people (especially those of older generations, and non-gamers) seem to get incredulous at the idea of playing a video game involving such a sophisticated degree of organization and group social skills
I know! The best I've been able to do is tell people it's like organizing a sports team or a theater group, but even that doesn't always get the reality of it across.
I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3"
Haha, the two priests who primarily played shadow loved me because I told them it was okay to do that, and stood up for them when the healer lead (an rsham) questioned it. I was like look, with this much spirit and chain chugging pots I don't even know what oom means anymore, I think we can handle it. And I vividly remember the MT piping up like "Yeah I agree, as long as [pauraque] has 1/3 mana I just pull." XD
I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.
I raided with someone in BC who said the exact same thing. I think the rdruid was her original main and then she started with spriest, and I remember her saying they both lit up the same parts of her brain. (This is where it starts to feel uncanny and I want to ask did we actually raid together?? but not all the details match up.)
the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows
I'm honestly curious about the details here if you don't mind taking the time to explain. Was this like a big guild with multiple groups, or a crossguild thing along the lines of OpenRaid or what?
Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.
This has been my experience too. Aside from just the ranged visual perspective, I think people who aren't healing can't easily gauge whether the damage going out is manageable or whether the healers are secretly crying behind their keyboards, because sometimes what looks scary is actually fine and vice versa. We are also very aware of which DPS are standing in stuff, even if they think they are getting away with it. :P
healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple
Healers and tanks have a special relationship that no one else can truly understand. I ended up moving across the country and literally marrying one of the tanks from our BC guild. :)
Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable.
Ahhh, that sucks. So many 'wowkiller' MMOs have come and gone with the same story. You know, it's easy to criticize WoW, and it does have its problems, but it turns out making an MMO that puts all those moving parts together just right and is worth investing your time in is fucking hard, and most that try come absolutely nowhere close to succeeding.
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I know! The best I've been able to do is tell people it's like organizing a sports team or a theater group, but even that doesn't always get the reality of it across.
I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3"
Haha, the two priests who primarily played shadow loved me because I told them it was okay to do that, and stood up for them when the healer lead (an rsham) questioned it. I was like look, with this much spirit and chain chugging pots I don't even know what oom means anymore, I think we can handle it. And I vividly remember the MT piping up like "Yeah I agree, as long as [pauraque] has 1/3 mana I just pull." XD
I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.
I raided with someone in BC who said the exact same thing. I think the rdruid was her original main and then she started with spriest, and I remember her saying they both lit up the same parts of her brain. (This is where it starts to feel uncanny and I want to ask did we actually raid together?? but not all the details match up.)
the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows
I'm honestly curious about the details here if you don't mind taking the time to explain. Was this like a big guild with multiple groups, or a crossguild thing along the lines of OpenRaid or what?
Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.
This has been my experience too. Aside from just the ranged visual perspective, I think people who aren't healing can't easily gauge whether the damage going out is manageable or whether the healers are secretly crying behind their keyboards, because sometimes what looks scary is actually fine and vice versa. We are also very aware of which DPS are standing in stuff, even if they think they are getting away with it. :P
healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple
Healers and tanks have a special relationship that no one else can truly understand. I ended up moving across the country and literally marrying one of the tanks from our BC guild. :)
Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable.
Ahhh, that sucks. So many 'wowkiller' MMOs have come and gone with the same story. You know, it's easy to criticize WoW, and it does have its problems, but it turns out making an MMO that puts all those moving parts together just right and is worth investing your time in is fucking hard, and most that try come absolutely nowhere close to succeeding.