EDIT: Apparently this post is nearly identical to one posted by Rilgon over at SES. So… you can read that one instead and basically get the exact same message.
Ok, let’s be clear here. I get playing “casual”; whatever definition you want to use. Dedicating hours a day into simulation engines, researching your class, finagling with gearing and gem choices for minimal gain… I get that it isn’t for everyone. I get that not everyone wants to spend nine hours a week raiding. I get that not everyone has any desire to throw themselves at the hardest raid content Blizzard has designed.
What I don’t get is why being utterly incompetent, why not even attempting to be any good at anything is somehow acceptable these days.
If you follow any blogs besides mine whatsoever, or occasionally listen to your friends, you’ve heard of horrendous, epic fail PuG groups. You’ve heard of the hunter wearing mp5 gear, the arms warrior trying to tank with 443 defense and DW daggers, or the legions of DKs struggling to maintain 300 DPS.
These people are full of fail, and more often than not are completely beyond help. If you attempt to help them, they usually become hostile, tell you to fuck off, and on and on.
What’s wrong with kids these days? Can’t take an ounce of criticism, tsk tsk.
Let’s say you meet a mage, and he spams scorch and nothing else. “Why are you only spamming scorch? Your DPS is terrible, it could be much better if you used other abilities, too.” There are two possible responses to this. They could raise a pair of middle fingers in your direction. They might come back with a perfectly rational (but wrong) explanation like “it casts fast, and doesn’t cost a lot of mana”. At which point you can simply educate them on their errors, they become better, hurrah hurrah.
Sadly that doesn’t happen very often. The stupid remain stupid, the ignorant remain ignorant, and there’s this attitude going around that it’s somehow okay. “It’s their fifteen bucks a month, they can do what they like with it, after all.” Yeah, uh, no.
If their answer is something like “idk lol”, I move immediately for a vote kick (on the admittedly rare occasions I do run into a fail player). Is this elitist of me? I don’t think it is, but I’m betting a fair number of you do. I say, if you’re not even going to put in the barest amount of effort into your class, then why the fuck are you signing up for heroics and inflicting your lazy ass on others?
I’m all for running with “lowbie geared” players. Dealing 80% of a party’s damage by myself fills my head with egotistical laughter. Running with a tank with “only” 26k HP actually makes me pay attention as a DPS, or gives me something to do as a healer.
When I sign up for a random heroic, I’m not expecting players of the “hard mode raider” type. I am not expecting players on the same level as me. I am not expecting the tank to be decked on ToGC-25 gear. I am not expecting a druid tank with 55k HP unbuffed. I am not expecting a holy paladin rocking 258 epics in every slot sporting the “Death’s Demise” title.
What I am expecting is for people to try.
I expect people to attempt to learn how their class works. I expect people to have an inkling of what aggro is and how it works. I expect people to have a foggy idea about things like “the mage doesn’t pull the next trash pull when the healer is dead”.
The “all fresh 80s should be able to produce 2k” thing that gets tossed around isn’t a matter of opinion, it is unwavering fact.
However, there are two provisos to that.
First, the 2k minimum assumes the player has put actual effort into their gear. This means no greens in any slot, it means blue gear from quests, professions or reputations. You don’t even need exalted epics or the 200 crafted epics to reach 2k deeps.
Second, the 2k minimum assumes a target dummy fight. With no movement, no target swapping, no gimmicks whatsoever, a fresh 80 can and should produce 2k DPS minimum.
IF you put effort into your gear, even if that effort was collecting dirt cheap AH mats and some questing in icecrown, and IF you put even the slightest amount of effort into finding out how your class works, it isn’t hard at all to produce non-fail DPS.
In a heroic, a fresh 80 shouldn’t expect to run at 2k/3k DPS for the whole run. Any number between about 1.3k and the aforementioned 2k is right about where a fresh 80 should be over an entire run.
If you are a fresh 80 in blues trucking along at, say, 1400 deeps in a heroic instances, us “elite players” (I’m finding it really hard to reconcile myself into that group) will not bother you. We might throw some tips your way if it’s obvious you’re new, but other than that we won’t notice.
We don’t mock the 1500 DPS newbies, we mock the 500 DPS morons. We don’t mock the dude in quest blues who actually took the time to get a decent set of gear together (in fact, we swoon when we see enchants and gems in blues), we mock the elemental shaman in 232 socketing defense rating gems. BURNING CRUSADE ERA defense rating gems.
As a side note, I’m not saying “better gear makes you a not dumb”. Players can still be full of fail even with great gear.
Take the “wannabe elitist”, that is, the guys pulling 6k DPS in their hard fought heroic badge gear using the cookie cutter specs they googled. Those guys most certainly will bother the appropriately geared folks. You know the type. The type who calls out a rogue wearing blues for “only” producing 2.4k DPS on a boss fight. Those guys deserved to be cock punched so hard.
