Lowering the stakes in asking for help

All of us, sometimes, need help. We need help getting things from tall shelves, which is why I like having a boyfriend that's seven inches taller than I am. We need help doing our homework. We need help doing our work-work. We need help understanding the games we play.

There are a variety of people and organizations that help with a variety of problems. Some examples are:

• World of Warcraft GMs
• World of Warcraft Customer Service representatives
• Police
• Forum moderators
• Poison control
• Human Resources
• Social Workers

And of course many others.

Sometimes we need help with really serious, scary things. This post was inspired by someone in a WoW-related community who had been cornered at a convention in a way that terrified her so badly that she can't remember what the man who cornered her said. She made her post because she was worried that she might have overreacted, and she wasn't sure if she should or should not have contacted con security.

Reading her post made me really sad.

It also reminded me of posts I've read regarding much less serious issues, such as posters on a forum reluctant to use a feature that flagged a comment for moderator attention. Many persons felt that their concerns were, perhaps, too minor to make use of this feature.

What I want to do here today is to lower the stakes as much as I can.

I think that probably the most important thing to remember is that alerting someone to a potential problem does not force them to respond in a certain way. All we're doing, when we ask for help, is saying "hey, there's something here you should be aware of."

You can see this really well if you ever report someone to Blizzard for their behavior. You'll eventually get a message back that will say the following:

1. Thank you for the report.
2. We'll do an investigation.
3. We will not discuss our findings or any action taken with you.

This is a great system, and I really think that it helps remind us of just how small of a step we're taking when we report someone to the GMs. Blizzard does the investigation. Blizzard reaches its own conclusions. Blizzard takes action as it sees fit, and it neither consults with us nor notifies us of what actions it took.

All we're doing when we put in a ticket is bringing something to their attention. Nothing more than a "hey, you should take a look at this."

Of course, it is in some ways more serious to take this step with a body like con security or the police. I would urge people to think of it in very similar terms, though. If you notify the police of an issue or ask for their help, they may or may not do an investigation. They may or may not take action as a result of those investigations. Those are all steps they take on their own, though. Just like GMs depend on players to alert them to problems, police rely on citizens to alert them.

All of that being said, many people have many reasons for not reporting any given thing. It's not as if I've ticketed everything that's ever bothered me or called the police for everything I see. I'm not trying to pressure anyone into doing things they don't really want to or that they don't think will help. If, however, you want to ask for help or put up a flag on something but you're worried it's "too minor," I would really encourage you to go ahead with your plan.

Whether something is too minor or not doesn't have to be solely your decision and solely your responsibility. There are people whose function it is to make that decision, and ideally they'll have a wider experience to pull from when they're doing that investigation and making that determination. If you're in doubt, why not at least give the experts a crack at it?

Sorry this post has wandered pretty far afield from hunters! It's just been knocking around my head a little bit, and hey, it doesn't really do any harm to post it, right?

Ramblification

This will be something of a rambly post, covering several small things. There haven't been any Big Things recently, but rather a slow trickle of small things.

Regarding the upcoming gentle, incremental nerf to the Dragon Soul: I am largely indifferent. If it is really actually definitely the challenge that you crave, turn it off. My little casual guild will leave it on, although I'm fairrrrly certain that we'll be able to get heroic Mor'chok down before the nerf is in place. I suspect that we'll get 1-2 additional heroic mode bosses over the course of February.

Our rogue is just about done with the first shadowy gem collection. After that it should be another 7-8 weeks to finish the next step in the quest. Good lord. Building a legendary takes FOREVER for a 10-person guild. Just absolutely forever. The upside to being a super-casual guild, though, is that he'll probably have an opportunity to put them to use on progression encounters, rather than finishing them and then putting them in his bags and never using them again because the Pandaclysm has happened.

In this way they're a slight advantage for guilds pushing for heroic progress in 25 instead of 10-person mode, but on the other hand, the instance was cleared on heroic before anyone in the world completed their daggers. So.... whatever, I guess.

We never did complete a Dragonswrath, and it seems unlikely that we will in Cataclysm. On the other hand, that made it a lot easier for my boyfriend to swap his main from his shadowpriest to his DK when one of our main tanks had to step down from the raid team because of scheduling conflicts.

We also got a mage app! When I saw it in the inbox I almost expected a little "Guild first! Mage applies to your guild." achievement window to pop up. We'll hopefully be bringing them in this coming week to see how it goes. Said boyfriend from earlier has been healing previous pulls, and our ret paladin will be trying out his holy offset, which hasn't seen a lot of use. So I'm not sure how all of that will turn out. It might cost us a pre-nerf kill. But on the other hand, it doesn't really do us any good in the long term to have people playing essentially alts just to get a kill before a 5% nerf happens. So if the roster changes cost us the kill, so be it.

I hadn't actually worked through that before now - thanks, rambly blog post!

I am eagerly awaiting 4.3.2, a little bit for the extra 700 AP and a lot bit for the 30% damage reduction on Deterrence.

I'd like to do more videoguides, but to do those I need to drop $45 on Sony Vegas, feckless amateur edition, and there have just been other things to spend money on. Like this light-up mouse that should arrive on Monday.

