So I Can Get Valor From Some PvP but Not From Some PvE? Where is the Logic Blizzard?

I'll be the first to say I like the return of valor, it makes content long forgotten worth repeating, such as dungeons or LFR, but I am not exactly sure the way they are adding valor back is the right way to go.  Firstly there is no valor gear.  So collecting valor to upgrade gear is still RNG based.  Sure you can get the valor in a set way, but having something worth upgrading still depends completely 100% on RNG, which is a failed design to begin with.

But lets put the glaringly obvious fact that blizzard has completely screwed up the addition of valor without adding valor gear and look at the even larger glaring issue that pertains to something they did add, and not something they didn't.

Valor will be attained in the following ways:

• Your first random heroic dungeon per day.
• Each mythic dungeon completed once per week.
• Each raid finder wing completely once per week.
• Completing the weekly bonus event quests. (except for the pet battle one)

At face value everything here seem perfectly logical.  They are all well thought out and reasonable ways to gain valor.  Some people are complaining that the pet battle bonus event does not offer valor when all the other bonus events do but even if I do sympathize with their reasoning that because all other events do grant valor as a reward, the pet battle event should as well but I am going to have to side with blizzard here on this one, which if i am doing that must mean there is a good reason as I do not often agree with blizzard it sometimes seems, and say that the pet battle bonus even should not offer valor.

There are 2 solid reasons why the pet battle event should not offer valor and I will gladly share them, even if the blues have only shared one of the two reasons themselves.

1) The pet battle weekly is account wide.  This means I can pick it up on my hunter, do it on my hunter, and turn it in on my mage, for example.  It is not a quest for my hunter.  It is a quest for me, as the player, not me as the character I am playing.  As such, I can only do it once no matter how many characters I have.  So which one of my characters should I get the valor on?  What if I want it on all of them?  No can do, you can only turn it in on one character, as it is an account wide quest.  It is one and done no matter how many characters you have.  So I agree with blizzard, and this is the reason blizzard has given.  A very solid reason if you ask me.

2) This one blizzard has not said, but it is another very solid reason.  And there is also a reason why blizzard has not said this one, as you will find out shortly after I finish explaining it.  That reason is that pet battles are not PvE content.  Pet battles have noting to do with PvE, nothing to do with PvP, heck nothing to do with lore or quests or reputations or anything else in the game.  It is it's own stand alone mini game.  With that said, it makes no sense for a bonus event that honestly has nothing to do with PvE to award a currency that has uses for PvE purposes, and more importantly, only PvE purposes.  Like it or not, that is a very reasonable explanation for why a non PvE bonus even does not offer a PvE based reward.  Because it shouldn't.

Now, being we just explained why the pet battles are not offering valor, for two extremely valid reasons in my opinion, we need to look into what another bonus event does offer valor.  The battleground event precisely.

Why does PvP offer a PvE reward?

It is a very solid question, one I would love to see blizzard answer without just throwing their standard lines at us.  Give us a real and honest reason why someone should have to PvP to increase their PvE power.  Did they not learn anything from mists with their legendary quest line fiasco? Horde hated the 45 minute to an hour wait times, alliance hated the losing 39 times to get the wins they needed.  Win or lose, most people that were a solely PvE focused player liked it.

It seems that blizzard did not learn anything from their past mistakes.  They once again dangle the carrot telling PvE players, "hey, if you want to make the most out of your PvE gear the fastest you can, you have to PvP."  While it is true no one will be "forced" to do it and it most definitely is not "mandatory" the majorly of player who like to feel that they are doing all they can to better their gear will feel "forced" to do it and in their mind it will feel "mandatory".  So just because it isn't mandatory doesn't mean it will not feel mandatory for a great many people.

Just like I have two completely fair reasons why the pet battle bonus event should not offer valor I feel it would only be best if I do the same for why I believe the PvP bonus event should not offer valor as a reward either.

1) Just like pet battles, PvP has nothing to do with PvE.  While there might be a mild connection, such that you can PvP in PvE gear and you can PvE in PvP gear, they are two separate parts of the game.  Even blizzard has acknowledged that by the announcements for legion where they are splitting the two further apart than they have ever been.  So they can not play ignorant to the fact.  Unless they plan to start giving PvE players conquest points as a reward for finishing the weekly dungeon bonus events and killing raid bosses, they should not be giving PvP players valor for completing their battleground events.  It is as simple as that.

2) Just like valor does nothing for the pet battler, because it is not like you can level pets or increase their rarity with valor, it does nothing for the PvP player.  It is a completely useless currency in PvP.  You can not buy PvP gear with valor, you can not upgrade PvP gear for valor, you can not use valor to get enchants for your PvP gear even.  Bottom line is, valor is 100% useless to the PvP player.

All that said, if you do both normally, kudos to you, you can benefit from it.  But for everyone else, it makes no sense what so ever.  But there is something that makes even less sense than a PvP quest offering a reward that can only be used in PvE and that is the general focus of the entire game in PvE, raiding, not offering a reward that is used for PvE power.

Why doesn't raiding offer valor?

Sure, you can say looking for raid offers valor, but that is not what I am talking about.  I am talking about organized raiding, not random group raiding.

Lets look at what valor is intended to do this time around.  It is intended to boost the power of PvE gear a tiny bit to help people feel like they are getting stronger as the expansion goes along.  This is something all MMOs require.  As soon as people stop feeling as if they are advancing, they stop playing, in large amounts it seems.  To keep people playing you have to keep them feeling like they are moving forward, getting stronger, even if it is only 10 item levels at a time on one single piece of gear.

So even if all you are doing is farming content and not pushing it, having a little boost to your gear allows you to go from doing 88K on that farm boss to 90K on that farm boss.  It makes you feel as if you are still growing stronger as time goes on even if you are not pushing any new content for yourself, be it moving on to heroic or mythic.  You still will get to see your character grow stronger week by week, and people like that, they really really like that.

See, that is what the valor is being added for, to make people feel as if they are growing stronger.  But in some cases, and for a great many guilds out there, that feeling of getting stronger is not just about feeling stronger, it is about getting stronger. 

If you are that normal mode guild stuck on archie, having the entire guild being able to add 10 item levels could help push you through.  If you are that heroic guild just starting progression and hitting the gorefiend wall that seems to effect a great many guilds when they first got to it, those 10 item levels for everyone can actually mean the difference between downing it or continuing to wipe.  And then there are guilds like mine, with only 15 or 16 decent players, at best, that will never get to see a mythic.  Maybe, just maybe, we might be able to get a couple of bosses down if those 16 all had 10 extra item levels so we can carry a few slots with people doing heroic numbers in a mythic.  Or perhaps you are a group that have been working mythic but each boss becomes a new challenge, those 10 item levels for everyone can make that new challenge a hell of a lot more bearable in the dull drums of a late expansion when people start getting bored and wiping tends to tire people out more causing them to quit by turning and 50 wipe first kill into a 25 wipe first kill thanks to having a higher item level.

You see, the item level boost, while nice for everyone, is actually required for raiders.  And not just high end raiders, raiders of all skill levels from normal to mythic.  Allowing a normal guild to get their first archie kill, allowing a struggling guild to get past gorefiend on heroic, allowing guilds like mine who thought mythic was out of the question to think, once again, we might actually have a prayer of seeing a few bosses if we were higher geared so we could carry a few lesser players, and of course, the better guilds working through their first progression on mythic will have a more enjoyable time with it, or even the best guilds that already have everything on farm by making their farming go much smoother and faster.

So those valor upgrades will effect raiders, actual raiders, more than any other players in the game.  Yet for some reason, one that completely escapes me, you can not get valor from raiding.  Why?  If you can get valor from PvP and PvP gear can not even be upgraded, why can you not get valor from raiding when those people not only can upgrade their gear but very well might be the people that need to do so the most.

Now with my piece said, I would like to end by adding, why no valor from our first of each challenge mode each week too?  It could breath more life into it and isn't that what valor is supposed to be meant to do, at least this incarnation of it.

So my question is this blizzard...

Why can we get valor from PvP when we can not upgrade PvP gear but we can not get valor from raiding when we can upgrade raiding gear?

I do not see the logic behind this at all.

Blizzard Lies

This will be an extremely short post, for me at least.  I also put it under the header of humor because I think it has to be one of the funniest things I have heard from blizzard all expansion long.

I saw a question and answer highlighted on the front of MMOC regarding the extremely long queue times for the LFR recently.  After reading it my mind was blown.  I had to read it a second time to make sure I did not misread it.

Someone asked on twitter
"time in queue 1h 30min.. this isn't very fun gameplay"

For this warcraftdevs had a two part answer
(1) We have a fix in the works that should improve LFR queue times
(2) We’re currently giving too much weight to class diversity in forming groups

I found this funny partly because they have a "fix in the works" because it should have never been like this to begin with and should not need a fix.  But the real reason this had me laughing was the second reason they gave, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that blizzard lies.

Two weeks ago I queued up for the BFR wings on my horde hunter, I get into a group and it has 15 hunters in it.  You are aware there are only 18 damage dealer spaces to begin with right?

Last week, horde hunter again, BRF again, 12 hunters in the group.

Monday before reset, wanted to get the first two bosses on my druid, because I only tanked from the 3rd on, so I queue up as a healer for the first HFC.  Guess how many druid healers we had?  5 druid healers.  Let me give you a reminder how many healers LFR uses, it uses 5.

So I have to say "(2) We’re currently giving too much weight to class diversity in forming groups"  has to be both the most blatant lie blizzard has told us all expansion and probably the funniest one too.