Yes, yes, I see your leet deeps, I’m sure you worked real hard to earn that gear. Oh look at you using tab to swap targets even if it pulls the next trash group, you are so awesome, shine on you crazy diamond. Casting Rain of Fire on a fresh batch of mobs whilst the paladin tank is OOM and drinking? Oh you rascal.
Also, to all the healers complaining about tanks with less than 30k HP. Shut your goddamn whore mouths. If he’s defense capped, if he has over 20k HP buffed up, then he can damn well tank a heroic and you can damn well heal him through it. (The new stuff being the exception, dur.) “Oh but he takes daaamaaage and it’s haaard to heal hiiim.” OH NO WoW is occasionally moderately difficult and requires you to push buttons! Whatever shall we do! Here, cry into my pillow while I smother you.
One more explanatory tangent. We “elite players” mock the people pulling 2k DPS in high end epics (as in 232 plus) just as much as the people pulling 300 DPS in greens. Just sayin’.
The moral of the story is… try. Just try. Put effort into it. Learn. ASK, for heaven’s sake. Don’t worry about screwing up. We’re humans, we all fail. Sometimes you dodge Shadow Crash, sometimes you’ll just get smashed with it. So? That’s why you carry bandages, isn’t it?
I am not advocating rude and harsh treatment of newbies. I am not advocating behaviour that is best described as “fuckwadery”.
I am, however, advocating the rude and harsh treatment of moronic dipsticks, the kind with no idea how anything works with absolutely zero desire to do anything about it. The kind who just sorta wanders around going “herp a derp derp”. Like this guy.
“Think a Level 80 player should be on top of his or her game?” asks the Drama Mamas. Why yes, yes I goddamn do. Being on top of your game does not mean you are doing everything flawlessly.
It means you are trying to do everything flawlessly, to the best of your ability.
That is what I expect.
Just what i needed to cheer me up on the first day back to work, thanks Euripedes.
I dinged 80 on my mage on boxing day, first thing i asked my guildies was what i should do next, there advice was to read here and spicytunas.
I choose to re-spec PVE frost 18/0/53 with the water glyph as i’d be comfortable with it through leveling frost and my guildies assured me it would be fine for DPS in heroics whilst i geared up and saved the 1k g to dual spec.
Sure enough i hit 1.7k on my first heroic in my quest gear, a couple of drops and a crafted epic or two from the AH and im up to 2.3 – 2.5k.
I do have to say though, my first character was a Druid and hitting 2k dps on that character as a fresh 80 either specced cat or as boomkin was substantially harder than for the mage and wasn’t till i had almost full 200′s from naxx i surpassed that lvl.
I wish I could run with more people like you, I really really do.
I seem to run into a lot of idiot elitists, the kind that expects you to heal them through standing in bad stuff, just becasue their dps is high, the kind that expects tank to grab and hold aggro telepathically or something becasue they cannot possibly wait another second for tank to pull, or god forbid start their rotation to establish some sort of threat, the kind that expects you to successfully heal with no mana after you just switched specs, the kind that mocks someone for doing 1.4k dps as a fresh 80 in heroic gundrak – not the hardest instance by any means (and bosses still die in a minute or less, so what the hell is your problem, dude?)
Addicus has a good point though, some classes are just easier to hit that dps benchmark on then others, as well as some specs, but nonetheless – for majority of people you ran into in pugs, trying is not enough. doing your best is not enough. I’m seriously considering making my freshest 80, blood dk tank into not so private alt and moving her to my main’s guild, just so that I could run heroics with them instead of pugging with assholes who cannot be bothered to actually think before rolling their faces on a keyboard.
WoW Insider had a post highlighting some great PuG bingo cards that someone on the official forums made.
Rankwatch? Every time.
Oh, and, the funny thing is, I did group once with a paladin with Death’s Demise and ToGC-25/ICC-25 gear. Except he was ret, and I was tanking. Which was a teeny bit of a challenge.
With a larger pool of people to run with, you’d think that you’d run groups with lots of average joe folks. The ones that aren’t elitist asses or wannabe elitist idiots, nor are they the completely incompetent “what’s a heroic?” type. But it really does seem that many people are actually grouping WITH those types quite often. So it begs the question is WoW really dominated by either elitist (or wannabe elite) asses or lazy or incompetent noobs?
I definitely agree with you though. There are obviously people who don’t remember or weren’t around when we actually ran that and beat the timer with MUCH less gear. You don’t need to be ICC geared to run heroics. Heroic CoS has been around since the start of WotLK. People actually do complain when there’s not 3.5K+ dps or complains about a tank with less than 40K health.
