I help out with wowdb, and I’d really like to encourage anyone else who likes that sort of thing to help out, too. It’s a fun project to work on.

Yes, I know wowhead is more established and has more comments. Yes, I know wowdb doesn’t have a model viewer. However, the way to get more comments is to get more contributors. The way to get a model viewer is to get more people to use the site so Curse directs more devs there. Even if wowhead is still your go-to site for information, consider that a lot of other sites that you might use (icy veins and mr robot are two primary example) rely on wowdb, and those sites will be able to serve you better if wowdb gets more support.

Basically, I’m asking you guys to help out if that’s the kind of thing you like to do (if it isn’t, no worries). Some of you know a lot of cool tips and tricks and all of you have been around long enough to be good resources for stuff.

How To Contribute

You need to log in to wowdb.com with your curse account (the one you would use for the curse client if you use it).  It’s easy to register if you don’t have one.  You do not need Curse Premium or anything like that.

Comments

We need helpful comments on quests, items, spells & abilities, NPCs/bosses/mobs, achievements, etc. Detailed explanations, strategies, tips; anything that isn’t immediately apparent from the in-game text, like if you’re aware of any prerequisite quests, but also linking related items or quests, achievements, providing spawn points, coordinates, any tips, suggestions, outside resources, whatever.

We especially need comments on all the new content – any of the new Mists quests, bosses, items, achievements, spells, talents, and on things like pet battles where comments are a better source of information than anything in-game.

Examples of some good comments: here, here, here and here

One thing I like to do is open the website when I level alts and leave comment each time I encounter a quest that isn’t completely straightforward and just leave a few sentences here or there as I play. It just takes a couple extra seconds per quest and is way easier than trying to remember later which quests needed comments.

Unlike wowhead, you can leave embedded images and videos in your comments if you find those are particularly helpful.

Comments are posted immediately and moderated reactively.

Screenshots

To take screenshots:

ALT + Z to disable your UI then Print Screen button. You then can either find the screenshot in your WoW/screenshots folder (sort by date is very helpful here) or you can just paste the screenshot immediately into a blank file in Photoshop or Gimp or whatever and save somewhere. The upload tool has its own crop utility so you shouldn’t need to crop in advance.

Again, we need screenshots especially of newer stuff. What that quest mob looks like, the entrance to the cave that is hard to find, appearance of those footprints that the stealthed pet is supposed to leave behind, quest objectives, armor models, boss models, tameable pets, etc, etc. People like to know what stuff looks like.

Example: here. Shot of the track, what the tooltip says, shot of the mob itself.

Screenshots are approved manually by mods and admins and can take a day to appear (or poke me and I can do it immediately).

Use the Curse Client

When you are playing the wowdb profiler that comes with the curse client will gather data and save it. When you are done playing, Curse Client will see the game close and upload the collected data from the addon. You can see the last time data was uploaded by looking in the Plugins tab of the options, as well as making sure the addon is enabled there. Be sure you have Curse Client open (even if it is just running in your system tray) before you close WoW so that the data will upload!

Contributing in the right places

Remember when you contribute anything to add it to all the related pages. Mount screenshots, for example, should be on both the item-that-teaches-the-mount page and the spell-once-you’ve-learned-it page. Some quests are completed the same for both factions but are separate in the database, and you will want to make sure the helpful comment is included on both. Another example is my comments here about acquiring one of the new raptor pets; I left this exact comment on the page for every single raptor mount, as well as on the pages for both the eggs that are part of the process.

Dont steal

This is really important: don’t copy comments or screenshots from wowhead.  That’s inappropriate – not fair to wowhead or its community, and it will just get taken down from wowdb anyway.

If wowhead has some super helpful information that you think wowdb absolutely needs, then rewrite it yourself.

Why wowdb exists

Comments from Boubouille, the creator/owner of MMO-Champion:

WoWDB is used to power most of what’s behind MMO-Champion‘s news. It replaced db.mmo-champion.com that was becoming super obsolete and wouldn’t have survived MoP. It’s also a way to try to improve user experience on MMO-C over db.mmo-champion.com pages we had because those were pretty bad.

db.mmo-champion.com was created because Wowhead refused to work with us years ago and we needed it to run MMO-Champion. There is absolutely no way for a company as big as Wowhead/Zam/Tencent Games to work with MMO-Champion in the first place because it would require us to have access to absolutely everything they have, which is a pretty good reason to refuse.

