Apr 14 2011

The Problem With [not] Healing PuGs

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?

Jul 30 2010

Gear valuation and addons like “Gearscore”

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.