Should I break my T12 4pc for T13 2pc?

YES.

Sorry. Not yelling at anyone, I just actually found myself asking myself this question the other day, and then I went "oh yeah, duh, of course I should." T12 4pc bonus gives you free focus in different amounts at random times. T13 2pc gives you a predictable, never ending flow of free focus. It's a huge DPS increase and gets you that much closer to getting your T13 4pc, which is appropriately righteous for an end-of-expansion tier set.

Of course, luck being what it is, the LFR runs I did on my hunter dropped conqueror tokens, and the runs I did on my priest dropped protector tokens.

I am now a social media maven!

Ok not really. But I did sign up for twitter. The second... thing to "follow" me was porn spam.

I looked through the default widgets and stuff on blogger, but I didn't immediately find a good one to easily provide a link on the sidebar for people to follow me on twitter with a single click. Not sure how to do that, but I'm sure I can figure it out with a bit of googling.

Overthinking Raid Difficulties

I am now at work, having finished up my interview with the Twisted Nether folks earlier. It was a lot of fun! Presumably I was pretty boring to listen to, but I had a good time. As happens so often with me when I talk with my mouth rather than my fingers, however, I didn't manage to convey all the thinkin's I've been having in my brain parts.

See, it seemed like a good idea to listen to a couple previous episodes before I went on, and the most recent episode was with Kurn from Kurn's Corner. I've been reading her blog for quite a while now, and I think she's awesome, which is why I was kind of saddened at her response to the question "what went right with Cataclysm?" ("nothing!") as well as her pessimism regarding Mists.

I got across some of what I wanted to say about those things in the show, but the big thing I didn't address was her complaints about the raid difficulties.

I think that you have to establish some background before you start talking about how satisfied you are or are not with raid difficulty in Cataclysm, because the game totally and completely changed the way it addressed difficulties over the course of Wrath of the Lich King.

In classic WoW and Burning Crusade, when you'd killed a new boss you had killed a new boss. Full stop, end of story. You weren't going to clear the instance and come back later and kill a different, more difficult version of that boss. You either killed Illidan or you didn't. Ok.

This approach to raid difficulty is intuitive and viscerally satisfying. It feels totally awesome and great to come together and work as a team and get that first kill on Lady Vashj or Kael'thas or Archimonde or Illidan. Man it feels good. And then you've done it! You've cleared SSC or TK or MH or BT and no one can gainsay that.

There are some problems with this approach, however, because it means that you're going to pour a really staggering quantity of development resources into assembling and tuning content that single-digit percentages of your playerbase are going to see, if that.

That isn't even the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem is that there is no cap on player skill and no cap on guild teamwork. I loved Lady Vashj and it remains one of my favorite encounters in the game, but if the modern top-10 guilds were doing SSC and TK, they would have laughed at T5. They would have just wrecked those encounters with a violence that would be sickening and terrible to behold, yes, even before they were nerfed. We were starting to see this with vodka's pre-nerf kill of Mu'ru, an extremely brutal encounter. There were, what, 6 or 7 guilds that were able to clear that before it got nerfed?

The thing to keep in mind, then, is that they did in fact clear it. The gulf between someone like me and someone in those top 10 guilds is much wider than the gulf between me and someone 10k DPS behind me in the raid finder. And then you have to remember that that gulf continues to grow wider.

I think the best way to think about this is to look at some illustrative examples.

I think I'm pretty good at WoW*, and I'm in a casual guild with people I like and a raid schedule I can live with. We're totally average, the perfect target market for normal modes. Roster difficulties in T11 meant we never cleared Nef or Al'akir before the nerf, but we got everything else. We went 7/7 normals in Firelands and never touched a heroic mode. We're the scrappy little kid in the school hallway, with a heart full of fierceness that's at odds with our awkward, uncoordinated exterior. We are currently 4/8 Dragon Soul normals on 10 and Ultraxion is looking like a formidable challenge on normal difficulty.

Kurn is the GM of Apotheosis. They went 7/13 25H in T11 and 6/7 25H in T12, which is awesome and amazing. They are some straight-up swaggering brutes, covered in rippling muscles and arcing with fearsome eldritch power, heirs to the eleven fatal secrets of Shaolin and masters of the most deadly arts. They are currently 7/8 Dragon Soul normals on 25 and will almost certainly be working on heroics within a couple weeks.

Beru is an officer (or perhaps GM? Not sure) of Monolith, who went 13/13 25H in T11 and 7/7 25H in T12. They are nightmares risen from the depths of a fevered unconscious mind, the formless given a form which is death unending. They are the coming of chaos and the rending of the world; from their manifold mouths issues a ululation that sunders flesh and from their uncountable eyes issues a light that sears all it sees to ash. They have already killed their first heroic boss in Dragon Soul.

