4.3 LFD: The good, The bad, and the ugly!

I know that I am not a hardcore raider, but I do enjoy raiding.  I also enjoy doing the best that I can, and having the best gear that I can.  Yet, with all that, I still couldn't bring myself to run Trollroics anywhere near as often as I should have.  I just loathed the instances with a passion.  I rarely capped my VP, and that was on the Pally, let alone other toons.

I would much rather have leveled alts, messed around with professions, or generally anything else. And I did, until 4.3 dropped.  I have capped my VP on the Pally the last couple of weeks, including this week when unscheduled RL commitments meant I couldn't raid.  I ran BH this week on the Pally too. I am very happy with that, and happy with the speed of the runs and the ability to gear up my prot (and heaven forbid) ret sets nice and easily.  I will be getting Valor gear at close to the maximum rate as long as I can keep this up.  Groups have been generally reasonable, with few real issues or total morons.  I had one group congratulate me on my healing when I prevented a wipe and healed through a full three packs of trash that were inadvertently pulled together. Life was good.

Once I capped my VP on the Pally, I decided to see how far away the Mage was. My poor, weak attempt at a frost mage, but more on that later.  His gear was ... well, decidedly average, but a couple of normal heroics and some JP purchases later, and here I was, able to queue for the new instances. What the heck, what is the worst that could happen? ... Famous last words... I am up to about 700 VP for the week, and about half that the week before, so I am well on the way to buy the VP boots for the Pally.  My gear has risen exponentially, with most slots now sporting 378 epics, along the way replacing a level 318 staff and assorted other items of dubious nature.  These pieces of gear have not all been optimal, and I am sporting a number of spirit items.  The spirit, however, does not mean that the gear is not way better than what I had before. Naturally I will replace that when I get non-spirit drops, but that doesn't mean I don't have the right to roll on Spirit cloth, despite one particular moron spending five minutes ranting at me for doing exactly that.

And this is where the story starts to diverge from my experiences on the Pally. Some people are rude to DPS, particularly 'underperforming' DPS (by which they seem to mean anything under about 15k).  Although, to be fair, there have been several groups that have not uttered a single negative comment, and the instances have completed quickly and happily, with the occasional wipe.  I zoned in to one instance, and had a shammy tell me in party chat "mage, go arcane or fire for pve". My blood pressure started to rise in a manner that would have had a health professional looking at me askance. Firstly, if you wish to offer me advice at least have the courtesy of taking the 2 seconds to look at my name. Secondly, asking a question such as "Pug, did you realise that arcane is a vastly superior spec at the moment and have you considered respeccing to take advantage of that?" would have been far less inflammatory, and might have got a different response, regardless of the facts.

Now, before I get into the specifics, some background.  Mr Robot and I have become very close the last few weeks, and I have been reforging and regemming constantly as I have been getting new gear. I have't been shelling out for the most expensive enchants on some of the gear, but I have certainly been doing some.  An inspection of my character sheet should hopefully show that although not ideal, I have been putting in the effort to do what I can with the current gear.

I have also, as is my want, done a fair bit of blog reading, Christian Belt wrote a very interesting article (for frost mages) showing that the gap in DPS isn't as bad as it is reported as being, and anyway, I happen to like playing frost, especially given that the spec is so underrepresented amongst the general raiders I do not alike to follow the crowd :D.  So, I feel quite comfortable in suggesting that I do not NEED to change my spec.  I would certainly say that as a non-raiding character that I run a few heroics on, the requirement for respeccing isn't there.  If this WAS a raiding character, and my raid leader was *asking* me to respec and the DPS difference was causing the raid to fail, then I would absolutely consider it.  But this was some random knowitall (Zahahadid - Azjol-Nerub by name) ordering me around like his own personal lackey, without any context or thought.  I said a number of things in party chat, to that general effect, and that I liked frost and didn't see an issue.  This exchange went back and forth, and then just before the last boss was pulled, I was summarily ejected from the group. For no other reason than my spec, and the fact that I wouldn't let this guy bully me.


This sort of behaviour is all that is bad about LFD, and is just wrong on many levels.  So, if you happen to be out there and there is someone gearing or or new at the instances, how about offering some gentle advice, not immediately treating them like someone lacking all mental faculties. Understand that they might like their spec, and you don't have the right to tell them to do anything! Also, if you see it happening, then please, speak up!