Some people also mentioned that competition is good, and I tend to agree with that. WoWDB was the first database to support a bunch of things such as spec variable spells or item upgrades. We also focus a lot more on newsing, so our spell parsing tends to be much cleaner to keep the unofficial notes clear: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=100780/jab / http://www.wowdb.com/spells/100780-jab

We also have random features like reagents breakdown http://www.wowdb.com/spells/93328-vial-of-the-sands

It’s a technological sandbox to let us improve the database platform on a company level. The improvements on wowdb are partially the reason why gw2db was more succesful than other databases for example.

The goal isn’t really to compete with Wowhead, it’s more of a pet project to see if we can find new ways to improve MMO-C and make the experience more enjoyable for users with what we have.

WoWDB  is mostly a “hey let’s see what we can do with this” project with no real goal. It’s a 100% money sink for the company and even if we added an ad slot somewhere it would still be a pretty huge money loss. The main goal is really just to support MMO-Champion‘s news and make our life easier on this side.

However, I’m glad that some people/other major sites adopted it because it lets me work with smart minds that provide us with a decent amount of feedback and let us improve our database platform altogether (contributing to the success of gw2db.com for example) but I’m not really on a crusade to destroy Wowhead, otherwise I wouldn’t have them listed as the most obvious link on every page you click.

And just so there is no question, I’m not a shill for Curse.  I don’t get paid by them or anything, I’m not advertising for them, and my only affiliation with them is being a volunteer on wowdb (and at MMOC).  I don’t have a vendetta against wowhead and am not asking people not to use it — I think it’s a great site and I use it daily.  I am involved with wowdb largely because it’s a fun project and I think it has a lot of potential to be a great database that is useful and helpful to the community.

Anyway, if you do choose to help out, great.  Here is a link to the Public Feedback Thread.

The new Looking for Raid (LFR) tool is a new avenue of advancement introduced in 4.3 for characters.  Out for a few weeks, the feature has had enormous popularity with players.  For those of you who haven’t experienced it yet, here is an overview based on my experiences using it.

LFR is raiding with training wheels.  To compensate for throwing a bunch of strangers together, many of whom will be inexperienced or underskilled or just bad as following directions, the fights are stripped down and tuned to be very, very easy.   They are designed to be successfully done provided at least half the raid is conscious and capable of following basic instructions, a difficulty level that is arguably necessary to ever get anything killed in such an environment.  As a result of their ease, they offer low quality loot — just slightly better than the new heroics — and lack the perks of regular raiding like achievements, epic gems and Valor-points-per-boss (LFR awards VP only for completion), or the ability to work on the tier’s legendary.

To use it, one queues through an icon on the menu bar like with random dungeons, and is automatically matched up with 24 other players.  It can be done multiple times a week (although you only have one chance at loot), and will not lock you from doing the raid on normal mode.

Organisation

The group is composed of two tanks, six healers and seventeen DPS.  The fights are designed to always use this same comp, so there is no need for dual spec or talent switching during the raid.

Raid leadership is on a volunteer basis.  To queue as a potential leader, one must check the box on the queuing window along with their usual role – same as is done for the LFD tool.  If the raid leader leaves, a new one is assigned from amongst the other volunteers.  Raid leaders get no special perks or powers and mainly exists as a way of saying “yes I will give any new people instructions if they want them.”  Unlike with a real raid group, here the leadership rarely is required to do anything different than any other raid member, although you shouldn’t volunteer for the job if you’re not interested in explaining the fight mechanics.

Players are in and out of the raid group constantly.  It is not uncommon for people to leave mid-fight, or to start a boss down a few people.  The tool is very efficient about replacing these people the instant a group leaves combat, but the fights as also easy enough that the empty spots are rarely a problem.  For this reason, no player should feel intimidated about having to bow out before a run is finished; it is possible no one would even notice.

