Only God Can Make A Tree

PvP Chat Channels

2011-01-21T11:07:00.001-08:00

I have recently come to the conclusion that PvP guilds are doomed...at least on Normal servers. I make this sweeping generalization off of my own experience, YMMV, but I have generally found the following rule to be true:

When someone needs a group, they go to their guild for PvE content, and to their friends for PvP content.

Nobody says "Hey guys, let's all get together and go raid BH!" Well, ok, maybe they do and I'm just not seeing it, but I think by and large the first impulse is to go to your guild chat first. And it's a simple reasoning -- I think people are selective (reasonably) about who they put on their friends lists, and usually when you open that up you don't see 9 friends all online at the same time, in a capable level of gear, to go run something for PvE. But you can PvP with any number of people.

And precisely BECAUSE less organization is needed for PvP(on balance; rated BGs are a different animal), people are loathe to sacrifice their PvE guilds to join a PvP one -- how will they advance their PvE game, EVER, if they're stuck in a PvP guild? Especially when they could (or perceive that they could) meet both their PvE and PvP goals by being in a PvE guild? Speaking as someone who has both tried to create a PvP guild, and also someone who has been a part of (I think) most of the attempted PvP guilds on my server, all of which sputtered out and died, it doesn't look like a format which works. It is possible that rated BGs will change that, once they acquire a secure place in the community. In the meantime, I would like to share with you a story about me. It's a successful community story, and it's about PvP. Rare, I know.

Once upon a time, there was a group of friends. They liked to PvE together, but unfortunately they also all had a lot of alts and it was kind of unreasonable to try and have every one of them friended so that you'd know when they were on. This was before RealID -- I can see you with that suggestion on your lips -- and so we created a custom channel, joined it on all of our alts, and thus we could communicate together in that channel no matter who you were on, without having to devote 30% of your FL to one person's alts. Thus was born /KITTEN* chat.

*not the real name.

My wife was in a hardcore raiding guild at the time, as I recall, and their healing team used a custom chat channel to communicate during raids if they didn't want to clutter up normal raid chat with their healing nonsense. Or maybe they were using it to convey subtle healer-wisdom like "Person X is going to drop really low on this fight, but that's because he's an idiot who stands in fire, so don't heal him." One of the things that worked well with /kitten was that it gave us a way to communicate with several friends at once -- instead of whispering each individually -- who all happened to be in different guilds.

And I got to thinking...well that's an awfully useful device. And not very many people use it, I don't think. How could I use a channel to my advantage?

I think you can probably see where I'm going with this -- when you PvP with friends, or are trying to on a large scale, it would be nice if you had a way to grab them all up at once instead of having to whisper several people one at a time. So the next time I ran some premades (that went well, incidentally), I suggested at the end that they all type

/join pvppremade

so that we could join up again the next weekend. Which we did, and it was also successful. It started small, but the more we did the more people we got into the channel. Inertia carries! The real astonishment of the channel is that taking a two-month break from WoW, I came back to find the channel still in existence, with several people still in it. I don't think it was being actively used, but the point is the network was still there for me to pick up the pieces and start reassembling premades fairly quickly.

I highly recommend this strategy -- it's low-risk, most people will join a channel if you invite them. It's not like they're leaving their guild, after all. You don't need to do any special /create pvppremade -- just type /join pvppremade (or whatever you decide to call it), and if you're the first person there it will create the channel automatically.

The downside is that you can't control it; the "Owner" of the channel seems to be the person who's been in it longest, devolving to the next-longest once that person leaves. And you can't keep people out, except via the headache-inducing method of implementing (or changing) a password on it, and then informing everyone you want to keep in the channel of said password.

That's my method, and I thought it might help other PvPers out there struggling to find groups to run with. I'd be interested to hear what other people have done to cope with the general "I can't leave my PVE guild for PVP" sentiment!

Leather Is Not Bark (and other stories)

2011-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

I was healing in an AB the other day, and the druid who was topping me on the meter (I was #2, but by a comfortable margin) calls me out in BG chat to say something along the lines of

"You know Ihra, you should stay on the fringes...I keep seeing you getting pounded on."

He speaks the truth of course, and this is something I've always had a problem with. It's even more important now, though, since most of the time we are not sporting that pretty 120% armor boost from ToL. Standing in the center of a maelstrom of combat in a BG is the PvP equivalent of standing in Bad (tm) in pve...don't do it. Especially because

* People tend to tunnel-vision and hit what's next to them, so if you're in the back you're less likely to get hit.

* You have to use some cast times which renders you more vulnerable to being kicked, punched, slapped silly, mind-****ed (sorry, "frozen"). If Oombulance's guide is any indication, and it seems like a viable position, we'll be able to safely shift away from the cast time heals when the gear is sufficiently improved.

I queued into a BfG yesterday that had us down like 1300-400. We turned it around and won, qualifying us for an achievement. I think, on balance, this is easier than the AB equivalent -- AB requires you to wrest more bases from your opponent to turn things around (because let's face it, if you were down 500 resources you were probably being 4-capped), and in addition to that AB's resource count has been cut to 1600 so you have less room to maneuver in.

Anyway the point of mentioning it was to say...that I am once again on the back of the wagon, because I'm working through a Gilneas post only to find that Cynwise and Gnomeaggedon have gotten ahead of me and posted stuff already. /nerdrage. Oh well...as usual, I'll let the Professionals handle the guides, and go back to providing helpful statistical numbers :-).

There are moar trees?

2011-01-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

Apparently there are!

And one of them has posted a very nice resto pvp guide!

Show him some love :-)

Basic Resto PvP Tips

2011-01-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

Aloha people, having been 85 for ... uh ... six days now, I am now totally knowledgeable and educatable about some PvP tips for trees. Although I guess they're not trees anymore.

SPEC:

I am running with 2/3/36 currently, as a minor modification from one of Lissanna's specs on her site. I am unlikely to change this when the patch hits. I pulled the point out of Swift Rejuv to put the last point into Perseverance.

There are points in Nature's Bounty already, which whill become much more valuable to our PvP once the patch hits. For PvP, faster is almost always better, and turning our efficient heal into a faster heal is big plus on my book. I think in BGs currently I'm getting kicked out of HT / Nourish probably a good...third to half of the time.

Malfurion's Gift I don't think is particularly valuable. OOC is nice for PvE, but over in the PvP area we've been dealing with gimped mana pools for a LONG time in order to get the resilience to survive, so use your tools you've always been using and don't worry particularly about getting OOM. In a BG, die. You rez with full mana ;-). In arena...get out of combat and drink. Those are standard tactics and they haven't changed. You are not locked into combat for an extended period of time like you are in PvE. The other PvP talents are more valuable, drop this for them.

Fury of Stormrage is, IMO, lackluster. Mana, again, is not really an issue we have the leisure to worry about, and wrath isn't a good thing to cast unless you're tree-formed anyway. It's the non-specced cast time that kills us on this (which tree form already fixes), not the mana cost. The 12% chance to proc an instant SF sounds like a lot but you're rather limited by RNG there to make this really worthwhile. Wrath is something you snag when you have a few spare seconds, not something you can generally afford to spam until you proc that off.

I'm jury-out on the T1 talent Blessing of the Grove. I can see the MF buff being useful for gunning down people running away in arena -- I specced 21 points into balance for that purpose back in wrath -- but I don't see where the viable points can come from. Possibly out of GotEM; what with *everything* refreshing our LB stacks (post-patch), the loss of the bloom buff may not be as yuck as it initially seems.

ROTATION:

Ha, you people are silly...rotation in PvP. Cast what's faster. Staying back is more important in wrath than it used to be, what with our much-heavier reliance on cast times. Don't be in the thick of things!

ToL if there's a mage around. I discovered to my dismay in arena that druids no longer have immunity from sheeping...you can't shapeshift out of it anymore. I'm pretty sure if you're already IN a form, you can't be sheeped. But be wary! Mages are not your friends anymore. I am told reliably that the PTR patch notes have been updated to no longer confer sheeping immunity when in ToL...gg blizz... We do have a bit of vengeance in that we can cleanse the sheeps off other people now (<3 Nature's Cure!). I think maybe mage / tree may have finally reached its viability point in 2s... *hope hope*. Tangent: 5-10 this week to start the season, which was actually really good I thought considering that we were 2 months out of practice. And that between us we had a combined 1600 resilience (1200 for me, 400 for kity). You could almost call it 6-9, as I missed the queue on one of them and Kity in her glorious mageyness still managed to kill one of the opposing team without me there. IN SQUISHY CLOTH. So if I hadn't missed the queue...probably a win.

Also: if you are at a node, use Wild Mushrooms on the flag! I know they're practically worthless in PVE at the moment, but when you're sitting there waiting for people to show up and attack you, it's not like you have anything better to do...and they're an excellent emergency-flag-tag-stopper. They won't kill anyone, but they might buy you the time you need to get someone over to the flag who can. And you'll be healing that person as they do, right? RIGHT?

Stampeding Roar is useful in a flag-running situation in TP or WSG, but elsewise treat it like a second dash CD for solo-benefit only.

GLYPHS:

...are mostly the same as in PvE. I have a major glyph slotted for Barkskin still, but that's a personal choice. I think for PvP the major (pun intended) requirements are that you put into Entangling Roots for the insta-cast, and into Treant for the camouflage I mentioned in my last post. I know, I just said a minor glyph was required...that makes me a special internet snowflake, tell me you've read anywhere else that someone required you to pick up a minor glyph ;-).

Glyph of Regrowth is still not worth it, I don't think, though I may need to do some more experimentation with it. Despite PvP placing a higher value on regrowth than PvE does, the glyph retains the same trouble -- it will auto-refresh itself *during the period of the hot* if they fall under X% health, and the hot only lasts six seconds. Window's too narrow to make this one a good pick. You're still not going to be blanketing this around, and the gains are therefore less than using your more standard PvE prime glyph selection.

Gearing to be discussed in a later post :-). Also a foray into the Rated BGs this weekend which will hopefully go well *crosses fingers*

Back and better...though blind

2011-01-05T09:43:00.001-08:00

85 has been attained. Quickly, run to respec reglyph etc. Accidentally hit my tree shapeshift in stormwind before I had picked up the proper glyph to use Old Tree Form. Now blinded, but still hankering to kill. Tactical note for druids : glyph this. New tree form shouts "I'm a healer kill me!". Old tree form still 95% shouts that...but you have the same model as boomkin treants. And those few seconds of confusion if you use it right (= when a boomkin casts force of nature)could obscure your presence as a healer long enough to do something useful. Grab any edge!

