Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Monday, 28 September 2009
Sunday, 27 September 2009
"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.
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.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
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
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
Friday, 11 September 2009
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.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Cataclysm: potential issues.
Obviously, posts like this aren't immensely useful, because their content speculates over the mechanics of things that may change as the new expansion approaches. To avoid such a problem, issues and potential side-steps have to be thought about, fully, before one can gauge one's opinions accurately and "conclude" things.
There isn't a huge amount of Shadow Priest-specific stuff so far on the Cataclysm preview front. The one major thing we've been told is that we will "probably get a nuke without cooldown".
Now, this is a problem, really. My initial reaction to hearing this news was: we already have a nuke without cooldown -- it's called Mind Flay. My reaction was met with a certain deal of hostility from people claiming that Mind Flay doesn't "Count as a real nuke" because it's channeled. This argument, I suspect, comes from a PvP perspective. I don't see how it really matters whether a spell is channeled or cast in PvE -- you're standing still and nuking ... Indeed, a channeled spell has some advantages in this respect since, if you have to move, you can clip it short and yet still have dealt some damage to your target.
However, the reason I say we "Already have a nuke without cooldown" is this: we already have something that we spam between our cooldowns. Mind Flay is a powerful spell, and we use it whenever we don't need to do anything else. So where on earth do we fit in another "Nuke without cooldown" into our rotation? The only room it has is in the same places as Mind Flay: we can only cast it between Mind Blasts and refreshing DoTs.
This, naturally, means that there is going to be a preferred spell to cast: either Mind Flay or Spell X (Shorthand for "Nuke without cooldown") will provide us with more DPS. If it is Mind Flay, then Spell X isn't going to be used at all. If Spell X results in higher DPS than Mind Flay, though, then Mind Flay will fall by the wayside: just as Shadow Word: Death was the casualty of TBC --> Wrath, Mind Flay will be the casualty of Wrath --> Cataclysm. It will become a spell that we only cast when we want to keep SW: P refreshed.
I was talking to Koren about this, and she thought that Spell X might act like a "Reverse Arcane Blast": her thought was something like "it gets weaker with each consecutive spellcast." I can't see this being particularly appealing, though ... and even if it were a non-reverse Arcane Blast, I'm not entirely sure I'd feel comfortable about becoming an Arcane Mage.
Shadow Priests are in a good place right now in terms of their complexity. We don't need another spell coming in and screwing with things. Besides which, I don't have a keybinding spare for it.
There isn't a huge amount of Shadow Priest-specific stuff so far on the Cataclysm preview front. The one major thing we've been told is that we will "probably get a nuke without cooldown".
Now, this is a problem, really. My initial reaction to hearing this news was: we already have a nuke without cooldown -- it's called Mind Flay. My reaction was met with a certain deal of hostility from people claiming that Mind Flay doesn't "Count as a real nuke" because it's channeled. This argument, I suspect, comes from a PvP perspective. I don't see how it really matters whether a spell is channeled or cast in PvE -- you're standing still and nuking ... Indeed, a channeled spell has some advantages in this respect since, if you have to move, you can clip it short and yet still have dealt some damage to your target.
However, the reason I say we "Already have a nuke without cooldown" is this: we already have something that we spam between our cooldowns. Mind Flay is a powerful spell, and we use it whenever we don't need to do anything else. So where on earth do we fit in another "Nuke without cooldown" into our rotation? The only room it has is in the same places as Mind Flay: we can only cast it between Mind Blasts and refreshing DoTs.
This, naturally, means that there is going to be a preferred spell to cast: either Mind Flay or Spell X (Shorthand for "Nuke without cooldown") will provide us with more DPS. If it is Mind Flay, then Spell X isn't going to be used at all. If Spell X results in higher DPS than Mind Flay, though, then Mind Flay will fall by the wayside: just as Shadow Word: Death was the casualty of TBC --> Wrath, Mind Flay will be the casualty of Wrath --> Cataclysm. It will become a spell that we only cast when we want to keep SW: P refreshed.
I was talking to Koren about this, and she thought that Spell X might act like a "Reverse Arcane Blast": her thought was something like "it gets weaker with each consecutive spellcast." I can't see this being particularly appealing, though ... and even if it were a non-reverse Arcane Blast, I'm not entirely sure I'd feel comfortable about becoming an Arcane Mage.
Shadow Priests are in a good place right now in terms of their complexity. We don't need another spell coming in and screwing with things. Besides which, I don't have a keybinding spare for it.
Never start with a quote.
[14:12] [Primar|Home] I think everyone and their mum uses a variation on that themeSo that's my excuse.
[14:12] [Primar|Home] cos it's the only one that isn't retarded
For the past few days I have wanted to stick stuff on the Wowhead forums, but have felt that it wouldn't really garner much in the way of people responding to it. So, for future such instances, I will just dump stuff here. This will probably be stuff related to being a Shadow Priest, though it may also expand into my forays into the world of Discipline as well as my guild's various antics.
So: Hi, I'm Chris. I take the form of Valandilv on the Wowhead forums and Sinespe on my Draenei Shadow Priest. I wrote the Anathema Guide on the Wowhead forums, and have also levelled a Horde priest to 80, though she is now in semi-permanent retirement.
As Sinespe, I raid in the relatively private guild
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