Welcome to Druid Net!

This is a blogsite based on my character Owlaf, from the US server Feathermoon, in the game World of Warcraft. Other characters might appear every now and again, but Owlaf is my main character and the first one I got to maximum level during Wrath of the Lich King, and again in Cataclysm. She collects mounts, pets, and other nonsensical junk. Packrat? Maybe. But we are talking about an OCD... Yep... this is the site of an Obsessive Compulsive Druid.
Thanks for visiting, and ENJOY! ^_^

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Pre-Patch 4.1 Woes

Well, I just found out they're coming out with a "Call to Arms" for the dungeon finder. According to blizzard the Dungeon Finger will have a feature where it will automatically scan the dungeon ques to see how long it will take for the que. If there are too few tanks for example, it will offer an extra reward. This Call to Arms will give a tank an extra satchel that will reward the tank with an extra item, like flasks, potions, non-combat companions, even rare mounts. The rare mounts in question would be like Baron Rivendare's Dreadsteed, or the Reigns of the Raven Lord, or even the white Hawkstrider that I rarely see! I bet they might even include those holiday mounts like the Brewfest Kodo or the big Love Rocket. I wouldn't mind that.

My problem then? Well, how fair is this? Lets look at the dungeon makeup. You have one tank, one healer, and three DPS. The DPSers, for some reason, have to wait the longest, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour maybe! So now Blizzard is trying to come up with an incentive to the tanks and healers to que in the dungeon finder so that the DPS players won't have to wait as long. Sounds like a good idea.

The bad part is that this totally excludes the pure DPS players, or more specifically it excluded the classes that are pure DPS. Namely the Mages, Warlocks, and Hunters. They can only pick DPS. Even if they had a pet that could take enough damage, they couldn't select the role of tank, and their healing spells if any are geared towards themselves and only work under certain circumstances. Mages, they use Evocation, which restores mana, and if glyphed it can restore health, so that's a healing spell they could cast on themselves, but has a long cooldown because of it. Hunters if they are Beast Mastery, they can have a talent the regenerates health as long as they have their pet out (pet and hunter health heals about 5% every X seconds) which can help the healer a little. And then the Warlocks. They can channel health from an enemy target to replenish their own health... so as a result they have to be in combat! ARGH! How annoying is that, having to kill something to heal yourself.

So other than that, these three classes have no choice but to DPS, and why not? It's what they were designed for. The problem here is that if there are not enough tanks or healers in the que, the dungeon finder will come up with a reward for those two to give them an incentive to pug. As a result, this will leave the DPS short, because the tank and the healer will get a bag as an extra reward, but the DPS will get nothing out of it. Sure it will result in a faster que so they can do heroics, but really, most of my alts that are DPS only have gotten all they can out of heroics.

Now my druid is my main character, and druids can do multiple roles, but only one at a time of course. I dps for the most part as a Boomkin for the fun of it, and when pugging for a random, it does take a while to get into a que, so I fly around and farm herbs or I do archaeology. With 30-40 minutes to wait, it gives me plenty of time. If I go afk when the que pops, then oh well! I should have kept an eye on the time.

And if the rewards from farming wasn't my incentive to wait that long for a que, then the lack of annoyance as a feral tank is. There were times when I pugged a random and I've had the DPS members charge ahead of me while I was eating to get a food buff, or a hunter putting misdirection on me and shoot at the mob while the healer was getting mana back up and wasn't ready. Then I've had times when the healer went oom and blamed me for being a bad tank, or the whole group wiping and blaming me for it for whatever reason. I ended up rage quitting a few times.

Even when I wasn't tanking I've been the victim of bad players. I was on my troll druid and the other players were picking on my addon that said things when I shapeshifted or cast spells. I kidded right back at them of course, picking on their picking on me, and for the most part the dungeon went okay. Not too many deaths, since it was a low level anyway (dire maul to be exact). Then we got to the boss, which was a beast-dog with blue skin and about a thousand eyes. Yep, a demon of some sort. We destroyed the guards so now the beast was loose. We kill it. I rolled need on the item that dropped so I could use it, and I won the roll and skinned the beast. Next thing I knew, a player said, "You bitch!", I typed "?", and the next thing I knew I was removed from the group. Now I have no idea if it was because I rolled need on the loot or skinned the beast, and now that I was removed from the group, I would never know. If it was the beast skinning I couldn't trade that so there might have been cause to be mad about, but if it was about the loot, that was tradeable, and if they had been mature enough to politely ask if I could trade it to them because they really needed it, then I might have traded it. Items won in dungeons have what, two hours till they become untradeable? I think so. So why the sudden boot? Probably because they were kids and they had no idea that the item in question would be useless in a few levels anyway. It's not like I was rolling on a 359 epic weapon that drops once in a blue moon, right? So yeah, some people can be douchebags in their own way.

There were times like that as an 85 too. I've seen a tank charge on into the mob while the healer was in another room drinking to restore mana. I've run back from dying only to reset the monster and we'd have to start all over again. Mistakes do happen. I've declined from tanking randoms by myself since it doesn't feel worth it to get into a group of dpsers who try to rush you when you or the healer isn't ready. I've wiped because I was in a group with a bad healer, or a polymorph going wrong and healing the mobs so we can't kill them. I've been blamed for bad tanking myself. So now, I just que as a boomkin, dig up herbs while I wait for the pop, and hang back and cast spells as a DPS... and if something goes wrong and everyone is about to die, I can step back and shadowmeld... and the teabag the ones who died if I didn't care for them. Good to be a night elf.

Anyway, if this new Call to Arms for the dungeon finder goes through, I might not use it as a tank at all anyway. The rare chance of the mounts or pets as a reward aren't worth it considering the fact that I can't get them to drop in a solo run of those dungeons. See Raven Lord... Yeah... As a druid I feel entitled to it... but now anyone can get it, and that pisses me off since I went through a lot of quests to get that object in the first place, and I still haven't gotten it.

Yeah... not looking forward to this patch at all.... not much anyway. :/

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