Happy New Year.

This is going to be one of those annoying posts about that place called "Real Life" I hear so much about. So, a warning, if you don't want to read such things, don't scroll down.

I'm always very cynical of the New Year celebration; I've always viewed it as a poor use of the Gregorian calendar as an excuse to get drunk -- it's a new year every day: every time the Earth reaches an arbitrary point along its orbit, it will have been just shy of 365.25 Earth Revolutions since it happened the last time. January the First isn't even notable in cosmological terms: it isn't a solstice, for instance.

Nevertheless, my life needs changing, thus, in-keeping with what I consider to be a less cynically inclined spirit of New Year, I've made some resolutions that I intend to stick to.

1. Play WoW less.
Oh, I know, you're all smirking that it's one of those resolutions or Lent sacrifices like "give up chocolate" -- it never happens, right? Fortunately I have a brand new shiny Xbox to keep me occupied. That sounds like I'm just switching one vice for another -- and, to an extent, there's some truth in that. It will, at the very least, get me into another room of the house. My bedroom, in which my computer resides, is up two flights of stairs, and feels like a bit of a crow's nest a lot of the time. Any excuse to push outwards from that and not feel bored or exposed would be very nice.

2. Fix my sleep pattern.
This is code for "Go to a doctor", which is a more general thing I need to do. You'll notice that quite a few of these blog posts go up either in the early hours of the morning (like this one), or even earlier than that: 2-4am, say. Rest assured, I am British. The reason why I might as well be on CET rather than GMT is that my sleep pattern has been messed up for the past two years or so, except on select days when the stars choose to align, or when I'm in a certain person's company. No matter what I try: Pulling all-nighters, taking courses of sleeping tablets ... nothing stops me from being awake until 4-6am whereupon I go to bed out of sheer exhaustion. It would be nice to go to bed for the sake of wanting sleep, rather than because my body quite literally can't keep itself awake any longer unless I push it into an all-nighter, with which it punishes me by stubbornly refusing to let me sleep until my usual time the following night (early-morning). This will help me with ...

3. Get a job.
I'm a graduate in a recession. Things have been bleak the past few months for graduates, with most jobs going to people who already have experience of the relevant workplaces. Having never worked in a "proper" environment, this puts me at a severe disadvantage to the legions of other out-of-work people. Fortunately, I do have unofficial, casual leads which I will follow up this very weekend, since I am going to ...

4. Be more open with those I love.
I finally had a long argument yesterday with someone with whom over the past couple of months I've been having a long, slow period of friction-building tension due to a lack of communication. She lives 400 miles away, in the city where I went to University -- Exeter -- whither I long to return as soon as possible. She is what I would call a "Very long-suffering friend", and we go through far too much strain and stress for one another. Fortunately this fued has been, mostly, resolved, and it only remains for me to hop on a train in three hours' time to go down there and celebrate the turn of the decade in her company.
Resolution 4 is already being put into action, since it is the reason for this post's creation: being open with whatever readership numbers I enjoy here. A lot of love goes into making Anathema understandable, easy to read, and overall as accessible as possible; same goes for Gone Blogal. So, to my silent readers, my vocal readers, and to my whole TWO! (2!) followers, I love you all: go out and enjoy the arbitrary starting point of 2010.

"Until Cataclysm".

I have been looking with hungry eyes at Icecrown tanking gear for my Death Knight. Now, I know that I resolved to be a DPS through and through on my Death Knight this time around, but I've found it quite enjoyable to itemise myself differently to other tanks. Namely, I love +armour items, so I've picked up all that I have access to, giving me a 2,352 boost to my armour; roughly a 3.2% boost to mitigation (from 62.42% to 64.46%, both numbers with Horn. None of those numbers are typos -- that's the way armour diminishes.)

Anyway, I was looking at these, which I'll very likely never get -- they cost 8 Primordial Saronite, after all. And I happened to scroll down to that particular comment I've linked to. I thought it would be good at this late stage of Wrath to remind everyone of what "Until Cataclysm" actually means in terms of upgrades.

When Wrath was launched, Ensidia, in their iLvl164 epics from Sunwell, went straight into Naxxramas and cleared it. They complained that it was too easy. It wasn't. It was intentional. The way that gear has been designed after TBC is that the uppermost tier should be usable in at least the first raid of the new expansion, in order not to result in "Green is the new Purple" syndrome which afflicted people in the transition from Vanilla to TBC.

Now, let's look at some numbers, just to point out that this is something we can extrapolate reasonably from existing data:
BT/Sunwell Epics: iLvl 151/159-164. WotLK Heroic Epics: iLvl 200
Icecrown Epics: iLvl 251/264/277. Cataclysm Heroic epics: iLvl 300. It would make sense from the pattern that Cataclysm epics will be 300.

So, why is it that iLvl 164/264/364 epics will be viable for content from which, pre-farming, you can pick up iLvl 200/300/400 epics? The answer to that is itemisation. Blizzard has said* throughout Wrath that items are not perfectly itemised with every stat you could possibly want straight from the first tier of raiding because it's boring when a new tier comes out and the only gear-picking you need to do is "Well, this one gives +5 SP/Haste/Crit/Int/Stam, so that's my upgrade!". This is why, though we are getting somewhat simplified stats in Cataclysm, we're also getting the option of "Reforging" items -- adjusting their stats slightly to get them slightly more in-line with whatever stat we will want to focus on (Most likely, for us, Intellect, since it'll give spellpower, of course... But we'll see!) -- this forces us to think about our gear if we want to min/max.

We have also seen blue posts saying that Icecrown gear is far more perfectly itemised than any previous tier, because it's built to last.* Again, let's look at previous evidence. This comparison is between the BiS-crafted Sunfire Robe of Sunwell and a Priest's Tier 7.200 robe. Because Spirit was nigh-useless to us in 3.0.8 (A mere 11% spellpower from spirit thanks to talent and glyph. Remember those days? 11%!), the Sunfire Robe destroys the Tier 7 -- you could re-gem Hit rating wherever you would like in order to make up for it: your Tier 6.5 gear would be competitive, if not better in slots such as these; at the very least it would enable you to get into Naxx.

So, certainly it is the case that those legs, and every other item of iLvl264, and some of 251, will be viable in the Plain of the Elements (Which I think is going to be the first raid, but it might not be. We'll see the order in which they choose to do them when they give us more info). "Until Cataclysm" isn't quite right, and it suggests that you'll be sharding all your purples a week before the expansion launches just to get some final gold sprees from the abyss crystals. Instead, Icecrown loot will be useful "Deep into the Cataclysm raid on Normal difficulty".

*All quotes are without their respective sources, because I don't want to spend ages trawling through MMO-Champion to find them. Just trust me that they exist, though.

Anathema 1.3 LIVE.

Pseudo Power has never been so understandable.

Oh, right ...

I totally forgot to mention that on Monday 21st, Fancy Hat Club completed A Tribute to Insanity (10-player). I was on fire.

I now wonder how much nagging it will take to get everyone willing to do A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity. (And we still need to do Herald of the Titans.)

Maybe if I wish it from Santa. He owes me big-time after he failed to make the Gunship drop my telescope.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

@Paolo: Planning for Tier 10.

My fine, Discipline-based fellow Priest Paolo has created a thread about gearing philosophy for Tier 10 -- weighing up the benefit of the Tier 10 set bonuses for Discipline against the gains of taking the SP/Crit/Haste bonuses available from non-set pieces.

The post is here, and you should go and read it before reading this post, since this is a direct response which was too long to fit in the comment box under the blog post itself.

Anathema 1.3.

The new incarnation of the Anathema Shadow Priest guide will not be 100% complete until all database gaps on Wowhead have been filled and I can compile the appropriate BiS lists, and fiddle with them until I've come up with something I find to be correct. This will take some time; however, certain areas such as the Icecrown Citadel section of the "Specific advanced advice" will be updated as I gain experience of the fights. I will also try to make the "Pseudopower" section more informative and relevant to all tiers of play -- at the end of the expansion, this is substantially easier to do because I can suggest gear progression paths.

It'll take a while, but it'll be worth it.

Possible spoilers, just for the sake of it: My 10-man-H BiS list might contain a staff.

3.3: Overall first impressions.

I've had a few days to digest the main parts of the Icecrown Citadel patch, not only from my own class/spec perspective but from a more general perspective of the main features touted in the patch notes. So I'll divide it up appropriately from the specific to the general:

Shadow Priest DoT Haste Scaling

Well, let's be honest, what can anyone say but "awesome"? It's far from being an overpowered change -- it sits just nicely in with the buffs that almost all classes have received. Unfortunately, the one fight on which I would have excelled -- Deathbringer Saurfang -- I have yet to DPS. I switched to Discipline for that fight because I was worried that we might need three healers. Turns out we didn't -- the healing was manageable. I've not yet noticed an increase in my DPS because, in new content, I am more tentative of other fight mechanics at first. I have a feeling that the DoTs are the only reason I managed to come second on the Marrowgar meter, though.

Icecrown Citadel 5-man instances

Forge of Souls

I wish I could get into this more than once per day on Heroic without going through the randomiser. I had spoiled it partially for myself with the PTR sound files of Bronjahm's voice. The music while fighting him, though, makes it so much better than I could have anticipated. POWER-JAZZ. Additionally, of course, the instance music in general sets that mood. If you know that there is a James Brown-esque boss, you instantly notice the Hammond organ solos mixed in with the general spooky vibe that the place is intended to convey.

