The Queue: Learning to play, It is people, gods and monsters

Got a little Queue to sing for ya.

Questions and answers coming up.

I’ve often felt that there could be better ways to learn how to  play your class/spec in game. First off, rotations can grow to be fairly complex and there’s nothing in game that tells you what they are beyond the Core Abilities tab in your spellbook. (That does exist, though. Don’t overlook it.) One of the things I was hoping for with the Proving Grounds was that it would actually provide this kind of instruction, which may be asking a bit much for something intended to test all players who want to run dungeons.

Perhaps class-specific scenarios could be designed that would give players the chance to practice their rotations in a more natural feeling way. I’ve always disliked being expected to just go whack dummies, especially since that so rarely approximates what in game play is actually like.

I’d also see if you can find other players to talk to. I’ve learned more in conversations with other players than I can easily convey – sometimes things that don’t gel when reading them and which elude you while trying to execute them can click into place when someone else discusses how they go about it. There’s also the class columns here, of course – if you have a specific problem, you can always leave a comment on a post. Even if the writer him or herself can’t help, often the commenters will have some advice for you.

I’m going to tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a bright eyed warrior around level 40, back in the days when level 60 was endgame and getting that gold for your first mount was a huge deal. That warrior existed in a world with no LFG – instead, he had to basically get groups by reading trade and city chat. He was tanking, because that was what he was supposed to do as far as he knew. DPS warrioring was a ways off in his future, but on that day, he was pretty excited about tanking his first on purpose dungeon. He got a group to go to Zul’farrak, made his way to the dungeon (you had to get yourself to the dungeon back then – no meeting stones, no porting to the dungeon) and what happened next was the longest four hours of his life.

Everything you described happened. People would run ahead, pull half the dungeon, die, and then it would all come running to eat everyone else’s faces because someone else in the group had joined in. The carnage, the acrimony, the group infighting. People would quit (you couldn’t kick people back then) and the interminable process of finding replacements would begin, and inevitably the replacements would also run ahead and pull before the tank was ready. Over and over again this happened.

Eventually we got to the big pyramid for the waves of trolls event, opened the cages, and one of the DPS ran down the side to aggro everything at once. This poor battered tank, at the end of his tether, screamed so loudly that they heard him in the past and future and somehow (to this day he doesn’t know how) managed to get the pull under control, kept the group from wiping. After it was all over, the DPS player who’d run ahead said in party ‘Why is this tank so bad?’

So the moral of the story is, it’s not LFG. It’s people.

As far as I’m aware, there is no time limit.

I don’t know if it’s always been that way, but it’s been that way for quite some time. And I agree, I just hated the way I’d set up my garrison when I first got it to level 3.

Okay. Here’s what I want to explore, in order. No, I’m not just confining myself to one.

First, Tauren religion in general, and specifically how it branched off into the taunka and yaungol variants. The tauren creation myth in particular I’d love to see expanded upon.

Do ogres have a religion? We’ve seen the Gorian Empire – what, if anything, do they pray to? They seem elementally minded, so how does that connect up to the Magnaron, Gronn and the ancient giants like the one whose remains we see in Frostfire?

We have the Light as a kind of philosophical tradition among humans, and the draenei seem to view it as a more concrete force – why? Where do the differences come from? How does this connect to the original high elf priesthood and the current version of paladinhood among their sin’dorei offshoot, or the tauren’s An’she? And the dwarves didn’t have anything even like a religion until they started finding Titan relics, so why are they allowed to be paladins at all?

Tauren religion in general, and specifically how it branched off into the taunka and yaungol variants. The tauren creation myth in particular I’d love to see expanded upon.

And that’s the Queue for today. I’ll see y’all Friday on my way  out the door to go celebrate my anniversary with my wife.