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.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Hide Helm.
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:
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:
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:
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?
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.)
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.)
Monday, 1 February 2010
Just a taste ...
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?
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?
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Invincible
This was going to be a short and relatively straightforward post about how stupid it is that Invincible is not available to 10-player raiders. It still is going to be that, but the thread in question has had its stupidity factor multiplied by several magnitudes.
But we'll start from the core:
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 ...
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:
Then, there is our old favourite:
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.
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.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Delicious mid-week breaks.
I was away in Exeter, in case anyone noticed my absence. I'm flattered that someone broke their two-year silence of the Wowhead forums just so they could misinterpret something that I said, take it out of context, then claim that I was wrong -- and all in vain, 'cause I wasn't around to respond to it. People are funny.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
How to get a Battered Hilt.
Stop running Pit of Saron.
I'll explain: Blizzard messed around with the drop rate quite a bit, but settled on it. The blue post I would like to draw your attention to is this one:
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:
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.
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.
Friday, 22 January 2010
300 million on looking pretty.
I know that with something like this, any publicity is good publicity, but it's been forced down our throats so much anyway that one obscure blog post won't make a dent either way in its popularity.
Avatar has been nominated for 8 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. Stealing crudely from the External Brain on the subject, we can see that they are for:
Best Film
Best Director
Best Music
Best Cinematography
Best Editing
Best Production Design
best Sound
Best Special Visual Effects
If it earns over 50% -- i.e., 5 or more -- of the awards for which it has been nominated, I will not watch any film screened or released on DVD between 00.00 on February the 22nd, 2010 and 23.59 on February the 21st, 2011.
There is one veto on this: If it does not win the BAFTA for "Best Special Visual Effects". That outcome will be too hilarious to pull away my, admittedly not very wealthy, support of the film industry.
The real kicker is that Sherlock Holmes didn't get any nominations at all. Grrrr.
(Sorry if you happen to like Avatar. I just do not see the appeal of spending $300M purely on making a film look pretty. Have we not yet progressed past the point of cinema as an "oooh lookit the pretty picshures" experience?)
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?)
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Your will is not your own.
So apparently people are annoyed [Apparently the exact post I linked to on this thread got deleted. Hah.] by the new feature of the Armoury. Words like "Private data" are being thrown around.
I'll keep this one short:
a) Blizzard owns every byte of data on "your" character. I say "your" in inverted commas because the character isn't actually yours at all: that's owned by Blizzard, too; you just rent it. That they then use that non-sensitive data on a section of their own website is not objectionable.
b) No one is going to look at it. Really. One person on that thread said this:
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Putricide bugs and potential fixes.
We managed to get up to Putricide tonight. We made some decent progress, but ran into a couple of bugs which caused quite severe headaches.
Note: The below information is true for 10-man. I don't know about 25-man.
The main issue is that, sometimes, Putricide will only throw out one growing slime pool, or only one will spawn. This is a problem because it causes our abomination to be slime-starved -- keeping one pool up at a consistently low radius is ideal for a constant stream of slime, required to cast the only snare to have any effect on the volatile oozes and gas clouds.
Another issue, I think, is the following: Slime Pools are thrown out where people are currently standing. People who get hit by the Volatile Ooze's Adhesive ability can still be targeted with slime pools. Now, because of the way that the encounter just times itself, it is nearly always the case that a slime pool spawn will occur while a Volatile Ooze is roughly 25-50% of the way into its movement towards its target. This means the abomination has to be busy hitting the slime with a slow, and that there isn't enough time to consume a slime pool that spawns underneath the target.
The reason this is a problem is that it (to my mind, artificially) increases the difficulty of the encounter. If the Adhesive target gets a slime pool put under them, they are immediately taking 50% more damage than they were before. Additionally, because everyone has to group up on that player before the slime reaches them, so that the explosion damage is split and is healable, this increases the damage that everyone else takes.
I propose, then, that -- as with Marrowgar's Sabre Lash ability conferring an invisible immunity from Bone Spike Graveyard to its targets -- Adhesive should confer a mechanic which prevents the target from being the target of a slime pool. I am not at all suggesting that this should be abusable: If someone else (Person B) is standing too close to the Adhesive target when Slime Pools go out, and a Slime Pool targets Person B, the slime pool should still land and grow as normal. The way we are currently dealing with the timing on Slime Pools is that we only group up on the Adhesive target in the last few seconds before the Volatile Ooze reaches that person -- Naturally, this works 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time a slime pool will target the Adhesive player and we're a bit screwed then.
