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With 3.3 fast approaching and it being the final content patch of this expansion, some of us will be lucky enough to experience the full wrath of the Lich King, but the expansion has brought about another wrath, one far more menacing than its namesake, and it is the wrath of the moron.

Bob Knight and WoW

Back during the talking tank round table, cdeagle and I exchanged comments in the chat room about tanking prowess.  We both, if I remember correctly, likened tanking to running a Bob Knight motion offense.  Nothing is more mesmerizing as watching a Bob Knight team, an old school 70-80’s Indiana Bob Knight team, run a well executed motion offense.

Motion is perfected when players stop thinking and start reacting.  Your responses should be so ingrained into your basketball IQ that they happen naturally in much the same way a tank in front of his monitor is watching for boss abilities, threat monkeys, and shit on the ground.  Tanks, like a Bob Knight point guard, need a team around them though.  The best tanks are propped up by the DPS who know not to “stand in the fire” and healers knowing who to heal and when.  Anyone who watches raid streams understands what I am talking about.  The best raid teams move and react without so much as latency stealing their mojo

The DPS Perspective

Recently, my DK hit 80.  She has about ample HP unbuffed, but there are still some heroics I just don’t feel comfortable tanking with her, so I have been pugging many of the dungeons as DPS.  If you listened to the tanking round table, you heard Hafrot compared tanking and DPS to raising kids.  He mentioned a line his mother was quite fond of “when you raise a son, you only have to worry about one dick in town.  When you raise a daughter you have to worry about every dick in town.”  I obviously agree, but what a wise woman can say in 15 words takes an entire post for me.

With  DPS pugging though, the tables were turned.  I went from usually watching everything to not knowing how to just watch what I am doing, and I learned one very important lesson; the game has become saturated with idiots.

Pulling Aggro

On several occasions during my revelation, I found people had forgotten, or having never run anything but Wrath content didn’t know, what they are supposed to do when they pull aggro.  Time after time ranged DPS after ranged DPS would start to AoE too soon for a bear or warrior and they all backed away.  They would back away in hallways in UP, and they would back away on flights of stairs in Old Kingdom .  Some time ago, when a DPS pulled, he knew he better get his ass in my consecrate or he was going to get pwned, but now, almost any healer can bully his way through a stupid DPS who insists on eating the damage, therefore people don’t even expect DPS to run to the tank.

WoW easy mode – 1

More Skilled Players – 0

Boss Encounters

Whether you are running Utgarde Keep, Halls of Stone, Violet Hold, or Gun’Drak people just don’t know what they hell they are doing on boss fights.  Everything has become such a tank and spank where success is predicated by the sum of a tanks survivability and the healers throughput.  All other things are ancillary.

No shit right?  Well it’s not that simple.  All things are not determined by the tank or healer alone.  If you have good DPS who respect the mechanics of any specific encounter, you buy the healer more time to heal who is supposed to be healed.  Everyone has become so willing to eat splash damage that poison novas, void shifts, and lightning novas are really just cute little mechanics who’s very existence are designed to annoy a healer and not much else, and anytime they pose any threat, the group almost always falls apart because fingers start getting pointed.

Never has this been as obvious as it was on Loken early on in Wrath.  Loken was so problematic because we have spent all of our time in Northrend with raw output trumping boss strategy that we had become a base of idiots.  We were so bad that Ghostcrawler decided, in a rare if not unprecedented move, to give us the Blizzard strategy for downing Loken.

Want to argue we have gotten better? Look at the list of Azeroth’s most dangerous creatures.  Both the Black Knight and Argent Confessor Paletress are in the top 10.  Are they challenging fights?  Of course they are, but are they so difficult people should die numerous times if they are executing a reasonably intelligent strategy?  Not so much.

WoW easy mode – 2

More Skilled Players – 0

Pugging with Honesty

Previously I was in LFG to tank or DPS Drak’Tharon.  When I got a group invite, there were 2 Mages in the group.  I, sincerely, let them know I was blood and that I didn’t have the lovable howling blast in my arsenal, and as such, I would need an extra GCD, you know because 1.5 seconds is unheard of, to really grab all the adds.  One of the Mages responded in party chat, “then I suggest you respec and L2P before hopping in LFG,” and then left the party.  I won’t attempt to defend my build because anyone who is visiting this site probably knows I ninja’d it when I looked up Hafrot on the armory and then tweaked it to suit my play style.  Knowing your limits is essential to a player’s development, and being honest about them with a pug is even more crucial to group success.  The uncontrollable need for everyone to AoE sickens me because it is only really a method to boost your DPS.  As a player with a blood DK and affliction lock, I hate looking at damage meters for a total run because they make me look abysmal.  Every time some ass hat wants to flash his dps, I always respond with the DPS of a boss fight where I almost always kick them right in the jock strap with the full force of a well played toon who understands the importance of a true rotation.

WoW easy mode – 3

More Skilled Players – 0

So, the next time you log out and the background downloader kicks into high gear to bring you the patch which will allow the storming of Icecrown Citadel remember the Lich King may bring with him a wrath never seen by the inhabitants of Azeroth, but we will inevitably find some closure to his story.  How long will the morons from Wrath linger?  Cataclysm?  The expansion after that?  Until the servers shut down?

Time for an Ambien

Rhab