The Messy Breakup

Winter Wonderland

Over the night we got another dusting of snow, and as a result I had to once again dig my jeep out before coming to work.  Firstly… Cold is not one of those things that Belghasts do best… especially a 70 lb lighter Belghast.  This morning as I was getting ready the weatherman said something to the effect that it has been over 150 hours since we had been above freezing.  As I was clearing my vehicle it was 20* outside with a wind chill of significantly less.  I realize this is nothing like the –27* that my Canadian friends have been experiencing this week, but still…  it is in the realm of “effing cold”.  I have been wearing a fleece jacket and then a big winter coat on top of that.

All of the car clearing caused me to get up and around significantly later than I had planned, and as a result I am getting this started significantly later.  Supposedly we will experience some melt this afternoon as temperatures finally go above freezing.  Thursday is supposed to be in the 40s… which seriously feels like short and t-shirt weather as compared to this.  There is no way I could actually survive in a Winter climate.  The irony is… as much as I dislike snow in real life, I tend to love zones that have a winter theme in games.  I love Winterspring, Icecrown and Storm Peaks.  I feel like I would enjoy snow if it were not for that whole cold thing.

The Messy Breakup

The other day I talked about how I may have been wrong to avoid the looking for group tool and pugging in general.  From 71 to 80 I had a really great run of 26 dungeons without much issue at all.  It was a clean and efficient way to level.  However upon entering the Cataclysm dungeon queue system that all changed.  The first group I got was Blackrock Caverns.  Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and was more than geared enough for the content.  As a result it went quickly and smoothly and I thought that maybe just maybe my luck would hold until I was able to level into the Pandaria content.  This however was not the case, or at least not the case for very long.

My next queue was Throne of the Tides, and within moments of stepping through the doors we began a horrific wipe fest that ended with most of the party rage quitting after the tank failed miserably at the first boss encounter.  As a rogue I ended up tanking most of the adds, and was able to pop cooldowns and all that wonderful stuff to at least down both of the casters.  However the tank just seemed to lack the hitpoints and avoidance/mitigation to survive in the instance.  It was not until the third, fourth and fifth bad queue of Throne of the Tides that I started to notice a pattern.  They were all wearing the 1-80 Heirloom gear.

Public Service Announcement

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Simply put… the heirloom gear that caps out at level 80 is simply not viable for tanking the cataclysm instances.  The problem is that Heirloom gear is itemized for the previous expansion.  At 80 it is itemized like it is a low ilevel Wrath of the Lich King blue, which is significantly worse than the lowest ilevel Cataclysm green.  Essentially the quested gear you get early on will be better than anything but epic gear from Wrath, and even then on most of my characters I was changing put purples for greens left and right, especially for tanking where the stamina matters so much.  The above image shows the Polished Breastplate of Valor as compared to Hardened Obsidium Breastplate.

Taking away the fact that the Valor breastplate contains zero tanking stats, it has 391 less armor and 100 less stamina than a Cataclysm tanking green.  The tanks that I see rolling into the level 80 dungeons wearing full heirloom gear simply do not have enough hit points to survive the level of damage that is being dealt by the encounters.  That is even with getting out of all the things they are supposed to be getting out of.  Essentially if you are reading this blog and leveling an up and coming tank, please god do not queue as a tank until you have switched out your level 80 heirloom gear with green quest gear at a minimum.  Granted I am generally more diligent than the average player, and I did not queue at all for ANY dungeons until I had swapped my heirlooms out for quested items. 

Gear Changing

To be truthful I logged in my leatherworker and crafted a full set of gear, and logged in my smith and made two blue axes…  but that is probably going above and beyond what anyone should be expected to do.  However in each expansion, that first zone gives you a complete set of gear including weapons and trinkets within the first few quests.  Over the course of the evening you can go from relatively crappy gear to greens that are better than most of the raid content gear from the previous expansion.  You can maybe limp by as a dps, but especially as a tank, the Cataclysm content is brutal on anyone who has not shifted out their entire set of items. 

