2c – Instance 299 interview with Russell Brower

Just a 2c review – Episode 299 which is an interview with Russell Brower is excellent. If you like game/media production lore, or music production it is especially interesting. Kudos!

Thoughts from 5.1 patch notes

Some odd stuff:

Spirit of Harmony can now be purchased for 600 Conquest Points at the Conquest Quartermaster.

Can I convert the other way please? Please? And to VPs not Conquest? That would be bloody wonderful. 1x SoH granting 600 VP would be like Christmas. I know, dream on.

Portal Shards grow into consumable items which can be used to open a portal from Sunsong Ranch to a major faction city.

That’s handy. Although I’d say just buy yourself the Stormwind cloak and use it to teleport. Less farming and it never runs out.

A search bar has been added to the mount section of the Mount and Pet Journal. The Mount and Pet Journal remembers which tab you were last using.

Good. It needed it.

Banquet of the Steamer and Great Banquet of the Steamer now correctly provide Intellect to damage based casting classes. Healers will continue to gain Spirit from these foods.

This will make a huge amount of raiders happy. Bravo.

 

 

Shieldwall VP rewards

The Shieldwall rewards are live, and are as follows (5.1 patch notes):

• 458 trinket for approx 100 gold as a starter reward,
• a 496 ring at Honored, costing 1250 VP,
• a 496 Belt, Boots, and Trinket at Revered, costing 1750 each,
• Exalted gets you a new flying mount.

The starter reward is likely to go to an offset, as most raiders have better in main at the very least. Despite the undertone of my last post, this gear is welcome, and will make the dailies for the other factions a secondary consideration.

Getting to Revered will be very rewarding for raiders as 496 gear is far better than MV gear, and good for HoF. The honored Ring also means that you should skip the other Valor rings now if you have not purchased them, by comparison this is better – because it can be upgraded with more VPs to 504 gear level.

There are five dailies to do each day, each granting +250 reputation, 5 VPs, and 2 Lesser Charms of Good Fortune.

You will need 6500 Valor points to buy all the gear for one spec, and will also need to have unlocked the various Reps. That is 1300 daily quests performed if this is done by dailies, so I hope everyone has a realistic impression of how long these will take to get, and also how important a 496 ilevel is compared to some raiders still using 476 gear. I think a raider who is missing key items such as Boots, Belt, Rings, or a Trinket should be doing these dailies before they raid – the upgrade is guaranteed and a powerful change.

Or 13,000 VPs if you wish to have gear for both specs which might be used in raiding.

Yet the VP rewards for activities are apparently as desired and working as intended? Bullshit. Only working as intended by people who don’t play the game. I’m nudging closer to giving this Valor treadmill away for good.

ps. Wasn’t operation shieldwall something in Mass Effect, or by Bioware? Have we run out of names for armies fighting?

pps. If the end boss of the Tier is the Sha of Fear, does that mean this is the War on Fear? How did the war on Terror go?

wow p5.1 Valor Grinding Update by Ask Mr. Robot

You PvE folks don’t need more gear drops, just update the gear you have with Valor and Justice! Yay. Grinding instances and daily quests is not mandatory.

Mr Robot has an excellent summary with examples of how and how gear will soon be able to be upgrades with grind-able points. In Patch 5.1 for WoW you’ll get a +8 item level boost on any gear, costing 1500 points. That is pretty neat for a raider who is missing a key upgrade due to poor luck. It offers an alternative which was not available.

I have a niggling feeling though that it will make capping Valor/Justice each week so much more important. It was already very desirable, but now it feels even closer to a mandatory requirement.

Q. Where do you get the points?

A. Same places – boss kills, instances, and doing daily quests. Grinding instances and daily quests is not mandatory.

Q. Do we get more, or are the scales adjusted?

A. Nope, all is good in the ratios so I’m told. 25 points per boss kill is apparently what is needed.

Raiding and LFR offer between 40-50% max of the Valor, assuming that you are doing full clears. Not many guilds are doing full clears – so many raiders are not even close to max before they start doing Instances and daily quests.

Grinding instances and daily quests is not mandatory.

