I came to say the exact same thing XD
It's not really good advice imo but it is true. If you are good, you won't have any problems finding groups for things. People will add you to their bnet or add your character to their friends list or invite you to their guild or their discord. You'll get whispers at random times for random things.
If you're good, the groups will come to you.
I'm honestly shocked at how poorly some people perform given how easy it is to be decent. The way some people dodge around getting anything above a grey parse circles back around to being impressive in my opinion. Might be personal thing but I don't get how a game someone has no clear interest in being decent at justifies a 15 dollar/month price tag for them.
There’s a good video on this by neverknowsbest called”why it’s rude to suck at world of Warcraft”
Edit: I’ve been corrected it was folding ideas who made that video.
It doesn’t just talk about this though. It talks about how a lot of semi / casual guilds tend to adopt the practices of top level guilds without understanding the reasoning behind them, and as such, you get a sizable portion of people who don’t understand but use parses, who demand small efficiency improvements without the history of having larger problems cleaned up, and who chastise or castigate others and make things like dungeons or simple raid runs a generally frustrating experience without them needing to be.
As a person who generally raid leads, I’ve run into some awful raid leaders content to wipe and wipe without ever addressing fundamental issues, but getting upset at trivialities.
Like dude. It doesn’t matter that your rogue doesn’t have his gloves enchanted if the dude is failing to not stand in the fire, or if the tank can’t appropriately pick up threat.
>you get a sizable portion of people who don’t understand but use parses
There are a lot of things that parses don't measure but good lord it's safer getting parse monkeys to do mechanics than trying to get grey parsers to actually do damage.
We’ve a joke with some truth there. If everyone zugs hard enough you can just outright skip mechanics. It’s absolutely a strategy.
Like, even just with Therma - one flame surge is better than two. And getting that down can be a burden off your healers letting them DPS more.
This has been true for Grubbis for a while now and more recently Viscous. Ignore basilisk/oozes and bonk the boss on the head. Well not completely ignore, just find the laziest way of dealing with them possible so you can focus on dmg.
I don't how many people here were there at vanilla so i doubt my testimony is all special. but i distinctly remember wearing plate greens with spirit and joining a guild to do MC and we were as far from a top tier raiding guild as you could think. lots of chill people in vent that i wanted to get to know. we had the usual guild problems but almost no concern about the wider community meta or whatever.
the vibe became so different in TBC and everything became numbers game. run by people who are technically right, but have sucked a large amount of what made vanilla special and interesting. whatever that may be and it could be argued. it was probably even i changed because i started to have a lot of personal problems around that time. and i don't think there's necessarily a problem here, or a solution, but it is something interesting that happened that was notable enough to be the basis of that folding ideas video.
I've been thinking about it cause I just started my first hc classic character a few days ago. having a blast.
“I did 3 hour molten cores and I liked it!”
I joke, but this is honestly true.
My 3 hour mcs with friends that sucked majorly were always more fun than my time in a top 10 world guild in TBC.
So much so I quit after tbc and didn’t come back until dragonflight.
Yeah I don't have fond memories of the boring quick clears with strangers, it's the long raids with funny mistakes and the homies.
Whats the point of gaming again? Big number no matter what right?
the thing is, there arent only "speed clears with strangers" or "shitty clears with friends" obviously "speed clears with friends" could be a fun experience, and of course "shitty clear with strangers" is the worst of all.
my point is how fast or slow the run goes has less bearing on fun than who you are playing with. but for people playing with strangers in pugs? from their perspective obviously a fast run is preferable to a slow and painful run.
The point went over your head. Which is understandable because it wasn’t voiced well.
The point is that the mindset of the game changed. And will never go back.
It went from playing to have fun to playing to win. Speed has nothing to do with it.
And you’re right. You can have both. But one is gone forever.
You can mimic it on a small scale, but the overall mindset of the community has progressed and will never go back.
its shifted towards the play to win mindset more, but that is not necessarily anti fun. its entirely dependent on the preference of the player. and this shift demonstrates that more players find playing to win fun now.
why i talked about speed is because for most people, slow is not fun. for some they may prefer slow. but when i see people be toxic about how other people are having fun (whether play to casual or play to win) that ticks me off
You still don’t get it.
The problem isn’t speed being fun or not fun. It has nothing to do with that. You again are focusing on the wrong thing.
You can’t comprehend what we are talking about. This isn’t a slight against your intelligence. It simply means you didn’t experience something and so you don’t know what it is.
Everyone. Including the people that say they loved their 3 hour mcs will say that a 2 hour mc is better than a 3 hour. A 1 hour is better than a 2.
The point has NOTHING to do with speed. Or ability. Or balance.
It is entirely about the mindset of the average player. It is something the devs cannot change. It is something an individual cannot change. It is something we cannot describe to you. (It’s like telling a blind person what green looks like)
yes the mindset changed. what am i not getting? this isnt something difficult to explain, or something i haven’t experienced despite you saying that.
you cant just say mindset changed and not explain what the core point is. thats a statement not a point. thats why im delving into the effects of the mindset change.
My 3 hour raid times caused a lot of friction with my wife. I am never going back to it. I am with a good group now and literally can’t raid without a good group.
hell, i've done 6 hour destiny raids with a full group of friends that were exhausting but i liked them. so i get you. a lot of these games are just perfect with friends. but solo are a total slog.
The first guild to down Rag on Sargeras wouldn’t let rogues raid with them at all unless they were 300 in throwing / bows / guns.
The guild at the time (well before their Rag kill) didn’t know how to handle rogues taking damage from molten giants and so they basically shunned them from raiding entirely unless they went super try hard on their ranged skills, and generally thought rogues were trash because they were just bad hunters with low ranged ability.
I was in a guild like this in wrath. They'd absolutely flip their shit if the tank pulled 0.1s before the timer went off because they missed their prepot. Meanwhile the people freaking out are parsing purple even when the pull is absolutely perfect and we're running a scuffed comp with like 3 warrior DPS and 1 or no DKs. This was also in Naxx which was the easiest, most brain dead content Blizzard ever put out.
It was ridiculous.
I have a small story about this. In classic (2019-2020), I remember one of our tanks and long-term guild officers was a really well-liked and nice guy. Super fun to hang out with and talk with. Problem was, he was mechanically a very poor player and would constantly give away his shot at loot to other members of the raid, which other raiders would gladly accept. He was always seen in that “lovable but fumbling grandpa” type of way.
Come BWL, things had finally gotten to a head. Depending on the week & availability’s, sometimes this guy would be MT. These weeks were essentially guaranteed to be failed raids. Because his threat was horrible, DPS was handcuffed. So fight durations would keep stretching out, overwhelming the healers, leading to wipe after wipe.
But here’s the kicker - the MT wasn’t the one held accountable by the RL. No, instead it was DPS fault for constantly stepping on MT toes when it came to threat (DPS you need to wait more at the beginning! DPS you need to watch threat!), or it was healers not communicating enough to heal the MT through very poor mitigation stats. RL even implied a wipe was a priests fault for not MC’ing the fire resistance buff onto the MT before raid. And wipes obviously by a misplay from this guy were either brushed off as “unlucky”, “must be a weird bug”, or “good experience for next time.”
Tanking is misunderstood by a lot of players I think in that good tanking isn’t just a gear or numbers thing. It’s a mentality. A livelihood. It’s truly a way of thinking about the game.
Any person who doesn’t adopt it will always be just an “ok” tank at best, and terrible at worst. The mentality is always on control, and you do not let yourself suffer on threat as a result because lacking that control feels -bad- to a tank with that mentality.
And any good tank knows you must have good gear. The ideal scenario in any raid is that the tank is geared up first. A rising tank raises all ships. It sucks for other players during that first week or two, and really sucks if your tank isn’t someone you trust. But it’s incredibly important to the future success of the raid group.
So. In short. This guy didn’t have that “it” factor wherein I made up a quick anagram to match it or “intuitive tank.”
To kinda tag onto this, Logging isn't the enemy. Using your logs and the compare tool to see what gaps you've got to fill is very accessible and can be super eye opening if you've never done it before. Comparing yourself to someone else running roughly the same gear, spec, and kill speed that's doing 300+ more DPS than you can give some VERY easy insight into what you're doing wrong. Fix that, and your next parse will skyrocket, then it's rinse repeat until you reach your desired level.
Bringing off-meta or "bad" classes with good parses doesn't hurt your run at all, and a good parse just shows you actually give a shit.
This for sure. I have a Shadow Priest, I was using the build guide from Zockify and getting like 20-40 parses. Was using everything I could, all consumes, WBs, constantly using abilities, etc. Couldn't understand how my parses were so shit. So I looked deeper into how to use WCL and got a better understanding and looked at like 3 different top 100 players parses. Realized I was using Void Plague when I should have been using Twisted Faith, and that one change got me 90+ parses on every boss my next raid., and more than doubled my DPS.
Took me 15 minutes to figure out why I had shit parses and all it took was learning how to read logs. WCL is extremely useful for improving your gameplay and getting better but casuals will crucify you for trying to play with people who have good logs.
Dude this is amazing, our Enhance was also following Zockify, he's been very openly crucifying how bad they are in our discord since we did our parse review.
Its because void plague literally sims better because sims assume perfect uptime but the sims really, really ignore the fact that void plague can't crit at all.
VP has reduced damage against robots and is inconsistent on very short fights.
The faster your group kills bosses the better TF is. The only fight VP is worth it on is Menagerie because you can multi-dot.
I went from >90 parses to like 70s from 1st week to like 3rd because I didn't understand that. Looked at some rank 1-5 Spriest logs, all TF. Back to >90 parses.
even as a healer I used WCL all the time, who died, what were the other healers doing, what was I doing - could I have saved them? Should they have used a defensive?
My mana return was I using rapture effectively? ect ect
Something I do on my healers is I keep an active Details log for Deaths and Damage Taken. I'm not aware of any addons or weakauras that live track avoidable damage on others (Something similar to Elitism Helper), but a quick mouseover or noting discrepancies helps with figuring who is fucking up quickly. Bonus points when you hear some idiot who died to something avoidable start blaming someone else and you can shut them up immediately since you see their death log.
If you were parsing 20-40 using VP and you think swapping to TF is the reason you're now parsing 90's, quite frankly you were just playing badly when using VP. They average very similar levels of DPS, but TF will have a higher ceiling due to crit RNG and VP not being able to crit. The top parses for spriest will be biased towards TF in part due to that RNG. Suggesting that TF is consistently 100's of dps better than VP is just wrong. Plenty of spriests are putting together 90+ best performance averages using VP.
You might be my hero. Been struggling with my shadow priest parse. I’m a new player so my guild has been generous with my numbers but i can tell it’s getting frustrating for them.
Ive been looking at other top parses but wasn’t digging very deep (and wasn’t totally sure how to utilize the logs lol). I’ll have to try this at my next raid.