I seriously doubt that any of the offending tanks I ran into will actually read my blog, but here is hoping that maybe I catch a few people who simply did not realize that heirlooms are not itemized as the new expansion until you ding 61/71/81/86 etc.  This is the problem with the “mudflation” that has set into blizzards system, there is always a massive jump in stats between expansions, and in the case of Wrath to Cataclysm… it is simply not sustainable for dungeon running.  Hopefully in the post “Item Squish” world the change between expansions will not be nearly as traumatic to the player base.  I am hoping once I managed to get to the next tier of dungeons this problem will for the most part go away, and I can once again return to leveling through instances.  However in the meantime… I am questing my way through Hyjal for what feels like the billionth time.

Matter of Perspective

Unexpected Route

Yesterday I set out with the mission of running the rest of my characters through LFR, but after some frustrations with a couple of bad tanks… I decided to retreat into the comfort of leveling.  The problem is…  leveling through Wrath content feels extremely slow.  The way they lay quests out just is not conducive to burning through them.  I began the day at 71 and after a  few hours I had finally dinged 72, so I figured I would take a break and run a dungeon.  Apparently somewhere along the way I had forgotten just how good Wrath era dungeon experience was.  I quickly shifted from questing my way across north rend to chain running dungeons.

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I am generally the most anti-pug person you could imagine, but for whatever reason as I said the other day… if I am dpsing I have the patience of a saint generally.  What I found surprising however was just how painless the whole event was.  We had one tank rage quit because we did not clear the optimal number of mobs, and someone aggro’d one pack too many.  After calling us all noobs and leaving we got another tank within seconds and completely the dungeon without issues.  We had another tank that did not know which way he was going in Gundrak and after going swimming with the angry fishes for an extended period of time several of the people afk’d out of the dungeon, and I joined them.  Other than those two instances… I had 26 instances of success.

At times the group was chatty, other times they were utterly silent.  In all cases however we succeeded without much effort.  It feels like they have nerfed the dungeons to the point at which anyone can run them without much thought.  As a rogue I pretty much spammed Fan of Knives as we pulled huge packs of mobs.  I found it surprising how quickly I hit 80.  Thanks to the handy dandy statistics inside of World of Warcraft I know I ran exactly 26 dungeons to get from 72 to 80, which was the better part of a day.  However this is definitely the express elevator through wrath content, and I feel like I will do this with pretty much all of my alts that have yet to clear that hurdle.  In fact I am considering today once I have gotten a bit of gear, to do the same with the 80-85 climb.

Matter of Perspective

Maybe my fear and loathing of pugs is unfounded?  Maybe it really is a simple and efficient way to level?  Maybe chain running LFR has just given me a perspective on what I should expect from others?   In any case it was not nearly the traumatic experience I had expected.  I figured I could stomach anything for a single group, however I found the experience rather refreshing.  It may simply be that at this point everyone knows the wrath instances like the back of their hand, and can pretty much run them on autopilot.  In any case I might have to revise my opinion of pick-up groups.  That’s one of my good traits however is that none of my opinions are so intractable that they cannot be changed.  After all I had sworn off World of Warcraft for years, and now find myself enjoying the hell out of it again.  Just like everything in life, I feel that it is all a matter of perspective.

Playing Dice with Humanity

Tribalism

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Yesterday my friends were having a long drawn out conversation that started out about the current Roma controversies, wound its way through discussions of any insular society… and like always an hour or so later ended up landing in the game world.  Namely discussion fell onto the concept that even within small groups, cliques and teams form and the number over players it takes before that happens.  Based on the discussion we agreed that likely the smallest number that really starts to occur is around seven people.

So none of this so far has any real bearing on todays post…  but throughout the conversation we started talking about the openness to new players.  One of the things that disturbed me a bit, is that one of my friends said that I was most likely the least open to new players, or at least the most suspicious.  This went against my own personal vision of myself, considering I am constant abducting people into my guilds on a regular basis.  So as I explored this line of thought further, he said that mostly it was due to my views on PUGs.

No PUGs Allowed

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While this is not necessarily the thing I would like people to think of when they think of me… my guild as a whole has known for years that if they want me to tank for them, my price is that we have a full group of known good players.  Usually this means that they are folks from the guild, but I am also completely open to friends of the guild in these scenarios.  Basically… I don’t want to enter the group finder and play dice with humanity.  The thing is… this did not used to be the case.  I used to PUG players in a regular basis both in dungeons and even raids.