If having 5 out of 5 healers being a druid and 15 out of 18 damage dealers being a hunter is diversity in the eyes of the people that work at blizzard, I now completely understand why they are having all the problems they are.

Don't Judge A Character by Their Item Level

I was going to name this post "Don't judge a book by its cover" but I did not believe enough people would understand it was a post about gear and item level.  Well, at least until they started to read it.

I did the new LFR last night because I wanted to see what they changed with the bosses.  I also might need to tank this week so figured I would get it out of the way on the first night.  I like doing them all at least once so I can see the fights from the perspective of LFR.  It helps me explain the fights to people that might have only done it in the LFR.  But that is an all together different post, lets get to the topic at hand.

As fewer and fewer actual raiders do the LFR when I go in I am usually the LFR hero, a phrase most people use for its derogatory meaning, but lets face it, for a smooth group to happen there needs to be an LFR hero.  Our group found that said hero was not me.  Nope, not even close.

There was a mage in the group that was destroying me.  We one shot the first boss, two shot the second and one shot the third.  He owned me every step of the way.  The closest I came to him was 12K.  He was rocking it.  I'd get to 150K on the pull, he would do 175K, I could not beat him and I actually was trying.

As normal I take a look at the gear of people that beat me, or people of the same class so I can use it as a means to compare how I am doing to them.  If they are doing better I will view over their logs to see what they did that I did not so I could learn.  I am a geek that way, excuse me.  But when I looked at the mage it was not to learn, it was to see how he was geared and maybe glean into things a little as to why and how he was doing so well.

He had one piece of 695 gear, one piece of 701 gear and then everything else was 710 or higher.  It would be very easy for me to just chalk it up to that was why he was beating me.  His item level was 715 while mine is a pitiful 687.  With a nearly 30 item level advantage he is supposed to be beating me right?

But I don't just take item levels word for it.  I looked at what he did, how he did it, and I saw that he was not beating me "just" because of his item level.  He was a damn decent player to say the least.  As I said, it would be easy to just write it off and think he was doing good because his gear was carrying him but that was most definitely not the case.  He knew how to use the gear he had.

There could have been others in there with the same item level as him and they could have done poorly because they did not know how to get the most out of the gear.  I see that all the time.

But the big reason for this post was not to point out that it is the person that makes the gear work for them and not the gear itself doing all the work, but that with the T2 gear and 695 upgrades, people need to start to realize that is it not all about item level.

I mentioned my 687 item level, which for a raider is pretty poor, but once again that does not mean I would do poorly.  For my gear I do okay and oft times do better than those with much better gear.  I could easily get to a higher item level using some baleful upgrades, might even push 700 if I did that, but that would not be the best gear for me.  What gear you use matters.

Does the fact I was beating everyone else outside of him mean that I am that much better of a player than them?  Absolutely not.

I just made better choices.  Sure I had bad luck never winning a heroic tier piece in BRF but I do have the normal 4 piece which means I am stuck with four 670 pieces.  It also means I have four very effective, when used together, pieces of gear even if they are of a lower item level.

Put me along side someone that just did the T2 grind, upgraded anything they could get, and purchased a few BoEs off the auction house and you will see someone with an item level over 700 but someone that is not even remotely capable of matching my hunters numbers.  Why is that?

Because the stats on gear matters, the bonuses on gear matters, almost just as much as hitting the right keys in the right order.  There are those of us that pay such close attention to our rotation that we try to delay a shot if chimaera has less than 0.3 seconds to come off cooldown to try to get maximum damage and while perhaps that is a little more skill based, choosing to wear the best gear you have and not be sucked into thinking item level is no less of a skill.

Choosing a mastery haste baleful belt to upgrade as marksman is like delaying your shot by a full 2 seconds so you do not miss it.  It is a DPS loss.  All because you made the wrong choice of upgrading the mastery haste belt instead of a critical multistrike one for example.

Two people wearing the exact same gear and at the exact same item level could see greatly different results.  One guy upgraded whatever baleful gear he came along and the other picked and chose to get the best stats he could for his spec.  One will surely do better than the other, in a large amount, even if equally skilled, because one is wearing the "right' gear for him and the other is not.

What gear you choose matters, it matters a lot.  Sometimes choosing a lower item level piece of gear is the correct choice.  You can not just judge someone by their item level.  It would be like me saying that mage only beat me because he had a lot more gear than I did when that is just not true.  Sure it helped him create the large margin he did, but he beat me because he was skilled enough to use that gear to the best of his ability. 

You can not say he did well just because of his gear just the same as you can not tell me I will do poorly just because of mine.  I applied to a pug that was asking people to be capable of pulling 40K.  The guys asked me why I signed up, he wanted 40K and there was no way I could pull that at my item level.  He, of course, was wrong.  He judged just on item level, which means he judged wrong.  Sadly all people have to go on is item level when looking at a glance, but if you want a successful group, taking a look at the gear that comprises that item level matters a lot more than the item level itself sometimes. 

You can't judge a book by its cover and you sure as hell can not judge a character by their item level.

What Do the Long LFR Queue Times Mean?

After spending three hours in queue, on a Saturday during prime time nonetheless, to get into and LFR it had me thinking that there are some real problems with the grouping system that needs to be addressed.  Or maybe it is more telling that just that and it says something about the health of the game as a whole.

Tanks:

It is easy to chalk up the wait time to be because of the lack of people playing the role of tank.  I know I am as much a part of that problem as anyone else.  I have tanks but refuse to tank the LFR.  I have a saying I often use, and it is true, that even if blizzard were to offer to send me a paycheck each week to tank the LFR I still would not do it.

Admittedly that is only my opinion on tanking but it seems like I am not alone.  There are a shortage of tanks and that does seem to make a difference.  The idea is how do we deal with this problem in the LFR to shorten queue times.

I have the answer and I have been saying it for a very long time.  Make all LFR bosses one tank fights.  If you only need one tank it makes filling the group with tanks a lot easier.  Also, if you only need one tank that means many people, myself included, that do not like tanking because we do not like the other tanks we run into, will tank it.  If LFR was a one tank event I would tank it, no problem and no need for blizzard to pay me to do it either.

But, are the lack of tanks really the main reason for the long waits lately?

Coding:

I've wondered a few times, more often while waiting for those three hours, if perhaps there was a problem with the coding that was screwing up making groups.  How it it even possible for a game with seven million subscribers, even if they are in all different zones and play at different times, to not be able to assemble 25 people at prime time on a weekend night when usually more people are supposed to be playing.

It made me wonder if someone over at the blizzard home offices has been playing around with some of the match making code and broke something so it is not matching people correctly.  It can not just be a tank issue.  Even more so when just the other day one of the people over at blizzard watch, a writer there, said he waited in queue, as a tank, for an hour before he gave up.

So it can not be a tank issue if sometimes even tanks are waiting in queue.  Sure when you look at your group it always shows there are no tanks, but that does not mean there actually are no tanks.  It just means they have not matched you with a tank.

So if sometimes tanks are waiting and sometimes others are waiting all while there are even others that say they have 10 minute queue times as a damage dealer and get right in, makes you wonder, is something broken?

How can one damage dealer get into a group in 10 minutes and another wait 3 hours?  How can one tank wait in queue for an hour while other groups are sitting there waiting for one fill in tank after someone dropped for the past 30 minutes?

Maybe there is something wrong with the coding.  Maybe it is not just the lack of tanks.  Or maybe it is something else?

The Health of the Game:

Maybe it is a symbol of the over all health of the game.  Longer wait times because less people are playing it, or less people are doing this aspect of the game.  Blizzard did say they wanted to give raiders less of a reason to go into the LFR and lets face it, they did exactly that.

My main did the HM and BRF LFRs once each.  Because that is what I like to do, just to get it done.  My main alt, my druid, did one here or there, but I could count how many LFRs she did on one hand it was so few.  All she really needed to do was blackhand because she never killed it.  Otherwise she, even as an alt, collected all her legendary parts in the real raids.

Even my alts do not step foot into the LFR.  The couple of characters that do have any progress toward completing the legendary only go there once to loot items needed.  Otherwise I let the garrisons, and now shipyards, collect the pieces for them slowly but surely.

You are talking a person that did the legendary quest line last expansion to completion on 11 or 12 characters and had partial completion on another 13.  I had no aversion to working for something, I had no issue with group content even if it was LFR.  For the most part I liked doing LFR on alts.  But between the removal of tier gear, decent trinkets and weapons and the fact I can slowly get items with my garrison, there is no need to do it.  Not even on alts.  Unless I wanted to speed along the legendary quest line that is.  And with as crappy as the end result ring is, I am not really all that excited about getting it on multiple characters. Maybe if the bonus was not capable of being used by someone else I might, but that is another story all together.

So with all that added together, blizzard basically said they do not want me there.  If I get the feeling they do not want me there I am sure other do as well.  So add the feeling we are not wanted there, no tier gear, bad groups, increasing long wait times, lower subscriber numbers, and the LFR is the very symbol of what warcraft really is, a dying game.

Maybe the LFR and its long wait times are just a side effect of a game that no longer is capable of grabging the attention of the people it is trying to grab.  A three hour wait time at prime time on the weekend which is usually busier just has to mean something.  And it has to mean something more than just a lack of tanks because it is impossible to believe there are none at that time.  Maybe it means a lot more.  Maybe it is telling of the health of the game as a whole.

Should LFR Drop Better Loot or None At All?

I was reading a post on the forums where someone was complaining about LFR, as if it were some sort of new thing that they just noticed, and saying that LFR creates the feeling of entitlement.  At least that is what I believe he was trying to convey as his central message.

