The Wednesday WTF.

Adds. Those guys that spawn during fights, that do stuff and things. Dealing with them (usually by stabbing them in the face) is not a polite suggestion, as many players seem to think it is. Even during Wrath, I think most players got that adds = kill, but the time frame in which they needed to be dealt with was much more lax. It was okay if you finished your rotation before swapping, finished eating that last bite of pizza before taunting, or ran in circles crying about healgro for a few seconds. It’s not okay anymore. When they exist in a Cataclysm fight, dealing with the adds is almost always crucial to success. Taking care of them, be it via stabbing, sheeping, or some other mechanic is neither optional, nor something you can do at your own pace.

Just going through heroic bosses: Commander Springvale, ignoring adds will wipe you. Drahga Shadowburner, ignoring adds will wipe you. Erudax, ignoring adds will wipe you. Lord Obsidius, Corla, Lockmaw… you get the idea. Even the easiest adds, which don’t have a wiping mechanic directly tied to them like Rom’ogg Bonecrusher or Baron Silverlaine need to be delt with. If left unchecked, they significantly increase damage intake, which in turn drains more mana from the healer which will, you guessed it: wipe you.

Most fights exist somewhere between these extremes, in that a couple of slip ups will probably be recoverable, but they have nasty effects that will push the fight outside the realm of doable if left to run rampant. Again, this is not to say that most players will ignore adds (though plenty do), but rather that they don’t have enough respect for them. Don’t finish that cast, don’t get that last strike in, don’t wait for them to spawn/come to you, don’t unnecessarily pull aggro on them, and most importantly don’t assume someone else will handle it. Whatever it is you’re doing, dealing with the adds is very likely more important. So… deal with them. You’ll win more and get yelled at less.

The Wednesday WTF.

I was worried that I was going to run out of stupid things to talk about. Then Cataclysm came along, and now I have a list as long as my arm. This one… I don’t even. Corla, Herald of Twilight is just about as easy as fights get. Yet I have seen dozens of groups, dozens of non-PuG groups fail. So, here it is. My extremely in depth guide that is everything you need to master and defeat this encounter. I do it for you guys.

Congratulations, you are now an expert at this fight. Seriously, I can see maybe wiping once because everyone fell asleep at their keyboard, but beyond that, how?! Up next week: the elusive “W” key and how to locate it.

The Wednesday WTF.

DKs are terrible. Seriously. According to one guy who is definitely not me’s totally not subjective experiences, DKs suck 10-15% more than any other class. You want more proof? Okay, take a look at this totally legit pie chart:

 

This clearly shows that DKs overwhelmingly do not know how to play. What are they doing wrong, you ask? Well, for the most part they face-rolled their way to 85 and still think they’re playing Wrath. Not in the “Oh, sorry, I mistargetted that sheep” kind of way, but the “That carefully CC’d mob isn’t in the AoE. I could be doing more DPS if there were more mobs to AoE. Let me Death Grip it over here and then tank is as a DPS” way.

Over the past week I have seen around a dozen DKs try this exact thing in heroics. I want to make this perfectly clear: nothing about that is okay. An irritation and easy way for your group to tell how bad you were in Wrath, this is now a potential group-wiping move, and most definitely more headache than the rest of you group, especially the poor healer that now has to try to keep you alive, needs.

The above I think is pretty obvious to all but the worst WoW players by this point. However, a surprising number of them still think similarly silly things are okay. It is very, very common for DPS to take incidental damage they could have avoided, not interrupt a cast they could, or refuse to run out of a potentially lethal zone for the sake of doing more DPS. Healers and tanks have their own problems, but I’m picking on DPS right now.

Even good players that I’ve grouped up with sometimes do this. Sometimes you really need to just stop DPSing and get to safety. Even if you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong, it’s entirely possible that your healer has his or her hands full just trying to keep the tank alive. Staying in is just going to result in your death, which prolongs the fight, making the situation worse. Run out. Bandage if you can. Wait for the healer to have a moment to toss a heal your way. Maybe self heal if you possess the ability. Being mindful of what’s going on in the rest of your party really can be the difference between life and death. Don’t worry, we’re not far off from being able to power through heroics without CC, but smart play never goes out of style. And right now, it is more important than ever.

The Wednesday WTF.

