Anathema: Gone Blogal.

MMXI

2010-12-31T17:25:00.002Z

So, it's been a while.

I did something I've never done before in WoW. I sent out Christmas and New Year greetings to people -- and because I was/am in something of a sentimental mood, they varied from including actual presents, to including joke-nostalgia presents, to just containing words of good-will for 2011. I'm now on Defias Brotherhood, where I don't know many people, so quite a few of these messages were on servers I once called home, to people I rarely talk to any more.

I should probably find time to update this again. It would do me good.

Happy New Year, everyone. Celebrate well.

Wowhead Priests

2010-09-11T22:15:00.001+01:00

... have the best community in WoW. Evidence here. I love you guys.

Almost a pet class

2010-09-05T13:00:00.003+01:00

So, there are some amusing changes currently on the Beta regarding Shadow Priests. The new PvP talent, Sin and Punishment, has been developed further with elements that PvE players will enjoy. And I really hope it stays the way it currently looks.

Obviously, all those pesky things like crit rating and haste rating will be harder to acquire in Cataclysm and will result, therefore, in us having less of them percentage-wise. But, still, what? 20 second reduction on Shadowfiend just from critting with Mind Flay? In 9-10 crits, assuming a 15% crit chance, you've reset the cooldown. That's ... We're going to be swimming in mana, and more than ever will we be using Shadowfiend for the damage it will deal rather than the mana it provides. Archangel will result in high uptime on a large mana restore...

But maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way. I have had the growing concern that Mind Spike is going to replace a great amount of Mind Flay's damage in Cataclysm. Expressing this as a "concern" is a slightly silly thing to do, of course. Think about it: Mind Blast will have a 6.5 second cooldown in Cataclysm. That means that, between each Mind Blast, you can fit two Mind Spikes and a Mind Flay, with a bit of dead space (0.5 seconds plus hasted excess).

At this stage of the beta, I posit that this will be the best way to DPS: The Mind Spikes will give the subsequent Mind Blast an extra 60% chance to crit on that target and cause it to be instant. The Mind Flay will refresh SW: P and keep Evangelism ticking over, ready to be consumed by Archangel when you're at five stacks. (Look at the disparity between Evangelism and Archangel, by the way. Archangel isn't a nuke button; it's a "Use whenever you get five stacks" button. 15% on all damage rather than 10% on periodical damage? No-brainer.) You then have a half-GCD's worth of dead space. You can fill that with a DoT refresh, another Mind Spike, or a Shadow Word: Death if that proves to be good with its relevant talent.

And if this is the correct way to go, we'll need all that extra mana. Mind Spike is almost twice as expensive as Mind Flay.

Looking forward to it, in either case.

And it's over

2010-08-27T20:50:00.001+01:00

After much QQ,
Wowhead ends their beta trial
of polling systems.

Cataclysm

2010-08-16T22:00:00.001+01:00

My internet is being retarded, so I'll keep this one short from my phone.

Cataclysm is a four-syllable word.

Haiku contest? Hells yes.

2010-08-14T08:21:00.003+01:00

So, I'm going to Ireland shortly -- and I will need to do something on the plane. As if by magic, Wowhead announces a haiku competition.

They have no idea how hard I am going to spam them when I get back tomorrow.

Additionally, my luck has been utterly bloody ludicrous. I have a guaranteed job at the end of my six-month placement with my place of work (details to be discussed on Monday), and my Stormrage Death Knight hit level 80 last night... And look how geared he is. Yes, that is Needle-Encrusted Scorpion. Yes, I ran FoS specifically to get it before signing myself for the daily random. Yes, there was zero competition because both of the other DPS were casters and the tank didn't roll need. Yes, it was my very first heroic -- and I earned the "Dungeon and Raid Emblem" achievement from it when Bronjahm died.

I fucking love my life. See you tomorrow, bitches.

Americanisms, Part II

2010-07-19T08:18:00.003+01:00

This isn't another rant. It's just an amusing coincidence. 10 days after I posted this, this appeared on YouTube.

Like I say, it is an amusing coincidence. I love David Mitchell, and I think he rants about the subject way better than I did. I like to think I successfully held the fort while he constructed a much better demonstration of why "I could care less" is idiotic.

RealID Addendum.

2010-07-08T16:31:00.003+01:00

I do, however, feel that it is very wrong of Blizzard to push through Forum RealID if they have decided that Blizzard's own staff will not have their names displayed for "Security reasons".

I don't support hypocrisy in any form.

RealID.

2010-07-07T17:13:00.003+01:00

This will be a big post. Like, really big. Because it's a big issue, and it's one that the privacy brigade -- the "Hockey moms" and the Daily Mail readers -- have all wrong. But, frankly, when do they stop to apply their walnut brains?

(If you're offended by the outset without even looking at the content I'm about to pour out, you have proven my first point. Congratulations for being a walking foil for my cynicism. It's all right. I won't force you to strain your least-exercised muscle. I do hope you feel small in the process of clicking the X in the corner, though.)

So, RealID: Blizzard's new pet that it is rolling out throughout the new Battle.net system. This post is going to be one huge counter-rant against all the people I mention in the first paragraph. To give it some structure, I will be working through this Wowhead blog post on the subject. I'll pick out the quotes that capture the essence of the arguments against this system, and will comprehensively destroy them in order of importance and distance from the central point (i.e., the points that cause me to go on tangents will be placed later on in the article).

But, first, if you genuinely don't already know what I'm on about, here's the essentials: Blizzard, having created a "RealID" friends list (which, it turns out, does not require you to know more than one friend's e-mail address, since you can then pull the other people off their friends-of-friends list -- so, well done, guys, your security is actually not at all affected there either), is changing the official forum structure. When the new Battle.net system is rolled out, alongside Starcraft II, all official forum posts will use RealID instead of character aliases for the cognomines (that's the correct plural of cognomen, by the way) of those who post there.

People who were up-in-arms about RealID friends lists are, of course, up-in-arms about this, waving around the same old, tired arguments. So, let me set the scene further by pointing out the benefit that no sane person can deny: Real accountability. No level 1 alts clogging up the system with purely retarded posts. Actual names with actual recognition will cause this to be a thing of the past. People will still post stupid shit, and people will still troll, but they will have to consider that it is their real name being displayed when they do it.
This works the other way, too: people who have written guides and who are very proud of their positive contributions to the official forums will now get proper recognition. I do not at all suggest that they're going to be winning Nobel Prizes for literature with their fanfics, or whatever, but, if they have any sense of self, they will enjoy seeing their name there. It helps one's ego, even just a fraction of a fraction, when one encounters someone else who recognises their alias -- so how about someone recognising their name?

This is summed up perfectly by this post by ceto:

I think this is bound to increase the quality of discussion on the forums. Posts actually mean something when you sign your name at the bottom. Likewise when you're replying to someone with a name. You might feel no qualms telling Omgbeefeater, Level 3 Tauren Druid, that he's full of fail and should kill himself. Now you're , telling the same thing to David Anderson. Maybe the conversation just got a little more civil. Or maybe you just stopped posting to the forums. Either way, quality won.

This is the best thing that could happen to the crowded, noisy World of Warcraft forums.

So, let's delve into the realms of pucks and racism.

Compromised Security

This is the main thrust of the nay-sayers' argument. They claim that, because information based on one's legal name is publicly available, they open themselves up to all kinds of attacks and fraud just by posting on the official forums. That, regardless of their post's content, they will be targeted.

Random targeting

That bit in italics will be my first counter-question: Why would someone target you when the only thing you did was post on the forums? Assuming the mark had nothing to do with the content you posted, it can only have been random. Newsflash: randomised targeting of people to exploit is not a new thing. It has been around for hundreds -- hell, fucking thousands -- of years. Since the dawn of time, one dishonest man has stolen from another whom he targeted semi-, if not completely, randomly. You can be targeted at any time by anyone. If you're seriously worried about this on the WoW forums, you must live in fear, surely? You must be aware of the dangers of, y'know, existing on this planet? How on Earth do you cope with crossing the road ten times a day?

I'll stop the silly rhetorical questions and ask the main one behind this point: How is it that you are going to be targeted, randomly, through the WoW forums, in a way that you could not be targeted by any other person in any other medium? Answer: you're not. Yes, I guess it must suck that, until now, the WoW forums had been a cocoon for you in which you felt that nothing could harm you. If you did feel that the WoW forums were safe before RealID then you are blind or stupid. Nowhere on the internet is safe -- it's the same level of danger as crossing the road (i.e., low-level), but not completely safe.

