Time To Quit?

In the current state of the game I am very close to quitting. PvP is ridiculously unbalanced Healers are nearly unkillable, Ret paladins burst is out of control, DKs do sickening damage and frost mages are tearing people apart in all specs.

On top of this I entered a WSG this morning with 3 players the rest being bots on both the teams, the honorgrind is just so terrible and even with a full set its not going to make a damn of difference.

I’m sorry, but to be frank the current state of PvP is bullshit. But hey the game is balanced around 3v3, oh wait nvm resilience will fix it, oh wait nvm PvE is the games focus.

Silly me I thought by having a PvP aspect in the game you’d want to make it enjoyable, well as a non arena, BG player it certainly isn’t.

Honorgate and You

To all those people grinding honor for Vicious offsets and all those doing the tortuous grind for alts with 0 resiliences i have some bad news for you. After the recent maintenence blizzard announced a change to what gear is available for honor.

In the old format players would have time between the end of a season and the start of a new one to grind honor for the previous seasons gear (in this case Vicous Gladiator), however with the coming of the new season blizzard made an announcement:

Arena Season 10 Start and new gear
You are correct. The season transition and introduction of new PvP items was different this time around, and we apologize for the lack of advanced warning.

The Season 9 set was removed today. The items available for purchase with Honor Points are now considered lower tier Season 10 items. They are still the same items from Season 9 in terms of aesthetics, but the item level and stats are slightly higher to ensure that the Season 10 honor gear has the correct item level relative to the Season 10 conquest gear.

It’s likely this is how things will work going forward and we’ll be sure to make that more clear when the next season transition takes place.

New basic transition flow:

1) Season X ends and rated play is unavailable; Season X gear becomes available for purchase with HP; CP is wiped.
2) One week later Season Y starts and rated play is available; Season X gear is removed entirely; Season Y introduces a low tier of items which replace Season X vendor items and are available for HP; Season Y introduces the new top items available for CP and rated play.

What this basically means is anyone who spent grinding gear before the new season now has outdated gear and is now going to grind the new 371 ilvl gear. Don’t worry guys i do feal your pain, i’ve spent hundreds of gold and around 11k honor over two characters .

I’ll do a better rundown later tonight but for now its back to the honor grind.

Dungeon Entrances

What Is This, I Don't Even...

With the coming of cataclysm Blizzard changed it so that you could only enter a dungeon if you had found the entrance in the new areas. I was even going to make a post on how to get to BRC really quickly but to my dismay you no longer need to ‘find’ the entrances any more.

Sad tank is sad

Fear Me for I Am UNHITTABLE!

nomnomnom Damage!

I haven’t been tanking for a long time, in fact I’m probably one of the greenest tanks you’ll meet even though I have 2 of the four classes at 85 and the other two at 82 and 75 respectively. In my other post I talked about healing in the shattered world, well in this one instead of applying band aids to people I’ve decided to let creatures smash on my face while I scream for more.

Tanking has always been a scary thing for me as was healing but after starting to level a warrior I knew that it is what I wanted to do with it. Seeing a warrior charge a group of mobs, rend and thunderclap before an explosion of numbers on the screen has always made me feel warm on the inside. Not to mention that they could then intercept another pack straight afterwards just for funsies. It’s like being a mage but wearing plate and a shield. You want mobility? Well a warrior certainly has it!

I just love the warrior play style more than the other tanks, DK is meh, Paladin I could never get my head round even though it is terribly easy and well Bears are hard . But enough gushing about how much I heart Warrior tanks <3.This post is about my quest for obtaining unhittable before I reach level 85 so let’s get into it shall we?

What Do You Mean Unhittable?

loljk we all know that's mages

Now some of you may be wondering what the hell I mean by unhittable because no matter how good the gear is, a tank will always take damage right? No I’m not high and no unhittable is not some hippy ‘state of mind’. Unhittable is a term used in the tanking community to describe when a tank will never take a full hit from a boss.
So what does that mean? Say there is a boss ability which would normally hit you for 50k damage, if you reach this ‘unhitabble’ cap you will never take the full 50k damage, you could block, parry, dodge or it could simply miss but you will never take a full hit. So how do you achieve this?

Math Is Hard

So in this game there is an attack table consisting of 5 main things (my current values are in brackets):

Miss 5% (0.01-5 (this is the base miss chance))
Dodge 14.12% (5.01-19.13)
Parry 15.59% (19.14-34.73)
Block 58.92% (34.74-93.65)
Hit

Whenever a boss takes a swing at a player a roll is made and whatever that roll equals we get the corresponding action occur in the attack table. So say the roll equals 47, with my current stats that would mean I would block. If the roll was 7 it would be a dodge.

