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While it’s a bad idea to link your damage meters over a common chat channel, it’s a very bad idea to link your damage report if you’re a damage dealer and you’re that one dps’er who consistently does less damage than the tank. What you’re trying to say is that you outperform the healer at doing damage, but what you’re really saying is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep everyone alive and also do 30% of the damage that I’m doing.”

The healer’s damage is basically like the rock bottom of damage performance in a raid. Healing does zero damage. You are also saying that you don’t understand groups enough to know what the different roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spamming down. This is a chain of thought that will immediately lead others to group with you less, because veterans will sense that this is probably the tip of the iceberg:

• you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when someone tries to tell you how your character works
• you don’t understand or don’t care about crowd control
• you cry and blame someone every time you die
• you go afk without warning
• you complain about repair costs
• you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
• you use curse words in a way that’s not interesting, relevant, or funny

Not everyone is all of these, but usually these character flaws don’t come in single servings. Most people went to the all you can eat Buffet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a single damage meter post said. And incidentally, this person lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

I healed through Magister’s Terrace this weekend to get a couple of friendly guildies ready for MrT heroic. My wife, in the next room, said “What’s wrong?” I hadn’t even realized I sighed. “This new recruit just spammed his damage meters after our first wipe.”

I had forgotten about this little slice of the game. Of course, now my blissful ignorance has been shattered, but it’s a good topic of discussion.

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If you like to group in these big social MMORPG games, then choose the hard but essential role, whatever that role may be.

In World of Warcraft, my primary character is a healing priest. My close runner-up is a protection warrior. Say what you want about inability to solo, but every single time I log on, I’m asked to group. Every single time.

My dps friends tell me how hard it is to get a group, or how many groups get four players but never get that last person because they need either a tank or a healer and never end up finding one. I can imagine how they feel, but I do not understand these people. Once you have seen that groups always stall on tanks and healers, then why not just solve the problem? That’s how I started tanking, and I grew to enjoy it nearly as much as healing, and certainly more than dps’ing. Instancing is one of the most fun parts of the game, and when you’re a needed role, you have the ability to write your own ticket for grouping and raiding forevermore. But more than that, I enjoy the fact that I make groups any time I want.

Let me try an analogy. If you’re of legal age of consent and enjoy having sex, then when you go to an engineering college (typically around 6:1 male-to-female ratio), would you rather be a guy or a girl?

This analogy didn’t really pan out like I hoped. Let me try again.

Picture a loosely-organized football league where there are fifteen teams and only five quarterbacks. How do you think those five quarterbacks are treated when they show up at the field? That’s right, they get to have hot engineer sex as often as they want and they get to be choosy about what jersey they wear.

Just like tanks and healers do. This is your guild and your server.

The downside is that you solo at 30-80% the speed of a pure dps class. This isn’t as bad as you’ve heard, unless you’re absolutely in love with grinding. Even on my little protection warrior who’s dual-wielding, I can go fast enough if not fast. Just be sure that in all those instances you’re running that you grab unwanted dps gear that’s appropriate for your character. And honestly, if you’re not a complete social misfit, you’ll probably have game friends who will group with you for dailies or other solo content because you group with them. If you do love grinding (or you are a social misfit), then just have a dps alt. Who doesn’t have a hunter in their pocket nowadays?

I’m not saying that dps isn’t fun. It is, and it’s very relaxing as well. I have a hunter who I battleground with, and it’s a great time. But if grouping is what you like best, then why would you want to compete with the millions of other hunters/rogues/warlocks/mages/hybrid-dps spec people for the large number of damage spots in a raid/instance, when you can just walk into the big-leagues by being a role where demand is far greater than supply? My guild is perpetually short on tanks, we’ll take anyone with 9k base life and the ability to fog a mirror. I’m exaggerating, but dip into the Guild Recruitment channel and you’ll see this message in the first ten minutes:

X of Y is raiding Z content and is looking for a offtank/maintank/healer to join and “raid casually”/”raid five nights a week”/”oh god please join us, I don’t care if you’re an alt of another toon in another guild, just give some backup to drop cross-eyed-Joey the holy pally alt who still looks for his Mend Pet button”.

Heck, even my dps wife loves that I’m a tank/healer combo, because our group is already half-made whenever we want to run together. Her primary alt is a druid healer. And while she’s still warming up to healing, she loves the ease at which she can find a group.

So make your next alt project a tank or a healer, and get to the hot engineer sex.

Many guilds have outright terrible names. Ok, not terrible, just terribly bland. They’re all stamped from the same lame press: X of Y.

• Seekers of Truth
• Champions of Honor
• Seekers of Honor
• Defenders of Glory
• Champions of Truth
• Seekers of Glory
• Defenders of Truth
• Champions of Glory
• Defenders of Champions
• Protectors of Italian Virginity (kidding, this one would actually be ok)
  

Tell me that you haven’t seen dozens of these guilds lingering around. In my experience, they’re always recruiting. Their GM quotes Gladiator or other epic movies in his sig. I can just keep piling these stereotypes on, we’ve all seen people like this. They attach weight to the name of a group of people.

