The Written Word (and Other Fantastic Creatures)

I’ve started a new, almost entirely unrelated blog about words, media, publishing, television, that sort of thing. If you’re interested, you can check it out here. It’s called The Written Word (and Other Fantastic Creatures), and I hope to stay there for a long time seeing as how while my love for World of Warcraft may wane, my love of reading and writing never will.

Appropriately Titled Farewell Post

Seems like not too long ago I was excited to log into WoW to raid or to blog about raiding. I’ve taken a break from WoW, at least until Icecrown comes out, and as a result I have lost the desire to blog about WoW. I’d like to thank everyone who visited the site, especially those who took the time to write comments or link here from your blog/website. I really do appreciate it.

One of the reasons I no longer felt excited about blogging was that I realised that I didn’t have anything to add. Elitist Jerks covers everything you’ll ever need to know about being a successful, raiding Death Knight, so I hope you’ll go there if you ever need information. This site won’t be taken down or anything (mmm free webspace) but I’ll no longer be posting.

Once again, thanks for visiting/commenting/linking here and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of 3.3/life/WoW.

Signing off,

Shopshopshop

Does Anybody Really Enjoy Faction Champions?

I don’t try to hide it. Whenever I down Jaraxxus, I sigh at the upcoming fight. I hate Faction Champions. I’d rather lose Eye of the Storm than do this encounter, which says a lot since I’m not a huge fan of PvP. I know there are a lot of other people who don’t like it (and some crazy weirdos who do) so I thought I’d compile a list of reasons why I don’t like it.

1. Randomness. In very few other fights can you get gibbed so easily, especially while CC’d. I can break fear once every two minutes with my PvP trinket, but when I can’t break out? More often than not the melee champions start chasing me and kill me while I’m CC’d. Is there any other encoutner in Wrath where something so random can happen (and happens frequently)?
2. I don’t get to DPS. I spend most of my time in heroic FCs casting Chains of Ice on the Death Knight and the Rogue to keep them off our casters. So basically I end up running around, away from the kill target, to cast Chains. That’s boring. It’s not the same as having a few interesting gimmick-things to do in an encounter, like switching essences in Twin Valks.
3. It’s not PvP. One of the irritating things about this fight is that I would likely perform better if I used a PvP spec. Since it is a raid, and not a battleground, I find this to be something of a design flaw. I’m all for some off-the-wall talents being useful sometimes (like reduced Death Grip cooldown to help with Sparks on Malygos) but when it’s better to completely nuke your DPS in favour of a bit more survival? I’ll pass, thanks.
4. Morale. I play on a PvE server, so there are a lot of people in my raid who just don’t like PvP. Whatever people say about FCs, it will always be a PvP encounter forced into a PvE situation to me. Again, this is bad design in my opinion. If anything, this is the kind of encounter that should be put behind a PvP barrier like Wintergrasp, since at least the flavour of PvP is retained. So when we do this fight, and half the raid is irritated even before we wipe, well, it just doesn’t help the raid’s morale.

So why don’t you like Faction Champions?

Why the Scourge Strike Redesign is Amazing

Around when the DK Q&A came out, I was pretty unhappy with Armor Penetration as a whole. Back then, I was Frost specced (in those days Obliterate was not the primary source of damage) and thought that I would never want to see ArPen on my gear. Ever. When 3.2 hit and I started Dual Wielding, things changed. Obliterate was a lot better than it was and as a result so was ArPen. Since then I’ve switched to Blood and ArPen is the best stat besides Strength, but that’s beside the point.

The worst thing that happened to DKs since Wrath was when Unholy Death Knights started using Obliterate. Deep Unholy, that is (not counting the 32/39 builds of old that used Howling Blast). Why, you ask? Well, on the surface Obliterate and SS aren’t very different. They’re both use an Unholy and a Frost Rune and hit for some % of weapon damage plus some other damage.

It’s the texture that matters

To me, though, SS and Obliterate feel different. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel like casting Death Strike, Obliterate, and Scourge Strike each have unique associations. In this comparison, Obliterate is on the generic side since its only unique aspect is that it removes diseases (which can be talented away). Its respective glyph is also a flat damage increase rather than one that’s dependent on other factors.

