Most groups this week missed tons of kicks, rarely used defensives, invited the wrong comp, you name it.
Groups I joined were especially bad this week.
Like this 22 WM. The tank had a really high score and invited me first. But then added these players and our comp was just bad. A lock and warrior who got very few kicks, if any. A shadow priest that died fast and got like nothing. Like, ok. I get it. The idea of inviting classes with short kicks, like shaman and rogue, naw. And even a class that can dispel curses. Naw. Not fun when runs are easy. Make it hard. Especially hard for the healer.
And this mage in one key, a 22 EB. The guy did not use a single defensive the whole run. Like, ok. I get it. You have a healer who can magically heal you through it all. Anyhow, on the last boss, the guy did not use a defensive. We had no more brezzes. And that bricked the key.
Yaay.
And on a 22 AD. Like all of a sudden, on the last boss, we are going to use a new strat. Run directly behind the boss with soul rend, no matter how many spiders are there.
Right.
I wont go into any more detail, but pugging keys has been incredibly disappointing all week. Except for one good 22 at BH, the rest were pretty much awful.
And so many groups bringing carries. Like ok, your ilevel is 445. You need gear, but why not work your way up vs bricking the key?!
I dropped on more than half the groups I joined (before the key started of course) this week in the 20-22 range because so so many had carries or semi-carries. Like I get it, but man.
Have to say i had some bad runs, didnt even get 4 done. Boosted my vanilla pally tank to 70, 420 odd ilvl and set about 2-3 chesting everything and ended up with a 15 key which i didn’t try, ran out of time.
I had a ball but also amazed that with F all gear, no tier it is very easy to use a pally to get to a decent lvl of key and not be 430 ilvl
Point is maybe change your role and do something different and have fun
It WAS a rough week. Not even hard affixes. I thought last week was also crap. I feel like last season I was shocked at not having to touch afflicted most of the time and now suddenly I’m having to solo it (that’s super fun on my resto druid).
I’ve also gotten yelled at for “low” dps. Like, ok, I know 40k overall isn’t stellar, but it’s pretty decent with a pug that doesn’t use defensives in AD where pulls were small and bosses like totem boss are kinda dps light while healing and waiting for totems to die. Just weird healer hate.
Can’t wait for fort/bursting where tanks are going to make stupid pulls, dps won’t use their defensives, and I get to try to clean up the mess.
I did roll a ret paladin and I feel like a god. I can help with affixes, I can stun, I have defensives for myself and others, I can interrupt, all while doing pretty decent dps (as long as you don’t compare me to havoc dh that knows how to play). It’s just not as convenient to get into a group, but man when I do it’s so much more fun.
It’s just my main that was a problem. My alts all did well (all five of my disc priest alts), but nothing over a 20. What surprised me is there just seemed so few groups that even looked good in the 21-23 range. Just a lot of people who had done relatively few keys for that level–and seemingly thinking that in higher keys it’s not much different than lower ones–as in in terms of using defensives, doing CC, skips, and kicks and avoiding mistakes and that kind of thing.
Oh well. My mistake was not getting a head start early. But my vault drops were mostly garbage for a few weeks. And I was already undergeared on my main as I had just made her two or three weeks earlier.
I guess I ought to be happy my alt runs were fun.
If you ever need a healer, I’d be glad to heal some runs. We could talk shop even (or not). Ha ha.
Historically, it’s been easier to pug a higher key (20-22) than an upper-mid key (16-19) because the higher damage and tight timers would limit advancement of poor players.
But the timers this season are too generous and the enemy damage not as threatening relative to previous expansions. People aren’t getting 1-shot on a missed kick on a +18 now, for example, like in Slands. This means people who have no idea what to do are flooding the higher key ranges like never before.
I get it. I tried to heal a 21 WM last night and the run did not go exceptionally well. I might be stupid but I don’t understand why people leave early vs still completing it? You still get loot and vault completion.
If y’all aren’t aware. 22s are basically like 17-18s last season. So that’s basically the infamous middle tier where bad players exist but can no longer afford to be bad without being punished.
I’ll give you a hint: most of the entire playerbase doesn’t actually participate in keys higher than 20, higher than 18s for that matter. 20 is the absolute highest most players will go simply because the gear reward goes up that high. Most players only do dungeons for gear rewards, that’s it.
