The World's Okayest...

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
--Sir Isaac Newton

I guess ol' Isaac never played video games.*

Even though this is a rotation for the
Enhancement Shaman circa 2016,
I laughed. (From Reddit)

 

Playing a video game for any length of time is an exercise in managing complexity. Even the simplest of games, such as Tetris, get complex the farther along you play. (Or faster you play, in the case of Tetris.) 

But the scope creep of video game complexity, particularly in MMOs and other games that require multiple moves and an ever evolving amount of complexity to play at a high level, is very much a real thing.

I thought about this even before I saw posts from Shintar and Bhagpuss on their blogs, but their posts certainly did push these thinky thoughts into the forefront. And rather than contemplate the state of Briganaa's and Linna's gear** I'd much prefer to instead poke that roadkill that is theorycrafting.

***

On the face of it, theorycrafting deconstructs a video game into its component parts --numbers and data structures-- and attempts to make sense of it all. The overall goal is to find the "best" way of doing things, which can be both bedeviling and satisfying at the same time.

Yes, there is both a good and a bad to the meta.

The bad is that the meta becomes all consuming to a not-insignificant number of gamers, to the point where if you're not doing it perfectly there's bound to be problems.

 

Totem twisting as an Enhance Shaman
in TBC Classic. Thankfully, I've never
had to deal with very many of these types.
(From Reddit.)

 

But the good... Well, the good is that you still have to execute the meta to make it work. Just showing up with the correct gear might be 3/4 of the battle, but you still have to play well.... in a group.

I highlighted that last part because what works out in the field while questing in a solo format may not work well in smaller groups, and that may not work in raids.

For example, Linnawyn is a Retribution Paladin, and one of the hallmarks of Ret Pallys is that they need water to regen mana. Lots and lots of water. When I go out into the world to quest with her, I typically carry 80 food and 80 water with me, and that doesn't last nearly as long as I'd like. I also have to freaking drink after every pull --my questing buddy can tell you allllll about that-- so any way to improve my mana efficiency and keep me able to fight enemies longer is a welcome thing. 

If you read up on Ret Paladin rotations and whatnot, you constantly hear about keeping the Seal of the Crusader judged on the enemy you're attacking --I'm not even going into the Seal of Blood/Martyr part, as I'm keeping this simple-- but all of this costs mana and will suck you bone dry. So... Enter Seal of Wisdom and judging that Seal while out in the field. Sure, my DPS takes a hit, but I can handle twice as many enemies before stopping to drink, which is more important when questing as opposed to simply killing something quick and then having to drink far more often.

I suppose someone could calculate the timing difference between taking a few seconds longer to kill an enemy versus the extra downtime spent drinking, but my admittedly "winging it" feel to the game seems that I gain a bit more uptime when judging Wisdom rather than Crusader. 

However, I get to spend more time doing what I want to do --questing and exploring-- without as much downtime spent drinking, so my modification to what is "supposed to be followed" is based on my solo questing experience on Linna. 

Yep, that's me.
From etsy.com.

But.

This simple explanation about the best way to play a Ret Paladin goes totally off the rails once you start talking about maximizing DPS in raids. 

There's the "Basic" option of Judging Crusader and keeping that going with Crusader Strike, and then keeping Seal of Blood/Martyr going to maximize DPS at the price of your own health, not to mention keeping the Judgements going as soon as it comes off of CD. Oh yeah, and there are other attacks to sprinkle in there, but that's the Basic option. 

The "Advanced" option, however, is Seal Twisting, where you try to get two Seal effects within a single melee strike. So you have to have a swing timer to get that just so that you can hit that second seal in the last 0.4 seconds before a melee swing engages. Oh, and did I mention that even sites such as Icy-Veins say it's a very advanced tactic that is very hard to do, but you can seriously up your DPS if you get it right?

Well... guess what version progression raid teams want your Ret Paladin to do?

I mean, the numbers don't lie, but can you execute it?

I know my answer to that question: I can't.

From the comment section of the Reddit
post of that Windfury pic shown above.

 

It doesn't make me a bad player, despite what the hardcore crowd might think. I just simply can't do it. Maybe a decade ago I could, and if I'd the time to practice a lot maybe I could pull it off even now, but given the stress of totem twisting + shock twisting + AOE totem twisting***, I'm just not interested in dealing that stuff.

I suppose it's a matter of the old saw about how "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink," but despite all the numbers pointing toward an optimal method of doing something you still have to execute. And the numbers can't make someone execute if they don't want to. 

 

In case you think I'm picking on WoW,
here's a rotation posted on MMO-Champion
on a thread titled "Do All Classes Require
15+ Buttons Rotations?" for FF XIV. Makes the
Enhancement rotation at the top look quaint.

