Top 10 peeps you want to know in WoW

Subject: Top 10 peeps you want to know in WoW Fri Sep 05, 2008 4:57 am

One of my favorite people to read online is a fellow by the name of Pjammer on Livejournal. He's smart, funny, and a gifted writer. One such great entry is "The 16 Essential People In Your Life," which lists such valuable acquaintances as the Computer Security Guru, the Wolf, the Consigliere, and (most importantly) the Best Friend. Pjammer, quoting Harvey Mackay, correctly notes that 2 am is a bad time to make new friends. These are the kind of people you want in your life as early as possible, and to exercise a positive influence on its course.

I've had reason to mull over how the virtual world differs from the real world with respect to friendship, backstabbing, greed, betrayal, honor, and how people choose to handle their problems. In my considered opinion it doesn't differ at all, and your experience ingame is largely determined by the network of players assembled around you, whether that alliance is a recognized one in the form of a guild, a co-op, or simply a more informal group of friends.

So, from my own experience and with a hat tip to Pjammer, these are the people you want in your posse for the best possible experience in the game:

1. The Friendly and Easily Bored Tank.
"Man, I'm tired of doing dailies. You wanna run something?"

Wow's official forums are typically awash with players complaining about the constant lack of tanks. There's no faster way to get a group together than to have a tank buddy around who's willing to chair your runs.

There was a lengthy period over spring and summer 2007 where I did very little ingame apart from PuG-ing, and it dawned on me at one point that one of the biggest reasons tanks are so frequently out of general circulation for 5-man runs is they get accustomed to running with a specific group of people and, to a not-inconsiderable degree, are often "pre-scheduled" with them.
Moral? Find a tank who's gearing up, demonstrate that you're a capable player who won't make their life hell in an instance, and give them a reason to put you on their friends' list.

2. The Hunter Who Doesn't Suck.
"I'll trap over on this side. You'll probably want the melee mob Misdirected because it's not a big deal if the tank loses aggro on that caster. Healer, you'll want to stay on the side away from the trap."

I once wrote in a comment here that the first person you'd want added to a 5-man group after your tank/healer was a good hunter, and the last person you'd want added to a 5-man group was a bad one. A good Hunter, regardless of spec, excels at threat redirection, various forms of crowd control, and just plain keeping the mobs away from squishy people in the event of an emergency while providing massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS. Outside of a 5-man, a decently-geared Hunter is a superlative farmer-buddy for people who can't farm quickly or efficiently on their own, and an equally good battleground-buddy when the time comes to farm up some honor.

It's very easy to find a bad Hunter. It's not very easy to find a good one UNLESS you know ME. When you do, hang onto them, and if you are a Hunter, try to be this person.

3. The Multi-Tasking Healer
"Triangle is stunned and Wisdom is on the skull -- I'll Consecrate under you so the mob that X is going to spawn won't go anywhere. Just taunt off me when that happens and burn them down."

Paladins, Druids, Priests, and Shaman are more than just healers, even if that's what they're specced and geared to do. They have totems, various forms of bubbles, buffs, and damage reduction, Cyclone, stuns, fears, and elementals. The healing classes have more means of affecting a party's survivability and efficiency than anything else in the game. The problem with many players who are either forced into a healing role or just don't take to the job naturally is that they forget their toon never stopped being a hybrid class, and abdicate all responsibility not directly related to pressing their heal buttons. A healer who is not prepared to do anything beyond heal is someone who can probably get you through a 5-man assuming a minimum level of skill on the part of the group, but not someone who's likely to save you from a potential wipe or work with any particular distinction in a raid.

It takes time, trial, and error even for good healers to learn when they can and can't supplement their healing with hybrid abilities (e.g. even the best one is unlikely to do more than chain-cast heals if the tank is badly undergeared), so finding one with a good sense of their class, an experienced guess at what the healing load is going to be, and a little imagination is like hitting a gold vein.

4. The Ridiculously Lucky Bastard
"Dude, that's like the fourth Blinkstrike I've gotten this week. You want it for your rogue? 'Cause otherwise I'm just vendoring it."