Niche

LFR has such a huge scope of utility across all spectrum of players, that it’s hard to just pin as “raiding for casuals,” although this is the thing it is typically billed as.

However incomplete that statement might be, though, it is still very much true.  With the difficulty level so low, even someone who has never played in a raid environment can stumble through it successfully.  The tool is an amazing way to let players see the raiding content they might have not otherwise dared to try.  The DPS checks are minimal, and even a few stronger players can balance out a handful of inexperienced ones.

Additionally, with the [currently] very short queues for DPS and healers, players who don’t raid due to lack of time may also find LFR to be an exceptional tool.  Not longer do forays into raiding content require regularly scheduled groups and hours and hours of attempts learning new bosses and farming old ones.  Instead, these players can opt for a limited “demo” version of the raid instance on their own schedule as an alternative to seeing nothing at all.  Currently, both wings of Dragonsoul in LFR take about an hour each and with so many players in and out constantly, it is not harmful to your teammates if you need to bow out even earlier.

Another advantage is that LFR provides a way for all players, serious or casual, to have an opportunity to try raiding on an alt that they wouldn’t have otherwise raided on.   Whether you just want to get more familiar with that class, or take a break from your main, or practice with them for a potential re-roll, the tool can fulfill this niche.

The LFR tool can also be extremely helpful as a tool to help seasoned raiders become familiar with the fights in advance.  Although the stripped down nature make it nearly useless for learning the mechanics themselves, seeing even the basic version of the fight can be helpful in figuring out position, learning spawn points for adds, what that special mob or ability looks like visually, and getting a general feel for the way the particular fight works.  Instead of just watching that tankspot video, now you’re immersed in it, and you can control the camera angle and zoom yourself. Paired with a written guide or a video, I’ve found the LFR tool to be immeasurably helpful in understanding a fight.

Finally, let’s not discount the huge advantage LFR provides for gearing up new players, alts and rerolls and for filling in gearing holes on raiding characters.  It also allows for main raiders to get their set bonuses faster and get small upgrades more often, and the nerfed tier pieces will still work towards completing a set bonus.  Lastly, as a source of Valor Points, you might choose to get the currency to buy those VP items through LFR rather than LFD.  Although its steeper item level requirement means you can’t just waltz in as a fresh 85, the requirements can still be met by doing the new heroics rather than raiding.

Success Ratio

Queuing at least once weekly on four characters, I’ve had very good luck in terms of success with my LFR groups.   Most bosses take just one or two tries to down, with ample forgiveness for mistakes.  Trash wipes typically only occur when someone facepulls several packs or the boss itself (or both in the case of the slime boss).  The worst group I’ve encountered spent 45 minutes just on the first boss of part 2, which is still a good deal faster than a real raid might take, and they still went one to one shot every following boss.  In the best group, I’ve cleared part 1 of Dragonsoul in just over a half an hour on my lunch break.  The raid is definitely succeeding it its goal to be painless and easy.

Loot

You can roll on loot for each boss in LFR once per week. Once you’ve already beaten that boss, you will be ineligible to roll on loot from that boss again during the week if you continue to queue.  Many of the items are now limited to particular appropriate classes (ie, a rogue cannot roll on a strength sword).  Roll bonuses are given if you are ‘need’ rolling on an item for the spec you are queued as, so if a piece of intel/spirit mail drops, the resto and elem shaman will have an advantage on it over the enhance spec’d one, but the enhancement shaman may still roll for their offset without worrying about the item getting dusted.

The system is far from perfect and is still peppered with bugs and oversights, but overall it is a large improvement over LFD.

Attitudes

Just as any environment in which anonymous strangers are thrown together and forced to interact, LFR certainly contains its share of jerks.  Every group has the one DPS who spams Recount after every attempt to brag about his numbers, and the other guy who spends more time bitching about the weaker DPS than he does doing his own job.  You do encounter those two people who get in a fight over something petty and insist on holding up the entire raid so they can bicker over it.  And yes, there is the guy who tries to publicly shame anyone who makes a mistake or taunt everyone who dies with “newb!”   There are also people who are abusing the system by joining then going AFK, and those lazy people that don’t want to help with trash or run back after a wipe.

