But the WoW five years ago is very different from the WoW we have today, both in the good aspects and the bad. My real life job has me analyzing and evaluating online memes, so my interest in WoW is not only for the game itself, but the society it creates. Lets take a walk down memory lane, as I express my rather biased, and perhaps, rather elitist views of the evolution of WoW.

World of Warcraft was fun, new and very exiting. One of my earliest memories was when I met another dane on the beta servers, and we played through Darkshore and the surrounding areas together. At one point, we killed a bear, and I always smile when I see a Rotting Bear Carcas drop from a mob, and remember how me and my friend tried to agree on some terms: the carcas sold for a whole silver, after all! We eventually decided that one of us got the item, and the other was to get drops from the next couple of mobs to make it fair on both of us. A whole silver, can you imagine?

I was quite a newbie back then, and I didn’t really immerse myself very much into the finer details of the game until I managed to get my priest up to level 60 and start doing some raiding. Back then, raiding was a terrible complex thing: You couldn’t just make a PUG for Molten Core, and expect everything to be alright. Just making a guild and managing 40-60 people and have them coordinate on some – at that time – rather sophisticated bossfigths, was a massive undertaking. When Zul’Gurub came out, I was suprised to see that people would go there first, even if it was harder than Molten Core, and then go to MC and beyond when they had enough people. I suspect this was the first sign to Blizzard that 40 man raids just weren’t going to cut it.

Raids were very difficult back then, at least from my perspective, and even if we don’t give much credit to the fights now. Talent trees were badly made, each class was generally forced into one role, and there was a lot of requirements to be met, just to have some succes. There was a great respect for the people that managed to clear just Blackwing Lair, and even more to those that went through Ahn’Qiraj and old-Naxxramas. I was not one of them – I fell short just before the Twins of AQ40.

Then came the Burning Crusade, and it turned the world upside down. Suddenly, a druid wasn’t forced to be resto, a hunter didn’t have to be marksman. The silly specs like the survival melee hunter or the pitiful excuse for a balance tree, got replaced by something that could at least work, even if there was a lot of focus on watering down hybrids. Raiding was made a bit easier, first with a 10 man instance to get you going, and then later 25 man instances that were a little bit easier to manage. They were still hard, mind you. You couldn’t just walk into Serpentshrine Caverns with a PUG and expect to clear the place in a few hours, even at the end of TBC. Even heroics was something that you wouldn’t take lightly; I tried going through Shadow Labs heroic when I was in mid-Karazan gear, and that was a terrible experience, where we decided to give up on the third boss in the end because it was just too hard. It was a challenge we were not yet ready to face.

But while the hard working raiders was rewarded with lots of items, other players had a chance to get into the action, even if they had a late start to the expansion. Some time after a new content patch came out, Blizzard would allow you to buy nearly as good items – for some of your slots – for heroic badges, and I think that was a great idea in itself. When Sunwell came out, a person who had only been doing heroics could buy a full set of epics, ranging from Karazan to Black Temple level and above. One piece for each slot, most of the time, but still an option for the new player, or the alt. With a bit of elbow grease, they could get into a SSC or BT guild, and work their way up to the rest.

I think thats fair. Some people work for months and months to be able to manage the harder content, and those who doesn’t go the natural way will have to struggle a bit more, and a bit longer. Effort equals reward.

Then came Wrath of the Lich King. We re-used Naxxramas (which made sense, I might add), and added a big area with five big portals but only one boss, and threw in the guardian of magic for good meassure. Naxxramas was quickly cleared, and it would take a good while before we saw Ulduar – a bit too long for my personal taste. When it came, however, it was the epiphany of a raid instance in my book: Many bosses, changing settings, challenging hard modes, and a place that you could take on whether you were in a big 25 man guild or simply a 10 man group of friends. Blizzard did right with Ulduar, and I have many fond memories of raiding the instance.

Then it sort of went down hill. It took a very, very long time for Trial of the Crusader to come out, and when it did it sported a disappointing five new bosses. But hey, you could do them four times each week, so in reality it was 20 new bosses! That was, when the place was actually unlocked, and only after waiting for a month could you clear the whole place and try the hardmodes. What followed next was months of killing the same bosses four times each week, and the fights were all identical. Even going into the heroic version didn’t offer anything new or exiting: The bosses did more damage, they had more health, and they had shorter enrage timers.

