Invincible

This was going to be a short and relatively straightforward post about how stupid it is that Invincible is not available to 10-player raiders. It still is going to be that, but the thread in question has had its stupidity factor multiplied by several magnitudes.

But we'll start from the core:

If [Invincible] were available in the 10-person encounter as well, it may become too prolific and lose some of its initial unique qualities.

The way this reads, to me, is Crygil trying to protect 10-man raiders from themselves. "We could give you this, but you won't like it!" Oh, will we not? So, in order to save us from "devaluing" our own reward, your solution is just not to give us that reward at all? Gee, thanks. I feel so much better.

One of the flaws behind this issue is that Blizzard assumes we care whether 25-man raiders farm our stuff when what is at stake is a mount, and nothing else. Y'know what? If they have enough hours in the week to clear both 25-man and 10-man versions of ICC, which is a massive instance, and if they do the latter solely for the purpose of an extra mount, let them. They've earned it, frankly. The only thing that changes if you allow Invincible to drop 100% of the time from Arthas-10-H is that one or two 25-man guilds per server will get a full guild's worth of mounts in half the time. Once they've killed Arthas-25-H once, they're going to kill him 25 times anyway. All you do by allowing them to farm 10-man content is reduce the amount of time it takes for the inevitable to occur. And if they want the mount badly enough, but run out of time for everyone to get one before Cataclysm gets launched, they'll find a spare day to go back and farm it again when they're level 85. This isn't Al'ar we're talking about here: This thing has a 100% drop chance.

Besides which, how would this hypothetical situation -- 25-man raiders get the mount quicker than 10-man raiders -- be any different to the fact that they gear up faster than us? Bosses in 25-man drop more pieces of loot because Blizzard has to account for the fact that there are more people in a 25-man raid that need to gear up. It's balanced. So why is it not balanced in the case of a mount that only a small, finite number of 25-man raiders per server are going to have access to in the first place?

But let's look at it from the other side of the fence: What if 25-man hardcore raiders complain that "their" reward is getting handed to 10-man-H raiders? What if it is devalued from their side of the fence? Well ... it's not, frankly. Sorry. I know I bang on about this, and it's something I'll come onto again shortly, but there is no reason for 25-man raiders to get any additional benefit simply for having more people than 10-man raiders. The inflated item levels on their gear is enough -- and is reasonable, because it is a point of design and of concession (If they weren't more powerful, people would just raid 10s). But as I say, we'll come onto that in a little while.

But even if either of these things is a concern, there is a solution to appease both parties: Put Herald/Insanity conditions on the 10-Player Invincible. This solves Blizzard's irrational fear of servers being swamped by Invincibles, and ensures that only people who raid 25-H or 10-H can get the mount: 25-N wouldn't be able to, because the only 264 gear permitted would be 10-H gear -- 10-H raiders would have to work equally hard as 25-H raiders in order to qualify for the mount. The reward in both circumstances would be appropriate for the conditions under which it was sought. But it seems like Blizzard has forgotten all about those conditions since ToC: There's no such achievement in the ICC list.

That's the main issue. Now, we delve into the realm of "Looking at blue post comments and ripping them to shreds", since as I continued to scroll down that thread I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at what I read.

You would think, reading things like ...

The 10-person heroic raid dungeons are tuned in such a way that players do not need to rely on gear from the 25-person normal mode equivalents.

And

It's as simple as logistics. When in a 25-person instance, you are using 25 peoples time. This makes accumulating that number of players more difficult to achieve.

And

The more people you have, the more difficult (numerically) you can make the encounters.

Might make me tempted to say "I told you so" ... But, unfortunately, I can't say such a thing, because Blizzard is being irritatingly cryptic. One the one hand, they claim that 25-mans are scaled up just on the number of players and the numerical increase in damage, but on the other hand they say things like ...

We also scale the difficulty of the encounters up in the larger group of players. Thus, because of added difficulty, they achieve slightly better rewards.

And

We will continue watching upcoming content in the future to make certain that we are able to adjust these encounters and keep them aligned with our goals.

Does the first one mean they are scaled up purely because there are more people, or because the increase in people allows for better synergy? Is it "simple logistics" or not? What exactly are Blizzard's "Goals" related to the 10-/25-player dichotomy? None of this tells us anything -- it's all just vagueness that points in different directions.

