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

[Sithalos]

I think all of your warlocks should be required to have green fire also.

[TirielWoW]

Proving Grounds as a healer bears absolutely no resemblance to what I do as a healer in an actual raid. It's so different that it's honestly hilarious. From a healer perspective, it teaches you nothing and breaks quite a few specs.

As a healer, successor failure depends entirely on a set of bots that do brilliant things like:

1) Stand in any and every fire (I've watched Sooli disengage into the fire on multiple occasions)
2) Fail to use their survival CDs in any kind of coherent manner
3) Fail to use their active mitigation as a tank (the "tank" bot is a Warrior)
4) Fail to focus down adds one at a time
5) Fail to interrupt adds doing massive AoE damage to the group
6) Do such shitty DPS that the HEALER finishes second on the DPS charts.

This happens on a regular basis. And before you say it - no, I don't have gold on my character. But I got it multiple times on the PTR, where I was one of the people heavily testing Proving Grounds. At the moment, I just don't really want to spend the amount of gold I would need to completely regem and reenchant my gear to do them effectively. I'll get around to it at some point, but not at the moment.

BTW, OP, the difference between healing specs in PRoving Grounds is massive. Shaman, Monks, and Pallies have interrupts, Druids have knockbacks, Monks, Pallies, and Druids have stuns. Priests have Fear - which doesn't work on 99% of the mobs. Certain healing specs are more dependent on gear to maintain mana. Others (primarily Disc Priests) have no way to catch back up if their group falls behind, because they lack any kind of appreciable burst to deal with Chomp. So while it may have been easy for you on a Shaman, that doesn't mean it would be easy for every class or spec.

[clevin]

I would challenge you to find me ever saying I've raided with these players before.

So... you're brand new to them, you're an ex-hardcore and you're demanding things from a 1 night per week Flex raid? Yeah, that's got a bright future.

[RickJamesLich]

I tried it. Proving Grounds is a brawlers' guild type thing. You're not testing raiding. You're testing brawlers' guild. That's not raiding. It's just an epeen thing for boys. Many players are turned off by that.

Honestly IMO I think this place is great for raiders, a lot of stuff, especially hard modes, require a single player to focus on a few different tasks at the same time, and while it's not exactly like every fight (but the bronze dps one is identical to norushen's orb phase) it teaches you multi-tasking in a format that's very easy to practice. I personally think it's a great addition.

[Mizzet]

I think the dps trials are a decent judge of damage dealing skill, it's a good test of dealing with multiple mobs, having to dps on the move, as well as having to do some fast target switches. Overall I would be happy to invite someone with the gold achievement to my raid, I would be pretty confident in their capabilities.

Most raid mechanics are rather trivial once memorized anyway, in some ways I hold the proving ground difficulty in higher regard as it has more emphasis on being holistically good at your class, in terms of general mechanical ability (movement and targeting), as well as use of skills you don't normally use in a raid like frost nova.

[Sfr528]

I think that if they really wanted to test a player they would scale the enemies up to your gear instead of scaling you down. At 463 item level - feral kitties have insanely poor energy regen and their ability to generate combo points is greatly diminished as a result. The play style is completely different as well than that of a 556 item level raider.

I was able to clear the gold trials with much more difficulty than I would've liked, and was shocked with how easily I could clear it with my alt affliction warlock, wind-walker monk, and assassination rogue. These trials are not balanced whatsoever. Go try them on one of the specs that are actually 'hard' and see what you think of them than. As it stands, I had trouble clearing the gold trials on my main, and on my main I'm currently ranked top 20 dps on most heroic fights, cleared heroic 25m TOT in the top 30 world...so what does that say about these trials?

Don't get me wrong, I love a challenge. I was thrilled with how challenging it was to clear the trials. However, when you have a bunch of classes that can do it easily and scoff at players who had a rougher time due to the mechanics of it all -- that is BS. Hearing so many players giggle at how easy it was for them while I had to really put some effort into it bothers me immensely. So, maybe, in some instances, the player isn't the baddie. Maybe, you just had a much easier time because it was easy mode for you.

[TirielWoW]

Honestly IMO I think this place is great for raiders, a lot of stuff, especially hard modes, require a single player to focus on a few different tasks at the same time, and while it's not exactly like every fight (but the bronze dps one is identical to norushen's orb phase) it teaches you multi-tasking in a format that's very easy to practice. I personally think it's a great addition.

From a healer perspective, I disagree.

[slime]

I think that if they really wanted to test a player they would scale the enemies up to your gear instead of scaling you down. At 463 item level - feral kitties have insanely poor energy regen and their ability to generate combo points is greatly diminished as a result. The play style is completely different as well than that of a 556 item level raider.

I was able to clear the gold trials with much more difficulty than I would've liked, and was shocked with how easily I could clear it with my alt affliction warlock, wind-walker monk, and assassination rogue. These trials are not balanced whatsoever. Go try them on one of the specs that are actually 'hard' and see what you think of them than. As it stands, I had trouble clearing the gold trials on my main, and on my main I'm currently ranked top 20 dps on most heroic fights, cleared heroic 25m TOT in the top 30 world...so what does that say about these trials?

