Reflections From The Pond

Imagine a world where you’d be deprived of three of your five sensory inputs, a world where you could not smell, you could not feel and you could not taste anything. Imagine how you would be confined to experience the world you live in by sight and by hearing alone, and how you would interpret that world.

Now, welcome to the World of Warcraft.

In WoW, you don’t ever touch anything, you don’t get any tactile input whatsoever. The rain or sunshine on your face as you ride through the great big wilderness, the magic bolts incinerating your innards or the melee swings ripping open your body, the pain in your knuckles as you scrape them against a boar when levelling fist fighting and or the warm smoothness of your lover’s skin under your fingertips when you engage in a bit of roleplaying in a secluded spot, these are things you only feel in your mind.

In WoW, you never smell anything, you don’t ever get any olfactory stimulation. The blood and sweat of your fellow raiders, the musty odour of your horse or perhaps the not-so-faint oily aroma of your mechanostrider, the sweet smells of the herbs as you gather them, the dry dustiness of the old inns and houses around the world, you can only imagine these smells.

In WoW, you never taste anything. Perhaps you are better off actually not knowing what Pungent Seal Whey or Bitter Plasma or Spider Kabob taste like, but wouldn’t you like to taste that Black Coffee or Delicious Chocolate Cake?

In WoW, you experience the world around you through vision/audio. You interpret the world through your eyes and ears and you react accordingly. But in a hectic environment, with a lot of information flooding through your eyes and ears, you will find it difficult to experience and interpret everything, and to react upon it. The more information, the more difficult the interpretation and the slower the reaction.

In real life, in the afk world, you would not need a flashing warning across your eyes and a loud sound to alert you to the fact that you were standing in a fire. Your burning feet would scream in enough pain for you to not even have to think and make a conscious decision about stepping out of it, your brain would have bypassed that and reflexively thrown you out of it. If you happened to be dressed in sturdy leathers or possibly chain mail, impregnated with enough dirt and blood and other body substances to form a rather functional fireproofing, perhaps your feet would not be the first to react but your nose, sniffing at that horrid smell of something burning.

In the afk world you don’t need to get a skull over your head to show that you are infected with some nastiness that takes out a sizeable chunk of your health every second and will spawn a gooey ooze that will follow you around and pulse more nastiness around itself until it meets another ooze and falls in love with it and the two little oozes becomes one. Ok, bad example for a RL comparison but I guess you get my point?

But in WoW, when you are staring intensly at your screen on that ugly mofo Gormok the Impaler and you also need to keep a close watch on the health of the other 24 raiders in there with you, chances are it will take you a second or three before the information that it is YOU that’s in the fire has filtered down through the layers in your brain, and then you may need an extra second or two to react and by then it is too late and you will be dead.

In WoW, when you are gathered up in a chummy group with most of your fellow raiders, humping hugging the leg of the rotted slimy abomination in Icecream Citadel, seeing the small yellowy flakes around you that indicates infection is nigh impossible in all the fireworks and slime spewing going on, and chances are you will spawn the baby ooze in the middle of your raid bringing the wrath of your healers down upon your head.

Enter the BossMods.

A BossMod is an addon that highlights certain things in a fight to help you see it and act upon it. They can also provide you with timers for those bosses that have various timed phases, such as Kel’Thuzad laving his phase shifted state and physically entering his room after three minutes and 48 seconds.

There are a few varieties of BossMods, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters to name a few, and most come pre-packed with a lot of nifty features enabled, most of which you don’t really need. The BossMod is there to make it easier for you to fish up those vital snippets of information out of the massive information flood coming your way in a raid, remember? They are not there to make you drown in even more information.

So what you want to do is set your chosen BossMod up to show you things where you find them easy to see. For some reason, BossMods often come configured to be as obnoxiously in the way as possibe, showing their pretty bars of various formats spot on in the middle of your screen. I don’t know about you but I generally want to see what is going on and not have it obscured with a bar showing me that a new ooze will spawn in 6 -5-4-etc seconds, so I have moved all such things to the sides or the top/bottom of my screen.

