Tagra’s Tactics pt.5 – Respect and Negativity

Guest Post

Respect your Fellow Raiders.

This is a much bigger category than you might think at first glance. I don’t just mean like “Don’t make racist jokes because one of them might be that race!”, or “Don’t insult someone because they had a brain fart and died to something dumb this time.”

I mean recognize the fact that there are 24 other live (with or without lives…) people in the raid with you. You are not better than them. Your time is not worth more than theirs. It also means that it is not ok to tab out or go afk after every fucking pull, or god forbid after a wipe while you lie there waiting for everyone to run back and rez your lazy ass, because you are wasting the time of 24 other people. And it also means that it is not okay for you to watch TV while putting in minimal effort while everyone else is doing their best on an encounter.

I hope anyone leading a raid is aware enough to recognize disrespectful assholes and kick them out on their ass.

And a very important one for me…

Don’t be Negative.

I zoned into the battlegrounds the other day, and before the gates had even opened, a very familiar scene played out for me:

Newbie: Hey guys I’ve never been here before, what do we do?
Asshat: Lose.

Asshat has a lot to do with what is wrong with shitty raids. Let me explain!

The above is a battleground example, and the anonymous and random environment of BGs is basically a perfect storm with disastrous results, so it’s a great place to observe it, but if you think about it, you can see it applies to PvE raids as well.

Being negative lowers your morale and self-efficacy.  Being openly (raid chat…) negative lowers the morale of the entire raid.   If a persons self-efficacy is low, they are less likely to put effort into their actions, because they feel (consciously or unconsciously) that their efforts aren’t going to make a difference anyway.   If they stop putting in effort, then we are more likely to fail, which just confirms their beliefs… but had everyone in the raid put out 100%, maybe we would have succeeded.

The reason it bothers me so much is I had a lot of trouble with this back in the BWL days, back when consumables were a pain in the ass to collect and carry around and gold was hard to get and you needed to drink 20 different fucking potions every single wipe because there were no flasks that persisted through death.  Yeah it was a bitch and I can understand why people would try to sneak under the radar when we tried to enforce them.   What pissed me off was how when they were called out on it, they’d go “We weren’t going to win anyway, I didn’t want to waste them.”

Do you know how many times we called raids early because it seemed like we weren’t really getting close to killing the boss, but half the raid wasn’t using consumables (or putting in effort…) so we didn’t really have an accurate benchmark on how we could have done?   Do you know how many 1% wipes we had when there were negative cheapskates not using consumables?  1% worth of boss-killing consumables?   No, we didn’t win.   But we could have, you asshole.

And then the best part, my absolute favorite part… was when we did kill the boss and they were all “oh wow I didn’t think we could do it.”   What the fuck is that?  Not only are you negative before we start but you’re negative after we win?  No wonder we were plagued by shitty attitudes.

Positive results from shitty negative comments like those: … well if the raid really truly sucks, then it might end early!
Negative results: Everyone in the raid is more likely to put in less effort as they come to believe we are never going to win. Thanks for your contribution!

It’s tricky because a lot of times people make jokes (I know I’ve made several jokes about our impending horrible demise…) that they might not even realize are negative, but it can set a negative tone for everyone and take a lot of steam out of our momentum as everyone comes to think “well, we’re not going to win on this attempt either, so…”

Tagra’s Tactics pt. 4 – Don’t Be A Whore

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Tagra and her tenacious attitude towards one goal.  Owning your fucking face.

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Don’t Be A Whore

Meter Whore:
You know them, the ones that “forget” to switch targets on target switching fights because if they stick to the boss, they do 500 more dps than everyone who did switch.  Or, worse, the ones who switch to shit they’re not supposed to because it gives better numbers.

Congratulations, you did 10k dps!  …we wiped because the stuff you were assigned to kill didn’t die fast enough, but you’re on top of the meter!  And that’s what it’s about, right?

Loot Whore:
The ones who don’t actually want to raid, they want to watch TV until the boss is dead (without dying at all in the process, of course.  That might cost gold!), then scoop epics, then bugger off until the fights are easy again.  I’m not entirely certain why they want the epics if they don’t want to get them dirty.  It probably has something to do with standing around in front of the bank trying to get people to notice them.