Malicious targeting

So, we can discredit randomised targeting as a valid reason for disliking RealID -- or, at least, a valid reason for disliking RealID more than, say, signing up for a mobile phone contract and ticking the "Do not share my information with third parties" box. We now turn to malicious targeting. In other words, targeting which has been caused by the direct or indirect result of the actual content that a user has posted.

So I'll get the short one out of the way: if you're posting stupid shit at the present time on the WoW Forums, I would recommend that you stop posting, since, yes, by some degree of logic people could maliciously target you for posting stupid shit. I will go on to explain how even the fear of that is unfounded (using a degree of logic much more advanced than the one mentioned in the previous sentence), but, if you want to play it safe, you can do us all a favour and take your ball home with you. As shown in the quote earlier, the prospective improvement of post quality in the WoW Forums, as a result of RealID, is a good thing.

Now, some slightly longer, more advanced arguments:

The likelihood of being targeted effectively is incredibly small.

I entered that Wowhead thread at this point.

Xaratherus: Give me your name and two hours. I'll give you a call.
Sinespe: Chris de Lacy. Go for it.

Over the course of the next two pages, Xaratherus showed me the following.
1) Three links (Gone Blogal, Twitter and Facebook) that I knew were in the public domain. Look -- I've even linked them here, too!
2) One link (192.com) which garnered no information that he could use. It wasn't even that 192.com did have the correct information and that it would yield it for a fee. The information it had was completely wrong, and the only places where it even came close to the mark was three years out of date.
3) That he is a retarded 11-year-old.

Xaratherus: If I had the desire, and financial resources, to dig a bit deeper, I could find more.
Sinespe: Except, you couldn't, because that second link sees only one Chris de Lacy in Exeter, and it has the age range completely wrong -- yet, my age, I'm pretty sure, is publicly accessible somewhere too. "I could if I wanted to" is not valid argument ... It's 11-year-old logic, at most. So, please, come back with something more substantial. I'm waiting for my phone-call.
[...]
Xaratherus: When exactly did I say that I would restrict my search to the public domain?
Sinespe: Quite a few times. Because you "don't have/want to use the resources to search deeper". You're just making wild assumptions now about whether I can or cannot be located. All you have done is claimed you can find me and then backed away from it, falling back on "Well, I could if I wanted to!". It invalidates your argument utterly. In short, I've called your bluff. So, please, stop talking. And, in future, maybe you'll learn not to make grandiose claims before checking whether you can actually live up to the bluff. It'll make you look less stupid. You do feel stupid, I hope? Doesn't matter if you're behind an alias -- anonymity doesn't protect you from that.

(I'm done, by the way. I've proven my point; you haven't proven yours, nor do you intend to.)

I will return to Xaratherus later, because he is an incredibly amusing hypocrite on another issue of security which is a mirror-image of this one. That is something of a tangent, though, so I will stick to my point here.

I cannot be located in any meaningful way using a Google search. I do not deny that, if someone had a lot of time and a lot of contacts, that person could find out whatever they liked about me ... But that returns to my random targeting point: That could happen at any point and for any/no reason. Why is RealID, specifically, going to be the catalyst that causes me to become the subject of fraud or stalking? Answer: It's not. The information I have made publicly available has been done so by my own hand, with my own knowledge. I have control over it. Oh, speaking of which:

Stalking

If someone knows where I live, they can stalk me. There you go: I said it. 1-0 to the Daily Mail? Not so fast! There are a number of reasons why I don't care; and, moreover, why no one is going to stalk me.

1) I can, and will, call the police. They can, and will, deal with it. Ironically, the reason why they are likely to deal with it is exactly because of Daily Mail scare stories. That is, I will admit, the advantage of the tabloid press: they do make people aware of the dangers of the modern world. The problem with the them is that they exaggerate everything. (In the Daily Mail's case, everything gives you cancer. No, seriously, I mean it.)

2) I am a nobody, frankly. And, further frankly, so are all of you; paranoia is one of the highest forms of arrogance. And, damn, am I ever arrogant. I do not run my own company, I have very little money to my name, I am not famous in any way. I'm reasonably good-looking, I'm informed, but someone is more likely to stalk me for that reason outside of WoW than as a consequence of posting on the WoW forums. Even if you are notorious in a WoW context, you aren't going to be stalked. So get over yourself.

But enough about me. What about other people's concerns that they will be stalked or e-stalked? Well, let's see the arguments:

1) Female gamers (such as myself) who do not wish to be "targeted", either in game or offline.

So, apparently there is a third potential target criterion: being female in a male-dominated environment (which WoW is: 84% of its population is male). Fair enough; you could be targeted just because you're female. But, again, I'd have to ask the question: who on earth is going to do that? It'd have to be a really dedicated kind of crazy to go to all the trouble of stalking someone from a WoW forum, when (and I'm almost sorry to be crude, but this is criminal logic) there are far more accessible, immediate targets in the real world. The "female gamer" angle can only be spun from a purely sexual perspective, so, by its very nature, it falls flat on its face.

2) I have already covered.

3) Users getting fired or disciplined at work for posting on Blizzard forums.
5) Exploitation of children who must now either post under their real name, or not be allowed to post at all.

Apparently it is Blizzard's fault that you're slacking off at work. Nice scapegoating tactic, there. You might as well also blame YouTube. Hell, why not go the whole hog and blame Google? WoW has been used as a scapegoat throughout that Wowhead thread for bad parenting and bad self-discipline. Sorry, but those arguments are incredibly old and incredibly tired. They have no weight behind them; they never did. Oh no, children are going to be forbidden from posting on the WoW forums. What a huge loss to the community. (I'll be coming onto community later, too.)

4) Users being discriminated against by potential employers, friends, romantic partners based on easily searched gaming habits.

a) Employers. Illegal. You can sue. Well, if you can prove that i) that was the reason you weren't chosen for the post, ii) that reason was not sufficient grounds for refusal, and iii) that you were otherwise the most qualified and capable person for the post. And, frankly, any employer who does that much of a background check on you before you even get hired is very likely to fire you six months down the line for whatever s/he can. Lack of trust does not make for good business arrangements in 90% of circumstances.

b) All of my friends know that I play WoW. Know why they're friends? Because they accept it as part of who I am. Get new friends, frankly. Don't bother with people who don't want to bother with you. This logic extends to c). I don't understand why you would want to be with someone who dislikes something that you do on a regular basis, if you personally like that regular thing and have no desire, now or in the future, to stop it. It is just going to cause more hassle than it could ever be worth. I can understand compromise, but that is not what is being implied in c). What is being implied in c) is someone who, upon hearing that you play WoW, either tries to make you stop altogether or just doesn't want to see you any more as a result. Again, why bother with someone like that who cannot accept you for who you are?

I think I've covered the main points of the whole "I'm going to get stalked/have my identity stolen" brigade now, so I will just finish with my Xaratherus-based tangent.

Authenticators

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that Xaratherus has locked horns with me before. If it was not him, then I apologise, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway and claim it was him because I am 90% sure it was.

I am an authenticator-denier. By that, I mean I do not subscribe at all to the theory that, if you have an authenticator, you're not going to get hacked. We know that's not true, and I've had it demonstrated to me how it can be done. Yes, it is more elaborate than a simple keylogger, but it's enough to make you realise that you don't want to lax on security.

Xaratherus's argument is that Man in the Middle attacks are too elaborate to be considered a viable threat. Yet, this is the same Xaratherus who claims that just by giving him my name he can find out everything about me. Do you see the double-standard? It's pretty subtle, so I'll use an analogue.

Man in the Middle attacks : Deep Privacy Searches :: Keyloggers : Google searches.

See what I mean? The person who claims that an authenticator will provide nigh-on immunity from being attacked is the same person allowing himself to react in a knee-jerk fashion to the idea that people's real names can be googled. Just as Man in the Middle attacks require more set-up than a simple keylogger, so too do deep privacy searches than Googling. There are already so many other reasons why someone would want to perform an MitM attack (a deep privacy search): a WoW account (a real name on a WoW forum) is not going to be high up the list.

Business sense

People seem to think that this is a bad idea because it will lose Blizzard money due to its unpopularity. People also seem to think that this decision was made because the only thing that Blizzard cares about is money. Sorry, what? How does that work, exactly? Either it will gain them money or lose them money. You can't claim that it is unpopular but that it will make them money.

