Jelitist Erks

Apparently if you don’t write a post for a few months everyone forgets about you. Well hmm. I intend to change this. No one forgets about me!

There has been a virtual storm of activity in the blogging community, virtually every blogger I read consistently has now posted about, or at least commented about this topic. I believe the beginning of this trend started with the comments on Arioch’s post last Tuesday. The discussion was between the “apparently elitist” Dark/Soth and the “apparently anti-elitist” koalabear, who wrote their follow-up and rebuttal posts as linked above.

Arioch then began a series of very well written posts here, here, and here, along with a guest post with another voice from Tyrael.

Also related to the subject of standards in pug heroics and such are the Pug Commandments from The High Latency Life, the Official QQ on Intolerance of Incompetance, and another equally well-written post from Stabilized Effort Scope.

See what I’m talking about? Yes, that is a lot of blogging, and yes, I read every one of these and can almost entirely agree with all of them.

What else is there to say? Well, a couple things.

1) Arioch stole my concept of the Game/Hobby/Job analogy. I had written up a whole post about it, then ended up not publishing it and then what do you know a month later Arioch steals my idea. Ok, so I hadn’t actually written it, but I thought it. In my mind. If you could’ve read my mind, you would’ve been like, what?

2) People at the “Hobby” level, meaning that they invest time and effort the World of Warcraft more then the “Gamer” crowd, have a tendency to be frustrated with people of the “lower” class. Because they do not share the same level of interest, their viewpoints on the World are entirely different.

3) People at the “Job” level have an even greater potential for frustration with the “lesser” masses. They are then perceived as rude and inconsiderate “elitist jerks” and we tell them to bugger off and go join Ensidia.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the “average” WoW player, at least the average blog-reader, will fall into the “hobby” category more than anything else. If you were a “gamer”, you would have no need whatsoever of looking up specs/gems/rotations/strats and if you did decide to browse a few blogs it would be mainly for the hilarious fail DK stories.

If you were in the “job” category, you would have no need for us lesser bloggers, you would be straight to the Elitist Jerks forum and analyzing algorithms and whatnot and variable modules of amazing stat configurators or whatever. I don’t actually know what you guys do, and I couldn’t care less.

I’m rambling. Who cares? I will continue.

In a Heroic, in a 5-man situation, there is very little you can actually suspect. Like the pick-up game of neighborhood baseball, you have a completely random assortment of people from every possible branch of the elitist spectrum. I don’t think there can ever be a set expectation of dps numbers, I think that the hypothetical “fresh 80″ could be anywhere from 1k dps as a noob that is trying, or a leet math wiz could be doing 2.5k in greens. Whatever.

Honestly, in a 5 man I couldn’t care less about those meaningless numbers. I’m there to have fun. If you can make jokes, laugh, not get upset over the little things (it is just a game believe it or not) then I will have fun. In a 5 man, there are zero enrage timers, and there is absolutely no reason you couldn’t take an hour to down a boss with only the tank and healer alive. Assuming the healer had ridiculous mana regen. Anyways, moving on…

Almost all of this gets thrown out the window when you move up to raiding. Apparently I spoiled the end of the story on my first comment to Arioch’s first post, but she’s just taking too long to get to the point and I wanted to say it anyway.

In a 5 man that will last no more than 30 minutes, and has no enrage timers, I really couldn’t care less what you’re doing. As long as you aren’t afk’ing or /following, I’m good. As Critical QQ put it, if you are trying.

But if you are going to commit to spend hours and hours with 9 or 24 other people for weeks in highly competitive and complicated situations, if you are going to RAID, then in the name of all that is holy you had better be up to the challenge.

1) You need to know your class. No duh. You need to know your rotation, your spec, and your gear/gems/enchants. This does not mean you know how to google cookie-cutter stuff. This means you know what you are doing.

2) You do your best to achieve the highest level of performance. No you won’t get everything down perfectly the first time, but if you’re still getting hit by Hodir’s ice spikes on the freaking 17th try then you have a problem.

Before I step off of my soapbox, I have one more complaint. Ok, two.

The first is, Tier 10 is a nightmare for us resto druids. Only 2 pieces of our epic end-of-the-expansion-tier-set have haste.. and the other 3 pieces have crit.

For those of you (especially you) who don’t understand the difference, here it is:

1) Critical Strike rating is not so good for us trees. In fact, it’s pretty bad. Our HoTs (you know the things that makes resto druids.. resto druids) cannot crit. Nourish and regrowth can crit, but generally speaking regrowth is too slow and expensive to spam, and nourish is not used nearly as much as our HoTs. At best, crit gives us a chance for a spell we occasionally use to do double healing… and probably overhealing. If a target was at low enough health for me to throw a Nourish… chances are I was planning on getting him to full health with that Nourish and the crit will overheal. Now, the 4-piece Tier 9 set bonus does in fact allow Rejuvenation to crit… but Rejuv already overheals so much, I really don’t care about it overhealing for double.

2) Haste increases the speed, therefore decreasing the time, of every spell we cast. Including their global cooldowns. The difference between a 1.5 second GCD and a 1.3 second GCD is huuuge when 90% of the spells we cast are instant. In this example, for every 100 casts without haste I could cast 115 spells with the haste.

That may not seem that big to you, but it is. The fact that it helps every spell makes it so much better.

Sadly, Blizzard doesn’t give us trees nearly enough of the gear we want with the perfect combination of stats: spellpower, spirit, haste. With these you shall be content. Case in point: I need to replace my item-level 200 belt. The frost-emblem level-264 leather caster belt does not have spirit or haste. It has crit.

It’s a moonkin belt.

What do trees get?

Cloth.

*gasp*

But it’s cloth!

.

..

Your point?

I even linked these belts in guild chat and was discussing/complaining/ranting about all this, and my fellow resto druid made that comment. “But it’s cloth”.

Just earlier that day I had a conversation with this druid, it went something like this:

Delerius:                          So, how do you as a fellow tree feel about only 2 of our 5 pieces of tier 10 having haste?

But-it’s-cloth-druid:   Lol it doesn’t matter that much, it’s a spellpower upgrade.

Delerius:                          But haste is so much better for us than crit, and while we can get it from off-pieces our tier gear doesn’t have what we want!

But-it’s-cloth-druid:  Yeah but really I just stack spellpower, the rest doesn’t really matter to me. They’re both good..

..

I want to cry. And this is the guy that got the Tree spot on the progression team this week over me.

I want to be a good sport, I don’t want to kick and scream and whine and complain… to his face.

So I’ll just blog about it behind his back.

So there.

-Del