State of the Blog

I recently received a couple very kind emails from a reader, and they've given me the first idea for a post in a long while. This person wanted to know if I'd received an invite for the beta (I haven't) and, if so, if I had any thoughts on it.

In fact, I hadn't even opted in to the beta until after I got their first email. I've also been largely indifferent to the beta information that's been posted so far, for a few different reasons that I won't really go into here. The thing that struck me, though, is that this person felt like they'd really had to struggle at the start of Cataclysm, and this time they wanted to be prepared.

When I read that, I realized that while I'm pretty confident in my ability to ferret out the basics of Pandatimes huntering, this wasn't always so. I came into this game with a pretty big advantage: my boyfriend. As I stumbled through the leveling process, did dungeons with people I found in general (this was before the RDF), and finally capped out at 70, I could always go ask him what the deal was with stuff, things like "what's Omen?" and "why should I have it?" I could ask him to help explain the peculiar mechanical oddities of the World of Warcraft such as the infamous BC steady shot macro. To this day, he's more knowledgeable about the game as a whole than I am, even though I think I've got a pretty good grasp on a lot of things.

On the other hand, with Mists, Blizzard has continued its movement towards a more intuitive model. When I started playing in BC, there was a lot of deeply weird stuff in the game, and the ideal way to play often made very, very little sense. These days, they're continuing to pare down the bad talents, give you the mandatory things, and try to make the glyph and talent choices interesting. This means that I think we'll be able to look at our spellbook and pretty much figure out what we ought to be doing based on that.

So, that's going to be my next "real" post. Not "here's how to play once the Pandatimes happen," but rather "here's how to know how to play." Expect it later this week - Thursday at the latest.

The duty of leisure

Warning! This is post is as long and pompous as the title implies - read at peril of falling asleep and/or rolling your eyes right out of their sockets!

Thank you to Hugh over at the Melting Pot for finding something I can write about. He picked up on an essay Bravetank wrote about feeling guilty for playing WoW. He then also links to an essay by a developer about why downtime is necessary. I don't think the second piece was written in response to the first, but it's pretty clearly applicable.

As far as these things go, I don't really disagree with Psychochild's position. It seems clearly true to me that a human expected only to work, sleep, and eat is going to go mad or die. Further, the only work such a person would be capable of doing would be the most rote drudgery you can imagine. They wouldn't have the energy to do anything else. Something like digging ditches would probably be your best bet. You wouldn't even be able to have them do something physically less demanding, such as standing guard, because a guard shift in a legitimately hostile or dangerous area requires real concentration and attention.

So he makes a good argument, but I honestly don't think that he even needs to appeal to a need for downtime to "justify" hobbies. Especially a hobby like gaming.

I recently said on twitter that "culture is collaborative," which isn't a new sentiment at all, much less one that originated with me. At the time I was saying it in response to complaints about the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings (the films are not the books, that's the point, deal), but I feel that it's a much broader truth.

The culture we live in is a huge, goopy mess of currents and masses and deformations and eddies. We are affected by it and we shape it in turn. It reaches into every aspect of our lives. Gaming is a part of culture, as is reality TV, literature, film, advertising, the nauseating Republican debates, fanfiction, folk art: everything. When we game, we're taking part in that grand project.

It's tough to talk about stuff like this because it's so nebulous, and to be frank it begins to sound pretty silly. Like someone logging in to camp for Loque has some kind of mystical bearing on the Greek debt crisis. Of course I wouldn't go that far. Amongst the analogies that I would use to illuminate my understanding of culture is one of gravity. All of us little gamers are tiny little specks of matter out there in the void. We have gravitational fields, and we do a lot of jostling between each other. No particular individual will have noticeable pull any of the big elements in the system, but in the aggregate we shape the way things look in the future.

The games we play today and the ways we play them determine the games that get made tomorrow. Games, films, books, visual arts, music, and conversation all impact each other. Mass Effect 3 is going to introduce gay male romance options, and that fact did not occur in a vacuum. Nor is the fact of gay marriage in six states in the union.

