WoD Highmaul BiS List

[Deleted]

Sry if this turned out into some general rant, but some things just baffles me and I dont understand some peoples approaches.

No problem at all, I focused bit much on your wording instead of what you meant in the first quote

[Deleted]

According to who, you? Also, my belief is that there is much more to an encounter than purely "do as much DPS as possible". Which makes your statements fall short in my eyes.

I did not say that encounters have nothing more to them than doing as much DPS as possible. My statement was completely general and didn't mention encounters at all. Since you brought it up, what I would say concerning encounters is that a good raider tries to do as much DPS as possible, provided that he's correctly doing whatever else the encounter requires him to do. This is not inconsistent with a general sentiment to want to do as much DPS as possible -- it simply means that the DPS one could have achieved by ignoring one's role in an encounter is out of one's reach, as it will wipe the raid.

See, that's where you are wrong. You can optimise the output of your class in it's current gear at any stage of the game.

What I said was that "One cannot optimise the output of one's class without BiS gear", which is not at all the same thing as saying, as you just did, that "you can optimise the output of your class in its current gear at any state of the game" (my emphasis). The difference is that my statement pertains to optimising the DPS of one's class, not optimising the DPS of one's class given one's current gear. What I said was therefore simply that if you want to make as much DPS as your class is logically capable of producing during any encounter in the game, you will need BiS gear. It is impossible for you to not need it, since what makes BiS gear BiS is its unique ability to achieve this. If it doesn't allow you this possibility, then it is not BiS gear.

Im not sure I fully understand the point of this part. You are saying that, players ("of this type" beeing they who strive for BiS gear?) who desire BiS gear to allow themselves to perform at their peak, also know the value to fully utilize the items at their disposal? Im not denying the existance of a combination of items that will yield potential max throughput in specific scenarios. But as "Kapadons" said, some players tend to not use DKP (or similiar) on items that are not BiS because something better (see BiS) CAN drop. It's the same with players who didn't use any valor points to upgrade gear until they actually got the BiS items (or maybe got forced to pick something once they reached the 3k cap). I recognize the fact that players might want to know what the best gear is once you have nothing else to do than to raid to collect gear (Farm content). But my confusion was more about why people obsess with BiS lists during progression, when it only matters what drops actually drop and not what could potentially drop. If that makes any sense?

Players 'of this type' referred to 'most good raiders'. Sorry about that. I understand the problem of people failing to gear up because they're looking for specific pieces of gear. However, this is not an issue t that undermines the point of having BiS lists. It's a separate problem that is caused by the various methods through which guilds distribute loot between their players. I also understand that you intended to qualify the importance of BiS lists with respect to progression and thereby conclude that they are pointless, even though I also thought that your complaint went beyond doing just that, so I responded more generally. Still, BiS lists do have their uses even during progression. There are certain BiS items that will always be better than all the other items available for that slot, no matter what other items you're using and regardless of what your stats are at the time. They are what you might call 'pure' upgrades. For a long time, this has been a distinguishing quality of legendary items. I don't think you would claim that legendary items are useless to progression. If you don't, then you'll have to concede that identifying certain BiS items through a BiS list can turn out useful to progression, which would also mean that BiS lists are useful to progression. Even if you did claim that legendary items are useless to progression, there are other BiS items that sometimes carry the same 'pure upgrade' quality. Historically these have been 'gimmicky' items, such as trinkets. Due to imbuing your character with unique new abilities that it would not otherwise have, Blizzard has often failed to balance them properly. However, it's entirely plausible these may become more scarce in the future because of the recent streamlining of stats and general gameplay.

Though I would like you to clarify what you mean with "competitively", as I believe there are people who do not consider themselves competitive at all but still want to play properly.

In that context I used the word 'competitively' to refer to anyone who attempts to play the game in accordance with contemporary theorycrafting. I think that this is the fundamental feature that distinguishes competitive gameplay from non-competitive gameplay, even if there are players who don't consider themselves to be competitive despite playing in this way.

I think you are overestimating the complexity of WoW. The game in it's essence is not very hard to grasp. Encounters has mechanics that the raid has to deal with, aka scripted events. How you deal with the mechanics depend on the approach you decided to take with your tactic , while doing your job as a healer, tank or dps. Unless you have some kind of mental disorded, all people should have the potential traits to succeed in the game, if they want to.

