Gnome Racials are Overpowered

I finally started leveling engineering on my gnome DK. This is after farming tons of mats, up to thorium, I have more farming to do to be ready for Outland. I based my mat collection off a guide I'd found and gathered a bit more than what was recommended. This means a few stacks of copper, a few of bronze, and so on.

Time to start leveling.

Okay first, I have to explain what a nerd I am. Playing WoW: check. Using 3rd party resources: +1. Copying the mat list into a spreadsheet: +1. Making that spreadsheet a Google doc so I can have it up in Firefox instead of having to run an extra program (Excel): +1. Moving on...

Oh, I'm at 16. Weird. Oh, gnome! +15 seems like it would save some gold near the end, not having to level the last 15. Oh but it's more than just that. +15 means that I can make items 15 higher than normal, but with the equivalent skill chance of the normal level. The result is that I start making powders at the normal level, but they last 15 longer. That's 15 fewer levels of needing expensive metals. The overall result so far has been to save me about 75% of my metal. Remember, it's often the last 15 before a new tier that is most mat-intensive.

Now I have tons of extra ore and bars that I can sell.

Gnome racials are overpowered.

Part Two: Am I a Carebear?
A conversation with a friend of mine, with his parts cut out for reasons of privacy and me obviously being so much more important.
I'm trying to decide if a recent action makes me a carebear
so I'm on a PvP server
I see an enemy druid fighting some elite
losing
so I help him out, even taunting it off of him
and let him loot the quest item
then I promptly remove his last remaining health
does that make me a carebear?

Part Three: GADPVP
Gnomes Against Drunk PvP
so instead of a normal DPS plate hate
I wear this cloth quest reward
because it looks cool
and once an hour I can pull booze out of it
Brian: Horray!
well seeing as I lost to this DK and shaman with the DK living by only a few health, I suspect the hat got me killed
leading to the suggestion to not PvP while drunk

Part Four: Slogans
Escape Artist: I didn't have enough ways to kill mages as a DK.
Losing in PvP? QQ more! No seriously, my PvP trinket is bound to Q.
If it's red, it's not released yet so you can keep spamming emotes at it. Asshole.
Gnomish Engineering: Smaller explosions, bigger disasters.

Death of the Small Town: Part Two

Part two was supposed to talk more about AV, but that never got off the ground. Then a dev told me to write this. True story.

"That segues in nicely to this question: Cross-server gameplay. It's convenient, but do you think that it runs the risk of destroying server communities?"

As for the community question, I used to ... I think that 5 years ago, I would have answered this question differently than I would today. I was all about preserving the small realm communities, but already... Well, look at Battlegrounds, it's a good case in point, because it doesn't diminish social relationships that matter on a realm. Sure, everyone can bring up "that one guy" that they know, the ninja looter who stole his stuff. But I think your real community isn't the whole realm, but it's your guild and the friends you group with, and the cross-server LFG won't undermine that at all.

I'll start with a small bit of opinion: I don't mourn the death of small towns IRL. I am annoyed by politicians' pandering to 'small town America' as if it is some unrepresented demographic made up of honest, hard-working, moral people while everyone else is a big-city banker or homosexual artist, both of whom hate God and freedom. Why do I bring this up? Because then you can play "find the contradiction," since odds are at some point I'll get sad and nostalgic for the 'small towns' of WoW. Oh. I already did that!

"But I think your real community isn't the whole realm, but it's your guild and the friends you group with, and the cross-server LFG won't undermine that at all."

This is where I see risk: redefining community. As we join larger communities we tend sometimes define our community in reverse: making it smaller. While we always had our guilds and our friends and those were special, they were not the entire definition of community. We did have servers and guilds were influential on those servers.

As the community expands outward to include the entire battlegroup, our perception of community cannot keep up. We cannot know the entire battlegroup, we cannot even recognize the guilds. Our server is diluted. In reaction we invert our community and restrict it to friends and guilds.

The result is that if we don't have a guild, we're lost. We must find a new one or risk being outside the community. This risks isolating people. Isolated people are dangerous because they have no social institutions to follow and will tend to act out of short-term self-interest, with harmful effects on those around them. In real life this is theft and all manner of crimes while in WoW it is ninjaing and flame wars.

