Wednesday, November 21, 2007

I walked barefoot to school, through the snow, uphill--both ways

That's what it's like talking to old school players like me. We love to tell the "newbies" to the game what it was like in the old days. There is something to be said for the old days. Our hunters didn't misdirect, they pulled with something big then feigned next to the tank. We counted sunders instead of looking how much aggro the tank had. And we waited for visual cues that the boss was doing something special (like casting a heal). Nowadays, we have new skills for the hunters. And we have mods that tell us when we're about to pull aggro--or when the boss is going to do something special.

But I've noticed on a few fights that some of these new-fangled things don't work quite so well. In particular, let's talk about the Maiden of Virtue in Karazhan. She does this repentance thing that stuns everyone in the room for about 12 seconds. And no boss mod that I've tried can predict exactly when she's going to do it. She's a finicky lady that way.

And it's in these cases that the training that the oldbies received in places like Molten Core and Zul'Gurub starts to pay off. We just live with a boss warning mod that doesn't tell us exactly what's coming when. I've even seen newer players really complain about pulling threat when "the tank was a good five kay over me." In some cases it's the mod. In some cases it's the player not understanding aggro.

But in each of these cases, I get just the slightest smile and remember the old days.

2 comments:

K said...

The Maiden may be a finiky lady, but she can't resist a healadin. :)

Anonymous said...

It's quite misleading to imply that the popular bossmods are doing the wrong thing for abilities like Repentance. The Repentance cooldown is tracked completely accurately by BigWigs (and I would assume DBM). Same for, say, Akil'zon's Storm in ZA.

It seems many people fail to understand that "always cast every X seconds" is not the same as "has an X second cooldown".