What sense does it make to be raid geared to run heroics? Laziness I tell you!
Is it really too much to ask people to try . . .even a little?
“If you are a fresh 80 in blues trucking along at, say, 1400 deeps in a heroic instances, us “elite players” will not bother you.”
You couldn’t be more right. Mostly because we remember what it was like to enchant your blues and pray that the epic bracers would drop in H VH. We remember what DPS in heroics was like when you’re at the right gear level and playing your best to make the timer in H Culling of Stratholm.
Some guildies and I will commonly run heroics, and sometimes we only have a group of four. It’ll usually be myself (tank), a healer, and two of our DPS, so the last DPS will be “pugged.” The adventures we’ve had with the “fifth wheel” have been hilarious.
When I run heroics with one certain guildie healer, he absolutely demands that I chainpull the entire place because it’s the only way he has any urgency to heal (since I’m pretty decently geared, as he is too). He also is the first to criticize the extra DPS.
He’s the guy that calls out in vent how bad the guy’s gemming is, or how he keeps targeting different mobs than I am despite the fact that I’m marking mobs. Usually doesn’t matter much since I’m a Frost DK and have superior AoE threat, but it’s still hilarious to listen to him.
And sometimes, he will outright let them die if they do something really stupid. Like a DK DPS using Deathgrip, or a Mage casting Flamestrike before I’ve lifted a finger. He will yell at me “DO NOT GET AGGRO, LET HIM DIE FIRST.” He’s elitist to the core.
I, personally, have a lot more tolerance and patience. I’ve always been the type of guy who researches his class and takes pride in knowing what the hell I’m doing. Even when my original main (mage) dinged 80, I was enchanting my blues and greens and trying my best to out-DPS the tank, let alone other DPS. And luckily, most people recognized this.
However, while I’m not necessarily ready to vote-kick on sight or get all riled up, I agree with you Euri; it’s really frustrating when you see a tank using a dagger enchanted with Crusader trying to get into FoS. Or a Warlock with a defense ring…the BADGE defense ring (meaning they actually spent badges on it)…then hearing them explain they got it since it “had more Stamina.”
I mean, it’s one thing to be lazy, but c’mon…you can Google everything nowadays. WoWiki, WoWhead, hell, even Thottbot is still chugging along with pertinent data. Even the official forums (the wasteland of asshattery that it is) have threads that can provide tips that will help any unwise player.
QQ of this sort is certainly more common now since the fantastic new dungeon finder system makes getting into heroics so much easier. And it forms the group before anyone can inspect anyone else.
Heh, this reminds me of the dual wielding warrior doing consistently 5k dps, even on trash. (I average 2.5 – 3k on trash, more on bosses…I know I suck, but I DO try.
)
Anyway, said warrior says to the DK tank, “yur threat gen sux.” After inspecting the warrior, who was in anwhere from 232 – 258 stuff, and the DK tank, who was in 200 – 219 purples; I felt the need to remind him, “Not everyone’s able to raid ICC. He’s doing just fine.” (And the tank was indeed doing just fine.) Call me crazy, but good DPS usually tries to sort themselves out if they’re pulling aggro.
This warrior also told me that mages should stack SP and spirit, not haste. I told him haste was good for arcane, but not so much the other specs, etc, etc. (although I probably do need more SP.
)
So yeah… I actually had a really awesome story and stuff, but it’s early on Monday and I haven’t had my coffee yet.
PS: I like lazy maple bacon.
wtb edit:
*after inespecting the warrior (232 -258) and the DK tank (200-219).
Coffee’s kicking in…
I reeeally reeeally gotta cough up the cash so I can actually do one of those crazy CSS things that let people edit their comments.
Unless wordpress makes it a default, free option some day.
WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE WARRIORS??
Frorealz, ever since the LFD system was implemented my opinion of DPS Warriors has plummeted. Every single one of the lot is an overgeared, overeager threat-spamming mouth-breather fixated on the damage meters! Holding trash aggro off a Fury warrior, as a Beartank, is a struggle when we’re at even gear levels—yet the first time I tanked HoR, same day LFD released, the Fury Warr had a damnable Quel’Delar (in his defense, he, uniquely among Fury Warrs I’ve grouped with, was willing to scale back on the Whirlwinds a bit, and we did manage to finish the instance). And it only got worse from there, if you can believe it.
Strange. I almost never saw DPS Warriors before LFD.
I was running random Occ on my alt DK, for the 2 embloms, was D capped with oh about 22,000HP. After the first boss the Priest Heals goes over party chat, “man you are squishy”. To which I responded, “this is reg right”? I mean REGULAR Occ and was getting shit from the Priest c’mon! A couple of the DPS said yep just regular. So good now I know I am not crazy and this is regular so I said to the priest, “can you handle it”? He didn’t say a word we just kept going and finished without a problem.