Incidentally, on that killing subject? Twilight Highlands is a great place to ding 85...because the whole zone is like HORDE ARE BASTARDS KILL THEM ALL NAOW. So I was frothing ready to do just that as soon as I hit 85.

Ran a Battle for Gilneas before being called to work. In two pieces of resto gear, the rest all feral pve levelling junk, and I did this :

That ain't right peeps...get it together. Especially when in addition to junk gear, I was basically hitting random buttons because the only heal I used levelling was lifebloom and that feral-procced free instant healing touch. Not a good training on the new differences between spells, btw.

Having a get-out-of-jail card is still king. I mourned its absence on at least six different occasions during the BG.

An Announcement

2010-12-28T10:56:00.001-08:00

No, not *that* announcement.

Active January 1st, Ihra will be back on WoW...temporarily. When it came down to it it was just too hard to make a decision between WoW & LotRO so my wife and I have decided to alternate on and off. So expect a fair amount of posting

Jan 1 - Feb 28

May 1 - Jun 30

Sept 1 - Oct 31

and a slim pickens of posting in those off-months when I'm back on LotRO. Hopefully this compromise proves workable...if not I guess I'll have to make an actual decision and it's so much easier to not do that.

Ihra will be 85 in a week or less and then there will be stat-whoring aplenty for 85 BGs, I promise :)

API WTF?

2010-11-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

I don't know what an API Hook is, I'm just going to get that out there first thing. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about using our battleground scoreboard, as limited as it currently is, to pull out useful data when you're running a premade, or a fairly consistent rated-BG group. This is a thinking post, with the following caveats :

1) Right now, this is too much effort for too little reward, because it's nearly impossible to get a consistent group together, and the PUGs you're likely to be running with are not going to care about performance to the same level that you would hope out of a more dedicated cataclysm approach.

2) You currently have to gather this data YOURSELF, which is irritating. I'm not exactly sure what an API Hook is, like I said, but from the context of cynwise's post I'm going to assume that it means "addons can access the data from the scoreboard and manipulate/report it in various ways". So we can all dream and pray that that will happen someday, but in the meantime you have no tools but your vid-capping software of choice, and manual entry of the final scoreboard into a spreadsheet program like excel to manipulate them yourself.

Ok, those caveats out of the way, and being on hiatus and therefore unable to pick up a scoreboard screenshot myself, I have elected (with gracious permission) to analyse this WSG game that Cynwise participated in :

I have input that data into excel, and made the following spreadsheet:

Overall Competence

The most important thing here, obviously, is who won; hopefully you don't need a spreadsheet to tell you that much. But we are also looking for data on how efficiently you won -- I remember running a premade and having somebody quit after the first game (a win in EOTS, that we 4-capped) because we struggled a little at first and to him it was not enough that we win, we had to win smashingly and efficiently. It's an extreme example but people do expect that you will win solidly and efficiently -- if they wanted to grind out a 27-minute WSG that they won because they capped the last flag, they'd just risk it and queue normally. There are a number of stats that you can pull out from the data you're given that can help you analyse this:

Total HKs / Total KBs : You receive an honorable kill credit if you are within range of somebody dying, regardless of whether you contributed anything or not; hence there are going to be a lot more HKs than KBs. HKs are awarded to whoever is in range, even though it's all for the same kill, and that's the key to understanding this stat. HKs/KBs gives you a measure of group cohesiveness, as compared to the opponents' -- how well did your team move in a group, versus how many people wandered off alone? In this example, Cynwise's winning ally team had a "cohesiveness factor" of 6.40 compared to a Horde CF of 6.24. Statistically, a slight difference, but on a battlefield it's usually not a hugely disparate difference -- your victory (or loss) is the sum of a number of incremental factors, and here I would say that the Alliance was slightly better than Horde in this game at keeping together and moving as a group.

HKs Average : What you want here is to get an average of the HKs on your team, and find the standard deviation of it; statistically, assuming a normal distribution, 68% of your team will be within 1 st.dev. of that mean. I would stress here that we are looking at a matter of cohesion here, not strategic placement. This is an individual indicator of how well that person stayed with the group, and passes no mathematical judgment on where that group is on the field (maybe they're all farming in the mid, for example). In this example, the Ally HK average +/- 1 st.dev goes like 36.85 - 48.94. There are two people who come out above that (a warrior and a mage) and one below (pally). The warrior and the mage are good at scenting where the fighting is and being on top of it. The pally *may* have a problem -- the numbers give you a guide to finding potential problems, you still need to use your intelligence to work out if it actually is or not. It could also mean that he was a latecomer to the party and only got the last 5 minutes of the game. One may also note that his HKs scored / deaths comes in at a very low (9th out of 10) 3.4 -- and that stat is independent of time spent in the BG. Gear is also not necessarily a factor here; it contributes to more deaths but it should not stop you from moving to get with a group. So if I were running this as a premade group, I might keep any eye on those warning signs and watch him more closely in future runs. Speaking of that stat --

HKs / Deaths : What does this stat mean? Obviously you have to take into account some considerations when you're comparing to the other team, but presumably everyone on your team suffers from the same limitations regarding surfeit/lack of healers, so it's something of a level playing field. It's also not unfairly balanced against aggressive players -- people defending a quiet node will get less HKs, but also correspondingly less deaths. In this game the ally average for this ratio was about 5.18, with a standard deviation of 2.06. I take an average/stdev of 9 here, because they had a mage with them in this game with a ratio of 49 HKs to only 2 deaths, which does tend to have a large skewing effect. So if we can all just acknowledge his greatness, and then calculate without it, we'll be better off ;-). I would like to observe here that being on the bottom of this list DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE A BAD PLAYER, necessarily. As Cynwise reminds, it's about individual excellence *in a team setting*, and the #10 worst performer in this category, a shaman, also capped a flag and returned one. I would venture to guess, with little knowledge to go on, that this person knew the objectives of the game and was one of those people (like me on occasion, *blush*) who goes repeatedly running off to Return The Flag! without checking to see if they have backup before so doing. So they've got the basis for solidness, but maybe their patience / part-of-the-group mentality needs a little work.

Healer Tools

A point near and dear to my heart, obviously, is the performance of your team's healers. Cynwise used this example, I presume from the name of the file, to demonstrate that it is not heals which win a BG, and that is true to some extent. Notwithstanding that, here are some useful stats that you can pull out of the scoreboard --

Healing Done / Opposing Damage Done : This stat is a measure of your healers' effectiveness at gauging (and getting to) hot spots on the field. Alliance here managed to heal 25% of the damage done, whereas horde managed to heal 50% of alliance damage done. Considering that the alliance *had no healers*, 25% is a fairly respectable number. Looking quickly at the other two scoreboards mentioned in that post of Cynwise's :

Game 1 (twink WSG, Alliance victory) : Alliance with 4 heals covered 60.12% of the damage; Horde with 4 heals covered 54.98%

Game 2 (80 EOTS, tie) : Unfortunately I can only see part of the scoreboard but alliance with 0/11 heals covered 18.6% of the damage shown, horde with 0/8 heals covered 11.96%. Horde's low here b/c a greater percentage of their people are not shown -- and alliance is high similarly. Now with no way of knowing what those invisible people are, I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and say that with no healers, self- /off-spec- / bandage- healing ~15% of the damage maybe would be appropriate with no heals.

So the 25% is quite standoutish! I would bet that there were a few people who were willing to heal even though that wasn't their primary job description, once they realised that their team had a significant lack. Another of those incremental factors.

Deaths / healer . Again, paucity of data prevents me from doing a detailed analysis of this but I would venture to say that a higher number here means either a) your healers were overtaxed and you needed more, or b) they weren't getting very good coverage (all 4 of your premade healers somehow ended up together at BS, for example). In our star example, the alliance number is undefined, horde had 67 deaths / 2 healers = 33.5 deaths per healer. One more piece of data I shall try to start tracking in cataclysm, I suppose :-).

A Last General Stat

Look at the number of objectives attacked (successfully or not) divided by the time of the BG -- this provides a rough measure (very rough) of how much activity there was. For example here,

Alliance : 2 flag caps, horde returned 6 times = picked up the flag 8 times in 27 minutes; there was *some* kind of activity around the horde flag every 3.375 minutes, in other words.

Horde : 1 flag cap, alliance returned 4 times = 5 flag events in 27 minutes, some kind of activity every 5.4 minutes.

See the difference? We can parse that out a little further actually, and make a general supposition that alliance was more aggressive on offense (they managed to at least pick up the flag, 3 more times than horde did) but that horde had a slightly stronger defense (they returned the flag 6/8 times which indicates a perhaps higher percentage of suicide 1-2 man grabs out of the EFR for alliance). But the alliance controlled the flow of that match -- they did more action, and horde was doing too much re-acting.

Welp, that's my story! Look forward in cataclysm to in-depth vid-capping / excruciating analysis of games such as this one; If raiders can spend hours poring over WoL to dissect success and failure in raids, there's no reason PvPers can't hold themselves to the same standard!

So what would you look for? What do various combinations of those stats suggest to you? I know I for one would love to see some kind of assist column for if you were within X yards of a flag capped, node assaulted / defended...but for the meanwhile we're stuck with what we've got!

And if cynwise shows up in the comments to tell me that my read of that game is 100% off-base then...I guess disregard everything I just wrote :-)

Takin a Wee Break

2010-09-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

Turned off my WoW subscription to go play LOTR Online for a little while pre-cata...didn't seem worth it to pay for thumb-twiddling. I will be back for the big world-shaker, and I'm still reading you guys in the meantime.

*wave*

Stay Out of BGs!

2010-09-09T10:14:00.001-07:00

...if you're a healer, or a tank, or have an OS in either of those two categories. Having recently dinged my priest to 80 and in an attempt to gear her up rapidly for arena with Ihra's forsaken partner, I ran a few calculations. Here's an interesting thing, if you are not doing arena to get the relentless gear, which is another post in itself. While you are still buying set pieces, running a heroic probably nets you a better honor return than running a battleground, under certain circumstances (ie, you control wintergrasp).