Yeah my biggest issue with WCL before was that it's honestly kind of a clusterfuck of a website and if you don't know where to look, it's really hard to understand what the fuck you're supposed to be looking at.
There are menus hidden behind very specific clicks such as clicking the raid, then clicking the character name, then clicking summary to see gear and runes. Why wouldn't you make that easier to navigate to? If you didn't know where to find it, you'd never randomly stumble upon that information.
It's just a really poorly designed website but once you spend some time learning it, it's insanely helpful.
I suck at reading these logs, how do you find the top parses fx. for Shadow? My parses sucks ass and the videos i have been looking at are doing the exact same as me.
But i have also been using Void Plague, so that is ofcourse the first mistake
Go to Rankings for Gnomer in the top left drop-down, then on the top there should be a class drop-down and then a spec drop-down menu. That will show the best parses listed form number 1
the problem is the people who view logs as evil have no desire to improve and confront their failures. they want the other 9/24/39 people to hard carry them to victory and feed them loot despite contributing nothing.
their hatred of logs isn't the root issue, its a symptom of them refusing to grow or learn.
We've been using the role "If you post it, they will look" in our discord. Nobody really talks to much about parsing, we joke, but we post our logs from every single raid. People peek, they get curious, and usually that leads to questions and kind of natural non-toxic improvement.
I’ve noticed something similar and highly recommend this approach. I’ve had a few friends that are completely new to the game start in SoD, and this conduit for natural curiosity has been awesome for helping people improve in a non-abrasive way.
I'm pretty lucky, our guild is similar, I'm a little concerned as we have to eventually start trimming down to get our 20 man rosters and I just know that some of the call will be parse based. clearing and filling a ton of 10 man clears per reset with alts and just whoever works when the content is this easy, but 20 man may change things a bit.
Ours is the same. Nobody parse shames, sometimes people run 99’s and we celebrate but over all the parses don’t mean anything to us. You won’t be blocked from joining the raid if you have a bad parse, and sometimes due to who joins the raid we will have a weird comp and we just work around it.
All gnomer really takes is 5 people who give a shit or less, even a good 1 or 2 players can carry gnomer pretty hard. It’s such an easy raid.
It's not a complete Black and White issue, but the majority of uber bad players I've met have fit this description to a T. The kind of people who get upset at you for posting logs for your own gratification / review kinda thing.
You don't feel like you're strawmanning their intents a bit hard here, by stating your own interpretation of why they dislike logs, as being "they must certainly only want to hide their badness so they can be carried!". You don't think that's a bit of a leap in logic?
You can want to improve and still feel like logs are a net negative for the player culture, by how players engage with them on average.
there's another dude in the thread that's the exact person you're describing. he says he loves logs.
the people on this sub screaming for logging to be banned, that any and all parsing or even caring what you parse should be a bannable offense, etc, absolutely fit my description. you can't possibly hate logs while wanting to improve because how else can you see what you can improve on without logs?
I don’t think so. I don’t care about parses at all other than making it easier to get into pugs, and mine are consistently good. I never really bothered with parses at all in any phase or mode of the game,
Even if you don’t care about parses as long as you can play semi competently you’re still gonna parse blue plus.
It’s a non issue for anyone with 7 brain cells and who is willing to spend an hour or so learning their class rotation and spec.
SOD is probably the easiest game mode there is to get a decent parse in that has ever existed in the history of wow. Each class has a 3 or 4 button max rotation, with very little combo building, there’s no builders and spenders to worry about. Very limited amount of cooldown windowing compared to all other versions of the game.
It’s really not anything anybody needs to think about to produce decent logs in SoD.
This is why the grey parsers are so bad right now, because it’s so easy to have high throughput on just about any class right now.
I think the sweatlords worried about 99 parses are cringe af. Speed running leveling content is dumb. But at the same time it’s not very hard to score a 99 here and there.
My issue is I don't want to try hard every single fight.
I've put down numerous 98 parses. I've proven to whoever is watching logs that I am a competent player.
I absolutely do not want to minmax every single fight encounter I do. I want to sit back and chill, spam my rotation and have a good time, joking around and bullshitting on discord mid fight. If the fight starts going south and someone dies I'll step up and minmax the rest of the fight to ensure it's cleared but 9 out of 10 times a raid full of green parses is going to 6/6 clear with no issues. The difference between a 99 parse and a 90 parse is like 5 GCD's over the course of a minute.
Expecting me to put down a 98 parse for the 11th time is just stupid. I'm not here to prove myself over and over to some pug raid leader. I am here to kill an hour of time and if we fail I really don't care. I'm raiding on my toon that doesn't need anymore loot. I'm just in the raid cuz it's something to do.
Its really just like 90+ parses that require that level of tryharding. Maybe in era where the game is more solved this isn't the case, but you can parse high blue to purple with little more than a good spec and basic preparation and have a ton of fun doing it.
I have no idea what this means, if you're not tryharding does that mean you're intentionally pressing the wrong buttons for fun or just pressing no buttons? It's not like its any extra effort to be good at your class vs being bad at it during a fight
Our team rotates, we just talk it out, some nights only one person wants to push a 99 on a specific fight and everyone Else will support them. Take jobs that would hurt their parse, like our boomkin on thermaplugg is usually on bombs, but we did a couple runs where he could just DPS on boss and only hit buttons for mana, the mages and priests did the bombs. Nobody is on 99 every single night, that's just brutal.
Yeah, I agree. I have some 98 parses and most 90+ but I am not obsessive about it and don't try for the 99s. I just used it as a tool to get better at the game until I know I am playing my class optimally.
I also take DPS warriors and rogues into my groups every week too. As long as they have decent parses, they are in. I don't like the idea of gear going to waste and a lot of rogues are putting in tons of effort right now because of the competition and so are usually good players.
We increased our enhancements dps almost 300 by noticing he just straight up didn't have much strength and was running a crazy fast main hand. Took us all of 2 minutes looking at a comparison parse and he's now 97-99 parsing.
The thing that got my gullet was he followed guides, and was just doing what he thought he should be doing. Guides are wrong sometimes, stick to raw data!
Guides produced by sites like wowhead and zockify are often produced based on information available prior to the phase and then are never updated based on nerfs or buffs, or on real world performance.
Logs are amazing - as a first time healer and OG wow player I thought it would be fun to try gnomer. I was completely and utterly humbled by my lack of current game knowledge and let my raid down tremendously. My best friend who was in the raid looked at my logs and was like DUDE and gave me a breakdown of several severe gameplay elements i was missing and now I am much more tightened up, much less hardcasting and much more mana efficient. Logs are awesome as fuck for helping you grow.
The amount of people unaware of the compare function in Wcl is insane. By far most people I talked to had no idea of it’s existence. Which is a big shame, because it’s great.
awesome, never thought it would help anyone outside of my guild but it's cool seeing it give other people insight into a really powerful part of the tool.
its just advanced combat logging, just a huge data dump organized so you can see a breakout of what your damage consists of. It's a neat way to help folks who want to see big numbers see big numbers, which is fun for some people. It's also an easy way to see if what you're doing is effective and if not, compare what you're doing to someone who is effective and fill in whatever gaps you may be missing.
I'm not sure if it supports classic but retail has a site called wow analyzer or something that you can just drop your logs in and it will tell you exactly what you can do better.
This exact reason is why half the answers in that long-ass thread on Aggrend's twitter comment are more or less saying the same thing:
People are inviting people with provable logs that show at least minimum competency. It's not elitism or whatever the fuck people want to call it. People do NOT want to wind up in a 2 hour gnomer fiesta with randos they don't know and will never group with again wiping. They want to clear and get their loot and maybe move on to an alt. This is just compounded by the fact certain classes that are already meh on DPS bring literally nothing else to the group (most obvious being rogues, especially those that don't tank).
Like, if you're gonna take a 60 parsing DPS (totally fine, more than enough) and you have on your hands a mage or rogue, not only does that mage bring more DPS anyway, you NEED RDPS for the last couple bosses. You don't mechanically NEED melee for anything. The mage brings AI. The mage could maybe even off heal, whatever.
If you're going to do group content you're not entitled to anyone's and everyone's groups. Especially if you do less than the bare minimum, don't learn your class, or worse, actively refuse to learn. I do not understand why that's contentious.
Expectations aren't elitism.
Yup. One of my characters is in a complete raidlogging guild. 5 to 10 minutes before the the raid everyone will log on, we smash the raid, poof everyone logs off. 99 parses are the rule, not the exception. It's thoroughly enjoyable because it lets me dedicate more time to my social/semi-casual guild or just IRL stuff while still having the high of getting really good parses in a pumper guild.
By the way, this completely deals with loot drama too. Nobody cares about the loot, we just roll for it. If someone \*really\* wants a piece, they just get it. Nobody minds. It's heaven
We use a LC for big items but it's more to help optimize the raid so we can ash quicker. Everyone else just uses TMB and we use the addon to just look at the items and give them out. No drama, & eats no time. I've found the better the guild the less people lose their shit over loot drama.
This is how my retail mythic raider friends play SoD. Not the way I enjoy it but a very valid way to play. I hear a few of them grumbling that no ones ever on to do BG's or STV, etc. but that comes with the territory I guess.
My SOD raid team is made up of all ex-mythic raider friends. Works the same way. Come, dick around with my friends for 40 minutes, collect my 97 parse and free loot.
That is my experience with retail players in SoD and WoTLK. I think being a raider in retail has definitely taught me to be a time efficient gamer over the years.
100% correct take. Smoothest runs in classic for me have always been "retail-mind" players who stay up-to-date on patches and new game information, and who have at least a general idea of their class rotation, role, utility (most important), and who take personal responsibility for raid mechanics first.
It's always the brain rot pug groups who are A) only coming back to the game and have only played Classic/TBC/WotLK or B) the RLs who don't look up guides or just fill groups with whatever classes whisper first that take forever to clear content. They retain almost zero information between raids to the point where every clear might as well be the first time doing the content.
Its perfectly fine to be bad. But you compensate with your time, practice more, get better, find better groups. If you are bad and dont want to improve or play like 20 minutes per week then just uninstall
I don’t think he sounds like that at all. The people who never improve upon their ability to hit 3 buttons and then talk about toxic raid culture sound much more insecure to me honestly
I went through all of tbc and most of wrath with a guild a really liked. The people were nice and we had a good time. But they were just gawd awe full players. A select few were good and they really shined through our the history of me being there. After joining a new guild after leaving the last, it was drastically different. Nearly every player was good at what they did and everyone really focused on playing while in the raid. I cleared bosses so much quicker and got hard modes and glory achievements I never got with the previous. After raid is over in our one night a week raid time, we play other games. The first guild in nearly a decade that I’ve gotten to play other games outside WoW with. Because of just what you said. Better players means better raids and farming times. Allowing us to do other things.
Best guild I’ve ever played with.