Moving on, though, I think it’s important that each talent tree uses different strikes or else they’ll all start feeling the same. So when I read that Scourge Strike was being redesigned in 3.3 into an attack that initially does physical damage and then shadow damage based on the physical part, well, I was happy. I used to be despondent about how ArPen sucked for 2/3 specs, but Blizzard has managed to quietly make it useful while maintaining each tree’s uniqueness. Well played, Blizzard, well played.

Rolling Diseases: How to Effectively Spread the Plague

Note: this post is primarily about Blood DPS (though it is also applicable to Frost, which often uses Glyph of Disease).

Rolling diseases is the term used for casting diseases while you have temporary buffs (such as Greatness, Fallen Crusader, Unholy Might, Unholy Force, etc.) that increase your Str/AP and then refreshing those buffed diseases with Glyph of Disease/Pestilence. The way Pestilence works with GoD is in the wording: “Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.” Compare this to Glyph of Howling Blast: “Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.” The HB glyph causes HB to apply Frost Fever while GoD allows Pestilence to refresh the diseases already applied to your current target.

Keep in mind that the decision to use Glyph of Disease (over Glyph of Dark Death) depends on how many on use/chance on hit AP/Str procs you have. The major ones you can get are: Darkmoon Card: Greatness, 2p t9, Sigil of Virulence, that sort of thing. The more you have, the better Glyph of Disease will work for you.

But Shop, how can I get all my procs to align?

The short answer is that you can’t. The long answer is that there are a few tricks that can help you set up your procs to align.

1) At the start of your fight, use HS-HS-DS (with the option of BT to get a 3rd HS if Unholy Might doesn’t proc) to get as many procs going as possible, then apply diseases.

2) Download and configure Procodile, an addon that can monitor internal cooldowns (ICD) of buffs (as well as the buffs themselves, but I use other addons to cover that). When you have it set up to track all the ICDs of your buffs, if you don’t get all your buffs up at the start of a fight, you can see in advance if and when multiple proc cooldowns will line up again. Considering how important this can be for your DPS, Procodile is a worthwhile investment.

How does Pestilence fit into your rotation?

If you are spell hit capped, you can wait until the last possible second to refresh your diseases. If you’re not, it’s best to leave yourself at least one GCD before your diseases fall off when you refresh. This way if your Pestilence misses you don’t lose your buffed diseases. Aside from this, fit Pestilence in wherever necessary, and where possible refresh disease right before you use DRW so you don’t waste a GCD on a Pestilence while DRW is up.

The ideal rotation for Blood with GoD is to use the traditional 20 second rotation (IT-PS-DS-HS-HS-DC // DS-HS-HS-HS-HS-DC-DC) and simply cast Pestilence before the 21-second diseases run out. This is, however, in an ideal situation and you should be thinking ahead about what might happen to cause you to be away from the boss. One example is Icehowl: you want buffed diseases to stay up as long as possible but are frequently knocked away from the boss.

Some final tips:

• First priority in your rotation is keeping buffed diseases going; if they fall off it’s not always easy to get them going again
• Know when you will be away from the boss so you can refresh in advance
• Cast Pestilence as little as you can while still keeping diseases up (i.e. don’t refresh halfway through disease timers without a good reason to)

Revelation is Recruiting!

I’m going to take advantage of all this traffic from wow.com, come to see the magic of the zeppelins, and plug my guild, which is currently recruiting. First of all, here’s a link to our recruitment thread, which has all the basic information you need to know about us. We are focused on progression but on a casual schedule. We raid 25-mans only 3 times a week and make the most out of that time. If you’re a very skilled player who just can’t dedicate 20 hours a week to raiding, we’re the guild for you.

With that done, I’ll turn this into a real post about recruiting. It’s difficult. It’s frustrating. It seems like whenever you browse the official guild recruitment forums the only LFGuild posts are from classes you’re full on. Have 5 mages? You’ll only see mages. So what can you do in this situation?

