"Elitists" are blindingly ruining the enjoyment with their MIN-MAX/META obsession

Community General Discussion
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Hello there,

Was never a fan of the MIN-MAX/META concept and during my first raiding years, I was not feeling any kind of pressure out of my guildmates or random players because I was not playing the META spec out of my Warlock. If I felt like playing destruction, then that was it, even if Affliction was 10-15% better, but I was having fun and I was enjoying myself.

Nowadays the same people that blame Blizzard for MANY things that relate to being a BUSINESS COMPAMY and acting for the profit, are the people are so obsessed in numbers, in statistics and artificial results, that they cannot actually comprehend that META/MIN-MAX is not the ONLY way this game can be played.

For example, maybe someone loves to play, lets say, affliction and they do play it in better and worse conditions. But even when Destro is the best spec with 10-15% dps differences, maybe that person would get actually no difference at all if it is being forced/pushed to play Destro cause he is either bad at that spec or he doesn’t enjoy it, or it doesn’t fit his gamestyle. And in the end he would have 0% difference in DPS when playing the META spec, unenjoying himsel, even tough, on paper and sims, the META spec is superior 10-15%.

Playing normal/casual BGs with my Warrior Fury, I get reactions like “we gonna lose, can’t you see we have a Fury Warrior in our team?”. I mean, come on, when did you transform this game into an obsession about numers and statistics ?

If a guy only loves Assassination Rogue, he can’t play it anymore since Subtlety Rogue is the only meta.

Sure you can play them, no one will stop you, BUT, we are already wasting more then HALF of our GAMETIME looking at the damn LFG window, imagine how it is to make a group as a Fury Warrior or an Assassion Rogue :confused:

For some WoW is not only a game, it is lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean we have tu turn it into an MIN-MAX job grade thing. For some that say WoW’s just a game, what other games have you played for 16 years?

TY, GL HF

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You can still get plenty of enjoyment from the game playing whatever you want - yes, it will be much more difficult to get into pug groups, but that’s where friends, guild and communities come in. When people know that you perform well, regardless of whether your spec is meta, or are a fun person to have around, they will make room for you in their groups.

Yes, there will always be idiots who will judge you because some guide said “X spec is awful”, but you can mitigate this by surrounding yourself with nice, sensible people who don’t care about that stuff.

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The problem isn’t just the min-maxers it’s all the people that follow along and then refuse to invite people that are ‘low’ or the ‘worst of the bunch’ for classes/specs shown on whatever data website they chose to use or leaderboards. Which, it’s almost impossible to force a community to change unless we did something like not allowing DPS meters, not allowing all kinds of ways to track player dmg/healing and leaderboards for what everyone at the ‘top’ is running which I don’t see happening.

It sucks, but it’s a community problem though it’s true Blizzard could stop knee-jerk nerfing things to death that then become some of the worst specs and quickly buffing things that need it but then the variables just change more frequently and there will be a new ‘worst’ spec/class to ‘not take’.

Premade group finder I also agree is utter trash for getting into groups and pugging. I do miss when the end-game dungeons and such were queueable, like heroics were in Wrath/Cata so no one could try to gatekeep specs/classes out of runs.

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Reasonable answer but what is those players have an undesirable spec, they don’t have friends, their guild is running meta comps and don’t want to waste time on keys on people who aren’t the meta and the communities are dried up by this point.

All you have left is PUG and this expac Pugging is an extremely toxic and soul draining experience. I’ve had really toxic FOTM players both tanks and dps DM me some really horrific stuff which is extremely bannable and I had none of this back in BFA.

I’ll point you to one such toxic site which colates data from higher keys and this is usually the type of sites the minmaxers frequent and this has a knock on effect with “hardening” the community against playing the game for fun.

Then you have the total farce of MDI running FOTM groups on both sides and this reinforces the toxicity.

h ttps://mplus.subcreation.net/

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Remove m+.
Remove heroics raids.
Remove Mythic raids.

problem solved.

(oh wow , enumar you are really insane , how can you even really consider that?? )

Take a deep breath.And think how it would be for a few seconds.

