Wait. What?

I was speaking with a guildmate over the weekend and had a spark of conversation that caused me to go through 3 phases: confusion, refreshment, frustration.

The player in question has an elemental shaman.

With a 71 point spec.

We (politely) ganged up on him and convinced him that was inappropriate for any circumstance, but especially not for raids.

Again, we explained the requirement of DBM or some other raid-warning add on.

And then I touched on Recount.

I have a love/hate affair with Recount.

I love it when I go to the training dummies and can use it as a tool to help myself or someone else pin down a weakness in a rotation.

I love it when I glance at it in a raid and my raid is all bunched together at the top AND we’re not dying to people doing stupid shit. We use it to challenge ourselves and each other to do better.

I hate it when I’m in a random heroic and my husband is tanking and the random rogue is talking about how much better he’s doing than everyone else. You might be doing more DPS, but you are stressing the hell out of my husband with him trying to keep threat off you. You don’t have to live with him grinding his teeth and being grumpy about dumb shit DPS. If it takes 5 minutes longer to complete the instance because we let the tank pick up threat, that’s OK.

I hate it when I’m in a raid and the numbers are all over the place and we’re dying to stupid shit because someone’s DPS is too precious to insert utility into their ass-kicking rotation. And then they usually spam their numbers to “prove” it wasn’t their fault we wiped.

But love it or hate it, it has it’s usefulness and I appreciate its existence. I blame the player, not the tool.

Back to the elemental shaman we were working with.

He doesn’t have Recount.

Wait.

What?

A DPS class, and a person that wants to raid at that, and he DOESN’T have Recount?

My brain just sort of shut down.

Confusion set in.

He does not have a healing spec. I’m pretty sure this is his only 80, so I don’t think he has a tank laying about.

He’s pure DPS and does not have Recount.

How is that even possible?

After I picked my jaw up off the desk, I was struck with the notion that it was pretty cool that he didn’t have Recount.

Here is someone that wants to play the game as a game and isn’t going to get involved in the epeen flexing about numbers.

It was a refreshing sort of view on the whole thing.

For about 2 seconds.

And then hit my frustration.

We had just taken this guy into Ulduar hard modes and his performance was less than stellar.

Of course, he had no way of knowing that he was at the bottom of the pack, since he wasn’t running Recount and we don’t spam numbers in our raids.

I had 9 people working very hard to get these encounters down, with all the DPS pulling 4, 5, 6, 7+ thousand depending on the fights (or 11k+ on Hodir), the healers are healing their asses off, the tanks are doing their thing keeping that monumental amount of threat contained, and then I’ve got him in the corner, just happy to be there with his (unknown to him) 3k DPS.

The next day I encouraged him to get Recount (I never thought I would say that to anyone) and to spend some quality time with a training dummy. If he was worried about computer performance in raids, he could always disable it before the raid.

He went and downloaded DBM (which if I had known he did not have at the start of the Ulduar hard modes I would have booted his ass in a heart beat to go get) but came back and said he’s going to pass on Recount.

If he wanted to be a serious raider, I would bench him until he got it or somehow otherwise magically improved his DPS. Hell, I would be willing to sit in a city by a training dummy and post numbers for him if he was interested in improving.

But his response that he is going to pass on Recount tells me that he doesn’t care about his performance.

He never once (that I am aware of) has asked how he’s doing or what can be done better.

He can’t make many of our raids due to an odd work schedule so I think we’ll be losing him shortly anyway and the whole situation will be moot.

But I am at a loss for having a DPS that says they want to raid but doesn’t recognize the tools needed to do so.

…

We did not successfully clear all of Uld that night. A couple people that signed up did not show up. A few had not done their homework and researched the fights beforehand.

So we struggled on a couple and will have to come back for them, but we did get a few down. I think we got the following under Tiræl’s guidance:

• Stokin’ the Furnace
• Heartbreaker
• I Choose You, Steelbreaker
• Disarmed
• Crazy Cat Lady
• I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare
• Lose Your Illusion

It was late so we called it at Freya for the evening. All in all, it was fun and a lot of good experience.