It’s an MMORPG. You know what those first two letters stand for? Massively Multiplayer. That means you’re not just dicking around with a bunch of AIs. Every other character has a person behind it. And you shoudln’t be an entitled ass to those people because “it’s only a game.” I notice you didn’t answer my question about the group-work slacker.
Honestly, I’m feeling like you think I’m judging you, since you said upthread that you ran Heroics when your DPS was still low. And you know what? I guess I kind of am. In my opinion, you were rude to every single person you ran Heroics with while you weren’t performing at the level you should have been. I don’t think that makes you a bad person or a bad player–but refusing to consider your actions in the context of the consequences they have for everyone else might.
No, the way to do that is by running instances, period. If you’re not geared for Heroics yet, you run regular dungeons first. Running Heroics when you’re undergeared benefits yourself at the expense of everyone else who responsibly ensured that they were actually capable of something before doing it, instead of counting on other people to carry them.
With respect to the people I raid with, yes, I want them to min/max. When it comes to an RDF group, all that I ask is that you meet the *literally minimal requirements *of the instance. And for Heroics, that’s 1500 DPS for a damage-dealer, 540 Defense and enough health that you can stay up for a tank, and whatever HPS you need to keep the tank and group alive through normal damage for the healer. Seriously. If you’re a DPS, I don’t care if you’re doing 1500 DPS or 5k. Both people have an equal right to be in the group. I actually prefer the person with the lower level of gear, because that means that they can still use the upgrades. The only thing I can’t stand is someone who’s too lazy to take the time to make sure they’re able to adequately perform the role they’re signed up for.
Would you think it’s okay for a healer or tank to come in undergeared and expect all of the DPS to be classes that can also heal, and spend all their time dropping extra heals on the tank instead of DPSing? After all, it will help *them *queue faster! Who cares if it makes the group a giant pain in the ass for everyone else!
How about if someone found a way to hack the game so they could start running Heroics at level 70. That shoudln’t matter, right? After all, it will help them gear up faster! Who cares if the slot might as well be empty?
That’s interesting. I don’t remember the last time I sheeped something in a dungeon. Almost everything is AoE City in heroics at the moment. Some ubertanks will round up multiple groups of trash, and when I’m channeling blizzard, my screen turns into a yellow haze.
I was one of those guys that geared up quickly. It was fun, but I can see where some folks can get frustrated with it being almost too easy. I can roll either way. I loved Everquest, and that was a much harder game, with positively sadistic consequences for failure–even when failure was pure bad luck. I like WoW, which pretty much took Everquest and made it a much more player friendly game.
I suspect that Cata will be considerably tougher at launch, but within 6 months, most of the non-bleeding edge content will become relatively trivial, as heroics are now.
Yeah, once people hit a high enough gear level, I’m sure they’ll be back to the old AOE ways. I mean, even in Wrath there were some spots where it was really helpful to CC at first (e.g., the ramp after Ick in PoS) where now I don’t even bother to see if we have anyone in the group who could do it–though I do still at least try for a kill order on those.
The concept of gear sets and tiered gear and all that makes me flail around a bit, although I know I won’t worry about it too much - I don’t intend to ever do a 25-man, and even the idea of a 10-man is overwhelming. Maybe 5-man Heroics I’ll get to someday.
Anyway, here’s my character profile on the Armory. I’m upgrading all the items under item level 100 as I move through NR (I got an awesome bow and crossbow my first day there, I am pleased).
Any ‘WTF are you doing noob do this instead!’ comments? I’m doing well in my pugs, even though my DPS is pretty low. But I don’t die unless everyone else does and I can’t pop a ‘Feign Death’ in time.
It was funny, I started using that character after being away from him for a few weeks and we got halfway through UT and I realized I never turned Growl off and I felt like the stupidest huntard EVER.
That’s one thing I like about having a brand new 80 – the heroics are actually challenging again. With my priest, who is ICC geared, I’ve taken the habit of following the tank into the middle of a large group of mobs and spamming Holy Nova throughout the instance – I can often top 1k dps in addition to healing. Because frankly, most tanks don’t require that much healing anymore.
But with my new pally, I have to focus a lot. I have to conserve mana as much as possible. I have to make sure I’m reapplying buffs because if Beacon goes down at the wrong time, I’m only healing one person at a time (a 50% reduction in healing!). It takes a lot more concentration than lol’ing through like my priest does. I’m looking forward to Cata and having to put some thought and trial/error into dungeon runs again.
