Damage Per Second: the MMO fundamental?

I've been toying around with an idea recently.

There's an extent to which I think about the world in ways that I imagine a structural engineer might (although I'm definitely not a structural engineer!). I always want to think about fundamentals, principles, platforms, and foundations. Right? These are all words I've used a lot in my posts. I used one of them in the title for this post, before I even knew I'd be writing this paragraph.

I'm drawn towards finding those few, simple things that you should get good at, and I think of everything else following on naturally after you've attained some degree of proficiency at those simple things.

There's a lot to recommend this viewpoint! When I was an amateur-competitive fencer in college, for example, the fundamental that you could always go back to work on was your footwork. Your ability to move your body up and down the strip at will compensated for almost any other failure you might experience. You could completely misread your opponent's intentions, betray your own plans, and otherwise bumble just about everything but if you were sufficiently agile and athletic on your toesies, your opponent couldn't touch you.

This works for playing a hunter, too.

Imagine a survival hunter that did a lot of things wrong. Maybe she just came back to the game after playing in BC or early Wrath and she's not sure what this cobra shot thing is, so she uses steady shot. Maybe her spec is weird here and there. Nonetheless, if she understands that Explosive Shot is her most important damaging ability and keeps it on cooldown, she's going to do pretty good damage. Fixing a substantial error like using SS instead of CoS is going to net her another 2-3k DPS maybe, but that will just bring her from "above average" to "even further above average".

To go back to the analogy with fencing: the most fundamental of the MMO gameplay fundamentals is pushing buttons. Regardless of role or class, we interact with the game world by pushing buttons, and I think playing a DPS character is really instructive in this regard.

If you learn the game by playing a damage dealer, you have an understanding that you must always be pushing a button. There is never a time when you could be performing better by remaining idle. Further, there are often times you could be performing better by pushing a different button.

Last night I reviewed the video I recorded of my guild's most recent Blackhorn 10-normal kill. Assuming I actually buy a video editing program, this will probably be the first video guide I do because it honestly seems like the first (and almost the only) normal-difficulty encounter that warrants a video guide from a hunter PoV. But I'm wandering.

What I actually wanted to say was that it was painful watching that video. I winced - a lot! - at DPS mistakes I made. Pushing the wrong button, or the right one one at the wrong time, or not pushing a button, etc. I did fine with the encounter. I wasn't hit by a single Blade Rush. I stood in a couple swirlies it made sense for me to stand in. I killed my drakes in time and helped out on the melee mobs when I could. My pet spent moooooooost of his time biting something. And yet still it was painful for me to watch because of the times I misjudged the CS cooldown, or triggered the haste from T13 4pc at a dumb time, or whatever.

This awareness of wanting to always be pushing a button, and further, to be pushing the right button is what I'm trying to get at.

I've currently got a little druid alt that I very occasionally do some leveling with. I've had him for quite a while now, several months, and he's like level 40 or something. He quests feral and dungeons resto. When I'm healing low-level dungeons on him, I spend a lot of time spamming Wrath, because there's no healing to be done and it feels wrong to just stand there.

But what if I weren't someone leveling an alt? Especially what if I weren't in heirloom gear, just the well-itemized stuff from helpful satchels and quest rewards, such that my hots (which mostly depend on level at that point) were roughly as effective, but mana was more of an issue? Wouldn't I then feel like I was playing correctly but standing idle much of the time, so I could have a full mana bar and an innervate ready just in case?

What about tanks that hold on to their cooldowns "just in case," even on trash, and then never end up using them?

This was a huge problem for RDF groups when Cataclysm was released. Warriors that never used shield block or shield wall, Death Knights that never used vampiric blood: they all made difficult trash pulls more difficult because of an inclination not to push buttons. Trash wipes happened pretty frequently in those groups. Think of heroic Deadmines or the Stonecore, when a tank would go down with all their cooldowns available.

When I play my tank alt, I am basically always staring at my cooldowns, waiting for them to come up so I can use them again. Trash and bosses alike.

When I play my healer, I have power auras specifically set up to remind me to use inner focus, power infusion, power word: barrier, and pain suppression.

I think part of that mentality comes from growing up DPS. Use your cooldowns early and often, right? Use every global. Always Be Casting.

I think you can make a pretty good argument that playing a damage dealer is the footwork of WoW. Sure, as you tank Warlord Zon'ozz you'll get better at timing your shield wall for Psychic Drain. Sure, as you heal heroic Morchok you'll get better at finding the right time to channel tranquility. But you can paper over a lot of mistakes by always being active. When I'm playing my healer, if damage is low I just start bubbling people and spamming PoH, because why not? Damage is going to happen eventually, I may as well have some shields on people, right? If I'm tanking and shield wall is on cooldown at a time that I'd like to use it again, I might live through it anyway just because I started with higher health because of damage I didn't take earlier.

