Want to know a secret? There’s a simple way to make WoW more fun.
Last night I had more fun in a random dungeon than I have for a long time. I was in Stockades, of all places. A Stockades run is usually a pedestrian half hour filled with enemies which aren’t challenging but have vaguely annoying abilities and no loot to make up for it.
The dungeon didn’t magically morph into a Lernean Hydra spitting epics at us. What changed was the group. The tank suddenly left. We were left with a lowish level party of three mages and a priest healer. We also had prison cells full of bad guys cracking their knuckles and asking whether our relatives could stitch this.
We carried on. The three mages had fun using every trick to play mage tennis and help the healer ensure we didn’t become wallpaper paste. The priestie sat there cheerfully swearing as he healed and cackling maniacally every time he physic screamed because he could it saved our clothie hides. Lots of conjured water later we finished the dungeon, all in great spirits.
What does that mean? We don’t need tanks. Nope. Not in 5 man instances.
Right now WoW is based on the ‘holy trinity’ of three roles; tank, healer, DPS. It’s a tradition going back through the MMO and RPG genres. The nay-sayer in me mutters that removing one of the roles would shake the very foundations of the games industry. It wouldn’t; it’s already happening.
The complexity of the roles has been simplified over time. Back in the day groups had to be pristinely organised. Each person performed challenging tasks. Support classes were necessary. Contingency plans were useful if the battle went awry.
It was the case for WoW as much as any other game. It wasn’t long ago tanks alone were juggling single-target tanking on four monsters whilst anxiously watching the one nursing a headache and herding the battle round the confused sheep. Before TBC, I gather, it was more tricky. That type of game play taught players to be creative strategists. It’s in that kind of situation that I met and bonded with my guildmates over hours of wipes and brainstorming.
Things are more straightforward now. More generalised; each of the roles is cut-and-dry in WoW. Tanks are there to hold the monsters’ attention. DPS are there to take them down, usually with little mind of what dies first. Healers are there to keep everyone topped off with heals so huge I’d not be surprised if characters feel like they’ve been dunked in the fountain of youth. Of course, there are fights where there are exceptions – sometimes healers get to top the boss’ health off instead, The roles are plain and appear interdependent.
But the roles don’t need each other to function. Last night my group’s DPS did its job – to deal damage – perfectly fine without a tank regulating us. We just had to be a bit more creative, versatile, and able to think on our feet. These are qualities which haven’t really been challenged in Wrath’s standard system but I’d go as far to say that the creative strategist in me opened one drowsy eye while my mana’ed out mage watched the cooldown on frost nova with her robed back to the wall.
Dare I say it, we also had to work as a team, rather than just have the tank glue everything to himself and everyone else sedately press the usual buttons to floor the next pack. We functioned much better as a social group. Usually the members of a group each have a set task and if something untoward – or just unexpected – happens it’s easy for a group of strangers to feel justified in laying blame on a person who failed or made a mistake with their individual task.
Last night, without a tank and with the group’s tasks shared equally, the potential for blame was removed. Everyone could contribute to everything. Even the healing! Us mages didn’t just sit in the fire expecting the healer to keep us all, four clothies, up AoEing 10 mobs at once. I don’t know if any of us would do that under the standard roles but with that jot of creativity and freedom allowed to us, we did what we could to help tank and heal. And when we did wipe? We all laughed and congratulated each other on a good fight.
So there we go. The roles already look a whole lot different to how they did when they were originally conceived in EverQuest or even Breath of Fire. We just need to take the plunge and get rid of one of the canonical roles. Not much to ask, right?
We’re only talking as regards 5 man groups, here, but just think of the ramifications for raids. What would they be? More creative players graduating from instances and more chaos and raids unlike anything we’ve ever known – I wonder if the outcomes would offset one another. I wonder if WoW could even support such a change, or if it would require a whole level playing field.
What do you think – is this a terrible idea which would do irrevocable damage to WoW, or a great one, with modifications?
This is an article by Mimetir, an owl (and resto shaman) of a raid leader on The Venture Co. (EU) You can find my twitter feed here.
Article image originally on flickr, by id-iom.