Q. Should I do progression, with wipes, long effort, etc or do Valor farming?

A. Both. You need to play more, or play more efficiently, or whatever – this is all about being given expanded options. Grinding instances and daily quests is not mandatory.

Q. How could the reward improve or valor system improve?

A. How about:

• Increase the reward from the instances from 80 VP first and 40 every run afterward to 100 and 60 each extra run. Make it so more people run instances to get their Valor – it can’t hurt. It still makes it a hard slog to cap. Increasing the JP reward is a good idea too.
• Reward both Valor and Justice from Scenarios, unless they are intended to be done once and then forgotten.
• Reward more from boss kills in PvE, from 25 to 40-45. This means that it is still very unlikely that a character will cap valor just from PvE clearing.
• Reward daily quest reward from 5 VP to 10 or 15 VP. This is for fools like me who are earning valor through daily quests a lot and are really bored with it.
• The bonus for valor capping a character changes so that instead of one character getting to 1000 valor and the buff kicking in, the 1000 can be gained on any set of characters, then all get more. This means more people are using alts – which would be their choice.

Remember: Grinding instances and daily quests is not mandatory. Are you happy citizen?

Refs:

•  World of Warcraft Patch 5.1 – Valor Upgrades | Ask Mr. Robot’s Blog.
• Wow Forum post discussing the grind of Valor being too long

Numerious daily quests yesterday

Yesterday I did a heap of dailies in Warcraft – All the Golden Lotus, Klaxxi, Tillers, Shado-Pan, Fishing, Archaeology, and the {dragon flying mount guys}. It took the better part of my time online, and was not so bad. It was not my objective to do that many, but there queue times for 5 mans were long, and it worked out that way.

It didn’t suck as much as I thought it might. I think knowing that the task ahead was to grind that many is probably a big part of what puts me off, as thinking about tomorrow I have no intention of doing that many.

I raise this as there is flack about daily quests through out the wow community, and I’m on the fence on the overall issue. Pondering this I thought:

• I like that there is no limit to the amount you can do, even if that means going back and doing dailies from old expansions. It’s your time, do whatever you like.
• I dislike that I’m doing it for 5 valor points a quest. It seems too low.
• I like that we get the coin-thingy which eventually allow extra loot rolls.
• I dislike the gated release of Shado-pan and the other guys at Revered, as I think the idea is OK lore wise, but it should have been opened at honored. Getting to that faction sooner would have made a world of difference to my level of boredom in daily quests.
• I dislike that the non-valor Rep rewards are all but useless compared to crafted gear, drops, and easily available alternatives. Essentially most of the rewards are not usable.
• Soon (patch 5.1?) the Justice points will upgrade gear, as will the valor. Thankfully that will help me a lot, but I cannot see that as a justification for the low point rewards.
• Players who play every day will get capped quickly, but then those players will get capped quickly anyway – so we have a barrier in place for the grinders who play daily, which also applied to the more casuals. I see both sides of this – limiting the grind rate help stretch content, but that also frustrates players. Tough call.
• If I was given a choice there would be some way to enhance the rep gain per week. Perhaps a tabard as implemented in previous expansions is not “right”, but the grind to Exalted feels wrong at the moment too.
• Daily quests are not “fun” enough by themselves to keep playing, I do them because of the valor and rep reward. That is a slightly depressing thing, and I wonder how much I will feel like playing if I ever get the required factions to Exalted.

I got a heap of valor points from the many quests, and thankfully some gold which helps cover the raiding costs and flippant purchases (like extra node detection goggles for my gathering alt). I also skipped a few of the quests available which only rewarded rep and gold with Vanity Factions – those factions that have no PvE advantage, but have mounts and tabards. Perhaps I should have included them for the sake of being a completionist, but honestly I don’t care for achievement points.

As a method of gearing my character a valor grind via daily quests is the longest and most banal method I can think of. Its an utterly poor way to garner gear – but casuals have very few other choices. So tomorrow is more – an unless I’m lucky enough to see a Sha of Anger group, it’ll be that until the cows come home.

As an aside – the Lore for many of the daily quests feels like things that an apprentice or scrub could do. Is this really the tasks that need the attention of a person who vanquished Deathwing, The Lich King, and all the other old gods? It’s an old snark, but still relevant when you pick-up your eleventh flower. The quest givers in Pandaria are no more or less lazy then elsewhere – asking for the dull tasks to be done by those who have something to prove.

