Cracks starting to show?

[Merusk]

Your raid leader sounds retarded.

Well that's a given.  He runs a raid guild in WoW that doesn't do weekends "so I can go out" but then is online all weekend. 

[Samprimary]

I realized how much I liked recount when I pulled up the extended data once and realized our disc priest DPS had never once used penance.

ALSO YES IT IS GREAT FOR MY EGO CAUSE I AM NUMBER ONE IN RAIDS DEEPS

[Nebu]

DPS parsers punish people for using their utility.  Most gamers fail at recognizing this. 

[Setanta]

I've now gone 2 nights without logging in - hell I'm re-reading Shogun for about the 20th time and it's more engrossing than WoW is at the moment.

God I even watched Master Chef and Bondi Vet rather than log in - the cracks in WoW are taking its toll.















Actually, Bondi Vet is pretty cool.

[caladein]

DPS parsers punish people for using their utility.  Most gamers fail at recognizing this.  

What utility?  For non-tanks everything right now besides straight damage and healing is...

... a function that supersedes damage (and to a lesser extent healing) in importance, namely interrupting and dispelling important abilities.  The only non-quantifiable thing on this list is soft/short CCs like Ice Traps and Ring of Frost, but those are pretty obvious and important when needed.
... baked into your normal abilities or you simply existing.
... something that increases your survivability or mobility which allows you to do more damage or healing anyway.
... Vanish for Assassination Rogues.  (Honorable mention to mana battery style Restoration Shamans, but those aren't as prevalent as they used to be.)

WoW simply doesn't have only-here-for-the-buffs specs like it did in Burning Crusade and most pure utility/survivability talents are only traded off for other types of utility/survivability, not for throughput.

[Paelos]

Yep, it pretty much just comes down to dps either doing interrupts or not doing interrupts, and I can track that too.

[Rendakor]

You can even track damage taken, to see if anyone stood still to keep DPSing rather than move out of fire.

[Sjofn]

In my experience, recount does a lot more good than harm. I have yet to be in a PUG where anyone used recount to kick or shame anyone (although there were definitely a few people who could probably stand to be shamed, frankly, but we just gave piggyback rides instead), and in organized groups it's a nice, quick way to see if anyone is obviously being a fuck up so you can help them not be a fuck up. Or even just see if the reason you keep failing an encounter is because the dps isn't there or some other reason. Or shit, on fights where you need relatively even DPS on two seperate things, how to group people together for that.

[Merusk]

You've been in some oddly polite pugs then as it happens in mine all the time.  Last one was a week ago, leet purple hunter spammed recount, told the DK who was at 5kdps to "pick it up, scrub" and then said "You're fucking horrible, DK" after we killed the last boss.

Yeah it's a useful tool (I used it just last night in my first ever ZA run with my Horde guild to figure out why we were failing a few places and what killed me.) but only if it's not in the hands of tools.

[Paelos]

I've had DPS call out other DPS. I'm fine with that. At least you're backing it up. It's the cross-role shit talking I don't like. And no, I won't call out someone for bad dps if we're winning.

[Sjofn]

I honestly wouldn't care if someone in a heroic told a 5k DPSer they're terrible. Because they are. Although if we're winning, I would probably say, "It's fine, settle down," because ... it's fine if we're winning. But yeah, apparently I'm in a ridiculously nice battlegroup or something, because I cannot remember it happening. There have been times when I have considered it, but I'm just the healer, yo. I put the terrible + stupid people (a rogue doing 5k AND face pulling shit for lulz is my best example) on ignore and go on my merry way. 

[Ashamanchill]

As a tank, nine times outta ten I don't care what our DPSers are pulling as long as the job is getting done. It's the lack of interrupts that grind me.

[Lakov_Sanite]

My dk was doing 7k dps at level 78 in greens and I'm not even exagerrating. 5k dps is indeed horrible.