The average dungeon in WOTLK contains 4 bosses (I added them all together, and then averaged). Which nets you, in terms of honor,

- 4 bosses x 4 stone keeper shards = 16 stone keeper shards
- 6 emblems of triumph (4 for the bosses, 2 for completing)

There are 5 set pieces to buy:

* shoulders = 34,700 honor / 50 emblems, 1 EoT = 694 honor
* legs = 34,700 honor / 75 emblems, 1 EoT = 462.67 honor
* gloves = 43,300 honor / 50 emblems, 1 EoT = 866 honor
* helm = 54,500 honor / 75 emblems, 1 EoT = 726.67 honor
* chest = 54,500 honor / 75 emblems, 1 EoT = 726.67 honor

To wit, the average is that one emblem of triumph = 695.202 honor.

30 stone keeper shards = 2000 honor, 1 shard = 66.67 honor

So your dungeon run, which probably took you about 20 minutes (assuming the negligible queue of a healer, or a tank), netted you

6 EoT X 695.202 = 4171.212
16 SKS X 66.67 = 1066.67
Total : 5237.879 / 20 minutes = 261.89 HPM

Which compares very favorably to anything except AV on holiday. So if you are

1) gearing up your set pieces
2) a healer or a tank
3) in control of WG

then don't pvp gear by doing pvp /sadface.

What will you require?

2010-08-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

This is not a long analytical post...it's a short, thought-provoking post. With luck, I will suffer the fate of Gnomeaggeddon and Cynwise will turn it into a fantastic post for me later ;-).

Cataclysm will offer us the chance to put together full premades for rated battlegrounds. It stands to reason that people will have more requirements for these premades then we do currently. What would you require, if you were running one? What are you working on now, to prepare for trying to meet other people's requirements? I think the major options are the same as they currently are for raiding --

I. Guild Runs
II. PUGs with a GS requirement
III. PUGs with an achieve requirement
IV. The always-popular PUG with no requirement whatsoever

I'm not going to discuss I & IV. If you are lucky enough to have the former, or idiotic enough to do the latter, in either case you are not going to receive any help from this blog.

II. Gearscore

I think this is probably as stupid as it is when running a PVE raid...it's easy to game the system by wearing the wrong gear (PVE in this case, despite the usual stereotype being to wear PVP gear to game a pve GS requirement). But maybe it has some value if you combine it with an inspection.

III. Achieves

This is where I think most people are likely to go; it seems to be the route of choice for PVE content currently also. The question is, what achievements would you ask for? Or are you looking for currently? Certainly I think a Battlemaster or a Gladiator title would probably net you an easy invite in the same way that posting a 25-man kingslayer gets you an icc-10 normal achievement faster than you can type it out. Is that extreme? Probably. I think I would gun for the individual mastery achieves, or maybe even just the veteran (100 wins) of whatever BG we're premading.

I recently put Ihra back into a pvp guild called We Met During Skirmishes, which is arena-centric. They are not going to let anyone into their rated premades who doesn't have a 2k arena achieve in some bracket. Allegedly there are "too many 1800 carries" for that to be respectable anymore. I don't think I approve of this -- I've seen too many well-geared arena masters in BGs who care about topping meters and not working as a team. I think arena encourages small-scale cooperation but that people for whom arena is their sole focus tend to miss the bigger picture cooperation necessary in BGs. On the other hand, rated BGs are supposed to be as SRS BSNS as arenas are now, or at least the rewards are the same. So maybe having a cross-achieve like that is useful. Or another thing that hasn't really been discussed, is that *rated* BGs implies that you're going to have some kind of rating associated with your name. More fluid than an arena team, I would imagine, but will they have formal teams associated (Maybe you can put up to 30 people on them?) with the rated BGs in addition to pugs? If so, maybe requiring that kind of achieve/rating would be a good idea instead.

What would you require?

A Lovely Weekend of AB

2010-07-20T09:14:00.001-07:00

I think I had the most amazing PVP weekend ever. First I found a (temporary, normal is out of town) 2s partner and we've smashed our way almost to 1400 with relative ease. I suppose there is something to be said for running with an Accepted Comp rather than the I'm Challenging Myself comp...tree/dk has some amazing synergy, for sure.

I also compiled holiday numbers for AB...I lost most of them, until one of my networked pvp buddies invited me along on some premades he was in. Full premades, not the partials I usually run. We roflstomped AB all weekend, I think we ended up something like 30-0, made a chat channel so we could all reunite next weekend. AND we did the Resilient Victory come-from-500-points behind no less than three separate times, just for fun. The first time was a little off, and by the time we started getting points it was more like 650-0. But 4-1 bases still works for that. The second one was a thing of textbook execution, we all hovered around ST without tagging it while horde went up 4-0. Split into groups and fanned out at 350-0. LM, GM, and Farm all got tagged within 5-10 seconds of each other, and suddenly we were up 4-1 and rolled from there. I'm sure Horde was like... WTF just happened? OTOH, when they saw 15 alliance all huddled around the ST flag with campfires and nobody touching the flag, somebody intelligent probably looked at the roster and saw 14 people from draenor and figured it out.

The interesting thing was that the HPM on the premade wins was comparable to my non-premade wins. The real value in a premade is not that you get better winning HPM, it's your overall. B/c if you get a good one, like I got, then your winning HPM = your overall.

AB Holiday HPM (Cyclone BG, 54% win)
Winning HPM : 241.39
Losing HPM : 87.86
Overall : 171.28

So instead of 171...you get to say 241 is your overall. That's 70 extra HPM, or over the course of an hour running a good premade, 4200 more honor. Or looked at another way, a premade makes 140% of the honor (in AB) that running solo gets. Or looked at yet a third way, regular it takes you 5.84 minutes to get 1000 honor. A premade will get you that in 4.15 minutes. You can spend 71% of the time you would have spent soloing to get the same amount of honor.

I'm not sure why the losing HPM is so bad here, except to say that the average points accrued in a loss for my data is 786.86 -- there are not a lot of close games in AB. It's an interesting comparison to EOTS, where I've noted previously that the average points in a loss is about 650 (669 on nonholiday, 624 on regular). So at least they're closer than EOTS, but I would venture to suggest that this is due to the general rule of 2-3 games in AB (you lose controlling 40% of the resources) vs. the general rule of EOTS of having 1-3 games (you control 25% of the resources, and maybe the flag a few times).

However, EoTS rewards you more frequently, on the holiday at least -- you gain your bonus honor every 160 points in EOTS(H), but only every 200 in AB(H). So you need more points to get the bonus tickover, and maybe that's why it's so bad?

More Updates

2010-07-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

I do not, regrettably, have good IOC numbers for the holiday, having once again gone streaky (2-5), and on top of that, not finishing my requisite 10 games. I'll tell you, informally, that it went :

IOC HOLIDAY HONOR
Winning : 315.84
Losing : 120.64
Overall : 194.06 (54% of AV, #3 overall behind EOTS, 57%)

It's actually a really good winning HPM...but since Alliance has tactical problems winning this battleground on my battlegroup, that counts for less than you might expect. Tragedy all around, I know. Please remember that this data, and the winning data in particular, IS ASTERISKED

---

However, I AM in a position to remove the asterisk from SOTA, having ground out some wins to record on the last holiday. Previously I had the winning HPM at 190.68; I have now revised that to say 262.84. That also changes the overall HPM from 141.11 to 170.76. Let that be a lesson that when I put an asterisk on something, it's for a reason :)

How to Run a Premade

2010-07-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

Why wait for Cataclysm? There's nothing stopping you from running an organised group into a battleground now (a "premade"). A premade is to PVP what a guild raid is to PVE -- or described on the flip side of the coin, going into a BG without one is like trying to use trade chat to find an ICC PUG that's not going to fail. On a Monday evening right before reset. This post is geared towards newer people who have found their appetite for PVP whetted by the iminent Cataclysm, and want some information on how to get started before that hits and the world is changed forever.

I. Limiting Mechanics
II. Your Raid Composition
III. Leading the Raid
IV. Managing the Other People
V. Ending the Raid / Consistency

I. Limiting Mechanics

Blizzard restricted the amount of people you could take into a premade a while ago. Widespread wisdom suggests that you can only take a party-sized group of 5 with you, and to some extent this is true. But only to some extent. I formed a raid group of six over the weekend and attempted to queue for everything, with the following results:

Warsong Gulch (10) : Works with a raid
Arathi Basin (15) : Works with a raid
Eye of the Storm (15) : Works with a raid
Strand of the Ancients (15) : Works with a raid
Alterac Valley (40) : Limited to a party of 5.
Isle of Conquest (40) : Limited to a party of 5.
Random BG (??) : Limited to a party of 5, presumably because you might get one of AV/IOC, which apparently want you in smaller groups.

This is a little counterintuitive -- the smaller BGs allow you to take a larger group into them, exerting more control over the outcome, while the two largest battlegrounds restrict you to a small group. I wish I could explain Blizzard's logic here, but I can't.

There are ways to get around this, though they are cumbersome. An addon such as Preform AV Enabler will queue everyone in your party as individuals, and only enter you if everyone gets into the same one. I have used this addon in the past and found it to be clunky and time-consuming, apart from the difficulty of requiring everyone in your premade to have it installed...which if you're recruiting your premade out of trade chat and not out of a solid PVP guild that requires its members to have it, will cause yet more delays as everyone goes to go get it.

You might ask why that's worth it, and the answer is that Blizzard first attempts to queue premade groups against each other, considering the significant tactical advantage that accrues to people who queue as a group with instantaneous voice communication. Only after a set amount of time failing to do so will Blizzard match your group up against a pug, which you will undoubtedly stomp. AV Enabler (or addons like it) allow you to game the system into thinking you're all queueing separately (ie, not a premade) when in fact you're not -- guaranteeing you disorganised opposition. If you're one of those people who claimed to be excited when blizzard gave the ability to turn off XP so that your geared twink could face other twinks, but in reality stopped playing b/c your actual enjoyment came from roflstomping lvl 10-12s in grey gear...then an addon will let you enjoy that again. I personally do not find the organisational headache worth the tradeoff -- it inevitably takes a long time to get all the kinks straightened out with an AV Enabler group, and I would rather spend that time actually pvping -- but if you do...I've given you the resources to do it.

II. Your Raid Composition

I'm assuming that you're rolling with a 5-man premade, in order to be able to use the random BG queue and maximise your honor return. On a holiday weekend which allows it, you could make a larger one. Those five roles should probably be, with some variation as the situation calls for:

A Single-Target Healer

A Holy Pally or a Disc Priest work well here -- these are particularly useful in games where keeping one person alive is important -- the flag carrier in WSG, or a tank in AV or IOC. They also have nice synergy if they're traveling with your other healer --

A Raid Healer

Priority here goes to Resto Shamans, Resto Druids, or Holy Priests (assuming you can find any of the latter who PvP). These are useful when you need to keep a group of people alive -- defending or attacking a node/tower (AB/EOTS/AV/IOC), or trying to recover a flag (WSG). You can see, I think, that if you are forced to unbalance your group, it's a little better to have two raid healers than two single-target healers, just b/c of their slightly wider area of usefulness.

