Metatheorycrafting: Examining the Social Theorycrafting Process

Posted on January 18, 2015 by

Today I’d like to talk about metatheorycrafting, or what essentially amounts to theorycrafting about the overall picture of theorycrafting.

I’m going to examine the different types of places that theorycrafting generally starts and how theories evolve and progress throughout the general WoW community. To my knowledge, this isn’t something that anyone really ever even talks about, let alone trying to formally describe, so we might be going into uncharted territory. As such, most of what I will say here comes from my own perspective and my own experiences.

The purpose of this venture is to help people understand where they might go to get the most raw information they can, or where they might go if they want refined information a little later down the line. Hopefully I can also help others that produce and analyze the information that comes out of theorycrafting identify where the best places to start might be or how they want to be involved in the way that suits them most.

The Question

All theorycrafting starts because someone wants to answer a question. If you wanted to get very deep into epistemology (the “how do we know what we know?” side of philosophy) you might say that the search for any kind of knowledge always starts with a question. The question can be anything, but there must be an objective of theorycrafting to aim the search and the analysis.

The question can come from anywhere, but it has to be heard by someone that will actually do some theorycrafting for it to mean anything. In the case that it is your own question and you are doing your own theorycrafting, that’s great. If you just wonder out to thin air whether Crit or Mastery provides greater defensive benefits for a Brewmaster and leave it at that, your question is pretty useless.

This is where the theorycrafting community comes in. Most people don’t understand everything about the actual mechanics and mathematical forces behind the game, and that’s fine. You don’t really need to know what the damage reduction from armor formula is unless you plan on doing some theorycrafting with it, so most people just don’t. There are a few people though that could be considered experts in the mechanical and mathematical way that World of Warcraft works, and they’re usually the ones that answer the questions. The best way to get a question answered is to make sure the question is heard by someone that can and will answer it. If you want to know something, all you really have to do is find someone that can answer it for you, but that can be tricky because theorycrafters practice their craft in a variety of places, some more accessible to others.

The Answer

If you want to answer a question, you need a place to work. Most theorycrafting involves long equations and many variables, which means that the sheer math involved in the work practically requires the ability to write things down as you go along to keep everything straight. It is possible to do a lot of mental math, but a large part of the strength of the theorycrafting community is the ability to have other people look at your work and agree that it makes sense (also called peer review). For this reason, theorycrafting in-game or on Twitter is almost impossible. Character limits and an inability to format things into a logical progression that can make sense to other people destroy the ability to theorycraft as well as cause them to be lost in a flood of other things, which makes reproducing the work require doing it all over again.

Because ample space is needed, most theorycrafting actually occurs on forums and blogs (sometimes with links to publicly viewable spreadsheets via Google Docs as well). It should be no surprise then that the best place to get a question answer is on whatever forum the theorycrafters for your area usually frequent (might take some looking around, maybe specifically asking a few of them yourself) or to comment on a blog post to try to get in contact with someone. Some theorycrafters also put themselves out on Twitter or are available in-game, but that’s only really good for getting the question across. The answer (and its supporting work) usually comes in the form of a forum or blog post where it can be seen by the most people possible in its full version.

Peer Review of the Answer

No one is infallible. That is why it is extremely important that theorycrafting work be done in public and be viewable by other theorycrafters so that mistakes can be identified. I would advise everyone to be very suspicious of anyone that claims to be a theorycrafter but keeps all of their work hidden, or anyone that just gives an answer and expects to automatically be believed without having the work available to show on request.

When it comes down to it, you want to make sure the answer that you are getting is the correct one. Posting work in a place where peer review is not only possible but also encouraged has numerous benefits.

1) It drastically increases the chances that mistakes are found and corrected.

2) It lets everyone else know that the work is done and can be borrowed for future use. There’s no sense in 20 people all doing the same work if the first person that did it could just put it out in the open.

3) Sometimes someone else’s theorycrafting can spawn new questions that other theorycrafters might think of themselves, which spurs the advancement of new work without it having to be directly asked.

4) Public, preserved, and peer reviewed work can simply be shown to anyone that has the same question in the future. It only has to be done once, checked, and archived to be referred to any time the question comes up again. This way, we can have the most accurate knowledge possible for the most amount of people while doing the least amount of work.

The Right Places to Be

With all of the above in mind, there are a few places to accomplish each of these things much more easily than anywhere else.