In my defense, I didn't realize that it lit up when I ordered it, and my elderly current mouse finally had its first button die after around a decade in use. I hope I like the new one! Returns are a huge pain.

Anyway, what have y'all lovelies been up to?

The Real Achievement

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having that second of hesitation when I'm asked to talk about my hobbies or what I do for fun. I mean, I do a lot of things other than work, eat, and sleep. Playing an MMO is hardly my only hobby, but it is one of them. And I don't even care about the "those games are for nerds, real people play Madden and Halo" sorts of people. I have to say I'm completely indifferent to their opinions.

I'm much more sensitive to an objection that I've never actually heard, one that goes something along the lines of "how can you play an MMO? Don't you know it's just a virtual Skinner box with a variable interval payment schedule?"

And well, yes, there is that element to them. That is a true statement; it is not, however, the only true statement.

There are also folks who are totally fine with an MMO hobby, but they want to know "why World of Warcraft?" It's old and ugly and anyway, don't I know that Cataclysm was the worst expansion ever? They've lost like a million subscribers! And next expansion they'll be jumping the panda!

I get that Cataclysm was unpopular with a lot of people. Some think it catered to the casuals and the game got too easy or watered down. Some think it catered to the hardcore, becoming too inaccessible. A lot of people seem to have been bullied as a child by one of the Pandaren. I'm not really sure.

Let's talk about my guild.

I came to my guild by resubscribing to the game after taking a break from December 2009 to October 2010. That's a pretty long break! I had played Wrath from about the time when Ulduar came out to about the time Icecrown Citadel came out, when a new job made raiding pretty impossible.

I think it was probably my boyfriend that told me that a friend we'd made (or rather, that he'd made and I'd gotten to know through him) outside of WoW had become GM of her small guild, back on the little tiny role-playing server that we'd originally started playing on and had since transferred off of.

They had no need of a hunter, so when I transferred over I moved my priest first and started healing for them. Their raid schedule was about half as intense as what I'd been used to. They could only field a 10-person raid, and further that was all they wanted to field. In fact we pretty frequently had to find an extra person from outside the guild to fill in.

But then over time, some of those people became regular raiders. Eventually some of them joined the guild and a team started to congeal.

Cataclysm was actually the first time I went into an expansion on patch day. I wasn't playing the game when Burning Crusade was released and I was taking a break when Wrath came out. I went into it with a group of people I liked with a plan for how we'd resume raiding after we'd leveled to the new cap. We used the release of the expansion pack as a reason to change up the raid roster, allowing me to go back to playing my hunter as my main character.

We've built a guild culture - almost from the ground up - that we can all be proud of.

Both of our main tanks, a role most commonly held by men, are women.

None of the women on our raid team have to worry about being harassed or denigrated because of their gender.

My boyfriend and I don't have to worry about referring to each other as a couple.

No one yells or screams during raid time.

If someone needs a week or two off, no problem.

People have been able to change main characters and change roles because they wanted to.

There have been disagreements. There've been some hurt feelings. It happens, but we've dealt with it all as a group, and we've done a pretty good job with it.

I don't log on to push the loot-pellet dispenser lever.

I don't log on because it's Warcraft or because it's the Cataclysm.

I log on because I like playing with my guild.

We started raiding in Cataclysm probably about a month after most other casual guilds did, and a good couple months after the really serious raiding guilds did. We never quite cleared out the initial tier of raid bosses on normal difficulty, and we never did any of the heroic modes. We got close, with only the most difficult two (Nefarian and Al'akir) remaining, but then the Firelands patch was released and it was time to move on.

We started out on Firelands with Beth'tilac, a giant spider boss that most guilds killed second or third, and it was tough. The DPS, healing, and coordination requirements forced us to play better - so we did. The coordination and individual skill requirements of Alysrazor stymied us for a while too, almost a whole month, and we had to go back to basics and work on fundamentals again. In the end, we didn't quite get Ragnaros-normal down before the whole tier was nerfed pretty hard, but we did get him the week after that. We would have been able to kill him before he was nerfed.

As it was, we used the post-nerf Firelands content period as a time to sort of rest and regroup. It got boring doing the same bosses over and over, but we were able to mostly farm up all the gear people could have wanted, putting us in the unfamiliar position of really being prepared going into patch 4.3 and the Dragon Soul raid.

That raid was, of course, released right around the holidays, and out of the four-week period of its initial release, we only raided two. Bosses were dying, though. We cleared out the first four bosses on our first night in there, and those bosses - even on 10-person normal difficulty - have presented some significant challenges for a lot of groups.

I think that Zon'ozz and maybe even Hagara would have been huge speedbumps for the guild that first stepped into the Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight raids of Cataclysm's initial release. I personally didn't even start using Aspect of the Fox until halfway through Firelands. No one was pre-potting or knew what it was (if you're unfamiliar, "pre-potting" is the practice of drinking a potion just before combat begins, allowing you to drink a second potion a couple minutes into the encounter. Potions provide a significant benefit for a short period of time).

Everyone in this guild has gotten better over the course of this expansion. We've grown as a group and improved as players without having to give up any of the things that make raiding fun for us.

