paladin

It was a simple enough question, posed on Twitter Thursday morning while I made my morning commute. Rewt, of HearthCast, asked “What does being a Guild Leader mean to you?” I told Rewt that I could write a novel on the topic, and thus this blog post was born. Once again, this post will be [...]

Yesterday, we discussed some of the pros and cons of our current mastery implementation, and briefly considered the limitations of a bounded system like the combat table.  Today I’m going to toss around some ideas for new mastery implementations that could be used in MoP to avoid the complications caused by block-capping.

Diminishing Returns

The first, and most obvious answer, is that they could apply diminishing returns (DR) to block.  There are certainly some advantages to that approach.  It would give block a similarity to dodge and parry, and would allow for more complicated interplay between the three because the “best” stat would depend on the amount of each that you currently have.  If the numbers are tuned properly, it would completely eliminate the ability to reach block cap.  All in all, it seems like a fairly easy solution to implement.

However, there are some problems.  For starters, no other classes have DR on their mastery bonuses.  Paladins and Warriors would be the only ones who are punished for stacking more of their “awesome” stat.  Admittedly, the same is true for dodge and parry, so tanks are used to it, but it’s a valid criticism of simply slapping DR on block and calling it a day.  It would mean that mastery procs and buffs would have less value for a shield tank than a DK or bear, which makes itemization trickier.  That may not be a critical problem, but it’s enough to make us consider some of the other cool ways they could change mastery.

Expandable Combat Table

For a slightly more radical idea, we could completely change how the combat table works.  Right now, the roll is made between 0 and 100, and the combat table is adjusted according to current stats.  What if, instead, the combat table expanded to fit the possible options?

For example, you start out with 5 “points” of dodge, parry, miss, and block, and about 30 “points” of taking a regular hit.  We’ll ignore crits for now, since those get removed by spec bonuses.  Instead of rolling from 1-100, the combat roll would be from 0-50 (5+5+5+5+30=50).  So without any gear on, you’d have ~60% chance to take a regular hit, and a 10% chance to dodge, parry, or block.

As you load yourself up with gear, all of your stats increase, but so does the combat table.  So if you end up with 20 dodge, 20 parry, 5 miss, and 50 block, your roll is between 0 and 125 (20+20+5+50+30=125).  Your chance to take a regular hit has decreased to 30/125, or 24%, and your chance to block has increased from 10% to 40%.

This system is very similar to putting the stats on DR, because there’s no way to push “hit” off of the table anymore.  You can increase your stats indefinitely, but there will always be that small chance of taking a full hit.  Except in this model, the stats all scale linearly in “points,” but share the same DR formula when converting from points to percentages.

It’s a neat idea, but ultimately I think it’s worse than just putting DR on block.  For one thing, the system is a little less obvious.  A player may understand what “20% dodge” means, and the character sheet could still provide that number, but it’s unintuitive and confusing that adding more block reduces their chance to dodge.  At least with diminishing returns, you get the independent scaling of each stat, so that adding extra mastery doesn’t cause collateral damage to avoidance.

Neuter Block

As we discussed yesterday, one of the big reasons that mastery is so attractive has to do with the strength of blocking itself.  Shaving 30% off of an attack makes a very significant difference.  But if block was weaker, then mastery would be as well.  They could “nerf” blocking to prevent only 10%-20% of the incoming melee attack, which would reduce the impact of blocking on survivability.  In that system, you’d still be able to block cap, but it would no longer be as super-powerful to do so.

Unfortunately, this idea has more problems than diminishing returns.  It makes mastery our weakest damage prevention stat by a wide margin.  It doesn’t fix the discontinuity you arrive at when reaching block cap.  Even though this is not all that unlike the discontinuity that DPS players have to juggle with hit/exp caps, there are also no proc- or buff-based hit and expertise effects in the game.  But there are mastery procs, and it would be advantageous for those procs to be attractive to all five tanking classes.