Asking/Receiving Questions – Twitter, direct contact (in-game or otherwise), or on a forum are the best places to get a question to a theorycrafter. Blog comments can go unread and be superfluous and Reddit posts can be forgotten or buried.

Publishing Theorycrafting Answers – As mentioned, forum and blog posts are the best ways to go about this. If in a forum, the post should be in a stickied thread that won’t disappear and the specific post should be bookmarked for later use. Personally I prefer keeping math theorycrafting to forum posts where they can be more easily reviewed and keeping more philosophical things (such as this) to blog posts because they have little to no need to be reviewed.

Reviewing Work – Realistically the best and only place to easily review work is in a public forum. This ensures multiple participants, a conversation, and usually the ability to quickly edit mistakes so false information is eliminated as quickly as possible. The problem with most things WoW-related though is to find the appropriate forum, because each class and/or spec usually only has one very good peer review site due to the problems with trying to coordinate discussion with multiple people in different places. IRC can work in a pinch though.

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Brewmaster: Soul Dance, Serenity and Chi Explosion, an Honest Choice

Posted on January 1, 2015 by

This is a topic I mentioned when describing the Damage-Tankiness Continuum that BrMs live on in WoD, but it deserves a more in-depth explanation when it comes specifically to the level 100 talent choices.

Dishonest Choices

Before I go raving about why the BrM level 100 talents are so wonderfully designed (in purpose anyways, if not individual execution), I need to talk about choices in World of Warcraft. Specifically, most of the “choices” in the game aren’t choices but multiple things that all fulfill the same purpose and can be quantifiabley compared with each other.

One of the core ideas of theorycrafting is that WoW (and just about every other video game out there) is based on numbers behind the scenes and that we can use math to determine which set of variables produces the best result. The general idea is that we can distill things that look like choices into “right” and “wrong” answers. Everything from what stats you should use to what abilities you should press to even what glyphs you might take can generally be mathed out into several wrong answers and hopefully a definitive right answer.

One example is the Ascension/Chi Brew/Power Strikes tier. All three of them give resources, and while they have a little bit of qualitative uniqueness in the way they deliver them, sometimes (like Ascension currently and Power Strikes for the entirety of MoP) it’s so bad that the part that is shared is totally overridden because they have too much numerically in common. Adding Brew stacks to Chi Brew was a good move to differentiate, so it will forevermore be unique, but Ascension and Power Strikes are basically the same thing, only one is superior.

I call these dishonest choices. Some people just call them the illusion of choice, but I think game developers know better than to think they are just illusions. In reality they are what most people refer to as “noob traps”, or basically traps for players that didn’t go do the math or find someone that did and just picked what looked good and ended up worse off for it.

An honest choice, therefore, would be one where you can just compare them qualitatively instead of quantitatively and actually choose things that you want instead of picking the good thing or the bad thing.

The Facts of the Level 100 BrM Talents

Let’s get some stuff out of the way.

Chi Explosion provides more damage than Serenity. It flat-out increases the damage normally done by Blackout Kick by more than Serenity can compensate for.

Serenity provides more physical damage protection than Chi Explosion does. It does this by eliminating the need to Blackout Kick during the normal rotation, so every bit of chi can be used to Guard or Purify instead of having to stack Shuffle with Keg Smash CDs. People have tried to make up reasons as to why this isn’t true, but I’ll hope explaining such a simple concept isn’t necessary for people reading this.

Soul Dance is the only talent that provides magic damage protection, yet is also the only talent that provides zero extra DPS.

The Honest Choice

What these three talents set up is a real player decision: What do you value? If you value damage, take Chi Explosion. If you want to lower the risk of dying to physical damage, take Serenity. If you find magic damage particularly threatening, take Soul Dance. It is literally impossible to tell someone to take one of the three all of the time as they demand attention to what is going on in the fight as well as what is going on in your own raid.

Ko’ragh and Brackenspore in Highmaul are two of the only bosses where I have ever seen all three choices of talent on a tier that actually does something for your role (as opposed to, say, movement talents or utility talents). You could make a compelling argument for any of the three talents on those two fights, and just about every fight where Soul Dance doesn’t apply you can still make an argument for either Serenity or Chi Explosion, because no one can really tell you if your specific raid needs you to be tankier or to do more damage without looking at how your raid performs as a whole.