This got me thinking… what changed, why did I no longer even consider finding players outside of my monkey sphere to fill groups.  I used to build groups on a nightly basis and even believe in it so much that I wrote a series of guides to covering the finer points of networking, communication and assembly of a winning PUG group.  This was not something that was limited to WoW, but something I had done in many games previously.  So I guess the question is… what changed to make me so fearful of the player base that I now refuse to pug even a single player into one of the groups I am responsible for.

Before the Dungeon Finder

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Without too many leaps of logic I landed on the specific moment it changed… The Dungeon Finder.  I have railed on the evils of the dungeon finder for years, but I don’t think I have really elaborated on that point enough.  Essentially in the world before the dungeon finder I regularly relied upon social channels, trade chat, and other guilds to find folks to fill out my groups.  I drew upon my friends list to fill the most basic elements.  As a tank I knew that all I needed to do was find one of my many amazing healers that I worked with regularly, and then the dps could be filled out in short order.

The key point here is that with each player I talked to… I actually took the time to exchange a few lines of dialog with them before throwing them a group invite.  It is amazing how much you can gauge about the personality, intentions and general character of a player from a few sentences.  There was a very human element to this discourse, and over the years I developed and instinct about who would make for a good dungeon run by the way they presented themselves.  To some extent I had learned to prune through the bad apples and seize upon the good ones only.

Additionally playing with players on your own server there was a bit of an honor code in the works.  As the guild leader of one of the larger guilds on our server, I knew the leaders of most of the other guilds.  So as a result if I had trouble with one of their players in a dungeon run, I knew precisely who to come to with those concerns.  This lead most players to be on their best behavior, since there were potential social consequences of making an ass of yourself in public.  Additionally I met a lot of really amazing people through this process, many of them that would end up in my guild or raid later on.

Playing Dice with Humanity

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The Dungeon finder was the first blow to this world, but since we were dealing with mostly players from our own server… it wasn’t really that bad.  I still regularly queued as a tank almost out of welfare to help the folks get those dungeon runs.  I continued to still meet great players, and the bad ones were quickly added to my ignore list never to be seen again.  However players complained, that the queues were still too long, and not enough tanks and healers were queuing.  So as a result Blizzard started the cross server queuing madness and this was the nail in the coffin for me and pugging.

When there are no social consequences to ones actions… the worst possible behavior can be expected if not assumed.  Periodically I would get convinced to queue with someone for a dungeon, and every single one of these occasions lead me to log out of the game frustrated and angry afterwards.  I learned quickly that if you play dice with humanity, you are always going to loose.  I met exactly ONE really awesome player through random groups, and that was only because the player happened to be on my own server.  I didn’t really mind braving the bullshit as a DPS, but I refused to tank the instances any longer.

Rift Happened

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So in a whole series of events I ended up leaving World of Warcraft, and entered a game without a dungeon finder system.  It is funny how quickly I fell back into the old habits of building groups from social channels.  Level 50 chat served as a launch pad for groups, and quickly within a few weeks time I had built up a long list of “known good players” that I could draw into dungeons.  As a result we were filling out Elite groups on a nightly basis and happily clearing dungeons.  I met enough people that there was even talk of merging in with another guild at one point… but we decided against it.

When the dungeon finder was released for Rift I watched the same events play out all over again.  The social channels dried up, folks no longer responded to calls for groups in Level 50 chat… and everyone went back to the wow-like ways of relying on the dungeon finder to make a group for them.  Additionally the community of the server as a whole suffered.  The same old wow-like behaviors came back and the chorus of “PULL BIG” and “GO GO GO” returned as well.  So once more.. I stopped grouping and resurrected a rampart around myself with a sign on it reading “No PUGs Allowed”. 

From that point forward my rule as a whole has pretty much been… I will tank any dungeon you want me to tank, but you have to make sure we have a full guild group before we do it.  I refuse to pug in any players that come from random dungeon finder systems.  I would literally rather not do dungeons, than have to deal with the random chance of finding a decent person in the system.  Most of the time this is not really a huge deal since I tend to bring a large group of people with me into whatever game we end up playing.  However I am running a lot fewer dungeons than I would like to, and I am not sure how I can get past my phobia of strangers.  So at the end of the day… after all of this… I guess I can see my friends point.