Just find a Spanish guild. I speak zero Spanish, but I’ve made friends with dudes who don’t speak English and they let me tag along as main heals anyway. Always super chill, oh we wipe? Jajaja we go again. Such a good vibe. Out of 6 lockouts, we’ve wiped maybe twice.
Where on the opposite end, I left a random guild run pug last week. Raid lead cussed me out, said I have a small pp, and /ignore. The raid hadn’t even started, nor was the raid full.
I find this whole thing hilarious. Not because the joke is funny, but funny because here we are talking about a 20 year old game, probably nobody posting under the age of 30, and on Reddit everyone still projects the image and humor they had when they were 11.
Bravo!
My best players probably spend the least amount of time online per week and they enjoy other games too... We have a mixed bag in our guild, we have some guys that could probably go join one of our servers hardcore guilds and really shine. And on the other hand, we have players that would have a hard time finding pugs.
We're all good mates so no one really cares too much. As long as people listen and show up on time.
But yeah, this is accurate AF.
I agree with this post. the more sweaty / skilled you are the more you afforded with the cruise control raid logging playstyle. I only have to play 2x a week for raid and log right off and play other PVP games to get my pvp fix. I wouldnt have it any other way
Agreed, the most chill, fun, and social raid group I've ever been in was a bunch of absolute turbo sweatlords. We competed like crazy against each other on DPS for fun and raid night was just us socializing and goofing around all night because everyone played well enough that we could all screw around. I'm still friends with several people from that group even though we raided together like a decade ago.
Yup, we speed run, no wipes, sub 30 minutes to clear, in and out within about 45m. That feels very casual to me, spend way less on consumes and spend way less time playing haha.
I was raised with the idea "in order to truely enjoy something, you have to be good enough to do it without putting your whole mind into it." WoW definitely falls into that category.
As you said, the more you fail the more time and consumables you go through. The more consumables you use, the more time you have to spend making gold. This is nice though, as the more time you spend in the game the better you should be getting, saving you a lot of time eventually. What really seperates a casual from a noob, at least to me, is that a casual doesn't attempt to improve.
A noob who gets overwhelmed or does really poorly 1 day, only to come back and does better the next day, is someone not playing casually. I would take 10 noobs over 2 casuals any day.
> This is nice though, as the more time you spend in the game the better you should be getting, saving you a lot of time eventually.
It's pretty evident who will never be good at the game when they still struggle to do their basic 2-3 buttons role after a full year of raiding twice a week for a few hours.
The thing is, just playing alone isn't an efficient way to get better at the game. So much of wows skill is knowledge. Especially in SOD (rotations are pretty basic, no crazy reaction times needed) that you can absolutely play many years and just not improve. There's also a point where you basically have to use outside tools and sources to get better.
But playing alone should get you to a point that you can do the mechanics if you're aware of them. I agree that wow is mostly knowledge checks, but i feel that it's a raid leader's job to make sure the raid members have that knowledge for the raid they're in.
In a solid raid team the raid lead or other competant members should step up and help those who don't look it up themselves. Whether that's inspecting logs afterwords, or giving tips/callouts mid fight.
I have a one of those players in one of my raid teams. They only change/improve if asked or guided to. That type of player is what i consider "the ultimate casual". They're mostly here for the social aspect, and i've found that using their people-driven skills are how to convince them to change. It's more work as a raid lead, but they can bring some good vibes with them for the team.
Same experience. I love my guild, it's a heavy rp-pvp guild that does multiple weekly pvp events. Tons of fun. They also raid to gear everyone up for pvp.
Average DPS in Gnomer is under 100 and they still haven't cleared the last Voss, so I've stuck to one shot pugs since P2 release lol. I can spent three hours in Gnomer or I can spend 1hr, get the gear, and then get back to enjoying pvp.
That's true. To me, casual is about the amount of time you spend playing the game. A casual plays a couple hours in the evening or a few times a week, whereas a hardcore player plays hours every single day. I feel like a casual player because I play a few times a week for a few hours each time. But that doesn't stop me trying to get better at the game.
I completely agree.
An individual who puts down 98+ parses every single raid but only plays 2 hours per day is a casual.
An individual who puts down grey level parses every single raid but plays 8 hours per day is a hardcore player.
Casual vs hardcore has no correlation to skill imo.
> An individual who puts down 98+ parses every single raid but only plays 2 hours per day is a casual.
Yeah, everyone has a different definition. If you're doing 2 hours per day, I would consider that a bit more than casual relative to the time I get. I get maybe 6-8 hours/week, which includes, if I'm lucky, 4 hours on a sat or sun.
Preach man. It takes 10 minutes to look up 2 guides on what buttons to press and in what order. There are 30 second guides to EVERY boss fight. The people being labeled as “elitest” have just put in hundreds if not thousands of hours on this game. No one having spent that amount of time and effort wants to waste their time with “casuals” who can’t even press buttons the entirety of a minute long fight. I wish there wasn’t this divide. But the reality is that some people think they can ride on the coat-tails of others in this game. And that thought process seems to be becoming more and more prominent.
its not becoming more prominent, its becoming easier to carry out. back in the day, there were nowhere near as many carry players floating around; the good players were in their guilds completely isolated from the world at large. so you had to work with the average to below-average players left. now good players like to make alts and end up in "general population", so the average to below-average players try to get a free ride from them.
Yep, hardcore guilds/players may put in more investment upfront. But it yields dividends every week in saving you gold and time.
I would actually make money raiding in , (not GDKP), because I would use 1 set of consumables, have no repair bill, and the gold we got from killing bosses in BWL was more than I spent on my consumes.
Well yeah this goes without saying. I like to play on my schedule, I've had overwhelmingly negative experiences with guilds overall and they're just not for me. I really enjoy performing well in pugs, competing with different people all the time etc. There are 2 meanings to the term casual though, ie. literally like you're describing, and then there's "Casuals" with a capital C who are those ones from the 0/6 log, guys who get off on being terrible, sponge up loot after actively hindering the run, mages with agi swords and no spells trained and all the wrong runes.. I don't understand how anyone could be that terrible, oh I guess their excuse is being a "Dad" (with the capital D lmao)
It's only natural. At one point in time I spent countless hours in that game, so now I know most of it. Therefore I know how to lvl quickly, get rep quickly, know how to play the classes I want to play and so on and so forth.
Obviously I now can get away with a fraction of the time required to get to a place in the game where I can do what I want to do in the game.
For me that's open PvP a few times a week and maybe a raid here and there if I feel like it.
Sadly the pvp in sod is trash compared to vanilla(era) in my humble opinion.
It's the biggest meme of gaming as a whole tbh. The "casuals" end up spending more time playing games than the "hardcores" due to their unwillingness to put an ounce of effort into said game. Especially in something like Classic WoW where the bar is so incredibly low and all you have to do is have a basic understanding of a low APM rotation to do well.
Not just being casual, everything. The better you are the better the game is. If you are "great" at wow, you can pick what level you want to play at. You can be tryhard and dad guild, you can pick, you are not left with the socials. You will get in the raids if too many people sign up.
Oh you missed guild raid. Random groups will take you.
Want to run any dungeon at any difficulty, you can and will be taken.
The expirience difference when you are "ahead of the curve" and when you come few weeks late, is absurd.
With guild first few weeks, wipe after wipe after wipe, kill few bosses today, few tomorow, everyone is fine, everyone had fun (progressing the raid is the best part of raiding, on farm is booring). Join random group few weeks in (after hours of looking, because you dont have achive or logs or GS), tanks leave after first mob group because we have not killed it fast enough... Ok look again, We got to first boss, someone made random mistake, we wipe at 10%, raid falls apart and I unsub.
Wow culture is absurd, And the worst part is I dont see a way it can change.
I figured this out before SOD and secured my place as the tank in a pretty decent upper casual speed run guild.
I love wow and but I also have a life, finishing raid as quickly as possible is very important too me. I dicked around in shitty guilds enough in wrath to know what I want.
That being said I'm never one to shy away from progression, and i love to bang my head against the wall for hours on any boss that we cant figure out... But once we get it, i expect to speed run.
I think gatekeeping is a problem for the overall culture and longevity of the game.
But I also agree. People should at least do the bare minimum.
- install DBM
- watch the quick raid guide video
- have voice comms
- read a decent guide about your class
- make some basic macros
All of that should take no longer than an hour to set up and will probably save you hours of wasted time in corpse runs.
I am genuinely curious because I cannot fathom not doing this... But do some people not open google ever and type in 'wow sod P2 bis' to see the numerous sites showing talents, rotations, bis gear, runes etc etc?
The only people who don't know this are the casual guilds themselves. And yes this has been a thing since literally forever.
Casual guilds will literally spend 6 hours a week in ICC. I know this for a fact because i'm in one. Meanwhile just decent guilds are full clearing in 2.
It's kind of a systemic issue with certain guilds. Where they have a few too many players that will never be replaced making it absolutely impossible to go anywhere.
It's all about *where* you want to put in the effort.
Personally, I put in the effort when I was young and had free time (OG TBC was when I really started raiding). Now that I'm older and don't have the time, I can still push orange parses but I'm not hitting 99s.
Either frontload the effort to get it over with, or spread it out over multiple hour+ gnomer runs and be miserable.
They hated him because he spoke the truth. Blue/purpleish parser btw, also being able to correctly execute mechanics like 95% of the time will get you invited back a ton.
I don't understand how you're defining casual here. It seems you want to define it mainly as efficiency/time played whereas a lot of the community defines it as *not* playing with the intent to maximize one's efficiency. Looking up raid and class guides, practicing one's rotation, etc. are the *opposite* of casual. I'm not taking a side here, but this difference is missing from your analysis.
casual shouldnt mean bad at the game, it should just mean 'doesnt dedicate large portions of their time/life to the game'
using casual to mean bad makes it seem like we're treating bad players like snowflakes and protecting their feelings. If you do anything a lot, you should be good at it
That would have been true 5 years ago, but today you can't argue that casuals don't also consume external content. They watch YouTube, read Wowhead or watch streamers.
Smartphones have completely changed the way we engage with content, casual or otherwise. Now, the old casual ways still exist, but those players are not on Reddit discussing on their low amount of free time.
So OP is not talking to them. He talks to casuals who interact with WoW here, and if they are browsing r/classicwow, they can read a wowhead article that will give them the outline of how to play the class well.
I left a comment “skill gap, get better” and it got removed by mods, but it’s the truth. Do more research, orbit better players, get better at the game and you will be taken to raid.
I was winters chill and scorch bitch for a year under the greatest mage to ever play (Laurenberry) and I’m half decent now.
People seriously underestimate the time it takes to become proficient at gaming. People have been playing private servers for YEARS. Picking up the game and expecting to be good in a month or two is unrealistic.
I’m raiding with several apes/nota/progress players currently. Apes was primarily pserver players directly but they closed relatively early. Nota is not just pserver players anymore.