Recently I was on one of my lowbies, a mid-60s resto druid, in Slave Pens. The tank left right before the final boss for some asinine reason, as did one of the DPS. We were down to me (the healer), and two DPS, one of which was an Arms warrior. We queued back up in LFG and waited for, no kidding, a half hour. No bites. So finally the Arms warrior said “Let’s try it with me tanking” and slapped on a shield and charged into the final boss.
The first half of the fight was spent with aggro on me, the Tree, as I frantically spammed heals and removed poisons from everyone. Ran out of mana, used Innervate. Ran out of mana again, used a pot. Everyone was still alive though, miraculously, and I was still spamming heals, but I knew my mana wasn’t going to last long enough…
…and right when my mana ran out and I was sure it was going to be a wipe, BOOM, suddenly a tank and DPS queued up and the boss was down a few seconds later.
Later the arms warrior tank whispered to me, “Sorry about that, my one handed sword skill was 1.”
That was one of the greatest things that happened to me in WoW in a looooong time.
.-= Pike´s last blog ..Rah Rah Ah Ah Ah =-.
Hi-enders really miss the point here. Scaling is the answer. In heroic, maybe, only tank can take the hits. But in Wailing Caverns, when tank is dying and i peel mob off him and hit Evasion and… he taunts mob back and yells at me and dies and I have to tank anyway?
There is a big hole between «omg, I have to outlive that lizard» in leveling dungeons and «omg I have to tank/dps/heal like crazy» in raids. There’s no omg in that hole. Just let tank do his thing and try not to die of boredom (or aggro-slipping) in the process.
Give us an omg! Give-us-an-omg! Or shut the hole? Shut-that-hole-down! I mean, up! Whatever.
The game is its most fun when things get out of hand but you manage to barely pull it out. silly example but yesterday I was playing a baby shaman (lvl 5 or 6) when he got overwhelmed by 3 scorpids in durotar and then my foolishly dropped earthbind totem aggro’d a boar. I managed to drop the last of them with 0 mana and about 10 Hp, it was fun because the outcome was not foreseeable.
Modern tanks are horribly over-tuned for five man leveling content, I have a prot pally in his late 20s and there is never an issue with threat or survivability in 5-mans, the content is far too easy for a T+H+3D group. They were designed with non-traditional groups in mind. Not until you reach heroics should the dungeon mechanic require you have a proper group.
I agree, those crazy moments are often the most fun. I’ll never forget when I was in Maraudon with my lowish Rogue when everyone else left but the healer. He managed to pull two groups of elites and what ensued was pure awesomeness. I Gouged, Cheap Shotted, bandaged myself and the healer (who was running at almost no mana after about a minute). We kited them, he screamed when we were in big trouble, I used my engineering bombs and Vanished in the nick of time twice so I could get some bandaging in. In the end, we took them all out and had a great laugh about it afterwards.
I think one reason dungeons have become so boring is that there is rarely any danger in tanking large groups of mobs. I hope they achieve their goal of bringing more “utility spells” and coordination back into play with Cata. CCs, interrupts, and the like. The game would be more interesting if DPS had to do more than Volley and Blizzard. We are level 85 after all, but I seem to remember having more trouble with Deadmines 4 years ago than I did with many of the WOTLK dungeons. That just doesn’t seem right.
“I think one reason dungeons have become so boring is that there is rarely any danger…”
That’s what has made all of WoW boring for a lot of people – there is no danger anywhere. I applaud anyone who is willing to put some of the risk back into the game.
No risk + too ample rewards = might as well be playing FarmVille 🙁
Its sorta sad that its come to this and perhaps the fun of using your abilities in new and interesting combinations will become integral to the dungeon game again. Heck, it would be interesting to find some boss fights that are untankable even!
But I digress…
In our guild, we’ve been having fun in the 5 mans by queuing up with atypical tanks. The Beast Master hunter (of course) but also a “Battle Mage” spec. We’ve been passing on +Armor and +DEF gear and using Resilience and PVP gear to get these atypical tanks high enough to, well, tank. It’s helpful, of course, to have a hybrid DPSer queue as a tank and then switch over to dps. We’ve even entertained some puggers this way as well.
In these groups, kill order and CC is essential. Each encounter is no longer a scoop, hold ’em and burn ’em repetition of rote boredom, but instead is tactical.
