In a blinding flash of the obvious, apparenty most folks raid from 8 to 11 pm each day. I blog this for the reason that in Australia with such a wide range of players in our guild we don’t get rolling till 8:30 to 9pm AEDT, and often have to end the raid when we start to get tired around 11pm (I know! 11pm – what a bunch of soft-touches). If you’re raiding a solid 8-11 without delay then you’re a lucky sod and I don’t like you at the moment.

What I’d like is raid members join at 7:30 to 7:45, 15 minutes as a grace period (slackers!), first pull at 8pm, and last wipe ending at 11pm. It gives 3 solid hours of raiding wipes fun. But most folks can’t do that, so what do we do?

• Recruit folks who raid in same core hours, and by extension start to de-proiritise the folks outside these hours. Who likes to be “de-prioritised”? Hmm.
• Accept and be strict on folks who can only come before or after certain hours, thereby trying to force players to attend.
• Run a flexible raid where we swap toon in and out? Frustrating, possibly more fair, and certainly a pain in teh arse.

Again I blog with no answers, just questions; but readers will hopefully feel that at least they are not the only ones who deal with late raiders, bad starts, or all the other joys of organising 25 people to get to a location together. Thank Ragnaros’s burning belly button that its not 40 people like the old days.

Linkage via WoW.com http://www.wow.com/2009/10/22/world-of-warcraft-in-the-nets-traffic-patterns/, yup, those guys never stop.

A useful dps tool, for those who hate to theorycraft with a calculator

Quick post to say go check out the web based dps app called Team Robot WoW Simulator. Easy to use, and quick to config, and if you dig through the rotation and buff settings it might show you how it considers an optimised setup to be configured.

Its neat.

What I found particularly useful is the part in the rotation setup where you can alter the latency on your connection. The default is 150ms, which is ungodly fast to an Australian. I run around 450-600 most times, and can have upward of 800 sometimes.

I used this to test the affect of a highly latent connection on what the maximum dps scores are. As you’d expect the more latency the lower your dps, but what I found really odd was that once I was over 500-600ms latency, the dps really starts to drop a little more.

So figure that the latency is increasing the delay beween actions, and this in turn makes the response on abilities worse. What I didn’t expect was that after about 700ms it seemed that Unholy presence would actually be slightly better than Blood presence for dps. What the hell?

I don’t quite get if this is a quirk in the tool, a real game affect, or just some strange attribute that pops up. You’d think this would have to do with the affect on the global cool down, but not sure that it would work. Anyone heard of this before?

So a Conquest badge can be downgraded to others, but that means they have a 1 to 1 value on the lower ilevel gear, so why would you? Getting a small upgrade from a 213 item that costs tokens that can buy 226 is rough. And sooner or later the patch 3.3 will be released and we’ll see Triumph badges instead of Conquest from heroic runs. The heroic badge gear is basically dead now, and it will become even more dead soon. That lower gear might actually still be usable though, which means you’re spending expensive badges to get lower gear.

For the casuals (like myself) this means that the time I spent grinding out Conquest badges is somewhat wasted when the Triumph badges replace them. I know this is a leg up for raiding, and it also facilitates content for more people – but I think its flawed at the moment.

It does not make total sense to me, as the effort involved in getting to a nice set of 226 gear in many gear locations is not a small task. You really have to work at it and run heroics a lot. Then when the switch to 3.3 happens the casuals go back to running the same content for slightly better gear. Opportune moments will see them in the new content now and then, but nothing changes really. Perhaps they might be well geared enough to then try ToC’s last few bosses, and some of the end of Ulduar. So casuals don’t actually see much in the way of new content, instead they spend longer in the same old runs. Any way you look at it the fast track to upgrades will involve grinding heoric 5 mans, and that content is not even close to new.

There has to be a better way to get more folks into the later content. I know it is not fair to just boost these players up too quickly, as it slaps the more serious players in the face, and sends a bad message. I also know that Blizzard wants us to keep playing, and a prime driver for playing is seeing new places, bosses, content, etc. Its a Catch-22, and I have no 100% solution.

The degree to which this makes sense to you as a player probably relates to where you are in the content. Folks already clearing Uld 25 and ToC 25 probably don’t care what happens to the old heroic runs, except the daily. Folks who don’t care what they run, or are leveling new toons are not affected either. The middle ground is where this takes affect, and they are a very hard area to design a challenge for, especially when everyone else can also make use of any perks/nurfs placed on these mid range players. You can’t offer too much without upsetting everything.

An idea would be if badges are more valuable as they get rarer, then perhaps the items that are purchasable with heroism, should also have a purchase value in the other badges too. In this way a badge of Conquest would buy a few Heroism, getting the lower items faster – and that seems to be the goal here: to get folks with average or low gear to the point where they can compete in the new content. eg, 1 Conquest buys 5 Heroism, 1 Triumph buys 5 Conquest. and so on as they are upgraded (so 1 Tri = 25 Hero, but do you really care if somebody has 25 H-badges quickly when you compare iLevel 213 to 232-245). This way the really old gear gets used quickly, but only for a short period of time, and the grind is still the same for the really nice badge reward items. Sustain the grind at the top end of the badge reward system, but make the lower end faster to gear through.

Consider that we we’re getting badges from 5 mans anyway now, so spending the time to get an item which takes 10-12 runs to get, should not matter if that is any type of badge. Its still a major upgrade for 10-12 runs of a basic instance, and possibly a minor upgrade too, but not to gear that is going to break the system by being devalued, as it is already devalued by the better gear. 

