LoDBlog

There are lots of different measures for lots of different things when it comes to Warcraft. Some are obvious like logs and meters while others are a bit more subtle. I’m going to share a little secret here about one of the things I look for when rogues put in an application to Ladies of Destiny. When looking at their spec, one of the things I look for is Glyph of Tricks of the Trade. Why? Because rogues are notorious for doing everything they can to increase their own DPS, even at the expense of others and that glyph does just the opposite.

It’s been proven time and time again that for every PvE rogue spec (Combat and Mutilate), the rogue could get better personal DPS by using some other glyph but the Glyph of Tricks of the Trade actually results in a much higher raid DPS. A rogue that is willing to take a personal hit on the meters while at the same time pushing somebody else ahead by another couple percent or more is more likely to be the same rogue who spends energy on interrupts, defensive cooldowns and debuffing.

And if you do ever run into a rogue who doesn’t have Tricks of the Trade glyphed? Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuunnnnnnnn!!!

• * Mana will be a bigger consideration for all healers. We aren’t trying to make healing more painful; we’re trying to make it more fun. When the cost of a spell isn’t an issue, then casting the right spell for the job is less of an issue because you might as well just use your most powerful spell all of the time. We are, however, getting rid of the five-second rule, because we don’t want to encourage standing around doing nothing. We’re also going to cut back on the benefits of buffs such as Replenishment so priests (and all healers) don’t feel as penalized when those buffs aren’t available.
 
 
 
 
• Heal (available at level 16): While priests already have a spell called Heal, the existing version becomes obsolete at higher levels, which is something we intend to change in Cataclysm. Introduced at a low level, the “new” Heal spell will functionally work much like a down-ranked Greater Heal did in the past, adding more granularity to your direct-healing arsenal. If you need to heal someone a moderate amount and efficiency is an issue (making Flash Heal the incorrect spell for the job), then Heal is what you want to use. Heal is intended to be the priest’s go-to direct-healing spell unless they need something bigger (Greater Heal) or faster (Flash Heal). We will be following a similar philosophy with all the healing classes.

Well that’s interesting…. 

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A few counter arguments to the Anti-Meter crowd (specific to healers)

From time to time we hear from someone that has been recently wronged by the use of meters.  I usually assume this person to be a casual player, since I can’t imagine a more hardcore player not embracing a system of measuring improvement and success, but I suppose that any type of player could develop a dislike of meters.

Lots of people have written blog posts about how awful meters are.  “Everyone uses them incorrectly”.  “HPS != DPS”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re healing recklessly or abandoning your assignments”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re causing more overheal for other healers”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re taking another healer’s job“.  “Pushing HPS means you’re more likely to stand in fire”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re going to snipe heals from other healers to intentionally prevent their heals from registering”.  “Pushing HPS means that the communists have won, there are no more French Fries, and the world is going to end”.

A few common arguments and replies to the meter bashers.

“If the boss is dead and everyone is alive in the end then I’m doing my job”

Raid success does not indicate individual success. If you’re on a basketball team and you miss all ten of the shots you take, but your team still wins you had a bad game. Winning does not change the fact that you had a poor performance and your other team members must have had good performances, in fact they needed to have even better performances than usual to counter your poor performance. Read more »

Ah the ever changing landscape of an MMO. With every new major and minor patch these days it seems each class can expect something that comes along to affect them either directly or indirectly. A long time ago classes didn’t change much, you’d get a class review once in a blue moon but that’s about it. Now Blizzard is much more apt to tweak classes as they go; it’s still the same old conservative Blizzard but with a bit faster reflexes.

Patch 3.3.3 is now on the PTR and with it come some changes to rogues. These changes are very likely to be the last we’ll see before Cataclysm. Blizzard says that they’re never truly satisfied with anything but the fact remains that rogues are in a pretty good place right now. Since the last round of nerfs, the caterwauling about our damage being OP has subsided to it’s usual low rumble and while there are a few fights that penalize us more than other classes (*cough* Sindragosa *cough*), it’s not anything we can’t learn to just deal with.