I don't think anything else besides those two things really needs to change about the encounter. There is a bug wherein if Putricide casts Unstable Experiment shortly before entering Phase 2, the experiment (Which will be Ooze #2 if you're doing it right) will try to cast its Adhesive and, because of Tear Gas, will get an immune error. It will, then, just start charging towards a random player once Tear Gas has worn off. This is something that can be worked around, though: You can aim to push Putricide into phase 2 either before or after you have dealt with this experiment. You can't really work around a slime pool under Adhesive.
It's a very fun fight. We got him to 53% on our best attempt. Another 18% and it'll be a kill.
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.
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Second Class Raiders.
There are a lot of problems with 10-man raiding. PTR testing of bosses results in 25-man values for certain boss mechanics getting assigned erroneously to 10-man content owing to the large number of people who test stuff in 10-man wearing 25-man (Normal or Heroic) gear. On Live servers, 25-man guilds will steamroll through 10-man content, outgearing it the whole way, and claim that it's "easier by design", when that is certainly not true (you can believe it's true if you want. I'm tired of trying to dispel the myth of 25-man content being any more or less challenging than 10-man content from a design and tuning perspective. Until a blue poster comes along to tell everyone that I'm right, I won't continue to waste my breath.)
But today, the thing that has annoyed me about 10-man raiding is the gear. Aside from the illogic of allowing 25-man Normal Mode raiders access to legendaries when 25N content is easier than 10H, there are problems of the itemisation and distribution of epics. In Trial of the Crusader, every single one of the 10-man trinkets was underbudgeted, and every single one of the 25-man trinkets was overbudgeted.
In Icecrown, 10-man spellcasters actually get a decent trinket. Please note: a decent trinket. Having gone back to look at the patch notes, I discovered this:
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?
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?
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Thursday, 31 December 2009
Happy New Year.
This is going to be one of those annoying posts about that place called "Real Life" I hear so much about. So, a warning, if you don't want to read such things, don't scroll down.
I'm always very cynical of the New Year celebration; I've always viewed it as a poor use of the Gregorian calendar as an excuse to get drunk -- it's a new year every day: every time the Earth reaches an arbitrary point along its orbit, it will have been just shy of 365.25 Earth Revolutions since it happened the last time. January the First isn't even notable in cosmological terms: it isn't a solstice, for instance.
Nevertheless, my life needs changing, thus, in-keeping with what I consider to be a less cynically inclined spirit of New Year, I've made some resolutions that I intend to stick to.
1. Play WoW less.
Oh, I know, you're all smirking that it's one of those resolutions or Lent sacrifices like "give up chocolate" -- it never happens, right? Fortunately I have a brand new shiny Xbox to keep me occupied. That sounds like I'm just switching one vice for another -- and, to an extent, there's some truth in that. It will, at the very least, get me into another room of the house. My bedroom, in which my computer resides, is up two flights of stairs, and feels like a bit of a crow's nest a lot of the time. Any excuse to push outwards from that and not feel bored or exposed would be very nice.
2. Fix my sleep pattern.
This is code for "Go to a doctor", which is a more general thing I need to do. You'll notice that quite a few of these blog posts go up either in the early hours of the morning (like this one), or even earlier than that: 2-4am, say. Rest assured, I am British. The reason why I might as well be on CET rather than GMT is that my sleep pattern has been messed up for the past two years or so, except on select days when the stars choose to align, or when I'm in a certain person's company. No matter what I try: Pulling all-nighters, taking courses of sleeping tablets ... nothing stops me from being awake until 4-6am whereupon I go to bed out of sheer exhaustion. It would be nice to go to bed for the sake of wanting sleep, rather than because my body quite literally can't keep itself awake any longer unless I push it into an all-nighter, with which it punishes me by stubbornly refusing to let me sleep until my usual time the following night (early-morning). This will help me with ...
3. Get a job.
I'm a graduate in a recession. Things have been bleak the past few months for graduates, with most jobs going to people who already have experience of the relevant workplaces. Having never worked in a "proper" environment, this puts me at a severe disadvantage to the legions of other out-of-work people. Fortunately, I do have unofficial, casual leads which I will follow up this very weekend, since I am going to ...