Don't get me wrong, I love a challenge. I was thrilled with how challenging it was to clear the trials. However, when you have a bunch of classes that can do it easily and scoff at players who had a rougher time due to the mechanics of it all -- that is BS. Hearing so many players giggle at how easy it was for them while I had to really put some effort into it bothers me immensely. So, maybe, in some instances, the player isn't the baddie. Maybe, you just had a much easier time because it was easy mode for you.

How dare you come here and make sense. It wasn't much different than how the cape celestials solo quest was handled.
Regardless OP, using this as a test just shows your ignorance. Most wow players will eventually get this done with enough repitition and attempts. that's just how most people learn to play - if the achievement told you how many attempts were made to get it - or how long it took to get, then maybe you have a good determining factor at how good a player is (like they one-shot it), even then class imbalance to the test makes this piss poor as sfr528 stated.

[Adhemar]

Proving Grounds as a healer bears absolutely no resemblance to what I do as a healer in an actual raid. It's so different that it's honestly hilarious. From a healer perspective, it teaches you nothing and breaks quite a few specs.

As a healer, successor failure depends entirely on a set of bots that do brilliant things like:

1) Stand in any and every fire (I've watched Sooli disengage into the fire on multiple occasions)
2) Fail to use their survival CDs in any kind of coherent manner
3) Fail to use their active mitigation as a tank (the "tank" bot is a Warrior)
4) Fail to focus down adds one at a time
5) Fail to interrupt adds doing massive AoE damage to the group
6) Do such shitty DPS that the HEALER finishes second on the DPS charts.

This happens on a regular basis. And before you say it - no, I don't have gold on my character. But I got it multiple times on the PTR, where I was one of the people heavily testing Proving Grounds. At the moment, I just don't really want to spend the amount of gold I would need to completely regem and reenchant my gear to do them effectively. I'll get around to it at some point, but not at the moment.

BTW, OP, the difference between healing specs in PRoving Grounds is massive. Shaman, Monks, and Pallies have interrupts, Druids have knockbacks, Monks, Pallies, and Druids have stuns. Priests have Fear - which doesn't work on 99% of the mobs. Certain healing specs are more dependent on gear to maintain mana. Others (primarily Disc Priests) have no way to catch back up if their group falls behind, because they lack any kind of appreciable burst to deal with Chomp. So while it may have been easy for you on a Shaman, that doesn't mean it would be easy for every class or spec.

Well said, and I must admit I am glad to hear I wasn't alone in struggling with this on my Discipline priest. Getting punished for having the legendary meta gem and for reforging and gemming into throughput stats instead spirit that I do not need while raiding was incredibly frustrating. I found myself frequently running out of mana around wave five if my team of NPCs was unhelpful and it probably took me six attempts to complete something I expected to have no trouble with at all.

To get back to the point, proving grounds is not the same for every class or spec and is therefore a worthless measure of raid capabilities. It will require a higher level of play for some than it will for others. As a raid leader myself, I think you're trying to make the game do your job for you here and it will likely fail in the long term.

[Tankitbetter]

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.

Thanks for the reply! My arms warrior guildie made the exact same mistakes you did and fixed them the same way you did.

I know I personally had fun doing this all as well, and many guildies have found the challenge to be entertaining.

[BreathTaker]

I sent like 5 hours today trying to get Gold on my mage (i'm not playing wow more than LFR for 2 years now).
As of now i go through waves 1-7 easily, and my best result is 10% of last mob of 10th wave.
It seems to me that after some time all the 'mechanics' are obvious.
To get decent dps i have to be very strict: at each wave i stand at particular place and know exacly in which order i'll kill mobs, and with which spells.
It seems that i kinda learn encounter by hearth, but that does not seem to do much for actually being better. Another encounter would just take less time to adapt.
Sometimes i misclick once and fail at 1st or 2d wave. I'm not sure this is right :/

[Ryuji]

Just finished gold dps as a ret and it wasn't too bad, though I panicked a bit on wave 8 or 9 when my cooldowns weren't up. Managed to one-shot bronze to gold though.

Tried the others and I will say the healer one ain't exactly a good judge of healing considering the people you need to heal stand in bad stuff A LOT. Tank one's a pretty good judge of it, though I will say the dps one is fine in terms of judging said dps for raids at least.

[Deleted]

From a healer perspective, I disagree.

They are all quite far from real raiding, but they at least teach you to be keybound, play decently and plan ahead. In OP's example some of his raiders lack these basic skills. This is why I think it's a good idea to require these.

The DPS one is about ONLY dpssing while not caring about standing in bad stuff.
The healing one is about waiting for damage before you heal it up with your cheapest spells (no preemptive healing). You just cannot wait for significant damage in raiding at this moment. Abilities just hurt too much.
The tank one is said to be the most challenging. The reason? It has very little to do with actually raid or dungeon tanking. You're supposed get aggro and then you cc and kite while your npc kills stuff for you.