Devourer of Souls is somewhat annoyingly voice acted and you only get the hot Desire-esque face and voice if your group isn't decked out in 245 epics and zerging him super hard. The loot, however, is brilliant. Blizzard knew exactly what it was doing when it designed that boss and wanted to give maximum nostalgia to anyone who was in Black Temple.

Pit of Saron

This is where things start getting brutal in terms of difficulty. The trash pulls in FoS are more annoyingly-positioned than anything else. The trash in here, though, hits very hard. Magic damage is in the 10k region and melee damage 4k per strike. I feel that Scourgelord Tyrannus's initial conversion into Undead of the Coliseum Champions is not particularly well done -- they're turned from 330k-HP elites into 5k HP normals. I get that the idea trying to be conveyed is that he can turn them immediately, but another point of the Scourge is that the more powerful you are in life the more powerful you become in Undeath. Additionally, because they have so little health, and because Jaina only spawns at the instance entrance when you're already close to pulling the first trash mob yourself, her own "Empowered Blizzard" spell gets unnoticed as you just zerg through the non-elites yourself.

I feel, therefore, that the introduction to this instance is a bit poor -- in terms of specifics, though, rather than overall concept. I see what they're gunning at, but they don't tune the mobs correctly for what they're trying to convey elsewhere. Jaina should spawn much sooner from when you move away from the portal, and the Undead that Tyrannus spawns should be more powerful: it would give both Jaina and the Scourge a more realistic sense of their respective powers.

To move on with the actual instance, though -- Ick is fairly well-designed, but Pursuit (as yet) does not have a "non-tank" modifier -- i.e., it's possible for Pursuit to be trivialised 20% of the time because the tank can be targeted with it. Garfrost's adds are irritating to try to tank, because they are so spread out, and the platform itself lends itself to irritation on the melee DPS side of things. The idea is that, when Garfrost forges a new weapon, it gives you plenty of time to wipe your stacks of his Permafrost debuff by LoSing it. But for a Death Knight, say, with self-removal of the debuff, it's just inconvenient time-wasting because of the distance away to which he jumps. The trash before Tyrannus's gauntlet is the most brutal part -- heavy melee and magic damage, and if you don't have a disease dispeller, or people who read tooltips, you're a bit screwed. Tyrannus does win this instance's Best Voiceover award, though I deducted points for him being American. It would be nice if Blizzard were to get some British actors in when they want that type of voice, rather than Americans who can just affect a fairly decent accent.

Halls of Reflection

This is one of those instances where, if you don't know what you're doing, and you overgear the instance, you'll have minor problems resulting from mistakes. If you don't know what you're doing and you're in appropriate level (Ulduar-level) gear, you'll wipe. If you do know what you're doing and you're in appropriate level gear, it'll be a challenge, but not impossible. It is very well tuned, and I really hope Blizzard doesn't nerf it owing to people complaining that it is "too hard". Falric is an excellent DPS check and Marwyn is a superb group balance-enforcer. Either you have all four decurse bases covered, or you'd better have a damn good healer.

The lore retcon, ignoring a key questline in Icecrown, is rather annoying. There are some weak arguments that can be conjured up such as "Tirion is blinded by his zealotry to see the need for a Lich King", but I don't exactly understand how Blizzard is going to pull the "This new Lich King [Possible spoilers: Bolvar. Well, honestly, it's pretty obvious.] is good and/or won't destroy us!" rabbit out of the Lore Hat without the whole thing being comical.

The Escape from the Lich King event has just one flaw in it, which you only experience once but which is pretty silly: To activate the event, you have to talk to Jaina/Sylvanas. This is not indicated in any way by the hero, nor is it implied by what they say -- they say, quite clearly, "I can't hold him for long, we must run away RIGHT NOW!" -- so what my group did was run down the path. Then someone noticed that nothing was happening, so they went and talked to Jaina. The event started, and all four of us were on the other side of the first ice wall when it appeared. Instawipe. Irritating. "Make your preparations with great haste!" would convey the same sense of urgency without implying that the event starts with no player-given cue. Aside from this design flaw, the event itself is excellent. Watching Arthas inch closer and wondering if you have enough time to kill this mob before he unleashes wintry instadeath on you is quite scary, even after the first time.

Overall

Blizzard said it would be epic. It is epic. The whole three instances back-to-back form a 5-man raid more than a set of 5-man heroics. You really feel like it's easy to screw up and wipe, even if you're overgeared. Priests, naturally, should dust off their Shackle macros (Yes, you should have it macroed) and have a raid mark keybound to indicate a Shackle target.

Looking for Dungeon system

A success, without a doubt. I think the gear-matching system is a bit squiffy, as it seems to match players of equal gear, rather than matching "less experienced players with more experienced players" as Blizzard diplomatically puts it -- so it feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor ... not poorer, but certainly richer at a slower pace -- but maybe it's as golden for people in Tier 7 as it is in Tier 9.

The removal of /rw in parties has to be reversed, though -- or a /pw (Party Warning) command needs to be added. It is very irritating to have one's /rw Pulling %t now! macro disabled and having to resort to /s.

I will look forward to using this on my lowbie alts. It might even encourage me to level them solo instead of relying on the 3-man static group I occasionally enjoy on my shaman.

The one problem, of course, is Additional instances cannot be launched. Please try again later. Hopefully this will be fixed somehow.

Icecrown Citadel 10-player

"Balanced" is again the word to be used here. It was quite easy for us, but we're decked out in iLvl245 epics, which is a whole tier above the intended range for ICC10N. It is also epic. I would like to pick out two aspects I particularly like:

Trash

I think that Blizzard now has the balance perfect in terms of trash tuning. Good trash, to my mind, fills three purposes:

1) Prepares you, either through abilities or through mental strain, for the boss it prefaces. Some of the best examples of this were found in Ulduar: Dark Rune Thunderers before Thorim and Faceless Horrors before Vezax are the two strongest examples of direct mechanic training. Deathwhisper trash has such mechanics: some of the trash gets raised as an undead copy of itself once it falls, and the large single pulls demonstrate the importance of spreading out.

2) Can wipe you. This should not be in an overpowered sense, like Ulduar first-week trash being overtuned in 10-man, but rather it should feel like you need to use CC and you need to be careful, alert and awake to make it through.

3) Should be short. If it goes on for too many corridors, trash is just a waste of time that serves less and less of a purpose the more you increase its frequency.

These three rules serve one overall aim: for the whole instance to be fun -- not just the bosses. If you keep the trash short but hard-hitting, such that people take as much time over four hard packs of mobs as they would ten or twelve easy packs, then you create a much more enjoyable feel about it. It's boring when trash is a faceroll but goes on forever, and it's also boring when trash is too hard but goes on for a long time (see Tempest Keep trash). It's much more fun when you reach Deathwhisper and you can see that, yes, there is trash, but it's just four packs. It makes you more likely to take your time and enjoy taking your time.

The pace of the whole instance so far is enjoyable, and the remaining wings will be worth the wait. Some of the achievements for the Glory meta will require four weeks to get used to (I'm looking at you, I'm on a Boat), so the leisurely pace we can afford to spend is welcome.

Storyline

5-man retcons aside, the story in Icecrown is proving to be epic. I won't spoil anything, save to say that what happens after you kill Deathbringer Saurfang is rather moving and (on the part of certain characters for whom jerkassery is par for the course) surprising.

Disenchant button

Thank you, Blizzard. <3

Quest Tracker

Apparently it's inaccurate as hell for some categories of quest, so please do send in bug reports if it tells you to go somewhere that ends up being false according to the facts (Searched through Wowhead, of course).

Emblems of Frost

Emblem of Frost, the new token. This is a brief run-down for the ten-man raider in terms of accessibility.

10.251: 60/60/95/95/95 Emblems required.

When 3.3 drops, we can get 6 Emblems immediately from running through the new 5-man dungeons, starting with this quest. Handily, they're all one questline -- except the final one, which currently says on Wowhead "Repeatable", though I suspect that's just a PTR UI bug.

2 Emblems per day from the random heroic, of course.

5 per week for the weekly raid quest -- let's be honest, this is going to be hilarious. Either you get Marrowgar, whom you will kill as a matter of course for the sake of progression anyway, or you get to kill a boss from a previous tier of instance, which, unless you still wish to clear ToGC10 (which you may still want to do), will mean nothing more than steamrolling that boss with 1-3 tiers' worth of outgearing. A nice easy warm-up to a Wednesday progression night if ever there were one.

8 Emblems per week (initially) from the first wing (four bosses) of ICC. This will be the case for anything between 2 to 4 weeks, depending on Blizzard's final decision regarding gating.

4 Emblems per week (And, presumably, a shot at the pinata for Tier 10 gloves or legs!) from Toravon the Ice Watcher on 10 and 25-player [pending Season 8 release]. Fight mechanics can sort-of be seen here, though I want to strangle that Mage for having no raid frames at all. It's like Koralon, except the flame patches (Ice patches, in this case) come alive; and, instead of Meteor Fists, Toravon will just do a knockback on the tank, so tanking him up against a wall seems to be the standard.

So, 6 emblems to start you off, plus 14 + 5 + 8 per week for the first three weeks or so (until a new wing of ICC and VoA comes out)
Week 1: 33 Emblems
Week 2: 60 Emblems
Week 3: 87 Emblems. [Potentially +4, since Toravon might be released here]
Week 4: Yay, I pick up some Tier 10. \o/

My shopping list priority, if you're curious, goes Helm --> Chest --> Shoulders --> Gloves. After that, I'll be saving up all my EoF for Primordial Saronite, my priority there being Legs --> Boots.

Total EoF shopping list cost: 95 + 95 + 60 + 60 + (23 * 8) + (23 * 5) = 609.