[Numtini]

I never want to hear someone called out in a PUG. If I'm not willing to deal with their ability, I politely leave the group. If I think I can help, I sent a private message. I've never seen anyone called out in public where it was anything other than an opportunity for a tense upsetting end to the group.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If I'm in a heroic and people are not pulling enough dps to defeat a boss then I sure as hell will boot them, I may not chew them out though.  I have however brought a shitstorm down on a few people who would queue up as tanks/healers without having gear for it, or people in damn near full pvp suits.

[Ingmar]

I initiated my VERY FIRST pug kick last night. Start of Lost City, tank marks for CC, says hunter trap square. Hunter stands there. Tank says "hunter?" Hunter stands there. Everyone else in the group says "hunter?" Hunter shuffles back and forth a little bit. There was no rudeness or anything, but after what felt like ages of just waiting I did it myself. And of course the finder gave us a replacement who couldn't CC those mobs anyway. 

[Merusk]

or people in damn near full pvp suits.

  :RAGE:

I agree there.

And yes, 5k is horrible.  I was just saying that people do indeed use it to call each other out.  We were killing bosses, nobody was dying and I was still the only one interrupting, I didn't care. 

[Paelos]

I figured since I was bored at work, I'd pull some of the better "I quit" threads from the general forums and post them here. Here is today's version of FUCK YOU CATA, I'M OUT!

[Rokal]

I can tolerate people that do low DPS, but it's the people that do low DPS and are lazy or don't listen that I vote-kick. I've initiated vote kicks a few times recently when the person doing low DPS and was also constantly attacking the wrong targets even though I marked skull and re-iterated to them to kill skull first, or if they keep going afk, walking into trash, etc. I had one rogue doing 3k DPS in ZA, and after any mob died he would stand still for ~6-10 seconds before starting to attack something else. I brought it up after it happened a few times, and he said his mouse battery had died and that he just had been semi-afk to replace it. Except that he was still doing it 10 minutes later as we were clearing to bear.

My guild is fairly inactive at the moment. The troll dungeons have lost their luster and people were sick of the other 5-mans months ago. Everyone has what they need from T11 raids, and in-frequent attendance with summer means that our 10man Hard Mode attempts have usually had poor group compositions. Last week we even skipped HM Halfus because we had no mage or paladin. Having no mage makes the fight virtually impossible unless you have a bunch of humans in the group (we had one, our disc priest  ), or a bunch of people wear pvp trinkets. Having no paladin just makes it much harder. Similar issues for the other HM fights we've tried.

It's been said here before, but hard-modes lack a certain element of fun. It feels the same as beating a game, and then immediately restarting it on a higher difficulty. Doing something completely new has much more appeal than repeating a slightly different version of the same thing. It seems like 4.2 is coming out soon, but we're definitely feeling fatigue from the current content. We'll see if 4.2 reinvigorates the game for us.

Lately my gametime has been split between League of Legends, LOTRO, and WoW in that order. LOTRO has been pumping out content at a much faster pace, even with an expansion right around the corner.

[Azuredream]

It's been said here before, but hard-modes lack a certain element of fun. It feels the same as beating a game, and then immediately restarting it on a higher difficulty. Doing something completely new has much more appeal than repeating a slightly different version of the same thing.

They should  just have both modes unlocked from the start, and make the hard-mode not explicitly require you to have gear from the normal mode.

[caladein]

It's been said here before, but hard-modes lack a certain element of fun. It feels the same as beating a game, and then immediately restarting it on a higher difficulty. Doing something completely new has much more appeal than repeating a slightly different version of the same thing.

That's just not in the cards.

As of this post, between the US, Europe, Korea, and Taiwan there are 2 955 25m guilds and 8 746 10m guilds with Heroic Chimaeron kills.  Slice those numbers any way you want, it doesn't add up to more then a few percent of 11 million+ players even when factoring in no mainland China.  If you go by Normal Cho'gall kills, you get a bit over twice as many (nearly all from 10m), which still isn't a lot.

Heroic modes let them keep those few hundred thousand players (myself included) for a minimal outlay over content that a lot more people do, especially after it's "old", and at least in my case, I'm reasonably happy with the compromise.  They're all just numbers and drop tables anyway.

[Lantyssa]

You sound... unhappy.  What happened?

