My Updates
First up, updates. My mage and my warlock and my priest have all hit 70. It really was easy. I didn’t even have to do any of the pre-patch event to ding them. So I have 8 level 70s. And, once my timewalkers come over, I will have 10 level 70s. I feel like that’s probably 7 too many… But I am set to make some serious cash at the outset! I am very excited about this. More excited than the fact that Warband Banks work (although that is awesome), and more excited about it than the pre-patch event that I dipped a toe into today. Meh. I’m not all about cosmetic/transmog rewards, so I’ll probably just do things through once and be done with it. That gives me a bit of time to relax and not level something for a while.
Okay, enough of my updates. I wanted to talk about THE META. This is a good, old-fashioned Kurn rant, complete with examples to illustrate my points, so get yourself a drink of your choice and settle in for the next, uh, 1700 words and change. :)
The Meta
I don’t know if it’s because I started raiding when we were lucky to get 20 people into ZG for a couple of hours to kill Venoxis, or if it’s because we only ever hit up Molten Core with a full 40 people once (and once, we 27-manned Gehennas!), but I’ve never really understood the whole concept of what is the “best spec” at this time.
Okay, let me rephrase that — I’ve never really understood why people seem to care so much about what is “meta” and what isn’t.
When I started raiding, there wasn’t any room for this “optimization” nonsense. Three warlock curses up on a boss? HAH. We didn’t have three warlocks! We were lucky to have two warlocks on any given night in Vanilla and like 6 warriors who could hold aggro on Garr’s adds while the warlocks banished the other two. It was not a fun time, but we (usually) made it work. Because that’s all we had, you know? We didn’t have the luxury of saying “sorry, resto druid, we don’t have a spot for you because we have 8 priests healing”. We needed healers! We needed everything.
So when people talk about “the meta”, I want to acknowledge that yes, there are likely specs and classes that are performing really well right now. Heck, back in Burning Crusade, Beastmaster Hunters were all the rage. There was a single macro you could just hit over and over and over and over again and boom, you topped damage meters. On Gorefiend in Black Temple, I had to actually swap from my holy paladin to my hunter, Kurn, in order to not mess up the whole raid. I raided on a shitty laptop with an integrated graphics card and things did not cooperate with the encounter. I couldn’t function as a Vengeful Spirit quickly enough to take care of the shadowy constructs that would spawn, and if I was the FIRST person killed, then it was going to be a wipe. So I came in as Kurn (swapped to BM, even though my forever-Marks-heart broke at it) and would feign before every Shadow of Death cast, leaving me able to avoid dealing with constructs and death on that fight at all. And, because I think we had four BM hunters in the same group that night, I did quite well, considering all I had was crafted gear and a couple things from Karazhan.
“But Kurn,” you say, “switching to BM for Gorefiend is playing the meta!”
Kind of. The only reason I did it was because I was incredibly undergeared for T6 content on my hunter, having basically a couple pieces of the equivalent of T5 (from my Leatherworking) and some scattered epics from Karazhan. Had I thought I could keep up with my hunters in any other way, shape or form, I guarantee you I would have gone in as Marks. But the whole point of my swapping to my hunter was to not mess up the raid. So I pulled out all the stops and did everything my hunter possibly could do not to mess it up. In this sense, I played the meta to compensate for crap gear.
The way I see it, when we look at all things being even, I don’t particularly care about the meta and, I guess, that’s why I don’t understand why others care so much. Granted, I’ve never been in a guild that has pushed world firsts. I’ve never been much of a PVPer, so I don’t care if the combo of, for example, frost mage, holy pally, sub rogue, would suck in arenas, if I wanted to play with Majik and Fog.
But that’s the thing, right? Everything has to be even. So when we look at my guild’s first kill of Gorefiend, back in the day, my gear was not even, so I had to step it up with the spec to make sure we had enough DPS. (Not going to lie, the stacks of Ferocious Inspiration, my using a flask and food, etc, really helped.)
So what happens when things aren’t even? Let’s take, for example, Magister’s Terrace, again, back in Burning Crusade. At the end of the instance, you’re flying around the room, trying to kill Kael’Thas, but he’s throwing crap at you and you can hardly stand still. You’re dodging arcane spheres, phoenixes, flame strikes, all kinds of shit. How do you think that went for a holy paladin? Answer: badly.