So even on reg you can’t get away from some of these people.
Just thought i’d mention, for lots of the reasons now is a really great time to get an alt or even your first char to 80.
Since my Mage hit 80 on the holidays, i’ve won every roll in the heroics when stuff i needed dropped, VH bracers, Old Kingdom Skirt and a couple of other bits & bobs.
And no it’s not cos im lucky, just that i was the only person to roll need on those items, as ilvl200 is irrelevant for the vast majority of people in lfg.
“Also, to all the healers complaining about tanks with less than 30k HP. Shut your goddamn whore mouths. If he’s defense capped, if he has over 20k HP buffed up, then he can damn well tank a heroic and you can damn well heal him through it. (The new stuff being the exception, dur.) “Oh but he takes daaamaaage and it’s haaard to heal hiiim.” OH NO WoW is occasionally moderately difficult and requires you to push buttons! Whatever shall we do! Here, cry into my pillow while I smother you.”
Can I macro this for my prot warrior alt who is OMG STILL IN SOME BLUES and OMG ONLY HAS 26K HP and gets healers bailing left and right? Fuck.
I used to heal tanks in blues as a healer in blues, through every heroic. OK, Occulus, you name it I healed it.
I have absolutely no sympathy for healers who complain about their appropriately geared tanks.
Very true. It’s the way they spec and play. A green geared tank is ok if they invested in correct talents and use their moves wisely. For e.g. talents in parry, talents in armor, avoiding smash in last UK boss or warrior using spell reflect on the nasties in OK. On the other hand, a blue geared tank who feels the need to add a few dps talents and then proceeds to button mash will have their health drop in chunks and die quite often. Of course according to them it is the healer’s fault.
I am a relatively fresh 80 (but oldschool WoW player); kinda lost my WoW enthusiasm for a long while, and just got it back recently, right before 3.3. Now with 3.3, and the dungeonfinder, I am finally getting to run all the things I never even saw before, because PUGs took time, and (at the time) having no guild made groups even harder to come by.
So now I can run stuff, I have heroic group (but not raid) drops and emblem gear, and am starting to feel pretty good about my playing again. And even though I think I am pretty good about how I play my mage, I still ‘only’ do 2k dps. Some groups thing this is acceptable as technically I am still gearing up, and some groups totally shit on me.
Some of it is gear I’m sure, and how could some of it Not be my playstyle. The problem is knowing what is ‘normal’ and acceptable dps as a mage, and finding out the best ways to improve other than building (slowly) gear stats. I’ve found that heroic PUGs don’t really like it when you try new things on runs, and the votekick happens a lot now if someone isn’t prepared to fly through every instance to spank-n-tank the last boss just for emblems.
I know this site of yours isn’t a playing guide/tutorial or anything, but I would love a post sometime with general guidelines on maximizing DPS and/or mana for grouping/raiding mages, of either specc.
Thanks man, love your site.
I think the blogging collective was ready to explode on this topic. O.o
I’m doing a whole series this week on it. Unfortunately, mine lacks the poetic justice that yours has. “Here, cry into my pillow while I smother you.” Love it.
“It means you are trying to do everything flawlessly, to the best of your ability.”
If I had to pick one statement that stood out to me – that was it. 80 levels is a LONG time, even with accelerated XP gains and heirlooms (which accelerate it even further), to figure out the enough of the basic mechanics of a class to pump out 1.5k-ish DPS in your first heroic. If you are living by the above statement, you’ve asked questions, queried a search engine, and read basic theorycraft.
That said – I’ll still take a player with lower DPS but with intelligence/awareness, over one with 5k that constantly eat cleaves/whirlwinds, pull aggro on the mob that isn’t currently being tanked, or stand in “The Bad”™ because they are TOO focused on their perfect DPS rotation – at the expense of LIVING. Dead DPS is 0 DPS, after all.
I guess we all have something similar on our minds. I just threw up a post, then decided to catch up on my blog-reading. Great minds….
Newbie lvl 80 here. It does take some time to learn all of the instances and the specific attacks from the various bosses. As a DPS it seems to be a bit easier. Namely follow the tank and don’t stand in the glowing green stuff… My DPS sucks now but hopefully I will be getting some more drops in a few weeks.
I am here to learn. Sometimes I get good advice during a PUG, other times there is so much crying going on I wonder why I wasted my time. I am glad that I have a helpful guild who will come out and run some instances with me.
You hit the nail on it’s head with this post and saying all I could say just in more direct colourful tone. Because everything you’ve said I’ve seen it just about running heroics as a Tank and dps both.