I’m torn between the view that this is making the gear too accessible, and the opinion that this will help reset the playing field.

A while back I’ve had a good few days doing Heroics. Was fun, and I saw some strange stuff in CoS heroic.

a) A great pick-up line if I’ve ever seen one: “My bed is looking pretty good right now.” That NPC is one very cool guy, who whilst under the pressure of a sociopath prince coming to kill him, still finds the time to impress the ladies. Well I’m impressed too.

b) Back before 3.2 you would not see this. Cat dps seems to have taken a big hit. Gen normally pushes far harder. Bring on some fixes for cats in patch 3.3.

Recently arrived and learning whats changed since four years ago. Melbourne has progressed in many ways. New roads, strange places that used to be dead alleys now have great bars, and overall its easy to like this city.

However the property and rental markets are highly competitive, and I could not resist sharing this photo I grabbed while walking home a few days ago.

Modern open plan living with great views?

heh.

The “back-up laptop” is not all I’d hoped or remember. True it is a significant step down from the old MacBook Pro that my old work gave me, sheesh its slow. Was the Internet ever this slow? Celeron 1.4 gighz, 256mb ram, Windows XP.

I’m going mad.

All the damn expasnion news is distracting, and especially irritating as I can’t play at the moment. I can say that “I told you so” about all these guild changes. I knew it was a tad obvious, and if wow is going to stay ahead of the new MMORPG curve, then need more stuff like this. Need more shiny stuff. And I suspect they’re slamming the news at the moment to take momentum away from Aion and Champions Online. Good luck Blizzard, I know at least 10 people who have left wow and are trying either game.

The player base in World of Warcraft is getting tired and wanting new games. Good on them. It makes total sense to me that people would want to not play the same game 2-3 nights a week for several years. Even if people end up playing the same amount of time, the change is healthy.

I’m not sure either of Champions or Aion has longevity to shutdown WoW for good though. Both games don’t have a lot of content as yet (from the blogs and reviews I’ve read – pure speculation). That means that folks might try, play, enjoy these new games, and return to WoW later. Its not like wearing epics will hurt the leveling process from 80-85.

That said – I saw the character creation screens of Aion on Tuesday and the options are off the scale. So are the pc system requiremements, so that game won’t see me any time soon, unless I find an awesome laptop in a trash compactor somewhere (I wonder how many you’d have to dig through?).

Well its been a screamingly busy work + WoW + life week just gone, and as it should be as I’ll be offline for at least a few weeks due to the move. I made my last week a mad-house of H zerg runs, and tried to always say yes to everything. It paid off.

This lead to yesterday’s solid session where I ran almost every H dungeon. This was great fun, but no way in hell I could run 11 instances every day. The idea of running more than 3 n a typical day is a bit of a push. I know that some folks say that the 226 gear is too easy to get, but really you need to be doing a crazy amount of instances every week to make fast progress.

I was in LFG for Obsidian Sanctum all week, and I think its being run less and less. ToC5 and VoA10/25 get a lot of attention, and the 5 mans; but for some reason EoE and OS seem rare. This is disappointing, as these runs are not hard, and the drops in 25 are still ok.

No way I was going to do Naxx again on my Death Knight, there might be a few upgrades there for 25m drops, but its just not worth the hassle of getting 24 other folks to do it. Naxxramas I bid you farewell.

The result of this was a new set of Tier Shoulders for DPS (the Death Knight t9 2 set is nice and I want it!), all the last 226 items I wanted from Conquest, and also enough badges to buy my last piece of Tanking gear at 226, but the rest of the Tank gear I have is so haphazard that I can’t really apply the 226 Helm until I get some better items to fix the Expertise and Hit levels.

Mortigen has never looked better.

In a week or so I’ll be leaving my home of four years, to return to Melbourne. Its a strange time, and I find myself often contemplating the past four years. When we moved here from Melbourne I was very skeptical that any other city would be able to feel as much like a home as Melbourne did. I knew nothing really about Adelaide except it was a “city of churches”.

In retrospect this was fairly stupid, as it was the first time I’d relocated cities in my life and to expect a bad experience will only mean that you find the bad rather than the good. Instead I do feel like I live here, and am a little sad to go.

It has been wonderful.

1. I’m a drooling maniac when it comes to WoW, particularly doing dps. I like it. Love it. Wants it. Tanking is awesome too, but not dps by half.
2. No way in hell I’ll play WoW (or any game) when I’ve a perfect partner at home wanting to head out and do stuff. While she’s studying or working though…
3. I don’t believe anyone is really in the game for anyone except themselves, or very close friends. ie. If a guild talks about being a Family, they better be folks that you have met and know in real life, or been playing with for a very long time. Otherwise your family vibe is a bit of a stretch.
4. I’m a loot whore. So is everyone else.
5. I will never have enough gold, even if I had max gold I’d spend it on something.
6. Healers are almost always praiseworthy, as they’re doing something I don’t like doing.
7. Gear will always date, and mean nothing 1 year later. Its like that link from Terminator “in 100 years who is going to care?”.
8. You think your Alt is way cooler than I do.
9. I honestly don’t care much for WoW RP. I respect it, but can’t get it to click in my head.
10. PvP still feels like a disorganised mess to me, and making PvE content do PvP is a reason to stop. Not a big reason, but its plain silly.
11. I think your vanity pet is vain.