Life in Group 6 - an article on being benched
by Vixsin at LifeinGroup 5
Over 5 years ago, when I made the decision to roll my shaman, I was motivated by one very simple reason-I thought Chain Heal was cool. And 4 years ago, when I decided to make my Resto Shaman my main and forgo the dps spotlight for a more covert role, I was motivated by the desire to have a greater impact on the outcome of an encounter. 2 years ago, when I set my sights on the US top 50, I did so with the desire to prove my value as a player and as a healer. And a year and a half ago, when I launched a tiny blog, I was fueled by the desire to help the community and provide them with a resource that they had never had before. And up until two weeks ago, I never had the cause to regret any of these decisions.
The Rag-Shaman Kerfuffle
Two weeks ago, marked the death of HM Rag at the hands of two of the world’s top guilds. Paragon, with their stacked raid of Druids and DKs, burst though with world first; and Method, with a slightly more loose composition, nabbed world second only a short time later. It was an achievement that, according to their members, required an unparalleled effort of skill, research, and perseverance. From my own experiences with the fight and after watching multiple videos of the kill (all of which made it look so easy), I can attest-it’s one hell of an undertaking. But marring the celebration of and my excitement for an accomplishment that every serious raider dreams of was the ever-present shadow of the “Lack of Shaman”. And it didn’t take long for the posts to start; one even garnered a very stern CM rebuff:
It doesn’t matter at all unless you can verify and prove that Heroic Ragnaros is impossible, or way more difficult to kill, when a specific class or specialization is represented in the raid.
You’re forcing together a couple of incredibly fragmented pieces of data - and the sample size of that tested data is 25 players in the whole world fighting one boss in the entire game - to extrapolate an entire thesis on class balance. (Source)
To give our fellow blue poster some credit (because the poor guy is going to get mentioned more than a couple times in this post), Zarhym did concede that something might be amiss:
Yes, there’s certainly a pattern here. But no matter how hard you try, you can’t accurately draw such broad conclusions from this pattern, because the data has virtually no frame of reference in the grand scheme of World of Warcraft class balance and gameplay.
So, two real questions arise out of this entire mess. First, what is the pattern? And second, what conclusions can actually be drawn from it? To most, I think the pattern is pretty clear-Paragon has consistently excluded Shaman from their raiding roster. On their website, they include one single shaman, out of 34 players. Checking their screenshots from their multiple first kills, and you’ll see the same pattern-one or no shaman. So it should hardly be surprising that they don’t have very much dark blue on their raid frames because they simply don’t have it on their roster to begin with. And no, I’m not buying the argument that they can’t find good shaman-they’re bloody Paragon. Good shaman find them all the time. The point is that they have a take on the class and it happens to be a bad take. It’s absolutely no fault of the shaman they do have (and had), who I know are exceptional players; they have a stance on the value of the class as a whole.
But what sort of conclusions can you draw from that pattern? (This is where I think players get ahead of themselves). The obvious and the most concrete conclusion, at least in my eyes, is that Paragon’s Lack of Shaman demonstrates … you can be the most successful guild in the world without shaman on your kill roster. As Zarhym put it in that same post:
Yes, it’s working as intended that the first guild in the world to kill Heroic Ragnaros was allowed to bring whatever players/classes they were confident would help get the job done.
And I do agree with him … to a point. If it would have netted them a world first kill to have nothing but paladins in raid, Paragon would have done it. And that wouldn’t necessarily mean that every other class out there was horribly broken or useless. But just like CM’s have been quick to point out the Lack of Shaman doesn’t equate to the class being woefully neglected, I think the same can be said for the presence of shaman-just because Shaman might be included in later kills, does not support the conclusion that the class or any particular spec, is reasonably balanced in terms of HPS and DPS.
In the larger picture, what Paragon has presented WoW developers with is a hypothesis, and the fact that Paragon has been successful time and time again acting on that hypothesis, either represents that they’ve been lucky enough to have not encountered a situation which disproves their belief, or … *GASP* … they’re actually closer to the truth than we might think. But it will, undoubtedly, take more data to prove that.
So, should it be a slight cause for concern that Paragon, once again, was not disproven of their hypothesis? If you’re a developer who’s working on game balance, I would think so. Because as much as developers might assert that they can’t tune to Paragon’s exacting standards, the fact remains that even Paragon goes in with a tolerance for some variation in their dps and hps. They value the player so much, they have an army of alts (who arguably, are just as good as most players’ mains), in place of a mega-roster so that they can ensure raid team consistency even when the player’s primary class isn’t up to their standards. If shaman were up to their standards, I’ve no doubt they’d bring them.
But, what about people other than developers and world first guilds? Should that Lack of Shaman be a cause for concern for them? Absolutely, fucking not. (Yes, I’m dropping the f- bomb, so you know I’m serious about this). But will it still be a cause for concern? You bet your ass it will. And the ramifications of the Lack of Shaman will be felt both near and far.
Read the rest at the source.
For context, this isn't any old shaman whining, this is one of those shaman, Vixsin is a shaman in a hardcore progression guild, Pie Chart. They're amazing and do much of the math about shaman healing.