Penance Priest

One of the most exciting blue-tinted things I read in a while came from Wowhead’s exclusive interview with Ghostcrawler. It’s a great interview, so if you haven’t read it, go to it.

Here’s what got me all jazzed.

...really what we're trying to do—and with like, the passive talent trees we're putting into Cataclysm, we're trying to give ourselves better tuning mechanisms to be able to make easy changes. One of the things we're often up against is: Say we're going to make a patch. We want to, for example, buff mages. We have to do something that both does what we want it to do, and, you know, isn't buggy. It's not a good time to mess with, you know, "Hey we're going to add a new talent", or "We're going to put in this untested tech that makes this other thing proc" or whatever, because then we're just going to be fixing our own patches over and over again. So we have to be so strategic that we often can't make the changes that we really want to make, and we know "this is still going to leave Frost Mages underpowered in PvE, but we can't do anything else—we just physically, technically can't make the change we want." So what we're trying to do in Cataclysm is build in a lot of hooks to let us constantly tweak, and when we see something is too low we can dial it up a little bit, or dial it back a little more.

I’m a professional programmer, so I know how challenging it can be to tweak a complex system. Once you have something that works – and the definition of “works” can sometimes be quite sloppy, but hey – making changes to it is far more difficult than most people realize. Everything is tied together, and the more complex the system, the more delicate the connections.

So it looks like at last, for real and for true, Cataclysm will fix it. They just need to man the dials, and we’re good to go. *fingers crossed*

Deceive. Inveigle. Obfuscate.

Let’s be honest. Blizzard lies to us. It’s just a fact of life in an organization that has to work 24/7 just to prevent global riots. It gets a little extreme sometimes… remember how they were telling us for months that shadow was in a really good place, despite the mountain of data showing the contrary? They weren’t simply ignoring us; they said repeatedly that there was no problem. Eoy blogged about it, and Blizzard continued to deny. Then one day, out of the blue, shadow got a huge buff. No warning, no discussion. Suddenly we were competitive again.

I’m sure there are many reasons they don’t always let on that they’re looking at buffing some spell or class. First is the obvious, which is that it opens the door to everyone to whine about perceived deficiencies in their own favorite ability. Second, it’s such a complex system that even if Blizzard wanted to buff an ability or a class, there’s no guarantee that they could pull it off gracefully.

The more tweaky-hooks they put into the system, the easier it will be for them to make changes. And the less they will need to lie. There will be fewer instances in which Blizzard says “we can’t do that.” It will be more “we don’t want to do that,” and that’s a good thing.

Yes, I am a very optimistic person. I really do hope and expect that Blizzard will be far more responsive to real complaints, as they were (eventually) with shadow priests and frost DKs, even if both of those specs lingered at the bottom for months.

Aren’t you going to say anything about the new talents!?!1?

Yes yes, I’m getting there! In fact, that’s the whole point.

Honestly, I don’t really have much to say. It’s all “in theory” right now. Until we’ve played with it, what can be said beyond “I’m excited” or “I hate Smite” or other unsubstantial comments?

Here’s my unsubstantial response: I’m very excited! But I love change, and welcome the disorienting feeling of being a nub again, having to relearn everything. I hope you do too!

You see, there seem to be two basic objections to the new talent tree for healing priests. The first is, in a word, Smite. And the second covers a lot of ground related to balance: How much mana will we regen from Archangel? How much dps will we be doing with Smite? How much indirect healing with Atonement? What about talents that were removed, like Holy Specialization…are they nerfing our crit? Those sorts of things.

(Well, there is a third objection, one that I don’t see enough discussion about. Which is why the HELL is Improved Holy Nova so deep in the Holy tree? This is grave mistake, one that I hope Blizzard rectifies before it’s too late.)

The whole balance issue is one that will be tweaked until it works exactly as planned. Smite not putting out quite as much damage as they wanted? *Tweak*! Not enough regen? *Tweak* This is also obvious in the masteries; if abilities aren’t performing properly, or classes are imbalanced, they have a knob to twiddle to adjust these things relatively easily. They could even implement nonlinear scaling so that as you get more mastery from gear, the three masteries grow at different rates.

