Let's play Flip Things on Their Heads

You may or may not know, but if you want to piss off Iapetes, argue with him about how arenas are killing WoW. It's great fun. I suggest avoiding my mistakes and think of some irrational arguments beforehand so you don't have to make them up on the run. And now for something completely different:

PvP is not responsible for PvE nerfs. But maybe we can blame PvP for PvE buffs! Aha, you didn't think of that one, did you?

As we all know, and by we I mean people other than me until I read this post by Rohan: Regen is out of control. This is clearly the fault of PvP, specifically arenas.

Here's the situation: In a BG combat favors those who operate well on a 1-2 minute cycle. These are called death knights. However arenas, well I have no clue, I'm a noob. Let's move on to the shoddy circumstantial evidence.

Since arenas came out, with the exception of a big Illumination nerf, casters have steadily gained regen. Spirit scaling with intellect, intellect giving some classes mana/5, enhancement getting activated regen, eventually glyphs came out to boost mage regen, ret and prot gained regen, holy even got divine plea, you get the picture. People have loads of regen these days. Why?

It's not for PvE. No? No. PvE doesn't actually need regen. Fights could instead have been tuned for lower burst and output, putting more emphasis on efficiency over time. This hasn't happened, instead damage outputs are insane, matched out by the regen of healers. Why make this mess? Arenas.

Arenas are different because they have a few classes who don't need regen gear. They just get it by their normal play: warriors and rogues using energy and rage. Take a caster-healer and a rogue-healer team and start shooting it out. The rogue has natural regen while the mage does not. Without regen on gear and talents, the rogue could outlast the mage. The mage is forced to burn the rogue soon or risk losing through attrition, except burst was mitigated by resilience. The only solution is to remove energy regen and force rogues to stop attacking to regain energy. Sorry, I mean give the mage a lot of regen. Replace mage with anyone who uses mana and don't forget that healers get swept up in this.

Here we are now: caster must by necessity regen as if they had energy or rage in order to balance arenas and healers ended up in this too. To balance it in PvE, Blizzard had to do something with that all that mana: spend it on spamming of max rank spells (remember when people downranked for efficiency?).

Now that that is finished, let's move on to the flaws:

I mostly ignored it, but holy paladin regen was nerfed during arenas, not buffed. Furthermore, the great regen gain for ret is most useful in PvE, in PvP judgements are more likely to be absorbed, stopping the mana gain. In addition the replenishment buff works best in high-intellect situations, such as fully buffed raids where there are no shamans running around purging everyone.

PvE burst damage was going up throughout the time of WoW, not in reaction to recent regen buffs (I have a weird sense of recent, to me 2.0 is recent).

Much of the regen is necessary for PvE as fights got longer and was being added long before arenas. Long fights favor regen.

What have we learned?
I don't like arenas, but unfortunately, they can't be accurately blamed for ruining WoW. Sadly, facts do not always support opinions or theories.

Does anyone else do this, make up arguments and then try to prove them wrong? It's very disheartening when the one you prove wrong is one you like.

How to misuse good advice

The other day I expressed some frustration with my recent time in WoW. It was suggested by Larisa that I try something different than normal.

Roleplay: As I write this I am thinking "I don't know who I would roleplay with... oh wait, I have some RL friends on a RP server!"

Change faction: I suppose I could jump over to my warlock again, but I'm very bad at different servers. It's the mailboxes: they're my banks and I have to constantly manage them or risk losing hundreds of gold worth of items.

PvP: Hmm... we shall leave this for later, oooh, ominous forebodingness!

Silly achievements: Good idea, but followed by "something you don't normally do", so that's out the window, since silly achievements are my standard way of playing. On a related note: I spent a few thousand gold on more elementium ore, the end result is a useless scepter and a ring to breath underwater. Woo, AQ!

So PvP...

Events seem to have worked out well for this. My warrior friend has been pondering his gear and weapons recently, specifically his inability to upgrade anything without a total set conversion due to stat juggling. The arena weapon would apparently get around this. So, that means arenas! I yelled at him for being realistic and pointing out that we're unlikely to get the needed rating. Me, considering arenas? See what a cruel idea she placed in my mind?

The next event led to a much less terrible thing: ganking. There I was on my hunter in STV when a dwarf zooms past and start shooting everything in sight. He stole my kill! Hm. Well then. My paladin ran over from Dalaran and did mean things to him and his flagged friend. Should I feel bad? I think not! The friend was not flagged by the time I got there, instead he attacked me. I eventually let him go, I suspect the hunter logged. Woo, empty hunting area!

It was a fun day. My priest killed Vrykul. My warrior hit 69 and is fully rested the rest of the way. He leveled a little bit more by exploring all of Northrend. Two of my friends had never seen the Frost Shock video (it's very old) so I had them watch it. I believe it is required watching for all shamans and paladins.

Chaotic Moods

There are good days and bad days. There are the off days and then almost-soloing-the-world days. And then there are the chaotic days. Somehow order and direction are annoying. Any attachments feel restrictive. There's the urge to gquit, not out of rage or any personal resentment but more like "I don't want to do this anymore, I want to just be free."

I feel like that now. I know it's stupid. I wouldn't get anywhere. I can't PUG everything and as sad as it sounds, I get lonely. Sure I get annoyed by idiots in gchat saying dumb stuff about who knows what, but, something about the lack of green scrolling by just makes me feel isolated.

Perhaps it's bad timing. The end of semester is coming and it's crunching my time a lot. Or at least it's crunching my perspective of time. I've not been raiding as much recently. I was on last night for Ulduar and we downed a few bosses. It wasn't much fun. It felt like either waltzing in and chopping down an easy boss or like dying over and over for no progress at all. To be fair, Razorscale is on farm, the council was done the easy way, and my guild had been doing the hands guy for a few days. Still, from my perspective it was a totally unbalanced run, either trivial or impossible.

