Don't Win More -- Win Better

Just in time for the Arathi Basin holiday weekend, I present you with a pair of graphs which should dazzle and amaze you.



What is this graph, you ask? It's a comparison of the relative investment of your time, versus your effort, mainly. It represents, for the AB Holiday weekend, your honor per minute returned versus two factors (hence the two lines. I have reduced the honor per minute to a percentage of the baseline on my server, so it should hold across battlegroups, not being a numerical value specific to mine.

The blue line on this graph represents the relative HPM return based on how many minutes you can save off the average, off of a baseline 19.5 minutes (which is what it is on my BG and I can't see that number materially changing on others). So if you manage to win (and lose) a minute faster than that, x=1 on this graph and you follow it up to the blue line, and then over, you can see that that's going to net you about a 5% increase in your HPM. Now since time is on the bottom side of your equation (Avg Honor / Avg Time), changes in time go up exponentially - the more time you can cut off, the better you'd be. I only drew this graph out to five minutes but you can see that even at five minutes you're getting a return of say...34% more honor? Cutting off time is a significant improvement on your HPM.

The red line on this graph represents your HPM return based on changing your winning percentage. Simply, x is how much of a win percentage increase you're given, based on my server's percentage which is about 56-44 (leastways when I made up this graph it was). YMMV, here. But the key difference here is that it's a linear function, since the number you're changing is in the numerator of the fraction,

(AvgWinHonor*Win%) (AvgLossHonor*Loss%)
---------------- + ------------------
(Avg. Win Time) (Avg. Lose Time)

For my battlegroup (so this formula is NOT adjusted to be a fit-all), the formula for this line comes to be

TOTAL HPM = 79.1993 + 0.4194x

To modify this for everyone, multiply by 100/79.1993, you'd end up with something like

TOTAL HPM (adjusted) = 100 + 0.5296x

which basically means that for every one percent over your average win ratio, you're getting about an extra half-percent gain in HPM.

How's about a new graph? What would it take to make these roughly equal (at least in the zero-five bracket I graphed in?)



That's what it would take. I've moved my screencap up and rescaled the Y-axis for a better view; the X-axis is the same scale as the previous graph. What I did there was multiply the slope of the HPM/% graph by a factor of TWELVE.

Cutting one minute off your time, at this level, is worth about twelve times as much as increasing your win percentage. Conclusion : Don't win more. Win cleaner / faster.

Your Honor, the tree rests.

Arena Season 7 : Teh Funnyzors Wrap

With the arena season coming to an end last week, I decided it was time to compile a representative list of team names we faced this go-round. Without further ado, because how much introduction does something like this really need, the good, bad, and the funny, with a tacked-on head-scratching!

THE GOOD:

1. "Ebay Sold me a DK"
2. "Get the DK not Me" -- which is representative of several teams that tongue-in-cheek made reference to a nonexistent partner on the team. In this case, there was no DK anyway.
3. "Hit the MagOHGODCYCLONE" -- ditto above, I'm not sure this team had a druid OR a mage on it.
4. "Not now Mom" - I don't even want to think how many times this has been said in the heat of a brutal arena match.
5. "stop laughing right meow" -- Does it really mean anything? No. But it's got that light touch of whimsy that made me and Kity both smile.

THE BAD:

1. "for points only" -- it would be funny, except for the number of teams with some variant on it...much overused.
2. "UR MOMs MY EPIC MOUNT" -- similar reasons to the above, except this doesn't even have the virtue of being funny on its own.
3. "we touch young children" -- sorry boys, there's funny, and there's offensive, and this was way over the line.
4. "dont kill us" -- again...a stale, overused concept, along with teams like "are we dead yet"...it's supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating funny but it just falls flat.
5. "sloppy secunds" -- Geeks who think they prove their leet hotness by cracking misogynistic jokes, your mom jokes, sex jokes...wrong, it proves you're immature. If you're getting some, you don't need to constantly stroke it about how you're getting some.

THE FUNNY:

1. "THEY SAID THIS WOULDNT F"
2. "JFK Shouldve Bubbled" -- it borders right on the verge of being in bad taste, but it made us laugh anyway.
3. "Walmart Geared"
4. "She looked level sixteen" -- I give this a pass because blizzard already made the joke with their Noblegarden hijinks.
5. "Earthshield carry us" -- it's a similar self-deprecation, I think, but carried off with a little more class than the simple "don't kill us" appeal.

THE "HUH?"

