I’ve been thinking a lot about respect the past couple of weeks, and more particularly how people or teams can earn or lose my respect. By definition respect is giving something or someone a “high or special regard” or “to consider worthy of high regard”. Respect is a strange thing. It often takes a lot of time to gain, but can be stripped away in a minute.

For me there are a few key things that will cause me to lose all respect for something or someone. Not being humble in successes, or gracious in struggles top that list. With regards to this I am often reminded that “modesty is attended with profit, arrogance brings on destruction”. I cannot stand people who gloat needlessly; regardless of if it’s the game winning touchdown or simply crossing a finish line first. It is the fastest way to lose my respect and likely never regain it. I have almost zero tolerance or patience for those who let their egos control their actions rather than their minds and morals.

That being said, not far behind is being dishonest or disingenuous – either as an individual or as an entity. I cannot stand being lied to, regardless of the reason. If you can’t be honest with those who trust you, then you are not worth respect. And to push that even further, if you can’t be honest with yourself then you can’t be honest with others. Which, again, means you are not worthy of respect. And if you lie to promote yourself at the cost of my friends, you can bet that you will never gain my respect again. Ever.

Now that we are a few weeks into the raid content, I thought it would be an appropriate time to have some discussion regarding the current state of the Resto Druid. I am going to offer some numbers and data below to support what I am about to say: Resto Druids are currently not in a good place. We continue to deal with the same issues that we struggled with for the majority of Cataclysm – we lack the toolkit to deal with burst AE healing. As the weeks have passed and other healers have obtained more gear and become more comfortable with their toolkits, the discrepancy only continues to become more noticeable. This is only further exacerbated by the fact that every other healing class received abilities permitting them to be stronger at dealing with this type of raid damage.

I have a few thoughts on how to fix this that I will discuss later on in this post, but first I thought we’d take a look at the numbers.

I went ahead and pulled all of the healing numbers from the past three weeks of raiding utilizing Raid Bots (an amazing too in so many ways!). I only pulled numbers from normal 25s for the purpose of this analysis. I did this for two reasons: 1) 25s are my preferred raid style and what I am passionate about fixing; and 2) there is simply not enough heroic data yet to look at (although I will tell you from the data I pulled, Druids are a bit worse off in heroics). I understand that three weeks isn’t a huge sample selection, but it is all the data we have at this time, and throughout those three weeks is fairly consistent, leading me to believe it will not appreciably change in the weeks to come if things stay as they are currently.

I have taken a look at the content as a whole and then drilled down to each of the six encounters for a more in depth look. The first set of data that I’m going to share is an overall view of how the healing classes are comparing as a whole.

Here you can see a few things. Monks are undeniably the strongest healers at this juncture in the game with none of the other healing classes coming close to them in performance. They are followed by Shaman and Paladins, with Druids and Priests bringing up the rear. You can see the bump in Holy Priests when they got their buffs to PoM and (I think) PoH. As you can see, Druids and Priests are trailing behind the other three healing classes by a fairly appreciable amount.

Let’s take this one step further, and examine how we are doing on a fight by fight basis to see if we fare any better on the individual mechanics of certain encounters.

We are now into our third/fourth week of MoP and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about things. The expansion is gorgeous, but I’m still a bit sad that I’ve been so busy doing “WoW Chores” that I’ve hardly had a minute to actually stop and smell the cherry blossoms.

Time Sinks
Let me start today’s rant with time sinks.

There are…so many of them. But I think the ones that bother me the most are dailys and valor point grinding. I hate the fact that to be the best player I can be for my raid team I am condemning myself to things that I quite honestly despise doing. I absolutely loathe the fact that every night, to do my part, I have to log in and do my “chores” before I’m allowed to play. I hate that I have to fly out the Town Long Steppes and visit the Shado-Pan. I hate that I have to ferret out where the August Celestials need my help. And most of all I hate that these miserable things take up time in game that I could use to do things I actually want to be doing. I hate that I feel compelled to grind out reputation in a slow, arduous, and cumbersome process. I hate that I feel like I’m letting my team down if I don’t do this every day.

I’m sure someone is going to read this, and feel the urge to comment “well, you don’t have to do them”. Sure, you are right. I don’t have to do them. I also don’t have to do the dishes in my house, or dust, or run the vacuum. But I’m doing myself (and a team I’ve committed to) a huge disservice if I don’t. And you can’t take that fact away, no matter how you look at it.

Which I suppose brings me to my next point: Valor Point accumulation at this juncture is just stupid. Did you know that you acquire more Valor Points right now from running Looking for Raid than you do actually raiding? I’m dead serious. How completely messed up is that? How do I earn more valor points for an hour of my time than I do for the effort I put in the other three nights a week that I raid? There is something inherently wrong with this fact.