I can assure you all that Blizzard is going to profit off of this; or, if not profit, it is not going to lose money. Know why? Because Blizzard is a business, and it has been a business for over ten years. It knows about market research, and that you don't take any action without first carrying out market research. They are big boys now. They can look after themselves. Whatever changes you might perceive as being crackpot ideas have actually been considered from a business and practicality perspective. In short: Blizzard> You.

Community

This post sickened me.

Krypter: That's going to kill their forums quite a bit. People are going to be too scared to post things since the great thing about forum communities is the sense of anonymity. Now you have to worry about your idea or post being taken the wrong way, and someone finding you on Facebook and making your life miserable. No thanks.

"The great thing about forum communities is the sense of anonymity"? What? No... Sorry, I think you must have misspoke. You aren't anonymous in a forum community unless that forum "community" is /b/. Remind me: Why is that community "great", again? Do you really want to put forward /b/ as an argument in favour of anonymity?

No, what you meant to say was that forum communities give you an alias. You are still known by a name -- it's just not your real name. Your alias can still be brought into disrepute. Your alias will still carry with it the mark of whatever you choose to post. Your alias will be branded in people's minds as "Helpful" or "Unhelpful". If "Unhelpful", at some point, you're still going to have to leave that community owing to everyone eventually ignoring you, after your constant asstardery.

Opt-in & "The majority of people do not want this"

It just is an opt-in. The forums are not the game. I'm pretty sure that the majority of people do not even know that the forums exist, let alone post on them. At the end of the day, WoW is a game, and there are other avenues to give your feedback. Hell, you can post on the Wowhead forums to give your feedback: Blizzard does read those. Nothing has actually been lost in this respect, because your views will still get across if you publicise them in equally notable venues.

_________

And, with that, I think I'm done. There's a whole slew of other stuff about this issue that I think I wanted to say, but which I simply can't remember at the moment. Oh well. I think 3.3k words is long enough for one night.

Wall of Whispers.

2010-06-27T13:44:00.002+01:00

All I am going to do here is link you to a tweet.

Dear America (and the World, by Extension),

2010-06-13T09:02:00.002+01:00

Now, I don't follow football. Especially where the World Cup is concerned, I think it is a blight, especially for the English, who seem to like to take it as an opportunity to show the hosting nation just how full of pathetic hooligans England is.

However, it is in my best interests that England stay in for as long as possible, since it means that, whenever England are playing a match, I get to socialise with certain people and do certain things with an increased frequency -- plus, everywhere in town is nice and quiet because everyone is in pubs or at home watching the matches.

So if you guys could let us get to the semi-finals, at least, that would be nice. Go on. Do it for your old pal Sinespe. He likes getting tail.

The Huge, Throbbing Stick and the Tiny Carrot

2010-06-12T08:43:00.003+01:00

No euphemisms here.

This is what happens when you are useful.

This is what happens when you are useless. (See over the page, too.)

Take your pick, ladies and gents.

Touched by a Troll on YouTube!

2010-06-11T22:55:00.001+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/trolltouched

I'm not telling you which voice is mine.

Raid SHeroics

2010-06-09T23:46:00.001+01:00

We tried Earth, Wind and Fire tonight.

Dear God it is hard.

We'll get it later in the week.

HTC Bastard.

2010-05-28T16:08:00.003+01:00

DISCLAIMER: O2 are awesome people. I am retarded.

For six years, I have had the same phone: my trusty Nokia 7250i. Given that it is now more rusty than trusty, I figured it was time to get a new one.

So, I go to the o2 store. I happened to see the HTC Desire, which was described by one of my friends as, "Like an iPhone, but without the restrictions that come with an apple logo." I had a nice long talk with the trainee who had asked if I needed any help, and he gave me the outline of the pay monthly tariffs (I am currently, and always have been, Pay as You Go, but recently I have found that I am in need of talk-time, owing to being in contact with one of my long-lost school friends, rather than so many hundred free texts per month; calls to other networks being needlessly excessively expensive as they are, I figured I'd go Contract and get some free ones).

I, intelligently, I thought, said that I would go away and think about it for a while before deciding whether I wanted it. Because I really did want it, but I didn't want just to get it on impulse. So I went away, spoke with my mum, outlined what I intended to do (my sister is the complete opposite of this: whenever she gets a new phone or car, mum knows after the event. I figured I could do with a voice of reason, however), and asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She did, so I went back to the store and asked to get it. Here begins my long journey filled with trepidation on the road to entering the 21st century 10 years too late.

Problem 1: Saturday 22nd May: Phone not in stock. This is fine, it's perfectly common. The chap I spoke to was very nice and said that he would take my name and number, and would phone me when they knew that they were getting some more in. This was duly done on Wednesday, and the phonecall detailed that a new delivery of Desires would be in on Thursday and ready by 12 o'clock. Okay, I said, I'll come in after work.

Problem 2: Thursday 27th May, 2.30 p.m.: I don't have my account number to hand. That's fine, I thought, I'll go to my bank and get a statement with it printed on. I'll be back, I said, after a meeting that I had at three o'clock. So, I went to my bank. While I was getting my statement, the cashier asked me if my address was still correct. It had not been correct since I had started going to university, and I thought that now might be a good time to update it. So, I told her my new address, and the system was updated.

Problem 3: Thursday 27th May, 5.10 p.m.: Card declined in O2 store. Wrong address: Because of how banks work, it would take a while for my updated details to be completely fed through the system. As a result, my updated address, for the time-being, would not work for such things as setting up a Direct Debit for a phone contract. I was advised by Fred, the person who has the misfortune of dealing with such an idiot but who is very kind and polite about the whole thing and entirely sees my perspective. He advised that I come back tomorrow and try it again.

Problem 4: Friday 28th May: O2 Exeter's linked computer systems are down. My card is still declining on the non-linked, manual system. I am advised to come back tomorrow.

Someone doesn't want me to get my new phone. I am determined that tomorrow there will be no more hitches and that I will get the arsing thing.

UPDATE 29th May: Still nothing. Apparently it could be a credit issue, which is pretty retarded, so I now have to wait for someone to get back to me on that front.

Tier 10 trinkets

2010-05-25T07:39:00.002+01:00

10-man: 1.
25-man: 3.

I hear 25-man raiders have three trinket slots.

Oh wait.

@Nymarie

2010-05-22T08:23:00.002+01:00

Re this:

The cloaks aren't really that good for Shadow. Spirit/Crit is pretty suboptimal -- not quite as bad as the stat combination on that god-awful Tier 9 Spirit/Hit helm, but still not fantastic. I'd hold out for Lich Wrappings (Valithria-10). A stop-gap with +hit is Kurisu's Indecision (ToC5N). Where emblems are concerned, I instead recommend investing in 4T10 Shadow if you have not already. Whenever someone decides that they want to develop their shadow gear set, Tier 10 must be the first port of call. It is so powerful that it dwarfs all other Frost Emblems purchases

So, with regards to some gearing suggestions: Tier 10 Gloves, Helm, Shoulders and Chest (In that order) should be considered. Your Tier 10 Disc legs will be just fine until a SP/Crit/Haste alternative comes along. The Tier 10 Shadow legs have too much hit on them. Your Circle of Ossus will also do nicely in Shadow.

... Although, having said all that, hit rating on 25-man Icecrown gear seems to be focused in the neck, one ring (Valanar's. Don't get the Crit/Hit one unless it is a stop-gap for the Haste/hit) and ... that's pretty much it for optimal slots, annoyingly. You don't want the Chest, Gloves or Shoulders because they're all tier slots. That's incredibly short-sighted, I think.

But let's have a play, shall we? We've identified this, this, this and this. 194 Hit. 95 short. Let's get these. 31 to go. These. Done.

Alternative: Tier 10 Shadow legs instead of Tier 10 Shadow chest (+80) and a Rigid gem in the cloak (+24).

(I know that you have the +hit offhand, but you'll want to get rid of that as soon as you win Dying Light. Dying Light is wonderful for Shadow.)

Obviously these are all optimal selections rather than necessarily what you'll be able to get your hands on at first. I tend to do that.

And now I must go out, so I'll have to cut short my advice for the time-being.

Bad Priest #243

2010-05-21T19:15:00.003+01:00

That's a random number, of course.

Sinespe versus Blendia.

Just look at those delicious Haste/Spirit gems socketed everywhere in that Priest's bloody gear. Funnily enough, despite his over-zealous hasty behaviour, he almost has less haste than I do.

But look at that spellpower. 3150 without Inner Fire. Not even my Draenei has that much. Full 251 and 264 epics. A challenge, surely, in spite of the terrible gemming choices.

