Stay Competitive in WoW

“Be prepared.”
Girl Scout Motto

---

Stay Competitive in WoW

Competition can be a healthy thing. It can make us strive to be better, more aware of new moves and strategies and by focusing on the numbers we can measure ourselves against others. This will increase our skill levels as a player.

Misdirections has a piece up called Gear and Math. I also have read in the guides advice on staying competitive. Especially the forums, where opinions can be very loud; funneling our choices like Talents, Stat stacking and Legendary pieces for the goal of being competitive is how many measure their own success in the game.

Following competitive advice can make things wonky. This is because the goal is to get the boss down through team work. The goal is not to have numbers as high as our neighbors but we find ourselves looking at that as if that has decided our success rate.

Any competition can be cheesed. If it can not be cheesed then people will still be looking for ways to cheese it. When Personal Glory is on the line, Integrity is often sacrificed. Whether a DPS players ignores the adds for a few seconds or a Druid uses Tranquility early in a fight for no reason; it will not be for the most clean team work but the goal of personal ego by comparing numbers.

Last Sunday, in anticipating Tomb, I asked whether I should stack my stuff to protect the Tanks (two Legendary pieces, two Talents). I suggested that our success on progression would be better even though my personal numbers would plummet. No one, not even my Raid Leader, had any clear response and I think that they were shocked. Which tells me that maybe I am wrong. I can’t guarantee but I can load a lot of protection on a Tank to make him hard to fail.

I do want to believe that my choices are meaningful and reflect the specific circumstance. I do not want to be in a cookie-cutter big AoE healing set up and simply pump out numbers off of cooldown. Ideally, I’d be healing the fight in the best way possible and not just making my numbers look good.

I believe that (Gear and Math) there are thresholds. If we continue to only make our numbers look good then we’ll have to wait to down bosses until we are geared or over-geared. It may not be the best way but we’ll sure look pretty.

I suppose it is true for all competitions. It is not how I measure up against others. It is how others are measuring me; that is the chilling icky thing. Even if I can get past the need to be big and know that performance is the most important, there will be others judging me by my numbers and not by my skill, knowledge and resourcefulness.

I can promise you that your success in the World of Warcraft is not a reflection on yourself as a person. It can seem that people are defining themselves by what they do in the game. Not all but many see a Normal raid as beneath them, for example. You can expand that into any facet of the game. Failing at your class will never make you a loser. The winningest lawyer in the country could suck at Resto-Shammy. An astronaut could totally fail at tanking. Meryl Streep, well, I’d bet that she’d make an awesome raid leader; everything she does is golden.

It sounds trite to say that the bosses will go down whether my number is as big as yours or not. We start progression tonight and I sure hope some bosses do go down! Wish me luck.