I found this picture on the internet. Google links it back to ectmmo.com – so credit to them, I suppose!

I have now had experience with all six of the raid bosses that are currently available, as well as the two world bosses. As I have approached raiding this expansion, it has been with a love/hate relationship with my mana bar. And by love/hate, I suppose it’s probably more like a 20/80 split. There have been so many times that I’ve approached the end of an encounter cursing that damn blue bar. Cursing the raid wide AE damage pummeling the raid. Cursing my relative inability to efficiently deal with it.

And one night, as I was trying to squeeze out one more spell at the end of Elegon, in hopes that it might keep someone alive long enough to do just a tiny bit more damage, I couldn’t help but wonder: who decides what makes healing fun?

I mean, I know that the devs are invested in making the game engaging for everyone. But as we are immersed in yet another healing paradigm change I once again revel in the shortcomings of our toolkit, that are always highlighted the strongest when mana is an issue. But I don’t necessarily want to talk about how Mushrooms fell flat, or how Rejuv is still our way to get a raid topped up in high damage situations, and is so expensive that it’s laughable to think it can be effective – which means you have to throttle the one of the only tools you have to work with in those situations.

Rather, what I want to think about is why the devs seem to always go back to “making mana important” or why making your mana pool so tight that it’s borderline frustrating to work with equates to fun.

I have entered and come out of the other side on the grind to level 90. After finally making it through level 89 (dear god, this level was far too long) and hitting 90 I felt relieved to be finished. That is until I went to purchase my ability to fly and was assaulted with all of the quests. Only to learn that in addition to the quests there were more quests, in other places, to partake in. I was immediately overwhelmed and exhausted. I didn’t know where to start, what to do, or why the hell there were so many daily quests to begin with.

Yet, as I knew I needed to, I made room in my quest long and started on my way. Opting not to do the mount or the lore walker quests, I had daily quests for the Klaxxi, the Pandas, Cooking and Fishing. I easily obtained the achievement to do 25 daily quests in a single day, and then continued to have more to do. Each day after I hit 90 I spent 90 minutes to two hours taking care of daily quests. I quickly realized that it was going to become a huge burden to complete all of these quests every day once I went back to work and we started raiding again – and I imagine that it’s going to also involve me staying up later than I should just to make sure they are completed every day. The fact that it’s several hubs of dailys and so many dailys each day only makes it worse.

Every day I dread the daily grind. It is one of the first things I do, because I know that if I don’t I will find ways to avoid doing it. It is tedious, it is boring, it is frustrating…and for a progression raider it is required. I hate that rep grinds are tied to it. I hate that Valor Points are tied to it. I hate that I feel obligated to spend time doing things that I generally do not enjoy and make me miserable when I would rather be doing things I find fun (instancing, pet battles, hell – even fishing!). I stated more than once over the past few days that I felt dailys would be the end of WoW for me – I don’t enjoy them and there are just so many to be done. It’s overwhelming and time consuming and I can’t help feeling that Blizzard went overboard with them.

Good Luck on your first journeys through Pandaria, Everyone!

Be sure to take some time to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Pandaria – if you don’t, you will really be missing out on one of the best things about the expansion.

You will likely see me resurface in approximately one week (when I am forced to return to work!).

Everywhere you look, Pandaria is all the rage. People are preparing, excited to start their new adventures, counting down the days until Tuesday, September 25. And while I am usually one of those people, I’m having a hard time working up to the frenzy that usually surrounds a release. I know that the expansion is gorgeous – I marveled at the detail in the beta. I know that there are a lot of things that I’m looking forward to doing. I’ve got gear lists running out my ears, new raid bosses to explore and pokemon to play.

But when I think about next week, it’s with a little bit of regret and fair amount of sadness. And, I suppose if I’m being honest, a case of the jitters and nerves.

Let’s back up. I suppose this story needs to start at the beginning.

When MoP was released, I did what I do every expansion year: I requested a week off work, and got ready to hunker down. Brade had done the same thing. We’ve leveled every expansion together since TBC. And even though he drives me absolutely nuts leveling with him because he often forgets I’m there, doesn’t give me time to read all the quests, doesn’t account for my OH SHINY distractions and tends to be very particular about the pace at which he does things, it’s just something we’ve done together time after time. Once we’ve deprived ourselves of sunshine and sleep to reach max level, we start the gear grind together (which is significantly less rage inducing on my part!). This process is just as much a part of the expansion for me as having a gear wipe, relearning my class and spending several hours leveling fishing.