4. Be more open with those I love.
I finally had a long argument yesterday with someone with whom over the past couple of months I've been having a long, slow period of friction-building tension due to a lack of communication. She lives 400 miles away, in the city where I went to University -- Exeter -- whither I long to return as soon as possible. She is what I would call a "Very long-suffering friend", and we go through far too much strain and stress for one another. Fortunately this fued has been, mostly, resolved, and it only remains for me to hop on a train in three hours' time to go down there and celebrate the turn of the decade in her company.
Resolution 4 is already being put into action, since it is the reason for this post's creation: being open with whatever readership numbers I enjoy here. A lot of love goes into making Anathema understandable, easy to read, and overall as accessible as possible; same goes for Gone Blogal. So, to my silent readers, my vocal readers, and to my whole TWO! (2!) followers, I love you all: go out and enjoy the arbitrary starting point of 2010.
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.
Sunday, 27 December 2009
"Until Cataclysm".
I have been looking with hungry eyes at Icecrown tanking gear for my Death Knight. Now, I know that I resolved to be a DPS through and through on my Death Knight this time around, but I've found it quite enjoyable to itemise myself differently to other tanks. Namely, I love +armour items, so I've picked up all that I have access to, giving me a 2,352 boost to my armour; roughly a 3.2% boost to mitigation (from 62.42% to 64.46%, both numbers with Horn. None of those numbers are typos -- that's the way armour diminishes.)
Anyway, I was looking at these, which I'll very likely never get -- they cost 8 Primordial Saronite, after all. And I happened to scroll down to that particular comment I've linked to. I thought it would be good at this late stage of Wrath to remind everyone of what "Until Cataclysm" actually means in terms of upgrades.
When Wrath was launched, Ensidia, in their iLvl164 epics from Sunwell, went straight into Naxxramas and cleared it. They complained that it was too easy. It wasn't. It was intentional. The way that gear has been designed after TBC is that the uppermost tier should be usable in at least the first raid of the new expansion, in order not to result in "Green is the new Purple" syndrome which afflicted people in the transition from Vanilla to TBC.
Now, let's look at some numbers, just to point out that this is something we can extrapolate reasonably from existing data:
BT/Sunwell Epics: iLvl 151/159-164. WotLK Heroic Epics: iLvl 200
Icecrown Epics: iLvl 251/264/277. Cataclysm Heroic epics: iLvl 300. It would make sense from the pattern that Cataclysm epics will be 300.
So, why is it that iLvl 164/264/364 epics will be viable for content from which, pre-farming, you can pick up iLvl 200/300/400 epics? The answer to that is itemisation. Blizzard has said* throughout Wrath that items are not perfectly itemised with every stat you could possibly want straight from the first tier of raiding because it's boring when a new tier comes out and the only gear-picking you need to do is "Well, this one gives +5 SP/Haste/Crit/Int/Stam, so that's my upgrade!". This is why, though we are getting somewhat simplified stats in Cataclysm, we're also getting the option of "Reforging" items -- adjusting their stats slightly to get them slightly more in-line with whatever stat we will want to focus on (Most likely, for us, Intellect, since it'll give spellpower, of course... But we'll see!) -- this forces us to think about our gear if we want to min/max.
We have also seen blue posts saying that Icecrown gear is far more perfectly itemised than any previous tier, because it's built to last.* Again, let's look at previous evidence. This comparison is between the BiS-crafted Sunfire Robe of Sunwell and a Priest's Tier 7.200 robe. Because Spirit was nigh-useless to us in 3.0.8 (A mere 11% spellpower from spirit thanks to talent and glyph. Remember those days? 11%!), the Sunfire Robe destroys the Tier 7 -- you could re-gem Hit rating wherever you would like in order to make up for it: your Tier 6.5 gear would be competitive, if not better in slots such as these; at the very least it would enable you to get into Naxx.
So, certainly it is the case that those legs, and every other item of iLvl264, and some of 251, will be viable in the Plain of the Elements (Which I think is going to be the first raid, but it might not be. We'll see the order in which they choose to do them when they give us more info). "Until Cataclysm" isn't quite right, and it suggests that you'll be sharding all your purples a week before the expansion launches just to get some final gold sprees from the abyss crystals. Instead, Icecrown loot will be useful "Deep into the Cataclysm raid on Normal difficulty".
