Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs posted something that just made me want to post in response to. He discusses the use of “elitism” in WoW and its impact on how we view others around us. I know, three posts in two days, its unheard of, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity as it struck cords with me.
I think the issue with elitism goes a step further than Tam suggested even. Kruntak is my Warrior tank that I faithfully levelled up. And I know this will sound like tooting my own horn, but throughout every PUGged instance I did, I would get compliments on my ability as a tank, with people able to appreciate my actual performance regardless of my gear. This is at low levels.
What happens to people at 80 though? Its as if their appreciation and understanding of performace flies out the window as soon as they start gathering up emblems and gear. One can quite easily point to Gearscore being the cause of the majority of this thinking, but it isn’t just that. Hitting 80 on Kruntak and being able to queue for random HC’s in order to gear yourself up, you naturally take that course. That is essentially the only way to gear up once you hit 80 and eventually qualify gear-wise to actually queue for an HC. The drops are great and the emblems start stacking up to help as well.
So why is it that as I started tanking HC’s I would encounter dicks that would take one look at the generated number Gearscore provides or the HP of my freshly dinged 80 in pretty much all blues, and decide I should not be running HC’s?
One particular occurence sticks out. I queue randomly. In other words, I have NO control over where I will be sent except for what the game itself decides I am capable of doing, and get zoned into an Occulus run. I know, not the most fantastic HC that exists, but I am willing to see it through.
“Oh hell no! Not with that tank!” pipes up a 9873498734 GS mage. Starting to seethe at the umpteenth time that someone comments on my as yet unproven ability to tank an instance, I ignore him and get going. 20 minutes later, we are all looting the lovely chest after Eregos is down with nary a wipe in sight, able to hold aggro even with super-leet ICC 25 geared monster DPSer in the group (and he only pulled around 2-3k DPS anyways).
“So I guess ‘that’ tank wasn’t so bad after all” I chuck into party chat. Thats right knob, suck it up. No apology or anything, they all just stood there with their fingers up their arses waiting.
“Please leave” comes the eventual response and I realise they are all from the same guild, waiting for me to leave so that I guess they can get a “real” tank. I left in disgust.
There are just far too many other encounters similar to that to recount in this one post but that just stood out to me. Others include the “lolz, my penis has more HP than you” to yet another mage even saying “lol, i can tanks this instance” to which I responded “Sure, if you want that I can switch to Fury spec!”. Needless to say that instance went over fine as well with the mage behaving himself.
My question after all this is … how do these idiots expect someone to become an uber GS toting, 70k HP tank if they aren’t allowed to run HC’s? And then I wonder why they don’t realise the reason they spend so long queuing for an instance is because of a shortage of people willing to tank because of intimidation from dicks like them?
I am not the best tank ever in WoW. Occasionally I mess up. It happens. But I do work damn hard to do the best I can. Hell, I have even main tanked Naxxramas for christ’s sake, which is supposed to be harder than a lot of the HC’s I get flack for queuing for.
Unfortunately, the guys that react like this, killing baby tanks before they get started, are not the type to actually read articles like this. Sure it would be great to have yourself a 5k+ GS tank with over 40K HP, but guess what? Not all tanks ding 80 that way. We have to gear up just like everyone else.
This is my version of elitism. Not being able to realise that even YOU were at this stage of your characters development. Even YOU didn’t walk into your first HC toting the latest and greatest tier 9 gear. Now that you suddenly have a full ICC 25 everyone else is deemed unworthy? That is elitism too, and one that I wish could be stamped out.
“how do these idiots expect someone to become an uber GS toting, 70k HP tank if they aren’t allowed to run HC’s?”
That is my question too. Players seem to want crazy-fast emblem gathering heroics whereas my hunter wanted gear and (at the time) so did my priest. My experiences on the priest put me off PuGs completely and it is only very hesitantly that I sallied forth with the hunter (first PuG, shadow priest tries to pretend to heal so I drop hunter and get my priest, for no thanks whatsoever).
I like your version of elitism, where do I sign up?!
Hmm, why is it always the mage? I remember when I had just gotten my bear tank to 80 and I started running random heroics, I got into Nexus… which is a phenomenally simple, though tedious, place to run. I went to buff everyone, but before I could switch back to bear form and start my tanking shiz, this mage just runs up and starts hitting that first dragon. I said in party, “Does the mage want to tank it or something?” And the mage said, I shit you not, “I might as well! You’re a bad tank, you only have 30k hp!” The hell with that, I don’t need to deal with that crap. I left the group, and boggled about this to my best friend, who has a paladin tank as his main. He was horrified, and said, “Maybe that person doesn’t remember that most tanks had around 25k hp when these were first run on heroic. And how does that make you a bad tank? You’re better than a lot of geared people I know.”
Skill is undervalued these days, but mainly because when you don’t know someone, you have little to go on other than numbers… and you can’t really quantify skill, unfortunately. As we know, GS and skill have no correlation. It’s possible to get fantastic gear without having skills, even in ICC… I recently left a guild because I was tired of running ne’er-do-wells through ICC25. They were bringing people to raids who really had no business in a raiding guild… no interest in learning anything about the instance or the fights; they just wanted loot. “The GM said it was okay for him not to learn the fight,” after we wiped twice and I confronted the moron in vent (only to be yelled at by said moron, and asked not to say anything mean about him by one of his RL friends). Really, if that’s what’s valued over hard work, then they can have it.
And… it’s too bad that GS doesn’t take gemming and enchanting into consideration; I’ve run with people with great gear and NO enchants or gems… or the wrong gems! It seems to be too much for people to even know why they gem or enchant those specific enchants. Correct gemming and enchanting CAN be quantified, but isn’t… I wonder why. It might help make judgment based on GS a little more accurate.