The boss? Toravon the Ice Watcher.

The result? An obliteration.

5.8k? Seriously? Full bloody buffs, right down to an unholy death knight for the extra disease damage, and you pull 5.8k? You're about 3k below what you should be capable of doing with that gear. Full bloody Tier 10, and all.

Want to know the kicker? Tier 10 legs dropped. Now, I already have these, and I will only be using them for a very short period of time while I accumulate enough emblems to have four pieces of tier 10 without relying on something with a severe problem in the hit department.

This guy, on the other hand, already has four pieces of tier 10, and Leggings of Woven Death. That's pretty much Best in Slot without access to anything above ICC25-N content.

He rolled on the legs.

I died a little inside.

Why I love being British

2010-05-21T18:28:00.003+01:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7746090/Cream-teas-battle-rages-between-Devon-and-Cornwall.html

That is all.

Americanisms.

2010-05-10T16:04:00.003+01:00

The ones that make no sense and which make me cringe whenever I read them.

Language is important. Thinking about language is even more important. If you use a word without knowing what it means, you have a high probability of being ousted for attempting to embellish the expanse of your vocabulary by the use of oddities of verbosity.

Text-speak, it has been claimed, uses an altogether different part of the brain from the one devoted to language and communication: it cuts out that part of our brain which is designed to think, carefully, about whether we are using words appropriately, aptly and correctly. Instead of thinking how to express an idea in 140 characters using full words and sentences, text-speak is a convenient circumnavigation past the necessity of considering and weighing up each word. The counter-argument is that considering and weighing each word could take longer than just writing in a sentence composed of half-words, and that text-speak is used for its expediency, which makes it appropriate to the medium of communication in which it is deployed -- text messages themselves designed to be a quick way of telling something to someone.

This argument falls apart, however, when one considers the simple adage, "Practice makes perfect." The same argument is applied to using text-speak on-line: it is claimed that the fractions of seconds saved by missing out characters can make all the difference on, to take a WoW example, a message typed in the middle of a boss-fight, where time is at a premium for communication owing to being completely disabled while typing. But consider this: what if one actually practises typing full words from the start? They'll type quicker as they learn the positions of the keys. Text-speak is a whole other language with its own alphabet -- pseudo-Oriental in its use of certain characters to represent whole words (compare Japanese or Chinese Kanji with "4" as a substitute for the combination of phonics producing the sound "for").
To become fluent in any language, you have to think in that language. That's what fluency means: you spend no time at all consciously thinking about what you want to say -- the words enter your speech centres directly from your subconscious and go straight out; and, conversely, words of others in the same language flow into your brain and are immediately understood. A scholar of Latin could stare at a complex sentence for many minutes to work out its full meaning; show it to a Roman and he'll react to it instantly.
Where typing is concerned, the same logic applies, but rather than your brain being the key motivator, it is a combination of your brain and muscles. Muscle memory is used to remember the position of the keys. Assuming one has one's hands anchored at the same location on the keyboard, one's muscles learn exactly how far to move in order to press down on a particular key. Combine that with fluency in the language, and you have the phenomenon touch-typing.
So, learning fluency in English, rather than in text-speak, means that the two are apples and oranges. Those who claim that the amount of time saved by cutting out characters make such a claim from the position of typing proper English really slowly. I would type text-speak as slowly as they would type English.

This is a large diversion from the point I want to make, which is the following: once you are fluent in a language, you can devote more time to analysing it instead of spending time making sure that what you are saying it grammatically accurate. You can analyse the differences in meaning between "drenched" and "damp"; both mean "wet" but have differing levels of wetness associated with them. This varying scale can be applied to other, more subtle examples: Greed vs. Gluttony, Tautology vs. Redundancy. By such analysis, one starts to use more precise language; one becomes more efficient, in a way that text-speak, by its very nature as an invention of convenience thought up in but a moment compared to the millennial evolution of English, cannot hope to achieve. In that previous sentence, I could have said "the evolution of English over thousands of years"; but "millennial" is more succint and conveys the exact same meaning.

So. Americanisms. Why am I annoyed at their use of language today? Well, it isn't the spelling, for once. At least, not really. Instead, my problem is that some of our English idioms have been corrupted by our Free cousins, in ways that do not make sense; ways that show, clearly, a disregard for actual thought: text-speak evolutions, done in haste, mistranslation or for convenience.

Some examples for you:

Correct idiom: "I couldn't care less." Meaning of idiom: "I don't care." Americanised idiom: "I could care less."
Why the Americanism is wrong: Just think about it for a moment. If you use a conditional sentence indicating that you could care less about something, you are saying that the current reality is that you do care to an extent -- that it would be possible for you in another circumstance to care to a lesser extent than you currently do. But the meaning is supposed to be "I do not care one little bit. It is impossible for my care level to be lower: My level of care is 0 on the scale from 0 to infinity. I could not care less."

Correct idiom "There is still a way to go." Meaning of idiom: "Progress is still to be made before we can consider this deed accomplished." Americanism: "There is still a ways to go."
Why the Americanism is wrong: a way. A: singular, impersonal pronoun. Singular. It is a singular, non-collective noun. Change it for any similar word: "We have been travelling on this path for a mile, but we are only half way along it. There is still a mile to go." Not "A miles", "a mile".

Now, by the sounds of things, I am late to the party on this one, because Webster has prepared a defence: it insists that idioms are not defined by their grammatical structure, and that, by their nature, require foundational knowledge of the culture in which they are used if they are to be understood. I do not consider this argument remotely adequate: There is no cultural difference between "A way to go" and "A ways to go". They convey the exact same thing. The only difference is that one of them is wrong. Furthermore, "I could/couldn't care less" is not the same as the difference between, for instance, "He kicked the bucket," in English and ,"He broke his pipe," in French -- in the latter idiomatic construct, and others of its kind, the thought being conveyed is completely based in imagery and metaphor. "I couldn't care less", however, is entirely linguistic. Calling these literal expressions "Idioms" is therefore something of a misnomer: They are commonly used expressions specific to a particular language, and they are expressed as self-contained units in the same way that individual words are, but their grammar should nevertheless be correct. There is no reason why someone from another culture should not be able to understand the meaning expressed by "I couldn't care less" simply by reading the sentence.

I will come up with more examples and lengthen this treatise, but I should really do the heroic daily and stuff.

SHeroics.

2010-05-03T20:57:00.005+01:00

Meet the Fungineers:
Sinespe, Hand of A'dal: Undead Shadow Priest
Isolde the Patient: Undead Discipline Priest
Fermy of the Nightfall: Blood Elf Holy Paladin (And Kartok the Patient: Blood Elf Beast Mastery Hunter)
Twilight Vanquisher Zorzil: Troll Protection Warrior
Starcaller Drenera: Undead Arcane Mage (And Cherana: Blood Elf Protection Paladin)

Together, we are Touched by a Troll. We intend to be a 10-man raiding guild in Cataclysm. We are transferring to Stormrage, where there are actually good people. (Cyclone-EU is a fantastic battlegroup. Frenzy, on the other hand, has Magtheridon in it. Oh dear.)

To tide us over until Cataclysm actually gets launched, we intend to get a decent raiding base together and clear some ICC content. And, while we wait for that, to get us noticed, we are doing SHeroics.

"SHeroics" is a term we coined from calling what we were doing in Heroics "Shenanigans". "Heroic Shenanigans" became "SHeroics". SHeroics are Heroic Hard Modes. "But, Chris, 'Heroic' means 'Hard mode' already!" Well, yes, but have you seen Wrath 5-man Heroics? They're a joke. You can't really call them "Hard".

So, what are Heroic Hard Modes? Simple, really: engaging multiple bosses at the same time, and killing them one-by-one.

This post is a trial-run of the formula I will be using on our guild site, which will hopefully have a blogging section. There will be Youtube videos of the kills when my lovely companions have worked out how video editing works. We have already done one SHeroic -- Nexus -- and we have been experimenting with Utgarde Pinnacle. So, without further ado:

SHeroic Nexus
Bosses engaged: Ormorok --> Anomalous --> Telestra.
Kill order decided: Anomalous --> Telestra --> Ormorok
Toons used: Sinespe, Isolde, Cherana, Zorzil, Fermy.

After some experimentation, we found that the only way this was going to work was to clear all trash and pull backwards through the instance from Ormorok. We had accidentally killed the Alliance captain during trash clearing, so killing all four bosses will have to wait for another time.