*All quotes are without their respective sources, because I don't want to spend ages trawling through MMO-Champion to find them. Just trust me that they exist, though.
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.
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Oh, right ...
I totally forgot to mention that on Monday 21st, Fancy Hat Club completed A Tribute to Insanity (10-player). I was on fire.
I now wonder how much nagging it will take to get everyone willing to do A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity. (And we still need to do Herald of the Titans.)
Maybe if I wish it from Santa. He owes me big-time after he failed to make the Gunship drop my telescope.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
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.
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
@Paolo: Planning for Tier 10.
My fine, Discipline-based fellow Priest Paolo has created a thread about gearing philosophy for Tier 10 -- weighing up the benefit of the Tier 10 set bonuses for Discipline against the gains of taking the SP/Crit/Haste bonuses available from non-set pieces.
The post is here, and you should go and read it before reading this post, since this is a direct response which was too long to fit in the comment box under the blog post itself.
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.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Anathema 1.3.
The new incarnation of the Anathema Shadow Priest guide will not be 100% complete until all database gaps on Wowhead have been filled and I can compile the appropriate BiS lists, and fiddle with them until I've come up with something I find to be correct. This will take some time; however, certain areas such as the Icecrown Citadel section of the "Specific advanced advice" will be updated as I gain experience of the fights. I will also try to make the "Pseudopower" section more informative and relevant to all tiers of play -- at the end of the expansion, this is substantially easier to do because I can suggest gear progression paths.
It'll take a while, but it'll be worth it.
Possible spoilers, just for the sake of it: My 10-man-H BiS list might contain a staff.
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.
Friday, 11 December 2009
3.3: Overall first impressions.
I've had a few days to digest the main parts of the Icecrown Citadel patch, not only from my own class/spec perspective but from a more general perspective of the main features touted in the patch notes. So I'll divide it up appropriately from the specific to the general:
Shadow Priest DoT Haste Scaling
Well, let's be honest, what can anyone say but "awesome"? It's far from being an overpowered change -- it sits just nicely in with the buffs that almost all classes have received. Unfortunately, the one fight on which I would have excelled -- Deathbringer Saurfang -- I have yet to DPS. I switched to Discipline for that fight because I was worried that we might need three healers. Turns out we didn't -- the healing was manageable. I've not yet noticed an increase in my DPS because, in new content, I am more tentative of other fight mechanics at first. I have a feeling that the DoTs are the only reason I managed to come second on the Marrowgar meter, though.
Icecrown Citadel 5-man instances
Forge of Souls
I wish I could get into this more than once per day on Heroic without going through the randomiser. I had spoiled it partially for myself with the PTR sound files of Bronjahm's voice. The music while fighting him, though, makes it so much better than I could have anticipated. POWER-JAZZ. Additionally, of course, the instance music in general sets that mood. If you know that there is a James Brown-esque boss, you instantly notice the Hammond organ solos mixed in with the general spooky vibe that the place is intended to convey.
Devourer of Souls is somewhat annoyingly voice acted and you only get the hot Desire-esque face and voice if your group isn't decked out in 245 epics and zerging him super hard. The loot, however, is brilliant. Blizzard knew exactly what it was doing when it designed that boss and wanted to give maximum nostalgia to anyone who was in Black Temple.
Pit of Saron
This is where things start getting brutal in terms of difficulty. The trash pulls in FoS are more annoyingly-positioned than anything else. The trash in here, though, hits very hard. Magic damage is in the 10k region and melee damage 4k per strike. I feel that Scourgelord Tyrannus's initial conversion into Undead of the Coliseum Champions is not particularly well done -- they're turned from 330k-HP elites into 5k HP normals. I get that the idea trying to be conveyed is that he can turn them immediately, but another point of the Scourge is that the more powerful you are in life the more powerful you become in Undeath. Additionally, because they have so little health, and because Jaina only spawns at the instance entrance when you're already close to pulling the first trash mob yourself, her own "Empowered Blizzard" spell gets unnoticed as you just zerg through the non-elites yourself.
I feel, therefore, that the introduction to this instance is a bit poor -- in terms of specifics, though, rather than overall concept. I see what they're gunning at, but they don't tune the mobs correctly for what they're trying to convey elsewhere. Jaina should spawn much sooner from when you move away from the portal, and the Undead that Tyrannus spawns should be more powerful: it would give both Jaina and the Scourge a more realistic sense of their respective powers.