1. "Too Fat to LoS" -- I guess it's funny too but...if I recall correctly this was not a team of big toons...blood elves, actually.
2. "ILADELPH"
3. "rng rng banana phone"
4. "Blueberry Scourge"
5. "Anything"

What about you? Any memorable team names on your list of opponents this season?

Gnomer Challenges

And Ihra shall answer!



This is not a story about Ihra, however : it is a story about Isnota...which is a joke on the fact that nearly all of my characters have a familial relationship (-yeep being the surname of my favorite house of nobility in my novel-in-progress). Hence, Isnotayeep...except that you could argue that, having yeep as his last name, he IS in fact a Yeep despite his first name's argument to the contrary. ANYWAY that is quite besides the point. Isnotayeep is a budding warrior tank -- incidentally, if you want wicked-short-queues, roll a tank -- who ventured on Friday night into Shadowfang Keep, which is a lot less confusing than I remember it being. Maybe that's because at level it seems more straightforward than at 80 where you just kind of...wander around aimlessly b/c you're not worried about pulling stuff.

So the mage unlocks the door, ports himself out (aside: why didn't he just port himself out of the cell in the first place?), we head down the stairs, and I lose a mob to the mage. I apologise and get the somewhat odd response "It's OK Sugar, you're doing great!". Not the "great" part, mind you, I like having my ego stroked, but I don't think I've been called sugar in a while, even by my wife. The druid was a great healer, we pulled everything smoothly, and somewhere in Arugal's tower I asked the mage to stop charging in and frost novaing everything, which after a whimsical back-and-forth revealed that the mage and the healer were a married team and that they'd basically had crap for tanks earlier in the evening. I fished for a compliment saying that I hoped I wasn't adding to their terrible night and the druid obligingly fell into the trap and told me how awesome I was ;-).

The run was smooth and lovely and we requeued and ran it again afterwards. So...cheers on a good pug to these fine people over on feathermoon, the rogue silent partner (and shouldn't he be?) Riverside-Bloodscalp, and the warrior Ocis-Stormscale.

<3 Hugzors!

Revisiting the High Ground

Ihra can make mistakes. Despite the fact that he is not human, that night elves have a long history of being perfect (forget about the well of eternity. forget about the naga. forget about vordrassil's corruption. forget about...aw hell, just forget everything), Ihra can and does make mistakes.

I would like to retract an opinion I issued earlier, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cynwise, about the worthlessness of the hangar in IOC. I stand by parts of the original thesis, namely that

• "EVERYONE ZERG HANGER PLX" is generally a stupid idea, and


• the key to winning should be, on paper, to control more of the three middle nodes that give you keep-assault options than the opponent.

I have been forced to revise this plan on the basis of

• Horde zergs docks all the time, resulting in a lot of wasted time corpse running if you even make a try for it.


• Because zerging docks is such a successful strategy for horde, and they win a lot more than we do, Alliance at least on my battlegroup has basically abandoned the battleground.
  

I log into IOC and run into 38-19ish numbers disadvantages ALL THE TIME. And judging by the way other people complain about it, I'm not the only one. Of course, that's skewed by the fact that all of the people I hear complaining about it are from my battlegroup, so it's not really getting a wider representation, and also by the fact that we all know people are more vocal about complaining than when things are going well. That aside, however, it is obvious to me that with 19 people it is impossible to make a serious play for two of the middle nodes, and so we're left with trying one. I venture to propose that that one might, in point of fact, be best served if it were the hangar. Why?

1) Horde does not go there, because it is an inferior node. This minimizes deaths Alliance-side which, if you're at a serious numbers disadvantage, you can ill afford to do. You need every man, woman, and child to be alive the maximum amount of time.

2) Since IOC, to an even larger extent than AV, reduces to an exercise in herding cats, it is inevitable that you will fail to rally enough people around you to take something like docks, at least at the forefront. Horde simply puts too much pressure on it.

3) It's higher. This is, I think, an overlooked value to the Hangar, and has much the same benefits as the lumber mill in Arathi Basin. By a careful series of jumps, you can hop down from the Hangar to the Workshop, if you wait for the horde fellas to clear out. You can take advantage here of the fact that they may be horde, but they are subject to the same recklessly offensive spirit that wrecks us up. Nobody likes to defend something when they could be killing shiny objects somewhere else. Imagine the setback, the big siege engine takes four minutes to bring online, if you hopped down and tagged the workshop flag right at the end of that timer? It's like recapping a bunker in AV, big points for you.