Yeah, there are still a couple of places where I like a little CC even at my gear level, if I can get it–that ramp you refer to, H-HoR (I adore paladin DPS in H-HOR)…but in most places it really is just easier to round them up and burn them down. I’m sure that it will be so again–but the issue currently in Cata is that tank threat is down fairly considerably from Wrath, which means if you’ve got two or three high-DPS AoEers letting loose on the whole groups, they will pull them off the tank and have them in their face. As Cata is currently designed, tanks simply don’t have the tools to gather up large groups and hold them unless the DPS is smart and follows the kill order. I’m not sure how it works for other tank classes (I’ve heard them all complain, though), but for DKs they’ve increased the cooldown on Death and Decay and made it do less threat, they’ve changed the way runes refresh (which was supposed to be a fix, but is actually causing more problems in practice than it’s solving), and made it more difficult to have the typical tank “oh sh*t” buttons available when they’re needed, because you have to use so much of your runic power/runes to maintain threat. DKs only have two taunts, and one of them is on a longish cooldown. We have no AoE taunts. This means if you pull four things off me, I can, at most, pull two back. Six seconds later I can get another. Six seconds is plenty of time for something to eat someone’s face.
I predict that the first few weeks of instance-running are going to be very interesting–and very frustrating for many people who got complacent and expect their epix to be handed to them on silver platters.
I’m just not seeing the extremes of rudeness you see in the same activity. It’s not like one underperforming dps is going to cause group fail in most heroics. Any imposition on the uber-tubers is trivial. What, the run takes 20 minutes instead of 15? Not a big deal. Most groups don’t even wait for a table, and buff on the run to the first set of trash. As long as a player seems to be trying their best, and isn’t aggroing adds or otherwise doing stupid stuff, let 'em queue up.
Yeah, I got carried through my first few heroics. I learned the fights and geared up in the process, and now I’m carrying others to some extent. I’m doing the same thing with pug raids now. I haven’t done most of them before, so I’m learning the fights, and performing toward the bottom of the DPS list (but not dead last). That will change as I improve. Then I will become one of the raid dps studs, and the ones that come after me will get carried. It’s gaming karma and stuff.
I don’t know that much about hunters, but here are a few suggestions:
You’re wearing a tank neck. Hunters don’t need Str, and they definitely don’t need defense.
Your shoulders aren’t really hunter shoulders either–again, you’d be much better off with Agility and Attack Power than Strength.
Your cloak is more suited for PvP. Stam isn’t a really important stat for hunters, since if they’re doing it right, they shouldn’t be getting hit. If you can find one with Agility or AP, that would be better (I’m not sure which, if either, of Haste or Crit benefits hunters, but might look into those as well)
Your bracers have a useless stat on them (Fire resistance). Even Str or Stam would be better than that.
Your axe isn’t really well suited for a hunter, since the proc requires that you actually hit somebody with it. For hunters, the melee weapon(s) are usually “stat sticks,” and the bow or gun is where you want to focus.
Your Band of the Great Tortoise ring is pretty much useless for a hunter. All it has on it is armor, which isn’t terribly important for anyone except a tank.
The PvP trinket is okay, but if you can get a better one, you’d be better off.
BTW, take all these comments with the understanding that I know you kind of have to take what you can get while leveling–but a couple of things you can do are look at crafted pieces and see if there’s anything there to help you, and also check the AH occasionally. Usually the prices are insane, but every once in awhile you can find a nice piece for a reasonable price. Look for Agility and Attack Power as your primary stats.
It’s selfish. It’s saying, “I’m going to get mine, even if it’s potentially harmful to you.” It’s saying, “I’m going to count on the fact that you did your job so that I don’t have to do mine.”
If everybody showed up undergeared, you’d do nothing but wipe. That is a fact. You shouldn’t count on other people doing your job for you as an excuse not to do yours.
One person picking some flowers in a forest isn’t that big a deal, either. But what if everybody starts doing it?
I don’t think you should feel obligated to incur a deficit first, by taking on content you’re not ready for. Nobody should ever be getting carried, except by people who’ve agreed to do so. It’s an imposition.
If we’re eating at the same restaurant and you join my table, I could certainly afford to pay your portion of the bill if you didn’t bring enough cash. But it would be rude to expect a stranger to do so.