What games we play and how we play them are important. Not only is downtime necessary, but how we spend it shapes the society we live in, and it is also a part of shaping ourselves. Quite apart from the enormous, impossible to grasp nebula of "culture," I think that humans have responsibilities to ourselves. I guess I take an almost Aristotelian view of virtue, in some ways. I would say that we should always strive to be the best version of ourselves possible. Work can be and is a part of that, but for me personally I feel that I grow into a better self by the consumption of media.

This goes beyond games, of course! I am a voracious devourer of the written word (fiction, non-fiction, prose and poetry), some varieties of TV and movies, and lots of different games. In fact recently I've felt guilty because I've been doing so little gaming, to an extent that I think I've been failing a duty to myself.

Obviously, everything in moderation! But the mere act of playing WoW should not trigger a feeling of guilt. When you engage with a facet of culture, as you're doing when you play the game, you're doing the collaborative work of shaping culture at the same time that you're advancing yourself as a fully realized person. Take pride in your work!

Transmogrification!

Oh, since I've reached a point where I'm pretty happy with my transmogrification set, I thought I could let people see what it looks like:

Click for bigger!

Hat: disabled
Shoulders: Fortified Spaulders
Chest: Val'kyr Vestments
Back: Cloak of Fiends (no longer available, sorry!)
Gloves: Silvered Bronze Gauntlets
Belt: Ironspine Belt
Pants: Cormorant Leggings
Boots: Southfury Greaves
Polearm: Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned (oh how I wish I could turn off enchantments!)
Ranged: Bristleblitz Striker

I think she looks pretty freakin' huntery!

Words with friends

This past week, my boyfriend and myself celebrated our fifth anniversary together (aww) with a week-long trip to Chicago. I tweeted about our destination on the way down and it turned out that Apple Cider was nearby! So we had dinner with her on the way down, and then on Thursday we hung out with her and O! It was a lot of fun - they're both lovely people - and of course we did a lot of talking about WoW and WoW blogging. I think my boyfriend might even pick up blogging again, which is pretty neat because he's probably one of the smarter people about the game out there.

Of course, in all this talking about the game and blog community stuff, I couldn't really escape thinking about the fact that I haven't posted anything since January. The problem is that this blog is so class- and game-mechanics oriented that in the absence of big patches, it's tough to have very much to talk about. I'm also really bad about talking about stuff from upcoming expansions (such as the impending Pandatimes) because it changes so much and everything is changing around it such that it's difficult to have any sort of sensible opinion about things.

For example, I took a look at the most recent Panda talents, and there were some changes that (on the face of things) seem sensible to me. Removing the stacking DoT from auto-shot: great choice. Making people choose between Fervor, Readiness, and Thrill of the Hunt: awesome. Same with having to choose between the interrupt, instant sleep, or pet stun. That's all really good stuff. The way they're thinking about things gives me a lot of hope.

I do think that it's going to be tough to really make that final tier an interesting choice for PvE hunters. I would suspect that either the boringly-named Power Shot or the Binding Shot (really, why not Arrow of Binding? Come on guys) will come out on top for DPS. I don't see this is as a criticism of the devs or anything - I honestly don't think it's realistic to try to come up with talents that directly affect damage done without having a mathematically best option. Overall, though, I remain excited for the way the changes are shaping up. I don't really get why someone leveling an MM hunter doesn't get Chimera Shot until 60 while their Survival and Beast siblings get their respective signature abilities at 10, but whatever, that's not a big deal.

On a totally different front: I should also mention that Apple Cider tagged me for a post-thing! The idea is that you go into your images folder, go to the 6th sub-folder, and then pick the 6th image from there and post it and talk about it.

Unfortunately that doesn't really work for me!

My raw screens folder is just a directory with screens. The 6th image there is of the skybox in the Eye of Eternity, which I took for the background for the guild site.