However, I have been largely impressed by the bulk of groups.  For every asshole throwing a tantrum, there are three people telling him to shut up.  I have encountered players who have made special effort to explain the fights to the people that ask, who give helpful call outs and reminders, who present solutions instead of complaints.  There are those people who are cheerleaders and in the face of others bitching can say, “we were really close, we can do it, we just need to be a little more disciplined.”   There have been people who win duplicate loot and gracefully hand it out to the second highest roller.  I have seen more people booted for being a jerk than I have for making mistakes or doing low DPS.

Overall, I’ve found it to be a smoother and more enjoyable experience than doing PuG five mans.  The jerks are diluted in a sea of people, and the bad players don’t hurt the raid’s success and there are always at least a couple good and patient players to help teach the inexperienced what to do.

My conclusion on LFR is that it is a wonderful tool that many people will find useful and/or enjoyable.  Since it is only a few weeks old, I suspect that once the novelty wears off and people are capped on valor goodies, the demand for running it will decrease and queue times will grow.  Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe it will still be one of the most popular game features Blizzard has ever implemented in WoW.   Love it or hate it, the thing is clearly a hit.

As Blizzard scrambles to bribe healers and tanks back into the LFG Randoms using pets and mounts, I would like to talk a little bit about one reason why we’re struggling to find people to fill these needed roles. More specifically, I’d like to talk about what it is like as a healer using the LFG tool this expansion.

The shortage of healers is due to many factors. It is true that some players just prefer DPSing. It is equally true that many people don’t like the additional responsibility that comes with playing a tank or a healer. It may also be the case that some healers were dissuaded from healing this expansion due to the increased difficulty. However, it is also because many healers have started queuing for heroics as DPS (or forgoing randoms entirely) because they are tired of being the punching bag for other players who can’t handle the increased difficulty. Of these points, only the latter one is a legitimate problem, and it is the one I am going to address.

Choosing Pew Pew Over Heals

I consider myself a decent healer on my restoration shaman. I have healed extensively since classic WoW, both in PvP and PvE, in hard modes and regular content, and doing so has been some of the most fun I have in the game. I like the increased challenge in heroic dungeons in theory, but I hate the indirect consequence that has turned every bad PuG into a nightmare of finger pointing and name calling. Healing for LFG PuGs has gone from something that was mildly frustrating on occasion to being completely unbearable anytime there is a bad player or two in the group. As a result, I just will not heal heroic PuGs anymore. If I need to random, I will take a queue that is 45 minutes instead of 5 minutes to do something I enjoy far less, just because I don’t want to deal with being the scapegoat for every other poor player in the game.

This is not an issue unique to me; I have multiple friends in the same circumstances: great healers who just don’t want to put themselves through the torture and abuse of healing PuGs anymore. I have spoken with many more who feel the same, both in-game and on the forums. Players like this may not be the majority but there are obviously enough of us to merit discussion. And while this is our choice, it does impact your LFG queue times by aggravating the existing healer shortage, which is an issue Blizzard is trying to fix as I write this very post.

LFG Heroic Dungeon Climate

In Cataclysm, heroics are designed to be more challenging than Wrath on several levels. Crowd control is more desirable and often mandatory if the team is not overgeared. Avoidable damage is far less forgiving than before, often one-shotting or severely injuring players who don’t pay attention. Healers are no longer responsible, as some like to put it, for “healing stupid.” Although design has shifted, player mentality about how heroics are “supposed” to go has not. Players still expect to be kept alive and at full health regardless of how they play. I would have thought this would have improved as the months passed and more and more players experienced the new content, but it hasn’t.

