Introducing: Roguelike Series

I'm sure you've all heard that hunters are going to use Focus (Energy, only with a fancy new name), DK Runes are overhauled and Rage Normalization is coming to warriors. So, what do these mean for these classes?

Roguelike series will look at all tree classes -Hunters, DKs and Warriors- one at a time and try to explain what these classes should expect from the expansion pack.

The way DPS works in WoW, is that for physical classes, there's their auto-attacks, and special attacks. For spellcasters, there's only special attacks, unless you count wands, which no one does since Vanilla (And briefly in TBC). For all DPS classes, there's a cooldown model for special attacks. Notably:

• Energy - For Rogues, Druids & Deathknights: You have a predefined set amount of power you can use. Your special attacks have organic cooldowns, meaning, you have to wait for your power to fill up.
• Mana - For Spellcasters: You have a predefined set amount of mana you can use. However, since Blizzard thinks it's fun for DPS Spellcasters to go OOM, the only limiting factors are GCD for Instants and spellcast times for everything else.
• Mana - For Hunters & Enhancement Shamans: You have a predefined set amount of mana you can use. Again, it's completely irrelevant. Your limiting factors are cast timers (Steady Shot pre soft-haste cap), GCD (Soft-haste capped Steady Shot) and artificial cooldowns.
• Rage - For Warriors: The more autoattack damage you deal, the more rage you get.

You see a problem here? I certainly do.

There just has to be a way for people to not spam a certain ability every single GCD, to make them unique and interesting to use.

For Rogues & DKs, even though their most devastating abilities do not have cooldowns, they can't spam them at every single second. Rogues' Sinister Strike costs 40 Energy, and each second they gain 10 Energy so they can only use it every 4 seconds. 

For spellcasters, GCD for instants and spellcast timers everything else works to that fashion. A Mage's Frost bolt spam might give him the most damage, but he can only cast it as every X seconds only. 

Now for Hunters and Shamans, both Mana users acting like Rogues, they have instant attacks all around, but they also have mana. For them now to go OOM, their mana has to be large and keep refreshing. But what then they can just spam their abilities non-stop. What's the fix? Cooldown model, on spells like Arcane Blast, Storm Strike, etc.

For Warriors, it's even worse. Playing a DPS Warrior is a rollercoaster of an ordeal, dealing next to nothing at early levels of gear due how pathetic white damage is, and becoming the single best DPSer in ICC. Furthermore, to compensate it, their numbers are always crunched with introduction of new gear, to "normalize" their DPS with the rest of DPS classes.

Blizzard has finally, after five years of trying to make status quo work, giving up, and utilized the Rogue model for these classes. 

Stick around to hear how these changes will effect your gameplay.

DPS in Trash

Gevlon doesn't disappoint with his latest post. Quote him:

"Posting damage meter on trash is considered impolite in WoW. There were even posts where this was considered "jerk" behavior, since "properly specced" DPS can't compete with a tank or a DPS who has a stupid AoE spec he made clearly to top the meters.

This is bullshit!"

You just gotta love the man.

For a long time, I've advocated using cooldowns and such in raid trash to speed up the process. It was even worse when I was level 70, a Rogue (We didn't have FoK back then) and on Karazhan stairs, an obviously AoE pull, I'd outdps several mages or warlocks randomly.

In Ulduar, there's this massive pull before General Vezax. Three of them, to be exact. There are 9-10 mobs each pull, and they can't be AoE'd. Or so our GM told us. We tried to sheep, hex, cyclone them so that tanks took less damage... Yes, no.

Even though I was an officer/raid assist, of course the GM's word was law. But not to my subjects. I told the DKs I had (We were three DPSers) to AoE shit down like their life depended on it, and to be ready to tank the sheep targets that they were likely to break. We pull, Team-DK goes nuts on bolts, we pull off around 30-35k DPS each, and the pack is down in meager seconds.

From there-on, those pulls became the most fun pull in Ulduar for us as I had successfully persuaded that they were AoE packs.

If there's something I hate more than raid trash, it's probably powerleveling (which I do with any-all characters I have a slight interest in playing). Raid trash is uninteresting, boring, heart-grinding. It's something all 25 people in the raid just want to get over with. So why not bring your A-Game to these ugly packs to make them die so fast it's actually a little fun?

