The View From Down Here

The Skills Gap

More Heroics. Hard but utterly rewarding. The standard level 70 dungeons are starting to feel a bit easy – we know the tactics, we know how to pull. Heroics take that all away again. Every pull is likely to wipe you if not perfect, every boss needing all the members of your team to be on top of things, at least.

And that’s where the interesting experiences come in. This weekend, I had the privilege, with another guildmate, to do a couple runs -one heroic, one normal, with a friend who’s in a much bigger raiding guild and some of his guild. These are people who had been regularly raiding Naxxramas. And, to be honest, I wasn’t as impressed as I was expecting to be.

Yes, the quality of these players was way higher than I’d expect to find in one of the giant “take all comers” guilds, but in several players there were definite hints of “could be better”. Perhaps the reason for this is that they’ve rushed through 5-man content to get to the endgame, and don’t have the practice that we do, having honed ourselves to ridiculous levels in five-mans while waiting for others to catch up.

The other option is the more interesting – in a 40-man raid, there’s less oppportunity to show a lack of ability to do certain things that might be expected of your class. You’re just one of a bunch of people who each make a tiny impact on the outcome. In lower numbers of players, your weaknesses start to show through.

This was, I think, the aim of reducing the raid size to 25 people. It becomes more about skill and versatility than being very good at one thing and not a lot else.