I can see my Death Knight's EoF contributing to the Primordial Saronite costs to speed things up significantly.

In completely unrelated news I had four glasses of wine with dinner and woke up about an hour ago hungover.

Henry Hatsworth

If you have a DS, and any sense of taste, you will get this game.

Hybrid Tax

There was a Ghostcrawler post recently that outlined, in proper detail, the logic behind capping Hybrid DPS just below that of a pure DPS class.

Tonight, we got Tribute to Mad Skill after wiping only once on Anub'arak, through nothing more than bad luck.

We almost wiped the second time because our main-and-off-tank-encounter-breaking-Paladin-healer died at around 7%.

We survived because both of our hybrid DPS -- Chayah and I -- switched to spam healing the tanks to keep them alive, with occasional support on Pen Cold healing so that our Discipline priest could provide Penance etc. Once our Anub tank had been stabilised after a Frost Slash that triggered her Ardent Defender, I switched back into Shadowform and continued to support nuking Anub'arak.

49 Attempts. Mad Skill. Cause? Hybrids.

That is why we are taxed. Accept it.

And we both still did over 5k DPS.

Upvote this.

I won't ask this often, because it invites trollish downvoting, but could you please upvote this comment for me? My irritation can be summed up by the final sentence.

If there is one thing worse than Thottbot comments that read "give this to [my caster class] because I deserve it more than [rival caster class]", it is people rabidly downvoting anything they see that refers to a certain class under the assumption that what is being said is redundant.

Desert Buss..zzzzzz...

Every year for the past three years, Canadian comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun, known not only for the weekly videos posted to their own website but also their work on The Escapist through Unskippable and ENN, have played the most boring game in the world in support of Child's Play. The game is Desert Bus -- the more people donate, the longer they keep playing. Aside from smashing last year's donation record of over $70,000, they seem this year to be trying as hard as possible not to crash. They are currently working on their tenth point, which, after 83 hours of gameplay, means they have barely crashed at all.

For more information, to donate, and to join in with the live chat and live video streams of the event (which also feature various other ways to encourage you to part with your money for the sake of charity -- auctions and humiliation of Matt seeming to be the two most popular methods), visit desertbus.org. And do check out their video work cited above -- they are excellent comedians.

Muahahaha. Isn't it beautiful?

Skilled Starcaller Sinespe.

Light of Elune

One use only, so I was saving it for a special occasion. Used it tonight on a 3% Anub'arak wipe. No kill -- took him down to 1%. Alas.

We'll get him on Monday.

13,300 mana / 1234 mana

= 10.

10*2.2s = 22s.

1,632,000 health / 22s / 6 DPS = 12k individual DPS.

Isn't going to happen, m8s.

@C

[Sinespe] http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/tier10sneak/huge-sh.jpg
[Zicon] ... err, what?
[Sinespe] Shaman Tier 10
[Sinespe] Looking at that helm, what's your first reaction?
[Zicon] "who put that moose in the freezer"

ENJOY 3.3.

Gear II: Gear Harder.

I wish I could drop this. I just can't. (Just as Paletress refuses to drop her trinket.)

I've already mentioned gear once, from a top-down approach. Now I need to return to the root and work upwards, because this is the position in which I find myself.

A certain website with a gear-score-based system (Whose name I am not going to mention ... But let's call them "Iamamazed-Champions") gives the gear score of my recently-80 Death Knight is a mere 1.8k. The reason I am linking you a screenshot to my page, rather than linking the page itself, is because I want to deny Iamamazed-Champions as much web traffic as I can. Now, I don't particularly care for the number itself. I more want to draw your attention to the "Progress bar" that they have. They insist that I should focus on Naxx25.

I'll back up a bit: My Death Knight dinged 80 three days ago. I have geared her up like a hardcore raider on steroids, Powerthirst and chocolate, inasmuch as luck would allow me to deck her out in free epics. I've never played a Death Knight before -- or, rather, I've never played one since 3.0.8, and they've changed a lot since then. As a result, I'm pretty much re-learning the class, and I will write later on about what it has taught me of the situation regarding melee DPS.

But, because I have a brain, I am capable of pulling between 3,498 and 4,124 DPS with that character, on a boss, depending on my raid composition. In a VoA 10-man Class Run with bad raid composition (No Feral Druid, no Enhancement Shaman, no Retribution Paladin ... pretty much all I had for physical damage was the Rogue), I was able to pull 3,750.2 DPS on Koralon. I topped that meter, and it was a one-shot. It was slower than if we had all been 5,000 DPS, but we cleared the required threshold.

Now, Koralon is not a benchmark for PvE DPS. He's designed as a PvP boss: with the exclusion of tanks requiring defence-based gear, competent PvPers working around hit caps and the like are supposed to be able to kill him. But, let's go through some DPS thresholds for a moment.

The following is on key, non-optional bosses for various raids, who have enrage or berserk timers and the fewest gimmicks I could find. Where there are gimmicks, I explain reasonable allowances in-depth.
I always assume the following:

• Tanks do 50% of the damage of DPS classes when tanking; and 75% of the damage when they have nothing else to do but DPS, making the further assumption (which will be very false in a great many cases, but I will nevertheless make the assumption) that they also have no Dual PvE DPS Spec.
• Raid composition is always 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 DPS for a 10-man; 2 tanks, 5 healers, 18 DPS for a 25-man.

So, let's dive in, shall we?

Naxxramas 10-man:

Faerlina: 2,231,200 health, plus four adds of 83,408 health, for a total of 2,564,832 health. 60*4 + 60 = 300-second soft Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 8549.44. Individual DPS requirement (One tank. Other tank on adds, so not added): 1554.44
Patchwerk: 4,322,950 health; 360-second hard Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 12008.194. Individual DPS requirement (Two tanks): 2001.36.
Thaddius: 3,834,875 health; 360-second hard Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 10652.43. Individual DPS requirement (One tank, other DPSing): 1704.38....
Loatheb: 6,693,600 health; 420-second Inevitable Doom Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 15937.14. RDPS requirement (One tank, other DPSing): 2549.94.

None of these factor in mechanics such as damage boosts (Thaddius and Loatheb) or movement (Thaddius). At a guess, the +50% crit bonus on Loatheb would increase DPS by about 20%. So, the DPS requirement for Naxxramas 10-man is about 2.1k, give or take.

Naxxramas 25-man:

Faerlina: 6,763,325 health, plus two adds of 521,320 health, for a total of 7,805,965. 60*4 + 60 = 300-second soft Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 26019.88. Individual DPS requirement (One tank. Other tank on adds, so not added): 1406.48.
Patchwerk: 13,038,575 health; 360-second hard Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 36218.26. Individual DPS requirement (Three tanks): 1957.74.
Thaddius: 30,400,100 health; 360-second hard Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 84444.72... Individual DPS requirement (One tank, other DPSing): 4386.73.... Actual Individual DPS requirement, given a 100% damage boost all of the time by Charges: 2193.36.
Loatheb: 20,220,250 health; 420-second Inevitable Doom Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 48143.45. RDPS requirement (One tank, other DPSing): 2500.95. (Before crit bonus accommodation.)

Well, this is amusing. In the case of Patchwerk, the DPS requirement goes down on 25-man. But, again, we're left with roughly the same value: 2.1k DPS required for Naxxramas 25-man. This means you can do Naxxramas 25 in the same gear that you would be able to do Naxxramas 10: If you pull the requirement for Naxxramas 10, you pull the requirement for Naxxramas 25.

Malygos 10-man:

Malygos is a hard fight to gauge accurately, because of the strange way in which it works. However, we will model it thus: We will devote equal time between the three phases. This means you have 200 seconds in phase 1 to take him to 50%, then 200 seconds to kill adds, then 200 seconds to burn him down. The last of these cannot be modelled, because the drakes don't work that way. However, we will assume that if you have the DPS to take him down to 50% in three minutes you will have the gear required for your Drakes to be scaled far enough to burn him in phase 3, shall we? That sounds reasonable to me. We will also assume, from the nature of Sparks and Vortices, that Sparks contribute a 20% DPS increase. We will even do Iamamazed-Champions a favour here and assume that you are forbidden from taking Malygos below 50% health after phase 2 initiates.

Phase 1: 6,972,500 / 2 = 3,486,250 health. RDPS requirement: 17431.25. Individual DPS requirement (One tank. Six DPS): 2681.73. Factoring in the 20% DPS boost, Actual Individual DPS requirement: 2145.38.

The DPS requirement for Malygos-10 is 2145.38 DPS.

Malygos 25-man:

Phase 1: 19,523,000 / 2 = 9,761,500 health. RDPS requirement: 48807.5. Individual DPS requirement (One tank. 19 DPS.): 2502.94. Actual Individual DPS: 2002.35

The DPS requirement for Malygos-25 is less than 10-man.

Sartharion 10-man:

Drakes! We will include drakes here for your pleasure. Sartharion+0 and +1 have no Enrage timers. So, technically, there isn't a DPS requirement. It's very safe to put them with Naxx etc.

Sartharion+2: Two tanks are assumed here. Shadron will land 45 seconds after Tenebron does. Ideally, then, you want to kill Tenebron after 50 seconds maximum. 976,150*1.25 = 1,220,188 health. RDPS requirement: 24403.76. Individual DPS requirement for 50 seconds: 4437.04. Assuming you have a Shaman, this is reduced by 30% to 3105.93. Very hefty stuff compared to Naxx.