You then get conflicting philosophies. In response to a request that 10- and 25-player versions of every raid be on a shared lockout (i.e., you're only able to participate in either the 10- or 25-player version of a raid each week), Crygil said this:

The matter is more complex than that. It's not a good thing to take away content from players, be it 10-person or 25-person.

Are we expected to buy that line, when the whole of the rest of the thread is about Blizzard's decision to take away a piece of content from 10-man raiders? How can we take that philosophy seriously when it runs in direct contravention to Blizzard's choice in this matter?

Then, there is our old favourite:

I've PuG'ed my way to Putricide in 25-person content.

And how many times in that PuG did you wipe, Crygil? Did you actually kill Putricide? "To", once more, is ambiguous. How out-of-touch are you that you suggest 10-player raiders want to be doing 25-man content? Yes, it is true that 10-manners do pug 25-man content. Does that mean they want to? Hell no. I sure as hell don't want to pug ICC25 -- the times that I do, I do so for the sake of gold (through a GDKP run), or Emblems (Only when I miss out on said Emblems in 10-player owing to missing a raid). I don't even want to pug ToC25 in order to get a respectable second trinket -- that's your fault, too, y'know: not giving 10-manners two well-itemised ones at endgame level.

On the aforementioned GDKP runs, I have the potential to get Dislodged Foreign Object -- I have enough (26k gold) to outbid any other competitor. Would I, though? Probably not. I'd bid up to 16k to jack up the price, but I wouldn't bid to win. I don't want to feel like I have to go into potentially disastrous PuGs just for the sake of not wearing a trinket which is three tiers of content below the content I'm supposed to be raiding. Pugging is not an acceptable alternative. Congratulations to you for being on a server capable of doing it, but absolutely nothing compares to the environment of an organised, guilded raid group -- and I don't want to do anything besides organised, guilded raid groups if I can at all help it.

Aside from the issue of the pugging environment, there is the time element to be considered. I'm (un)fortunate in that I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment with which I can potentially pug. What about the people in my raid group who can only set aside 1 hour a day for the random daily and a couple of daily quests/profession cooldowns, plus 3 extra hours on Mondays and Wednesdays in order to clear Icecrown? One of the benefits of 10-man raiding over 25-man is, once more, in the logistics: Fewer people to organise means less time spent waiting for everyone to come online, etc. etc. One player dying in 25-man raids might not be a lot, but 24 people waiting for player number 25 to come online so that they can start is one of the most irritating things imaginable.

Now, though, I've run out of steam. In short, Invincible is the 25-H equivalent of a Legendary: Available to a 25-man playerbase for no discernable reason. We can only hope that what we do get from Arthas-10-H is more of an incentive to kill him than that silly tentacle trinket for YS10+0.

Delicious mid-week breaks.

I was away in Exeter, in case anyone noticed my absence. I'm flattered that someone broke their two-year silence of the Wowhead forums just so they could misinterpret something that I said, take it out of context, then claim that I was wrong -- and all in vain, 'cause I wasn't around to respond to it. People are funny.

How to get a Battered Hilt.

Stop running Pit of Saron.

I'll explain: Blizzard messed around with the drop rate quite a bit, but settled on it. The blue post I would like to draw your attention to is this one:

The increase in drop rate is more significant than the removal of this item's chance to drop from Skeletal Slaves, particularly for those clearing all three wings as intended.

Now, I've emboldened that last bit, because I'm pretty sure people haven't quite grasped how the drop chance on Battered Hilt works.

Firstly, let's dispel a myth: The chance of a Battered Hilt dropping off one mob in a 5-man Icecrown instance is not 1%-2%. Oh, yes, the Armoury claims that it is 1%-2%, but do you want to know why that is? "Extremely low" is the lowest category they have. I'll show you another example to demonstrate this: The Tiny Emerald Whelpling drops from mobs at a rate of 0.2%, recorded by 190,000 trials using Wowhead's looter. What does the Armoury tell us about it? Extremely Low (1% - 2%).