In my images directory, the 6th folder is an empty one that gets made whenever I plug my phone in to my computer (argh!).

The 6th image in the base directory is an old version of my blog banner.

In my WoW images directory, the 6th one is a super-boring picture of a small bug from Wrath, where hunter pets appeared to be their original size inside one of the tents on the Argent Tourney grounds. There's a big devilsaur in it.

I guess I'll just post a picture of my guild having fun with Potions of Illusion:

Probably the best name/title combination up there is Crusader Liecrusader.

As for picking other people to do it, good lord. I don't know if I can, really! Who would I tag? How would they know it had happened? The whole endeavor seems fraught with peril. I think we'll stick with the dancing chorus line and leave it at that.

Staggering intellect at work

The other afternoon - possibly Saturday or Sunday - I was doing a little LFR tanking on my warrior. I don't do this every week, but sometimes I feel like I want to, so I do. We were in the process of clearing Zon'ozz trash, which means disinterestedly pushing buttons and praying for the tentacle to throw you so you can leap back to it, which is about all the fun that's to be had there.

And then I saw someone in /say insult someone else's DPS. I kind of rolled my eyes - whatever, it's LFR - but then I saw the response. The person being attacked was a rogue, and their response to link their achievement for getting a rating of 2400 in 3v3 arena. That made me roll my eyes even more than the original insult did, because again! This is LFR. We do not care about your arena rating.

Our intrepid DPS-checker says "whatever that's fine, but all you're doing is white attacking, if you're better than me then show it."

The response was "I don't raid. I'm just here for the vial."

This was all in /say of course, so most of the raid didn't see it. And then before I could bring it up, the other tank pulled the boss.

Immediately after the boss, I said in raid "so anyway, this rogue straight up said they're just white-attacking for a chance at the vial, so let's kick it."

Rogue's response? "You mad, brah?"

I felt like the only sensible response to that was "you hurf, durf?"

Then the kick went through, so that was nice.

Pro tip to all the pros out there that wanna leech off of LFR without expending even the barest minimum of effort: keep your fat, stupid mouth shut, you lazy idiot.

Sorry, this is a really lame story! I was just completely blown away that some guy feels so entitled to the fruits of another's labor that he didn't even try to hide it. Usually, someone trying to deliberately cheat others at least feels a little shame, you know? Tries to be sneaky about it? This guy was all "pushing buttons in PvE is beneath me - bring me the loots, peons! Hoist me upon a palanquin and deliver unto me the purples that I so clearly deserve! And be sure to peel them, first!"

Remarkable. Just remarkable.

Damage Per Second: the MMO fundamental?

I've been toying around with an idea recently.

There's an extent to which I think about the world in ways that I imagine a structural engineer might (although I'm definitely not a structural engineer!). I always want to think about fundamentals, principles, platforms, and foundations. Right? These are all words I've used a lot in my posts. I used one of them in the title for this post, before I even knew I'd be writing this paragraph.

I'm drawn towards finding those few, simple things that you should get good at, and I think of everything else following on naturally after you've attained some degree of proficiency at those simple things.

There's a lot to recommend this viewpoint! When I was an amateur-competitive fencer in college, for example, the fundamental that you could always go back to work on was your footwork. Your ability to move your body up and down the strip at will compensated for almost any other failure you might experience. You could completely misread your opponent's intentions, betray your own plans, and otherwise bumble just about everything but if you were sufficiently agile and athletic on your toesies, your opponent couldn't touch you.

This works for playing a hunter, too.

Imagine a survival hunter that did a lot of things wrong. Maybe she just came back to the game after playing in BC or early Wrath and she's not sure what this cobra shot thing is, so she uses steady shot. Maybe her spec is weird here and there. Nonetheless, if she understands that Explosive Shot is her most important damaging ability and keeps it on cooldown, she's going to do pretty good damage. Fixing a substantial error like using SS instead of CoS is going to net her another 2-3k DPS maybe, but that will just bring her from "above average" to "even further above average".

