All of us have been in that nightmarish PuG filled with paladin tanks that don’t consecrate, druids that don’t use HoTs, and DK DPS who can’t stop using death grip.
All of us have been in that PuG from heaven with the ret pally who flawlessly swaps to a spellpower weapon and starts healing when the priest bites it, the prot warrior who for all intents and purposes might as well be omniscient, or the shaman healer who somehow keeps the whole group alive when the tank pulls a boss and two packs of trash simultaneously, and makes it look effortless.
All of us have been in that PuG with the competent hunter, the competent mage, the competent rogue… they weren’t really special, weren’t really all that great, but they weren’t bad. So average you forget them immediately, maybe even forgetting what class they are.
The fact is, behind every single one of those characters, behind the worst mage you’ve ever seen, behind the best druid you’ve ever had the pleasure of running with, is a human being.
Now there are a couple interesting things about human beings.
How many of you are perfect? How many of you play every single raid boss absolutely flawlessly every single time? How many of you never, ever make a mistake in PvP?
For the flip side of that, how many of you strive to play every single raid boss flawlessly? How many of you strive to play your absolute best, and then improve that absolute best any way you can?
All of you do, of course. You wouldn’t be here in the first place if you had absolutely no interest in an improvement over your current state of affairs.
We, as humans, want to become better. We want to improve. We have an innate desire to look at our current circumstances, our current skills, and want to improve them any way we can.
Well, more accurately, we as thinking, reasoning, mature humans, want to become better.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who play this game with absolutely no interest in becoming better at what they do. Either they just don’t care or already think they’re plenty good already. (The first being casuals, the second idiots.)
The rest of us, however…
The guild did ToC-10 last night. We’ve already cleared all the bosses, though we still have lots of wipes. We took a PuG mage along with us, by the name of Arcanio, a frostfire mage.
I was not impressed. Bringing Hateful Glad gear, spirit gems (not hybrids, but actual, full out epic +20 spirit type gems), with Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Deconstructor, and the Black Knight topping out his list of hardest content run, and being a blood elf to top it off…
Well. I wasn’t expecting stellar performance. He does have over 25k HKs, so maybe he’s learned a thing or two here and there. /crosses fingers
I expected the worst, but had faint hope he would at least manage to be okay.
And what’d I get? Well… I got okay. Bottom of the DPS, of course, but he beat the snot out of the tanks, and never once fell below 2k DPS. Usually hovered around 2.2-2.5k, which while not SUPER AWESOME OMG, was still far better than the “below the tank” I was expecting.
I’m not jaded at all about PuGs. Nope. Not even a little bit.
The ridiculously awesome trinket Fetish of Volatile Power dropped. I lost the roll to Mr. Arcanio by a mere 3 points, and was all “ARAGHAGAGARR!” I was a little miffed, to say the least, at losing a great DPS trinket to some PuG elf!
I offered to buy it from him for a thousand gold, but no dice.
He said he was trying to gear up, that my gear was already in fantastic shape compared to his, and that he could really, really use the extra crit as a frostfire mage.
He may not have nearly the level of knowledge I have (apparently the dude doesn’t know what a hit cap is?), but at least he understands the concept that crit = good.
Mark Mr. Arcanio up a few notches in my book.
In the middle of a brutal brawl on champions, I (being in charge of crowd control for this fight), call for Arcanio to get a polymorph off on something.
And guess what?
He did.
Near immediately.
Mark Arcanio up a few more notches.
We’re about to pull twins after a wipe (our very first ever!) and Arcanio appears afk. He gets back, apologizes, as he was alt tabbed reading up on the fight.
Alright, alright, a proper raider would have read up on the fight before starting it for the first time, but Arcanio didn’t exactly have much time to prepare. Dude was yanked out of trade and wiping to Beasts before he had a chance to get his pants on.
Call my standards low if you want, my conclusion remains the same.
Here we have an average mage with an average skill set. Yet, despite all that, he nonetheless possesses the desire to improve, rudimentary knowledge of how to do that, and the will to improve.
Sounds a lot like you and me, doesn’t it?
Arcanio was not an amazing player. He didn’t produce unimaginably awesome DPS, he didn’t blow us all out of the water with his amazing skills.
And yet I can guarantee you that he is a better player now than he was a year ago, and a year from now will be far better still.
Improvement is inevitable. If you care, even slightly, about your character, your performance, you will become better using any means available to you. Most of you won’t even question this behaviour.
Let’s say you roll up an alt, something you’ve never ever played before.
You ding level 10, earning your very first talent point. What do you do?
Do you spend it how you see fit?
Or do you fire up google and see what information you can find?
