Yes, MMO's have a certain obligation to leave some content to the imagination of the majority of their players, and to that extent they may have even made BT/Hyjal too easy. But at the same time, it's inherently obvious that Blizzard still wants to encourage new players and retain players who aren't in top-flight guilds, so that requires new content and occasional revisions to existing content to keep it fresh or enticing. It's a difficult balancing act, and "I want to see all the content on two hours a week!" is as foolish as "PHOOEY to players who don't EARN their right to raiding content through sweat, tears and blood!" For every overly casual player who whines that the game should be tailored to their limited schedule and limited interest, there's a hardcore player who whines that the game should be tailored to their extreme schedule and extreme interest. So let's not get into the game of arguing about who's more unreasonable.

This is just plain idiocy, and that kind of simplistic view of the game has been blown apart in countless threads on this forum. Does it please you to think that raiding is so black and white?

This is in the new 2.4 combat log, by default, for what its' worth. Right click on [dead person], select "Show me what happened to [dead person]?" and there you go.

Getting back to the "learning curve" discussion.

I completely agree with many people here that the game itself has a lot to do with the apparent lack of "skill" shown by many players. This idea of inherant skill is simply obsurd. I have taken people who are new to the game who were honestly being out DPS'd by the tanks on their first Kara run and educated them to the point where they became top 5 DPS. The solo grind to 70 doesn't teach people ANYTHING about their class... and this is a design fault.

I think that implementing even some sort of "daily" type quest that tested basics like shot rotation, sheild block uptime, DoT uptime, effective healing.. etc. (picture a sort of training ground) While this might become mindless for experienced players, it would at least become a mechanic for players to work on skills that they will need later.

I wouldn't say that it teaches nothing. Rather, it doesn't teach skills necessary for raiding such as how to push your DPS to the theoretical maximum of what your gear allows.

There is plenty of room and encouragement for most players to experiement with what their class can do, and a lot of people do. Paladins soloing elites with sword and board Light/Light (long before buffed Protection), warlocks and hunters seeing if there is any possible way to avoid grouping for group quests, mages seeing how many things they can blow the %&^# up at once, and so on.

However, a warlock rounding up an elite felguard from Forge Camp: Fear and beating Banthar's face in does not teach much in the way of how to DPS down Boss X.

Most people are willing to look at their book of abilities and see what works on a given problem. What you are talking about is something quite different. If anything, Blizzard has to nerf or immediately fix certain types of player creativity with their classes. It took a matter of minutes after the PTR opened before warlocks tried grabbing the "demon" tagged Pit Lord Commanders and found out that they could. See also: Paladin one-shots Kazzak, kiting Kazzak to Stormwind, suiciding to Kazzak/Krull to grief other or same faction, enslaving Lord Banehollow, enslaving giant felhound in Blasted Lands, bringing Corrupted Blood or exploding pets into IF/Org, rogues making off with tens of thousands of gold from Heroic Chests, etc.

I want blizzard's worlds, with valve or nintendo's player training.

There's a large amount of player training for the multi-player segment that is very rudimentary. That's a shame really.

Ignore the casual/hardcore argument for a moment and just consider someone who simply "plays wow". How are they going to intuit how hunter mechanics work? It's by no means obvious. Same deal for learning the basics of raid leadership.

That sort of basic "this is what you need to know to perform this job in a raid with minimal competency" should be taught by the game. It's largely not. That's a problem in the design.

You have me all wrong and slating my own ability is unnecessary. The players who seek to improve themselves or are willing to learn in no way fall under my bad player tag (why would they). The bad players are those that are completely ignorant of what it takes to play their class to a standard higher than a failed kara pug. Everyone has encountered them, some have played since day 1 others are new in TBC. A reset learning curve wont help those that are happy in their ignorant bliss.

Anecdote time!

I participated in a ZA pug the other night. Confused as to how one of the hunters did so very poorly, I glanced at recount.

Autoshot: 70%
Aimed shot: 20%
Serpent Sting: 9%.

