I beat the game!

MMO’s are designed so there is no ‘beat the game’ so to speak, but we can pick endings. Lets say ‘beat the game’ is killing the lich king. Then what. I’m kinda curious how that’ll be handled. If you beat anub, that’s not the end, that’s start farming up max gear so you can beat lich king. But here’s the deal, once you beat Lich King, the next patch isn’t a patch, it’s a gear resetting expansion. You don’t need i264 epics to kill 12 rabid bears for a i300 level green.

The icecrown gating will stave off some of that. Hopefully the Lich King won’t be on farm for too long before the expansion. Or maybe they won’t total gear reset. Some of the higher end bc epics were good to 75 or so. The level cap will go to 85, so maybe t10 gear will stretch till t11.

I got a 245 weapon finally, so feral gear is completely done until icecrown. Well, hard modes, but lol. Our fri toc25 group tried hard mode afterwards. We got destroyed. A lot of people bailed and got replaced with bad dps. We got gorlock the impaler to ~50% hp before worms came out once. The rest of the attempts we died before then. By the way, if togc25 can be tanked with two tanks I don’t see how. After getting one shot (through cooldowns!) several times I’m calling shenanegans on that one. Mind you I’m packing full 245 gear, 55k hp without using stam trinkets, 62% avoidance, a few % below armor cap, etc. Conclusion: togc25 CANNOT be two tanked. It needs three, and like.. everyone needs to be doing 6k dps, not 2.8. What the heck are people thinking joining a togc25 with 3k dps seriously.

World of Logs comes to the rescue! Three tanks, five heals, seventeen dps. There is a 100% wipe rate below 80k raid dps. Assuming three dps are removed from combat via cobald/toxin, that’s an absolute minimum of 5.7k dps per person, assuming zero deaths (lol!).

abandoning the mouse (keyboard?)

When I first started playing wow I tried to emulate the control layout from Final Fantasy XI Online. That game used the mouse for nothing at all and did not have very customizable keybindings. In retrospect, the controls were horrible! But I tried to copy them anyhow.

Eventually I gave up on it, the mouse absolutely had to be used for movement and camera control. It’s the only way you can, well, turn around sometime this week. I still kinda prefer the 2x analog stick style, but I moved to a bastardization of my failed attempts to reproduce ffxi’s keyboard controls merged with fps style mosuing, and throw in some wow-style clicking on stuff for good messure. Many hand cramps later…

This weekend I sat down to completely eliminate the handful of keyboard controls that make use of the right hand, all modifier+wierdkey hand gymnastics and all clickables. I used one of these keyboards in my fps days, and that’s the style I set out to reproduce. The fun starts: I ran out of macro space.

That’s not fun? Ya, it is. See that just meens I have to come up with ways to compress macros, make them do more things with less code, program more inteligence into them. I’m good at that kinda thing. Ex. coming up with a one liner that’ll make frostweave bandages, mount me up, drop my current form, shadowmeld, cast wrath or drink all on one button, with it always doing the correct thing that it needs to do when I push it. Or maybe it’s time to start looking at custom addons so I can make a super over 9000 line PWN button that just does.

On that note, this isn’t fair. At all. The person with the best addons/macros has an advantage over those who do not. All competitive games that let you program them have this problem.

epic rolls

I’m out of stuff to upgrade on my feral. Everything is 245 except my weapon. So of course everything in the last week drops a weapon upgrade and I loose every roll. Fate. I’m not complaining, really, my roll luck has been extraordinary. It came to my attention the other day that xt in uld25 drops a good feral weapon, so maybe I’ll try to pug that this week too.

I got the triumph badge tank trinket (armor), so I’m out of triumph badge items to get. I’m going to use the rest to finish off my furious resto set. Time for the next patch! Almost.

Last time I ran out of stuff to upgrade I started a warlock. Abandonded since 3.2, he’s been seeing some action the last week. Since prior abandonment he’s gotten every heirloom item evar and a phat pile of enchants. I’ve got an almost full set (minus heirloom slots) of ‘of healing’ items for spellpower and stuff is dying crazy fast. I just charge through a swarm of monsters, putting corruption on everything that moves, lifetap and everything dies in two ticks and I’m back at full mp/hp.

I respeced my resto into insect swarm. See dot farming above, but it takes longer. I can kill chillmaw on resto now. It’s kind of a waste of time vs bear. The spec is infinately more entertaining than helplesshealer spec. I can actually kill a dude sometime before a bg ends.

world of logs

I discovered worldoflogs.com. It shows recorded dps/heals for kills and wipes for whatever boss, side by side. It shows top recorded dps for each boss, which isn’t very useful but sure is interesting.

