Why is "I want to play what is best/really good RIGHT NOW" an invalid idea?

[Kalador]

Outside of guild they are mostly hurting themself but in guild fotm reroller are a fucking cancer.

Rerolling is costing the guild a lot, i can understand why some people want to reroll but most of the time people wanting to reroll every tier are alwayse the same. They have a tendency to be selfish aHole, they're the one that alwayse find an excuse for being bottom of the metter, they feel the spec is to blame when most of the time it's just that they didn't invest time to learn/gear thier main specs. they alwayse put the blame on everyone but themself.

They ask for reroll and they expect to be treated like gift for guild cause they are rerolling to somthing more "powerfull", other player feels like they are getting cheated from it and they are cause the soak the minor upgrade out of everyone cause they are ungeared as fuck... 90% of the time they don't do better on thier new main anyway and proceed to start blaming it on gear/procs or any other BS excuse. Whenever you say no to them they react like they will alwayse say shit like "i do it for the guild" or "i thought the guild needed a ______"

From experience (witch doesn't mean a lot ) people who have ask for fotm reroll in my guild (outside of few exeption) were never player worth keeping. They alwayse were the first to quit whenever things don't go thier way. They were alwayse the one pushing for dps by failling mechanic, etc...
The rule in our guild is now if you want to reroll you need to bring the new caracter you want to reroll on as geared as your old one and you will be in the back od the line for trinkets or other very powerful upgrade...

[Deleted]

I resent the idea that a focus on meters/FOTM is a community problem. It's not. It's entirely a function of how the game itself expects players to perform, and how it measures performance.

I mean, when you're playing as a DPS in a raid encounter, what do you look at to judge performance? The meters. The DPS "game" in an encounter is maintaining the highest possible DPS whilst not screwing up. Assuming that you haven't made any readily-visible mistakes (not switching to an add, failing a mechanic, dying, etc) then the meters are a direct measure of how well you did. There's nothing strange or mysterious about the focus players put on it.
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The problem with that is that DPS is not objective, as it can be cheesed like crazy. There are obvious examples for that in Ilgy or Xavius, but also less obvious ones: Standing in fire to get that additional cast out, not dying but still distracting healers, etc. It has become quite the art of dissecting logs just because this obsession with DPS has become so crazy that people feel the need to artificially "inflate" their performance.

A similar "inflation" of your performance is playing a class that by definition does more DPS without requiring too much skill (i.e., FOTM) because then you don't even have to compete with 90% of the others.

[maccajoe]

Want to always be competitive? wihtout needing to do any reasearch?
Play druid, warrior or mage and you are set no matter what.

[BrioWoW]

In a raid guild setting, unless the guild is really hardcore where you will all have multiple raid ready alts, it kind of screws over other people in the raid group. It puts the raid behind on gearing, most fotm rerollers are mediocre anyway so they won't be that good at the class, so you're behind on dps/healing/tanking. Most people know this so will not reroll at least until a point in farm where it doesn't matter.

Imagine a typical scenario where someone gets their main geared up, but still lots of gearing to do for the raid. Now they want to reroll because "the patch killed my class." So now they take all that gear they got and make it worthelss. On top of that they funnel even more gear away from other players because they will need to get their new class geared up.

It basically just sucks for everyone else while making the one person happy. Only way it works is if it is done at the right time (everyone basically geared, current tier been cleared for a while).

[ItachiZaku]

I feel there are only ever 2 reasons to "reroll".

1. you have several max level or near max toons, you shelved one of them for whatever reason, you hear it is really good now and you happen to be burning out on your main. For instance, you are a healer or ranged DPS and have a 825 ilevel melee and hear it got boosted, so you think about switching to that toon for a bulk of your time.

2. Your a raid loyalist and they need you to reroll. Say you main a resto druid and 2 old time guildies come back to the game and they are both primarily healers, one is resto druid the other is who gives a goddamn. You HATE boomkin and suck as feral, and you don't need tanks, but you have a really good time playing a necromancer... yay, switch to that toon.

It's less a full on rerolling (I always considered that term to mean start and level a new character) and more just switching mains.

If you do it strictly for the numbers game... if THAT is where you get your pleasure, being #1 on the meters... meh, it means that game itself just isn't that fun for you.