I once even got a whisper once about my DPS in trash, pulling easily a few Ks over others, and the voice told me "Why do you use cooldowns and abuse the system on trash? Does pulling off more DPS make you feel a better player?"

There certainly is a notion, like Gevlon said, about people topping the charts. They "Abuse" the system. These people are the ones that say:

• I don't care about DPS Meters (Then why do you play a DPSer?)
• I cold easily top them if I could (Why don't you?)
• I hate people who are obsessed with putting out highest DPS (Because you're not one?)
• DPS doesn't mean skill (Both of which you lack)

Don't be deluded. Once at Freya, someone criticized me and a fellow Feral druid when we were "training" on Freya as the PvPers say. He said we were cheating the DPS meters because we were DPSing her when she was healing herself, so our DPS meant nothing. 

He completely ignored the fact that I was trying to roll a high-damage disease on her to spread to her adds, and that the feral was building combo points. But since most other DPSers didn't do anything to Freya, we were showing highest, and haters hated that we were cheating our way to success. 

There's one thing DPSers should know and care about -numbers. Beautiful, shady numbers. Our jobs is a quantitive one. We bring DPS, which is not an in-calculable objective. True, in some places, your DPS will naturally suffer, like when I was running around the room in General Vezax to Death Grip sparks to healers. I pretty much sucked those attempts. Does it make me feel useless? No, but I still make he best of my time when I'm not running around the room like a headless chicken, DPSing the boss to best of my abilities. For example, Yogg-Saron and the tentacles for the Brain Group. I'd have chance to kill one every few attempts when I didn't need to regain full sanity. Why shouldn't I do it, even if it's not my priority? 

Or, why shouldn't I work harder to do my job better?

Let the haters hate. Numbers don't lie. Yes, the person pulling off higher DPS than you are is likely (though not positively certainly) a better player. Conversely, you're a better player than the slackers in your raids. Just because people don't want to do what they were brought in to do doesn't mean those who do are evil, evil people. They just enjoy smashing skulls.

Introductions - Why DPS Meter?

So, one more blog to an ocean of blogs.

I'm a(n ex) Magic: The Gathering Tournament player. What's true there is also true in every aspect of life: If you're doing something, it must have a specific purpose, and it must succeed at hitting that said purpose. So what does this blog aim to achieve?

This blog aims to gather intelligent raiders, who are past lurking ElitistJerks and went beyond the theorycrafting, taking it on a deeper, philosophical level, with aims to see real-life results (or in our case, real pixel results). 


As the name of the blog might imply, I will often be writing from a DPSer perspective. I've been topping the meters since Vanilla as a Rogue, recently OTed often in faceroll raids or instances as a Death Knight. Yet, my heart lies with the DPS role. This is more or less due to my obsessive-compulsive nature, but also due to the DPS problem in raid guilds.

The guilds often have the most problem with DPSers, as opposed to PuGs having problem with Tanks. To understand it, you must understand first the tanks.

Tanks often come in two fashions.

• First one is LFD Hero, a Fury Warrior, DPS Death Knight, Cat Druid or Retridin. The class doesn't really matter. This guy doesn't give a crap about raiding progress, sees hardmodes for something that no-lifers do, and for him, being a tank means shorter wait times for the next LFD. He's probably not even close to being optimised for his role, but for today's faceroll heroics, random badge gear and ICC 5-Man rewards are more than enough for an educated monkey to clear public raids. 

• Second one is Guild's Tank, the guy who gives impression that even if he had a level 60 Mage in MC gear, he could tank Festergut 25 HM. This is the guy, who's often an ex-DPSer, often a control freak and likes setting other 4/9/24 people's pace to his own. Which is, given the healers are responsive, faster than a LFD typing 'gogogogo'.

Just like a raid boss' death, a guild is found on a solid foundation of at least two tanks of the latter type. For semi-serious guilds and up, Tanks are the stars of the guild, treated as if they're boosting all other 24 people with their Stamina gear, often get the first upgrades in a raid environment and they get priority on orbs. Good tanks are dime and dozen, and being the first requirement of raiding an instance, they're (naturally and respectfully) spoiled.