Just 2 days ago I was in a HFoS run. So the group was killing everything for the hilt. So ok all good. Well we had a Mage that kept doing low dps name “Opps”. Imagine that as well. But he was doing barely 1100 dps how odd. He also kept dying too on the bosses. I inspected him during the run after group wipe on Ick after some never done boss before. The low dps Mage was rocking 12 pieces of epics of 213/226 variety. None of his gear enchanted, none. He was also wearing some lvl 70 blues pieces. But the Mage never broke 1100 dps and much lower dps than the tank by far. That was just bad. The tank was pissed at him and was pissed to be carrying him as well the healer. What was even worse was a epic drooped on all the trash the low dps Mage won it. And on all the boss dropps the Mage won all cloth drop roll even rolling against the healer. Man the healer was having hearthburns and even more so when the healing dagger dropped that healer needed and low dps Mage rolled against him and won that roll too. It was just bad for the healer loosing all his rolls to low dps getting carried Mage. It was disheartening. Opps the Mage made out like a bandit. But that low dps was just just terrible.
God, I wish more people had your attitude.
Prior to 3.3, I absolutely refused to pug, simply because I’d run into so many asshats. However, since the introduction of the random LFG, with one exception, I’ve not run into any problems, even though I’m in PvP epics, 200-226.
That one exception – *cough* Waldorf of Misha *cough* started off by asking me if I had any PVE gear. I explained that no, not that was any better than what I was wearing.
By the way… educate me. If gear has better spellpower, crit, haste, etc., why is it so horrendous if it has a bit less int, a bit more stamina, and resilience? I get that my mana pool is going to be smaller, but I’ve not had any mana problems to date. Just what is the horrible problem with PvP gear in PVE??? Should I forego spellpower, crit rating, etc. etc., just so I don’t have the resilience that seems to bring a sneer to the face of every fuk-tard who’s guild has carried him through heroics so he can get geared? I’m being flip, but I’d honestly like to understand what the problem is.
After his initial sortie, the tank asked him if he had a preference for one pull over another, and he replied “What I’d rather have is a mage in blue PvEs than PvP epics.” He then proceed to tell me how I was being carried, etc.
I refrained from telling him that the reason I don’t HAVE better PVE gear is because I keep running into asshats like him, but I refrained. Shortly, thereafter, the group broke up after he started lecturing the tank on what glyphs he should have. By the time we left, he’d managed to run off two healers, in addition to the tank and a pally, so at least I didn’t feel alone.
I ran with a DK once on my warrior tank. It was HoS and I was on auto pilot farming emblems, so I didn’t notice till we reached the second boss that stuff was taking a real long time to die. I pulled up recount and noticed that the DK was doing 700dps, the other 2 were decent at 1100 – 1300 dps; on inspection, he was in full tank gear. I figured I may have made a mistake since I usually queue as Tank/DPS and he was the real tank and he was just letting me do it (Hasn’t happened yet but I still have hopes). So I asked and no, he was dps but collecting tank gear so he could become a tank, he just couldn’t tank yet cause he was at 460 or so defense. Well, I was kinda happy that he knew he was under the defense cap but /facepalm at dpsing in tank gear. In the end, I just went with it and just waited a lil longer for stuff to die.
One little thing. If you want to Tank or heal, GATHER YOUR DAMN BLUES AND DO IT SINCE THE BEGGINING. Really, you are not going to learn how to play if you are only DPS’ing. And no amount of gear in the world is going to change that.
You can tank or heal heroics with blues and do just fine. I started a few weeks ago with 21k health unbuffed. And I’m fine. Got the def cap easily.
(comment got cut)
If people bitch about your gear (and they will), tell them that you are perfectly fine for heroics, you researched and gemmed and enchanted. Yes, you will sweat to keep up with people in Colisseum gear, but is the only way you are going to learn.
Besides, all the gear in the world isn’t going to help you if you suck.
Great post. Your words seemed ripped out of my head.
I very rarely say anything about dps to anyone whether it’s high or low. As long as they aren’t cocking up the instance so that it can’t be run normally or being a complete git, I’m pretty patient.
I’m with you though, I just dont understand why people play the game with no interest in improving in any way… while healing I came across a mage doing about 1.5k, said nothing, but checked their gear and they were decked out in mostly gemmed/enchanted 200-232 stuff. Since my main is a mage I started paying a bit more attention and noticed they were just spamming the three main ‘arcane’ spells in a random fashion. I commented that I had an arcane mage and a good starting rotation to try is 4xAB with a missiles to clear the stack. They remained silent and their ‘rotation’ stayed the same. 1.5k wasn’t going to kill us so I just left it, but I just don’t get that attitude.
p.s. to Lajos – if it’s good pvp gear you can probably put out decent dps anyway so fair enough, particularly if its the best gear you have. But for the same ilevel you can get more bang for your buck in pve gear (less item points wasted on resilience/stamina, more in useful stats for pve).
