Everybody has alts (alternate characters). You may only have one lonely little bank alt or a server of max-level behemoths on both sides of the faction fence but if you play WoW you have alts. For a very long time, Tinwhisker was my only character. Leveling in vanilla WoW wasn’t terribly difficult (although it was more difficult than it is now) but I was busy learning one class in a new game already. The thought of another character was a bit overwhelming. Eventually though, I rolled my first bank toon.

Well, she wasn’t intentionally a bank toon. I rolled a priest because I had seen shadow priests running around and thought that Shadowform and Mind Flay were pretty awesome. I mean, even today I think that looks pretty darn cool. Unfortunately I really hadn’t gotten my head around WoW yet (I was a slow learner) and when she reached level 12 she stayed in Stormwind. Eventually I made her into a bank alt though I had never known what one was before. I had a level 12 bank alt for all of vanilla, all of Burning Crusade, and the first part of Wrath of the Lich King.

When Burning Crusade hit, I immediately got Tinwhisker to 70 and was raiding Karazhan. Besides that, I was excited about the new starting zones and started my Blood Elf Mage to try one of them out. Before I knew it, I had gotten her to 70, then the Draenei Paladin and got her to 70, then the abandoned Night Elf hunter made 70. Actually, once I started leveling, it all happened so fast I’m not really sure how long it took.

That was when I discovered what alts were for.

Having an alt makes you better on your main. No two ways about it, that is absolutely correct and I’ll tell you why. It’s because when you see a fight from a different perspective, you learn more about it than you would from a single perspective. In Burning Crusade, my paladin tank and hunter gave me insight on fight mechanics I didn’t have to think about on Tin. There are a multitude of fight mechanics that you’re never aware of if you only play a single class in a raid. Most of the time that isn’t important but there are quite a few times where something happens and you have to deviate from the plan a bit. Now you’re the melee standing at ranged and you have no idea what’s being hurled your direction.

Imagine you’re a healer on General Vezzax, standing in melee healing as you always do. BOOM! Uh-oh, there aren’t enough ranged out there anymore! Somebody needs to get out there and run with the groups. Do you run out there and save the raid like a pro or hope somebody else will do it because you have no idea how it’s done?

Matron touched on this when he was talking about reps, when you’re on your main you can often ignore lots of things without consequence when it’s all going well but when things go wrong and you’re out of your element, there’s the potential for real disaster. Going through the same (or similar) fights on alts means you’re being exposed to new mechanics and new situations. When those situations come up, you’re muich better prepared for them.

Right now I’m going through ICC on my main and also on my shadow priest alt. Her gearscore is fantastic but closer inspection reveals she’s more than 100 hit rating over the cap and suffering from other problems (gearscore is just one step above useless in my book). That is often the fate of alts but having to work a little harder on an alt is the best thing ever. You actually learn the fights from multiple perspectives; things you can faceroll on your main become nail-biters on an alt. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to see what actually happens instead of looking at some mobs but crack for five minutes.

But what if you don’t have an alt that can do the same fights?

Not everyone has alts that can raid with the mains, in fact, most people don’t. LoD is a top tier guild and part of that is that most members do. Blizzard isn’t stupid though. There isn’t a single mechanic in any raid that can’t be found in multiple heroics or elsewhere in daily quests. From boss abilities to vehicle content, it’s all there. It’s all a matter of having that alt and Blizzard has made leveling incredibly easy to do.

If you’re reading this and you have a max level alt that you play on a regular basis, good for you. I really hope you can see how knowing how to play in different roles and perspectives makes you a better player. If you don’t have an alt, go make one. I guarantee it will make you a better player. Find another class you like and play it; I can’t stress how much better you’ll be because of it.

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?