New Topic: Redemption of the Week

[edit] I've blocked comments in this post due to spam.

My favorite social has called it quits on other people making his posts for him. It was too much work sorting through all the submissions and dealing with fakes. Perhaps I should have instead made a post Is Gevlon too popular to be good? But yes, no more morons of the week posts. I was almost disappointed, since having started playing my priest again I'd finally run into the awful tanks that I've heard so much about, but never seen.

I ran into a DK tank that used no diseases. None. I watched and asked. She said her boyfriend told her not to. Not part of her rotation.

I did some facepalming to myself.

But I decided to try to save her from the terrible advice. I had hope. Why? Because so far she seemed nice. Second, the fact that she took advice (even if wrong) in the first place suggests she might listen again. And finally, girls seem to be more receptive to advice anyway; maybe they are capable of hearing a suggestion as anything other than "you're wrong and stupid and I'm better than you."

So I said a bit about how diseases are a core part of the class and they boost damage and aggro. She claimed she was holding aggro just fine (barely). I countered with the always legitimate claim that more damage is good. That didn't seem to work, but she wasn't really getting defensive, just seemed that it wasn't clicking yet. She was still in the mode of That is Not Part of My Rotation.

Frost fever might have done the trick. I explained that it's a huge deal for tanks, so they take a lot less damage. Getting that on everything would make her a better tank. I think that broke through and got across the idea that diseases are good for tanks.

I gave her a starting rotation: death and decay, icy touch, plague strike, pestilence. Now everything is diseased and very angry with her. I didn't go much beyond that, since I was worried about seeming bossy or a know it all (this happens a lot). And she did it. Over and over. It did take a while though, pretty much to the end of DTK.

But at the end, I knew she had learned and the lesson would stick. What gave me this confidence? Her exclamation of how much more damage she was doing. People always respond to bigger numbers.

I doubt I made her a great player. Maybe not even good. But I did pull her back from major fail. Somewhere out there, someone has one less terrible tank to rage about. Random LFD is slightly better. With luck, I planted the seed of thought: looking at what spells do, trying to do better, learning from those around her, and hopefully testing their advice.

I want to make this a weekly post, created from your submissions, of a player who you have made significantly better through some minor effort.