With the current state of IOC, you cannot control all of the space you need to, Alliance-side. And fragmenting our numbers trying to do something beyond our means (ie, to carry out a 40-man strategy with 20 people) merely accelerates the losses.

I don't have a particularly good strategy envisioned here -- the best I've been able to come up with is to suggest a 10-10 split with people on defence and people going to hangar, in the hopes that we can turtle up long enough to get the numbers on a more even footing. But I won't pretend to any experience with that working, b/c nobody listens as soon as the word "hangar" or "turtle" comes out of your mouth.

Is going for the hangar still an inferior option? In the words of Spock, "All things being equal Mr. Scott, I would agree...however, things are not equal." If you have enough people to play IOC as it was meant to be played, then by all means do so. But I think there is a serious problem Alliance-side with over-reaching ourselves and trying to do too much with too little, the way that battleground tends to set itself up.

The Asshat Server

I remember reading a while ago (I think at Righteous Orbs but I could be mistaken) how every battlegroup seems to have one of Those Servers -- you get in a random pug with them, and people from that server seem to be obnoxious asshats in higher percentages than others. I have come to the conclusion that on the Cyclone battlegroup that role is being filled by Suramar. I still remember with pain a rogue I had from there in a HOR *weeks* ago who was one of those totally obnoxious people who keep trying to railroad their idiot ways of doing things over what the majority of the group wants to do. Anyway, got a pair of suramar idjits today in my last pug before my T10 gloves (side note: WTH is up with all this crit on t10 tree gear? MOAR HASTE PLOX), which is the only reason I stuck it out instead of bailing.

I promise there will be something useful tomorrow, and in light of Gnomeaggedon's post about bitch:joy ratio I should clarify that with these two or three exceptions, the vast majority of my pugs have been wonderful, clean experiences with asshattery nowhere in evidence. But for today... rant incoming.

Daily pops : UK, hooray, nice and short. Pally tank ("R"), DK ("C")/mage ("L")/rogue dps. Goes ok except that the mage and the DK in particular keep pulling aggro. I didn't think to look at that part of the recount after but I would bet they took more damage than the tank did. At one point working our way up the stairs to Dalronn/Skarvald I whispered the tank and said, "Do you think if I used the word aggro to these people, they would know what I meant?" and he whispers back "Prolly not." Perhaps inspired by my display of comradely confidence in him, he gets up the nerve to ask in party chat:



So the DK takes him up on his offer to basically DPS-tank, and we drop D/S in record time for me (20-something seconds I think), which we only managed because these idiots DID have awesome dps -- 4500 apiece, I think -- but just b/c you CAN bring it to the table, doesn't mean that you should. My mage Forol has taken to pulling 2100 dps in heroics. I COULD pull 4-500 more, but I don't, because the mobs are still dying insane-fast, and I decided that threat management is more important. There are enough people already who don't care about that. Anyway, Mr. So-Hot-He-Can-DPS-Tank decides to criticize the Former Tank, who is doing his best to dps in tank spec and dps gear, with:



Now I've been grimly soldiering on with this because I want my T10 but...there's a limit to my asshattery tolerance. Monsieur le mage didn't get healed for the rest of the instance. I wish I could say that the story ended well with the mage lying in a puddle of goo on the floor but we were out on the balcony by that point so there wasn't much I could do to get him killed. Also at that point I realized not only were they both from Suramar, they were both from the same guild, so my guess is they queued together. Guess I confirm what Gnomer says in that afore-linked post, that asshats seem to travel in packs. I ditched group the second the boss was down, without bothering to click any loot. I make them wait for it, that's my petty vengeance. Le sigh.

Need Moar Guild

My wife and I had an interesting discussion the other day about the nature of guilds and the needs they fill for different people. It should be said here that my wife after being in a fairly decent raiding guild for a while, has moved up in the world and now belongs to the #2 raiding guild on the server, while I continue to piddle along in my very social, occasionally-pretends-like-they're-going-to-get-some-raiding done guild. Here's the funny bit : for a brief period of time, my wife was a member of my guild before their lack of raiding drove her to distraction and she left for greener pastures. And yet, she's still friends with most of the people there and occasionally opines about wishing she could be there, if only they would actually raid (which, as mentioned, they don't, though we're in the middle of a new year's resolution to raid more which hasn't died yet. I expect it any day though.). And I would like to raid more, also, if not on my wife's level, but I guess I'm too sociable to cut the cord. I like the word "loyal", here, because it sounds better without some of the stigma now attached to the word "social", and also because I think it better describes me -- I've never /gquit, always hung on despite various dissatisfactions until the guild imploded around me (twice, now). Anyway,

What if you could be in two guilds at once?

