New hunter pet taunt and tanking shortage

I was going to call it Guard Dog, but that's taken. Guard: The pet will automatically attack and taunt mobs which attack the Guarded target.

This would have a limited duration or chances to activate in a given time, something to make it less mindless and less prone to abuse. BM hunters or tenacity pets would have more charges or shorter cooldown, hopefully to the point that a BM hunter with a tencity pet can be a decent heroic tank.

Iapetes and I have been batting this idea around of expanding the available tanks by allowing DPS classes/specs to do some moderate tanking. I didn't like it much at first, but it actually might address a serious problem: the shortage in heroics and the excess in raids. This would add tanks who are good enough for heroics, without changing the supply in raids.

Still, evidence remains that tanking isn't a matter of availability. We have DKs and there's still a shortage. We have dual-specs and there's still a shortage. Druids can tank in their kitty gear. DKs can tank, with a mitigation/avoidance loss (but still more than enough for heroics) with their DPS specs. Tanks have instant queues, which are themselves indicators of a shortage. Something about tanking just isn't attractive to the majority of players.

On the other hand, there is almost certainly a non-trivial minority of players who would tank if they had just one more spec or didn't need to devote a spec. I had the idea of a dedicated PvP spec; a third spec not intended for PvE and purchased with honor or arena points, but I have no idea how to prevent this just being a third PvE spec. Iapetes suggested that the crit-immune talents coming in Cataclysm could be low enough that DPS specs could take them. This would likely be overpowered in PvP or require coding to disable them in PvP. And if DPS are seeking to maximize their damage, they would need spare points to pick it up unless it was tied to a damage/tanking talent already, such as divine strength.

I don't think adding more tanking options will fix the shortage, but it would at least help a bit. And who knows, maybe I'm wrong and there's actually a huge number of players who just need one more spec or less grindy gear options or a pure class player who hates leveling too much, but a respec would work.

I like my bubbles

Double, double pull and trouble;
Fire burn, and paladin bubble

Of course I like my immunity bubble.

I also like my 50% less damage bubble.

And the Divine Intervention bubble on other people saves me repairs, so that's nice.

But I also like my figurative bubbles. I like my tanking bubble. It protects me from the elitist, speed-running, wipe-causing, asshole tanks that supposedly are rampant in LFD. I've had one non-me tank since LFD started (outside of raids) and that was a very short HoR run, short due to fail.

Maybe this accounts for my generally positive perspective of LFD. I get near-instant queues (I blame lag) and I get to control the group somewhat.

in unrelated news, last night's ICC went very well. I got a new plate chest (die, leather!) and am now so far over the hit cap it has gone from being non-ideal to noobish to terrible and has now passed back around to being funny, if frustrating. Lady Deathwhisper felt overnerfed. I suppose we have downed her before, but either we played perfectly (which we didn't) or the adds were far too easy and her shield too weak, because it felt effortless. But, it is a game and this is only my perspective. Probably someone out there thinks she is perfectly tuned now.

It's all in how you say it

Did you know that in Outland there are animate herbs, hostile creatures which wander around and have to be killed before you can gather them? Even the trees are not chopped down, but hunted. They are immune to nature magic, and so resist the attempts to druids to pacify them. Even shamans must resort the mage-like calls of fire and frost to damage them.

Sounds so much more impressive than: In BC herbalists can pick crap off some mobs.

I know this is about three year old content, but I only thought of it a few months ago when I was talking to a new player. I guess that's still old.

When do we learn that gear is for certain roles?

A few days ago I happened to inspect another paladin in Orgrimmar and noticed that her gear was... odd. It was a mix of holy, ret, and prot gear. If you check my armory I might be wearing a prot chest and PvP boots and trinket in what is otherwise a decent ret DPS set, so I would seem to be a hypocrite for seeming critical of the person in Orgrimmar. Maybe I am! But there is one thing which I think stands out: enchants and gems. I am clearly wearing a tanking chest and PvP boots and they are gemmed and enchanted as such, so presumably I know they they don't belong. The paladin I ran into had the LW AP 'enchant' on her wrists, which were holy wrists.

This seems pretty stupid, right? Perhaps. But I try to avoid quickly dismissing people as stupid. Instead I believe the person in question may have not had the idea that gear is designed for certain roles. That sounds obvious, but is it really? The holy bracers had crit, SP, and intellect on them along with stamina which doesn't really differentiate anything one way or another since it's on everything. The crit, since it was unified with the introduction of 3.0 (or was it 2.0?) is definitely useful for DPS. Spell power is a weak stat, but someone could honestly and accurately claim that is is a beneficial stat, since many of our DPS abilities do scale with spell power. We even have a talent to increase it, so it's not so ridiculous to assume that spell power is a good ret stat.

Experienced players automatically do a lot of meta-gaming, trying to figure out what the devs intend, so as to gain an advantage. To us it seems perfectly logical that the devs would break gear into five different categories: DPS, tanking, healing, PvP, and cosmetic. So of course we'd see spell power and put it into casting: DPS or healing, and then judge that since they are plate they would be intended for paladin/warrior/DK, see that none of caster DPS trees, and reach the logical conclusion that they are for holy paladins: healing.

