L2L|Raid Awareness - Learned Practiced Skill | Learn To Learn
Learn to dance. Then learn to play. That's life.
- I have written many "WoW Guides, WoW nonsense, TL:DR WoW ramblings and generally making indirect BUT legitimate inquiries about PvPing in World of Warcraft" over the past years, largely covering the details of what it is to play a particular class in a particular field. The Priest in PvP. But over the past few days... I have been forced to immerse into the banal, dull, "disorganized organizations" of the PvE Groups, Parties, Instances, Raids and Guilds. When writing about it I just feel I am addressing a narrow slice of what makes a skilled player, a happy player, ergo, a good player, not skilled... but good, and I hope you understand what I mean with this, because if you do not, you are not going to like this post. While there are reasons that players who know the nuances of perfectly optimizing their class’s output and ability use are prized, even they are no substitute for a PvP-Raider who excels at the most important skill of all: Not dying.
“You guys keep dying in the blue cloud thingy when there is loud noises. I don’t die in the noisy part."
After every wipe, the Raid Leader, a Hunter, kept posting DPS and Healing statistics in the chat. Asking in Raid Warning: Ok who fault was this time? NEW STRAT: Don't die n kill ***** fast pls.
The MVP of your stupid random raid group is not the person at the top of the DPS meter; it is the person who has not died by standing in fire 5 seconds to pop all DPS cooldowns in the last 3 wipes. I did not heal, I did not DPS, I literally stopped using my spells seconds before the moment that I knew 10 people were going to die instantly, even though they were Shielded and almost at 100% health. Doing elite DPS is rare, but doing quite good DPS is somewhat common. A player who does quite good DPS and dies regularly to avoidable mechanics is nothing special. A player who does quite good DPS and dies very rarely to avoidable mechanics is the best prize a stupid guild leader or a random raid recruiter can find in their applicant pool. Because a raid full of those players, even if none of them are at the top of your stupid recount numbers or in the large "best" PvE guilds, or she does not have gear from the big raids or she is trying to run the instance in her Resilience full PvP gearset... is going to succeed at what matters. We are not going to die. We are going to jump jump jump, left left right left and win boss encounters.
“You should have added the debuff that disappears at 100% healedto your UI. If you haven’t, I cannot prove it but you are the reason your Tank died and the whole 25 died. I am not angry and I do not want to argue, I want you to process it and accept it and fix it, so that we both can finish this already."
If somebody pricked you with a needle every time the fire appeared under you, you would notice it immediately 100% of the time. It would grab your attention over anything that you may have been looking at—It is something that your brain is hard-wired to respond to instantly. Associating it with an event that needs to supersede all others for priority in your response (move out of it now or you die) is a perfect marriage of a threat with a corresponding alert. This is the principle you want to keep in mind when configuring your actual UI to recreate that result in a more practical, and less painful, manner. Get a decent Unit Frame addon editor and a sound or visual alerter, please.
“I do not care if you do 0 healing for the rest of this pull, just do not die to the stupid tornado spinning electricity storm thingy again, take 5 minutes and download what I told you to download, I am not the Raid Leader but I just took over, do what I say, BRB 5m"
After 1 of the other 2 healers whispered me, very civilized, asking what position would be the best for him in the next pull, I did a /yell and I told the Raid that I want them to play the Donkey Kong Country-Mine Cart Carnage stage. I was only half joking. If you try it, it should illustrate the concepts of this post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiOHtCyd13U
Raiding is often made up of fundamentally easy tasks: reacting to something dangerous in a generous window like 2 or 3 seconds, using abilities in a familiar practiced rotation, using cooldowns at a planned time. The difficulty is in juggling all of it at once. Even if it is just jumping to avoid damage.
If another guild leader of any top level guild asked me how they could improve their play, I would not start by worrying about whether they use haste or crit. In truth, I would much preffer that you have had read this post rather than any guide I have ever written about what talents to select for your class or what stat to reforge for. Most importantly, because knowing whether to use haste or crit is easy. When you start playing a class, you can learn that on the first day. But being a good raider who stays alive during encounters is hard. I have been trying to learn it for a month, you have been doing it for years... years. No matter how long you have been playing, what class or role you are, or what level you play at, you too can find room to improve these skills for the benefit of your team, and more important, a benefit for yourself.
Learn to learn, then learn to play, then learn to die, Then repeat. That's PvE.
That's not our life.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wrath Of The Lich Twinks
Role playing gangstas non-combat pet trafficking mafia.
wrathofthelichtwinks.tumblr.com