And, yes, it takes longer to finish the run, but isn’t gaming about the time spent as much as achieving some objective? We’re having fun in the 5 mans again and that’s what counts…
I imagine this is why people like pvp so much, its unscripted and requires people to think beyond the role trinity. I also think that this is the inspration behind Faction Champions. I would like to know how you would compare your experience in deadmines without a tank to Faction Champions and if you still think its a good idea.
The problem I find is most players are not willing to break out of the box. Last night while fighting Ahune on my warrior I had a great experience. In a PUG we had just completed a second run, but we were still having some minor issues with funneling the adds to the tank. I suggested we dual tank it.
Light bulbs go off and the healer yells “Do it”.I switch from fury to prot, slap on the tanking gear, and the Death Knight and I go to town. Still finished it in the same amount of time as before, with more control, and the hilarity of the adds jumping between us.
That was the last run of the night, but also the best one.
In experimental groups the healers are the key. If a healer is willing to try then usually the group will give it a go.
.-= Nochecazador´s last blog ..Expanding My Warcraft Experience =-.
This article highlights why I was depressed when the dungeon finder became the tool du jour for running the heroic daily (Want emblems? You Must Take Five.) We have a small guild and before the advent of LFD routinely ran the dailies with four or even three people. It was hard, it was exciting, it was…fun. Atypical groupings can be a nice challenge. So can small groups. Wish Blizz would let us play the way we want and still get the rewards we need for our raiding nights 🙁
Running lower level dungeons with less than 5 people is a lot of fun. When I was leveling my DK we would often 2 or 3 man dungeons without problem, it was a lot of fun. Most of the fun was because it took away the “certainty” of clearing the dungeon. It gave the feeling of “I’m not sure we can do this, but let’s try” as opposed to the usual attitude in wow lately of “omg I’m dropping group if we don’t have a 100% chance of a quick clear”.
I think Bennett has a really good point. It would be nice if the LFD tool had a “We know what we are doing, just put us in a random dungeon as we are” button. You could go in with 2 or 3 people, you could go in with five mages, etc.
I think we are going to see a significant improvement in cataclysm because of a not-very-talked-about change. They said they are going to bring the armor types closer together and make tank health closer to non-tank health. Having people use their abilities to deal with situations only works when they have time to use those abilities. That means clothies shouldn’t get one-shotted by heroic trash mobs. It’s fine if they are a terrible threat, but one-shotting means are very limited in how we can react to situations.
We are hopefully moving from a world where the tank has to hold aggro because otherwise people instantly die to one where the tank has to hold aggro because otherwise the healers will run out of mana healing people who are much more vulnerable. That will give us a lot of flexibility to win with different strategies.
I think that the future of good gameplay is not going to be the holy trinity of roles, but on individual class utility.
Lets take healing and make it seem more like a utility, kind of like Ret Pallys or Shadow Priests. It’s something they can do, but it is more passive. Once rogues get their healing finisher it will be the same, just self only. Then lets lower enemy damage a bit so tanks aren’t so “needed.” Now everyone is a damage dealing class with several utility tools.
Now… go have fun! The fights will become more about strategy and working with what you have to mitigate or control a boss, rather than being able to take it to the face and hope your healers can keep up. Meanwhile the dps won’t be spamming rotations in boredom only to be woken up by “oh, I died? What there was fire under me? Pssh… I half fell asleep and didn’t realize.”
Wait… I write a tanking blog and am advocating getting rid of that role entirely? Yikes!
.-= Cassieo´s last blog ..Path of the Fake-Out =-.
I’ve definitely had the most fun doing runs with an odd mix. There was the time that my lv 74 DK and my friend’s lv 63 Paladin, both DPS-specced, decided we were going to run Strat all by our selves. The whole thing. And we DID. We wiped several times, but it was SO fun.
Then there was the time on my lv 22 druid, who was specced into Resto at the time, when our tank D/Cd in the middle of a pull. All the mobs descended on our poor mage, and I immediately popped bear and grabbed aggro. Then, without even coordinating it in chat or anything, the warrior and I swapped back and forth so I could pop back into caster and put HoTs on us before grabbing the aggro again to let him and his superior DPS whack them down. It was one of the most awesome instances I’ve ever run, for sheer fun and creativity, and everyone loved it so much they joked we should run it again and queue me as a tank. We eventually got a new tank, but we didn’t let the lack of one stop us from continuing on in the instance.