Block Chance Fixed (BCF), Mastery Increases Value

In this idea, block chance becomes a fixed amount for warriors and paladins.  Instead of increasing your block chance, it’s set at 30%-40% as soon as you choose a tanking spec.  Mastery then has to play a different role entirely, and the logical choice is to focus on increasing the amount blocked.  Warriors could keep an incarnation of Critical Block, where additional mastery simply increases the chance of doubling the amount blocked.  Paladins could simply get an increase in the amount blocked, at roughly half the rate warriors get Critical Block.  For example, the same amount of mastery rating it would take to give warriors a 50% to critical block would give paladins an extra 15% block value, so both would yield an average of 45% damage blocked.

There’s a lot of merit to this idea.  It’s simple.  There’s no obvious bounding issues, because the scaling can easily be tweaked to make sure that 100% Critical Block chance isn’t achievable.  While paladins get the more reliable block amount, neither class has a particularly “smoother” damage profile because block-capping is out, so full-sized hits still occur at a more-or-less fixed rate.  Interestingly, dodge and parry get more attractive here as well, because they suddenly provide the only source of increased Combat Table Coverage.  That may devalue mastery enough that we don’t pursue it at all costs, which will keep us from lusting after high-mastery DPS plate.

I can’t really think of that many drawbacks, either, aside from mastery falling behind dodge and parry in attractiveness.  Again though, that could be considered a positive, and there are other classes who value mastery less than other secondary stats.  The only fear is that this makes it so weak that we actively avoid it, which is unlikely.  However, there are ways to fix that….

BCF, Mastery Generates a Proc

Using the same “fixed block chance” base as above, in this case mastery also generates a proc-like effect.  This could be its own stand-alone effect, or it could be in addition to an amount of bock value (or crit block) to make sure that mastery remains attractive.

The proc itself could be any number of things.  A proc that gave us a few seconds of a Holy Shield buff, increasing our block value during that time, is one interesting option.  For warriors, it would either be a buff that grants a chance for a Critical Block (with a longer duration or higher crit chance to compensate for the double-RNG), or simply a shorter-duration buff that grants the full 60% block value.  Not only does this idea have enough parameters to tweak to make it attractive compared to dodge and parry, but if the proc trigger is melee attacks it gives us a reason to like hit, expertise, and even a traditionally-eschewed stat like haste, something Mel has written about before.

On the other hand, this system brings block chance back to the table as an option.  A proc that gave us +30% chance to block for a short duration could work; the uptime probabilities involved produce a natural diminishing returns effect, such that you can never guarantee full CTC, and extra mastery rating gets less and less valuable automatically.  Or the proc could be a Shield Block-esque buff, which guarantees that the next melee attack will be blocked but is consumed by that event.  Again, probabilities give you a natural DR mechanism and automatic anti-cap control, and a proc triggering off of damage dealt gives value to DPS stats (hit, exp, haste).

Or the trigger could be defensive instead of offensive.  For example, it would be neat if every successful block had a chance to proc a heal or short-duration absorb bubble.  Mastery would increase the proc chance and the absorb/heal amount.  This is an interesting proposition for two reasons: it procs defensively, much like the reactive damage of the old (BC-era) Holy Shield, and it’s ex-post-facto.  The second part is the important one – it means that the heal will rarely be wasted (unlike offensively-procced heals like Mending and Souldrinker), and that the effect isn’t as powerful as a straight-up increase in block value, because you need to survive the larger-sized hit before the absorb/shield bubble is granted.

A more controllable alternative might be for a successful block to grant a bonus to Shield of the Righteous, Holy Shield, and Word of Glory.  The bonus could increase damage/healing/absorb done and duration, and mastery would increase the potency and proc chance.  This has the advantage of tying the mastery into the Holy Power system and giving the player some choice in how that benefit gets used.

You could imagine any number of other, less block-centric proc-based benefits.  For example, SotR could proc an absorb bubble or mini-heal that gets consumed on the next unblocked attack, as a way of smoothing out damage.  That’s getting closer to what DKs and bears have, though, and veers outside of our self-imposed “must involve blocking” constraint.