That’s what we need more of out of talents. We need more choices and less noob traps, more honest choices and less dishonest ones. When someone that’s nearly obsessed with finding the correct mathematical answer can be swayed by situational arguments for things, that’s a real choice. I love Brewmaster.

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Brewmaster in Mythic Highmaul

Posted on December 26, 2014 by

So far, most of my WoD posts have been purely theoretical in nature. Whether it comes to using Simulationcraft as a tank or trying to decide where to place yourself on the Damage-Tankiness Continuum, there is a point at which theoretical discussions need to stop and actual real-world scenarios need to be taken into account to make use of these systems that help us know how to gear and how to play.

Today, I’ll be going through Mythic Highmaul and talking about each encounter in respect to damage (DPS) and tankiness (TMI/DT-HPS) and how much of each really needs to be considered. I must point out that at this time I have only personally experienced 3 of the 7 Mythic Highmaul bosses and my knowledge of the other 4 are from Warcraft Logs research, talking to players that have done that content, and what I know about the fights from doing them several times on Heroic.

Here is the format:

Health Hazard: This is how likely I think a BrM around 650-670 item level will die from normal things the boss does without regard to avoidable damage (such as eating hits of Berserker Rush that should just never happen). Scaled out of 10 with a 1 being “if you die, someone really screwed up”, a 5 being “should live as long as you can react to danger and are decently geared towards survival” and a 10 being “it is likely that you will still die even after doing everything you possibly can to survive.”

DPS usefulness: How much DPS a fight requires. Similar to above, a 10 would mean that you must do everything you possibly can to increase DPS or hitting an enrage is likely. High numbers mean DPS is both more useful OR required.

Overall: An attempted average between the two, with my opinion on what I think is either useful or necessary.

Kargath Bladefist

Health Hazard: 2/10

If you die while tanking Kargath himself, you should be ashamed. The only even somewhat lethal part of the fight is being up in the stands killing the crowd, and even then it’s mostly a joke.

DPS Usefulness: 7/10

Once again, damage on Kargath himself is mostly irrelevant. More damage is helpful for clearing the crowd more quickly, which can help the raid survive if there are less Bombers or Bileslingers around.

Overall: You should need neither more damage nor more tankiness to kill this boss. If you’re looking to be the best that you can be though, more damage is pretty helpful while more tankiness just means that you will have even more Guard remaining after Impale than you normally do.

Twin Ogron

Health Hazard: 3/10

Assuming you are tanking Phemos (since he does more damage and is harder to position), the point at which you need to leave for Whirlwind can be deadly. TMI is fairly important because you will probably be on your own without a healer in range for a few seconds before the Whirlwind starts (whose damage is irrelevant). As long as you can live through those parts, you’re tanky enough.

DPS Usefulness: 5/10

My guild’s first kill at 1 second before the enrage with a raid item level of 660 and a few deaths. More DPS doesn’t necessarily make the fight much easier, but it might be useful to avoid the enrage if things go south.

Overall: I ran with Chi Explosion because once I learned how to not be bad and avoid Blaze and time Guard for when I was leaving for Whirlwind, all chances of dying disappeared. You shouldn’t really need more damage to kill this boss though, and it doesn’t make it much easier. I’d go with personal preference, which for me is just running Serenity until I feel a need to use Chi Explosion.

Brackenspore

Health Hazard: 6/10

This is where some might say “but Necrotic Breath can kill you easily!” to which I respond: Learn to Guard properly. With proper Guards, Necrotic Breath will never kill you, and it only occurs every 30 seconds so you should have Guard up. Instead, the most dangerous parts of the fight are normal tanking when the Fungal Flesh-Eater hits 6 stacks and any time you are tanking in the final 4 seconds of Infesting Spores (because healers tend to be busy and you’re taking 50k/sec in magic damage too). If you gear against physical damage, Guard for Breath properly, and have clever use of Diffuse Magic at the end of every other Infesting Spores, you should not be dying unless you are bad like I am and get hit by waves or mushrooms.

DPS Usefulness: 6/10

Enrage should be a non-issue, but more damage can down the Fungal Flesh-Eater slightly faster.

Overall: I was alternating between Chi Explosion and Serenity for a bit and the difference doesn’t seem to matter. Realistically enrage should never be an issue if you do the fight properly, so it’s more of a decision of whether you want to kill the Fungal slightly earlier in exchange for having less control over when it’s hitting you with 5 stacks, or if you’d rather it stay up longer and just be invincible anyways because you are the most overpowered tank spec in the game right now. Either way works.