Every single week that we've actually raided we've killed a new boss in Dragon Soul, and we haven't had any trouble replicating kills once we learn them the first time.

Last night we completed the Madness of Deathwing encounter on 10-person normal difficulty. That's the big villain of the expansion, Deathwing himself. That's what we've been moving towards this whole expansion. We've reached this point without having to give up anything. We didn't have to add a new raid night, or kick people we liked, or scream, or raid when we'd rather be spending time with loved ones, or anything.

We've just been having fun, indulging in a social hobby with people whose company we enjoy, and we've killed some dragons on the internet in the meantime. And now, for the first time, we're going to do some heroic modes.

Cataclysm has been the best of the WoW expansions for me, and it's been that because I love my guild.

Click for full size.

Old and Busted: Haste Plateaus

The community of WoW players often seem to be to be very slow at changing attitudes. Even after the 4.3 buffs, you'll see folks saying that MM is "higher DPS" or that Survival DPS is "more forgiving." Neither of these statements is strictly true. In my gear, I sim about a thousand DPS better as Marksmanship and I just feel more comfortable with it and we have two good sources of the 10% haste buff in the raid, so I generally play MM. But most of the top parsing hunters are playing Survival right now, and I've had at least one Survival hunter beat me in LFR. I think the two specs are almost identical in damage capabilities, and your comfort with one or another spec will make more of a difference to the damage you do with it than anything else.

Further, at high gear levels (average item level climbing past 385), I think MM just gets easier and easier to play, while SV tends to get more difficult. As you get better gear as an MM hunter, you prioritize haste as a tertiary stat, and it just kind of makes everything easier. It makes it easier to keep ISS up, it makes it easier to cast AiS if you play that style, it makes it easier to keep CS exactly on cooldown, it makes it easier to squeeze one more AiS into your Rapid Fire duration, on and on.

Survival, on the other hand, gets swamped in focus and procs, making it very difficult to keep up. Whenever I play Survival, I find myself frequently capping out on focus and then a few seconds later either spending so much focus on Arcanes that I can't immediately use Explosive Shot or just pushing past the ExS cooldown by using one too many instants of one sort or another. When LnL procs you have to decide if you should wait a heartbeat between your first and second ExS, use Kill Command, or use a CoS; let's not even mention the number of times I've pushed the ArcS button right as LnL procs.

Accepted wisdom that carries numerical weight is even more difficult to change.

When Cataclysm was new and Survival was kind of king of the heap of all DPS in the game, it was pointed out that with around 20% haste including gear, Pathing, and Hunting Party, you could easily fit exactly 3 CoS inside the ExS cooldown. This came to be considered the optimal Survival DPS haste and gear point, and that accepted wisdom has never really been questioned.

It seems to me, however, that as soon as one obtains the T13 2pc bonus, that haste point becomes obsolete. Like I said above, modern SV DPS is completely frantic. At no time is there a period that allows you to calmly chain three CoS in between ExS. This just gets more pronounced as you pick up more gear such as the T13 4pc bonus, any of the haste proc trinkets, and then place yourself in a raid situation where you're getting Bloodlusted and using Rapid Fire as often as you can. If you look at your logs, you're probably spending at least 30% of the time under some sort of haste effect! What good does it do you to gear for 1.67 second CoS when you're going to be casting an array of 1-second to 1.5 seconds CoS?

No, I think it's time to retire the 20% haste point as an useful concept for end-game Survival hunters. The days of stringing three Cobras in between ExS are simply over. It's time to go back to basics, start thinking more about your priority, and do a few million damage to the target dummies. Look for patterns in your ability use, but don't be too surprised if you don't see any. Get used to doing things like ExS -> ArcS -> ArcS -> CoS -> ExS and get used to the feeling of waiting through the dead time at the end of that CoS unless you've got a haste proc up.

The same goes for MM, by the way. With T13 gear, I've started doing things I never did before this tier. I've DPS cycles that look like this:

CS -> AiS -> SS -> SS -> AiS -> SS -> CS

That orphan SS before the second CS is crazy! What is that little guy doing there? Well, he's giving me just enough focus for CS. Before 2pc, I'd've used that SS and still been starved for the focus to put CS back on cooldown. With the two piece, I can do crazy things like that shot sequence and keep glyphed CS on cooldown with 1815 haste rating. It's madness.

Haste plateaus don't exist any more. The concept is no longer of any use. Just know that the more of you have, the more focus-generating shots you can cut in favor of higher-damage focus dumps.

Or at least that's what I think!

I haven't looked at EJ in ages. Is there something there I've missed? Do you see a flaw in my reasoning? I'm eager to hear what anyone thinks!

Apology from the desk of Mike Morhaime

Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard entertainment, has posted an apology for the video played at Blizzcon. You can read it here, but I'll also paste it in to this post for those who can't read it because they're at work.

Dear members of the Blizzard community,

I have read your feedback and comments about this year’s BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I’d like to respond to some of your feedback here.

As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.

It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.

The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We’re proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.

As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.

– Mike Morhaime

President, Blizzard Entertainment

For what it's worth, I personally was glad to read it and I think it addresses the issues fully. This heals the breach for me. I've also said and done things that I wish I could take back, and of course we can't do that. The best we can do is realize our mistakes and apologize for them sincerely.