BCF, Mastery Converts Blocked Damage to Absorb/Healing

Taking an idea from the previous section, and removing the proc mechanics, mastery could simply convert blocked damage to healing or damage absorption.  Block chance could remain fixed, while mastery gave a small increase to block value and increased the conversion factor.  So when you block, you might reduce the damage by 35% instead of 30%, and get half of the amount blocked as a free heal.  Absorb bubbles would give more damage smoothing than the heal, if that sort of mechanic is desired.

This has the advantage of being RNG-less outside of the inherent combat table rolls.  It’s not particularly easy to math out because it’s boss-dependent, but it’s something you can easily identify and analyze in parses.  The disadvantage is that it’s similar to the druid and DK mastery effects, though it’s triggered and calculated in a different way.  Unfortunately, it’s also a primarily passive effect, in that nothing you do can increase the trigger rate, unlike Savage Defense.  But so is the current incarnation of block chance mastery.

BCF, Mastery Grants Rollover Minutes

Using another idea I touched upon earlier, what if our mastery gave us “rollover minutes?”  Blocking a melee attack could grant credit towards a buff which causes a heal or absorb bubble on the next unblocked attack.  The idea is that it’s a Lifebloom-like effect that triggers off of a guaranteed damage spike.  Mastery could determine the conversion rate, just like above, or could adjust the proc chance if a more unreliable mechanic is desired.  And again, the concept here is that every block continues to contribute to the buff (hence “rollover minutes”), so that multiple blocks in a row will result in a bigger heal when the effect triggers.

This wouldn’t be that hard to implement, and there are more than enough parameters to tweak to make it an interesting mechanic.  It does share some similarities with druids and DKs, but the proc and usage mechanics should be enough to make it feel unique.  But again, it’s a passive effect rather than something the player can control or influence.

Get Rid of Tank Plate

On the more radical end of the spectrum, we could consider getting rid of tank plate entirely.  After all, druids already use the same DPS leather gear that rogues do, and monks will be doing the same in MoP.  At that point, dodge and parry rating go out the window too, and get the same “fixed amount” treatment that block does in some of the earlier suggestions.  By choosing a tank spec, a warrior or paladin automatically gets 20% dodge, 20% parry, and 30%-40% block.  Our mastery would then have to trigger off of damage dealt, making hit, exp, crit, and haste more attractive.

There are several ways one could go with this idea, many very similar to the BCF solutions.

• Mastery could grant a stacking block amount buff from successful melee attacks (maybe ~5% amount per stack, up to 6 stacks, consumed upon a block event), with mastery rating increasing the amount per stack.
• Alternatively, you could grant block chance, again with a per-stack amount that’s consumed upon a successful block.
• Or with either of those methods, the stack properties could be dependent on damage done, tying crit into the mix as a useful stat.
• Or the stack properties could be fixed, and mastery simply provides the proc chance per successful attack, possibly double for crits.

However, this idea isn’t without it’s host of problems.  If all tank plate gets eliminated, then plate DPS gear becomes far and away the most highly-represented gear selection in raids.  There are already 2 warrior specs, 2 DK specs, and 1 paladin spec fighting over DPS plate; adding 3 more tanking specs to the mix will require it to drop even more often, which isn’t good for drop tables (or, for that matter, for other classes!).  In addition, this would require a re-working or replacing of all tanking gear in the game, from level 1 to 85.  That’s a lot of developer time, and I’m not sure it’s worth it when there are other, arguably better solutions on the table.

Closing Thoughts

In this post, I’ve provided a number of possibilities for the paladin (and warrior) mastery implementations in MoP.  Some of them were a little far-fetched, others were very down-to-earth.  I think that the “BCF,” (block chance fixed) solutions hold the most potential for a reasonable implementation.  They’re all fairly straightforward, and easy for a new player to understand.  They work within the current combat table system, and with current gear, and thus don’t need heavy restructuring of the game’s fundamental mechanics.  Most of them grant hit, expertise, and haste survivability benefits.  And finally, they completely eliminate the problem of block-capping by removing the mechanism that gets us there, while giving us other neat effects to compensate.

