Rageblogging after it was cool

So Children’s Week is over. None of my characters did any of the achievements, except for my levelling rogue who did the Orgrimmar quests as a cheap way to get some xp and a neat pet. Of course, as soon as ‘rage’ popped up in the title, it should have been pretty clear what the topic of this post was.

School of Hard Knocks killed seasonal events for me. After trying for it in my first year playing and discovering that it was a cruel, vile, unrepentantly disgusting excuse for content, I started looking at any achievements at all and the holiday achievements in particular not as a rewarding goal, but as a series of ridiculous hoops that lazy, stupid designers dropped into the game. The violet drake reward for the meta becomes essentially a symbol of debasement, where genuine enjoyment of the game has become secondary to enduring ludicrous horseshit.

This achievement is the worst piece of design that I have encountered in WoW. Tying it to a year-long meta devalues the meta and is insane and unconsciable. Were I the person who decided to do this, I would be wholeheartedly ashamed. Also paralysed with terror each night that someone might find out and the ravening hordes would descend on my home in a frenzied orgy of vengeance and bloodlust.

I am not worried about this person’s family. This person orbits so far out in the void beyond rational thought that I doubt the concept even means anything to them.

Reading the comments on articles on WoWInsider, I see a few fairly common themes.

• People who finally got it after the third/fourth/nth year.
• People who got lucky and got it within an hour because the enemy decided to co-operate. Generally telling other people not to whine so much.
• People who will never, ever do this and want it removed from the meta.
• PvPers who hate the selfish, frustrated mindset dropped into their BGs.

What don’t I see? Anyone at all who actually enjoyed it. Idi fucking Amin has more fans than this achievement. There are* people out there who will defend the slaughter of millions in the Stalinist purges of the early 20th century, but no-one wants to touch this thing with a 20 foot barge pole. There are more people who want to visit war-torn hellholes like Lebanon or Afghanistan than want to take part in this PoS.

I did the Pilgrim’s Bounty meta for the first time at Cata release, when Blizzard screwed the horde over by putting the Teldrassil table out at the far end of a city filled with elite lvl 85 guards when the level cap was 80, out over an expanse of water where the horde had no way to get other than somehow fighting through Stormwind to the harbour or taking a chance with waterwalking since the boats from Kalimdor had been removed and there was no old-world flying yet. It was difficult and caused a pretty severe bout of discontent at the shortsightedness of its implementation, but it didn’t turn me off holidays wholesale. SoHK did. It’s simply that bad.

* admittedly bugnuts insane

Picture me

Amazingly my RL uses even worse settings than I do.

Hagara HC is down. Puts Bitter at 5/8 HC legit. That’s him on the left there in the corner of disenthusiasmism, and yes, he is indeed wearing a fishing hat. Something about a cowboy tauren just works.

This was my second night on this fight, and it was already significantly easier. Don’t know how much is familiarity and how much is the scaling* nerf.

Ah yes, the nerf. Something I’ve been considering while PvPing on the paladin… PvP players must find all this talk of nerfs completely hilarious. There’s no way to nerf battlegrounds, and while some specs do get nerfed for PvP and yet others are simply screaming for the same**, it’s rare that the content itself becomes any easier. That’s because the difficulty level is dynamic, based on the players competing.

I don’t know how realistic this outlook is, but I do know that as the more hardcore raiders in my guild are losing interest in Dragon Soul, they’re also gaining interest in battlegrounds. Maybe I’ll get that arena rating*** yet.

* 20% at this point

**  looking at you here, frost mages

*** any arena rating, oh gods

Turn your head and cough

Given that my fiancee has recently been loath to level the character she’s been playing along with my rogue*, I’ve resorted to fine tuning my priest and hitting up a few more BGs with my paladin. Oh, and of course Tol Barad.

