How come survival has explosive shot, anyway?

I really do like huntering. And despite the name of the blog, my conceptually favorite tree has always been survival. I've always ended up speccing whatever tree does the most damage, but my abiding love is for the "ranger" tree. In pretty much every fantasy game ever, single player or multi, videogame or pen and paper, I roll a "ranger" type character. I love the skill and beauty of archery, I love the aesthetic of the lanky independent traveller, skilled in the ways of the wild, I even love the story of Agincourt - although to say one loves a story wherein a lot of real people died is kind of bizarre. I suppose I simply mean that it gave me an appreciation for the elegance and power of the bow as a weapon. Bows as art are also compelling: the bowyer's craft is intricate and involved and somewhat mysterious, from the selection of source woods to the shaping and steaming and lamination processes.

I just think they're neat.

So you can see why I am drawn to the survival tree conceptually, while at the same time I'm disappointed by its reality. Tying a bomb to an arrow is, in addition to being unlikely to work, something of an exemplar of inelegance. Black arrow makes very little sense, and certainly has nothing to do with having a connection to nature and being able to perform extraordinary feats thereby. It's just not satisfying.

By the same token, the Marksmanship tree is lacking. I like that it's the tree that focuses on physical damage. That makes sense to me. But why, then, is its top-level shot chimera shot, which does nature damage and refreshes serpent sting? And how or why does said chimera shot cause the piercing shots bleed? Again, it's just not satisfying.

So I was thinking about this the other day, and it seems like some of the flavor issues with the class could be fixed by simply shifting things around for a little bit. I would move explosive shot over to the marksmanship tree and rename it aimed shot, for continuity. Instead of being a 3-second fire damage dot, I would make it a 3-second powerful bleed with crittable ticks (complete with an animated gout of blood every tick). What is now lock and load (again, inappropriate for what I'd imagine survival to be) would move over to Marks as well, perhaps being renamed to something like "Uncommon Precision". I'd proc this buff off of regular old auto-shots instead of the weird and unpleasant juggling between black arrow and a variety of traps that it works off of right now. I'm unsure if I'd even want to see Marks hunters continuing to use serpent sting, but if I did perhaps I'd tie a talented bleed damage increase to it.

The survival tree would of course get chimera shot. What is now the "improved steady shot" buff (and what does that even mean?) would be renamed serpent's swiftness - the 20% haste talent that lived in the old BM tree but is now gone. Proccing serpent's swiftness off of cobra shot makes a lot more sense to me than "improved steady shot". Chimera shot would probably not refresh serpent sting but instead consume it for additional damage, which would hopefully make for a fun resource management game as well as be fruitful for theorycrafting. How long should one extend one's serpent sting with cobra shots before eating it with chimera shot? Is it better to keep chimera on cooldown or try to manage your chimera use situationally?

This would all be a pain to re-balance of course, and I'm quite certain nothing of the sort will ever happen. It's fun to think about how things would be better If Only They Put Me In Charge, though.

Low-level random dungeons: meeting the moon-people

I suppose that, sad as this is, it really should not surprise me that the wow-playing population is perhaps not as well socialized as one might hope. Nonetheless, I'm surprised at how completely bizarre some of these interactions have been. I just - I simply don't understand some of the rudeness I've encountered. I'm pretty sure Oliver Sacks would be just fascinated by some of the dysfunction. Here are a couple examples:

1. Tanking scarlet monastery's library, I at some point or other mentioned LoS. You know, the common and widely-known abbreviation for "line of sight"? A member of the party accused me of laziness because, get this, I hadn't typed out the whole phrase. I'm serious. He asked what it meant, I explained, and then he called me lazy for using an abbreviation. Verdict: from the moon. There is no way you could be reared amongst regular Earthlings and think that this made any sense.
2. I was in a WSG and there was a flag stand-off. A rogue and myself snuck up on the opposing team's roof, where we almost returned the flag. Almost! It was so close. So while waiting to respawn I said: "Shoot." Someone in battleground chat cared so deeply about my word choice that he berated me for not using a stronger word. This one is even weirder to me, so I'm thinking Venusian. I mean, really? On what planet does it ever occur to someone to say: "that person really should have sworn, I shall inform them of their deficiency." Possibly Venus? I know it still seems like a stretch, but it's more believable than the relative neighborliness of the moon and I'm trying to be charitable.

