It's hard.

To be fair.

Or rather, it's hard to try to be fair and not an unreasonable bitchmonster.

Wild Hunt was initially a 20/40% extra AP/Stam shared with your pet. I thought it was gonna be a percentile increase of the percentile scaling, and it sounded cool to me. Turns out that it was an additive to the percentile scaling. From 22% AP and 30% stam to 62% ap and 70% stam.

Clearly this was out of whack; my pet AP went from 1500ish to 3300 or so, and pet hp went up by around 5k. I wasn't dim enough to think this would go live.

But nevertheless, I was disappointed when it got not only fixed, but nerfed, too. Now it is 10/20% percentile increase to the scaling, so an extra 4.5%ish ap and 6% stamina scaling. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but if I hadn't had a taste of sheer ridiculousness on the PTR, it would really feel so much sweeter.

Irrationality can be a bitch.

Six Weeks.

Really, that's a while. Partially, I got absorbed in the game - probably a positive thing considering the topic of the blog - and partially, I've been playing my paladin alt due to lack of healer shortage in the guild. Now, however, I'm back to playing my hunter, we've finally cleared Naxx25 due to having 25 able people, and I'm happy.

The hotfix to the BM nerf made the spec tolerable again; I can handle not being #1 all the time atm when I know there's a buff slated for 3.1. Only just.

I've nothing more to purchase for honor, so there's little to do on that front too. The result? A new game. A money game.

The Greedy Goblin set me on the path to having fun with profiting from laziness, stupidity, or just situational lack of time, and so I started scanning the auction house, making deals with a friend who's already keeping tabs on a few item markets, and generally profiting a great deal even just from buying mats, crafting stuff, and posting it.

On a sidenote, I guess the blog desc needs updating; My dps breakdown shows far less than 30% steady shot in light of the BM changes.

On Good Players

So, a bit back, Deathcoil wrote a post about what makes a "good" player, and challenged other people to give their views. Naturally, this being vague and a huge issue, I have to jump on it.

Let me first say, there are good players, and there are players I'd like to play with. Most of the traits discussed by the topic starter are traits I'd love for people that I surround myself with to share - and mostly that's the case, luckily. People who are over themselves, and sensible, yes. I can't write a much better post than Jaramon at DC did, really, about good people.

Note the last word. These are good people.

Good players, on the other hand, are a different thing, if you ask me. For sure, all the things that make a good person comes in handy to make a good player, but all the same, in no particular order, here's how I envision a good player;

* Get into character.
No, not talking about RP here. I'm talking about leaving drama, physical distractions and personal issues aside. For sure, RL has priority over WoW in most people on a planning basis, but if you sit there grumbling over an insulting remark another raidmember made, you're doing it wrong. If you're munching cheetos while playing, that too takes your mind off the game.

* Know your buttons.
I don't care what you keybind and what you don't; if you can get the job done with clicking then that's fine. What's important is that you know what skill goes where, when. These are few words on a big thing, but they're only part of the puzzle. Know when to use which heal, mitigation/tps button and cd, and which dps rotation to use.

* Know your numbers.
If you think mp5 is something you want to gem for at a high priority as a holy paladin, you don't know your numbers. If your warrior uses 32 ap gems, you don't know your numbers. Numbers dictate your dps, hps or tps output, along with your rotation where applicable. This is how you convert button mashing to effect, and can make all the difference.
Spec falls under this, too. Know why you spec the way you do, too, and be ready to defend it. If you cannot, you need to reconsider it.

* Know how to move.
I am tempted to say this may be the most important one. This is about more than doing the safety dance on Heigan. This is not about avoiding the flame wall because you know the encounter - anyone can do that - but because you have that rare blessing called situational awareness. Keep one eye on the buttons, timers and numbers, but keep the other one on your surroundings, and chant "Don't stand in the fire" to yourself.


Of course, someone who does all of this, a proper geared/gemmed/chanted/specced player who never falls prey to encounter mechanics while expertly executing his job, well, is a highly theoretical being. Nevertheless, this is what I aspire to.

Or so I say. And like to think. Today saw me taking my woefully undergeared holy paladin into Naxx while eating pizza and talking crap with the other healer.


Other posts on this subject;

Pink Pigtail discusses the subject of skill more intimately.
Byaghro talks about memorable and above-average players.
Moonfire focuses more on the social aspect.

These two latter posts here focus more on good people, in my opinion and definition, but good reads nevertheless.

Arena for All?

Anyone who obsessively monitors bluetracker like me will remember one of the lead devs - Kalgan, was it? - responding to yet another whine about arena play being "required" to play WoW. His words were something to the effect of "Losing 10 games a week won't hurt you".