What you're responding to here referred to what a player would have to achieve in order to master the game; not just what it takes of a player to overcome an encounter. Knowing your own role during the encounters and how to play your class is sufficient to progress through the entire game eventually, but not at optimal speed. You only achieve optimal speed and efficiency once everybody knows everyone's role, as well as everyone's ideal interaction with every mechanic of the encounter. Raiding under such circumstances is actually a pretty sublime experience. You're no longer just your character; you are the raid.

I would say that the skill bar for WoW is pretty low, and what mostly determines the top guilds from the rest, when it comes to progression ranks, is the dedication and time commitments.

You say this, but you didn't respond to my argument as to why this isn't the case, i.e: "all these players need to do to recognise the error of their thinking is to ask themselves if obtaining their present level of understanding of the game was easy and, assuming they concede that it was not, conclude that since this understanding is a necessary component of the way they play the game, playing the game cannot be easy either." Even though we thus don't agree on whether or not this game is easy, I do agree with you that given the current way of measuring raid progress, time is the most important resource of every raiding guild. If you have a a lot of time to spend on raiding, you are almost guaranteed to kill the bosses sooner than those who don't. Since this is the only thing that the current rankings take into consideration, you are thereby judged to be the better guild. I think that this amounts to a very primitive way of ranking raiding guilds. For example, I've never thought that a guild that spends 6 hours wiping on an encounter is superior to a guild that kills the same boss in 1 hour, just because the former gets the kill 30 minutes before the latter. A better ranking would take into account the amount of time spent on each encounter, and not just how soon those encounters are defeated after their release. I think that measuring a guild's ability to develop and correctly execute a strategy is the best way of determining how good it is at raiding, and the present method doesn't do this at all. Currently, being a 'top raiding guild' doesn't seem to amount to much more than raiding just like above average guilds do, but much much more. Therefore, 'world class raiding' becomes equivalent to 'massively sped-up mediocre raiding', which makes the image of the PvE scene suffer. It is often said that PvE doesn't require skill, and this is why. With a more sophisticated system for measuring a guild's ability to raid, it would be possible to make other aspects of the game frequently associated with skilful playing (read: PvP) look vastly inferior in comparison. Imagine an encounter that had an achievement that could only be attempted a limited number of times (or for a limited time) per WoW-account, and a raid progression system that tracked this. So much would be bad for a number of reasons, but I also don't think that anybody would deny that the players who did succeed under such circumstances would be very skilled indeed, provided that the encounter itself is left alone. This is not a suggestion that I myself would recommend -- it is only intended as a hypothetical example of how raiding progress could be tracked in a better way than it currently is. In the long run, I think that this would enable the PvE aspect of WoW to reclaim its self-respect.

I also want to ask, do you talk from your own experience or where is this coming from? It feels a little bit as if you present your statements as facts, but Im not entirely sure what the source would be. It feels like one of those impersonal (not sure if it's the right word) essays where you write as an impartial person and never reveal if this is your opinion or not, and kinda throws it out as it "beeing the way it is"... I hope you understand what I mean.

I've observed WoW players for a very long time. From these observations I make various connections and claims, which I attempt to justify by pointing towards the phenomena I've been observing. You could always accuse what I say of 'just being my opinion', because most of the time what I say pertains to how players experience and play the game, as opposed to how the mechanics of the game operate. I could never show you a graph that tells you why I'm right and you're wrong. You can't do that with experience. Accordingly, the only reason you have to accept what I say is to judge for yourself whether or not you find my arguments to be compelling or not. If they look like nonsense to you, there is no reason for you to listen to anything I have to say.

[Murlocbait]

I think this was already said, but the setup of Highmaul really doesn't leave much room for a BiS list. There are only 7 bosses, and each one drops a different plate piece (except Butcher and Brackenspore each drop two), there's only one slot (boots) that can come from two different bosses:

Head - Kargath
Shoulders - Mar'gok
Chest - Twin Ogron
Belt - Brackenspore
Wrist - Ko'ragh
Hands - The Butcher
Legs - Tectus
Boots - The Butcher, Brackenspore (just depends on if you want Haste/Mastery or Crit/Versatility)

Not much weapon variety really.
Arms: Mar'gok drops your preferred 2hander
Fury: Mar'gok again for TG, or Butcher for SMF (might make SMF more practical initially since it's a difference from first boss to final boss in the raid)
Glad or Prot: Butcher for weapon, Shield off the Twins

Not much in the way of trinket depth either:
Maybe Pol's Blinded Eye for Glad; otherwise Tectus' Beating Heart from Tectus and Bottle of Infesting Spores from Brackenspore are literally the only trinket choices for Arms and Fury.