Of course, it is no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of bad players in heroic randoms because we’ve all encountered them. There are players who take the same nonchalant attitude towards heroics on their grossly-undergeared, fresh 85 tank as they might on their raid-geared main. There are tanks who refuse to use CC because their “threat is fine” even though they take massive amounts of unnecessary damage, or who are incapable of doing a pull without breaking what CC was used. There are tanks who don’t know how to kite, who are trying to tank in DPS or PvP gear, who don’t use their defensive cooldowns, or who chain pull without watching mana or waiting for the rest of the group. There are players of all varieties who stand in void zones, get cleaved by the boss, are terrible at interrupting, or who ignore the adds that need to be killed. There are lots of players that don’t run away from insta-gib mechanics, pull aggro by attacking the wrong mob or laying in too early, players who often suck at positioning, break CC or have no idea how to apply it in the first place. And of course, there are the garden-variety-bad DPSers who put out about half the amount of damage they should be, making the fights far too long.

Dual Spec:  Healer/Scapegoat

Healers have always had increased responsibility by nature of their job. They are also used to fingers being pointed at them when things go wrong (both with and without merit). Unfortunately the difficulty level of this expansion has made things far, far worse. In the past, healers could cover for people’s mistakes. And while PuGs have always full of jerks, before they were appeased by how smoothly runs went no matter how badly people played. All those stupid mistakes before really didn’t matter. Now they do. Now the people who play poorly will die. If they don’t die immediately, they run the healer out of mana later. And when that happens, the player who gets berated or booted isn’t a DPS or tank. The player who is punished the most for mistakes isn’t the person that made them: it is the healer.

It is no consolation to a healer to know that they were not at fault when booted from a group after already investing 45 minutes in a dungeon; knowing it was someone else’s mistake does not give back time lost. The fact that it is the DPS who fails at a mechanic does not make the healer feel better when they have to spend an entire dungeon being berated every time that lousy player dies. The knowledge that healing is designed so healers can’t always keep everyone topped constantly does not filter out the players demanding heals, cursing or name calling when they don’t get them immediately. It doesn’t console the healer to know that after they leave the party (either by choice or by force), the party is going to have the same problem with the replacement since the issue is the group itself. The healer is not comforted through the scapegoating just because they know that the reason they ran out of mana wasn’t because they were using improper spells but because the DPS was so bad that the fight lasted twice as long as it was supposed to. It doesn’t matter who is really to blame when a dungeoning experience has ceased to be fun and started to be legitimately stressful and draining any time a healer gets a group that is less than stellar.

Now What?

To clarify for people who tend to skim articles: this is not a complaint about Cataclysm heroics being more challenging. While I understand that some healers don’t like the new design, I’m not concerned with those players; you can’t please everyone. Overall, most healers — myself included — seem to enjoy actually having things to do in heroics, unlike Wrath heroics where we were barely needed. And the reality is, healing is not really that much harder once you learn how to manage the new playstyle assuming people aren’t taking excessive damage.  However, it seems like a design failure when an indirect result of the difficulty level is that players who like healing and prefer to heal refuse to do so because being brutalised by other players — who regularly do take excessive damage — has made a job they previously loved into a miserable experience.

Blizzard obviously can’t control the actions of their players, but their design does influence the environment and attitude, and one could argue it is precisely that design that is encouraging players to act poorly. As long as the punishment for failing at a mechanic is damage to a player, healers will be blamed regardless of whose fault it actually is. Between this and the fact that you need addons for tracking fails or discerning death reports (the default combat log is too incomprehensible for the average players), it far too easy to shift the blame towards the healer because the punishment for every mistake is damage, the very thing healers are tasked with solving.

I don’t know of an elegant solution to these circumstances without reverting heroics to super easy and giving healers godmode again, which I don’t think anyone wants. However, I think the issue is worth discussion. There has to be some other way to keep the challenge level while keeping individual player responsibility from drifting to other players. Perhaps possible alternative solutions should be explored, whether it is changing the consequences for failing at mechanics to something that gimps DPS or threat (like Putricide’s slime debuff) rather than damage or deaths, or making it easy to see why someone died or why things went wrong within the default UI.

What do you think?  Have you had similar experiences?  Have you been kicked from a PuG you were healing for someone else’s mistake, or seen it happen to another?  Do you still heal in LFG PuGs?

Survey any raider on the worst offenses one of their fellow raiders can commit, and you will generally find they fall under one of the following four categories. While no raider is perfect, a good player will always be aware of how their behaviour affects their teammates and will make good effort to make sure these sins do not occur.

