What separates the “hard core” gamer from the more casual one is not necessarily the amount of time devoted to playing the game, but rather the willingness to tolerate failure and try again.

On the face of it, this phrase is just a re-tooling of the “if at first you don’t succeed” motto but if we take a closer look we can see that there’s a lot more going on in here when we apply it to an MMO. Specifically, when talking about an MMO you need to be able to tolerate the failures of others as well as your own. Everyone is going to individually make mistakes or fail but when you add another 9 or 24 people into the mix it changes everything. Most notably, our relative perception of failure.

Suddenly, everyone is failing so much more than you are. In fact, I’d venture to say that in a 25man raid, “other players” are failing 24 times more often than you. And that’s where the real gamers prevail, the gamers who know that the more people you add to the mix, the more often failure will show it’s ugly head.

Raids are going to wipe – a lot – and a good portion of the time it’s going to have nothing to do with you and there’s nothing that you specifically could have done. It’s out of your hands. How you choose to deal with your own failures and more importantly the failures of others will define you as a gamer and as a person.

A recurring theme on WoW forums that I’ve seen since the days of Molten Core, is uninformed raiders complaining about Damage Meter mods and how they hurt the raid.  The truth is that damage meters are a tool, much like a hammer.  When used properly, a hammer can help you build some very cool stuff that you never could’ve built with your bare hands.  Or when used irresponsibly, a hammer can smash your thumbs or poke your eye out.

The most popular damage meter addon is probably Recount.  Another option which I’m told is much less CPU intensive is Skada.  I would consider it essential to run one of these mods (or something similar) while raiding, but this is especially true if you have any hand in the raid leadership, or even if you just want to be able to discuss fight strategies and analyze what happened on the previous attempt without accidentally making a fool of yourself.  However, you will learn very little from simply looking at, say, the Damage Done meter, without analyzing the context in which those numbers were obtained.  The true usefulness of these addons is dependent on digging a little deeper than what you immediately see on the surface.  Here I’ll discuss some examples of how I use Recount for the first 7 bosses in Icecrown Citadel (i.e. Storming the Citadel and Plagueworks sections), emphasizing only DPS classes and ignoring Tanks/Healers.

Lord Marrowgar

- Marrowgar is a pretty straightforward fight, and is a decent boss for judging the strength of each DPS player based on the Damage Done meter.  However, the one extra detail you must examine a little closer is Damage Done to Bone Spikes.  Anyone who has very little damage done to Bone Spikes (or no damage whatsoever) is not pulling their weight in the raid, regardless of how much DPS they did to Marrowgar.  However, the cutoff for “very little damage” will depend on many factors.  For example, if you position your raid right behind Marrowgar then melee should have much more Bone Spike damage than casters – but if you spread out all over the room then melee/casters should all be contributing evenly to Bone Spike damage.  Also, if this fight is farm content and the spikes are blowing up in under 5 seconds then it’s acceptable for casters to not help with Bone Spikes, but if this fight is still challenging or if spikes are staying up for 10+ seconds, then you should really consider sitting any DPS out who are not pulling their weight on the spikes.

- As far as analyzing failures on this fight, Recount isn’t all that necessary since basically anything you die to on this fight as a DPS is your own fault (with the exception of dying to a 10+ second Bone Spike, but this would be so obvious that you shouldn’t need to analyze the Death meter to notice it)

Lady Deathwhisper

- Lady Deathwhisper is one of the few cases where the “Damage Meters are useless!” crowd would actually have a good point.  Anyone DPSing the boss in Phase 1 will have much higher DPS, even though P1 boss damage is probably the least important aspect of the fight.  So the total Damage Done is pretty meaningless unless you are only comparing two people who had the exact same job in phase 1.  Even comparing just the Damage Done to Cult Fanatics/Adherants isn’t necessarily useful, except for spotting people who are  ignoring their particular assignment.  Probably the only way to get any relevant information about DPS players’ performance on this fight is to reset the meter for Phase 2 only, but even then you need to also check the Interrupt meter and realize that people handling the frostbolt interrupts will be lower on the Damage Done meter thru no fault of their own.