Gear is another problem. I feel like I've fallen behind on tanking gear, though not too badly. My ret gear though, it's clearly not up to par. This has its roots in Naxx. Since ret was my offspec, I had a hard time getting anything more than completely unwanted scraps. In retrospect we should have started using the dual-spec loot system before they came out rather than afterward. We spent a long time giving marginal upgrades to main specs while future secondary specs were treated the same as offspecs and got screwed. The result is my current ret set which I feel bad using because I feel as if I'm hurting the raid using it.

This is fixable of course. I can do naxx 25 to get pieces I'm missing, but that's going to be a pain. I don't like PUGs much for raids. It's likely that I'd be there tanking, but then what raid is going to give DPS gear to a tank before the DPS? I could demand it as a condition, but I doubt tanks are in such short supply that it would work. Besides, we all know how much demand there is for plate and two-handed DPS loot.

So frustrating.

I feel rhymy again

Raiding trade chat I saw someone ask
He wanted to know about hunter changes
And use of his limited bag spaces
What we did establish
Is that quivers are not useless
But instead they have lots of space
Despite no longer giving haste
But it does not seem worth the trade
When a normal bag could hold more grenades

School of Hard Knocks

If you're anything like me, you cringed when you saw this was part of the Children's Week meta. Take heart! It's not all that bad. I have a few tips to make it easier.

1) Remember to have your orphan out.
2) The orphan is critical to success, remember to have it out.
3) Put the orphan whistle on your bars in order to facilitate remembering to have your orphan out.

Follow these tips and I'm sure you can avoid the mistakes I made.

The achievement took around three hours, including some interruptions. If not for my forgetfulness and distraction, I think I could have gotten it done in two or less.

By increasing difficulty, I'd rank them as EotS-AB-WSG-AV. None of these are truly hard, but are instead various mixes of opportunity and competition. AV has few chances per BG, a lot of competition, and BGs take a while. In contrast EotS is faster, had many chances to carry and capture the flag, and has fewer people.

If you're willing to play 'wrong' in order to increase your chances at the achievement parts, consider these tactics:
AV: Don't defend your attacks, but instead allow recaps for more chances to attack.
AB: The second person to a defended node has the advantage. Ninjaing a poorly defended node is more rewarding than ever. I learned this after I parachuted into the mine to find nothing but a squishy hunter.
EotS: Defend the center to allow everyone a chance at the flag.
WSG: Let the other team get to your flag, and then do horrible things to them.

Good luck!

P.S. Don't forget your orphan.

Dual specs and loot: after the storm

In an earlier post I contemplated the effects of dual specs on loot distribution and also proposed the system of main, secondary, off for loot priority. Since then I attempted to do a followup based on some conversations with one of my guild's officers. Unfortunately that post never got finished.

My conversations with the officer seemed to have had some effect though. There was some sort of debate among the leadership about what to do about loot. I don't know the exact end result. However, my last time in Ulduar on Tuesday, during the Razorclaw loot, dual specs came up. A few people sent in offspec needs, but then after some questioning changed them to dualspec needs. Apparently the priority system has developed in some form.

Still, it's not a simple issue. One person's dual spec may be of greater use than another person's main spec, depending on attendance, size of upgrade, relative frequency of needing one spec or another, etc. Nevertheless, we're clearly making progress with loot distribution.

So now I wonder, how has your guild handled dual specs?

Sorry this is coming out so late. I don't like throwing out a bunch of posts all at once, so I'd delayed this one for other posts. Then it got buried under drafts and I only refound it now.

Results: Is the Squire pet Creepy?

Yes 9 (24%)

No 6 (16%)

Only if the player is a priest 22 (59%)

Comparing only yes and no there's a clear lead for yes. However the conditional answer won overall. I declare this a victory for me and let it be marked in the public record that Iapetes was wrong. Of course I am not misrepresenting our positions and the results of the poll to support my own views. Who do you think I am, a cable news pundit?

Why are the CMs so feel goody?

Over the last couple weeks I've noticed a lot of threads by CMs on the general forum which I can describe only as feel-good. They're kinda fluff things: guild traditions, favorite ruined city, having fun wiping, etc. I don't mind them, but they seem to have suddenly arrived in a high concentration and it's weirding me out a little.

Crygil: Which ruined city is your favorite? Granted the polls over time have mostly been little opinion "what's your favorite?" questions.
Zarhym: When a wipe feels so right...
Nethaera: Deserted Island: What do you take?
Crygil: How do you feel about Gnomes?
Nethaera: Travel Azeroth: What are your places to go?
Nethaera: Guild Traditions: What are yours?
Nethaera: New Player Advice: What's yours? This one is a little different than the rest, but still, this isn't exactly serious business stuff.

What's going on here? Maybe the CMs suddenly became very cheerful and outgoing and really love to talk with us. But that doesn't really seem new. I think this is a new tactic for information gathering. Ruined city? That's another way of seeing which content and lore people like the most. The wipe one is testing reactions to new content (a million flames would mean people aren't liking wiping much). Travel Azeroth? Clearly asking favorite zone and why. Guild traditions don't have immediate development value, but they help, along with the wipe thread, to figure out social patterns and how to work them in Blizzard's favor. Advice for a new players is a way to see what we hate or what doesn't work. If someone says "don't bother to train X spell" that suggests that X spell needs some work. If people keep saying "don't bother with X quest" well then X quest needs some fixing up.

Community building and customer research at the same time, those sneaky devils... I mean developers, not that I'm not calling the CMs devs.