The posts about 3.2 have been around for some time now, and being a casual blogger, I never hoped to compete with the likes of WoW.com or MMO Champ for news. Instead, I'll try and offer a few insights and analyses to the mage and shaman changes respectively.
The general changes are pretty interesting - although my kneejerk reaction to Emblems of Conquest dropping in friggin heroics was "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'VE WORKED HARD AND LONG TO EARN ENOUGH TO SOON BUY MY FIRST TIER 8 PIECE, AND NOW ANY FRESH LEVEL 80 CAN WALTZ INTO THE HEROIC GRIND AND BUY ILVL 232 STUFF A WEEK LATER Q_Q!", I think I can appreciate the slack Blizzard are cutting people who are gearing their third or fourth alt (such as myself, in a distant future - I'll not be fucked over when the next expansion comes, but rather have some 4-5 level 80's to grind to max level for some added fun). At the same time, why T8? Why not bump heroics/Naxx-10 to Walrus and Naxx-10 end bosses/25 normal bosses to Conquest Badgers? It's gonna be slightly longer before we have people in full ilvl 232 gear destroying Ulduar PuG's at least. And yes, I think a time will come when the average gear and fight awareness level allows most of Ulduar to be PuG:ed.
I don't really care though, cause deep inside, I'll know that I earned my badges when it was still hard, and that I am better than everyone else, so I'll be fine, and it'll be an overall gain. Mount changes look good, and again, while giving a free ride to new players, it offers well needed speed boost to levelling alts. The new raid instance seems rather lackluster and is not consistent with old dungeon design, and frankly, I've never been that psyched about "tournament" or "gladiator arena" type of gameplay. While I'm sure Blizzard will stick some nice and interesting mechanics in there, the idea of "let's have them fight wave after wave of adds" is a bit overdone and lazy. Mount Hyjal comes to mind, and I remember how frustrating it was to wipe on the last wave before the boss and have to do them all over again.
As far as mages are concerned, we are still getting shafted. We are decent for damage, it's only we have to work 36%* harder to get the same results that are facerolled by other classes. We only show up high on the meters when RNG permits. We are, for almost all intents and purposes, the only class that ever runs out of our chief resource. We've not seen any significant quality of life changes for a long time, and they look to be sparse in the future.
And as much as I would like to pretend that showing up high on meters is all that matters, this isn't true. We have quality of life issues that makes the game less fun to play, and they aren't being adressed. They are tossing us a small bone - they are making the invisibility fade timer noninterruptible. We still have to wait 3 seconds for the threat to drop, and it's still something we need to put effort into clearing off (when it's used as a threat dump we want to keep DPS:ing as soon as it has had effect, just like Feign Death for hunters - it's useless for solo play anyway cause you can't see any mobs when it's up...) with right clicking or keeping a macro. I cannot begin to explain how miniscule this is, especially compared to how they are, and have been, basically nerfing everything regarding our mana the last couple patches, and are continuing to do so because of replenishment. They've band-aided Evocation from once being a talent to having two minutes cooldown for arcane mages who like to eat through their mana. But it still requires us to do 0 DPS, it has a fairly unforgiving cooldown, we have to stand still, any damage, movement or pushback will severely diminish the gains since a tick is worth 3.5-4k mana, and with some bad luck that you totally can't compensate for, you'll have to move out of a Kel'Thuzad void zone the exact second you start the cast, quite possibly gaining 0 mana and being forced to wand the next two or four minutes. Game design that prevents the player from playing the game (i.e., keeping up some DPS in the case of mages) is inherently bad game design. They are nerfing replenishment and are tacking mana returns onto ignite at the same time they are lowering the mana cost of Arcane blast, but that does not solve the root problem. I even saw convincing maths showing that you need to take these new changes a lot further than Blizzard is doing for it to not be a very obvious nerf. I'm not begging for buffs (well, to our mana managment, I am), but at least do not nerf anything. Replenishment really screws with the games mechanics - Blizz does not want DPS:ers running out of mana, and they want healers to do it. Giving them all the same mana buff is not gonna help achieve that.
The Q&A brought some great questions and actually some good answers too, in the cesspool that is the official forums. The mana gem/health stone shared CD is being removed. The fights where me being able to eat a health stone would have saved the raid from wiping is probably not more than one, but at least the squishiest class around will be able to cut the healers -some- slack by gaining some much needed self-heal capabilities.
The T9 bonuses look weird, and while datamining is unreliable and we are in for some fixes, it shows some very boring thinking from Blizzards side. The two-piece is basically a free armor glyph. That's nice since it frees up a spot for Impr.... argh, no, sorry, I can't bear to type that. Improved Scorch is crap and needs to be fixed and homogenized with Winters chill and Improved Shadow Bolt to be a shared caster debuff. Anyway, it gives more armor to Ice armor, more regen to Mage armor and more Spirit->Crit rating for Molten armor. Pretty boring, to be honest, since Warlocks and Shamans have similar armor-type mechanics. It would be nice if it affected the way we play and help distinguish us as mages. The four-piece is a straight 5% crit bonus. The T8 four-piece, while heavily increasing our dependence on RNG, was fun, flavouristic and very much inline with how we play the game. Getting straight damage upgrades is boring, this is true for any magical weapon in a roleplaying setting, and our tier bonuses are the closest we get to a "magical weapon" as they come in pen and paper roleplaying. Most of them look rather lackluster, and some even make no sense (datamining issues no doubt), so I hope we get to see a lot of changes to these.
My mage is looking less and less appealing, and levelling my alts in those boring areas where I'v already levelled six alts seems like the reasonable thing to do. And I seriously do not belong with the crowd who reroll the Flavor of the Month. Maybe I'm tired of DPS all over. Maybe I want to heal more or tank instead. I dunno, but I intend to find out by getting my alts in shape.
For shaman, especially resto, it looks promising. Numeric buffs across the board - base health %, totem drops, CH jump distance - it's all good. However, what's really nice is what's been done to the way resto heals. Tidal waves no longer brings LHW haste but crit, NS is now up every 2 minutes, Healing Way is a straight HW buff (combined with Tidal waves haste we'll see some more use of HW than "OSHIT" every three minutes), Ancestral healing goes from armor bonus to physical damage decrease (should be straight damage decrease but it feels as if I'm asking for too much here...), homogenization when Cure Poison and Cure Disease gets slapped together and a big ole buff to Water Shield should make any healing shaman happy. Enhancement will benefit indirectly when rogues get axes, but since we still want slow ones and rogues fast ones I doubt it will be that big of a deal. Shamanistic rage gets a nice fix and makes shamans more like arcane mages (more total mana spent, less mana wasted, shorter cool down on active mana regen), and since I don't play elemental I won't delve into that.
I guess that concludes it - some mage QQ, some shaman happiness, and some general stuff. Here's to hoping that 3.2 is a long way into the future still (despite being up on the PTR already) so we can enjoy the current content when it actually is endgame.
* I made these statistics up.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Mimiron down!
"Just" ten man, but we had an entire night dedicated to downing the bastard and last night he bit the dust after something like 12-13 tries or so. My combatlog farked up which was a big disappointment, but now I have Loggerhead installed so hopefully that won't happen again. We had a few tries at General Vezax too, and I think he is within our grasp gear and skill wise if we get another night dedicated to just killing him.
Mimiron was a big pain, but we managed phase 4 a lot better this time. Last time we had a focused effort at downing him, we got to phase 4 two or three times and promptly wiped each time. This time, we got to phase 4 at least five times and actually stayed alive long enough to have him down to "omg we might make it!!1" two or three times. First time we had no ranged and the head was at ... many %, second time we managed to kill the bottom (or was it middle?) and have it respawn. Third time we got all of the pieces down to about 5% but had a lot of people dead so synchronizing the DPS would be hard and I thought we'd wipe for certain due to one part dying and the others not following suit, but pessimism turned to optimism when everything was below 3% and the bottom went down. I remember frantically screaming "MIDDLE! MIDDLE!" on Vent and then came the achievement popup and a big sense of relief.