So, we pulled Ormorok, then worked our way back through a sea of respawned mini-lashers (The Aura of Regeneration mobs) to get to Anomalous. Cherana and Fermy went with Ormorok towards Telestra. Zorzil, Issy and I ran up to Anomalous to pull him. While on the move towards Telestra, I was killing the Chaotic Rifts to limit the adds we had. Upon reaching Telestra, our priority was to kill Anomalous first, since the number of adds was ludicrous. The combination of Telestra's AoE "freeze" stuns and Ormorok's Crystal Spikes was brutal, as was all the damage from Chaotic Rifts, adds, and Telestra's Blizzards, fire bombs and Gravity Wells. I died at around 30% of Anomalous' health, but that was the majority of the challenge: identifying which of his Chaotic Rifts was generating his immunity shield. Once that was overcome, the rest was relatively straightforward.

Attempts required: 2. (1 wipe, 1 kill).
Achievement name: "There's Plenty of Them to Go Around. [10]" Sequential achievement. Next achievements in sequence: "There's Even More of Them to Go Around. [25]" (O->A->AC->T Kill A Kill T Kill AC Kill O); "Chaos: It's Not Just a Theory. [40]" (Overview: " Pull O Pull A Pull AC Pull T Kill A Kill T Kite to K Kill O Pull K Kill K Kill AC".)

The beauty of SHeroics is in inventing these achievements. You can come up with various ways to pull, deal with and kill bosses, and the combinations you come up with will have varying levels of difficulty.

So watch this space for more Heroic Shenanigans.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

2010-04-26T17:05:00.001+01:00

Link.

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout.

SUCK IT. SUCK IT HARD.

About fucking time.

2010-04-23T10:44:00.004+01:00

This is the appropriate form of greeting when someone takes an extra five minutes to log in, owing to the Cyclone battlegroup's login servers playing up,which they had been doing for days. Such was the level of playing-up of the login servers that it had been well documented on the official board for Cyclone over the past three days from when the problem started and, thus, should be at least partially expected and wholly sympathised with.

That is, of course, if you are more concerned about doing SRSBSNSS 5v5 than concerned about the actual "friends" (I use the term incredibly loosely, because I don't think it's appropriate at all -- it's more an aspiration) with whom you're doing said 5v5. Speaking of which, by the way, our 5s started out as just a way to get points and was never, and will never, be srsbsnss. 1950 does not make us awesome. Nor is it worth being so fucking acerbic, obsessed, and haranguing about.

It very quickly becomes suffocating to know that whenever I log into my toon I'm going to get people interrogating me on why I've not been online (Note, not "asking"; "interrogating". Asking is nice -- especially if it shows a regard for how I am. Interrogating doesn't care about how I am, it cares about the use of my toon for the sake of 5v5). I wonder what the chances are that that suffocation explains why, even when I do have free time lately, I'm more likely to log on to my Horde priest with other friends who don't have these scheduling expectations of me. Pretty high, I'd say.

My apologies to Elanie and Sane, who did nothing to piss me off and who, I hope, care more that I'm using my energy to immerse myself in the working world, and thus increase my employability, and that this is leaving me very tired at the end of the day, and in very little mood to deal with any other crap (that I already had done on Tuesday and had had quite enough of) such that I am in no mood to have sarcastic snipes thrown at me by the other two thanks to their complete selfishness and single-mindedness. "Just an excuse for taking so long".

Rad Nauseam

2010-04-08T23:58:00.000+01:00

I have a job.

I start on Monday.

More 25-man exclusive crap

2010-04-06T15:00:00.001+01:00

Grats Shadowmourners.

I will spare you all a 1.5k-word rant this time. You all know how much bullshit that is.

Tier 10 Healing.

2010-03-22T15:25:00.002Z

Get it changed; and tell them to talk to us.

Because, right now, they're not discussing it with us at all.

Hell, if you're on the US forums, copy it over to them.

Want me in your guild?

2010-03-15T14:50:00.006Z

Then don't advertise yourselves like this:

[14:25:04] [W From] [Bien]: Hey mate, you need a new guild ? :) we are a newly formed guild, gonna be a good raiding guild, and we would like to have you in :)
[14:25:09] [80:Bien]: Level 80 Human Paladin [Shadow Raiders] - The Forge of Souls

Because it translates as "You have awesome gear and I want you to carry people I already have in the guild who think they're a lot better than they are, and think that if they get four pieces of tier 10 like you they will, magically, know their class inside-out and pull the DPS you can."

______

Someone commented about me being in Inglourious Gankers. I am, as a pink pony-tailed gnome rogue. Levelling is very slow -- but I'll get my scalps in due course.

______

Account is due to expire in one month. Just before you start thinking I'm back. Oh, and I am deliberately being more of a jerk and caring less about being such. Retarded blog posts, which have their justification sounding very much like "Balance", are not softening my edges. "These people are clearly morons of the highest order [...] 'Everyone's opinion is equally valid', my arse!"

______

I am on Twitter now, for some reason.

______

"Lay" still takes a direct object.

Gambler's Fallacy

2010-02-09T04:12:00.002Z

I have made it my business not to be kicked from any guild I join, nor have a guild application refused, nor be involved or be a party to pointless, destructive arguments through any medium. My luck on all fronts however has changed and it is time to assess where I stand.

Much like the gambler coin-tossing away his savings, I can rationalise that this is a downturn that will improve, or I can cut my losses and get out before I go insane. Having never been one to subscribe to fallacies against statistics, and being quite fond of what little sanity I have, guess which option I'm taking.

(Note: At this point I just start rambling, so the TL;DR is "To keep a long story short ... The End.")

WoW loses one shadow priest with an ego doing nothing but crowding up server space. One slightly louder voice in ~7 million. There was a post I was going to make at the turn of the decade pointing out that Anathema is nothing special, in response in part to someone on Wowhead's forums saying that they "couldn't do what I do": all I do is write into an easy-to-read form what is readily available for anyone to find out if they have a spare 20 minutes; and where my character is concerned all I do is press buttons in a certain way. As with quite a few of the unfinished posts in my Dashboard, I started to write it but then lost my flow and didn't return to it. I could say to myself that people will notice the void left by my departure, but that'd be a lie.

Funnily enough, I knew there was a reason why I wasn't interested in WoW when it first came out, despite having been quite fond of WCII and WCIII. I think I need to get back into that mentality which takes a while to react to anything, instead of jumping on anything new and exciting. There's probably quite a lot to be said for taking everything slowly. It's more biological -- I won't necessarily say "natural", because "nature" within humans isn't the same as with any other animal given our self-awareness -- it adds a layer.

You might've figured out by now that I'm just rambling and not really wanting to press "publish" on something quite so short. Rambling is something I'm rather good at. One of my favourite things to do in the company of someone else is just to wind through long, tangential discussions -- no central point, just jumping opportunistically from one subject to another. I don't do it enough with the people with whom I'd get the most out of it -- I'm too comfortable with my default position of silence. (I know, right? For someone who types such long stuff you'd probably expect me to talk a lot. Not so. I don't necessarily prefer silence; my brain just shuts off when it feels it isn't needed, expected or wanted.) On Thursday I move into a house whose occupants are 5 people I've never met -- hopefully at least one of them will encourage me to ramble speakily, and perhaps even to get back into coining odd words like "speakily". My imagination has been rather stunted over the past few years; it's not a good thing to lose so easily -- it's one of the things we should long to hold on to from our childhoods for as long as we can; not necessarily out of any sense of staving off the inevitable, but just because it's enjoyable to imagine.

So ... yeah. Sorry if this is sudden, or whatever. You can all go back now to your respective comings-from with whatever opinion you like of me, of shadow priests, of maths, of "being emo" as I believe kids like to call it these days, of anything. Hopefully I won't be around to hear it.

Hide Helm.

2010-02-04T18:00:00.005Z

I have raided with Fancy Hat Club for 8 months. Over those months, I have found a home -- after almost three years of playing the game. A place in which I feel comfortable raiding, and don't feel the need to reach through my monitor and throttle the other 9-24 people with whom I'm wiping on bosses. The 6-hour-per-week structure was perfect for a 10-man guild: Not as many nights as would be needed for Icecrown Hard modes -- so, when they come around, raid extension lockouts will likely be needed so that time isn't spent clearing normal mode bosses first off -- but enough to clear each wing of Icecrown before the new one had been released, and more than sufficient competency to form a solid basis for defeating Arthas.

Apparently, though, I missed the point completely. Today I was kicked out, after assisting with killing Putricide and Lanathel (Shadow and Discipline, respectively, and damn hard roles they are to fill successfully) and assisting with the acquisition of Proto-Drakes and Tribute to Insanity. -- Apparently, even that sentence misses the point completely.