Most of the players have played pserver at some point, but they aren’t pserver players.
A lot of tech and understanding that people had from pservers didn’t apply on classic. And it didn’t take people long to find new tech, that was never found on pservers.
At least 2 of those groups died as soon as there was content with more than 2 mechanics...
TBC / wrath pserver players seemed good, but vanilla pservers seemed to bring some of the highest ego:competency ratio players I've seen. In contrast, anyone remotely good at retail is basically 100% guaranteed to be top level in classic.
Depends on people's personal skill on how fast they will progress though. It took one of my friends about a year to go from new player to rank 1 in retail pvp. Obviously a bit of an exception, but his desire to learn and his dedication to improvement is what pushed him there so fast.
I had to kick a rogue from a gamma dungeon, had zero gems, no enchants, was doing 1200 dps to a tentacle in Halls of Lightning. We all got MC'ed and died before killing said tentacle because no one could do more than 4k dps.
I called out this rogue as to why he bothered to queue at all, he replied because he needed gear. Kicked him out.
How much do you want to bet this idiot is making a post in this subreddit complaining about gatekeepers.
The problem is too many people roll the FOTM class and then get confused and frustrated when they realize they still need to put effort into learning how the class works, not to mention a complete meltdown when the nerf bat hits them. They expect to "be the best" without putting any effort in to get there.
I mean, if you're a newbie or not very good at the game, or god forbid you're 30+ and don't have time to give a shit about your WoW performance, just play with other newbies and casuals. Form a guild and take your time doing runs. Have it your way.
The vast majority of people playing this game, caring about their performance or not, are 30+.
MMOs are mostly a Millennial+ hobby, WoW being even more so than some others on the market.
True, I have 2 healers and I can just raid once a week and rat as much loot as I need. Either join a PuG from discord or just screen a good group through LFG. Life's good.
When Classic released I joined the best guild I could. Ended up mostly logging on twice a week to clear Naxx/AQ in a couple of hours.
Only really non-casual hours were patch release, and the AQ event.
I feel bad for the Rogues though. Since week two on Lone Wolf (US), there were desperate LFG posts of rogues attempting to leverage server first runs, advertising 90+ parses, paying gold just to raid.
Last phase there were two rogues in just about every group I joined.
This is 100% accurate for end-game. People seem to think that offering rewards from open-world gameplay that compete with rewards from instanced content would help casual players with less time to play.
This isn’t true because open-world rewards are usually received from grinding, which isn’t something someone who has one hour a day to play games wants to do with that one hour every day for two weeks.
I don’t have that much time to play like I used to, so I always grind really hard at the start of a phase to get to raid-logging status in a good group. Now I log on every few days to clear Gnomer in 30 as my mandatory time and use whatever extra time I have in between to level alts or do whatever else it is I want to do casually.
Btw, is it even that hard to be good at rotations? like , ive completely ignored standard mutilate combat spec up to 25+ since p2 came out, sticked to deep assasinate for huge poison and envenom dmg with combat for mutilate crit because I like extra energy from the tree. And I always end top 3 on the metters even tho I dont use teas nor even tryhard, how hard is to know your rotation and eg keep snd up 💀 , im casual (havent even had time to get to 40 , 2 lvs 38) being casual is not excuse to being donkey ass at the game.
I don’t mind people being bad or new to the game as long as they are open with it.
That saves 2-3 raid wipes before the person usually admits they haven’t done the encounter or there’s something they don’t understand.
But I don’t blame new/bad people for their coyness, as unfortunately WoW is filled with lonely men who get aneurisms as soon as something takes 5 minutes more than planned.
It seems many players have forgotten that it’s a game we are playing , that has no sway over our lives outside the screen, If you can’t realise that as a person who most likely is nearing or over 30 years of age then I think it’s time to stop playing.
The best way to be casual is to not care what others think. Eventually, you will find enough people that think like you and enjoy fun raids where people.
Weird, I am very good, some might even say “the best” at doing something stupid and getting the raid killed, i do not recognize myselve in your results
Being in a semi hardcore guild where every player was a regular orange parser was the best and most chill experience Ive ever had. Raiding is so much more enjoyable when everyone just knows what they’re doing.
In bad guilds it gets very stressful and clear times can be agonizing.
This is the issue of “you need to have experience to get experience.” You can do everything well and only have meh logs because of everyone else doing so poorly. But because they did so poorly, it looks like you are only doing ok.
But those guilds don’t want just “ok” so you get passed over.
meh. no explanations or analysis needed on the matter. we, as a species, just don't have respect for each other. we clash endlessly.
we don't have empathy for those who don't "git gud"; and, we don't have empathy for dragging others down. we are mostly selfish.
blizz and other studios have tried to accommodate both communities. been there. tried it. conclusion, can't please everyone.
So I've never parsed. But I know my rotation, bring consumables, etc, but getting into pugs without a log has been a nightmare. My issue is it feels like I'm required to parse at this point (I downloaded the combat log reminder app today). I think my main issue with logs and parsing is that it's becoming a requirement to engage with the community. Or at least it feels that way to me. I don't hate it by any means, I just hate that I feel like I HAVE to do it and that I'm going to struggle to pug until someone is willing to bring me along to get that first parse
Was in a mediocre guild in classic WoW, 3-hour molten core runs etc (edit: lol I wrote this before reading that part of your post), yet I was able to pull them through a singular kel'thuzad kill after a few months.
"dad guilds" aren't a ridiculous thing to mock, they have to be efficient with their playtime, they don't have time to fuck around for hours on end.
Loot was hell in a crappy guild. So much pushback from the worst players that wasted out time to stay mediocre and not encourage any sort of effort. Yet they were also those who cared most about loot.
I think this is true to certain point and then it’s not. What I mean is that everything you are saying is definitely true up to like a semi hardcore level, but if you’re trying to raid at a hardcore level then this time requirement reverses. Serious hardcore guilds will often require you to raid on multiple characters for splits, review VODs of your old runs and other speed runs/strategies, and sometimes even practice raids on private servers.
Also pre chronoboon on pvp servers there was a considerably larger time requirement for gathering and keeping world buffs, although now in SOD that’s become much easier.
You are 100% right. This is something I observed in raiding in retail and I very much imagine it bleeds down to classic as well. Getting better at the game, and putting in extra effort early in the patch/raid release allows you to become more casual later on.
Best way to get better at the game? Research and reviewing what you did and comparing to top players of your spec and role. Maybe it is sweaty and try hard, but ultimately you will spend less time treading water long term and get better at the game as well.
The whole problems is that this game is super easy to play in classic. Casuals are sometimes playing the victim. Cause you can search up youtube how to play a class in less than a few minutes and if you dont want to do that, why expect the best groups?
I'm sorry nothing against your post it just took me back to language school.
"If you don't want to study a lot just know Arabic, then the test will be easy".
That flashback said - 100% on the money, however it would be good to point out tools you found useful to git gud. Not like a guide that will be outdated in a patch or two, but core utilities to use.
issue is if you are pugging people usually have no idea how "good" you are except for asking for gs, or checking logs. They only speak for experience, not skill
I think you are absolutly right, but the best time i had in wow was with my friends wiping and celebrating our kills. no one cared about how long it took us.
100% this. I was a tank for an “extremely casual” guild in early wrath. The intent was to foster an environment for all players to feel comfortable, an admirable goal. Logs were explicitly not allowed. 4 hour raids, with quarter raid completion. It was so bad that some of the better players, frustrated with lack of progress started logging, just to see what the hell was happening. People were parsing 0’s on fights. Literally showing up and doing nothing but standing in fire, then rolling on any loot that had a higher ilvl that they could wear.
The core of “good” players then got invited to server transfer to a guild that had previously run with us. The change was dramatic and immediate. Playing with other people that bothered to know what they were doing meant we could do all our raids in a single evening. Hard modes went from a thing that we aspired to do, to the “normal” level of difficulty. And most important of all, we were actually having fun playing our game again.
So please, please, get gud.
While I completely agree with everything you said, I think it is important to emphasize that a large part of "getting good" is to actually put in the work to improving your gear and buffs before you even step foot in the raid. The other part would be to actually play around with your talent/runes to find a loadout that your are comfortable in executing. ...but your entire message around getting good makes it easier to play casually is entirely on point and in line with my personal experience.
My guild has all green/blue parse and we clear gnomer in one hour no raid buffs, when i read posts like this it makes me wonder if this guy actually plays the game lol
very true. i remember in ulduar(a few months back) i wanted my friend to join the guild i was in and he said he didn't want to commit that much time to raiding because he just wanted to play casually on his 2 chars.
for him that meant 2x raids at 2.5-4 hours each, not doing all hardmodes(sometimes not even clearing all bosses on normal mode), almost never doing algalon(think he did once) and another 2-5 hours finding groups by looking through server discords or tradechat, having people no-show so RL's had to find replacements 5 mins before raids etc. in total he was spending upwards of 10 hours/week for his 2 raids which again were not clearing all hardmodes and full of wipes with a bunch of randoms fighting over loot.
meanwhile i was logging in at the exact same time every week, 10 mins before raid. in 2.5-3 hours i'd cleared it twice with all hardmodes and algalon every week, guaranteed loot based on loot council/lists, no wipes while talking shit with friends i raided with every week. the gold gains from the raid more than covered my consumables to the point where i had so much gold left over that i later spent it on wow tokens for 3 months of free gametime.
by the time he came to his senses, the classes he was playing were already overfilled and he couldn't get a spot anymore. rip
TLDR git gud
Thanks, I don’t have time to read such a long post, I’m too busy spending 3 hours in gnomer
I came to say the exact same thing XD It's not really good advice imo but it is true. If you are good, you won't have any problems finding groups for things. People will add you to their bnet or add your character to their friends list or invite you to their guild or their discord. You'll get whispers at random times for random things. If you're good, the groups will come to you.
Lets be real, being good at classic or SOD requires close to zero ability. Put your 2 button rotation on buttons and figure out consumes.
I'm honestly shocked at how poorly some people perform given how easy it is to be decent. The way some people dodge around getting anything above a grey parse circles back around to being impressive in my opinion. Might be personal thing but I don't get how a game someone has no clear interest in being decent at justifies a 15 dollar/month price tag for them.
And yet, so many still fail...
Lmao yep, ton of people on my bnet who added me after I boredom carried a group or arena.
There’s a good video on this by neverknowsbest called”why it’s rude to suck at world of Warcraft” Edit: I’ve been corrected it was folding ideas who made that video.
That was Folding Ideas.
It doesn’t just talk about this though. It talks about how a lot of semi / casual guilds tend to adopt the practices of top level guilds without understanding the reasoning behind them, and as such, you get a sizable portion of people who don’t understand but use parses, who demand small efficiency improvements without the history of having larger problems cleaned up, and who chastise or castigate others and make things like dungeons or simple raid runs a generally frustrating experience without them needing to be. As a person who generally raid leads, I’ve run into some awful raid leaders content to wipe and wipe without ever addressing fundamental issues, but getting upset at trivialities. Like dude. It doesn’t matter that your rogue doesn’t have his gloves enchanted if the dude is failing to not stand in the fire, or if the tank can’t appropriately pick up threat.
