Avoiding the Avoidable

Yesterday when I got online I grabbed two guild mates and went on my standard journey to valor cap.  We ended up with Battle of the High Seas.  Neither of the two people I was with had ever done it before.  I explained quickly what we would be doing and more importantly, that we would be getting bombed the whole time.  Try to avoid them, they can really hurt you. Then I said, if none of us get hit during the entire scenario we get an achievement.  10 minutes later the achievement Keep those Bomb Away! from me... popped up.

On a side note, valor capped in 2 hours, I love heroic scenarios.

Honestly this is an easy achievement for any raider at any level of skill.  The first thing we are taught is not to stand in the bad and quite honestly, if you can not handle that, you have no business being in a raid in my opinion.

This isn't so much about me getting that achievement as it is about avoiding the avoidable and a few posts I have seen around lately concerning that from ghostcrawler.  The idea is bouncing around that, at least in LFR difficulty, they would stop making all stand in fire effects healer issues and start passing the penalty to the person it should be passed to.  As in make the damage dealer suffer for being bad, not the healers because they have bad damage dealers.

As someone that has always stressed mechanics I support this idea.  I am that type of person, I am sure the type of person some of you hate.  I believe that even in the LFR you should follow mechanics most of the time.  If something says move, you should move.  Yes, I run from the acid rain on Megarea even in the LFR.  Why?  It is good practice to not get into the habit of standing in things that are avoidable.  Can it be healed through?  Yes.  But that is not the point.  You should never take a point blank hit from it, so I don't.

The idea being thrown around is that when someone stands in the bad instead of them taking increased damage and making the healer have to cover for this inability to play, the person standing in the bad would be the one penalized.  Perhaps spell lock them for 10 seconds, or disarm them for 10 seconds, or something else that would reduce their DPS.  Because in the end the only thing that matters to damage dealers is how much damage they put out.  If you want to teach them to move from crap causing damage to them is not motivation.  They will keep standing in it and attacking and if they die it is the healers fault.  Their DPS is what matters most.

If their DPS goes down, as in something like haste reduced to 0 until they move, or the global cooldown is increased to 5 seconds until you move, or anything that would hurt their DPS really, then they will learn to move.  It would teach them to be better players by making their own selfish motivation for high numbers causing them to move.

Yes, there will still be people that stand in it and do less damage.  There will always be those that do not care.  But people see numbers, they react to numbers.  If they see billygnome is doing 12K they will be more likely to kick him then if billygnome dies and says, I didn't get any heals.  It would become him calling the healers bad and the healers calling him bad.  Nothing would be solved, and nothing would be proved.  But 12K would stand out like a sore thumb.  And that might motivate billygnome to shuffle his tiny little feet out of that toasty warm fire next time.

When I started raiding one of the first rules I learned, after let the tank get aggro, was that a dead damage dealer means 0 DPS.  The new generation of raiders, the ones learning in the LFR, don't seem to get the idea that stuff on the ground is bad.  Hurting them with it only puts more pressure on the healers and that is unfair to them.  They need to learn a different way.  While the LFR can be really horrible for teaching new players, it can be tweaked to work a little toward that endeavor.  By hurting the only thing a damage dealer cares about, their DPS.

Floor damage will remain the same for normal and heroic of course, but they did say they are looking into the idea of having more stand in bad moments hurt the person that is standing in it and not the healers that have to heal them.  I like that idea a lot.

There are many things that help you tell the good players from the bad ones but nothing is more telling than the avoidable damage area.  I've seen damage dealers pull numbers I only wish I could only to look at the damage taken and from where that damage was taken and sigh because how could anyone doing that good really be that bad.  Is doing 20K more really worth giving the healers that much work?  No.  It is not.

There is no reasons for anyone to ever have more damage taken than a tank unless there is a mechanic that makes it unavoidable.  I've seen it happen more often in the LFR where there are two or three or even four damage dealers taking more damage than one of the tanks and all from easily avoidable sources.

People will just say, it is only the LFR but that argument has never worked for me.  In my opinion, if you can not do the easy version correctly, what is there to make me believe you can do the real one.  Face it, if you fail at the LFR, you will fail even harder on the real raid and don't even think about heroic modes.  The "its only the LFR" argument holds no water with me.  It is like a weight lifter that can't lift 200 pounds (LFR) there is no way he can lift 400 pounds (normal).

No matter what level of content you play, the most important thing you can teach someone is to avoid the avoidable. Perhaps it is time we go back to old school and teach these people rule #2 for damage dealers.

The First Three Rules of the Damage Dealer: (as I learned them)

1) Let the tank get (and keep) aggro.
2) Dead damage dealers do no DPS.
3) If you have an assignment, do it.

#1 and #3 are something I don't think you can really ever teach better in the LFR environment where new players learn.  Aggro is not quite the issue it used to be but there are some funny moments I do recall with a rogue in one of my early raid teams.

Rogue: It is not my fault I got aggro and died.
Raid Leader:  Do you have Omen?
Rogue:  No.
Raid Leader:  Then it is your fault.

That still holds true.  If you grab aggro and die, it is your fault.  Damage dealers need to work within the frame we are given.  Just because you can do more DPS doesn't always mean you should because it can lead to rule #2 if you do.

#3 is the same.  Rarely do we see fights where someone is given another task that will greatly reduce their DPS and never do we see that in the LFR where people are learning now.  Kiting zombie chow was a DPS killer, but when done correctly, it did make that fight super easy.  Like I said, we do not see stuff like that often and we never see it in the LFR.  So you can not teach rule #3 there.

But rule #2, oh yes, rule #2, that can be taught in the LFR and the best way to teach it is to hurt the player, not the healers.  I would love to see a change to how "don't stand in the fire" mechanics work for the LFR.

My suggestion for a change would be to still have it do damage, minimal, so the healers still learn there is something to do there, even if less, but to give the damage dealer a debuff that lasts for 10 seconds.  Each second you stand in avoidable damage the buff gains a stack and refreshes its duration.  10% less damage done.  So if someone stands in the fire for 10 seconds they will do zero damage for 10 seconds.  If they keep standing in it, the debuff keeps refreshing, and they are basically at no damage forever until they move and wait for it to go away or until it disappears on its own and they wait for the debuff to go away.

Want to teach people to avoid the avoidable?  Hit them where it hurts, in their epeen.  In their DPS and damage done.  Maybe, just maybe, that might teach some of them.

I swear, if I hear "but it doesn't hurt that bad in the LFR" from someone we try to bring to our 25 one more time I am going to just kick them and not even waste my time explaining why I did.  Really, they need to teach these people to avoid the avoidable.  How do you know how much it hurts in the LFR?  You should never be getting hit by anything that is avoidable no matter what level of content it is so you shouldn't know it doesn't hurt much in the LFR.  End of story.