There is no better way to build confidence as a healer than to go to Tol Barad. At least on my server, you will never be cc’d, silenced, interrupted, focussed, etc unless it’s literally you and one other guy at a base. Meanwhile you may find that you can single-handedly keep an arbitrary number of similarly facerolling DPS from melting into goo.

I’m not really aggressive enough to make a good PvP player, but a support role like healing lends itself well to a certain bloody-minded, obstinate mentality.

In a previous post I noted that holy paladins are all but invincible in BGs. This isn’t strictly true… it’s just a strange side effect of mixing in with the melee that means you’ll mostly be attacked by melee rather than casters. With somewhere around 56% damage reduction from armour, a further 30% from resilience, a block/parry/dodge chance if I’m not casting and healing if I am, a paladin isn’t a good target for melee***.

Great against swords. Not so much against fireballs. Who knew?

The ‘not strictly true’ aspect comes in when we’re talking about casters. Armour’s bloody useless against them, which just leaves Resistance Aura**** and resi. For that rare caster who actually notices the paladin down in the furball instead of attempting to reduce the opposing side’s hunters to free-range eco-friendly craters, it turns out that paladins are made of delicious crunchy honour points.

Either way, I’m contemplating asking around in /g for someone to try 2s/3s arena with. My resi’s a bit on the light side, and the only time any of my toons stepped in before resulted in near-instantaneous melting. Should at least help me learn a bit about how to handle focus and cc. Also, I’ve wanted the tasty paladin Conquest outfit since the first preview.

 

* nothing to do with the slightly sarcastic how-to post I made previously**

** or so she maintains

*** not that it stops druids. seriously, there’s nothing more persistent than a kitty druid on a healer. GIVE IT UP, SNUGGLES

**** …which I’m still not sure I should be using rather than Concentration…

Roll face left to right

There are gremlins. They are real. Their job is to read anything I write here, then sneak into my head and rewire it so that I go the opposite direction of anything placed on teh interwebs for the world to see.

So, I’m levelling a rogue again. And it’s specced as Combat.

Not too long ago, Chase Christian wrote a pretty decent guide to playing a rogue with three buttons. It’s simple, it’s effective, it’s… completely ignored by the levelling population. With the legendaries available and not a lot to do before the Great Pandanaring, many folks seem to be levelling rogues. If you’re one of them, here’s why you’re being trampled by my filthy plebian ways.

Weapons. Your weapons make a difference. If you’re playing combat, you should never be using a dagger in your main hand. Yeah, rogue flavour, whatever. I don’t care. You want a fast dagger in the offhand, and a slow agi weapon in the main hand. Since most of the rogues I see are sporting heirlooms, my suggestions are a Venerable Mass of McGowan in the main hand and a Balanced Heartseeker in the offhand. Substitute a Dal’rend’s Sacred Charge for the mainhand if you like, but I tend to prefer the haste on McGowan.

Poisons. If you’ve been checking Noxxic or Elitist Jerks for L2P info, you’re probably using instant poison on your main hand and deadly on the offhand. For levelling, this is stupid advice. Deadly will never stack to the point where it’s good, and instant doesn’t have anywhere near the proc rate you want until deadly is stacked to 5. I use wound poison on both weapons – the damage is decent and it’s got an excellent proc rate.

I am your master now.

Blade flurry. This is the most common problem I see. Most rogues level as combat, so they have blade flurry as a base ability. This ability is the most OP anything ever to make it live. Ask any rogue in DS. All you need to do is toggle it on when you see more than one enemy and off when there’s only one. Doesn’t cost energy, doesn’t even cost a GCD. Glyph it – it’s worth it. Flurry consistently clocks in at a good third of my damage.

Slice and Dice. Since your offhand weapon and poison are only about 25% of your damage, you could probably play without one. What’s that you say? I’m spouting silly talk for imbeciles? Well then, why aren’t you maintaining SnD? It’s literally the same thing. Use NeedToKnow or something similar to monitor your uptime. Your 100% uptime.