Other than that, there's just been the garden-variety rudeness of the mage that wants to do the pulling for me, but that's pretty standard. It still makes me want to reach through the monitor, grab hold of the person by their shoulders and shake them as hard as I can. I'm not sure why I think that vigorous agitation will fix the problems here: it's just one of those feelings that you get deep down in your heart. You simply know it's the right thing to do. I think maybe my subconscious reasoning is "it works pretty well on clothes in the washing machine, so why not moon-people on the internet?"

Thurvik and Diwali

Hooray for the shattering! As soon as I could I made a little dorf shaman named Thurvik. He has the mail heirlooms (mailooms?) and two big hammers with the crusader shimmer on them, which is pretty satisfying. He's kind of fun, and he's definitely way more fun than the shaman I got to 17 a few months ago. But he's just nowhere near as entertaining as Diwali, the troll druid I made after I got Thurvik to 12. She's now 35 and is just starting in on Desolace.

Being a druid and doing the horde-side quests in Ashenvale and Stonetalon was kind of... odd. The questlines mostly seem to be along the lines of "time to clearcut the forests and stripmine the minerals, FOR THE HORDE!" Which I would be fine with if she were an orcish warrior, but she is not. She is a druid. She draws her power from nature, and trolls have been a forest and jungle-dwelling people for hundreds or thousands of years anyway. Stonetalon, at least, was a little bit redeemed by the very final quest, where you get to see Hellscream be a little bit less of an idiot.

I've also tanked a couple instances on her. Specifically I've tanked Scarlet Monastery: Library and the lasher wing of Maraudon. It's a little tough because I don't have swipe and glyphed maul only hits two targets, but I've been doing ok so far. What I really wish I had were some damage reduction cooldowns. I'm going to be getting a few in the next five levels or so, which is nice.

First time tanking and first time healing were both quite similar. For both roles I've been very intimidated and put the whole thing off in favor of more questing for level after level. What finally gave me the confidence to try tanking was talking with my BF about it for a bit, not least because he reminded me that, you know, glyphs exist.

Of course having a horde druid doesn't do my alliance mains much good, but that's fine, because seeing all the hordeside stuff has made me excited for my worgen warrior. I've now seen some of the worgen animations and I love them so much. And I'm really just totally down for open warfare with the Forsaken. Pradzha rode through Hillsbrad on the way to SM to help my BF tame one of the crusade's mastiffs, and on the way she encountered bears with spider eggs on their backs. Hurrrrrrrrrgh. Urrgl! Shudder. So gross. I think Blizzard has finally made a quest chain I wouldn't be able to complete. Oh god. Parasites: nein. So yes. I am absolutely ready to roll a plate-wearing wolf lady and fight off the genocidal undead. And then in a few months I can roll a goblin rogue and experience the goblin starting area and Azshara. Yay!

Predictably extended maintenance

Dammit. I was really looking forward to making my dorf shaman, but I doubt the servers will be up before I go to bed tonight. Kind of a bummer, but pretty much to be expected. I'll have some time to play with it tomorrow.

4.03a and weapon speed normalization

One of the things happening to hunters in the 4.03a patch is that all of our special attacks are being normalized with respect to weapon speed. Let us reflect, for a moment, on the oddity of that sentence. What does it mean to have an attack normalized? What does weapon speed have to do with anything? Wasn't that something only rogues and stuff worried about?

Well, no.

To explain what's going on here, let's first take a look at two different imaginary bows. [Humbert's Mighty Twang-Stick] as compared to [Wesley's Elegant Willow]. Humbert's is a 100 DPS weapon with a 1.0 speed and Wesley's is a 100 DPS weapon with a 2.0 speed. That is: they're both 100 DPS weapons, but Humbert's is twice as fast as Wesley's, firing once a second instead of once every two seconds. It's pretty obvious that Humbert's is going to have to hit for 100 damage every shot to do 100 DPS, while Wesley's is going to have to hit for 200 damage every shot to do the same thing.

So here's the issue: the formulae for most damaging abilities for a hunter look like this:

Platypus Shot attacks the target, doing ([weapon damage] + [N% x Ranged Attack Power]) nature damage and dazing the target by forcing it to consider the inexplicable reality that a creature such as the platypus exists.