Imagine if you didn't break gear into those categories automatically but instead were shown gear and asked to determine if it is an upgrade. That would be a much more difficult task because you must evaluate a much larger pool of gear rather than being able to automatically throw away two-thirds of the possibilities. As with so many automatic human processes, these save time but not perfect; they are effectively a variation of stereotyping and can cause upgrades to escape us because they're not supposed to be DPS gear.

Oh there I went rambling on and on... When did you start calling some items healing gear and other items DPS gear and still others DPS? Did someone tell you one day when you rolled need on the wrong type of gear or did you figure it out on your own? Perhaps there was some guide which explained it? I've never seen such thing, but I don't see why it wouldn't exist. Perhaps it should if it doesn't!

Now accepting submissions for you to write my posts for me

My favorite social is at it again. Oh yes, the Greedy Goblin has figured out a new scheme: convince people think he has a great new post format by making them do all the work. I have to hand it to him, this actually isn't an incredibly stupid idea.

Step one: Write the introduction post
Step two: Do nothing. This is the best step of all for a lazy social who expects others to do his work for him.
Step three: Copy-paste screenshots
Step four: Add stupid commentary, or maybe just copy-paste the submission email text.
Step five: See your viewers go up as people rush to see if their particular screenshot was stolen. Er, honored.

Oh he has a great scheme going. Tell people who are too stupid and lazy to understand others that they are in fact brilliant and hardworking and that the others are the stupid and lazy ones, and then get a whole army of stupid and lazy people eager to say how much they agree with your brilliance. Oh he's such a little Ayn Rand. Someday I also hope to be a terrible writer who is famous for making sociopaths feel better about themselves.

P.S. I am not actually accepting submissions for you to write my posts for me. Even if I put your name as the writer, who gets the traffic and attention? Not you! Maybe a little bit. But let's face it, being able to put "written by Larisa or Tamarind" in a title would benefit me a lot more than it would them. If you really do want to send me free posts so I can publish them and people can get confused and think I suddenly got way better at writing, go right ahead, but don't blame me. Blame Syrana. Except do it a month ago.

P.P.S. I was going to stop posting on Sundays.

It's a girl

I have a niece.

Apparently she's the first girl in thr family in 52 years. I hope I can give her my legos once she's old enough to not eat them.

Saturday Superstar: Person who found me in Orgrimmar

/2 100g to the first person to find me, open trade, and hit trade if I put in 100g and hit trade

I put that up in response to someone begging for 50g. Someone found me pretty quickly, opened trade, and then we had a brief exchange of tells with him insisting that he'd won. He did eventually understand how he hadn't won.

Meanwhile the gold beggar had invited me to a group, but I guess he had taken a flight out to the Barrens. So he had a long flight back and I got bored and switched characters.

Why do people not take the time to read and understand what others say? At the very least they should have noticed that I said more than "100g to whoever opens trade" and found that odd. Maybe I was just in a trolling mood. Earlier I'd argued with a ret paladin about stacking int gems in response to him saying that the ret t10 bonus (40% chance on hit to reset divine storm cooldown) causes mana problems. He claimed he was not a whiner but got mad when we (trade chat) offered solutions.

But I'm going to make a huge assumption and guess that this isn't an isolated behavior. No, not my trolling, the failure to read and comprehend. Past lit reviews I've done found that people do not communicate well with text, partly due to loss of non-verbal gestures which are essential when speaking non-literally. Or when there is a perception of meaning within meaning. Combine this with the perception, the desire for the words to mean a certain thing (free gold!), and it's no surprise that people would misread. I suspect this has real life implications beyond just "lol they're dumb". In this case I was being intentionally misleading by imitating the usual message of hide and go seek for gold. If the message appears to be about free gold, is it so stupid to act to take advantage of the situation?

Could similar things happen elsewhere of people making otherwise rational decisions based on flawed perceptions? If so, this has use for preventing scamming or honest but harmful transactions by suggesting that the target problem is not the incurable stupidity of the customer, but instead the limited and temporary failure of accurate perception.

Player-made Heirlooms

As I was looking at level 60 Darkmoon decks I was struck by a question: Wouldn't these be great for leveling? Too bad they're level 60 and very quickly obsolete.

So how about making them heirlooms, scaling up until 60?

Heroism: The healing would be lower at low levels. This might be a huge boon to warriors.
Maelstrom: Weaker nature damage proc. Could this be the ultimate enhancement leveling trinket?
Blue Dragon: Doesn't even need scaling, it works off stats.
Twisting Nether: Same thing, it self-scales.

These are all quest rewards, but thanks to inscription, the individual card are crafted in addition to world/boss drops.

Could this go further? I think alchemy has an easy option with its unlimited flask/potions. Perhaps they could have weaker BoA versions. Other crafters could make BoA 'greens', items which are uncommon quality, so as to not discourage instances, but would be persistent, creating a market for crafters and helping to keep gear reasonably up to date with the fast leveling. The material level would need some figuring out. Hopefully this would help to further expand the role of crafting in a way other than the latest super-expensive BiS.

Or is this all the wrong direction and it's time for characters to stand on their own again, besides a bit of gold and bags?