Make sure your recruitment thread/shpiel reflects your guild’s personality

Recently I’ve been working on an assignment for school developing a media kit for a magazine. A media kit is basically something you sent to potential advertisers to sell them on your magazine/product. Your recruitment thread is no different. You need to describe why you’re different from every other guild that you’re competing with. This means that if you are, say, a hardcore guild with all hard modes completed (like other hardcore guilds) you should discuss what sets you apart.

Don’t just say that your DPS is awesome and your tanks are well-geared or that your healers could solo heal Onyxia without a tank. Talk about your raiding atmosphere, guild chat, quirky things about your guild, that sort of thing.

What do you offer recruits?

A fair loot system? Free repairs? Brunch on weekends? Beyond your progression level, each guild has something to offer its recruits, even if it’s just a functioning guild bank. Tell people about this stuff; it will help people make a choice between your guild and another like it.

What classes you’re looking for and what positions are available

You should, of course, put a list of what classes you’re recruiting. But be more detailed than that. What positions are available? Core raid spot (like an MT) or a DPS who might get benched now and again? Don’t get into the situation of pissing off a recruit who transferred under the false pretences of having a full-time raid spot. Bad press about your guild is very near a death sentence since a lot of recruiting is done by word of mouth.

P.S. Revelation is recruiting! We want you! Here’s that link again.

Zeppelins, Attack!

When you’ve finished all the content you can, what do you do next? I bet you didn’t guess “attack Dalaran with paper zeppelins” but that’s just what we did. I hope you enjoy the following screenshots of the great Dalaran zeppelin raid.

Paper zeppelins begin to swarm

They’re everywhere!

Even in the bank...

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Rawr

For the uninitiated, Rawr is a program that players can use to evaluate different pieces of gear. Rawr does fuzzy math things which I am not qualified to talk about and gives a value for every item available to you, with the highest value being the best item. What is optimal may change, however, based on your current gear. For example, if you have capped expertise as a DPS, items with expertise on them will not be valued highly. You can set filters to ignore, say, Trial of the Grand Crusader-25. Finally, Rawr gives an estimate of your DPS on a 10-minute (that’s the default time) patchwerk-esque encounter where you set what buffs you have and what rotation you use.

Rawr can be a little bit intimidating when you first download it, and this guide will help you get started and hopefully make you fall in love with Rawr.

Step 1: Download Rawr and load up your character (File -> Load from Armory)

Make sure your character has the correct gear (i.e. DPS gear if you are a DPS character) when you log off so that you don’t have to go in and change each piece of gear manually. Before you go off and look at upgrades or die of shock at the fact that Rawr is telling you that your DPS is only 2400 there are a few important steps to take.

Step 2: Check off buffs that your raid group regularly has (under the buffs tab)

Since Rawr evaluates gear based on your current stats (including buffs you have), it’s important to select buffs that accurately portray a regular raid night for your guild. If you only raid 10s, for example, don’t go checking off every available buff or you won’t get accurate information.

Step 3: Make sure your rotation, talent spec and glyphs are correct

The rotation is found under Options, just hit the Rotation Details button. Pick whatever is appropriate to your spec and modify as needed. The default rotations are taken from EJ discussion, so if you follow that you’re probably familiar with them already. Review talents and glyphs to make sure everything is up to date (sometimes Armory can be slow and/or stupid). Also make sure to set up any enchants that disappeared in the move from Armory to Rawr.

Now for the good stuff

Those are the basic steps you need to take to start using Rawr. Now you can use it to test out what items are upgrades and which are not. A few things to note before you start that, though:

• Just because an item does not have Strength doesn’t mean it’s not an upgrade (for me, Collar of Ceaseless Torment is pre-25 hardmode BiS)
• Remember that while an item might be BiS with one set of gear it won’t necessarily be BiS all the time (item values are dynamic and change based on your current gear)
• Leather is an option too
• You still have to use your judgment; for example, exclusively following WoW will not always keep you at the Hit or Expertise cap, so if you prefer to keep them capped you have to consider that on your own

The easiest piece of gear to look at for a Death Knight is the sigil. Since it doesn’t provide any complex stats (i.e. Hit, ArPen, Expertise) it’s not going to change very much based on your gear and stats.