And of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list.  Given more time and thought, other solutions could certainly be found.  I’d be willing to bet that our readership has their own innovative ideas.  If you do, please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments.

In the latest “The Light and How to Swing It,” Matt Walsh (a.k.a. Rhidach from Righteous Defense) made some pretty sharp criticisms of our mastery design in Cataclysm.  I think he’s got some valid points, but I don’t agree with all of them.

For example, he derides the stylistic choice of block chance, and calls it a “returned and renamed stat which was stamped as fit for deleting.”  I don’t think that’s entirely fair.  Certainly, the old block chance was unattractive in Wrath, but that was primarily because block itself was weak.  However, that’s not the fault of block chance.  If block had been very strong, block chance would have been very attractive.  This is exactly the situation we have in Cataclysm – a very strong block mechanic and a high valuation on mastery.

In that light, I think it’s erroneous to call it a stat that was “fit for deleting.”  Far from it, in fact.  The real reason block chance was removed was not weakness, but redundancy.  Since block chance was only useful to two of the four tanking specs, it was a natural choice for conversion into a mastery stat.  So block chance wasn’t removed, really.  It’s still with us, just under a different name.  And it’s actually our most prized stat.

I also disagree with him on the issue of style.  As paladin tanks, we’ve traditionally been the “block tank.”  Blocking is in our blood, and it’s thematically appropriate for the class to have a block-centric mastery.  Block chance seems like it was a reasonable choice on stylistic grounds, as paladins traditionally blocked more than warriors.

However, Rhidach’s post does hit upon an important point.  Block chance differs somewhat from most other stats, in that it can be capped and that cap is fairly readily achievable.  Crit and haste can be capped, but not passively or easily.  Armor can be capped, but again, not with obtainable gear.  Primary stats, health, attack and spell power are all unbounded.  And dodge and parry have diminishing returns (nonlinear scaling) that keep them from reaching an upper limit.  Block chance joins hit and expertise as the only three stats that have this unique combination of linear scaling and an upper bound.

And that’s what makes block mastery broken.  Not in the sense that it’s overpowered (though you could argue that it is, in some cases).  But in the sense that it’s incredibly hard to balance effectively.  It’s either so strong that you want to stack it to cap, or it’s weak enough that you ignore it entirely.  It’s difficult to find a middle ground, where you’d be just as happy with 1 mastery rating as you would with 1 dodge or parry rating.  And it’s especially difficult when only a subset of the tanking classes can do it.

Rhidach is also right that this problem has its roots in the combat system itself.  The single-roll system, where the result is between 0 and 100, creates the boundaries, and the linear scaling of mastery happily expands to fill them.  A bounded system can lead to problems simply because when those bounds are reached, funny things happen.  You can hit discontinuities, get accelerated scaling, and create other unintuitive behavior.

A familiar example to some might be avoidance.  In Burning Crusade, avoidance scaled linearly, so that every X rating gave 1% dodge or parry.  This meant that as you stacked more avoidance, every point of additional rating actually got better.  To see that, consider that adding 1% avoidance when you’re at 50% total avoidance (so, going from 50% to 51%) reduces your damage taken by 1/50 (=dx/(1-x), where x=0.5 is avoidance and dx=1% is the increase), or 2%.  Adding 1% avoidance when you’re at 75% (75%->76%) reduces your damage taken by 1/25, or 4%.  Doing the same at 90% avoidance (90%->91%) reduces your damage taken by 1/10, or 10%.  You can see why this could be a problem for balance – the tank that manages to squeeze out an extra bit of avoidance gets a huge benefit.  So even small discrepancies between classes could lead to large performance gaps.

As of patch 3.0, avoidance sidesteps this behavior with diminishing returns.  No matter how much avoidance you stack, you can’t get 100% of either dodge or parry individually.  And the formula is set up such that it would take a ridiculous amount of raiting to get even 50% of either one.  Even now, in nearly best-in-slot gear in the last patch of the expansion, we can only manage 20-25% of each.  The diminishing returns formula acts as an arbitrary limiter so that dodge and parry rating act like they’re an unbounded system, even though they’re doing so within a bounded structure.  It also makes sure that the impact of avoidance rating gets smaller the more you have of it, so that the 1/(1-x) behavior of Burning Crusade doesn’t happen.