- Other uses of Recount on this fight include a) the Dispels meter to find out which people are not decursing, and slap them on the noggin, b) Interrupts meter in Phase 2, or c) Death meter to analyze why people died (there are many possible sources of death on this fight which are completely not your fault – but if you died to Death and Decay, a Vengeful Blast from the Ghosts, or an aggro pull on the boss, then these are your own fault)

Gunship Battle

- I don’t really care what you do on this fight as long as you don’t go AFK inside the cabin where you still take damage but can’t get healed (lookin at you, Asgeroth!).  Analyzing Recount on this fight would be like analyzing the Chess Event in Karazhan, no one cares.

Deathbringer Saurfang

- Saurfang is an excellent fight for judging DPS players’ performance.  Melee classes can be judged strictly by the Damage Done meter on this fight.  For Ranged classes (including Hunters plus the Caster DPS), the relevant metric for judging their performance is mostly the Damage Done to Blood Beasts.  If you really needed to judge the strength of a particular Ranged DPS player (like say an applicant on a farm content trial run), you might consider instructing them to ignore Blood Beasts and only nuke the boss, so that you can compare apples to apples when you review the logs later.

- One of the main causes of wipes on this fight is if melee DPS or the tanks get aggro on Blood Beasts and give Saurfang a ton of energy.  In cases like this, I switch Recount to the Damage Taken meter, and start checking each melee/tank to see how much damage they took from Blood Beasts.  Then when you find out who the culprit is, you can switch back to the Damage Done meter, click on that person, and check out the breakdown of their damage done to Blood Beasts, to tell them which ability they need to make sure to not use when the adds spawn.  The most common culprits are Hammer of the Righteous from Prot Paladins, Maul from Feral Druids, Consecrate/Divine Storm from Ret Paladins while using Avenging Wrath, and Whirlwind crits from Fury Warriors leaving Deep Wounds.

Festergut

- Festergut is the best fight in ICC for judging DPS players’ performance, but like Saurfang, the fight heavily favors melee DPS.  This fight is even better than Saurfang for judging melee DPS, since there is no concern about hitting Blood Beasts with AOE moves.  It is possible to completely remove the “melee bias” on this fight by having Ranged DPS stand at melee, but most guilds prefer to stick healers at melee instead since the tanks can take some large damage spikes.

- There isn’t much need for analyzing Death meters on this fight.  If you died during Pungeant Blight then that’s your fault for not getting innoculated 3 times, and if you died to anything else then you should’ve been healed thru it (exception being death by multiple people getting Vile Gas – then it’s a question of who didn’t spread out properly, which isn’t something Recount can tell you)

Rotface

- Rotface is actually one of the better fights in WoW for judging the true skill of a DPS player, since it is a single target DPS burn with tons of movement and stuff to avoid.  This fight doesn’t particularly favor melee or range, but instead mostly favors people who never have to run out with the Mutated Infection.  Unfortunately this means that you cannot draw much conclusion from a single good or a single bad DPS score, since there is so much RNG involved.  But you can learn ALOT about the DPS in your raid while wiping on this fight several times over the course of a progression night.  Your most skilled DPS will gravitate towards the top of the meters consistently, while your lesser skilled players (including “Patchwerk Pros”) will find themselves dying too often to do well on the Damage Done meters reliably.

- This fight is also one of the best examples of where the Death meter is very helpful, since there are so many ways to get yourself killed on this fight.  Sources of Avoidable Deaths that are always your fault:  Sticky Ooze/Ooze Flood, Unstable Ooze Explosion, melee hits from Rotface (all bets off if tank dies first).  Sources of death that are not really your fault:  Mutated Infection DoT damage (needs to be cleansed), melee hits from Big Oozes (need to be kited).

