OutDPS!

The interview with Kripparrian in  The Hunting Party Podcast #14 gave us plenty to think about.  While the message that most focused on (that of stack your cooldowns) is important, I thought another of Kripparian’s comments also deserved its own post: that you need a mindset of self-improvement.

In this post I will go over how we arrive at this mindset and then what it looks like when practiced well.

I do not want to put words into Kripparrian’s mouth, and so this is only what the mindset means to me.  The mindset entails always trying to do better next time.  It means always looking at things in terms of how they affect dps.  It means searching far and wide for new ideas, and making sure that they are good ones.  It means experimenting and testing.  It means holding little sacred (dps-wise) and keeping an open mind.

This sounds a bit like the scientific method, and rightly so.  But this is a game, right?  Why is rigorous examination necessary in this thing you do for fun?

The answer is a little long but obvious.  We are first motivated to do better dps.  But when we reach a certain point in the PvE endgame, we realize that better dps will no longer come in huge shifts: no new talents, no new levels, and stat increases from new gear are usually drops in the bucket.  Rather, better dps comes from adding up the little things, like stacking cooldowns or maybe getting that runspeed enchant.  These little changes, ranging from re-spec’ing a few talent points to sitting up straight in front of your computer, are plentiful as possibilities.

Because the potential changes are plentiful, they can add up when made to be huge changes in our dps.  However, they are also typically small individually and often cannot be found without help and/or tools.  To find them, we have to search a lot, far and wide and all the time.  We have to observe and question and experiment.  We know the little things are worth looking for, but we also know that to find a lot of them we have to be looking for them whenever we can.  As we internalize this search through its repetition and make it habitual (if not obsessive), it becomes a mindset of self-improvement.  The search for better dps becomes part of the way we play the game.

In this way a mindset is an effect, the product of various motivations.  However, it also ends up being a cause: the better your mindset for finding improved dps, the better your dps will be in result. The more rigor and objectivity you have, the more reliable your returns.  The more systematic and careful you are, the fewer things you miss on average.  Basically, the better you learn how to fish, the more fish you’re likely to catch.  Put another way, striving for self-improvement is good, but some mindsets for it are better than others.

Having described how we arrive at a mindset of self-improvement, and having given a rationale for adopting a good one, I believe I can now outline principles that lay behind such a mindset.  Different hunters do different things to discern potential dps improvements; however, from what I have seen these behaviors (the good ones) are usually structured along the same lines.  I phrase these principles as imperatives because this is a guide, but really they are also meant to be descriptive.

keep an open mind: This sounds trite and obvious, I know.  But I mention it because I see hunters holding as gospel things that were only true in The Burning Crusade.  I say it because I run into hunters still using cats only because they stopped questioning whether or not cats were still the best non-BM pet dps.  Everything should be subject to scrutiny and nothing should be given a free pass.  For if you consistently ignore something, that absolutely precludes you from working to improve it.

observe: It is not enough to just keep an open mind, you also have to actively watch for possible dps improvements in your environment.  And by your environment I actually mean a lot of things.  I mean watching the way other hunters and other dps perform in raids.  I mean talking to these people too.  I mean watching yourself play the game, within and beyond the screen.  But I also mean things outside your personal gaming experience.  You should be online looking at a variety of media, possibly including reading hunter blogs and forums, watching videos from other guilds, listening to podcasts, studying boss fights and reading the latest patch notes.  Generally, you should observe from all angles.  Have an eye to any avenue you think could lead to you bettering your gameplay in a specific or general sense.  This of course requires an investment of time and some diligence; but you’re already playing WoW, so I’m taking it for granted that you have some free time.

experiment: This takes keeping an open mind and observing a step further.  It is more calculated, more systematic, more scientific and more proactive.  Instead of waiting for things to happen to him or her, the rigorous hunter finds possible dps improvements and then tests hypotheses about these possible changes.  This can mean using a dps simulator or a training dummy to compare possible specs.  It can mean trying one thing one boss attempt and a second thing on another attempt (all the while secretly hoping everything else remains the same for testing purposes).  Always do your best to make sure your experiments are valid, though; you need to understand your tests well enough to understand what (if anything) they are actually saying about your dps.  And good experimentation often requires a bit of creativity.  Using a good test can mean devising that test yourself if you are indeed trying out something new.