[Rotted]

yeah this sounds sooo familair xD
and then you had the people who mained rogue before the legendary daggers who were easily outdps'ing most(if not all) of thos people :P

Yea xD, tbf we didn't have a rogue in our guild and funny enough no one was fussed about re rolling, so we carefully spoke to each applicant then said fuck it and brought all the rogues in for one night and took the best dps out of all of them xD

[Datenshi]

Yea xD, tbf we didn't have a rogue in our guild and funny enough no one was fussed about re rolling, so we carefully spoke to each applicant then said fuck it and brought all the rogues in for one night and took the best dps out of all of them xD

haha that's amazing xD
we were(are) a small guild and could only run 10 mans so we had one caster with the legendary staff from firelands and me as the only rogue with the daggers :P

[unbound]

Looking over a lot of the re-roll advice threads or class feedback threads I see a lot of people who ask "What looks like its going to be good for patch X/what dps spec is best right now" and they get absolutely obliterated with people saying "lol fuck you fotm reroller" or trolled with people claiming well known trash specs are top tier. But that question doesn't seem as off base or ridiculous to me. Why is it unacceptable to want to know what the strongest class/spec for a given role is at the moment? There generally always is one, but people treat this question like people are asking something completely nonsensical, or in some cases offensive. So my question is this: why is it taboo to want to play the thing that can do the most dps or healing, or win more consistently than everything else in pvp.

Not an invalid idea. Mostly it is just sad that the game has become little more than a "chase the DPS top position". Blizz could have done so much better when they shifted into the "bring the player not the class" approach.

I think there is a perception that the only people that jump on the FOTM are bad players, but, from my observations, it seems that players both good and bad jump around a bit on the FOTM.

[Dug]

It's not that it's invalid but more often than not I find the FOTM people just aren't good players to begin with and are simply looking for the easy way to the top. They're also the ones this expansion bitching about how it's not super easy to catch up anymore so they can't jump from class to class per minor number tweaks in hotfixes.

Idk I just have more respect for people that stick with a class and master it and not frequent rerollers. I've played warrior since BC and while I've played different alts here and there I've never rerolled.

[Shangalar]

There's nothing wrong with the mentality of wanting to play something that's best or perceived as best. However, as others have pointed out, the "best" is meaningless if you can't pull it off.

I am just not a fan of people who like to play what's best and being good at it looking down at others who play what they want even if it's not the best. But that depends on your guild or raid group's plans and play style. My guild is moderately casual and I prefer people play what they want, as long as the group has the skill and numbers required to defeat whatever boss we're facing next. To be more specific, I play Arcane which was quite undertuned at the start of the expansion, and even though I'm the raid leader there were raids from which I excluded myself because my numbers weren't good enough for whatever we were doing as my guild's progress is more important than my ego. Sure, I could have been playing Fire this expansion, but that's just not what I prefer. I'd rather people play something they're happy with and train/gear them until they're good enough.

That being said, if I were playing in a hardcore guild, I would fully expect to be forced to respec or be benched for a while (or do it to myself if I was a leader in it). I used to play Fire in times when it was so severely above Arcane that I was hurting my guild by not playing it (back when there was no Flexible raiding), most notably at the start of Cataclysm and at the start of Mists of Pandaria, along with some other bosses along the way (Alysrazor, half of Dragon Soul, Beastlord Darmac, Iron Maidens). It's always important to take into consideration your personal desires and goals, and your guild's needs, but also to be aware of the possible pitfalls of underperforming after a reroll which doesn't have to mean having bad numbers and being benched - the individual disappointment of not being the best in something that you think should be best is also something that destroys motivation and enthusiasm.

[Eats Compost]

The problem with that is that DPS is not objective, as it can be cheesed like crazy. There are obvious examples for that in Ilgy or Xavius, but also less obvious ones: Standing in fire to get that additional cast out, not dying but still distracting healers, etc. It has become quite the art of dissecting logs just because this obsession with DPS has become so crazy that people feel the need to artificially "inflate" their performance.

A similar "inflation" of your performance is playing a class that by definition does more DPS without requiring too much skill (i.e., FOTM) because then you don't even have to compete with 90% of the others.

None of that addresses the core of what's going on here, though. Meters represent damage, and damage (without fucking up) is the sole point of accomplishment for DPS. Even if you dissect a lot to find the "real" winner by trying to exclude cheese on applicable fights, the same thing is still going on.

[Kazgrel]

Not an invalid idea, especially if said potential reroller is coming from a class/spec that has underperformed for most of it's existence *cough* ele shaman *cough*.