There were no new adds spawning, there was no clever change in the way the fight worked, there was no pressure to play it smart. Just heal more and do more damage. And you had to do this over and over again. Doing Ulduar twice a week was acceptable, but clearing the same five bosses four times every single week, with no refreshing changes was a daunting experience. Sure, it was challenging, but we are at a point where the only real challenge is Anub’Arak on heroic 25, and all of the other bosses are just a minor annoyance.

And at the same time, as new raid instances were released, Blizzard made new gear for the people that hadn’t quite made it to that level of raiding. They were a level of emblems behind the rest of us, but could still get good gear from doing heroics. The gear isn’t perfectly optimized, and it doesn’t offer the same look and feel as the stuff that drops in raids, but it can still give you an edge and get you into raiding, even if you will have to struggle for the last tier.

Then came Icecrown Citadel. I had, and have, high hopes for Icecrown, and so far I have been pleased with the content. But Blizzards need to please everyone is a thorn in my eye, when people – with the release of Icecrown – are getting emblems of triumph for simply stumbling over a heroic boss. Heck, even my level 72 hunter alt gets two emblems of triumph for the first normal random dungeon she completes, and if I keep that up, I can probably buy a few pieces of epics as soon as she gets to level 80.

It all boils down to this: Some people have worked very hard, and spent a lot of time and gold on beating the content that Blizzard puts in, and we are fully equipped to go in and face whatever Icecrown throws in our way. Other people have been doing a lot of heroics for the last few months, or they have sleepwalked through Naxxramas 10 and 25, and they have almost instantly gotten a full set of tier 9 with accompanying epics for the rest of their slots, with very little effort. The difficulty they face in their 232 gear is not much harder than what we face in 245-258 gear, and it feels a bit like all my hard work was wasted.

No, no, ofcourse they should have access to all of the content. I wouldn’t dream of denying them that pleasure. But I do feel a bit of resentment when I have raided for the past year, and worked my way through every instance and every hard mode to get to this place, only to be matched equally to someone who has done heroics and Naxxramas for the last 2 months. Everybody should see Icecrown and enjoy the end of the expansion, but maybe, just maybe, these people should work a little bit harder for it.

It feels as though the hard work we have put in is being reset whenever new content is being put out, and while we can gear up slightly faster because we have access to both 10 and 25 versions of the raids, I do feel that it might be pushing it a bit too much to reset people to a standard with every release of new content. I want everybody to enjoy the game, but maybe we could reserve just a little bit of respect for those that works a little bit harder for it. Is that too much to ask for?

I’ve tried a lot of MMORPG’s since I started playing WoW, and I’ve always come back, simply because it is the game that offers the most. And I do still enjoy the game. But it all leads me to wonder: How will Cataclysm be?

Are we nearing a point where normal 5 man bosses drops epic gear, where you get a starter raid set when you ding 85, and where Blizzard are so focused on making every bit of the game accessable for everybody, that they are too frightened to make something just a little bit challenging?

- QQ

We are a few people who has been spending the better part of our “We could go hit on girls”-time discussing this subject, and it seems to be growing hotter with every post, and once in a while a new person on the board will stroll in, post something as if we haven’t just been discussing this for eight weeks, and it all starts over again. I myself am beginning to feel a little bit frustrated about all of this whole ordeal, and I aim to put a stop to it.

It seems that, with all the different threads we discuss in, sometimes the arguments previously made gets “forgotten”. The initial argument is then re-posted, regardless of it having been countered already, and the cycle repeats itself. On top of that, if an active participant goes away for a few days, the responses to his post might not be seen by him, and that part of the discussion isn’t continued and both parties believe that they have won the argument. And all of the points made, whether they were forgotten or intentionally ignored, it makes it very difficult – if not completely impossible – to reach a consensus.

So I have decided to make the mother of all arguments, the father of posts, the biggest, meanest blog post to defend my point of view: We’re fine!

There are a few arguments that seem to be the most used by the opposition. Some of them might be valid and some of them are just plain dumb. In this post I will attempt to refute the following:

Hybrids aren’t supposed to beat pures!

Your guilds other DPS suck!

Moomkins are never on the Top Lists!

You’re just selecting what benefits your argument!

But what about..!

Hybrids aren’t supposed to beat pures!
Blizzard once made a comment that hybrid classes should be a little bit behind pure classes, because hybrids has the benefit of being able to switch playstyle on a different character. While I agree with this ideal, and think that this is how it should be, it just doesn’t seem like the case. We often see hybrids on top of the meters, in many cases well ahead of any pure class. Death-Knights have been dominating meters for ages now, and have been able to pull astonishing numbers ever since Naxxramas. Feral druids as well has always been in a good spot on the meters, even if they are very difficult to play. So when this is the case for some very powerful and diverse classes, it’s not unlikely that it slips in regards to others.

