Personal CDs 101: Introduction To Not Being A Stupid Jackass

Repeat after me: My Death Was Not An Accident, And It Was Probably My Fault

To be a good mythic raider, high throughput is necessary. But it is not sufficient.

Throughput is easy to measure, monitor, obsess on, take pride in, mock over. There is a meter open on everyone's screen, and everyone knows it. You're the #3 dps in the raid, and everyone knows it, and you know everyone knows it.

Warcraft Logs ranks you among your class--you're a 75%tile mythic raider, a 99%tile mythic raider, a 55%tile mythic raider. You know it, and everyone knows it, and you know that everyone knows it--and if there is a chance they don't, you make sure to talk about it in Mumble, to ensure everyone knows it.

It is easy to take these easily measured numbers as the measure of your quality as a raider. But your dps, or your hps, is not the measure of how good a raider you are. High throughput is necessary for mythic raiding, but insufficient to kill bosses, and insufficient to make you a good raider. If it were, we'd all be hitting target dummies all day.

Personal Cooldowns: A vitally important aspect of off-meter raiding necessary to make you a good raider. Just as you can improve your dps through study, planning, and practice, you can also improve your use of personal cooldowns through study, planning, and practice. It isn't on the meters. You won't get a percentile.

But your healers notice it, and they don't have a dps meter open. I promise you we saw you misuse or underuse or fail to use a cd and die, cause a wipe, or underperform as a result--and we mock you for it.

Your raid leaders notice it. And though they may not mock you for it, they certainly evaluate you for it, and consider whether you are the best person for a raid spot due to your excellence or ineptitude in using personal cooldowns.

There is no excuse for failing to use, or misusing, your cooldown

E.g. 1: "I didn't know that would kill me." Not an excuse: an admission that you don't respect 19 other people enough to learn the fight and save everyone wipes learning something that could have been learned pre-pull. Everyone at this level of raiding should know every deadly mechanic in the encounter before the first pull. You should already know that Curse of the Legion, Empowered Shadowforce, Empowered Mannoroth's Gaze can and will kill you without good play. You should already have planned how to respond to these mechanics.

E.g. 2: "I didn't have time to use it." Not an excuse: an admission that you failed the mechanic. This is a game of skill, planning, and reflexes. There is no such thing as an unheralded, unpreventable insta-gib. Just as an example, if Cani has time to locate the cursed person, finish his cast, and dispel you, you have time to push an instant, often non-gcd defensive cooldown. You didn't know you had the curse? Still your fault--why didn't you have a weakaura ready, knowing the mechanic was deadly? Why didn't you have an audio cue that signals that mechanic, and only that mechanic, so you could reflexively respond? Why didn't you just click the weakauras I make before every boss fight?

E.g. 3: "It was on cooldown." A close relative of #1, and still terrible. There are several reasons why it might be on cooldown, and they are all bad:
A: You used it for no good reason at all. Imps were falling and barkskin was available, so you pressed it. You got hit once for 90k; barkskin prevented a whopping 18k damage. Now you don't have it for Curse of the Legion, where it could prevent 100k and save your life.
B: You used it to save yourself from a mechanic that would not have threatened you if you played well. You didn't position correctly on fel seeker and got knocked away rather than toward the boss. You are out of position for Mannoroth's Gaze and get picked. You're forced to bubble, and now don't have it for Shadowforce where it could prevent 500k damage. Or you didn't position correctly for Mark of Doom and yours didn't detonate. You're forced to ice block/deter/bubble and now don't have it for Wrath/Gripping Shadows.
C: You used it to prevent damage that you thought could have killed you, but wouldn't have because you had a 300k shield. Please--you mean you still don't have an absorb tracker? Sure deciding whether to use a defensive not merely based on the incoming mechanic but also on your current level of absorption is advanced play, requiring attention and skill--but aren't you one of the best?
D: You used it to do a miniscule amount of additional damage. The entire raid was perfectly stacked for Mannoroth's Gaze, and there are 17 people soaking all three debuffs. You get the Gaze, and bubble is the only button you can push. You push it--maybe you hate not being able to push something for 3 seconds, maybe you're desperate to get that 1 additional GCD on the boss--and now you don't have it for the 8 stack of Gripping Shadows you pick up when the mages mess up Wrath.

E.g. 4: "It was the healers' job to save me." You may not know this, but healers are rarely able to actually save a life, and doing so takes incredible reflexes and luck. If you're taking the damage you should take, when you should take it, it's just a healing throughput check--and when was the last time this heal team failed a healing throughput check? In that situation healers aren't saving lives, they're just doing their normal job. But if you go from 100-0% in a second or two, and you didn't save your own life with a cooldown, why do you expect the healers could? You are probably already debuffed with weakened soul from the damage you were supposed to take; PWS isn't available to save you from the damage you shouldn't have taken. Flash of Light is a 1.1 second cast. If you were at 100% two seconds ago, and dead now, the holy pally didn't have time to finish his previous GCD and finish a 1.1 second cast. Chain heal was already being cast, and didn't choose you to jump to. Sure, you may get a lay on hands, or a spirit link totem--but to count on that instead of using your personal cooldown is bad play.

A quality paragraph:

Please read this article. Already read it? Read it again. This article is the most important thing a mythic raider can EVER read: http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2014/01/29/raid-awareness-is-a-learned-and-practiced-skill/

Your Death Was Not An Accident, And It Was Probably Your Fault

 

"Raiding at any level, it is a virtual certainty that the limiting factor on the speed at which you learn and defeat bosses is the rate of avoidable mistakes made by individual group members. No matter what other factors are present, multiple avoidable deaths (or sometimes even one) scuttle any attempt at a hard boss. With 10 to 25 people having to play for many consecutive minutes, and a win only being likely if virtually all of them make no death-causing errors on the same attempt, you can’t avoid the math of the situation. "

 

"the most important way you can improve your skill as a raider and your contribution to your group is by reducing your rate of avoidable errors"

 

There is another excuse I didn't mention:

"I really don't care enough to spend time thinking about why I died and how to avoid it; I'd rather hope no one noticed and just hope it doesn't happen again, this game is all about RNG and it isn't my fault."

You're a bad player. I absolutely know you when I see you; I despise you and never want to raid with you again. Go get carried by someone else.

 

You need a nap and some cake. Or some @Cakezilla . I can't decide.

<3

 

I have homemade biscuits. Better than cake!

 

what do you say when cani's spirit link totem kills you
and he keeps denying it

 

It CAN NOT kill someone. It can bring someone low enough something ELSE kills them though.

 

I was supposed to do fifty pages of reading from my textbook for homework, but I chose to read this instead. Now I am fucked for class, but I regret nothing.