Skill? What skills?

I was thinking about what skills it takes to be successful in World of Warcraft. Or to be more precise, what skills am I missing if I can't beat Nefarian easily?

One skill certainly needed in any real-time computer game is eye-hand coordination, combined with quick thinking. You must see, to take a healer example, that one of your group members health bar is going down, decide quickly on which spell to heal him with, and then quickly press the right buttons or do the right clicks to target him and cast your healing spell on him. Now a MMORPG like WoW certainly needs less eye-hand coordination than a first-person shooter, but still it is something that is needed. I don't think that this is a limiting factor for me. Okay, I'm 41, and a teenager would certainly beat me in Counterstrike. But in a MMORPG I have a lot of practice in taking decisions fast, and pressing the right buttons quick enough. A younger guy might shave off a couple of milliseconds in the button mashing part, but I'm probably better at taking the *right* decision in a split second.

Another skill needed is strategy and tactics. This is the area which I enjoy most. And in a 5-man group everybody is involved in a major way in this. A 40-man group also needs good strategy and tactics, but to succeed there should be only ONE strategy. Which means that not all 40 raid members can be involved in strategic decisions. They are all involved in tactical decisions of the moment, but if all goes well, these decisions become routine pretty quickly. We have some good strategists in our guild, plus information that other guilds published on how to kill certain bosses, and I don't think it is lack of strategical or tactical skills that is stopping us.

The next skill on my list is organization. That is a difficult one, because the better the organization, the lower the opportunities to make individual decisions. Good organization is efficient as hell in getting results, but not always the most fun. And again it is obvious that not all 40 people in a raid can organize things, there has to be one raid leader, maybe some officers organizing sub-systems like the healing, and a lot of people following instructions. I must admit my guild certainly has deficiencies in the organizational department. That is a natural consequence of trying to be a "nice" guild. Military organization and being nice doesn't go together well. What I've seen from the application requirements of some of the uber guilds makes me think that they are a lot less nice, for example if you go for 3 weeks on a holiday on the beach and don't participate in raids during that time, you get kicked out. Mandatory raid participation improves the class mix for raids a lot, but it isn't something I could live with. Nevertheless my guild isn't a total chaos either. We do get our raids full, with at least a reasonable class mix, and very few early drop-outs. We are *much* better organized than a pickup raid group, just not quite as good as a hardcore guild.

Which brings me to the last "skill" on my list. Well, if you want to classify it as a skill, you'd have to call it tenacity. But effectively it is simply the time spent doing certain things in the game. That is doubly rewarded in WoW raids: With know-how, and with epic gear. Part of our failure to kill the first boss in AQ20 was certainly due to nobody from us having killed him before. Once we have downed him a few times, it will become a lot easier, with everybody knowing what to do. But another part of the failure was that among the 20 people trying this, we had less epic gear than a 5-man group from a hardcore guild.

Kyroc was level 58 when on this raid (now he is 59), with a meta-level of maybe 60. I will get to character level 60 soon, but getting to meta-level of lets say 63 will take a lot longer. This takes longer for my guild than for an uber guild. If you have 40 members, each of which attends every raid, you get epics a lot faster than if you have 80 members, each of which attends half of the raids. And we also find ourselves at the wrong end of a snowball effect: An uber guild kills more bosses per raid, and thus gets more epics, which then help them kill even faster. We are still a lot weaker, thus we kill only 2 or 3 bosses per raid, thus we get less epics and increase in force only slowly.

Bad gear is also a consequence of a bad underlying strategy on the level of guild events. We have a lot of characters, like my priest, who are still running around with green or lower level blue items, and who don't have their complete blue "class set" from places like Scholomance or Stratholme. The intelligent thing to do would be to organize lots of raids with these guild members, accompanied by people with better gear, and just breeze through these dungeons in 10-man raids in very short time, farming blue gear for the less well equipped guild members. What we do instead is running before we learned to walk, taking "new" level 58-60 people to Molten Core or even Ahn'Qiraj. That of course weakens the raid group. The problem is getting the better equipped guild members to agree to do "boring", "too easy" places like Scholomance or Stratholme in a raid group. There is some interest in doing these in 5-man groups, because as 5-man these are still challenging and thus fun. But the people who have been to Strat/Scholo when they had just hit 60, now consider farming these places for other guild member's blue gear to be too boring.

As I explained with the meta-level concept, not all level 60's are the same meta-level, which is the level at which they are effectively acting. Unfortunately it isn't that easy to see another characters meta-level, you would need to know not only all of his gear, but also his talent specializations to judge whether his gear matches his talents. For example Raslebol is defensively specced, and even if he would wield an epic 2h-weapon, he still wouldn't deal much damage, because he doesn't have the talents to support DPS. Thus the people organizing guild events often only see that there are lots of "level 60" available for Molten Core or higher raids, without considering that of these "level 60" there might still be quite a number who would first need to get their blue class set from the lesser dungeons, before being really efficient in Molten Core.

Of course that is not a fault particular to my guild, it is a flaw in game design. The normal leveling ends at 60, and is replaced by a much slower, and much less visible alternative advancement by gear improvement. And coming back to the subject of skills, this alternative advancement is often very little skill-based, and very much based on just time spent farming. It would be possible to farm more efficiently by organizing guild events to the dungeons the guild can farm easily, but in the end the gear of everybody comes down to how many hours he played.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:13 AM Permanent Link