The top guilds in the world are 6/8 25H in Dragon Soul.

The very best players are continually just getting better and better, inching farther off to the right-hand side of the bell curve. Any encounter which presents a challenge to them is rapidly approaching the state of being an impenetrable citadel to the rest of the world. Two encounters in this expansion have prompted Beru to write posts asking "is this fun?" and coming to the answer that no. No it is not fun.

Unfortunately, any encounter difficult enough to present the gentlest of speedbumps to those top guilds is pretty much doomed to make her give the same answer to that question.

So I can understand Kurn's disappointment that she's almost cleared the normals already, but I really think she underestimates the unbalancing effect of her own skill and the skill and teamwork of her guild. Presenting her guild with normal modes that challenged them would mean my guild banging into a brick wall at Zon'ozz, while presenting Beru's guild with normals that challenged them would have Apotheosis hitting a wall in the same spot. At the end of the day, if the normals are too easy for you, blow 'em up and move on to heroic modes.

I totally get that all of these difficulties sort of dilute the raiding experience. I agree with that. In fact I think she's one of the people that got the short end of the stick: normals are too easy for her to really feel satisfied at clearing them, but she's also not necessarily clearing the heroic modes. That's not very satisfying either!

What it comes down to, though, is that I think the choices were between dilution and destruction - the one-lockout model did not and can not scale with player skill, and just ignoring either the hardcore or the casual segments of the subscriber base would have ended up scuttling the ship. The very fact that there are millions of casual players is part of what gives meaning to the hardcore being hardcore, and without the accomplishments of the hardcore to admire, the casual playerbase loses interest.

*I think that a guild around the level that Monolith plays at would be happy to have me, even if my current progression doesn't reflect that.

Pugged players and personality conflicts

I have about as much affection for priest healing as I do for hunter DPS. My hunter was my first character, and she holds a higher percentage of time as my main character, but I have mained my priest in a raid healing capacity, and it was a lot of fun for me. It's actually a little unfortunate, because there's no way for me to heal without feeling twinges of "I wish I were on my hunter," and I can't play my hunter without getting similar twinges of "I wish I were on my priest."

Since I do main my hunter, this means I keep my eye out for opportunities to take my priest through current content. Somewhere in, I think, September I saw someone posting ads in trade looking to recruit a healer for their Firelands progression raiding. I sent her a tell saying that, while I couldn't be a permanent person that could make all their raid times, I could help out with their Friday raidtimes until such time as they found someone that could better fill in and was she interested in a discipline priest?

Her response was "no," which was fine, but then she gave me the reason for that no and said that it was because they already had a holy paladin.

I could go in-depth as to why this was an incorrect opinion to hold at the time, but I think it's enough for my purposes here to simply state its incorrectness. Having a holy paladin is just absolutely not a good reason to turn down a discipline priest with the current game balance, and it was an even worse reason before 4.3 was released. But this person Knew What She Knew and nothing was going to change her mind, certainly nothing so petty as the game's actual mechanics.

And you know what? That's fine. I shrugged and wished her luck and went on my way.

Earlier tonight, I posted a recruitment notice in trade and actually got a response from it, which was certainly a first. I'm not sure if this particular person is going to work out, but it'll be nice if he does, and since he didn't server transfer to play with us I won't feel any pressure to try force it to work if he's not a good fit with the guild.

Shortly after I'd invited him to the guild, he mentioned that he was pugging Firelands with the guild that I mentioned above. My sleep schedule is totally weird right now (totally weird) and, although I'm completely burned out on sick of Firelands, I could still use the trinkets from Domo and Rag. More importantly, it would be a good opportunity to hang out with the new recruit and see how he did, so I said sure, I'd come.

The raid essentially had one person in it who hadn't cleared the instance on normal before, and yet they felt the need to do full-length boss explanations on vent. Once more, that's fine. It's ok. Not everyone has my particular bias against pre-pull boss explanations going longer than a minute (maybe two minutes), and I get that.

What I don't get, and where I think I again have to say that I think they were just incorrect, was insisting that their raid leader be the only person to discuss encounter mechanics ever, in any capacity. Even on an AFK break, when said raid leader wasn't present, and someone not in their guild had asked a question.

I understand that it can be rough to bring in players from other guilds. Everyone does everything a little bit differently, and a lot of people have this notion that any difference from their method is wrong, rather than merely different. They feel like they're clearly better, and they have this weird misplaced arrogance happening, and they want to change the way you're comfortable doing things.

This guild leader pretty much instantly jumped to feeling like I was doing this, because the first time I mentioned anything her response was "we've been here countless times before." I could see the gear they were wearing. I could see the rote facility with which they went through the encounters. It was already obvious to me that they'd cleared all these places before and were just here to farm stuff for their mage's staff.

