Min 10k DPS for Loot!

I know this is something thats been discussed a thousand times already but I wanted to add my two cents.

It’s not unheard of, in fact it’s quite common, for the raid leaders of VoA pugs to set a minimum requirement for DPS if a player expects to be allowed to roll on any of the loot that drops. So when our benevolent guild leader put me in charge of the looting for the VoA25 she’d put together last night, I told people that they would not be allowed to roll if they did less DPS than me, the tank. Doing more DPS than the tank generally isn’t a tough thing to do unless you’re a healer, and is a reasonable demand to make, but it’s one that should motivate people to do their best.

Thing is, I didn’t mean it, and I knew that when I said it. Toravon’s not a tough boss, and never was, being tuned like all the other VoA bosses to be do-able in PvP gear. But the real crux of the matter is that, denying under-performers loot is counter productive.

Doing good DPS is a three pronged fork. Talents, Rotation and Gear (ok, maybe glyphs too.) Theoretically if you’ve motivated people to *not* slack, they’ll be doing the best they can with the gear they have. If their talents are bad, it’s not something you can fix in the context of a pug, or maybe they’re PvP specced which generally is acceptable/expected for at least a few people in VoA. So to complain about someone’s performance, but then deny them the opportunity to get gear that will improve it, is kinda stupid.

It’s also unfair when you, as a tank, break 5k DPS on Toravon. Hell, I doubt I could even do 5k on some of my level 80 pure DPS alts! So by those rules, they wouldn’t get loot in a raid where the tank did the same damage as me.

Assume you have 2 tanks, 5 healers and 18 dps. Toravon has 15,060,000 health. Lets say you have 3 minutes to kill him before Whiteout damage becomes unhealable (as an estimation). Thats (15,060,000 / 180) / 18 = 4648 dps. So if everyone in the raid had been doing 4.6k dps we’d have still killed him. But, in that scenario I’d have been at the top of the meters, and that’d be just wrong!

This brings up, then, the fact that people don’t like the feeling of carrying other players through content that is somewhat trivial to them. I’m somewhat familiar with this feeling myself, but when you get some perspective, it’s not so bad. We’re playing a multiplayer game and so surely one of the objectives, however abstract, is to play well with others. There’s no directly-tangible rewards in game for carrying fellow players or penalties for being an ass, so it’s easy to forget but it’s important to behave towards other people as you’d like others to behave towards you.

Larisa wrote a great post about this recently, in which she said that as a proud Swede she’d rather be the one carrying a group through a heroic than be the one being carried. I think thats a great perspective. If you figure you’re going to be the impressive one, that they may well look up to you, and maybe even learn from you, playing in pugs with lesser geared or experienced players can be quite an ego boost rather than a drag.

The flip side is that people are sometimes both under performers and assholes all at the same time. In this case, I won’t really feel like doing them any favours. But sometimes you get lucky, and people endear themselves to you. Like the DK in Nexus last night which I was tanking on my recently rediscovered warrior. He’d never been there before and everything was amazing to him. He didn’t hit very hard for someone of his level and was obviously a new player in need of some tips, but he was having so much fun and it was great to see. He may have held the group back in terms of performance but he propped us up in spirits, and thats far far more valuable.

(Footnote: Toravon dropped Sanctified rogue legs and the winning roll was from Anderath, who was underneath me in the meters. I gave them to him and whispered him a “gz!”. Maybe next time I see him in a pug he’ll beat my DPS! Also, I did check his armory this morning, he’s wearing them and he’s got them properly gemmed and enchanted. Good man!)