Friday, May 30, 2008

My anonymous friend returns

I'm a bit slow off the mark, but on scanning the comments on my Kara post a moment ago, I discovered I had the following.

"I was pulling aggro all over the place on Netherspite and some of the trash we did, even with Salv up, so I figure I must have been doing something decent."

Uh... what? No, it just means:

1) You don't know how to manage your threat.

2) You're not running a threat meter.

3) Your tanks blow.

How you can pull aggro during Netherspite is beyond me, since it's virtually a no-aggro fight, unless you decided to attack him right after he phased which is obviously something you shouldn't do.

Good Hunters top the damage meters without pulling aggro with or without Salv. Get Recount, get Omen2, and seriously, re-check your gear because 36% crit and 1978 AP fully raid buffed with stacked consumables is questionable at best."


I've noticed I've had probably a total of three comments of this nature now. Although the IP address and block are different in each case, I'm fairly sure the same individual is responsible for all of them. The context differs a little each time, but the content is basically a refutation of more or less anything I write with,

"You're terrible.
You're terrible.
You're terrible.
You're terrible.
You're terrible.
Oh, by the way, did I mention that you're terrible?"

To counter this specific troll; I also actually have Recount, and Diamond Threat Meter, because I discovered not long after 2.4 that Omen didn't really work well any more. I don't simply use a threat meter for groups/raids, but I actually use them for soloing as well, and have since around six weeks after the start of KTM's initial development.

I've also been doing testing not only with Recount, but with a couple of other DPS meters as well, since Recount apparently hasn't worked terribly well since 2.4 either.

If I suck in any major area, it's primarily in the area of making money in the game, and I admit that freely. Pre-2.4 I would have needed a flying mount to get attuned for Kara, and I wasn't able to make that amount of money until primal prices spiked to the degree they did, due to the introduction of dailies.

It's interesting; I'm actually noticing that as the game's population steadily diminishes, the voices of persistent, elitist trolls like the above are actually steadily growing louder. I haven't been going into the forum anywhere near as much recently, because lately it's been sinking to new levels of toxicity every time I do. I've noticed the forum tendency to refer to people as terrible or bad has risen sharply since 2.4.

I admit; I have a different set of priorities to the competitively minded individuals who keep telling me how bad I am.

It took me close to two years to get this character to 70; part of the reason for that was giving people run throughs to a greater degree than I should have, but part of it was also due to the simple fact that I was enjoying levelling to such an extent that I actually wanted to make it last. Truthfully, I'd probably prefer to still be levelling rather than at the cap even now; I enjoyed questing and still having new places to go.

I've never been able to understand people who try and race to the cap as quickly as possible. To me that defeats the entire purpose of the game, and I also notice that such people are also those who make posts in General about feeling burned out and quitting. They've torn through the content without even touching most of it; and yet they insist that the only reason why others aren't as fast as they are is because said others are supposedly incompetent.

When primal farming, my rate of per-mob kills is also exceptionally slow. I generally use the duration of my traps as the time it takes me to do it, since as I've written I lean very heavily on them.

Yet this also is done for a reason. When the pet threat generation nerfs came in 2.4, raiders who attacked every mob as though it was a raid boss complained long and loudly on the forum that their pets could no longer hold aggro.

For me, the threat nerfs caused barely a ripple. I ended up having to get a new pet, yes, but truthfully that was also partly motivated by what Alumatine had written about Wind Serpents being great pets anyway. For dailies and farming, I use lower level ammo and rely on dots. Per mob, I'd be lucky to break 300 DPS in most cases, yet it also means that mobs stay off me, and if I get adds, I can literally kill half a dozen of them before dying myself. It also means I get to choose what I want to see happen based on individual circumstances. There are going to be times when I need to go very slowly if I want to avoid corpse running. Other times, I'll be in a safer scenario and feeling impatient, so I'll willingly trade safety and mana efficiency for faster kills.

My point, fairly simply, is this. Nothing I've done in this game is likely to be what this game's elitists would consider remotely impressive; however, what I do is done for a conscious, and deliberate reason. It works for me, according to my set of priorities, not yours.

If you're someone who feels a need to try and down a raid boss before anyone else on the planet; that's great. Realise however that for the most part, that genuinely isn't something that's important to me. If it truly was, I probably would have put a lot more energy into trying to make it happen.

The problem is when you assume that your priorities and goals are somehow more legitimate than someone else's, when they truly aren't. Killing Illidan isn't going to alter your offline situation in life in any way whatsoever.

When you call someone terrible, the standards by which you're judging them are arbitrary, subjective, and ultimately entirely meaningless. What you're really saying is that that other person fails when it comes to meeting your individual goals within the game. You're not realising or caring about the fact that said other person likely has a completely different set of goals entirely, and doesn't care whatsoever about yours.

As an example, according to my criteria, someone ending up corpse running or having to kite during dailies or primal farming could possibly do with some improvement. The reason why I don't care about the raid progression of someone who that happens to is because, in a raid instance, you've got human-played tanks in front of you. In your mind I might be a scrub because I'm not in BT yet, but I've put priority on learning how to take care of myself in scenarios where I don't have 9 or 24 other people looking after me.

See how stupid us judging each other like that is?

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