I ended up commenting at the end, that I suspected Tobold was trolling us all, but then I see him mentioning his whole idea about social responsibility in another post, and I guess he wasn’t kidding afterall…..

I found the whole thing so blantantly flawed, and the comments so full of clever counter arguments and insight.

I wonder how Tobold would tackle the concept of playing for fun in his theory.

Whoda thunk!

*salute goblin*

Usually, it’s a difference that only the healer notices.

The other thing ofc is that even if you did tank, people would raise hell if you rolled on dps gear so what’s the motivation anyway?

In fact, I think it is socially responsible of me to queue as a DPS! Why would I do a job I’m barely competent at? How is that responsible? When I don’t queue as tank, you don’t wipe through any fault of mine!

However, I do disagree about the healing meters. The healers in my guild compete to get the highest on the healing meters. DPS is not king to them

Good enough for -what-, though?

I mostly tank and heal, so I have a fair number of opportunities to observe dps and their various failure modes. Sometimes I come away from the LFD experience impressed, but more often I’m badly disappointed.

I agree that expectations should be set accordingly, but according to what? Some players expect perfection, which is clearly too high a standard. The LFD system, by contrast, expects only an average ilevel of 329, which seems to me a bit low in the absence of skills. I think it would be reasonable to expect players in the queue to have some demonstrated ability to move out of fire, move into buffs, run an effective rotation, use a variety of abilities, and switch targets. These are (some of) the skills necessary to complete the content for which the group was composed.

Random things will happen when a random group of players is assembled, but the frequency with which a heroics group has one dps doing <6k dps suggests to me that the system has scope for improvement.

Within a week, we had quite a few folks able to do Heroics. However-our tank situation was lacking, due to said holidays. We have several MS tanks, but many were not able to really play often due to winter vacations, family, and the like.

Thus, I would not group-by my own choice-with other tanks. Because we were trying to get guild runs going, I was a perfectly acceptable tank gear wise. Say we had 10 people online, but only 1 tank. If I grouped up in my MS with one group, the other group would be not only left with needing to LFD, but one person would have to be left out on top of it. Helping guildies, IMO, is a good thing to do. I like tanking though-I wouldn’t have a tank OS if I did. (DPS are not FORCED to take an OS they dislike in our guild. It’s highly encouraged though hybrids do take a different OS for raid flexibility. Tanks are required to have offspecs in priority of healer-ranged-melee.)

This goes for raids as well; If someone can’t make it and the raid’s short, it’s just a good gesture if someone steps up and takes up the missing role. I admit I’d frown at someone who would absolutely refuse to use their OS(which they geared up) and let the raid be cancelled because of it.

Again, I see both sides-some people like DPSing, and don’t like tanking or healing. But at the same time, it’s a known fact-queues for tanking and healing are much shorter than queues for DPS. If a DPSer has a heroic viable OS, but insists on always queueing as DPS and KEEPS COMPLAINING about the long queues, yes, I would say something to them.

In other words, it’s perfectly okay to be a hybrid but only take DPS specs. But by doing so, IMO, you give up the right to complain about long queues. Want a shorter queue? Go as a tank or healer. It’s a choice-a spec you prefer and a long queue, or a spec you dont’ quite prefer but a short one. Sadly, if you’re a DPS preferred person you can’t have both. (This goes for pure DPSers as well-I mean, DPS has a long queue.) This is where i can see the plight of the pure DPSers however-they CAN’T queue as anything else, and due to the fact so many hybrids also play as DPS, their queues are longer.

It’s a back and forth thing and IMO there is no real right answer as both sides feel entitled. It’s a bad situation on both sides; DPSers who play hybrids who dont like non DPS specs are made to feel guilty and that’s not good, and DPSers who WOULD play another spec aren’t able to due to the class design. The only way I could see a possible fix to this would be to really-redesign/scratch the ‘holy trinity’.

That’s not what I meant.

The Cata heroics are challenging once, maybe twice. After that it’s just an hour long grind for 70 valor points. If you stop running them at this point and wait for your gear you don’t pass on challenges. You pass on grinding.