Rotation. This is especially bad if the player has been visiting EJ. That is high-level advice for insane robots with positronic brains. It is not for you. Opening with Ambush? Pointless! Using Rupture? DPS loss! While levelling, trash goes like this: Sprint in, spam Sinister Strike, keep up Slice and Dice with whatever combo points you have whenever it’s about to expire. On a boss, you can really stretch your wings with… Sinister Strike spam, Revealing Strike at 4 combo points if you have it, and then Eviscerate at 5. Oh, and keep SnD up with whatever points you have when it’s about to expire.

The flowchart knows all. The flowchart sees all. Obey. Obey.

That’s literally it! That’s all. I really suggest checking out the Lazy Rogue guide at the top, but keep these points in mind while levelling and you’ll at least end up slightly better than half the damage of that other rogue spamming /flirt at the healer.

Trends

If anyone’s ever scrolled to the bottom of this blog, they’ll see a little section of links marked ‘Gunblogs’. It’s mostly there because I tend to use this place as a sort of persistent bookmark collection, and shooting is one of my interests. One of the side effects, though, is that I tend to load up on a healthy dose of ‘lets see what it actually says’ when I see statistics being paraded around.

Lovingly stolen from the best

Here’s where we get back to being WoW-related. This chart’s from an article on WoWInsider bemoaning the lack of raiding warlocks. It raises some good points about other classes as well, and there’s no question that ‘locks aren’t the most popular class in the world. I’d even go so far as to say that given the sample used – players with ilvl over 400 and no PvP gear – locks may be overrated simply because of the class’ high skill cap and background knowledge issues.

What I’m talking about, though, is small things that make me go ‘huh’ when I look at the lists. For a start… look at the melee DPS specs. Combat rogues are grossly ahead, a given in a tier with a class-exclusive legendary and where a number of the fights cater to their mechanics. Otherwise, though… enhancement shaman, fury warriors and assassination rogues all have numbers lower than any ‘lock spec, with unholy dks edging in at the same numbers as affliction warlocks. Yet they’re not quite as low as the frost mage and non-survival hunter counts. Seems like melee have a lot of spec loyalty compared to ranged.

Feral presents a problem. In Mists we’ll see the guardian tree take over tanking duty, but for the moment we can’t actually separate out who’s doing what. If we assume bears are about on par with warrior tanks, though, we end up looking at a number of cats pretty close to the low ‘lock specs again. Which is surprisingly high, frankly, given how unfriendly a number of fights are for the spec. Maybe they’re respeccing per-boss?

Which leads into a thought on the methodology of the data gathering. Spec is, as far as I know, determined by whatever the player logged out on at the time.

Also, my guild has been 4/8hc in DS for weeks and a number of us (including me) are still below 400 ilvl, simply because of poor drops. Meanwhile any rogue who can get to the second stage of the legendary quest – which at this point is any rogue who bothered to show up for a couple of bosses a week – has got ilvl 400+ weapons bolstering their claim to relevance.

It is statistically improbable that such a wall of text has not resulted in this reaction

Anyway… back to the data. Holy priests are, unsurprisingly, the lowest representation healing spec. It’s kind of sad, given that they’re really strong in normal mode, but my own experience has shown that the wipe-prevention ability of discipline’s barrier and mitigation beats out any benefit of better straight healing in HC. Being able to go into an AoE phase with the entire goddamn raid bubbled also helps. And I can do that even with my paltry 2700 spirit, because disc simply scales better than holy. End of story.

Retribution paladins, despite being eclipsed by their holy radiance addled brethren, are actually seeing some pretty good numbers. I’d put that down to the potency of burst in DS, but I’m guessing that part of it is also the smoothness that the 2-piece t13 adds to the rotation. That one extra holy power generator just makes a paladin’s quality of life so much better. Playing without it feels almost unnatural at the moment. Last I saw this was baseline in the beta for Mists, along with a number of other HP changes.