They wouldn't both be *called* guilds, mind you. We didn't really come up with a good name for it, but for lack of a better phrase, call one (the social one) your "guild" and the other (the serious-bizniz-get-things-done one) your "raid team". /g triggers your guild chat, /rt (or something similar) triggers your raid chat. Different /who rosters as well, obviously. It's not so much that I would miss my friends if I left guild, because they're still on my friends list, but the peripheral almost-friends who aren't there because I'm used to just looking for them on the guild tab.

What would you gain?

I think you would gain a certain clarity of purpose that is sometimes missing, and to bad effect on guilds occasionally. I think everyone wants to see raid content, on some level, even if it's one day a week running naxx. Too often people fall into traps where they join a social guild, are frustrated by its lack of raid progress, and then leave. Sometimes they leave after several months of general complaints about how the guild needs to do more, but the guild doesn't really want to, b/c different people have different expectations. Tension and drama is created.

On the smaller side of that coin, I suspect that many people in raiding guilds are hurt by the soulless, machine-driven nature of high-end, hardcore entities like that. Would they be helped by having a social outlet where they weren't expected to be totally l33t and professional all the time? I rather suspect that they would be.

But I like my guild for both!

Congratulations on your rare find. But I don't think the system would necessarily screw you. If you wanted to make a social guild composed of mostly members from your raid team, you could. If I wanted to make a raid team composed around the nucleus of people in my social guild who can actually raid, I could do that too. There's room for overlap. Or not even overlap, if your raid team likes to be social and has that happy mix, you could do everything in one group like you currently do now. Splitting the two up would merely help achieve clarity of purpose, which I think is sometimes lacking.

Who loses?

There are negatives here, primarily for PvPers, though it is well known that hardcore pvpers are a very small minority compared to hardcore raiders. You can't organize pvp events very well in a social guild (believe me, I've tried), and they don't really classify as a raid team.

Levelling guilds would also be hurt a little by that classification, though it seems obvious to me that they'd fall more into the "Guild" category. Hard to tell though, sometimes.

And in the end?

It's not something I think that will ever be realized, but it was an interesting idea to toy around with. As my wife so cannily observed, when cataclysm hits with guild talent trees and such it's going to imbue more guild loyalty, not less, which might make a system like this more difficult to implement. On the other hand, maybe they would jive together well, since I have to think giving people the option to be in (essentially) two guilds at once would encourage more loyalty to those. More needs are being met, less frustration about guild Progress leading to less drama-quitting...*shrug*. Who knows?

DogTags : The Hidden Add-on

If you have Pitbull 3 (PB4 converted to "lua scripting" or something that frightens me when I look at it) or X-Perl, and possibly other unit frame addons as well, buried into your addon package was a library (technically not an addon) called DogTags. What this does is allow you to tweak your raid frames with custom texts / borders / highlights / etc., if you're willing to brave the way down into the addon to find it. It being one of my sworn, and so-far-unsuccessful, goals to learn everything there is to know about pitbull, I was digging around after looking at Elitist Jerks trying to find a way to code in my unit frames to light up with big flashing lights if said player was a healer. Basically, to do what I do in a BG anyway and covered earlier, and identify my healers for me. It is not, regrettably, perfect, due to the incredible annoyance that is dual spec which has a tendency to confuse DogTags. I haven't figured out what spec DT is getting when you ask it to, but it will frequently return a spec that is not what the player is packing at the moment (presumably the other, inactive, dual spec). I'm pretty sure it's either the Primary spec (which is completely arbitrary for most people), or the spec they logged out in, or the spec from the last armory update, but in any case what should have been a simple thing to code forced me to do a work-around. And so, complete with step by step screenshots, I present, a BG Healer Addon :



STEP ZERO : Open Pitbull. That part was hopefully obvious?

STEP ONE : It should probably default to this, if you haven't previously in this session been dicking around with pitbull to do something else, but click 'Pitbull' at the top.

STEP TWO : There'll be a configuration mode window over to the right, which defaults to disabled. Click the down arrow to get your options.

STEP THREE : Click 'Raid'. You could do party if you were doing something tiny, but no BG uses only five people, and if you're doing this for arena well...why don't you have Gladius anyway, suckas? Be warned that your screen is about to look very, very ugly. Ignore that, though, that's just pitbull's way of showing you every possible buff, debuff, unit frame, etc. You are not expected to be able to make sense of any of that gibberish in the background. Seriously, it will look like a magic eye, and if you are one of those lucky enough to be able to DO magic eyes, you might see Arthas totally making out with Jaina if you look hard enough.