What that little formula in parentheses means is that the game figures out how much damage a white attack would be, then adds a number to that by multiplying your RAP by some percentage. If you think back to Humbert's and Wesley's respective bows, you'll realize that the weapon damage the game will calculate for Wesley's is always going to be higher than the damage it calculates for Humbert's because Wesley's is a slower weapon. If you had two otherwise identical hunters shooting at a target dummy and using only Platypus Shot, the one with Wesley's will do more damage because his platypi are envenoming harder.

Or at least, that's how it used to be. With patch 4.03a, hunter weapon speed will be normalized when the game is calculating our special shots. What this means is that Blizzard have picked a speed (hopefully 3.0 or slower), and every time a special shot needs that "weapon damage" value, the game will figure out what weapon damage the weapon would need to pull its stated DPS at that normalized speed.

To go back to our example bows, imagine the game normalized hunter weapons to a 2.0 speed. If this were to happen, the two identical hunters will do identical damage. This is because every time our hunter with Humbert's fires his Platypus Shot, the game will go "if this bow were a 2.0 speed weapon, it would need to hit for 200 damage to do 100 DPS, so that's what I'll use for weapon damage for this shot."

This is overall a positive change because it makes the game a little more intuitive. Without normalization, hunters were using the item-level 264 Wrathful PvP bow over item-level 277 heroic Zod's, even though the DPS rating on Zod's was higher. They were doing this because Zod's was such a fast weapon that the PvP bow's special attacks were still hitting harder than Zod's were. With normalization, the answer to "which weapon should I use in Cataclysm?" is almost certainly going to be "the one with the higher DPS rating."

Pugging Arthas and killing time

I saw someone in trade looking for a healer for LK10 last night and I had a free hour, so I hopped on my holy priest and helped out. They actually made it to p3 before wiping on the first attempt, which made me hopeful, but we still hadn't killed him by the time I had to go.

Incidentally, it was nice to hear one of them on vent say "oh no, the rockin' healer has to leave?" But yeah, no kill. It's interesting how raids differ. My guild raid had and still has its biggest difficulty dealing with defile. It consistently gets too big, and then that forces the raid out of the center, or a couple people are getting clipped by it so it expands faster than they can run, or whatever. One way or another, defile is what kills us.

With this raid last night, the defiles were beautiful. But as soon as the first transition was done, the DPS wanted to kill the Lich King yesterday! That last raging spirit? Psh, the tank's got it. Val'kyr? Whatever, it's probably the fault of the person she picked up. The important thing, for these folks, was doing more damage to Arthas.

The problem with this instinct is that it led to them getting frequent little tastes of phase 3 - just like we did on the first attempt - so they decided that they were doing it right. Despite the fact that their desperate sprinting for P3 meant we were just going to wipe to viles because the two remaining DPS couldn't actually do anything about them. For my guild raid, like the 2nd or 3rd time we made it to phase 3, we killed him.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how raids develop in different ways.

Other than that, we're definitely in full-fledged "can it please just be the Cataclysm already?" mode. Over the past couple days I've been farming the old-world enchant patterns for the afore-mentioned priest, who is also my enchanter. I've got Crusader, fiery, 15 agility to weapon, 25 agility to 2h weapon, and lifestealing. The last one was probably the most annoying, because I had to get the key to Scholomance, which involved going from WPL to freaking Gadgetzan, from Gadget to Un'goro, realizing I needed a thorium bar, flying to Darnassus to buy one and flying back to Un'goro, realizing I needed two thorium bars and flying back again, etc. Good god the classic questlines were awful, sometimes. Nothing says "fun" like AFKing for a 15-minute flight path. But now I've got almost all the standard enchants people need for their heirlooms.

Apparently getting the spellpower enchant is more involved, possibly involving one of the classic raids? Which makes me wonder if it's going away? I should probably get that as well. And I should probably farm up some righteous orbs (oh, so that's what their blog is named after...) to put crusader on the new heirloom axe I got for my furry warrior.

Clearly there's stuff to do - just not very fun stuff. For me, at least. Which is why it could really be the Cataclysm any day now, please.

WoW-playing couples

The BF and myself were doing some grocery shopping earlier and came across these:

Said boyfriend looked at them and went "what are those?"

To which I responded (because I am so helpful): "wisps."

Prompting him to say: "This is what happens when night elves die."

Which made us both laugh, because we're nerds. Also it's funny to think of an alliance raid wiping on the Lich King or something and having a bunch of tiny, disposable toothbrushes clattering to the ice.