So are you complaining about groups because the leader wasn’t doing a META or following the META? If so, you really need to go outside.
This one I do support, as I think you should not be inviting anyone below item level 470 to any 20+ level keys.
That’s odd, and sorry for that. I never yell at healers and I honestly don’t understand this nonsense. A healer should be expected to do 0 damage the entire dungeon, and then any damage they deal is bonus damage. All timers should be adjusted for healers doing 0 damage unless it’s level 30+, then the healer damage should matter which 97.5% of the playerbase will never get to that high at all anyways.
I don’t think they’re too generous, I think they’re good. If you need tight timers, you’re not gonna get a lot of participation in keys, which means your groups for filling in PUGs are gonna take 100% longer than needed due to the population being trimmed so much. You need more lenient timers because then it opens up participation more to a lot more players and allows them to have access and have fun.
The better at the game you are, the more cursed you are because most good players can’t accept average play from average players. That’s the curse humanity deals with and struggles with. As you get better at things, your patience for mess ups and tolerance levels creep way down. That’s why many people who are amazing at things, can’t accept average people in what they do and yell at most people. Their tolerance level decreases as their skill levels rise.
Yeah, which is helping you to get groups filled out faster. Again, go back to tight timers and way less people participate than ever before. So many players literally don’t care for the timer system in keys, that’s part of the loathing for keys. The other part is that with stricter timers comes perfect play expectations, which most players can’t and won’t do, then the yelling at them from the party lead, etc. All stupid things that people don’t care to deal with. They will just avoid it and instead of taking 20 minutes to fill, it’d take 85 minutes which would mess up your key because people have hardly any patience already to wait a long time for a key to fill even if it’s a 24. It doesn’t matter. Most players don’t want to wait 2 hours to fill a group for a single key when that could have been 6 keys done in that span already from other groups in other seasons.
That’s totally how it feels generally to me, except for on tyrannical bosses. I got a real wake up call last week on some bosses, like the last at EB and the sisters fight at WM. The fact that some people don’t know to nuke the summoned add at EB and dont use defensives or dispels opened my eyes. And group members missing important kicks or not inviting the right classes to do them enough gave me a real wake up call.
I have been healing keys mostly as disc now for a few years–and I typically heal at least twenty keys a week on my main and alts, sometimes as many as 40 a week. While I agree with the idea that keys feel 3 to 5 levels lower than prior, I dont believe that is the case with some tyrannical boss fights.
In some cases people view keys not timed but completed (on your io history) as possible evidence of poor play–proverbial black marks on your history. I know this because in my case, i have been refused plenty of invites for keys where my IO showed I was in a group that did not time a key (for example where your io shows a 20 AD not timed and you cannot get invites to any 20 ADs after that). Some people also see problems in a current run as evidence that the group is not capable enough to complete the dungeon in a reasonable time, and simply bail so they can start fresh and not waste time spinning their wheels with a bad group.
Also, at least in my case, on a lot of toons it is not so much gear as crests that I am after. There is a huge penalty in terms of the crests you get for not timing.
Do you even play a healer? When I heal and people get kicks, do the dispels as needed, etc–or even if there is an Aug Evoker in the group that knows how to play it well then it makes my job as a healer not only easier, but in a lot of cases possible–and also in a lot of cases fun vs stressful. The fact that people in 20s-22s can NEVER press their defensives also adds a layer of difficulty to healing that augs, kicks and dispels help dealing with.
Sorry to be frank about it, but you obviously have not been in the same situation once, let alone dozens or more (even hundreds) of times. All I can say is, read the post. Trust that it comes from the heart. Trust that it is not some meaningless rant that you cannot relate to because you have never been in my shoes.
As for going outside. Ha ha. I got outside at least once every week or two for a few minutes. So chill out (lol).
I main a Resto Druid, yes. I’ve healed, tanked, DPSed though for keys tanking as a Druid is more fun simply because I have After the Wildfire, which helps healers so much so I’m like a Pseudo-healer, a 0.5 version of one.