Oh, and don’t bring up PvP. It is, and always will be, an impossible balance to strike. Unless they implement Arenawell Radiance (which they damn well should), or some other debuff that tweaks coefficients when you step into PvP, balancing abilities for PvE and PvP will remain stormy and frustrating.

My big questions for Cataclysm are about creativity. Since we all know Blizzard is trying to encourage us not to shield spam (because we love shielding so much!), will we be given new fixed rotations? Like, five Smites, then power-heal for 10 seconds, then back to Smiting? Or will we be given room to breathe, room to be dynamic and creative again? Will encounter design follow the new philosophy of talent design, which (in theory) reduces the need to min-max in favor of choice? They say Smiting will be optional, but really? Once we get in there, will it become clear that there is really a best way, bringing us back full circle to cookie-cutter specs and rotations?

I’m as curious as everyone else about how it will feel in Cataclysm.  But I’m not concerned about the balance issues. The new “CWFI” system (not such a good acronym, I’m afraid… will Cataclysm fix that?) will be used to adjust the numbers so that the big-picture changes don’t leave one class desperately behind.

As for Smite, it’s a big change. We don’t know what encounters will be like. We don’t know how much idling time we’ll have. But surely if Blizzard wants us to be Smiting, it will be obvious, and eventually, natural.

AFK

With this I bid you a temporary farewell. In about a week I begin a cross-country move, followed by lots of other stuff that will keep me mostly away from WoW and away from writing. Who knows, but it won’t surprise me if I’m away most of the summer.

So have a great one!

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« Back to QQ #1

It will be difficult to make this seem less directly related to my current situation than it is. What I mean is: this is a private QQ and a public QQ. Both a philosophical argument and a more personal argument. I actually have a proposal at the end of this rant. So bear with it.

Preliminary disclaimer: this is not about loot. It’s about loot policy. We all know that getting loot is part of the motivating factor for playing the game. If you raided all of ICC25, then all of ICC heroic, and were victorious the whole way through, you would feel like you beat the game for sure. But if you got no gear along the way, your gnawing sense that you were being carried would get stronger and stronger. That you weren’t living up to your potential. That you were in fact more of a burden than a player. If your toon is not evolving, getting slightly but consistently more powerful with every raid week, it becomes a psychic knot. It feels awful, and it has effects on your performance, your relationships, and your interest in playing the game. Whoever says that loot isn’t important might be correct if they’re attacking gear-score whores. I just hope you don’t miss the deeper point: loot is in fact quite important.

As I’ve said before, I believe loot council is the best loot distribution method available. That is, if it’s run by philosopher kings and/or enlightened officers. I have not met a single person who fits this description. Therefore, in practice, it runs the gamut from merely awful to the absolute worst.

The quality of a LC is limited by several factors, including but hardly limited to: (1) the integrity of the council members; (2) the degree of team spirit on the council and in the guild itself; (3) the data systems used for tracking loot distribution, including a way to measure the amount of upgrade a piece represents; (4) clear rules regarding performance and its affect on loot; and (5) delicate care for the individuals in the raid, as well as for the raid itself.

Integrity: This should be obvious. We’ve all heard stories of loot councils in which council members grabbed high-value loot for themselves, or gave it to their friends. That’s just the most obvious example of a lack of integrity. While integrity is tied to team spirit (below), it is so vast and multi-dimensional that it can’t really be narrowed down to a simple bullet-point. There are more situations than you could ever codify in some rulebook of loot allocation. Integrity itself must be the rulebook; you need to be truly trustworthy to be a loot councillor. And that’s no small feat.

I’ve been in the position many times of having to make a loot allocation decision that had no easy answer, and which would most definitely anger or hurt someone who did not deserve their fate. It’s hard stuff. Most people I know have small cojones when it comes to making hard decisions, such that they’ll reliably take the easy way out, rather than make harder, gutsier, riskier calls. Our true character is on the line when it comes to stuff like this. We all know it. Challenging situations bring out the devil and the saint in us; those with more integrity are more likely to show their saint than their devil when the going gets tough.

