I am requiring my guild to do their spec's "Gold" Proving Grounds - thoughts?

[Arainie]

Do as you like, people are spoiled brats nowdays and if they won't do a simple task asked by their GM they might as well find another raiding guild.

[deadman1]

I find it idiotic to the people saying fire mage or destro lock can't do it. Well guess what in a raid setting if fire was complete trash would you still play that spec? probably not. Only people who have a right to complain are shamans and druids since both dps specs require and play completely different.

They can do it, but fire mages get much less crit and the spec relys on crit therefore it is much harder. Its not idiotic, and don't judge unless you are informed on the matter.

-snip- forget it

[Deleted]

i cant understand why would anyone care if someone else is done gold or not the 463 scaling screws some specs over really bad and i for one refuse to regem just cos of that. sounds stupid to require it for raiding, absolutely nothing to do with each others

[Xarkan]

If your guild killed garrosh, then you don't need PG as a metric. You're ilvl 549. Most of our raid was 505 on wednesday.

505? I have a better suggestion than proving grounds then, tell your raid members to be better geared than lfr raiders 2 (well 1½ maybe) patches ago. That should help a good chunk

[Deleted]

It's such a minor thing really, I don't know if it's 100% reasonable, but I mean come on, it takes like 30 minutes at max

[Tucci]

if your main tank cant even manage to get SILVER tank then be prepared to progress slower than a snail, or level up a tank alt and just take over once you get timeless gear / some alt runs, nothing is more detrimental to a raid than a horrible main tank (and subsequently guild(raid?) leader, Fuck that.

Oh trust me, there is no such thing as progress in my guild anymore. They're nice people but don't know shit about the game and think because they cleared DS normal and did a couple bosses on heroic after a billion nerfs that clicking and not using any macros is okay. I got to the last part of wave 10 gold tank in my dps gear just fucking around. Just learned my GM was using a 2 button macro to tank with. And I was the one being blamed for pulling, lol. Why I haven't /gquit yet, is beyond me. I guess I just want to help them and see them actually get better at the game.

[Deleted]

It depends on the level that your raiders play on. If they are kind of shit and everybody knows, then yes I think this is not a bad idea. The people that took this as an insult are idiots and you should be happy they left.

[averykey]

I think this is great, everyone can complete gold at 463, it shows they have a basic understanding of their class and can learn and deal with new mechanics.
It took me two tries personally, I didn't know I needed to save cooldowns/berserking.

For endless so far, I've had to go find certain gear to get the most stats possible out of each piece, I've made it to wave 32.

[Deleted]

Fire mages without changing their gear/gems/specs etc will have a hard time getting gold. Took me like 3 attempts, and I've raided in top 100 world guilds and am currently in a top 200 guild. some people may struggle really hard to do this without changing their spec or meta gem/gearpieces.

- - - Updated - - -

I find it idiotic to the people saying fire mage or destro lock can't do it. Well guess what in a raid setting if fire was complete trash would you still play that spec? probably not. Only people who have a right to complain are shamans and druids since both dps specs require and play completely different.

Fire is EXTREMELY reliant on gear. Which means, when all your gear gets dumbed down to 463, you lose your meta gem and extremely important tier bonuses, you become extremely weak. Fire got nerfed every single patch, due to GEAR SCALING, yet you lose all this gear scaling in PG.

Fire is great in raids, but terrible in PG, I had problems (took me 3 attempts) to get gold as a fire mage, and I'm miles above average skillwise. (Got loads of rank 1s on WoL on heroic bosses, got top 100 kills on a lot of bosses, etc)

[therayeffect]

All these carebears here, damn. Despite being on the internet for quite awhile, I'm surprised at how so many are taking this the wrong way.

Thank you OP for putting a bit of a 'carrot on a stick' for your casual/new players. That's the problem with the game right now, no sense of progression really unless you have immense self motivation and competitive drive. Hopefully they'll be a bit better and it's good that you required a bit of them so hopefully the challenge will be fun, whatever you may do. It's glad to see a few people still care to help others.

[Deleted]

It's a fair reasoning, noone likes to carry bad players in their team unless its a strictly social / family enviroment where the competition aspects are really toned down. The real challenge doesnt start until endless still so if any of your players have a big problem with gold even after quite amount of practice and they dont have the desire to improve, then they aren't going to be an asset in your guild. Especially since you only raid once per week.

[Bigbazz]

So I saw this thread and pretty confident of my abilities I decided to give this proving grounds a try, and I must say I was pretty pleasantly surprised, it was a lot of fun. I one shot bronze and silver as a Fury Warrior, then after making a mistake(those wailing ghost women if you dont kill right away you wipe). Seems that having cheap easy AOE is a big advantage and so is being able to switch target and move around a lot, so I changed to my Arms spec (with bladestorm) and swapped my 12 second charge for a double charge.