The reasoning for this post is that I am not sure if I agree with him.  I am either part of the people that feel entitled to more from LFR, because I do actually feel that way, or I am the type of person that believes LFR is fine for what it does, because I feel that way too.

I guess I feel both ways depending on who's perspective I am looking at it from.  On the grand scale of things looking at the game as a whole I think the LFR is absolutely fine.  I also do not see it being what he sees it being, a place where people go to demand more. 

His argument is that the LFR only crowd wants the "ahead of the curve" achievement, they want the real tier sets, they want mounts, they want to do achievements, they feel entitled to it all.

I don't see it that way.  I see it as the people who actually want these things use the LFR as the tool it was intended to be and springboard to a higher level once they are able using the new group finder system or finding a guild on their server that is just starting progression on normal modes or is not very far in.

Thanks to the change of flexible if they actually "try" to do well they can make the adjustment from LFR to really raiding easily enough.  Carrying a noob, for lack of a better word, that can follow instructions and does a fair job is not a problem at all and they are no longer locked out because the group already has their 10 people or 25 people.  They can join and contribute and learn to get better.

See, what I am getting at is that the people who actually do want those achievements, those titles, those mounts, they can use the LFR as a springboard to work their way toward it.  I personally can not say I have seen people asking for any of the things he has suggested in LFR.  Not even once.

However on the flip side, I do believe there is a feeling of entitlement.  At least from my perspective because I can say I feel it.  Yes, I feel entitled to more from LFR.  Then again, I am not the one that the LFR was created for, so that could be the reason for that.

I am not doing the LFR on alts this expansion.  I would like to get a dozen rings just like I did a dozen cloaks last expansion, but without valor which was a huge motivator to get me to do it, because even if I did not get the drops I wanted I still gained some currency that could get me some decent gear otherwise, I have no desire to step foot into LFR without valor and valor gear, simple as that.  Not even a legendary ring is enough bait for me.

Why is that?  Because the gear sucks balls, if you will excuse me being extremely rude about it.  640 gear and 655 gear?  No thank you.  I need to do it each week every week on alts not geared enough to pug, or because I would rather just not pug because their gear sucks or I suck at them (like on my rogue).

Without valor there as the consolation prize that I can use to gear up my alts to be closer to raid ready where my main is currently raiding LFR has lost all of its draw for me.  I believe this is working as intended.  Not a shot at blizzard either saying that.  They said they wanted to make actual raiders feel as if there were no reason to run LFR and, for me at least, they have done exactly that.  Kudos to blizzard on a job well done.

But that is why I say I feel entitled.  If I am going to run LFR I want to get gear that is raid ready.  I do not want garbage 640 and 655 gear.  It should at least drop valor which in turn I could use to buy 685 gear so my alts can keep up with my main, just like they always have since I started playing.

So this guys entire argument is wrong, at least as I see it.  He was stressing that the LFR only players were feeling entitled to these things.  I just do not see it.  Never have.  I can not recall one time ever seeing an LFR only player saying they should get more from LFR.  The only people, or person in the case of me, that feels any entitlement to better things from LFR are the people that have already passed it.  The ones that raid at a higher level.

So in effect, he made a post complaining about entitlement in the LFR when in fact the entitlement was coming from people already doing normals or more so heroic and especially mythic.  We people, the ones that play well past the LFR level with organized groups, we are the ones that would like to see more come from the LFR.  The LFR only people are happy with it because that is all they do so they do not want, or need, more.  This is how I believe it to be based on my own feelings and that of which I read around other place, or maybe it is just me?

Either way, I do not agree with him.  LFR is not creating entitlement.  Not even in the slightest.  It is making the people that want things move up from there and it is making the people like me not do it because it does not offer gear on the scale I am used to receiving.  Neither of us are really feeling a sense of entitlement.  We are both just seeing LFR for what it is.  Them, a starting point, me, something that is a waste of time.

Do you think LFR is creating a generation of warcraft players that think everything should be handed to them like this guy suggests?  I don't think so.

As a matter of fact, I think the LFR is in the best place it has ever been since it was introduced.  Sure the toxic players still make it hell sometimes and extremely bad groups can still make it a very unfun experience, but the LFR is in the best place it has ever been as I see it.

He wants the LFR to drop no loot at all, I would love to see it drop better loot for my alts, we are both wrong.  It is just fine.  Doesn't mean we have to like it... it wasn't made for us.  How can some people still not see that?

Raid Awareness is More Than Just Don't Stand in the Fire

Have you ever went to explain a fight to your group and there were a few new players there when most of the group already knew the fight?  You might just say sometimes simple along the lines of, this is your priority target unless this is out, healers save cooldowns for this moment and tanks make sure to switch on three and use cooldowns for this, oh, and don't stand in the fire.

When you are with people that have done a fight before a description like that could sum up nearly ever fight we do in any raid we have ever stepped foot into.  Breaking it down to the absolute basics raiding is simple, but really it is only simple once we know what we are doing.  Learning it still takes time, lots of time and effort for many.  There is a lot more to it, a hell of a lot more to it.

With new raids out and many people seeing bosses for the first time my prepull explanation is more a short story than crib notes.  Some fights, even more so the longer ones could even reach the lenght of a novel before the first pull.  But I am not going to go into basics of explaining an entire fight in this post, I am going to stick to the one simple basic rule that we probably all learned in our first raid, don't stand in the fire.

At face value don't stand in the fire seems like something simple enough.  If there is fire under your feet, move.  Jobs done.  Right?  Wrong.

I am going to start at the beginning of BRF for my first explanation of what I mean when I say there is a lot more to don't stand in the fire.  And basically it comes down to knowing when the fire is coming, were it is coming, and how long until it actually get there.

That first big brute carrying boxes from one end of the room to the other that you run into in BRF, the one that hits tanks for a metric ton of damage and requires them to tank switch and then turns and blows some fire breath because he hasn't brushed after eating some seriously spicy mexican food on the raid every so often.

I know you know exactly who I am talking about right?  I've seen him wipe raids, I've seen him wipe LFR, he can be one dangerous mofo.  But only if you are one of those people lacking in raid awareness really.  Otherwise he is a breeze.

Every time we pull him I give my group a gentle reminder.  "There is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever get hit with the fire debuff, it is completely avoidable."

Every pull I see half the raid get hit with the fire debuff from him.  It does not matter to me that the healers can handle it, nope, not at all.  But what does matter me is that the healers should not have to handle it.  It is a 100% completely avoidable bit of damage as simple as don't stand in the fire, or fire breath in his case.

If the tanks hold him left and right and all the damage dealers and healers are to his side he will always turn to the side to breath.  All you need to do is move, either to the left or the right, and his breath will go down an empty hall way and no one gets hit.

See, simple, avoidable, and still half the raid gets hit by it every single time even if I remind them before it is pulled ever week.  No one should ever get hit by the fire.

There is a second little tib bit that they should know.  He hits the tank, and anyone else in front of him, for a metric ton of damage, as I mentioned.  So when you side step the flame, step to the side of the tank that is not currently tanking.  That way when he turns back to the tank and does his move he does not one shot you.

There is so much more to raid awareness than just don't stand in the fire.  Part of that is how to avoid the fire being under your feet to begin with.  This first large trash mob in blackrock foundry works as the perfect example of what I am talking about.  It is a mob everyone of basically any skill level can get to and it has simple telegraphed moves.  Once you can do him without ever taking even one tick of fire damage from the breath you are well on your way to being one of those, elusive it seems, raid aware players.

Raid awareness is about that, reading those moves.  We all might know to move from the fire, but does everyone know that you could completely avoid being hit by roughly 80% of the fires in the game to begin with. 

Nearly every single boss will have some sort of emote when he is doing something and with deadly boss mods or big wigs or whatever addon you use, and you should be using it, it will announce the move the boss is telegraphing is coming your way.  In nearly all of those circumstances you can start to move before that fire, poison, void zones, or what have you ever makes it to you.  So basically when it lands you are already in the process of moving out of it.  You could be all the way out when it lands, half way out when it lands or only a little bit out when it lands but one thing for sure is that you will not be dead center of it when it lands meaning you have a shorter distance to run to get out of it and you take less damage.  This means less work on the healers and possibly a longer life for you.  Two very good results if you wish to kill things instead of them killing you.

Even better are many of those things that bosses will throw at you are so heavily telegraphed that the second you are notified it is coming your way you can move and it will land at the spot you were at when it was announced because it does not follow you. Those are my absolute favorite don't stand in the fire mechanics and you might be surprised how many of them there really are in game.  I love them because they are 100% completely avoidable.  When I look at logs I like to see who gets hit by those and have a nice little conversation with them.  Nothing mean, just telling them, as soon as you are targeted, that is where it will land, so move, and you will not get hit by it.  Simple really.  I love any mechanics where you can effectively take zero damage from it because it has a travel time, it will not follow you, and you have more than enough advanced notice to move before it gets to you.

Remember, the main objective of any damage dealer is to aim for tops on the damage done list and bottom on the damage taken list while following the appropriate fight mechanics.  Being raid aware is a lot more than moving from the fire "after" it hits but learning when and how the fire hits so you can move out of the fire "before" it hits.

Do you know the number one difference between a "good" player and someone that just plays?  The good player won't get hit by that fire from the brute at the beginning of BRF.  Not because he is trying to be uber or anything, but because he was trained correctly that you should never take avoidable damage unless absolutely necessary.

Raid awareness is more than just moving from something when it happens, it is moving from something before it happens.  It is the most basic of basic things you can learn to begin your journey to become a raider, or at least a decent one.  The game is in desperate need of new raiders.  I know my server is crying rivers for people that can even manage normal modes nevertheless heroic or mythic because most people fail in one of two places.  Raid awareness or execution.

