Dear V-Team: Can you help me push my car? (How do you Teach/Learn in WoW)

First a couple of letters:

To all new Holy Pallys, and all new players period,

I am guessing if you are here, you are looking for help and advice on how to properly gear or play your character. When I say proper I mean in a way that will squeeze the most out of your gear/gems, DPS, HPS etc... I recognize that there are multiple ways to get to that conclusion and multiple different play styles.

I applaud you on looking outside the game for help with making your in game experience less frustrating. Running out of mana on boss fights? Have sub 1K DPS? Healing assignments always dying on you? All of these things can bring frustration and doubt into your mind, before you create another atl, or go blow up 12 year olds in counterstrike, keep searching and reading articles from the amazing community of players that WoW has to offer. Check my blog roll for amazing pally/healing blogs and keep up the quest for knowledge (after you read my ranting below)!  Also check here for a listing of many great blogs.


Dear Blizzard,

Please stop giving OP gear to people who are not ready to use it. You wouldn’t give a 12 year old a Porch with a machine gun mounted to the roof and ask him to go heard some cattle would ya? Maybe you would, is that why you are giving out this candy? To watch and laugh at the carnage left in the aftermath, then swoop down and kick my dead corpse in the nuts?

I know, we want everyone to be able to kill the Lich King, I get it. I just wish that we had a safety switch or captcha or something that would prevent people from getting T9ed out and a couple pieces of T10 that are not gemmed or enchanted correctly (if at all). Maybe a quiz about your class before you can purchase an upgrade or something?

Love,
Vailladin

I know it’s a game; you can do whatever you want with your toon. Until you start to affect other players game play and enjoyment, that’s where I have a problem, if you can’t do the content because you haven’t taken the time to get your toon up to par, than please don’t subject me and 23 others to… you. Devil’s advocate says yes, I don’t have to group with you, I can leave the group and go do something that doesn’t put me in that situation, but that is negatively affecting my enjoyment of the game as well.

Having said that, here is letter #2

Dear Holy Pally from my VoA 10 last night,

You obviously took the time to read up on or figure out how to JC because you had 3 Dragon Eyes socketed. Why those gems were SP gems, I will not understand. Especially after I noted your 20K mana pool with you 5K GearScore and asked “Are you Flash of Light spec”? and you replied “Nope, Holy Light, holy crap you have a lot of stacked int and mana”!

You’re right I do, and you, you only have two int gems (non epic) socketed, a bunch of SP, some random MP5 and crit gems and … what’s this? A hit gem?!?! Your healing you don’t need hit rating. How are you going to spam HL with that mana pool? You’re not, so you are going to spam Flash of Light, but your haste is at 350. Not to sound elitist, but while you are casting your slow, week Flash of lights, I will cast my Holy Light, faster and for way more healing (and yes over heal) than you.

You took the time to pick out the correct professions for a pally and leveled them to max. Maybe you did that without reading a single guide, maybe you figured it all out on your own, or asked a lot of people/friends in game. Whatever you did to get that right, go do the same thing for your gems and enchants.

Love,
Vailladin

This pally was very receptive to my advice; he had good gear, and just didn’t understand how to use it. I hope his enjoyment of the game goes up after he gets some more knowledge on pally healing.

I don’t bitch that often, I just get frustrated by the most casual of casuals. I consider myself a casual player. I play a couple hours during the week, and try to get a raid in on the weekend. Maybe 10 hours total, all late at night after the family is asleep. I do take the time to read about the game and class I love so that I can be more informed and play better. My goal is in increase my level of enjoyment and in turn that will increase the level of enjoyment that people playing with me have. Let’s face it, the more you die, the less you accomplish, the less enjoyment you get in a time frame. If I spent my 10 hours a week wiping on Lord Marrowgar, I would have to take a look at myself, what I am contributing and the fight and do some research on why we are failing. I could go on but Thespius has it covered here.

Ill leave you with this question

If you couldn’t figure out how to get your car into drive, would you get out and push it to where you wanted to go? Or would you go find out what you were doing wrong. Would you even look around to see if other people were pushing their cars? On the other hand, if you saw someone pushing a car down the street, would you stop and find out what was wrong and offer to help?

Thanks for hearing me out.

Vailladin