STEP FOUR : On the left hand pane, where you clicked Pitbull before, scroll down to where it says Raid. Expand that, either by clicking on 'Raid', or by clicking the little + sign next to it.

STEP FIVE : In that expanded raid menu, scroll to find 'Texts', and expand that. Your list of options under 'Texts' will NOT show one called 'BGHealer' like mine does in this screenshot, b/c I've already created it. It will after we create it, don't panic mmkay?

STEP SIX : Click 'Other'.

STEP SEVEN : Over in the right pane you will see two drop-down text fields, one for disabled texts, and one for New Text. Click into the New Text field, and type whatever you want to call this fancy gadget were making. I call it BGHealer but...use your own creative tastes. Incidentally, if you choose to create custom texts for other things, and want to reuse it in other unitframes (say you make something for your "target" frame but want to reuse it in your raid frames), you'll find it under your disabled texts so you don't have to create it from scratch again.

Notice under the pitbull config window the gigantic mess of Magic Eye. I made my cut and paste big enough so you could see what I'm talking about and not panic ;-).



Ok, time for the scary coding part of the text.

STEP EIGHT : Under your expanded texts you should now see the name of the one you just added. Click it.

STEP NINE : This drop-down menu lets you pick where you want your custom flashing green healer light to show up in the unit frame. I put it on the inside right of the frame, b/c I have nothing else going on there right now anyway.

STEP TEN : Tada the coding. Reproduce this exactly. I reput it in here with explanation:

[Class = "Priest" ? ~HasAura("Shadowform") ? "H":Green]
[Class = "Paladin" ? MaxMP > 10000 ? "H":Green]
[HasAura("Earthliving Weapon") ? "H":Green]
[Class = "Druid" ? ~HasAura("Moonkin Form") ? MaxMP > 10000 ? "H":Green]

What this is basically doing, is running through the steps that we talked about before in my How to Heal a BG.

*The "Class" dogtag, returns the unit's class. The = compares it to what we set up following it in quotation marks (priest/pally/druid).
*The "?" is an if statement. So if the class matches, it proceeds to the next thing in the brackets. You can put as many of those sequentially in a tag as you want, depending on the complexity of what you want to code. You'll note that my druid one has three if statements in it, b/c druids are hard to figure out!
* "HasAura" checks the auras/buffs of the unit. You could do a ~ in front of the HasAura which is a negation -- a DoesNotHaveAura, if you will.
* "MaxMP" is exactly what it sounds like. It checks the mana pool of the unit in question.
* After all the ifs have been truthfully satisfied, you see "H":Green. This is what you actually want the text to be. I just made a green H, because I found that saying "HEALER" took up too much space on my raidframes, which tend to be fairly small in a battleground, particularly a 40-man one like IOC or AV.

*Possible faults should be highlighted here. Remember that no addon is ever going to match your personal skills of actually inspecting the person for talents/gear, or getting a direct response to a query in BG chat. This text is a helpful assist, and I do not recommend using it to replace personal hands-on observation. Also, with regard to shamans, sometimes a resto shammy will forget to put earthliving weapon up, in which case they won't get flagged. But my reading tells me they're SUPPOSED to have it on pretty much all the time, so you shouldn't run into that too often. Also, an spriest dpsing in normal form, or a boomkin dpsing in caster form, won't trigger the flag either. But usually if either of those classes is out of form, it's because they're healing (usually themselves, but hey, miracles happen) so they deserve your support!

STEP ELEVEN : Save your lovely new dog-tag!

LAST NOTE : See that button at the bottom, DogTag help? Feel free to click Open and fiddle around. There's a LOT of utility with this library that I haven't even scratched, and it's actually a fairly easy readthrough help screen that lets you mess around and try to play in the sandbox before you risk trying to actually use it in pitbull or xperl. You can also open this same window up to play with dogtags by doing /dt in your command window.

.

Go forth and tinker!

Other leafy blogs

I commented on some blogs I've started reading but neglected to put them in my blogroll, which is a crying shame especially as Soph over at VTB wrote an extremely kind linkback to me a week and a half ago. So, class-interested among you --

The View Through The Branches - It's a tree...but an intelligent, creatively artistic one with a nice mix of humor and helpful information. Have particularly enjoyed guides on some of the heroic achieves, though Ihra is only down I think...six? for his glory of the hero.

