Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting

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.

The fol­low­ing quote has no def­i­nite attri­bu­tion, but it’s good advice in general:

“It is bet­ter to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

In World of War­craft, this applies to dam­age meter report­ing. Every raid diag­nos­tic addon has a whisper/party/raid/guild broad­cast fea­ture. Who­ever first thought of that should be killed! Despite that, these raid diag­nos­tics and their abil­ity to broad­cast will exist forever­more and so: bet­ter to educate.

What came about very shortly after damagemeters-broadcast was invented was an eter­nal epeen con­test between the dps’ers in raids.

“Who can top the dam­age meters?! Let’s export the results to raid chat after every boss attempt! After every wipe! Every raid!”

This dam­ageme­ter wank­ing was so strong in my guild’s Molten Core days that some char­ac­ters would will­fully skip the kill order just to have a longer unin­ter­rupted dam­age stream on a tar­get. Lunacy! Kill orders are crit­i­cal in group­ing. I’ll write more about it another time, but basi­cally every­thing goes bet­ter when the dam­age deal­ers coor­di­nate efforts. How­ever, every class loses dam­age out­put while switch­ing tar­gets: melee has to run between tar­gets, cast­ers have to build up debuffs or what­ever. It’s part of the game. But peo­ple were so wrapped up in epeen that they were actu­ally try­ing to win at that stu­pid meter more than they were try­ing to win at the events. They’d push dam­age so hard that they’d pull aggro and wipe the raid, over and over, just to stay on top of the epeen meter. (Not mul­ti­ple times in one raid, but once per raid) It wasn’t just one per­son; most of the dam­age deal­ers had been infected by dam­ageme­ter epeen madness.

I know that this wasn’t local to my guild, either. Every dps recruit had dam­ageme­ters, and they jumped right into the epeen contest.

It took us months to stamp that out. (Actu­ally, most of those peo­ple left once TBC hit to form a hard­core raid­ing guild, which then nat­u­rally imploded after six months and then scat­tered to the winds. Real-life friends were on non-speaking terms with each other. Yay hard­core raid­ing! Later, I receive a tell, “lol you’re still on Aran?” “Yes, but I didn’t have to leave the server, and my friends are still my friends, and we still laugh with each other most every raid.”)

Any­way, I’ll speak for every healer and tank out there: nobody cares about your dps diag­nos­tics. I mean, you wouldn’t want to see the fol­low­ing wipe out your chat box every few min­utes, right?

Recount PANTS ranking:
1) Tank: PANTS
2) DPS1: PANTS
3) DPS2: PANTS
4) DPS3: NO PANTS
5) Healer: NO PANTS

Heal­ing is best done with no pants, but I can’t speak for dps’ing. Would you want this spammed over your chat win­dow? Your answer is what heal­ers, tanks, and progression-minded dps think every time some­one posts their epeen.

Vir­tu­ally every raid­ing guild had to suf­fer through this. Most of the ones that I know real­ized that epeen and pro­gres­sion were coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, and have some kind of pol­icy on epeen spam.

I’m not pick­ing on dps’ers, but I’ve only seen one healer ever spam heal­ing num­bers, and the rest of us whis­pered him so quickly that he couldn’t respond indi­vid­u­ally. “/ra Sorry!” Also, I’ve never seen a tank spam a dam­age break­down. Maybe it’s some­thing about the team-oriented mind­set that tanks and heal­ers must cultivate.

Also, this is noth­ing against raid diag­nos­tics. I love them! Install them. Learn what they’re telling you. Use that infor­ma­tion to improve your char­ac­ter. Dis­cuss what you find with your peers. It’s even use­ful to chal­lenge other play­ers out­side of a raid set­ting, “War­locks, the mages/hunters/rogues are out­dam­ag­ing each of you by 40% per per­son, and yet you have equiv­a­lent gear. What’s going on?” This can all be use­ful. You might help some­one play bet­ter and have more fun! I per­son­ally use Recount and Recap every raid.

But have mercy. Keep your damn epeen out of my chat win­dow.

More Words!

• Fools, Silence, and Dam­age Reporting–supplemental
• Offi­cers should all have Tanks and Healers
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid
• The Down­side of Endgame Guilds
• There is no heal­ing spreadsheet