The changes are pretty interesting, let’s take a look. Read more »

So as part of the Ladies of Destiny 5th Anniversery blog series, I’ll be writing a response to each of Matron’s posts, to let you know everything he got wrong or important details that he left out!  There actually wasn’t a whole lot going on in that first year before we started running Molten Core in earnest, compared to nowadays.  I think the main general theme of that era is that it was just a completely different game back then.  We still took ourselves every bit as seriously as we do now, but man were we noobs!

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LoD celebrated our 5^th birthday on Feb 22^nd 2010.  As part of the celebration I’d like to take a trip down memory lane and go year by year, recounting the trials and tribulations, lessons and achievements, wins and losses, and try to capture what has made this guild home for so many during the years.  Our achievements stand in stark contrast with our humble beginnings and my inexperience.  In fact, I often wonder how we ever made it out of the woods to evolve into a highly successful raiding guild.

Year 1 – 2005

Our story begins, as all good WoW stories do, in Goldshire.  Read more »

Gaming phrases are all over the place, some are good and some are bad but most are trying to convey something in a way that the reader will remember. There’s a good phrase that gets passed around on gaming forums, put into peoples signatures, and has even made it onto my much maligned Facebook page.

What separates the “hard core” gamer from the more casual one is not necessarily the amount of time devoted to playing the game, but rather the willingness to tolerate failure and try again.

On the face of it, this phrase is just a re-tooling of the “if at first you don’t succeed” motto but if we take a closer look we can see that there’s a lot more going on in here when we apply it to an MMO. Specifically, when talking about an MMO you need to be able to tolerate the failures of others as well as your own. Everyone is going to individually make mistakes or fail but when you add another 9 or 24 people into the mix it changes everything. Most notably, our relative perception of failure.

Suddenly, everyone is failing so much more than you are. In fact, I’d venture to say that in a 25man raid, “other players” are failing 24 times more often than you. And that’s where the real gamers prevail, the gamers who know that the more people you add to the mix, the more often failure will show it’s ugly head.

Raids are going to wipe – a lot – and a good portion of the time it’s going to have nothing to do with you and there’s nothing that you specifically could have done. It’s out of your hands. How you choose to deal with your own failures and more importantly the failures of others will define you as a gamer and as a person.

The Problem –

We all know how it goes in raid guilds.  When you’re raiding and things are dying people are happy.  When you’re not raiding and when things aren’t dying people are unhappy.  It’s basically that simple.  There are many different flavors of drama, but most of all of gets solved, or ignored, if raids happen and stuff dies.

So it’s leadership’s responsibility to make sure that raids happen and bosses are killed, preferably making worthwhile progress each week.

When guilds struggle it’s typically for the following reasons

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Everybody has alts (alternate characters). You may only have one lonely little bank alt or a server of max-level behemoths on both sides of the faction fence but if you play WoW you have alts. For a very long time, Tinwhisker was my only character. Leveling in vanilla WoW wasn’t terribly difficult (although it was more difficult than it is now) but I was busy learning one class in a new game already. The thought of another character was a bit overwhelming. Eventually though, I rolled my first bank toon. Read more »

A recurring theme on WoW forums that I’ve seen since the days of Molten Core, is uninformed raiders complaining about Damage Meter mods and how they hurt the raid.  The truth is that damage meters are a tool, much like a hammer.  When used properly, a hammer can help you build some very cool stuff that you never could’ve built with your bare hands.  Or when used irresponsibly, a hammer can smash your thumbs or poke your eye out.

The most popular damage meter addon is probably Recount.  Another option which I’m told is much less CPU intensive is Skada.  I would consider it essential to run one of these mods (or something similar) while raiding, but this is especially true if you have any hand in the raid leadership, or even if you just want to be able to discuss fight strategies and analyze what happened on the previous attempt without accidentally making a fool of yourself.  However, you will learn very little from simply looking at, say, the Damage Done meter, without analyzing the context in which those numbers were obtained.  The true usefulness of these addons is dependent on digging a little deeper than what you immediately see on the surface.  Here I’ll discuss some examples of how I use Recount for the first 7 bosses in Icecrown Citadel (i.e. Storming the Citadel and Plagueworks sections), emphasizing only DPS classes and ignoring Tanks/Healers.

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