However, I’ll take the time to respond in detail anyway.
This part is for WoW players:
Feign Death, for anyone who understands WoW but hasn’t played a hunter, instantly clears 100% of your threat. Misdirection transfers[1] all threat you cause for the next several seconds to another party member (typically you’d use it on the tank). For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS (unless of course your tank is really bad, but then you have many other, larger problems).
[1] This is how it worked at the time I wrote about; it’s a bit different now.
This part is for everyone:
Yes, you don’t want to things that cause you to fail, such as (in this case) drawing aggro (i.e. causing the monster to hit you instead of the designated tank). If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit — not switch to some more complex and inferior rotation. Then, after some appropriate pause, you start Steady Shotting again.
After all, I didn’t say that the correct rotation was necessarily “hit Steady Shot constantly; never take your finger off that button even for a second”. My point was that using abilities other than Steady Shot was always inferior to using Steady Shot. Always. Steady Shot was provably the optimal ability to use, in 100% of cases where you wanted to be doing damage to the enemy.
It also goes almost without saying that the aforementioned less-competent hunters that I sometimes played with didn’t have anywhere near enough damage output to have the slightest aggro issues. No, there is no construal of the situation under which their behavior was sensible in terms of effective play. They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS...
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot. You say:
If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said. All I wanted to do was to point out that thinking along the lines of, “I’m a DPS class, my goal is to maximize DPS without looking at any other variables” is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you wiped (and it sounds like you agree).
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities. I say in this comment that
… to say that hitting that one button repeatedly is the only thing you needed to do to win was a bit of a simplification. True, your rotation was as simple as can be; but there are other aspects of correct play, both in-the-moment (DPS cooldown timing; mana management; positioning and other things to do with fight mechanics; pet control) and during-downtime …
You can have a rotation of Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, …, and use FD and MD when appropriate. You can also have a rotation of Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, …, and likewise use FD and MD when appropriate. FD and MD do not take up “slots” in the rotation; they don’t replace offensive abilities (because one is not on the global cooldown and the other is cast pre-fight).
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said.
No, there is not, which has been my entire point.
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
I don’t agree that it’s hard. It seems pretty easy, actually. If your complaint is that my statements were insufficiently precise (“Ah, but surely you have to hit your arrow keys to move your character! That’s something other than Steady Shot!”), or “technically incorrect” in some other way, then… I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point. If you’re saying that my claims are actually false, in the sense that the opposite is true, then… you’re incorrect.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
Granted. I find this unlikely, however. The people in question almost always maintained that their way of doing things was more effective, or at least least as effective, than mine (and blamed evidence to the contrary on having inferior gear, on bad luck, on other players… on anything but their own technique). Furthermore, as far as I could tell, said people never actually tried my way. (I say “my way”, but it’s not like I came up with it; all hunters in high-end raiding guilds used this approach.)
Here’s another formulation of my hypothetical instructions to underperforming hunters that you might find more to your liking:
“If you’re using Serpent Sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re using Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Concussive Shot, or any other shot or sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. Any time you consider pressing any of those buttons in your rotation, don’t do it; press your Steady Shot button instead. When I look at the damage meters after this fight, the only entry I want to see on the list of damaging abilities used by you is Steady Shot. So much as a single Aimed Shot showing up on that damage meter will tell me that you missed at least one opportunity to use Steady Shot. That is bad. You should have used Steady Shot instead. You would have done more damage that way, thus increasing our chances of success.”
I believe that should avoid accusations of imprecision or technical inaccuracy. If I have misread the nature of your disagreement, please elaborate further.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities.
Fair enough; I always thought that “rotation” included any abilities, both offensive and defensive, but your terminology works too. That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot. This is all that I meant. That said, I was unaware that FD was off the GCD; I don’t remember if it was always like that or if they changed it at some point.
I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point.
Your original post made it sound as though you only cared about the final DPS readout, to the exclusion of anything else, such as aggro management. When I still played WoW, there were plenty of players who thought exactly that way; you couldn’t throw a snowball without hitting one. These people were the leading cause of death in dungeons. I understand that you are not one of them, but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting; and my point was that declaring actions “worse than useless” is often—though obviously not always—a symptom of over-fitting, or perhaps merely of solving different goals. For example, the fencer who ends every move with a flourish might have a very different goal in mind (“showing off”, “roleplaying”, “added challenge”, etc.) than a purely competitive player whose only goal is “winning the match as quickly as possible”.
From the point of view of the competitive player, his opponent is indeed performing “worse than worthless” actions; yet the assessment is still incorrect.