I apologize for the vagueness there, but I'm going to base this post on that memory, on the fact that WoW is a casual player's game to a greater extent than most other MMO's, and on the manner in which they encourage players to participate in all aspects of the game.


Arena rating is zero sum, "mostly". 1500 rating is the average until people start abandoning sub-average teams and create fresh teams to increase the average. I'm not gonna open the can of worms that is discussing the word "casual", instead I'll deal with majority and minority.

Majority. As in most players with rating below 1615, in this case. There's gonna be quite a damn while until average rating surpasses 1615. The majority of the WoW player base will be below 1615 - how many is impossible to tell without proper demographics at hand, so I won't use numbers.

The majority of people, once they buy their savage gladiator sets, will have nothing to spend their arena points on. This is assuming they did not buy them for emblems early on, and did not grind them for pure honor*.
After getting your 1525 honor points, the total needed for the set, a mere six weeks even for a below-par player getting his ten matches a week, you need 1615 rating to get anything out of your arena points.

There were savage gladiator-level weapons in the beta, from what I hear - the items certainly exist - but they were taken out. Heck, there aren't even hateful weapons in-game at the moment.


I want to understand this situation. A few of theories.

1. Blizzard wants to ensure that "grinding a little honor" isn't a substitute for doing PvE alltogether, like the situation with S2 weapons in S4 matching or eclipsing early dungeon and raid loot.

I can sympathize with this, as I agree with the intent. The problem remains; that there is no motivation whatsoever for the majority of players in full savage gear to do any arena.

2. Blizzard wants to reward only the truly hardcore with the good stuff.

Which is of course nice, except it clashes with the concept of WoW being casual friendly. I am not advocating giving casuals everything for free etc etc, but when, as already stated, the majority of the players will be locked out from even getting to use their arena points on anything, something is off.

Even if everyone suddenly became super skilled ninjas, only a select minority would have access to spending their points on upgrades. No real way around this I guess, as the system can't recognize who's good, like PvE does, but only who's best.


Now that's an awful lot of whine, so let's lighten it up a bit. I realize these things are useless, but by jove, it's fun! Let's move to solutions.

* Introduce Hateful-level honor bits for arena points + honor points like the savage pieces.

Most of the casual PvP'ers I know, aka the lower rated ones, are low rated partially because of gear, because they don't like the idea of spending multiple hours in a BG for each new piece of pvp gear purchaseable for honor. If you could buy the no-rating-required pieces for a fifth of the honor + a sizeable amount of arena points, that'd give further arena even at low rating a point.

* Add the savage weapons and/or offer zero-rating requirement versions of the hateful chest, pants and gloves, possibly with higher arena point cost.

The savage weapons might pose a problem what with them being ilvl 200 blues, but then again, they do have a suboptimal stat allocation for PvE. The second part here, I must admit I like. It gives higher rated players easy access to cheap stepping-stone epics, and lower rated players can grind their way to it. Deadly remains reserved for the elite, shoulders and head are still hard to get.


One final mention here is VoA and Emblems.

Raiders doing normal raids get an alternate route into the Savage sets. This has low impact, saving them some effort, but inevitably, anyone can grind their way to that anyways.

Raiders doing heroic raids plus normal VoA get an alternate route into the Hateful sets. These sets have 1615-1775 rating requirement. All the same, they're the penultimate set, and you could argue that in the case of the heroic badges, you make a real sacrifice in prioritizing it over PvE upgrades. That said, those pieces are the highest rating required ones. VoA 10 requires minimal effort and is a weekly chance for gear others work hard for.

Raiders doing VoA heroic get a shot at deadly chest/legs/gloves. This, like VoA 10, takes minimal effort with a pug, and gives you gear that, at worst, requires 1970 rating.

Doing some minor PvE/PvP crossover to make it easier for people to do both, without having to dedicate their entire lives to WoW is a good idea. I liked the resi rings in SSC, and PvP weapons having PvE use as well isn't all bad.
But really. I am not a fan of this. At all.

I haven't started doing 3v3's yet, but when I do, the thought of deadly shoulders/helm and weapons being the only real goals for me is not a pleasant one. Yes, there is a lot of RNG involved in the drops for sure, and it'll take a while, but eventually, I'll get 3 Deadly/2 Hateful while half asleep.

Ach. Going to stop writing before my tears drown my poor pet, Ed. Speaking of pets, I definately need to write about them sometime soon. This is far too un-huntery.

*Which is a terrible, terrible idea.