Your chance to not take a full hit is determined by your Miss + Dodge +Parry + Block. Now there is a soft cap to this and the hard cap. The hard cap is 102.4%, yep you read that right. The reason for it being above 100% is because for every extra level a mob is above you add 0.8% more to the attack table (so 0.8 x 3 = 2.4%). The reason you add this is because for every level above you the boss has a 0.2% chance to not miss, for you to not dodge, parry or block (0.2 x 4 = 0.8).

Now the soft cap is achieved by using shield block which gives us an extra 25% chance to block while it is active. So this means that the warrior soft cap is 102.4 – 25 = 77.4%.
Now at level 81 the highest i managed to hit was 98% with a mastery elixir and only in plate tanking items (no Agi whatsoever) which is pretty damn respectable. With even with one enchant I could have easily reached the cap most probably (and this is without any real tanking trinkets too!). By level 83 I will most probably have a full passively unhittable set due to that being the level you can get reputation items (i.e. tanking items ). But there is a problem.

I Don’t Like You When Your Angry…At Somebody Else

HULK SMASH

The reason we have tanks is so the squishy people don’t go splat. They take the damage from the mobs and keep them pissed off so we can either pew pew or apply more band aids. Now tanks do this by generating threat and vengeance which increases the amount of threat they can produce.

Threat is generated by the damage you can do to the mob and to do this a warrior needs to generate rage. So you could say that the speed of a warriors threat generation is tied to their rage generation and their ability to tank.

Now the way a warrior generates rage most simply is by having a mob or group of them to beat on their face which is where the problem lies. From what i understand rage generation is proportional to health, so the harder i get hit the more rage i generate and so therefore threat (If i use the threat generator priority list properly).

The more avoidance/the closer i get to unhittable the harder it is for me to generate the initial threat required to hold a pack of mobs before my vengeance is maxed which is a pain in the ass. It also doesn’t help that DPS loves to spam the shit out of AoE at the first sign of a group of mobs. So please be kind to your tanks and at least wait for a thunderclap before going wild.

Overall would i recommend getting unhittable before 85 (there are issues with warrior unhittable at 85 but this isn’t the place to talk about them)? No I will have a set just for the sake of it but i will be running a setup that will give me a nice balance of both mitigation and threat generation .

Bad blogger is bad :(

I know i said i was going to post more regularly on here but it seems as though i’ve failed pretty hard at that. The problem is i’ve been a little busy with playing other games and sleeping while waiting for 4.2 to drop, but I have a lot of post banging around in my head at the moment and i’m going to crank some out today .
These include my thoughts on the LFD (I know old news but I’ve seen a few things recently that i want to talk about), Getting unhittable on a Prot Warrior before even hitting 85, more BG guides and a guide to the first Warfront in Rift and my thoughts on the game (This will even have a video segment!).
So yeah stay tuned folks, lots of content to come

The Return of the Link Love!

Getting back into blogging recently means that today being wednesday we hath blogs to big up!

• There’s a guest post over on Restokin that really caught my eye and mirrors the sentiments i was trying to make in one of my previous posts. Its nice to see i wasn’t the only one feeling the mana recession since Cata hit – Resto Healing at 85…Casually.
• Ophelie over at The Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon talks about playing while dealing with studying, Gratz on the qualification acheivement! I’ve studied a bit of pharmacology and you’re a braver soul than I to do a whole degree on it. Some of her feelings mirror my own so it makes me feel a bit better about how i deal with it all thank you .
• Cynwise as per usual has some very helpful advice on how to get ready for season 10 if you, like me, are just a BG player.
• Vidyala over at Manalicious talks about the good points and bad points of playing alts while Zinn of Jinxed Thoughts has some awesome Pointers for the Altoholic

Have a nice day

Falling Behind and Welfare Epics

I first came across the term ‘Welfare Epics’ during Wrath. I had just gotten into the whole wider community thing of WoW, no longer did I just play the game I read blogs, frequented websites and perused forums. I was drinking deeply from the cup of QQ and enjoying myself!

You see with a game as big as WoW is as I’ve mentioned before you quickly begin to realise that it is more than just a game when you begin to go to these places. To the untrained eye the lexicon of the game would seem like gibberish even to today’s texting language savvy kids (LFG, LFM, IMBA, BWD, ICC). If it exists then we’ve got an acronym or another name for it.

I have long been fascinated by words and how their use be that in their pronunciation, context etc. can generate a large variety of feelings, but I digress. With patch 4.2 on the horizon we will see the first of these so called welfare epics of this expansion, in both PvE items and PvP ones and I for one am looking forward to it.