The next thing you want to do is check all fights and chose the information you think is relevant for you. I am lucky in that my guild goes for an exploratory “blind raiding” run first, spending an evening in the new raid wing without having read up on the tactics, with all BossMods disabled, just exploring and gathering information and trying things out, so when the next raid rolls around and it’s time to kick it up a notch, I generally know what I want to keep extra track of or where I need extra help to not screw up.

For example, in my BigWigs I show the Unstable Ooze Explosion because that is something I am not likely to see myself as my focus is generally on the people bunched up around Rotface’s legs. I don’t show warnings for Mutated Infections since I see them anyway on my Healbot and even though we are not blind raiding anymore on this one we still have someone call out who’s infected just to help people react. I use the Flash’n Shake though to alert myself to the infection if I have it, shaving that extra second of reaction time off. I don’t show warnings for Slime Spray because as I generally have the boss targetted I see his cast bar and, being so close to him, I see his animation too and can react to it without problems. I don’t show warnings for Ooze Merges because I don’t care about that. I show the Boss Death simply because I like the triumphant sound it plays when the boss keels over.

Another example, on Festergut I don’t show warnings for the spores because so far I have had no problem getting one, and I don’t show the Inhale Blight warnings because I see it clearly enough myself and there is not really anything I can do to prepare for the extra damage. I do show the Pungent Blight warning because I want to be prepared to heal my designated targets up to full asap when that happens, which takes some pre-planning and clever distributing of Riptides. I don’t show the Vile Gas because it should not be a problem if people spread out as we are supposed to. I use the Proximity Display just so I can avoid being too close to someone and vomit on them should I be in a ranged group healing. I have the Berserk timer enabled so I can see how close we are cutting it and I have the Boss Death chime of triumph enabled for the same reason as above – I like the sound.

These are the settings that work for me, resto shaman generally on raid healing. If you are anything else, tank, tank healer, melee, ranged dps, you probably think something else is vastly more important and should set your BossMods up accordingly.

There are a few problems associated with BossMods though

One is what Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn describes in a post recently, discussing another post over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog, that are we really playing the game if we allow BossMods and other addons to show us what to do? How can we complain that the game is too easy if we always use the training wheels of BossMods? Well, I decided a long time ago that addons let me have more fun and help me play my game better, but I definitely want them customized to my liking and to help me with what I want and what I need and nothing else.

Another problem is that even if you tailor your BossMod to show those and only those timers and warnings and messages that you yourself find indispensable, a BossMod happy raid leader or raid assistant may still flood your screen and your eyes and ears with raid warnings and countdowns in chat, putting a huge dent in your pretty customized layout.

Thirdly, you learn the encounters as if the BossMod paraphernalia were an integrated part of them. You train yourself to react upon the BossMod instead of the fight, which risk leaving you flailing helplessly if the BossMod plays trick on you.

Example: I was dragged into a late night Naxx Undying run with my priest Jools a few weeks ago. We started with killing Sapphiron and Kel-Thuzad, steamrolled through the Abomination Wing, Patchwerk went down in notime, and then we faced Grobbulus. And there we failed.

For some reason – perhaps because none of us had run Naxx in a long time – no one had an updated BossMod and the players targetted with Mutating Injection did not get a skull on their heads. They did not notice that they were infected and thus they dropped huge poison clouds in the middle of the room. Perhaps it was something else as well, because some players’ screens lit up with a lot of error messages so they could not see where they were going. The other healer was trapped out of range and I got confused trying to circumvent the spreading clouds so I failed to pop a pair of wings on the player going dooown.

We were all trained to trigger a run to the side when we had a skull on our head and not when we had an infection. So we relied on the safety net of our BossMods and it failed. Not a big deal, it was late at night and we were tired and/or inebriated, and we had had a good laugh together during the previous boss kills, but our reliance on addons did cost us that Undying title that time.

BossMods, like any other addons, can be turned on and off at your pleasure. If you feel you no longer need a certain warning, or you can do better without it, turn it off. Maybe you can still play as good as before, maybe you want to turn it back on.

So, use the BossMod as training wheels for as long as you need, but don’t be afraid to take them off sometimes and see if you can balance on your own. If not, no big deal, just make sure you keep the BossMod updated :-)

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