One of those vivid memories from high school involves my intense hatred for doing proofs in geometry class. That was when you learned the if-then stuff...if A AND B is true, then C is true, etc. How many of you noble readers remember your high school geometry class? How many of you are sitting in that class right now reading this blog? The cynical educator in me says most of you are, or would be if you were in high school. The statistician in me says there's a finite but greater than zero chance that some of you are doing that. The realist in me says there's probably only two of you reading this blog, and you're close friends and family who would still read it even if I wrote about purple pansies for the remainder of the post today.
*ahem* Anyway, one of the...oh, what did we call them? Theorems? Axioms? Something like that. One of those...things...from geometry class that we used to prove stuff was the rule of contrapositive. Goes kinda like this: if you can say that "if A is true, then B is true" then you can also say that "if B is not true, then A is not true." See? Pretty simple stuff, really...swap A and B around and negate both, and you still have a truthdom...or whatever we called it. Plus, it sounds really cool to me to go around using words like "contrapositive," which is probably why I remember it after all these deca...er, years.
I'm sure you're wondering by this point how this applies to WoW. Yes, there really is a connection. With the new Dungeon queueing option, it won't let you queue if your gear isn't up to snuff. Prior to level 80, you can't queue for heroics at all. At 80, if your gear is craptastic, you can only queue for some heroics. Others open up with better gear scores, to the point where my mage and my tank can queue for any instance in the game. Granted, usually we all just choose "Random" and then it picks one for us...theoretically, one that we'd qualify for if we were trying to queue for it specifically.
So..."If your gear isn't good enough, then you can't queue for an instance" is an obvious statement. Contrapositive..."If you CAN queue for an instance, then your gear IS good enough"...must be true. Right?
Yeah. Right. Mmm hmm. So, last night, a buddy and I decided we were gonna run a random heroic, me on my fairly new healer. My healer has a fair to middlin' gear score, in the mid-3000's, which is good enough for many heroics but NOT good enough for the three new ones...Forge of Youregonnadie, Pit of Thisreallysucks, and Halls of Craptonofdamage. But sure 'nuff, we queued up, and pop! Right into the Forge.
My buddy, Ermakk the Shaman, did a great job supporting me through, even taking a break from his 5K DPS to help me heal, but that last boss in Forge of Souls is just plain mean. Even my brother, one of the l33t (hmm, did I spell that right?) healers of the guild, has troubles with The Boss With Three Faces. I got two tries in before it was obvious that my gear just plain wasn't good enough, so I bowed out, they found somebody with better gear, and I went off to do some other heroic.
So...lessons learned:
- The contrapositive isn't always true.
- Geometry teachers lie sometimes
- If you think your gear isn't good enough, it probably isn't.
- Don't hang around if you're put into a spot you can't manage as a healer or a tank...you'll just cost others gold.
*sigh* Till tomorrow, then. Hope the server resets OK. If not, I'll just go pick purple pansies.
Gearscore never equals skill, unfortunately. I've seen people decked out in the various upper echelons of gear that don't know what they're doing. I occasionally fall into that category, myself. :BB
ReplyDeleteThis is Ermakk piping up :) I found a link to the blog on the Syk forums, where I now lurk. Lurking is fun!
ReplyDeleteAnyways, thanks for the kind words. I probably could have helped heal through the fight more efficiently, I have main-healed a grand total of... 2 times? And that was my first time doing it with Grid/Clique. But that's not the point.
The point is two-fold. One, the tank was undergeared as well, and I think some of the other DPS (may have even been me) hit the boss during Mirrored Soul, which certainly made the healing harder than it should be. You did a great job, and I think with just a couple of upgrades you should be able to breeze through FoS.
That was the first, relevant part. The second part is much less relevant but I'm going to say it anyway because I occasionally pretend I know a little about mathematics and like to share my knowledge with others. I hope I do not come across as condescending - your argument was valid and thoughtful, I would just like to add a quick caveat.
The caveat is this. In the real world, if-then relationships never hold with certainty. Nine times out of ten, if I eat coleslaw, I will like it. One time out of ten, the coleslaw will be bad, I will have an upset stomach and hate it as a result :( Same in WoW - nine times out of ten, a GS of 3000 is enough to go into FoS, but one time out of ten, it's not enough. So the contrapositive relationship "if I can queue for an instance, then my gear is good enough" does hold... in most cases. Geometry teachers talk about the 'ideal cases' where these relationships always hold, but the dirty little secret is, such ideal cases never happen in the real world.
TL;DR: Your geometry teacher did not lie to you, he/she just presented you with a skewed view of reality.
Excellently argued, Ermakk! You're right. And no, you didn't, to me anyway, come across as condescending at all. In fact, I made my own argument rather tongue-in-cheek; glad you pointed out the weak point in it.
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