Everybody knows someone to whom the game's random number generator is stupidly generous. I've known people who have nabbed practically all of the rare dropped recipes and noncombat pets without even being aware that these things usually require effort. Others can't swing a dead cat without looting a world drop. I'm not one of these people, but it sure pays to know someone who is, because these people practically never fail to cause rare mounts, pets, and drops to rain from the skies wherever they go. If you can't get groups with them, try to be a person who springs to mind when the 1,458th Design: Solid Star of Elune drops for them.

Not a valid statistical assertion? I care not. There are some people out there whose ingame luck absolutely beggars explanation or belief. I don't question it, I just try to be a boxcar on the gravy train.

5. The Cynical Raid Leader
"Look, the reason you keep dying "randomly" is you're not facing the same direction your healer is. You're going to keep getting Air Burst out of her range, and you're going to keep dying to curses or Doomfire as a result. It is not her responsibility to run all over the place trying to find you; it's your responsibility to stay in range. Cut the crap or I'm going to have to bench you."

Raid-leading, particularly on progression content, can be a pretty ugly job. You have to do whatever job you already do in raids to the best of your ability while keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing, to the point where you can tell what's going wrong, where, and with whom. Ha ha! Little joke from those of us who've done this. You usually can't see jack.

Under the best of all possible circumstances, your raid leader is someone who knows the fight cold, expects the same of everyone else (or is otherwise willing to explain things), and allows people time to learn from their mistakes while still holding them accountable for their performance. It's not an easy balance, and people who can do it well are notably more successful at getting their raids through content than others. You may not like being called out on doing something dumb, but there is definitely a general tolerance limit on the raid's part for wipes resulting from behavior that players can't or won't fix.

Ultimately it's a two-way street. The best raid leader in the world is still going to get a bad performance out of a raid full of indifferent or just plain bad players, and a good raid following a bad strategy winds up doing doughnuts in Black Temple's courtyard. Even if you don't raid, you want someone around who knows the 5-man content well enough to cook up a workable strategy for the group you've brought and furnish an educated guess at why something might not be working.

6. The Gladiator
"No, no, no -- you WANT that guy to blow his cooldowns, nitwit. Don't go nuts trying to prevent him from using them, just focus on surviving until he runs out of tricks. Watch how I do it."

Some of us like PvP more than others. I, personally, despise it. But that's all the more reason to make the acquaintance of someone who actually does know how how your class and spec need to be played when you're under fire. Sooner or later you will find yourself in the battlegrounds or arena if for no other reason than relatively easy access to decent gear, and no one out there is going to argue that it's a fun experience when the competition outgears and outplays you. You need someone to be the master Jedi to your clueless padawan as you struggle through the ranks -- someone who knows the tricks the other classes are likely to pull and when they'll do it, the strategy that's likely to result from the arena team composition you're facing, and whether your problems are predominately caused by your team, your gear, or your reflexes. The advice you get isn't necessarily going to be couched in the nicest terms, but someone who PvP's extensively with your class and spec can probably be counted on to prevent you from succumbing to an array of stupid deaths while you're still learning.

7. The Rival
"Jesus, just look at that guy's gear! Why didn't that stuff ever drop for us, huh?"

If you raid at all, then odds are pretty good that you have a direct counterpart in a competing guild close to your level of progression. Theirs is the toon you'll want as an immediate reference for the purpose of comparing spec, gear, enchants, and gem decisions. If they seem to know what they're doing and some of their choices seem radically different from yours, it never hurts to ask why. They may have changed their gear for progression purposes, or they might have found something useful in a different spec -- or, appearances to the contrary, one of the two of you might have gotten something drastically wrong.

Either way you want to maintain a good relationship with The Rival. He will almost certainly be under consideration if your GM gets hungry for more players of your spec and class, and their guild is where you're most likely to end up if yours goes belly-up. You (or he) may not wind up the same spec when all's said and done, but if your GM asks if that person's any good, you want to know enough about him to give an informed perspective. On the flip side, you want The Rival to know what your capabilities and experience are, because I 100% guarantee that he's going to be asked about you in the event that you apply to his guild.

