More on tanking

I've been reading other blogs more about the threat mechanics change in warcraft. People sure get worked up over things. :o

I already expressed my opinion, but at the same time I have to wonder if I really am able to make a good judgement about it. I don't want to sound too elitist, but I'm far closer to the upper echelons than to the average wow player. My guild isn't too well progressed, but I say that looking up at the very well progressed guilds. We've killed heroic shannox, a feat which guildox says 3974 10man guilds and 1423 25man guilds have done, or perhaps 75k players. The easiest raid content at the moment, reg magmaw, has been killed by 50622 10man guilds and 1472 (really, that seems small?) 25man guilds, or about 540k players. So even among players who raid at all, I'm in the top 15%. And there are millions of people who never set foot in a raid.

That leads to a very different experience than the average player. I rarely do anything outside of raids other than ah'ing or the occasional troll heroic. Even when I do heroics it's usually as part of a guild group, with other 375+ ilvl peeps, or an alt of someone equally experienced. I have no idea how the average player sees zul'aman. Is it difficult for them? Is the timer unrealistically short? I know that when I did heroics for real, back when we were all wearing 300 blues, it was tricky, we had to use cc, and not going oom was a big deal. I remember having to drink between pulls and getting annoyed when peeps kept pulling while I was at 30% mana. Now I get annoyed when dps pull aggro and I actually have to heal them, instead of just splashing atonement heals on them from smiting.

Is this threat change an important change? I have no idea. It's not aimed at me and really won't affect me. Most of the major bloggers play in the same lofty circles as I do, so they don't really have a good idea either. You see a lot of whining on forums about things, but that's a vocal minority, so it's not a good measure of effectiveness. How can you judge what would be best for 11 million people? The number is almost out of my ability to comprehend that many people. If you were to talk to each of them for 5 minutes, without interruptions or sleep, it would take you over 104 years. If this change makes the game more fun for even 5% of the playerbase while pretty much not affecting anyone else, that would still be half a million people. I doubt that I'll even see a half a million people over my entire lifetime. How could they not make a change that would make gaming even slightly more enjoyable for the 80+% of the players who prefer to dps? o.O