Welcome back to another week of me trying to come up with news for the holiday week. Most WoW sites this week are running non-news stories because there is nothing to talk about. Most raiding guilds got their raiding done early in the week, Blizzard’s offices are closed, and even the official forums have slowed down a bit. Winter Veil released the BB Gun that you can use to “pelt” your enemies, but it only has 200 charges and once you use it up then you can’t use it anymore. I think Engineering should have gotten the ability to recharge it, or something.
Oh, someone has found wow gold some mystery monsters that are causing random "earthquakes" throughout the world. Some players think they're going crazy, but it's just some kind of prelude to Cataclysm! We haven't even downed the Lich King yet and took his purps and Deathwing is rumbling. Yay.
In other news, well, there is no news. Oh boy, what will I do? I conferred with The Overpull on what we should do. The Overpull said to talk some more about the dungeon finder tool and get it all out of our systems, even if the topic is played out by now. So, let’s talk about the dungeon finding tool AND DRAMA.
I really love the Dungeon Finder, but I have been really stressed out by some of the groups I’ve gotten. The stress is quite a bit more than the groups I got from spamming /trade, because at least then if someone joins your group with obscenely low health or mana then you could easily just uninvite them. With the Dungeon Finder you’re basically shoved into a group with these players and forced to suffer the consequences of it.
Now, first let me preface this, half the time if the group is killing things I don’t care about carrying someone through. I’d prefer not to, for many reasons that I’ll cover below, but I honestly don’t feel it necessary to bicker in party chat, vote to kick, or anything else because someone is doing a grand total of 800 DPS (what my level 70 can easily do). At the same time, it’s easy to understand the frustrations of some players who see it as an insult that they’ve gone out and gotten at least a little bit of gear before running heroics and now have to carry people far lazier than themselves.
This is playing out so much that there is literally a line drawn in the dirt. One side says that it’s insufferable to tolerate leeches wedding dresses and that they should be identified with addons, tagged as bad players, and then kicked out of all subsequent groups. Not to mention that many of those same people find great joy in humiliating them with verbal abuse in the game. The other side attempts to preach tolerance and promotes education and understanding.
Personally, I don’t find myself in either camp. I’m not annoyed to such great lengths that I’m going to pull the car over and start screaming at the children. At the same time, I don’t want to promote the idea that you can, in quest blues, join random heroics and do absolutely no DPS while everyone else works hard on pulling the group through the instance. There is a reason for this.
That reason is very, very, simple. If you argue and bicker about someone in the group then the group is going to slow to a crawl even more. Then you have to vote to kick,coffee mugs, which you’re already halfway through the instance, and then you have to wait for a replacement or 4 man the instance. I’m not saying that we should allow people to exploit us, but I do think that by the point you find out someone is really poorly geared then you’re probably at the point that it’s just too much additional work to bother. I do take it on myself to talk to people in tells and tell them about how having better gear would make their heroic experience a lot more enjoyable, though, after the instance is finished.
On the other side, you can easily gear yourself out in ilvl 200-213s within no time by normal instances. Regular ToC and The Frozen Halls provide massive amounts of gear and can be run back to back. My healing offset that only had a random assortment of 232s from ToC 25 was easily filled out and heroic ready after 2 hours of farming those instances. The Dungeon Finder tool makes finding groups nearly instant and the challenge is almost non-existent even for the poorly geared. Since, after all that is what normals are for. There isn’t an excuse to be in terrible gear during a heroic.
So that’s my thoughts on the subject. Feel free to talk in our forum thread. This rant isn’t stopping here, though.
There is one time I approve of being a “bad” person in WoW. That is if a group you are in is constantly throwing itself against the wall and making no progress within an instance. I feel that if you’ve exhausted every possibly way to make the instance a fast and enjoyable one and you’re not having fun then it’s appropriate to excuse yourself from the group and take a brief break from the game. Now you may say to me that it’s unfair to leave and that leavers are terrible people. I say to you that WoW is about having fun and if you&rsquo,cheap dvds;re not having fun in a sensible way (especially if you don&rsquo,led lights;t have an hour and a half to run a heroic) then excusing yourself is sensible.
I don’t think excusing yourself because the instance is The Occulus is. The place has been nerfed and you can only wipe IF and this is a BIG IF you don’t clear above the second dragon boss guy. He’ll call the dragons that are flying above him folding bikes down which will overwhelm you fast if they’re not cleared out. Be proactive about making your run a success and ram yourself into the dragons to get your group into clearing them. The rest of it is easy, at least now that dragons have way more health and everything else has way less.
If you’re in greens on your offset and the dungeon tool has deemed it appropriate to let you in heroics because your main may be properly geared then please, heed my advice above. I’ve seen a tank whose last words were “Hi guys this is my first time tanking!” who then went straight to a trash pull and instantly died. Don’t try to cheat the wait times, DPS may have 3x the waiting time than tanks and healers but if you can’t tank or heal don’t queue. That’s another time it’s appropriate to leave, when the tank or healer can’t do their jobs and won’t voluntarily excuse themselves.