Falling Leaves and Wings - More tree...but like the kind of tree I like to sort of pretend I might someday end up being like because, woah, she's in progression content and stuff and...I'm definitely not. Proud owner of two guild wipes on Twin Val'Kyr yesterday here, thank you very much.

Righteous Orbs - As near as I can figure, it's a pally blog. I mean it has the word Righteous in it, right? But it's very very funny, and I love how he imbues each of his characters with their own personality. I do a *little* of that (my mage never learned to swim, for example) but...Tam leaves me dwarfed in that regard.

Warriors Can't Kill Me!

Taking a temporary break from my other series, and returning to one I started a while ago, today we are discussing some arena (and BGs, to a lesser extent) counters for different classes -- specifically, warriors and the gigantic woodchoppers they usually carry in an attempt to deforest you.

1) Lookit their hands. Gladius, if you have said addon and you're in an arena, will tell you spec, but if not, you can get a spot idea by checking what they're packing in terms of destructive weaponry. weapon + shield = prot (rare but sometimes you'll see them), weapon + weapon = fury, one ginormous 2H weapon that's probably bigger than your sequoia cousins = arms. Now by and large, at least in a 2s bracket (and in 3s, I've noticed, though I play that bracket less), most warriors you see in arena tend to be arms. There may be a slot for prot in 5s as a damage soak and also the spell interrupts, but *shrug*.

2) L2Kite. Warriors are so kiteable, it's not even funny. *pause*. Ok, it's actually very funny. Laugh with me. The nice thing about warriors and other melee classes is that it opens up two forms of CC -- now you can use Entangling Roots and its instant-oh-crap-counterpart Nature's Grasp as an additional way to keep a warrior away from you. Because you know what warriors have when you're not in melee range? They have crap.

3) Travel Form. It's one of your best friends, especially against arms warriors, because they have two major things that will saw through your bark. First, the bladestorm. You cannot miss this, seriously. Even if you're asleep at the keyboard, it will reach through the screen and shake you violently until you wake up. The warrior goes into a spinning machine of death, and goes all red. RED is BAD. Just like how red means stop at a traffic light. Warriors are IMMUNE TO CC for the duration. So what you must do, is get the heck away from it. Now you could run...but the warrior can keep pace with you. Besides which, he's probably hamstrung you before he started. Travel form runs faster than a spinning warrior, which gets you distance. The act of shifting INTO travel form also removes movement-impairing effects (like hamstring). It's like two for the price of one!

4) Study this picture. Memorize it.

.

Mortal Strike, this is called, and it is the other incredibly dangerous thing a warrior will do to you. It reduces the healing you take by 50%, and it lasts for, wait for it, ten seconds, with a six second cd. What this means is, if a warrior is pounding on you, and you do not GET SOME DISTANCE, there is nothing to stop them from keeping that debuff up on you continuously (following the basic rule that 10 > 6, cwutididthar).

Pro-tip: Warrior's got a MS on you. Hamstring, Bladestorm. You run like a good cheetah, rejuv yourself somewhere in the mix, and keep running. Your heals suck until that MS goes off. Run it out, and as soon as it wears off, swiftmend yourself. Matches against warriors, I find, frequently come down to me watching me and my partner's debuffs and carefully timing the important heals to go off in the little windows of non-MS that you manage to snag. You will never be totally free of them (well, until the warrior is dead, obviously), but you can create windows by making it very hard for the warrior to stay on top of you. Druids are *the* most mobile healer in the game, and if you don't use that mobility you're losing a major tool. Also, when the warrior is bladestorming, he's very dangerous to be around...but he can't do anything besides spin in a circle (it requires concentration not to get dizzy and fall over). So for the duration of the BS he's not going to be putting up MS on anyone. Get some distance, and look for the opportunity that opens up. Every cloud has a silver lining, yes?

Another option here is strategic CC -- if you've almost got free of a MS, it may be a good idea to throw a cyclone up to get those last couple seconds to go by without a reapplication.

5) Gear...it's all about gear, for warriors more than anyone else. Good gear on a warrior = massive hurt. Bad gear on a warrior = roflfail. The nice thing about arms warriors is that they're not very bursty so you can likely get a fairly non-skewed picture about what kind of DPS they're going to put on you from the get-go, and that in turn will educate you about what kind of hotting you need to keep up.

So there be a melee class...next time...locks? Or maybe we'll get lucky and I'll get my dogtag scripting to work and share a fantastic BG tag I came up with but haven't quite ironed the kinks out of yet...