AOE CC

I like to take a lock or a mage here, for Howl of Terror / Frost Nova, respectively. A priest can also fill this role, or dual fill that role if you already have a priest as one of your healers. The ability to take a large chunk of an enemy force out of action, even for the smaller amount of time that you usually trade in order to get that AOE capability, is critical in several BGs -- it can buy your flag carrier in WSG needed space to get out of midfield, or put a lot of people out of range of your demos in SOTA (you only run as fast as the demos, barring things like sprint or dash, so once you get behind them you'll stay behind).

The Sneaky Folks

A rogue, or a druid (feral or otherwise) can provide you with valuable reconnaisance, spying out enemy weak points without putting themselves into harm's way. It helps that both of those classes also have solid single-target CC (sap, roots/hibernate/cyclone)

Everyone Else

Mostly you fill this with any dps; in some specialised instances you may want this slot to go to a tank -- WSG to run a flag, or AV/IOC to tank the enemy general NPC. If your premade goes to 8 or more people, I would bring a third healer.

Recruiting

Generally, you can fill your slots from four places, in descending order of usefulness : from your guild, if you set the event up on your calendar beforehand; from your friends list, especially if you make an effort to keep other PvPers on your realm on your FL; trade chat; and from the BGs you run -- if you see other people from your realm while you're running your premade, feel free to invite them along on your next queue.

A word about trade chat : you need to say three things. First, "LFXm to run some premades", replacing the X with your number. This conveys the idea that you know what you're looking for, which builds people's confidence that they're not signing up for a waste of time. Some servers have a negative connotation associated with the word "premade", for reasons that escape me, or people may not know what they are (if you're on a normal server, especially), and so sometimes you can get better results if you say "LFXm to run some (battlegrounds / battleground premades) with". Second, mention that they should have vent, and resilience. Again, this is a confidence builder. If you want to name a specific figure for resilience, that's fine too (5-600 is good); I usually just say "decent resilience" and rely on people to know what their own capabilities are. If someone doesn't know what they should have, I figure that's maybe not somebody I want running with me. Possibly that's judgmental of me, feel free to vary that. I say "decent" and I get people whispering me saying "I have 1100, is that ok?" which is amusing in its own way. Lastly, I like to put a smiley face, or an exclamation point (ONE ONLY) at the end...it demonstrates enthusiasm, that while you're going to be running something with a serious desire to win, you also haven't lost sight of the fact that you're also trying to have fun.

III. Leading the Raid

It is reasonably important that you have vent. You can run a premade successfully without it, but the quality of your win will be correspondingly decreased...much like trying to organise a PUG of any wing past the first in ICC without vent. You might pull it off...but it will be messy.

It is more important that you have a plan for every battleground you go into. Remember how we used our advertisement to give an illusion of self-confidence? Now is the part where you have to deliver on that, or you are not going to retain the people you recruited. This is where having two healers is crucial -- it gives you more flexibility to split your team in half to do a couple things at once. Within reason, the more map coverage you can get onto your vent, the more up-to-the-second information you have as the leader to determine what needs doing. Don't take this to extremes though -- sending one person to each node in AB may get you more information, but it nullifies your advantage.

In WSG, for example, I like to leave two to defend the flag (sneaky dps + me as druid heals, usually, but you could make any combination work) and 3 to go get the opposing flag with the crowd of PUGS. Once they make it back we swap to the FC and his healer (we send out the single-target heals usually) staying behind, and I take the other two dps with me to go lead an attack. By having a strong presence in both groups we have a good amount of influence.

The splitting also works well in a game like AB or EOTS, where you may need 5 people to take a node, but you certainly don't need 5 to hold one.

Speaking of lead...try to get yourself promoted to BG Lead...there's something about having different colored text that will occasionally make people listen to you.

Assist. The second guild I was ever in, a lovely PVP guild back on Emerald Dream called Meridius (and later, I regret to announce, DEVASTATE, yes in all caps), was fond of using an assist method, and I've carried it over to my premades. I usually pick a ranged dps before we go into a BG, or failing that I'll do it, to pick out high-priority targets and call over vent for an assist. I do this now just by having them say "assist" over vent, and making sure everyone has a macro made up beforehand that says "/assist XYZ". This is important for knocking down things like healers, or that Kingslayer DK with shadowmourne who's going to rip you all to shreds if you leave him up. It's also better that this person be someone at range b/c melee are...well...melee. They have a harder time seeing the bigger tactical picture than someone who's at a few steps remove from the brawl.

IV. Managing the Other People

One of the most distressing mistakes you can make is to forget that half your team, or more, is not on vent with you. Remember to relay information that you have in vent onto BG chat, if you expect anyone to do anything about it. I've led premades that went down to failure, only to realise afterwards that probably nobody had any clue what was going on b/c BG chat was totally silent.

The reverse is also true of course -- remember to READ BG chat as well.

There are two schools of thought on whether you should announce at the beginning of the battleground that you are a premade. School 1 suggests that you should do this, b/c it gives you auto-respect/authority and makes people more willing to cooperate with you. School 2 does not do this, b/c if you lose then the pugs will ridicule you incessantly. I belong to school 1...a) you should not be caring what pugs think b/c odds are you're not going to see them again, and b) I know that when I pug and someone announces a premade, I get all excited and just want to help. I don't think I'm alone in having that reaction either.

It is important that you value the pugged people you're with -- they are part of your team no less than your vented premade mates, but you guys can't be everywhere unless you're a full premade in which case...you shouldn't be reading this section anyway. Thank them for their help, both at the beginning, and at the end. Be civilised and polite, yet firm and authoritative. You are the default leader...act like one.

That being said, try to keep on top of what pugs are doing and tailor yourself accordingly. It is inevitable that some people will not listen to you. Try to work your premade's (people who WILL listen to you) strategy around that as much as possible, without fatally compromising your original plan. Hopefully you're using something reasonably simple that most people would already (*cross fingers*) be doing anyway.

I like to make my announcement at the beginning something along the lines of "Hello everyone. This is a partial Draenor premade...we will be handling XYZ, and we would appreciate it if you guys could do ABC. Thanks for playing with us!"

V. Ending the Raid

You should have in mind how long you plan on going -- someone may ask, and it looks better if you have an idea. That being said, don't be surprised if you have to swap people out more frequently than you thought. People are finicky about BGs...some people only want to go once, some people would go all night if you left them. I generally try to go for two hours or so, but sometimes cancel early, and sometimes go past. Have a finger on the pulse of it, and if it seems like your premade is not having fun, it may be time to call it.

The MOST IMPORTANT THING, and I cannot stress this enough, is that you NOT LOSE THE PEOPLE YOU RAN WITH. Offer to trade friend requests, get those people on your contact list so that you can grab them again. You will run better premades if you run them with people you've run with before. It's true in raiding, and it's true in BGs. I have reached the point where I usually fill 80% of my premades out of my friends list before I hit trade. Which is kind of like the job market, really...most jobs you never see advertised b/c they're filled by networking before it ever gets that far. If you run premades consistently (every saturday at 1pm! or whatever), create the event on your calendar and make sure that those people get invites. If you have too many friends...try to rotate them around so that everyone is getting a chance to run once in a while so you don't forget each other.

A good premade is like a raid that one-shots all the way up to LK...it's an exhilarating experience that has the capacity to completely overturn people's opinions about PvP. They are hands-down your best recruitment tool if you are trying to convince someone who "hates" PvP that it's really quite fun. And of course, it's more fun for you too. It goes without saying, I hope, that premades generally enjoy much higher win rates than going in solo. And they also give you the power to make legitimate attempts at the harder BG achievements (Resilient Victory in AB, anyone?). And yet for all that, they are not formed very frequently. I pose the theory that this is due to a dearth of people willing to step up and lead. Go forth and be a PvP missionary!

AV : Fail At Failing

2010-06-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

The title reflects the trouble I had with AV over the holiday in trying to lose, where unfortunately my side was not in the mood. Consequently, going 9-1 makes my AV potentially skewed in the same way that Strand was in the opposite direction (2-8). I apologise...I tried to lose, I even asked them to (whimsically) at the beginning of games...no dice. So :

AV Holiday Honor (Cyclone BG, 57% win)
Winning HPM : 530.83
Losing HPM : 123.2
Overall HPM : 357.37

In comparison with the other holiday BGs I have posted,

AV : 100%
EOTS : 57%
SOTA : 39%
WSG : 39%

I have also updated the holiday chart link on the right, if you would like to compare to the old data.

In other news, does anyone know what the deal is with how many people you can queue for a BG? I was certain it was five. Then I went into one and queued 6 people all night long, and so revised my understanding to "as many as you want, the 'join as party' is misleading"...and then when I deliberately recruited for 6 the other night, it told me my party was too big to queue for it. What gives?

Holiday EOTS Paint By Numbers

2010-06-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

WARNING : If you don't like numbers this post is not for you!

I gathered data for EOTS(H) over the weekend...it's up on the Updated Holiday HPM post I have linked on the right, along with SOTA & WSG. The nutshell:

Winning HPM : 283.92
Losing HPM : 126.32
Overall HPM : 204.76

EOTS : 100%
SOTA : 69%*
WSG : 68%

Interestingly, the old WSG data is about 69% of the old EOTS data, so that stuff seems intact. What this says to me is reinforcement of the asterisk I put next to the Strand data when I put it up (short version : my data was skewed toward the losses and so win data was likely not as accurate as it could be), so people out there who liked SOTA and were sad that it was apparently sucking as bad as WSG, have hope, the situation may change.

What I would like to do with this data today is draw some comparisons with regular EOTS (which I also have data for) to make some general conclusions about holiday/nonholiday experience. To recap :

Regular EOTS
Winning HPM : 247.08 ( -37 )
Losing HPM : 111.89 ( -14 )
Overall HPM : 179.18 ( -25 )

Unsurprisingly...holiday gives you better than regular. You may take your dunce cap and sit in the corner now. Here's where the interesting numbers come in though, and I think it shows fairly conclusively that when a BG is on holiday, it attracts better players. Yes, most of us already knew that, and no, it's not just the fact that I was fighting at BET yesterday with one arena master on my side, against two arena masters on the horde side (yes, they killed me badly), that makes me wonder that. It's just that, much like the assumption that WSG sucks for HPM, which everyone implicitly knows to be true, it's nice to have hard numerical data to back that up.