Thx Len. It’s good gear… not great, but the best I could get outside of the Arenas. Of the heroics I’ve run, I’ve been well inside Euripedes rule-of-thumb boundaries, and generally at least competive with the other DPS, if not on top. I get that with equal iLevels, the PvE is going to better optimized for PvE, but I have yet to come across many items that didn’t involve taking a significant cut in spellpower from what I’ve got. Note that’s with quest items, faction items, and mostly normal 5-mans. As I said, I refused to pug before because I didn’t want the abuse, and the small group I run with lacked a tank, so we didn’t do a lot of even normal 5-mans, let alone heroics. That’s changing, thankfully. I do need to work on the gemming… I’ve been tinkering around with different combinations of SP, hit, and haste.
@Lajos -”Just what is the horrible problem with PvP gear in PVE???”
I haven’t deeps since TBC, but as i recall PVP gear has very little +Hit. If you arent hit capped you’re taking a good blow to your dps already. That’s no defense for him being a jerk tho.
@Rip – “Oh but he takes daaamaaage and it’s haaard to heal hiiim.”
I don’t think i’d say that. I enjoy a challenge on the old heroics. For the most part I try to do ‘leet’ shockadin dps because there is very little healing to do.
There actually is a fair amount of PvP gear with hit on it. Every class has multiple WG epics with hit, you can buy a neck piece and cloak with hit as well.
Besides the point, I think. Wearing PvP gear for PvE content is treated as something akin to wearing tank gear to DPS and vice versa.
Despite the fact that if you’re wearing, say, 245 PvP epics, it’s probably going to be better than that 232 epic that just dropped.
For some reason PvP weapons are never questioned!
PvP gear should be fine for heroics. The points lost to resillience and stamina would be spread about, butoften end up in HIT.
This isn’t /that/ important for heroics or even raid trash. Raid bosses a different story, but even so you should account for yourself ok.
Agreed. The only pity is the vote kick works once per run, so only the worst performer can be eliminated. I would like to add to the list of incompetent people – warlocks who life tap and expect heals. Ok so those idiots don’t like eating food, my tree doesn’t like drinking either.
My tree and my partner’s bear in the early 70s has been carrying a lot of groups lately. Sure bear tanks can deal damage, but more than every other dps in the group? When they act smart we just both leave instance and quest/re-queue instead. Instant instances because we are heal & tank so no reason to tolerate imbeciles.
Have you guys heard of this one after an idiotic act “my cousin/brother/nephew/dog/cat was playing.”
I WAS LAGGING GUYS.
It’s actually pretty horrible when you actually were lagging, and nobody is going to believe your ass.
I have a warlock, I life tap a lot, but I took herbalism and first aid for precisely that purpose. Through bandages, lifeblood, healthstones and in desperate cases drain life, I don’t really need any help keeping my mana up.
And here I was thinking that Drain Life was a good way to replenish health without upsetting the healer too much. Go figure.
It is a burden for healers to heal warlocks who lifetap and leave their minimal health as it is. Especially during fights. One warlock I played with named lifetapp was obsessed with lifetap and contributed a whopping 300dps in UK. No soulstone, no healthstone provided for the group, just an unnecessary burden.
My main is a mage, every instance replenishments are provided as is arcane intellect. As a tree, I have to pester mages for a stack of water. That’s not good enough. Also not good enough is noob mages casting blizzard on single targets.
It is not elitest because suggestions and tips are offered, first in a polite manner and then along the lines of “LEARN TO TAUNT THE MOB OFF THE HEALER” or “YOUR AUTO SHOT AIN’T CUTTING IT”.
Locks that life tap are ok. Those that do it as we enter battle not so much… They aren’t getting an early heal so I can lead the aggro meter.
I don’t understand why locks don’t tap immediately after battle. I mana up immediately, ready to go…
Ohh yeah, they are doing what healers never have time for… Looting
On my lock, I lifetap (rank 1) right before battle, to proc the 40 second spellpower buff. That barely affects my health. I also lifetap after battle to top off mana (and bandage/eat/whatever). Lately I’ve been using Dark Pact more (also procs the spellpower buff; drains pet mana rather than my health). I always soulstone the healer and offer healthstones — most puggers like them; some are vaguely insulted that I’d think they need them
I also respecc’d to affliction from deep demonology, to reduce healer burden (afflocks can self-replenish indefinitely). The respec also made aggro management easier, since affliction is less spiky (barring SoC, but I don’t drop that until I know the tank can handle it). I’m more pug-friendly since the respec (nerfs my dps a bit on trash pulls, but so what). Stopping to loot – have to admit my lock does that. When healing on my shammy, I rarely have time to loot
@OP: I pretty much agree. I have no use for asshat behavior in pugs (or elsewhere) – but it’s reasonable to expect people to try. I consider myself casual (not a raider at all), but I do my homework, read EJ and other sites, gem/enchant my toons, and do my best to pull my weight.