The problem doesn’t generally occur with hit and expertise, despite being a bounded system.  In fact, quite a few DPS classes have a hit cap as their first priority, because it’s their strongest DPS gain.  But damage output works a lot differently from damage taken.  The DPS gains you get in reaching hit cap have a finite upper bound.  You’re increasing the success rate on your way to 100%.  With avoidance, you’re decreasing the boss’s success rate, which gives you the scaling I described above.  That’s why getting 1 more hit out of 100 isn’t game-breaking, but taking one fewer hit out of 100 can be.

So, you may be asking yourself, what can Blizzard do to fix the problem presented by block chance mastery? Or, more generally, what can Blizzard do to redesign our mastery for Mists of Pandaria?  In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be exploring a number of possible ways they can implement mastery for shield tanks and discuss the pros and cons of each.  We will, however, adhere to one constraint: all of the ideas have to involve blocking, somehow.  Sure, they could give us our own version of Savage Defense, but that wouldn’t fit the theme of a shield tank.  There’s no reason to homogenize tank mastery, so we’re going to avoid doing so (apart from keeping both warrior and paladin mastery bonuses shield-themed, of course).

So stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment!

Hagara, one of the first students of arcane magic under the Forsaken, showed surprising potential for one who had started learning so late in life. But in her undisciplined attempts to bind elementals into servitude, she was ensnared and twisted by the Windlord, Al’Akir. Now fiercely loyal to the Twilight’s Hammer, Hagara binds others for [...]

Countless ages ago, Warlord Zon’ozz and his soldiers waged endless war against the forces of C’Thun and Yogg-Saron. Millennia have passed, but the warlord still serves the chaotic might of the Old God N’Zoth. Deathwing has now unleashed this legendary faceless one to crush the defenders of Wyrmrest Temple. ~Dungeon Journal Warlord Zon’ozz was the [...]

Since the fall of the Bastion of Twilight, Yor’sahj the Unsleeping has eagerly assisted Deathwing, providing the Destroyer with the means to release more faceless ones from their prisons deep beneath the earth. Their numbers are endless and their power is beyond reckoning, and Yor’sahj intends to reap a grim reward for his faithful service. [...]

The most powerful elemental still under Deathwing’s sway, Morchok–once a passive guardian–is now convinced that his only respite will come with Azeroth’s demise. Morchok rages against the foundation of Wyrmrest Temple, Azeroth’s last beacon of hope in the Hour of Twilight. ~Dungeon Journal Morchok is the easiest fight you’ll encounter in Dragon Soul. The fight [...]

Kurn wrote a good post about the upcoming Dragon Soul nerfs. She is unhappy with the nerfs. I am on the opposite side of the issue. However, I want to address two specific points in her post.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I like a challenge. I loved attunement quests, no matter how crappy they were to do (doing Jailbreak twice in a single night for Majik because he was a dumbass and died? Not fun.). I loved working out strats for encounters in Burning Crusade raids, which, at the time, were incredibly punishing (Vashj, Kael, Bloodboil all come to mind off the top of my head). We were nowhere near server first, we were over a year behind in most cases. But we persevered and worked through it. The only nerfs we took advantage of were attunement removals (except the BT one, because we needed the necks for shadow resistance) and the 3.0 nerfs because, dangit, we weren’t ready to stop raiding yet. (Still, we were 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT when 3.0 dropped.) By and large, Vashj was pretty similar an encounter when we downed her (on June 2nd, 2008) as when SSC opened up in 2007. There had been no 20% zone-wide nerf. No stacking 30% player buff. Nothing of the sort. 

There was a measure of pride there. I still wear my Hand of A’dal title because of what it took for us to kill Vashj and Kael and finish the Vials of Eternity quest.