Team spirit: First of all, if your guild is missing this, you should be looking for a new guild. And if your officers are missing this, run for the hills. It’s a team sport, and if you don’t have a team-spirited team, there’s no loot distribution “trick” that can fix it for you. Certainly a LC needs to have its eyes not on the individuals, but on the team. Where will this piece of loot benefit us the most? This is so obvious it surely doesn’t need to be said. But it always needs to be said.

Data systems + upgrade measurements: That’s fancytalk for “spreadsheet.” The LC needs to track who was given what, and when. It needs to track when people missed raids. It needs to track the degree of each upgrade –  getting a new ring with a 19-iLevel jump is very different than getting a new 19-iLevel pair of pants, or a trinket.

If a loot council is looking at any single piece of gear in isolation, it’s doomed to failure. Consider two mages, one decked out in Ulduar (226) gear, the other in ToC10 (232) gear. Every piece that drops will be a bigger upgrade for the Ulduar mage, so unless you’re tracking distributions as a holistic upgrade model, with team spirit, and a lot of integrity, the ToC10 mage will get gear only after the Ulduar mage is fully ICC geared. This is a stupid-obvious example of one of the problems that data systems should be in place to help solve. No system is a replacement for integrity, intelligence, and care, but those qualities without a data system cannot be channeled and used properly.

Performance: If there is ANY rule that affect how loot is distributed, it must be articulated clearly so everyone knows what to expect. Will missing a raid lower your loot priority? By how much, and for how long? How about dying to fire? Lower dps? Will brown-nosing change your priority? Being an officer? Donating to the guild bank? These types of rules are often in place but unspoken until the moment they’re used. (See integrity, above.) Personally I’m seriously opposed to a lot of these policies, but that’s not the point: if these policies will be in place, they must be explicit.

Care for the individuals: At any point along the way, you need to be aware of what’s happening on the other side of the council’s walls. Has one of your raiders gone three weeks without a drop? Maybe they should get the next one even if it isn’t the highest benefit for the raid. Maybe, just maybe, that will keep your raiders happy. And that’s in the loot council’s hands. Is it paying attention?

Between all of these criteria, there has to be some way to prevent imbalanced situations. Just as an example, I looked at our guild’s healing core. In that group, you have people with this many main-spec LC-assigned drops: 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 7. (Which one do you think is the officer?) Maybe I’m wrong about my presumption that fairness forms some portion of the policy. But in case I’m right, I have a suggestion.

The proposal: Limit loot council to non-armored pieces: rings, necklaces, trinkets, cloaks, weapons and offhands/shields. Use EPGP for anything with an armor class.

Let’s say your raid has an abundance of clothies, but only two holy pallies. (Pretty typical, I suspect!) In a pure EPGP system, the pallies would have less competition, and would spend fewer points on armored gear than the clothies, leaving them freer to bid higher on shared gear like rings or trinkets. Implementing a hybrid system where a LC handles shared gear would ensure that your clothies, leather, mail, and plate wearers all have an equal shake at that stuff.

It also allows the LC to shift the loot balance if too many mail pieces have dropped recently (for example). So even if a ring might be a great benefit to a resto shaman, the LC can rebalance loot distribution as it sees fit.

The meta-point: Running a guild is not the same as leading a raid. There is a whole other set of skills that very few people have; skills that are about humanity, fairness, and development of team spirit. And no, leading a guild is not about group hugs. But integrity (in the way I’m describing it here) has absolutely nothing to do with being soft. It has to do with doing the right thing.

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« Back to QQ #1

Tank healers, skip to the next QQ! This one is not applicable. This is for bubble-spamming raiding discipline priests.

Let’s look at the stats on our gear.

Stamina, intellect, spell power: More is always better. These stats are on every piece of gear you’ll equip, and they scale with iLevel. As you gear up, you really don’t have any choice – you’ll get higher and higher values of spell power and intellect.

Haste: The hard cap for bubble-spam is 150 haste rating. Since we’re almost always affected by the haste bonus from Borrowed Time, we need only a tiny amount of haste from gear before our GCD hits the 1 second hard cap. After that, haste will only affect the casting time of your long-cast spells (GH, PoH, Penance, DH). Realistically, you get capped at 150 the moment you hit 80. Because of the GCD cap, the value of haste is nearly zero. It’s not actually zero, but the value drops precipitously at 150. To paraphrase my old probability professor (discussing asymptotes), the value of additional haste on our gear is so close to zero that we might as well just call it zero.