Hey, we’re back everyone. Vacations, Internet failure, and general laziness kept the WTF from you, but no longer! I bring you a shiny new WTF, and cookies.

In right before the actual expansion, I wanted to talk about the gameplay changes between WotLK and Cata. There have been any number of posts, discussions, and rants ranging in quality from insightful and informative to nothing but QQ. Last week MMO-Champion featured a post about all the things WoW players are going to have to learn/relearn for Cataclysm. The post caught my eye not because it was exceptionally good (or bad), but rather because it was incredibly bland.

A well written and concise post, it nevertheless seemed that all the discussions on the upcoming changes over the past months were distilled in it, and the result was uninspiring mush. The post offered nothing new, and unless you’ve been away from WoW for the last three months, nothing you didn’t already know. The post itself is not the issue however. It’s a fine tool for a returning player, someone who’s lived under a rock for the past several months, or just something to point at when summarizing gameplay changes.

The problem is in the responses. Given a lack of criticizable content, the people on the internet picked the closest thing they could think of: talking about how WotLK (and the players thereof) sucked. Ignoring the fact that ~45 pages of posters are all sure they’re not the average WoW player, I have a couple problems with this attitude.

First, all of the things on this list good WoW players either A) were doing throughout the entirety of Wrath, or B) knew about but didn’t do because it was suboptimal. Maybe this is applicable to new WoW players, people with the memory of a goldfish, or just bad players, but once you rise even a little bit above the sea of mediocrity, you’re going to find that everyone already thought of all of this on their own, and is prepared for it. Not to discount the endless stupidity of people on the internet, but I think it’s safe to say anyone reading MMO-Champion already knows this shit.

Second, it continues the popular trend of slamming WotLK, and the play-style that resulted from it. Almost all of the “bad habits” of Wrath are a subjective response. So you don’t need CC in PvE? It still has a place in PvP. Who says a /focus /polymorph macro takes more skill than a perfectly executed AoE rotation? Heck, I liked the chain-pulling of Wrath. Maybe you didn’t get  a cool achievement or bonus loot for completing a 5-man in under 10 minutes, but it was a challenge just as valid as anything else presented.

Sure, Wrath had its faults. No one is going to argue that. The scope of the problems is just an opinion, and one I think is generally pretty disingenuous. If you hate the 3 button facerolls that Wrath turned most classes into, fine. That’s a valid opinion. But for every you, there’s someone else that saw the same situation as an opportunity to absolutely perfect their use of those three buttons. More buttons to press does not equate to more skill, just a different kind of skill, and no matter if they’re pressing 1 button or 20, a good player will always find a way to shine through.

Wrath was a fine expansion, arguably the best Blizzard has produced thus far (6 days…), and everyone bandwagoning on to the “Wrath playstyle sucked” wagon can go sample some penis. We had a good couple of years, Wrath of the Lich King, and I appreciate what you gave to the WoW community. /salute

Grow A Pair (Of Fangs).

I randomly stumbled across a trailer for the movie Priest, and it looks pretty sweet. Possibly quite campy, but still sweet. More importantly, it’s a vampire movie that actually about vampires instead of sparkefaggots, and right now we need more of those. I’m hoping it comes out as something like a higher-budget version of The Mutant Chronicles, instead of falling into the same void movies like Daybreakers and Legion did. I hear it’s nothing like the graphic novel, so there should be some nerdrage over its release which is always delicious.

Also, this week’s WTF will be late. Surprise, I know! But this time it’s actually planned, because tomorrow with any luck I will be nowhere near a computer. Clearly I am building your anticipation. Clearly.

The Wednesday WTF.

This week: Disc priests. On live, they’re still bullshit, but I hear in Cata they are somewhat less mighty. Even… bad. Players have proposed countless changes, but this one in particular caught my eye, because it was both a bad idea, and the guy posting about it was an ass. Good combo.

So, the idea was to let Penance add a stack  of Evangelism (currently only Smite will do this). While this would certainly make disc stronger, it is not a good way to go about it, for two reasons. First, it would devalue the Atonement. The idea is that you can Smite to both heal and deal damage, marginally more efficiently then healing with Heal. The tradeoff is that you cannot control to whom the heals are going, and an additional mental tax from having to rapidly switch targets if healing becomes suddenly intense. If Penance were to stack Evangelism, there would be no tradeoff. You could simply use this amazing spell, taking no risk that your targets suddenly take spike damage or that your heal the wrong target, and gain the full benefits of Evangelism, and thus the Archangel cooldown.