I remember Lady Vashj too. What I remember about Lady Vashj was that she broke the guild I was in. We went 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC, but we broke on Vashj. Maybe she was beyond us, maybe we should have improved, maybe we should have practiced more or been better players. Really hard bosses break guilds. Vashj, Kael'thalas, Vaelastraz, Ragnaros.  These bosses are known as guild-killers. Broken guilds are not good for the game, in my view. Guilds that get stuck on a hard boss, with no respite in sight, die. These nerfs keep guilds from getting stuck. Small, steady nerfs keep people moving forward, keep them from being completely stuck forever. To me, the choice seems to be between guild-killer bosses, or nerfing. I choose nerfing.

I’ve long felt that Blizzard is ignoring its population of older players. I have been playing WoW since October of 2005. This doesn’t grant me any in-game advantage, and that’s okay, but those things that I “grew up” with, like attunements, like keys, like epic class quests, like epic instances without the novelty of a “heroic” mode… those are the things that kept me interested in the game. Those are the things that helped grow the game to 11 million players. Precious few of those mechanics and concepts remain. Is it any wonder why people are quitting? Is it any wonder why I now believe this to be my final expansion? The game is unrecognizable. The playerbase is maddeningly lazy and unwilling to put forth the effort that so many of us old-timers did and their laziness is affecting us.

I am obviously not the type of player they want playing their game. And that’s what’s so very shocking to me. I am a good player. I am a community asset. I am a guild leader, a raid leader, a healing lead. I write a blog dedicated to the game that has had hundreds of thousands of visitors and pageviews since December 31st, 2009 (and more before then, but I don’t have any data before 12/31/09). I co-host and produce a podcast dedicated to the game.

The Old Republic doesn't have a dungeon finder.  A lot of bloggers seem to be applauding this. I don't know. Maybe they're right. Maybe a dungeon finder does damage the community and make running instances less fun. All I know is that my highest level character, a 42 Sniper, has only seen the first three flashpoints, and only the first two were done at the appropriate level. The third flashpoint I did when I was 15 levels higher than the recommended level. I have not finished a [HEROIC 4] group quest since the second planet, at about level 16.  I have done some of the smaller [HEROIC 2+] quests though. I have a whole set of outdated quests in my log, pointing to the flashpoints I just have not been able to do. Now, maybe it's my fault for choosing to play a DPS character instead of a tank or healer. Maybe I should have found and joined an active guild with people at the correct level. Maybe I should be more willing to spend hours on the station looking for a group, instead of continuing on my quests. Maybe I should have stuck with the player-made global Looking For Group channel, despite the fact that everyone was using it as a general chat, and it was worse than Barrens chat. I did try for the third flashpoint when at the correct level. I spent an hour looking for people, but only found one other person, at which point I gave up. I really enjoy doing small group content at the correct level. I don't like being carried by higher level players. But as far as I can see, that's pretty much not an option for me in The Old Republic. I guess I'll get to see the flashpoints when I'm at max level, and there's nothing better to do but hang out at the station and scan the chat. Maybe the dungeon finder makes running instances less fun. But at least with a dungeon finder, I can actually run the instances.

The Old Republic has an interesting mix of zones. There are zones unique to each faction, like the starting planets and the capital planet. There are "shared" planets, like Hoth, where both sides quest (and gank, if on a PvP server) together. And then there is Taris. Taris is a city planet, destroyed by planetary bombardment by Darth Malak back in Knights of the Old Republic. It's now infested by rakghouls, a vicious bunch of monsters who infect their victims and turn them into more rakghouls. Taris is a level 16-20 zone for Republic and a level 30-36 zone for Empire. But Taris is not a shared world! Both zones use the same geography, and the same planet, and the same concern with the rakghouls. But on the Republic side, the Republic holds Taris and is attempting to reclaim it from rakghouls and pirates. On the Empire side, the Empire holds Taris and chasing the remnants of the Republic off it. It's as if the two Tarises exist side-by-side in parallel universes. In one universe the Republic is dominant, and in the other universe the Empire is ascendant. It makes me wonder if SWTOR is a shared universe between the two factions. In World of Warcraft, it's obvious that the two factions share the same world. You can go and visit the home cities of the other side. But SWTOR seems to be running two parallel universes that only occasionally overlap. Which is really odd at first, and seems quite unusual. But there are advantages. With two separate universes, the storyline can unfold differently for each side. One side can "win" without the other side suffering a "loss". Still, this quite caught me by surprise. I'm so used to the shared world, that other setups seem hard to grasp.