Basically… I agree with your post. Things need to get shaken up a bit – hopefully the changes to healers in Cata will help with that a little bit, at least – who knows? Maybe we can turn this game on its head soon.
.-= Apple´s last blog ..Real ID, RP, and why only one person gets to have mine =-.
I love these moments. For me, it was on my first ever character, a mage. Running through ramparts with no healer, and a DPS tanking. It was great fun sheep pulling packs, kiting two other mobs with CoI and burning the fourth down, and repeating.
Definately not something I want EVERY instance to be, but it was a fantastic experience.
I know that a lot of us who got our WOW on in BC and Vanilla have rosy colored glasses about epic nights in 5 mans. But those days are gone. AND THAT IS A VERY, VERY GOOD THING.
Here’s why. 🙂
Read that first sentence again. Epic *NIGHTS* in *5 MANS*. We used to spend entire evenings wiping in heroics for blue tier sets that more than one class could wear. The ratio of effort to reward was insane. Back then, Heroics and endgame 5 mans (in vanilla) served as the pinnacle of the casual player’s experience. Raiding was only for the most *seriously hardcore*. That philosophy has changed. Now, 5 mans are more like 1/2 hour daily quests that you do with a random group or with your friends. They are meant to be low stress, a predictable time commitment, and complete-able by the average player.
Those challenges we remember no longer belong in 5 mans. 5 mans, in this new system, are for farming, especially once you outgear them. I have epic memories of some dungeons too (heroic Shadow Labs, Heroic Magister’s Terrace…). I want to continue to have those experiences. They belong in the raiding format (or in the PVP format, for arenas and rated BGs).
Now, what I do agree with is that 5 mans should require just at least a modicum of strategy. They are a little too much linear aoe fests right now. I know as a tank I feel like I am just pushing the same buttons over and over. There’s no strategy, which is what being a tank should be all about. But on the flip side, when you queue for a dungeon finder, you don’t want a 3 hour wipefest, especially since you don’t know if you lucked out or if you got the huntard end of the stick with your group. I for one *don’t* want Heroic Shattered Halls 2.0 in my random dungeon finder.
So. Yes, 5 mans right now are a little too simple and boring. Yes, more challenge and strategy would be good. No, we don’t need to try to re-create the 3 hour crawls through BRD in the 5 man dungeons. Save that type of experience for the raids.
One other point: when you create long instances, you put up quite a serious wall for pugs. A dedicated player may know the whole place inside and out, however, your average casual will hardly ever get a chance to try fights later in the instance. It creates another barrier for a casual player to move up to the next level (don’t know the fights? waitlist). ICC has definitely had this effect. We get lots of recruits who have the gear to compete, but have simply never done fights past Putricide or even Saurfang. Even if a pug gets that far, they often don’t come back another night. If instances were a little shorter or lockouts spread a little bit more widely over a tier (think tier 5, with 2 lockouts, or tier 7, with 3 lockouts), more pugs and casuals would have experience and could hit the ground running when they apply to raiding guilds. Long instances really put the kibash on that. Just a thought.
I fondly remember my brother and I levelling a pair of shaman together: running dungeons like SFK and RFK as a duo and being forced to use every tool in our toolbox to get through a groups of mobs and having to really strategise for most pulls was just so much fun (obviously it helps to be hybrids).
first off, thanks for yet another excellent article Matron 😉
after reading the comments i see most of my thuoghts already well expressed, so i’ll leave it as is for the most part, two exceptions made:
@Sthenno: i’m afraid those days are already here – personally none of my clothies, nor leather-wearing dps-freaks (not necessarily more than half-decent dps though :p) are currently being one-shot, despite several of them being of a highly threatening nature and often find themselves tanking heroic trash – two of them (balance druid and warlock) sometimes even find themselves tanking the odd boss briefly (instantly stopping all damagedealing and letting the tank get it back) – this applies regardless of their roles (yes, i have a priest that sometimes tries to heal, and every now and then have not only one but two-three heroic trash coming on to it strongly).