Points in Favor of the "Smarter People" Argument

Point A : Time Investment

A regular EOTS match lasts an average of 13.71 minutes. On a holiday it lasts 13.9 minutes. The games are fought closer and so they tend to last longer. Why? Because it's harder to roflstomp a good team than a bad team.

Point B : Smart Targeting

I don't mean to sound like a self-absorbed prick here but taking me as a healer and extrapolating to generally cover all people who heal -- on a regular game, I die 2.65 times. On a holiday, 2.67. It's close enough that I guess you could call it statistically insignificant (.7%). I choose to look at it as saying that maybe it shows that people are ever-so-slightly better about targeting and killing healers on the holidays.

Point C : The Map

On a holiday, games that devolved into 2v2+flag games were more common. This correlates Point A; games are more evenly matched, and abandoning a 3-tower strategy to go for 2+flag usually follows upon the heels of recognising that the opposition is too tough to grab a third.

Statistically : On holiday, I recorded 10 games, and two of them were flat-out 2v2 matches, with another 2-3 that started out that way but eventually gave way to a 3-tower game. On regular, I recorded 20 games, and two of them were flat-out 2v2 games, with one unrecorded that you could give the benefit of the doubt to if you wanted and pretend it was a 2v2. But the gist is: it's basically twice as likely to get trapped into a 2v2 on holiday as it is otherwise.

People are also slightly smarter about fighting you for that flag cap in that situation -- on a holiday, a flag cap took 2.31 minutes on average, as opposed to 2.28 on regular. There's also correspondingly less flag caps in total -- 7.19 caps on average (both sides put together) for regular EOTS, 7 for holiday.

Point D : Dropouts

Four of my 20 regular EOTS games were joined in progress...none of my holiday ones were. That could be a fluke, and why I put this point last b/c I think it's the most nebulous, but it could indicate that people are more likely to play it out on holiday than otherwise.

Point E : Point Differential

The average point value for losing a game of EotS (both Horde and Alliance together) was 670 for nonholiday losses, versus 624 for holiday losses. You could make the point that therefore people are more skilled on regular b/c they manage to get more points even when they're losing, but I would argue differently. I think it means that the teams that win have it more "together" on a holiday than otherwise -- to allow the losing teams more points on a nonholiday to me speaks to sloppier play.

I think also what it might come down to is those 2v2 games -- smarter players, recognising that they're in a 2+flag situation, will be better about controlling mid before they cap (hence the longer time between caps on a holiday, also), and therefore keeping the losing team's point totals smaller.

How can we test that? By looking at the differential between flag caps (how many times the winning side caps, versus the losing side) on those 2v2 games. Using the 5 games (2 certain, 3 sort-of) from the holiday, the average differential between winning side / losing side caps is 4.8. Using the 3 regular EOTS games...the average differential is 3. I don't think I'm going too far here to say that there's a direct correlation between that number and how effective your control of midfield is -- the smaller the differential is, the worse your midfield control is, and the higher it is, the better you were at monopolising it.

Conclusion : If you want to play a game with smarter people, go to the holiday weekend BG. Ron Burgundy imitation: It's SCIENCE.

A Picture is worth a thousand words!

2010-06-11T10:34:00.001-07:00

and I lack the words to express my head-shaking outrage, anyway, at Blizzard reintroducing the snare to Tree of Life form. Like...wtf. No, actually, WTF doesn't begin to cover it.

Tree of Life needs to be like this (jump it to 8:30, sorry) :

and not like this.

Yuk yuk, they're TREES, therefore it would be HILARIOUS to ROOT them to the ground!

If my roots are so powerful they slow me by 50%, then I had damn well better be able to cast Entangling roots at a 40 yard range, on no diminishing returns, on up to three targets, and maybe throw in making it an instant cast. That MIGHT even out the terrible, terrible idea it is to reintroduce this idea.

As Beru said so eloquently...no other form is penalized for shifting into the tree-defining (pardon the pun) form. So not only does everyone else get to keep their form while ours is reduced to a cooldown with 17% uptime, our CD has negatives associated with it that nobody in their right mind would consider worth it, with the anticipated-heavy-movement fights in Cata, to say nothing of the always-movement-intensive PvP?

Fail, Blizz. Way to fail hard.

PvP Talents?

2010-06-09T10:14:00.001-07:00

ETA: I am a total n00b because apparently you can already queue as a raid...the "Join as Party" button being somewhat misleadingly named!

Looking ahead to Cataclysm it is clear that Blizzard wants to make PvP more accessible than ever before, which I think is generally a good thing. Cata could be the best thing to happen to PvP since...well, idk...random BGs?

We are getting guild talent trees in Cataclysm, and we have definite word that that will include PvP talents of some kind. You earn these talent points by accruing guild currency, which are acquired in various ways...but most noticeably for us, by winning rated BGs. Here's the kicker there though : in PvP as in PvE, they're throwing a ballpark number around of 75% guild participation for it to count as a guild win to get the points. That means 7/10 of the people in the raid (or WSG, explicitly used as an example) have to be in your guild.

Thought 1 : 7 > 5. Therefore they're going to let us join queue for BGs in a raid, finally, instead of limiting it to party...at least for the rated BGs. About time, Preform AV Enabler is getting kind of clunky and it's annoying anytime you try to set up a premade to pause and wait 15 minutes while the people who don't have the addon have to go download it. I suspect this is only into effect on rated BGs -- elsewise you'd get the same complaints that people had before about twinks rolling over casual pvpers, until Blizzard separated them. But maybe it could work on normal BGs too, since Blizz has something in place already (allegedly) to try and match premade groups against similar-sized ones.

Thought 2 : Talent trees are supposed to (theoretically) make people more loyal to guilds. I'm wondering if it won't actually encourage less -- "ok, everyone gquit and join our guild for the duration of this raid so you can get our perks...then you can go back to your original guild after." Blizzard could stop that by saying you needed to be in a guild for a certain amount of time before you had access to the nomnoms...it wouldn't even need to be that long, probably a day would work since PUGs aren't usually formed that far in advance. But it seems unlikely that Blizz would do that.

Some of the talents posited include a mass rez, mass summons, extra gold loot, reagent-free raid buffs, reduced mat cost for flasks and other consumables...most of which seems to me is pretty PVE-ish. We could get some mileage out of raid buffs, I suppose, and it's likely that rated BGs are going to be SRS BSNS enough to at least require flasks so maybe that helps too. The big problem here is that in PVE, you don't care if guild A has a certain perk, and guild B doesn't...they're not competing against each other, and there isn't something like "you do 5% more damage" or "raid bosses have 5% less health" that would cause all sorts of progression drama about who has Legitimate Kills and who doesn't. But in PVP, guilds are going to be competing directly against each other, which makes a whole host of "give you an edge against the content" talents unworkable for balance reasons.

The only PVP talent I've seen proposed is to reduce the flag cap time by a second, which I suspect is highly unlikely, again for balance. It looks to me like by "PVP talents" we're actually going to get stuck with the wuss-talents that can go either way (like the raid buffs). I've thought of a couple things but they all run into that balance thing and I can't seem to come out with a way around it.

* More efficiency -- maybe guildies move x% faster, or x% faster mounted speed, to get to objectives faster. This is again a pvp/pve talent both but useful in BGs certainly.

* More information -- maybe guildies can see when another guildie is under attack, and by how many people. Much like calling incs at a flag, but more automated the way some addons do now. Alternately, give all members of the guild "track humanoids" for the duration of a BG. But what if guild A has this and guild B doesn't? Fairness? Or do we assume at this point that any serious PVP guild, even if they don't have Unbalancing Talent P, will probably have Unbalancing Talent Q, and therefore they work/cancel out?

* Terrain alterations -- there's already been some hints of this with individual talent trees like the mages' wall of ice, or the rogues' fog thingy (I forget the name). What if the guild leader had something like this at their disposal that they could use every..idk, 15 minutes, to limit it to once in a BG.

* My pet idea : allow two guildies to set up a portal that's operable as long as the channellers at both ends are not disrupted. Say it's a 20s channel that allows you to port from ST to farm, but subject to the same disruption as any channelled cast. So if something's under threat, you could rush reinforcements there...but only if you can keep the enemy off your portal-anchor long enough to do it. It's a massively unbalanced idea, of course, and would only work if you were working off what I said above, assuming that the other side of the BG would also likely have some kind of kickass talent too. It might be worth mentioning that the Zerg can do something similar to this in Starcraft with a thing called a Nydus Canal (and I think SCII also but I'm not as up on that as I should be) so it wouldn't be a new concept for Blizzard.

What ideas can you come up with? If you were running a PVP guild in cata, what end-level talent would make you drool with anticipation?

Wow.

2010-04-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

This blew my mind, courtesy of Gnomeaggedon -- apparently people in BGs are NOT sheep...they're fish. I am resolved to take a few people into some BGs and try this "mutual support" thing out for myself!

Did WSG Dye Its Hair?

2010-04-12T22:25:00.001-07:00

...because apparently it is no longer the redheaded stepchild. Picking up SOTA Holiday numbers over the weekend, WSG, though it lags behind, is not nearly the joke-far-outrunner that it used to be. Why? I have no idea; it definitely feels with 3.3.3 as if there may have been a subtle tweak on Blizzard's part to give you an empty plate for most of a WSG match and then SUDDENLY THROW YOU A WHOLE BUNCH AT THE END FOR NO APPARENT REASON. *cough*. Anyway, the numbers here for Strand, with a caveat*:

SOTA HOLIDAY HPM (Cyclone BG, 41% win)
Winning HPM : 190.68 (92.7% of WSG holiday)
Losing HPM : 106.55 (115.3% of WSG holiday)
Overall HPM : 141.11 (101.63% of WSG holiday)
Average Objective Points : 7.24 (WSG gives 8.6)

* My record this weekend was 2-8...bad streak I guess. So while I am pretty confident of the loss numbers, the win numbers are based off two games and may therefore be awry to some degree or another.

Put another way, WSG on holiday gives 98.4% of the HPM of Strand...a difference which for all practical purposes you could probably consider to be nonexistent, given the potential fluctuations in the data.