Tectus

Health Hazard: 8/10

4 Motes plus the empty core of a Shard of Tectus is one of the most health-hazardous moments in the entire raid. If you live through that and have the DPS to finish the fight, you win. The sheer amount that each of the mobs melees for is pretty ridiculous though, so don’t feel too bad if you die.

DPS Usefulness: 5/10

This is another fight similar to Twins where more damage won’t necessarily make the fight any easier, but there is a certain amount of raid DPS required to do the fight. I still wouldn’t recommend Chi Explosion though even for damage purposes because with 8 mobs up Breath of Fire is just as good anyways.

Overall: Prepare to get wrecked. Play well and maximize tankiness and you probably won’t die as long as healers are good. If you get this far and are 3 healing and still need more DPS, you raid has a problem. If you are 4 healing, you might be able to get away with trading off for more DPS because it will be necessary.

Ko’ragh

Health Hazard: 7/10

The actual boss doesn’t do hardly anything in any of the logs or streams that I have seen. The hardest part of the fight for a BrM is having purely magic damage adds hitting you, which kind of requires Soul Dance. Live through that, and you’re good.

DPS Usefulness: 4/10

As a tank on this fight, you simply don’t get to do damage very much. Between running in circles with Arcane on you and whatever strategy you use to deal with the adds, your ability to be hitting things is somewhat restricted. If you’re not the one tanking adds it’d probably be a 7/10, but seriously why would you have someone other than the guy with the statue do the adds anyways?

Overall: Just consider this a 100% magic damage fight. Ko’ragh will never kill you with AAs even if you’re in full multistrike gear using Chi Explosion, but the adds can. In the worst-case scenario you can have the other (probably less damaging) tank do adds and sit on the boss the entire fight, but that’s kind of a guild-by-guild judgement.

The Butcher

Health Hazard: 10/10

Here it is, the hardest hitting boss in Highmaul. You know what this fight is, so try not to die and if you do, hope that someone has a quick battle rez trigger finger.

DPS Usefulness: 7/10

With a 4 minute enrage, DPS is certainly required, but with the “Pool Party” strategy (taking the boss to the water and using the geometry of the room to make adds group up so be easily soaked) tanks really shouldn’t need to be the ones to get damage from.

Overall:  As with all things, not dying is the top priority. If you get to a point where you feel invincible even on Mythic Butcher, congratulations, you’ve basically won the game. I would never prioritize DPS over tankiness on this fight though, although maybe things will be different by the time I and a lot of people reading this get there.

Imperator Mar’gok

This is mostly guessing since logs are not readily available and I still don’t know what all of the mechanics in the final phase are.

Health Hazard: 7/10

Accelerating AAs are not very deadly. There are no DoTs to worry about either. He just gets a high hazard number because he’s the last boss on Mythic and from Paragon’s video it looked like the tanks were getting chunked fairly hard, but then none of them were Brewmasters so I’m not sure.

DPS Usefulness: 10/10

Killing adds: The fight. This is one fight where I would walk into it trying to maximize DPS and only dial back if things went south. All of the adds are very dangerous and have strict timers where they must die before the next wave or things get very bad. Of course you could always be called on to kite, but you know what the answer is already if you’re just going to kite the adds because your job is neither to live nor to do damage, but to run around in circles throwing kegs.

Overall: Maximize DPS. In the event that you are using the kite strategy, who cares what your setup is anyways?

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Simulationcraft Part 3: Analyzing Tank Simulations

Posted on December 25, 2014 by

This is the final part of a series on use of the Simulationcraft (SimC) simulation program in regard to theorycrafting and optimizing performance.

Part 1: Constructing and Interpreting a DPS Sim

Part 2: Experimenting with DPS Profiles

In this part, I will attempt to explain the vast differences between simming for DPS and simming for tanking.

Setting Up a Tank Simulation

If we look back in Part 1 at the Options pane, there is a middle column of options that I originally said was mostly pointless for DPS. This is because those are all tank options. For DPS, as long as you are hitting an immobile target with a constant armor level, that’s fine. The DPS metric does not care what else that target is doing, merely that it exists much like a target dummy.

