So What's Next?

So we know that 3.1 is Ulduar, we know that 3.2 is a gap-patch to keep us busy, and 3.3 is Icecrown. I do believe that we will be allowed to kill Arthas. Many people believe that Blizzard won't allow him to be killed because that would mean it's all over.

Hardly.

I can easily...VERY easily...give you two more ideas for expansions. It's been stated by Blizzard that WoW will stop at level 100, so that gives us two more expansion packs before the end. So really, the only thing to theorize about is what's going to be in those two expansion packs, and how conclusive they will be to the entire universe.

I think the next expansion pack will be Nazjatar. For those of you unfamiliar with the lore, Nazjatar is the place within the Maelstrom where it's assumed Queen Azshara resides. Obviously, the final boss of the next expansion will be Queen Azshara herself.

The challenge of creating this in a game is naturally the fact that it's entirely under water.

For the final expansion pack, I can see no other answer than fighting the Burning Legion for real. This would naturally mean that the final boss would be Sargeras.

FAIL

This post is simply a means to point to the post below it. Still as applicable as ever.

Pet Peeves

I have several pet peeves. A few minor ones include people who ask for gold, people who ask for run-throughs, and people who ask stupid questions that would be answered if they would simply visit wowhead.

The purpose of this post, however, is how complacent people get when it comes to raiding. It irritates me when someone says "good job" after a boss dies where half the raid is dead because someone was staring at their DPS meters and consequently blew up the raid because they weren't paying attention. Or they didn't watch their aggro and pulled the boss to the ranged group, whose aura then killed half of them.

"Well I was relying on feign to work properly."

Heigan has an aura, numbnuts. Feign will NEVER work properly on him.

Perhaps I'm just a perfectionist and expect too much of people. That could be true, but I also recognize something else here: The fact that people make mistakes, zone out, assume too much, or just plain act stupid doesn't bother me as much as their inability to admit they fucked up. Own up to it. I certainly do.

Yes, I dragged Faerlina too far away from the worshippers so that it was too far away to walk the mind-controlled add over to her. I admitted that, and I stated that next time I would reposition her in such a way so that I could avoid the rain of fire but not pull her out of range.

I expect the same thing from everyone else.

When you pull aggro on a boss, the reason is not "feign didn't work properly". You failed. It's that simple.

When the tank you're assigned to dies on a boss, the reason is not "I don't know what happened. You failed. Again, it's that simple.

"But Sab, why don't you tell this to your raiders instead of venting about it here?"

Because no one cares. As long as the boss dies it's a "good job" in most people's eyes. No one is going to see my point until we once again face a boss the requires all 25 people to perform perfectly. Until then, I would be wasting my breath, and just pissing everyone off.

It was like going to a movie, and leaving the theatre before the end.

For anyone who raided with me in BC, last night should have given you some sense of completion unlike anything we've done before. Why is that? Because in BC, we never, ever killed an end-game raid boss. Gruul and Mag don't count, they were 1 of only 1 or 2 bosses in their raids. Give me a break.

Killing Kel'thuzad last night broke a precedent for us that has existed since SSC. A very bad precedent. Good riddance, evil precedent. No more skipping bosses.

The Psychology of a Game

I tend to think too much. I would suffer from insomnia if I didn't find a way to distract my mind from thinking every night. The greatest thing that I have found to keep my mind occupied so that it will actually let me fall asleep is audio commentary tracks on DVDs. I've been playing the same one every night now for the last three weeks or so. If I would lay in bed in utter silence, I'd be awake until morning. I opened this post in this manner to explain how I started thinking about what I'm going to discuss here. Now on to the meat of the issue.

Ever since I've become a tank, I have noticed something different about playing WoW. It was sometimes difficult to notice, but it was always there. And I believe this thing is responsible for a great many different behaviors in the game. Explaining this isn't going to be easy, since I'm in no capacity a psychologist, but I'll try my best.

I'm going to focus first on something I call the "Tank-Healer Relationship", but I'll spend a little bit of time on other things later.