There was eventually some bad feeling about this, which is really unfortunate, and to be honest I think she's looking at things with the wrong attitude.

I've learned a lot by pugging myself into other guild groups, and I've learned a lot from people we've pugged in. We improved the way we did Valiona and Theralion, we improved the way we did Ragnaros, we got little tips for weird trash packs, etc. It is not necessarily disrespectful if someone mentions the way they're used to doing something. It is not necessarily confusing to have someone bring up an idea, especially if it's someone that's not doing things like talking over the raid leader. I think you run a very real risk of missing out if you declare that there shall be No Discussion of the Encounters.

So, I did get lucky. Domo dropped his trinket and I won the roll on it. Awesome. I don't think I'll be pugging with that particular guild any more, but I do wish them luck. I just think that things could be a little easier and more fun for them.

Dragon Soul so far: pretty great, actually!

I think I spent maybe 6 or 7 hours logged into WoW for the entirety of November.

It just wasn't something I was really very interested in doing. I mostly logged in to farm the nerfed Firelands normals, but we pretty much gave up on trying out heroic progression. Killing the same stuff over and over again in hopes that the few things we needed would drop was extremely tedious. Beth'tilac was the first boss we killed in Firelands and she never did drop a single tanking sword. On the other hand, our rogue got kitted out in his BiS for every slot, so that's cool.

The point being that I was pretty much totally bored with WoW and couldn't be bothered to log in. Patch 4.3 has done a lot to address that, at least for the meantime.

Part of that has been the raid finder, and I'm forced to admit that I was completely wrong about it. Basically my thinking was that all mechanics would have to be nerfed to the point of irrelevance, thus robbing the encounters of any sort of inherent ability to be engaging. Socially, the raids would be poorly organized and raid chat would be the linguistic equivalent of the pus drained from a festering, poisonous boil (sorry for that image).

The first of these predictions was correct, but I've underestimated my fellow humans when it comes to the second. I've done a few different LFR jaunts, both on my hunter Peregrina and my priest Andaviel, and more than anything else it's been pretty quiet. To be honest, I do most of the talking! I do things like try to engage with other people there, make jokes, what have you, and I haven't had much luck with that. But it hasn't been a whirling cesspool of misspelled epithets and and trash-talking about overall damage done, so whatever! Well done, population of the raid finder queues in my battlegroup.

I've also been enjoying the new heroics. I don't have a whole lot to say about them: they feel easier than the troll heroics did on release, but whatever. They're pretty fun, and generally visually engaging. I like the mechanic for the shade of Sylvanas the best, requiring as it does some modicum of organization and halfway competent DPS.

The real meat of it though, the normal-mode raids with the guild, has really been the big bonus for me. Raid nights this week have been fun, damn it! I'm looking forward to logging in next Wednesday night and clearing out the first four and then taking more shots at Ultraxion. There's been more chatter in vent, discussion of how we're doing the different boss encounters and dealing with specific mechanics, teasing each other about stuff: all the fun parts of raiding in World of Warcraft.

The difficulty curve is really strange. We wandered in and killed Mor'chok the first time we pulled him, and I think we wiped 4 or 5 times total between Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz. Hagara took another 5 wipes on her own, and then we ran into Ultraxion and he is a really surprising brick wall of a gear check. One of our raiders was actually really upset about this: we're raiding Dragon Soul normal modes with Firelands normal modes gear, and our best pull got him to 14%. That's a pretty significant debt to make up.

Now, I think we'll kill him next week, but I think the way we'll do it is by going to two healers. I don't like making my healers take on roles that aren't really the ones they want to play, but I honestly don't see another way to do it. I talked a bit with someone in raid that had killed him, and they were sitting at almost 170k raid DPS (for a 10). We seem to be averaging around 140k raid DPS. And I really don't think we're doing bad with the 378 gear we've got. Our DPS mains seem to be pulling between 20 and 26k, with an average around 24. I think the drops to 20 are in large part due to bad RNG with fading light, but I should check that in the logs.

Anyway, as you approach that 5:00 mark, it seems to me that the damage very quickly ramps up, such that you're going to be wiping at around 5:30 regardless of the number of healers. Dropping down one healer shouldn't be a huge deal.

The important part for me is that we were having fun, even with the wiping to the gearcheck boss. I've also cleared the place out in the raid finder - the last two encounters are pretty fun. I don't think this particular guild is going to clear out Dragon Soul on heroic, but I think we'll finish our rogue's daggers and I think we'll get a few heroic modes down. I'm pretty happy with that.

I recorded a video of the Hagara kill, which means I'll need to finally find a video editor I like and address the compression issues. It was the first encounter that really seemed at all worth a video though. I will try to have that up in a week or two.