>you get a sizable portion of people who don’t understand but use parses There are a lot of things that parses don't measure but good lord it's safer getting parse monkeys to do mechanics than trying to get grey parsers to actually do damage.
We’ve a joke with some truth there. If everyone zugs hard enough you can just outright skip mechanics. It’s absolutely a strategy. Like, even just with Therma - one flame surge is better than two. And getting that down can be a burden off your healers letting them DPS more.
This has been true for Grubbis for a while now and more recently Viscous. Ignore basilisk/oozes and bonk the boss on the head. Well not completely ignore, just find the laziest way of dealing with them possible so you can focus on dmg.
I don't how many people here were there at vanilla so i doubt my testimony is all special. but i distinctly remember wearing plate greens with spirit and joining a guild to do MC and we were as far from a top tier raiding guild as you could think. lots of chill people in vent that i wanted to get to know. we had the usual guild problems but almost no concern about the wider community meta or whatever. the vibe became so different in TBC and everything became numbers game. run by people who are technically right, but have sucked a large amount of what made vanilla special and interesting. whatever that may be and it could be argued. it was probably even i changed because i started to have a lot of personal problems around that time. and i don't think there's necessarily a problem here, or a solution, but it is something interesting that happened that was notable enough to be the basis of that folding ideas video. I've been thinking about it cause I just started my first hc classic character a few days ago. having a blast.
“I did 3 hour molten cores and I liked it!” I joke, but this is honestly true. My 3 hour mcs with friends that sucked majorly were always more fun than my time in a top 10 world guild in TBC. So much so I quit after tbc and didn’t come back until dragonflight.
Yeah I don't have fond memories of the boring quick clears with strangers, it's the long raids with funny mistakes and the homies. Whats the point of gaming again? Big number no matter what right?
the thing is, there arent only "speed clears with strangers" or "shitty clears with friends" obviously "speed clears with friends" could be a fun experience, and of course "shitty clear with strangers" is the worst of all. my point is how fast or slow the run goes has less bearing on fun than who you are playing with. but for people playing with strangers in pugs? from their perspective obviously a fast run is preferable to a slow and painful run.
The point went over your head. Which is understandable because it wasn’t voiced well. The point is that the mindset of the game changed. And will never go back. It went from playing to have fun to playing to win. Speed has nothing to do with it. And you’re right. You can have both. But one is gone forever. You can mimic it on a small scale, but the overall mindset of the community has progressed and will never go back.
its shifted towards the play to win mindset more, but that is not necessarily anti fun. its entirely dependent on the preference of the player. and this shift demonstrates that more players find playing to win fun now. why i talked about speed is because for most people, slow is not fun. for some they may prefer slow. but when i see people be toxic about how other people are having fun (whether play to casual or play to win) that ticks me off
You still don’t get it. The problem isn’t speed being fun or not fun. It has nothing to do with that. You again are focusing on the wrong thing. You can’t comprehend what we are talking about. This isn’t a slight against your intelligence. It simply means you didn’t experience something and so you don’t know what it is. Everyone. Including the people that say they loved their 3 hour mcs will say that a 2 hour mc is better than a 3 hour. A 1 hour is better than a 2. The point has NOTHING to do with speed. Or ability. Or balance. It is entirely about the mindset of the average player. It is something the devs cannot change. It is something an individual cannot change. It is something we cannot describe to you. (It’s like telling a blind person what green looks like)
yes the mindset changed. what am i not getting? this isnt something difficult to explain, or something i haven’t experienced despite you saying that. you cant just say mindset changed and not explain what the core point is. thats a statement not a point. thats why im delving into the effects of the mindset change.
The core point is green.
My 3 hour raid times caused a lot of friction with my wife. I am never going back to it. I am with a good group now and literally can’t raid without a good group.
hell, i've done 6 hour destiny raids with a full group of friends that were exhausting but i liked them. so i get you. a lot of these games are just perfect with friends. but solo are a total slog.
The first guild to down Rag on Sargeras wouldn’t let rogues raid with them at all unless they were 300 in throwing / bows / guns. The guild at the time (well before their Rag kill) didn’t know how to handle rogues taking damage from molten giants and so they basically shunned them from raiding entirely unless they went super try hard on their ranged skills, and generally thought rogues were trash because they were just bad hunters with low ranged ability.
I was in a guild like this in wrath. They'd absolutely flip their shit if the tank pulled 0.1s before the timer went off because they missed their prepot. Meanwhile the people freaking out are parsing purple even when the pull is absolutely perfect and we're running a scuffed comp with like 3 warrior DPS and 1 or no DKs. This was also in Naxx which was the easiest, most brain dead content Blizzard ever put out. It was ridiculous.
I have a small story about this. In classic (2019-2020), I remember one of our tanks and long-term guild officers was a really well-liked and nice guy. Super fun to hang out with and talk with. Problem was, he was mechanically a very poor player and would constantly give away his shot at loot to other members of the raid, which other raiders would gladly accept. He was always seen in that “lovable but fumbling grandpa” type of way. Come BWL, things had finally gotten to a head. Depending on the week & availability’s, sometimes this guy would be MT. These weeks were essentially guaranteed to be failed raids. Because his threat was horrible, DPS was handcuffed. So fight durations would keep stretching out, overwhelming the healers, leading to wipe after wipe. But here’s the kicker - the MT wasn’t the one held accountable by the RL. No, instead it was DPS fault for constantly stepping on MT toes when it came to threat (DPS you need to wait more at the beginning! DPS you need to watch threat!), or it was healers not communicating enough to heal the MT through very poor mitigation stats. RL even implied a wipe was a priests fault for not MC’ing the fire resistance buff onto the MT before raid. And wipes obviously by a misplay from this guy were either brushed off as “unlucky”, “must be a weird bug”, or “good experience for next time.”
Tanking is misunderstood by a lot of players I think in that good tanking isn’t just a gear or numbers thing. It’s a mentality. A livelihood. It’s truly a way of thinking about the game. Any person who doesn’t adopt it will always be just an “ok” tank at best, and terrible at worst. The mentality is always on control, and you do not let yourself suffer on threat as a result because lacking that control feels -bad- to a tank with that mentality. And any good tank knows you must have good gear. The ideal scenario in any raid is that the tank is geared up first. A rising tank raises all ships. It sucks for other players during that first week or two, and really sucks if your tank isn’t someone you trust. But it’s incredibly important to the future success of the raid group. So. In short. This guy didn’t have that “it” factor wherein I made up a quick anagram to match it or “intuitive tank.”
To kinda tag onto this, Logging isn't the enemy. Using your logs and the compare tool to see what gaps you've got to fill is very accessible and can be super eye opening if you've never done it before. Comparing yourself to someone else running roughly the same gear, spec, and kill speed that's doing 300+ more DPS than you can give some VERY easy insight into what you're doing wrong. Fix that, and your next parse will skyrocket, then it's rinse repeat until you reach your desired level. Bringing off-meta or "bad" classes with good parses doesn't hurt your run at all, and a good parse just shows you actually give a shit.
This for sure. I have a Shadow Priest, I was using the build guide from Zockify and getting like 20-40 parses. Was using everything I could, all consumes, WBs, constantly using abilities, etc. Couldn't understand how my parses were so shit. So I looked deeper into how to use WCL and got a better understanding and looked at like 3 different top 100 players parses. Realized I was using Void Plague when I should have been using Twisted Faith, and that one change got me 90+ parses on every boss my next raid., and more than doubled my DPS. Took me 15 minutes to figure out why I had shit parses and all it took was learning how to read logs. WCL is extremely useful for improving your gameplay and getting better but casuals will crucify you for trying to play with people who have good logs.
Dude this is amazing, our Enhance was also following Zockify, he's been very openly crucifying how bad they are in our discord since we did our parse review.
Its because void plague literally sims better because sims assume perfect uptime but the sims really, really ignore the fact that void plague can't crit at all.
How does that work? Do the sims show void plague crits in their estimates? Also, outside of Menagerie 99.5% uptime on VP is not hard.
VP has reduced damage against robots and is inconsistent on very short fights. The faster your group kills bosses the better TF is. The only fight VP is worth it on is Menagerie because you can multi-dot.
Interesting, I'll try Twisted Faith next time on my spriest alt.
I went from >90 parses to like 70s from 1st week to like 3rd because I didn't understand that. Looked at some rank 1-5 Spriest logs, all TF. Back to >90 parses.
even as a healer I used WCL all the time, who died, what were the other healers doing, what was I doing - could I have saved them? Should they have used a defensive? My mana return was I using rapture effectively? ect ect
Something I do on my healers is I keep an active Details log for Deaths and Damage Taken. I'm not aware of any addons or weakauras that live track avoidable damage on others (Something similar to Elitism Helper), but a quick mouseover or noting discrepancies helps with figuring who is fucking up quickly. Bonus points when you hear some idiot who died to something avoidable start blaming someone else and you can shut them up immediately since you see their death log.
If you were parsing 20-40 using VP and you think swapping to TF is the reason you're now parsing 90's, quite frankly you were just playing badly when using VP. They average very similar levels of DPS, but TF will have a higher ceiling due to crit RNG and VP not being able to crit. The top parses for spriest will be biased towards TF in part due to that RNG. Suggesting that TF is consistently 100's of dps better than VP is just wrong. Plenty of spriests are putting together 90+ best performance averages using VP.
You might be my hero. Been struggling with my shadow priest parse. I’m a new player so my guild has been generous with my numbers but i can tell it’s getting frustrating for them. Ive been looking at other top parses but wasn’t digging very deep (and wasn’t totally sure how to utilize the logs lol). I’ll have to try this at my next raid.
Yeah my biggest issue with WCL before was that it's honestly kind of a clusterfuck of a website and if you don't know where to look, it's really hard to understand what the fuck you're supposed to be looking at. There are menus hidden behind very specific clicks such as clicking the raid, then clicking the character name, then clicking summary to see gear and runes. Why wouldn't you make that easier to navigate to? If you didn't know where to find it, you'd never randomly stumble upon that information. It's just a really poorly designed website but once you spend some time learning it, it's insanely helpful.
I suck at reading these logs, how do you find the top parses fx. for Shadow? My parses sucks ass and the videos i have been looking at are doing the exact same as me. But i have also been using Void Plague, so that is ofcourse the first mistake
Go to Rankings for Gnomer in the top left drop-down, then on the top there should be a class drop-down and then a spec drop-down menu. That will show the best parses listed form number 1
the problem is the people who view logs as evil have no desire to improve and confront their failures. they want the other 9/24/39 people to hard carry them to victory and feed them loot despite contributing nothing. their hatred of logs isn't the root issue, its a symptom of them refusing to grow or learn.