Killshot!
Mimiron was a big pain, but we managed phase 4 a lot better this time. Last time we had a focused effort at downing him, we got to phase 4 two or three times and promptly wiped each time. This time, we got to phase 4 at least five times and actually stayed alive long enough to have him down to "omg we might make it!!1" two or three times. First time we had no ranged and the head was at ... many %, second time we managed to kill the bottom (or was it middle?) and have it respawn. Third time we got all of the pieces down to about 5% but had a lot of people dead so synchronizing the DPS would be hard and I thought we'd wipe for certain due to one part dying and the others not following suit, but pessimism turned to optimism when everything was below 3% and the bottom went down. I remember frantically screaming "MIDDLE! MIDDLE!" on Vent and then came the achievement popup and a big sense of relief.
Killshot!
Monday, June 15, 2009
Argent Dawn, How I Love Thee
I'm not a religious man, but ... Jesus Christ! I got into Silvermoon City with my paladin (on my way to drop of the necklace to Sylvanas, level 18, woo!) and people in trade were talking Swedish. Very bad Swedish on top of that. People had characters named "Pelleboy" and "Blödjägare" ("Bleed hunter") and other -extremely- silly names - no Gymliz or Legololases as far as I could see though...
I'm all for the whole "I don't identify with my character" but the character is not just a faceless tool with which you play a game, the stuff you put in is supposed to be a representation of that character, and not just a random nickname like the ones you throw around in Counterstrike. People with different characters that share a common name but with accents (someone in trade named Hùbert*" said "I'll log on Húbert*, he is a tank" when someone went LFM AN (in Swedish of course)) for ease of recognition within a guild should just get a better guild or go shoot themselves and rid the world of their filth. Anyone with their nickname and the character's class as the character name should be chemically castrated so that they cannot spread their genes further (no, they will not have breeded yet, cause they are going to be about fourteen year old, hideously mutated and possibly inbred too). They should then be repeatedly tortured, preferably by means of the Pear of Anguish.
I know I won't change anything, and I should be accepting their attitudes and playstyle, and that I sound just like any person more than ten years older than me going "when I was young...", but damnit! Some things are holy, and some things should just be that certain way. I blame the internet. The kids today don't remember a time before the internet, and while that is lovely and teh futar and all, I don't think it's all for good. They are still using it as a very blunt instrument, they are supposed to be "the digital generation" but I'd care to wager that my generation is a lot better at computer things than the kids of today, and not just cause we have had more time to practise!
Anyway. The way people act on Argent Dawn is how I expect normal people who play World of Warcraft would act. I'll never roll on a server that hasn't got naming rules again. Ever. Such a small thing really makes a huge difference - you'd think that the 14 year old snotlings would just come up with a random fantasy looking name and still plague our experience, but they don't. They simply cannot be there to the same extent, cause I'd have noticed. I've played more than 90% of my time on RP servers, and I've never quite seen anything like what I saw tonight. I can count the real douchebags (the type that goes "naa, I'd rather solo play" when asked if they want to group for five minutes when you are both killing the same quest mob) and totally clueless noobs on the fingers of one hand.
/rant.
* Fictious name to protect the innocent. The real name was equally silly however.
I'm all for the whole "I don't identify with my character" but the character is not just a faceless tool with which you play a game, the stuff you put in is supposed to be a representation of that character, and not just a random nickname like the ones you throw around in Counterstrike. People with different characters that share a common name but with accents (someone in trade named Hùbert*" said "I'll log on Húbert*, he is a tank" when someone went LFM AN (in Swedish of course)) for ease of recognition within a guild should just get a better guild or go shoot themselves and rid the world of their filth. Anyone with their nickname and the character's class as the character name should be chemically castrated so that they cannot spread their genes further (no, they will not have breeded yet, cause they are going to be about fourteen year old, hideously mutated and possibly inbred too). They should then be repeatedly tortured, preferably by means of the Pear of Anguish.
I know I won't change anything, and I should be accepting their attitudes and playstyle, and that I sound just like any person more than ten years older than me going "when I was young...", but damnit! Some things are holy, and some things should just be that certain way. I blame the internet. The kids today don't remember a time before the internet, and while that is lovely and teh futar and all, I don't think it's all for good. They are still using it as a very blunt instrument, they are supposed to be "the digital generation" but I'd care to wager that my generation is a lot better at computer things than the kids of today, and not just cause we have had more time to practise!
Anyway. The way people act on Argent Dawn is how I expect normal people who play World of Warcraft would act. I'll never roll on a server that hasn't got naming rules again. Ever. Such a small thing really makes a huge difference - you'd think that the 14 year old snotlings would just come up with a random fantasy looking name and still plague our experience, but they don't. They simply cannot be there to the same extent, cause I'd have noticed. I've played more than 90% of my time on RP servers, and I've never quite seen anything like what I saw tonight. I can count the real douchebags (the type that goes "naa, I'd rather solo play" when asked if they want to group for five minutes when you are both killing the same quest mob) and totally clueless noobs on the fingers of one hand.
/rant.
* Fictious name to protect the innocent. The real name was equally silly however.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The current state of Mages
Yesterday, I was supposed to have written this post, but since I had some loose ends on tanking, I went with those instead. With that safely out of the way, I can attack this subject instead.
First off, I'll do a short introduction and then I'll deal with the different specs and some global issues.
I raid in what I consider to be a fairly normal guild. We have a bunch of really good players, but we aren't exactly hardcore. We don't have minimum attendance and we cancel raids every now and then due to bad signups. We don't have enough people to run Heroic Ulduar on a regular basis but hope this will change when summer and exam season is over. Our current progress in 25 man is Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor and Kologarn, and for ten-man, every boss up until Mimiron who we are currently working on downing. Myself, I go on (and occasionally lead) 1-2 ten-man Ulduars per week and have so since we started going.
If you are Frost, I reckon you are so by old habit and nostalgia. I wish I was more like you, but I've discovered that the playstyles are pretty much all fun to me and as such, I'm not that attached to Frost that I used to be. If you go to raids as Frost, your raid leader is desperate for replenishment and you are the best person to lose DPS from. You keep only one point in Enduring Winter to not lose replenishment ticks and with that, Water elemental uptime which means even lower personal DPS. The spec only comes in handy in one fight, and that's General Vezax, and then, most likely only ever in hard mode. I'm sorry, but frost does not currently hold any valid ground in PvE content beyond Naxx-10. Frost will most likely not get any PvE love for a long time, if ever. There's very little AoE where Frost could of have shined with ultraboosted Blizzards. Blizzard seems content with having three viable raid specs for mages, and I guess the rest of the specs are in fairly good shape.