He used steady shot once. It was probably an accident. The culture of his guild allows him to be like this, probably perfectly happy with his sub-500 DPS. The contrast between them and mine is pretty stark.

Everyone in my guild is an experienced MMORPG that I know from outside WOW. We grinded in MUDs, we yelled "BRING BACK PRECASTING, BIYOTCH!" from the roof tops, we taxi'd to victory in WW2OL, we know what NEED SOW 4 CR means, we've been brutally flamed by MMORPG developers, and a few of our number even work in the industry now. From level 1 to 70, we've been intensely competitive with each other. There's no need for us to call anyone out for sucking because we're our own worst critics. If one of us just sucked on the meters and couldn't figure out why, they'd turn to us and ask, "What am I doing wrong?"

Theirs is a group of friendly people that plays WoW together.

---

My personal favorite solution to people sucking is a daily mentorship quest. Lowbie players get into a queue and are automatically matched up with 70's of the same class. Neither party HAS to do anything but stay in a group with the other for an hour. The high-level player gets gold, the lowbie gets experience for a quest and maybe a +speed buff or something. The idea is that few feel comfortable just walking up to a stranger and asking for help, if two people are put together for the explicit purpose of one helping the other, the barriers'll be broken down. Some 70's SUCK (see above), but hopefully the correct info will get around better than the bad stuff.

I had coffee this morning and ran into someone I went to school with, along with his father and my co-worker. Somehow WoW came up. He has been playing since it came out, and has a level 70 warlock.

He asked what class I play, I said I have a level 70 paladin. He said "No way man! Paladins SUCK! Warlocks are where it's at!" The topics were mostly guided by the other people at the table. My co-worker, who plays in a semi casual 10-man raiding guild and the warlock's father, who doesn't play the game. Things came around to what content we do. I said a few words about raiding. He said "Yeah, I can't even do that stuff, because on my server, horde outnumber us like 20,000 to 1, and I get pwned just trying to get to the gate!"

Somehow the topic of keybindings came up, and he said "Yeah, but on some classes, like the warlock you have way more spells than you have keys so I just turn on all my extra action bars and then I can click them all. Sometimes I have to move buttons around, but I always make sure I have all of my damage over time skills there."

I said very few words the entire conversation, letting the majority of the flow be dictated by the other people at the table. But there is absolutely no way that this guy is playing the same game as I am.

This guy brought up wild statements like that the expansion was set to be released in September but kept being pushed back, and that horde was Blizzard's favored faction and alliance are crapped on etc.

So, to that extent I think that bad players, such as this guy, will never manage to become good players. Not because people can't improve their skills, but because the game that people like this play is so far removed from the game that I play, our worlds only collide in the form of a terribad pug.

There's no DPS rotations in that world. There's no maximizing anything. There's only feeble attempts, goofing off, and excuses.

Anyone who takes the game seriously, strives to improve themselves, and can put in the time, can likely kill Illidan.

There is an interesting conflict I see regarding how folk describe TBC raiding compared to classic WoW. Almost all folk will agree that individual responsibility in raids is much much higher. You hear common statements like 'everyone needs to be awake and paying attention' or similar things in the context of most TBC raid encounters. Folk say 'deadweight' is a much higher burden.

Similarly, I don't think anyone will argue that TBC encounters are an entirely higher level of complexity compared to pre-TBC. When there are adds in an encounter, there are more of them, and they have different abilities (contrast Akama to Gehennas or Sulfuron for example). Even the simplest bosses have multiple phases (Supremus/Naj'entus), etc. Kaelthas and Vashj are leagues more complex than anything prior to BC with perhaps the exception of 4h.

And yet. Folk describe 25man TBC raiding as easier.


I think all of it is true, and the discrepancy can be described by a little fairly elementary mathematics.

Let f be the chance that someone fails.

The probability of your raid failing is related to the binomial distribution:
classic = 1 - (1-f)^40
tbc = 1 - (1-f)^25

The big difference between the two is the exponent. This means that you can significantly increase the individual difficulty in any encounter and still result in an encounter that is *easier* overall for the raid to execute.