So, why do I say "Don't do Pit of Saron"? Well, this is myth #2: The chance of a Battered Hilt dropping off a mob in Halls of Reflection is not the same as the chance of it dropping off a mob in Pit of Saron. For this, we need to look at the aforementioned blue post: He says that if you clear all three dungeons, you have an increased chance of getting a Hilt drop. In a way, what he is saying is true according to the myth: If you do Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron, you have more of a chance of getting a Battered Hilt than if you just do Forge of Souls. But if you click "Next blue post" on that link, you get this:

No, the drop rate is flat. You have a fixed chance of getting the item every time you run one of the dungeons. What we did in these recent fixes is substantially increase that chance and remove this item's ability to drop from the creatures most frequently and easily being farmed for it.

Read that extremely carefully: The chance for a Hilt to drop is equal for the dungeon; it is not equal for each cross-dungeon mob. I will explain this with statistics:

Let's say that you have a fair, six-sided die, and you're trying to roll a 6. Of course, your chance of success is 1/6. You also have something called the "Expected value", which is the number of trials that you expect, from looking at the probability, you will need to complete in order to get a success. Predictably, this is 1/(1/6) = 6. If you roll the die 3 times, you're going to have a 1-(0.85^3) ( = 38.6%) chance of rolling at least one 6. If you roll the die 6 times, a 1-(0.85^6) = 62.3% chance. And so on.

What do you do, though, if you want to make sure that you have an equal probability of rolling a 6 on two dice, but you're allowed to roll one more times than the other? Well, not too hard: You increase the number of faces on the die that gets rolled more often. That way, the probability of rolling a 6 on one individual roll will go down, which increases the expected value.

So, let's say you have a 6-sided die and a 10-sided die. You want to rig it such that you have the same chance of rolling a 6 on both. The default chances of success of this are 1/6 and 1/10. We'll say, for simplicity, that you want a 1/6 chance of rolling a 6 on the 10-sided die. This means that you only roll the 6-sided die once, but you roll the 10-sided die 1-(o.9^n)=1/6 times.

1 = 1/6 + (0.9^n)
5/6 = 0.9^n
ln(5/6) = nln(0.9)
ln(5/6)/ln(0.9) = n = 1.7304....

Obviously, we can't have 1.7 trials, but you see the point being made here: As with all algebra, changing the variables while keeping only one unknown allows us to rig systems for equal probability in unequal starting circumstances.

This brings us back to Blizzard's semi-cryptic message about the drop rate. This is why I started going on about dice: You have various different numbers of trials in each of the instances -- one mob kill is equal to one trial. So, this example differs because we know the maximum number of trials allowed per instance. We also know the probability we wish to achieve: We want to rig the drop chance of each instance mob so that the overall chance of a Hilt dropping in Halls of Reflection is the same as Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron. The unknown, then, is p: to what level is each mob in each instance rigged in order to produce an equal total chance?

Let's say that the overall total probability we're trying to achieve is 0.02 -- a 2% chance. That seems reasonable for an iLvl251 weapon: 50 trials is about two weeks of running through all three instances.
Forge of Souls has 39 lootable mobs including bosses. This means 1-(q^39)=0.02
0.98 = q^39
39√0.98 = q = 0.99948... p = (1-q) = 0.0005. So, you have a 0.05% chance off any individual mob in FoS to get a Battered Hilt, assuming a 2% total chance.
Pit of Saron has 62 lootable mobs including bosses. This means 1-(p^62)=0.02
62√0.98 = q = 0.99967... p = 0.0003. A 0.03% chance. Roughly 40% lower, per mob, than Forge of Souls.

This means that, to achieve the same drop chance from Pit of Saron as you do in Forge of Souls, you have to do 58% more clearing. If you ignore mobs, then you won't even get to 2%: Your chance will diminish. It'll be appallingly low if you're only clearing half the instance in order to get through it quickly.

There are 36 mobs/lootable objects in HoR, so your chance there is slightly higher than in FoS on a per-mob basis.

Because Pit takes up so much time to clear through, it's better for the sake of efficiency not to do it at all. Forge of Souls and Halls of Reflection are both worth doing: In Forge you have minimal effort to pick up the 6 mobs not directly on your path to the finish, and in Halls every trash pack is mandatory anyway.