So I then again wiped on wave 8 by not understanding exactly how it worked, figuring that there is a time window of burst. So I went again and using that tactic of simply preparing for the burst I beat it, using my dps cooldowns only on wave 10.


Personally I think this is a good test of a players skill, but it doesnt necessarily equate to raiding ability. Fact is that there are not many raids that have this kind of combat and for me it reminded me a lot more of a PVP with targets that don't fight back. From a high end PvP perspective this isn't very high end skill and though the dps on the last 3 waves was pretty tight (and you need to be good to beat it) those fights once you saw the mechanics were very simple.

I find that raiding is more about situational awareness, trying to differentiate the good shit on the ground from the bad shit, knowing when and what buff/debuffs you have on yourself, its about "can you see that shit on the ground with all the other shit going on to distract you?" and its about dealing with a set of specific mechanics and about maximising dps as a team, compromising when needed. If anything for me the brawlers guild (though a soloing competition) is probably closer to an actual raiding proving grounds than this.

So yeah it's fun, it definitely is a nice test of skill and it definitely requires a player to have a solid grasp on really maximising dps and movement, economy of choosing the right target, but overall It's more of a pvp/pve dps race hybrid than a proving ground for raiding ability.

[Kalmah]

The healer challenge at least has some major issues wrt raiding.

- the need to relearn how much each spell heals due to gear scaling
- paying attention to hpm rather than max throughput
- extreme mana conservation.

There's also the fact that at those gear levels, I used to gem full spirit while my current gear is gemmed for crit.

It would've been much better if the gear was scaled to 496. With timeless isle that's easy to achieve and gives a more realistic stat pool for raiding.

[Deleted]

of course the problem now is half your raid are focused on getting gold so they wont be puttingthat effort into improving in seige

[Deleted]

I don't know about other classes, but as a rogue, you use talents in PG like "Marked for death" which you usually wouldn't use in a real raiding environment, it does teach you to interrupt and stun and be quick in switching targets but I find that much more useful for getting better in pvp. There are some Bosses in SoO where you need target switching and stuns though.
Many raiders that struggle are using wrong rotations, PG doesn't help with that.

[Deleted]

Well I've red about PG in some patch logs months ago. I felt it was boring crap. I never even looked at it a second time on new pages and never even thought of trying it out ingame... If now some puny dude comes on me and has a lot of fun doing it, thinks it's one of the best things ingame and whatnot and doesn't realize that I even have won celestial tournament on day one, then why would I even try to grasp what the fuck he wants when he says "do pg."? I would have instant quit as well but it's so out of this world for me and my colleagues, we would simply not take him serious - raid/guild lead or not.

[Raggamasta]

I went to an Openraid SoO event that had only one requirement - you must have Proving Grounds gold. And surprise surprise the raid was really nice, nobody stood in random crap, everybody knew tactics and the overall raid awareness was great too.

And getting gold in Proving Grounds is super easy. Got gold in 2 tries and and after that got to endless 17th round in 3 tries. Also I didn't have optimal gear and was using legendary gem, which doesn't work there. Probably more serious hc guilds should have at least endless 20 or 30 as a requirement.

[Fungj]

I think this is fair, they learn and get better at the role they are playing without having to put a lot of time into it.

[Deleted]

Fire mages without changing their gear/gems/specs etc will have a hard time getting gold. Took me like 3 attempts, and I've raided in top 100 world guilds and am currently in a top 200 guild. some people may struggle really hard to do this without changing their spec or meta gem/gearpieces.

- - - Updated - - -



Fire is EXTREMELY reliant on gear. Which means, when all your gear gets dumbed down to 463, you lose your meta gem and extremely important tier bonuses, you become extremely weak. Fire got nerfed every single patch, due to GEAR SCALING, yet you lose all this gear scaling in PG.

Fire is great in raids, but terrible in PG, I had problems (took me 3 attempts) to get gold as a fire mage, and I'm miles above average skillwise. (Got loads of rank 1s on WoL on heroic bosses, got top 100 kills on a lot of bosses, etc)

The point is, it's not Proving Grounds Gold: Fire Mage, it's just Proving Grounds Gold: Mage. Picking the right spec for the right situation is part of demonstrating class knowledge. Like Supersnap said, the mage that insisted on staying fire even if it was by far the worst raiding spec at that time wouldn't be a good mage.

[Floopa]

This is especially true of the healer challenge, since while it doesnt' translate at all into a raiding situation in terms of the way you're going to heal, it perfectly translate into making them do something else than play whack-a-mole with their grid.

Don't talk about healing when you a) don't heal and b) have no clue how healing works. Thank you.