The thing is, most people will figure out a basic rotation without needing all of the theorycrafting, just on feel alone, and will come pretty close to something that the numbers say works. If you just play and fiddle around with what seems to do the best mix of efficiency and damage, you'll get probably about 75-80% of the way there. 

So yay, common sense.

***

But let's talk about the other part of theorycrafting: gear + enchants + gems + whatever.

You know, the part that might or might not fall into your lap during a dungeon run or a raid.

That's not quite true: you can buy some stuff using gold and/or badges (or whatever), and having a ton of gold does solve quite a few ills. Art truly does imitate life in this regard. 

The irony about Classic WoW was how far off the tier sets were compared to what gear popped out as the "best" gear when crunching the numbers. 

Which is how you ended up with
this Holy Pally meme in Classic.
This is why Cardwyn never had her
head slot visible: that damn pre-raid BiS
turban looked incredibly stupid.
(From Reddit.)

Crunching the numbers to find the best gear makes sense. 

But understanding what is the best gear for you, that involves nuance. 

For example, our Mage Lead recently told me that he was going to switch back from Arcane Specialization to Fire, even though Arcane had more DPS. "I just like Fire more," he told me. Because of that, he's going to optimize his gear for Fire Mages. 

So what if it's a pencil and
paper RPG thing. It's still fire.
From displate.com.

 

Or for me with Neve, I have no designs on taking her raiding beyond maybe Karazhan and/or Gruul/Mags, so I'm planning on sticking with Frost for her. If you listen to the guides and theorycrafters, the DPS isn't optimal and the gear is different, but if you go with what you like you can still find what works for you (and what's optimal gear for that specialization).

Now obviously Fire Mages aren't that off the top of the damage meters compared to Arcane Mages, and they have the additional bonus of giving Destro Warlocks who specialize in Fire an additional DPS boost. So it's not like you walked up to the raid leadership and said "Hey, I want to suck at DPS but since I like it you have to live with it." There's a tradeoff here. And when I was recruited into AQ40, it was explicitly stated that I'd have to switch to being a Fire Mage, because even if my DPS personally sucked, my presence would boost the DPS of the rest of the Mages. But still within the realms of reason you should be able to do what you want to do, and what works for you, and still find a way to do well within that paradigm.

***

So what am I getting at?

Well, the TL;DR here is that while theorycrafting does a good job of identifying what the meta is for a specific class and/or build, telling you what rotation and gear are both optimal, you can't simply be a slave to it. You have to do what feels good for your enjoyment in a game, complexity or not. Some people love their meta, and some people have their own way of doing things. Telling people "yr doing it wrong" isn't going to win you friends and admiration of your peers. 

People will figure things out on their own if you give them enough time and a basic understanding of how a game works. Even when it may seem counterintuitive to do so, just letting people learn at their pace does wonders for their enjoyment in a game. It's when you try to accelerate the process artificially --such as the race to max level when the Dark Portal opened-- that people stop having fun and become slaves to the meta, because they don't have the time (or inclination) to figure it out for themselves.

Of course, that sort of idea kind of flies in the face of "how to play an MMO correctly", but that's the crux of the thing: there is no one way of playing an MMO correctly. 

That's the entire point of an MMO: to allow people to play the game their own way. If you want people to just "play it right" by following the meta, then why have all this extra crap lying around in the first place? Because it's "how things are done?" No, all of the extra stuff in an MMO isn't there to bedevil the people who tinker with the meta, it's to allow people to have options. Perhaps too many options in the case of Retail, where it frequently feels like you have to do all the things in order to satisfy the meta, but those options are there for people who want to play and figure things out for themselves. 

Or just hang around and fish all day.

*Or tried to solve the Schrodinger Wave Equation for the Hydrogen atom, for that matter. Admittedly it's the easiest of the elements to solve, but I remember it taking at about a month in my Atomic and Nuclear Physics class to go through it for the first time. When we commented on the difficulty involved, my professor told us about this one grad student he knew who decided that his dissertation was going to be solving one of the higher level elements --I think an atomic number somewhere in the 80s-- and we all just kind of shuddered.

**Maybe in another post, but not now. I'd prefer to pretend that we're still back in Phase 1, where Karazhan + Gruul/Mags gear was the best you could get, because the reality of where I am versus where seventyupgrades says I could be is pretty damn depressing. And that's just for Brig; Linna is still entirely in quest greens, having not poked her nose into a BC instance this entire time.

***And moving around. Don't forget that part. Throughout Karazhan, Gruul/Mags, Serpentshrine Cavern, and The Eye, I've yet to find a melee friendly raid like there were in Classic. There might be a boss or two here and there, but when you're constantly on the move your totems ain't worth crap once you move out of their range. At least Ret Paladins do have that advantage over Enhancement Shamans in that their Judgements are on the enemy, not a specific place on the ground, but still, the mana costs do add up.