I know, I know, shamans and shadow priests are generally very soddy DPS, but they have been performing really badly, and are getting a bit of love now. The point is, though, that if you look at the current leader table in either Ulduar or TOTC, you will see Death Knights and Druids on many of the spots. Sure, they are fights that are completely dominated by mages at times, but that’s completely beside the point: Some hybrids already have shown that they are more than capable of competing with pures, and Blizzards vision has not been successfully executed.

Your guilds other DPS suck!
This is a rather hurtful comment, and a below-the-belt kind of way to draw attention away from whatever argument that has been put forth. It’s suddenly not just about me, but the people I play with. In some cases, I am willing to admit that one person can shine in a guild and carry the rest of the raid, but I don’t think at all that this is the case here. The argument is automatically refuted when you note that my guild, in fact, doesn’t suck. In its present form it is just about 6 months old, and yet we have cleared every encounter in the game except for Alone in the Darkness, Algalon 25 and Anub 25 hard mode.

I know, we didn’t clear Glory of the Ulduar Raider before TOTC came out – in fact we cleared it about 1½ months after the release of TOTC. But when we did, we were the 1053th guild in the world – at that point there were over ten times as many guilds that had cleared TOTC25, and had access to just as many nice upgrades as we do. To this date there are only 1469 guilds that has managed to kill Yogg +1, with no less than 19270 guilds that has cleared normal Trial of the Crusader 25. What this means is that even if my guild sucks in your view, we are still doing what only a small fraction of guilds are doing, and gear alone doesn’t permit you to do that – obviously, or we would see a lot more people flying around with drakes.

So what I am getting at here, is that while you may view my guild, and my fellow DPS’ers, inferior to your guild and your DPS’ers, they are certainly meeting a certain standard to ensure they have a grasp of their class and game mechanics at a point where we can say that they do not suck.

Boomkins are never on the Top Lists!
Dear oh dear, people just love to go to World of Logs and look at the top 200 lists of all time best DPS’ers across all the fights. They link that and say “clearly, these classes are much, much better”. I say “Clearly, these lists are very, very biased”.

One thing we should notice straight away is that some fights are completely dominated by one class. The top 10 DPS’ers on Lord Jaraxxus, Faction Champions, Twin Val’kyrs and Anub’Arak heroic are exclusively arcane mages and unholy death-knights, which shows that these classes are quite unfairly balanced, and they should not be used as a general ruler for DPS comparison (especially since one of them is a hybrid! Gasp!)

[singlepic id=58 w=320 h=240 float=right]But even so, you have to note the irregularities on a fight like Northrend Breasts heroic, where we have a bit of a mixed class representation. I made a little graph of the top 50 DPS classes, as shown below, and you would note how quickly it drops from a high top DPS of 8994 to a much more even DPS of ~8200. This should probably show that it is still very unlikely to reach these numbers, when there is such a gap between #5 and #10.

In fact, if you look at the two players at the very top, Hyped and Kripparrian (who are even from the same guild), they are well ahead of their fellow DPS’ers. Whats even more curious is that some of these logs are several weeks old, some going back to late October, which leads me to believe that they have either been incredibly lucky or that they are the more frequent receivers of upgrades.

Think about how much DPS could be affected just how your raid setup works. We spend over 8 minutes killing NrB heroic, and guilds that bring one less healer shave several minutes off their kill. If a larger percentage of the fight is spent during bloodlust, it has a massive effect on how DPS compares to others, not to mention the fact that any damage anybody else does is damage you can’t do. Bloodlust has a huge impact on peoples performance. We bloodlust when the worms come into play, and that allows us to kill Acidmaw shortly after he surfaces after the first burrow. During that, a moonkin will be sure to proc lunar eclipse once (and one duration of lunar eclipse is all we can do to benefit from bloodlust). But if a guild pops bloodlust the first time Icehowl gets stunned, most classes can pop a nuke macro and a trinket, and get a massive DPS increase, where a moonkin is left wishing for the slim possibility of proccing lunar eclipse fast enough to get any benefit at all.

The result is that the top DPS’ers of all time (OF ALL TIME, Kanye!) are prodigies with a bit of luck, and comparing any DPS to them is a mistake. And you cannot be sure that they are teaming with any kind of decent moonkin.