Feels So Good Being Bad

 There’s a stigma attached to any purple item you can get without grinding for days or weeks. People use it as a measure of how good a player is especially when they are ignorant to a specific classes limitations. This is where the welfare epics phrase comes in to play, to quote urban dictionary:

 ’Epic quality items in the video game World of Warcraft that are obtained through grinding PVP. These items are generally on par with the highest quality items in the game and can be easily had by anyone with only a minimal investment of time. 

No skill is required to obtain a Welfare Epic.

I was just killed by some faggot mage in season 3 welfare epics.’

I will admit I have been a gear snob in the past, especially back when I played a role in raid leading. We would be over subscribed every week for the raid team we had, some people had to come (i.e. we only had two healers and two tanks, two of which were married. The couple then had a DPS friend the wouldn’t raid without so that meant he had to come too.). But the rest needed to be vetted so it fell to me, the jobless student and instigator of this raiding thing, to be the bad guy and say no to the gem less, unenchanted, wrongly itemised people.

I understand exactly why Blizzard changed the gearing system and that was to make it more acceptable to a larger group of people and I personally believe it worked. There was also another benefit to these changes also.

Say your raid needed a new healer or ranged DPS and, you have a nearly maxed out character who can fill this role so you say your willing to switch to help. But lo and behold you have no gear! What ever are you to do? In the previous painstaking system of gear tiering you would have to grind a dungeon set for weeks, join another guilds run that is doing the content below your guilds to get the gear you need to then progress upwards a process of which could take forever, before finally reaching your guilds level of gear.

These days especially in the second major content patch of a expansion, you can get to an acceptable level of gear in a matter of days. I never truly appreciated this until very recently.

The Long Grind Home

My WoW time as anyone who reads will have noticed, was all but non-existent over the last few months after Easter. University got tough on the workload front and it didn’t relent until I returned home for the summer. It go to a point where I considered quitting university because of how miserable I was feeling about the whole thing. It felt as though I was trapped and couldn’t escape, even WoW wasn’t any comfort as any time I spent on it was marred by guilt at not doing anything productive.

So as things started to let up for a short period of time before exam revision started (Or didn’t as was the case, but this is not the time nor the place for that) I logged on at last and saw my old guild had left the server almost completely! To say I was shocked was an understatement, I searched the EU official forums, with no mention as to what had happened before visiting the website and finally getting up to speed.

Our original server was a barren wasteland for the Alliance as I’ve mentioned before and it finally got to the members and they voted on a move to pastures new. I dropped by their new recruitments thread and said hello only to see a vacancy for an Enhancement Shaman, so I thought why not?

I applied and was accepted, the problem was I was vetted for raid suitability and had my ego a little bruised. My gear was and still is to an extent too crappy for where they are raid wise (currently working on hard modes), so I’ve been playing catch up since.

The problem was however with my practically non existent play time I couldn’t sit in heroic queues for gear, never mind the Rise of the Zandalari ones! So I’ve practically been unable to do anything except run dungeons when I can bear the queues since coming back.

How Many Roads Must A Toon Walk Down…

I couldn’t grind enough valor to get a trinket never mind a piece of tier gear and with the changes to how gear can be purchased in 4.2 there is really no point for me to do it right now. So this is where I am now and I’m not afraid to get my welfare epics.

This game is about having fun, be that via raiding, PvPing or just acting as an escape from life for a little while. Logging in had become a chore because of the grind I had to do for minimal rewards, with no chance of getting to do what I wanted. Call me a wrath baby or a noob and talk about how you had to walk up the hill in the snow, with no shoes to even imagine the colour purple all you want.

I don’t care.

Once 4.2 finally hits I can finally ‘play’ again at the level I want to. Will I need to grind? Yes, but the justice point grind is more manageable than the Valor one. Once I’m back to where I feel comfortable I will resume that all too familiar grind with everyone else.

Sometimes knowing how to play your class well is not enough, sometimes gear does matter (Especially seeing as getting to the hit cap as an Enhance shaman for raids is damn impossible without epic items) and hey, I’m looking forward to gearing my alts too, so I can try new things like tanking and healing full time without having people pissed at me while I get some practice.

(On the gear front sometimes it doesn’t matter, I’m looking at you Mr. PuG who wanted 350+ilvl for BH. I’ve healed it with <345ilvl and out healed an almost fully raid geared healer. Plus my DPS is a Frost DK, all I have to do is bind Howling blast to all the keys on one side and obliterate to the other and roll from one side to the other ).

PS. WoW memes from here: Fuck Yeah, WoW Scrubs!