The breakdown of "bonus honor" seems to be as follows, for the holiday. Remember that 1 OP (OGCMAT wordage) = 1 "bonus honorable kill" (blizz's wordage) = 124 honor (what you actually care about).

* 1 OP for each level you break through (ie one of green or blue. You do not get two points if you break both, which was news to me), to a maximum of 4 (blue/green, red/purple, yellow, relic door).
* 1 OP for capturing the relic
* 1 OP for each level you successfully defend (but unlike offense, both doors must remain up to count)
* 1 OP for the opposition not capturing the relic
* 2 OP for clearing the map
* 3 additional OP for winning the map.

Bizarrely, for each of the gated objectives (not the clear or the win), you also get 37 bonus honor in addition to the standard 124. Why that should be, I'm not sure...there it is though. *shrug*.

What I find interesting here is the potential to judge how well an average Strand team performs. If you subtract out the "congratulations for just sticking it out" honor, a team scores 7.24-2-(.41)*3 = 4.01 objective points in a game. Mathematically, that translates to, say, in a game where you manage to break into the courtyard (3 points), they are going to break down the relic door (you get 1 for them not capping). If you don't knock down the yellow gate (2 points for you)...they may knock it down (you get 2, for the relic and the relic door). If you get stopped after only one wall, your points come from...stopping them after two walls. No matter how well you do, the other team always does slightly better...which in Strand means winning. And I suppose that makes sense given Alliance's losing pattern in this BG, in my battlegroup. That is, of course, an *average*. In reality, you capture the relic sometimes (5 points), they capture it sometimes (you get 0 points), and most times are in the middle.

If you look at a further breakdown here:

Average Offensive OPs (overall): 3.45 -- we get into the courtyard somewhere between knocking the yellow door (3) and the relic door (4).

Offensive OPs when we win : 5. Le duh, to win you must have captured the relic. I include only for completeness ;-).

Offensive OPs when we lose : 2.67. Which is not bad; we still tend to do OK, we get stuck 2/3 of the way past the red/purple doors (2) to the yellow doors (3)

Average Defensive OPs (overall) : 0.56 -- abysmal, really, we keep them somewhere between the relic and the relic door, on average.

Defensive OPs when we win : 1. Frightening. They knock the relic door, but not cap? That's unlikely and what this really translates to is : when we win, it's not because we stop the Horde from capping, it's because we manage to do it faster than they do.

Defensive OPs when we lose : 0.22. But again -- to lose by definition involves losing the relic. The only reason this is not a flat zero is because of the occasional tie, which in terms of HPM counts as a loss.

More on those sorts of things as the spreadsheet develops...I know it doesn't seem it but we are still relatively new into the 3.3.3 madness :-)

This just in : WSG still sucks

2010-04-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Despite the temptation it provides me to slit my wrists, I bravely ventured into WSG over the weekend to gather data for you, my lovely readers. (Lies. I did it b/c my mind would explode if there was a gap in my spreadsheet. But I like you guys too). There's not enough data for a table as yet but :

WSG Holiday Notes :
Winning HPM : 205.65
Losing HPM : 92.41
Overall (on Cyclone BG, with a 43% win ratio) : 140.74

Average Bonus Honor in a game (from capping the flag, 248 points, clearing the map, 496 points, and winning, 372 points) : 1079.2

There is a maximum of 13 "kills" of objectives in WSG(H) -- 4 for finishing, 3 for winning, 6 for 3 flag caps. If you correlate from the above, 1079.2 / 124, on an average map you are scoring 8.7 of these Objective Points, as I'm labelling them for comparison. I've come up with a whole slew of new things I'm tracking with the introduction of 3.3.3, just to try to come up with reasons why the honor in some bgs is so much better than others.

By way of comparison :

EOTS (Random, non-holiday) Notes:
Winning HPM : 247.08
Losing HPM : 111.89
Overall (Cyclone, 49% win) : 178.02
Average Bonus Honor in a game from objectives (only points) : 674.65
Average OP : 5.44

This is assuming that you queued for a random, and got EOTS. If you queue specifically for EOTS, thus forgoing the bonus 1862/621 honor, you end up with rather more unpleasant numbers, to wit:

Winning HPM : 116.87
Losing HPM : 64.78
Overall : 90.26

So what makes the difference? Why does WSG have a worse HPM than EOTS? At first I thought, well...maybe it's b/c you kill more people in EOTS? But you don't, I have an eots kill average of 27.81, and in WSG, 35.5. In WSG(H), those tend to be worth 25.08 honor apiece, versus 20.71 in EOTS...and that's considering that EOTS gives you a buff when you kill someone near a tower. So I kill *more*, and they're WORTH more, in WSG. So that's not it. I think the answer here is in time committed -- my average EOTS game is 13.71 minutes, whereas WSG stretches out into 22.7, which is roughly 50% more. I would venture to guess that your honor gained in WSG on holiday is better...but it takes you too long to get it. A similar argument could be made for the blitz versus the Standard Win in AV -- you get a crapton more honor doing it the latter way, but at too much of a cost in time to stand up to a blitz solely on HPM grounds. There are other excellent arguments against the blitz -- Cynwise has some over on his site but I can't seem to find it atm...will ETA when I do -- but you can't beat it for return on your investment.

ETA: On a whim, went into the spreadsheet and the above appears to be true. WSG(H) gives you 3127.66 honor, on average, while EOTS(R) is 2481.73.

I rather suspect that the formula here is going to boil down to taking a given holiday weekend, and comparing it to the table which I shall in the future get together ;-), and saying, if 4 or more of the Random Battlegrounds are better honor, skip the holiday and queue for random, playing your odds. If three are better, it's a 50/50 shot so do the holiday if you enjoy that BG, or skip it if you don't. And if only 1 or 2 are better, hit the holiday BG.

The tree rests.

And just in case

2010-04-02T15:03:00.001-07:00

You were doubting my credentials to write the previous article, I finally got this last night!

Go me!

Eye of the Storm : All in the Title

2010-04-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Do you know what the key to winning Eye of the Storm is? I'll tell you : it's The Eye of the Storm! Right in the title, crazy I know! Let me illustrate what I mean, using stick figures of meditating men so that I, too, can make Cynwise's day. Here's two storms :

In both examples there is a RAGING SPINNING TORNADO OF DEATH on the outside, and a peaceful, calm, meditation-worthy space in the center. And that's how you win EOTS -- fight at the towers, which are around the periphery, and not in the center. Unfortunately, Blizzard has decided to play a cruel joke on this strategy and put a big shiny flag in the center, which encourages people to try and grab it. I once read this referred to as a "buglight" and that's totally true : try for it and you're like to get fried. Most likely by ele shammies knockbacking you off the edge into oblivion but that's a complaint for a different post. So let's look at a couple things here :

What are my resources?

You have 15 people on your team; with this you can reasonably defend control of 3 nodes -- 5 at each makes for a solid defense. As in Arathi Basin, controlling three nodes leads to winning; also as in Arathi Basin, you frequently CAN'T control three nodes because half of your team will be fighting like idiots in the road and not actually at a node. Ahem.

What's the mechanics?

You win by gaining 1600 points. You gain points by holding towers, and capping flags. Capping flags gives you more points the more towers you have...kind of like a snowballing effect.

With one tower : You earn 1 point per second, and a flag cap is worth 75 points.
With two towers : You earn 2 points per second, and a flag cap is worth 85 points.
With three towers : You earn 5 points per second, and a flag cap is worth 100 points.
With four towers : You earn 10 points per second, and a flag cap is worth 500 points.

It's much like AB in that there's a huge gap of difference between mostly-dominating with 3 (4 in AB), and totally dominating by owning every node.

As far as honor is concerned, you gain it from your usual three suspects -- killing people, the bonus honor from doing a random, and from completing the BG objectives. The objective in EOTS is simple : points. You gain 124 honor every 267 points (on a nonholiday), ie at 267, 533, 800, 1067, 1333, 1600. You also gain 124 honor for completing the map, regardless of win or lose, and 124 honor for winning. If you win, therefore you get 8 x 124 = 992 honor from objectives.

On a holiday, you gain 124 honor every 160 points, for a total of 10 "ticks" (as opposed to the 6 on a regular, non-holiday day), ie at 160, 320, 480, 640, 800, 960, 1120, 1440, 1600. The 124 honor for clearing the map, and the 124 honor for winning, remain unchanged. A holiday win is therefore worth 12 x 124 = 1488 honor from objectives.

What are my options?

There are two accepted strategies for Eye of the Storm. One is much better than the other, and the other is the one that gets used all the time. Raise your hand if you think they're the same. If you raised your hand, go pug a few more BGs and come back when you're not so naive.

Option 1 : Capture two towers, and then run the flag

This is what usually ends up happening in pugs. It's easy to run from your start point, grab the two nodes closest to you, and then go to the flag. The problem is this results in a mirrored map -- you are forcing the other side to follow the exact same strategy, which results in both sides fighting over the same objective, the flag in the middle. You are both accruing tower points at the same rate, and so control of the midfield flag spawn will make or break the success of this plan. Here's the problem with this plan : you look at the map, and you think there are four nodes. The cleverer among you may even have said, aha no, there are 5. There are six. And successful execution of a 2+mid plan relies on you controlling four of them. Remember when I said you only really have enough people to control three nodes? That's why this is a bad plan. Another picture :

The six nodes are : Mage Tower (upper left), Draenei Ruins (upper right), Fel Reaver Ruins (lower left), Blood Elf Tower (lower right), the flag spawn (in the middle), and wherever the flag happens to be. To pursue this strategy you must hold your two towers, control the flag as it's being moved from the center to one of your towers, AND control the middle so that once the flag is capped you can pick it back up again. This is difficult to execute in practice, and tends to result in seesaw capping games where the last to cap wins. This is why you frequently hear "don't cap till we have mid" in an eots game of this type.

Option 2 : Control 3 towers

This is by far the better option. Best of all, if executed correctly you usually only have to worry about controlling TWO nodes! Here's the thing : if you control three towers, only two of them are likely to be attacked, the third being out of range of any but lonely stealth-attempts. Again :

And the thing is, as the other side attacks those two nodes, people like the sheep they are will drift to the defense of those nodes, which is exactly where they need to be. In the above picture you'll end up with the lion's share of people defending MT & BET, with a token few at DR.