i wish i still instantly died – that would make it infinitely more interesting to continue running the same old non-challenging, pointless heroics – instead of waiting around, doing only the daily heroic and then only because i still need the emblems – which is the only reason most of us run the various heroics these days: Emblems…
with the level of ease you can gear your character there’s less and less time to attain your skills, and it starts long before you run heroics – there was a time when instances were challenging along the way – that time is long gone for most of us, longer than most know for those of us who had the pleasure of running instances in vanilla (i wish i’d reached 60 and done some raiding before TBC, but.. at least i got a few proper instance-runs :p) – heck, BC-instances still were somewhat challenging – even though my vanilla-raiding friends kept moaning it was too easy :p
@Felade: i see your point, it’s good and it’s valid, but…
you could just as easily argue that heroic instances(at least) should be challenging, and then challenging enough to be a preparation for raiding – both casual raiding, and hardcore raiding.
although i enjoy having along all nice, polite people with loads of mad humor regardless of their game (which i do), i prefer in some situations to know the ones guarding my back (as tank or dps) to know their game (which is why i never heal raids myself – i’m simply not that good a healer :p), or the one standing in front of me keeping things that want to kill me away from me to have enough knowledge and experience to not have to worry about holding his/her main target(s) and as such be able to pay attention to the fourth-sixth target when they run off to kill a clothie…
as much as i agree that heroic farming shouldn’t take too long: without challenges along the way the new raiders can’t be expected to produce the massive numbers established raiders are, or hold the insane bosses established tanks are, or learn the fight in a flash – which everyone expects of everyone else these days (particularly in a pug-situation, which again is why so many pugs fall apart at some point along the way).
facts are, with a fresh player with little to no skill it will take some extra time to manage some of the fights, some raids will be harder to do and we’re already at a point where most raids can be “farmed” – or could have been if the sessionlocks weren’t in place to stop us. some of the raids despite half the group being undergeared and poorly skilled (like naxxramas through ulduar).
some of the problem might come from the new lfg-system not letting you join heroics until you reach a certain average item-level of an epic variety (recently tried entering the queue with a rogue geared in equal gear to that of my warlock when he first reached 80, and were prohibited even entering the nexus…)
there are good things to be said for having an easy run, and as such a quick run – but there’s no point in running if there’s absolutely no challenge in it. they effectively might as well remove the item-drops entirely in favor for further emblems… had my tank reached 80 these days, he would have been hard pressed to get a proper run, and once he did he would be bitched at, moaned at, whined at and regularly yelled at for not being “properly” geared for keeping the aggro off ICC10-ready dps – which would have soured my experience to an extent where i would seriously consider simply ending my relations to the entire game.
why not instead make the system more versatile – by adding a choice of difficulty to the sign-up chart… let those of us who wishes to run them the challenging way choose to do so, let us run them (like Bennet said) in two’s and three’s without having to give up on the rewards we all need to get the gear to be able to compete if we want to raid at a later point. let those who simply want a quick walkthrough say so when signing up, and let all of us be grouped with people of similar inclinations. that way all drops might be of use, there’s still some challenge (even for the vanilla-crew :p) and if you can’t be bothered you can sign for swift-runs with no challenge, no thinking necessary and no time wasted.
instancing – hell, playing wow at all – isn’t about the time spent, but the amount of fun had during that time and as such they’ve cramped the amount of my fun by introducing a lfg-system that is severely restraining while claiming that it’s liberating as it will put you in a group that is ready for that heroic, that instance… half the time i meet people who should be running through the nexus in blue&green gear to learn what not to do, a fourth i meet random morons claiming their way is the only way and everyone else are “NOOBS”, 23% of the time i get a group that’ll simply fly by leaving in it’s wake a trail of dead and be done with most any wotlk heroic in 15 minutes or less….
the last 2% are the fun ones :p the ones where everything that can go wrong goes wrong and we somehow manages to reach deep down, grab our long-trained slightly forgotten skills by the balls/spine/nose/toenail and come out of the fight just in time before the tank falls over, shortly followed by the healer using a soulstone to ress.
long post is long – far longer than i expected… and i’m sure there’s a bit of indignant ranting in there as well, but the points come across clearly and that you can forgive my ranting.
my finest instance-memory in wow? trioing wailing caverns as a priest five-six years ago with a mage and warlock – none of which were higher than 17 at the time. took a while, but we had fun doing it, we learned a lot from that experience and the words “that can’t be done” lost their meaning after that run 😉 (again, sorry for surprisingly long rant-reply-comment-thingy-post :D)
I remember the time we went into a dungeon – 5 hunters. That was so much fun.
however, end game, and no one wants to do this kind of ‘silly’ thing with even regular 5 mans.