The obvious insight that comes out of this relates to how pre-tbc encounters often had a lot of slack built in. Individual failure was much less strict. Folk could die on most encounters and provided it wasn't above a threshold or one or two critical roles, you were generally ok (read: bliz encounter design reducing the exponent from 40 to some smaller number).

Fights where everyone had to execute perfectly were very rare pre-tbc because of this issue. Everyone remembers them. Gothik, 4h, Thaddius, etc.
TBC encounters it's easier to have a much lower tolerance for failure on an indivdual level and still not run into the binomial probability of failure problem just due to the lower number of players. So you can have fights like Archimonde and actually have it work (if anyone thinks archimonde would scale to 40 people, you'd need to go revisit basic probability theory :P).


Anyway, the conclusion simply is - it's harder to design fights for 25 people that will take weeks to learn. At least without throwing random failure into the equation. Just because the mean time to failure for your raid is so much lower even given the same level of skill of individuals.


As to providing training content, I think Karazhan provides an excellent training ground for most raid roles. CC, add control, tanking, reactive healing, raid healing, proactive healing, dps checks, etc. Furthermore I think the 5mans are varied enough to provide a good training ground too. I'd venture to say heroic trash is a bit overkill for teaching tanking, but it can be a challenge for folk that want to push it.
Is there scope for more content to bring folk up to speed? For sure - and I'd certainly say bliz is planning on it in the next expansion.

I think the game is just fine as is, the people that want to improve will improve and those that can't be arsed would probably not even respond well to any tutorial in the first place. As I see, the tools are readily available to improve yourself but not in the form of an in-game tutorial. It takes some digging and some thinking, but not too much really. Most classes aren't as complex as the hunter class and you can become fairly proficient with any by just applying some simple logic and dedication.

Any in-game tutorial, or any such thing, would probably raise the bar some but it would really be groundbreaking or usher in any kind of new era. Dumb people would still be dumb and crappy players would still be crappy, just at a higher level.

(I presume you mean "wouldn't really be groundbreaking". I will answer your post as translated by me :=)

This whole issue is predicated on two things: players want to get into the real end game content and fight the big bad bosses, and they may be stuck in smaller, slower guilds; Blizzard wants those players to experience real end game content because they want the game to expand and take in new players. Both of those statements of "fact" obviate against making strictly exclusive content, and keeping attunements in place, and keeping barriers always too high.

As a side note, a lot of people are not willfully bad; they may need encouragement and support to learn how to improve their game.

It's not necessary to have a tutorial, but it is a very good idea to have a training ground. This is related to learning theory, as I understand it. Some people learn by reading and then by doing it. Some people learn by doing it and then by reading about it. Some learn by watching others do it and then copying it. I won't even go into other learning modalities.

Forums and theorycrafting threads do not cut it for most people. For one thing, the theories themselves are too complex. The threads get very long, the details get very cumbersome, and a minor patch can kill skill rotations in the blink of an eye. Summary threads like Working Theories of Theorycrafting help to some extent, but there is so much inertia from all of the data and equations and opinions, that that thread is hard to keep current.

Karazhan is more of a training ground than UBRS ever was. For all I knew when we were running UBRS in 2005, things just happened. We were never really sure why, but they just did. People who came from earlier MMOs knew that wasn't correct. There was a lot to be learned in such encounters, and they knew how to read combat logs and work on their skill sets.

More importantly, I did not understand raid management. Nobody in the guilds that I belonged to had done anything more organized than City of Heroes. Raiding operations were brand new to most of us because we had never raided before. Reading strats only told you some of the basics, it didn't make it real when you had to deal with the people you had signed up, or could recruit.