So if you want to get a Battered Hilt, and don't want to spend an additional 5-10 minutes clearing insignificant trash in Pit of Saron for the sake of having the same drop chance as the other two instances, just don't go in there at all. It's not worth it in Pit of Saron to ignore half the trash, because you ruin your chances of getting one. That is not to say that if you just run HoR and FoS, you will have a greater chance of getting a hilt than running all three -- but the time:reward ratio will be lower by ignoring PoS.

And please don't join purely for trash only to leave before the first boss of any of these instances. That's just poor form. If you want to do that in a guild group, that's fine; don't subject LFDs to your selfishness.

300 million on looking pretty.

I know that with something like this, any publicity is good publicity, but it's been forced down our throats so much anyway that one obscure blog post won't make a dent either way in its popularity.

Avatar has been nominated for 8 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. Stealing crudely from the External Brain on the subject, we can see that they are for:
Best Film
Best Director
Best Music
Best Cinematography
Best Editing
Best Production Design
best Sound
Best Special Visual Effects

If it earns over 50% -- i.e., 5 or more -- of the awards for which it has been nominated, I will not watch any film screened or released on DVD between 00.00 on February the 22nd, 2010 and 23.59 on February the 21st, 2011.

There is one veto on this: If it does not win the BAFTA for "Best Special Visual Effects". That outcome will be too hilarious to pull away my, admittedly not very wealthy, support of the film industry.

The real kicker is that Sherlock Holmes didn't get any nominations at all. Grrrr.

(Sorry if you happen to like Avatar. I just do not see the appeal of spending $300M purely on making a film look pretty. Have we not yet progressed past the point of cinema as an "oooh lookit the pretty picshures" experience?)

FAO Paolo: Spyglass for Discipline

It drains way too much mana.

Your will is not your own.

So apparently people are annoyed [Apparently the exact post I linked to on this thread got deleted. Hah.] by the new feature of the Armoury. Words like "Private data" are being thrown around.

I'll keep this one short:

a) Blizzard owns every byte of data on "your" character. I say "your" in inverted commas because the character isn't actually yours at all: that's owned by Blizzard, too; you just rent it. That they then use that non-sensitive data on a section of their own website is not objectionable.

b) No one is going to look at it. Really. One person on that thread said this:

What I am suggesting is an option to restrict the recent activity feed to logged in guild mates, or even better, to be able to turn it off, so that I have the option whether to keep my privacy or show everyone what a miserable no life nerd I am.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't used the armoury in ... a very long time. Certainly not since the Wowhead Profiler has existed. If you think, first off, that someone is actually going to look at your feed and then, secondly, take the time to tabulate and analyse your activity and come to some conclusion about you as a person, there are a few things to be said: 1) Get over yourself. 2) What you think other people do generally says more about yourself. 3) If anyone actually were to take the time to do this, they would be as sad as you are. In short: glass houses, and something about throwing stones.

The only person who will be looking at my feed is I, and within a week I'm sure even I will have forgotten it exists and will have gone back to using the Profiler for whatever I need.

Putricide bugs and potential fixes.

We managed to get up to Putricide tonight. We made some decent progress, but ran into a couple of bugs which caused quite severe headaches.

Note: The below information is true for 10-man. I don't know about 25-man.

The main issue is that, sometimes, Putricide will only throw out one growing slime pool, or only one will spawn. This is a problem because it causes our abomination to be slime-starved -- keeping one pool up at a consistently low radius is ideal for a constant stream of slime, required to cast the only snare to have any effect on the volatile oozes and gas clouds.

Another issue, I think, is the following: Slime Pools are thrown out where people are currently standing. People who get hit by the Volatile Ooze's Adhesive ability can still be targeted with slime pools. Now, because of the way that the encounter just times itself, it is nearly always the case that a slime pool spawn will occur while a Volatile Ooze is roughly 25-50% of the way into its movement towards its target. This means the abomination has to be busy hitting the slime with a slow, and that there isn't enough time to consume a slime pool that spawns underneath the target.

The reason this is a problem is that it (to my mind, artificially) increases the difficulty of the encounter. If the Adhesive target gets a slime pool put under them, they are immediately taking 50% more damage than they were before. Additionally, because everyone has to group up on that player before the slime reaches them, so that the explosion damage is split and is healable, this increases the damage that everyone else takes.

