(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their sta­tus in the raid­ing game means that they’re Right. They label other peo­ple noobs, and the silly thing is that peo­ple believe them. “I have this awe­some item, you don’t, there­fore I know what I’m talk­ing about and you don’t.” This frus­trates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very per­son­able, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the orig­i­nal WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was look­ing for a more relaxed play­time require­ment while still play­ing at a high level. A per­fect fit!

One of our top dps’ers had lev­elled a priest to max­i­mum level and was look­ing for a run­down of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short heal­ing) He posted in our guild forums, ask­ing how to man­age mana, which spells were good where, the dif­fer­ences between instanc­ing and raid­ing, and so on. The other pri­mary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of gen­eral strat­egy and how to use the var­i­ous tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emo­tional rebut­tal to what we wrote. Her entire priest heal­ing strat­egy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s con­cerned, it is the only spell any­one needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of pas­sion­ate and anec­do­tal evi­dence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she down­right took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basi­cally framed her argu­ment such that to dis­agree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Need­less to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuck­led about it, but I didn’t under­stand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the appli­ca­tion to a mid-tier raid­ing guild?

The answer: Mary could suc­ceed in raid­ing, because her other heal­ers could heal around her. I remem­ber this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no rea­son that it couldn’t con­tinue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25^th per­son in some raid. They’re prob­a­bly pro­gress­ing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash heal­ing self, and look­ing down at every­one who isn’t geared like she is.

The fun­ni­est part of this is that Mary could only ever find suc­cess in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raid­ing is sup­pos­edly a pres­tige envi­ron­ment. Raiders are seri­ous busi­ness. They’re seen as elite play­ers. I mean, these peo­ple have zomgepics that are sim­ply inac­ces­si­ble to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of play­ers who by def­i­n­i­tion of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones push­ing new con­tent as it’s released, who write the wowwiki arti­cles, and write and tune the spread­sheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a bet­ter term, scrubs who exe­cute well-defined strate­gies. I’m not say­ing that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just say­ing that their posi­tion in raid­ing guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like every­one else.

(The title of this arti­cle really should have been “Mid-tier raid­ing and below does not nec­es­sar­ily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)