On the right part of Rawr, select the dropdown menu next to “Slot: Gear” and choose Ranged

Now you’ll get a numerical value (DPS) for each sigil. The one with the highest value is worth the most DPS. So go out, find that sigil, and now you’ve got a piece of BiS. Other slots, especially head, shoulders, chest, legs and gloves, are more complicated (these are the slots tier pieces go in). The most important thing when using Rawr is to keep an open mind while still thinking critically. Don’t let Rawr make all your decisions for you. That said, it’s a great tool for evaluating pieces of gear and comparing items. This is especially true when comparing Agility items to Strength ones, since it’s usually not obvious (you typically lose a few AP) that one or the other is better.

Where Are We Heading Tonight?

This is a question I see with growing frequency in guild chat or raid chat as the group fills up. This is because, as a guild, we are in a strange place with regard to progression. We’re not quite ready for ToC-25 hard modes, but doing Ulduar hard modes can seem a bit silly. They’re definitely harder than ToC-25 normal mode, but with (mostly) inferior loot.

This makes the term “progression” a bit loopy. There’s no doubt that Algalon is significantly more difficult than Northrend Beasts on normal mode, but Algalon’s loot is a few item levels lower. If you look back at previous expansions, raiding progression was a bit more linear. In pre-BC, you started off with a mix of Onyxia and Molten Core. When you could reliably kill Ragnaros, you’d probably move on to a mix of ZG (which was harder than MC) and Blackwing Lair. Then you’d start playing around with AQ20 and AQ40. Then, if you were awesome, you’d head into Naxxramas (when it was actually hard).

A mishmash of progression

In BC there were significantly more raids but again a fairly linear progression. You started with a mix of Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair, moving up to Magtheridon and then upgrading to the next “tier” of gear when you were ready. In Wrath, you can get Ulduar level gear from heroics. You can get ToC-25 level gear from an instance that is easily pugged (Vault). Malygos, Sartharionx3 and Kel’Thuzad drop loot that is comparable (and in some cases superior, as with the Signet of Manifested Pain and Pennant Cloak) to Ulduar gear.

Onyxia muddies the water even more. Another puggable instance that drops ilvl 245 gear! It’s crazy! Is it better, though? Hard modes have certainly made progression a fuzzier line than before. While I do certainly enjoy attempting (and later succeeding at, hopefully) the Ulduar-25 hardmodes, it feels off to be doing them after completing the normal mode of ToC. Invariably, progression is measured by the kind of loot you can get from an instance. So Ulduar is behind ToC in these terms. The major change we have seen in the last few patches of WotLK is that difficulty no longer necessarily scales with ilvl.

I recall talking to my GM about the subject (or at least something closely related) and he lamented the lack of a middleground. Something between ToC hardmode and ToC normal (which is simply too easy and a bit boring) for guilds that fall between casual and hardcore. What could this be, though? Perhaps if hard modes could be calibrated multiple ways with different loot, as with Sartharion, there would be more for middle-of-the-road guilds to do. This is my major frustration with having “hard” and “normal” modes. Where’s the middleground?

The basis for creating it is there. Have Freya with two trees alive drop, say, ilvl 236 loot (between 226 and 239, which is the ilvl of Ulduar hard mode gear). This would require tweaking of certain hard modes, such as Mimiron, where you have everything built into the press of the button. For other fights, such as the previously mentioned Freya encounter and Hodir, calibrating loot drops to have normal, medium and hard drops wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. It would also follow Blizzard’s trend of giving its players options.

Be casual, be hardcore, be casualcore. Play as much as you want. Just hope that Blizzard notices you and gives you something appropriate to your skill level to do.

World of Logs: Your New Best Friend (Even if the Old One Was Cool)

I decided to write about World of Logs (WoL) and then I thought I’d google it to see what others had written. Lowered Expectations has a post about it here that I recommend checking out. I’m going to try and cover some things he (she?) didn’t for the sake of variety and other good things. First things first. If you don’t know what WoL is, well, it’s like a super-expansive Recount that’s much easier to navigate. Instead of simple coloured bars with numbers attached, ala Recount, WoL graphs information out on a timeline.