To go back to the analogy with fencing: the most fundamental of the MMO gameplay fundamentals is pushing buttons. Regardless of role or class, we interact with the game world by pushing buttons, and I think playing a DPS character is really instructive in this regard.

If you learn the game by playing a damage dealer, you have an understanding that you must always be pushing a button. There is never a time when you could be performing better by remaining idle. Further, there are often times you could be performing better by pushing a different button.

Last night I reviewed the video I recorded of my guild's most recent Blackhorn 10-normal kill. Assuming I actually buy a video editing program, this will probably be the first video guide I do because it honestly seems like the first (and almost the only) normal-difficulty encounter that warrants a video guide from a hunter PoV. But I'm wandering.

What I actually wanted to say was that it was painful watching that video. I winced - a lot! - at DPS mistakes I made. Pushing the wrong button, or the right one one at the wrong time, or not pushing a button, etc. I did fine with the encounter. I wasn't hit by a single Blade Rush. I stood in a couple swirlies it made sense for me to stand in. I killed my drakes in time and helped out on the melee mobs when I could. My pet spent moooooooost of his time biting something. And yet still it was painful for me to watch because of the times I misjudged the CS cooldown, or triggered the haste from T13 4pc at a dumb time, or whatever.

This awareness of wanting to always be pushing a button, and further, to be pushing the right button is what I'm trying to get at.

I've currently got a little druid alt that I very occasionally do some leveling with. I've had him for quite a while now, several months, and he's like level 40 or something. He quests feral and dungeons resto. When I'm healing low-level dungeons on him, I spend a lot of time spamming Wrath, because there's no healing to be done and it feels wrong to just stand there.

But what if I weren't someone leveling an alt? Especially what if I weren't in heirloom gear, just the well-itemized stuff from helpful satchels and quest rewards, such that my hots (which mostly depend on level at that point) were roughly as effective, but mana was more of an issue? Wouldn't I then feel like I was playing correctly but standing idle much of the time, so I could have a full mana bar and an innervate ready just in case?

What about tanks that hold on to their cooldowns "just in case," even on trash, and then never end up using them?

This was a huge problem for RDF groups when Cataclysm was released. Warriors that never used shield block or shield wall, Death Knights that never used vampiric blood: they all made difficult trash pulls more difficult because of an inclination not to push buttons. Trash wipes happened pretty frequently in those groups. Think of heroic Deadmines or the Stonecore, when a tank would go down with all their cooldowns available.

When I play my tank alt, I am basically always staring at my cooldowns, waiting for them to come up so I can use them again. Trash and bosses alike.

When I play my healer, I have power auras specifically set up to remind me to use inner focus, power infusion, power word: barrier, and pain suppression.

I think part of that mentality comes from growing up DPS. Use your cooldowns early and often, right? Use every global. Always Be Casting.

I think you can make a pretty good argument that playing a damage dealer is the footwork of WoW. Sure, as you tank Warlord Zon'ozz you'll get better at timing your shield wall for Psychic Drain. Sure, as you heal heroic Morchok you'll get better at finding the right time to channel tranquility. But you can paper over a lot of mistakes by always being active. When I'm playing my healer, if damage is low I just start bubbling people and spamming PoH, because why not? Damage is going to happen eventually, I may as well have some shields on people, right? If I'm tanking and shield wall is on cooldown at a time that I'd like to use it again, I might live through it anyway just because I started with higher health because of damage I didn't take earlier.

Basically: there's a lot to be said for having an understanding that you need your button-pushing to be something that happens without conscious thought. I have to be careful not to think of the things my fingers are doing while I'm raiding! Some of the contortions the poor things have to go through are pretty weird. But because I'm not thinking about them, I have brainspace free to watch the rest of the encounter. I think that playing a damage dealer well is the best way to train yourself to play in this fashion, and I think that doing so has huge benefits for both tanking and healing.

Anyway, sorry! In the absence of big game things to talk about, you get rambling nonsense about footwork. I think about this game too much!

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?