Raiding - inexperience, great finds, raid styles and the raid environment

Going through my reading list for today and there are a TON of posts today about raiding.  I started out reading Jasyla's post on Raids: Business or Personal?   Here she talks about the raid environment and asks what your preferred raiding style is - family and friendly and relaxed (Personal) or organised and a well oiled machine and the goal is to kill ASAP (Business).  I didn't think any guild is all one or the other, they are a bit of both.  But Jasyla said this:

There are more cutthroat guilds out there, who can be ruthless about who they take to raids to ensure the best progression possible. These raids are like a well-oiled machine, killing bosses left and right and getting those server and world firsts. Sounds fantastic. But if you look a little closer, those raids aren’t all sunshine and ponies either. Take the BlizzCon live raid for example. Though Blood Legion’s run of Firelands looked perfect, according to everyone who listened to the raid with voice streaming Vent was full of people screaming profanities and racial slurs. That really taints an otherwise pristine run.
Well, that's certainly not how it is for Frostwolves.  I can't imagine spending all that time together and yet not being happy or friendly and social with a few jibes here and there.  I hate agro in a raid (and I don't mean healer agro, I mean yelling at each other on Vent agro).  And boy would we have raiding burnout real quick if you went to bed angry all the time.  Though I guess you can go to bed angry if you are doing really badly in a raid too, carrying all the "stupids".  Anyway.  So I guess you can see where my view on raids stands.

So after that I was reading Windsoar's post on Standards.  Which was NOT what I thought she was going to be writing about (I thought she was going to talk about recruiting) - it was another post on raiding!  She was defending - no, she was explaining - that people need to give new players a chance, and not everyone can be brilliant from the word go.  I like Windsoar's thoughts on raiding because she used to say it's not bad if you don't max your VP points for the week (hey, that's ME, I hated daily dungeon running JUST for VPs)

As challenging as raiding can be, as important as basic activities like talenting, gearing, gemming, enchanting and having proper consumables can be to the success of your raiding environment, in the end, raiding is a learned skill. If raiding guilds are not to fizzle out from attrition in the next expansion, there has to be some flexibility in allowing new players/raiders into a raiding environment to learn what the hell is going on.
I wholeheartedly agree.  I like to think I am giving people a chance, and showing them how to improve themselves (healing wise anyway) and then seeing if they can pick up to be a diamond in the rough.  But we can be taken advantage of in that way.  People use our little friendly easy going guild as a stepping stone, get us to carry them through things, improve their play, gear them up and then they move on to greener pastures. Or other progressive guilds come and steal away some players to fill their raid spots after we gear them up.  Some of our officers get cranky with this, and I admit even I feel irritated at times about it, but really, look at it this way.  Sometimes we pick up someone and they end up staying and becoming a core raider, a great addition to our raid team.  And some of them like it enough to stay, and they're worth 10 of those flybys that come, loot and leave.  And this is the way I look at the flybys - at least they filled numbers, right?  Without those filler flybys we might not have been able to fill our raids, and so if they took loot, at least I got some dkp out of it.  There has to be some sunshine shining out of the drainhole somewhere.

I noticed MMO Melting Pot had a pingback on Windsoar's post which led me to The Grumpy Elf's post on DPS: You're Just a Number - The Low End.

Here, he talks about how DPS are only rated on their DPS or their gearscore.  How people only look at numbers and not really at how you play.  This part in particular caught my eye (it's also what MMO Melting Pot highlighted as well):

The hunter laid a trap but the mob did not run into it. He disengaged toward the trap to the other side of it, distracting shot the mob and it walked right into the trap. While he was only doing 11K DPS he showed some serious skills right there. I am willing to bet 99 out of 100 hunters you see in a random would not even know how to do that and that 1 that does know how rarely will. His DPS was ample for the content we were doing and his skills where surely there. What he did not have in the numbers department he made up for in the knowledge of his class department while still doing at least the minimum for the content, so I had no problem with him.

When the fight was over someone commented on his DPS being 4K less then either of the other two. If I where not there he might have been kicked. I pointed out he saved us from a possible wipe, which it very well could have been.
Good players are more than good numbers.  I have often said this.  It's not about top dps or top heals.  It's about doing your job, your role.  There are plenty of healers out there who can pump out fantastic numbers, but put them on a job and their targets die?  I don't care what numbers you're pulling, your job was to keep your target alive and you couldn't do that because you were busy trying to top the meter?  Fail.  For DPS it's the same.  You need to cc that mob over there - oh wait, you didn't do it because you were too busy concentrating on your dps rotation on the boss and that cc target just took out a tank healer? Fail.  There is more to a good player than a number.  Raid awareness and boss mechanics are key as well.  No good pulling 30k dps for 1 minute before you DIAF as you were so busy concentrating on your rotation... In a raid there always has to be somebody on the lower end of the DPS scale.  But as long as that person plays well and knows their role I don't think that they're a hindrance.  But hey, what about those that pump out great numbers, do their cc's and decurse/remove buffs etc?  Well, those guys are just outstanding.

Wow, now that was a wall of text.  Glad to have gotten that off my chest.

Comments

  1. Good Post!
    So many aspects of this post I can relate to in some way, heres a couple:
    I'm happy enough to have not the best dps and sometimes this bothers me. However most times I don't even realize where I stand on a dps ladder because I'm not interested. I'm more interested in enjoying a raid night with my guildie friends.

    Important to note is "concentrating on your dps rotation". Sometimes I feel I concentrate on it so much I'm hitting the wrong target! lol

    Unfortunaley there seems to be a stigma in pugging ANY lvl dungeon about how crap your dps is, or how you cant keep aggro because of this and that or the "Fail Heals" crap...

    I'll leave on the note of I love running into those traps on Rag boss =D Gives me a sense of satisfaction

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Faithless - thanks Faithie! I know you love it when we give you tasks to do, and I know your stance on raiding - that's why you fit in well into our "personal style" guild.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My worries are slightly different, maybe because I was more of a filler than core raiding member in my raiding career (vanilla WoW then Cata, pugged BC/WOLTK due to server change) I am just wanted to make sure I am not last on dps (unless my role is not dps focus, e.g. on adds) and I dont wipe the raid and dont be the only one dying. This allow me to enjoy the raid more as I can watch what others are doing and learn a bit.

    People dont have much patience these days, even on 5 mans. I lost count how many times I see people yelling at each other for trivial things such as not knowing some fancy way to avoid a group of trash etc.

    And I have been to PUG raids where 1/2 the raid quit and zone out halfway fighting the first boss because they realise the raid make up is not strong enough to faceroll the raid... that was quite a sight, people dont die, just disappear...

    Ksret

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Ksret - hey thanks for visiting, and don't worry Ksret, we're not that kind of guild that yells at people for low dps, we do however point you in the right direction if we can... besides, I thought you liked the casual raids you've been turning up to!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I hope these comments work! Not sure why people can't comment lately, it makes me sad :(