DPS over time

You can get similar graphs for healing, damage taken, and other things. You can also focus in on certain areas to get a more detailed view. So with the basics out of the way, I’ll go into a few ways you can use WoL to your advantage.

Who did damage to what?

Sometimes a boss fight is less about hitting the boss and more about burst damage on adds or various other things. The best examples of this type of fight are Yogg-Saron and Freya. For example, if a melee DPS assigned to the brain room had lots of damage done to tentacles but very little to the brain, you would be suspicious and possibly investigate/ask the player what happened. As for Freya, if a DPS had no damage done to Eonar’s Gift (the trees Freya spawns) at all, you’d be similarly worried.

Don’t take this sort of thing as gospel and /gkick someone just because they don’t have the right amount of DPS to a certain target. Be sure to use WoL simply as a way to look objectively at what happened and then talk to the player in question to see what happened. Chances are there is a good reason for whatever you’re wondering about but the raider in question simply forgot to tell you or was never asked.

Who healed whom?

Healing meters are good for testing how well healers stick to their assigned targets. If you assign Healer A to Tank B but all he’s healed are other raid members and himself, you have a problem. Straight numbers (total healing), however, can be very misleading where healers are concerned.

DPS, Damage Done, Active Time, oh my!

When you’re looking at a chart of Damage Done there are three numbers on the right side, as seen here.

I'm the best!

First is DPS (damage per second). In my opinion, this number is usually completely irrelevant. As you can see, I have more damage done than other players with higher DPS. How can this be, you ask? If you get a particularly lucky streak of crits, during Heroism, say, your DPS will go up a lot for that portion. DPS as shown in the screenshot above is averaged out over the whole fight. So if you instead did really solid damage throughout an entire fight, your DPS might be lower than others but your damage done could easily be higher.

Next is Active Time. Since this is the Damage Done chart, Active Time counts seconds that the player is actively doing damage to the boss. As a result, this statistic can be misleading. Mages, or other classes who are frequently spending time casting spells, often have lower active time than melee DPS. This is because melee DPS are constantly active as long as they are next to the boss due to autoattack. Active Time is also a misleading stat to assess healers on since constantly casting heals is not necessarily a good thing. Overhealing doesn’t help anyone.

Damage Done seems pretty obvious, but it’s always worth looking into exactly what a player did damage to. Consider this example. I was in a PuG VoA (in the days before Koralon) and we had just killed Emalon. One of the rogues had about 8k DPS but if you looked at what he had done damage to, you quickly realized he had spent the entire fight casting Fan of Knives at the adds. He did lots of damage but was almost entirely useless in the big picture.

It’s also important to look at random adds that players can hit, such as Ignis’ Iron Constructs. If melee DPS are doing a lot of damage to them, it’s probably just an accident or to pad the meters. So when you look at Damage Done, don’t just take the numbers for granted.

Some things to watch out for…

WoL gives you a lot of information. If you take all of it at face value and don’t think what the numbers might mean, however, you’ll end up getting angry for no reason a lot of the time. The best example of misinformation (or lack of information) on WoL is looking at interrupts.

From this table, it seems like I sucked ass on interrupts (which, unfortunately, I actually did). But what you have to keep in mind is that you only see successful interrupts, not all interrupts cast. I definitely cast Mind Freeze more than twice, but it’s perfectly possible I only actually interrupted a spell twice. So what this information could be telling you is that the people with the highest number of interrupts were the ones who prefer to interrupt early on in the cast time of a spell rather than later (which is not necessarily a good thing, given that bosses don’t do other things while casting).

Buffs and debuffs

Another thing you can use WoL for is looking at uptime of debuffs on the boss. This is important for finding out if people are putting up the debuffs they’re supposed to be, i.e. Sunder, Expose Armor, Faerie Fire, etc. Like all other WoL information, however, make sure that just seeing a number below 100% doesn’t make you freak out. Sometimes it’s just impossible for buffs to be up 100% of the time and you should be aware of this. An example is Icehowl – with the frequency that he knocks melee around, it’d be difficult to keep debuffs on him throughout the fight.

Any other ideas for using WoL?