I've had some experiences in the past couple days that have made me sorely tempted to post spittle-flecked rants that are not at all related to WoW, so you should (all 0 of you) be thankful that I've resisted the urge to do that. I've also sort of considered posting a couple stories from my 2006 deployment to Afghanistan. Or well, less stories and more ruminations. I feel like that's starting to turn into a really unattractive clinging to an increasingly irrelevant past, though. A person is defined in part by their past, sure, but also by their present and future.

VA continues to work on Cho'gall. We've been extending the lockout, but being the guild we are, our weekly raiding time is still pretty limited. I do think I'm pretty settled on the strategy we've chosen to use for him, and I think it will work for our raid, but it's requiring quite a bit of practice. I think that's ok though - we're not really that far out of the norm of what a lot of guilds have had to put in on Choggsington, and apparently once it clicks it's a very repeatable boss. Then we go to work on Nef, and once he's dead we'll clear out Throne of the 4 Winds. There's still no solid date for 4.1 and T11 doesn't became old content until 4.2, so we should be ok to get it all down in time. There may be a couple of holes in the raid's gear in terms of what people would ideally like to have, but in general I think our progress through T12 should be quicker than T11 has been. And hey, it's not as if every guild made the transition from Wrath to Cataclysm as relatively unscathed as we have.

Pradzha is down to three last achievements for her Glory of the Hero drake: Headed South, Vigorous VanCleef Vindicator, and Rotten to the Core. They're probably the trickiest three, but we've also got enough good people (and, you know, raid gear) that we can definitely get them. Thanks especially to Jargon and Crapemyrtle, who are always willing to take a shot at an achievement for me.

That said, the endless quest for achievements is one of the things that causes WoW to be an especially potent timesink. There was a period of almost a month where I didn't log on outside of raids, and in that time I read a few good books, played a Dragon Age Origins game almost up to the final battle, and played some Dawn of Discovery and Sims 3. WoW is in many ways a great game, but there are lots of other great games to play, great books to read, and great movies to watch. I sometimes worry that I'll let it take over all of my leisure time, which would be a huge shame. There are so many people on this planet, making so many wonderful things, that we already won't have enough time in any of our lives to experience all of it. And this is all on top of trying to live a life that is in some way at least a small improvement to the life of our fellow humans and other creatures.

I guess that's not really a challenge unique to any particular hobby, though. We all pretty much just do what we can. And for me, right now, that means posting this and then launching Open Office to try to work on a little bit of fiction.

Satisfyingly enchanted

I got a couple upgrades during the Very Busy period of the semester, one of which was the VP cloak whose abundance of hit upset the relatively careful balance of all my reforging. In addition to letting my reforging fall out of wack, I actually raided for two nights without any enchantment at all on my cloak. Woops! That's why it felt so good, now that I've had more time to play recently, to really get all my item-enhancement ducks in a row. I purchased the bracer enchant pattern off of the AH and handed it to one of the guild enchanters, so now my bracers have the 50 agility enchant and I don't feel like I'm gimped compared to leatherworkers. We've also been able to do the more expensive boot enchants for most of our raiders, myself included, which is pretty wonderful. Finally, I wandered back over to the reforging guy and optimized my reforging such that I'm only 4 rating over the cap. Wunderbar.

I've also been playing around a lot with tanking on my gathering alt. It's been pretty fun, although I'm getting really sick of Lost City, Grim Batol, and Halls of Origination. I bought her a BoE cloak off of the AH and I think I'm going to be moving on to heroics once I've replaced her hat, probably with the JP purchaseable. It'll be a little scary, since I'll still have a couple greens when I start, but I've also got her relatively well enchanted and, since she's a warrior, she can pop a damage reduction cooldown at the start of every single pull. I've also been having a surprising amount of luck getting people in normals to use CC, so hopefully the people in heroics will be just as willing to use it. I think that, if I play smartly and do things like transition from the shockwave stun into shield block, that should give the DPS enough time to kill enough things that she doesn't get gibbed by the incoming damage. It's been interesting getting a sense for the tank's perspective on things, as well as really making me appreciate how well behaved I am on my hunter, you know? I misdirect, I FD, I single-target the kill target instead of spamming CCed mobs with multi-shot, etc. Some of the very elementary mistakes that hunters in my group are making have me considering making a "how to dungeon" post, even.