I guess there might be some options from crafting, but for raid drops, there's really not much complexity. Definitely simpler than SoO.

[nowish]

I did not say that encounters have nothing more to them than doing as much DPS as possible. My statement was completely general and didn't mention encounters at all. Since you brought it up, what I would say concerning encounters is that a good raider tries to do as much DPS as possible, provided that he's correctly doing whatever else the encounter requires him to do. This is not inconsistent with a general sentiment to want to do as much DPS as possible -- it simply means that the DPS one could have achieved by ignoring one's role in an encounter is out of one's reach, as it will wipe the raid.

Misinterpretation from my part then. Agree with you there, altho there are alot of people who take it a bit further and apply more ways of achieving "as much DPS as possible" crippling the raid for personal performance gain. For instance AoEing adds doing non efficient dps on things that actually matters etc. There are alot of considered "good" raiders that tend to act that way, boggles my mind. People can play the game the way they want, but intentionally hurting the raid by "cheesing" on stuff for some numbers... makes my eyes bleed.

What I said was that "One cannot optimise the output of one's class without BiS gear", which is not at all the same thing as saying, as you just did, that "you can optimise the output of your class in its current gear at any state of the game" (my emphasis). The difference is that my statement pertains to optimising the DPS of one's class, not optimising the DPS of one's class given one's current gear. What I said was therefore simply that if you want to make as much DPS as your class is logically capable of producing during any encounter in the game, you will need BiS gear. It is impossible for you to not need it, since what makes BiS gear BiS is its unique ability to achieve this. If it doesn't allow you this possibility, then it is not BiS gear.

It wasn't supposed to mean the same thing though. What I was trying to say was; it doesn't matter what you could use to potentionally optimise your character, should they not be accessible at the given time. Im not denying the fact that BiS is actually the best items you can get for that specific slot, and you will need that if you want to do the most DPS possible in the game (for w/e reason). And that is a completely different way of playing the game, as it is progression vs farm. Farm content allows you to skip mechanics due to having higher gear etc. I feel that the statement "One cannot optimise the output of one's class without BiS gear" has no weight to it the way you phrase it. It's obvious that if "man A" is 10 cm taller than "man B" , the fact is that "man A" will be 10 cm taller than "man B". Better stats = more dmg. You worded it as if "it would be impossible to optimise the output of your class, unless you have BiS gear" which is a false statement as you can indeed optimise your class at any point of the game. Can you optimise it to the maximized full potential output of the class without having the best possible stats accessible in the game for that purpose? Of course not, but that was not what your statement said, and that was what I replied to.

Players 'of this type' referred to 'most good raiders'. Sorry about that. I understand the problem of people failing to gear up because they're looking for specific pieces of gear. However, this is not an issue t that undermines the point of having BiS lists. It's a separate problem that is caused by the various methods through which guilds distribute loot between their players. I also understand that you intended to qualify the importance of BiS lists with respect to progression and thereby conclude that they are pointless, even though I also thought that your complaint went beyond doing just that, so I responded more generally. Still, BiS lists do have their uses even during progression. There are certain BiS items that will always be better than all the other items available for that slot, no matter what other items you're using and regardless of what your stats are at the time. They are what you might call 'pure' upgrades. For a long time, this has been a distinguishing quality of legendary items. I don't think you would claim that legendary items are useless to progression. If you don't, then you'll have to concede that identifying certain BiS items through a BiS list can turn out useful to progression, which would also mean that BiS lists are useful to progression. Even if you did claim that legendary items are useless to progression, there are other BiS items that sometimes carry the same 'pure upgrade' quality. Historically these have been 'gimmicky' items, such as trinkets. Due to imbuing your character with unique new abilities that it would not otherwise have, Blizzard has often failed to balance them properly. However, it's entirely plausible these may become more scarce in the future because of the recent streamlining of stats and general gameplay.