Tobold asks if Diablo 3 is gambling and concludes that it is:

And thus the question whether the randomized way in which the player acquired the Sword of Uberness is a form of gambling is valid.

I disagree with this interpretation. Wikipedia's definition, which I think is a good one, states:

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods.

Mel and I were guests on the Leetsauced podcast last weekend.  If any of you are interested in hearing us drunkenly debate Dragon Soul encounters, LFR, or the state of raiding in Cataclysm, you can download episode 47 from their website or through iTunes.

In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft raiding is an extreme meritocracy.  The better a player is, the more highly skilled, the more weight her voice carries. All the guilds I've been in follow this general pattern. The players who are listened to are the ones who can perform the best. For this reason, it's very important that officers in a serious raiding guild be among the top half of the players. In my experience, this pattern even holds in PuGs. I have never been treated badly in a PuG or LFR. It is really hard to argue with a person decked in high end gear, or topping the meters. And yet, the high skill players are not always right. I mentioned in the previous post that:

There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty, is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success.

The people who espouse this view are always really good players. Of the players I've known with this view, the vast majority of them were far better than I am. Indeed, it is highly possible that they are this good because they hold themselves to this standard. Not all of these players yell or are unpleasant. Many of them are nice and rational. They simply believe that all failure is a failure of personal responsibility. A lot of the time these players are right. Enforcing standards makes people live up to those standards. Sometimes you'll encounter players who just will not live up to the necessary standards for the level you play at. But sometimes these players are wrong. All my raiding experience leads me to believe that this style of play, where the only important thing is personal accountability, is brittle. When you get a good group going you can progress exceptionally fast. But sooner or later you lose people just through normal attrition, and have to recruit more and that leads to uneven progress. Or you hit a wall, and relations become acrimonious over who's failure it is. But the problem is that all these highly skilled players just cannot see that. Suggestions that weigh any other considerations get met with comments that such suggestions are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That the only thing that will lead to progress is the individual players stepping up and improving their play. Or under-performing players being replaced by ones who can perform. And because they are highly skilled, their voice carries a lot of weight. And that is the part that is very hard to combat or argue against. Edit: Copying this response to Kalon in the comments, because it may make things a little more clear. Or there's a third option - that you lose people through attrition and instead of accepting recruits that are perhaps subpar you always recruit for the best and do not settle. But then you don't actually raid. Because you don't always have the numbers to raid. Part of this--which I left out because I though it was tangential, may have been wrong--is that this style of play is very hostile to maintaining a bench. If you are always taking your 25 best raiders to new content, then your bench doesn't get to raid. And quality players will not hang around a mid-Aristocracy guild if they only get to raid 1 of 3 days at best. Maybe they'll feel that's okay in a Royalty guild, but not at my level. And to be honest, that's my main issue with this playstyle. Personal accountability is a secondary priority. The first and greatest priority is maintaining a full raid force, with a deep enough bench that you are always able to raid with a stable group. Basically, the personal accountability folks felt that because people didn't perform, we didn't progress fast enough in order to attract quality recruits. I felt that because we couldn't retain people (especially people who were on the bench), we couldn't put together a consistent raid in order to progress consistently.

