Madness

Recently there’s a stream of very annoyed blog posts from almost every place I look. That’s quite normal, seeing there’s nothing bringing attention better than doomsaying. There are however some that either bug me greatly or are just straight crazy.

There is this one post from The Noisy Rogue, which at start sounded like I could potentially agree with it, but quite quickly descended into pure madness.

DPS find themselves in the situation where not only are their skills found in any other class, but with the introduction of dual specs many former tanks and healers are willing to jump in the queue as DPS when it suits them.

Now wait a moment. Is my dual spec a bad thing? How so?

Is me being able to switch from tanking to dps when needed – and believe me when I say that at each raid tier there are always fights that you only need one tank for – a bad thing? Should I be rather removed from a raid for that fight in favor of a real DPS (or have to teleport to the trainer, respec and be summoned for 10 minutes of a fight, then do it all over again to resume tanking trash leading to next boss – leading to extra 10 minutes break if I’m fast), or try to add my still quite awful prot damage as an unneeded offtank? I’ve already been in the offtank-in-a-one-tank-fight role in all my years of playing WoW far too many times and I’m very grateful that I can quickly switch my specs and do some real DPS instead. You just can’t imagine how much – probably even more so if all that you ever played is a pure DPS class.

Hell, if I could have one wish from Blizzard granted, it would be a third spec, so I wouldn’t have to spend around 200 gold every time I want to PvP successfully. Why 200? Because when you respec, you still have to change your prime and major glyphs and removing them costs 60 gold on top of the 33 or so gold price of the talent wipe itself. And I have to respec, because both my normal specs skip the PvP talents and are therefore useless for it. To be honest, the gold is mostly irrelevant here, however the time it takes to change is not.

Lastly, what bugs me the most – so me queuing as a DPS is a bad thing? Why? Because I have full tank gear, should I always queue as a tank? Because I have a tank spec, I shouldn’t take rightful place in the queue from the poor pure DPS classes?

As a consequence of antisocial behaviour, many players who play tanks in particular are now unwilling to tank a run for anyone but those already known to them or in their guild. As tanks in particular are easy to run through the LFG system, tanks can gear up quickly in comparison to other roles, thus giving them the quick option of opting out of the entire LFG system.

While it is a consequence of antisocial behaviour, it’s not a consequence of the LFG tool itself. We don’t blame gun manufacturers for wars and massacres, do we? It’s completely possible for a player to not be a dick towards the random people found by the system for your heroic dungeon run. Neither Blizzard nor the game tell you to be a dick at any point, it’s your bloody choice. However, we still get morons like the ones I wrote about in my last post. Is it Blizzard’s fault that a stupid melee dps with raid epics can’t run out of an AoE and dies in it? Is it Blizzard’s fault that ignorant morons try to push their failures on the tank or the healer?

One might argue that it is actually Blizzard’s fault, because they’ve implemented the LFD system and without it we wouldn’t have these problems. Really? You’ve never once encountered a bad player/ninja/jerk under the old system, while making a trade PuG? Unless you ran dungeons exclusively with people from your guild/friend’s list, I can bet that you probably did – after which they went on the ignore list and you never had to see them again. Exactly like now.

However, in the end it’s still the players that are jerks, not Blizzard employees or developers. It is the players fault if they piss off a tank or a healer to a point where he just doesn’t want to tank/heal anything for people he doesn’t know. If you want to change that, start trying to change the players thinking, to not be dicks to others. That’s all of incentive I want, to run a heroic and be told “good job healing/tanking” – if I do a good job at it of course. Too tank a heroic and not be kicked just before the last boss for no reason other than because someone didn’t like me.

Do we see it more often now that we have a larger pool of jerks to choose from? We do. But often enough in the LFD PuGs I run, I encounter good players, nice people and generally have fun in the dungeons I run. And it actually enables me to run them at all, because usually I’d do them late at night (or early in the morning if you prefer to call it that). The chance of me getting enough people in /trade at 4 in the morning to run a heroic? On a low to medium populated realm like Deathwing-EU is? Zero. The chance to get enough people in an entire battlegroup to do so? Much better, thanks to the LFD tool.

There is also a gem of madness in the comments to that post.

“Tanks all became copy pasted versions of each other with different colors and “themed” names to their skills.”, says one enlightened commenter that – coming from a quick read of his site – apparently doesn’t play a tank. I could be wrong, though, because one of his talent specs suggests he does (not that I have much idea about feral specs, mind you). Either way, seriously? Dude, have you ever seen other classes’ tank talents and abilities, and what they actually do?

So my warrior’s mobility, spell reflection, dispelling buffs and a ton of stuns and interrupts are apparently nothing else than different versions of other classes’ abilities. Is this guy even serious? Show me these on any other tank. You can’t, because – what a surprise! – all tanks are not blobs with lots of health and just different names and colors of their abilities.

Madness. I don’t really know where it’s coming from.