Lord Jaraxxus, top 10 dps are all mages, on all difficulties. Faction champs, all unholy dks. Also kind of neat that top ten dps on togc10 anub is all warriors, but togc25 is all dks. Why do dk’s pwn faction champs? Ohwait. Onyxia! … all dk’s and rouges. That one doesn’t make all that much sense. I’d think something with better aoe would have the one-up there.

So what’s up with dk taking top dps spot for so many things? And better question, how on earth does a dk do 15k dps on a single target anyhow? I’ve seen all 245 gear dk’s in action, they don’t do 15k. What is missing? So you can click a person and it shows their rotation (linked is 19k dps enh sham vs anub).

So that’s neat, except I’m not not a dps. A lot of dps ask me things though, so it looks like a good place to point them. For me though, it shows the opposite information. What the monster hit the tank for, block/absorb rates, dodge/parry/misses, etc. I don’t know my historical tanking stats though, just what’s in recount at the moment. It looks like there’s an addon to store this stuff. That’d be useful, so I can see which trinket works better, how big that fireball really was, etc.

-20% dodge lol

Icecrown will have an aura that removes 20% dodge. This doesn’t bother me any. I saw it coming a mile off, with the 232+ accessories having low/crap avoidance on it, but lots of bonus armor. That -20% dodge is AFTER avoidance diminishing returns. I’ve had items passed to me because their avoidance was slightly worse than the 226 version (but with bonus armor). Oops?

There’s some talk that it affects druids more than other tanks, but I don’t see how. All tanks loose the 20% dodge, regardless if they focus more on other avoidance stats or not. I don’t think it’s possible to gear out of dodge (untill <20%, so as to only take a <20% hit) into parry/block to the extent that you'll have better avoidance in the end. Avoidance is on pretty harsh diminishing returns already (for all of us? I assume so), so mitigation stats become more important; bonus armor, bearblock (crit/attack), shield block, etc. Ya bearblock, people forget about that one, they added it in 3.1.

I got 1350 arena rating and am farming for shoulders now. I got the feral relentless boots for pve. All the pve boots have hit on them and I'm over cap, so my choices are hit (does nothing) or resilience (does nothing). 62k honor is easier to farm than a raid drop.

lessons learned, maybe not

Since my last update I got the stam trinket from toc25, loop of the twin valkuries from toc10, and relentless gladiator boots of salvation. It occured to me that if the feral 245 idol had a proc rate on par with the resto one it would be better than the 226 agi idol. I’ll buy it and try it out this afternoon. It’s kind of dumb that I’ve been listening to what people say on forums about the idols when forums are so frequently wrong? It’s not like it takes more than 10 minutes to test for myself.

We had three guild run ony’s this week. For obvious reasons I was only at two of them. There were more than 10 that wanted to go to ony10, so two 10mans. A few new guild toons did toc10/25 this week. All of this week’s raids were a success in one way or another (victory or learning via defeat).

When asked to assist with something, is it better to A. assist or B. refuse to for the sake of teaching personal responsibility?

the horde are in ashenvale again

loosing the pug lotto

On a good day there’s maybe half a dozen folks in my guild geared to run t9+ raids. Stop, insert topic change:

Why the heck do people take it personally when they’re told they arn’t geared for $xyz? It’s not personal, seriously. This is a numbers game: (monstershp/timetoenrage)/(dpsinparty-deadpeople) = dps you have to do or we loose. Similar with dmg taken vs healspersecond. The numbers are easier to meet with flawless execution, but they still have to be met or there is no way to win. This rant was inspired by the pugs in outlandgear/greens trying to join T9 raids this weekend.

Ok where was I. Right, half a dozen guildmates who can do t9 raids. The rest have to be pugged. Pugs are such a crapshoot. This weekend was the weekend of bad pugs. I’ve given up on ony25 for this raid week. I did uld at the sametime as others did ony25, so I got the pleasure of trying some ALL pug ony25’s. What a huge difference two or three reliable folks makes.

Ony25 #1, 0 guildmates, about 1/3rd makaveli. I’ve pugged with enough of them to know they’re both geared and competent. The healers are all unknowns though. I died to a single big add, the very first one, _every_ _single_ _try_. Due to no heals. None. Zilch. Nada. Recount showed a tick or two from a wildgrowth on one. The makaveli folk bailed as a group after the third and the pug broke up, as it should have. Good riddens ug.

