The Dimski Rule

Over at the Secret World Forums people are starting to complain about the elitist attitude of some players when it comes to creating groups for their dungeons. “QL10 only !” Most MMO players know this as “must have gearscore >5000”. A couple of people just don’t want to fail in their dungeon run, or just want to rush through it, because they are farming this or that.

What they fail to see is that they make things harder for themselves by having to wait so much longer for a matching candidate. Plus gearscore, or whatever measure your game of choice offers is just a single measurement out of a lengthy list of parameters. On top of it, it can be easily falsified. Who hasn’t fudged their gearscore by equipping that piece of purple PVP armor, or dps gear when running as a tank or healer? And of course it leaves one major component untouched: a player’s skill and knowledge.

Which brings me to Dimski, the shining beacon of light, aaaahmm, death. Dimski was the second death knight I had leveled. We had transferred servers and my wife had been raiding with a guild for a while. In the meantime I brought Dimski up without much haste. Eventually I joined my wife’s guild, mostly in purple dungeon gear plus a piece or two from the Wintergrasp vault. That guild certainly took their raiding seriously, fielding three 10 man raid teams and of course 25 man raid. Of course they had gear requirements for raid participation and of course I didn’t qualify by a good amount.

But rules go out the window when a raid is one head or two short and I didn’t have to wait for long to be a part of the my first 25 man raid. They modified the raid rules afterward. Have a gearscore of 2700 or generate 4600 dps.  (number’s are made up, i really don’t remember the exact numbers). 4600 dps was the number my little death knight had created in inferior gear beating 2 other guilded and geared deathknights. And all I had done was reading Elitist Jerks, using the proper specification and a good spell rotation.

It certainly wasn’t that much work for me to learn what was taught by the players at  that website. But it was already enough to overcome weeks of raiding for better gear. I don’t want to show off with this post what hot shot I am. I am certainly not. But it shows me and now hopefully a few more people, that a pure gear or experience requirement, like it is requested in many games, just doesn’t cover everything.

In fact, players should be happy that our games of choice aren’t gear dependent in a way that it blocks a player with less time invested, but that it allows to make up for this time investment by deploying smarter or more skillful play. This actually broadens the base of players to pick from for any one dungeon or raid, or any other undertaking for a group.

Of course there is a “downside”: A min/max player doesn’t have choices, or only a very limited number, since he can only pick the best choices. Which lead to Ghostcrawler’s decision to limit the number of talent choices in Mists of Pandaria to, in the end, allow for more choice.


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3 Comments

  1. TSW really didn’t strike me as a min/maxing game. Since there is such little emphasis on gear, I thought it would have eliminated the elitism.

    I don’t play, but what is “QL”? Is it related to damage output, or is it something non-relevant to your skill?

    • QL stands for quality level for gear. I understand the highest level in game is QL10 right now.

      I believe the min/maxing is there to a very large degree. Look at one of my earlier post where I analyze a character build: https://www.mmocompendium.com/analysis-deck-ninja-dragon/

      Just think of a build consisting of picking 7 active and 7 passive skills out of 500. There’s a huge number of possible combinations. (The lottery picks 6 out of 49 or 55 in places). Many of the combinations will be poor choices, and a few will be best.

      Also consider that there are synergies between your skill picks and my skill picks, opening up yet another dimension to juggle numbers in.

      However, to me, analyzing and picking good combinations is not elitism. Other players restricting my access thru arbitrary numbers like the quality level is.

    • I see.

      I don’t see a problem at all with min/maxing in theory. I get a kind of guilty pleasure out of trying to maximize efficiency. It’s just the restrictions that apply to being able to group… and the invariable (and endless) complaints about balance that get to me.

      You’ve got quite the blog. I’ll have to catch up on your previous posts.
      Machination recently posted..[Shameless Plug]: Pen on PaperMy Profile

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