gdp's Comments

Oh My, Kurenai! : I did a bad thing.

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:15:17 +0000

Too slow is totally just as bad as too fast! As much as we all hate it when some jackass goes haring off through the instance, pulling things willy-nilly with a pet, the needless hesitations you describe here are just as awful. I've often found that, as a healer, I can get a laggard tank to pull a bit faster just by whispering them and saying, "Please go ahead and grab the next group. I'll let you know if I need to stop, otherwise let's keep moving!" Some of it is just confidence, but I also know from experience that many tanks have learned to be conservative from healers who just couldn't keep up. And many healers can't keep up. Just as chain-pulling is an art tanks have to learn, we healers have to learn how to chain-pull-heal. You can always tell beginning healers, because they act as if they expect mana breaks to be like some kind of communal picnic that will be announced and shared. Sorry, sister! You drink whenever you're not in combat or otherwise moving. Lots of water, lots of potions, and careful triage are the name of the game for healing low-level instance at a brisk pace. I also laugh out loud when DPS ask the group to wait for their mana. Surely, you're kidding, right? Just drink when you need to. Your life won't end if you're not on the meter for ten seconds. Not that I have opinions. :)

Oh My, Kurenai! : Links for Thursday

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:42:16 +0000

Ooh, some tasty new reads! Thank you! And thank you, also for the link! :)

Oh My, Kurenai! : Open for Business

Wed, 8 Sep 2010 04:29:19 +0000

I recommend you give it a fertilizer spike. If it doesn't like that, and starts asking for blood, you know it's a demented vegetable alien bent on slaughter and world domination!

Oh My, Kurenai! : Open for Business

Tue, 7 Sep 2010 18:41:41 +0000

If you find the plant whining, "feeeeed me", terminate with extreme prejudice!

Kiss My Alas : Love of meters is the root of all evil

Sat, 4 Sep 2010 14:09:41 +0000

It's wonderful that you take that into account! Sadly, it seems many raid leaders, even ones who are otherwise very good raid leaders, don't get that one right.

Kiss My Alas : Love of meters is the root of all evil

Fri, 3 Sep 2010 21:39:25 +0000

This. The trouble is, though, even if you hide the meters during combat, you know they're there, and there's an incredible temptation to do things you know will look good on them later, even if you can't see them now. This is how we always lose at least one DPS caster on the Sindragosa trash. :)

Kiss My Alas : Love of meters is the root of all evil

Fri, 3 Sep 2010 21:37:52 +0000

I absolutely agree with you here. Meter-humping is the source of so many problems in a raid, it's enough to drive a girl crazy. But allow me to play the Devil's Advocate for a moment. Why do people hump meters? I argue they do it for the same reason that my students used to worry more about their points than about their understanding: Because the rewards go to those with the highest grades, not those who learn the most. They're not dumb. They optimize what gives them the best return. Of course, we'd ideally like to make it so that you can't get high grades without learning the most, but in reality it just doesn't work like that, ever. Ask any teacher anywhere—heck, ask the students, they know it too. So yes, the DPS and healers humping the meters is bad, but those of us who lead the raids and give out the assignments are also to blame. We give the highest praise and the best DPS jobs to the people who—are most effective at raid utility? No: To those whose numbers are highest. We send the healers in to do the fun portal job on Valithria Dreamwalker based on—the healers who did their assignment most reliably? No: To the healers with the best output. It's true that we will still fail if we neglect the things you mentioned—careless threat, standing in bad, waste of mana, and so on. But a wipe is only one kind of punishment, and many of the meter-humping behaviours we see are also reinforced by OTHER kinds of reward—praise, good assignments, and reputation among your raidmates—that are harder to measure.

Kiss My Alas : DinoTam, all the way, omg! What does it mean?

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:56:17 +0000

Great stuff! Congratulations to the winners, and yes, to second Zelmaru, please publish the rest! :)

Kiss My Alas : The new look

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:51:06 +0000

I simply can't imagine. :) Next thing you know, you'll have DinoTam in a Haliscan suit, strutting up and down pontificating. Let's just say, I wouldn't be surprised, anyway!