My issue with this, is that people look for BiS lists before understanding their class. What the stats are doing to their class, thus the lack of understanding in regards to stat priority. How do people get stat priorities? Usually from the awesome guys that actually bother to run the sims and try stuff out. The information is out there, it's not like it was back in vanilla where information was limited and pretty much the only thing (at least what I looked up) you tried to get information for back in the day was help with quests (Never forget, thottbot forever in our hearts). I mean I can make a list of complete garbage and say "this is BiS, follow it" and most people probably will, because they don't know better. If you dont really raid for progression, you use a DKP system of some sort, I understand why you would want to make sure that you dont "waste" it on the wrong item. But that's something you should be able to figure out for yourself, unless you are a potatoe. You speak of metaphorical legendary items such as trinkets and other items that give you a large dps boost and usually dont get replaced. The thing is, when you gear your toon up, when items drop you obviously have a priority list that you follow. BiS lists in general doesnt show you what's 2nd in line to that item slot, and often that change could mean that you could / should change another piece as well to optimise your dps with what you got. And again, that can't be achieved by blindly following a BiS list. It is as you said, most people are unable to verify if they are performing right/wrong, good/bad. Which goes back to my previous point, that the focus of information shouldn't be on that set BiS list, but instead of getting more knowledge of the class.

I guess I do understand why people tend to flock to BiS lists and follow them blindly, and I would say that I could accept some of the reasons more than others. My initial statement "I dont understand this "thing" with BiS lists". I think I should have phrased it differently; "I understand why people use BiS lists, but why would they use it in the way they do when there are other options that, I believe, would give them a better result with, for example, gearing their character for progression". You are trying to give me your take on the matter, but I dont really understand your statement about items that have a higher value than others, such as trinkets. If we look at SoO for example. Depending on what fight it is, how your raid handles the fight and how fast things die. You wouldn't be able to determine if the cleave trinket would be better than the AMP trinket for let's say protectors, by looking at a BiS list. Because the people who made it, at least most of the time, don't know your raiding conditions. Again, requires understanding of your class, and raid encounters in general. BiS lists the lazy mans choice? Sure, I can buy that, if you dont really care much about the road to BiS and are happy once you reach there, that's fine. But my issue lies with people that verify themselves as good raiders, who are said to know their stuff but blindly follow things without checking them out for themselves. I think that is a unhealthy approach to the game and from what I've seen it's been increasing more and more.

Turned into a long ramble, but I hope that the point still got across, somewhat, clear.

In that context I used the word 'competitively' to refer to anyone who attempts to play the game in accordance with contemporary theorycrafting. I think that this is the fundamental feature that distinguishes competitive gameplay from non-competitive gameplay, even if there are players who don't consider themselves to be competitive despite playing in this way.

Fair enough

What you're responding to here referred to what a player would have to achieve in order to master the game; not just what it takes of a player to overcome an encounter. Knowing your own role during the encounters and how to play your class is sufficient to progress through the entire game eventually, but not at optimal speed. You only achieve optimal speed and efficiency once everybody knows everyone's role, as well as everyone's ideal interaction with every mechanic of the encounter. Raiding under such circumstances is actually a pretty sublime experience. You're no longer just your character; you are the raid.

It's like that in every team "sport". How your team interact with eachother and function is what defies how skilled your team is. If you have played with people long enough you understand how they think, speeding up the learning process of how to defeat the obstacles. Im not entirely sure why this is brought up as it doesn't really have anything to do with players approach to "BiS" lists. Im assuming that's to the fact that your answer was very generalizied to what makes a good raider.