Sartharion+3: Two tanks with a DPS indisposed after 25 seconds on Tenebron to tank adds. Vesperon will land 95 seconds after Tenebron -- 50 seconds after Shadron. Ideally, the raid will have killed Tenebron and taken Shadron down to about 50% by the time Vesperon lands. 1,830,282 health. RDPS requirement: 19266.12. Remember, one DPS is out of the action after about 25% of the time, so he only counts as 0.25 of a DPS. Individual requirement is then: 4056.02.

There is a reason Sartharion10+3 was considered the hardest boss before Ulduar. The setup requirements are so tight with only 10 people that the DPS needed is very much inflated -- either you have three tanks, or you are under-tanked. If you are under-tanked, you can now do the Zerg method:

Sartharion+3Z: One tank, with a DPS (Feral druid, usually) indisposed from 35% onwards, kiting Tenebron away. This is not reflected, since it is pretty much balanced by Heroism, which you will have if you're trying this. 3,137,625 health. Time allowed: between 76 and 100 seconds, give or take. We'll say 85. RDPS: 36913.23. Split between 8(.5 for the tank): 4614.15 Individual DPS.

Sartharion-25:

Sartharion+2: Three tanks assumed, so there is no DPS requirement here. Lumped with Naxx.

Sartharion+3: Three tanks assumed, but this time you really do need to burn down Tenebron and Shadron pretty hard. We will say that they must both die by the time Vesperon lands. 5,578,000 health in 95 seconds. RDPS requirement: 58715.78. Individual DPS requirement (17 DPS): 3355.18 DPS.

Ulduar-10 Normal:

XT-002 is the obvious one here, but I'll also do others. Freya and Hodir are nice.

XT-002-N: 5,000,008 health, but with additional damage taken in Heart phases. Effective health is roughly 3,000,000. 600-second hard Enrage. Oh yes. You know where this is going, don't you? RDPS requirement: 5000. Individual DPS requ... Oh I can't even do it. Work it out for yourselves. What a joke.

Freyaaaaaaaa: One tank. Over 6 minutes, you must down different sets of adds -- one per minute. The highest health of these is the Children, with a combined health of 735,054.
Add phase RDPS requirement : 12250.9. Individual: 1884.75
Freya herself has 1,394,500 health, and you must kill her in 4 minutes before the Berserk occurs. She will negate 6,000 DPS. RDPS requirement: 6000 + 5810.41 = 11810.41. Individual: 1816.98.

Hodir: 8,115,990 health. 480-second Enrage timer. RDPS requirement: 16908.3125. Individual (1 tank): 2601.27. Assuming poor use of buffs, leading to a 30% increase in DPS, this means 1820.89 base individual DPS. This allows for a couple of pieces of Frost Res gear!

Thorim: 3,346,800 health on Normal mode. His stacking buff is gained approximately once every fifteen seconds, and it becomes impossible to tank and heal through once cooldowns have been blown around stack 14 on Normal. 15 * 14 = 210. RDPS: 15937.14; Individual DPS: 2656.19

Ulduar-10N DPS requirement: 2.7k. Now that you've seen my formula for Ulduar, I'm going to be brief with the rest of my analysis of this raid.

Ulduar-25N:

XT-002. Let's see if he's still a joke, shall we? 22,499,978 health, minus 40% again for the Heart. 13,499,987 health. RDPS: 22499.978. The Berserk timer makes this such a joke.

Freya:
Adds: 2,280,755 health in 60 seconds = 38012.58 RDPS = 2000.66 individual
Freya: 4,183,500 over 240 seconds. RDPS: 8000 + 17431.25 = 25431.25. Individual DPS: 1338.48.

Hodir: 32,477,904 health in 480 seconds. RDPS: 67662.3. Individual DPS: 3561.17. Account for poor use of buffs: 2492.82 DPS.

Thorim: 11,713,800 health over 210 seconds. RDPS: 55780. Individual DPS: 2935.78

DPS requirement for 25-man Ulduar: about 3k.

Ulduar-10H:

XT-002: He's no longer such a joke. Hopefully ... 5,000,008 health. 25% of that to enter the Heart phase, then kill the heart (900,000 health), then burn down another 7,500,012 health. A total of 13,400,020 health in 600 seconds. That sounds more like it! Let's try running those numbers. Raid DPS requirement: 22333.36. Individual DPS: 3435.90

Freya: I might be working with out-dated information. Tankspot claims that the adds and Freya gain a 72% health bonus with all three Elders up, but this could be wrong. But hey, I'll run with it.
Adds: 1,264,292 health in 60 seconds: 21071.548 RDPS. 3511.92 individual DPS.
Freya: 2,398,540 in 240 seconds. 6000 + 9993.91 = 15993.91 RDPS. 2665.65 individual DPS.

Hodir: 8,115,990 health in 180 seconds. 45088.83 RDPS. Seven DPS for this one with a couple of Frost Res pieces. 6441.26 individual DPS. Roughly a 70% increase in damage from good use of buffs. 3788.97 base DPS.

Thorim: 4,183,500 health in 210 seconds. RDPS: 19921.42. Individual DPS: 3320.23

DPS requirement for Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 Player): 3.8k

Ulduar-25H:

XT-002: 43,124,962 health over 600 seconds. RDPS: 71874.93. Individual DPS: 3782.89.

Freya:
Adds: 3,922,899 health over 60 seconds. RDPS: 65381.64. Individual DPS: 3441.13
Freya: 7,195,620 health over 240 seconds. RDPS: 8000 + 29981.75 = 37981.75. Individual DPS: 1999.03

Hodir: 32,477,904 over 180 seconds. RDPS: 180432.8. Individual DPS: 9496.46. With good use of buffs, there's about a 100% multiplier here, so 4748.23 base Individual DPS.

Thorim: 14,642,250 over 210 seconds. RDPS: 69725. Individual DPS: 3669.73.

DPS requirement for Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25-player): 4.8k.

Trial of the Crusader-10:

Twin Val'kyr: 5,790,000 damage over 360 seconds. I'm not 100% certain on the DPS increase of the Light/Dark Attunement, but it feels like 25%, so I'll go with that. RDPS requirement: 16083.33. Individual DPS requirement: 2680.55; 2144.44 with DPS increase.

Anub'arak: 4,180,000. This is a little tricky to work out, but let's have a go. Berserk is 10 minutes. After three burrow phases, which adds up to 7 minutes and 30 seconds altogether, you'll need to be taking him into phase 3 and killing him.
100%-30%: 2,926,000 health over about 260 seconds. 11253.84 RDPS.
30%-0%. This is trickier. Anub'arak will drain 10% of your raid's health -- a minimum of 2,500 HPS. We'll assume, though, that you keep everyone at about 7,000 health (Offsetting tank health). That's 7,000 HPS for Anub'arak. 1,254,000 health over the remaining 150 seconds. 8360 + 7000 = 15360 RDPS. Individual DPS: 2560.

Depressing how low the threshold is, no? Only 2.6k Oh well.

Trial of the Crusader-25:

Twin Val'kyr: 27,890,000 over 360 seconds. RDPS: 77472.22. Individual DPS: 4077.48; 3261.98 with Attunement bonus.

Anub'arak: 20,917,500 health.
Phase 1: 14,642,250 over 260 seconds. RDPS: 56316.34. Individual DPS: 2964.01
Phase 3: 6,275,250 over 150 seconds. RDPS: 41835 + 17500 = 59335. Individual DPS: 3122.89

DPS requirement for ToC25: 3.3k

Trial of the Grand Crusader-10:

Beasts of Northrend:
Gormok: 2,789.000 health over 180 seconds, plus ~135,000 health by four snobolds: a total of 3,329,000. RDPS: 18494.44. Individual DPS: 3082.40. A DPS penalty applied for anyone Snobolled, resulting in roughly a 25% decrease in DPS. Actual Individual DPS requirement: 3853
Acidmaw & Dreadscale: 3,137,625 health over approximately 165 seconds. 19015.90 RDPS. 3169.31 Individual DPS
Icehowl: ~4,100,000 health over 195 seconds. 21025.64 RDPS; 3504.27 Individual DPS.

Twin Val'kyr: ~8,000,000 health over 360 seconds. 22222.22 RDPS; 3703.70 Individual DPS.

Anub'arak: The general idea here is to take two healers and go for a single Burrow phase. 5,440,000 health, with 2*235,000 adds every 45 seconds.
100%-30%: 38651.85 RDPS. 5521.69 Individual DPS: You would ideally have Heroism for this, bringing the requirement down to around 4693.43 DPS. After that, it's not so much a burn as a survival test and an intelligent, reactive healing test.

DPS requirement for ToGC10: 4.7k

Trial of the Grand Crusader 25-player:

Northrend Beasts:
Gormok: 11,853,250 plus 808,860*6 = 16,706,410 over 180 seconds. 92813.38 RDPS; 4884.91 individual DPS. The DPS penalty for being snobolled isn't quite so severe here, because of the increased abundance in general. 10%-ish. 5373.40 DPS
Acidmaw & Dreadscale: 13,387,200 over approximately 165 seconds. Individual DPS: 4270.24
Icehowl: 18,128,500 over 195 seconds. 4892.98 individual DPS.

Twin Val'kyr: 39,046,000 over 360 seconds. 5708.47 individual DPS. 4757.06 base individual DPS

Anub'arak:
27,192,750 health, plus at least 727,974*8 =

100%-30%: 24,858,717 damage in 180 seconds. 7268.63 individual DPS requirement.

Requirement for ToGC25: About 5.5k, with incidental AoE pushing up to 7.3k

Onyxia:

She doesn't have an Enrage timer, but 3.5k is more than acceptable. It all gets skewed by AoE anyway.