Raid awareness needs to be learned first in my opinion.  You get no practice tanking the floor boss and with no practice you can't really get practice at execution.  You will never get better at doing your job, be it healing, damage dealing or tanking if you are dying to avoidable damage.  So I think learning how to avoid the avoidable is the first step on your journey to moving up the ranks.  Once you have mastered living, then you can master your role.

Some people like to use the excuse that "how can I learn if no one will let me into a raid".  I hate to say this but I must, you can learn, the power is in your own hands if you are willing to go through the sometimes hell it might take to learn.  There is this tool called the looking for raid and you can learn a lot in there.

I read all the time about people on the forums saying that the looking for raid is not a stepping stone into raiding.  They are right, it is not intended to be that, it is intended to be tourist mode, story mode, what ever you choose to call it.  But that does not mean you can not learn from it.  Any player that actively wants to become a raider, wants to move into normals and then up to heroics and maybe someday into mythic has to start somewhere and the LFR is a great learning tool, if you are willing to let it be so.

Right now you might be calling me crazy, but trust me I am not.  A little weird, a slight bit touched, but most definitely not crazy.

That big brute carrying the boxes with his mexican burrito fire breath is in LFR, you can learn to avoid that there.  The trains are being called by the operator in LFR and you can learn to avoid them there, even if the pattern is "slightly" different.  The iron maidens will still have turrets spitting fire balls all over the place you can avoid and bombs covering the entire ground that are also 100% completely avoidable.  Plates on hans and franz, stampers too, and they all work the same and can be used to learn to avoid them.  There are so many simple, albeit less damaging or less threatening, things that are in LFR and if you choose to use it as a learning experience instead of just saying, "screw it, it won't kill me here" it will help you become a better raider and increase your over all raid awareness.

Lets face it, there are only so many mechanics we can ever see.  New twists are added, new looks, new flashy graphics, and different presentations of it, but avoiding something coming through a room (trains) has been used before and will again, dodging a breath (brute) has been used before and will again, part of the floor lighting up showing danger (hans and franz) has been used before and will again, avoiding bombs and fire balls (maidens) has been used before and will be used again.  I think you get the idea.  Anyone that has been raiding a while has seen nearly everything we have had thrown at us before. 

That is why you see some guilds move along fast and others take longer.  It is not so much that one is actually better than the other, so to speak, but it is that one has experienced that fight already and they adapt quicker to it so they can beat it faster.  They beat it faster because they had the raid awareness to adapt the mechanics a lot faster so they did not need to spend as much time learning the fight and could go straight to beating the fight.

Our rotations are always changing.  With tier sets, nerfed abilities, buffed abilities, added abilities, removed abilities, changed abilities, special circumstances, and so forth our rotations are a living breathing entity that we always need to adapt and adjust to.  So doing our jobs as healers or damage dealers or tanks is a process which we are always learning and will always be learning. 

But raid awareness is different because once you learn to not get hit from the breath by the brute at the beginning of blackrock foundry it will always be the exact same ability, it will not chance, never, not in a million years and not when we see a boss doing in three tiers from now in a raid called Lady Azshara Hobo Barbeque where we need to retrieve the uneaten part of bobs left foot.

Raid awareness is more than just don't stand in the fire, it is learning how not to end up in the fire in the first place.  And it is a skill unlike any other in game.  Once you learn it that skill will stick with your forever and make you a better gamer and everything you do in this and other games like it just a little bit easier.  Because when learning new fights you will just say, oh yeah, this is like bonestorm, I got it, and know the mechanic instantly and how to handle it instantly so you can work on your rotation instead of learning a new mechanic.

Learn raid awareness first.  That is the most important part of being a raider.  At least as I see it.  Everything else comes after, because if you don't have raid awareness, you don't need to know your rotation to tank the floor boss.

I Can't Believe I Am Saying This

With some apprehension I decided to give the LFR a try on release day.  I always have since they were added to the game.  It was not always about gear, but sometimes it was, it was more about I like to experience everything there is to do in the game more so anything with such ease of access as the LFR.  So worst case, I wanted to do the LFR at least once.

After so many first day experiences with bosses that blizzard really screwed up with because they thought a random group of people that just wanted to blow through content for some quick loot, valor, or entertainment, would be capable of working as a coordinated group ended up in complete failure I was, understandably, not expecting day one of warlords first LFR to be anything better than painful.

After snagging about 8 people from guild we queued up and got into a fresh run and I must say I was pleasantly surprised by how easy things were.  For the first time ever since the release of LFR in the last patch of cataclysm was it really something one could call a quick way to have some fun and get some loot in sightseer mode.

The healers that were with the group said that there was almost no healing needed.  Not that being they were over geared for it that it was easy to heal.  No, they said there was no healing needed.  Even due to mechanics and people failing horribly at them, they were still so easy to heal it was as if they were not really healing at all.

We, of course, had our LFR jerkwads.  It would not be LFR without them.  But instead of being like so many fights before this release where one troll pulling something they were not supposed to would wipe the group, it did nothing of the sort.  Even a damage dealer it seems could easily tank the trash, at least that is what the healers told me.

Trash packs took longer than bosses.  Trash packs seemed more dangerous than bosses.  As a matter of fact one of the people in the group, after we downed butcher and I reminded everyone to loot, said, "that was a boss".  The bosses seemed like nothing more than glorified trash, with less mechanics than trash has, and I loved it.

The entire run, and I might be exaggerating on the high end because I did not actually time it, might have taken 20 minutes.  Most likely it took less.  All three bosses were ninja pulled by some moron but because there were no wipes, no deaths, no problems, it really did not make much of a difference.  Blizzard finally realized that in LFR we need moron protection.  That easy fights are good.  Even more so in a setting like that, the type of setting that inspires your standard jerk to step it up a notch and see if he can be an even bigger troll than normal.

I had absolutely no intention of bringing in alts to LFR this expansion.  I hated the fact that it would still be the only way to gear alts on a steady basis.  But after this experience I am second guessing myself.

I am thinking I can bring in my healers, that have no healing gear at all, and it should be fine because of the lack of healing needed, and get them some gear for healing as well as the quick queue to boot.  The fact I have no spirit gear should not matter being the fights are light on damage and short on length.

I even began to entertain the thought that I might actually tank this.  We had no guild tanks with us that I could ask but from what I saw it did not seem as if the two tanks were even talking, although I know it could have been kept to whispers.  They just went at it and I guess whoever had aggro tanked.  Could this be one of the things I have been asking for since the first half of dragon soul was released?  That all fights in LFR are designed for one tank.  Oh please say it is.  I might actually tank the LFR than.

I know this is opening day.  I know the better players are there.  Lets face it, the worst damage dealer in my group was doing 16K and you know damn well that will not be the normal case in the LFR.  So I am aware I had, by LFR standards, the best group ever in the history of the LFR.  But it gave me hope.  It was really sightseer mode with this group, so when we see groups where 6K and 8K is the norm instead of 16K and 18K being the norm, maybe it will still be easy, and if it is, LFR is a winner all around.

If we did not just over power it, and it really was as simple as it seemed to be with that group, I would say blizzard finally hit the nail on the head with the difficulty level of the LFR.  If this one experience I had yesterday will end up being the representative group for LFR than I can't help but have faith that there might be a future in the game for it.  Or more so for me doing it on alts.  Because the cesspool of hate and bile and mechanics that could wipe people that it could sometimes be before really made me lose faith in the players and the designers of the game.  But this smooth first day run is helping restore that faith.  Lets just hope it stays this easy all the way throughout the expansion.  If it done, I would be very happy.

But as wonderful as it was, and yes I did love it, it still leaves me with one question.

Shouldn't heroic dungeons offer higher level gear than LFR?  It is the harder content after all.

An Accidental Insult

I think I might have insulted a fellow hunter in an LFR the other day and I did not really intend to.  I was asked a question in a whisper and I answered it as I would normally answer it.  I did not look who asked it or look at numbers or another.  They asked, I answered, and I think I broke some unwritten rule of the brotherhood of hunters.

After the previous days horrible adventure through LFR that caused me to just log out I went back on my newest hunter to finish off the bosses I needed in an effort to collect runestones.  This means doing the second siege and the last throne.  For the record, I did not get any runestones except the 2 guaranteed ones.  Insert sad face.

This hunter has mostly blah gear having had won nothing off the celestial bosses and extremely little luck with ordos.  Not to mention I have a total of 1 kill on normal, Malkorok, in an effort to get a decent weapon.  Even if the character has completed the LFR and I think it completed flex, it has had no luck.  I have 1 tier piece from LFR and crap gear otherwise.  No gems as of yet but being I am an enchanter I did enchant what I was capable of doing and as a leatherworker I took care of my bracers and legs.

So I am sitting at a 531 item level mostly on the strength of timeless island burden pieces sadly but I do okay on the character even without the gear.  I pull upwards of 160K normally on something I can just pew pew on which I feel is quite solid for my item level.

So here goes where I made my oops.

I zone in on juggernaut in an already in progress run.  We wait a little before pulling but when we do I notice right off the bat I am having some huge hits.  Seems like I am having one of those lucky rights where I am landing many more critical strikes than my rating should allow me too.  I am over 240K for most of the fight but start to dwindle down at the end.  I knew it could not last, not in this gear, but I still manage to end the fight with 196K and, not surprisingly, top DPS and damage done.  It has to be my best ever on this character and well above what I am capable of doing in this gear.

I get a whisper from someone as we move on to the next pack of trash saying, "those are some impressive numbers for your gear, how do you manage that" to which I replied "Thanks, I have a lot of hunters this will be my 4th to get the cloak.  I just know how to play a hunter."