You guys have probably noticed that I haven't been writing a lot over the past two months. And that most of my posts have been about Star Wars. Well, there's a reason for that. Looking back on it, I think I've been playing so much SWTOR not only because it's the new hotness, but also to avoid logging into WoW. Which is somewhat ironic if you take the view that people often play WoW to avoid real life. When I last talked about my guild in the beginning of November, I mentioned that we had gone through a split, had moved to a more populated server, and were looking at merging with another 10-man guild to get back up to 25s. That merger turned out to be the worst mistake in the history of our guild. There is a type of person who believes that all failure is caused by people playing badly. That skill is everything in this game. That the only response to any problem, any difficulty is to tell people to play better, or recruit better people to replace the failures. That you must always take the "best" raiders you have to a raid to ensure success. There is a degree of truth in this.  But in my view, there usually there are a lot more elements that you can look at before you conclude that the problem is solely due to bad play. Sometimes the strategy is not quite right. Sometimes people misunderstand the plan. Sometimes people just make mistakes. Sometimes you just need practice, to wipe a few nights before everything clicks. Sometimes you just have to go with the army you have, rather than the army you wish you had. In any case, the merging guild was entirely made up of people who held the first view. They were all very good players, at least pure skill-wise. But their response to any wipe, any failure, was to yell at people, to point fingers and berate them.  Sometimes the yelling would start before the attempt even finished, while we still attacking the boss. It was the worst raiding experience of my life. And of course we started hemorraging members. In two weeks we went from 35 raiders online to barely 25. We lost some essential people from our old guild before the merger. The final blow came last week. We only had 23 raiders on, so it was decided to take the 10 "best" people and down some Heroic bosses for progression.  Apparently that team had trouble and drama blew up, with lots of yelling and finger-pointing, and the upshot was that the entire group of merged people left the guild. So we're back down to maybe a 10-man worth of people, minus those people who left earlier. I'm not really certain what will happen. A lot of the people who remain sound rather "shell-shocked", with their confidence in their ability to tackle Heroics broken.

So a discussion had apparently started yesterday on Twitter–one which I apparently missed because I wasn’t paying much attention to Twitter (aside from bemoaning the fail I was finding in LFR all day). The talk of being able to RealID raid with your cross-realm friends has been noted in the 4.3.2 patch notes, and the [...]

This post will have no beginning, middle, or end. This is truly me pondering the hands that I’ve seen dealt over the past month as I try to find my own way. There may be feelings, there may be frustration, there may  be an awareness as to why I haven’t been able to sleep for [...]

Since I’m now back to being a full time Prot Paladin, I figured it would be a good time to get down into the weeds with the new gear that appeared with Dragon Soul. The primary driver for this was a discussion that I had with Rhidach this morning–I was roughly trying to determine which [...]

So far, the single biggest mistake Bioware has made is their default chat filters. It's a simple mistake, but I think it has surprising large ramifications. Now, this is a hobbyhorse of mine, so maybe I'm overstating the impact. Especially since every recent MMO has made the same mistake, in my view. Heck, maybe it's a sign that I'm wrong. By default, system messages are sent to the general chat box. And there are a ton of system messages. When you hit level 25 and unlock your Legacy (shared XP pool and last name between your characters on a server), you start getting a Legacy XP message every time you earn normal XP. That's two lines in your chat box for every XP event. Which is every time you kill a mob. And the default pull is pack of three to four mobs. Basically, the spam of system chat messages makes your chat box useless for it's primary purpose. SWTOR is an extraordinarily quiet game, one that gets quieter as you increase in levels. And this is very unfortunate, because you need the chat to organize groups to take on the heroics. Go into the game, and turn off system messages in the general tab of your chat box. Turn it on in the Other tab (may actually happen automatically). All of a sudden, the general chat becomes usable once again, and you still have the Other tab if you need to recall a system message. Of all the changes Bioware could make in their next patch, I strongly urge them to turn off system messages in the default chat box. I think it would make a world of a difference community-wise.

I’ve been fairly current with posts lately (minus boss strats, but an explanation is coming), so a quick update post seems odd, but it’s needed as more of an informational gesture. A couple months ago I made the transition from main tanking to healing–it was an awkward transition with more self-discovery than anything. Not saying [...]

So in some ways it feels weird to title this post as such, and that will come up in the next blog post to follow, BUT, I want to get the post I planned to write yesterday up with the amusing SSs that I had. It was a slow night in guild, so we were [...]