To recap, in order of increasing DPS:
Naxx10, Naxx25, Malygos 10, Malygos 25, Sartharion 10+0/1; Sartharion 25 +0-2: 2.1k DPS
Trial of the Champion 10: 2.6k
Ulduar 10: 2.7k
Ulduar 25: 3k
Trial of the Champion 25: 3.3k
Sartharion25+3: 3.3k
Onyxia10: 3.5k
Onyxia25: 3.5k
Ulduar 10H: 3.8k
Sarthation10+3: 4.1k
Sartharion10+3Z: 4.6k
ToGC 10: 4.7k
Ulduar 25H: 4.8k
ToGC 25: 5.5k

Before this analysis, I showed you a screenshot from Iamamazed-Champions. I've zoomed in on what I want to show (I'm sorry that it breaks my blog's template):



Now, let's look at the same image, with those actual, real DPS values taken into account. Remember, "Yellow" indicates what I should be focusing on -- i.e., what I am geared to complete, and where I am likely to get the most upgrades.





What's out of my reach in my current gear? Trial of the Grand Crusader 10, OS10+3Z, Ulduar 25H, Trial of the Grand Crusader 25.

So, to Iamamazed-Champions, I have only this to say: You have been measured, and found wanting.

When Bots Go Bad.

Warning. NSFW. Seriously. But it's so goddamn hilarious.

There is a bot in a channel I frequent in IRC called Wheaties. He, for the most part, comes out with garbled, often crude, messages. Sometimes this is random. Other times, it is when you address him by name.

This link catalogues the very best, oh-so-appropriate times that he fires off a message, in this particular channel and others like it.

I'm dying of laughter.

A Bubble of Healing Bloggers

So, I've been tagged by my GM over at Planet of the Hats to participate in a questionnaire started by Miss Medicina. I will confess to having been forewarned about this indirectly by Paolo, who was tagged earlier in the day. I will also confess that I ... don't actually have anyone I can tag -- only person I know is Paolo, really. Oh, wait! I know! Muahahaha ... The next link in the chain will be at the bottom.

Post this questionnaire, with your answers, on your blog. Pick the healing class you know most about (or is the focus of your blog) for the questionnaire, and then send it over to another healing blogger you know and love who heals with a DIFFERENT class. Include a link to the blogger who sent you the questionnaire, as well as a link to the blogger to whom you are sending it.

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Sinespe, Discipline Priest, primarily shadow
  
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) When required by my guild, I heal Trial of the Grand Crusader 10-player, up to and including the Twin Val'kyr.
  
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Lightwell. No, seriously; stop laughing. Lightwell. I know it's not even in my spec, but it is my favourite Priest healing spell. People need to be educated in its use, because it is ludicrously powerful. Coming in a close second is Binding Heal. Both of those spells are unique to the Priest class, in spite of all the homogenisation that has gone on in Wrath.
  
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Either Greater Heal or Divine Hymn. The former just because I forget or don't find time to use it, the latter because by the time I realise I have it we've probably already wiped. I need to work on that.
  
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? As just about every other priest will have said, our biggest strength is that we have a spell for every occasion. Specific to Discipline, Borrowed Time allows for quite amazing single-target burst healing when it's needed -- Power Word: Shield is an instant 7-9k's worth of prevention, and following that up with a GCD-capped Flash Heal ... there's nothing quite like it.
  
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? I ... really don't think we have one in PvE. Specifically where Discipline is concerned, we have quite a lot of ways in which we can remain mobile while still casting useful spells -- Prayer of Mending and PW: S being the instant ways to do that, and Borrowed Time allowing for very short bursts of standing still while needing to move. I guess you could say that we have problems where our itemisation is concerned, because the lines between throughput and longevity are very rigidly defined: Intellect gives negligible throughput, and spellpower negligible longevity. But that's not a bad thing -- all it requires is intelligence enough to focus on a particular philosophy according to what you and your raid need.
  
• In a 25 [10] man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? (I don't do 25-mans, so I've edited this question.) I don't actually have a preference. Discipline has very strong supportive raid healing with its shields and Prayer of Mending, but also strong supportive Tank healing with Penance, Bubbles and Flash Heal. In a 10-man raid where the other two healers are a Resto Druid (Almost certainly a raid healer) and a Holy Paladin (Almost certainly a tank healer), I like to fill in the gaps between the two.
  
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Discipline, of course. I wouldn't give up my offspec for anything. I like to feel that I have an intuitive knowledge of both Discipline and Shadow -- as such, if either spec gets jumbled by changes, I get jumbled by them too. (In the words of "Kungen", "Live inside your character. If it dies, you die. FOCUS!")
  
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? I would most likely have trouble playing a Holy Paladin. I know that they have a lot of utility if they spec 51/20/0, but they are, for the most part, a "Stand still and heal" kind of a class. They get most hamstrung by movement fights, and especially in ToGC with fights like Gormok the Impaler with his Snobolds and Jaraxxus with his bassément Mistresses, I'd feel annoyed if a tank died because of my inability to heal them.
  
• What is your worst habit as a healer? The same as when I'm DPSing: Jumping (to the left or right, generally) whenever I cast an instant spell. If I hit PW: S, I jump. Prayer of Mending? Jump. However, I see this as a good thing: I have been conditioned to associate "Instant-cast" with "jumping" -- i.e., when I need to move, I will know my limits in terms of my healing capability, and I will know where my instant-cast buttons are.
  
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? I dunno ... I guess when I'm in PuGs I get annoyed at DPS who pull less DPS than me (while I'm healing. I smite in 5-mans to alleviate the boredom) -- and there have been people who do that, in epics, no less. I know they're only heroics, but I do wish people would focus just a little bit. I don't like slacking from other people, when I'm always trying to run at >90% efficiency for whatever I'm doing.
  
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Oh, definitely. I mean, I'd love some kind of Power Word: Bacon that I could apply to a target, and which would mirror my Penance healing -- that would give me a bit more single-target healing output to compete with Paladins, but, really, it would be a luxury. It's not something we need.
  
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? I use Pitbull. If Boss health is at 0%, fellow raiders' health are above 0%, and my mana is at 10% or lower after having popped every mana cooldown I have, then I consider myself to have performed perfectly. I do check the "Deaths" section of Recount to see if there were anything I could have done to keep dead people alive, but apart from that I don't generally focus much on anything other than what I'm doing at the time of a boss fight. If I screw up, I know it, because it doesn't happen often.
  
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? That we are tank healers. I think that misconception still exists -- I don't think enough people yet rate Power Word: Shield spam as a viable form of raid healing; or, if they do, I don't think they realise that we not only can raid shield but also can tank-heal at the same time.
  
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? The importance of Meditation. While levelling my Death Knight, I've seen so many holy priests who have gone too deep into Holy before hitting Northrend, and thus haven't picked up Meditation (including one train-wreck of a priest, but he has since respecced Discipline and it doesn't look as terrible as it used to). I find that Discipline is pretty self-explanatory. It's obviously about shields, and it's obviously centred around Flash Heal and Penance.
  
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? They wouldn't see a pattern. I try to keep low overhealing, but apart from that, it is entirely fight-dependent
  
• Haste or Crit and why? MOAR DAPPS
  
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Holy Priest. It's changed far too much since Wrath came out, and I don't really recognise it any more. I sort of get it, but ...
  
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? /cast [target=focus] Power Infusion, on the Macro side, and that's all. Add-ons, I use Grid, Quartz ... that's about all.
  
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I follow Paolo's advice: Intellect comes on gear, Spirit comes on gear where there are no double-dip slots, so stack Spellpower and Crit as high as you can. Moar DAPPS.

So. Tone. Your turn. You're not a different class, but I don't know anyone else with a blog. Go go.

Gear.

Paolo has already written on this subject, but something just happened which incensed me to the point where I had to add to this, from something of an opposite end of the spectrum, but firing at the same point. The point is that "Gear is not everything". But the premise this time, instead of being about skilled people in low gear, is unskilled people in Naxx gear.

I'm going to just say this bluntly, because I feel like it. Stop blaming bad DPS on your gear.

In my Simcrafting, I ran a simulation of a Patchwerk fight, with the gear template being this set. This is a set of gear that I am actively collecting, to prove a point, but for now, I will work off the following information to build a reasonable hypothesis:

Simcraft gave my Blue gear a DPS potential of 4.3k DPS.
On a target dummy, I determined that I work at a 92.5% rate of efficiency with respect to mess ups in rotation, crit variance, and the like. So, on Patchwerk, I would be able to pull 4k DPS in my blue gear.

Let me say that again: A skilled Shadow Priest can pull 4k DPS in heroic blues, given full raid buffs and less than 500ms of latency.

This is also a continuation of The Greedy Goblin's foray into Ulduar10 wearing gear sets rather similar to the one that I have created. In another post, though I believe it is on the same blog, Gevlon states that high-level gear only accounts for around a 40% DPS increase in current casual content -- i.e., if someone in iLvl 200 epics does 4k DPS, that same person on the same fight with iLvl232 epics will do 5.6k DPS.

Now, when a class is said to have "scaling problems", either positive or negative, this is because their gear is either contributing too much or too little a proportion to this DPS gain (I.e., it's either above or below 40%) -- and I know that you can throw a tonne of examples at me about why the 40% figure is arbitrary, such as melee classes scaling better with their weapons than any other part of their gear, or X class pulling 200% of the DPS in Ilvl245 gear that they pulled in iLvl200 gear, but my point still remains solid through all the minutiae: Player skill is far more important than gear.