Thanks to Mr. Morhaime and the rest of the Blizzard team.

Grubtor and his faithful companion...

I did end up getting a race change, as some folks have already noticed. I'm fairly pleased with her new appearance, but I did want to share a quick little story from the appearance editor.

To begin with, I seem to have this weird thing where I prefer to play female characters in CRPGs and male characters in tabletop RPGs. I'm not sure why this is! It just seems to be true. From the Baldur's Gate series through Oblivion and Dragon Age and WoW - lots of ladies. My three 85s are all ladies. I dunno, it just happens! So when I brought up the appearance editor for the hunter formerly known as Pradzha, I clicked on the boy button just to see if maybe I wanted to make a guy this time.

Now, female Draenei are not all that petite. They're taller than just about all the other ladies, and as Sir Mix-a-Lot would say: baby got back. Ok. Nonetheless, when she was replaced with a boynei the difference was crazy. He covered two and a half times more screen than she had, you know? Like someone dropped off a refrigerator in the appearance editor, taped a bow to it, and lit it on fire (yay T12).

My boyfriend happened to be in the room and we both sort of laughed about this, and then we noticed that the race change editor uses the same framework as the character creation editor. Which meant that this meaty slab of Draenei had, hovering down by his knees, the teeniest little level 1 moth pet. So teeny! This inspired my boyfriend to introduce the pair in the voice of a gravel-throated, gritty fantasy narrator which I have attempted to reproduce in visual format below:

Click for full size

So we laughed and laughed about that, and having completed our sojourn into unfamiliar territory, I clicked the girl button again. Ahem.

I also did some looking through my screenshot folder and noticed something else interesting: my hunter has now been three different races and she has never, not once in her life, worn shoes like a normal person. From troll-feets to spacegoat hooves to puppydog paw-pads, shoes are not for her. Just kind of... armored leg warmers.

The only downside is that one of my guildies that draws things recently posted a drawing of her before her race change, reading a book to her wind serpent Temeraire. It's really cute! And now I feel bad about race changing, as if Pradzha has abandoned Temeraire, and now he's sort of flapping around, looking for his lady to read books to him. Gaah! Sorry Temeraire and Crapes!

My ability to make myself sad by telling myself stories about virtual things is unrivaled. By anyone.

I would rather not be making this post

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Entering the Patch Cycle Holding Pattern

Well, I have to say that the nerfs this past week kind of put a few loads of grapeshot through my sails. We even extended our lockout the week before to take a last shot at a pre-nerf kill (however much some may giggle at having to try for a pre-nerf non-heroic kill), but some things happened in the real world that cut our raid time from our usual six hours per week down to probably a little under three. I suppose it wasn't meant to be. Especially with Civilization 5 going on sale for twelve bucks on Steam, I just kind of dropped out of WoW for a bit. I feel a little bad about this - I've clearly neglected the blog, and I've also neglected the guild that I've put so much time into. On the other hand, I think everyone needs a bit of a break from time to time, so perhaps this is just my time for one.

As these things go, it's a pretty decent time. It's not like I need VP for anything, and especially with the nerfs to the content, raid time needn't really be about maximizing our limited window of time to try to Kill New Bosses. We can just kind of come in and casually clear stuff up. We of course killed Rag this week, so maybe next week we can try out some of the also-nerfed heroic modes and step into T13 with some 391 gear. Sure, why not? It'll be nice having some 384 weapons and a bunch of people with some 391 stuff when we step into the Dragon Soul.

Actually looking at some of the information coming out about the new raid is what's done some good to renew my flagged enthusiasm. It does actually look quite exciting and neat and good - it seems to have that hard to capture sense of grandeur that tiers 7, 9, 11, and 12 have lacked. I mean sure they're neat or whatever, but with Firelands for example the main attraction for me was "new challenges". With Ulduar, the attraction was storming Ulduar. Even the vehicle-based opening, for all its flaws, did a great job of making the raid feel like it was kind of a big deal. You know, I don't necessarily want another Flame Lev style encounter, but I always had fun with it, and especially with the opening push through all the dwarves and what have you.

Sorry, I'm wandering off, as I tend to. The point here is that although I was a little bit gut-punched by the nerfs, the expansion's terminal raid seems like it could be good enough to kind of rescue things for me. We'll see.

I responded to the hunter version of the class survey thread posted in the official forum. I sort of feel like anything I might have to say would inevitably be lost in the tsunami of craziness a thread like that will inevitably turn into, but Blizzard is a big company that makes buckets of money. It could very well be that they have a rigorous system for extracting usable information from the wreckage left after the wave ebbs.

The two questions in the survey I found the most interesting were essentially "what is fun about your class?" and "what is not fun about your class?"

This may or may not be surprising to anyone, but I actually had to pause for quite a while to answer those. The fundamental reason I first chose the class is, as I have said before, that I like bows. I want to use a bow to shoot arrows into the mans. So as long as I'm doing that, I'm in a pretty decent spot. Some people (dwarves) like guns, and it has not been a very good expansion for them in terms of having that, so I'm a little worried that the T13 ranged weapon of choice is going to be a gun, but hey! Now we have transmogrification, so that's fine.

