Greedy Goblin

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Don't CR DPS FFS!!!

I'd like to address a particularly dumb thing in WoW: there are a limited amount of combat resurrections in a boss encounter for reviving fallen members. The canon says "don't combat res damage dealers", because later a more important healer or tank can die and you'll need a combat res then.

Why is it dumb? Because there are two possibilities:
  • All damage dealers are needed to kill the boss before the time is up. This case the dead one needs to be combat ressed or we run out of time.
  • Not all damage dealers are needed to kill the boss in time. This case why are they so many?
For some weird reason the raids are running with theoretical minimum tanks and healers and excess damage dealers. I always get comments for inviting a third tank and extra healers. "lol thiz needs 2 tankz and 6 hilz" - I got yesterday when I had 3+8. But this way we didn't wipe when one of them died (and the whiner was kicked).

Below the mythic (highest) difficulty, the boss can be killed with 10-20% of the raid being AFK. The question is, why give the unneeded spots to damage dealers? For a few seconds faster kill? I rather give these extra spots to tanks to make their complicated work much easier and to healers to keep everyone up. But if I do so, the damage dealers are no longer in excess and should be combat ressed if they fall.

It looks obvious that if you can have multiple "spare parts" you keep a few from each kind, instead of having lot of from one kind. Then the question rises, why does it happen the wrong way? In top raids you have no excess spots. They must go with minimum tanks and healers because even with that the kill in time is in doubt. Lower raids don't accept being lower. In the first week, they aren't worse geared than the top guilds, yet they blame their lower performance on lower gear. If we'd assume that they are less geared, we indeed need more damage dealers to provide the same DPS. The truth is that they are less skilled and create more mistakes. In this case we need more players in the critical roles, not in the much more tolerant damage dealer positions.


PS: some people doubted my statement that the purpose of Goons is to rat in Deklein. Here is the undisputable evidence.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

One person rated is undisputable evidence that the whole group is trying to do that? I saw an NPC corp player mining in a frigate. I guess that's evidence that all NPC players are trying to mine in frigates.

And the reason they get more DPS is pretty simple - there's always more DPS waiting to join while tanks and healers are more sought after. That and because when a tank joins and is one of 2 tanks, he knows he' got at least a 50% shot at tank gear. If there's 3 tanks that drops to 1/3. Same with healers. They can choose to be picky about which group they join, so why would they choose to stay in a group where they were just an extra and could get booted?

Anonymous said...

Your approach is good for a PuG.

In a guild however, you don't want to just kill the boss, you also want your players to practice the skills they need to do harder content. Using the minimum number of healers and tanks is better for this. With too many healers, raiders will develop bad habits of standing in fire since they will just be healed up, and the healers will just snipe each other instead of doing proper triage.

With the minimum number of healers, dps who stand in fire die and learn not to do that, and healers get good practice. Of course there will be much more dps than is needed to kill the boss, but competition to beat each other on meters can help get dps not to slack on this.

Babar said...

I agree with this, in a pug it's pretty smart to have extra tanks and healers, as long as the dps can keep up.

If you're running with a regular group or a guild, then the "Don't ress dps"-ting is also wrong because it creates a defeatist attitude among your raiders. When you don't CR people, you create an atmosphere where everyone expects failure. At least from personal experience, when I raided, my group had much better progress when we always ressed anyone who died immediately.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but a general rule in a fixed group, I say ress whoever dies.

Anonymous said...

The encounters due to "flex size" are undertuned in dps needed, Had you tried to bring extra tanks and healers on content from cata you would simply wipe due to boss enrage or there would be some other mechanic that would wipe the raid, ofc this is assuming the players runing said raid were not overgeared in wich case it was also preferable to replace a healer for another dps to clear faster.
Note: I said cata because that was the last time I ran any kind of organized raid content

Anonymous said...

Bringing additional tanks doesn't really bring anything to the raid. Tank's job in the raid is the easiest(and most boring) one and such, they are the least likely role to fail (I'm maining a tank and while it's interesting to play in 5 man heroic or challenge mode, not so much in raids). The number of tanks needed for an encounter is 100% dictated by the mechanics - each additional 'tank' you bring is really just a gimped damage dealer. Yes, if one of your tanks dies, he can pick up his job, but so can a dps DK/Warrior/Feral, at least for the few seconds while the tank get ressed and healed. And if the tank doesn't die... they bring you damage comparable with any other dps, while a Protection Paladin smacking the boss with other dps classes will be glad for half of that.