For arcane, there's some better news and some worse news however. The good news is that there are several fights with burn phases where arcane really can shine. There's also some high mobility fights and/or fights with lots of target switching. I'll get back to target switching and mobility in a minute though. You will most likely go for a Incanters Absorbtion spec, you lose very little and you have great potential gains in the fights with fire and frost damage. You won't win the meters on any fights, but you can easily fullfil special fight requirements (nuking Razorscale, popping brittle golems and keeping Singed up on Hodir) with a lot less overall raid DPS loss than other classes. For the target switching, you are dependent on TTW for max damage, something that is not likely to be up at all times in add-heavy environments. For off-tanked adds, you might start doing damage for 2-3 casts before the debuff comes up due to various reasons. Your AoE damage is going to be fairly weak, but your Blizzards hit for at least some more than Fires'. All in all, arcane is decent, almost good, but will keep on falling behind due to scaling issues. The real problem is the paradox: IA-Arcane will shine in high mobility/high damage environments, but Arcane overall is dependent on moments to breathe and popping Evocation. I lost so many evos last night I don't even want to count cause I'd probably break out in tears. The fights where Arcane has a good chance to shine is Flame Leviathan (bursting down the turrets), Razorscale (on-demand burst when she is grounded + IA/Flame warding bonuses), Ignis (popping golems, standing in the fire), Deconstructor (nuking the heart) and Hodir (insane haste bonuses + high mobility + IA/Frost warding bonuses). You'll do good on Kologarn (no Scorch for the constant switching, so someone else better bring the 5% crit, hai 2 u warlocks) and Council (some limited absorbtion, fair amount of "stand and nuke" and uninterrupted evos). Thorim is nice for arcane when going in the gauntlet, it usually uses up all my mana and I can evocate while Thorim has his speech, to start the DPS race at full mana again. Freya has a lot of different mechanics but nothing particularly helps arcane, DPS needs to be consistent during all of the phases, but the burstyness is nice when picking off lashers. Start with 0-stack AB on a low-health mob, retarget one with more health for the 1-stack, retarget yet again for the 2-stack and so on, clear the stack with Abarr when you need to run or use it at a tree. Very efficient mana usage and fun to maximise. For Mimiron, the phase shifts and need for burst are good for Arcane, and there's some use to get from IA, but you won't do overall better or worse than any other mage spec bar Frost really.
Another build that might need to use Evocation is Fire, a very mana-hungry spec. I still rarely have issues with mana even in replenishment-less environments, and even when I do go hard oom with small opportunities at regen, it's fun because it was becuase of lots of Hot streak procs, and tossing instant Pyroblasts just makes me giddy. If I could always cast instant Pyros and be forced to wand 50% of all fights, it'd be totally worth it. Fire is definately one of the specs to choose for your Ulduar dual specs. It's top DPS and will continue to be due to scaling, and the (a bit sad) fact that Ulduar loot is basically tailormade for Fire mages. The T8 bonuses, while RNG dependent(as if Fire needed more of that), benefit Fire the most by far whilst Arcane wants to hold on to 2T7 for the mini-trinket since they pop it every cooldown. The gear is littered with hit which is good news for Fire, which needs a whopping 446 to be capped. Luckily, there's 195 hit just on the T8.25 pieces (although the offpiece to throw out - gloves - has a hefty 60 +hit to make up for elsewhere). There's a healthy amount of spirit around, which means you can pick up spirit + SP + haste items and still not ruin your overall stat balance due to lack of crit on that particular piece. Fire will do good in any fight. If you are one-specced, go with Fire, it's the obvious choice. You'll have a trickier time maximising performance on certain fights compared to other specs, but you'll win out in the long run.
Talking about crit leads me on to the last mage raid spec, Frostfire. They thrive on big crits and is the only mage spec that cleary prioritizes crit rating over haste. The playstyle is exactly the same as Fire, only lacking Torment of the Weak and not providing Focus Magic to the raid, plus slightly worse scaling and slightly better AoE. You'll need less hit which means less hit pieces which means more SP/crit/haste. This is also why I've seen better FFB results in my FFB gear than FB results in my FB gear so far - my FB gear can only be hit capped by gimping other stats, whilst I can remain at 368 hit with FFB gear and hit 40+% main nuke crit fairly easy. My arcane spec only picks up 3% hit from talents so the transition from Arcane gearset to FFB gearset was mainly switching haste for crit, and was done as a step towards fully gearing for FB. Time and gear will close the gap. There's not much to be said about FFB that hasn't already been said about fire, however, there are some places where you will have a slightly easier time than Fire. Your AoE DPS will do some good on Razorscale and Freya, your huge crits will be of great help with breaking out people from Hodir's Flash Freezes and on mobility fights you'll have good use of your fairly high damage per casting time. The fight where you will truly shine is Deconstructor. You'll have no mana problems going all out on the heart and still AoE:ing those last adds coming through because the hunter or warlock slacked on their AoE. You hear that, hunters and warlocks? You should DPS the adds, not me! I haven't been the AoE king for like, forever, and I lose a lot of single-target DPS by switching to adds. Don't tell me I'm slacking - it's your job killing them, not mine. Call me when you need a Frost nova.
In conclusion, gear for Fire and keep that as your primary spec. Keep FFB or IA-Arcane as your second one depending on gear, taste and current demands. I'm going with Arcane even though I think FFB would be better ("= higher DPS"), simply because I want my two specs to feel different. Also, Fire and Arcane share the same basic gearing priorities which means I only have to juggle hit - not hit and crit/haste.
First off, I'll do a short introduction and then I'll deal with the different specs and some global issues.
I raid in what I consider to be a fairly normal guild. We have a bunch of really good players, but we aren't exactly hardcore. We don't have minimum attendance and we cancel raids every now and then due to bad signups. We don't have enough people to run Heroic Ulduar on a regular basis but hope this will change when summer and exam season is over. Our current progress in 25 man is Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor and Kologarn, and for ten-man, every boss up until Mimiron who we are currently working on downing. Myself, I go on (and occasionally lead) 1-2 ten-man Ulduars per week and have so since we started going.
If you are Frost, I reckon you are so by old habit and nostalgia. I wish I was more like you, but I've discovered that the playstyles are pretty much all fun to me and as such, I'm not that attached to Frost that I used to be. If you go to raids as Frost, your raid leader is desperate for replenishment and you are the best person to lose DPS from. You keep only one point in Enduring Winter to not lose replenishment ticks and with that, Water elemental uptime which means even lower personal DPS. The spec only comes in handy in one fight, and that's General Vezax, and then, most likely only ever in hard mode. I'm sorry, but frost does not currently hold any valid ground in PvE content beyond Naxx-10. Frost will most likely not get any PvE love for a long time, if ever. There's very little AoE where Frost could of have shined with ultraboosted Blizzards. Blizzard seems content with having three viable raid specs for mages, and I guess the rest of the specs are in fairly good shape.
For arcane, there's some better news and some worse news however. The good news is that there are several fights with burn phases where arcane really can shine. There's also some high mobility fights and/or fights with lots of target switching. I'll get back to target switching and mobility in a minute though. You will most likely go for a Incanters Absorbtion spec, you lose very little and you have great potential gains in the fights with fire and frost damage. You won't win the meters on any fights, but you can easily fullfil special fight requirements (nuking Razorscale, popping brittle golems and keeping Singed up on Hodir) with a lot less overall raid DPS loss than other classes. For the target switching, you are dependent on TTW for max damage, something that is not likely to be up at all times in add-heavy environments. For off-tanked adds, you might start doing damage for 2-3 casts before the debuff comes up due to various reasons. Your AoE damage is going to be fairly weak, but your Blizzards hit for at least some more than Fires'. All in all, arcane is decent, almost good, but will keep on falling behind due to scaling issues. The real problem is the paradox: IA-Arcane will shine in high mobility/high damage environments, but Arcane overall is dependent on moments to breathe and popping Evocation. I lost so many evos last night I don't even want to count cause I'd probably break out in tears. The fights where Arcane has a good chance to shine is Flame Leviathan (bursting down the turrets), Razorscale (on-demand burst when she is grounded + IA/Flame warding bonuses), Ignis (popping golems, standing in the fire), Deconstructor (nuking the heart) and Hodir (insane haste bonuses + high mobility + IA/Frost warding bonuses). You'll do good on Kologarn (no Scorch for the constant switching, so someone else better bring the 5% crit, hai 2 u warlocks) and Council (some limited absorbtion, fair amount of "stand and nuke" and uninterrupted evos). Thorim is nice for arcane when going in the gauntlet, it usually uses up all my mana and I can evocate while Thorim has his speech, to start the DPS race at full mana again. Freya has a lot of different mechanics but nothing particularly helps arcane, DPS needs to be consistent during all of the phases, but the burstyness is nice when picking off lashers. Start with 0-stack AB on a low-health mob, retarget one with more health for the 1-stack, retarget yet again for the 2-stack and so on, clear the stack with Abarr when you need to run or use it at a tree. Very efficient mana usage and fun to maximise. For Mimiron, the phase shifts and need for burst are good for Arcane, and there's some use to get from IA, but you won't do overall better or worse than any other mage spec bar Frost really.
