Solve The Immediate Problem

I'm a programmer.  When writing code, it's common for something to go horribly wrong.  When a program fails, you look at the result, trace it back to a root cause, research the cause, find a solution, and implement it.  In World of Warcraft, when learning difficult content, it's common to wipe on a boss.  What do you do after a wipe?

In my ideal world, after everyone dies, you look for the root cause of the wipe.  Maybe a tank died.  Did he die because he positioned the boss wrong and was out of range of healers?  Did he die because he failed to click a tanking CD?  Did he die because healers were busy with something else?  Maybe there wasn't enough DPS and the boss enraged.  Did people spend too much time running from place to place?  Were there multiple targets, and the DPS were focused on the wrong target?  Don't just look at the base cause, look at the root cause, dig deep until you can figure it out.

When a root cause is determined, then you find a solution.  Look for something that you can realistically change in order to bring the fight closer to completion.  If the tank was in the wrong place, make sure he knows where the right place is next time.  If there aren't enough heals to go around, add a healer.  If there's too much movement, determine a new place to tank the boss.

When you've determined a cause and decided on a solution, and this is the absolute hardest part, PUT IT INTO EFFECT IMMEDIATELY.  Don't sit around and argue about the effects of a solution, don't wait thirty minutes while you decide if it's the best possible solution.  Just come up with something and try it.

Ultimately, this is my largest issue with attempt limited bosses.  I would prefer to be able to test a variety of strategies quickly, but attempt limits really require that you focus on as many different problems per attempt as you possibly can, which leads to long debates between boss pulls, which turns raiding from a skill check to a forum discussion.  Ah attempt limits, is there any problem I can't trace back to you?

Bad Information Pisses Me Off

So, I follow Gravity's twitter feed.  Occasionally it leads me to an interesting blog post, because he apparently reads every WoW blog in the history of ever.  Today, bored at work for a bit, I ran into this post about some random guilds experiences with Festergut and Rotface.  I enjoy reading about other people, it's always interesting to see what people are doing and how they think.  However, I noticed this line standing out:

Remember: infections increase over time, and are not tied to Rotface’s hp, so bring the pain fast and hard is essential.

 This is wrong.  The quickest way to work that out is to check kill times.  He was complaining about 7 minutes being too long for the fight to drag on and that they were getting overwhelmed around the 6 minute mark.  Our slow kill of Rotface took 4 minutes.  We were getting overwhelmed around the 3 minute mark.  I pulled down parses of the two fights, checked the time difference between applications at the start and end of the fights.  Unless I'm highly mistaken, and I'm willing to be proven mistaken, the point at which it swaps from one timer to another is entirely based on HP, not time.  I left the numbers at work and I'm not going to pull them down again right now.

--Update:  A comment was left on his site explaining what they think is happening, my data (in a comment on this post and that post) does not seem to match up with thier datamined information
--Update 2:  I stand corrected, there are links to WoWhead timers that appear to be correct in the 2nd comment on this post.


I flipped through his site a little bit looking for more information, how he decided it was HP related, anything really.  That led me to this post also about Rotface. But these interesting tidbits:

1. Don’t run in a circle around the room

 Wrong!  You do want to run a circle around the room.  There's no reason not to.

3. Don’t run through a tank spill unless your Hand of Freedom is off cooldown

 Wrong!  If you're kiting properly, you'll be so far ahead of your ooze that the slow from going through a spill will not cause you to enter melee range of your ooze.  If you can't get freedom, pop a cooldown (A damage reduction one).  That'll negate the damage you take from the ooze while you run through until you can get back in range of a healer.

In terms of deadliness: big ooze melee > running big ooze through raid > running over the tank spill.

 Wrong!  If you run the ooze through the raid, every member of your raid will take 8,000 damage every 2 seconds.  If someone gets Mutation, they're in danger of dying.  If your tank doesn't dodge for a bit, he could take heavy spike damage.  The alternative is to move Rotface around.  Guess what happens when you move Rotface... Your DPS goes down!  Considering that his major problem with the fight was the duration of the encounter and that he's using a strategy that mandates bringing extra healers and moving around a lot, I'm really not surprised


It just bothers me like hell when someone posts information that is wrong and dangerous.  It bothers me when someone posts helpful strat info on a boss they failed to kill.