Next time I start a guild, I’m going to call my guild “X of Y”. Seriously.

The problem with most joke names is that nothing is funny after two days. Just like most tattoos aren’t cool in just a couple of years. What’s cool and funny now is never cool the fifth time you explain it. However, I suspect that as you see another guild form with a name like Harbringers of Misfortune, you might get another chuckle that will keep this joke fresh.

At least a guild with a stale joke name can be disbanded and reformed with a newer joke name… unlike those sad souls stuck with tribal tattoos.

In the meantime, I have an unguilded alt who’s about to start a new guild. It’ll be right up there with the Bankadins.

A rogue in my guild is working on making a competent healing priest alt. He asked me where the priest spreadsheet is. Like how you actually know for certain, the way a rogue can just say “Well, this sword is just flat-out better than that one because I put them both in the rogue dps spreadsheet and the answer is: the new one yields +10 dps.” I answered, “Ha ha.”

Healing is much harder to diagnose than tanking or dps is. I mean, trivially the question for healing is: Did we wipe? If yes, the problem might be healing, or it might be lack of execution or understanding of the event. If no, then you did fine. That’s it. Bonus points for nobody dying.

When you’re a dps’er, every choice regarding gear and talents and so on can be boiled down to one question (two if you’re advanced):

• Simple: Am I personally doing more damage?
• Advanced: Am I making the group/raid’s total damage output higher?

For each event, the raid has X time to do Y damage with Z constraints, now get to it. You can run Recount or Recap or any number of other tools to diagnose damage. It’s trivial. You put on a new piece of gear, go raid, and then say,

“Well, I thought bonus crit rating this would help, but my miss rate went up by 2% and I did less overall damage. Guess I’m back to this weaker looking +hit rating blue.”

As far as research, a class’s dps is broken down into a format similar to this: If you are build A, stack stat/rating B until Bmax, then stack C stat/rating infinitely. For frost mages it’s “stack spell hit until the spell cap, then spell haste and spell damage infinitely”.

Tanking is harder than that. You’re trying to both keep aggro and not die. Keeping aggro is about generating threat, which also has particular gear choices, but more or less works like doing damage (stack hit rating, expertise, spell hit, shield block, attack power, and shield block value in various amounts depending on which kind of tank you are). Not dying involves a few variables like stamina and avoidance, as well as preventing as much of the spike damage as you can. There are tradeoffs to be made, but you have a maximum health total that’s easy to see, an avoidance rate that’s easy to compute. You know you’re doing the right amount of threat if your raid doesn’t have to hold back on damage. You balance accordingly.

Healing? Like tanking, the suite of stats changes between classes–some mix of healing, mp5, spirit, intellect, and spell crit. But the act of healing depends entirely on each particular event. Your tank might get crushed, get hit normally, block, or dodge. Everyone in your raid might take steady, constant damage. Your tank might never drink potions or use healthstones. Your dps might get cleaved by the boss for standing in the wrong place. Your job is not just to heal the tank, it’s to patch the mistakes in mid-event.

Also, two different attempts on the same boss with the same raid can go completely differently just due to the inherent randomness of some events. Think of Ilhoof in Kara. If a healer gets sacrificed, it’s extremely tough on the remaining healers for those ten seconds. If not, that’s nine minutes of (healing) pleasure! Switching one piece of gear in that event, and most others… you can’t actually tell if it matters. You just know that a higher value in your key stats is better.

On top of all of that, in raids you also must instantly and silently adjust to the healing style of the people around you so that you’re not wasting group efforts. That ability to adjust is the whole essence of raid healing–it can’t be quantified and it doesn’t show up on your character sheet. If I was going to land a slow, mana-efficient heal for 5000 and someone else throws in a mana-inefficient 2000 heal, causing me to overheal by 2000 and waste that time and mana, who’s fault is it? (Trick question, it doesn’t matter. That’s wasted mana on someone’s part, and if you don’t work it out, the raid will wipe at some point due to your collective waste of mana.)

So given how nebulous and random and instinctive healing is, how can you tell that you’re doing better by swapping one item for another? You can’t tell, because you can’t run tests outside of combat. Your heals might hit for a tiny bit less or more, but the actual trade off between 6 mp5 and 22 healing? Can’t tell. Your playstyle influences your gear selection more than other roles. Damage dealers just do damage, and every piece of gear they have is about doing more damage. There’s no opinion as to whether 900 damage is more than 800 damage. Tanks want to survive and generate threat, that’s their balance.