Perhaps one day many expansions from now my character can return to Pandaria and visit farmer Yoon, and we’ll laugh as how much of his work I did for him. For now that guy pisses me off. Happy killing.

Head Down Bump Up

I’m DHBU at the moment covering for one of my PMs who is on two weeks leave, and my wife started working again this week, and all sorts of real life junk…which gets in the way of a good gaming session.

In Warcraft the absolute highlight of the month so far was last night getting a new sword upgrade (finally) from Elegon, which replaced my crappy item level 463 weapon – Starshatter. It’s a great looking toy. It might get transmogged to an older style Death Knight weapon soon, as they look even better.

Screenshots and happy rants will follow soon, for now though – I’m a happy lad.

I cannot help but love an almost 1200 raw dps upgrade, plus the additional stats.

Happy Killing.

Random in Boss fights?

A good find about how good or bad it is for encounters in PvE to be heavily or lightly scripted, which is interesting given how much the degree of “random” affects fun.

Tobold wrote:

In my opinion there is too little randomization in MMORPGs. They are nearly totally deterministic. Before combat even starts you know what the monster will do, and what keys to press in which order to optimally defeat it. Thus combat involves no thinking, only execution.

As Craig Stern says, the solution is not making the result of button presses unpredictable, but to make the opponent unpredictable, or the starting situation. That is why card games work: The cards you draw are random, but what you can do with them is not. And in a MMORPG the monsters could be made more unpredictable as well. Why do people need to know in advance what the boss mob is going to do after X minutes to beat him?

posted by Tobold Stoutfoot at 8:54 AM on Nov 18, 2012

To be fair, its better to read the entire post and linked articles.

Would introducing more randomness be good?

I think it would be terrible – consider that if you really want to make the bosses challenging then you make them more intelligent…..say they don’t have a threat table anymore, they just crush anyone who tries casts a heal.

Same issue in pen and paper – for some reason (story) the big bad orc (high CR monster) wails on the fighter, not the cleric.

I can see the point about execution and predetermined strategies removing “creative” aspects, but really the 4th wall is so present in an MMO that it is just differing personal perspectives for how far the slider between real and scripted the entire game is. I also think that some random is ok, but too much will be very disruptive to the players, as their outcome for victory is too much outside their control.

The card game in Tobold’s example is not a good match to the game style events in an MMO, given how different the perspective is, but does help my point: who likes playing solitaire when the game cannot be won?

Trial of the Champion had the pvp based fight which was excellent, but it still came down to a set of abilities, and a priority based kill order. It was also hated by a few raiders.

Another random fight was Lord Ryolyth in Firelands – who was basically impossible if the randomness didn’t go your way. That is a shitty way to spend an evening.

Go have a read as the discussion on both Tobolds and Craig’s blog are good stuff. Happy Killing.

SC2 HotS in when, wait what?

I had three thoughts when I read that Heart of the Swarm is due mid march 2013…

1 – That’s like 7 months away…oh shit! It’s almost December.

2 – I wonder if SC2 is any good?

3 – Who am I kidding, I have dailies to do.

Happy killing.

Is Wrathion an evil mongrel?

That funny son-of-a-black-dragon named Wrathion has a new quest in a future patch, to continue the bump and grind of assembling a Legendary item. The quest is called “Test of Valor” and requires the collection of 6000 valor points. So it’s not important if he’s evil in a good vs evil way, more in terms of if he’s the sadistic expression of “Love that Valor” grind which Mists has brought us.

It is not clear if the counter for 6000 starts when the quest is accepted, or is retroactive. I’d suggest that making it retroactive is poor for three reasons:

1. getting a Legendary should be hard. 6 weeks work is nothing compared to the years of work to get early Legendary items like Sulfuron and Thunderfury. Yes it should be as hard as it was.
2. getting 6000 valor will count in the next expansion as well as this one. Meaning that from start it does not matter what you do to earn them, its just a questline for a particularly challenging set of content.
3. if it is retroactive then I have 6000 valor from ages ago when valor points were first introduced, considering some isolated mechanic which counts from one day, but ignores others makes the coding harder.