The reason why I've been rejected after an 8-month trial period (Because that's effectively what has happened: I've never been a member; just a very very long-standing, very valuable triallist who has now gotten on the members' nerves to the point where they would rather I leave) is something I'm still struggling actually to find, but I think the best summation of it is: "Some of the core of the guild decided on my behalf and without consulting me that I was not happy where I was, and mistook other 10-man raiding guilds on the same server or on other servers as more suited to my needs, and so have given me a push in that direction."

Yeah. I know. This is going to be a long one.

Firstly, let's look at the guild structure. Or, more to the point, let's look at the perception I had of the guild structure which apparently is not actually how things work at all. At the top of any guild, you have the GM -- in this case, Chayah. Below that, you have the officers. In this case, the officers were the two assistant Raid Leaders: Razzmatazz and Tinytran; with assistance from the Main Tanks -- Finaldo, Lucian, and occasionally Asmodeus (Matsumoto). Below that, you have the raiders.

That's it. That's how a guild works. The GM calls the shots with assistance from his officers. Specifically in this case, there were always two raid leaders in one raid for the purposes of debate and consultation in officer chat -- two out of the three (Chayah, Razzmatazz and Tinytran) were present at all times.

Now I'll explain about myself as a raider: I have a capacity for leadership. I am perceptive, intelligent, and extremely good with language and communication. I can see what goes wrong on a wipe, how to solve it, and how to tell other people how to solve it. That's what you see in a raid with me: I don't pay attention to membership, ranks, or anything like that. If I have something to say which will assist in killing the boss, I will say it in /ra and I will, perfectly justifiably, expect my opinion to be taken note of, because I know what I'm talking about and it will benefit you to listen to it. If you read those last few sentences and thought "What an arrogant jerk", you can click the red X now. No one will judge you. I'll call you an ignorant scrub for thinking that successful raids could operate without people giving their input, but apart from that no one will judge you.

Since I have a capacity for leadership, I understand the importance of a command structure. 10 people with opinions is great; but if no one speaks out to say, "Right, we will take THIS element of this strategy and THAT element from that strategy, because it is most likely to result in success" then a raid will be all theory and no action. Conversely, if everyone says in whispers or in some other chat channel with just a few of their friends what should be done, and doesn't communicate with the whole of the group, bedlam occurs.

FHC has no command structure. Outwardly, it appears that it does, and I truly challenge anyone to come to a different conclusion about the guild's structure when you see three different people rotating who wears the Slightly Darker Text hat, two of them always being present at one raid, and pointing out that "Stuff" is being "Discussed" -- with the rest of the raid listening to what they eventually conclude. I'll let Chayah explain what I mean by that:

You see, I think that your impression of what FHC is is still a bit skewiff. I didn't "found" it, I just "did the paperwork". It was founded by Matsumoto, Finaldo, Lucian, Tuonie, Tinytran, Sinthaya, Clavicus, Maudlin, Riel, Razzmatazz, and myself. I'm not being diplomatic - these are the people who got together, said "hey, we're fed up with 25s and with all the raid group baggage, what if we could do 10s together? as friends instead of as "members"? what would it be like?" I'm GM because they all trust me to manage the guild effectively - I was one of the leaders of the old raid groups that most of them were part of and have been friends with most of them for even longer than that. I'm GM because I'm something that everyone has in common. I'm a unifying factor to the sometimes disparate elements of the group. I'm everybody's friend. I've not got any greater authority or weight than any of the other founders except what they give me because of that friendship. (And I have to be very careful not to abuse that.)

So, underlying the seemingly straightforward nature of GM-->Officer-->Member, what we actually have is a group of friends. This is where problems start.

Count the names, if you would. You'll notice there are 11 people. That's enough for a 10-man guild as it is, and it's a structure that works more than successfully for CakeFM -- a very greatly progressed 10-man guild on the same server who have just that: 11 members, with one of them on near-permanent standby because all of them have 100% attendance to every raid.

The problem comes when not everyone can attend all the time. And this, presumably, is why FHC recruits other people: Not everyone is able to attend every raid, and there are so few raids per week that even dropping one raid reduces that week's productivity by 50%. All it takes is two drop-outs from that 11-man roster -- say, the girlfriend/boyfriend duo in that list of names -- and that's a raiding week gone. There's nothing wrong with that; but if it happens too often then one moves from being a stable raiding guild to a collection of people all of whom log on very occasionally and clear an instance: without the stability, no progression can occur -- and, while progression isn't a focal point of FHC's raiding goals, it factors in at least to the degree that they want to be raiding the current tier of content at any point of time.

So, you recruit extras to fill the gaps. But the extras don't necessarily fit. They might want something slightly different to what you want. In my case -- my "problem", as it were -- the clique (Since that's what it is) seemed to think that I am solely focussed on progression. I must clear hard modes. I must get my proto-drake. I must beat the game. At one point in time, maybe 18 months ago, that may indeed have been my goal: I did beat the game when Illidan was the final boss, and then I burnt out. What I am actually interested in is bringing out the potential of everyone else in the group. As soon as I started raiding Ulduar with FHC, I saw how much potential there was for greatness. Not "Greatness" in terms of a 10-man Strict ranking, or a "Beat everyone else to kill Arthas Heroic", but "greatness" in the sense of the guild fulfilling the latent potential it had in every single one of those incredibly competent 11 people.

My way of helping this potential to be filled was to contribute quite vastly to the discussions of tactics in /ra and on the forums, to make sure that I was always aware of what I had to do -- and to maintain two gear sets, two specs and five playstyles (I'm not even joking. There's more than one way to play Shadow and more than two ways to play Discipline) for those two specs so that I could contribute as much as I could to the success of the group. But, I'll refer to Chayah again:

People in FHC don't want to wipe, but they want to be allowed to show up to raids after a hard day at uni or the zoo or whatever and not necessarily know everything about every boss, or to be allowed to choose gear based on their own terms rather than on hours of theorycraft, and so on.

I've emboldened two things there, because this kind of hyperbole has always irritated me whenever I've seen it; two different and equally strong arguments can be made against it, which I will come on to after I've explained the context of this quote.

Rarely -- and I do mean rarely; I can count on one hand the times that I did this, and over 8 months that's a very small number of occurrences -- I have questioned people's gear choices or spec choices. Not criticised, not blamed: questioned. The times when I've done this have been when we've been chasing that elusive 1% on Anub'arak -- when I was looking for ways in which we could take him down; looking for ways to improve. (And, yes, before you suggest that I didn't look at myself, I did look at myself; hard.) So, fine, occasionally I have crossed the line with one foot, dipping my toes into unknown waters, and perhaps that generated a negative reaction. That is an excuse for an eight-month campaign not to accept me into the rank and file? Something tells me not. Oh, but, Sinespe, what about your arrogance in correcting people's grammar? Short answer: Again, single-hand counting on how many times this happened, and grow the hell up.

The two arguments against this lazy hyperbole are the following:
1) The reason why there are condensed, and very enjoyable to read, strategies on
the guild forums as opposed just to linking people to Tankspot is because it takes 5 minutes; 10 at most; to read a boss strategy. Combine that with the staggered nature of releases in Icecrown, and you're looking at 10-15 minutes per week of reading forum posts detailing strategies. You can do that while on a break at work, or checking e-mails, or while you eat your breakfast. Same with the theorycrafting: The good sections of Elitist Jerks (Off the top of my head and from experience at the ones I have used, Blood Simple springs to mind) tells you what you need to know in a concise and easy-to-read manner. This does not take hours. It takes the mathematicians and casual theorycrafters hours to come up with numbers and prose that you can devour in ten minutes.

2) Since when does everyone need to know "everything" about a boss strat? When did I even imply that? You couldn't do that in Vanilla WoW, and even in TBC the guilds I was in tended to have separate chat channels for Healing, DPS and Tank roles to be assigned. I like to know everything about a boss fight because I like to be able to analyse for improvement -- but on Blood Prince Council, for instance, I could get by knowing the key points: "DPS the one with the healthbar"; "Throw a SW: D on a Kinetic Bomb if you see it's getting low to the ground"; "Be prepared to run when Taldaram is Empowered"; "Stay away from vortices [not "vortexes", you asshats. I've been drilling that into people since TBC.]".