If we really have to look at other peoples logs, I would much rather find logs from the highest moonkins on a specific fight, and then compare them to their group at that very moment. They are still susceptible to the things written above. They could be lucky, or they could truly be a golden nugget in a pile of dung, but we get a much wider spread. But you will ensure that these are the very best moonkins out there, and that you can compare them to their peers. In fact, you are much more likely to get a cut of logs from a more general population, and a much more realistic image of how it could be played out.

Looking through these logs, I notice that the top 200 moonkins are smack even with their peers. Does all of their guildies suck? Are they the only ones pulling their weight? Or are they, in fact, just capable of playing their class to a point where they are comparable to other DPS classes? I think not. Its one thing if 24 people (minus healers and tanks) in my guild are all sucky-sucky, but to say that every single guildie of every moonkin that does high DPS are bad players, is going out on a pretty wide limb. In fact, if i go down the list, i consistantly see the moonkins on that list being comparable to their peers. They can do it, I can do it, you can do it.

You’re just selecting what benefits your argument!
Of course I am – so are you! But you don’t even have to take my word for it. The big guys at Elitist Jerks are spending all of their “Second Base”-time on doing calculations that I wouldn’t dream of trying to understand. But we can look at the end result. Even if I can’t fully understand the amount of algebra put into this work, I can respect the fact that every single comma they make will be checked over by a dozen other people, who are spending just as much time as they are, trying to crack the game. Because of that, I view these results with general positivity, and it just so happens that they are pretty positive towards me – the numbers, I mean. I’m not smart enough to play with the big boys.

According to the current SampleOutputT9 from Simulationcraft, last changed 22th of November, the highest DPS class currently on a static fight, in the best gear currently available is an arcane mage. Big surprise. (Sidenote: I have no idea why there are no death knights in the spreadsheet. Hardly matters anyways). They are topping the calculation with a maximum of 10.232 DPS in their very best gear, under the best, most predictable circumstances. Moonkins show up twice on this list, once with 2pt8 and once with 4pt9 – the 2pt8 version being slightly higher DPS than the other. They come in at a whooping 9.937 DPS. Gasp, it’s not near the mage! Buhu, we are not at the top!

Well, close enough. Fact is, the calculations say that we are just 2,9% behind the mage, which is great because first time I looked at it, we were 4,6% behind, and the second time we were 6% behind. Heck, even if we are 10% behind, at 9208 DPS, I would still say that it is pretty damn nice! And these are completely sterile conditions. Is it so hard to believe that a moonkin with decent gear and a bit of brain could show off these results? No, not at all, and the theory just back up what I see in the real world (of Warcraft, I mean).

Remember, this is in the absolutely best gear available for these specs. Nobody has that, except for maybe the few guilds that has been clearing Anub tribute runs since day one. It’s going to take 25 weeks to gear up one raid group with four pieces of 258 tier 9, and there is the random factor of all the other loot that may or may not drop and go to one person over the other depending on DKP or how much they have bribed the loot master. Most of us do not live in the luxury of having perfect gear, but neither does our fellow raiders. So is it really that unlikely that a moonkin can be comparable on DPS?

But what about..!
Don’t even start on Anub! If there is one thing that makes me tick, it’s people linking meters from Anub’Arak heroic, saying “Look at us, we totally suck”. Yes, yes we do suck. That’s because Anub’Arak is a gimmick fight, where most of the time is spent doing AOE. Classes aren’t balanced assuming they will stand still and AOE. No way, not when I don’t even go near my hurricane button on 99% of the fights I’m in.

Yes, it sucks jormungar balls (they are very small, because they are very cold, I reckon), but we simply have to live with it. You still bring stuff to the raid group. You ensure a nice crit chance to your fellow casters. You make sure the adds are slowed by 20%, just in case that thunderclap doesn’t go on it. You are a giant turkey (happy thanksgiving!).

I have been competing nicely along with other classes on every other boss in the end of each instance, be it Kel’Thuzad, Yogg-Saron or a normal Anub. I can pull off amazing numbers on some of the funnier fights like Hodir and Vezax (the later especially because we are absolutely godlike during Lunar Eclipse) and I am comfortable with my position against my peers.

Conclution:
So whether you are whining about being 3% behind a pure DPS, or because you are somehow less geared or less skilled, it doesn’t really matter. I do not believe that we are in such a bad shape that it’s worth complaining about, and the few fights that we are, we just have to live with. I am sick and appalled about all the negative whiners, polluting the forums with their persistent crying, instead of trying to look at the bright side, instead trying to think of how we can improve or generally have a good time.