I won't rant for long about the incident itself, but, to summarise: Someone in VoA25 pulled 3k DPS and apologised for it. In their apologetic sentence, they said they "Needed better gear". They were in iLvl200-213 epics. I called them out on it. They then fell back on "This is my offspec."

You know what? It's fine to do badly in your offspec. Make that the core of your apology for why you only pull 3k DPS. Don't blame it on your gear. If you blame it on your gear, it carries with it the implication that you have this false belief that, with a full complement of ToC epics, you will magically transform into an awesome raider.

And don't put me on ignore when I'm about to link you to my shadow priest guide. You want to improve? Listen to me.

One last hurra-LEEEEROOOOOY ...

Sometimes, just sometimes, there arise from the ashes, phoenix-like, old memes, for one final, triumphant, Original Content return.

May it now rest in pieces.

... And everyone else. <3

So while I'm on the subject of thanking people and making them known, and since I don't really want to blogroll notable people whom I read, here is just a run-down list of all the other fine folks in the Wowhead Priest and General communities, and some other awesome people, and why they are most certainly worthy of mention in this little corner of the blogosphere:

Wowhead:

General awesome people

Casey (Malgayne) -- Awesome community manager, if far too infuriatingly forgiving of some of the trolls on the Wowhead forums. Always a joy to talk with through IRC or the super sekrit Premium e-mail address. He has this blog, too.
Corgan -- Corgan is a dick. Anyone who has been on #wowhead will know this. Be on his good side, though (I.e., Don't Be A Dick), and you find a cuddly owl who cares about the upper-tier content and cares about enabling people like me to get there. Hear that, Corgan? Your secret's out. Better start telling people to eat dicks again, or your reputation might start faltering.
Sarah (Noxychu) -- Has a hot voice (and I say that as someone who is used to hearing English voices anyway, so is not biased by the sexiness of British accents in general). She's also a Priest, and an extraordinarily talented artist -- and I hope that Blizzard takes note of her abilities sooner or later, because she would be a credit to their design department. She also keeps trying to get me play on the US servers. Not any time soon, I'm afraid, my dear. ;3

Priestlings

Euan (Primar) -- A retired Shadow Priest, through whom I was able to elbow my way into the Troupe of Superfluously Flamboyant Headwear where I now permanently reside. He now occasionally attempts to derail threads in the Priest section of Wowhead. I encourage him; he has a 100% success rate at derailment. Hilarious to listen to when drunk on Ventrilo. Always going AFK for more beer.
Paolo -- A Discipline Priest of whom I am a keen disciple, and with whom I have some kind of undefined rivalry. Day by day, I am slowly turning him British, while tapping him of all useful knowledge regarding the ways of the Bubble. Soon, Paolo, the student will become the Master. Of what, I'm not sure.
karlusdavius -- In the gold corner, representing Holy Priests. Wowhead's resident expert of the ways of CoH and Holy Contentration (or what we folks used to call OO5SR), and infrequent troll -- but he's toned that down a lot.
Patty132471 -- British, so I am biased to include him. An intelligent contributor to the forums, always worth reading.
Seneca -- At the time that Seneca actually started making himself known on the Priest boards, I was in my third year of Uni, and, coincidentally, part of my Latin course was to study three of Seneca's works. This I find amusing, though in no way significant of anything. Recently returned to the fold, and hopefully sticking around, Seneca is a fellow Shadow Priest, and Lord of Priest Memes. im shock.
Gwennevere -- Doesn't post often, which is a shame, because I always know to expect quality when I see the Rapture avatar.
kuinkitty -- A Paladin, regularly, but has recently entered the Disciples' fold and is doing rather well, from what I gather. A resident of #wowhead.
Astarael -- Another #wowhead resident, part of the little clique that Noxy, Euan, he and I share as Priests of IRC.

Other awesome folk:

Sihmm -- Also Chayah (ch-eye-ah ("ch" as in "loch")), Charles, or simply C. My GM. Very supportive, and willing to listen to far too many of the walls of text I throw his way.
Boubouille -- This guy requires no description. His website says it all.
Fáy -- A Shadow Priest on Shadowsong, with whom I enjoy talking about our buffs and nerfs. A hardcore 25-man raider.

If you're not on this list and you should be, then I'm very sorry for leaving you out, and I will remedy it as soon as you /glare at me.

Belated thanks.

It occurs to me that I never properly accredited my new blog design and layout, after my previous "I'm sorry for the mess" post.

Thanks must go to Zicon of Wowhead -- also Isolde of the fine 25-man casualcore raiding guild, Aurora, on Quel'thalas-EU; and Tone, to give her real name, which isn't pronounced at all like "Tuna" -- for painstakingly designing this new layout from scratch, after looking at the mess of HTML that comprises Blogspot's default layouts.

Kudos on your recent Heroic Beasts kill, Tone. May Aurora continue to thrive.

Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain.

Why is he climbing the mountain?

Wat.

Wat.

More 3.3.0 number-crunching.

Now. Once more, I'll deliver the disclaimer that this is still PTR stuff and it could all change. Additionally, I will say that my numbers are of a 10-man-heroic BiS list, and thus the numbers do not necessarily apply to any other gear set, above or below.

This is my BiS wishlist. I decided to have some Simcraft 3.3.0 fun with it. Firstly, I did some basic controls:

3.2.2 average DPS over 300-second fights, 10,000 iterations, full raid buffs: 7514
Scale Factors (Normalised):
Spirit: 0.35
Int: 0.23
Spellpower: 1
Hit: 1.45
Crit: 0.73
Haste: 0.69

3.3.0 average DPS, same conditions: 8726 DPS
Scale Factors (Normalised):
Spirit: 0.55
Int: 0.22
Spellpower: 1
Hit: 1.17
Crit: 0.74
Haste: 1.36

Then I started to have some fun with it. First test: Changing all "potent" gems to "Reckless":
8789 DPS
Scale Factors (Normalised):
Spirit: 0.56
Int: 0.23
Spellpower: 1
Hit: 1.25
Crit: 0.74
Haste: 1.31

Second test: Changing all "runed" gems and all "potent" gems to "Reckless":
8833 DPS
Scale Factors (Normalised):
Spirit: 0.55
Int: 0.20
Spellpower: 1
Hit: 1.28
Crit: 0.73
Haste: 1.14

Third test: Changing all yellow sockets to Quick King's Amber, and all red sockets to Reckless Ametrine:
8827 DPS
Scale Factors (Normalised):
Spirit: 0.56
Int: 0.20
Spellpower: 1
Hit: 1.14
Crit: 0.71
Haste: 1.09

So the third test took it too far -- as predicted in my previous post on the subject, socketing as many Quick gems as possible causes too much spellpower decay and the haste scaling loses its potency. There is something to be said for changing Potent to Reckless, but beyond that it starts getting a bit silly and expensive for not very much reward. And, besides, this is only tier 9 gear -- when patch 3.3 does hit, we'll be wanting to replace it all.

Huh. How about that.

So, it's early days on the PTR; thus, all things are subject to change. Buuuut ... I was curious about whether anyone had done any 3.3 Simcrafting, taking into account the haste changes.

Elitist Jerks, naturally, came through. The PP values of the current build, using 3.2.2 BiS T9 gear, and with 2/2 IST etc. etc., are:
Spellpower: 1 (Always)
Hit: 1.42 (No surprises here. Hit's always what you want)
Crit: 0.84 (Fairly consistent, really. It just naturally goes up as gear improves)
Spirit: 0.56 (Very consistent with the buffs to spirit. I guessed this precise number before I even saw it. For me, it would sit at 0.5 exactly because I don't run with 2/2 IST -- IST gives it a little extra push; just over 10%, as you see)
Int: 0.24
Haste: 1.31

Haste is better than Spellpower.

But don't all start gemming for it just yet. Early days, folks, early days. If these numbers do make it to Live, I would recommend exercising caution -- consider full Reckless gems rather than switching everything to Quick King's Amber. Scaling relies on all the stats available. The values above are from a full complement of BiS tier 9, gemmed optimally for 3.2.2 stats. In other words, all the slots apart from two would be gemmed pure spellpower. If you sink >200 spellpower and turn it all into haste, and then run the 20,000 Simcraft iterations again, you're going to get a much smaller gap between Spellpower and Haste: you'll speed up, but each thing you do will be doing less damage.

When MMO-Champion starts giving us enough data to build a Tier 10 BiS list, we'll be able to see the theoretical scaling values of a set with full Quick King's Amber versus one with full Reckless Ametrine or Runed Cardinal Ruby. My intuition tells me that Reckless will be the way to go, but time will tell.

About-face.

The chilling presence of the Frozen Throne deals Frost damage to all nearby enemies. Removes 1% of your health every 3 sec.

So, Blizzard, I heard you didn't want another Sunwell Radiance aura in future expansions, because it was a sign that you had screwed up some game mechanics. You put in diminishing returns on avoidance to ensure that this wouldn't have to happen.

So instead, you seem to think that healing is far too powerful, and that that deserves to be drained.

Fix your bloody game and stop being hypocrites.

In which I get Tailoring nerfed.

I apologise to all tailors. I just respecced Tailoring from JC. Blizzard will now nerf it, in line with their policy of breaking any profession I choose.

EDIT 1: (I can't sleep. As usual.)

EDIT 2: Oh god. 9g for a stack of Mageweave. Brickwall time! Fortunately I have lots of Runecloth stockpiled for the tailoring equivalent of the Thorium Sink.

EDIT 3: So apparently I don't actually need Mageweave at the level I learn how to Bolt it. Back to cheap silk. Yaaaay

EDIT 4: You can tell I planned this way in advance.

EDIT 5: Long craft times are the bane of my existence.