Once, back in 3.0, back when Heroics were at best only moderately overgeared and you still formed your own groups and flew to the far ends of azeroth to do your dungeons, my party wiped around me at 66% on Grand Magus in H Nexus. The healer on the floor advised me to wipe it.
I didn’t wipe it. I blew every cooldown I had in careful rationing and rotation, ate my Warlock cookie, chugged a health potion, spammed Death Strike like my life depended on it (which it did) and soloed the boss down through both split phases, and finished the fight with EVERYTHING on cooldown, and about 2k HP left. I finished with a /roar over the boss’s beaten corpse and the rest of the party just freaked out.
“Dear Lord I feel useless now.”
“How the fu’?”
“Dude, nerf DKs.”
“Wow, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
And so on. It was an experience that definitely renewed my interest in the game and set me on the path of extreme soloing for a few months.
I recently did it again in H Gundrak in the LFG when the healer refused to do Eck and then “got lost” on the way to the endboss after I ignored his absence and killed Eck anyway. It surprises me that people are still impressed by being able to solo t7 heroics; it was doable in Naxx gear, you’d think it would be quite commonplace.
My favorite silly dungeon memory was when i was leveling my priest during TBC. I was 47 and leveling holy, and the only dungeon even close to my level was BRD, i asked if i could go and the leader who was a tank said “Hell yeah!” The instance took a long time, longer then it ever took me on my main back in Vanilla but it was fun, why? Because the tank was 49 and all the dps were in the low fifties. We marked mobs, made choices, cc’d, and even had the feral druid dps tank an add every now and then.
Looking back on that run, I would say that it was probably my second favorite moment in wow, topped only by the time me and my good friend made a disc priest/resto druid 2v2 team. We played 10 games and won 9 of them, twice because the other team just gave up trying and 7 times because they just couldn’t kill us and we could wear them all down faster then they could wear us down. Fights were long, the one we lost was 45 minutes. but it was GREAT!
This people, this was fun, this is fun. I challenge all of you, find a few friends that are bored of the same old shit and do these kind of things. Walk into arena’s with the weirdest compositions and make them work, do dungeons with all dps groups, or all healers, or all tanks, hell go make your own hard modes for raids! You want fun? 3 man safety dance! Try doing Naxx in all blues!
WoW should be fun, so when someone tells you that your better off be efficient and farming your badges than to have 5 hunters do a heroic, ask them how much fun they have farming dungeons their way. The answer is little to none.
P.S: I think that people like the author of this column and those who responded with stories of their own silly endeavors should be working with blizz devs right now to make dungeons and raids more fun.
Wow, some really interesting stories here. Looks like quite a few of us make up our own rules outside of LFD (or at least wish we had time to do it more often!) Maybe the devs should adapt the LFD tool to make it more flexible – like @Bennet suggests with smaller group sizes and @Sthenno suggests with the “no really we know what we’re doing” option. Any other interesting “optional buttons” you think should go on the LFD tool guys?
@Felade – Good point. Long dungeons are… well, long, and create longer queues. But I think there’s a balance to be struck between time and effort – and right now in dungeons, the little time spent feels like little gain received for me. Not talking about loot; I’m talking about the sense of achievement for having completed something really challenging, no matter that it took 4 hours. I’m not a vanilla player, but I do have some fond memories of TBC – particularly Heroic MgT as a *shockhorror* fury warrior who really, really wanted the plate DPS chest. The run it dropped was an epic struggle; my friends and I were there for several hours, I think we went through about 4 PUG healers on Kael’thas, but we did it – with some impromtu tactics along the way. Good stuff – and stuff I wish still happened in random dungeons. Hmm, long reply is long… went down memory lane a bit there!
@Karkass – good points. Particularly about learning as you level and being challenged then. I’m levelling a baby mage at the moment and she’s finding more often than not that dungeons fly by in a way rather reminiscent of Heroics. It’s when I get a group that’s different in some way – either we have players completely new to the game (always nice to meet them), players who don’t remember/know the instance, or something – that it gets interesting.
@Trent – excellent challenge to throw down! I hope some people take you up on it – even tell us about iheir adventures, ‘cos it’s fun to read about it too – if there’s anything the comments here have proved, the sense of enjoyment really comes across positively when people tell their stories. (P.S. thanks for the compliment!)