I detect a trend…
I may have to write my own post on this subject too.
Great post. I couldn’t agree more with you.
If anything, there is also the other end of the spectrum to deal with… nah I won’t spoil it I’ll just write my own post.
My priest just hit 80 and has been healing random heroics (both before and after picking up a 219 staff and cloak from Frozen Halls and 2t9). None of his gear except the aforementioned 219+ items are gemmed or enchanted, and as long as people aren’t dumb with standing in fire and etc the runs are perfectly smooth (sometimes even easy).
Rip,
You said this about a million times better than me, and I agree with 99% of it wholeheartedly.
“The “all fresh 80s should be able to produce 2k” thing that gets tossed around isn’t a matter of opinion, it is unwavering fact.”
100% WIN.
Maybe I’m strange, but when I heal 5mans on my shaman I actually prefer it if the tank is a wee bit undergeared… otherwise it’s just zzzzz. Literally. I have repeatedly made some tanks I know strip a bit (sadly, no visual) so that I don’t nod off and fall off my chair.
Also, much rather a friendly and clever player with low dps, than some epeen retard who tries to throw his weight around and repeatedly causes deaths due to his careless ways.
Nuff said.
Freshly dinged 80 warlock here, and I have to say, random heroic groups have been really, really nice on a whole to my newly 80 status. I’ve got a couple of purples, mostly blues, and one high level green; I’m usually between 1800-2100 on the meter.
Am I rocking the charts? No – truth be told, with some of the players I’ve been placed with, I’m not even close to pulling my own weight, let alone contributing. But almost every single insanely-geared player has looked at my gear, seen it’s for a fairly fresh 80, and have worked with it. At the end of the run, I’ve not wiped anyone, I’ve made a couple of jokes, and haven’t been “that guy”.
The only trouble I’ve had with the new system on this alt is when there’s the inevitable douche who bitches about 2100 being too low for heroics.
How quickly people forget that if everyone’s popping 1500 dps, most of the heroics are do-able, or heck, even “easy” (leaving out HToC + later, of course).
It’s a shame how elitist even the average tool can be these days.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I’m always afraid of getting called out for not doing my job right. You could call me a pessimistic elitist; been 80 since you could be, done every raid, dungeon, daily, blog, chart, god-name-it you can think of, but there are still those people, those damned people, who hit the top of the DPS chart without trying, it seems.
I’m glad to know that some people do appreciate us kids who try hard but still fail sometimes. >_<
Oh, and the herp a derp derp guy made my night.
Completely agree with you about heroic tanks.
Today I got into a heroic Halls of Lightning on my priest (disc). The tank was a druid with 22k hp in bear.
As soon as we got in, there was a vote kick for the tank. I declined it thinking “this might be fun”. The hunter, presumably the one that initiated the vote kick leaves.
We get one more dps, and blast through the instance like normal and for once, I did more than cast power word: shield and renew. It was such a fun refreshing change. The tank himself was very competent, picking up all adds and holding them. I don’t remember him losing threat to a dps even once!
I tanked on my druid with random DPS last night.
They AoE’d everything, even before I had any rage or threw out any swipes. Even then, my swipes aren’t necessarily enough to keep up with uber-gear AoE. It’s really frustrating. I even said that I mark a kill order at the very start of things. The priest didn’t follow it.
I’m not that poorly geared a tank. I probably stack stamina a bit too much, but I’ve done every heroic short of HoR (we just didn’t have the DPS to get away from the ol’ LK).
Why, oh why, does everyone assume that EZ Moade suddenly means you can also be completely thoughtless?
[...] like Pie! Their seems to be a tornado on the blogosphere in regards to tools like Gearscore, and Recount. I’m old school, I’ve been playing [...]
I’ve been 80 a few weeks, and it took me a while to break 1,500 DPS regularly. (I’m a RetPal)
I read EJ, I gemmed, enchanted (to a degree, but with blues & greens that will soon be replaced, I didn’t waste TOO much gold) I knew the FCFS rotation, etc, but it took a while to get “decent” DPS, let alone consistently break 2k.
And my Ele-Shammie comrade had an even harder time. For her, it was a couple spec tweaks and a slight re-gem.
