lose it because the mob just died. now im out of energy and have to start over on another, almost dead mob. after the first finisher, i could never build enough combo points to actually do anything else. i cant even get enough energy up to do a 2-point finisher. nerfed content sucks i tell you. Then the boss fight comes and i shine because that's the only time the fight last long enough (okay, not always. some fights are stupid short) for Adrenaline Rush to last its whole duration, and then, i top the meters and actually feel useful. haha. tanks dont even care that i tricks them to pull a stray mob to them, which ends up in a messy pull.
5. My rogue is a skinner/leatherer. yea, typical. but that means i am running around killing countless kodos, wolves, dragonkins and yetis to actually make enough garbage items to get through to something useful. seriously, a rogue takes a ridiculous amount of time killing and skinning, even if the kill takes 1-shot. i cant "train" or aggro more than four mobs at a time unless i want to risk losing the first two mobs. i gather three or four at once, dismount, kill, loot, skin, mount, repeat. boring as hell. but hey, at least its not archeology.
6. Speaking of Archeology, gonna spend the next few mindless weeks leveling that up too.
So in conclusion, cata heroics are hard. rogue leveling is stupid. Jc makes lots of gold. and wow is pretty boring.
1. Half-heartedly doing dailies. yes, dailies for the fourth year in a row. dailies to get some cool gear and some enchants. of course, i'll get a different enchant depending on faction. but stealing food from dwarves get boring after the 5th day. and i dont even get to eat any of it.
2. Half-heartedly doing dailies. what? yea, the cooking, fishing, jewelcrafting... even the daily transmutes and research/discoveries. i missed a few researches on my scribe last week. i missed a JC daily or two last week (and i have two JCers). i missed a few xmutes, and when i do them, i dont even visit uldum or hyjal anymore, i just do them in orgrimmar and get a random element.
3. Automatically relisting gems twice daily. Most of my gold is made from JC, or from disenchanting the JC stuff and making enchants. well my enchants arent selling so i have a bunch of unenchanted rings and neclaces sitting in the mailbox. my "green" gems are sitting in my xmute character waiting to be changed to "blue" gems and metas. im always out of red gems and have way too many green gems. i've given up selling green gems for now, as no one seem to want sensei's, vivid, etc dream emeralds anymore.
4. I'm leveling a rogue. yes, another melee dps. i do miss having the instant attacks with very little cooldowns, providing me double the dps of my rogue usually. im doing half of what most people do, until i use my cooldowns. it sucks leveling as a rogue. i mean i get to a mob, get enough combo points to cast slice and dice, then try to build more combo points and lose it because the mob just died. now im out of energy and have to start over on another, almost dead mob. after the first finisher, i could never build enough combo points to actually do anything else. i cant even get enough energy up to do a 2-point finisher. nerfed content sucks i tell you. Then the boss fight comes and i shine because that's the only time the fight last long enough (okay, not always. some fights are stupid short) for Adrenaline Rush to last its whole duration, and then, i top the meters and actually feel useful. haha. tanks dont even care that i tricks them to pull a stray mob to them, which ends up in a messy pull.
5. My rogue is a skinner/leatherer. yea, typical. but that means i am running around killing countless kodos, wolves, dragonkins and yetis to actually make enough garbage items to get through to something useful. seriously, a rogue takes a ridiculous amount of time killing and skinning, even if the kill takes 1-shot. i cant "train" or aggro more than four mobs at a time unless i want to risk losing the first two mobs. i gather three or four at once, dismount, kill, loot, skin, mount, repeat. boring as hell. but hey, at least its not archeology.
6. Speaking of Archeology, gonna spend the next few mindless weeks leveling that up too.
So in conclusion, cata heroics are hard. rogue leveling is stupid. Jc makes lots of gold. and wow is pretty boring.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)