What would really be neat would be making guide videos, but I'm just not sure if my computer can handle running FRAPS and instancing at the same time. And then if it could, I've never done any video editing - I don't really know where I'd start. Maybe something to keep at the back of my head for the next expansion.

BoA Goodie Bags

Well, awesome! They've posted a clarification on their plan for the dungeon call to arms and, indeed, the goodie bags are BoA. I really think this system is going to help address DPS queue times. And since they are going the BoA route, people really don't have a whole lot of room to complain - if they think it's "unfair," they can roll a tanking alt. This may, in fact, be the impetus I need to dust off my gathering alt's neglected prot spec and try to gear her up. It'd be nice to have an OT available for our raids, too. Wins for everyone.

Dungeon Finder Call to Arms

On April 7, Bashiok announced the possible addition of a call to arms system for the dungeon finder. There has been a lot of negative reaction to it, negative reaction that I personally feel is mostly misguided, so I wanted to chat about it a little bit.

I actually think that this proposal is genius. I could re-state Bashiok's post, but that seems superfluous: if you haven't read it yet, you should go read it. I think the goodie bags, and specifically the non-combat pets and mounts, are an elegant solution to a difficult problem. I use the phrase "elegant solution" here quite deliberately, too. I most often associate that phrase with solutions found for problems in the sciences or engineering. It carries connotations of finding a very simple, yet creative fix for what had appeared to be an intractable problem. And the long DPS queue times really had appeared to me to be such a problem.

There are a couple complaints that I'm seeing a lot about this proposal, both of which seem really flimsy to me. The first is something along the lines of this:

"The only people that are going to queue for these bags are bad tanks and DPS players without any tanking gear, spec, or experience."

To be honest, I don't see a whole lot of need to give this any sort of serious response. It's a bald assertion with no evidence, not even logical evidence. I don't see why anyone would think this. I mean, if the goodie bag incentive is going to work so well on bad tanks and non tanks, why wouldn't it work on decent tanks? Are those players actually aliens or something? I always assumed they were players that were pretty much similar to myself, and I see no reason to change that thinking now.

Even if you weaken the statement to "most of the people that will queue for the bags," I still don't see any reason to think that that's true.

Look, think about it this way. It is an indisputable fact that good tanks use the random dungeon system. You just can't argue with me on this one: I've had too many perfectly decent tanks in random dungeons. Really awful tanks have been a distinct minority, in fact.

It is also true that these decent tanks get instant queues.

Since they're getting instant queues, I don't see any way that they could possibly not be gearing up faster than DPS players. Remember that they're decent tanks! They're clearing most of the instances they start.

Once these tanks are geared up, they have no reason to continue using the queue system.

The goodie bags are there to convince these geared folks to step back into the queues for a chance at some toys, flasks, and so on. I see no reason why this wouldn't work.

The second argument I see most frequently leveled against the goodies is that it's "unfair" or it "devalues" the mounts and pets that people have already ground. Again, I don't buy it. None of these are raid items or real prestige items - they're all things that you can get with varying degrees of patience. And they're all "devalued" as-is, by the relentless march of expansions. Anzu mounts were exponentially more rare in BC, when you had to have a druid that had spent the 5,000 gold in the party and H-Sethekk Halls was relatively challenging. Now any old idiot can wander into the instance and murder Anzu every day. The difference between that and a small chance at getting him from successfully tanking an entire random without any guildies is minimal.