Coming back to the learning aspect, Most of the current players of WoW had no raiding experience before WoW; most of the players since BC had zero raiding experience. Part of the issue is training the players, and part is the training of the raid leaders. Very good raid leaders are quite rare. You might find maybe a dozen on a server. I suspect fewer than that. Some guilds have one, and a lucky few have two. There are a bunch of people with leadership aspirations and skills who need to learn how to lead the end game raids. The surest way to burn those people out before they become very good raid leaders is to overwhelm them with a greater number of players, the complexity of the instances and complexity of the mechanics.

So, it is very much in Blizzard's best interests to keep enhancing the depth of the game by making more end game raiders, raiding further into the content, and staying and playing the game longer. Putting in training grounds that allow raid leaders to better learn leading, players to learn roles, and groups to work together will help to raise the standard of play, while reducing the need to dumb down the harder parts of end game.

This is a vast oversimplification. I know lots of players that would like to improve, but don't want to scour the internet for advice. And many things are not intuitive...without reading this site, I would have no idea how important hit rating is for rogues. I quit the game for a about a year before coming back several months into BC. Talent trees had changed (I was already killing things in outland before I noticed I had no talents since my points had been refunded), there were new types of stats on gear, etc. How can deep subtlety not be good for DPS with talents that raise agility and AP by a significant percentage? How is it intuitive that sword spec procs main hand swings? Without knowing that, wouldn't a 1.3 dagger in off-hand be good for more combat potency procs?

Sure I did know that slice and dice is essential for DPS, but there are still rogues who don't know it. And this can be true for any class...I remember running with pallys in 5 mans as a new 70, and thinking that they suck for holding aggro...until I ran into pallys who knew what they were doing. Dunno what the first couple pallys were doing wrong, but it had to be substantial.

Putting in some kind of training ground would help a lot. NPCs that teach people some of the basics. The addition of threat and damage meters to the game help a lot in this regard...put in a quest where you can see your DPS or TPS while you beat on a target dummy, and you have to reach a certain amount to finish the quest. When you fail, have the NPC give you tips for what you could do differently. Now Blizzard has shown they do not know their own game as well as posters here, but they can guide people away from big mistakes (hunter shot rotations? How is a hunter supposed to know about that from within the game?). Actually...I don't know how feasible this is, but Blizzard could spawn an NPC with identical class/spec/race/gear and you compete against it. It uses a semi-optimal script (something generic, good enough but not optimal) to generate threat or dps while you do the same. The objective being to come close to or beat your opponent. And at the end you get a screen that looks like a WWS parse, showing what abilities you and your opponent used and such...helps a lot if you failed to see what you did wrong.

It's not always a matter of being dumb, just unwilling to study this stuff outside of the game. So doing whatever seems to work, with occasional advice from guildmates/friends, and stumbling along.

Gear advice would be helpful too...general advice about what stats to focus on, this could come from class trainers. Rogues often go for crit over hit, which is hardly optimal for PvE DPS. But that should be what trainers are for...to actually train you in the basics, not just offer you skills.

Think of it this way...imagine you had never been to this website. In fact, imagine the internet doesn't exist, and you have no addons to parse your combat logs. You log on, do daily quests, run some 5 mans, and log off. How do you learn to optimize your character from only in-game info? There should be tools in place to help people do just that. And even though it won't be truly optimal (and I'm sure whatever Bliz thinks is optimal you would all be shaking your heads at), it will help a lot to bring people up to a certain minimal level of viability.

By not being a moron and being able to comprehend elementary math/logic?

I've only skimmed through all this but from my personal experience, when I read what Xl says about how dumb people hold their guild back and all that, it has nothing to do with simple min/maxing. It isn't knowing whether a 9dmg gem is better than 6dmg4crit or whether those 2 points should go into imp evisc or murder. It's just blatantly stupid gearing/speccing/etc due to either a. not caring enough or b. being a fucking retard. You don't need to bust out spreadsheets and charts to understand that drain life in pve as a warlock sucks and shadowbolts are >>>>>. You don't need to be brilliant to understand imp kick is a useless talent and should not be taken over weapon mastery if your goal is PvE. Pre BC everyone knew that MS sucked dick and fury was amazing. Everyone knew fire shit all over every other mage spec in Naxx but how many AP pyro retards did you see running around all day in the non bleeding edge, average raiding guilds? assa/prep rogues? etcetcetc