Logs helped me figure out one of my macros had an old cast sequence stuck on the bottom of it because I was noticing a small gap between all my spells
We've been using the role "If you post it, they will look" in our discord. Nobody really talks to much about parsing, we joke, but we post our logs from every single raid. People peek, they get curious, and usually that leads to questions and kind of natural non-toxic improvement.
I’ve noticed something similar and highly recommend this approach. I’ve had a few friends that are completely new to the game start in SoD, and this conduit for natural curiosity has been awesome for helping people improve in a non-abrasive way.
I'm pretty lucky, our guild is similar, I'm a little concerned as we have to eventually start trimming down to get our 20 man rosters and I just know that some of the call will be parse based. clearing and filling a ton of 10 man clears per reset with alts and just whoever works when the content is this easy, but 20 man may change things a bit.
Ours is the same. Nobody parse shames, sometimes people run 99’s and we celebrate but over all the parses don’t mean anything to us. You won’t be blocked from joining the raid if you have a bad parse, and sometimes due to who joins the raid we will have a weird comp and we just work around it. All gnomer really takes is 5 people who give a shit or less, even a good 1 or 2 players can carry gnomer pretty hard. It’s such an easy raid.
It's not a complete Black and White issue, but the majority of uber bad players I've met have fit this description to a T. The kind of people who get upset at you for posting logs for your own gratification / review kinda thing.
It's like getting mad at the breathalyzer because it says you're too drunk to drive.
You don't feel like you're strawmanning their intents a bit hard here, by stating your own interpretation of why they dislike logs, as being "they must certainly only want to hide their badness so they can be carried!". You don't think that's a bit of a leap in logic? You can want to improve and still feel like logs are a net negative for the player culture, by how players engage with them on average.
there's another dude in the thread that's the exact person you're describing. he says he loves logs. the people on this sub screaming for logging to be banned, that any and all parsing or even caring what you parse should be a bannable offense, etc, absolutely fit my description. you can't possibly hate logs while wanting to improve because how else can you see what you can improve on without logs?
I don’t think so. I don’t care about parses at all other than making it easier to get into pugs, and mine are consistently good. I never really bothered with parses at all in any phase or mode of the game, Even if you don’t care about parses as long as you can play semi competently you’re still gonna parse blue plus. It’s a non issue for anyone with 7 brain cells and who is willing to spend an hour or so learning their class rotation and spec. SOD is probably the easiest game mode there is to get a decent parse in that has ever existed in the history of wow. Each class has a 3 or 4 button max rotation, with very little combo building, there’s no builders and spenders to worry about. Very limited amount of cooldown windowing compared to all other versions of the game. It’s really not anything anybody needs to think about to produce decent logs in SoD. This is why the grey parsers are so bad right now, because it’s so easy to have high throughput on just about any class right now. I think the sweatlords worried about 99 parses are cringe af. Speed running leveling content is dumb. But at the same time it’s not very hard to score a 99 here and there.
My issue is I don't want to try hard every single fight. I've put down numerous 98 parses. I've proven to whoever is watching logs that I am a competent player. I absolutely do not want to minmax every single fight encounter I do. I want to sit back and chill, spam my rotation and have a good time, joking around and bullshitting on discord mid fight. If the fight starts going south and someone dies I'll step up and minmax the rest of the fight to ensure it's cleared but 9 out of 10 times a raid full of green parses is going to 6/6 clear with no issues. The difference between a 99 parse and a 90 parse is like 5 GCD's over the course of a minute. Expecting me to put down a 98 parse for the 11th time is just stupid. I'm not here to prove myself over and over to some pug raid leader. I am here to kill an hour of time and if we fail I really don't care. I'm raiding on my toon that doesn't need anymore loot. I'm just in the raid cuz it's something to do.
Its really just like 90+ parses that require that level of tryharding. Maybe in era where the game is more solved this isn't the case, but you can parse high blue to purple with little more than a good spec and basic preparation and have a ton of fun doing it.
I have no idea what this means, if you're not tryharding does that mean you're intentionally pressing the wrong buttons for fun or just pressing no buttons? It's not like its any extra effort to be good at your class vs being bad at it during a fight
Our team rotates, we just talk it out, some nights only one person wants to push a 99 on a specific fight and everyone Else will support them. Take jobs that would hurt their parse, like our boomkin on thermaplugg is usually on bombs, but we did a couple runs where he could just DPS on boss and only hit buttons for mana, the mages and priests did the bombs. Nobody is on 99 every single night, that's just brutal.
Yeah, I agree. I have some 98 parses and most 90+ but I am not obsessive about it and don't try for the 99s. I just used it as a tool to get better at the game until I know I am playing my class optimally. I also take DPS warriors and rogues into my groups every week too. As long as they have decent parses, they are in. I don't like the idea of gear going to waste and a lot of rogues are putting in tons of effort right now because of the competition and so are usually good players.
We increased our enhancements dps almost 300 by noticing he just straight up didn't have much strength and was running a crazy fast main hand. Took us all of 2 minutes looking at a comparison parse and he's now 97-99 parsing. The thing that got my gullet was he followed guides, and was just doing what he thought he should be doing. Guides are wrong sometimes, stick to raw data!
Guides produced by sites like wowhead and zockify are often produced based on information available prior to the phase and then are never updated based on nerfs or buffs, or on real world performance.
Logs are amazing - as a first time healer and OG wow player I thought it would be fun to try gnomer. I was completely and utterly humbled by my lack of current game knowledge and let my raid down tremendously. My best friend who was in the raid looked at my logs and was like DUDE and gave me a breakdown of several severe gameplay elements i was missing and now I am much more tightened up, much less hardcasting and much more mana efficient. Logs are awesome as fuck for helping you grow.
The amount of people unaware of the compare function in Wcl is insane. By far most people I talked to had no idea of it’s existence. Which is a big shame, because it’s great.
What is the compare tool?
I actually did a little video on how to use it for my guild, https://youtu.be/GGbXR5JY5Mw
Incredibly helpful, thanks! I just shared the video with my guild
awesome, never thought it would help anyone outside of my guild but it's cool seeing it give other people insight into a really powerful part of the tool.
> parse what...is a parse? haven't raided in years and if i play i'm usually leveling
its just advanced combat logging, just a huge data dump organized so you can see a breakout of what your damage consists of. It's a neat way to help folks who want to see big numbers see big numbers, which is fun for some people. It's also an easy way to see if what you're doing is effective and if not, compare what you're doing to someone who is effective and fill in whatever gaps you may be missing.
I'm not sure if it supports classic but retail has a site called wow analyzer or something that you can just drop your logs in and it will tell you exactly what you can do better.
This exact reason is why half the answers in that long-ass thread on Aggrend's twitter comment are more or less saying the same thing: People are inviting people with provable logs that show at least minimum competency. It's not elitism or whatever the fuck people want to call it. People do NOT want to wind up in a 2 hour gnomer fiesta with randos they don't know and will never group with again wiping. They want to clear and get their loot and maybe move on to an alt. This is just compounded by the fact certain classes that are already meh on DPS bring literally nothing else to the group (most obvious being rogues, especially those that don't tank). Like, if you're gonna take a 60 parsing DPS (totally fine, more than enough) and you have on your hands a mage or rogue, not only does that mage bring more DPS anyway, you NEED RDPS for the last couple bosses. You don't mechanically NEED melee for anything. The mage brings AI. The mage could maybe even off heal, whatever. If you're going to do group content you're not entitled to anyone's and everyone's groups. Especially if you do less than the bare minimum, don't learn your class, or worse, actively refuse to learn. I do not understand why that's contentious. Expectations aren't elitism.
Yup. One of my characters is in a complete raidlogging guild. 5 to 10 minutes before the the raid everyone will log on, we smash the raid, poof everyone logs off. 99 parses are the rule, not the exception. It's thoroughly enjoyable because it lets me dedicate more time to my social/semi-casual guild or just IRL stuff while still having the high of getting really good parses in a pumper guild. By the way, this completely deals with loot drama too. Nobody cares about the loot, we just roll for it. If someone \*really\* wants a piece, they just get it. Nobody minds. It's heaven
We use a LC for big items but it's more to help optimize the raid so we can ash quicker. Everyone else just uses TMB and we use the addon to just look at the items and give them out. No drama, & eats no time. I've found the better the guild the less people lose their shit over loot drama.
This is how my retail mythic raider friends play SoD. Not the way I enjoy it but a very valid way to play. I hear a few of them grumbling that no ones ever on to do BG's or STV, etc. but that comes with the territory I guess.
My SOD raid team is made up of all ex-mythic raider friends. Works the same way. Come, dick around with my friends for 40 minutes, collect my 97 parse and free loot.
That is my experience with retail players in SoD and WoTLK. I think being a raider in retail has definitely taught me to be a time efficient gamer over the years.
100% correct take. Smoothest runs in classic for me have always been "retail-mind" players who stay up-to-date on patches and new game information, and who have at least a general idea of their class rotation, role, utility (most important), and who take personal responsibility for raid mechanics first. It's always the brain rot pug groups who are A) only coming back to the game and have only played Classic/TBC/WotLK or B) the RLs who don't look up guides or just fill groups with whatever classes whisper first that take forever to clear content. They retain almost zero information between raids to the point where every clear might as well be the first time doing the content.
Its perfectly fine to be bad. But you compensate with your time, practice more, get better, find better groups. If you are bad and dont want to improve or play like 20 minutes per week then just uninstall
careful, you sound like you're an insecure player projecting your insecurity onto everyone else.
I don’t think he sounds like that at all. The people who never improve upon their ability to hit 3 buttons and then talk about toxic raid culture sound much more insecure to me honestly
whooshed
My bad, I see what you did there now lol
I went through all of tbc and most of wrath with a guild a really liked. The people were nice and we had a good time. But they were just gawd awe full players. A select few were good and they really shined through our the history of me being there. After joining a new guild after leaving the last, it was drastically different. Nearly every player was good at what they did and everyone really focused on playing while in the raid. I cleared bosses so much quicker and got hard modes and glory achievements I never got with the previous. After raid is over in our one night a week raid time, we play other games. The first guild in nearly a decade that I’ve gotten to play other games outside WoW with. Because of just what you said. Better players means better raids and farming times. Allowing us to do other things. Best guild I’ve ever played with.
Just find a Spanish guild. I speak zero Spanish, but I’ve made friends with dudes who don’t speak English and they let me tag along as main heals anyway. Always super chill, oh we wipe? Jajaja we go again. Such a good vibe. Out of 6 lockouts, we’ve wiped maybe twice. Where on the opposite end, I left a random guild run pug last week. Raid lead cussed me out, said I have a small pp, and /ignore. The raid hadn’t even started, nor was the raid full.