Basically: there's a lot to be said for having an understanding that you need your button-pushing to be something that happens without conscious thought. I have to be careful not to think of the things my fingers are doing while I'm raiding! Some of the contortions the poor things have to go through are pretty weird. But because I'm not thinking about them, I have brainspace free to watch the rest of the encounter. I think that playing a damage dealer well is the best way to train yourself to play in this fashion, and I think that doing so has huge benefits for both tanking and healing.

Anyway, sorry! In the absence of big game things to talk about, you get rambling nonsense about footwork. I think about this game too much!

Closer to Rhyolith video, but...

I've been playing with Vegas' export functions, and I've gotten my filesize to a much more manageable point. The videos it's producing are still larger than the original fraps capture, though, which is a little strange. I'm playing with codec and compression settings to try and get a smaller filesize without turning it into a blurry soup. We'll see how it goes.

Other than that, people in this game confuse me sometimes. I'm not always right about things, but I generally have reasons for what I'm doing. I decide to spec or play in a certain way because I've read tooltips, or read comments on wowhead or EJ, or observed some in-game behavior, and I decide something based on that. It often seems to me like a lot of players decide things for no reason. They don't think about it or read tooltips or anything - they just decide a thing is true.

I read and sometimes post on the official WoW forums, and there was a thread today from a guy confused about marksmanship hunters and haste (by the way, these threads are posted daily - haste is the armor penetration of Cataclysm). There's a small cadre of very knowledgeable, highly progressed hunters that try to help people out, but none of them had posted to that thread by the time I saw it.

Who had posted was some guy that just copied and pasted the links to WHU's old "haste plateau" posts that are problematic for several reasons, not least the fact that none of them actually explicitly state the haste breakpoint that most hunters are going to be looking for. They just sort of state rating numbers in a vacuum.

This person declared that the links he posted contained "everything any hunter would need to know," which just isn't true. But this guy had for some reason decided that, without even reading the OP's question, he could answer them by posting links that could as well have been from a recipe site for all the good they did.

Very frustrating.

A little later on, I offered to heal on my priest for one of the extremely common T11 pugs that started showing up with the 4.2 nerfs to that content.

Now, I realize that it's rude to offer advice to someone who hasn't asked for it, but... Sigh. Their hunter - who is a main raider in their guild, and seems to be of an officer rank - is not specced into any points in Bestial Discipline or Frenzy, but has 2/2 Improved Serpent Sting. For a Marks hunter especially, those two talent points are going to get you extra damage maybe 3 or 4 times in an encounter where you switch several times between large-healthpool targets; despite this, he dismissed Rapid Killing as "too situational". His raid had several druids and a paladin and yet he put a point into True Shot Aura and both points into Termination. He has over 16% haste and has put the new scope on his 378 crossbow (about a 20 DPS upgrade), but has neglected to put the 50 agility enchant on his bracers.

Perhaps most tellingly, at one point he said on vent "oh yeah, I forgot I was playing with my wolf now, 5% crit is nice" and summoned his wolf. I mentioned that the feral druid supplied the 5% crit buff, and he said that they were unique buffs and they stacked.

It was at this point that I heaved a heavy sigh. To his credit, I noticed shortly after that I'd gained the furious howl buff, then gained it again once it wore off. He'd clearly opened up his character sheet and was looking at it and seeing his critical strike chance not change. He then brought out his fox (without saying anything, natch).

I don't expect everyone to know everything about the game - I sure don't. But there's no reason for you to only be testing out how buffs work in a raid. If you'd read the tooltip for improved serpent sting you'd know that it's borderline useless for MM. If you thought things through, you'd realize that if you're putting talent points into Go for the Throat and Sic 'Em, maybe your pet is worth the talent points in Bestial Discipline and Frenzy. If you paid attention to the constraints placed on your DPS, you'd think maybe Termination's extra focus would be pretty much wasted.

These are all things that people can mostly reason through and test for themselves. The exact haste breakpoint to squeeze the maximum DPS in between Chimera shots: sure, that's finnicky. But we all know that other people have already done that finnicking for us, right? You just have to do a little looking.

The alternative is just sort of slapping talent points down based on the pictures in the icon, and I think our fellow raiders deserve better than that. This guy's fellow raiders certainly deserved better than his 13-15k DPS with a 378 weapon.

As is often the case, the lesson for me personally is "be thankful for your guild, dummy." I've had a couple of these moments recently, where I've looked at parses from people in the Dungeons & Raids forum hitting Baleroc's enrage, or struggling with other encounters, and I really have to be grateful. Everyone in VA has put in more effort than a lot of people ever have.

Distractions and diversions

It can be a little strange having a gaming blog, especially one so narrow as a class-specific WoW blog. Things will happen in the real world, like tsunami or the death of bin Laden, and you're not sure whether you ought to comment on it. Does it seem weird that you haven't mentioned it? Or would it seem weird for a WoW hunter blog to suddenly start talking about SEAL team 6 in Pakistan?