Another build that might need to use Evocation is Fire, a very mana-hungry spec. I still rarely have issues with mana even in replenishment-less environments, and even when I do go hard oom with small opportunities at regen, it's fun because it was becuase of lots of Hot streak procs, and tossing instant Pyroblasts just makes me giddy. If I could always cast instant Pyros and be forced to wand 50% of all fights, it'd be totally worth it. Fire is definately one of the specs to choose for your Ulduar dual specs. It's top DPS and will continue to be due to scaling, and the (a bit sad) fact that Ulduar loot is basically tailormade for Fire mages. The T8 bonuses, while RNG dependent(as if Fire needed more of that), benefit Fire the most by far whilst Arcane wants to hold on to 2T7 for the mini-trinket since they pop it every cooldown. The gear is littered with hit which is good news for Fire, which needs a whopping 446 to be capped. Luckily, there's 195 hit just on the T8.25 pieces (although the offpiece to throw out - gloves - has a hefty 60 +hit to make up for elsewhere). There's a healthy amount of spirit around, which means you can pick up spirit + SP + haste items and still not ruin your overall stat balance due to lack of crit on that particular piece. Fire will do good in any fight. If you are one-specced, go with Fire, it's the obvious choice. You'll have a trickier time maximising performance on certain fights compared to other specs, but you'll win out in the long run.
Talking about crit leads me on to the last mage raid spec, Frostfire. They thrive on big crits and is the only mage spec that cleary prioritizes crit rating over haste. The playstyle is exactly the same as Fire, only lacking Torment of the Weak and not providing Focus Magic to the raid, plus slightly worse scaling and slightly better AoE. You'll need less hit which means less hit pieces which means more SP/crit/haste. This is also why I've seen better FFB results in my FFB gear than FB results in my FB gear so far - my FB gear can only be hit capped by gimping other stats, whilst I can remain at 368 hit with FFB gear and hit 40+% main nuke crit fairly easy. My arcane spec only picks up 3% hit from talents so the transition from Arcane gearset to FFB gearset was mainly switching haste for crit, and was done as a step towards fully gearing for FB. Time and gear will close the gap. There's not much to be said about FFB that hasn't already been said about fire, however, there are some places where you will have a slightly easier time than Fire. Your AoE DPS will do some good on Razorscale and Freya, your huge crits will be of great help with breaking out people from Hodir's Flash Freezes and on mobility fights you'll have good use of your fairly high damage per casting time. The fight where you will truly shine is Deconstructor. You'll have no mana problems going all out on the heart and still AoE:ing those last adds coming through because the hunter or warlock slacked on their AoE. You hear that, hunters and warlocks? You should DPS the adds, not me! I haven't been the AoE king for like, forever, and I lose a lot of single-target DPS by switching to adds. Don't tell me I'm slacking - it's your job killing them, not mine. Call me when you need a Frost nova.
In conclusion, gear for Fire and keep that as your primary spec. Keep FFB or IA-Arcane as your second one depending on gear, taste and current demands. I'm going with Arcane even though I think FFB would be better ("= higher DPS"), simply because I want my two specs to feel different. Also, Fire and Arcane share the same basic gearing priorities which means I only have to juggle hit - not hit and crit/haste.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Some loose ends on tanking
So, downstairs I discussed why I'll probably always be a DPS player at heart. This is slightly interesting cause I'm considering levelling a tanking class, and I'll probably go for the only true hybrid class (the druid) or the close second (the paladin). Melee DPS can be done on Togtok, and as such, I'd have the core functions (healer, ranged DPS, melee DPS, tank) of the game covered.
I'll be leaving the Death knight out of this equation for now. I considered rolling one before Wrath hit to have a tanking class, but I'm not very interested in the lore and I find the class as such ... an abomination to the game. There, I said it. I think it's the stupidest thing Blizzard has implemented in a long while. I reckon it's a damn fun class to play, and I might have a look at one, but I'd sooner try a warlock or warrior since they are the classes I haven't rolled before (no, the level 8 warrior on Moonglade I made to chat with some friends does not count). Even though I'd hate doing the 1-55 grind again, not to speak of the 70-80 grind. However, I'm an officer of a guild. I'm gearing a second level 80 character up for raiding. I'm pretty deep in this shit already, might as well try and have something to do to keep me from getting the raid boredom and resulting burnout. I will have a lot of time on my hands, and with the right snacks and some kickass music, I think I can put in a serious effort towards it. The dilemma here is that I'd rather have several tanking classes and several healing classes than several different DPS classes - at best, I'd have to level 1 paladin, 1 warrior, 1 druid and 1 priest to have them all covered, and since pallyhealing does not appeal to me, I'd go with the priest, leaving my main project at two characters.
The remaining tanking classes all have some disadvantages that makes me not want to roll them, and some advantages speaking for them.
I'll begin with the warrior. The original tank, a versatile tank with lots of tools of the trade. I'd probably go orc, cause grunts are cool and look sturdy enough, plus, my druid's obviously tauren. I've heard they are a bitch to level though, and as "basic" they feel a little boring. I'm not sure I like the playstyle and I'm not sure I like the baggage that comes with the class. Somehow, warriors are expected to tank, and since I'd roll one to do just that, it shouldn't be a problem, but it still feels a bit like being locked in. Having a class not based on mana would be nice for a change though...
As for druids, they seem like the perfect one-target tank. That'd mean I'd probably spend a lot of time hitting the same mob, racking up threat so the DPS can go wild. I speak raid setting now, which is far in the future, of course. Being the real true hybrid (able to fill all four functions in a raiding environment) finding a group while levelling shouldn't be hard, and they seem easy enough to level with fairly little downtime. Gemming and enchanting two (or four) gearsets is gonna be a pain, but Togtok's self sufficient and he keeps 2.5 sets. Also, I have a level 14 one already, and on my main server. The downside? I don't particularly dig the shapeshifting that much. Constantly raiding as a non-cow (I'd probably go feral/resto) might get on my nerves. As they are the superhybrid, the talent trees don't leave nearly as much freedom of spec as the mage's three do and being locked into cookie cutters is boring.
Moving on to the paladin, my prime suspect here for one main reason: I have one at level 15, and I'm loving the playstyle so far. Downside? It's a mana based class, and I'm tired of those. Silencing mechanics lock you out of a lot of your abilities, luckily, such abilities are rare. The raid situation would most probably suit me, paladins are the embodiment of an offtank, good aoe abilities and a holy frisbee (I just love saying that). I think I'd be tasked with fun tanking missions simply by being a paladin - they always seem to get the offtank tasks such as picking up mobs or guarding special entrances. Another downside is that I'd have to play a belf for it, another race I'm not entirely friends with (look who's talking, I have three belf alts and if they'd been around back then, I'd probably rolled a belf mage instead of the troll one. Sorry, Vorla...) and for Pete's sake! THEY ARE LOLADINS. FOREVER AND EVER. I like saying "Hey, I changed my mind" or "I was wrong all along" a lot more than "Ha! Told you so!", even though it stings, so this will probably be my choice. Also, a belf paladin named "Audacity" is just too frickin' cool for lots of reasons, especially since I'd be levelling her along with my undead priestess "Prudense" (the good spelling was taken). I'm just a sucker for toons named after concepts rather than a random fantasy name. In the end, Auda is on a PvP server and I think I'm gonna give that a shot before transferring, I might like it. I'll probably count ten gankings and then give up, though...