(If anyone can remember the exact words, which dev it was, and possibly supply a link, I'd be grateful)

On Challenges

I was about to leave a comment over at Blessing of Kings, but instead I thought I would highlight a part of it, and add my own thoughts on the issue.

What Rohan mentions towards the end there is challenging DPS without challenging the healer. Mainly, BoK means that environmental challenges are unfairly hard for healers, since they have alot of other things on their mind. I both agree and disagree with this;

On one hand, dps generally, and I want to stress that I mean generally, have an easier job doing their cycles while moving out of the proverbial fire than a healer will, if only because the lost dps is less important in most situations, and because lost healing time can mean a wipe.
As a hunter, and BM at that, I have excellent mobility, and lose less dps than most because I can leave my faithful pet chewing at the boss in most situations.

On the other hand, (the right one, since I'm a lefty) it's all about teamwork. Many environmental challenges are rather easy for the healer if the dps does their part properly, minimizing damage taken, and letting the healer focus on his or her job.

I am painfully aware that this is all highly theoretical, nonspecific, and hard to both agree and disagree with. Let's take an example. Sartharion, anyone?

Sartharion spawns moving flame waves that you need to avoid. Sarth isn't as much a dps race as some other encounters, so dps like me have no excuse for ever getting caught in one of those waves.
If dps'ers are, to use one of my favorite expressions, terribad, this means more healing needs to be done, and means the healers' job becomes harder as a consequence.
While some may disagree, I'd say that whether a single healer occasionally gets caught in the flame wave is rather unimportant unless you do hard mode. It's a DoT, it's raid damage, not a spike.

Now to the point of my post; many challenges for dps are indirectly challenges for healers to a greater degree. As a healer you bite your nails and cry when you watch the dps stand in the fire, because it imperils your job.
But similarly, dps will moan if a healer manages his or her mana poorly through overhealing or what-have-you, knowing they will die as a result on Sapphiron. And the tank sits there, knowing every moment, he's reliant on the healers doing their job, just like the dps know they're toast if tank dps drops.

Of course it's more complex than this. But that's just what I'm saying. This pointless rant aside, I do sympathize with paladins. It should be a post of it's own, but being the worst aoe healer in a heroic aoe farming age with nothing but holy shock as your reliable, CD-ridden instant tool, well, that's got to blow. Hard.

Let's talk about loot.

As anyone who's taken the smallest step into Northrend should be able to tell, there's been a change in, well, loot. The new philosophy is to let more people use more loot. It's no longer rogue leather and cat leather, it's phys dps leather. It's not caster loot and healer loot, it's crit spell loot, mp5 spell loot, hit spell loot and what-have you.

This is all very obvious. What about it?
I want to tell you what a stellar idea this really is.

For sure, the concept is a sound one. Reduce the amount of loot that falls in the care/disenchant-box, reduce the amount of drops per loot table, and thus reduce frustration. It's a continuation of the token system introduced with T4 in TBC, and we like it.*


What I want to talk about is the pleasant side effect that comes with this; having to decide which loot to need, or in some cases, bid on.

"Is this crit loot better for me as a moonkin than for the resto druid?"
"Should I pass this mail with haste on to the enh shammy, or can I use it as a hunter?"

People asking themselves these questions, be it self-initiated or after a discussion coming up during a raid or group, will inevitably have to do research in some form or another.

This is good.

It is never a bad thing for more people to do research! To think! There was a time when you could mindlessly grab any loot labelled for you. Now, you have a choice, and you have to know what to do with that power.
If even just one in a hundred hunters become a little more critical with regards to haste for BM, cautious about hit bloat, or realizes expertise does nothing for us - yes, I've seen some interesting hunters out there - then this new philosophy has achieved a wondrous secondary goal.

Whether this leads to passing on loot in favors of others or not, well, that depends on the situation, but I have faith, or hopeless optimism, in that people are learning how to play their class on a slightly deeper level in part due to the choices we now have.

*"We" is really just me, I just turned the M upside down.

Merry Christmas and/or equivalent holiday.

Most projects start with something vaguely introductory, regardless of ambition or hopes. Because I am uncertain where this will all lead, I'm kicking this off by wishing you a merry december-positioned celebratory occurence.

But this remains the first post, and I guess there is no avoiding the customs for such things.

Hi. I play a hunter on Darksorrow-EU, spreading my time between raids and PvP. I figured an outlet for my thoughts would be a good idea, and here we are, you and I. I guess the "you" is the blog for the moment. So hi, blog!

I'll keep it at that for this first post, and hope to return with something like actual content soon.