I could reliably heal three of five people on the fight. Myself, my tank, and one DPS. That’s it. If we didn’t have healthstones from a warlock or didn’t have healing potions or didn’t have bubbles/ice blocks/etc, at least two people would die. And I was in full tier five gear. The gear should have been more than equal to the task. I daresay my skill was, too. But the fight was unfair for a holy paladin, because I had one instant-cast spell (holy shock) on a 15s cooldown. This was before beacon.
I had a priest alt at the time and did the instance in scattered blues and a couple of epics from Karazhan. Healed it without any issues. Like EZ MODE. Compared to my T5 paladin. That is ridiculous.
I did not let one challenging fight have me switch my raiding character, though. Were things harder to heal as a holy paladin than a holy priest? HELL YES. Did I care? No! Apart from dreading Shadow Labs (for Grandmaster Vorpil — the teleporting always screwed me up), and hating Magister’s Terrace, I could do anything any other healer did, barring a battle rez. (Okay, and healing while moving was hard even with Divine Favor and Holy Shock.) But my class and spec had so many benefits! Blessings of Might, Wisdom and Kings! Blessings of Sacrifice and Protection and Freedom! Crits returning 100% of mana cost! (I miss you, Illumination.) I loved the utility of my class. Hell, the very first time I killed the Lich King, both tanks had just eaten it, LK was at 11% (so 1% to go), and I bubbled and taunted the mofo and, yes, then died shortly afterwards when my bubble expired, but I bought the team an extra few seconds to DPS the crap out of him. And we won! And it was my Lay on Hands that crit Dayden as we took down Lady Vashj for the first time!
Show me a priest who can tank the Lich King for 10 seconds without dying. (I mean, apart from the priest who tanked Onyxia, who was shadow…)
The thing is, though, that even if all gear is equal and all instances are equally balanced for all specs of everything, the one thing that is never going to be equal is skill.
When doing most things in WoW, having skill that’s about average will still get you pretty far in the game. If your skill is higher than most people’s, it’ll get you further — mythic raids, high mythic key dungeons, that sort of thing. I still maintain that if your skill is high enough, you probably don’t need the added bonus that “the meta” will give you. If you can pull together your ideal group and it fits the meta, great! But if you pull together your friends and your classes and specs aren’t perfect, that’s okay too. Hell, I did the 45m Baron run in Strat UD in Vanilla in 39 minutes with 2 mages (one frost, one fire), a warlock (destro), a holy priest and myself as a Marks hunter. My CAT (that’s right, my CAT) tanked. No bear, no turtle. A cat. And we did it in 39 minutes. We used shacks and traps and then the mages and the warlock would go AOE down the towers while me and the priest drank. That was emphatically not the best group to do the Baron run with, most of us in a hybrid of T0, T0.5, ZG and possibly a tiny bit of AQ20 gear and a couple pieces of MC gear. We weren’t overgeared for the instance, though our gear was probably higher than some attempting the run. But our group composition was ridiculous. And we did it to see if we could. And we could!
I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is… think outside the box. Use your class and spec skills to their fullest extent. Did you know that you could cast Divine Intervention on a hunter pet? Well, you could. I can’t advise you do so, but you can definitely do it. Similarly, you could mind-control and sheep the same mob (or is it vice-versa?). Weird? Yes, definitely. But play around with your skills.
Dungeons and raids, even outdoor mobs, they’re all just puzzles. Can you brute strength your way through them? Absolutely. But can you sit there and be patient and do something you have absolutely no business doing just because you thought you’d try? Yes, you can.
Challenge Yourself
Coming this new expansion, that’s my challenge to you. Go do something really dumb on your favourite character. Try to solo something that is not typically soloable. Try to make creative use of your abilities to do something neat. Don’t break the game, don’t get caught making “creative use of game mechanics” to exploit anything. But go do something fun and stupid.
Example 1: I would take night elf hunters to Dire Maul East to kill Lethtendris with me as an application. They would need to make great use of feign death, shadowmeld, track demons, and would need great pet control. If we killed Lethtendris without too much trouble, you were in.
Example 2: I would take dwarf hunters (due to the lack of shadowmeld) to Winterspring and get them to kite… I think it was Azurous, to Everlook, whereupon the guards would help you beat him up. If they did it successfully within a certain number of attempts, they were in.