EDIT 6: Gee, Chris, do you want to guarantee these ten insignificant levels by using your overpriced Mageweave cloth, or will you take the ULTIMATE GAMBLE and risk losing TENS of silver by crafting YELLOW silk pantaloons?

EDIT 7: Why the hell do dyes stack in 10s if thread stacks in 20s?

EDIT 8: 225. Time for all the Mageweave to disappear magically.

EDIT 9: 250. Let's see what Runecloth I can scrounge up from my Death Knight.

EDIT 10: Ah. Runecloth Belt. My old friend.

ToGC. Healers: Tuonie, Chayah ... Sinespe?

You better believe it. I shelled out sixty emblems to pick up the Tier 9 healing Shoulders and Gloves, because I've had no luck getting the gloves from VoA, and I helped heal the first four bosses of Trial of the Grand Crusader, in my mix of off-spec-rolled healing pieces and just-happens-to-work-for-Disc-too DPS items. Ironically, I got no upgrades for my DPS set tonight, but I got three items (Belt, boots and ring) from ToC10N and Onyxia10 for my healing set. Know what I was doing in ToC10N and Onyxia10? DPSing.

Additionally, there's nothing quite like clearing ToC10N in 26 minutes and 30 seconds, including breaks.

Still wouldn't want to heal as a main, but it's nice to know I'm keeping myself fully up-to-date and competitive even in my offspec.

I have 12k HPS

And so can you.

I GOT THE BASTARD.

[13:30:21] [RL] [80 Shibba:1]: [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] roll
[13:30:24] Sinespe rolls 92 (1-100)

FUCK YOU, SARTHARION.

Urgh.

I'm ill. Whenever I get flu, my early warning sign is a sore throat. Sore throats happen to be the thing I hate most about illness. I can cope with the aches and the shakes just fine, and the loss of appetite isn't so much of a problem (thanks to Charlotte for sorting out that one: "Drink squash. Really strong. With lots of sugar. You'll trick your body into thinking you've eaten something and you'll get lots of glucose to fight the virus.").

I write the above paragraph as a warning that I might not be quite so lucid as I normally am, since I have something to respond to today. Yaaaaay.

Eoy now tells us that Ensidia has dropped him from regular raiding in ToGC25, out of reasons of efficiency. Naturally, one of those points of "Efficiency" is our "low DPS" compared to other classes. Which other classes? Mages and Warlocks are the two noted in his post. Those are pure DPS classes. Fair enough, a 2k discrepency is perhaps a tad higher than it should be, but those things could be fixed by nerfing damage done across the board rather than boosting Shadow Priest DPS, and comparing us with pure DPS classes has always been a silly thing to do. Nowhere in his post does he mention Elemental Shamans, Boomkins or Retribution Paladins. Now, why would that be ...?

As you know by now, I don't understand why people are complaining about our DPS. Primarily, this lack of understanding is because I do things like this (Note the lack of boomkin buffs). But let's talk about utility today, ladies and gentlemen. I'm willing to admit that our utility is not very exclusive, and I think it's a slight problem. I'm fine with Ret Pallies having Replenishment. Why? Because they're a hybrid DPS class. I'm fine with Frost Mages having Replenishment. Why? Because if you want to provide Replenishment as a Mage, you're going to be sacrificing some of your DPS in order to give it.

This brings us to Survival Hunters and Destruction Warlocks. Unlike the Frost tree for Mages, there is not such a huge loss of DPS by speccing Survival or Destro as opposed to Marksman or Demonology. Why should that be? They are pure DPS classes already, so why is their purity of DPS not tainted by picking up the extra utility?

But let's go back to the damage issue. Here's why I don't think it's very useful to say "omg buff us" (and, yes, as selfish as it is, it relates to my own situation). Let's take it as a fact that in 25-man cutting-edge content, Shadow Priests aren't performing well; but let's also take it as a fact that in 10-man cutting-edge content (where I currently am), Shadow Priests are performing well. What happens if you buff us based on the first fact alone? Our damage becomes overpowered in 10-man content. So what is Blizzard supposed to do? How can Shadow Priests be buffed for one raid setting without making us overpowered in another raid setting? Are we going to have to have a system whereby all abilities have a different base damage value depending on whether they're being used in a 10-player or a 25-player context? Would that not be something of an artificial solution to the problem?

And now I'm going to wander carelessly into the minefield of self-entitlement by saying this: cutting-edge content is not the only content there is. Or, rather, the "hardcore" attitude is not the only attitude in the game. Fancy Hat Club considers itself pretty hardcore in terms of our raiding ability, but I can't help but feel that guilds like Ensidia take this kind of stuff waaaay too far. If you're raiding in a guild where, as apparently is the case for Eoy, people are "Focus-geared" for the sake of "Efficiency", and where 2k DPS out of >100k RDPS matters that much, then, I'm afraid, you're not really in a setting that is representative of the game as a whole. "Bring the player, not the class" is the philosophy taken by Blizzard -- if Ensidia chooses not to follow that philosophy, do they not relinquish any claim to being representative? On their own heads be it, and I hope Eoy leaves Ensidia to find a guild that doesn't feel the need to min/max to such a minute level in order to rush through the content.

"Who's tanking?"

This question irritates me.

Specifically, this question irritates me when it comes from healers, in pugs. If you're a healer, presumably you have some kind of raid/party frame for, y'know, healing. Presumably this can be clicked to see a unit frame of the person you've selected. Presumably this unit frame tells you that person's current & total health. Total health is generally a good indication of whether someone's a tank or not.

If this is not the case, I'd love to know how you heal.

This has been designated a happy zone

All he needs is a hug.

Apologies for the mess

Page is undergoing some alterations. It'll look squiffy for a while.

"Can't".

There is no such thing, except in the realms of breaking laws -- either societal or scientific.

I'm keeping this post short. I just feel it necessary to reiterate that point for everyone who ever doubts themselves or others. Anyone can achieve anything if they are committed to putting in the necessary work. Never believe otherwise.

This sums up my current mood.

Sinespe, Hero of Shattrath

Many Basilisks were harmed in the attainment of this Feat of Strength.

Department of Labour and Fail.

Here's a sure-fire way of losing votes for your political party: employ people in those governmental departments deemed "Helpful to the public" who don't have the brain capacity to read words, letters and numbers accurately, and who type at 10WPM.

I'll do some background, just in case there are some non-UK readers of this little corner of cyberspace.

The UK Government has a service for just about anything related to living. This is a good concept. All of them tend to be found on www.direct.gov.uk. One of those services is designed to help the unemployed find work. It goes under a variety of names: JobcentrePlus is the formal title, though it's also 'Jobseekers'' or any derivation thereof. It provides a fair deal of useful and not-so-useful job listings on its website. (Though the website is pretty unnavigable until you've gotten used to the terrible way it works. If there's one thing I have to curse Blizzard for, it's that they give false hope to the idea that good design is easy to do or to find. Or maybe it's just that the Government doesn't want to spend money on a good web designer.)

The other type of support that the Department for Work and Pensions supplies to people looking for work, apart from job listings and the like, is a baseline amount of financial support. They claim it's enough to live off of, but it really isn't (£53 a week, unless you qualify for further benefits).

Now, here's the problem; or, rather, here's the way the system works, and then how I got dicked over by one number or letter in one wrong column. To qualify for the Jobseekers' Allowance ('the dole', it's also colloquially called) you need to prove that you're actively seeking work. You're given a little booklet in which you can log your various job applications and any other speculative queries or steps taken to find work or improve your employability. Every two weeks, you're supposed to go to the local office and 'sign declarations': these declarations basically say, 'The information I am supplying is accurate as far as I'm aware. I am also aware that any deliberate attempts to supply false information can lead to prosecution.' At the signing, this aforementioned booklet is checked and, by the looks of things, you talk through it with the chap or chapess sitting at the desk.

The time at which you sign is denoted by your National Insurance number (I believe the equivalent to the NI number in America is the "Social Security" number). It determines the day on which you sign and the "Rotation" that you're on -- e.g. in my case, it would be whether I were signing on Tuesday 22nd September or Tuesday 29th September, and then the following signing would be either Tuesday 6th or 13th October, respectively.

So now we come to my problem. I was written down as signing Tuesday 22nd, then October 6th, and fortnightly every Tuesday thereafter, at 2.28 pm. I turned up ten minutes early, as I had been advised to do. I waited. My name wasn't called. I waited until 3.00pm, at which time the guys at the desk at which I was due to sign buggered off somewhere else. I went up to the person on the desk adjacent to that one to ask her why I hadn't been called. She informed me that I had been written down on the wrong rotation, and that I was actually due to sign next week -- the 29th. She edited my booklet (which has on it a little section for 'Turn up at this time'), and so I thought that I'd just need to come up next week.

Today, Saturday, I receive a letter telling me that I no longer qualify for Jobseekers' because I 'didn't turn up to sign my declarations'.

So. I turned up to when I thought I was supposed to sign, and I didn't get called. I was then informed that I actually would be signing the following week: i.e. I wasn't supposed to be there this week. If that were the case, how did it either a) get programmed into the system that I was supposed to be there and yet no one called me up, or b) display on the screen that I was supposed to be the following week, and yet still send a message through to the relevant 'Jobseeker cancellation system' or whatever to tell them I hadn't turned up to something I wasn't supposed to attend?