You do not need to worry about the flag in this situation. Remember the math up above? With three towers you gain 5 points per second. They are gaining 1 point per second. A flag cap with one tower is worth 75 points. That means that *just to stay even with you* they have to cap a flag every 75/4 = 18.75 seconds. It's not gonna happen, trust me. The average time it takes to cap a flag is 137 seconds, from the games I've recorded. And I've never seen it faster than 90 seconds. You can completely ignore the middle if you like. Of course, if the other side is intelligent they will know this as well and be trying to grab a second tower, so they will also be ignoring the middle -- which may allow you to cushion your lead with an easy snatch-and-cap. But don't get locked into a fight over it -- if they want it, let them have it, because although they may be too stupid to realise it that flag is worthless to them. Which leads to the last point :

When should I flutter my moth wings and go towards the buglight?

There's three situations you could be in, but generally this goes back to what I said at the beginning : the center must be a place of calm and meditation. In other words, if nobody's there, feel free to grab the flag. If there's a big fight going on, then you would be better off doing something else. But specifically :

* You have one tower : You might consider making a flag grab if you can get away with it easily, but you SHOULD NOT CAP IT. Your goal here is solely to slow down their runaway win and buy your actual offense time to get a second (and hopefully third) tower back. Do not send more than a handful of people after this.

* You have two towers : If you're smart here you should be capping a third tower here. Look at it this way : capping the flag will take you two minutes, and net you 85 honor. Capping a third tower is an increase of 3 points per second. So if you can take a third tower in (137-(85/3)) less than 109 seconds, you would be better off doing that. Which sounds like a short time but your time-sense is very telescoped in BGs, that's a long time to fight over a node. If however you're fighting in a stalemate, a very well-matched game, the time it takes to cap a third tower may be outweighed by the ease of a flag cap, if you can control the mid. Just remember : that third tower will always work for you, and defenders will drift to your two vulnerable towers naturally; the flag will only work for you till you cap it, at which point you have to recalculate your odds all over again.

* You have three towers : Focus on defending your towers and you will win automatically. That said, similar to one tower, if nobody's in the middle why not make a push for it? Cuts down your win time by (100/5=) 20 seconds. Again though, don't make a serious effort at it; the flag at this point *does not matter* to either side so your primary focus should be on what is -- defending your towers.

Oh and lastly I suppose, if you have 4 towers : you outclass them so badly, why not? Just as with three towers, you really only have two vulnerable towers to defend (the two closest to the opposing side's starting spawn point) so you have a little wiggle room to grab the flag if you've got someone sitting around doing nothing. And you cut your win time by (500/10=) 50 seconds. Of course, you're already going to win in (1600/10=) 160 seconds = 2 minutes 40 seconds or less anyway, are you really that impatient? :-).

To sum up : BUGLIGHT BAD. HAPPY MEDITATING STICK FIGURE IN MID GOOD.

On Networking

2010-03-23T23:09:00.001-07:00

In not-so-funny news today, apparently Blizzard accidentally deleted my realm from the battlegroup, so we could not

*raid
*do dungeons
*do arenas
*do BGs

This led to a lot of bored people city raiding and counter-raiding...I doubt many faction bosses were actually killed, for which reason I declined to participate in the offensives (though I enjoyed stomping horde raids in defense). But that is not the subject for today's post.

Today I would like to mention that from 0 guilds on server we've apparently mushroomed into 3 pvp guilds gunning for the same people. I am unhappy, to say the least. One of them is run by our server celebrity pvp-er, who has much negative PR associated with him to the point where asking to join forces with him is repellent to me; the other started his guild today and apparently named it "Obamanation Healthcare", which also puts up red flags to me. I mean, putting politics into your guild name? Why would you voluntarily antagonize half your recruiting pool?

I have readjusted my recruiting tactics in lieu of abysmal failure on Saturday, the busiest /trade day of the week (2 nibbles, no joins). It seems to me from the nibbles that the scare-off was that the guild was just starting. This leads me to think that maybe trade recruiting is an ineffective use of my time until the guild is actually established. Instead I am going to lie low for a week or two and play BGs extensively (NO DON'T MAKE ME PLEASE LOLTH HAVE MERCY) and try to network other people on Draenor. Then I will seduce them into my guild once I have a network of people built up.

The weird thing is this kind of parrots what I'm doing in real life to get a job...not spamming the want ads, and building a network in the industry instead. I think I'm going to write an article about it, see what my employment coach thinks about THAT :-).

Tomorrow, guild's first event : premades at 7:30, assuming that Draenor has returned to the Cyclone fold by then and such things are possible *sigh*. That should hopefully be a good time to network some people in with trade advertisements. I'm still going to do that, just shifting tone from "LF PvP fans to join guild" to "LF PvP fans to run some [x/y/z bg]" which is a lot less threatening to people who may be in a nice guild already that they're leery of leaving. *crosses fingers*

Tis Official!

2010-03-20T10:33:00.001-07:00

No, not Glory of the Hero...though Moorabi finally gave up his mammoth dreams and got me that this morning as well.

Yesterday Ihra /gquit in the middle of the afternoon, and in the evening became GM of Esoterica. Time to fulfill all my happy fantasies about how great this will be, and ignore the tiny warning bells about how much work and suffering will be involved!

What's in an honorable kill?

2010-03-15T23:28:00.000-07:00

Pending me not being lazy and turning on the floating combat text that tells you what an honorable kill is worth, I am resorting to old-fashioned math. The gods at Blizzard have told us that in 3.3.3 our honor from killing someone (and, associated thereto, the battleground objectives which have a straight conversion) is being doubled. From what to what, though? Traditional wisdom says, 20.9 honor per kill. I have my doubts about that though, having run some figures, and that just leaves me more confused. Though I will say that 20.9 x 3 = 62.7 = 63, which is the honor I see from burning towers in AV so maybe that's not a TOTAL bunch of hogwash.

BUT. Questions remain. In WSG, you gain honor three ways : killing people, capping flags, and winning. Now, I have more than three winning games of WSG recorded, and because I'm anal like that I recorded the caps in those games, so ostensibly you should be able to set up a system of equations that reduces you out to solving what each of those things is worth. Three lines, in 3-dimensional space, which should converge at a perfect (x,y,z) point. But they don't. And if you add more lines (=games), it gets worse.

So, ok, let's take something simpler. Arathi Basin gives you honor in only two ways, at least according to the general info site : killing people, and the amount of points you have at the end converts directly into your bonus honor. Linearly, I would assume, but that may be in error. So you can set up a two-dimensional system of equations, theoretically.

(HKs)*(value of HK=x) + (End Resource Count)*(Value of One Resource = Y) = Total honor gained in match

So I did that for all 18 non-holiday AB games that I have written down. A picture is worth a thousand words; here's the result :

Notice how those lines DO NOT CONVERGE ON A SINGLE GLORIOUS POINT. Moreover, even if you wanted to draw a really big Dot Of Best Fit...the x-value -- an honorable kill, remember -- there hovers somewhere (roughly) between 9 and 12...NOT 20.9, the standard accepted answer. Y is in the 0.3-0.5 region but that's not really relevant to my point here.

I'm not being given correct information here and as an engineer I am extremely distressed by this. Seriously, I was in bed trying to go to sleep with my wife and this idea SO UNNERVED me that I had to come down to my computer, play with graphs and desperately attempt to fit some sense into it, and then write a blog post about how annoyed I was when the data would not be forced. Note to the public at large : if you ever want to explode an engineer's brain, feed him bad data and watch the fireworks.

*sigh*

*tries to go back to bed*

Ihrayeep, Guildmaster

2010-03-07T17:19:00.001-08:00

"Tired of feeling like a misfit in your social raiding guild, just because you enjoy killing horde? If you're a dedicated player with a passion for PvP, Esoterica wants to talk to you!"

Ihra's taking the plunge and starting his own guild. Why? Ehh...a variety of reasons, but mostly because I feel like the ground seems ripe (on my limited research) to maybe finally get a working PvP guild going on Draenor. For those not in the know, Draenor is a "Normal" realm, ie one where "pvp" said in trade chat has the impact of saying a word with one more letter than it actually has, so it could be challenging. On the other hand, I know there are people who PvP, and LIKE to PvP, despite that. And you know what? There is no pvp guild worth speaking of on the server. Trust me. I've looked, hard. I'm getting much encouragement from spousal figure and my 3s team, so that moral support helps give me the large brass objects necessary to engage in a pursuit of this kind. I've told one of my best buddas in the guild that I'm leaving (I guess now I'm committed to doing that!), but not formally till our GM comes back from hiatus sometime at the end of the week. I think I'll leave most of my alts in my original guild -- what they do doesn't conflict with what my new pretty guild will be doing, and that will let me keep in touch with my old guildies if the idea of a joint chat channel doesn't fly with our GuildMomma as I have some hints it may not.

So I've stealth-created the guild on an alt and started working through guild ranks and organisational things...Now it is a shadow-organisation just waiting for Ihra to formally abandon ship and take over as The Chief. Yes, I renamed the Guildmaster rank, "The Chief". Because I'm the boss, and I get to do that. Says the Simpsons,

"Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power."
"Of course I have! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring, nobody listens."

I'm not going to blog too much about guild stuff I don't think, except in a theoretical light, discussing what I think good organizing choices are -- because let me tell you, looking for resources for people who want to start pvp guilds, I found a lot of people asking that question but not a lot of good answers -- and so on, but in light of Tam's not-so-pleasant guild drama recently, I suspect that's the best route to take.

And in a side note jumping on the bandwagon, I created a character over on Argent Dawn-US to join up with the blogging guild over there. I didn't ACTUALLY get up the nerve to ask someone for a guild invite but I look forward to actually maybe meeting (in real time!) some of the people I read on a daily basis!

And Even More Game-Changing:

2010-02-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think Blizzard just likes to mess with me, and change the honor system based on how close I am to completing an analysis of the current system.

MAJOR OVERHAUL of the system including the elimination of marks of honor, the implementation of random BG Finders, etc.

It's gonna take me a week just to figure out how to record numbers from this new shenanigans. Damn you, Blizzard.

How to make an arena team :

2010-02-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

So you may have noticed that Relentless Gladiator gear requires only arena points...but no rating. And also there's no option for getting it with just honor. It seems like to get that pretty i251 gear you may actually have to take off your socks and get your toes wet in the arena after all. But where do you start? How do you go about finding a partner? Well lucky for you that's today's subject!