- Ironically, the Damage Taken meter is arguably of little use on this fight since the main sources of avoidable damage are not ALWAYS avoidable.  For example, normally any DPS player who takes a lot of damage from Slime Spray is failing horribly – but there actually are cases where you can get caught in a Slime Spray thru no fault of your own, if you have Mutated Infection and are running to the Big Ooze, or if you get sprayed on while spread out from the Ooze Explosion.  Also, it is normally the responsibility of the raid to prevent Radiating Ooze damage by avoiding the Big Ooze if it gets kited too close to the raid – but it is not uncommon to take 1-2 ticks of this damage aura if you run out with Mutated Infection and find that your Little Ooze is being stupid and not merging quickly.  Deaths to these two sources of damage generally require a closer inspection of the Death meter to really figure out what happened.

Professor Putricide

- Putricide is a very difficult fight to analyze meters for.  On one hand, the DPS requirements are steep, and squeezing every ounce of DPS out of your raid is critical, especially on the Volatile Ooze and Gas Cloud adds.  On the other hand, there is so much target switching involved that differences in class mechanics will often play a much larger role than differences in players’ skill.  Also, it is quite possible that players outputting the most DPS on adds may be positioning themselves too aggressively – which they can get away with if they don’t get targeted by the oozes, but which can cause serious problems for your raid if they do get chosen.  In my opinion, on this fight I think for the most part you just have to stack your raid with the players who generally performed the best on earlier fights which are easier to analyze than Putricide, and trust that they’ll do their jobs correctly.

- As far as analyzing the Death or Damage Taken meters, there isn’t a whole lot to find here.  One important thing to watch for is people taking too much unnecessary damage from Malleable Goo.  But beyond that, the main causes of deaths on this fight are either extremely obvious (like if you die to Gaseous Bloat/Ooze Adhesive, or if an Expunged Gas goes off on the raid), or are difficult to analyze what exactly went wrong if people died to the Volatile Ooze Eruption (which can be due to lack of DPS, or people not stacking correctly, or both)

Finally, A Word About Blame

If you’ve read this far, then you probably noticed a recurring theme of mine is analyzing who was “at fault” when people die to various sources of damage.  This is not just so you can go around pointing figures at people for making mistakes.  The point is that if you really want to judge the performance of a DPS player, then you need to take into account both how much damage they are doing on each particular fight, and also how well they keep themselves alive and avoid taking unnecessary damage.  Both of these factors are extremely important for judging DPS, as well as execution of “the little things” like damage on adds, interrupts, dispels, etc.

Finally, it is just a good habit to get into as a raider, to always analyze how you died on every fight, and to ask yourself whether the death was your fault.  If yes, then you need to figure out how you can learn from the mistake and prevent yourself from repeating it in the future.  And if not, then you want to ask yourself if there is anything you can change (either in the fight strategy or your playstyle on that fight) to make it easier on the healers/tanks who are struggling with that particular aspect of the fight – or if your death was just due to dumb luck and no adjustments are needed by anyone.

Part II for Crimson Halls and Frostwing Halls to be continued when I have more experience on these fights…

Without further ado…

Reps IRL

One of my favorite sportswriters often talks about repetitions or “reps” and how it takes a certain number of reps before anyone can be good at anything.  He talks about how reps extend beyond sports and can be applied to ANYTHING you do in life.

“Reps are easy to understand: The more you do something, the better you will be.”

Whether its public speaking reps, screaming kid in the grocery store reps, manual transmission reps, or even the magical phraseology it takes to order a plain turkey sub without it turning into a 5 minute conversation about what condiments you DON’T want on your sandwich reps.  Everything gets easier the more you do it. 