Unless the weapon also has stats on it that are better than your current weapon, as a Hunter you should studiosly avoid anything that has an “on hit” proc effect. And regardless of stats, you should never take a melee weapon over a melee DPS (just like they should almost never take a ranged weapon over a Hunter–the exception being a few top-end weapons in raids that are designed for Prot Warriors, which you can tell because they have tanking stats on them, which would be useless for a Hunter anyway).
In addition to the gear comments I’ll point out a few things with your spec.
Since you’re still leveling Beast Mastery is just fine, but you’ll probably do better (and have more fun!) if you re-spec to get the 51-point talent in the BM tree (allowing you to tame exotic pets and giving you more talent points for your pet). As a BM hunter your pet will be doing a good percentage of your damage, so maximizing it is very important.
Some of your secondary talent points are kinda wasted. Improved Hunter’s Mark is pretty useless for a BM hunter. Putting one point in Lethal Shots is kind of dodgy (it’s 1% crit per point, so generally you want all 5 points there). And Savage Strikes is just a bad talent (you should never be melee attacking, so Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite damage is irrelevent).
As you add levels you can fill in Mortal Shots and some other BM talents. Obviously move things around if there are things you particularly like (Pathfinding, for example).
An alternative would be to invest in dual-spec and create a Survival or Marksmanship build for running dungeons and keep your BM build for solo work.
I’m concerned that I’m going to be one of those “idiots” when I play my mage in Cataclysm dungeons. I didn’t even start playing the game until after WotLK’s launch, and by the time I ever got to running NR heroics, the need for CC was already pretty much gone. So I’ve never even really had the opportunity to learn how to do it in a dungeon group situation.
Oh sure, I know how to effectively sheep, etc., when I’m solo questing, but every time I’ve tried any form of CC in a dungeon, that CC gets broken by somebody else’s damage approximately 0.5 second later and ends up just being wasted mana and casting time that would have been better spent on another Flamestrike or Blizzard. So I just gave up on attempting CC.
OTOH, I’m pretty good at observing and respecting the kill order.
Sounds like you know how to sheep–people just don’t know how to stop AOEing.
Really, the basics of CC are:
1.) If it can be broken by damage, do your best to coordinate with the tank and DPS to make sure the CC’d mob will be out of AOE range of anything that’s still up.
2.) Keep an eye on the mob you’ve been assigned, and re-CC when necessary (unless the situation is futile).
IMO, everyone who expects to have to CC should at a minimum have a macro that allows them to apply that CC to a focus target without having to switch off their main target. Bonus points if you have some way of tracking the expected remaining duration of the CC without having to mouseover the debuff.
Personally, on my Mage, I have a macro that with one button:
1.) If I have no focus or if my focus is dead: Sets my current target to my focus and sheeps it.
2.) If my focus is alive: sheeps it again.
3.) Clears my focus if it’s dead and I don’t have a valid new target selected; or clears my focus manually with a modifier key.
I also have ClassTimer set up with Focus bars, so I can just glance over to see how much longer my sheep should last.
Well, depending on where you’re doing the sheeping, it might not be your fault that the sheep is getting broken by somebody else’s damage. Part of good CC is that the rest of the party has to pay attention and not break it. Have the tank count down the pull, and when he/she gets to 1, hit your sheep. Theoretically, the rest of the pack should move away from the CC’ed mob and head for the tank. It’s a little tougher when there are casters in the pack, but a good group can work around that.
What you want to do is get yourself two things: a focus macro and some sort of addon that will let you know when your sheep is going to break. The focus macro (you can find many of them online–just pick one you like) will let you DPS one target while keeping the other one on focus and allowing you to renew your sheep when it’s getting close to breaking. The addon (I use Control Freak) will let you keep track of when the CC is set to break, so you’ll know when to renew it.
ETA: There are also addons like BigBrother that will let you know who broke your CC, so you can yell at them. You can even make it announce to the party/raid, so everybody can yell at them.
But that isn’t what usually happens. In fact, I have never seen that happen. Think maybe I’ve seen two people in one group with gear scores around 3000 once or twice, and those runs were otherwise unremarkable. The pool of people with great gear…way overgeared for most heroics…is huge on Elune. I was browsing the loot for Flame Leviathan, or Flame Warder, or whatever that guy is in Uldar with all the vehicles in the fight, and I’d pass or roll greed on damn near everything he drops in 25 hard mode, and I’m just under 5k gear score now.