Nothing is being taken from anyone. As it stands, no one gets any goodie bags and DPS queues are 30-60 minutes, depending. If this change goes live, DPS queues should drop and tanks (and maybe healers) will get some goodies. Life gets better for everyone. There is no downside.

I usually try to be charitable when it comes to the motivations of others, but it's getting pretty tough in this instance. It really seems like a lot of people are mad that they won't get goodie bags and are scrambling for justifications for their ire instead of being thankful for a shot at reduced queue times.

I will note that many persons are suggesting the bags and/or the special items in them be made BoA, and I'd support that. The goal of the system is to add tanks and healers to the queues - making things BoA would only help with that goal.

I do apologize for the long break in posts. RL has been pretty active for me recently, and I haven't been logging into WoW outside of raid times. VA did kill the Ascendant Council last week though, yay! We've just got Cho'gall and Nef to go for the regular modes now. I really think we'll be able to clear T11 before 4.2 hits, which should mean that we'll be clearing T12 on a better timeframe. Whoo!

Crit vs. Mastery for Survival Hunters

I'm mostly writing this blog post because I actually did some napkin math for a post to the Blizz hunter forum just now and I'm so proud of actually having done something - even though it's something that's already been done by plenty of other people - that I wanted to post it. The root cause of the post is the fact that people aren't sure if they should be stacking mastery as a Survival hunter. There's more to the discussion of crit vs. haste vs. mastery, but the relationship between crit and mastery is pretty much greek for a lot of people.

The first thing to understand is that critical strike chance increases the value of Survival's mastery. Why is this so? Because mastery gives all of your magical damage a percentage bonus of extra damage. Critical strikes make your damage bigger. A ten percent bonus to a bigger number is more valuable than a ten percent bonus to a smaller number. The more often you crit, the more often you make those big numbers that your mastery can affect, the more benefit you're gaining from your mastery.

The second thing to understand is that critical strike chance decreases in value as a percentage of your DPS the more of it that you have. To see why this is, we'll have to do some napkin math.

Ok, so let's say you attack once per second for 1,000 damage per attack. Clearly, you're doing 1,000 DPS. Let's use a test case of 100 seconds.

We'll say that criticals do 50% bonus damage, which is to say that a critical strike does 1,500 damage. If you go from 0% crit to 1% crit, one of your 100 shots will now do 1,500 damage. This will mean that over the course of 100 seconds, you will do 100,500 damage instead of 100,000. This means that 1% crit has brought you from 1,000 DPS to 1,005 DPS.

Let's make it two percent crit. That brings your total damage done to 101,000 or 1010 DPS. Three percent crit chance makes for 1015 DPS. So every time we add a single percent critical strike chance, we're gaining a total of five DPS.

But check this out: that first percentage point of crit chance we added improved our DPS by .5%. That is: 1,005 DPS is .5% better than 1,000 DPS. The next percentage point of crit improved our DPS by .4975%. That same 5 DPS improvement has reduced in value as a percentage of our DPS when we add another percent chance because it's being added to a bigger number. By the time we get to 50% critical strike chance, or 1250 DPS, another 5 DPS only improves our overall DPS by .4%.

Again: The more critical strike chance you have, the less percentage increase you see from the next point.

So if you've been stacking crit and stacking crit and stacking crit, you will eventually reach a point where, yes, mastery overtakes critical strike chance. Optimal DPS will be arrived at maintaining a ratio of critical strike chance to mastery. I'm under the impression that the mathy people like Zeherah are thinking that's a ratio of 4:1 or 5:1, but don't quote me on that.

The thing to keep in mind with that ratio is also that raid buffs count, so it may be that in a raiding situation you can reach a 5:1 ratio even in T11 gear, I have no idea. So if you REALLY want to get crazy about maxing your DPS, you'd have to figure out what your average critical strike chance in a raid is and then get mastery to a point where it's about 1/4 or a 1/5 of that number.

I'm definitely not that crazy. Nor do I play main-spec Survival. It was still interesting to work through the reasoning for myself, though.