be willing to make sacrifices: Once you have studied your world and run your experiments, you have to go where the data leads you, wherever that may be.  That will entail not bringing your cool blue and white gorilla to raids because you now know that wolves do the job better.  Optimal dps leaves no room for the spec you leveled up with or your partiality to bows over crossbows.  Being willing to make sacrifices is not just a matter of sentimentality, though; it is also economic.  It means ignoring sunk costs and readily accommodating new costs.  You have to be prepared to get little mileage out of that 400g worth of weapon enchants because you happen get a new two-hander the next day (which you then have to enchant also).  You have to be prepared to ditch that spider you spent so much time leveling because you mistakenly thought Roar of Recovery would make a spider worth raiding with. Some people used to ignore sunk costs (of time) to the extent that they would reroll their entire characters (Orc racials are supposed to be the best for hunter dps).  I don’t think you need to go to the extreme of a race or faction change, but you should be willing to re-gear, re-gem, re-enchant, re-spec, re-tame, re-UI (these’s re‘s are making less sense grammatically as I go along), etc., whenever you have to for better dps.

seek and act on gains even if they are marginal:  This principle goes as a partner to be willing to make sacrifices partly because it will require you to make a lot of them.  Its lesson is, don’t ignore a potential means of improvement just because it may offer only a small increase in dps.  As discussed above, the little things do add up.  Sure, the one change may only bring you up 20 dps with full raid buffs.  But if you do that with five things, that’s one hundred dps.  It may even be more because I am mainly using add up as a catch-all phrase.  Consider that by stacking something like Call of the Wild or Black Arrow with other cooldowns, you aren’t just adding something onto those buffs, you are increasing them multiplicatively.  If you are wondering why you are sitting at 5k while another hunter with similar gear and spec is at 6k, it is probably because the other hunter spent time figuring out or learning about little improvements and when added together they made for 1k extra dps.  That has been my experience, at least.

keep things simple: This may not seem to fit in with what I’ve said so far.  After all, I’ve just given you the impossible task of watching and testing everything.  What I mean is, keep things simple so as to make watching and testing (and playing the game) easier. Don’t take a step down in rigor, but do what you can to make it easier on yourself and take time to evaluate what is helpful and/or necessary as opposed to what only appears to be those things.  Do you really need Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text flaring numbers all over your screen? Is there an easier, more intuitive way to track your dot(s)?  What test presents the clearest picture of what you are interested in?  Do you need that many keybindings and action bars when raiding?  These questions go on and I’m sure you get my idea.

trust well: This is almost required by the demands of the preceding principles.   Ideally, you would be testing everything out yourself, but that simply isn’t possible.  Since trusting others on pieces of information is necessary more often than not, trusting well is a good skill.  Do your best to make sure the source is reliable.  Don’t take hearsay as law.  Try to find other sources that confirm the piece of information.  Ask questions and scrutinize as much as possible so long as the game is still fun to play (and so long as you aren’t being a jerk :P).  Being scientific is one thing, but no one likes the person who is always getting in trivial disagreements with other raid members and wasting the raid’s time.

collaborate and share: There are visionary, path-breaking geniuses out there, but most of us aren’t them.  Good work for the rest of us comes from bouncing our ideas off other people, asking questions of them, and actually using their feedback.  And you should be willing to give feedback and help, too.  Collaboration should happen in game, too.  You should have an ongoing conversation with your guild’s other hunters about huntering.  A healthy competition on dps doesn’t hurt either!

Is a good mindset of self-improvement as described here necessary to raid?  No, you can raid without analyzing everything.  Is such a mindset necessary to do adequate dps?  No, you can be adequate without these principles.

The thing is, though, a good mindset helps with raiding.  It helps with dps.  That’s why I took the time to describe it here.  How much of it you adopt is up to you.

- Eidotrope