No matter what happens, you won't hurt yourself (or him) by keeping an eye on this guy and trying to be just a little bit better than he is at the job both of you do.

8. The Colleague
"If you want my honest opinion, the class leader's dead wrong about you need to be doing on that fight. Here's what worked for me."

A more genteel version of The Rival (unless your guild is really cutthroat or an ingame subsidary of the Corleone family), The Colleague is also someone who does the same job you do in raids. They are usually -- but not always -- an intra-guild player (those who aren't may pull double-duty as a Rival), and often -- but not always -- your spec and class. Now, they tend to be the most typically helpful whenever you're new to a fight that they've seen before and they can give you the benefit of their own experience, but if something clearly isn't working for you and you're not sure what's causing it, then The Colleague should be your first stop while trying to fix the problem.

Protect this person (or people). They're the most likely to back you up in the event that you have to argue in favor of changing the raid's approach to the fight, and if they're also a member of your guild, you're likely to be waiting on some of the same drops they are. If you look out for them, they'll look out for you.The tanks, the melee DPS, the ranged DPS, and the healers all comprise their own very distinct sub-groups in most raids, and they fail to support each other at the raid's collective peril.

9. The News and Rumor Junkie
"Don't buy that pattern! A blue post said it's going to be trainable in the next patch and that's why the price on the AH seems so low all of a sudden. Just give it a few weeks."

Some of us read the official forums purely for the entertainment value. Others do it because apparently they are professional trolls. Still others just hang around the forums and other WoW sites like Blue Tracker like it's their job (and for some of us, it is a job). If you don't have much time to devote to staying current with the numerous tweaks, large or small, the developers are planning, you'll benefit from hanging around someone who does. The game changes pretty frequently, but most of the time it doesn't do so without those changes being made public well in advance. Commodities on the AH rise and fall as a result of tweaks made to professions. Classes become more and less popular in both PvP and PvE as a result of the devs' experimentation with arena and new raid content.

If you want to be well-placed to benefit from upcoming changes rather than being at their mercy once they go live, the News and Rumor Junkie can help save you time and gold. And yes, this is a version of the asymmetric information Pjammer refers to concerning lawyers, doctors, financial advisers, and mechanics; these people all save (or make) money through their possession of knowledge that most people don't have. The nice thing about WoW is that such knowledge is usually free and out there for the taking. Like here, for instance!

10. The Techie
"Type in /menuhere and that should pull up the configuration menu for the mod. Got it? OK, what you want to do is scroll down and start clicking off the options to auto-publish to /raid and /group..."

Past a certain point, nearly everyone dabbles in UI enhancement or finds themselves with an unpleasant technical problem related to the game. Certain people have a more intuitive understanding of what's going on behind the electronic hissy fits being thrown, either because they've had the same problem or they just know how things work. Make friends with a Techie. At some point, unless you are possibly #4 and just as ridiculously lucky out of game as in, you are going to require his services. This person may be all that stands between you and a boring slew of nights trying to figure out how to get a mod or the game itself to work.

Now, what I've written here is necessarily colored by my own experiences; your mileage (as they say) may vary. But if any of these people regularly participate in your ingame life, I'd say you can count your blessings. I know I've left some people out, however. Thoughts on an addendum to this list?
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Oderint dum metuant

Subject: Re: Top 10 peeps you want to know in WoW Fri Sep 05, 2008 7:44 am

I'd add..

11. The Elitist Prick

It helps to have that one friend, in that one end game raiding guild, that says to his guild leaders.. "Hey, his gear is crap.. but the guy flat out knows how to play. We can gear him up in our farm content, and bring him along slowly."

Lets face it, if you're an up and coming player, who knows there class, but has crap gear.. the chances of you ever getting into end game content is almost slim to none. Many guilds don't want to have to teach a player something when they can just recruit a player that already knows the fights and know hows to play their class. Also, watching videos and reading guides about fights will never be the same as actually seeing it happen for yourself. And having your elitist prick friend showing you exactly where to stand, and exactly what to do is by far an easier route to go.

Trust me, I wouldn't be in the guild I'm in if it wasn't for my elitist prick friends in QQ.
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