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot.
This is true, and in fact I have an amusing anecdote about this very fact (amusing in retrospect, of course).
I understand that you are not one of them [people who only care about DPS and not threat], but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
Granted. The prior is pretty strong there, true enough.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
Well, perhaps. I don’t have anywhere near as strong an opinion on this once we broaden the context beyond games (even to games I’m unfamiliar with); you may well be right. I wonder if we couldn’t try and break down the categories of activity in which apparently “worse than worthless” things can be reasonably construed as optimizations for different targets?
A couple of preliminary stabs at an answer:
Whether the person understands that, and acknowledges that, their behavior is not optimized for the default target, should affect our probability estimate of whether the behavior is just a failed attempt at optimization, or successful optimization for something else.
For our purposes, there’s a difference between activities or aspects of activities that have a performance component and ones that do not; e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
Right, sorry, that was kind of a weird metaphor on my part.
Imagine that you’re building a classifier (f.ex. a neural network or something) that tells you which houses are “good” and which are “bad”. You have a bunch of features that describe each house; among them are longtitude and latitude. You feed some training data to the classifier, hoping that it will draw you some volume in the feature-space. Everything inside the volume is “good”, everything outside of it is “bad”.
Over-fitting occurs when you don’t give the classifier enough training data, and when you punish it too severely for any errors. Thus, it either ends up drawing a really convoluted shape that fits exactly those 5 data points that you gave it; or it ends up ignoring most of the features because they didn’t have as much of an impact on the outcome; or both. So, your classifier gets a perfect score on the 10 houses it knows about, and fails miserably at real-world data.
Similarly, these Hunters, and many WoW players in general, have been trained on low-level encounters, where the mobs are weak and the penalty for dying is small. They don’t know anything about aggro management, mana conservation, bandaging, etc… All they ever look at is the DPS readout. Thus, when they get to end-game content, they fail miserably.
You can sometimes see the same pattern occur in other situations, too. For example, programmers who are used to working with microcontrollers typically end up writing really terrible host-computer code. Their code is extremely fast and uses very little memory… and is also impossible to modify or maintain. In a microcontroller, using 2x less RAM is the difference between success and failure; on a PC, using 2x less RAM is usually not even noticeable.
e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
You might be right about that, though every WoW move does have a corresponding animation that other people (as well as yourself) can see. I know at least one person who picks their characters based on how awesome they look, but I have no idea whether that is a common pattern or not.
Your entire post is rendered moot by:
Feign Death
Misdirection
However, I’ll take the time to respond in detail anyway.
This part is for WoW players:
Feign Death, for anyone who understands WoW but hasn’t played a hunter, instantly clears 100% of your threat. Misdirection transfers[1] all threat you cause for the next several seconds to another party member (typically you’d use it on the tank). For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS (unless of course your tank is really bad, but then you have many other, larger problems).
[1] This is how it worked at the time I wrote about; it’s a bit different now.
This part is for everyone:
Yes, you don’t want to things that cause you to fail, such as (in this case) drawing aggro (i.e. causing the monster to hit you instead of the designated tank). If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit — not switch to some more complex and inferior rotation. Then, after some appropriate pause, you start Steady Shotting again.
After all, I didn’t say that the correct rotation was necessarily “hit Steady Shot constantly; never take your finger off that button even for a second”. My point was that using abilities other than Steady Shot was always inferior to using Steady Shot. Always. Steady Shot was provably the optimal ability to use, in 100% of cases where you wanted to be doing damage to the enemy.
It also goes almost without saying that the aforementioned less-competent hunters that I sometimes played with didn’t have anywhere near enough damage output to have the slightest aggro issues. No, there is no construal of the situation under which their behavior was sensible in terms of effective play. They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot. You say:
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said. All I wanted to do was to point out that thinking along the lines of, “I’m a DPS class, my goal is to maximize DPS without looking at any other variables” is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you wiped (and it sounds like you agree).
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities. I say in this comment that
You can have a rotation of Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, …, and use FD and MD when appropriate. You can also have a rotation of Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, …, and likewise use FD and MD when appropriate. FD and MD do not take up “slots” in the rotation; they don’t replace offensive abilities (because one is not on the global cooldown and the other is cast pre-fight).
No, there is not, which has been my entire point.
I don’t agree that it’s hard. It seems pretty easy, actually. If your complaint is that my statements were insufficiently precise (“Ah, but surely you have to hit your arrow keys to move your character! That’s something other than Steady Shot!”), or “technically incorrect” in some other way, then… I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point. If you’re saying that my claims are actually false, in the sense that the opposite is true, then… you’re incorrect.