What I don’t do, though, is keys around 20+ because there’s nothing more than either bragging rights (score) and cosmetics n other nonsense I care nothing about. Gear stops at 20, and I don’t even care to do a 20, I go to 18, 19 because I just don’t enjoy keys at all. It doesn’t matter the season, the affixes all blow because blizzard can’t figure out how to make good affixes outside of seasonal affixes like encrypted, awakened, the dreadlords one, etc. BFA, and SL had some very good seasonal affixes that I wish they’d scrap 99% of our current affixes and just put those seasonal 1s in instead, then it would be 10 times more enjoyable to do dungeons, though I also hate the GOGOGO mentality that every pug does, too. I don’t care to take my sweet time, but I don’t care to go at mach 5 speed either. I tank more keys than I heal simply because tanking is easier. I piss tanks off when I’m DPSing or healing because they suck, and either try to pull 25 mobs dying in the process over n over thinking they’re in the MDI or they pull 1 single mob at a time which makes me impatient af, too. There is no in between with pugs, it’s either all in, or all out.
And I get that, I heal as a Druid, a Shaman, a Priest(Disco spec) and I used to do Evoker healer last season, too. That’s why I love being bear so much, I literally get to help the healers out a lot with After the Wildfire when it procs, dispels, and mega big Regrowths that crit for 450-600k on people every 20 seconds. It’s very much fun helping the healers out and watching them get happy because, again, I heal and understand their plights very much so.
I’ve been in the same situation, just not on those high level keys. I understand the pug world better than everyone else and I did, on my Druid, like 45 keys a week easily while trying to gear up and looking for specific items that either never dropped(looking at you Arch Druid ring from DHT) or when they did they’re BiS for 35 of 39 specs.
Yeah, same, it’s mainly crests at this point, but ya know what? 5 crests because of it being completed is still better than 0 crests because of it being abandoned.
I hope you get many good groups. I noticed when the group is very competent, it is like an entirely different game mode to heal, the damage that is coming is much more predictable and fun as opposed to random and torturous. With the skilled Vengeance Demon Hunters, I think I have to heal them maybe three or four times per minute, and some minutes never, and they also make the packs of mobs do nothing for several seconds.
Well, that’s you. I have healed into the 25 range. At that level of play it is super fun. Why? Because kicks are spot on, CC is done, you do skips, and people are very nice typically. It is actually a lot of fun vs babysitting and correcting mistakes or poor play.
I guess you might not understand that, but when you are in good groups playing at a fairly high level the healing tends to be pretty easy and you can focus a lot more on things like getting the mechanics perfect or about how to optimize and coordinate and how to manage certain encounters with your kit the best way–as in when to use barrier and rapture to get through a hard pull etc. and that vs rescuing people standing in fire all the time. You can also focus a lot more on your own play vs always bailing others out because of their low skill. It is quite fun.
And also, there are often little tricks to some pulls that you only learn and get to do in first rate groups and in voice. I love that kind of play to be honest.
That is the whole point of my original post to be honest. I am tired of babysitting groups with people who dont know what they are doing and I have to bail them out at every turn. And/or the key is bricked because of low skill, ignorance, people not watching guides, being clueless, inexperienced and so forth.
That’s the majority of the playerbase who does keys around or below level 20. The only incentives people have, gearing wise, is to go to 20 and stop. The evidence of this is clear when you look at raider io website. You see so many people for keys up to like 18 or 20, and then it drops off dramatically. That’s because most people are playing this game for gear and they don’t want to chase cosmetics, titles, or anything else. If there is no gear, there is no reward and if there is no reward then they’re not going to be going harder for it.
This game, to many, is basically like an ARPG where it’s all about the gear chase, nothing more. People also don’t like the fact dungeons are timed, people are snobby in most pugs groups on higher keys, easy to bail out on keys, too which is very stupid. If you’re not gonna finish a key, then don’t join it in the first place. Affixes are all badly designed and dumb to do, there’s so many reasons for people not enjoying keys.
Sure, that’s the same with PvP where the 1500-2.2k brackets are terrible because people can’t play very well with their toolkits and then above 2.2k it becomes an entirely different game.
You sound like a challenger, though, and someone who wants to push themselves, especially from this
But many people who play this game aren’t challengers at all. They don’t have that mindset in the slightest and they don’t have that personality, either. Those in the high key pushing range do, but again when you compare those towards the top to the entire group as a whole, it’s like 3% of the entire population who plays the game. That’s it.