Given enough play time together, a tank and a healer will develop some sort of bond between the two of them. I know this bond exists, as I have experienced it many times. Most of the time, it's left unspoken, but it's there. It will also differ depending on the individuals, be weaker or stronger, etc. Sometimes it will be one-sided. I'm not the only one who has noticed it -- do a Google search on "Tank Healer Relationship", and you will find several articles and blog posts of people describing this very thing. And most of the time, they call it "unexplainable".

It's not unexplainable, it's just very psychological, and I think that people have a difficult time believing that such a deep human intricacy can form out of playing a simple video game with someone else. I'm starting with the T-H relationship because the nature of it creates the most powerful of bonds between any other players in the game.

Why? It's really quite simple. It delves back to the most simplistic (and sadly, most stereotypical) roles of human beings. The bond is at its most powerful when the healer is a female, and the tank is a male. The reason for this is because (and again, I know this is stereotypical), the female is the nurturer, and the male is the protector. And the two of them performing those very actions within the game creates a very intimate bond between them. Now obviously, there are other situations where this bond would be equally as powerful. For example, if the tank happens to be gay, and his healer is a male, then the bond would be just as strong for him. (Though not so much for the healer, unless he were also gay, of course.) Additionally, I sometimes wonder how it feels for a married couple to be in a T-H relationship as well, especially if they reverse the roles.

In other situations, the bond is less powerful, but still existent. And as I've said, I've experienced it myself, and it makes me wonder. Some of my closest friends in WoW are my healers. There's Aaron (Roskilde), Brad (Biza), Steve (Klik). These are some of the people that I talk to the most within the game. I've met all of them in real life. We've been together for quite some time now. And I can't help but think this is partly due to that bond that exists between a tank and his healers. I'm not saying that we wouldn't be friends if I wasn't the tank and they weren't the healers, but I do think that our relationships would be just a little bit different if that were the case.

I also think this bond creates some of the more common emotional reactions that you see in the game. For example, a very common negative trait of a tank is an over-inflated ego. I believe this happens because of two things. One, because they are everyone's protector and subconsciously feel they deserve special treatment. Two, because they get so much attention from the healers and it begins to effect them negatively. People who act like this lack the psychological maturity to understand the feelings they are experiencing with these bonds that form in the game. And they react negatively to them.

A better and positive example is closer to my own feelings, though I will admit that sometimes I do let my ego show. A more positive trait of a tank is that of a leader, and someone who's mantra is "My friends are my weapons and I am their shield." That's the mentality I have when I go into any situation in the game -- that my job is to keep everyone safe so they can do what they need to do to get the job done. A lot of trust is involved within these bonds. This is why I tend to get irritated when someone pulls aggro, or when the off-tank is taking my targets. It's not because I'm a control freak, but rather because I feel that in some way I am letting everyone down.

I should also add that I think the obviousness of the healer's importance to the tank is much stronger than the tank's importance to the healer. The tank sees his health going down, and then sees it going back up with the name of the person healing him scrolling along his combat text. It's clear and apparent who is paying attention to him, and who is keeping him alive. However, it's only clear and present how much the tank is keeping the healer alive when the tank dies, and the boss turns around and one-shots the healer. For this reason, I think the nature of the bond is much stronger for the tank than it is for the healer. Of course, I really can't say this with 100% certainty, as I have never played a healing character in the game.

There are two main problems that this causes. One, a tank may start to feel as though he's under-appreciated or taken for granted. Two, a healer may start to feel useless or unimportant if they aren't assigned their tank to heal, or someone else is filling up that health bar before they do.

Speaking from personal experience, I also think the existence of this bond has helped change people's certain opinions of me. Since I am also the Guild Master of our guild, it's quite easy for people to simply assume that I'm "elitist". The topic has come up a number of times, and is mostly misconstrued. I do believe, before we started raiding in WotLK, that a few of our new healers had that opinion of me. And I saw that opinion disappear as they raided with us, because they are now able to talk to me freely and are comfortable enough to even fool around with me during raids. And I believe it's mostly, if not totally, due to the T-H relationship.

"So what does it all mean, Sab?"

Mostly, I'm writing about this just because it was something on my mind and I wanted to solidify it into words. I'm thinking that most people who read this will go, "Hmm, yeah, I have noticed that but never really gave it much thought." That's really all I was going for, here.