Spirit: This is a mana-regen stat. Holy priests get a spell-power conversion talent, but we get only regen. Spirit holds zero value if you don’t need any additional regen; having more regen is just wasted mana. So there is a regen “cap” of sorts. In ToC25 or ICC gear, you should not have significant mana problems (perhaps none at all), so spirit has nearly no value for us. You can’t (and shouldn’t) get rid of it from your gear entirely. But it’s highly unlikely that adding spirit to your gear will change anything about your capacities, even marginally. Another wasted stat. (FYI: I will lump mp5 in the same category here…it’s present on some gear, especially shared gear like rings and cloaks, and it also provides zero value if you do not need mana.)

Crit: Our direct heals can crit: Penance, Flash, Greater, Divine Hymn, and PoH. Shields cannot crit. The heal from the Glyph can crit, but the heal is only 20% of the size of your shield anyway. So crit benefits your shield only 20% as much as it benefits your healing spells. Of the stats listed here, crit is by far the best, although it is gimped by nearly 80% for shield spammers. The more you cast direct heals (like PoM), the more benefit you’ll get from crit.

Ok, so all our gear will have stamina, intellect, and spell power. Then we’ll get two of the three other stats as well – either crit+spirit, or crit+haste, or haste+spirit. Two of these stats have zero value, and one has about 20% of its nominal value.

Contrast this with gear for a shadow priest, for example, who will receive less value from spirit on gear than from crit. But all three stats offer some real dps benefit. None of them are wasted, none are as gimped as crit rating is for discipline priests. And the only capped stat for shadow priests is hit rating.

Ergo: gearing for discipline is currently broken. On gear that’s supposedly designed for our spec, we receive less value per point of iLevel upgrade than any other spec in the game. If there were a piece of gear that had stam+int+double spell power, that would suit our needs just fine. But since that won’t happen, we’re stuck with getting approximately half the benefit from upgrades that another caster gets.

On to QQ #3 »

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Happy Monday everyone! Especially in New Orleans. Awesome game, just awesome.

Ok, to the heart of the matter. I’ve been one of the most staunchly anti-QQ forces I know, both in this blog and in the forums I haunt. Typically QQ is a sign of some sort of failure: failure of understanding, failure to play with the right people, failure to adjust to changes in game mechanics, failure to listen, etc. I hate the inner experience you have when you’re complaining. I also hate the feeling of reading others’ (usually irrational and aggressive) complaints. It just feels gross, and it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon: it riles you up in the wrong way.

It’s a life question more than a game question: with all of its complexity, is life basically good but with bad stuff that happens? Or is life basically bad but with some good stuff that happens? If you take the latter position, you’ll QQ morning noon and night. If you take the former position, you might QQ, but it will be within a framework of positivity and forward motion. I strive for this philosophy.

However, not all QQ is just emo-ranting. I will be presumptuous and assume that there is more than some merit in the QQ that I’m collecting in this post. That, and it’s also a rant.

To spare you from repeated assaults, I’ve put in three QQs into a triple post. Aren’t I nice? I have a chance to get it all out of my system at once, and if all goes well, you won’t have to read QQ every post for the next three weeks. I’ve put each one in a separate post, just to allow the dialogue to make some kind of sense.

Here we go! It’s long, meandering, and has some intense moments. Brace yourselves.

Is Discipline Fun?

I made the mistake of looking at an old post of mine. It was the second post I ever wrote, called “Why Disc is So Much Fun.” I was still trying to figure out what the hell I was going to blog about, and I definitely hadn’t developed much of a writing style. In it I compared the Recount profiles between two priests, one discipline (me) and one CoH. (This was in 3.0.2, prior to the release of the Lich King content. We called Holy priests “CoH” priests back then.) Here are the graphs, just so you can see them without clicking through.