Sometimes people don't care and just play to fuck around which is fine, but most of the time from what I've seen in several guilds is that most are just fucking stupid. And of course, when you're too stupid to understand how to simply spec your character for it to be halfway decent, there's a very good chance you're gona fail at knowing how to press your 2-3 buttons in the right order and how to move away from scripted laserbeam of death. I just don't see how a popup in game giving them advice is going to help. Why even have all the options and possibilities in the game then? Why not just remove gems/enchants/talent trees and have everything be set at the best possible choices? I would be willing to bet all the people that are terrible would still be terrible if that were the case.

After playing this game through every boss on dps, tank and heals, absolutely nothing has ever been any sort of challenge outside of possibly archimonde, pre nerf shahraz, kt and... ya. There's no "skill" requirement to flawlessly play through this game as an individual, it's just either being an idiot or not being an idiot. Whether or not the game should be tuned to cater to the masses who are (sadly) incompetent and inept is a different question, but to suggest that any problems any guild faces in this game are due to anything other than 100% player fault is dumb.

I wouldn't exactly say the math built into WoW is elementary. People with advanced degrees in it debate formulas for days and weeks after they're altered to figure out the best item or stat to choose.

Testify, brother! Any ideas on how to change it?

I'd like to see more grouping with NPCs. Most solo grouping with NPCs in my experience is the generally-painful "escort quest". Well, how might we mix that up?

I'm imagining an escort quest where a tank NPC escorts you through a group of very rough mobs with either progressively less forgiving enrage timers or a steady spawn rate. To get through the escort mission, you have to both DPS down the mobs fast enough to move along the path, but also avoid pulling agro off the NPC tank. This is definitely stuff that DPSers need to know how to do, that the solo game doesn't necessarily teach 'em. It's also not too rough to imagine a "keep the healer alive" escort, or a "for god's sake don't break the CC" escort.

Thank you for your helpful and insightful post. Such well articulated and thought out replies are hardly seen these days outside of the General Forums.


I have seen 30 page threads of people arguing back and forth over the value of stats or talent specs. By no means is it reasonable to expect your average game player to devote that much time and energy to understanding their class. While there will always be an element of min/max'ing that escapes the general population, the game SHOULD provide the gamer with enough knowledge to at least move into raiding if they want. Right now too much emphasis falls on the shoulders of Guild Leaders and Officers to educate new players.

As encounters become more challenging and dynamic, this knowledge gap is growing and one side is going to be hurt by it. Either the end game players will be upset because it's not challenging enough or new players will become disinterested due to the overly steep learning curve and a "glass ceiling" type effect.

I don't know. I sort of thought that the 'playing in groups' was taught by the 5-mans at 70.

Things i needed to learn to function in a group, which I certainly didn't learn from grinding or questing I did as I relentlessly farmed the level 70 5 man dungeons.

Needing to go through dungeons for karazhan attunement, then for reputation grinds, then again at a higher level of difficulty for badges and other goodies. That's what taught me to work in a team.

Things like breaking CC, maximizing and sustaining my damage, managing threat, positioning - you get very basic elements of all of those things in Arc, Mech, SV, Black Morass and so on. Even the bosses in those dungeons had elements of raid bosses and situational awareness that you needed to react to.

Speaking as someone who never had any pre-BC raid expereince, the learning curve was great. From 5 mans, to kara, and up into the 25 mans was a pretty good learning curve. There were problems, certainly. Most notably, the dungeons were tuned way too hard at first and the lack of a full length tier 4 25 man to get people more easy time in bigger groups.

Isn't that what the learning curve should have been?

I'm surprised to see a warrior saying this. Look how many of the tanking spells are simply "Adds a significant amount of threat." How much time would you have to put in to figure out those "significant amounts" without some add-on that parses your combat logs (be it a WWS or threat-meter)?