Do you even question the fact that you research your class(es) anymore? Do you ever walk into a raid without having done “homework” on the fights?
In game, we improve. Out of game, we search for ways to improve in game. It is impossible for us to do otherwise.
/end pointless ramble
Successfull PuGs always make my day, and this story made me smile.
Excellent starts somewhere and along the road it will pass through Pretty Good.
Pointless ramble? Hardly!
There are so many important lessons in that post, I don’t even know where to begin. But you already knew that. =P
That’s an encouraging lesson.
I’d pug that.
To answer your last questions (which also has a lot do with how I try to improve), I’ve always prefered to figure out things by my self, rather than google as soon as I have to stop and think for a second. Then I’ll try to perfect my own approach, before eventually checking out other resourses like forums, blogs etc. to find out how I can optimize my play style.
More often than not, this approach makes the knowledge stick. Instead of just plotting in some talent points and clicking buttons in a specific order, I learn a lot more by figuring out things by my self.
AWesome post. Something Id think of but never put into words. Great.
Weak players in a grp are ok to laugh at until they wipe the grp and/or win a roll.
As much as I like to learn by feel… I do tend to spend a silly amount of time researching before starting a new character… even when I promise myself I am going to start blind and enjoy the ride.
The “book learning” doesn’t make me a better player, but at least when something goes right/terribly wrong the dark recesses of my mind fire up and remind me of that thing I read once, a long time ago, and attempt 2 is always better.
Nice article, but calling the Fetish of Volatile Power anything but the utter garbage that it is kind of diminishes your credibility on this post. At least you saved yourself 1,000 gold for a trinket that should only ever be used on Flame Leviathon for ilvl purposes and nothing else.
Garbage compared to what? Scale of Fates and Flare of the Heavens, which I do not have access to? Illustration of the Dragon Soul, which I actually have tried for months to get?
Don’t get me wrong, if I ever do get the Dragon Soul or something else better, I’ll be swapping to that without hesitation.
At the very least, this gives me a nice trinket to use to tide me over until I buy the Talisman of Resurgence.
I google leveling specs _before_ I make an alt. =)
I have the pleasure of being in the same guild with Rip. He has the misfortune of having me in his raid from time to time.
I am a casual raider.
I get the basic concept of a fight before I go in, but do not read carefully or memorize the fight. I do this because I have a flaw in my personality that allows for little flexability when I know something works. I want to do it that way.
Our guild reads up on the fights, tries it, and tweaks the fight to the make up of the raid. This is why I don’t get inflexible.
As far as improvement goes, I defer to the more veteran guildies of my class. This is usually enough to get me me through. I hold my own, but am not a stud by any means. On paper I look good, but Rip himself had to show me some finer PvP nuances last week.
My point is that I like to improve, but don’t make it a homework assignment. I treat it as extra credit.
I use little in the area of macros too. Last year Rip stepped in the way of my targetting and I misdirected Gruul to his happy ass. It didn’t well, but ammused the hell out of me.
So, a guy that isn’t geared, but knows how to play his character wins the roll over a guy who has worked on his character, geared up through the lower content, and performed at a much higher level, and this is ok?
Good for you Rip, but by the 3rd or 4th undergeared/low performing PuG that beats your roll on upgrades you’ll stop appreciating them so much.
I doubt that this guy would have even gotten a start in my raid. I think I would have seen his gear and booted him straight away. Although tbh I am steadfast against pugging raids anyway.
Thats kind of a little sad, maybe I am missing out on valuable experiences…
I’d say you are.
True, there are many times when such a geared character will turn out to be absolute crap.
Then there will be the gems that didn’t until recently have the time to raid but do now. So they have awesome skill, but no venue for it.
“Well. I wasn’t expecting stellar performance. He does have over 25k HKs, so maybe he’s learned a thing or two here and there. /crosses fingers”
It’s funny you used that as an example. I got it a while back (http://www.hot-hot-hot-catlove.com/wow/09-13-2009-25K_HK.png — nevermind the date on the file, I’m slow to upload and post about stuff) which got a conversation going about it in my blog. A couple people pointed out that they only had a few HKs because they suck at PvPing, so I had to explain the whole ‘HKs really don’t matter all that much’. I haven’t been playing WoW all that long, so maybe you have more of an idea on this. Any guesses as to why there’s an achievement for this? It’s not like they’re /your/ HKs… it counts all the kills of everyone around you. I could AFK near a big battle and rack up HKs without doing a single thing. Why don’t they just count /your/ HKs? Or strike the achievement altogether? It’s more of a “Yeah, I’ve been around a whole lot of battles!” thing than proof of much of anything…
Hence the maybe.
The possibility exists that he didn’t earn any of those kills, but it’s equally possible he did.