Sorry, this is getting too slippery slope. We're not on the edge of chaos. This mean that small towns keep us moral while cities encourage lawlessness. It does mean that we need to keep an eye on social institutions and be aware of the possible trouble from transitions between them.

The cities of WoW, battlegroups, can have the same benefits as in real life. These benefits overcome any losses. Sure the social structure gets rearranged, but I believe that this actually encourages involvement in stabilizing structures. In real life this takes the form of what would otherwise be unsustainable minority populations being able to concentrate enough to form a self-sufficient community and from these build themselves up and approach the outside world as equals. For a good example, look at Jewish enclaves in the US where they built themselves up into a powerful group whereas when they were out in the European countryside people tended to kill them as the most convenient cure for a poor harvest.

Cities allow small activities to gain the population they need. Can you imagine a grand art museum in a town of 10,000? It's possible when that's 5 million instead. Cities allow residents to poll common interests to do what they could not otherwise and in that process they create a more varied and valuable culture than the pockets of homogeneity of small towns. In WoW terms this means a handful of scattered lowbies can run an instance together. This means the smaller faction can pool together across servers to fill a BG. This means getting groups for something other than the latest raid and daily heroic.

Overall I'm glad to see the benefits of the larger community, but we must be aware of the costs of this community in order to minimize the downsides and get the most possible benefit. I'm not going to stop missing the faction feel of old AV and knowing the names of people on my server for something other than trolling trade chat, but I can accept that this are smaller losses than the gains of more frequent instance groups. And perhaps we'll even see the full benefits of diverse populations and options as more people find that the perfect guild was waiting on the other side of LFG all this time.

You can do it!

There's my little gnome out farming fel iron. Oh no, the next node has a rogue at it. I want my fel iron.

Too bad I'm 65 and he's 72.

But I want my fel iron!

So I death grip him in the middle of his mining. Icy touch, plague strike, and start going with obliterate. I'm frost, so I'm not wiping out my diseases.

Somehow I was landing hits. Many hits. Many hits that made his health go down.

He didn't really fight back. He seemed to try to run away and I was going to hit him with chains of ice, but then he vanished. The diseases broke that. He gouged me and then seemed to be trying to line up a backstab when it wore off and I again put my polearm into his rotting face.

He died.

I mined.

I learned something important. I learned to never give up, never shy from any obstacle. I learned that nothing, not even seven levels, can stand between me and my mining.

'PvP' fights

Could this explain why so many people dislike arenas?

I'll start off with some facts.
1) People tend to dislike those activities at which they are terrible.
2) I am terrible at arenas. Like, really really bad. If I still did them, I'd be the reason you'd be sitting there wondering how such terrible people got into your bracket. They would be lower, but they're standing on my hunched-over shoulders as I shake in fear/am chain-feared.
3) I don't like arenas much.
4) The champions fight in the ToC raid has been described as a "PvP fight."

What can we get from this?

First off, people apparently think that PvP means a massive zerg rush against an enemy with no clear target. This means that they might potentially attack healers rather than the guy with plate and more health than you can count on thirty thousand fingers. With this in mind, I better understand some of the teams I ran into in arenas or BGs which would go after the absolute wrong person: they learned PvP from NPCs.

Taking this all together we can see a clear conclusion: Many people hate arenas because they are terrible at them.

Part two: The one where I don't launch half-joking attacks on PvErs.
I deceived you. I'm still going to attack PvErs, but I'm very serious this time. Read through some of the comments at Larisa's post.

"In TotGC, I honestly hate limited attempts. Why? I don't like PvP. Nearly no one in my guild is heavily interested in PvP or Arena. In short: We absolutely suck at Faction Champions Heroic. It's a drag every week and I just don't like being punished for not caring about PvP."

"Of course we know how the threat works and we all drag our PvP abilities in our action bar. We send people to get new specs just for this encounter.

BUT, on 25 heroic you will get destroyed if your fellow raiders aren't great at controlling their assigned targets."

"But I absolutely dislike fights, where PvP veterans have a big advantage and many PvP talents will make your life easier... PVE players often don't have those abilities keybound, if they use them only very very rarely."