He then whispered me again saying "I guess that means I don't".  Not with a question mark.  I looked to the raid frames and saw his name then inspected.  He was a hunter too, mostly normal gear partially upgraded and only 2 pieces below normal.  He did not have the cape yet so I am guessing he was an alt or a new player.  He was also gemmed and enchanted completely.

I looked back to recount for that fight and he was second behind me in damage done and had a 189K DPS number.  I then whispered him, more so to make myself feel better because I now felt like I insulted him saying I just knew how to play a hunter, "I had a really luck run with a lot of crits"  He did not say another word.

I honestly felt bad because I think I insulting him and it was not my intention.  I would have answered anyone that way if they asked me how I do well in bad gear.  It really is as simple as I have a lot of hunters, I know how to play them.  It was not meant to imply that he did not know how to play one.  Sure, he should have been doing much better, maybe around 220K - 240K in his gear, but he was not doing what anyone would considered poorly.  At least not poorly by LFR standards.  Hell, by LFR standards he was doing fantastic.

I am not one of those people that live to insult people which it seems like most of the LFR community is but I felt a little bad about what I said afterwards.  Even more so when I tried to make my "sort of" apology when I mentioned it was just luck of the crit and he did not reply.

Oh well, if perhaps whoever that hunter was stumbles across this post, It was not my intention to insult.  We hunters need to stand together, we are not like other classes that shoot each other down, we try to help each other up.  Keep working and you will get better, you were not doing bad at all.  I just got really really lucky.  Ask any hunter and they will tell you 196K ungemmed at a 531 item level and no tier sets at all has absolutely nothing to do with skill, it was pure luck.

An Episode of Frustration

Yesterday I logged into my 3rd alliance hunter, one that is on the runestone quest line, being it was a new reset and I was hoping that maybe I could grab the last 5 runestones I needed but of course I was not expecting it.

I logged in and I was on the timeless island and noticed I still had the valor of the ancients buff.  Cool, this happens quite often actually, so I figured I would do a quick epoch stone collection and start my week with 300 valor instead of 200 valor.

But good news, apparently I had the quest already complete.  I capped last week before turning it in, so I can start this week with a quick 300 valor and then go about trying to get those 5 runestones.  I ran to turn it in and saw I got 1000 timeless coins but no valor.

Mother F'er.  I forget I was capped at 3000 on that character.  Son of a bitch.  I was so pissed now.  Upset with myself for not remembering I was capped and even more upset with the game for not giving me so sort of pop up that asked me something along the lines of "you will not receive valor as you are capped".   Sure, I was an idiot, I should have known better, I should have remembered.  But it was not a good start to the week.

You see, the reason I was capped on valor is because this character can not win a god darn thing.  I have been 90 for 11 weeks and I have done the celestial and ordos kill thing each week, with a coin each week, and won nothing.  So at the beginning of each week I try to do them first to see if I get something decent to upgrade and if I don't (which I never do) I go and upgrade one of my LFR pieces so I can gain more.  I will only upgrade an LFR piece as a last resort.  Who really would ever waste valor on it on purpose?  Seriously.

Okay, I screwed up my whole week already, or it feels like it, so maybe the gods of the game will shine on me some and let me win something from a celestial for the first time... ever.  11 weeks and I have won nothing, not even a PvP piece which would also be a nice upgrade for me being my best pieces are timeless burden pieces or LFR pieces so even a 550 PvP piece would be a pretty sweet upgrade, but no, the game won't even spit one out for me.

The tiger was up and being attacked so I joined in.  It went down fast but without heals I needed to deterrence his lightning to limit the damage to me.  Outside of that as a damage dealer on the tiger there is no damage so you do not need heals and it does not matter if you are outside of the group.  If you get hit by the barrage I only have one word for you.  Move.  Really, there is no reason anyone should ever get hit by that.

I get what has become the normal off the boss a bag of gold.  Woo f'n hoo I am so excited.  I use my coin and to my surprise, or should I say not to my surprise, I get gold, but at least it was 114 gold.  Always look on the bright side they say right?

So I start to head up to ordos.  I will enter the in game finder once up there.  I do not join in when I am not standing there already.  I hate those people that expect you to summon them there.  If the warlock needs to work his ass there than your lazy butt can get there too.  If you are too lazy to get to ordos then I am too lazy to summon you.  I will not even help summoning people.  At least not people that use the in game system.  If you are using the in game system be there before you join in.  If someone invites a guild mate, then I can see summoning them.  It was an invite.  It was not someone that used the in game system.  If you are taking the time to list your name in the system you can take the time to get there before you list your name.  Simple as that.  I hate lazy people, maybe even more than I hate stupid people.  Sometimes stupid can't be cured, some people are just stupid.  But lazy can be cured.  It is called doing something.  Lazy is a choice and I make the choice not to play with lazy people.

Enough on that because I did not need to use the in game system anyway.  I saw a ton of horde running up the hill and noticed they were all from different servers.  Seems like the horde must be assembling for ordos.  Awesome.  I will just join in and tag it.

Nearly all the horde people are flagged, so I am very careful with my tabbing, the last thing I want to do is get flagged and then killed 20 or more to 1 and not get my shot in.  After I get my shot in, who cares, but shot comes first.

When I get to the courtyard they had just pulled.  I made it in time.  I make my way though the court and run up and lay in a few attacks then try to find myself a safe place to hang out.  It seems all the horde people that get the debuff all come aiming for me and standing on me with it.  As I move they move with me.  I would call them jerks or assholes or what have you, but they are the enemy, standing on my and doing damage to me is actually a smart move.  If it were my own faction then I would say they were jerks and assholes but when it was the opposite faction, more so PvP players, their job is to kill me and I am not flagged so in truth that is a pretty cool way to try and kill me.

The thing I I know of a few secret places by ordos where you do not get popped up.  I basically kite them around and when they are about to explode I step where I know I will not get knocked up and they go flying and I stay on the ground.  One point alliance, zero points horde.  Three times during the fight someone tries to stand on me, three times during the fight they go flying and my feet never leave the ground.  Three points alliance, zero points horde.

Then I get the debuff.  All there alone, don't really think there are any alliance up here, and I think to myself that no matter what, even if I do not go flying, the debuff will kill me.  It hits for a lot and I have very low life because I can't win any freaking gear.  Then I suddenly notice I am getting heals, and bubbles.  It seems there is a disc priest alliance side attacking and it is bouncing the heals to me.  Awesome.

The fight ends and I win something.  I won a neck.  Of course the worst thing you could possibly win, but still something right?  I can now spend some valor so I can earn some more.  I am so glad I will be upgrading a 559 instead of another 528.    Every time I need to waste valor on a 528 it hurts me inside.

In my excitement to have actually won something for the first time from either the celestial or ordos bosses in what is now my 12th week using a coin for each and every kill I did not noticed that there was a horde that still had the debuff and he got me this time.  I went up in the air but I hit disengage before I land and there is no damage to be done.  Nice try my goblin horde buddy but you need to be a hell of a lot more innovative to catch a hunter like that.

I hearth back and upgrade my new neck.   Now I can gain valor again.  But I should be at 300 valor already and I am still pissed about that.  I swear I was on the verge of writing a nasty ticket about it saying I wanted my 300 valor.  I knew better, so I didn't.  It is my own fault and really making 300 valor is not all that hard.  Grab a couple of friends, do a couple of scenarios, 10 minutes later you have the 300 valor.  It is the principle of the matter.  It should not have let me turn it in without letting me know I would not be getting the award for complementing the quest.

I queue up for the LFRs.  Needing 5 runestones I queue up for ToT 3, SoO 1 and SoO 2.  leaving ToT 4 for last in case I get lucky enough to get all 5 before the last boss so I can port out, turn in the quest, and then come back and get the heart.   Makes sense to me.

I fly back to the island so I can pick up a coin with timeless coins to try and roll to win the pet, again.  I do TOT 3 on multiple characters every week, I use a coin on all every week, I never win the freaking pet.  I am not going to pay the 80K they go for on my server.  Just give me my damn pet.

Nothing is worse than killing the same boss 100 times with 100 rolls and still not getting something.  Want to talk about frustration, that is frustration.  I hate RNG, have I ever mentioned that?  I think it might have come up a time or two.

I get ToT 3 first, an already in progress group.  Son of a... oh wait.  They are still on trash.  Not bad at all then.  I hate having to queue up for the same raid over again.  If I want all bosses I should be allowed to check something that says give me a fresh run.  I have, on more than one occasion, had to queue up for the same instance 3 times to get it done.  Come in on last boss.  Queue again, some in on second boss.  Then be stuck having to queue a third time.  Screw that.  There should be an option, fresh run only.  If you do not click it that means you are willing to take anything that they give you.

The run goes easy enough.  We do not have stellar DPS over all but there is one lock in the group doing 400K so he alone makes the run faster.  Combined with two tanks over 1M life and apparently knowing what they are doing and the fights all go smoothly.  I do not win any runestones however.  I do not even win any loot.  Not like I really need 502 loot but I am an enchanter and I do not mind getting myself a few extra sha crystals here and there.  They still sell somewhat nicely on that server to the tune of 90 gold.

Next up pops SoO 1 and again an already in progress group.  Son of a... oh wait.  They have not downed the first boss yet.  And it seems I have a few stacks of determination.  Should I cry now?  Stacks on the first boss... on a reset day.  How bad is this group?