For tanking, there is another dimension added in that the target is hitting back. The middle column of settings controls what kind of enemy is hitting you. The default boss is set to the Mythic level TMI Standard Boss, whose attacks include normal auto-attacks and a constant magic DoT (at a split of about 65% damage as physical and 35% as magic). This boss is used as the standard because it provides the most constant environment and thus can be handled by generic APLs in a consistent manner (e.g. Guard is most effective against the TMI standard boss at any given moment, whereas in more realistic scenarios it would be lined up with a hard-hitting attack instead of just used for its overall damage reduction).

Unfortunately for theorycrafters, boss attack patterns come in a huge variety of ways. In Highmaul alone, Kargath, The Butcher, Ko’ragh, and Imperator Mar’gok do almost zero magic damage to the tank, usually less than 10% of total damage taken. As easy as it is to just rely on one kind of boss for all simulations, it makes no sense to completely gear around the assumption that a boss is doing a large chunk of constant magic damage and AAs when the majority of bosses not only don’t do magic damage, but also have more complex attack patterns than simple AAs (e.g. Mar’gok accelerates his attacks, The Butcher is a 4 minute fight that frenzies at 30%, and Ko’ragh doesn’t even attack half of the time because of the Nullification Barrier and Tramples).

This is why we can change the boss type from TMI Standard to Tank Dummy, which trades out the constant magic DoT for a physical damage strike every 6 seconds and a big magic nuke every 10 seconds. The Tank Dummy changes two important things: it adds an un-dodgable yet physical component to the boss (The Tenderizer, Impale, and Double Slash are like this as well) and has generally less, yet spikier magic damage than the TMI boss. By using multiple kinds of bosses and comparing results, we can get a more accurate picture of what works and what doesn’t than if we just used the TMI Standard boss, which, while almost ideal for Brackenspore, can be a bit far off the mark for entirely physical bosses.

Tank swaps also have a huge effect on how effective things are, but although Simulationcraft has the features to custom-code a tank swap, at that point you might as well go all the way and do all of the quirks of a fight (like Ko’ragh not attacking all of the time and Mar’gok having accelerating attack speed) which would just be a ton of extra work. Feel free to look up how to do it in the help section, but I’ve found it to be more trouble than it’s worth. You can also find instructions on how to custom-code any kind of boss you want.

Analyzing the Results of a Tank Simulation

The results of a DPS sim are extremely clear-cut: whatever increases DPS the most is best (usually). Tank simulations have to consider DPS as well, but also the type of boss being simulated, DTPS (Damage Taken Per Second), HPS (Healing Per Second), and TMI (Theck-Meloree Index). Of course, this naturally adds an element of uncertainty to all results because it’s just impossible to come up with definitive stat weights that actually apply to all bosses because we’re talking about 4 sets of weights with varying importance per boss type. Make no mistake, tank simming is a lot of work, although thankfully pretty unnecessary unless you’re hitting content where you might actually die (which, as a BrM, I have only started to see on Mythic Brackenspore and no sooner).

Of the 4 primary tank metrics (DPS, DTPS, HPS, and TMI), I tend to combine DTPS and HPS stat weights because I personally don’t see why the distinction between the two would matter (using DT-HPS to symbolize [Damage Taken minus Healing done] per second). This DT-HPS provides number that could also be referred to as “Healing Needed Per Second”. A good way to think about it is “how much healers need to heal you”, which doesn’t matter much in small increments but 10% or more differences one way or another can matter a lot even if your damage intake is smooth.

DPS is fairly self-explanatory. Sometimes damage is needed and a concern, sometimes it is irrelevant. It depends on your guild and your personal feelings about tanking. Of course if you want to optimize DPS while using Serenity that would be a little silly since you could just use Chi Explosion instead, but debates about how much to weight DPS vary on a case-by-case basis. Use your judgement.

TMI (as linked above), is essentially your largest health differences (it includes healing) in a 6 second window, or how spiky your health is. Unlike every other metric, it’s not measured as an absolute number but as a percentage of your maximum health. A TMI of 100k = you can expect to go from 100-0 in 6 seconds without any outside heals against that particular boss. The math behind it is a lot more complicated and you can read about that from Theck above, but a good TL;DR is that TMI is how badly you might get wrecked if you get unlucky, which is obviously bad for a tank. Because lower spike damage is often prioritized over reducing total damage taken, TMI is the default metric stat weights will scale over as a tank.