Making People Wait On You

Time rules a raider’s schedule. Whether it’s getting that one last attempt in before calling it for the night or plowing through trash to get to the boss, everything is balanced around the amount of time a raid gets together each lockout period. Time is the most precious commodity a raider can have and nothing makes people angrier than those who waste it for everyone.

Sins:
• Showing up late
• Taking excessive AFKs
• Waiting until immediately before start time to buy flasks or gems, set up addons, or get enchants.
• Failure to travel to instance in advance and expecting a summons

Being Unrealiable

Raiding, like many sports, is all about teamwork. Raiders rely and count on each other, and the mark of a good raid is making your strengths work together and balancing out each other’s weaknesses. Unreliable people erode the framework of cooperation at the foundation. If a player can’t count on his teammate, the raid’s performance stunted and resentment festers between members.

Sins:
• Having a poor internet connection
• Failure to respond to the calendar invites
• Habit of not showing up when promised
• Being distracted during raid time

Showing An Obvious Lack of Effort For Your Role

Although being a good raider means being able to work well with your raiding peers, every player has an individual responsibility to prepare him to contribute to the group as best they can. This means doing research on the class you play, the instance you’ll be visiting and your roles and duties within. A good player will be proactive about reading guides and strategies, monitoring patch notes for changes and keeping up with relevant theorycrafting and always showing up for a raid prepared.

Sins:
• Failure to keep gear gemmed and enchanted
• Ignorance about class playstyle
• Lack of research on boss strategies or guides
• Showing up in the wrong spec or gear
• Didn’t bring proper consumables or reagents

Bad Attitude

By sheer virtue of being an activity that involves working closely with other people for many hours of the week, raiding is a highly social activity. While knowledge and skill may rule a raid’s success, the attitude of a raid controls how happy the players are with that group. People who harm the social dynamics of a raid are like a poison, causing disharmony, hurt feelings, a tense atmosphere and making raiding feel more like work than a hobby.

Sins:
• Blaming other people constantly
• Excessively offering unsolicited advice and critiques
• Being mean, rude, or belittling teammates
• Whoring loot at the expense of others
• Dominating voice chat constantly
• Inability communicate issues in a constructive fashion.

The addon Gearscore is a very hot topic for discussion right now. At any given point in time, there are dozens of threads on WoW related forums on the issue, and if you ask just about anyone, they’ll have a strong feeling on the issue one way or another. That’s not to say people over-obsessing about gear is a new development in WoW: It certainly isn’t, and certainly not an issue created by Gearscore itself.   Gearscore is simply the flavour-of-the-month means to do something people have already been doing since the advent of MMOs.

To weigh in myself, I can understand the feelings of hostility people have. While in a vacuum, Gearscore can be seen as benign or even helpful, but it has been tainted by the community.  Although it’s not the addon itself that is at fault, it has had a very negative impact on the mentality of current players.  In addition to encouraging the usual gear-obsession, its extreme permeation and popularity has shifted the philosophy and approach to gear valuation for raiders. It has caused people to judge gear based solely on where it drops and the item level it has.  I have encountered new players that assume that “higher number” automatically equals better.  I have also noticed that it has made older players lazy about spreadsheeting upgrades to see if a recent drop really is better. Worse, I have crossed some who may even know an item is better but still wear the worse-but-higher-ilvl piece instead just because they know that half the people around them are judging them based on their “score.”  Players, good and bad, just end up so focused and obsessed on that bottom-line number that they’ve minimised the importance of actually being better in favour of looking better.

However, I absolutely support a raid leader’s choice to require a particular gear level when planning PuGs or investigating subs and new members. I disagree quite strongly with all the people who insist that gear is totally irrelevant or those who imply the people who care are just stuck up elitists. While personally I don’t use any sort of standardized gear scoring system (website or addon), I do regularly utilise the armory to check both gear and experience when seeking out players to fill open positions. I make no apologies for doing so.