Would it be possible? Yes. Would it be stupidly tedious? Absolutely. I love coming here and reading the theory people put into the game. I hate testing and creating that theory past an entirely basic level.

Most of my friends are similar, if even lazier. It is a game after all. If you don't really want to spend time creating and reading formulas in your downtime, should you have to? I know when I bought WoW, I didn't think to myself "Woot!!!! A highly intricate math problem I get to work on each evening." No, I thought to myself "Sweet, I can kill shit with bolts of shadow conjured from my bare hands!!" Why do I need to not only be very comfortable with mathematics, but also intelligent/diligent enough to reverse-engineer the mechanics in order to be successful at the game. Do you really think that's Blizzard's intent?

I'd love it if they added some support in-game for some of the more complicated things. A built-in threat meter would be something both simple and huge. Same with a damage meter.

It's appalling how many experienced WoW players are eager to stand up and sweepingly denounce everyone else who isn't at the same progress level as them as hopeless idiots.

Many core elements of this game are not transparent *at all*, threat being the most obvious, with other things like damage mechanics against higher-level mobs being similarly mysterious. Other things are contradictory at first glance; a new or even intermediate player might wonder, "if my role in groups is to kill monsters, then why is it so easy to pull aggro off of the tank whenever I really do damage?" And given the even horrible tanks get mightily offended at the notion that it's their fault, that hapless DPS'er is left none the wiser and wondering what they did wrong.

To suggest that any of this should be absorbed by osmosis is pointless. Suggesting that players are going to learn anything from the WoW forums is equally pointless. And frankly, for most players who are logging on to enjoy themselves and take a break from reality, it's stupid to link them to the EJ forums and expect them to prune through the 100 threads they don't need to find the information they might actually use. Forcing somebody into a swamp of theorycrafting to learn about their class is as crazy as expecting somebody to start raiding BT-complexity encounters right out of the gate.

Concepts like "threat per second" and even "damage per second" are never directly approached by WoW, and at least to some extent that needs to change if they're going to do something about how many players hit max level and are still clueless about fundamental concepts.

Assuming they play on implementing a reasonably well-functioning threat meter, then at the very least they could implement some tutorials using intelligent target dummies, with some basic quest objectives to go along with them.

Have you actually looked at what skill have that text attached? I just looked through all the skills listed under Protection for warriors and these come out with that text: Heroic strike, Revenge, Shield Slam, Sunder Armour. If you were to take a character and spam Revenge and Shield Slam on cooldown, with sunders in between, and Heroic as much as you can, you don't do max threat, but you come out damn close to it. Sure, you don't know the exact value, but the premise that these skills are good for threat is explictly laid out. The number of people who I've seen tanking using things like Shield Bash on melee mobs just boggles the mind - the skill descriptions aren't exactly vague for most skills. Having said that...

I agree with the first point - unless you've played a tanking class there's no direct element of threat involved. The fact that most leveling is done solo compounds this, as a large number of people get to max level and then have no idea of how to play another class or even what another class can do. The fact there's no actual need to ever play more than one class if you enjoy the class you're playing, and no compulsion to know anything about any other class makes this worse.

The second I also agree with, but to a lesser extent. Pointing someone to a resource like EJ and going "the answer's there" is a close minded way of looking at things. The search function is useable but not perfect, and anyone who wants even the slightest excuse for not doing it won't. That's kind of the point of the class threads, as (while not perfect) they give a good summary of all the important bits about each class/spec.

Threat and Damage per second are never directly implied, but if someone wants to get the most out of their threat then they can follow the skill descriptions most of the time (see first part of this post). DPS is never directly alluded to, but enrage timers certainly give a good hint. Basic maths can be explained by this example: my fireball takes 3 seconds to cast and does 4k damage, my scorch takes 1.5 seconds to cast and does 1.5k damage, so fireball is better. Scorch has a 10% extra damage debuff, so getting that on should take priority. Just reading the skill descriptions and doing the simplest maths will get you to some optimisation of your class. I do agree that all the character stats are heavily confusing though, and napkin maths is sometimes misleading towards assuming one thing is better because you didn't take account of everything that's there. This is not a "highly intricate math problem" (Denogran's words), it's a simple thing of "we didn't make the enrage, how could I do more damage?".