[Rokal]

I can't seem to read the contents of posts, otherwise I might have noticed that you were complaining about the trickle of new content.

[Paelos]

What the hell is going on here?

[Merusk]

I'm just a small monkey who gets hit in the head a lot.

[Lantyssa]

I decided to summarize his quote as being unhappy, then ask how the WoW fanboy could be in such a state outside it, but goofed thanks to my illness.  He then apparently decided to copy the style of a sicky half out of her mind.

(Ironically, getting hit on the head is one way to get Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo! )

[Paelos]

It's easier when Yeg does it in pictures.

[Rokal]

Just having some fun  

My complaint post was more about the nature of Hard Modes, and Blizzard's glacial pace of introducing new content, rather than something specific to Catacylsm. My excitement for 4.2 is also low, since it's essentially a small raid and a rep-grind quest hub. It's a light patch when we haven't really gotten anything but the troll re-make dungeons for 6 months, or at least that is the impression I have without having played it.

For comparison's sake, in the past 6 months LOTRO has released:
In the past 6 months Blizzard released 2 remakes of old troll dungeons, and about 10 simple quests that lead you to them.

I like Catacylsm, but I don't like how Blizzard has been handling the patches for it. I'd be willing to bet we'll only see one more major raid after Firelands, and that's really pretty paltry to keep people engaged for two years.

[apocrypha]

While I don't quite buy the whole "Cataclysm is the end of WoW and Ghostcrawler is the Antichrist" trip that's been prevalent on this forum, this pissed me off the other week:

Q: Vengeance is a great tool to help raid tanks hold aggro over DPS, but in 5-man heroics it doesn't stack high enough to keep up with the threat generated by overgeared DPS burst damage. Are there any plans to address this? Are there any plans to help warriors put out more initial threat before Vengeance has been ramped up? – Nikelsndimes (NA), Cémanana (EU-FR), Arthur (TW), Mancake (NA), Migol (NA)

A: We think Vengeance works well overall. It provides sufficient threat without causing the tank to do more DPS than the dedicated DPS characters, and doesn’t let the tank just neglect abilities that cause threat. A full stack of Vengeance probably provides too much threat, but we didn’t think it was necessary to nerf that mid-expansion. Overall, we don’t want tanks to have 100% guaranteed threat on a pull, so we don’t want to buff that aspect of Vengeance, but we also don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS they can deliver midway through a fight, so we have to strike a balance.

Note: There are fights with tank swaps or incoming adds, or similar mechanics, when threat may matter mid-fight. This is intended – encounter design varies widely.

Raid-geared DPS routinely pull agro from both my paladin and warrior tanks (both 350+ geared) and not just on trash packs. When it's happening regularly on boss fights and taunts are on cooldown and the resulting positioning wipes groups (Ozruk, Venoxis, etc) then there's a problem. He says they "don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS" but that's exactly what's happening.

Just felt like a big fuck-you response from him really, very annoying.

[Merusk]

Now spread the same kind of "I don't really understand the mechanics I'm talking about beyond what the spreadsheet tells me" answers across several years and classes that you regularly play.  That'd be why there's so much venom for the man.

It's all theory, no play experience and often even the theory was just plain wrong.  From abilities classes don't have to misnaming abilities to thinking things caused or didn't cause a cool down when the opposite was true.

[Kageru]

Yes. Whereas Pardo's comments always gave you a feeling that the guy had thought about it, made a reasoned judgement and sometimes seen a step beyond the players. Ghostcrawler mostly gave a sense of "wtf" and the feeling he'd missed the core point but was never going to admit it.

Though Kalgan lurks in the background being continuously wrong.

[Paelos]

Here's today's quitting post in the segment I like to call, FUCK YOU CATA, I'M OUT!