I'll be leaving the Death knight out of this equation for now. I considered rolling one before Wrath hit to have a tanking class, but I'm not very interested in the lore and I find the class as such ... an abomination to the game. There, I said it. I think it's the stupidest thing Blizzard has implemented in a long while. I reckon it's a damn fun class to play, and I might have a look at one, but I'd sooner try a warlock or warrior since they are the classes I haven't rolled before (no, the level 8 warrior on Moonglade I made to chat with some friends does not count). Even though I'd hate doing the 1-55 grind again, not to speak of the 70-80 grind. However, I'm an officer of a guild. I'm gearing a second level 80 character up for raiding. I'm pretty deep in this shit already, might as well try and have something to do to keep me from getting the raid boredom and resulting burnout. I will have a lot of time on my hands, and with the right snacks and some kickass music, I think I can put in a serious effort towards it. The dilemma here is that I'd rather have several tanking classes and several healing classes than several different DPS classes - at best, I'd have to level 1 paladin, 1 warrior, 1 druid and 1 priest to have them all covered, and since pallyhealing does not appeal to me, I'd go with the priest, leaving my main project at two characters.
The remaining tanking classes all have some disadvantages that makes me not want to roll them, and some advantages speaking for them.
I'll begin with the warrior. The original tank, a versatile tank with lots of tools of the trade. I'd probably go orc, cause grunts are cool and look sturdy enough, plus, my druid's obviously tauren. I've heard they are a bitch to level though, and as "basic" they feel a little boring. I'm not sure I like the playstyle and I'm not sure I like the baggage that comes with the class. Somehow, warriors are expected to tank, and since I'd roll one to do just that, it shouldn't be a problem, but it still feels a bit like being locked in. Having a class not based on mana would be nice for a change though...
As for druids, they seem like the perfect one-target tank. That'd mean I'd probably spend a lot of time hitting the same mob, racking up threat so the DPS can go wild. I speak raid setting now, which is far in the future, of course. Being the real true hybrid (able to fill all four functions in a raiding environment) finding a group while levelling shouldn't be hard, and they seem easy enough to level with fairly little downtime. Gemming and enchanting two (or four) gearsets is gonna be a pain, but Togtok's self sufficient and he keeps 2.5 sets. Also, I have a level 14 one already, and on my main server. The downside? I don't particularly dig the shapeshifting that much. Constantly raiding as a non-cow (I'd probably go feral/resto) might get on my nerves. As they are the superhybrid, the talent trees don't leave nearly as much freedom of spec as the mage's three do and being locked into cookie cutters is boring.
Moving on to the paladin, my prime suspect here for one main reason: I have one at level 15, and I'm loving the playstyle so far. Downside? It's a mana based class, and I'm tired of those. Silencing mechanics lock you out of a lot of your abilities, luckily, such abilities are rare. The raid situation would most probably suit me, paladins are the embodiment of an offtank, good aoe abilities and a holy frisbee (I just love saying that). I think I'd be tasked with fun tanking missions simply by being a paladin - they always seem to get the offtank tasks such as picking up mobs or guarding special entrances. Another downside is that I'd have to play a belf for it, another race I'm not entirely friends with (look who's talking, I have three belf alts and if they'd been around back then, I'd probably rolled a belf mage instead of the troll one. Sorry, Vorla...) and for Pete's sake! THEY ARE LOLADINS. FOREVER AND EVER. I like saying "Hey, I changed my mind" or "I was wrong all along" a lot more than "Ha! Told you so!", even though it stings, so this will probably be my choice. Also, a belf paladin named "Audacity" is just too frickin' cool for lots of reasons, especially since I'd be levelling her along with my undead priestess "Prudense" (the good spelling was taken). I'm just a sucker for toons named after concepts rather than a random fantasy name. In the end, Auda is on a PvP server and I think I'm gonna give that a shot before transferring, I might like it. I'll probably count ten gankings and then give up, though...
Monday, June 8, 2009
Why Erc is wrong
Some kinda druid guy from my guild who thinks he's all big shot made some blogpost where he was cramping my style. I can't let shit like that fly, can I? With tounge planted firmly in cheek, here's my take on the subject.
First off, I need to do a short presentation of my preconceptions when starting my first character in WoW. I had basically no idea of the game, and almost went with warrior as my first class, since I felt that was "basic". The barbarian, the fighter, those classes from role-playing games were always just "Walk up to enemy. Apply trauma to face. Repeat." whilst the squishier caster classes were a bit more fiddly to learn to play. Cause they're squishy and all. Still, I went with shaman, since I didn't know if I wanted to heal, do DPS or tank. Yeah, they were actually considered offtanks back in the day - the enhancement tree had a shield specialization talent. I actually maintanked some instances in TBC and vanilla.
Anyway. I went with mage as my second alt since I wanted to try a fiddlier class, that needed more "skill". Frost spec meant I never let mobs touch me if I didn't want them to. Which I didn't. Frost requires insane micro in PvP, so I was sorta right about the fiddly part. Raiding and instances? Mash 3 until fingers bled. Not so fun. Then came Icelance, and some other stuff. The mage class got some attention. We did top DPS for a while. We scaled for shit in TBC, but hey, we only ever saw the inside of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine cavern like, three times. I kept up with people even though I was "lol frost go pvp".
Then came Wrath, and boy, did I read up. "Reading up" even had a name - theorycraft - that made it sound important. And so I theorized. And I crafted. And I learned all the talents and how they interacted. I was gonna top the fucking meters. And why? I don't really need e-peen. I can dig attention, but when I've done something, I don't really like that attention, that awe, that some people give you. When someone whispers me "Nice gear!" in Dalaran, I feel a little bad. The answer lies with my inner gamer. When I buy a new game, it's because I want to be challenged. Wrath raiding content is challenging: we have yet to down Mimiron in ten man, although we are pretty damn close. I wanted to make sure I was on the guild team that got the guild firsts. I wanted to be the obvious choice to bring to a raid. I'm after the same single player experience I get from playing Halo or whatever.
I haven't really tried tanking to any large extent, but I have gotten a good enough taste of healing on a shaman and on a priest to say, that I am truly a DPS player at heart. The actual buttonpresses might be a rotation and not a list of priorities with mages although the Fire playstyle is close. That's not the point. Healing on a shammy is three buttons. DPS:ing on my mage is usually four. When a healer doesn't land that heal and the tank goes down, it's not much to do - you were probably spam healing and the only thing that'd saved the tank was if you'd have more haste. A tank let's a mob slip and it goes haywire in the raid, killing half the DPS team? QQ more, should have watched your threat. Maybe the tank had more important things to think about than to build threat on the mob you just decided to unleash your full arsenal on. Neglective tankers and healers don't really come into play here, cause I'm sort of basing this on people actually trying. There's not much analyzis to do for a tank or a healer when things go wrong. There are genuine mistakes, such as using a global cooldown to top off a DPS when no damage is expected in the near future, and in doing so, missing the window to heal the tank. To avoid the situation, you would have had to been psychic, or let that poor DPS think "isn't I'm not gonna get a heal soon? I might be dying to the next meteor!". I'm not trying to downplay the extremely critical effect a tank or healer mistake can have in causing a raid to wipe. I'm trying to open your eyes to the other perspective.