A healer who loves mana regeneration is going to cast weaker heals continuously, and make it work. A healer who loves larger heals is going to try to time their larger heals correctly so they aren’t wasting mana, and make it work. The final grade is: Did we win? Yes. Great, your gear and spec is correct for that event!

Most of us just learn the stats that are necessary for our build (for example, spell crit plus healing plus mp5 for a holy paladin), and try to get decent levels of all of them.

So unfortunately, there is no healing spreadsheet. This leads to the huge learning curve in learning to heal (and tank), but that’s another article.

Way back in the day, I was a Sega person. Like everyone else at my college, I had a Genesis (Jenny), but I followed Sega into the Saturn (good system, far too expensive, some memorable games), and the Dreamcast (outstanding system, some fantastic games). Then Sega came to an end due to their own pricing, strange marketing, and lack of third-party support… oh, and the relentless PS/PS2 juggernaut. Afterwards, I had to find something else. On a weekend where my wife (girlfriend at the time) anticipated us being snowed in and unable to escape from visiting her parents house, we picked up a PS2. It was Sony who killed Sega, but the whole “love the one who defeats you” vibe is strong here.

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My casual/raiding guild is starting to build up to 25-man content. They’re raiding with a bunch of ex-guildies who have drifted through a handful of other guilds before running out of options and trying to start their own. This splinter guild doesn’t have enough people to raid even Kara, never mind their goal of beginning 25-man content, so they proposed an alliance to start the 25-man track.

There’s enthusiasm in my guild. New content! For many people in the guild, this will be their first big raid ever. For others, this would be a way to relive the glory days (cough) of Molten Core/Onyxia. The 25-man track is the big boy raid track! Whee!

There are a few problems, though.

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(Warning: infectious thoughts are difficult to root out once they take hold.)

Most simple raid encounters are kind of like a magic bukkake scene, especially with many flashy casters in the raid. (If you don’t know what bukkake is, don’t search for it while you’re at work.)

Apologies.

I have to admit that my most coveted drop that I want from Magister’s Terrace is the phoenix minipet. Minipets are probably the silliest thing in World of Warcraft. A non-combat pet. Window dressing.

For my wife, I think minipets are about 20% of why she plays the entire game. When I passed on the rumor of minipet bags, she was thrilled. She is that person who has 20 minipets, in her inventory. Chickens, robots, elephants, glowing balls of light, bugs, old chewing gum, and a ball of string. I have a mere dozen. Only four on my inventory at a time (less on my bagspace-starved warrior, he only gets three) Our love of minipets is strong, and it turns out that we are not alone.

The best minipets have a noise you hear when you click on it. Like with Willy, you get a groan. Mechanical chicken, you get a robotic clucking noise. And so on. It’s something fun you can do if you’re on a raid and the raid leader has to explain an encounter you know to the new person.

Come to think of it, the baby panda is partially what sold my wife on the game in the first place. You have these majestic, imposing characters, with huge shoulder armor and glowing effects and fearsome weapons and so on. And then you have a humble prairie chicken pecking the ground next to you. There’s something about that pairing that’s just perfect. Before we got her a computer of her own (and a game client of her own), my wife and I would play together, with her riding shotgun. We chatted up someone in Ironforge who had a baby panda. “That’s so cool!” “Yeah, but he doesn’t really do much.” And at that moment, the baby panda took a nap, laying down with the green zzz over its head. We laughed for a solid ten minutes. That was the beginning.

Minipets factor into our guild’s raid strategy as well. When we encounter difficulty on a new boss, the wipes can get tedious. Someone always suggests different minipets, and everyone in the raid says “Ah yes. Minipets.” A different contingent of (useless) minipets will certainly make this attempt much easier. Like I said, we’re casual/raiding, and we should probably be talking more about whatever’s killing us, but how can you turn down a guaranteed smile and laugh before rushing in to die again?

You can’t. It’s just one of the silly parts of WoW that make it fun.

What happens when you’ve got two gamers (me and my wife) who can’t play a game together, but you both want to play? Someone rides shotgun. This can be due to the game being single-player, or more recently, due to the need for someone to hold an infant.

The person who rides shotgun doesn’t have to focus on controls or the repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time on gaming. They focus on the big picture, missed details, and so on. If the game is something you’re both interested in, you combine to become something of a superplayer. For example, I can’t spot those hidden flags in Assassin’s Creed for the life of me, but she’ll pick out one that’s under a pile of hay, which is itself under a tarp… three miles away, through dense fog, around the corner. She spots the tiny corner of that flag, and we get closer to completing the game. In Pixeljunk Monsters, I point out that she tends to stand next to mobs, waiting for them to die, when she could be three steps away, upgrading a tower while she waited. And we get closer to getting a rainbow on that level. (Yes, you can play PJM with two players–and we often do–but when I get home from work and she’s playing, I don’t say, “Drop that and let’s play together.” I fix myself a drink.)

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