The non-raider perspective:

[caladein]

While I don't quite buy the whole "Cataclysm is the end of WoW and Ghostcrawler is the Antichrist" trip that's been prevalent on this forum, this pissed me off the other week:

Q: Vengeance is a great tool to help raid tanks hold aggro over DPS, but in 5-man heroics it doesn't stack high enough to keep up with the threat generated by overgeared DPS burst damage. Are there any plans to address this? Are there any plans to help warriors put out more initial threat before Vengeance has been ramped up? – Nikelsndimes (NA), Cémanana (EU-FR), Arthur (TW), Mancake (NA), Migol (NA)

A: We think Vengeance works well overall. It provides sufficient threat without causing the tank to do more DPS than the dedicated DPS characters, and doesn’t let the tank just neglect abilities that cause threat. A full stack of Vengeance probably provides too much threat, but we didn’t think it was necessary to nerf that mid-expansion. Overall, we don’t want tanks to have 100% guaranteed threat on a pull, so we don’t want to buff that aspect of Vengeance, but we also don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS they can deliver midway through a fight, so we have to strike a balance.

Note: There are fights with tank swaps or incoming adds, or similar mechanics, when threat may matter mid-fight. This is intended – encounter design varies widely.

Raid-geared DPS routinely pull agro from both my paladin and warrior tanks (both 350+ geared) and not just on trash packs. When it's happening regularly on boss fights and taunts are on cooldown and the resulting positioning wipes groups (Ozruk, Venoxis, etc) then there's a problem. He says they "don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS" but that's exactly what's happening.

Just felt like a big fuck-you response from him really, very annoying.

Bolded part is the important bit.  If it's possible for an undergeared tank to hold threat against overgeared damage dealers who aren't dumping threat or being otherwise attentive, the system breaks down everywhere else.  Threat simply ceases to matter in raids.

It's a lot like healing and players who can't avoid damaging encounter mechanics: if it's possible for the healer to heal through poor players playing poorly, healing good players is a completely trivial task.

[Xanthippe]

While I don't quite buy the whole "Cataclysm is the end of WoW and Ghostcrawler is the Antichrist" trip that's been prevalent on this forum, this pissed me off the other week:

Q: Vengeance is a great tool to help raid tanks hold aggro over DPS, but in 5-man heroics it doesn't stack high enough to keep up with the threat generated by overgeared DPS burst damage. Are there any plans to address this? Are there any plans to help warriors put out more initial threat before Vengeance has been ramped up? – Nikelsndimes (NA), Cémanana (EU-FR), Arthur (TW), Mancake (NA), Migol (NA)

A: We think Vengeance works well overall. It provides sufficient threat without causing the tank to do more DPS than the dedicated DPS characters, and doesn’t let the tank just neglect abilities that cause threat. A full stack of Vengeance probably provides too much threat, but we didn’t think it was necessary to nerf that mid-expansion. Overall, we don’t want tanks to have 100% guaranteed threat on a pull, so we don’t want to buff that aspect of Vengeance, but we also don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS they can deliver midway through a fight, so we have to strike a balance.

Note: There are fights with tank swaps or incoming adds, or similar mechanics, when threat may matter mid-fight. This is intended – encounter design varies widely.

Raid-geared DPS routinely pull agro from both my paladin and warrior tanks (both 350+ geared) and not just on trash packs. When it's happening regularly on boss fights and taunts are on cooldown and the resulting positioning wipes groups (Ozruk, Venoxis, etc) then there's a problem. He says they "don’t want DPS specs to constantly have to throttle the DPS" but that's exactly what's happening.

Just felt like a big fuck-you response from him really, very annoying.

<snicker>

[Paelos]

Bolded part is the important bit.  If it's possible for an undergeared tank to hold threat against overgeared damage dealers who aren't dumping threat or being otherwise attentive, the system breaks down everywhere else.  Threat simply ceases to matter in raids.

It's a lot like healing and players who can't avoid damaging encounter mechanics: if it's possible for the healer to heal through poor players playing poorly, healing good players is a completely trivial task.

There was a long period of time where threat really didn't matter in raids, and things were fine. Tanking was about survival, positioning, and pacing. Honestly, I don't know many tanks who thought that threat management was the best part of their playing experience.

Tanking should be about debuffing, interrupting, and affecting the strategy. You already have dps worrying about rotations and maximizing. We don't need to worry about that to the nth degree in tanking. The job itself is demanding enough.