So make it count from the time the quest is accepted, and make it reset if the quest is dropped. The idea that this might upset people upsets me. I’ll say something rude and elitist which is hopefully out of character for me: play another game if six weeks work is too hard for a legendary item.

There is a thread on the official forms saying farewell to WoW due to the Valor grind. While I think the grind itself around gearing with Valor is poor in Pandaria, I’m all for the Legendary being brutally punishing, the harder they are the better.

Thoughts? Too harsh?

Faction reps gaining slowly

A quick toon update on Reputations in progress for Mortigen my Death Knight, making me think that daily quests do have a reward, but by golly that does not make them entertaining.

• Black Prince now Honored. Not a big deal without the drops needed from raid bosses, which are darn rare and most of what I need now coming from Heart of Fear.
• Golden Lotus now Revered, so I can save that little more valor and might soon have some upgraded epic Shoulders. Yay. Anyone got some spare Valor? Also means I can unlock the Shadow Pan to start more quests. And a step closer to the epic quest reward too.
• Klaxxi now Revered, also not a big deal due to the Valor requirement on rewards. I suppose it is one step closer to Exalted and a free 487 epic item. Yippee. Grind.
• Tillers now totally beyond my comprehension of which idiot farmer likes me, and which are snarky. I do not understand why Farmer Yoon (or whatever his name is) actually needs rep or help. What he really needs and actually has is a host of available players to be slaves on his farm while he stands idle beside the hut watching. That shovel pusher is lucky he is not a yellow-mob, because I’d be killing him every week. Yes, I am exalted which is why these turkeys get the biggest rant.
• I also do not understand how to get Cooking leveled quickly. All my non-“Way-of-the” cooking is gray.
• Anglers have had a brief look in, but fishing is no more compelling than before, which means that it’ll be one of the last things I do each week if I have the time.
• Archaeology is after fishing/Anglers. Yawn.

So I keep doing Golden Lotus and Klaxxi for the Exalted quest chain, garnering Valor to buy the Shoulders, then add Shadow Pan into the mix instead of Tillers so that the epic Helm will one day be something available too.

It’s nice to have an upgrade path. See you online.

dps rankings for pve raiding

Saw the wowinsider post about dps performance in raids, 10 man through LFR to 25 man Heroic. The disparity (based upon raidbot) between Unholy vs Frost Death Knights is wider than I thought, especially when you show the data given an average, and the Unholy is below average; approx 10-20% difference based upon ideal scenarios, depending on what style of raid you are playing in. Bugger.

Nobody likes being below average. 🙂 I’ll have to rectify my spec choice asap. 10% might translate doing ~12.5% of the dps in a fight into ~13%, which could also be considered a slightly faster transition between boss phases in most fights. That is a key factor in killing bosses successfully!

What is disparaging is that some classes-specs are not suffering a 10% gap, they’re in the 22-35% below average range! Some BM Hunter, Frost mages, and one Rogue spec are horrid, and Monks are not far behind them. By comparison a DK being 10% shy of average is doing OK. Now in contrast Rogues and Mages have a spec each that can do well, so all is not lost. Afflic Warlocks, Fire Mages and Shadow Priests should be lighting up the dps charts.

What should this type of information lead to?

Perhaps it should create awareness of the potential to improve by switching play styles amongst characters, and it should certainly serve as some guide for who to take to a raid. Taking a Mage who is not spec’ed into Fire is not doing the raid any favours (that is not to say don’t bring the player, et al – just be aware).

It should not be taken as an excuse to whine about balance and favoritism, there is enough of that already. As always theory crafting, especially via graphs should always be taken with a grain of salt. Happy killing.

Quicktip – Use wowprogress to look for guild hoppers

WoW Progress tells you a lot about a player, when it can get reasonable data. It will show you how many guilds they have been in, which might give an indication of their character.

When you have players come and go through guilds which affects the balance, spotting those players who are always entering and leaving on whims is handy so that they never enter in the first place. Apart from checking The Armory and other tools to check their character’s current setup, the character history can help.

A smattering of blue footprints

Here are a few of the blue posts recently, showing what is topical out there for Warcraft at the moment.