It's much harder to articulate a game-mechanical thing that I like or dislike. I guess I don't really like the way Marks plays at the moment - it sort of feels like I'm trying to build something out of a mix of Duplos and Legos. Focus regen, the Chimera Shot cooldown, and the Improved Steady Shot buff duration just don't line up in nice ways if you're not using glyphed Arcane Shot and the 13% haste point. So that doesn't feel great.

I do like using disengage. I like the sparkle from Post Haste, I like being able to pick times when I want to be somewhere Right Now, and I like being able to negate or re-purpose a boss's knockback effects. That's all fun. It's also sort of a strange thing to highlight, since it has nothing to do with shooting arrows into mans or having a pet or anything.

All that said, I haven't really seen any signs that they're planning much in the way of hunter changes for 4.3. There might be a couple minor tweaks, but I'm pretty sure the class is going to remain as-is for the remainder of this expansion.

Meeting people! Also Alysrazor!

My boyfriend and myself recently hung out with one of our guildies, the lovely Maae. It was fun! She's in fact the first WoW-guildie I've met that I didn't know before I even started playing the game so, although I've met internet friends face to face before, this was a first WoW-based meeting.

Now that I put it that way, I'm actually pretty surprised at that - I've been playing this game for quite a while, even if I've taken a break here and there. I guess most of my guildies have historically been on the coasts, and I've generally been a Midwestern boy (minus a few years in upstate NY, Florida, and elsewhere).

It was a little bit of an adventure organizing the meeting. Said boyfriend works days and I work nights, so there was no really obvious time when we'd both be awake without at least one of us at work. What we ended up doing was that he took a nap after he got off work, then we went and picked her up after midnight, when I got off work. Then we hung out and talked in a Perkins for a bit. Nothing very exciting! But when you only have limited opportunities for stuff like this, you've got to take advantage of them in whatever way you can.

We had a somewhat heartbreaking night on Alysrazor on Thursday. On the one hand, I feel like once everyone is really comfortable with the tornadoes, she'll be a quick addition to the farm content roster and going 5/7 on our first night will be really easy. On the other hand arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh we're so close. Our DPS is high enough that we won't even be making it to the second burn phase. She's going to re-ignite once and then fall from the sky, dead, about 20 seconds after that. We just need to get a single clean phase 1, a tornado-death-free transition, and she'll die.

Also, Alys is a good fight for DPS in terms of alternative things to epeen about. It was fun going to the various wipes and looking at the "damage taken" graphs, unchecking everyone's name but my own and enjoying the way my green line lay dormant along the bottom of the graph.

So yes: Alysrazor should die this coming week. She really, really should.

Then Staghelm.

Then Rag.

It is hard to express how much I would like to clear the tier on normal difficulty before 4.3 hits. And there are guilds on my server that started work on Rag like 3 weeks ago and still don't have it.

On the other hand, stressing out about it won't help either!

This Just In: Threat Now Irrelevant

Dev Watercooler Post Here.

I have to say I don't actually particularly care one way or another about the threat change. It was a sliiiiiight issue for some of the DPS in our raid without a real threat dump, but between my healer, my tank, and my hunter, I've never cared that much about threat. It's just been a sort of base-level mechanic that I don't devote much thought to. And even for the dedicated tanks, "doing good tank DPS" is still a worthwhile goal (especially for Alysrazor!), so it's not as if this changes very much.

I am much more interested in how the active mitigation model will work out. On the face of it I think it sounds awesome. I know that, when I'm tanking, I basically keep shield block on cooldown and use shield wall/last stand/enraged regen for spikes. Once those are down I pretty much hope I don't die.

So if they do it right, I really think the active mit model could not only be more fun for tanks, but also be an excellent way for the skilled tanks to differentiate themselves from the not-so-skilled.

Basically when I'm a healer, I think I show skill when everything goes pearshaped and I keep everyone (or enough people) alive. As a tank, skill has always been in keeping things from pearshaping. This change could really bring that skill to the forefront.

Apparently I Have The Soul of an Actuary

I just realized I had the most boring WoW dream that has ever been dreamed. Yes. I dreamt that cauldrons suddenly came in containers that weren't BoP, so I'd be able to give cauldrons to the raid when I couldn't be present.

Seriously. That is a dream I had. It wasn't even something cool like dreaming about killing heroic rag or getting a shoulder upgrade (lol, as if that will ever happen), I dreamt about a minor convenience.

The title of this post is probably unfair. I bet there are plenty of actuaries that use their piles of ill-gotten cash to snort cocaine off of the six-packs of male models and then leap out of airplanes or something. This dream probably means I'm uniquely, startlingly boring.

I am also now disappointed in the Blogger spellchecker. "Dreamt" is perfectly acceptable usage, it's simply more common in British English than in American. And "dreamed" sounds weird to me.

I should probably go get ready for work now.

In keeping with our theme from yesterday

The video for lord Rhyolith still hasn't had a successful upload. I'll get it one of these nights! It would probably help if I got the size down a bit more though - I'm amazed at how large video files are.