Cataclysm Huntering at 85: Gems, Enchantments, and Reforging

Updated December 18, 2011!

I have, in the past, called item enhancement my favorite mini-game in WoW, and this is still something that holds true for me. I think the satisfaction is similar to the satisfaction from a well-played game of Bejeweled, or maybe a crossword puzzle. You need to know what points you want various stats at and arrange your gems, enchants and so on to achieve the maximum benefit from your available configuration of stuff. Sometimes you just get lucky of course: I got two upgrades on the same night once and equipping both of them put me exactly at hit cap. Exactly. Situations like this are rare, though, and you're usually going to have to shuffle around some combination of reforging and enchants to get your gear where you want it.

The sort of basis of item enhancement is stat weighting. This sounds like a scary term, but it really isn't. All this means is that, when you're considering your gear, you give some stats more weight in your consideration than you give others. This is pretty intuitive at its most basic: as a physical DPS class, we're giving spirit no weight at all because we don't want any. Conversely, we give agility a lot of weight because we want a lot of it. The difficulty comes when we're comparing things like crit vs. mastery vs. haste.

Unfortunately, there's no always true for everyone all the time stat weighting. Depending on the gear you already have, what stat is best for you might change, sometimes pretty drastically. This can lead to misunderstandings when people do things like look at the armories of hunters in world-first guilds and then try to emulate those hunters' reforging even though they're raiding in a totally different environment.

There are tools to help us decide on our own stat weighting, with FemaleDwarf being amongst the most popular. Even this isn't as easy as some would like though - you have to be careful to enter your raid's buffs and debuffs as well as making sure the shot priority and settings match the way you play. If you're using a playstyle where you use Aimed Shot as your focus dump and never cast Arcane Shot and run a FD sim without changing the settings to reflect that, then just click the "best raid buffs" button even though your raid is missing the 10% haste buff, your stat weightings are going to be incorrect.

Now that I've made all of my caveats, though, I'll make an admission: for the most part, I don't do any of this stuff. There's a sort of default stat weighting that will generally be mostly true for most hunters, and I pretty frequently just go with that. Here it is:

Agility > Hit Rating to cap > Critical Strike Rating > Haste Rating > Mastery Rating

Again, this may not actually be your ideal stat weighting, but honestly? If you use these as your stat priorities, you'll generally be doing OK. Hit cap is, of course, 960 rating for most and 841 rating for Draenei. In general, I'd prefer to be a few points under the hit cap than be a few points over. This is because there is a finite amount of stats on your gear and hit rating over the cap is doing zero damage and is thus entirely wasted. Missing 1-5 autoshots out of 10,000 is preferable to getting no benefit from some of your gear.

This stat weighting will also be reflected in the sort of gear you choose. I strive to get all my hit from pieces that have both crit and hit, and my hitless pieces I prefer to be crit/haste. Further, I try to not have any piece of gear without any crit whatsoever, which results in most of my mastery pieces being crit/mastery. That means that when I'm reforging off my least-valued stat, mastery, the only thing I can reforge it into is haste. Some people see all of the haste I'm reforging for and think that I'm "stacking haste," and this just isn't so. I have far more critical strike rating than I do haste rating. It's just that haste is the best thing to reforge to on the pieces I'm reforging.

Gems and Gem Sockets!

Gemming is actually pretty simple these days. Agility is far and away our best stat, which is in line with it being considered a primary stat by Blizzard. Further, the requirement to activate our metagem is "socket at least 3 red gems". Therefore, we're free to socket straight agility gems, and as a general rule this is what you'll want to do, ignoring most of your socket bonuses.

Consider, however, the Wentletrap Vest. This piece has two sockets, one red socket and one blue socket, with an attached 20 agility bonus. If you were to socket two 40 agility gems in it, you would be gaining a total of 80 agility from gems. If you were to socket one 40 agility gem in the red socket and one 20 agility/20 hit gem in the blue socket though, you would have 60 agility from gems, 20 hit from gems, and another 20 agility from the socket bonus. That's a total of 80 agility and 20 hit, which is just more stats than you get from the two red gems.