Speaking of burst, though, DS rewards burst like a doting parent rewards their mewling offspring’s hideous crayon scrawls. That makes balance’s numbers a bit of a surprise… though I’ve heard tell that balance druids are a special breed, possibly decanted from vats somewhere in the deep bowels of a land dominated by the iron grip of graphing calculators and slide rules.

Anyway, feel free to disagree vehemently. As I said at the top, I’m familiar with personal bias making figures seem more like ideas, and I like to think I’ve been pretty clear on my biases here, but I’d also like to see what comes up in other people’s heads.

Too late

Fiancee and I are levelling a fresh pair of toons. Couple of days ago we got Dire Maul capital gardens in LFD. The tank wasn’t great with threat and the warrior was constantly charging ahead into packs, but there was no damage to the party. Heading into the underground section, someone made a comment on how they were doing, which the warrior immediately took as an excuse to rag on the tank.

Wish I could say I stood up against this despicable bullying, but all I bothered with was a quick ‘keep it civil’, followed by tuning out the subsequent bullshit. That tank ended up leaving, and the remainder of the party simply kicked the warrior. Too late, though.

Artist's reproduction of all parties concerned

That tank – who was still learning on her first tanking character – has now had yet another adversarial interaction with a party. She’s got to weigh that attitude against however much she wants to learn the role. She’s got to consider whether the droves of acrimonious tanks may be onto something.

Meanwhile Captain Cretin the warrior goes on the forums and complains about long queue times and tanks who won’t treat him like the special snowflake his kindergarten teacher told him he was.

Truly horrifying is the comment by the warrior that “I don’t even have a tank spec on any of my toons and I’m doing better than you”. At rushing the dungeon? At holding aggro on one or two mobs out of a pack after getting initial aggro anyway? Certainly not at taking less damage. What the hell exactly did this guy think was the tank’s job? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like a stereotypical imbecile who only plays DPS and expects the tank’s job to be ‘wrap a special bubble around me as suits my special status and roll it through the dungeon as quickly as possible’.

I’m sorry, random clod, but what you were doing wasn’t tanking better than the tank, it was DPSing extremely badly. And I wish I could have said that before we kicked you, but it’s too late for that now as well.

Slash and burn

Scorched earth is the term, I believe. My character list on my server is down to 9 again, but with the loss of 3 lvl 85s.

Yes, 3. The mage I couldn’t play, the rogue I wouldn’t play, and the warrior who ws my first character ever. He’s been replaced with a shiny human paladin, bringing the count up to 3 pallies on the same server.

Don’t judge, that’s apparently my thing. Hur hur.

I will never be played again! Ha ha!

The druid is hanging on by a thread and a hope, and the simple fact that there are no mail pvp items available on my server. If I can work out what to sell in that market, she’s set. So far the results have been surprising… it looks like what people want most is belts. Chalked it up to no justice belts on offer, and the valour cords selling for 1650.

Crafters: serving your ilvl-boosting needs since 20whenever. Main problem is that leather and scales are really expensive, and the patterns require a lot of them. That means leather and mail pvp gear has to sell for a lot more than, say, cloth. Or even plate. I get that having access to two markets is meant to be a good thing for LW, but then there’s BS with weapons and plate, and tailoring with cloth and bags… just at the moment it doesn’t feel anything like being worthwhile for the amount of effort put into levelling the prof.

That 10th slot is bothering me, like a loose tooth wiggling somewhere in the back. Considered rolling another rogue*, a lock**, or maybe a worgen just to see the starting zone. For now, though, the lvl 51 alliance pally is enough to sate my levelling needs. Instead, I’ve been gearing my current 85s.