Also apropos to the theme from yesterday, I've got a couple short stories from the RDF and even a tiny one from trade. The first story is from Selinah, my gathering alt and tank. The further we progress into the Firelands, the easier it is to cap my main on VP, so I get a chance to heal or tank every so often. Last night after work, I thought it might be fun to pick up a satchel especially because tanks get instant queues.

I zoned in to a fresh ZA and we started up. Someone facepulled the little group of mobs right before the start of the gauntlet just as I ran up to the scout, so I got to tank a few extra adds and what have you, but it went fine. One of the DPS died on Akil'zon, but I didn't see where it happened and assumed that they'd stood in the lightning storm.

Then, as I was preparing to head off in the direction of Nalorakk, the healer says "Tank. You take too much damage."

I was pretty flabbergasted - it's not as if Akil'zon does a lot of tank damage, he's one of the party damage bosses. Further, I've tanked ZA and ZG several times, occasionally with somewhat undergeared healers. I use my cooldowns and debuff the bosses, and unless I stand in fire or something, I'm never really the point of failure.

There's this funny thing that happens in RDF parties though, where whoever first calls someone else bad tends to get others to agree with them. So if I'd called the healer a bad for letting someone die - even if that person had stood in the lightning storm - things probably would have gone differently.

I suggested that maybe if tank damage was an issue for him, he should consider using healing touch, but he was adamant that lifebloom should be able to heal 100% of the damage in an encounter.

Now for reference, here's the armory of the healer in question: Tankshifter of Silvermoon.

What happened last night was that, still flabbergasted, I said "uh, I've tanked this entire place multiple times and my gear is obviously sufficient. Maybe you should cast HT. But if you're TOTALLY CONVINCED of yourself, votekick me I guess?" And they did. And the healer apparently got some sort of tank to carry him, and probably lied about how I was bad.

In retrospect, I wish I'd been bitchier.

I wish I'd inspected him and said "oh look, someone with unenchanted pvp gear and welfare epix wants to get carried by an overgeared tank."

To the DPS that chimed in with him, I wish I'd said "maybe if your DPS wasn't so hilariously awful, Akil'zon wouldn't have taken so long and run our terrible healer OOM."

I wish I'd said "I'm obviously wearing enough gear for the content and I use my cooldowns, which means that if you can't heal me you're just bad."

I wish I'd said that healing through Nefarian after he'd been nerfed six feet under the ground didn't mean you were anything better than mediocre.

The group still would have kicked me, probably, and the healer especially would still have thought he was right... but I'd've felt better.

That said, my re-queue got me into a ZG group which ended up being fun. We got two DPS that had never been to the instance before, so I gave them quick tips on everything. The first couple healers saw that we had two new DPS and bailed, but the third healer, who was wearing T12 (Paladin T12 hat + shoulders look SO COOL) and was clearly only there for VP, stuck with us, even killing some of the quest mobs.

All of the DPS - all of them - died on the Zanzil encounter, chewed up by the berserker that I'd told them to kill (even melee, DPS in general was loooow and there was no way we'd be zerging Zanzil down without killing the zerker), and the healer and myself whittled down the last 40% or so of Zanzil's health ourselves.

I used all my cooldowns multiple times, used darkflight three times and intervene even more often to keep myself away from the berserker, and the paladin used holy's perpetual sprints to keep away from it. It was glorious.

We had to reset Jin'do once because I guess they thought I was kidding when I said "stand in the green on phase 1", but the second pull was successful (if hilarious). We actually broke the shields on all three chains before the first chain had died. I had never seen that happen before - a platform full of twisted spirits, none of the chains shielded, and no berserker up nor any reason to have one. So I spent a lot of time stunning and killing spirits and generally keeping them off of the healer and DPS. It was probably the longest Jin'do encounter I've ever seen, just like Man'dokir with that group was the longest I've seen it go on and actually result in a kill.

At the end of it, though, I'd had a lot of fun. More fun than I've had in any of a number of fast and smooth yet mute RDF runs.

Also I won the barrel from Gub and it was full of Sagefish. Yay!

Finally, this afternoon when I was on briefly before work to take care of some stuff and check auctions, trade chat had a little series of questions. There was one guy that was asking if the int heirlooms were for casters and the agi ones were for phys DPS. And it wasn't even that he was asking that general question, but he would link each individual set and then go "is this for casters?"

And, you know, yes. It is. But once that you've established that int is for casters, why do you need to ask individually for the cloth, leather, and mail heirlooms?

Another person had a very basic question about how to play their spec, and I remarked that the official forums typically have a well-maintained stickied guide thread for any given spec, and it would be faster and less prone to error to read that.

Some people in trade thought I was being rude, but I really don't think I was. I wasn't being insulting or mean about it - just letting people know that there are easier resources than asking trade, which often has 32 different flavors of the wrong answer for any given question due to a combination of people being mistaken and being trolls.

Sadly, even those people that make it to the forums don't necessarily read the stickies. Most days, there are 2-3 new threads posted to the hunter forum that say "how do I play Marksmanship?"

Now, I'm all for people asking that question and coming to the forums for help with it. But there stickied threads right at the top of the forum that are clearly guides for how to play MM and SV post-4.1.