See, tank and healer performance is always binary. Either you built enough threat, or you didn't. Either the mob resisted your taunt, or it didn't. As a DPS, your performance is always fluctuating. More is always better, up until 129% of tank threat, assuming you are not in melee range. Wiped on that boss, and the boss had 60k health left? My fireballs hit for about 5k on average, that's 12 fireballs. They take about 2.5 seconds to cast, which means, that if I'd been able to squeeze out 30s of more DPS time, the boss had been down. Did I reapply Scorch when I really didn't need to? Did I let the Scorch stack fall off because I was reckless and didn't reapply it before Auriaya feared us? Could I have watched the Screech timer a bit more closely and dared stand still for a few more seconds each minute? Could I have stacked my cooldowns more efficiently? That's the kind of questions you face as a DPS. Those "60k wipe" moments are fairly rare though. That just means you did your job the other fights.
Cause, really, what is our job? Not topping the meters, even though it's fun - it's making sure the boss goes down fast enough, and to not stand in the fire too much, so that the healers and tanks have an easier job. I want to be on top of the meters. But there's always one person that I want to beat, and that is myself. You can see me as a perfectionist, but when I slack on the DPS on Naxxnight, I feel a little bad about it. I still perform decently, and we get the job done, maybe I'm 8th on meters instead of 4th. That doesn't irk me nearly as much as getting 2.6k DPS one night when I had 3.1k the other.
DPS, your job is not to have a e-peen measuring contest each fight. That's not why we are here. It's to make the healers and the tanks go "lol thx 4 throwin' firaballs n all but srsly, we r most imrpotant". I think we can afford to let them have that smug feeling of being the key part to raid success. While healing and tanking may be arts, DPS is science.
And science saves lives.
First off, I need to do a short presentation of my preconceptions when starting my first character in WoW. I had basically no idea of the game, and almost went with warrior as my first class, since I felt that was "basic". The barbarian, the fighter, those classes from role-playing games were always just "Walk up to enemy. Apply trauma to face. Repeat." whilst the squishier caster classes were a bit more fiddly to learn to play. Cause they're squishy and all. Still, I went with shaman, since I didn't know if I wanted to heal, do DPS or tank. Yeah, they were actually considered offtanks back in the day - the enhancement tree had a shield specialization talent. I actually maintanked some instances in TBC and vanilla.
Anyway. I went with mage as my second alt since I wanted to try a fiddlier class, that needed more "skill". Frost spec meant I never let mobs touch me if I didn't want them to. Which I didn't. Frost requires insane micro in PvP, so I was sorta right about the fiddly part. Raiding and instances? Mash 3 until fingers bled. Not so fun. Then came Icelance, and some other stuff. The mage class got some attention. We did top DPS for a while. We scaled for shit in TBC, but hey, we only ever saw the inside of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine cavern like, three times. I kept up with people even though I was "lol frost go pvp".
Then came Wrath, and boy, did I read up. "Reading up" even had a name - theorycraft - that made it sound important. And so I theorized. And I crafted. And I learned all the talents and how they interacted. I was gonna top the fucking meters. And why? I don't really need e-peen. I can dig attention, but when I've done something, I don't really like that attention, that awe, that some people give you. When someone whispers me "Nice gear!" in Dalaran, I feel a little bad. The answer lies with my inner gamer. When I buy a new game, it's because I want to be challenged. Wrath raiding content is challenging: we have yet to down Mimiron in ten man, although we are pretty damn close. I wanted to make sure I was on the guild team that got the guild firsts. I wanted to be the obvious choice to bring to a raid. I'm after the same single player experience I get from playing Halo or whatever.
I haven't really tried tanking to any large extent, but I have gotten a good enough taste of healing on a shaman and on a priest to say, that I am truly a DPS player at heart. The actual buttonpresses might be a rotation and not a list of priorities with mages although the Fire playstyle is close. That's not the point. Healing on a shammy is three buttons. DPS:ing on my mage is usually four. When a healer doesn't land that heal and the tank goes down, it's not much to do - you were probably spam healing and the only thing that'd saved the tank was if you'd have more haste. A tank let's a mob slip and it goes haywire in the raid, killing half the DPS team? QQ more, should have watched your threat. Maybe the tank had more important things to think about than to build threat on the mob you just decided to unleash your full arsenal on. Neglective tankers and healers don't really come into play here, cause I'm sort of basing this on people actually trying. There's not much analyzis to do for a tank or a healer when things go wrong. There are genuine mistakes, such as using a global cooldown to top off a DPS when no damage is expected in the near future, and in doing so, missing the window to heal the tank. To avoid the situation, you would have had to been psychic, or let that poor DPS think "isn't I'm not gonna get a heal soon? I might be dying to the next meteor!". I'm not trying to downplay the extremely critical effect a tank or healer mistake can have in causing a raid to wipe. I'm trying to open your eyes to the other perspective.
See, tank and healer performance is always binary. Either you built enough threat, or you didn't. Either the mob resisted your taunt, or it didn't. As a DPS, your performance is always fluctuating. More is always better, up until 129% of tank threat, assuming you are not in melee range. Wiped on that boss, and the boss had 60k health left? My fireballs hit for about 5k on average, that's 12 fireballs. They take about 2.5 seconds to cast, which means, that if I'd been able to squeeze out 30s of more DPS time, the boss had been down. Did I reapply Scorch when I really didn't need to? Did I let the Scorch stack fall off because I was reckless and didn't reapply it before Auriaya feared us? Could I have watched the Screech timer a bit more closely and dared stand still for a few more seconds each minute? Could I have stacked my cooldowns more efficiently? That's the kind of questions you face as a DPS. Those "60k wipe" moments are fairly rare though. That just means you did your job the other fights.
Cause, really, what is our job? Not topping the meters, even though it's fun - it's making sure the boss goes down fast enough, and to not stand in the fire too much, so that the healers and tanks have an easier job. I want to be on top of the meters. But there's always one person that I want to beat, and that is myself. You can see me as a perfectionist, but when I slack on the DPS on Naxxnight, I feel a little bad about it. I still perform decently, and we get the job done, maybe I'm 8th on meters instead of 4th. That doesn't irk me nearly as much as getting 2.6k DPS one night when I had 3.1k the other.
DPS, your job is not to have a e-peen measuring contest each fight. That's not why we are here. It's to make the healers and the tanks go "lol thx 4 throwin' firaballs n all but srsly, we r most imrpotant". I think we can afford to let them have that smug feeling of being the key part to raid success. While healing and tanking may be arts, DPS is science.
And science saves lives.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Weapon design, part 1
One of the things people in /g will have noticed, is that I think a lot of the weapons in WoW are ugly. This often owes to them being overdesigned. I'm all for the notion that WoW is a fantasy world where heroes are a lot stronger than humanely possible in the real world, but this excuse cannot be used to handwave the fact that some of the weapons are designed in a way that makes them almost impossible to use in the way you would normally use a weapon of it's type. Blizzard's weapon designers usually go to extreme lenghts with swords. Axes and maces are lumps of metal at the end of a stick and tend to look alright. We'll still have a look at a few different types of weapons in WoW (maybe not the most extreme examples cause that would just be too easy) and compare them to their real life counterparts.
I'll start off with axes - they are easy to get right, but Blizzard still has some fundamental flaws in a couple of their designs. Traditionally, axes are used against armored opponents due to them being able to deliver more force due to the concentration of weight to the head. This makes them less precise than a sword, however. You mainly want to hit and smash with an axe, not cut. Danish axes, halberds and pole axes will be dealt with in the polearms section, but they have similar uses.