[Larynx]

Considering I one shot bronze, silver, gold and got to wave 18 all on my first attempts and going in blind, this is hardly asking anything. "Hey can you spend 30 minutes in Proving Grounds to show you're not a complete idiot?"

It honestly seems unnecessary from how easy it is. You're the raid leader, so you should know each person's individual raid performance. That will tell more than Proving Grounds. I'm under the assumption Proving Grounds are for a new player to learn their class. For the healing one at least, it teaches when to AoE, when to ST, how to conserve mana, proper CD usage, and future-planning. A lot of the lessons in proving grounds aren't actually applicable to real raids. The playstyle is completely different.

For example, you'd never catch me using a greater heal on a DPS to heal them, yet I do it all the time in PG. Since my mana regen is so abysmal, I can't atonement heal or PW:S spam or do other things like that. When was the last time I used "Heal"? Oh right, in PG. I've never used it any other time this expansion other than maybe regular dungeons.

LFR was honestly a better teacher for healing in a raid.

[Tankitbetter]

I agree with this.

Does getting gold mean that a certain player is a good raider? I think not. You could aswell require people to have 100 mounts or have 10000 achievement points. That's just as silly. If my guild leader required me to get gold, I'd consider leaving the guild even if it was easy to get gold.

I don't really understand this.

PG is a test of basic PvE skills. Acquiring mounts is not.

[Deleted]

The healing one is about waiting for damage before you heal it up with your cheapest spells (no preemptive healing). You just cannot wait for significant damage in raiding at this moment. Abilities just hurt too much.

I'm sorry but the healing one is about two npc's getting aqua bomb at the same time, as healer only able to dispel one, and the npc with the other bomb just stays amongst the other npc's and blows up damaging everybody.
It's also about shred ticking for quite a lot and only going away after healing everyone up to 90%, while the previous wave is still up and casts the sonic aoe spell and the npc mage keeps aggro-ing untanked ranged mobs getting 3 shot. And the tank, well he doesn't care at all about untanked ranged mobs.
You have firepuddles the npc's happily stand in.

Now this is not a 'are you ready to raid' test, if you have players like the npc's in your group, you kick them out and replace them by capable people.
If I would encounter this in a real situation I would say once to get out of shit and stuff, but if they don't listen, I would leave myself.

Not to mention, in order to get somewhere decent in endless mode you have to spend quite a lot of gold reforging, regemming, getting other enchants, mess around with your talents and heal damage that should not happen in the first place without being able to regenerate a decent amount of mana, you can't even use a potion. Yes very close to a raiding-environment this comes. Not.

[Tankitbetter]

Thank you OP for your post.It reminded me of why i stopped raiding in tier 12 and stay clear of the corrupt totalitarian regime known as the "Raiding Guild".Who are you to tell people what content to run.Do you pay their subs?????I hope they all /gquit.

You're welcome.

[Raggamasta]

Really endless 30? This is the real problem with PG. There are noobs running around with face roll over keyboard specs at 463 who feel like everyone should be able to do it aswell. Who are clueless about the way some specs work at that itemlvl.

Well, maybe endess 30 for hc raiding guilds isn't the right number as it's still too easy, probably 50-60 for classes with good burst damage and 20-30 for others. As a mage I did couple of more tries and now got to endless 37. I really think that getting gold is just a basic test to see if a particular person has a half-working brain or not :P

[TirielWoW]

I don't really understand this.

PG is a test of basic PvE skills. Acquiring mounts is not.

It's a terrible test. It really doesn't apply for healers. It teaches healers nothing useful, and encourages bad habits.

[Tankitbetter]

Oh trust me I get how they work, but I hate the attitude many people have in this game that it's a job. The OP is ordering people to do something because he wrongly believes it will show him that they are skilled. Not only that but he has dismissed any and all criticism, showing that he didn't come here for opinions he came here for validation, so he's going into things with the mentality of "I'm right and everyone else is wrong" and can't even understand how others can think differently.

Not to be rude, but for a moderator who should be able to read objectively and make moderation decisions off of what you read, you sure miss a lot.

Couple posts:

Some other players have said that. I don't really disagree with ya since I have no knowledge, ya know?

I think that when I have a player who comes to me and says "I absolutely cannot do this" I'll address it then. So far, that hasn't happened.

Hmmm. I'll sleep on it. You're right that I think very differently than many players do - it comes from a long time HC raiding and a very long time playing.

Really, the issue at this point is is that we have 4-5 people who haven't done it yet. If I now yank back the requirement after the other 10-12 did it, it could be seen as favoritism, dishonest, etc.

That's a decent point, Pengalor, and not one that I had really thought of too much. I suppose you're right - they will try to squeak by with the bare minimum - but if me putting small requirements brings them up to a level where the bare minimum kills bosses, I'm not really too upset with that.