There's some misguided belief that playing one's full class is a PvP skill. Maybe it is. Maybe only PvP actually draws out the full class. If so, that indicates that PvE is horribly designed and that 'PvP' fights are a step towards fixing that.

However I'm not going to accept this argument. It's giving up and giving it. It is accepting lack of skill and blaming the raid rather than the player.

The fact here is that whether something is a 'PvP' skill or a 'PvE' skill, having or not having this or that aptitude is part of what differentiates good from bad players. It goes beyond just having skills hotkeyed and being used to casting them. It taps into situational awareness. Good PvPers have to know what's gong on everywhere at all times. They watch their backs.

I've been described as a good tank partly due to my fast reactions to adds and other bad situations. How do I do this? Well first off it's just what a good tank does. But I didn't learn that adaptation and awareness from tanking. I learned it from learned paranoia on a PvP server. I learned to judge a pull before I did it: "Can I kill these mobs if I get jumped? Can I somehow kill that guy without aggroing the mobs near him?" I learned to always be aware because other players don't care about whether you're busy, they want you distracted and will take advantage.

PvP and PvE aren't using radically different skill sets. The problem is that in PvE we tend to focus on dumbing things down, on eliminating skill as much as possible. On regular Anub we used to try interrupting the adds so they wouldn't burrow; but that required rogues to keep an energy reserve and to pay attention, for the DKs to do the same, for people in general to do something other than a DPS rotation. We opted to drag them onto the ice instead and let the healers heal a bit more. Can you imagine how stupid it would look to see an arena team trying to fight the other team in a specific spot because they suck at interrupting? I don't mean a place where they can use LoS to screw with damage and heals by moving in and out of cover, but just someplace that they stand and suddenly enemy spells are automatically interrupted.

It's fundamentally a problem of attitude. People don't approach these more open fights as challenges. Instead they're PvP fights and omg we're not PvPers! They decide that a certain set of skills are not the right ones to use in raids and any fight that requires them is bad. This is a ridiculous mindset.

Until the mobs are controlled by a GM, it's not a PvP fight, it's only a more interesting PvE fight.

Does WoW need therapists?

I don't know if my paladin is very happy.

"He doesn't pay attention to me anymore. We sometimes go to Dire Maul, but I feel like we're only together because of the ravasaur hatchling. It's going to be grown up soon and then I feel like he'll just throw me away. What do I do then?"

How does this make you feel?

"Frustrated! I get so angry. Sometimes we go tanking, but it feels like he wants me to be another class. I caught him with a death knight once. His death knight he used to call her. I thought they wee done, that he'd stopped with it. But no, I get summoned into this ToC group and I'm thinking 'Why would he be here? He must have gotten the idea that I want something in here.' I knew it then, he's just been there with his death knight. Tanking! Without me! I bet they got the Black Heart."

Maybe you're just imagining it.

"Imagining? Do you know what if feels like to walk into an instance and know that someone else was there first? And then you say I'm imagining it!?"

I'm suggesting that you not lead yourself to conclusions.

"He gets me gems sometimes. But I know this one was just some reject that his rogue didn't want. Ugh, she gets all the gems and all she does is pawn them."

I heard he recently bought you a new mount.

"Yea, a new mount. How romantic. It has this ugly goblin and troll always in the back. And it smells. He only got it for Dire Maul anyway. I'm so sick of that place, saving that stupid goblin in there. It's so stupid. First we killed them and now he's saving them? What's next, I rescue the Ogre Prince from the Naga? Oh have I mentioned I was made queen of the ogres? That was such an honor..."

Why did you two start going to Dire Maul?

"It was supposed to be someplace fun. Just the two of us. No crowds or idiot PUGs. But he's just using me. And halfway in he left and started spending all this time with his rogue and druid. Grinding gold. Yea, great euphemism; those whores. And his shaman too! I thought they were over. I thought..."

Go on.

"I remember our first raid. We were in in Karazhan and these tanking bracers dropped. I wanted them so much. The raid leader asked if I was his main. Oh my god I was floored by that. THE QUESTION! Oh my god. He said yes and just like that his shaman was gone and I was his main. And oh my god those bracers. Eventually we had to sell them, but then one day he surprised me and took me back to Karazhan and got a new pair. Sometimes he so sweet like that."