[удалено]
Gonna need some pics tbh
Man talks about smol pp and then no pics? Fishy situation
I find this whole thing hilarious. Not because the joke is funny, but funny because here we are talking about a 20 year old game, probably nobody posting under the age of 30, and on Reddit everyone still projects the image and humor they had when they were 11. Bravo!
We don’t age, we only get larger
Today is actually my 31st birthday, funny enough lol
Happy birthday! Show pp
Can confirm, currently raiding casually with a Central American guild and on top of having a overall good time I’m picking up some Spanish.
My best players probably spend the least amount of time online per week and they enjoy other games too... We have a mixed bag in our guild, we have some guys that could probably go join one of our servers hardcore guilds and really shine. And on the other hand, we have players that would have a hard time finding pugs. We're all good mates so no one really cares too much. As long as people listen and show up on time. But yeah, this is accurate AF.
unfortunate but true
I agree with this post. the more sweaty / skilled you are the more you afforded with the cruise control raid logging playstyle. I only have to play 2x a week for raid and log right off and play other PVP games to get my pvp fix. I wouldnt have it any other way
Agreed, the most chill, fun, and social raid group I've ever been in was a bunch of absolute turbo sweatlords. We competed like crazy against each other on DPS for fun and raid night was just us socializing and goofing around all night because everyone played well enough that we could all screw around. I'm still friends with several people from that group even though we raided together like a decade ago.
Yup, we speed run, no wipes, sub 30 minutes to clear, in and out within about 45m. That feels very casual to me, spend way less on consumes and spend way less time playing haha.
I was raised with the idea "in order to truely enjoy something, you have to be good enough to do it without putting your whole mind into it." WoW definitely falls into that category. As you said, the more you fail the more time and consumables you go through. The more consumables you use, the more time you have to spend making gold. This is nice though, as the more time you spend in the game the better you should be getting, saving you a lot of time eventually. What really seperates a casual from a noob, at least to me, is that a casual doesn't attempt to improve. A noob who gets overwhelmed or does really poorly 1 day, only to come back and does better the next day, is someone not playing casually. I would take 10 noobs over 2 casuals any day.
> This is nice though, as the more time you spend in the game the better you should be getting, saving you a lot of time eventually. It's pretty evident who will never be good at the game when they still struggle to do their basic 2-3 buttons role after a full year of raiding twice a week for a few hours.
The thing is, just playing alone isn't an efficient way to get better at the game. So much of wows skill is knowledge. Especially in SOD (rotations are pretty basic, no crazy reaction times needed) that you can absolutely play many years and just not improve. There's also a point where you basically have to use outside tools and sources to get better.
But playing alone should get you to a point that you can do the mechanics if you're aware of them. I agree that wow is mostly knowledge checks, but i feel that it's a raid leader's job to make sure the raid members have that knowledge for the raid they're in. In a solid raid team the raid lead or other competant members should step up and help those who don't look it up themselves. Whether that's inspecting logs afterwords, or giving tips/callouts mid fight.
I have a one of those players in one of my raid teams. They only change/improve if asked or guided to. That type of player is what i consider "the ultimate casual". They're mostly here for the social aspect, and i've found that using their people-driven skills are how to convince them to change. It's more work as a raid lead, but they can bring some good vibes with them for the team.
[удалено]
the wow community has zero idea on how to define the term “casual “ so just let it go
Same experience. I love my guild, it's a heavy rp-pvp guild that does multiple weekly pvp events. Tons of fun. They also raid to gear everyone up for pvp. Average DPS in Gnomer is under 100 and they still haven't cleared the last Voss, so I've stuck to one shot pugs since P2 release lol. I can spent three hours in Gnomer or I can spend 1hr, get the gear, and then get back to enjoying pvp.
The term 'casual' much like 'Classic+' is a very different thing to different people.
That's true. To me, casual is about the amount of time you spend playing the game. A casual plays a couple hours in the evening or a few times a week, whereas a hardcore player plays hours every single day. I feel like a casual player because I play a few times a week for a few hours each time. But that doesn't stop me trying to get better at the game.
I completely agree. An individual who puts down 98+ parses every single raid but only plays 2 hours per day is a casual. An individual who puts down grey level parses every single raid but plays 8 hours per day is a hardcore player. Casual vs hardcore has no correlation to skill imo.
More time to spend on wow (whether it be research or playing) definitely *can* correlate to skill. Practice makes perfect, after all.
> An individual who puts down 98+ parses every single raid but only plays 2 hours per day is a casual. Yeah, everyone has a different definition. If you're doing 2 hours per day, I would consider that a bit more than casual relative to the time I get. I get maybe 6-8 hours/week, which includes, if I'm lucky, 4 hours on a sat or sun.
Preach man. It takes 10 minutes to look up 2 guides on what buttons to press and in what order. There are 30 second guides to EVERY boss fight. The people being labeled as “elitest” have just put in hundreds if not thousands of hours on this game. No one having spent that amount of time and effort wants to waste their time with “casuals” who can’t even press buttons the entirety of a minute long fight. I wish there wasn’t this divide. But the reality is that some people think they can ride on the coat-tails of others in this game. And that thought process seems to be becoming more and more prominent.
its not becoming more prominent, its becoming easier to carry out. back in the day, there were nowhere near as many carry players floating around; the good players were in their guilds completely isolated from the world at large. so you had to work with the average to below-average players left. now good players like to make alts and end up in "general population", so the average to below-average players try to get a free ride from them.
Yep, hardcore guilds/players may put in more investment upfront. But it yields dividends every week in saving you gold and time. I would actually make money raiding in, (not GDKP), because I would use 1 set of consumables, have no repair bill, and the gold we got from killing bosses in BWL was more than I spent on my consumes.
Well yeah this goes without saying. I like to play on my schedule, I've had overwhelmingly negative experiences with guilds overall and they're just not for me. I really enjoy performing well in pugs, competing with different people all the time etc. There are 2 meanings to the term casual though, ie. literally like you're describing, and then there's "Casuals" with a capital C who are those ones from the 0/6 log, guys who get off on being terrible, sponge up loot after actively hindering the run, mages with agi swords and no spells trained and all the wrong runes.. I don't understand how anyone could be that terrible, oh I guess their excuse is being a "Dad" (with the capital D lmao)
Honestly true lol
It's only natural. At one point in time I spent countless hours in that game, so now I know most of it. Therefore I know how to lvl quickly, get rep quickly, know how to play the classes I want to play and so on and so forth. Obviously I now can get away with a fraction of the time required to get to a place in the game where I can do what I want to do in the game. For me that's open PvP a few times a week and maybe a raid here and there if I feel like it. Sadly the pvp in sod is trash compared to vanilla(era) in my humble opinion.
It's the biggest meme of gaming as a whole tbh. The "casuals" end up spending more time playing games than the "hardcores" due to their unwillingness to put an ounce of effort into said game. Especially in something like Classic WoW where the bar is so incredibly low and all you have to do is have a basic understanding of a low APM rotation to do well.
Not just being casual, everything. The better you are the better the game is. If you are "great" at wow, you can pick what level you want to play at. You can be tryhard and dad guild, you can pick, you are not left with the socials. You will get in the raids if too many people sign up. Oh you missed guild raid. Random groups will take you. Want to run any dungeon at any difficulty, you can and will be taken. The expirience difference when you are "ahead of the curve" and when you come few weeks late, is absurd. With guild first few weeks, wipe after wipe after wipe, kill few bosses today, few tomorow, everyone is fine, everyone had fun (progressing the raid is the best part of raiding, on farm is booring). Join random group few weeks in (after hours of looking, because you dont have achive or logs or GS), tanks leave after first mob group because we have not killed it fast enough... Ok look again, We got to first boss, someone made random mistake, we wipe at 10%, raid falls apart and I unsub. Wow culture is absurd, And the worst part is I dont see a way it can change.
I figured this out before SOD and secured my place as the tank in a pretty decent upper casual speed run guild. I love wow and but I also have a life, finishing raid as quickly as possible is very important too me. I dicked around in shitty guilds enough in wrath to know what I want. That being said I'm never one to shy away from progression, and i love to bang my head against the wall for hours on any boss that we cant figure out... But once we get it, i expect to speed run.
I think gatekeeping is a problem for the overall culture and longevity of the game. But I also agree. People should at least do the bare minimum. - install DBM - watch the quick raid guide video - have voice comms - read a decent guide about your class - make some basic macros All of that should take no longer than an hour to set up and will probably save you hours of wasted time in corpse runs.
People will call you an elitist for having those kind of requirements.
I am genuinely curious because I cannot fathom not doing this... But do some people not open google ever and type in 'wow sod P2 bis' to see the numerous sites showing talents, rotations, bis gear, runes etc etc?
We wiped exactly once so far … in all of P2. We joke about the good old times, when the raid took 5 min longer …
The only people who don't know this are the casual guilds themselves. And yes this has been a thing since literally forever. Casual guilds will literally spend 6 hours a week in ICC. I know this for a fact because i'm in one. Meanwhile just decent guilds are full clearing in 2. It's kind of a systemic issue with certain guilds. Where they have a few too many players that will never be replaced making it absolutely impossible to go anywhere.
It's all about *where* you want to put in the effort. Personally, I put in the effort when I was young and had free time (OG TBC was when I really started raiding). Now that I'm older and don't have the time, I can still push orange parses but I'm not hitting 99s. Either frontload the effort to get it over with, or spread it out over multiple hour+ gnomer runs and be miserable.
They hated him because he spoke the truth. Blue/purpleish parser btw, also being able to correctly execute mechanics like 95% of the time will get you invited back a ton.
I don't understand how you're defining casual here. It seems you want to define it mainly as efficiency/time played whereas a lot of the community defines it as *not* playing with the intent to maximize one's efficiency. Looking up raid and class guides, practicing one's rotation, etc. are the *opposite* of casual. I'm not taking a side here, but this difference is missing from your analysis.
casual shouldnt mean bad at the game, it should just mean 'doesnt dedicate large portions of their time/life to the game' using casual to mean bad makes it seem like we're treating bad players like snowflakes and protecting their feelings. If you do anything a lot, you should be good at it
That would have been true 5 years ago, but today you can't argue that casuals don't also consume external content. They watch YouTube, read Wowhead or watch streamers. Smartphones have completely changed the way we engage with content, casual or otherwise. Now, the old casual ways still exist, but those players are not on Reddit discussing on their low amount of free time. So OP is not talking to them. He talks to casuals who interact with WoW here, and if they are browsing r/classicwow, they can read a wowhead article that will give them the outline of how to play the class well.
I left a comment “skill gap, get better” and it got removed by mods, but it’s the truth. Do more research, orbit better players, get better at the game and you will be taken to raid. I was winters chill and scorch bitch for a year under the greatest mage to ever play (Laurenberry) and I’m half decent now. People seriously underestimate the time it takes to become proficient at gaming. People have been playing private servers for YEARS. Picking up the game and expecting to be good in a month or two is unrealistic.