To move on with the actual instance, though -- Ick is fairly well-designed, but Pursuit (as yet) does not have a "non-tank" modifier -- i.e., it's possible for Pursuit to be trivialised 20% of the time because the tank can be targeted with it. Garfrost's adds are irritating to try to tank, because they are so spread out, and the platform itself lends itself to irritation on the melee DPS side of things. The idea is that, when Garfrost forges a new weapon, it gives you plenty of time to wipe your stacks of his Permafrost debuff by LoSing it. But for a Death Knight, say, with self-removal of the debuff, it's just inconvenient time-wasting because of the distance away to which he jumps. The trash before Tyrannus's gauntlet is the most brutal part -- heavy melee and magic damage, and if you don't have a disease dispeller, or people who read tooltips, you're a bit screwed. Tyrannus does win this instance's Best Voiceover award, though I deducted points for him being American. It would be nice if Blizzard were to get some British actors in when they want that type of voice, rather than Americans who can just affect a fairly decent accent.
Halls of Reflection
This is one of those instances where, if you don't know what you're doing, and you overgear the instance, you'll have minor problems resulting from mistakes. If you don't know what you're doing and you're in appropriate level (Ulduar-level) gear, you'll wipe. If you do know what you're doing and you're in appropriate level gear, it'll be a challenge, but not impossible. It is very well tuned, and I really hope Blizzard doesn't nerf it owing to people complaining that it is "too hard". Falric is an excellent DPS check and Marwyn is a superb group balance-enforcer. Either you have all four decurse bases covered, or you'd better have a damn good healer.
The lore retcon, ignoring a key questline in Icecrown, is rather annoying. There are some weak arguments that can be conjured up such as "Tirion is blinded by his zealotry to see the need for a Lich King", but I don't exactly understand how Blizzard is going to pull the "This new Lich King [Possible spoilers: Bolvar. Well, honestly, it's pretty obvious.] is good and/or won't destroy us!" rabbit out of the Lore Hat without the whole thing being comical.
The Escape from the Lich King event has just one flaw in it, which you only experience once but which is pretty silly: To activate the event, you have to talk to Jaina/Sylvanas. This is not indicated in any way by the hero, nor is it implied by what they say -- they say, quite clearly, "I can't hold him for long, we must run away RIGHT NOW!" -- so what my group did was run down the path. Then someone noticed that nothing was happening, so they went and talked to Jaina. The event started, and all four of us were on the other side of the first ice wall when it appeared. Instawipe. Irritating. "Make your preparations with great haste!" would convey the same sense of urgency without implying that the event starts with no player-given cue. Aside from this design flaw, the event itself is excellent. Watching Arthas inch closer and wondering if you have enough time to kill this mob before he unleashes wintry instadeath on you is quite scary, even after the first time.
Overall
Blizzard said it would be epic. It is epic. The whole three instances back-to-back form a 5-man raid more than a set of 5-man heroics. You really feel like it's easy to screw up and wipe, even if you're overgeared. Priests, naturally, should dust off their Shackle macros (Yes, you should have it macroed) and have a raid mark keybound to indicate a Shackle target.
Looking for Dungeon system
A success, without a doubt. I think the gear-matching system is a bit squiffy, as it seems to match players of equal gear, rather than matching "less experienced players with more experienced players" as Blizzard diplomatically puts it -- so it feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor ... not poorer, but certainly richer at a slower pace -- but maybe it's as golden for people in Tier 7 as it is in Tier 9.
The removal of /rw in parties has to be reversed, though -- or a /pw (Party Warning) command needs to be added. It is very irritating to have one's /rw Pulling %t now! macro disabled and having to resort to /s.
I will look forward to using this on my lowbie alts. It might even encourage me to level them solo instead of relying on the 3-man static group I occasionally enjoy on my shaman.
The one problem, of course, is Additional instances cannot be launched. Please try again later. Hopefully this will be fixed somehow.
Icecrown Citadel 10-player
"Balanced" is again the word to be used here. It was quite easy for us, but we're decked out in iLvl245 epics, which is a whole tier above the intended range for ICC10N. It is also epic. I would like to pick out two aspects I particularly like:
Trash
I think that Blizzard now has the balance perfect in terms of trash tuning. Good trash, to my mind, fills three purposes:
1) Prepares you, either through abilities or through mental strain, for the boss it prefaces. Some of the best examples of this were found in Ulduar: Dark Rune Thunderers before Thorim and Faceless Horrors before Vezax are the two strongest examples of direct mechanic training. Deathwhisper trash has such mechanics: some of the trash gets raised as an undead copy of itself once it falls, and the large single pulls demonstrate the importance of spreading out.