So, long post shorter – some specs can be really tough to do good DPS with, even if you are geared and read up. Some >small< changes can make a huge difference, and that can take a while to figure out.
This brings to mind a fellow I know well. He has the 15th highest gearscore of alliance dks on my realm. I congratulated him, but alas, something was wrong. I do not at all believe gearscore in any way shape or form affects your performance. This guy is proof, case ‘n point. With quel’dalar and nearly ALL gear from togc or toc 25, this guy is incapable of more than 4k dps without assisstance from army of the dead. Facepalms are in order. What is the cause of this? Somehow, despite raiding the most difficult content available, he is an idiot. I have told him to at least find a cookie cutter build suited to his gear and playstyle for months on end, and after finally inspecting EJs unholy dps builds, he announces they are wrong. With no points in epidemic (yes dks gasp in horror now plox) he believes EJ to be wrong. There are countless errors in his spec. He has no clue what stats he needs (as blood, he uses ap gems. Veteran of the third war use fail) and he has a grand total of 5 gems. In a gear set with at least 9 sockets. The pinnacle of his flaws is this: he critisizes me and my 5.5k dps because I have a low gearscore. Euripedes, I know your pain and I say elitists are needed to smite these nubcakes off their lofty perches and teach emxwhat fer. Lovely article btdubz.
I started out a bit frosty here. I’m usually ridiculously patient with PUGgers. Maybe it’s because I haven’t quite realized that replacing group members is easy, especially if it’s DPS; maybe I’m too forgiving of”special” DK’s and the like; maybe it’s because if the idiot Rogue keeps pulling trash, well, it gives me something interesting to do (I love saving the group with Poly, Nova, and Slow kiting a melee mob). My usual attitude is: so what if you’re carrying someone a bit, it’s a game, don’t stomp on their fun, if nobody’s dying and the instance isn’t taking an hour … no foul.
But reading stories of utter failpugs has begun to change my view a little. I remember the BC heroics days, when incompetent DPS was much harder to make up for, and gear drops were sparser due to oddball itemization and no badges. And as bad as that was sometimes, it did make people play better. Chain-trapping, Intercepting critters to dodge damage, knowing which mobs were immune to Poly, these were useful skills that separated the bad from the good. And carrying people who don’t make an effort isn’t going to make them better players; it’s just giving them more undeserved gear.
I may be a bit more stringent now. At least on my tank, where I can afford it.
It really is true that everything you need to know you learned in Kindergarten.
1. Be respectful.
2. Always do your best.
Really solves a lot of problems, in wow, and in real life.
You know, I completely agree. I hate seeing people in full epics pulling less than 2k DPS. When I’m tanking, it really makes it bad when I out-damage and out-DPS the entire group, especially when some of the people are stocked on purples.
[...] to the subject of standards in pug heroics and such are the Pug Commandments from I Like Pie, the Official QQ on Intolerance of Incompetance, and another equally well-written post from Stabilized Effort [...]
On the subject of 2k dps and heroics, i should simply like to state the following. Almost all heroics (excepting ICC) are easily do-able without anyone hitting that score.
I’m newly 80 on this alt myself, and last night case in point I joined a random pug for CoS, now i topped the chart in my couple of purples with 1.95k dps overall, but everyone in the group was between 1.5 and that score. We had no wipes and beat the timer to roll for the drake.
However i’d also like to say that this group was luckily full of skillful players and blessed with a good tank that could gather and hold aggro quickly, and a healer that could anticipate the incoming dmg. These facts made it a very pleasant run.
And here in lies the true tale, Incompetence leads to wipes and fail, skill and co-ordination even with gear lacking will usually prevail.
It may be a bit late, but I need to post.
About the 2k dps thing.
I was pulling 1.5k on violet hold…at 75.
Mind you, I have a lot of blues, but I was switching screens frequently, and I’m playing an elemental shaman, a lower dps class.
I beat a warlock and a rogue, both my level, by over 400 DPS.
You literally need to have no brain or spend a LOT of time afk to get under 1.1k as a fresh 80.
…seriously.
lols @ “elemental shaman, a lower dps class”
Even so, the other two had way better gear than me.
[...] And on that note heres a link to an awesome post from Euripedes of Critical QQ ‘Intolerant of Incompetence‘ [...]
My first alt is a 71 ret pally that can pull 1400 dps across an entire uk run with a few pieces of heirloom gear and random greens. My main is a tank/heals, so DPS is new to me, and I cracked 1k on the first random dungeon I ran.
I agree totally that a fresh level 80 who is not a complete moron should be able to pull 1.5-2k DPS without difficulty.
*sigh*
[...] And on that note heres a link to an awesome post from Euripedes of Critical QQ ‘Intolerant of Incompetence‘ [...]