To expand it a bit further, I think that sometimes the DPS will have a bond with the tank as well, although it is much weaker and rarer. DPS is mostly focused on staring at their DPS charts. But sometimes I think they do develop a bond with the tank, and see him as their protector, their leader, or just the guy who always seems to know what to do. Referencing back to my Thaddius story in the previous post, I think that is the perfect example of where I probably directly affected that bond with any of the DPS who might notice it. I changed our strategy, successfully, and it was incredibly obvious how much better it was. That probably affected, and strengthened, the bond.

Interestingly enough, the T-H relationship can affect the entire raid. If it's a good relationship, both of them will perform better and the raid will be more successful. If the relationship is strained, or if they hate each other, then the raid is probably going to suck. Right now, I feel I have an excellent relationship with all the healers in our guild. And you will notice that we've been basically kicking ass the last few weeks. I don't see that as a coincidence.

Harking back to Black Temple, there was a rather bad situation going on near the end of our raiding days, and one of our healers was directly involved. Even though the situation was MOSTLY between just him and I, it affected everyone. I hated this game during that time, and I also don't view it as a coincidence that our raiding days were over shortly after that situation occurred.

So there you have it, a big random chunk of what goes on in my mind when I let it wander too far away.

"Just because you got the monkey off your back, doesn't mean the circus has left town."

Funny how things work out sometimes.

I was dreading last night's raid. Literally dreading it. I was implementing a strategy that was not popular with the officers -- in fact, of those who voiced their opinion, 3 were against it and 2 were for it. Technically, this was a tie, since I was also for it, but we've never had an issue before were the officers were split down the middle. Usually we tend to all think alike. Additionally, I had no idea if our raiders were going to be able to do it.

Friday's test run on 10-man mode didn't help matters much. The two officers who hadn't expressed their opinion before seeing it both went different ways as well -- one of them liked it, one of them didn't. It was still a tie. I was attempting to change the strategy on a boss that we had been trying a certain strategy for a few weeks now, and we were getting better at it. It was possible that if we did everything right, we could have killed him with that strategy. One officer in particular told me that they didn't like the fight anymore now with the new strategy, when before he had loved it. That wasn't helping, either.

But I felt very strongly that we could do this fight better. I was willing to go through the pain of relearning the fight, and doing poorly on it once again while people got the hang of doing it in a completely different manner, because I knew if everyone concentrated on this new strategy, it would eventually be easier even though at first it would be considerably harder.

So, it was a tough decision to make. But I decided to do it despite the pain it would entail and despite the opposition that I faced from half the officers. If the strategy failed, it would have been no one's fault but my own. If our raiders wouldn't have been able to grasp it, if most of them hated it more than the old strategy, then I would have lost a large part of the confidence and trust that everyone has in me as their leader. Also, I ran the risk of the officers thinking I was taking one of those "it's my way, or the highway" ego trips, by implementing my own strategy regardless of what they thought. That may seem overly melodramatic, but these are also true statements.

Needless to say, I was nervous last night. And I think maybe that was a good thing, because I feel I explained things better than I ever have before. There were very few questions. And when we tried it for that very first time, I would say about 75% of the raid got it right from the start. And on the second attempt, 92% of the raid was doing it, and doing it well. I could see how smoothly it was working, and I could see that he was going to die that night. I think after that second attempt, I typed in ochat, "We're going to do this." And sure enough, on the third attempt, Thaddius went down. We BARELY made it. I knew it was going to be close, and I waited as long as I possibly could just in case the enrage timer was off. I was not wasting those precious 12 seconds of shield wall on a boss that was not yet hitting me for +1000% damage. But I knew if I was too slow, I would be dead before I even had a chance to turtle up. I soon as he turned red, I hit everything. Shield Wall. Last Stand. Dodge Trinket. One chain lightning one-shotted half the raid. But I bought enough time, and on the third attempt with our new strategy, Thaddius dropped. I was impressed, not to mention relieved. The fight lasted sixteen seconds beyond the enrage timer.

It's been a while since I've gotten that excited about downing a boss for the first time, and I could tell that everyone else was pumped as well. They wanted it bad -- this bastard had been a monkey on our backs for a few weeks now. While I don't expect him to be a cakewalk from now on by any means, at least now we know we can do it. And now I know that I made the right decision.