When we take these three metrics into context (TMI, DPS, and manually deriving DT-HPS from DTPS and HPS), you can pretty easily see that taking any one of them as gospel ends poorly. DPS almost always favors Agility and Multistrike as damage stats, but you’d be paper thin if you did that. DT-HPS can skew multistrike higher than it probably should be because it assumes 100% GotO pickup, which we know doesn’t happen in real fights. TMI is the only metric that shows Stamina as an increase at all, but as even higher than Bonus Armor because TMI is a factor of max health, yet it’s clearly not terribly good because it doesn’t even register as better for the other two metrics.

_____

At the end of the day, you should probably not sim very often (for small gear differences there isn’t much point), but when you do be prepared to do it right. Do two sims, one on the TMI boss and one on the Tank Dummy boss, with scaling and/or plotting enabled for all relevant stats (Stamina, Bonus Armor, Agi, all secondaries). Once you have both sets of results, try to create some kind of average of stat weights for DPS, DT-HPS, and TMI. Then, using your own knowledge, combine the three sets of stat weights into something that makes sense based on how much you value each category (or just ignore DT-HPS and do a 50/50 split for DPS and TMI if you want a quick and dirty method).Yes, it’s complicated and it will take you the better part of an hour and a lot of work on the calculator, but it’s far better for later Mythic tanking than just plugging in your character and taking the TMI Standard boss’s TMI stat weights as gospel. In the end, you’ll learn a lot, have a more effective character, and understand what you’re doing much more than the average player.

How to Construct and Analyze a Healer Simulation

….You don’t. Take all of the above, and try to add 19 other players all taking damage in various ways plus another 3 or 4 healers healing them at the same time you are. It’s literally impossible to get anything even remotely close to reality for more than one fight per simulation, and probably never going to happen. It’s far simpler to just use a spreadsheet because you’re not going to get any more realistic than that in SimC for healing.

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Worth Beyond Measure: A Raid’s Greatest Treasure

Posted on December 19, 2014 by

I was supposed to finish my series on taking an entirely scientific and analytic approach to using the Simulationcraft program to fine-tune performance in an accurate way to within a few percentage points of the theoretical maximum, but before that I have to talk about something different. These are my feelings and my thoughts, but I think it’s something that needs to be said.

I am growing weary of the pervasive need to boil each individual player down to their numerical value. I see it on forums, on Twitter, and in-game chat. I have to listen to people degrading each other or themselves in my own guild because everyone has been told time and again that they are only worth whatever numbers they can put out. This used to be relegated to DPS, but I’m even seeing HPS comparisons and even linking Damage Taken on boss fights to compare tanks as some sort of ultimate “X is a better player than Y” measurement stick. I read applications to my guild of players confused about why we won’t just replace one of our current raiders with some unknown person that happens to do 5% more DPS or HPS sometimes.

You are worth more than your numerical input.

One of the most common responses I’ve seen to the repeated WW nerfs is “GG time to reroll.” So far I have heard the same from Ele Shamans, Shadow Priests, Warlocks, Rogues, and Resto Shamans just for being “weak” at some point in the past month. You know what? Screw that.

I don’t care if your gear is bad. I don’t care if your spec has been deemed weak by the almighty “theorycrafters” and “top rankers.” So what if your DPS or HPS is 5% lower than someone else? Your ranking on WarcraftLogs is totally irrelevant to me.

I care about mechanics. I’m not in a top 20 world guild, and neither are 99% of the people I have heard express that feeling of worthlessness. Guilds lower than that actually very rarely hit enrages or lack the raw healing output to kill bosses. I’m not saying that a guild with 10 Ele Shamans will do well, but the difference between bringing a Rogue and a WW on even a fight like Twin Ogron is minuscule if the Rogue is a good player and the WW is not.

The player that switches to adds and kills them immediately is worth a lot more to me than the Warlock rocking the meters that tunnel visions so hard on the boss that he does less add damage than anyone else in the raid. You can be doing barely more damage than I do as a tank, and I’ll want you in the raid over someone that ignores mechanics. I will take a thousand Resto Shamans that actually bother to Purge and Wind Shear in a pinch over a single brain-dead Disc Priest that only knows how to spam Power Word: Shield but tops the healing meter doing so.

If, for whatever reason, you are playing well but some outside factor is hindering your numbers (such as class balance, gear, or fight mechanics), your first thought should be “how can I be more useful on this fight?” not “welp GG my DPS sucks time to stop trying.” Winners always want the ball when the game is on the line. Good players will find a way to be useful regardless of numbers, and rerolling is very rarely the only option.

Posted in General, Guilds and Raiding | 3 Comments