You learn shortcuts, you learn tricks, you figure out what people want to hear or what they expect.  You learn to imagine people in their underwear to make your speech easier.  You learn to bring cheerios to the grocery store so that your kid can have something to munch on.  You learn to accelerate from a stopped position on a hill after stalling out a few times.  You learn that when ordering a plain sandwich the only words you should ever utter following the placement of your order are “PLAIN” and “NO”.  Do not name any ingredients which you don’t want on your sandwich, they will inevitably end up a part of it!

Some tasks are actually nigh impossible without reps.  Take shooting a basketball for instance.  While the hypothetical act of shooting is perfectly scientific and calculatable… point of release, distance, arc, angle, force, spin… in a real life situation you’re not given the time to make all of these calculations.  What you need to rely on is muscle memory.  That is, your hands and body performing an action based on many factors, without any thought.  When you’re in the middle of a game you don’t have time to think.  You often catch the ball and shoot.  The best shooters are the ones that have trained their hands and body to simply DO without thought.  Without reps you cannot shoot well.

Reps in WoW

Reps apply in World of Warcraft too.

The more you do something in game the better you become at it.  This works because most of the game is scripted.  Even pvp has short term scripts.  When I used to pvp as shadow back in Vanilla I could beat most any class because I had memorized the order of moves each class would use on me.  It just became a series of if-then checks you’d have to make.

Rogue:

• Cheap shot (eat it)
• Kidney Shot (trinket this longer stun)
• Shield + Shadow Word Pain + Vampiric Embrace (instants which can’t be kicked)
• Fear
• Mind Blast immediately  
• Hop away to create distance and time for Mind Blast, Fear, and PWS cooldowns
• Mind Flay spam (spell which can be kicked, so you cast while the target is at a distance)
• Mind Blast when it’s off cooldown, fill with Mind Flays
• Shield again as soon as weakened soul wears off

= Dead Rogue

Because each rep against a rogue was a learning experience, eventually I developed a pretty concrete cast sequence which made me rogue proof.  It required a lot of failure.  At first I wouldn’t cast PWS right away because who does that unless they’re really low?  But two PWS during the brief fight was almost always a difference maker.  Or I’d fear when I broke the kidney shot because that’s what you do when something is attacking you, right?  But if I do that then I waste a lot of the fear time casting instants which aren’t going to do much damage and which are interrupt-proof anyway.  Or I wouldn’t bother with VE, but along with the second shield that little bit of healing was often enough to let me outlast anyone else 1v1.  Or I’d trinket the cheap shot (omg I dunwannabestunned!) only to eat a really long kidney shot.

These are all lessons you learn by DOING.  Reactions became automatic after a while.   You develop that muscle memory.  Its rogue muscle memory, just like free throw muscle memory.  Here is a rogue.  This is what I cast.  Dead rogue.  You can even hop around while doing it.

You can argue that PvE is even simpler (and by “you”, I mean all the pvpers who are like “omg pve is ezmode lolol”).  The encounters are almost always the same and once you figure out the mechanics to a fight it can become quite easy.  Getting 25 people all on the same page, executing their assignments, adds some complexity to it.

What makes a gimmick fight?

Sometimes Blizzard mixes things up by introducing “gimmick fights”, but if you think about it those fights are more accurately described as “things you don’t have reps on yet” fights.  Those fights work differently than anything you’ve ever seen before; you have no idea how to handle Malygos or Gorefiend because that hasn’t been a part of your game experience thus far.  Fortunately Blizzard gives you a daily which mirrors the Malygos drake abilities and some upstanding individual made a Teron flash mini-game which you could use to practice that gimmick.  People that didn’t understand these fights were encouraged to get in their reps using those tools.

Unfortunately we can’t just manufacture reps that easily a lot of the time.  You only have so many raid nights.  Your raid only has so much mental capital (read: sanity).  And sometimes (Teron, Rotface, Vaelastrasz) you can beat encounters without people in your raid even being chosen for the “important role”.  There’s nothing like discovering that Person X can’t do Teron ghosts on your 8^th week killing Teron.  