Attention Whore:
The ones who don’t ever shut the fuck up.  There are many varieties. Some of the more common ones are the “Guys I’ve done this instance before.  I’ve killed this boss before.  Do you want me to tell you about the time I killed this boss before even though you have also killed this boss before?  Because I’ve totally been here before and I know this fight.  Oh that’s cool you do this the same way we did it when I was here before.  Yeah that happened when I was here before too.” and there is the “I am pointlessly commenting on everything everyone says no matter how trivial because you all must be talking to me when you say anything even if I’m brand new to this raid group and even if you specifically mention someone else by name!”

No one cares. The most impressive thing you can do is your best at your fucking role in the raid.  Stop being a whore.

Tagra’s Tactics pt.3 – Fucking Pay Attention

Tagra’s Tactics is brought to you by the rant-a-licious Tagra and her mental daggers of kill-you-right-fucking-now.

Fucking Pay Attention:

The add you’re supposed to switch to just popped, and you didn’t kill it. Something you are supposed to be tanking just punched a healer in the face because you didn’t notice it switch targets. The tank you’re supposed to be healing just dropped like a rock because something funny happened on TV. You’re standing in shit that is fucking killing you.

Pay attention.

I don’t understand why this is so hard for some people.

Most things are understandable. Not realizing exactly how a class ability works because the tooltip sucks and you didn’t dig through all the catass bickering over the best ways to min/max it… understandable. Fucking up on a boss fight you’ve never been to before, understandable.

Dying to the same gimmick you died to last time, and the time before, and the time before… you’re telling me you didn’t notice it (again) and that’s why you didn’t react to it (again)? Are you even trying, or are you just hoping to die so you can watch TV without being bothered by this game thing that keeps distracting you?

There is also the ever popular excuse: “lag.”  Lag happens. Latency happens. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

One thing you most likely can do something about, though, is framerate. I once raided with someone who ended up killing everyone with a bomb-type gimmick every single raid, and the standby excuse was that their framerate was so low that the screen froze and they couldn’t move away. At the time I was running WoW on a computer that was already 5 years old, and theirs was roughly three times better. I did not have framerate issues. What was the issue? They had like, every fucking addon in existence installed and running during raids.

Some tips to hopefully improve framerates during raids:
- Turn off addons. You don’t need Gatherer and Auctioneer to raid. Get Addon Control Panel (yes I realize it is ironic to install additional addons…) and you can disable every addon except the bare essentials without having to log out of the game. You can even set up a “raid” set to enable only your raid addons with a click.

An additional note, since apparently a lot of people never noticed this… on the character select addon screen, there is a dropdown in the top left corner where you can set addons to load for specific characters only. So you can tell your auction addons to only load for your auction alt, or pvp addons to only load for your pvp characters, or whatever. It can be handy sometimes too.

- Turn down game settings. This is kind of a “durr” suggestion too, most everyone does this first, but it’s worth mentioning. Particle Effects being one of the biggest frame rate hogs and most fights don’t require it to be high.

- Turn down settings on your graphics card itself. Check the control panel for it and make sure it’s not trying to enforce antialiasing or anything.

- Turn down the resolution of the game. A lot of people don’t think of this, but if you run WoW at a smaller resolution your computer is working much much less to render the game. Yes, it is ugly, but if having a hideous screen for 4 hours is what it takes for you to not stand in fire, is it worth it?

To Be Continued…

Tagra’s Tactics pt.2 – Know The Fights

Today’s guest post is again by the mouthy and intelligent Tagra.  I’m glad to bring you part two of Tagra’s Tactics.

Know the Fights!

Know the Fights:
There are so many resources now that there is really no excuse for not at least having a vague idea of what is about to happen. I’m very much a learn-by-doing…-er, so I understand that the wall of text on Wowwiki doesn’t translate very well into “oh fuck there’s fire everywhere” until you’ve died to it once.

wowwiki.com
bosskillers.com

Raiders:
There’s really no excuse for not realizing that standing in fire is a bad thing, even if you have never seen this particular shade of fire before.