Perhaps these are positive aspects that you can focus on, build on those.

"Yea, sure. Sure. Let me tell you about another 'positive aspect'. Raid performance. Half the time he doesn't even show up. Yea we do some 6-9 tanking sometimes, but almost never. It's always ret and 'first come first serve.' Yea, that's him just dropping all his cooldowns at once and then complaining that sometimes my mana doesn't last the whole raid. Like that's my fault. Ugh. There's no timing to it, no rhythm. It's just all there and when it's ready again he goes and it just feels terrible. He never asks me how my DPS is doing. Can you believe it, no Recount during, not even a glance at WWS afterward. It's like he doesn't care about my performance, or his."

I will refer you to one of my colleagues about that. Can you tell me more about the alts? Those seemed to come up a lot.

"Yea they do. All the time. When we were in Dire Maul he got some felcloth and I got rid of it because, ew? But turns out he had me send it to his priest. Oh yea, she's a tailor, all the styles too. Turns out he took her to a moonwell. Can you believe it? Logs me out in that crummy SEWER bar so he can take her to Ashenvale."

I'm picking up faithfulness as a problem. Perhaps we can work on that next session.

Maybe I'm not supposed to raid

I don't DC. I mean, of course when the servers are being bad I have the same problems as anyone else, but I'm not one of those people who DCs and the raid is waiting for them and it's a huge waste of everyone's time. That's not me.

Recently I've not been raiding except for Onyxia.

But tonight I decided to try it again. My guild started hardmodes in ToC a week or so ago and that sounded interesting. So in I go.

I'd entered too many instances recently. Apparently DM shares that cooldown with ToC. That was so stupid I didn't even consider it. So I missed the first attempt.

Second time I got in. Then I proceeded to DC constantly. Sometimes on relogging I'd get stuck at success. I'd hit cancel and get the realm list. Pick Zul'jin and then WoW would suffer a fatal error. The one that asks you to send an error report to Blizzard.

On and off and on and off. I was at least able to be on to get badges, and some unwanted holy boots, which now makes me feel bad that I was 75% useless over the fight. I missed the entire faction champions fight when I decided to restart my computer since I had nothing else to lose if I'd DC anyway. That didn't fix it.

At one point I couldn't even log in fully; I'd DC once the loading bar filled. I was able to get on my bank alt, hoping that would help. It didn't.

I've changed nothing with my hardware. I've added no addons except ones which were disabled anyway. I don't know what could have possibly changed since the last time I raided.

Can't get in.
Wipe wipe wipe.
Can't stay online.

Maybe WoW is trying to tell me to stick to my rep grinds and crafting and leave the raiding to other people.

To top it off, on this last DC before the fight started they asked if I could stay online for it. I thought so, since I'd been online for a while at that point. The moment I swung at the Valkyr: DC. If I'd left before the fight, someone was waiting in line to take my place. What a way to end a night, wasting 3 badges that someone would have otherwise gotten.

Dammit.

The best FP in the game

It is the one from Dalaran to River's Heart in Sholazar Basin. No, not because it finally crosses over Wintergrasp or because it's a good farming zone. You're thinking of the wrong flight.

I mean the one that gets shot down, leaving you to run the rest of the way. That's how flights should work: they save you some time but they're not a trivial ride, skipping over everything in between.

Math says retribution is OP

Iapetes told me that he was doing Wintergrasp and beating people 2v1. You might think this just means he's skilled. Math says that's exactly the point and proves that ret is OP.

Let's run over some facts.
1) He was facing another ret paladin plus another player.
2) Math.

To elaborate on fact 2: If you have two equal infinities and add a finite value to one, then divide them, you'll get 1. This is because next to infinity, everything else is infinitely small and therefore zero, so adding the finite number has no effect on the ratio.

To put this in terms of player skill, let's imagine a power ratio exists between all competing groups. This is the ratio of the composite of player skill and class power. In cases where one group loses, it is clear that one is higher than the other. But how can 2 be greater than 1? Simple: Make 1 in each group infinite. This will cause the power ratio to go to one; at which point luck, which is innately infinite, to be the deciding factor.

In other words: Ret paladins are overpowered and this explains how ret+player can lose to another ret.