You say this, but you didn't respond to my argument as to why this isn't the case, i.e: "all these players need to do to recognise the error of their thinking is to ask themselves if obtaining their present level of understanding of the game was easy and, assuming they concede that it was not, conclude that since this understanding is a necessary component of the way they play the game, playing the game cannot be easy either." Even though we thus don't agree on whether or not this game is easy, I do agree with you that given the current way of measuring raid progress, time is the most important resource of every raiding guild. If you have a a lot of time to spend on raiding, you are almost guaranteed to kill the bosses sooner than those who don't. Since this is the only thing that the current rankings take into consideration, you are thereby judged to be the better guild. I think that this amounts to a very primitive way of ranking raiding guilds. For example, I've never thought that a guild that spends 6 hours wiping on an encounter is superior to a guild that kills the same boss in 1 hour, just because the former gets the kill 30 minutes before the latter. A better ranking would take into account the amount of time spent on each encounter, and not just how soon those encounters are defeated after their release. I think that measuring a guild's ability to develop and correctly execute a strategy is the best way of determining how good it is at raiding, and the present method doesn't do this at all. Currently, being a 'top raiding guild' doesn't seem to amount to much more than raiding just like above average guilds do, but much much more. Therefore, 'world class raiding' becomes equivalent to 'massively sped-up mediocre raiding', which makes the image of the PvE scene suffer. It is often said that PvE doesn't require skill, and this is why. With a more sophisticated system for measuring a guild's ability to raid, it would be possible to make other aspects of the game frequently associated with skilful playing (read: PvP) look vastly inferior in comparison. Imagine an encounter that had an achievement that could only be attempted a limited number of times (or for a limited time) per WoW-account, and a raid progression system that tracked this. So much would be bad for a number of reasons, but I also don't think that anybody would deny that the players who did succeed under such circumstances would be very skilled indeed, provided that the encounter itself is left alone. This is not a suggestion that I myself would recommend -- it is only intended as a hypothetical example of how raiding progress could be tracked in a better way than it currently is. In the long run, I think that this would enable the PvE aspect of WoW to reclaim its self-respect.

I can't say how fast/slow or how easy/hard it is to learn to raid "properly". I have played this game since vanilla, but I can't recall to when I developed the ability to comprehend how raiding works and perform accordingly. But I tend to pick up on tactics and such quickly, regardless of it beeing FPS, Dota style , RTS games or other competetive types of games. Im pretty sure people who have never played WoW before or any other competetive game could pick up on it quickly as well. It's like everything else in life, some people have it easier with certain things than others.

Time commitment is the biggest part, but it's important to not neglect that top guild do the encounters before the majority of guilds get to them, resulting in having to deal with bugs, coming up with tactics etc. Most guilds look on the top guilds for inspiration on how to deal with the encounters while the top guilds has to start from "scratch"(altho they got the advantage of ze beta). Time spent on the boss would therefore not be an accurate ranking system either. Almost all of the attempts to restric the time u spend on bosses, gating, limited amount of tries etc, can be dealt with my other ways. Alt run before the actual main run to try out tactics for limited attempt bosses and such. There is a significant skill gap between top 20 and top 10 IMO so I do not really agree with the "speed-up mediocre raiding"!

I've observed WoW players for a very long time. From these observations I make various connections and claims, which I attempt to justify by pointing towards the phenomena I've been observing. You could always accuse what I say of 'just being my opinion', because most of the time what I say pertains to how players experience and play the game, as opposed to how the mechanics of the game operate. I could never show you a graph that tells you why I'm right and you're wrong. You can't do that with experience. Accordingly, the only reason you have to accept what I say is to judge for yourself whether or not you find my arguments to be compelling or not. If they look like nonsense to you, there is no reason for you to listen to anything I have to say.

I listen and try to understand your perspective, giving me some more insight. Most of your point I can relate to and agree with, others I will have to stick with my own opnion on. Hopefully my respons makes sense, otherwise I just have to blame the tiredness at this point.

[Krazzorx]

While Highmaul has only 7 bosses, there is 1 other variable:

Crafted gear is Ilvl 665 for every armor slot and there are only so many raid drops. And crafted gear can have any stat combo so finding your 3 worst pieces is useful.

- - - Updated - - -

What I would find more interesting though is: a Pre Highmaul BiS list.

[Murlocbait]

While Highmaul has only 7 bosses, there is 1 other variable:

Crafted gear is Ilvl 665 for every armor slot and there are only so many raid drops. And crafted gear can have any stat combo so finding your 3 worst pieces is useful.

- - - Updated - - -

What I would find more interesting though is: a Pre Highmaul BiS list.

I assumed most folks are going to run Highmaul for the first week or two and see how drops go, then craft 3 pieces accordingly to fill in any weak spots. Also consider that you won't get a shot at a belt or shoulders until the last couple bosses, which a lot of folks probably won't be downing right away. So those might be the most logical first couple crafted pieces, especially if you know you won't have those last couple bosses down until sometime in 2015. If you're in a casual raiding guild and probably won't have Mar'gok down until 5+ weeks after the raid goes live, then you might as well craft some shoulders as soon as possible.