I guess all I'll really say about that is that, while I'm glad the guy's dead, I wish it had been Army Special Forces that did him in. Just a little vestigial branch loyalty from my time in.

Now that my priestess has also made it to 85 and done a few heroics, I really must admit that I like healing a lot more than I like tanking. I've been playing her as discipline, and for me there really aren't any tanking moments comparable to popping wings with a full stack of evangelism and then casting penance into an inner-focused greater heal. It's pretty feasible to bring a nearly-dead tank back to almost full health, and just the juggling and triage in general is more satisfying for me than rounding up mobs. You do have to be willing to dive into your combat log to prove things though. I had a group wipe a couple times on Karsh in H-BRC and you could tell they were winding up into "blame the healer" territory.

I went into my combat log and found the last tick of heat wave that I'd eaten was for 28k. The damage from those climbs the more stacks of the debuff he's got on him, so if you're leaving him in the fire long enough to get 4 or 5 new stacks of the debuff, that's 20,000+ damage ticking on everyone in the party every second, in addition to melee swings on the tank. There's no way a healer with an average item level of 333 is healing through that, you know? People were falling over dead even when I popped PI on myself and spammed prayer of healing.

Some boss mechanics are a little bit better at illustrating to the DPS that they have responsibilities past "DPS the boss real hard". I haven't yet had a group clear Drahga in Grim Batol without a single wipe, because DPS are just loathe to swap targets. Having a fire elemental ram into them and blow up, insta-killing them, is a pretty good wake up, though. Well, sort of. After a couple wipes on him last night, the PvP-geared arms warrior bailed to be replaced by the most delightful rogue, who made the encounter trivially easy. She also kicked casts on later mobs! When I remarked on how many DPS don't seem to like to use their interrupts, she said "they do no damage," then had a whole little comic monologue about "y i use if no damage, i no waste golds on training it" and stuff. So that was great.

In raiding news, I feel like I'm pretty sure that we're not going to clear T11 before T12 launches, which is a shame. I guess once we out-gear it we can come back later and clear it. Maybe I'm being pessimistic? I hope so. Part of it's my fault, as I've known I need to do some recruiting for... a while now and I haven't gotten around to doing so. Recruiting is a lot of work, and especially for a small casual guild with poor progression it's tough to attract the people that will really help with that.

Pugging Arthas and killing time

I saw someone in trade looking for a healer for LK10 last night and I had a free hour, so I hopped on my holy priest and helped out. They actually made it to p3 before wiping on the first attempt, which made me hopeful, but we still hadn't killed him by the time I had to go.

Incidentally, it was nice to hear one of them on vent say "oh no, the rockin' healer has to leave?" But yeah, no kill. It's interesting how raids differ. My guild raid had and still has its biggest difficulty dealing with defile. It consistently gets too big, and then that forces the raid out of the center, or a couple people are getting clipped by it so it expands faster than they can run, or whatever. One way or another, defile is what kills us.

With this raid last night, the defiles were beautiful. But as soon as the first transition was done, the DPS wanted to kill the Lich King yesterday! That last raging spirit? Psh, the tank's got it. Val'kyr? Whatever, it's probably the fault of the person she picked up. The important thing, for these folks, was doing more damage to Arthas.

The problem with this instinct is that it led to them getting frequent little tastes of phase 3 - just like we did on the first attempt - so they decided that they were doing it right. Despite the fact that their desperate sprinting for P3 meant we were just going to wipe to viles because the two remaining DPS couldn't actually do anything about them. For my guild raid, like the 2nd or 3rd time we made it to phase 3, we killed him.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how raids develop in different ways.

Other than that, we're definitely in full-fledged "can it please just be the Cataclysm already?" mode. Over the past couple days I've been farming the old-world enchant patterns for the afore-mentioned priest, who is also my enchanter. I've got Crusader, fiery, 15 agility to weapon, 25 agility to 2h weapon, and lifestealing. The last one was probably the most annoying, because I had to get the key to Scholomance, which involved going from WPL to freaking Gadgetzan, from Gadget to Un'goro, realizing I needed a thorium bar, flying to Darnassus to buy one and flying back to Un'goro, realizing I needed two thorium bars and flying back again, etc. Good god the classic questlines were awful, sometimes. Nothing says "fun" like AFKing for a 15-minute flight path. But now I've got almost all the standard enchants people need for their heirlooms.

Apparently getting the spellpower enchant is more involved, possibly involving one of the classic raids? Which makes me wonder if it's going away? I should probably get that as well. And I should probably farm up some righteous orbs (oh, so that's what their blog is named after...) to put crusader on the new heirloom axe I got for my furry warrior.

Clearly there's stuff to do - just not very fun stuff. For me, at least. Which is why it could really be the Cataclysm any day now, please.