There is this one loud mount yapping away when I come in saying how everyone was doing everything wrong and they all suck and blah blah blah yap yap yap.  I tuned the guy out.  Then he went on his I am the best player here and I can't carry all of you, I am top DPS. so forth and so on.  All I can think is "not any more".  If someone is that loud in an LFR there are one or two reasons.  They suck and they are trying to make themselves feel good or they are really uber and think they are better than anyone else.  From this person tone, at least as best you can catch a tone from typed words, he was the former.  A bad player that just happened to be the best in a bad group.  So I was sure his spouting of I am the best DPS here would prove false.  This hunter might have shit for gear but I am 100% sure that my ability will surely propel me past any LFR hero even in crap gear.

Fight ends, we down it, and we needed the stacks of determination it seemed.  Sure the first boss is a horrible judge for DPS because of all the down time but even at that the DPS in the group was horrible.  Not only was I, as I said I would be, tops, I was tops by a long shot and that is rather sad being I was not doing particularly well.

Mr I am the top DPS had nothing to say after the fight was over and oddly enough he had nothing to say the rest of the run.  Apparently he has recount and saw he got his ass kicked.  When sitting at the second boss I check his gear.  Pretty sweet.  He only has 2 pieces that are not normal.  He should have ripped me a new one.  This ladies and gentlemen is the type of person people are talking about when they use the term LFR hero.  They are usually top of the LFR because they over gear it but otherwise they are fairly poor players.

Second boss manages to see us wipe once and almost wipe another time.  Still no runestones.  Third boss is more of the same and with our DPS I don't see how the hell we are going to manage this one.  Even the LFR hero, being the poor player he is, does worse than normal because he stays on the boss 100% of the time doing reduced damage instead of killing adds and doing full damage.  When the fight ends the top 4 damage dealers are basically the only 4 people that did any damage to the adds.  Maybe if the LFR hero would look to this recount and instead of just seeing he got his ass kicked again but not only by me but by others as well and instead of just looking at the number but looking at what we did damage too he might learn something.  I am amazed we did not wipe, I am not amazed I did not get a runestone.

So 6 bosses down already and no runestones, at least the last boss will give me one.  We wipe on the trash, not once, not twice, not even three times but what seems to feel like 100 times.  Damn healers keep dispelling people even after we tell them not to.  I stay outside after I run back in.  Stupid healers refuse to listen and keep killing people and with three priests and three mass dispels they are wiping people at record pace.

I have a feeling this fight is going to be really interesting.  Just like they had issues with dispels on protectors they will surely have an issue here and not understand you should only dispel when you have the buff.  Or in the case of the priests they will try to mass dispel, which I believe does nothing.  How can they forget where their dispel button is when they need to use it but when they should not be dispelling they went dispel crazy?

We wipe on the last boss 3 times before we get it.  Lucky for us we had a few sub par damage dealers drop and be replaced with some powerful players.  It is sad when you actively desire real raiders to finish an LFR.  The LFR hero should be the super hero of the group.  They should not need a half heroic geared lock to come in and do 500K.

We down the boss and I do not get a runestone.  WTF?  This is the guaranteed one.  Only, absolutely, this one is getting me to put in a ticket.  As I am opening to put in the ticket the runestone pops up.  It must have just been delayed for some reason.  Normally I just drop group.  I am glad I didn't.  If I just dropped group I would have not got it and then been left up to the whim of a GM and if he was in a good mood or not on whether he would give it to me or not.

I am not having a hell of a lot of luck so far today.  Turned in my stupid valor quest when I was capped.  For the 12th week in a row I killed a celestial and did not get anything, and for the 12th week I used a coin and did not get anything, not even so much as a PvP piece.  I wiped multiple time to something you should never wipe to.  I've waited for far to long as a damage dealer in queue.  And I forgot to pick up my coins when I went back to spend the valor on my neck.  Things are just not going my way.

I get into gates, which we all know is a freaking nightmare to begin with in the LFR.  I take a quick look at the tanks, we have one that is well geared for an LFR and another that looks as if they would be suspect in an MV LFR.  Why do I get 1M health tanks in ToT and 400K ones in Gates?

It seems like the low geared tank is the dominate one.  Or maybe just the stupid one.  You decide.

He charges in before everyone has even walked down the path and pulls everything and dies instantly.  I had set my MD to the higher health tank so I just hit my MD marco and unload some multis hoping the other tank is actually here and paying attention.  All the mobs go flying for him and he goes down instantly too.  Guess he was not exactly ready maybe?  I will not pass judgement on his tanking ability just yet.  He did not do anything so not sure what he ability is.

We wipe 4 times on the trash, as in complete wipes.  Total wipes.  No one lived wipes.  All because mr 400K life decided that we needed to play a game of "but we do this on heroic" and pull the entire row of adds at once.  We finally kick the under geared, under skilled, basement dweller of a tank and get another piece of work.  At least this one had more gear even if it was only a little more.  He also seems to know what he is doing which can make up for a lack of gear, to some extent.  He is geared more than ample for the LFR however, even if seeing 500K life might seem like a little and it is.  With the appropriate level of skill it is more than you will ever need for LFR content.

We spend the next 15 or so minutes after clearing trash talking about tower groups.  I am not kidding about the time either.  It took that long to decide on towers.  Finally when the groups for towers are set up we pull the boss.  Of course some dim wits die to the point that one mob spits out because they do not move from it and we are down three damage dealers near instantly when that happens.  Then the tower group goes up and the two drakes come down and seemingly one shot the tank and then go on to dismantle every one else down there.  I look at my raid frames to see where the healers all.  Guess what?  All 6 healers went up on the tower.  You have got to be kidding me.  We spent 15 minutes setting up towers.  It was asked, and answered multiple times who the tower healer was.  So why did all six healers decide to go up to the tower?

Take two, more people die to the point puddle, will people ever learn.  So we are down 2 healers and 2 damage dealers instantly this time.  One was the tower healer.  No one got them up and the tower tank did not notice it, so the tower team goes up and dies.  This means another wipe.

Take three, again more of the time, idiots in the poison puddle die instantly, only two this time.  I swear they have to be dying to it on purpose.  No one is that stupid.  Only one healer goes up on the tower this time and they can't keep the tank up so the tower tank goes down followed by the tower team and then the entire raid.

Tower tank, the one with the lower life, but not a bad tank over all outside of not noticing he did not have a healer that one time, drops group without a word.  We have to wait for a new tank and we go over tower teams again while waiting.

Take 4 some 10 minutes later and it goes a lot smoother this time. Only one person dies to the poison cloud and the new tank that was doing towers, reminiscent of the first one, a 500K (with stacks now remember) tank that apparently was not really a tank at least managed to work as a meat shield somewhat.  He went down in the first tower but was picked up quickly and no problem.  He went down again in the second tower and someone ran up there and picked up him.  We lost a couple of damage dealers but not enough to stop us.  Finally we get the boss down and everyone spreads out all over the place.  People yell to stack, over and over and over but no one listens.  Just a few decent players like myself, a shaman and 2 other hunters, are stacked, everyone else is everywhere else.  The baby tank goes down.  The other tank tries as best he can to hold out and does a damn good job of it, but the healers can not come close to keeping up with the damage and the tank eventually goes down and so do we.

Someone posts healing done and there is one healer doing 60K and the rest are under 30K.  That is why we were wiping, holy crap that is bad.  60K with stacks should be the worst healer in there, not the best.  Both tanks did more healing than 2 of the healers.  The elemental shaman in the group did more healing than 3 of the healers.  WTF were the healers doing in there.

Take 5, more poison deaths, more baby tank dying in the towers, more wiping.  Same with take 6.

Take 7 and I am at the end of my wits.  This is the day after reset, it is when the best player are supposed to be playing.  If this is the best this game has to offer in the random setting we have a lot of issue with the game.  I have no clue why I am holding out, why I am still here.  I just want to get my freaking runestones.  I am already having a crap day in game I do not need more of this shit.

We wiped again, once more at the end of the fight because people are not stacking up, healers are not keeping up, and that other tank keeps freaking dying.  We get closer this time, much closer, but still not really a great attempt.

The top healer this time was 78K, the others were still all in the 30s or lower.  How is that even possible with all these stacks.  The only good healer, and I use that word loosely because with as many stacks as we had 78K is pretty dreadful, drops group.  So now we are down to only the super crap ones.  Then the one good tank we had that was with us from the beginning drops as does the elemental shaman that was tops in damage done and usually 3rd or 4th in healing done drops and I can't stay.  We lost the top healer, top tank and top damage dealer.  I drop too.

Screw this, do I really need another hunter with a cape, do I really want to put up with this, do I really want to stay for all these wipes just to continue to not get runestones?  I am having a hard time finding a reason to play when this is what I get subjected to.

You want to know the kicker of this whole thing that I find funny but not in a ha ha sort of way?  I am probably going to finish the legendary quest line before I win anything off the celestials and that is with doing it every week since I hit 90 and using a coin each and every week.  Not even one piece of PvP gear.  Don't ever talk about bad luck unless you mention me because my bad luck rules all.  I hate RNG but at the moment I do not hate RNG more than I hate the people in the LFR.  All I wanted to do was have a little fun killing some internet dragons and they made it impossible to do so.

When I got out I went to the little hut on the timeless island and logged out and exited the game.  Screw this, I'll go play wildstar instead.  At least if I am going to die 100 times it will be me dying there because I did something stupid instead of other people subjecting me to death.

I just reached a level of frustration that could not be matched and I could not take it any more.

The 5 Worst Mechanics Ever Added to the LFR

There are many things added to the LFR we can complain about but there are a few that make sense they added and then there are those that make you scratch your head and wonder, what was blizzard thinking.  I could probably make a list of the top 100 worse mechanics ever added for a group of random strangers (LFR) but I over simplified the list so that two of the top 5 will encompass a great deal of those in one.