Kiss My Alas : I'm a girl and a GM - so what?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:46:03 +0000

"A woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be thought half as good. Fortunately, this is not difficult." ;)

Kiss My Alas : The new look

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:54:06 +0000

Very pretty! Are those the Silvermoon Robes? :)

Aurdon's World of Warcraft Mage Blog : Five easy ways to make your PuG healer love you (or at least not hate you quite so much)

Sun, 8 Aug 2010 16:23:01 +0000

my priest got bawled out by a pally tank for letting him die. It was in Slave Pens after Rokmar. The fight took forever because some dps were afk, and he does a continual health draining debuff until the target is healed to full.

That was especially rude of him, since once the fight is over, he could have just bubbled off the debuff. There was really no reason at all he had to die from that, even if you were completely out of mana. I think a lot of people don't realize that the first priority of a tank—or in fact any player—isn't threat, it's survival. First you survive, then you generate as much threat as possible on the mobs. The difference between a tank and a dps is that, the dps are allowed to drop threat if they have to in order to live; the tank shouldn't. :)

Aurdon's World of Warcraft Mage Blog : Five easy ways to make your PuG healer love you (or at least not hate you quite so much)

Sun, 8 Aug 2010 16:18:36 +0000

Great advice! There are just a few things that, as a long-time pug-healer, I'd like to add:

It’s the healer’s job to watch their own mana. Only they know the rate that they expect to use it.

This is totally true, but I feel the tank should watch the healer's bar anyway. A good healer will keep track of her own mana usage, but the tank should keep a weather eye open. A good tank will be chain-pulling, moving smoothly from one group to the next; and if you're not careful, the healer may not be able to drop combat long enough to hit the water bottle. Or, even if she does, she might not have time to type something in party chat before you've started up the next group. So: Yes, it's her responsibility to deal with mana, but it's okay to ask "is your mana ok?" If she doesn't answer, or says yes, it's probably fine.

If you are the DPS, please do not use knockback effects or fears.

I completely agree! Most of the abilities that knock back can also be glyphed to eliminate the knockback effect (e.g., Typhoon, Blast Wave, Thunderstorm, etc.), and you should wear that glyph if you plan to use those abilities in a PvE group. If you don't want to glyph it, just don't use it! If you really want to use it anyway, then just carry around a stack of extra glyphs for it, which you can swap in when you're running with a group. Yes, I know, some players are smart about using their knockback, and it can be a good thing in some cases. But unless you know what those situations are, just don't do it.

What happens when you’re standing at range is this: You damage the mobs, maybe the mobs get aggro on you and start toward you.

What's more, the threat cap is lower for someone standing in melee range. If you're at range, you must exceed 130% of the tank's threat before the mob will change aggro. In melee, the threshold is only 110%. So, if you're a warlock (say) slamming away at a mob, it's in your own best interest to get out a bit. :) On a related note, your point about rooting things is especially important. Let's say a mage and a healer are standing near each other at range. A mob comes running for the mage. The mage, true to form, casts Frost Nova, freezing the mob in place, and then blinks away. The mob, being rooted, can no longer reach its primary target (the mage) so it picks a lower-priority target that is in range—the healer. If the healer is paying attention, she'll get the heck away, but sometimes having to interrupt a cast to run away from a rooted mob can make the difference between the tank living and dying. So, please, don't do that. Rooting in range of the tank isn't necessarily bad, but take care—if the tank is trying to position the mobs so that they're in front of her, you might screw that up. It's very bad for mobs to wind up behind the tank. Anyway, none of this detracts from what you've said here, which is all really great advice. And as Vidyala has pointed out in the past, the key to making it all work smoothly is communication. Is the tank pulling too fast for you? Say something! Is the healer letting your health sit low? Ask if you're taking too much damage, or if mana is a problem. A lot of puggies stew in silence, and I think it would be a lot happier for everyone—not to mention smoother—if we'd just politely communicate about our troubles. :)

Aurdon's World of Warcraft Mage Blog : You Win It, You Wear It

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:51:38 +0000

I agree, I think it's a silly rule too. Sometimes a piece of gear will be better than what you've got on, even without gems and enchants. But by the time you're truly well-geared, most of the new pieces you can find are NOT that big an upgrade, and may even be a downgrade before gemming and enchanting. The spirit of the rule makes a certain amount of sense, especially for groups that often bring puggies, but I certainly wouldn't be comfortable enforcing that if I were leading the raid.