Just like Tanks, Healers (Who are always between DPSers and Tanks on priority list, regardless of which of the two is the most important) get their share of the love.

DPSers in raiding guilds are ruthless, vicious, unloved people with problems (And I do not exclude myself from these).

The great funny ultimatum of 'I'm the tank FFS, if I don't pull, the boss doesn't go down. Shut up and listen.' elitism (Which healers also share the market, with 'Do not heal Tom McDPS, he asked me to Rejuv him for DPS increase.' in their private channels) works every single time, while rest of the 15 DPSers in the guild don't have brains to say 'Heh, we kill the boss, you know. We'll just stand still after the pull.' and give the similar ultimatum.

Long story short, DPSers are the bastard children of progress guilds.

There is a reason why good guilds recruit tanks and healers, and best guilds recruit DPSers. DPSers face the same treatment in raids that tanks face in random heroics. Awesomenessess DPS is expected from everyone, and who pull off the insane numbers are regarded as the norm, even if rest of the raid is pathetic on the meters, die to fire etc, in which case those slackers are 'bad' but outperforming DPSers are treated like they don't deserve any recognition.

This obviously changes as you reach closer to guilds that start trying and downing hardmode bosses on the release day, but is still true for vast majority of guilds.

For the most part, 'Average' raider guilds (And I mean the ones that are progressing in 25 ICC right now, maybe having 10 men cleared, and maybe working on 10 men hardmodes) learn the mistake of the PuGs of not giving enough credit to Tanks & Healers but see DPSers as rest of the 15 people to fill in the raid.

Most of the Raid Leaders of such guilds couldn't care less about optimal usage of Bloodlust, about assigning a Resto Druids to HoT the DPSers for insane amount of Rage/Energy/Runic Power/Mana returns, and are happy to see members pulling off the minimum amount of required DPS (Calculated from Minimum DPS = Boss Health / (Enrage Time in Seconds X Number of DPSers) and anything more is wasted / unnecessary / not important.

To them, if the boss requires 8k DPS, and all your guild is pulling 9k, except for that Shadow Priest, who's mastered his rotation to pull off 13k DPS, the guild's DPSers are good. How can they not be? They're good enough.

• No one asks how did that Shadow Priest beat the Fury Warrior who's got himself a Shadowmourne with concentrated efforts of the guild.

• No one enjoys seeing Damage Done meter in raid chat, as it's 'A pointless number', the boss is down, everyone is happy. 

• The DPSers are required to do Minimum DPS, those who don't are kicked, and those who top it are pricks. 

• [Friendly] DPS competitions are frowned upon, and a fire mage mocking a frost mage (Or a Mutilate Rogue mocking a Subtlety Rogue) is not tolerated, even if it's a progress night, even if the boss had only 100k health left before wiping the raid, and that optimal spec on the DPSers would mean a kill. 

Being a DPSer in a progressing guild (As opposed to an end-raiding guild farming Hard Modes for next content) is a thankless job. 

But barring that most hardmodes have insane amount of DPS requirements that most of the Average Guilds can only dream to achieve (not because of gear but because of the lack of willingness on both the raid leaders' and dpsers to achieve maximum damage possible). How many times have you heard Tanks of your guild being invincible and awesome? And the healers doing a tremendous job? And compare in to number of times DPSers being congratulated for the awesome DPS. The latter is surely scarce.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not griefing. I've been in guilds that were top of the line. Where I could compete on the DPS meters with blood and tear. Where good DPS was valued and Raid Leaders saw the DPSers as the blade of the sword, constantly working to get a keener edge. But to my luck, most all of them were mindless retards. 'Yo mama!' jokes and mindless spam. Sure, they were playing pro, but I would often leave them after a month, getting my DKP back with items and seeing a little more content. I draw a line where I play with people with brains, even if they don't need one to dominate the game.

But this is a problem of all the guilds not having downed 11/12 ICC Hardmode yet.

Thus the name of the blog. DPS Meter. Upholding the honor of those 20-odd DPSers whom you rotate in your guild every night.

My next post is going to further explain what a great DPS can help your guild achieve.