Bringing more healers makes more sense, especially in WoD. In previous expansions, with the spammy healing style, most of the additional healing brought by another healer simply turned into an overheal - everyone was either topped or dead. With WoD's wtyle of steady, sustained damage instead of 'heal tank immediately or the next hit kills him', bringing more healers definitely sounds viable.

As for bringing additional dps - here, the advantages are obvious. faster boss kill, adds die faster, certain mechanics get easier (i.e. Butcher enraging at 30% - sure, more healers will mean that your team can last longer (delay that critical point when they inevitably fail), but then, bringing additional dps has the same result - you simply kill him before your healers get to that critical point in the first place)

daniel said...

"some people doubted my statement that the purpose of Goons is to rat in Deklein"

when did anybody ever doubt that, and who?

Rollory said...

My experience in this sort of thing is with SWTOR, not WOW, and mainly as a DPS (some also as a healer). That said: 16-man story-mode operations can be done 2 DPS short, but only if the rest of the DPS are a solid team and know they can rely on each other. Having a 3rd tank in the mix tends to just confuse things; the maintank and offtank usually know exactly what they're supposed to be doing and when and where, and if one of them goes down it's because somebody seriously screwed up, and tossing in a third replacement tank will just confuse everyone (not least the healers, who need to suddenly switch mental gears as to who their primary is, which is a good way to have another tank go down anyway). In 8-man operations you definitely cannot afford to be short any DPS; I've been in 8-man groups where people were in DPS slots but were specced for tank or heal, and EVERYBODY had to pile on all the DPS they possibly could to make up for the lack (and several of us were well overgeared too). There's some situations where you can have a class that can go either tank or DPS be specced DPS but keep some tank abilities available (taunt in particular), and that works ok for offtanking if you have more than 2 bosses to handle at once. However, as a DPS, and a pretty darn good one (I regularly pull aggro from our tanks, who are excellent), I would never ever want extra tanks or heals in the group - it isn't necessary, it makes things harder for everybody because everybody has to work to put out extra DPS to make up for it, and it doesn't help in any way if people are doing what they are supposed to; even tanks and heals completely new to the fights can usually handle it if they're just given an explanation beforehand, but there's no way they can make up for missing DPS if for some reason it's falling short - and I would never ever want to be combat-rezzed in a boss fight. Losing 10% of your DPS when you're 2/3 of the way through the fight is one thing; starting off short on DPS from the very start of the fight is quite another.

It may be that SWTOR's storymode operations are a bit less forgiving than WOW raids for run of the mill players. Or it may be that the difference in DPS output between pure DPS and tank specs is much greater in SWTOR. I do know that in 4-man groups for heroics where I've seen multi-tank groups, it can take for freaking ever to kill things; and my tank character takes much longer to get through solo content than my DPS.

nightgerbil said...

Rollory yeah Swtor is harder then wow. I've tanked both. I've tanked every raid on my Sith Jug and most on my tankasin including dread palace. I also tanked Soo flex and every Mop lfr.

I haven't tried Highmaul yet, but Gevlons def right that many fights are easier to tank if you have 3 rather than 2 tanks. Off the top of my head general Naz and Iron Jug would both have been simpler/less likely to fail in a pug, if we had brought a 3rd tank.

*vlad* said...

You want tanks and healers to be at a minimum in proper raid progression, because boss enrage is likely to be an issue when you are undergeared.

In lfr or whatever it's called now, it's quite likely that the dps who die have no clue what is going on and if you ress them they are likely to die to the same mechanic the next time it occurs; hence it's a waste of time ressing them.

Anonymous said...

In a PuG you should not ress the DPS because he is most likely an idiot while if the tank dies you gotta wipe (our tank actually solo tanked HC bosses already in PuGs but thats a diff discussion). People need to get used to there not being the default of 3 combat resses available.

Regarding tanks, there is a reason why Method is 2nd and Paragon 1st and it is quite related to Method insisting on 2 tanking the boss instead of 3. 3 tanking often solves a lot of issues. I have even suggested to duo tank some CMs. Related to these events, Method's tank even got demoted for slacking.

And there are many more examples in various difficulties. Examples of warlocks tanking, 3 tanking Norushen for the adds in LFR, kiting the adds on Garrosh (old) HC.

The solution? Reduce tank DPS. I thought they'd do this and maybe they think they did by removing vengeance but then you didn't do CMs with a pala/DK/monk tank, but yeah, its Blizzard...