Which brings me to the second reason it’s silly: it breaks the entire Evangelism/Archangel system. The system is designed to allow you to have something to do during lull healing phases, and provide a nice buff during heavy healing phases. Again, if there is no opportunity cost, you can simply have Archangel whenever. There’s no restriction to your ability to stack up to it. At which point, the entire system becomes pointless. Why not just make it cooldown you can press at will?

There are plenty of ways to fix Disc (and apparently some went into the latest beta build), but this is not one. Even if it were not a mechanic-breaking ball of silly, it is far too big of a buff. Priests are closest to where Blizzard wants healing to be. Other classes need to be nerfed, as opposed to priests getting crazy buffs.

The Wednesday WTF.

A couple weeks ago, I visited the official WoW Priest forums. Boy was that an adventure. Amidst the threads about how Leap of Faith was a terrible ability, and Priest are the worst class because they have two healing specs, I came across a thread postulating that any healer who didn’t heal someone standing in fire was both elitist and a bad healer. The thread immediately was inundated with trolls, but somehow the topic continued in seriousness, progressing to the point of claiming that anyone that disagreed with the OP likes killing blind people. I’m not even kidding. I personally don’t think letting fire standers die makes one elitist, but that is a judgement call, and an argument over opinions is as silly as it is unwinnable. But a bad healer? Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think the problem arises from people that view a player’s priorities as something like this:

• Press buttons to do you job (healing, damage, threat).
• Get out of the fire
• Communicate with your fellow players
• Have a proper spec and gear

Now, you may be thinking “But Zalbuu, that seems like a fairly reasonable list.” Well, yes and no. Those are all things you should be doing, but they’re not in the right order and it’s missing plenty, mostly due to not making important distinctions. Try this on:

• Avoid getting hit by abilities/creatures that will kill you.
• Preform crucial assignments that save others from getting killed (interrupts, dispels, etc).
• Communicate with your fellow players.
• Move out of non-deadly effects/remove non-deadly debuffs.
• Attempt to optimize your location with regards to your role (melee stand behind the boss, healers get in range of your assignments, etc).
• Make sure that your spec, gear, and UI are the best they can be.
• Make sure the target you have selected and the abilities you are using maximize your contribution to the group.
• Press buttons to do your job.

Maybe it’s not a perfect list; I’m not going to pretend I have some magical insight into the best way to play WoW. What I will claim though is that it’s much better then the first list. What I really want you to note is: pressing your ability buttons is dead last. It is the least important thing you can do. Consider the following. Which do you suppose would have a greater impact on the health of the raid: one healer spamming all the right abilities, or 24 other people not standing in the fire? Which would have a greater detrimental effect on raid DPS: every DPSer spending a second to move, or a dead Rogue? Which is more likely to save your top threat DPSer: desperately spamming your abilities, or saying “hey guys vengeance just fell off watch your threat”?

So getting back to that thread, the idea that “the healer’s job is to heal his manz, and if he’s not doing it he’s bad” is patently absurd. The list of player responsibilities is long and complicated, and things pertaining to role are of relatively little importance. The other player moving out of the fire comes far, far before “hey, gimme a heal here!” Right now the worst players are decked in ICC10 epics making mana issues all but non-existent, which is a large factor in this flawed way of thinking. If there’s no real cost to you (besides your sanity), why wouldn’t you heal even players that are Doing It Wrong? Because the ability to save someone and the obligation to save them are not the same thing. And come Cataclysm this moronic way of thinking will be directly hurting your group’s ability to defeat the encounter, by either draining the healer’s valuable and limited mana or getting yourself killed.

I really want to drive this home. Complaining that healers won’t save you when you’re standing in something is the purview of DPS, so let’s reverse the argument. If a healer’s job is to keep people alive regardless of what the other players are doing, and failure to do so makes them bad, then it stands to reason that a DPSer’s job is to kill things regardless of what other players are doing, and if they can’t it must mean they are bad. It shouldn’t matter if the tank is keeping threat, if your fellow DPSers are contributing, if someone is ignoring a mechanic that makes the boss invincible, or if you’re covered in debuffs and weeping. Man up and kill it. It’s your job, isn’t it?