Leaders:
If there’s a new person don’t fucking talk about the fight for 30 fucking minutes, arrrghhh. Seriously, by the time you shut the fuck up and pull everyone will have lost focus and the new person won’t understand a goddamn thing you said until they see it in action anyway. If you have to talk, do it in a point form summary of things that will kill us, or on the SECOND PULL when they have a frame of reference for what you’re babbling on about. Thanks.

There are several common themes in WoW bosses, and learning them helps you pick up on what a new fight is going to expect, even if you haven’t seen it before. If it is killing you, don’t stand in it. If it is killing someone else and is attackable, we usually have to kill it so you might want to think about making a target macro.

/target XXX

It’s important to understand why we do certain things on fights, too. I remember on my first raid ever back in Molten Core, I asked the raid lead “why do we do (thing)?”, and their answer was “I dunno why, that’s just what we’re supposed to do.” This was before the days of guides on the internet, so the next attempt I went and did the opposite of it, whatever it was, and it did something god awful horrible to me and then I understood why it was vital to avoid it.

Before I understood that, it didn’t really seem all that important to me to avoid it. I was avoiding some faceless monster that didn’t seem worrisome because it was just another series of steps in the sequence, not something vital to remember to do. Remember to switch to the tree on Freya! But it’s not even doing damage! Surely I should keep killing these adds before worrying about th… a tree that will heal everything and wipe us if we don’t kill it in the next couple seconds? Oh shit, ok kill trees…

Which reminds me…

(to be continued in Tagra’s Tactics pt.3)

Tagra’s Tactics pt.1 – Know Your Class

Quite some time ago I had asked Tagra for a guest post (cuz she’s long winded).  She certainly didn’t disappoint and provided me with an enormous post that scared me.  I’m going to be breaking it down into smaller sections.  Yes, it’s about WoW… I still read up on WoW =p

Xeo wants a “Do’s and Don’ts of Raiding” post, and apparently I have sufficiently fooled him into thinking I am qualified to write one. This is an excellent opportunity to bitch about things that annoy me, but I’ll try to talk about useful things too.

Profanity warning. I curse sometimes. A little.

You are in a raid, gosh what should you do??!

Know your Class.
Yeah I know, that’s kind of “durr really?” but there are a shocking number of people who don’t actually know the capabilities of their class. You might even be raiding with them right now. It’s not entirely their fault, though. Knowing your class is actually far more involved than levelling to 80 would have you believe.

The in game interface teaches you roughly fuck-all about what your class should be doing in a raid, or what your capabilities actually are. As a tank you have no idea what your HP should be, other than “not 0″, nevermind the fact that there is a defense cap. As a healer you have no idea if you should be getting spellpower gems, haste gems, crit gems!??!? As a DPS you don’t even get (non-addon) in game feedback about how much overall damage output you’re actually doing, much less how much you should be doing, and how to do it. The game proudly tells us we have “8%” increased chance to hit bosses, and we go “sweet, I’m hit capped.” and actively avoid getting any more hit rating. Why doesn’t it fucking say 100% chance to hit? We know it’s 100% because someone sat at a target dummy and calculated it, then posted about it on the internet.

It’s unfortunate, but learning how to maximize the capability of your class requires hunting down people who do things like that and finding out what they have learned, because the interface doesn’t tell us useful things all the time.

Here’s the caveat though.

Beware the “cookie-cutter”. You probably won’t actually go wrong with the cookie-cutter build of the week, because it’s cookie-cutter for a reason, right? But it annoys me to see people go cookie-cutter without understanding why it is the cookie-cutter build.
This is very important, in my opinion, because next week when the patch comes out and they go “oh by the way we just changed all your core class abilities”, the ones who went cookie-cutter simply because it’s cookie-cutter are left lost and confused, mashing the same buttons and wondering what happened. Those who understand why their build is the way it is are able to understand the change, adjust rotations or specs immediately and continue to do their best… and then post the new improved cookie-cutter so that everyone else can catch up.

Look at the talents and rotation you use and try to understand why it is that way, and if it makes sense to have it that way. That alone makes you a better player.

Tomorrow… Tagra’s Tactics pt.2