Before I start my list I want to give an honorable, or is it dishonorable, mention to one mechanic that was hotfixed shortly after release or it would have surely been the #1 worst mechanic ever added.  It would have also made sure that no one would have ever finished the first part of heart of fear unless they ended up being insanely lucky or went with an almost completely premade group.

Garalon's crush was a griefers dream, just stand under him and wipe the raid over and over again.  Even the people that were not raiders but you could explain the concept to would occasionally make the mistake of standing under him and causing a crush.  When it was first released you went in there and effectively this is how the fight went.  Pull, crush, crush, crush, crush, crush, wipe.  Changing it so that it can only cast crush once every 30 seconds and reducing the damage of crush was required and if it were not for both those changes that would have been #1 on our list hands down.

Now lets get on to it, the five worse mechanics blizzard expected 25 random strangers to be able to handle as a group.  These are my opinions, please, share yours, let me know which mechanics you believe should have never been added to the LFR.  Which mechanics should never be handled by 25 random strangers.

5) Stack Up For The Bad:

Blizzard has been drilling into peoples head not to stand in the fire, it is even a loading screen tip.  Everyone jokes about it in any part of game play even while just out questing.  How did you die?  I stood in bad.  It could mean anything from not moving from a puddle of poison, to not moving from a frontal cone effect, you stood in bad and even the best players have made that mistake and had to say, oops, I stood in the bad.

For the history of the game from questing to dungeons to raids we are taught to not stand in the bad.  So blizzard decided to have raid mechanics that required you to stand in the bad and seemed to forget that a great many players in the LFR are not actual raiders, they are random raiders, not organized raiders.  For a group of organized raiders stacking in some bad effect to limit the damage from it is a standard raid mechanic we have all gotten used to but for the random raiders all they know is that loading screen tool tip that says don't stand in the fire.

So when I see someone not stand in something alone that we need to stack for, I can understand.  When I see people run from the group when they have a debuff on them that needs to be shared, I can understand.  These people are not raiders, they do not know.  Or do they?

Something like static shock on Lei Shen, as a hunter I can take it solo and in a normal raid I would do so.  What am I to think in a random group if a hunter gets it on them and runs away?  Is he a raider?  Does he know to hit deterrence and eat it or will he die from it?

For mechanics like that I handle things differently in LFR than I do in a real raid.  In my real raid I expect the players that can solo soak something to do so.  So if someone runs away with it, I know they are going to solo soak.  In LFR I never try to solo soak.  Reason being, you force the few people that know to stack up, but might not understand you can do it solo, to run after you.  Best to just stack up.  But when someone runs, you have to run after them or just let them die.

There are to many fights where you need to stand in the bad, or share the pain.  It is not just from this expansion, it started when LFR first started and it was a bad idea then and remains a bad idea today.  You can not tell people to not stand in the fire and then give them fires they need to stand in when doing random raid content.  It is just a bad mechanic to add.  Let their raid leader teach them that when they raid in a normal raid.  Standing in bad for a reason is not for 25 random strangers.

Starting with standing in the bad on Blackhorn being required to do the fight without the ship being destroyed blizzard has added more and more stand in the bad mechanics.  Such as the previously mentioned static shock, or the inferno strike on Protectors, there have been so many stand in the bad or stack from the bad mechanics.

Yes, I expect an actual raider to know beforehand which bad is bad bad and which bad is stand in it bad but I do not expect 25 random raiders, people who are not actual raiders, to read up on fights before they start.  I can not blame them for running from the group with inferno strike, they are only doing what they think is the right thing to do.

For the most basic form of raiding blizzard needs to keep the most basic design concept.  Stick with one idea, don't stand in the fire, and leave it at that.  No more stack to share the damage things, no more stand in the damaging circle things, none of that stand in the bad stuff.  It is one of the worst mechanics added to the LFR.  You can not spend the entire game telling someone not to stand in the bad and then having them wipe a group, or die themselves, because they didn't stand in (or share) the bad.

This type of mechanic has no place in a raid made up of 25 random players were it is quite possible none of them are actual raiders that understand the good bad from the bad bad.  Just never put this mechanic back in the game at the LFR level of play.

4) Group Assignments: 

Does blizzard actually believe that a group of 25 strangers will be able to quickly and effectively make groups to handle different assignments?  You will have new people, you will have angry people that they had to wait an hour to get there, you will have elitist pricks who think everyone should have done the fight on heroic before they are even allowed to do it in LFR, and you will have dozens of other personalities including trolls, people that are just there to make things harder on everyone.

So why make so many fights in LFR where you need to assemble groups for them?  Just like Norushen automatically pulls people in so there is no orb assignment (good work on that one blizzard) all fights that would mean you need to communicate to make groups or an order should be automatically assigned by the game, or not included at all.

Why does it need to take so long to get a tower crew for Galakras, a nest crew for Ji-Kun, and the like?  Just teleport a few people to the area where they need to do something and let them do it.  Just like they zone one player in on Norushen.

Some fights like that you might be able to automatically assign groups using a random system, just like Sha of Fear automatically pulls people to zone over, the game can automatically pick people to zone over.  Other fights would just need to be changed outright.

My biggest group annoyances this expansion are Spoils and Lei Shen.  Spoils is a quick fix really, just have the entire group go down together and have to work their way through all four rooms as a group, or just two, why not, this is supposed to be faster and easier.  The time it takes to split the group is insane.  I think I have been in SoO wing 3 runs where it took longer to get the spoils groups set than it did to do the entire wing otherwise.  There should never be a need for 25 random people to have to work in a coordinated way like this.

And then, dear god help you, if you get someone that is willing to step up and take the lead he is either blasted as an elitist prick, a know it all, wrong because you do it different, or people just do not want to listen to them because of the infamous "who made you the leader" syndrome.

There is no winning here.  Making the groups for Lei Shen and the phases, making it for the sides on spoils, for the nests or towers or what have you.  None of this should ever be in content that is designed to be consumed in mass quantifies by a group of 25 random strangers.

Blizzard would do well by its player base to keep the need for group assignments out of the LFR.  Even something as simple as who has belts or who has engineer can hold up a run for 20 minutes or more, I have seen it.

No group assignments blizzard, never again.  Learn from your mistakes and take the forth worst mechanic in LFR out of future LFRs even if it not really a mechanic in and of itself, but a way the raid would need to handle it.  Special assignments should not be in the game at this level of random game play, unless they are handled like Norushen was.

3) Elegon and the Amazing Disappearing Reappearing Floor:

I seriously believe there were GMs watching the LFR in those beginning weeks when it first came out and laughing so hard they fell out of their chairs.  I know I would have.  Still up to this day I get a chuckle out of someone jumping to their death after someone says "oh cool they finally added a wall here so people can't fall before the fight begins".  I know it is wrong to laugh but I just can not help it.

It is not like it was a hard mechanic, you could just read through the encounter entry and see it was going to happen but remember, these are not raiders, these are random raiders, a different breed.  These are the type of people that do not even know what most of their own abilities do because reading a tool tip is too much work, do you really believe they are going to read an encounter entry?

I believe, although not sure, that even without deadly boss mobs or another encounter mod that the in game system tells you to get out of the center.  So you have the encounter journal, you have an in game warning, so why do so many people still die to it.

It could be for various reasons.  One is many people play with no sound, no sound means not hearing the announcements.  Some people get so into what they are doing that they pay no attention to anything around them, which means they might not even see visual clues to get out.  Then there is the lag issue.  I know of many people that never have lag problems, ones that even had almost no issues with the 400 player raids on Oon when that came out that still managed to lag like a mofo on this fight.  A fight were even if you know what to do a small bit of lag could be the difference between life and death.

And that is why I hang #3 on elegon, and its instant death, can not be revived from, type of mechanic.  Firstly, there should never be any one single mechanic that can kill the raid like that in LFR.  Second, there should never be any one single mechanic that can make it so you can not revive someone in LFR like this one.  Third, making a mechanic like this in such a graphic intensive fight that could lag some computers just compounds the problem even more.

Instant death mechanics like this, unforgiving ones (meaning no revive), have absolutely no place in the random group setting.

Don't get me wrong, I still play the guessing game every time I am there trying to guess how many will die.  I still laugh when a friend or someone I know dies from it, because now I can pick on them for a while because of it.  I still get a kick out of the people that ask for a rez when the fight is over and when we tell them they have to run back they get upset.  I still get a chuckle about it, but chuckle or not, this type of mechanics has no place in the LFR.  Not now, not ever.

2) Durumu and the Maze of Doom:

I would like to consider myself a semi decent player and even I died to this the first time I did it (first 3 actually) and to absolutely no fault of my own.  I am color blind and I could not see the maze.  I watched the video, I read the guides, I did more than 99% of the player base did before they went in there I am sure.  I knew what to do, I just could not do it.  I swear I tried, I even zoomed in the camera all the way thinking that if it were closer I might be able to see it.  I have raided for many years and never in my entire life have I ever felt so helpless on a fight, so useless on a fight.  There was nothing I could do, or so I thought.

I was lucky enough to have someone in the run mention that if people are having trouble seeing the maze, as it seems it was not just me, to change their settings for particle density to the lowest and then they would be able to see it.  I did that and was fine from that point on.

But I needed to change my settings every time I was on that fight and only for that fight.  This is one reason this is #2 on my list.  No fight should ever require you to have to change your settings to do it.

This, like Elegon before it, can also cause some people to lag.  Lag and a tight maze you need to run without much time to stop is not exactly an ideal paring.  This is another reason this one is on the list.

