Ok, this could be a comment, or it could be its own post, so I'll make it the latter.
Every instance run is a single crime viewed differently by five or ten different bystanders, and your post and James's reminds me how much so that is. Here are some random thoughts.
Since we were playing with both Threat and Damage meters yesterday, we had a lot of feedback to evaluate, but I'm not sure we debriefed on how the tools helped or hurt us. The difference between threat and damage is a subtle one, and though you're not talking to it specifically, it's an important one to bring up.
DPS caster classes generally have a 1:1 threat to damage ratio, with some skills to push that ratio to 1:10 or 1:20. Warriors and other tanks are blessed with the inverse ability, to create 2:1 to 10:1 threat to damage ratios. As a warlock, then, you're the closer - you finish the fight, not start it. The DoTs that you describe are delaying or distributing the damage you do over time (sometimes evenly, sometimes logarithmcally), and so they push your threat contribution to the back end of the fight. I visualize this as a rising threat curve, and overlayed against a tanking class's declining threat curve (they start out big, with disproportionate threat generation like Sunder and Lacerate, then fall off with the melee damage), it ideally works out so that your two curves are essentially mirror images of each other.
Damage, on the other hand, will generally be unbalanced at the end of the fight. That you're second on the list even with the level disparity between Hall and Via at 67 and 70 is a testament to the power you 'locks can pump out. Pumping it out, though, may ultimately be what you find the most challenging to manage. Turbulence said he ultimately had to remove Damage Meters because it was skewing his playstyle from a team to individual perspective; I'l be interested to see what your experience is, since as a healer, I never top the DPS charts, and the pallies and resto druids are kicking my nerfed rump on the healing meters....
I don't know if it's a lack of understanding of the casters you were reacting to, or a different conception of their role. Where your description and my visualization during yesterday's run diverged (somewhat) is in the handling of multiple mobs, and also in the change in instances that follow Underbog.
My impression - and it's incomplete, since I've only done a handful of additional 5-man runs in places like Mana-Tombs and Sethekk Halls - is that Blizzard's trick for increasing the difficulty of instances is to increase the number of mobs in a pull, from 4 to 5 to 6, and when that happens, spreading the DOTs around becomes more tricky.
In any run, there's a limited number of crowd control options that are generally defined by your group composition. Yesterday's run was proportionally tank heavy - 2 tanks, 2 off-tanks (pet and VW) - and lighter on the DPS - beastmaster hunter and warlock, rather than, say, mage and rogue. In our run, we had potentially six or seven immobilizing crowd control options - ice block trap from the hunter, as well as the druid's roots and beast charming, priest's mind control and shackle, and lock's succubus seduce, demon enslave and banish. We also had some slowing abilities - fear from 'lock, priest and warrior, slowing traps from hunter, mind soothe from priest - there's probably others. So, for three mob pulls, we were sitting pretty - two tanks, and the off-tanks picked up the slop. Four mob pulls were still generally managable. We never (or rarely, I don't remember) used our skills to fully imobilize a mob, to put it on hold, so to speak - we just slowed things down. Within that context, focus fire wasn't as crucial, and so the "DoT them all up and we'll catch them" method was quite succesful.
With a five mob pull, however, it seems to go differently. Instead of delaying, immobilization and prioritization becomes the name of the game, and I'll admit, I came at the Underbog run with that mentality in mind. Here's what I've seen recently in Sethekk Halls:
Class composition: Warrior, Rogue, Warlock, Hunter and Priest. Five mobs, too many to fight straight up or simply slow, so complete immobilization becomes crucial. Fight opens with Sap, Shackle and Ice Trap imobilizing three mobs. Warrior charges skull, and Rogue cycles over to X. Warlock DoTs Skull, then cycles to DoT X. At that point, the Warlock's options are limited - any damage to the three controlled target will break them out of the control, so what's next?
In my opinion, you've got to kick in the burst dps - shadowbolt, death coil, etc. And you're going to focus fire on one target to bring it down quickly, so that you free up the group to cycle onto the next target or pick up one of the three immobilized targets as they break free. Mages are the top of the heap at burst DPS, clearly, but warlocks are no slouch themselves, and I'll argue that in five-man runs, you'll find yourself using those tools increasingly over the more delayed gratification of DoTs.
From a healer's perspective, this has benefits as well, because it allows for a more bursty healing style, where I'm just healing one or two people. Healers who toss heals throughout a fight, consistently, run out of mana, because we never break free of the five-second rule - we never get into our full regeneration period. On the other hand, if I start with a HoT to keep Via generally up and running for 6 to 8 seconds, and then burst heal him to 100%, then wait 6 to 8 seconds, then burst heal him - the per-tick regen looks like this: 47, 47, 47, 47, 47, 148, 148, 47, 47, 47, 47, 148, 148, instead of straight 47s. At the end of that period of time, I'm ahead by 400 mana - and that's the cost of another heal if I need it. If, on the other hand, a DoTted mob breaks free and beats on the warlock or the hunter, even once or twice, then that benefit is gone, or even worsened. Priests hate "worsened"....
James has, from time to time, commented about my post that called him a bad player. Certainly it's left an indelible mark on both of our experiences in WoW - it's a touchstone, even if it wasn't intended so. For me, in some ways, that post crystalized one of those turning points where the game mechanics and my own discomfort with being out of control (James rightly attributes at least some of my leadership style, and lack of appreciation for jazz, to discomfort) bring the pressure onto players to conform to social expectations. My reaction to your description of being pushed to play against your style is at first a kneejerk "get used to it or get out" response that's born out of raiding with Crimson/Project Mayhem, then my second response is to cringe mightily at my first response. My goal in playing WoW was never to become a judgementalist, dictatorial asshole - when did that happen?
But, in fact, I do find myself struggling with a fundamental challenge of leadership, which is how much to define and control, and how much to leave to ambiguity and adaptation. Yesterday's run was all about training for me - Via wanted to see how a warlock functioned in the group, I wanted to see Cainne get some real experience at tanking after his respec from Balance to Feral, and I wanted Assamyras to get more comfortable with running an instance with a group - she almost completely soloed to 70, and is hesitant about how to function within a group setting. As such, I chose Underbog because I knew the instance well, and because I believed we could do it steadily within a time frame (Cainne had a soccer game he had to attend). I was generally more controlling, and more precise, about my instructions than in other settings and instance runs.
But is training effective? Is it fun? What are the baseline measures a group uses to evaluate such experiences? I left the run feeling very satisfied - I thought it went exceedingly smoothly, loot dropped, bosses died, quests were completed, deaths and delay were minimal. These are my assessments of success. But I'll agree, the run generally proceeded against a mental template that I had ahead of time - it wasn't Improv Night at the Underbog...
Thinking about leadership and teamwork over the last year, one of the many things that have crystallized for me is the importance of initially defining the task and the goal. I've thought about whether it would improve instance runs to outline why I'm there as the leader, and hear why others are there. If two people come to a run with the hope of getting the phat loots off of the second boss of four, and the other three are just there for the social experience, is the divergence of goals signficant enough a barrier to present second thoughts? Is it better as a leader to clarify that the team may have asymetrical motivations, or rather to expect and assume ambiguity, and focus on dealing with it when it surfaces? I admit I don't know the right answer, but I suspect my play style and leadership biases against jazz, and toward square dancing.
Nerf Square Dancing!
ReplyDeletertard...