Ony25 #2, 3 guildmates, ~uld geared, but competent. At least I knew they would hug a wall for deep breath, and ya know, actually cast heals on me. Unlike most of the raid. Half a dozen people keeled over from deep breath and blast nova every single time. The raid leader wasn’t leading. A quick examine, ok the raid leader is barely geared for nax10 let alone ony25. I’m thinking this is going to go bad, so I kinda take over and explain the verysimple strat: When you see the raid warning for deep breath? Hug a wall or you will die. Didn’t help. Throw in a harty dose of welps-not-tanked, ranged in blast nova and waaayyy not enough dps (the undergeared raid leader wasn’t gear checking, whoda thought). Half a dozen wipes, a dozen people leaving/replaced and reexplaining the deep breath mechanic over 9000 times later, I’d had it and left.

toc25! Our normally awsome Friday toc25 pug got infiltrated by baddies this week. We wiped a lot. By time we got to anub it was pretty obvious it wasn’t going to happen. Everyone was staying alive, zero deaths, but we weren’t even coming close to downing him before enrage. Look at dps meter, oh where the heck did these people doing 2.5k come from. They were removed, and some got angry at it: but my main has a 2700 gear score! but this is my offspec! See itsnotpersonalguys rant.

Ok so it wasn’t all that bad a pug weekend. We did a toc10 with a lot of guild people that went flawlessly, and a heroic toc10 that made it to anub. Somewhere in there I got another t9.5 token and the heroic version of fevor of the frostborn. I’m not too sure about that trinket. It’s a mitigation trinket (dodge/armor), but the triumph badge one (that I dont have) and dmc:g are both better. I’ll use fevoroffrostborn for my mitigation set for now but I’m thinking it’ll get replaced.

Our 5s arena team got some good playtime in this weekend. We pwned some nubs! Really. Actually we lost a lot. There were some teams that were clearly throwing the match to get their weekly 10 for points, driving our match rating up to 2000 at one point…….. then we encounter a real team and get steamrolled. Loads of fun though.

Addons! Gladius+Natur == awsome. I just re-discovered Gladius. I’d tried it last season and found it kind of annoying. They’ve made some changes and it’s really nice now. Natur enemy castbar shows castbars, cds and diminishing returns for everyone in the arena. Very dbm-ish.

who needs crusader orbs

I bought another round of crusader orbs for bracers. I was thinking to maybe work on the resto crusader orb stuff next, but I just hit 1200 in my 2v2. The relentless stuff seems to be just as good as pve gear? The difference is resilience (crap) or crit (crap). Maybe if I ever did anything but raid heals or if the pve gear had haste on it. I picked up the 245 resto idol. It procs 2-3 times per rejuv with no cooldown, so +250sp always, and bought relentless gladiator bracers.

I’m not sure the friday night toc25 pug can be called a pug anymore. The core people are the same every week with a few pickup dps. The run has been cleaner every week since start (two months ago?), so every week we’ve have a larger portion of the same folks from the previous. We’ve settled on who tanks/heals what/who, and it’s been the same every time for a few weeks. I get lordjax, duo warrior faction champ with a war (war+druid for the pvp encounter, whoda thought), and anub. This last Friday we cleared the whole instance with only one wipe (on anub), and cleared faction champs with no deaths (I blame pure luck).

kill a dragon to get a sword to kill a bigger dragon

So I’m reading the 3.3 ptr notes. I hope it doesn’t come out soon, or maybe I do. Everything that drops conq badges will drop triumph, and the new raids will drop w/e new badge. We will kill a bigger dragon to get a bigger sword to kill a bigger dragon again.

This just seems to be the way of wow. It’s fun, and so clearly a hamster wheel. No goal. If there was a goal, then when it’s achived there’s nothing left. Or if it had a goal that was so hard to reach that it took years, forever, maybe never, then it’d become frustrating, hopeless or a chore. Although I must admit, I miss having an undefeatable monster.

This isn’t an original idea, but picture this. A rare spawn, outdoor world monster. Add a mechanic so no more than 25 could attack it at once. It’d drop some stuff with staying power, lets say a relic weapon that gets it’s ilevel scaled up every patch/expansion. The boss would get scaled up every patch/expansion too. Then make him unbeatable.

I got some random toc10 drops for my resto. I joined a pug toc10 steamroll, one shotted everything. It was my first toc10 since the day 3.2 came out and we couldn’t beat northrend beasts. The 10man felt soooo easy after doing the 25 every week. I single tanked both twin valkuries. Some time after the run some random person /tell’d and apologized to me. Said he had no idea his dps would be that bad in a raid, shouldn’t have joined, so sorry. I was like who are you and what are you talking about. I bring up recount from toc10, yep, he was doing 1.5k dps. I didn’t notice and we one shotted everything, so w/e. I told him as much, and ya work on that some. I guess the dude felt bad and was apologizing to everyone in the raid. Strange.

In another world, a person complained they didn’t care for carrying nubs through t7 raids, but wasn’t getting invited to 25 mans. I armory; unchanted gear, bad/no gems, *sigh*. I talked to them a bit, no go, why farm 3 days for a weapon chant when I can get a better one running Uld? Explaining wasn’t helping, so I recommended they join some pugs (ie.not mine). Not that nice of me but what can ya do.