Granted. I find this unlikely, however. The people in question almost always maintained that their way of doing things was more effective, or at least least as effective, than mine (and blamed evidence to the contrary on having inferior gear, on bad luck, on other players… on anything but their own technique). Furthermore, as far as I could tell, said people never actually tried my way. (I say “my way”, but it’s not like I came up with it; all hunters in high-end raiding guilds used this approach.)
Here’s another formulation of my hypothetical instructions to underperforming hunters that you might find more to your liking:
“If you’re using Serpent Sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re using Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Concussive Shot, or any other shot or sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. Any time you consider pressing any of those buttons in your rotation, don’t do it; press your Steady Shot button instead. When I look at the damage meters after this fight, the only entry I want to see on the list of damaging abilities used by you is Steady Shot. So much as a single Aimed Shot showing up on that damage meter will tell me that you missed at least one opportunity to use Steady Shot. That is bad. You should have used Steady Shot instead. You would have done more damage that way, thus increasing our chances of success.”
I believe that should avoid accusations of imprecision or technical inaccuracy. If I have misread the nature of your disagreement, please elaborate further.
Fair enough; I always thought that “rotation” included any abilities, both offensive and defensive, but your terminology works too. That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot. This is all that I meant. That said, I was unaware that FD was off the GCD; I don’t remember if it was always like that or if they changed it at some point.
Your original post made it sound as though you only cared about the final DPS readout, to the exclusion of anything else, such as aggro management. When I still played WoW, there were plenty of players who thought exactly that way; you couldn’t throw a snowball without hitting one. These people were the leading cause of death in dungeons. I understand that you are not one of them, but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting; and my point was that declaring actions “worse than useless” is often—though obviously not always—a symptom of over-fitting, or perhaps merely of solving different goals. For example, the fencer who ends every move with a flourish might have a very different goal in mind (“showing off”, “roleplaying”, “added challenge”, etc.) than a purely competitive player whose only goal is “winning the match as quickly as possible”.
From the point of view of the competitive player, his opponent is indeed performing “worse than worthless” actions; yet the assessment is still incorrect.
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
This is true, and in fact I have an amusing anecdote about this very fact (amusing in retrospect, of course).
Granted. The prior is pretty strong there, true enough.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
Well, perhaps. I don’t have anywhere near as strong an opinion on this once we broaden the context beyond games (even to games I’m unfamiliar with); you may well be right. I wonder if we couldn’t try and break down the categories of activity in which apparently “worse than worthless” things can be reasonably construed as optimizations for different targets?
A couple of preliminary stabs at an answer:
Whether the person understands that, and acknowledges that, their behavior is not optimized for the default target, should affect our probability estimate of whether the behavior is just a failed attempt at optimization, or successful optimization for something else.
For our purposes, there’s a difference between activities or aspects of activities that have a performance component and ones that do not; e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
Right, sorry, that was kind of a weird metaphor on my part.
Imagine that you’re building a classifier (f.ex. a neural network or something) that tells you which houses are “good” and which are “bad”. You have a bunch of features that describe each house; among them are longtitude and latitude. You feed some training data to the classifier, hoping that it will draw you some volume in the feature-space. Everything inside the volume is “good”, everything outside of it is “bad”.
Over-fitting occurs when you don’t give the classifier enough training data, and when you punish it too severely for any errors. Thus, it either ends up drawing a really convoluted shape that fits exactly those 5 data points that you gave it; or it ends up ignoring most of the features because they didn’t have as much of an impact on the outcome; or both. So, your classifier gets a perfect score on the 10 houses it knows about, and fails miserably at real-world data.
Similarly, these Hunters, and many WoW players in general, have been trained on low-level encounters, where the mobs are weak and the penalty for dying is small. They don’t know anything about aggro management, mana conservation, bandaging, etc… All they ever look at is the DPS readout. Thus, when they get to end-game content, they fail miserably.
You can sometimes see the same pattern occur in other situations, too. For example, programmers who are used to working with microcontrollers typically end up writing really terrible host-computer code. Their code is extremely fast and uses very little memory… and is also impossible to modify or maintain. In a microcontroller, using 2x less RAM is the difference between success and failure; on a PC, using 2x less RAM is usually not even noticeable.
You might be right about that, though every WoW move does have a corresponding animation that other people (as well as yourself) can see. I know at least one person who picks their characters based on how awesome they look, but I have no idea whether that is a common pattern or not.