The guy who originally put me into this system suffers from the issues I opened this blog post declaring to be a sure-fire way of losing voted. He couldn't spell accurately, and he hunted-and-pecked. Hunting-and-pecking isn't necessarily a problem -- not everyone can touch-type, I get that -- but it's fairly obvious that he put me on the wrong schedule and cocked all this up. If I could remember his full name I'd get him fired. People like him are employed, and yet someone with a degree, a perfect command of English and A-level Maths, and an IQ of above 90, gets rejection letters for interview opportunities, let alone from the results of interviews themselves.

In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be simple to fix as well as being simple to happen. Except, it's not. From what I understand it, I have to go through a full 'independent tribunal' process because one incompetent drone fails at taking his job seriously enough to input the stuff that actually matters and can cause this kind of time- and money-consuming bullshit to occur. It asks me to send in a form, within a month of having received the letter which details an erroneous decision. Within a month?! Does this mean I'm going to be waiting two months or more before I actually sort this thing out? I'm hoping to be set up in Devon by that time, for God's sake!

Roll on self-employment. Except, since I'm not on Jobseekers', I can't get free help from a government affiliate by way of asking what I need to do to be self-employed, in terms of things like Tax Returns. I refuse to hire an accountant to do that shit for me, that's for sure. Hiring an accountant would admit laziness, and laziness alone. I'm perfectly capable of doing sums, I just don't know what the sums are that I'm supposed to do.

3.2.2

IST still sucks. Twisted Faith change is nice, but doesn't call for an overhaul in how we gear.

That is all.

Oh, and the Transcendence 232 helm is just above Helm of Clouded Sight according to my napkin maths, so knock yourself out if you only have access to 10-man content: 265.44 to 256.38

FAO Atremini: Cease and Desist.

Sigh. Please stop polluting my forum with your ill-thought-out, class-cloning, or otherwise unnecessary ideas. Shadow Priest DPS is not so bad that it needs radical overhauls such as those you bash your head against your keyboard to show us.

I Demand a Recount.

This issue has been kinda beaten to death, but I'll forge ahead anyway and hope that something new or something more precise transpires from it.

There are situations wherein Recount is a useful tool. If you don't clear the DPS threshold required for each of the Northrend Beasts on Heroic (e.g., the Jormungar spawn before Gormok has died), but all of your DPS do survive the whole fight, it could be relevant to look at the Damage meter. If people are dying, the Healing meter or the Damage Taken meter might give some indication of what was happening. If your healers are going oom, it might be due to overhealing.

Note all the "mights", though. Owing to the diversity of fights we have been given in Wrath, there is not a single solution or fault with any scenario. Of the situations mentioned in what is a very basic, hard-hitting gear check, let's take them in turn.

The reason why the Jormungar spawn too early (Or, rather, why Gormok doesn't die in time) could be a lack of DPS; however, not on Gormok himself, but on the Snobolds. If too many people are staying on the boss, debuffs will fade which can affect DPS. This is always the problem with splitting DPS between two targets without any overlap: if I were to target the Snobold, but our Warlock were to focus on the boss, Misery would fade from the boss and Curse of the Elements would not be applied to the Snobold. This kind of stuff won't show up on Recount. That we have low DPS might not even be reflected by mathematical numbers. (Total DPS / time allowed) compared to (health of boss / time allowed) may not necessarily result in the total DPS being lower than the threshold (My DoTs on both targets, for example, would hide any deficit), yet the boss may not be dying quickly enough.

Similarly, with targets dying too quickly, it could once more be a DPS issue because of the snobolds. Equally, though, I mentioned the "Healing and Damage Taken meters". The latter of these requires clicking on individual bars to see whether targets died to their stack of Fire Bomb being too high and thereby being unhealable (Two stacks is the minimum you are able to take, given reaction time and assuming you're standing still; as you should be unless running into range of attacking a Snobold. Three is manageable. Four is pushing it. Five is a sign of Plancktardation.*), or maybe because of Impale damage or a healer being Snobolled. Note the italics: you have to look deeper than the coloured bars.

Healers going oom? That could be poor tank gear, or poor Impale tank switches, or, again, low DPS causing a fight to go on for too long. It's not enough to look at overhealing and say that that is the cause of a healer's mana problems. On Algalon, for instance, it's impossible for Holy Paladins to find time to use Divine Plea for its full duration because of the insane tank damage. I've taken to dropping Shadowform after the first Big Bang to pop my Hymn of Hope. I don't need the mana myself because Dispersion is on a 75-second cooldown for that fight. I can safely stop nuking for a few seconds, whereas they can't really afford more than one GCD to drop Mana Tide or Shield a raid target.

So, what am I getting at here? Well, pretty obvious, really: Recount is useful, but you need to go beyond the coloured bars. Now, it's time to look at the boring bit: what Recount is not for. More importantly: why it is that there is never any situation in which being top of the charts is in any way meaningful or important. This has been said by many, many people, but it has never really been explained other than in general terms of the rabid Pure Damage class who stands in the fire for the sake of not losing 0.1% of his DPS time.

Instead, and initially, I'm going to display a mathematical approach using a recent example from my own raid group. In this example, a rarity! A shadow priest at the top of the list! If I didn't realise how pointless the victory is, and if I were part of that horribly aggressive and anti-social demographic which, unfortunately, is the reason for this post, I might brag about it. Instead, let's see how much the success really means.

We will, of course, ignore the fact that Deathfist and Tinytran died early. That is an explanation far too easy for me -- naturally, looking at their DPS values, they would have been first and second respectively -- and Abominable Power would have taken Razzmatazz over my level of DPS. Those arguments don't matter to meter-spammers, because to their limited brainpower, the mantra of "If the DPS dies, it's their own fault" must of course apply to every fight in the game.

Instead, let's destroy the fallacy by looking at the values on their own merit.
Sinespe: 2265456
Razzmatazz: 2249801.

0.14% separates us. The amount of actual damage separating us is the equivalent of one Mind Blast crit during Icehowl's stun. What is the point in getting excited over that? The RNG favoured me over him -- it wasn't down to my skill, or my gear, or anything. In fact, I screwed up my DPS quite a lot over the course of that fight: I always do, because it's so hectic. I even got spell locked at one point during Gormok because I wasn't paying attention. Getting help from the RNG doesn't just account for that 0.14%: in a simulation of perfect circumstances he would have beaten me based on my errors alone.

Aside from the RNG issue, why should it ever matter who did how much DPS, if the boss dies? It's as pointless as looking at HPS on a successful kill: If your assigned targets do not die when healing them, and the assigned DPS target does die, why should it matter how much "value" everyone brought? It's clear that everyone brought a sufficient measure to overcome the task set for us, otherwise we would have wiped and had to have re-evaluated. Evaluating these figures on a kill means nothing. It is, however, funny sometimes to see classes that scale incredibly well with fight mechanics do ridiculous DPS. It gives no real value aside from its humour, though.

So far, though, I've given far too much credit to the whole scenario: I've assumed a raid setting in which everyone is pulling equal weight. The reason I've done that, though, is that "Everyone pulling equal weight" is the only situation that comes even the slightest bit close to being relevant or being a "Strong argument" in favour of meter whoring (There are in fact no strong arguments). Even worse is when people meter-whore in PuGs. Fantastic, Imapwnu, you managed to out-DPS everyone by 3% or more. And what is your point here? You out-gear them. And if you don't out-gear them? Well, I guess you out-skill them. Well done. You out-skill a random collection of people on your server, who probably are not putting 110% effort into their performance because it is a PuG, not progression content.

I've gone into the realms of ranting now, so I'll reign it back a bit into more sober territory. Meter-whoring (I promise I'll end on a positive note. My conclusion isn't "Meter-whores suck". Well, not the main one, at least.) is a sign of division within a raid. It is a sign that at least one of your members is confused about who, exactly, is the "enemy". You are not supposed to compete with each other in a raid setting: your adversaries are not your fellow DPSers; your adversary is that massive three-part robot trying very hard to P3W*2 your face off. It is absolutely fine to want your personal DPS to be as high as it can be, but pushing yourself for the sake of yourself is much different to pushing yourself for the sake of "Beating everyone else".

Yet, going back to PuGs, I will say that Recount is useful for building friendships if used in a civil, jovial manner, rather than a jerkish, braggardly manner. I know one of the best-geared Shadow Priests on my server, of equal skill to me, because we were in an Eye of Eternity PuG together and we were trading places on the meter with every failed attempt. This is where I have to admit something: while I don't use Recount as an e-peen measure, I do use it to see if people aren't shaping up to how they should be. I do allow myself to get somewhat annoyed when I see a Rogue in full Tier 8.5 pulling 3k DPS on Koralon, for example. Thus, when I find someone who actually uses their gear to its full potential, I have a tendency to reach out to them either in lighthearted competition or in outright appreciation. I was most impressed at a particular Warlock whose name, alas, I can't remember: in Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle, in a mixture of heroic epics and blues, he came pretty close to out-doing me in my 2/5 Tier 8.

Though I'm elitist, I don't want to sound arrogant by what I said in the last paragraph: I don't talk to these people out of a sense of relief, per se, that I've found someone "Worthy of my time" -- more the opposite, really. In such a negative environment that the Internet seems to encourage through anonymity, it isn't very often that kind words get spoken. Particularly when I'm healing, it's nice to get complimentary whispers on a job well done -- but that applies to my DPS, too. I don't consider myself "above compliments", by which I mean I will reply to people who say "Nice DPS" with a "Thanks" rather than an "I know". The latter I consider arrogant.

I've strayed from my point somewhat. That's what I get for being distracted all day and coming back to this again and again to write a little more each time. I think my point is: use Recount constructively. If you feel that you "need to be at the top", you need to rethink your priorities. What's more important: being at the top, or killing the boss?

*Apparently that is a word I shouldn't use. I do rather like it, though.