I propose, then, that -- as with Marrowgar's Sabre Lash ability conferring an invisible immunity from Bone Spike Graveyard to its targets -- Adhesive should confer a mechanic which prevents the target from being the target of a slime pool. I am not at all suggesting that this should be abusable: If someone else (Person B) is standing too close to the Adhesive target when Slime Pools go out, and a Slime Pool targets Person B, the slime pool should still land and grow as normal. The way we are currently dealing with the timing on Slime Pools is that we only group up on the Adhesive target in the last few seconds before the Volatile Ooze reaches that person -- Naturally, this works 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time a slime pool will target the Adhesive player and we're a bit screwed then.

I don't think anything else besides those two things really needs to change about the encounter. There is a bug wherein if Putricide casts Unstable Experiment shortly before entering Phase 2, the experiment (Which will be Ooze #2 if you're doing it right) will try to cast its Adhesive and, because of Tear Gas, will get an immune error. It will, then, just start charging towards a random player once Tear Gas has worn off. This is something that can be worked around, though: You can aim to push Putricide into phase 2 either before or after you have dealt with this experiment. You can't really work around a slime pool under Adhesive.

It's a very fun fight. We got him to 53% on our best attempt. Another 18% and it'll be a kill.

Second Class Raiders.

There are a lot of problems with 10-man raiding. PTR testing of bosses results in 25-man values for certain boss mechanics getting assigned erroneously to 10-man content owing to the large number of people who test stuff in 10-man wearing 25-man (Normal or Heroic) gear. On Live servers, 25-man guilds will steamroll through 10-man content, outgearing it the whole way, and claim that it's "easier by design", when that is certainly not true (you can believe it's true if you want. I'm tired of trying to dispel the myth of 25-man content being any more or less challenging than 10-man content from a design and tuning perspective. Until a blue poster comes along to tell everyone that I'm right, I won't continue to waste my breath.)

But today, the thing that has annoyed me about 10-man raiding is the gear. Aside from the illogic of allowing 25-man Normal Mode raiders access to legendaries when 25N content is easier than 10H, there are problems of the itemisation and distribution of epics. In Trial of the Crusader, every single one of the 10-man trinkets was underbudgeted, and every single one of the 25-man trinkets was overbudgeted.

In Icecrown, 10-man spellcasters actually get a decent trinket. Please note: a decent trinket. Having gone back to look at the patch notes, I discovered this:

Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.

Now, since the ToC10 trinkets were rubbish, that means we have to look to earlier tiers of content to find anything worth taking ... From a shadow priest perspective, with four pieces of Tier 10 in the middle-distance causing my Haste priorities to shoot up, do you know what my two BiS trinkets are, if I were to look at 10-man and 5-man content only? Spyglass, of course, and ... Abyssal Rune. Yep. My BiS 10-man-heroic ICECROWN-GEARED priest would be using an iLvl200 trinket if she hadn't lucked out in Obsidian Sanctum. Broodmother doesn't make the list, thanks to Haste far out-stripping crit at a 4T10 level. Neither does the gimmicky NIC, much as I might like it to.

So the options are zero from 10-man raiding. If you happen to be unbelievably lucky, you can pick up Reign of the Unliving/Dead from a ToC25 pug.

But this is only half the problem. I could say, at this point, that since 25-man raiders are tuned 13 item levels above 10-mans, they don't need to worry about being unable to double-equip their Foreign Object; they're free to enter ICC10H with their 264 epics from 25N and overgear the place, thus allowing them to pick up the Spyglass. This, already, is unfair ...

But I don't need to make that argument, because there is a far stronger argument to be made here: 25-man casters already have two caster trinkets in their ICC 25-man loot tables. Not only do they have the one I have already linked, they also have the closest thing to Timbal's I've seen in this expansion.

Why should it be that 25-manners get absolutely no hassle at all with their trinket options, since they're given two trinkets to circumvent the unique-equipped problem, and 10-man raiders have to scramble around in ToC5, or, worse, a ToC25 or Sartharion25 PuG? Blizzard says that they like people to be thinking carefully about the gear they take ... So why are 25-manners not being made to think? Further, why should we 10-man raiders take our own raiding tier seriously if Blizzard acts as if 10-man raiding is a mere concession with no competitive or self-sustaining enjoyment within it -- merely as something to please the casuals?

FAO Nymarie: Oculus bribery!

This is pretty hilarious, really.