What if the Wentletrap had a yellow or a blue socket instead of that red socket, though? Well, then to match the bonus you'd need another hybrid gem, bringing your total agility down to 60. People have done pretty extensive math on this and, for all specs, the extra crit and/or hit you gain from those hybrid gems doesn't outweigh the 20 lost agility. Your rule of thumb, then, is to only gem for socket bonuses which reward you with 20 or more agility per non-red socket. Here are the actual gems you'll want to use:

Metagem:

Agile Shadowspirit Diamond if you can afford it,

Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond otherwise

Red: Delicate Inferno Ruby

Orange: Deadly Ember Topaz

Purple: Glinting Demonsye

Item Enchantments!

Finally we get to the enchantments. There's not a whole lot of choice involved here, and all of the choice that is involved is budget-based. A lot of the top-shelf enchantments cost maelstrom crystals, and for most of us those are still out of reach. We probably won't be using all the best enchants until sometime in T12. I'm still going to list them here, though, because eventually there won't be an economic justification for using anything else.

Head: Arcanum of the Ramkahen

Shoulders: Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal

Chest:

Cadillac enchant: Peerless Stats

Hyundai enchant:  Mighty Stats

Back:

Cadillac enchant: Greater Critical Strike

Hyundai enchant: Major Agility

Wrists:

Cadillac enchant: Agility note: this should be the first enchant you spend crystals on

Hyundai enchant: Critical Strike

Hands:
Cadillac enchant: Greater Mastery
Hyundai enchant: Major Agility

Waist: Ebonsteel Belt Buckle

Legs: Dragonscale Leg Armor

Feet:

Cadillac enchant: Assassin's Step

Hyundai enchant: Earthen Vitality

Melee Weapon: Mighty Agility

Ranged Weapon:
Cadillac enchant: Flintlocke's Woodchucker does not chuck wood
Hyundai enchant: Gnomish X-Ray Scope

I'll just finish up with a couple quick notes on these. You may have noticed that a few Wrath enchants snuck in there, and that's fine. Maybe at some point they'll add a better glove enchant to the game, maybe not, but until then we're best off just adding the 20 agility. I also noted that the agility to bracers enchant should be the first thing you use your maelstrom crystals on, and I think this will be true for most of us. Replacing an enchant of 0 agility with one for 50 agility is just such a huge upgrade that it's hard to justify doing anything else first. Especially since the cloak and chest enchants are such minor upgrades from their budget versions, I'd let those slide until you and everyone in your guild had all the best melee weapon enchants, bracer enchants, etc. Like, I'd only really get those once you reached a point where there's a stack and a half of crystals sitting in the guild bank with no one using them, you know?

I haven't addressed profession perks in this post, and unless someone specifically asks about one I don't really plan to. Your professions are your professions, and taking advantage of your perks will generally result in a bonus of 80 agility one way or another. Other than that, I would pretty much expect any given person to know their profession bonuses pretty well, so it's up to you to make the best use of those.

Finally: please please just do the dailies and put on the tabards until you have the good head/shoulder enchants. It really really really doesn't take that long to finish those rep grinds, and using the crappy versions or the last-expansion versions is pretty much disrespectful to everyone else in your raid.

So that's it! It's taken me a couple months to actually write this thing, but hopefully it helps clear up any lingering doubts you had about gearing your hunter. Have fun!

MM Guide updated

The MM guide is updated for the AotH/AiS hotfix. I did it pretty quickly, so I probably missed something or added a typo or whatever, but I'll proof it later. I feel like I should have more to say! But I kind of don't. Ah well! Raid night tonight, hopefully we'll clear five or six bosses or so, giving us plenty of time to work on Chimaeron tomorrow.