All It Takes Is One

So, back in BC there was this cool thing where you needed consumables to raid.  Slap a temporary buff on your weapon, eat your food, pop your flask, chain pop mana potions, and if you find some odd consumable that mysteriously stacks with everything else be sure to use that too.  The result was hours of farming to do serious raiding.  Thousands of gold poured into spamming hundreds of consumables a night just to remain competitive.  And of course bosses then have to be designed around that.  If you could spend a thousand gold to double your HP for 10 minutes, bosses would have to hit twice as hard.  If they didn't, you could spend a grand to trivialize the encounter.  But if they crank the boss damage, you have to spend a thousand gold or the encounter is impossible.

As long as there is an extreme end which a guild can go to in order to trivialize content, all it takes is one guild to do it for the entire game to fall apart.  As soon as guild #1 goes for it, every other guild has to go for it as well to remain competitive.  Guilds that can't put in the time will fall by the wayside.  They'll complain that it's unfair or dumb.  It doesn't matter how dumb or unfair the situation is, competitive guilds will have to do it.  In BC, this was consumable farming.  In Cataclysm, I fear it will be alt raids.

Attempt limits were put in place to prevent people from giving a boss 300 attempts per kill and to prevent guilds that can raid for 8 hours a night from getting guaranteed world firsts just by slamming their heads into content.  I will tell you right now that if this keeps up for Cataclysm, attempt caps will make the situation worse.  Consider a guild that can raid 40 hours a week vs a guild that can raid 12.  If an attempt takes 10 minutes and you have 30 attempts, that's 300 minutes or 5 hours.  Guild 2 does 5 hours of effort split across two nights and is done for the week.  Guild 1 does 5 hour of effort, then mandates 35 hours of leveling alts.  Given a month's time, Guild 2 does 5 hours of effort for their 30 attempts while Guild 1 does 10 hours of effort-  30 attempts with their mains and 30 attempts with their alts.  Then they mandate 30 hours of leveling per week.

This situation is inevitable.  The only question is which guild will start the madness season.  I desperately hope that Blizzard does something to counter the attempt cap issue before it gets out of hand;  I'd prefer a BC style 10 hours of farming per week to making Cataclysm's high end a game of who can level the most alts fastest.  It will be a nightmare of epic proportions.

PS, there are already guilds powerleveling secondary mains to 80 to run same-class alt raids, this isn't some far-fetched "maybe one day" future.

Care

Right now, you are reading a blog I write about World of Warcraft.  Either you care about WoW or you care about me.  Lets just assume it's the WoW thing.  You care about this topics enough to take some time out of your day, engage your mind and learn something.  This isn't unique.  Odds are you read other WoW blogs.  Odds are you read EJ and you occasionally discuss WoW with real-life friends.

Odds are, when you join a 5-man heroic group you are the one doing the carrying, not the one being carried.  And therein lies the problem.  Jeff Atwood explained this concept a long time ago in relation to programming.  People who come to a website to learn are people who already know too much.  The people we need to help are the people in heroics, the people in Dalaran, the people in those trash low-tier guilds that are working on Ulduar, or would have been except TOC and the first part of ICC gives them better gear easier.  The problem is that those people will never come to this site, or EJ, or most likely even the WoW forums.  I have no problem with that.  Some people will be better at WoW than others.  Those people simply don't care about their performance in WoW.

Care is an interesting thing.  It defines everything in life.  If you care about doing your job well, you'll most likely research it in your spare time, work to better your performance, and eventually be recognized for your effort.  If you care about your significant others, family, or whoever else you have in your life, you'll put in the time it takes to solidify meaningful relationships.  And if you care about a video game, I guarantee that you will master it.

I don't have much more than a warm fuzzy feeling to throw out there.  Just make sure that you care about the things you do and you do the things you care about because really that's the key to happiness.  And if you ever want a job done right, from fixing a car to getting a piercing to landing on the moon, try to make sure the job is done by someone who cares about it, not someone who's just doing what they have to.

Life lesson of the day.  Whenever I get around to my next post, I'll explain what happens when 33 people care way too much about a damn video game.