So now we have 3 solid reasons why even a semi decent player could have a problem with it, color blindness, settings, and lag.  If you are in a normal raid group your group can decide if they want to take you.

When we did our first normal kill we had a healer and a tank that just could not manage the maze.  So just to get it done I told the healer not to even try to run, stand at the edge and stay alive as long as they could throwing heals and then (being they were a shaman) to wait for my call to pop afterwards, and we use our battle revive on the tank.  We ended up doing it.  Later on, they ended up getting better at the maze.  Practice makes perfect.  But we were a group working together and we made a plan.  LFR is random people.

It is completely and totally understandable while you are willing to wipe, or waste a revive, on someone you are with because you choose to be with them, just so they can learn.  But no one, and I do mean no one, wants to wipe over and over with random strangers while they learn.  Wiping while learning for a team mate, and wiping while learning for some random joe blow are two completely different things.

Now, lets forget for a minute that I said there were all reasonable explanations for dying to the maze.  While it may be true, I over came my color blind issue after a few attempts and playing with settings, the healer and tank that we had to revive eventually made it through on their own, we even held a celebration for the healer after she made it through for the first time.  It was fun.  The thing is, all the reasons I mentioned that can cause people to die can be over come.

They shouldn't need to be over come, not in random raid content, but that is only part of the problem.  The other part is, some people are just freaking stupid.  Check that, most people are just freaking stupid.

While I completely understand if someone is new to the fight and is having the same problems we all did when learning it, I am 100% certain that more than 50% of my group is not there for the first time every single time I am there.  Either that or I managed to get every single person that ever did that fight in my groups because every time I am there more than half the raid dies.

Blizzard, really?  First you made a mechanic that could give issues to people as is, but then you made it hard for the average random raider, so even if someone has no issues they still can not do it?

When I go in there now all I hope for is that one tank, 2 healers, and a couple of damage dealers survive.  With the numbers people are putting out now it usually goes down before that phase or sometimes shortly after, so all we need are a good 7 or 8 people to survive.

Sadly, all that ever survives are 7 or 8 people.  And that is why a mechanic like this can never be put into a random raid again.  Whoever decided to keep this mechanic in the LFR must have really been in a bad mood when he made that decision, someone pissed in his cheerios, so he took it out on us.

So taking a solid #2 on the list, with no single boss mechanic in an LFR that can even come close to catching it is Durumu the forgotten with the single worst boss mechanic ever to squeeze its way into the LFR.

1) The Trash Between Tortos and Megaera:

Notice I said Durumu had the worse boss mechanic?  Well he did, but the number one worst mechanic ever put into the LFR is not from a boss, it is not even from a single mob.  It is from the trash between Tortos and Megaera.  All of it.  The ability to teleport players to them is the worse mechanic ever put into an LFR by miles.

First off when will blizzard learn that how people handle trash is the opposite of the field of dreams where it was "if you build it they will come", it is more "if you put in trash, they will skip it".

So blizzard not only put in trash, they put in trash that hides underground, they put in trash that calls for help, they put in trash that grows stronger the longer it takes to kill it, they put in some really cool trash and some very avoidable trash.  For a smart group of people working together that is.

For random raiders all this means is people that do not understand aggro ranges, people that think it is cool to pop the mushrooms which just happen to have spiders under them, and what is even worse than people pulling stuff you could easily have walked around is that if someone is falling behind and pulls something, don't worry, you will find out about it sooner or later because after it kills them it will slowly teleport everyone in the raid to it, one at a time, and kill them, until the entire raid is dead.

And don't even think about running back in sometimes because on some occasions you will be in it's aggro range even all the way back where you spawn in to be teleported to it.  Once activated whatever mob it is becomes the ultimate minion of death and it will not stop until every living breathing humanoid in the instance is dead.

I've been in a run or two were we got caught in a loop and had to keep yelling for people to not zone back in.  As long as people kept coming in, we could not get out of battle, because someone ran for the entrance and dragged the trash with them.  The spider might not be able to climb up those steps but they sure as hell can pull you down to them.

I have suffered more deaths on the trash between Tortos and Megaera in the LFR than I have on any boss in the LFR.  I have seen more people die to that trash from being teleported to it than I have seen fall through the floor on Elegon.  I have seen more people die to that trash from simple pulls that quickly became over pulls than to the maze on Durumu.  I have seen more people accidentally pull trash because they do not understand how to walk past it than I've seen people self implode from trying to take an inferno strike solo instead of stacking.

Who ever created this trash to be put to use in a random raid setting with people that do not understand the basics, like you get from random raiders, is a sadistic bastard.  And that is being kind in my assessment of them.

So the #1 worst mechanic ever added to the LFR is trash that teleports people to it.  Not only is it horrible, but it lends itself to trolls.  If someone pulls a trash pack, let them die, it should not kill the entire raid.  At least not in the random setting with random raiders.

So what do you think are some of the worse mechanics ever added to the LFR?

Four Newbies Walk Into An LFR and...

The title of this post is actually a little misleading, the four people I am talking about are not exactly what you would call newbies but they were new to what they were doing, so I guess it sort of fits.  I think a more appropriate title for this post would be "It is not hard to not be bad."

The four newbies were as follows.

Me, on my druid healing with a total of one days healing experience on a druid in the last 5 years.  Our resident DPS beast attempting his hand at a hunter that he hit 90 on a month ago because he liked the idea of me saying I had so many key binds for PvP and he wanted a challenge.  An extremely dedicated player who saw what our resident DPS beast could do as a feral druid and wanted to see if he could ever be that good on his druid that was a boomkin up until two weeks ago when he decided to try feral and started to gear for it.  And last but not least a player who was well versed as a ranged DPS and healer but had never played on a melee class who used his boost to 90 on a warrior less than a week ago in his first raiding experience as a melee.

So we were four experienced player all in roles we were experienced in.  If we were to do poorly it would not be that surprising.

We started in ToT even if we could all get into SoO because, lets face it, with our experience on those respective classes we might as well start on something we were a little better suited for.  A place where we could learn a bit about how to get better at the roles we played.  Even if we were geared enough for SoO there are already too many players doing poorly there that should be in lesser LFRs learning how to play their class and/or roles, why compound the problem.

In the end none of us ended up being LFR heroes, we did not carry the group, this is no story about how awesome we were, but it is a story about the fact were were not horrible.  None of us did anything you would consider well above and beyond our ability.  None of us will be looking to steal a slot in a real raid team on these characters any time soon, heck, we might not even be ready to steal a slot in a flex on them yet.  None of us excelled at playing in a role we were not used to.  But all of us did decently.

I was number 1 or 2 in healing done, while never being higher than third in over healing (which is weird for a druid), on all the bosses we managed to do except for one where I was 4.  The new hunter who was a month old that had never played one before was top 5 in every fight.  The druid that just switched from boomkin to feral two weeks ago was also top 5 in every fight and the warrior that was a boost to 90, while finishing a little lower, was never less than 10th in damage done despite having never once played a melee class and only having timeless island pieces mixed with the instant 90 green pieces.

We might not have been great, but we were not bad.  Not even by a long shot.  But looking around us showed that most people were exactly that.  Bad.

There is no reason to be that bad.  Sure, we all start off not knowing how to play, but there is a difference between doing badly and being bad.  It is not hard to not be bad.

Each of us could have had someone that knew how to play the classes well look at us and say we were doing badly, they could pick out that I was letting lifebloom fall off, or I was not using wild growth on cooldown, or one of a million mistakes I made, but they would not say we were bad.  We might have not been doing as well as we could have, but that is different from being bad.

The 4 week old hunter spent some time asking me questions and I answered them.  He spent some time on the timeless island killing things, in battle grounds killing things, and even doing the LFR a little in the last few weeks.  He might not be ready to challenge me on the charts, but he is already starting to shape up to be a damn good hunter because he spent some time playing with his character, learning his abilities, figuring out how they interact, and asking questions.

The 2 week old feral druid asked a million and one questions, spent some serious time on the target dummy, and showed that he is willing not only to learn from people that know how to play the class but he listened to them, he did not just ask the questions and then still do his own thing.  When weak auras were mentioned to him by me and another he stopped what he was doing instantly and downloaded it and spent a while trying to get it set up to his liking.

The boosted to 90 warrior went to noxxic and read about the priority system, visited some other web sites for tips and tricks, even contacted an old friend that does not play warcraft any longer but used to play a warrior.  But not only that.  Having never played a melee before he spoke to a few people about how to play in melee so he would have a better understanding of what he would need to do and what he would have to expect.

Then there is myself, and I already said in another post about what I did on my druid.  I went to the proving grounds to practice some, asked a lot of questions and spent some special alone time with my healing addon so we could get to know each other better in terms of druid healing as well as visiting more than a few how to heal as a druid web sites and forum posts.

We might not have been great, we did not bring anything to the group that anyone else couldn't have, but we were one thing for sure, and that was not bad.  We were most definitely not bad.

All it takes is a desire to do well and a little bit of time to attempt to learn and while you might not become a great player you surely will not be a bad one.  There is no reason anyone should be bad, even more so when in group content.  Nobody is asking for everyone you run into in the LFR to be a great player, not even the elitist jerks, they just want everyone to try, to at least not be bad.

Moral of the story.  If you want to play solo, who cares if you are a beast mastery hunter that never uses bestial wrath, you are not hurting anyone but yourself and you are not even hurting yourself as long as you are having fun.  But if you are going to play in group content you owe it to everyone else to at least seek out a basic understanding of what it is you are doing there.  Not just for the group, but for yourself as well.  You do not need to be bad because it is not hard to not be bad.