I cringe every time a new poster comes along to give his two cents, complaining that they can’t compete with their 17% crit and 600 haste rating. I cry a bit every time a new and creative post is shot down with “You can’t do that, just reroll mage”. And I slap my face with a facepalm that is so hard that it nearly flails the skin off my cheek, whenever someone “forgets” to reply to an argument, or completely forget to take into account the arguments put out on the forums previously.

Disclaimer: These are the reasons I made this blog, and I will continue linking to it every single time, until someone steps up and give me a decent counter argument. I am not going to spend ages writing this stuff up again, but I do hope that future respondents will appreciate the arguments I have put in here, and the hours I have spent on putting all this together. I would be genuinely upset – and very quick to call troll – if someone strolls along and fails to take this all in and give it a good think.

I realise that things will change within a few months, what with the impending nerf to tier 8 and all the new stuff in Icecrown Citadel, but lets live in the moment and get the best out of it.

- QQ

Quite frankly, if the Ashen Verdict is having problems continuing the siege on Icecrown Citadel, then maybe they shouldn’t have their forces slaughter each other in Trial of the Crusader. For the past few months, I must have killed over thirty alliance NPCs each week (2x 6 from 10 mans and 2x 10 from 25 mans). Now, unless The Ashen Verdict turns up with a couple of thousand NPCs, I really think they could have benefitted from these 300+ NPCs we have killed, not to mention all the players dissolving in Acidmaws spit. On top of that, it seems strange to stop in the middle of a good siege, just because they have exhausted their resources…

To give you the rundown, Icecrown Citadel will be released in four sections. The first will contain four bosses which we may kill as we wish. After “several” weeks, they will release the next wing containing three bosses, and the end boss of that wing – Professor Putricide – will only be accessable for five tries. After “several” more weeks, a new part will be released along with two new bosses, and we get another five tries that we can use to kill the Professor and the end boss of the new wing, Blood-Queen Lana’Thel. Finally, after more waiting, the final part will be released, and we have a total of 15 tries to down the Professor, the Blood-Queen and The Lich King.

What this means is that we will probably be pretty decent at, or at least close to, killing the Professor when the next comes out, giving us 10 tries on the Blood-Queen, assuming we don’t wipe. By the time we face Sindragosa, we should be able to get to her without too many wipes, giving us 15 tries on her, and the remaining tries can be used on The Lich King. But if we wipe 5 times on the Professor, we are down to 10 tries on either the Blood-Queen, Sindragosa or Arthas.

From this, I assume that even if we spend all our tries on one boss, we may still access the other bosses, that isn’t included in this special system, as long as Professor Putricide doesn’t block the progression. If we are talking about wings such as Naxx, we should be able to bypass him and go for the bosses leading up to Blood-Queen Lana’thel, once they are released.

So what does this all mean? Well, on one hand, it means that we will be facing new challenges before they have precise, well made guides. That should make raiding a bit more fun. On the other hand, we show less reckognition to the guilds that are able to bring the High Bosses down, because they can’t progress, and by the time the new bosses are released, other guilds might have the first bosses on farm, making everybody equal. I don’t really mind if guilds like Ensidia wishes to raid 14 hours a day – let them have their fun. But once that final wing gets released, you will have hundreds of hardcore guilds gunning for the first Arthas kill, even though a handfull of them got to that point well before the other guilds. It seems a bit unfair to them.

And I am not sure I am too fond of getting another staged raid instance. It made sense with AQ40 (that had to be unlocked) and it was fine with Sunwell (where the bosses was insanely difficult and Black Temple was still interesting), and i suppose it does make sense to release the final raid instance a bit at a time, to extend the lifetime of the raid. But we have been rotting around with Ulduar for many months now, and TOTC was released over four weeks for just five bosses. And we have been clearing that (almost) four times each week now. Nothing is left in Ulduar, other than a few drakes. My guild still need to kill Anub’Arak on heroic, and there are plenty of drops we want from TOTGC25 aswell, but we are giving away a lot of items from normal 25-man already. Heck, we are giving out trophies to offspec now! So I am a bit annoyed by the fact that we will only have access to four bosses from the beginning, and then three more “several weeks” later.

Then again, I raid because its fun, and because I enjoy the social aspect. I will still be raiding, regardless of any restrictions they put on Icecrown Citadel.