Teldrassil Protector is a tanking axe you can buy for Argent Tournament emblems. As you can see in the screen shots on WoWhead, the shaft is incredibly short. This might make sense, since the axe gives you parry rating, and using it to parry, not strike, is probably would be best, owing to the fact that it's a huge chunk of metal with a one handed grip - almost like a second shield. You'd have to get very close to an enemy to be able to hit them, and even so, the shaft is so short it wouldn't give you much momentum (try hammering a nail into a board by holding just underneath the head of the hammer - you'll have good precision, but you can just barely channel your strength through it). Even if the heroes of World of Warcraft are strong enough to still gain enough momentum to break through armor with such axes, simple physics still tell us that a longer handle would give them even more momentum so that they could do even more DPS.
A real life counterpart would be the broad axe, used to cut logs into straight timber. While the handle on the Teldrassil Protector is about as long as the edge of the axe, the broad axe has a ratio of about 2:5. If the Protector had a longer handle, it would be a decently made weapon. It still suffers from the enormous head, but I guess metals in the World of Warcraft are lighter, and as such, you need more metal for the head to be heavy enough in total or something. Real life battle axes use a lot less metal, to the left is a fairly pretty 10-11th century battle axe that still could pass as a fantasy weapon. Notice how it does not look like a huge disc of metal, but rather like ... an axe.
To round out the one-handed axe department, have a look at this one that drops from Yogg-Saron, 10-man normal mode. Why does it have a thingie covering the fingers? Why is it double-headed? Why is the damn handle so short? It makes me want to cry.
For two-handed axes, the problem remains the same. The two-handed axes at least have slightly longer handles (about as long as I would expect from a one-handed axe). Gorehowl looks very good. It is designed in about the same way as a normal, real-life battle axe would have been, but it has a fantasy flavour that isn't "too much", I can even imagine a use for the spikes on the back side of the head - it will penetrate mail armor a lot better than the actual edge. Still, there's a little bit too much metal on there, but overall, a very good design. To the left is a replica of a real life two-handed battle axe (probably from the crusades). The handle-to-head ratio would also be about 2:5 in this case, and the head is designed in a way that it looks a little fantasy without being overdone. A bit more realistic norman design.
Maces and hammers differ slightly in usage - a mace is used to deliver blunt force trauma, and a hammer is used to pierce metal. A flail is something completely different (real-life replica flails are often designed with a chain that is too long - the one depicted has a realistically short one however. You don't want to hit your own fingers after all...) designed to smash the arm holding a shield by "wrapping" itself around the edge of the shield.
A lot of maces in World of Warcraft are hybrids between maces and hammers - they don't have radially identical heads, but they also often lack the piercing part of a hammer and thus resemble sledges more than actual battle hammers. Most maces in WoW are fairly nice, some of them have short handles or stuff that will poke you when you use it, but overall they are fine.
This leads me in to the subject of caster weapons. Arguably, they don't need to be designed for melee, since they are just "stat sticks". But, if they were not intended for melee, why did the creator of the weapon go to such extreme lenghts to make them look like an actual weapon? Why not just enchant a wand or staff? Some weapons look fine to use for combat, but have a little too much going on in the design department. Spikes on the mace head? Evil angry red eyes on the shaft? A magical crystal in the middle with a magically projected glowy circle? Friggin' spikes on the handle? They cannot possibly come into use during combat, which makes them only superficial, and why would you want to add more weight than necessary to the contraption? It's not gonna give you more DPS, it's there to look "badass" but ends up in the ridicolous end of the range.
That was the top-heavy, shafted heavy hitters. I might write on some other subjects before attacking swords, polearms and shields, but it was a fun article to write, so who knows.
I'll start off with axes - they are easy to get right, but Blizzard still has some fundamental flaws in a couple of their designs. Traditionally, axes are used against armored opponents due to them being able to deliver more force due to the concentration of weight to the head. This makes them less precise than a sword, however. You mainly want to hit and smash with an axe, not cut. Danish axes, halberds and pole axes will be dealt with in the polearms section, but they have similar uses.
Teldrassil Protector is a tanking axe you can buy for Argent Tournament emblems. As you can see in the screen shots on WoWhead, the shaft is incredibly short. This might make sense, since the axe gives you parry rating, and using it to parry, not strike, is probably would be best, owing to the fact that it's a huge chunk of metal with a one handed grip - almost like a second shield. You'd have to get very close to an enemy to be able to hit them, and even so, the shaft is so short it wouldn't give you much momentum (try hammering a nail into a board by holding just underneath the head of the hammer - you'll have good precision, but you can just barely channel your strength through it). Even if the heroes of World of Warcraft are strong enough to still gain enough momentum to break through armor with such axes, simple physics still tell us that a longer handle would give them even more momentum so that they could do even more DPS.
A real life counterpart would be the broad axe, used to cut logs into straight timber. While the handle on the Teldrassil Protector is about as long as the edge of the axe, the broad axe has a ratio of about 2:5. If the Protector had a longer handle, it would be a decently made weapon. It still suffers from the enormous head, but I guess metals in the World of Warcraft are lighter, and as such, you need more metal for the head to be heavy enough in total or something. Real life battle axes use a lot less metal, to the left is a fairly pretty 10-11th century battle axe that still could pass as a fantasy weapon. Notice how it does not look like a huge disc of metal, but rather like ... an axe.
To round out the one-handed axe department, have a look at this one that drops from Yogg-Saron, 10-man normal mode. Why does it have a thingie covering the fingers? Why is it double-headed? Why is the damn handle so short? It makes me want to cry.
For two-handed axes, the problem remains the same. The two-handed axes at least have slightly longer handles (about as long as I would expect from a one-handed axe). Gorehowl looks very good. It is designed in about the same way as a normal, real-life battle axe would have been, but it has a fantasy flavour that isn't "too much", I can even imagine a use for the spikes on the back side of the head - it will penetrate mail armor a lot better than the actual edge. Still, there's a little bit too much metal on there, but overall, a very good design. To the left is a replica of a real life two-handed battle axe (probably from the crusades). The handle-to-head ratio would also be about 2:5 in this case, and the head is designed in a way that it looks a little fantasy without being overdone. A bit more realistic norman design.
Maces and hammers differ slightly in usage - a mace is used to deliver blunt force trauma, and a hammer is used to pierce metal. A flail is something completely different (real-life replica flails are often designed with a chain that is too long - the one depicted has a realistically short one however. You don't want to hit your own fingers after all...) designed to smash the arm holding a shield by "wrapping" itself around the edge of the shield.
A lot of maces in World of Warcraft are hybrids between maces and hammers - they don't have radially identical heads, but they also often lack the piercing part of a hammer and thus resemble sledges more than actual battle hammers. Most maces in WoW are fairly nice, some of them have short handles or stuff that will poke you when you use it, but overall they are fine.
This leads me in to the subject of caster weapons. Arguably, they don't need to be designed for melee, since they are just "stat sticks". But, if they were not intended for melee, why did the creator of the weapon go to such extreme lenghts to make them look like an actual weapon? Why not just enchant a wand or staff? Some weapons look fine to use for combat, but have a little too much going on in the design department. Spikes on the mace head? Evil angry red eyes on the shaft? A magical crystal in the middle with a magically projected glowy circle? Friggin' spikes on the handle? They cannot possibly come into use during combat, which makes them only superficial, and why would you want to add more weight than necessary to the contraption? It's not gonna give you more DPS, it's there to look "badass" but ends up in the ridicolous end of the range.
That was the top-heavy, shafted heavy hitters. I might write on some other subjects before attacking swords, polearms and shields, but it was a fun article to write, so who knows.
The Echo Isles - introduction
ow hai 2 u.
Ever since my good friend Ercles started his WoW blog I've kinda wanted to get back into teh blawgingz. I'll try and get a few subjects that's been brewing out of the way fairly soon and then update with more experiences and news as I gear my shaman and pewpew with my mage.