A REPrehensible Change

Reps are so important to raiding that Blizzard’s latest “let’s slow progression” concept is to LIMIT the reps available for each raid group.  If you can only attempt an encounter 10 times in a week that severely limits the amount of learning you can do as a group.  Gone are the days of wiping three nights a week to a boss, learning the ins and outs of a fight.  Blizzard’s encounters aren’t anywhere near as tough as the Sunwell days when it took you 2-3 weeks for most bosses, or 4-8 weeks for M’uru + KJ.  Those fights BROKE guilds.  I can’t count how many applications we get where someone “raided Sunwell, but my guild broke up at M’uru”.  These encounters were crushing.  We can argue about whether the change to easier encounters was good or bad, but that really isn’t important. 

Blizzard’s new way to ramp up difficulty is by limiting reps.

It’s sort of silly… imagine if your child wasn’t particularly gifted at math, yet studied very hard, and aced all their tests.  Then the teacher decided this was unfair, the other kids didn’t have time to study that hard.  If she made the test harder to challenge your Johnny then the other kids wouldn’t pass.  So what’s the solution?  Little Johnny is only allowed to study math one night a week!  No problem sets, no homework, no bringing his math book home.  No extra reps!

Reps are encouraged in real life, not so much by Blizzard.

More Reps!

So you need to cheat the system a bit.  Johnny might spend his lunch studying math, or swap his math book cover with his science book cover and sneak his book home at night.  What raid groups have to do is raid more… just as much, if not more, than they were when attempts weren’t limited.

Guilds are still spending three nights a week working on Putricide.  They’re clearing ICC on alts and doing 10 attempts with them first.  They’re doing 10 mans for experience.  And finally they’re going in with their 25 man main raids and doing these limited attempt bosses.  It’s the only way to get the reps people are so used to getting.  Not everyone is doing this of course, but the same guilds that would spend three nights a week on a boss in SW are definitely doing this.

LoD, Reps, and Alts

LoD has never been about brute forcing encounters, we’ve never spent 50+ wipes a week on fights.  But we’ve recently started a 2nd ICC 25 man run with alts to get a bit of practice on certain encounters.  It’s actually a great learning experience for our players.  By definition the alts aren’t as well geared as our mains, many using ilvl 232 and mixed pvp gear, so execution needs to be close to perfect.  When you can’t just brute force encounters with crazy dps/hps it forces you to learn mechanics and perform at a high level.  We still are doing a lot of learning on encounters during this alt run.

The first week the Plague Quarter was released we killed Rotface in a few attempts but all I could think to myself was “wow, I would have really preferred to wipe a few more times on this fight to get more practice”.  Crazy, right?  Sure the boss was dead, but the next week we wiped 3-4 times because we hadn’t learned the fight properly the first week.

Following those few extra Rotface wipes during our main raid we had our alt run focus on Rotface and learning the mechanics perfectly.  Reps reps reps.  It was a struggle, the encounter doesn’t get any easier with sub-par DPS.  But this handicap puts the focus on executing the fight.  Kiting slimes, proper movement around the room, avoiding damage… all things that our main raid probably doesn’t need to pay attention to because the fight doesn’t last that long.  Sure you can tell your players to focus on learning the fight, but until you take away their 258 gear and knock them out of their comfort zone you can’t really force them to play properly.

Reps make everything easier.  As a raid leader I’m looking for new and innovative ways to get the raid group practice on fights.  Blizzard has sort of forced our hand with the limited attempts, which spawned an alt run.  But the alt run has allowed us to practice fights which don’t even have limited attempts and learn them with handicapped characters.

How is your raid group getting practice or reps on encounters?  Do you run 10 + 25 mans?  Are you one of the guilds running alt runs to get Putricide or Blood Queen attempts?  Is this strategy cheap?  Has Blizzard gone about this the wrong way if guilds end up raiding just as much, if not more?