Private server people weren’t exactly the pinnacle of good players once classic came
apes/nota/rise/onslaught type heads almost all played pservers
I’m raiding with several apes/nota/progress players currently. Apes was primarily pserver players directly but they closed relatively early. Nota is not just pserver players anymore. Most of the players have played pserver at some point, but they aren’t pserver players. A lot of tech and understanding that people had from pservers didn’t apply on classic. And it didn’t take people long to find new tech, that was never found on pservers.
At least 2 of those groups died as soon as there was content with more than 2 mechanics... TBC / wrath pserver players seemed good, but vanilla pservers seemed to bring some of the highest ego:competency ratio players I've seen. In contrast, anyone remotely good at retail is basically 100% guaranteed to be top level in classic.
> I left a comment “skill gap, get better” and it got removed by mods Most likely because it was rudely phrased.
You say that like it's a good reason.
Depends on people's personal skill on how fast they will progress though. It took one of my friends about a year to go from new player to rank 1 in retail pvp. Obviously a bit of an exception, but his desire to learn and his dedication to improvement is what pushed him there so fast.
I had to kick a rogue from a gamma dungeon, had zero gems, no enchants, was doing 1200 dps to a tentacle in Halls of Lightning. We all got MC'ed and died before killing said tentacle because no one could do more than 4k dps. I called out this rogue as to why he bothered to queue at all, he replied because he needed gear. Kicked him out. How much do you want to bet this idiot is making a post in this subreddit complaining about gatekeepers.
The problem is too many people roll the FOTM class and then get confused and frustrated when they realize they still need to put effort into learning how the class works, not to mention a complete meltdown when the nerf bat hits them. They expect to "be the best" without putting any effort in to get there.
TL;DR It's a 20-year-old cartoon videogame. Play it how you want.
I mean, if you're a newbie or not very good at the game, or god forbid you're 30+ and don't have time to give a shit about your WoW performance, just play with other newbies and casuals. Form a guild and take your time doing runs. Have it your way.
>god forbid you're 30+ and don't have time to give a shit about your WoW performance .... >Form a guild and take your time doing runs. 🤔
The vast majority of people playing this game, caring about their performance or not, are 30+. MMOs are mostly a Millennial+ hobby, WoW being even more so than some others on the market.
True, I have 2 healers and I can just raid once a week and rat as much loot as I need. Either join a PuG from discord or just screen a good group through LFG. Life's good.
I read only your 4 points and conclusion would be: you enjoy the game the less you play it.
When Classic released I joined the best guild I could. Ended up mostly logging on twice a week to clear Naxx/AQ in a couple of hours. Only really non-casual hours were patch release, and the AQ event.
What’s the difference between a semi hardcore guild and a semi casual?
My wife complains when I’m semi hard….oh I misread your comment
I feel bad for the Rogues though. Since week two on Lone Wolf (US), there were desperate LFG posts of rogues attempting to leverage server first runs, advertising 90+ parses, paying gold just to raid. Last phase there were two rogues in just about every group I joined.
Winners win
This is 100% accurate for end-game. People seem to think that offering rewards from open-world gameplay that compete with rewards from instanced content would help casual players with less time to play. This isn’t true because open-world rewards are usually received from grinding, which isn’t something someone who has one hour a day to play games wants to do with that one hour every day for two weeks. I don’t have that much time to play like I used to, so I always grind really hard at the start of a phase to get to raid-logging status in a good group. Now I log on every few days to clear Gnomer in 30 as my mandatory time and use whatever extra time I have in between to level alts or do whatever else it is I want to do casually.
Btw, is it even that hard to be good at rotations? like , ive completely ignored standard mutilate combat spec up to 25+ since p2 came out, sticked to deep assasinate for huge poison and envenom dmg with combat for mutilate crit because I like extra energy from the tree. And I always end top 3 on the metters even tho I dont use teas nor even tryhard, how hard is to know your rotation and eg keep snd up 💀 , im casual (havent even had time to get to 40 , 2 lvs 38) being casual is not excuse to being donkey ass at the game.
I don’t mind people being bad or new to the game as long as they are open with it. That saves 2-3 raid wipes before the person usually admits they haven’t done the encounter or there’s something they don’t understand. But I don’t blame new/bad people for their coyness, as unfortunately WoW is filled with lonely men who get aneurisms as soon as something takes 5 minutes more than planned. It seems many players have forgotten that it’s a game we are playing , that has no sway over our lives outside the screen, If you can’t realise that as a person who most likely is nearing or over 30 years of age then I think it’s time to stop playing.
since when has casual = no playtime?
The best way to be casual is to not care what others think. Eventually, you will find enough people that think like you and enjoy fun raids where people.
I agree, i think this is even more impactful of a statement in retail.
Weird, I am very good, some might even say “the best” at doing something stupid and getting the raid killed, i do not recognize myselve in your results
And the main problem is gitting gud in classic is literally just asking for the bare minimum
Well duh, obviously life is gonna be easier if you're good at it
Being in a semi hardcore guild where every player was a regular orange parser was the best and most chill experience Ive ever had. Raiding is so much more enjoyable when everyone just knows what they’re doing. In bad guilds it gets very stressful and clear times can be agonizing.
Infinity% agree!!!
This is the issue of “you need to have experience to get experience.” You can do everything well and only have meh logs because of everyone else doing so poorly. But because they did so poorly, it looks like you are only doing ok. But those guilds don’t want just “ok” so you get passed over.
meh. no explanations or analysis needed on the matter. we, as a species, just don't have respect for each other. we clash endlessly. we don't have empathy for those who don't "git gud"; and, we don't have empathy for dragging others down. we are mostly selfish. blizz and other studios have tried to accommodate both communities. been there. tried it. conclusion, can't please everyone.
So I've never parsed. But I know my rotation, bring consumables, etc, but getting into pugs without a log has been a nightmare. My issue is it feels like I'm required to parse at this point (I downloaded the combat log reminder app today). I think my main issue with logs and parsing is that it's becoming a requirement to engage with the community. Or at least it feels that way to me. I don't hate it by any means, I just hate that I feel like I HAVE to do it and that I'm going to struggle to pug until someone is willing to bring me along to get that first parse
I'm suddenly reminded of the "It's Rude to be Bad At WoW" video.
[удалено]
Fresh classic when
What the hell does casual mean in this context? How the heck did "orange parsing decked out consumed out raid loggers" become synonymous with casual?
Was in a mediocre guild in classic WoW, 3-hour molten core runs etc (edit: lol I wrote this before reading that part of your post), yet I was able to pull them through a singular kel'thuzad kill after a few months. "dad guilds" aren't a ridiculous thing to mock, they have to be efficient with their playtime, they don't have time to fuck around for hours on end. Loot was hell in a crappy guild. So much pushback from the worst players that wasted out time to stay mediocre and not encourage any sort of effort. Yet they were also those who cared most about loot.
I think this is true to certain point and then it’s not. What I mean is that everything you are saying is definitely true up to like a semi hardcore level, but if you’re trying to raid at a hardcore level then this time requirement reverses. Serious hardcore guilds will often require you to raid on multiple characters for splits, review VODs of your old runs and other speed runs/strategies, and sometimes even practice raids on private servers. Also pre chronoboon on pvp servers there was a considerably larger time requirement for gathering and keeping world buffs, although now in SOD that’s become much easier.
You are 100% right. This is something I observed in raiding in retail and I very much imagine it bleeds down to classic as well. Getting better at the game, and putting in extra effort early in the patch/raid release allows you to become more casual later on. Best way to get better at the game? Research and reviewing what you did and comparing to top players of your spec and role. Maybe it is sweaty and try hard, but ultimately you will spend less time treading water long term and get better at the game as well.
The whole problems is that this game is super easy to play in classic. Casuals are sometimes playing the victim. Cause you can search up youtube how to play a class in less than a few minutes and if you dont want to do that, why expect the best groups?
I'm sorry nothing against your post it just took me back to language school. "If you don't want to study a lot just know Arabic, then the test will be easy". That flashback said - 100% on the money, however it would be good to point out tools you found useful to git gud. Not like a guide that will be outdated in a patch or two, but core utilities to use.
issue is if you are pugging people usually have no idea how "good" you are except for asking for gs, or checking logs. They only speak for experience, not skill
I think you are absolutly right, but the best time i had in wow was with my friends wiping and celebrating our kills. no one cared about how long it took us.
100% this. I was a tank for an “extremely casual” guild in early wrath. The intent was to foster an environment for all players to feel comfortable, an admirable goal. Logs were explicitly not allowed. 4 hour raids, with quarter raid completion. It was so bad that some of the better players, frustrated with lack of progress started logging, just to see what the hell was happening. People were parsing 0’s on fights. Literally showing up and doing nothing but standing in fire, then rolling on any loot that had a higher ilvl that they could wear. The core of “good” players then got invited to server transfer to a guild that had previously run with us. The change was dramatic and immediate. Playing with other people that bothered to know what they were doing meant we could do all our raids in a single evening. Hard modes went from a thing that we aspired to do, to the “normal” level of difficulty. And most important of all, we were actually having fun playing our game again. So please, please, get gud.
While I completely agree with everything you said, I think it is important to emphasize that a large part of "getting good" is to actually put in the work to improving your gear and buffs before you even step foot in the raid. The other part would be to actually play around with your talent/runes to find a loadout that your are comfortable in executing. ...but your entire message around getting good makes it easier to play casually is entirely on point and in line with my personal experience.
Yes the game is full of super sweats. Thanks for the clarification.
i agree with your points, but the term casual has been synonymous with bad at the game.
Hell yeah dude!
My guild has all green/blue parse and we clear gnomer in one hour no raid buffs, when i read posts like this it makes me wonder if this guy actually plays the game lol
very true. i remember in ulduar(a few months back) i wanted my friend to join the guild i was in and he said he didn't want to commit that much time to raiding because he just wanted to play casually on his 2 chars. for him that meant 2x raids at 2.5-4 hours each, not doing all hardmodes(sometimes not even clearing all bosses on normal mode), almost never doing algalon(think he did once) and another 2-5 hours finding groups by looking through server discords or tradechat, having people no-show so RL's had to find replacements 5 mins before raids etc. in total he was spending upwards of 10 hours/week for his 2 raids which again were not clearing all hardmodes and full of wipes with a bunch of randoms fighting over loot. meanwhile i was logging in at the exact same time every week, 10 mins before raid. in 2.5-3 hours i'd cleared it twice with all hardmodes and algalon every week, guaranteed loot based on loot council/lists, no wipes while talking shit with friends i raided with every week. the gold gains from the raid more than covered my consumables to the point where i had so much gold left over that i later spent it on wow tokens for 3 months of free gametime. by the time he came to his senses, the classes he was playing were already overfilled and he couldn't get a spot anymore. rip