It has always mystified me why there seems to be a certain disdain towards so-called “cookie cutter specs” in many games. For those not familiar with the terminology, these are basically certain characters/talents/skills that are very commonly espoused to be “best dps” or “best healing spec” etc etc. For example, the cookie cutter warlock raiding spec before WotLK was 0/21/40, with 21 points in demonology to get Demonic Sacrifice and 40 points in Destruction up to Shadow and Flame. It’s not only in WoW, but any game where you have some kind of choice in how to build up a character. There were cookie-cutter builds in Diablo, and even in fighting games there are cookie-cutter teams and strats.

And among the players of all of these games, there is often a feeling of disdain for people who use cookie-cutter strats. “Oh they just blindly follow what’s posted on the Internet. I, on the other hand, am a beautiful and unique snowflake and I like to experiment and come up with my OWN builds.” Note of course that their own builds are just as effective, just that no one else ever discovered them because they are, you know, special.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to experiment, because that is how people learn. The whole reason a cookie-cutter build came into existence was because someone experimented and came up with something that worked out well. It doesn’t matter if you have 3 talent trees with a gazillion different talents, if you are limited to 71 talent points there will be a certain combination of points that will just be better for a particular purpose. It doesn’t matter how creative, or how special you are. If you want to perform the best, you will tend to end up with a cookie cutter spec because it’s normally the best.

The funny thing is, don’t people realise that if their “unique” spec was actually better, wouldn’t many other people also find this out and their “unique” spec would be the new cookie cutter? It’s much more likely that they are actually performing sub-optimally, all just because they want to feel special. Another newsflash: everyone is already special. You don’t need to do something strange just to be different: there are just as many crazies out there thinking the exact same thing. Doing the opposite of what most people are doing isn’t much better than doing the same as what most people are doing; your actions are still being dictated by other people. If everyone stopped using a cookie-cutter spec and started using your special build, would you respec to something else? If the answer is yes, that’s pretty sad.

Some people will say that they just play better with some strange build. Well, quite frankly its not that they play better, they probably are just really bad at using the cookie cutter build for some reason. Instead of actually improving, they prefer to just suck less? I don’t get it…

As mentioned, this isn’t restricted to just WoW. I used to play a fighting game called Marvel vs Capcom 2, which has 56 characters. A player can choose a team of 3 characters to use. Well, of course certain combinations of characters work better than others. This is inevitable if there is any variety at all in the characters, and is the reason why perfect game balance is in a sense unattainable. No one is going to be perfectly equal, the key is to have acceptable trade-offs.

Yet many players, especially new ones, will decry the lack of variety in most teams and boast that they, unlike everyone else, “came up with their own team and it works for them”. Their team usually ends up looking like 3 characters chosen randomly, or because “they look cool” or they have some theme like being all green. Of course, when they get trashed playing against another player who knows what they are doing using a team that is… well, actually a team… inevitably there will come the excuses that they lost because “that’s just a cookie cutter team” or how “ability xxx is overpowered and for losers”.

Cookie cutters are there for a reason, it’s probably because many people developed them over time and there are many strengths. If there is already such knowledge, then it makes sense to use it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time you drive, you take what works and use it. Occasionally, someone will come up with a real humdinger of an idea. This idea will either be worse, or better than the original cookie cutter. If it’s better, then it will become the new cookie cutter. If not, then it was a good try but something was wrong somewhere.

So really, why look down on people using a commonly used build/strat/team? It only makes sense right, otherwise it wouldn’t be commonly used? I just don’t get it. The only reason I can think of is that this is yet another example of players trying to externalise their poor performance. They didn’t lose because they played poorly… they lost because they are “not like those other sheep using overpowered cookie cutter teams”. Uh huh… just like how their dps is below the tank’s, because “they don’t have gear”.

I got a comment from Mike on one of my old posts on undergeared players . He disagreed and gave examples about how he has much better runs with well-geared players compared to people running heroics with “poor gear” and how it shows that gear matters very much.