A few folks don’t like to wait for the Cinder Kitten pet, and there is the odd rant about it. The devs move forward their plan to do another fund raising venture because of the hurricane and folks get angry. A brilliant example of first world problems.

The extra rolls allowed from the coins could become satchels akin to the holiday boss specials, as a way to offer a wider spread of options, and solve some issues.

Zarhym – “The satchel is actually a point of reference for what we’re thinking.”

Posting about the game being World-of-Panda-Daily-Quest gets a locked thread, and a blue with a sense of humour. Nakatoir‘s nice touch.

And a few threads about the Brawlers Guild, including the note that there is no world first or realm first. One commenter wrote particularly well about their distake for the buying of invites from the Black Market AH:

Nessaja – “You may not have intended this to be something big, but it’s obviously extremely popular and anticipated content, and your unwillingness to budge from your wealth-centered content delivery mechanism is both disappointing and wholly unfair to the vast majority of your paying customers.”

BluePost – “After reaching a certain rank in the Brawler’s Guild, each of the new members can eventually earn one new invitation of their own to pass out to someone else on the same realm, so the Brawler’s Guilds on each realm should get progressively larger and larger over time. We may also investigate alternate methods of acquiring invitations or making them more plentiful”

Ream Maintenance for Tuesday 13 Nov starts typical time, and lasts 6 hours.

Lastly unrelated to blue trackers but found via a blue link – a guy who is building Diablo 3 weapons (website). Incredible. Same guy has build Warhammer 40k bolters too.

Related articles

• Blizzard Talks about Brawler’s Guild (wow.joystiq.com)
• A thought about the Brawlers Guild (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• Brawler’s Guild: There must be another way (wow.joystiq.com)

A few nice things like kills, achievements, and factions

A few nice things happened in the past few days; so this post is a long-ish one.

Firstly I was able to join the raiders for our Guild first Elegon kill – booyah! That is a poor fight to be melee but we did it with a few characters playing up close and personal.

The tricks in the fight are plentiful, mainly based upon how to manage the stacks of the damage debuff so that you (a) increase your own damage to Elegon, (b) don’t take too much regular “pulse” damage, (c) don’t die when the large elemental style adds explode on death, and (d) gathering the sparky-adds in the third stage.

Now we head off to the Emperor fight, which is even worse for melee – with the “fun” mechanic where you watch which way the animation goes to dodge, and need full raid awareness, and luck, and manage the adds. I’d rather be doing many other things – grumble.

I finally gained Exalted with the Tillers (yippee), and very underwhelmed with the rewards. As rewards there is a tabard, a Yak, a few cooking recipes, and a basically useless knife. I didn’t expect the earth, but the rewards along the lines of automating the farming (like the bug sprayer and watering system) would have been good, or reducing the instances where we need to perform maintenance on crops?

Like what types of things you ask?

An actual scarecrow (not the toy), which reduces the chance that you get the birds, or rat-thingy infestation. Or anything which makes doing the dailies a little faster, now that the rep is at maximum.

I still have to get each bloody NPC’s individual rep to maximum so not out of the woods yet. Overall I’d like Farmer Yoon to actually be animated around the farm doing things…like farming. It actually looks like I did a lot of the farming and he just stood there. That lazy son of a bitch owes me more than a “thanks pal!”. If he walked around and did things it would go a long way to making it feel like we both did the work.

Is there a faction or way I can now get back down to Hated or At War so I can kill him? Do the Mogu need a champion?

I also happened to get the achievement Chef de Cuisine for 10 points when learning the 2x cooking recipes from the Tillers, indicating 160 recipes known. I don’t like cooking and these two additional recipes are all but useless. Meh, but yay +10 points!

Upgrades via Valor and Justice points soon – interesting news.

Some information via MMO Champion on how the items will be upgraded in patch 5.1. Basically PvE players get the option to use Justice to increase lower level gear by about 8 levels (463 to 471), and Valor gets two steps of 4 levels each costing 750 Valor per increase (489 to 493) and then (493 to 497).