The bubbling joy I experienced with discipline was not only its novelty, but its versatility. Back then, I expressed my love for the spec because it “forces a degree of engagement and creativity,” which is displayed very nicely in the healing profiles above. I was using every tool at my disposal. The creativity and versatility were the source of the thrill of discipline healing.

Well, as you saw in my last post, discipline’s role (at least in 25-mans) is much more well-defined than it was in those frothy days, when we were all finding out how the new spec would work out. We’re now officially bubble spammers with a wee bit of tank support. The more I play 25s with an excellent team, the more I realize just how narrowly focused the tree has become. There are exceptions of course, and certainly in 10-man raids bubble spam isn’t really much of an option anyway, so there’s more room for creative play in that setting.

Here’s a graph from our raid last Tuesday, covering 7 bosses. I removed the Glyph of PWS and Divine Aegis from the graph, since they aren’t spell-casts. There are 662 shields and 17 ticks of Penance in the graph. And a single Divine Hymn out-healed my entire use of Penance for the night.

I’m thinking about renaming my blog “FUCK YOU BLIZZARD.” If our ridiculous and broken one-trick pony-of-a-spec doesn’t get fixed on day one of Cataclysm’s release, I’m folding my healing robes and burning them. Yes, I know discipline has a powerful role in raids. Yes, I know GC recently declared that discipline “is in a good place at the moment,” which means it’s unlikely to get fixed. That doesn’t mean it’s fun to play. It’s not. I don’t play discipline for its function. I play(ed) it because it rocked, because it “force[d] a degree of engagement and creativity.” It revitalized my interest in healing, which had gotten rather dull at the end of BC. The chart above shows the current state of affairs: there is an absolute and total lack of engagement and creativity. Props to those who still enjoy discipline. Seriously. Meanwhile, I’m begrudgingly bubble-spamming my way to glory, hoping for the change that I do not expect to arrive.

On to QQ #2 »

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So I got Mad Skill on 10-man last night. How exciting is this? It's very exciting, since I hadn’t even killed Anub10h before. How impressive is it? Well, not impressive at all. This late in the game, we're all geared to the teeth, mostly in 25-man stuff (including some 264s). And even though there were plenty of 232 alts in the run, the players behind the toons were very experienced in the content. Insanity was the goal, and it could very well have happened with this group, but for a few minor mistakes. Which is, after all, what Insanity is there to prove: that you can pull it off without mistakes.

I missed two full tiers of content: hard-mode Ulduar and heroic ToC. So now I'm on a new server, in a guild that's young but shit-hot, and where people are mostly just after One Light (for drakes) and Insanity (for pride, and the cloaks are damn good too). I'm getting whisked along as part of our “get to know each other” phase. It wouldn't be fair to say I'm being carried, but it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate either. I'd never seen Firefighter before, nor the Animus, nor limited-ice Anub. My experienced guildies are making it happen; I'm just following along, doing my healy thing, and snapping up long-lost achievements.

As of last week I had Iron Dwarf and Heartbreaker. Tonight I might get a drake and Starcaller. So what? Well, like I said, it's nothing to brag about at this stage, but it's still satisfying to recover from months of progression-less farming on my last server. My old guild is a fairly strong 10-man guild with enough good people to fill up the 25s. The guys in the 10-man core are progressing, and I'm happy for them, and wish them all the best in going as far as they can. I wasn’t in that 10-man core, which meant my raid time was spent farming old content (boring) or attempting 25-man hard modes for which we didn't meet the minimum dps requirements. Too easy or too hard. No one is to blame for this; it's a server issue more than a guild issue. But it basically describes the main reason I've moved on. Again, I’m not trying to dis the great people in my last guild, but I’ve had a lot of “why did you leave”s, and felt the need to clarify.

Never underestimate the Goldilocks effect: the most satisfying content is just right: it provides a challenge, but not too much, and not too little. I can't tell you how important this aspect of the game is, especially for those in management roles. Keeping your raiders happy is not about giving them loot; it’s about keeping them on this “just right” edge of progression, wherever that may be for your group. I'm convinced that my new guild will stay on the Goldilocks edge for a long time, and this is pure win. With the right amount of ever-increasing challenge, on content that gives you the right chance to succeed if you give it your all...that's when you start to flow, start to really have fun, and start to remember why you play in the first place.

