Gamer Rant, Volume I, Footnotes

From Dictionary.com:

Rant /rænt/
–verb (used without object)
1. to speak or declaim extravagantly or violently; talk in a wild or vehement way; rave: The demagogue ranted for hours. –verb (used with object)
2. to utter or declaim in a ranting manner. –noun
3. ranting, extravagant, or violent declamation.
4. a ranting utterance.

I didn't call it, "How To Play Your Empath, Defender, Blaster, Scrapper, What-the-f-ever, And If You Don't, You're A l0z3r." I'll leave that to the people on the CoH/V forums. And I certainly didn't mean "you" in particular, but more like the people on the PuGs I've been playing with, such as the previously mentioned Kinetics defender who quit the Moonfire TF I was on in the second mission when the team asked for Speed Boost (True story).

Once again, PuGs are held to different standards than our core group who plays together, or any group that plays together. Like I said earlier today in a Yahoo Chat:

If a person's going to play on their own, I don't care if their scrapper has the entire medicine pool, tp friend, flurry, and 2 other attacks. But I don't want them on my PuG. Heck, if one of you guys (meaning Team Whatever-we-are-this-week, and our list of occasional Guest Stars) makes that scrapper, and we RP through ten missions, that's fine. But, on a PuG, that scrapper's dead weight.

If I'm playing with "you guys," I'm playing for fun, social aspects, humor, entertainment, stories, whatever. If I'm playing with a PuG, I might be playing for fun, too, but the main goal is XP/influence, or some type of game reward/advancement.

On a PuG, my blaster doesn't care that "your" (General, universal "you" representing some random person in the game, used to distinguish that this person is not "me") defender hasn't taken CM/SB/Any shields/whatever because you only play with scrappers/tanks/Khelds/your husband/wife/cousin's-wife's-roommate's-best friend normally. You're on a different team, and if you can't contribute to that team in a meaningful way, maybe you ought to play on your own or wait for your cousin's-wife's-roommate's-best friend to log on. And, no, "tanking" with your Stormy while the tank is regaining endurance and then screaming at the empath/scrapper/blaster for not healing you/taking the extra aggro/shooting the baddies, and then telling everyone why their way of playing is wrong/ineffective/old-fashioned/n00by/stifling your creativity doesn't count as a meaningful contribution. In a PuG, you adapt to the team. Don't expect them to adapt to you.

I'll stand by everything I've said here and in the last post. And also admit to making some of the mistakes I've listed. Blaze (Blaze Noir, level 50 dark/dark/dark defender, hit 50 somewhere around i5) was respec'ed not all that long ago. She was an "offender."

But, wait, didn't I just say if you want a defender to do damage, make a blaster? Why, yes, I did, and thank you for pointing that out. But I also talked about building for the group that you play with, didn't I? Well, yeah, I guess I did.

Blaze's "core group" was a variation of a tank, a scrapper, an empath, and a blaster who didn't do very much. Sometimes another blaster, sometimes not, and a few random others with no regularity. Healing wasn't a big thing. Damage was. The ability to pull and not die was. Holding/stunning/sleeping mobs wasn't. So her damage was built up, and it was pretty freakin' decent. She had BlackStar (dark's "nova")... and it still sucked. Oh, sure, it looked cool, especially after they changed it in... i7, maybe? But, usefulness-wise, it sucked. And by then Blaze's old group was gone, and she was more or less put on the shelf and only brought out as back-up for Vagabond Mage occasionally. Her heal and damage mitigation was enough to keep one level 50 competent blaster alive... most of the time. But, then I found myself wanting to take her out more often, and into PuGs. And she just wasn't cutting it. I hate respecs. The more levels, the more I hate respecs. But I respeced her, a lot. It's like a whole other character. And she's pretty freakin' awesome now. I wish I'd done it a long time ago, even when she played with that first group. She takes advantage of her primary much more now, and the effects those powers are meant to have. No, she's not going to out-damage Fyre anytime soon, but that's why one's a defender, and one's a blaster. But, they both solo AND team very well, and highly effectively.

So, yeah, I do think I know some stuff. No, I'm not an expert. I'm not a genius. No, I'm not saying that "you" and your Whatever-character-you-think-any-of-this-applies-to suck. Yeah, I've "only" been playing 30 months, and some people have those shiny new 42 month badges. And maybe some people have 6 month badges and they've read every guide there freakin' is and have spent hours with calculators in their hands working out percentages. But I'll stand by what I've said, and if I'm in a PuG tomorrow that proves one of those things wrong, I'll be grateful to whomever teaches me differently. Once you think you know everything and there's nothing left to learn, that's when you need to worry.