As an offering its not bad – perhaps… I don’t have a sense yet if all gear will have this option, or if it will be only selectable items. If the items themselves are rare, then I can’t say much positive about this offer, as it will do nothing to stop luck being a major factor in improving gear. The point seems to be that effort can get a reward which is absolute. It would give reasons for the daily quests rewarding Valor, as it would have a permanent and tangible use beyond the initial purchase.

Related articles

• Random stuff from MMO Champ and Blue Posts
• A thought about the Brawlers Guild

A thought about the Brawlers Guild

Update from patch notes v5.1:

Entry into the brawler’s guild is by invitation only.  Invitations can be found on the black market auction house, by invitation from somebody within the guild, and occasionally as drops from certain Horde and Alliance NPCs.

Reaction: Good change. Fair call.

I’ve been seeing reactions to the Brawler’s Guild, and thought I’s share my reaction.

If you’re not familiar with the idea – the Brawlers Guild will be a solo fight arena for characters against a random boss in a fit-pit style. The character will slog it out, demonstrating how bad ass they are. Bosses will have powers that require strategy, experience, and use of abilities. Good concept, implemented with a Fight Club spin.

The Brawler’s Guild is:

• No mechanical in-game rewards/advantage – which means it is basically not compulsory for focused PvE and PvP players.
• It grants achievements – which will appeal to completion-junkies. That’s good too, an appeal without a draw back is good.
• Once started the player must wait their turn to fight, watching others. One fight at a time (?). This makes the system hard to imagine when everyone has an invite and are all interested, but a short stacked set of queues makes sense. No biggie here if the loading is handled well.
• The invites will initially be offered through the Black market Auction House. This means that the first players to do this will be those who are mad keen and also wealthy enough to buy in. Early adopters with large bankrolls.

The basic concept is new to WoW where the achievements of the individual were typically not openly on display to others in a dedicated way. Love it or hate it, this will allow those participants who like glory to get it. To have a reason they can demonstrate to themselves and others which says they are bad-arses. I think most players want their characters to be tough, and this impression of how mean and hardy the top players are matches well with the lore and feel of the Fight Club ethos. It is a nice fit.

Tyler Durden: “Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!”

Rewards wise – the BG gives only the achievements and kudos for being a tough son of a bitch – which is an interesting choice, and a choice which should be taken into consideration when talking about the impact and style of the implementation in game.

No rewards…get it. None. You fight because this is what you love doing, or have to do, or can’t stop doing. It is a bold statement when you think about it outside a game, and an even bolder risk to make for a company to develop around – if nobody uses it then it could demonstrate that the fight is not why we play. Why do we fight? Indeed.

Brawlers Guild might actually be a very clever statement, and a very sharp punch in the guts to the players who play to improve their gear/stats/whatever. Here is a facility where the fight itself is almost the only reward.

I love this idea, as it is a brave thing to do. In a game where time is limited for a lot of players asking us to fight for the joy of fighting is offering a new pathway in the game. Here is where you demonstrate how totally awesome you are, yet gain no trinket or shiny bauble.

Gearing Quick Tip – Ghost Iron Dragonling

The trinket Ghost Iron Dragonling is one of the best ways to get a character’s gear improved quickly. It is generally cheap and available, and offers a highly customisable a item for your Trinket slot; which is a gear slot where it can be hard to get upgrades.

All toons can use these for each gear-set spec, as they are BoE and unique equipped.

If you’re not using a item level 450 trinket yet, go grab one of these. I’ll cost anywhere from 100g to 280g-ish to grab, plus some change for the Engineering sockets. If you know an Engineer it is almost insultingly cheap to craft.

Each of the three sockets adds +600 in a secondary of your choice, adjustable just like a gem slot. So all you need to do is look up the stat weighting for your current spec choice and add a socket for each of the top three.

• Flashing Tinker’s Gear 600 Parry Rating
• Fractured Tinker’s Gear 600 Mastery Rating
• Precise Tinker’s Gear 600 Expertise Rating
• Quick Tinker’s Gear 600 Haste Rating
• Rigid Tinker’s Gear 600 Hit Rating
• Smooth Tinker’s Gear 600 Critical Strike Rating
• Sparkling Tinker’s Gear 600 Spirit
• Subtle Tinker’s Gear 600 Dodge Rating

A nice side affect is the mini-pet that frequently gets summoned to help you fight. The dragonling does not inflict much damage (a frontal cone instantly inflicting 3750 to 6250 nature damage), but a good animation. It is great for multi-mob packs when farming drops as a Tank.