After thinking about this a bit, I realised that gear sort of does matter, but probably not in the same way that most people think. In the anonymity of an online game and especially in pugs, a character’s gear is often one of the few ways you can glean some information about how good that player is. In that sense, gear has a signalling effect in that good players tend to have good gear. Poor players tend to have… “strange” gear. Note that this is not a cause and effect type of relationship but more of a correlation; i.e. people with good gear aren’t necessarily good players and people with bad gear aren’t necessarily bad players.

But since there’s no way you can tell before actually playing with them, you would assume that the player with better gear has at least some experience (he should at least know where heroic nexus is if he has gear from the last boss). Even if they both suck equally, the dumbass with 1200 spell damage should at least do a bit more dps hitting buttons randomly than the dumbass with 1000 spell damage hitting buttons randomly.

You could also probably assume that the person who has better gear has actually put in the effort to research his own class and his options to gear up. In other words, he actually knows how to use an Internet browser. Or can actually read. This probably already puts them miles ahead of the people who somehow can’t understand the meaning of “kill the adds when you get the debuff”.

However, the point still remains that the gear itself has very little real impact on the most important thing: can you kill the boss? For obvious reasons, you shouldn’t need to be in full epics before you do heroics. As long as you didn’t grind up to 80 by killing gorlocs in Borean Tundra, you should be geared out at a level that allows you to kill bosses perfectly fine. It may not be brain-dead easy, but it’s perfectly doable. Hence, you don’t NEED gear. If you’re talking about people trying to do heroics in level 70 greens then yes, you have bigger problems since only an idiot would still be wearing such gear. “I chooz plate and vendor them for the guldz!”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, from Attumen to Illidan our guild never encountered a boss that could not be downed due to gear. A Chinese guild killed Illidan wearing some pieces of level 60 T3 (yes, those items with a godly 30 stamina on chest!!!). On every single boss, you can see a massive difference between first kills and second kills. Learning to play is a huge huge difference compared to a paltry 50 spell damage. Your rogues are not below the tank on damage because they have shitty gear, they are there because they are shitty players. That mage isn’t doing only 800 dps because of his gear, because mages at level 70 with level 70 gear were already doing 1000 dps.

To end, I’ll relate another choice memory from running pug heroics. We went into heroic Gundrak with another feral druid, a rogue and a hunter. The snake boss Sladran has a aoe poison nova which does huge damage, but has a relatively short range and thus can simply be avoided by running out. Ranged classes shouldn’t need to move at all. So when he announces poison nova, all melee runs out, he casts, run back in, rinse repeat and he’s dead.

As expected, first poison nova and everyone gets hit except me and Yannie. Even the hunter got hit. Of course we wiped. After saying “lolz my cloak of shadows was on cooldown” the rogue then suggested we just stay in and zerg dps him down and heal through the poison nova. “That’s how I do it on my priest”. After a second of stunned silence, I told him congrats, enjoy your CoH nerf, but it’s really not hard to just pay attention and run out. We then killed him on the next try (of course the rogue still got hit by poison nova again).

I can imagine it now…
Rogue: LFG Heroic Gundrak, must have holy CoH priest with 2000 spellpower and well-geared dps to kill snake boss in 30 secs! Pst me for invite!

Despite the fact that I post as Pockie, my “main” is actually my feral druid. Pockie has been idling around, doing the Jewelcrafting dailies everyday and other assorted Wyrmrest and Kaluak dailies occasionally. I also played him on and off when my wife wasn’t playing.

Amazingly, he is now 79 >.< He went through a similar questing route that our mains did, doing Borean Tundra followed by Dragonblight and Sholazar Basin, where he hit 77 and finally was able to fly again. After finishing up Howling Fjord and Sholazar Basin, he did some Argent Crusade quests in Icecrown and Zuldrak and is now about 5 bars from 80. The big question now is what he’s going to do once he hits 80.