Really, really think you’re just completely over the top with your reaction to this thing. You’re acting like people are raping your child by trying to get a couple of badges in a heroic. It is not a big deal. Even if that hypothetical everybody underperforms group happens sometime…so what? The group wipes a couple times, then either disbands or boots someone for a replacement. No drama. No “Thou hath blasphemed against my Holy Requirements (which don’t actually exist or have any relevance anymore, but I like them, so I will keep repeating them like a mantra).”
I just don’t understand why you think it’s okay to expect complete strangers to carry you. You wouldn’t do it in real life–why is it okay in a game? Being selfish isn’t *my *idea of fun. If you want to get carried, have your friends do it. Or even just find *one *friend who can make up the DPS you’re short and always queue with them. But don’t queue for Heroics when you can’t fulfill the MINIMUM REQUIREMENT (and it really is *obscenely *minimal) and expect me to get all excited about it just 'cause we won’t wipe if we’re lucky enough to have someone whose performance can make up for the fact that you’re not doing your job.
Ugh. That whole attitude is just so much of what I *hate *about people. “If I don’t do my job, someone else will, so why should I bother?”
As for the breaking sheep thing, back pre-BC, my rule regarding sheep breakers was simple. You spank it, you tank it. I’ll burn it down when I can, but it may be a few seconds. Possibly because I may be whispering the healer to let you die next time you break a sheep.
Old school EQ guys will adjust to CC required runs fairly easily. The holy trinity of EQ was Tank/Healer/CC, and DPS was secondary. In current WoW, the Holy Trinity is tank/heals/dps, with CC left as an afterthought. Think I prefer the AoE fests now, because it’s simply easier and more fun. I like slinging destruction with reckless abandon. That’s why I play a mage who earned his nickname of “Boomer” for his big crits pre-WotLK. But the must-cc style is ok, too. Just have to work a bit harder. Tank marks targets, one symbol is my sheep target…I prefer the moon, but whatever is fine. That mob belongs to me. Nobody else touches it until the tank is ready.
It’s funny how we all have our own ideas about what marks mean what, isn’t it? It can vary quite a bit from guild to guild or server to server. Personally, my mental list is:
Skull: Kill first
X: Kill second
Circle: Kill third
Moon: Polymorph or Sleep
Diamond: Sap or Repentance
Triangle: Banish or Roots
Star: Shackle
Square: Trap
I’m sure I’m missing a few in there since I can’t look at lists of CCs from work, but that’s what I have off the top of my head.
I gotta say this: Elune(Alliance) as a server is VERY DEEPLY WEIRD when it comes to the kind of people who do random heroics (having spent time as an 80 on Icecrown(Alliance), Proudmoore(Horde), and Argent Dawn(Horde) ) I see relatively less pug raiding on Elune, and relatively more GS 5000+ people doing RDF heroics.
On Icecrown, RDF teams would pretty routinely fail/wipe/have to kick a person who had no idea what the hell they were doing–granted, I won’t vote to kick someone unless they’re obviously not even trying, but it got really frustrating with people with great PvP gear and no idea how to run an instance would get in on Heroic RDF stuff and we’d get completely iced. You would occasionally see people in heroics with gearscore as low as 2600 IIRC, which is fine except when combined with a player who has no idea how to do PvE DPS. Admittedly player skill is more important than gear (hell, I doubled my DPS months ago when I started reading more stuff about proper ability rotations and such and using Shock And Awe as training wheels, with no changes to gear at all) which is why I like the actual DPS metric.
So I think you might be getting a bit too upset at Shot From Guns–a) it’s not a given that a group will be able to carry an underperformer, b) 1500 dps is pretty trivial in PvE gear and really is more about talents and player skill than gear for the most part, and c) ultimately it IS kinda selfish to put yourself into a situation where others have no real choice but to carry you (annoying) or boot you (rude).
For the record, I can’t say I’ve successfully done the gauntlet after Ick in PoS more than once or twice without some CC and/or kill order–that may be the single hardest segment of any of the heroics out there. It perpetually amazes me how few DPS casters will bother to sheep the full-HP Flamecaller that’s appeared next to them and out of the pack. Me, I volunteer for CC/controlling duties with my enhancement Shaman–between earthbind totem, hex, and grounding totem, I can do pretty well with things like corrupted souls in FoS and whatnot where some control is needed but no one else wants to do it.
Those PoS ramps are hard, but I don’t think they’re in the same league as the HoR gauntlet. I haven’t been in a completely fail PoS group in a while, but the group I did HoR with on Monday never got passed the first boss – an there was nothing obviously wrong with our group. Just too much damage to everyone, especially the tank.