2) Can wipe you. This should not be in an overpowered sense, like Ulduar first-week trash being overtuned in 10-man, but rather it should feel like you need to use CC and you need to be careful, alert and awake to make it through.
3) Should be short. If it goes on for too many corridors, trash is just a waste of time that serves less and less of a purpose the more you increase its frequency.
These three rules serve one overall aim: for the whole instance to be fun -- not just the bosses. If you keep the trash short but hard-hitting, such that people take as much time over four hard packs of mobs as they would ten or twelve easy packs, then you create a much more enjoyable feel about it. It's boring when trash is a faceroll but goes on forever, and it's also boring when trash is too hard but goes on for a long time (see Tempest Keep trash). It's much more fun when you reach Deathwhisper and you can see that, yes, there is trash, but it's just four packs. It makes you more likely to take your time and enjoy taking your time.
The pace of the whole instance so far is enjoyable, and the remaining wings will be worth the wait. Some of the achievements for the Glory meta will require four weeks to get used to (I'm looking at you, I'm on a Boat), so the leisurely pace we can afford to spend is welcome.
Storyline
5-man retcons aside, the story in Icecrown is proving to be epic. I won't spoil anything, save to say that what happens after you kill Deathbringer Saurfang is rather moving and (on the part of certain characters for whom jerkassery is par for the course) surprising.
Disenchant button
Thank you, Blizzard. <3
Quest Tracker
Apparently it's inaccurate as hell for some categories of quest, so please do send in bug reports if it tells you to go somewhere that ends up being false according to the facts (Searched through Wowhead, of course).
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).
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Emblems of Frost
Emblem of Frost, the new token. This is a brief run-down for the ten-man raider in terms of accessibility.
10.251: 60/60/95/95/95 Emblems required.
When 3.3 drops, we can get 6 Emblems immediately from running through the new 5-man dungeons, starting with this quest. Handily, they're all one questline -- except the final one, which currently says on Wowhead "Repeatable", though I suspect that's just a PTR UI bug.
2 Emblems per day from the random heroic, of course.
5 per week for the weekly raid quest -- let's be honest, this is going to be hilarious. Either you get Marrowgar, whom you will kill as a matter of course for the sake of progression anyway, or you get to kill a boss from a previous tier of instance, which, unless you still wish to clear ToGC10 (which you may still want to do), will mean nothing more than steamrolling that boss with 1-3 tiers' worth of outgearing. A nice easy warm-up to a Wednesday progression night if ever there were one.
8 Emblems per week (initially) from the first wing (four bosses) of ICC. This will be the case for anything between 2 to 4 weeks, depending on Blizzard's final decision regarding gating.
4 Emblems per week (And, presumably, a shot at the pinata for Tier 10 gloves or legs!) from Toravon the Ice Watcher on 10 and 25-player [pending Season 8 release]. Fight mechanics can sort-of be seen here, though I want to strangle that Mage for having no raid frames at all. It's like Koralon, except the flame patches (Ice patches, in this case) come alive; and, instead of Meteor Fists, Toravon will just do a knockback on the tank, so tanking him up against a wall seems to be the standard.
So, 6 emblems to start you off, plus 14 + 5 + 8 per week for the first three weeks or so (until a new wing of ICC and VoA comes out)
Week 1: 33 Emblems
Week 2: 60 Emblems
Week 3: 87 Emblems. [Potentially +4, since Toravon might be released here]
Week 4: Yay, I pick up some Tier 10. \o/
My shopping list priority, if you're curious, goes Helm --> Chest --> Shoulders --> Gloves. After that, I'll be saving up all my EoF for Primordial Saronite, my priority there being Legs --> Boots.
Total EoF shopping list cost: 95 + 95 + 60 + 60 + (23 * 8) + (23 * 5) = 609.
I can see my Death Knight's EoF contributing to the Primordial Saronite costs to speed things up significantly.
In completely unrelated news I had four glasses of wine with dinner and woke up about an hour ago hungover.
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.
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