The Queue: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday….

Hm… I’m sure something comes after that. Well, anyway, it’s probably not important. Let’s talk about games.

I feel like guides often misguide us, and that has to be frustrating to developers who work on making one thing and then everyone decides it’s something else. Guides tell you one way to play a character, and layout optimal talents and skill rotations.

But the advice in guides isn’t always good advice — or at least it isn’t always good advice for you.  When I’m playing retribution, for example, I run a highly sub-optimal build  for my Ret Paladin. I tried a lot of different setups, but did significantly less damage with the recommended builds because I wasn’t juggling cooldowns precisely. I spent a lot of time reading guides and figuring out how to play, and then I spent a lot of time with training dummies, seeing how things actually worked in a perfect, safe environment. Guides and sims were telling me to do one thing, but I found builds that were supposedly weaker let me do more DPS.

I’ve come to think of my class knowledge in term of guides. Initially, I lean heavily on a guide and do my best to follow its advice. That’s usually a good starting point for getting into a new class or spec. But eventually I’ll get enough experience to know when the guide’s advice is just wrong and doesn’t work for me. And it’s always at that point where I start really feeling competent at playing.

The point being: guides can be wrong. They can give advice that isn’t good for you, personally. They can give advice that says a talent that’s the tiniest fraction better than the alternative is the best talent on that tier. It will suggest gameplay that sims the best, works the best in a perfect environment that we don’t always play in.

But once a guide is out there, its advice starts to become “common knowledge.” People read it and take it for true, whether it is or not. People don’t always play around with alternatives because the guide said they should be doing this. And that gets us all stuck in a rut.

Don’t get me wrong: World of Warcraft’s classes have a lot of cookie cutter builds, a lot of talent tiers where there’s only one good choice, skills you don’t even put on your bars. There isn’t as much variety to play styles as you can find in something like Diablo: much of the basics are pre-determined.

But even when we have few choices, guides may lead us to believe that we have no choices. That there’s one correct way to play and you can’t deviate from it. I think that’s really proven a trap for players… and developers too. We all wind up locked in the thinking of popular guides, whether it’s entirely accurate or not. Guides can be a trap, and devs probably feel that more than anyone else.

Well, I’d never thought about this before but now I’m in full agreement.

It’s hard to say. It’s one of those things where you know it when you see it. And even then, it’s more of a feeling than an exact number. A feeling that the raid is dragging, that you’re spending all your time running down corridors instead of fighting anything interesting.

I think Sanctum of Domination has felt pretty good. Though there are some long run backs, the trash never quite reaches the point where killing it is just tedious, which feels right. But I couldn’t say if too much would be adding one more trash pack or adding 20 more trash packs. It’s just hard to quantify.

It’s a dog-specific superpower, much like how they know when you’re opening a package of chips in the kitchen and rush to see if you’re going to share, even when they were three rooms away in a deep sleep. All dogs have this superpower, and you have to be extremely careful when you approach if you want to take the perfect photo. (Or just eat a bag of chips undetected.)

Happy accident?

And that’s all, my friends. Take care of yourselves and have a good afternoon and a good weekend to come. Stay safe out there, folks.