There’s a bit of a problem for melee, though, and its name is Gurthalak. With just an RF version my warrior bounced from 19k dps average to 26k. Still not stellar numbers, especially compared to my pally, but… honestly? How in the hell is one item making that sort of difference? Before getting the thing I was despairing of ever being effective on that toon again, trying everything to get my rotation sorted out, messing with keybinds, anything I could think of. Once I had it, though, all that sort of felt like a waste compared to the gear jump.

Just thought skill was meant to be more important than gear.

I feel you, bro

 

* because it was fun to level once Combat was off the table

** until I looked at their actual performance as opposed to their rotations… summoning and unsummoning pets in combat to get middling dps? maintaining a host of debuffs and procs with different cooldowns for the same? are we meant to take this shit seriously?

Not in the face, concluded

Not too long ago, I ventured an opinion piece about bear levelling, cunningly disguised as a walkthrough of sorts. So, we continue.

Where were you my whole life?

The biggest reason for this post is Maul. I remember stupidly recommending hitting this thing any time clearcasting was up. It’s ridiculous how badly this ability saps your rage. Once you get Lacerate at lvl 66, hit Maul only if you want a free off-GCD at low rage. The feral design team is nothing if not consistent in their insistence on inconveniently placing major rotational abilities.

Not to be confused with Slowpoke

Another big one is Thrash, which somehow shows up at lvl 81, about 50 levels late. Better than never, but worse than actually having a functional AoE rotation for 90% of the game. Oh well.

Bear was the last of the four tanks I’ve played, and honestly I wouldn’t bother if the toon didn’t have two professions that I can’t really afford to level again. It’s clumsy, poorly planned, and levelling as a bear has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I don’t even want to touch mine at max where it’s more or less squared away.

Basically, if you want to play a bear, get a Scroll of Resurrection. That way you might actually still want to when you hit the cap.

Tanks: center of the universe?

Red shirts look better

Remember last week when I was so emo about my paladin’s healing? It was like “bluuuuhhh” and “waaaahhh” and “why can’t I be OP like all the other kids, you promised” but then you threatened to turn this bus right back round baby right round, or maybe that was your mom. One of the two.

Yeah, over that. LFR finally choked out some gear, and with 3k spirit and Heart of Unliving, my mana issues’ sweet run sort of went dash vault to kong to oh cocks I jumped off the goddamn edge of the Burj al Arab. Still, the swan dive at the end there was kinda classy.

With that sorted, the natural order of things was to practise and learn to use my cooldowns because if they were kids I’d be getting a stern talking to from the authorities, involving the consequences of neglect and possibly a date with Justice. Thus, equipping the three pieces of terrible pvp gear that I used to heal my early dungeons, did I step into battlegrounds.

Now, let’s be clear here. You see that eyebrow-raising avatar of careless carnage on the right there? Cover of Indestructible, by Disturbed. Also pretty much exactly how a holy pally feels in BGs. It’s ridiculous. Ladies be all up in my milkshake, like frothing it up and spilling it all over their faces, but it takes more than a squeeze and a shake to get a warrior of the light going weak at the knees.

So yeah. Been quiet around here, but it’s been a fun kinda quiet. One last thing though… my RL seems convinced that I should be Crusader Striking on cd in PvE to build HP. This seems like a waste of time, since I can land an HL in about the same time, use the same amount of mana, and get double to four times the healing. Sounds like something to do in chill phases, not a general part of the healing style. Is this craziness, or should I be spending healing time aggrieving things in their hideously deformed maws?

When everyone’s special

Well hello there

…no-one is.

The NDA for Mists is up, and the deluge has hit. A small, unremarkable point in there: pet battles will a) not show your opponent, and b) record no stats for losses, only wins.

Dafuq am I reading?

Are we really at the point where Blizz believes they have to shield people from the mere concept of failure? Because, while I’ll usually disagree with the elitists decrying how the game is now a coddling mess, this is the first solid sign that I’ve seen that screams yes, it actually is.

Trying to protect people from realising they are terrible when they in fact are? Where’s the impetus for improvement meant to come from? It just makes one want to weep.