The name of the blog comes from my favorite race of the Warcraft universe, the trolls. The Darkspear tribe was saved from murlocs by Thrall and his orc companions, and has ever since been a part of the new Horde. In an act of severe cultural imperalism, the Darkspear were forced to stop cannibalizing each other, to become more 'civilized'. Anyway, they are supposed to live on the Echo Isles, off the cost of Durotar. However, in game, you kill the trolls on those islands and the only real Horde troll presence is in Sen'Jin village. The Darkspear are supposed to be rare and they remain fairly so (the least played race together with dwarfs*, coincidently the coolest race of the Alliance), however I don't understand how people can resist the male troll model or the patios accent.
Thus, when I started the game, it was obvious which race I would choose. Since I love hybrids and was told shammies were, and I also love shammies and the head hunters from lore and Warcraft 3, that was no hard choice either, and Togtok saw the light of day. I figured I wanted a character that could do a little bit of everything to try out what I would want in a pure, although I thought about creating an orc warrior too, cause grunts are cool. Apperantly, shaman is the least played class also, and I always love feeling like I'm a unique snowflake.
I embraced WoW fairly late, mainly because I didn't have anyone to play with, but when some peeps from a pen and paper roleplaying forum decided to start, I went with them and my account was created in the autumn of 2006, i.e., before The Burning Crusade. I never got to level 60 before it's release however, and never really saw any of the vanilla content on my own.
I wanted an alt to play while Togtok was gaining rested status, and I figured that mages are also cool. Forsaken or Darkspear Trolls (remember when we didn't have belfs? Glory days...)? Easy choice since I don't particularly fancy the whole gloomy-emo theme of the undead. Thus Vorla saw the light of day. Back then arcane wasn't a "real" spec, and flinging fire balls is boring, so I opted for the more control related AoE build and Vorla stayed frost and kept up with the rogues well into Naxx-10 content before respeccing arcane.
When Burning Crusade hit, the people I originally started playing with kicked off a belf group. I thought this sounded fun enough, and for quite some time we played every wednesday night. We made it to somewhere around 35 together before it sort of fell apart due to various reasons, but my belf hunter (all the other classes except rogue were taken) is currently 43 and the others have taken up the wednesday night gaming and are currently somewhere around 72-73. The reason I write about this is that the guild never really was up to par with fielding Karazhan runs in the day, and I wanted to raid and see content. So, I raided with Vorla in another guild and kept doing that until summer struck. Steamwheedle Cartel being a low-pop server really died. To make matters worse, the guild I was raiding with had some minor drama and simply wasn't working that well. No guild on the server matched us either, people were doing T5/T6 content, struggling in Kara or were simply full on mages. So, I decided to migrate.
The highest populated RP server was Argent Dawn, so that's where my hunt started. I applied for Absolution, which seemed like a guild that would fit me, and three days later I was accepted (the guild masters first comment was "Nice kit :)" which made me fairly confident) and paid for a character transfer.
Today, I remain in Absolution and has done so for 11 days short of a year. I was recently appointed officer together with a warlock (Brr! Mage's sworn enemies!) to deal with the ranged department, and I do the occasional raid leading. I won't be musing much about that though, since there's usually nothing fun to write about anyway. A few weeks back I transferred Togtok to Argent Dawn with the intent to level him to 80 and start gearing him as a healer alt. A few days back he dinged for the last time and the Heroic grind started. I got the healy mace off of Nexus yesterday and also managed to heal my first Naxx-10 run, all in all fun and something I look forward to doing again.
The main characters that this blog will be about is thus Vorla, level 80 arcane/FFB mage, and Togtok, level 80 restoration/enhancement shaman. Sometimes I'll write about my alts (I've been wanting a tanking alt and will probably level a paladin. Slowly.) but I am by no means an altoholic.
Welcome to da Echo Isles, mon!
* http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php
Ever since my good friend Ercles started his WoW blog I've kinda wanted to get back into teh blawgingz. I'll try and get a few subjects that's been brewing out of the way fairly soon and then update with more experiences and news as I gear my shaman and pewpew with my mage.
The name of the blog comes from my favorite race of the Warcraft universe, the trolls. The Darkspear tribe was saved from murlocs by Thrall and his orc companions, and has ever since been a part of the new Horde. In an act of severe cultural imperalism, the Darkspear were forced to stop cannibalizing each other, to become more 'civilized'. Anyway, they are supposed to live on the Echo Isles, off the cost of Durotar. However, in game, you kill the trolls on those islands and the only real Horde troll presence is in Sen'Jin village. The Darkspear are supposed to be rare and they remain fairly so (the least played race together with dwarfs*, coincidently the coolest race of the Alliance), however I don't understand how people can resist the male troll model or the patios accent.
Thus, when I started the game, it was obvious which race I would choose. Since I love hybrids and was told shammies were, and I also love shammies and the head hunters from lore and Warcraft 3, that was no hard choice either, and Togtok saw the light of day. I figured I wanted a character that could do a little bit of everything to try out what I would want in a pure, although I thought about creating an orc warrior too, cause grunts are cool. Apperantly, shaman is the least played class also, and I always love feeling like I'm a unique snowflake.
I embraced WoW fairly late, mainly because I didn't have anyone to play with, but when some peeps from a pen and paper roleplaying forum decided to start, I went with them and my account was created in the autumn of 2006, i.e., before The Burning Crusade. I never got to level 60 before it's release however, and never really saw any of the vanilla content on my own.
I wanted an alt to play while Togtok was gaining rested status, and I figured that mages are also cool. Forsaken or Darkspear Trolls (remember when we didn't have belfs? Glory days...)? Easy choice since I don't particularly fancy the whole gloomy-emo theme of the undead. Thus Vorla saw the light of day. Back then arcane wasn't a "real" spec, and flinging fire balls is boring, so I opted for the more control related AoE build and Vorla stayed frost and kept up with the rogues well into Naxx-10 content before respeccing arcane.
When Burning Crusade hit, the people I originally started playing with kicked off a belf group. I thought this sounded fun enough, and for quite some time we played every wednesday night. We made it to somewhere around 35 together before it sort of fell apart due to various reasons, but my belf hunter (all the other classes except rogue were taken) is currently 43 and the others have taken up the wednesday night gaming and are currently somewhere around 72-73. The reason I write about this is that the guild never really was up to par with fielding Karazhan runs in the day, and I wanted to raid and see content. So, I raided with Vorla in another guild and kept doing that until summer struck. Steamwheedle Cartel being a low-pop server really died. To make matters worse, the guild I was raiding with had some minor drama and simply wasn't working that well. No guild on the server matched us either, people were doing T5/T6 content, struggling in Kara or were simply full on mages. So, I decided to migrate.
The highest populated RP server was Argent Dawn, so that's where my hunt started. I applied for Absolution, which seemed like a guild that would fit me, and three days later I was accepted (the guild masters first comment was "Nice kit :)" which made me fairly confident) and paid for a character transfer.
Today, I remain in Absolution and has done so for 11 days short of a year. I was recently appointed officer together with a warlock (Brr! Mage's sworn enemies!) to deal with the ranged department, and I do the occasional raid leading. I won't be musing much about that though, since there's usually nothing fun to write about anyway. A few weeks back I transferred Togtok to Argent Dawn with the intent to level him to 80 and start gearing him as a healer alt. A few days back he dinged for the last time and the Heroic grind started. I got the healy mace off of Nexus yesterday and also managed to heal my first Naxx-10 run, all in all fun and something I look forward to doing again.
The main characters that this blog will be about is thus Vorla, level 80 arcane/FFB mage, and Togtok, level 80 restoration/enhancement shaman. Sometimes I'll write about my alts (I've been wanting a tanking alt and will probably level a paladin. Slowly.) but I am by no means an altoholic.
Welcome to da Echo Isles, mon!
* http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php
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