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An interesting array of cultural factors aligned in the 1990s. As baby boomers were entering their 50s, they were experiencing mid-life crises in large numbers and with large bank accounts. Boomers were ready and willing to part with a lot of money to alleviate the nagging ache that invades the spirit as one grows older. The ache that says, “I haven’t lived up to the expectations I set for myself when I was younger…there’s so much more to do!”

Additionally, the 90s saw the advent of eco-tourism and adventure tourism. With the number of untouched wild areas dwindling, the Australian Outback and South American rainforests were becoming more and more popular. For many people, vacationing in Paris or Tuscany started to hold little pull compared to the more raw emotional experience of the wild.

One type of adventure tour that emerged in the 90s was the Everest climb. The way to the top had been well mapped…not only the actual routes up the mountain, but the process of acclimation to the thin air and biting cold. It remained a dangerous and sometimes deadly climb, but the perils were more predictable and preventable than ever before.

Tour guides – people who were themselves highly trained, very experienced climbers – began offering the thrill of a lifetime. For around $60k (plus travel and equipment, of course), you could essentially be carried to the Top of the World. Everest was no longer the exclusive domain of the most trained, elite, risk-seeking mountaineers.

The process has a built-in ready-check. Most humans are not built to deal with the trivial amount of oxygen in the high mountains, nor with the trivial amount of heat in the air. So climbers spend weeks at Base Camp, which is actually at 17000 feet above sea level, doing little but letting their bodies adjust to the extreme conditions and taking occasional forays to higher altitudes. (The summit is over 29000 feet.) Not everyone is suited to this process, let alone to the final, intense hike to the top. Those who are physically able to endure the conditions do so with the assistance of the very best gear, large support crews, and a generous dose of supplementary oxygen.

Early explorers, of course, traveled under a very different set of circumstances. Sir Edmund Hillary wore winter clothes that look to our modern eyes as scarily insufficient. He had guts though, and he failed multiple times before he finally succeeded in his historic ascent.

In 1996, everything went wrong. Two tour guides and six of their customers died on the mountain. A combination of bad luck, bad judgment, and raw arrogance brought the experiment in paid summiting to a devastating halt. No amount of money or gear was enough to secure the safety of those involved. The two tour guides died trying to save their customers’ lives. The inexperience and arrogance of their paying customers was just too much weight for them to carry.

I find myself fascinated by this type of arrogance and its results. We all have it, we all act on it, we all create some form of repercussions because of our own hubris. This was obviously an extreme example, with deadly results. But what about in our little corner of the world, where the price paid for shortcutting is virtual?

We all know that in this patch especially, gear is free for the taking, no raiding required. Which means no learning required. You can be geared in 245 without ever having made a mistake severe enough to wipe a raid. Messing up that badly is a very real learning experience. Wiping in a heroic is not. It’s why the Everest tour guides were tour guides: they learned through hard work and mistakes, in real and challenging situations, not just on indoor rock-climbing equipment.

I’m very much in favor of the gearing shortcuts that have been implemented in 3.2. The thing is, farming (or buying) cheap epics is not a substitute for learning. You can be a well-geared failure but still be proud of your accomplishments (i.e., purples), never realizing that you earned nothing.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. On my DK, I have something like 100 heroic instances completed, and only 15 boss kills in Naxx and Ulduar combined. On those fifteen kills, I wiped the raid at least five times, and no one knew it was me. I was brought in as the overgeared tank – with the assumption that I was a low-risk asset to the raid – and proceeded to silently prove to myself just how empty the purchased epics were. I learned first-hand how utterly irrelevant good gear is compared to the skills and awareness that come only from experience. Some of that experience transferred over from my priest, but much of it had to be re-learned as a tank the hard way.

So…you’ll get a snapshot from the Top of the World if you get airlifted in or get there on your own guts, determination, and suffering. While that snapshot might look the same to others, to you, there’s no comparison. The learning process, while more time-consuming, brings deeper and more lasting satisfaction to the reward you get at the Top than any shortcut method could. I won’t insist that the journey is more important than reaching the destination, because it’s not that simple. Just don’t underestimate how rewarding the journey can be, both because of and despite the difficulty of truly doing it yourself.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Jon Krakauer’s book about the tragedy on Everest, called Into Thin Air, I strongly recommend that you do. The story is heartbreaking, and the storyteller is a master.