I have digressed slightly. Back to the guild structure, and recruitment from outside: Sometimes, people won't fit. So, what do you do? You'll find out they don't fit pretty quickly -- so, you could talk to them about it and try to see where they're coming from, or you could silently allow your irritation at them to get worse and worse over an 8-month period, recognising that they're incredibly strong players and very useful to your progression, until you get one of the people from the group who knows the Problem Player well -- the GM, of course, because he's the token Fall Guy (Sorry, C, I meant you're a "Friend to everyone" -- that's the term you used to describe it. I prefer "The mask behind which all the bitching can go on" myself. You say potayto, I say "Get stuffed with this cliquery". I mean ... Potahto.) -- to kick the person out and try to explain the unreasonable in reasonable terms.

The problem with the latter choice is that I've been left feeling like an object. An alien. I knew, when I joined, that I had caused a bit of friction. In the first month, this was, I thought, all smoothed over. Chayah was a constant source of sanity in the madness that appeared to be sheer insanity -- For instance someone reportedly got offended during one Ulduar raid when I said "Be careful of aggro in the first few seconds [on Auriaya's pull]." Really. Someone got offended at that purely neutral, sensible reminder. I persevered, because he reminded me that FHC was about accepting others for their faults. So I accepted others for their faults. Seven months later, the clique decided that they didn't want to accept me for mine. But it has been dressed up to me in a way that makes it seem like it's for my own good. Chayah, once more:

So we revisited all the stuff that we thought makes us us and how you could fit into that. The conclusion reached was that both FHC and you would still need to change significantly before we could be comfortable bedfellows. And - I know it sounds hard to believe when you've just been kicked out - but people were genuinely concerned as to how "fair" it was to you to "require" you to change so they didn't have to. They genuinely think that you'll be better off in another group. I think nobody except myself really realised how much you regarded FHC as your home, which I suppose isn't their fault.

And why did this happen? Complete lack of communication. Chayah has been my only point of contact -- ever -- for how I have behaved within the guild; and his disposition to be friendly and see everyone's point of view has resulted in my failure to see just how much people apparently hate me. I don't even know who those people are in the list of 11. I suspected that Maudlin might, but apparently he didn't until four or five months into my lack-of-tenure. Did Clavicus hate me? I spent whole evenings talking with him about everything and nothing. Tuonie, I know, did not -- and he reacted with surprise when he discovered that I was no longer in the guild, and the reasoning behind it; so is it the case that some members of that clique were not even present at the decision-making process where what would make me "better off" was decided without my own voice being heard? Same with Lucian: not so often did we speak, but we did speak, and I enjoyed his company immensely; was all that enjoyment one-sided?

It strikes me that I have not been treated as a human being in this. I have been treated as a problem that needs to be solved; a problem that wasn't solved because everyone was too lazy to practice what Chayah was preaching when he told me that everyone accepts everyone else in FHC in spite of their flaws -- if, indeed, this was the philosophy applicable to new members too. The very fact that I've been kicked out is proof that at not one moment did anyone, with the possible exception of those that I have mentioned, consider that I am currently sitting on a chair, looking at a computer screen, and typing on a keyboard: just like they are. I am feeling the pressure of the keys, my heart is pounding in my chest and blood is flowing around my blood vessels. There are people in this world -- outside of this online guise of Sinespe and those who know it -- whom I love: faithfully, passionately, filially, fraternally and sororially. There are passions I follow: my poetry, my archery, my (simple, by comparison) maths, my explorations of philosophy; that none of them know anything about. My fate within this guild has been decided by a group of people who do not know the first thing about me, because I was an outsider and they were determined to keep me that way.

But how could I say they were determined to keep me at arm's length? Simple, really: None of the people who are likely to have been instrumental in my removal from FHC have ever tried to talk to me. They've never tried to get to know me. They've never tried to reconcile what they perceive as differences with me. Throughout, they have not needed me, thus they have chosen to ignore the problem as best they could rather than tackle it. If all goes wrong? Well, doesn't matter, really, does it? They still have enough people to raid with.

And this is the problem with the guild's lack of structure: Letting no one new into the ranks will cause their ranks to stagnate, and eventually they will die off. What's Chayah's reaction to this?

As I said online, the end to an affair is not the end of its meaning: endings complete meaning. They're a necessary component of meaning. Some day, maybe very soon, FHC will end and we'll all move on to other stuff. When that happens I'll still have some very fond (as well as not so fond) memories of FHC and I'll still have things to be pleased about or angry about and to learn from.

Everything ends, therefore we'll just sit back and let it happen. I'll give you my direct response to that:

You may have accepted "One day it will die", but that's laziness, in my opinion. It's a casual, shameful excuse for not wanting to do anything about it. Yes, one day we'll all die. That's why we make an effort to last as long as we fucking can.

This whole situation has been about a lack of effort. Not in whether to approach me or not, but in the very essence of whether it was worth it to try to approach me. It must have been deemed quite early on -- perhaps even from the guild's creation -- that it was better just to keep themselves to themselves. Perhaps it would have been better for them to stick to that model completely, and recruit no-one, instead of selfishly stringing along very good, perfectly legitimate members only to ditch them at a moment's notice later on.

FHC very quickly became my home. The landlords, who are also the tenants, have decided that I'm "too good", under some ludicrous, hashed definition of the word, for FHC -- that I am unhappy where I am. They think I'd be better off in some flying-pink-unicorn guild where I can be myself. They seemed to think that their lack of desire to integrate me into their group was a two-way thing: That just as they didn't want me in, I didn't want to be in.

I did not go into FHC wanting to be myself; I wanted to be a Hatter. And I damn well did try, okay? To say that this is a two-way thing is ludicrous, Chayah. I have reached out to people; and I've been met by the cold silence of a group banding together and deciding that I'm not suitable for that empty chair on your raiding roster. It was a perfectly comfy chair. I don't want a super expensive and technologically advanced massage chair, thanks; I'll quite happily sit in the comfy, old, moth-eaten armchair into which one can sink and from which one never has to rise.

Sinespe will no longer show her helm, as proud of every single one of Blizzard's cloth helm artworks she may be.

(A side note: Coming in at 3,499 words in length, this is longer than any essay I wrote while I was at University.)
(Another, far more bitter side-note: The last person who suggested on my behalf that I was "unhappy" is still working in Tesco without any kind of analytical brain beyond the shallow. Completely unrelated; I just thought I'd throw something very venomous out there while I was in a "Looking at the people in my life who have sucked hard" mood.)

Just a taste ...

2010-02-01T23:35:00.004Z

Here, have a terrible killshot.

What? Of course I was Shadow for it. Why would you think otherwise? It's right there in the killshot.

The combat log, you say?

... What combat log?

Invincible

2010-01-31T19:53:00.003Z

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.

2010-01-30T02:10:00.003Z

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.

2010-01-24T22:35:00.004Z

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.

2010-01-22T04:37:00.003Z

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

2010-01-17T18:52:00.000Z

It drains way too much mana.

Your will is not your own.

2010-01-17T09:54:00.004Z

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.

2010-01-12T15:21:00.002Z

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.

2010-01-09T13:17:00.005Z

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!

2010-01-05T08:39:00.000Z

This is pretty hilarious, really.

Happy New Year.

2009-12-31T06:14:00.004Z

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".

2009-12-27T20:01:00.002Z

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.

2009-12-24T08:26:00.001Z

Pseudo Power has never been so understandable.

Oh, right ...

2009-12-24T03:46:00.002Z

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.

2009-12-23T18:01:00.007Z

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.

No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO, NO!

It's disagreement time! Or, rather, it's time to persuade you away from the BiS non-set argument altogether.

Non-Tier Throughput

As Paolo says, the BiS non-set pieces have a whole bunch of throughput stats on them, and the set bonuses of Tier 10 are more for a tank healer than a raid-shielder. Paolo also implies in his introduction to that blog post that, since his impression of the fights and assigned role so far in ICC has been shield-spamming, overall it is better to take the BiS non-set pieces if you're filling that role because they provide more throughput.

Here's the problem ... well, here's the first problem, of quite a few, I have to say: which throughput stats do you get by taking the non-set gear? Crit and Haste -- mainly haste. Which throughput stats are nigh-useless for a raid shielder? Those very same stats -- Crit and Haste: you don't need DAPPS if you're just raid-shielding. Sure, as Paolo points out, you would gain 25 raw spellpower, but that's an extremely poor gain for losing the Tier 10 bonuses -- as I will demonstrate in a moment. And what you do gain in raw green writing, Paolo then fritters away by saying "I'll gem SP/Int!". It follows that if the only reason you're gemming that intellect is to make up for lost regen, you might as well take the regen, no? If, with the spirit, you can gem pure spellpower, you actually gain throughput by taking the Tier 10 thanks to the lack of need for intellect in gems.