If you are of the mind that such behaviour is unfair, consider the other side of that coin:

I am a “serious casual” raider, a raid captain, a raid leader, and a guild leader. I have hosted countless PuG and impromptu raids, including running weekly “farming” 25mans in at least four different instances over two expansions. I am the sole leader of an ICC10, and I am an officer who helps lead an ICC25 raid, which is where I find myself most frequently investigating newcomers. My raid is not “hardcore” or on the cutting edge of progression, but we share a commitment to clearing the content. We devote only a few hours each week to raiding, so we are diligent about making sure those precious hours are spent being productive towards our goals and towards becoming a better raid. So when it is time to fill an open spot, you can bet I’m going to make sure fill it with the best possible option, not just in terms of class balance but also gear and experience.

I’m not doing this to be elitist. I’m doing this because the “raid” belongs to all 25 of us and it is not fair to my raidmates — who have put in hundreds of hours, thousands of gold on gear upkeep, consumables and repair bills, who have worked very hard on their accomplishments, who spent time outside the game researching their class, reading strategies, watching video guides, and participating in “how can we improve” discussions on our forums – to bring in people who have NOT done these things and expect them to make up the difference. It is irresponsible leadership to risk wipes on tough enrages in order to test out the skill of some guy wearing blatantly inappropriate armor. It is improper to ask them to waste their valuable time explaining the fights to new players just for the sake of “giving them a chance.” They did not sign up for that, it is not their responsibility or obligation, and it is simply unacceptable for raid leadership to compromise the raid’s hard-earned progress needlessly.

I have absolutely nothing against those people in non-raiding gear, nor do I have any ill will for those who are new to raiding (in fact, I wish them the best of luck in my favourite aspect of the game). Everyone has to start somewhere. But the caveat is: a progression raid is not that somewhere. So, yes, I owe it to my raid to be discriminatory. They shouldn’t be expected to concede — or even risk — their successes for a stranger. You’re not being fair if you don’t look at things from that perspective.

Being exclusionary in this context is not being snobbish or cruel to new players. They have other options. Those players can simply look for another raid in more-appropriate content for their gear and experience level, or seek out a raid that is dedicated to aiding new players (they exist; I know because I have also helped lead one of those). Most promising of all, they can start their own raid! Most current raiders did not ride in on the coattails of raiders before them; a large number of us headed fresh into the new content at the same time and moved forward together. If we could do it then, so can new players today. You just have to be willing to put in the effort to work your way up from more suitable content rather than waiting for an advanced raid to carry you along tiers above your gear level.

Finally: Yes, skill matters significantly. There are lots of bad, unskilled and/or lazy players across all gear and progression levels. But let’s be practical here: there is no means to “look up” someone’s skill or rank their performance. So raid leaders use what tools are available to them: checking past accomplishments and gear level. Yes, that guy in blues might be a better player than the guy in ilvl 264 epics (side note: why do people in these discussions always assume the circumstances to be where the guy in blues is amazing and the guy in epics is terrible?), but you’d be a fool to take the guy in blues over the guy in epics without knowing either of them. I have no reason to assume either of them is better or worse than the other, so I am going to suppose they are both average players. If they are both average, then you take the best geared and most experienced, of course. It’s common sense. The player in purples certainly has more potential, more experience and, on the off chance he does have weaker skills, more gear that will balance that out, and to push him ahead if he does exhibit proficiency; the odds are vastly in his favour.

The armory let’s us look at more than just gear: we can also tell if they were good enough that a raid kept them around for multiple kills (a raid might carry you through one or two kills but probably not months of them). Yes, it’s possible he’ll die to the fire 20 seconds in, but if he’s had eight kills worth of practice on the fight — and the new guy has none AND will also need us to spend 10 minutes explaining the fight — I’m going to bet on Mister Epics living longer and putting out better results with the added bonus of less downtime for the rest of my team. That is a bet I will win nearly every time.

And let’s not kid ourselves: gear matters. The best skilled player in the world still will be incapable of meeting our DPS requirements if he’s not wearing raiding gear. There is a DPS ceiling based on gear quality; Playing well will make you exceed other similarly-geared players of lesser skill and it can bring you closer to your perfect spreadsheet figure, but it’s not magical and it’s not going to put you on par with people who vastly outgear you because that’s simply a numeric impossibility.