I'd be fine with someone posting a thread that said "I read the stickies and didn't understand this particular part..." or "So in the sticky it said this thing about 4.1, but is that still true in 4.2?" or "the guide doesn't make any recommendations for how to do a fight like Beth'tilac, can anyone give me advice on that boss?" But no one does that! They show up in the forum, don't read the stickies, and then want people to re-type all of it just for them.

Why does this happen? I don't get it.

PvP: It's No Bigs

I don't currently play on a PvP server, but I have for a while in the past, and I read a sad post yesterday (or maybe the day before) that I want to address at some minor length. A hunter who'd been looking for Sambas for a while finally lucked out and he was up in all his prettiness when she checked. Hooray! So she went to go to tame him, and an opposite-faction DK started messing with her. She's on a PvP server not because she's a big PvPer, but because she has friends and family on the server that she wants to play with.

I didn't quite have family on the server I played on, but I was there because I'd joined a guild on the server, so the situation was somewhat analogous. Like her, I've never really been big into PvP. I've done some battlegrounds, even did some arenas for points so I could get gear to use in PvE, as the arena season 3 hat was hilariously better than the T6 hat. But it's never been something I've been really excited about. So I get it! It's possible to be on a PvP server without really being into PvP.

However, this poor hunter's tale made me really sad because she did everything she could besides PvP. She actually trapped the DK in a freezing trap and tried to tame in the window of its duration. This says a couple things to me:

1. She's good enough at PvP to get a melee class into a freezing trap
2. The DK didn't have a PvP trinket equipped

And yet, when I suggested "just killing him" as an option when he started to mess with the tame, she said this:

"I'm absolutely terrible at PvP."

It makes me sad when people say this. Firstly because there's nothing all that special about PvP. When you get to high-level arena play, there's a lot of technical discussion about "countercomps" and stuff, but duels are really, really not a big deal. There's nothing magical, nothing deep and strategic about duels. You're trying to do enough damage to the other person to kill them before they do it back to you.

And the reality is that almost all of the basic dueling tools have an use in PvE as well. I use frost, explosive, and snake traps as well as scatter shot and wyvern sting on Cho'gall. I use disengage all the time! I glyph raptor strike and use it whenever it makes sense to! All while trying to do as much damage as possible to one target or another which, really, is all PvP is, right?

And the really nice thing about world PvP with a single asshole trying to deny you a cool tame is that there's no reason not to blow all your cooldowns the second someone so much as looks at you sideways. Especially as BM (and a lot of the hunters out taming prestige pets are BM) this would be awesome. Someone tries to mess with your tame, ok, sucks to be them! Call out a pet, intimidate, and Rapid Fire/Bestial Wrath/Call of the Wild: they'll be half-dead before the stun ends if, like the DK in question, they don't have a PvP trinket equipped. And you'll still have deterrence, all your traps, any other pet special abilities like pin, scatter shot, and master's call available. A hunter with all their cooldowns up is a dangerous thing.

Finally, maybe you do all this and the person turns out to be someone in arena gear who's actually pretty good and you die anyway. Oh well. If you died when you were trying to fight back, you'd've died when you weren't. At least trying to kill the person gave you a shot at getting the tame, while just trying to tame in spite of harassment is pretty much never going to work.

Fortunately, I don't think I've ever seen a really talented, geared PvPer do something lame and petty like messing with a prestige tame. No matter how bad you think you are at PvP, there are people that are as bad and worse. And the wonderful thing is that these are the people most likely to do griefy, trolly things because they're looking for easy targets to pick on. They get destroyed in battlegrounds and can't look at an arena without dying, so they think "I know! I'll look for easy kills so I can feel better about myself!" These are the easiest people to turn the tables on.

So stop worrying about how bad you are. It doesn't matter, I promise. Just start pushin' some buttons and see how it goes.

Ease, difficulty, bads, and learning curves.

I'm actually pretty surprised that I find myself with a desire to write this post. There are some sort of basic assumptions about difficulty in WoW that I thought were universal, but it turns out they're not. I shouldn't really be surprised, of course. There does not exist an opinion about this game that you can't find someone to disagree with. Up to and including the opinion that it is in fact a game. There are a number of ways to disagree with that, but then I'm wondering off-course.

Alright, difficulty. To begin with, I think that any given encounter or activity or place in the game has a learning curve. These curves vary in steepness. Lost City of the Tol'vir, for example, is easier to learn than pre-nerf heroic Stonecore, where all the bosses had a number of instant-kill mechanics. Instant-kill things are tougher to learn because if you miss them once you're simply dead, and you don't get another look at the warning until the party wipes and comes back or the next time you do the instance. The important part I'm getting at here, though, is that some encounters are more difficult to learn than others.

I also think that WoW is entirely about teamwork. Classes are designed to create synergies, mechanics require correct relative positioning, battlegrounds and arenas depend on communication and cooperation, on and on. Right? I don't think any of this should be controversial.

If you accept the previous two statements, however, I think you're pretty much required to accept the logical conclusions that extend from them. One of those conclusions is that there is no such thing in the game as something that is hard or something that is easy. The Sinestra encounter one-shot farm content for many guilds at this point. So it's easy for them, but that doesn't mean it's just plain old easy. Converseley, even though most guilds aren't even going to pull Sinestra, that doesn't mean it's difficult. It's just difficult for them.