Then smile with me. Because it would be awesome.
No rush, no min maxing, no elitism, no spec favoring; no covenant shaming , no gear shaming no skill shaming etc…

Just pure content farm and socialization. Pure enjoyment.

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Then you look at classic, where content is easier than even what you suggest and there’s still a frankly hilarious amount of min maxing and people caring about crit rng on speed kills.

Also, if there’s no challenging content I and many others like me probably just wouldn’t play the game. Not everyone who participates in difficult content is a jerk to those who don’t.

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There aren’t really that many guilds that are like that.

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The only way of removing elitism is to make the game easy. Then many people are going to complain aboot the fact the game is too easy.

The good approach would instead going back on cata/Mop class design, meaning more class uniformisation and aiming at reducing delta damages between the best and worst spec down to 5%.

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I don’t remember the DPS delta in actual pve environments ever being that small, mop especially felt all over the place. The closest to DPS parity, at least for single target encounters, I think we’ve ever been was EP.

It was more that every spec had something it was very very good at, and the game / raid environment had some way for those who were good at their spec to show off what it could do and get good results on that fight or type of fight etc.

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Not sure if it was sub 5 % but in legion last patch classes were pretty even.

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Yeah antorus was also pretty close in theory. Again what type of fights you have, and which of those actually end up mattering, always heavily skews it. Damage pattern and utility are almost always more valuable than overall DPS at the end of the day.

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Yeah, blame players for Blizzards wild “balance”.

You can also make friends…

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I kinda miss formulate what I meant. What I enjoyed in Mop is that I felt relevant to the raid as a ret paladin. During BFA and SL, I don’t feel relevant in PvE environment not in terms of output but rather aboot what the spec brings in terms of utility.

As regarding delta damages, it should be reduced. I’ve took a look on warcraftlogs up to Mop and the traditional delta is 20%, which means if your spec is a bottom tier spec, it’s likely you won’t get invited in both guild or pug content. This is why I’m saying delta should be 5% at most. If it means nerfing top dog or overbuffing bottom specs, I’m all for.

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I’m honestly not sure blizzard’s balance has been all that wild. It’s more that a few specs on otherwise pretty good classes are routinely neglected. Hunters in 9.0.5 being a pretty huge negative outlier that needs fixing before 9.1.

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This is the point I was making. Overall damage on logs is way more complicated than just what the specs do normally. Deltas get skewed by fight style, sample size, individual strategies, and post progress cheese.

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No remove PUGs.

PUGs are the root of all toxicity in the game.

Mythic raiding is not toxic because only guilds do it.

M+ and Heroic Raiding is only toxic because of PUGs.

Being social makes WoW a much better game.

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That would completely suck and I really hope that most guilds are not like that. I haven’t been in many, and I love my guild where everyone plays whatever they like. Yes, there are some who reroll to whatever is FotM and min-max, but they apply that only to their own performance and never expect the same from others. No one has ever said “ewww, no, you’re a survival hunter, you can’t come” (except in jest).

Really sorry to hear this. I pugged much more in BfA and generally had a pretty good experience - but then I was a healer so it was easier to get into groups.

Haven’t pugged enough this expansion to notice any overall trend towards more toxicity, but I expect that the changes to loot (such as less loot if it’s not timed and equal Valor points whatever the key level) have led to much higher expectations and demands in pug groups. And those things are Blizzard design decisions, not a community issue. If you make the fastest way to farm Valor to run +2s, how can you not see that pug groups will fill up with high ilvl people and push out those trying to gear up and get into m+ from the bottom?

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There’s one thing the meta playstyle doesn’t account for and that is those who change to the meta who can’t play the class/spec to its fullest, for example people who choose fire mage but have no clue about how to maximize their throughput with Combustion. For these kinds of people the meta is literally a way of gaining easier access in the pugging scene.

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Well, I tend to have a look at fight to fight and I clearly remember my former main spec during all of BFA was just plain bad or just slightly under above average. It feels bad when some of top dog specs are good in most of situations.

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I think that’s the big difference in recent tiers, there used to be somewhere for almost everyone to shine.

You’ve also got to remember that overall damage doesn’t necessarily kill bosses. How your spec does it’s damage can often be more important than how much it does total.