That’s also why I said before in some other post: the better of a player you are, the more cursed you become. Why? Because as your skill improves…your patience and tolerance for those below you declines. That’s why people say “quit wasting my time” and stuff. It’s the same thing; “You guys suck, I’m out.” And that’s a very snobby attitude, it’s fine to have it but it’s seriously a very snobby attitude. Imagine taking that attitude with your boss at work. You’d be fired right off the rip at most places, especially anything corporate related, for having such a bad attitude they wouldn’t even think twice about firing you, regardless of how good you are most people in life hate snobby attitudes and impatience is just that.
Challenger mindsets are very few and far between. Challenger attitudes even less. And pushing above 20 means you’ve got a challenger appetite, which is not something so many people playing this game have. This game has become so very casual compared to what it was back in BC, Wrath, in MoP. It was quite hardcore during those expansions, and it loosened up to attract a much bigger audience and it did. Now that audience owns this game because there’s far more of them than anyone else.
I dunno. I dont necessarily play wow for the gear. To me it is a stepping stone that enables entry into harder content. It is like the key to bumping up the gaming level from easy to intermediate to hard to very hard and so on. In my case it is the challenge I like, as with any game. It is taking on a challenge and pushing yourself and learning something and the process of learning and achieving mastery. It is not the gear. The gear is merely the enabler and in another sense an extrinsic reward.
In the field of motivation there are two kinds of rewards, extrinsic and intrinsic. I’d google it if I were you. Anyhow, I doubt you are aware of your own motivations, and that you too could be like me, but just dont see it. But I dunno.
That’s not my experience. In my experience people are typically very very nice the higher the content. I have never done keys in the 24-25 range where people were as you describe them. Never.
I dont know what your point is here. Nobody joins a key they dont intend on finishing. If it is too hard drop it and do the one lower. And if it’s a pug and it is not working out, why stay?! Be polite, thank people for the group and move on.
True undoubtedly. But you get a lot more in gaming of those types than you do in other facets of life. This is where people like me go to challenge ourselves. That said, it is not hard to see that people have different reasons for doing whatever they do with their time.
Yeah, but a lot of people would push into higher content if they had the time for it. Most people have lives away from Wow and lack the time to really push. The rest of us who do, well, we have been sucked into the void of no return. Ha ha.
To me that sounds like immaturity. And while I cant speak for others, I am not rude about it. While I wonder why people stand in fire, and never use defensives when on the brink, I simply express my view by letting them die. It is not the healer’s job, in my view, to babysit dps who dont have the sense to rescue themselves when they can. I am tired of babysitting.
That said, when the content is lower, like in a 10 key or something, I get it. People are learning. But in a 20 to not know to use a defensive to save yourself and even the key itself?! I dunno. That said, I pretty much always leave keys thanking the group and leaving without anything more than a tyfg or tyfg gg, or thanks for the tries. We did our best.
Honestly, I dont see that comments like You suck and such are in the least bit helpful. That said, I once commented, in fact at the EB key that was partly a source of my original post with: Dude. You ought to use a defensive when you need to. But that was it.
Well, challenger mindsets are relatively low in the general population, but in gaming, there is a much higher number. But like I said, some who would go for it, simply cant because of time and commitment restraints.
Well, people are already doing 30s so 22s are a relative joke. But if you are in groups where people are inexperienced or generally low skilled, never use defensives, their dps is low for the key and/or they dont target fast so that the add does not die fast, etc, and/or the dps do not use defensives and die and you are out of brezzes because that has been the case the whole run then good luck.
Sisters at WM is also not that hard, but if there are a ton of missed kicks and no dispels, etc, no pot use, no use of defensives your group is going to wipe on a 22. It seems there are loads of dps out there that still think they only press their damage buttons, and never anything else. They seem to think that anything other than damage buttons is enough and that the other stuff, like avoidable damage or damage easily mitigated with defensives is better left to the healer who can do miracles.
I would add that a big part of the problem is dps players fixate on their parses. They think that if they have to press anything other than damage buttons that it is going to result in a fall in their dps. They dont care that the result is mana burn for the healer, that it can create trouble for the healer who has to waste CDs on you when they could be used instead optimally on hard pulls and such. They have no idea that healers who do dps have to sacrifice their own dps to save you. They have no clue that interrupts are critical to success in high keys because they negate damage and therefore contribute majorly to survival.
But so it goes. I am tired of raging in my own mind against players that neglect to use anything other than their damage buttons, or only rarely vs optimally, and expect a lot from and will even blame healers for their own failures. When my game time is up in a few days I will be on sabbatical from Wow for some length of time.