These are fun and stupid things that test your skill and your ability to think outside the box. Yes, this is a game about the holy trinity of tanks, healers and damage-dealers, but it’s also an open world. The world is yours to explore. Do so! :)
Thank you.
I’ve complained about players being a slave to the meta for any game (pick one, any one) for some time now, so it’s nice to see I’m not alone in this. When I get on my high horse and start rolling, I’m sure some readers think “oh crap, there goes Red again”, so it’s great to read this post from someone whose experience I greatly respect.
(While I never did Magister’s Terrace in TBC Classic, I remember running it often enough in Retail Wrath back while leveling a Frost Mage that yes, if you had to stand and cast that Kael’Thas fight was a nightmare. I was jealous of Warlocks in that fight.)
If there’s one thing about Classic Era that I really do enjoy, it’s that the raiding teams there can’t afford to be picky about who they take, so if you want to raid as a Ret Pally or do AQ40 as a Frost Mage they’ll take you. If a raid team wants to be a slave to the meta, Classic Era raiding is definitely not for them. In a way, things have come full circle on WoW where “back in the day” is now truly that in WoW Classic Era.
No problem. :) It’s something that gets on my nerves because… unless you’re pushing to be the top 1% of anything, you probably don’t need to change things up enough to warrant changing your spec significantly (ie: to arcane from frost), much less changing your class entirely.
Really, when we look at things, it’s all about skill. Gear makes up for a lack of skill. “Meta” specs and classes make things “easier”, to make up for a lack of skill. Specific talents make up for a lack of skill. So it depends, IMHO, on your baseline skill with X character and what the heck you want to do. As someone who always did raiding content from Vanilla through Cata, I chose to try to ensure I was never a drag on the group — hence going BM for a couple of Gorefiend fights to make up for the gear gap. At the same time, though, I am confident enough on my hunter and my paladin to experiment with them. I’m not as familiar with either of their toolkits as I would be had I raided at all over the last few years. Still, given equal gear, I think I could cobble together a couple specs that would do just fine.
Magister’s Terrace can kiss my ass. Actually, any fight with Kael’thas can kiss my ass…
Glad to hear that the classic folks can’t afford to be picky at this juncture. It’s a smaller population than retail, I would imagine, so if raiding guilds on retail are having trouble (who doesn’t have trouble recruiting?) then that gives players a bit more say in what they want to do and how they want to do it. :)
As to “being a slave to”, gotta say I’m not a fan of the term, though I get what you’re saying. Might I humbly suggest “overly influenced by the meta” or “deferential to the meta” or even “at the mercy of the meta”? More options here! :)
“At the mercy of” is probably a better way of putting it, because the other two options give the meta far more credit than it’s worth.
I ended my progression in TBC Classic before my raid team downed Kael’Thas, but given the number of times we bashed our head against him on Monday nights, I really dislike him. Far more than Four Horsemen in Vanilla Naxx.
I think Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery have more players than Era does, so raid teams there can probably afford to be more picky. But in Era, the lack of raiders overall means that you simply can’t be picky and expect to field a team.
One thing that the meta does do is compensate not only for skill but the decline of said skill. I no longer have the reaction times I did when I was 40 when I began playing WoW, much less my 20s and 30s. The meta does allow me some slack to cover for my slowing reaction times in the same way that magnifying glasses allow me to work on circuit boards that I can no longer see with the unaided eye. But as you pointed out, there’s a difference between being a drag on the group versus tinkering around to see what works for you. My Vanilla Classic Rogue was some weird hybrid of Subtlety and Combat because I refused to give up Improved Sap for the damage bonuses found in the Combat tree, so I created a franken-build that allowed me both Dagger Specialization and Improved Sap. Was it a DPS-maximized Sword Rogue build? No. Did it do what I wanted out of playing a Rogue? Oh hell yes.
This is Tharivol from approximately 2009 Apotheosis. Real name is Robert Craig. Start playing WoW again as VaraTharivol on Eldre Thalas. Level 5 frost mage. Cuz we are sticking with the class specialization that got us here today :). Many humorous but possible disturbing videos available on our YouTube channel.
We didn’t read your guidance and am just going to kinda do what we do. How’s the gravy/ french fries thing in Canada … still enjoying that?