This might seem like froofy, new-age nonsense, but I really don't think it is. I think an encounter's difficulty is entirely dependent on the group that's engaging with it. A guild group on vent with a lot of experience working together can pretty believably get a new ZA bear on the first run through the place, as long as they've all read up on things beforehand. A group assembled of people that don't know each other through the RDF system can wipe several times in ZA even if everyone in that group has cleared the instance a few times before. The encounters are not inherently easy or inherently difficult. The most that can be said about them is that their learning curves may be steeper or shallower depending on the group making the pull.

In turn, this is why I don't really feel like it makes a lot of sense to upbraid your RDF party members as bads or terribles or whatever. Any particular person may be having trouble picking up or executing a particular thing in an encounter, but they're just a part of the group or raid. A sufficiently practiced group can carry pretty much anyone through pretty much any encounter, as illustrated by guilds doing things like selling achievement drakes (or achievement bears from the raid version of ZA a couple expansions ago).

Basically, if you're calling your party members bads, you're saying you're not good enough to cover for them. If you feel like someone just isn't getting something, you can vote-kick, sure. But going on about how stuff is "easy" and not at all like other stuff that's "hard" just gets you into an endless pissing match that, unless you're in a top-100 guild, you're not going to win. I've seen people that (like me!) still haven't cleared T11 normal calling people bad. Or people calling their teammates in BGs bads and terribles even though, on later armorying, their arena/rated BG teams are in that 1500-1600 range.

As long as you can keep in mind that no particular thing is "easy" and other things are "hard," you should hopefully have an easier time reigning in those impulses to shout at your teammates. Unless of course they're being little pricks, which is the one thing that's guaranteed to get me shouting at someone.

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!

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.

Luck!

Thorium Brotherhood's alliance PvPers unexpectedly took control of Tol Barad yesterday afternoon, which is awfully amazing. Friday afternoon is a pretty highly populated time, and those are usually the times when Horde defends successfully. I wasn't there because I was off farming primal airs (and more on that later!), but I asked in guild if people had interest in killing Argoloth and lo, they did! It took a few minutes for everyone to finish doing they stuff they were doing, but we pretty quickly had a core of (I think) six people, so we pugged in some random DPS from trade and hopped over to stab the pit fiend until he died. Or shoot arrows at him, whatever.

I felt much more confident in my playing of Marks than I did for the raids last week where, although I wasn't terrible, I wasn't doing very well either. 4.06 changed the spec a lot in addition to making it viable, to the point where we're now glyphing and hard-casting aimed shot even when we don't have 5 stacks of the MMM buff. I'll go into more detail on the priority system when I write a guide for it, but it's pretty intuitive and satisfying, I think. Anyway, this was the first time I actually killed Argoloth, since we've never really had TB at a convenient time for me before. What did he decide to drop but hunter T11 pants, and me the only hunter in the raid.

But that's not all! You'll remember that I was farming airs beforehand, right? Well, one of the Scions of Al'akir was ever so obliging and decided to drop Design: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond for me. So I handed that to one of the guild's JCs along with some metas from the gbank and now all of our agility-using DPS raiders have the good meta. All I need to complete that is for the agility to bracers enchant to drop for me when I'm farming volatiles today (I've ever so slowly been making a couple hammers for my gathering alt to play with in PvP).

Finally! We also decided to do a heroic DM last night, since we still had some upgrades for various people in there, and what should poor Vanessa drop but a replacement for my last 333 item! Pretty exciting! VA is also 5/12 normal modes of T11 now, and our re-kills are getting more efficient every time (although our first kills tend to be pretty hilarious - that is the nature of first kills, though). It's pretty tough to clear a 12-boss tier in 2 nights per week, but we're making great progress. We may eventually have to start extending lockouts to get in enough time on the more difficult bosses, but I'm hoping we don't have to resort to that (and the attendant loss of VP) until we're working on heroics.

Edit: good god, things are moving quickly. Now they're thinking of nerfing Aimed Shot? What in the world. I suppose if they're compensating for it through AotH that's relatively ok, but I guess it's their intent for us to not hardcast Aimed? If so, why did they reduce the casting speed at all? Having hardcast AiS in the priority was really cool for me - I liked not having to bother with arcane and I especially liked when I'd get a 5th stack of MMM while an AiS was casting, so I'd get two of them within a global. Very satisfying.

I don't think anyone at Blizzard has any particular animosity or affection for a given class, such that they'd treat the class differently in balance discussions. But I wonder if maybe the game has gotten too complicated? Kurn's most recent post on the Light of Dawn nerf is another example of this. It seems like the nerf and buffbats are just being swung blindly, without much consideration of the context of changes they've made in the past or bugs that are currently affecting abilities. The game's various classes and specs are pretty much being treated as pinatas that they can smash open, spilling QQ all over the forums.

I dunno. I just don't see a point to nerfing Aimed Shot. Yes, well-geared hunters in BGs can blow 0-resilience people up in PvP, but... so what? Our PvE damage is not out of line, and equally-matched opponents in PvP do not fall apart against a hunter.