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It's not your fault. You're not the original sinner. Your motives were pure, of that I'm convinced. But times have changed, and your services are no longer providing the benefits to the community that they once were. In fact, quite the opposite.

So I will have to put you on notice. You have one month to clear out.

Your only other option is to help us clean up this god-awful mess. The mess begins and ends with:

“LFM Ulduar10, 2300 required…”

Am I geared enough to ...

Stop. Stop right there. Look carefully at this simple question, so innocuous, so common, so flawed. Let's turn it inside out: “If I have X gear, then I will be able to down Y boss.” It sounds weird when you put it that way. We all know that gear does not kill bosses, people kill bosses. But answering the question “yes you have enough gear to down X boss” is feeding that very wrong idea.

Gear does not kill bosses. People kill bosses.

How much spell power do I need to ...

You're not listening.

How much mana ...

No. Not answering.

What gear score do I need to …

Wow-heroes, pack it up.

The Gevlon Experiment

If you haven't already heard about Gevlon's experiment, go read it now. A few months ago, he and his merry band of misfits re-geared themselves in heroic blues and cleared Ulduar. It wasn't pretty, but they did it. Full clear.

Be honest: the first time you heard that – perhaps it was now – didn't it shock you? Impress you? And make you question your own obsession with gear as a ticket to higher-level content?

I'm a fan of Gravity's response to the matter, in which he created a graph to illustrate the wide range of gear requirements for each raid. Because we all know that gear is not totally irrelevant. Just less relevant than many people think.

I know you know that gear isn’t enough

But if I hear one more person asking if they have enough spell power or mana or crit or haste in order to do this or that raid…

/shakes fist
/screams
/pummels people who actually try to answer the question earnestly
/quits trying to bring sanity to this crazy crazy world

Scratch that last one. I’m in it for the long haul.

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I alluded to this a few weeks ago, but I think it deserves a little more room to breathe. Incoming philosophical treatise.

One of the beautiful things about the min/max world of Burning Crusade is that it forced you towards perfection. There was often room for creativity, but not a whole lot. You needed full consumables. The correct spec. The right balance of stats on your gear. The right set of down-ranked spells. If you were serious about raiding, there was no “well it works for me.”

In Lich King, we all know that raiding has gotten easier in the extreme. I’m sure you could heal Naxx in a 0/0/0 spec, agility gems, and no consumables. The gap between correct and well it works is largely irrelevant because so much works.

From one perspective, this is a great thing. It’s a game FFS, not a challenge to survive for ten days in the wild using only a paper clip and a roll of duct tape. Having a margin for error is what makes a game playable by mere mortals, and not only by the elitist jerks among us.

This is not a lament for the good old days of WoW. Not at all. My issue here is that by allowing the “well it works” folks to succeed, the distinction between right and wrong has been lost. The fact is that right and wrong still exist, although right is no longer required to succeed. Wrong works just fine. Which makes wrong start to look like right.

I strongly support finding a way to play that you love, even if people (like me) tell you it’s wrong. Playing your way might be technically wrong even if it’s morally right. What I do lament (and strongly so) is the “well it works” folks giving any sort of advice whatsoever. Enjoy the game however you play it (and I truly mean that). But it’s important to know that there is still a line between what’s technically correct and what merely works because Blizzard has softened the edges so much. You may, in fact, be doing it totally wrong, but your apparent success makes you believe that you’re doing it right.

There are many levels of the game as well. Advice for beginners may be perfectly irrelevant for advanced players. And the experience and advice that advanced players have to offer may be totally wrong for someone at a lower level. There are also different raid roles (tank healer & raid healer, primarily), and very different advice applies there too. The context you’re in is 100% relevant, and determines the choices you should make. That context includes the your gear level and the gear level of your mates, whether you’re running with pallies or druids, whether you’re attempting content below or above your gear level, etc.

So there are indeed multiple ways to be right, but that does not negate the fact that there are still many ways to be wrong.

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