September 20, 2009
The deep end.
I heard something in guild chat last night which chilled me to the bone and summed up how I’ve been feeling about the game of late.
The comment, to one of our levelling warriors who will be flip-flopping MT/OT roles with me when we’re both ready was this (when discussing gearing up):
“Forget Naxx, just run heroics, gear up and get into Uld”.
I just stared at the screen in quiet disbelief…
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been running a lot of heroics the last week or so. For 2 reasons:
1) For emblems so I can greatly improve my gear’s ilevel and stats.
2) So I can learn to tank many and varied scenarios to help prep me for bigger and tougher encounters yet to come.
Seems to me that skipping Naxx and heading straight into Uld is a bit like taking your driving test having never actually driven a car before.
Ok, so many of the members of my guild have progressed through Naxx already and yes, they’re chomping at the bit for bigger and better things, but I still feel it’s a useful, valuable, if not vital experience for any up-and-coming player to make these progression runs.
Before WOTLK, my old guild had a “No Boosts” policy. This upset some players but was a necessary policy since it forced people to run dungeons in properly formed groups. This experience taught the principles of group mechanics and also let them learn how get the best out of their class to support the group’s success.
Now, when I enter an Heroic, 99% of the time people just want to run it as fast as they can, AOEing everything down ASAP and flexing their DPS Epeens for ‘easy emblems’…
Having blasted down everything in sight for a few weeks, then strapped on their shiny new ilevel 226 purples, they feel ready for Uld because “My DPS is 3k+”.
Whoop-de-doo. What’s the point in having earth shattering DPS if you don’t know how to behave in a group, can’t follow the RL’s instructions, repeatedly rip aggro off the MT making the healers work harder than necessary and causing wipe after wipe because you were too damned lazy to make appropriate progression runs to ensure you knew what the hell you were supposed to be doing in a raid group!!!
/sigh
Maybe, I said too much… maybe it wasn’t enough.
Rant over; need to run some more heroics then it’s off to Naxx at the earliest opportunity.
I’m not ready for Uld yet!
Q