Retnoob
He’s been levelling as Retribution, which frankly speaking is overpowered and just needs me to press random buttons. Occasionally I actually have to use Divine Plea to get some mana back

Ret is very strong now, despite the crying over the “nerfs”. Most of the ret pallies I’ve grouped with do pretty strong dps even without amazing gear, compared to some sub-1k dps mages and warlocks. I can easily craft myself a Titansteel Destroyer (once my wife’s warrior actually gets to levelling her Blacksmithing…) and buy any other good BoE pieces.

The only problem is that according to the stat weightings on Elitist Jerks, I’m supposed to be a Huntardin >.< Apparently strength is weighted highest (no surprise since 1 str = 2 ap = spellpower for judgements), but it’s followed by agi and ap weighted equally, except that agility provides crit rating. So the gear list ends up being full of items with AP, agi and crit… in other words, hunter mail and leather dps pieces…

Of course I’m not going to take mail and leather over druids, rogues, hunters and shamans. But I’m a bit reluctant to take them in any case since I would actually like to solo a bit and losing half my health bar to kill 1 mob would not be nice. Mail is maybe ok, going down to leather is a bit extreme… Hmm.

Holy
My original intention was to spec holy and heal. This was the whole reason this pally was originally levelled. Similar to my druid, I chose a pally as my healer because they were one of the easiest healers to play (can’t go much wrong with only 2 buttons, small heal or big heal hmmmm which one should I press…).

However, my experiences running heroics lately have started making me reconsider whether I want to heal as a pally in WotLK. I originally thought that pally healers should be quite strong now due to 15% haste after judging, some nice aoe heals on holy light, and beacon of light helping heal the tank. But the new holy pally seems to have a ton of things to do, and most instances seem to have quite high amounts of aoe damage being spread around. Even Yannie has problems on some fights as even the awesomeness of chain heal can’t keep up if she has to move or do other things. I can’t imagine doing heroic Violet Hold and meeting the voidwalker boss… and being a holy pally that has to kill adds. /cry in a corner

In raids, a holy pally should be a bit better as they can then play to their strengths and leave other classes to deal with the aoe damage. Unfortunately, prior to the CoH and Wild Growth nerfs there simply isn’t much for a holy pally to heal. Due to insane mana regen, I don’t even know why druids and priests have any other button on their bar. A priest topped healing by far on 25-man Obsidian Sanctum the other day and all he did was spam CoH 80% of the time. He probably pressed the wrong button for the other 20%. The holy pallies had less than half his healing, I think one of them went to take a ninja-dump halfway through and no one even noticed.

The good thing is that a holy pally should find it easier to get groups compared to Just-Another-DPS, but the strange thing about our server is that we do regularly see many healers LFG for instances. They may suck, but they are still healers… or maybe that’s why they are still looking for groups.

Prot
I’ve been keeping random plate tanking gear from quests if there are no better ret or holy pieces. I’ve never tanked as prot, and only specced prot for a couple weeks when I was aoe-grinding for Consortium reputation.

Even though tanks are in demand, I’m quite hesitant to go prot because I already have a druid tank who is fairly decently geared. No real reason for me to gear up yet another tanking character even if prot supposedly is quite strong now. Besides, if I’m tanking I prefer to have Yannie healing me rather than some noob CoH-spamming priest.

Summary
Right now I’m leaning towards staying as ret, even if getting groups may be harder. I may not have that much time to do instances anyway since I basically play him only when my wife isn’t playing (or is playing some other character like her cute little warlock). With the trend towards no cc and brain-dead dps in WotLK heroics, being a healer sounds like too much pain for too little gain given that there is actually a fairly good amount of healing plate that is craftable or through rep, so why should I suffer through healing 4 noobs for gear >.< Hopefully I can get a few quick groups here and there and just be a less-brainless dps, if not I’ll continue finishing up the many quests which I skipped and getting some rep.

How to distribute stuff has always been a big debate since people started having to group up to get the loot. Many guilds use all sorts of different systems, each claiming that theirs is the best. A common gripe among casual players is that they are firmly against any sort of DKP (Dragon Kill Points) which is basically a way of tracking how many times a player has helped to kill bosses and rewards them accordingly.