Adding in quests/some sort of system to "tutorial" players through things would be good, but I wonder how many people may feel it's too constricting. WoW has no tutorial as such - the beginning is just laid out as a quest pathway that happens to co-incide with being a tutorial. It's a very very good system, and works beautifully in getting people to do things while rewarding them at the same time (which is basically the entire leveling system). Adding some kind of actual tutorial to guide people towards doing things right (e.g. having to use healing spells on a quest NPC to keep them alive without running out of mana) would help, but some people may just skip them concluding that either they're impossible, or that it's too much effort for what it's worth.

Some people here will have solo'ed every elite it's possible to solo while leveling, just for the challenge of doing it more than anything else. Others will have skipped every single one past the first that gibbed them, assuming that they're either meant for groups, or just too lazy to do them. There's a varied middle ground.

I'm not denouncing anyone as an idiot, I'm just saying some people prefer to take the lazy way out of the game. Does playing Half Life 2 on Easy mode suddenly make monsters fall over when you look at them, or does it assume you have a base level of skill in order to progress? WoW actually makes this easier as you can outgear things by a hefty margin, giving you a massive advantage.

It's a game, let people do what they want. If they want shiny epics, they can put in a little bit of effort (see above fireball example above) and get most of the way although it may be tough/take a while, or put in a lot of effort (get a good grounding in everything in general) and find that it's actually not that hard if you can find others like you.

People who don't want to learn won't. Unfortunately some of these people think that they should get things for nothing. TANSTAAFL.

Well, then put me in the moron category. Without this site, I'd be clueless on optimizing my rogue. I'd grab a bunch of agility and crit, because crits are cool. I wouldn't have the inclination to do tests and study the numbers. I'm very thankful for all the work done on this site, and I know I play better because of it. Without all the work people here have done, I'd be another tard rogue I'm sure.

Did everyone know that? Maybe those players just didn't know? Maybe if the game had some way to give direct feedback where you could just play your character and see the differences between different specs, there would be fewer "retards" out there?

I really doubt people are "retarded" on purpose. And sure they are in non-bleeding edge guilds...but that's who we are talking about here. No one who posts here is in the group we are talking about...we are talking about average WoW players who have never been to or heard of this site, who only play WoW, and don't look outside the game for info. We've had some new recruits in our guild, and they've asked me for advice, and since I honestly know nothing about non-rogues I come here and skim some basic info for them. They want to improve, but don't want to read stuff outside of the game.

Well, to begin with there are no "best" possible choices. The "best" build for PvE raiding is not necessarily best for PvP or PvE 5 man content...and often times there are separate but equal (or nearly equal) builds for different parts of the game. And a small hit to effectiveness for a big boost to personally liking the play style is for most an acceptable trade-off.

But I think we are talking about different things...if you just cannot stand still during flame wreath no change to gear/spec/whatever is going to help you in raiding. But I'm talking about people trying just to optimize the abilities they have. Hunters being a huge example here...from what I've read, using their skills wrong can actually decrease their DPS over autoshot due to clipping autoshot attacks...a mechanic that is completely hidden from players.

Ok, fine, I guess I'm a skill-less mouth-breather. It's taken a while for us to get through kara, and we've only just beat the bear boss in ZA...and many fights have taken us time to learn and get better at. I guess to me that means we've gained skill, but apparently we should have 1 shot our way through both instances the first time we tried them. My bad.

But you are just being intentionally inflammatory, so I'll try not to stoop to that level. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to find a way to have, in game, help for players who are new to grouping/raiding to improve their game. And I think enough players would buy into it to make it worthwhile for Blizzard to add.

Okay, that's a totally useless cop-out post. Calling everyone stupid and/or lazy isn't going to change the number of people who hit max level with no idea what's going on in group scenarios.