Oh yeah! I'm also going to be - gosh. I'm sort of embarrassed to say this? Like it seems silly that anyone would want to listen to this. But on the off chance someone would, I will mention that I'll be chatting with Hydra and Fimlys on the Twisted Nether Blogcast Saturday night, 10:00 P.M. CST. So if you're super bored I guess you could have a listen!

I thought this was hilarious

Reverted a bug fix that caused Bombardment to be consumed by the next Multi-Shot. Fixing this bug proved to be a significant dps loss, so Bombardment once again lasts for its full 6 second duration regardless of the number of Multi-Shot casts. The tooltip will be updated in a future patch to reflect that this change is intended.

From the most recent hotfix notes. And, as always, I'm surprised that no one realized this would destroy MM AoE, since "spamming multishot" is all we do, and we already had to wait a little bit after the first one for the buff to pop up. If we have to multi-wait a second-multi-wait a second, of course DPS is going to plummet.

Changing the tooltip is a far more efficient bugfix.

(Probably) The Last Major Cataclysm Content Patch Is Out

Which means I Should Probably Make A Post.

Breaks like this are what separate professionals from amateurs, I think. Or at least, they're amongst the things that separate pros from not-pros. This month-long posting drought was brought on by a few different things, including lack of anything to talk about, lack of desire to find new things to talk about, holidays, and Skyrim.

I really think this break in content patches was too long. It was getting increasingly difficult to scrape together 10 people for a raid, and in fact the break from raiding for Thanksgiving conspired with a somewhat surprise-patch-release to keep us from putting together a raid for Dragon Soul. I think a few guildies have done the LFR thing, but I really have no interest in it. This is a little bit naughty of me - I could be getting 390 gear! - but playing with 24 people I don't know or care about and will never meet again is just not something I'm going to bother with.

This is going to be a tough patch for the guild in general. We're losing one of our main tanks to major surgery, and I doubt we'll get her back before mid-January. Our enhancement shaman has officially stepped down from raiding, although we hadn't seen her for a bit. Our students are getting nailed by end-of-semester stress and time crunch. I never succeeded in building a healthy off-night social atmosphere, which makes recruiting even more of a bear than it already was. So on and so forth.

It really doesn't matter how tiny and how casual your guild is, or how flat of a hierarchy you try to have: being in any sort of a leadership position takes time and energy, and if you don't put that time and energy in it begins to wither. Much the same as happens with a blog, in fact! Or well, anything else in life, I suppose.

It's been tough to put that time in, though, not least because I haven't been playing much or any WoW. There aren't going to be any more big mechanical adjustments to the game until Pandaclysm comes out. There was that little cowflop a blue dropped in the forums about how hunters just haven't figured out how to play Survival correctly, which is absolutely untrue. The problem with that spec is the same one it's had since Wrath: Explosive Shot damage doesn't scale with weapon damage. End of story. Even if they hadn't nerfed it, I expect top-tier raiding hunters with heroic Arathars would have been MM by now, and they certainly would have been MM with heroic Dragon Soul weapons. A physical DPS spec that doesn't scale with physical DPS is just not going to compete.

In fact, I hadn't looked at the 4.3 patch notes before now and I see that they buffed Explosive Shot damage by 15%. This is hilarious because the original nerf was 25%, and that was too severe so they nerfed the nerf by 10% (making it a 15% nerf from Cataclysm release). Now they're reverting that 15%. Hah! Guys, we could have (and did) tell you this was going to happen before 4.06 came out. Also before 4.0 came out. Tie ExS to weapon damage, dudes!

But in the grand scheme of things that's no bigs, really. The original "you're doing it wrong" comment was insulting and infuriating for the top-tier survival hunters, raiding in the spec because they do heroic tens and don't have an alternative, but balance stuff ebbs and flows. Frankly, the various specs in the game are the most balanced they've ever been, IMO.

Killing Nozdormu in a five-man dungeon is pretty WTF. Also it makes me kind of sad, considering he's still the hottest thing in the game.

But that's it, you know? What else is there to talk about?

I think that what I really need to do is reach out to some of the other small guilds on the server and - as dramaful as this could be - maybe try to arrange some kind of a merger or something. I dunno. I'd be playing more WoW if I had people to play with. As it is, I think my habitual absence means others are less likely to be playing.

Bonus addendum! If you look at my achievements, you'll note that I got Stood in the Fire. I have to protest that I did not actually stand in the fire. I tried to use disengage to get across the gap between pillars faster. It didn't work - instead, I fell into the Maelstrom. Definitely not fire. It actually confused the client, which decided that I'd died to elementium bolt and advised me to move next time. No, game! I fell into the Maelstrom between platforms. Did not stand in anything.