Many times, loot rules will be the biggest reason for drama and discontent in a guild because an incident occured that wasn’t “fair”. And people will come up with all sorts of tweaks and adjustments in order to make their system “more fair”.

What I think people fail to realise is that there is no definition of “fair”. When someone, somewhere, gets a piece of loot over someone else, a case can almost always be made that it’s “not fair”.

For example, what is fair? Does it mean that everyone has an equal chance of loot? Ok, that sounds like a reasonable definition. So random /roll on all loot will accomplish this perfectly because it’s a uniform distribution…

But wait, what if during the night some guy is on a hot streak and ends up rolling high and winning every single piece of loot that drops? Somehow, this isn’t “fair” anymore. So do we restrict people to 1 piece per night? That sounds “fair” again.

Ok, then a great tanking shield drops. Your tank has been waiting for this for 6 months, coming night after night just hoping that this item drops. But a off-tank who logs on once a month then rolls a 100 and gets the item, which goes into his bank. Is this “fair”? Yes and no, it was a random roll, but it doesn’t seem like the regular tank got a good deal out of it.

So what now? Maybe there should be some way of tracking player efforts historically, so that they can be rewarded accordingly. Enter DKP, Suicide Kings, zero-sum DKP etc etc etc… Also enter accusations of hoarding DKP, forced loot when someone doesn’t want to spend it on a minor upgrade, and of course complaints by non-regular raiders that they basically can’t keep up with the DKP of regular raiders and thus “never get the chance to loot”.

To deal with this, some people go to… Loot Council! Where a group of people will vote and decide on who gets loot, with no /rolling and no DKP. The loot will be distributed for the benefit of the guild and go to those to whom it is the biggest upgrade etc etc. Sounds great and “fair”. So did communism by the way.

My take on it is this… it doesn’t really matter what system you have, the important thing is that there actually is a system. Despite what many people claim, there is no “fairest” system because what’s fair differs from case to case. Random roll doesn’t really work well because a raid isn’t like a pugged heroic, the efforts to kill the boss do not extend only to that particular fight and many people will feel disgruntled if their efforts learning fights and clearing previous trash bosses go completely unrewarded. Some form of DKP helps to track this. To counter the argument of the more casual raiders never being able to loot, remember that the hardcore raiders get many more chances at seeing the item that they want drop. By the laws of probability, they earn more DKP because they come to more raids but they also spend more DKP because they see more drops. Thus, by the time the casual sees item X drop, most likely many hardcore raiders already have it so they get it anyway. The only time this comes into dispute is when a very rare top of the line weapon drops from a difficult boss, in which case I would say a case can be made for it going to the people with 2000 DKP anyway since they’ve been waiting for it forever. A casual doesn’t NEED to get the absolute best spelldamage weapon in the game, he can get the next best one since all the others already have it. Remember, gear has a much smaller effect on performance than most people think.

Loot council is the absolute worst system there can possibly be, because there is no system at all. No matter how good the intentions of the council members, there are many subconscious prejudices that will affect any such decisions. And because there is no transparent system, a disgruntled player can very easily convince himself (rightly or wrongly) that there is favouritism in loot distribution. Plus with the intelligence of the average WoW player (hint: rogue class leader who thinks that a) subtlely is good raid dps b) other officers are dumb enough to believe him) I think people should be a lot more cynical about the effectiveness of Loot Council.

In short, as long as there is a system and the rules apply to all players strictly and in a transparent manner, most people will be honest enough to accept it. If they lose out on a piece of loot today, they know that if another day the situation was reversed the winner would be on the other end of the stick. No amount of tweaking of rules will ever prevent “unfairness”, the important thing is to ensure that it’s “equally unfair”. The people who try to game the system will always try to do so, no matter what new rules you put it. So don’t add new rules, get rid of players who are obviously asshats.

And remember that in the end, loot will come in time. If you never get an item, so be it, the continued success of the raid proves that you didn’t need it.