Outstanding post on Bullying by Stubborn

Stubborn has written an outstanding post on Bullying. As part of the anti-asshat week movement and the posts on player and guildie behaviour in World of Warcraft – this one is very good. Read it if you have any interest in the topic, especially where an explanation of the typical bully paradigm is different in an online game.

And a great image of David and Goliath by Themico, who I hope does not mind me using this.

Flowchart – Are you a Raider?

Those who raid seriously are sometimes a little extreme in views, and those who don’t raid with passion can sometimes not understand the devotion and effort it takes. Thus I seek to insult a wide cross-section of the community with the “Are you a Raider?” flowchart.

Its been done before, likely better elsewhere too. However this post was written more as therapy for me in terms of dealing with that last decision point before the final answer, than actually seeking to be innovative or compassionate when thinking about raids. If you take a look you’ll see that the criteria I’ve suggested are really very open and far “less strict” than many raiding guilds. That’s just my 2c perspective.

I get miffed when a player has a sense of entitlement beyond the rules well established and what is reasonable – so I wasted a few minutes of therapy crafting this sheet so I can always keep myself in check when it comes to getting raid ready, and then staying raid ready.

Some days I’m not a raider by this measure, and that can be OK in isolation. It’s not OK when it’s to the detriment of others. eg. I’m still using Unholy for Death Knight dps when Frost 2H or dual wield is technically higher. My reason is that I grok Unholy far more, and the difference is slight. That said, I’m switching within a week or so, or overnight if I get another 1-handed weapon of item level 463. Excuses, excuses.

This post was just going to be a pic of the flowchart, but I’m mid-rant now so here is some other stuff I left out:

• An alt spec geared up as well as main spec. You’re not “geared” until you have two viable roles, or two modes for the pure dps classes who sometimes suffer due to spec choice.
• Actually understanding why your stats of priority are the way they are, and what your soft caps and hard caps are. This includes making an intelligent and defensible choice when it comes to things like Mitigation vs Avoidance for tanks, etc.
• Turn up on time, and take your bio breaks when everyone else does.
• Raid awareness and no fire standing (google them, its faster)
• Do research. Be willing to use improvement advice websites like Mr Robot or others.
• Be humble about being right.
• Don’t be a greedy gear hound.

In our guild only the Raid Leader gets to hop from the first box to the last box, and that person would get vilified socially if they skipped over any checklists anyway.

Happy raiding.

Cinder Kitten Pet go to charity

The Cinder Kitten pet (nom nom nom) is the most recent little gem being sold as a vanity item in the wow store. It’s cute, grants no mechanical advantage, the proceeds go to charity (Red Cross), and is high res entertainment.

More power to all involved I say!

Will I buy one? Probably not, but I love that these are around for the folks who like pets, and also that Blizzard-Acti keep the charity spirit alive.

If you want to cry about the fall of humanity have a read in the Ref link below – some of the comments really are made by the lowest scum our poor dilapidated race has to offer. No good deed goes unpunished.

Ref: Cinder Kitten pet sales to benefit Hurricane Sandy relief charity.

Really farming Motes of Harmony

I wrote a post a while back about farming for Motes of Harmony, and the one thing which really gives fantastic return is the Tiller’s Farm. Its a safe 10-12 (or more) motes a day if that is all you did. And that effort takes about 15-30 minutes max. Sheesh, if you’re not doing it – get on it.

Granted you need the rep to unlock the seeds, and that takes some grinding. However these dailies grant cash and side rewards, with motes on top. It really feels like something that the game got almost perfect in Mists of Pandaria.

With a slow steady effort even a slow player can get a fair reward for time spent. Regular readers and followers of all the news will know this, but the impact of 10 free motes per day is a huge potential source for new gear, or even money if you are happy to craft gear to sell. The seeds are cheap, and you are in effect paying for the effort. Players with alchemists are doubly blessed due to the metal transmutes too.

Happy Farming, I mean killing