The Wednesday WTF.

Late, again. Anyway. The subject of this week’s WTF is the Skill Shot. The skill shot is a fairly common mechanic in LoL, given its name because it requires you to aim your attack at an enemy instead of just clicking on them, which theoretically requires some skill. The targeting looks something like this (image is not mine):

The projectile travels down its path until it (hopefully) hits your target. A particular type of player (usually one that has never played a champion with a skill shot) will take any miss on the part of a player with said shot as a sign that they are hopelessly terrible at the game. While it is true that the shot takes a bit to get used to, and thus it is possible that someone missed because they are bad, having a bad day, or too busy eating pizza, but far more likely one of the following occurred:

• It wasn’t supposed to hit. Skill Shots, because of the difficulty of landing them usually have a fairly nasty effect when they do. Even letting one off you know will miss can cause enemies to retreat to safety. You can even use this to force them to go where you want them to.
• You were using it as a deterrent. A shot launched to where an enemy will be if they continue with their present course of action is quite effective at convincing them they should go do something else. Especially useful for saving allies in danger.
• Mind games. This is by far the most likely reason. Once you have mastered the basics of “aim thinger at other guy, fire”, and your opponents have mastered “dodge bad thinger”, most skill shot scenarios become a game of who can out-guess who. You can’t aim straight for a target because they will move out of the way. At the same time, your target can’t wait to see where it’s going: they have to move immediately. So, did you pick the right direction to aim it? Did they? There are plenty of ways you can improve your aim beyond the 50/50, but even so there’s a fair element of luck involved.

Skill Shots do in fact require skill, and not all of that skill is hitting something. There are plenty of other factors to consider, and even the best LoL players aren’t going to land every shot.

The Wednesday WTF.

Oh man it’s Wednesday again. Well, I guess since I’ve covered tanks in 4.0 and then DPS, it’s about time to talk about healers. This has to be split into two parts: now and Cataclysm.

Right now healers are pretty much fine. Subject to tweaks until launch, there’s really not any glaring problems with healing right now. Any issues right now are people learning, either how to play, or how to gear. In particular, complaints of mana issues arise from people either not re-gearing for spirit, or from trying to heal like you did before 4.0. Seriously, that new heal you have? Use it. Mana expenditure is actually higher than it would be if you were to fight a level 80 Cataclysm mob, because the Wrath damage output is still higher than what the new abilities are designed around. Luckily, you can buy ICC epics now from farming heroics, so we can all outgear content and rofl until the expansion.

Of course, the infinite mana goodness right now goes away when you level past 80. Most of the real healer QQ is that we’re not going to be viable at level 85. The problem is: I just watched a dozen guilds down 6 Cataclysm bosses. They got through it. That’s pretty conclusive evidence that healing is viable. I’m not lucky enough to have gotten into the beta, so I have to take others word that it’s hard. Fine.  Even if there was some way to prove that they made healing the hardest thing in the game, it still wouldn’t mean that healing was broken, just that it was, you know, difficult. At which point I say… welcome to raiding?

I also keep hearing something to the effect of “Healers are so bad at 85, I have to drink like every pull in heroics!”. Okay, this… I don’t even. Remember when they nerfed spirit, but didn’t buff replenishment? Yeah, I had to drink every couple pulls then too. So you can’t blow through heroics as fast as your tank pulls. I again disagree that this means your class is somehow broken. More perhaps than any other role, healers’ success is going to be dependent on the rest of the party. And while people are still getting rid of those Wrath habits, themselves just barely geared enough, and still subject to new and changing abilities, I think drinking often is right about where we should be.

So healers just like everyone else need to chill out, especially if most of your beef is with an expansion that isn’t even out yet. Blizzard is still in full-time-balancing mode. Just sit down, take a deep breath, and maybe… have a drink.

Mandelbrot’s In Heaven, No Longer Teaching Math At Yale.

I just found out Benoît Mandelbrot died the other day, which is super sad times. Best known for his creation of the Mandelbrot Set, a type of fractal that repeats itself infinitely no matter at what “resolution” you view the image, it turns out he even coined the phrase ‘fractal’. So yeah, very smart fellow. Even if, like me, you’re not overly fond of geometry, you’ve got to respect what he did for the field. The world is less for his passing.