So, the BiS non-set pieces are only good for tank healing, since their only major gain is in DAPPS -- it's not a set for raid-shielding since it confers no benefit (unless the minor 700-1000 shields from Glyph of PW: S crits count as viable DAPPS). But what good are these stats even for tank healing? The DAPPS bonus is minimal. 80 crit? That's only 2%. When you're in a balanced 25-man raid, you're going to be pushing north of 50% crit already, so that extra 2% is a diminished 1% increase. The haste is fairly decent, but only if you don't have haste in other slots -- and haste in other slots is wholly possible to find.

Tier-10 Bonuses

Furthermore, if you're taking the BiS pieces for the purpose of tank healing ... then why not just take the Tier 10 set, given how the bonuses are more tank-centric? You trade a tiny bit of DAPPS and a large chunk of almost-entirely-useless haste for large amounts of extra throughput, potentially freeing up a trinket slot for other things, an actual increase in spellpower-based throughput, and tank-healing set bonuses. Having tanked fights such as Deathbringer Saurfang and Lord Marrowgar, I can say from experience that Chill of the Throne has been very effective in allowing Blizzard to go down the "Tanks take less damage per attack but get attacked more often" route. This route gives us a Deathbringer Saurfang who swings every 1.4 seconds for 6.6k on plate, and a Marrowgar Sabre Lashing for 10-12k every ~1.7 seconds. This rate of damage makes Penance such a powerful spell that you would be a fool not to want its cooldown reset as often as possible.

Raid-shielding

Yet further, there is never going to be a call for raid-shielding on every single fight. Marrowgar and Deathbringer are two fights on which it is viable -- though I would somewhat dispute the former since, unless he charges you and you're slow to get away, the damage he inflicts while using BOOOOONE STOOOORRRRRRM is not *critical* -- it can be healed over time, or pre-shielded *to an extent* without being zealous.

10-man Raid Shielding vs. 25-man Raid Shielding

Paolo's assumptions of raid shielding are also deeply entrenched in 25-man territory. The 10-man raid-shielder only ever has ten people whom she can shield at any one time, which leaves lots and lots of time for tank healing in the meantime. On hearing this, you may think it a pretty ineffectual argument for taking the Tier 10 pieces for 25-man raiding ... but what about changing your philosophy regarding raid-shielding in 25-man settings? By the sounds of things, Paolo is currently shielding a full 25-man raid, all of the time, with Penances here and there to keep certain useful buffs up on the tank, right? So why not, instead, pick two groups to shield, and tank heal the rest of the time? Then go back to raid shielding when those shields need to be refreshed -- or, if you feel like it, pick two different groups to shield every time you move back to clicking your PW: S binding.

Shadow Moonlighting

Paolo justifies taking Tier-10 Shadow gear rather than Tier-10 Discipline gear (He uses the Helm and Gloves in his pure non-set BiS list) using the following logic: "The throughput stats are better, and I intend to dabble in Shadow anyway, so I can kill two birds with one stone."

This logic, unfortunately, is not sound. If you intend to be competitive in the later stages of Icecrown as a Shadow Priest, you're going to want to get the Tier 10 4-piece set bonus. And if you want to do that ... then you'll be gemming SP/Haste, not SP/Crit, in all your relevant gear. (Haste is only better than Spellpower for Shadow when you have the 4-piece Tier 10 set bonus. I will show this at a later point when I update Anathema. In the meantime, just take it from me that this is the case.) The Leggings of Woven Death, for instance, which are BiS for anyone who doesn't need Hit Rating in that slot (which should be everyone, FYI), would therefore have to be socketed with a sub-optimal gem either for Discipline or Shadow.

This, on its own, might not be such a huge argument -- Paolo only overlaps two pieces of gear in this respect which would be affected by a SP/Crit:SP/Haste clash: the legs and Tier 10 Shadow Gloves... But he also cites the helm. The helm, in which you put whichever meta defines your role. You have to take Insightful if you're healing; you have to take Chaotic if you're DPSing.

What I like about Discipline is that you can overlap gear sets with Shadow, to an extent, because SP/Crit/Haste is, overall, The Way to Go™ for both. However, they start to diverge with Haste's increasing importance for Shadow compared to Crit.

Conclusion

Take your Tier 10 set, dear Disciples. You're going to be useful as a tank healer at some point, because Icecrown's tank-damage philosophy favours Penance very highly -- machine gun healing for machine gun damage.

Although Shadow and Discipline can overlap most of the time in their itemisation, it is far better not to try doing so with your Tier set. The bonuses are unique to each and provide far more than a large chunk of haste. Instead of shunning the Spirit on Tier 10 Discipline, embrace it and work around it: Take two throughput trinkets instead of just the one, or work out which dual throughput+regen trinkets have their budgets weighted more towards the former than the latter.

If you wish to be effective as a Shadow Priest in Icecrown, you'll need a full complement of Tier 10 Shadow. If you wish to be effective as a Discipline Priest, embrace your set bonuses: they are the tank healing boon provided on a set laden with the regen that a raid-shielder would love. If you wish to do both? Well ... you're gonna need a lot of Emblems of Frost, I'm afraid.

Anathema 1.3.

2009-12-13T18:39:00.003Z

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.

2009-12-11T16:58:00.011Z

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

2009-12-06T04:54:00.008Z

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

2009-12-04T15:59:00.002Z

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

Hybrid Tax

2009-12-03T00:52:00.008Z

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.

2009-11-25T15:52:00.002Z

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...

2009-11-24T13:53:00.003Z

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?

2009-11-24T10:53:00.002Z

Skilled Starcaller Sinespe.

Light of Elune

2009-11-11T22:53:00.002Z

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

2009-11-09T22:52:00.002Z

= 10.

10*2.2s = 22s.

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

Isn't going to happen, m8s.

@C

2009-11-09T19:35:00.000Z

[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.

2009-11-03T17:53:00.015Z

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.

Freya aaaaaaa: 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.

2009-10-30T03:42:00.001Z

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

2009-10-29T17:48:00.003Z

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.

2009-10-27T21:59:00.003Z

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 ...

2009-10-27T14:48:00.003Z

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

2009-10-27T13:18:00.006Z

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.

2009-10-27T13:07:00.005Z

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.

2009-10-27T12:58:00.000Z

Why is he climbing the mountain?

Wat.

2009-10-25T22:28:00.000Z

Wat.

More 3.3.0 number-crunching.

2009-10-24T04:35:00.002+01:00

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.

2009-10-19T17:59:00.003+01:00

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.

2009-10-16T15:25:00.002+01:00

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.

2009-10-16T03:22:00.013+01:00

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?

2009-10-15T01:09:00.003+01:00

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

2009-10-14T13:50:00.001+01:00

And so can you.

I GOT THE BASTARD.

2009-10-12T14:12:00.001+01:00

[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.

2009-10-07T16:52:00.002+01:00

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?"

2009-10-03T17:54:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-29T19:02:00.001+01:00

All he needs is a hug.

Apologies for the mess

2009-09-28T19:32:00.001+01:00

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

"Can't".

2009-09-27T22:13:00.005+01:00

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

2009-09-27T00:49:00.001+01:00

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

Department of Labour and Fail.

2009-09-26T13:09:00.005+01:00

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

2009-09-22T19:12:00.003+01:00

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.

2009-09-11T13:25:00.003+01:00

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.

2009-09-10T11:49:00.005+01:00

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.

Black and White and Reddit all over.

2009-09-09T11:39:00.000+01:00

This is why I need to read Reddit more.

Cataclysm: potential issues.

2009-09-05T23:45:00.005+01:00

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.

Never start with a quote.

2009-09-05T14:28:00.006+01:00

[14:12] [Primar|Home] I think everyone and their mum uses a variation on that theme
[14:12] [Primar|Home] cos it's the only one that isn't retarded

So that's my excuse.

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 Fancy Hat Club, a strict 10-man guild by GuildOx's standards, and we're doing pretty well, I feel. Some of the blog entries here may take the form of killshots (We're expecting Algalon very soon, and then Herald of the Titans soon after that).

As Chris, I'm a recent graduate who now has to look for a job, being pushed and pulled by various conflicting advice on the issue in the current economic climate. The "be direct" approach will probably win out, but we'll see. I'm looking to get into a proofreading/copy-editing role at a publishing company; if there is one thing I am good at, it is spotting grammatical errors.