BEFORE YOU GET YOUR TEAM:

1) Know this website : Arena Junkies -- it's the PvP equivalent of Elitist Jerks, except less n00b-friendly. There is a lot of information on there, especially in the forums where they only allow people with high ratings to publish. It's a somewhat-guarantee that the people talking know what they're talking about. We'll get into some specific things you can do with AJ a little further down, but for now, feel free to browse and see what you come up with.

2) Buy a charter. You can do this at four different places: a fella in Gadgetzan named Bip Nigstrom, a fella at the Nagrand Arena named King Dond, a fella at the Blade's Edge Arena named Steamwheedle Sam, and a fella-ette in Dalaran named "Baroness" Llana. Apparently if you're horde you can also buy a charter in Orgrimmar (lucky!) from Greela "The Grunt" Crankchain. A charter costs you 40g per person -- 2v2 is 80g, 3v3 is 120g, and 5v5 is 200g. General courtesy is that founding members of your team should reimburse you their section but that does not always hold.

PLANNING YOUR TEAM:

3) Now you've got a pretty charter, and it's got your own lonely signature on it. You need more. This is where AJ comes in helpful. If you click the "Ratings" tab at the top, you will see the top arena teams in various brackets. Go for the bracket you're trying to form a team for, and you will have a corresponding range of pull-down menus to talk about class. The first one is you. Are you married to having certain people on your team? Friends, guildies, etc. -- fill those people in also.

This is what I did when I wanted to make a 3s team. I knew I wanted to build it around me and my 2s partner, who is a mage, so I put us in and then look down the chart and it will show us what people with a druid and a mage are running with. 8 of the 16 highest teams run with a lock, so that's what we started shopping for.

Also be careful to look at spec -- you can click on the individual teams that show up. Once you have a team put together, find a team on AJ that matches that, and you may find that in order to do Well a respec is necessary. If you look at 2s teams with a druid/mage, tree is not optimal. Feral or Boomkin are much preferred. I chose to sacrifice that because I like to challenge myself -- but be aware of that handicap ahead of time. Which leads to :

4) Have realistic expectations. Don't expect to hit 2k in the first go-round. Experience playing not only arena, but with each other, shows noticeably. Me & Kitykat don't notice improvement particularly from when we first started, but when we picked up our lock for 3s he commented several times on how well we worked together. If you're running a sub-optimal comp, be comfortable with the fact that you may not hit 2k at all -- there is a glass ceiling sometimes to what you can achieve. Apparently, tree/frost mage CAN get to 2k...but there is only one team on AJ that has done that. I would be happy if we hit 1800. Know your limitations.

5) If you're shopping for a partner, do you want them to have experience? Or not? Like I said, experience tells, and it can teach you. I learned a ton from my first serious 2s partner over on Emerald Dream (Hello, Cleverfox!) and I am grateful that he took me with my relative lack of experience. That was an arms warrior who knew what he was doing. However you need to look at your synergy too -- If some people on the team have experience, will they be intimidated/threatened by people with more? Another thing to remember is that people who have experience have certain ways that they do things -- they're not wrong, or right, usually, but it may be different than other people run. I ran a few 2s skirmishes with a DK who had a tree as his actual partner, and there was an adjustment there b/c he was used to expecting certain things out of his tree that I didn't do, and not expecting things that I did do. You may add to your learning curve if people have to unlearn old ways of working. It's a balancing point.

6) Know where to get your gear and how to get it. Much like you have to run heroics before you can raid, you will need to do some non-arena stuff before you can run arena successfully. This can include BGs, Wintergrasp...even running heroics, since you can buy furious gear (i232) with emblems of triumph. I'm going to make a copout here and highly recommend that if you're having trouble with this step, you read Cynwise's article on the subject.

7) While you're gearing, don't do it alone. Gear with a buddy, ESPECIALLY your arena partners, in BGs -- it's more fun, and it helps you practice together outside of getting gibbed in 2 globals in an arena. Much like my set on healing battlegrounds, playing arena together is about two things : working with each other, and working against the enemy. When you first start an arena team, if you're a total n00b at it, then you're going to lose. A lot. And very quickly each time. It's hard to learn much, except what classes really have it in for you (Kitykat and I are terrible against locks, for example). So BGs can give you a longer set of time where you're all alive together to practice different things and coordinate them.

PLAYING YOUR TEAM:

8) Don't be afraid to lose. This doesn't require much explanation but your team starts with an invisible matchmaking rating of 1500, which means the system is going to try to put you up against 1500 teams. Your team is not a 1500 rating, and I don't care if it's the most dreamy mcdream team ever made : you lack experience together and there's going to be losses, especially at first, as you learn to play together.

9) Know your team's pacing -- does your team focus on burning someone fast? Or playing chess for a long game? Do you CC? How are you coordinating that? Figure out your team's strengths and weaknesses are -- playing a lot of games will help give you an eye for that -- and tailor your strategy for winning to your team's strengths. On the flip side, think about what you can do to limit your team's disadvantages.

10) Be prepared to step out of your comfort zone...but don't sacrifice your primary role to it (I need to CC sometimes...but not at the expense of healing necessarily). If you're dps, do you need to bandage your partner? If you're heals, do you need to throw in a last little push of dps to help drop someone? Look for opportunities to step outside your realm. As a general rule the need to do that is going to go down the bigger your team is -- in a 2s team there's only the two of you to do everything that needs doing; in a 5s team you likely have more specialized roles and stepping outside of them is not so much encouraged as frowned upon.

And last but not least :

11) Communicate! Vent or some similar form of real-time speaking communication is absolutely key for arena. Things move too quickly for you to take the time to type things out. My 2s partner and I really struggled last season, even though we had vent, in doing this. There was a lot of dead air during the match. Don't let that happen to you, talk about EVERYTHING. We've somewhat corrected that this season by having a little pep talk before we start a session. I say "What are we doing?" and she says "Communicating!". Whatever helps you focus. Referencing #9 above, we recognised that effective communication was one of our weaknesses that we needed to address, and so we added that little back-and-forth to our pre-game warmup to help fix it. And it has, and our performance has been noticeably better this season.

---

Hopefully this information will help you if you're new to that whole arena thingy...go forth and dominate :-)

GAME CHANGING ALERT

2010-02-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

(ETA: This post was MEANT to be published last friday but blogger was not cooperating on the pictures)

and no, I'm not referring to the bizarrely ludicrous happening of Saturday where, casually deciding to participate in the Kalu'ak Fishing Derby for the second time ever and somehow ended up winning and getting the achievement that only 103 other people on the server will get this year. Though that was pretty cool, and had me fishing for the rest of the day since suddenly Salty seemed a lot more obtainable. No. What we are talking about here, is a potential solution to the great IOC debacle.

For those three of you not familiar with the fact that IOC sucks for alliance, let me first tell you that Alliance sucks at winning IOC. How much suck I would imagine depends slightly on your battlegroup but on mine at least it's a good 8-10% lower win rate than other BGs (which if you want to really make it sound bad, is a 16-20% swing). The reason for this, in my opinion and generally concurred in by other PvPers around the blogosphere, is a map design that allows for horde glaives from the docks to perch in a "sweet spot" across the bay from the west side gate and batter it down without opposition b/c our cannons can't reach them there.

However, while grinding through IOC with my arena partner (and yes, the new season is going very well, thanks for asking, 26-16, 921 so far), we noticed a shammy doing something interesting. By the time I could get back to get a good screenshot, he was gone, but I can give you the gist of it :

Upper circle is the sweet spot where horde parks their glaives. Lower circle? IN RANGE. If you park some ranged dps with you down there, it's like lying in wait. The horde will come right up to you, not realising you're there, and you burn those glaives like nobody's business. I've tried this both with my 2s partner Kitykat and with our new 3s partner Littlebroe (a destro lock) and it's worked lovely every time. Horde usually jumps down in a rage and kills us after, of course, but the damage is done.

And really, the more people that do that the better, I think -- the point is not even the physical "we can actually kill glaives now!" one, so much as the psychological "guess what horde...that's not such a sweet spot and we can KILL YOU THERE TOO"...maybe they'll eventually become leery enough of it that they'll start risking the cannons to come at the gate how it was meant to be.

Go forth and game-change!

HPM Chart (non-holiday)

2010-02-03T22:08:00.000-08:00

ETA 4/2/10 : With the drastic revamp of 3.3.3 the below data is wildly outdated! I will be making a new chart soon, but the relative values of one to the other, I expect, will remain reasonably similar. Keep that in mind :-)

Holiday Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM (inc. marks)	Overall Percentages
Arathi Basin	55.83	37.32	78.88	90%
Eye of the Storm	71.81	34.12	87.6	100%
Strand of the Ancients	77.05	29.98	86.6	99%
Warsong Gulch	47.8	22.73	58.16	66%

I'm not going to go into the big long math list on this again, as you can find it elsewhere on blog if you so chose, and also because at some vague point in the future I plan to make a comprehensive "Here's the Math Behind Everything" general post, but I will be putting a link back to this chart on the sidebar so as I update it it will be available for easy reference.

Little suggests itself from these numbers for now due to the missing of the two 40-man beasts, IOC & AV. If I had to venture a guess based on the holiday proportions I would say AV is probably Still the Place To Go, and IOC fairly middling -- there's a fairly consistent clumping in the middle, with AV a high-end outlier and WSG a very disappointingly low-end one. But hell, nobody who has any sense actually needed concrete math to tell them that.

Don't Win More -- Win Better

2010-01-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-26T00:40:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-26T00:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-01-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

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...

You've got one fire extinguisher

2009-12-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

...and five separate fires. The other day I landed myself in an AB with all dps classes except for two pallies.

Ihrayeep: Please, for the love of...whatever deity you worship...tell me one of you pallies can heal.
Pally1: Nope.

Quick inspect: sure enough, both ret. Seizing the opportunity to crack the inside joke against my guild's pally healer,

Ihrayeep: Ok so...I'll solo-heal this. Should be fine as long as noone gets hurt.
Pally2: I'll bubble the whole game.

We eventually won that game, though I was outhealed by a pair of horde priests (I believe the numbers went 260-240-200(me)k), and this I think is why: For heals especially, it's not about topping the charts in a BG (though I do that fairly routinely) so much as putting those heals in the right place. When you are called on to solo-heal a BG, particularly the three 15-man ones, positioning is important. You are responsible for EVERY SINGLE FIRE. AT THE SAME TIME. It sucks, high stress. Basically, if you are standing still you are losing the game. You have to be constantly moving, because *something* is always under attack, and if it's not where you're at then you need to move yourself somewhere else. You have to be everywhere at once. Frequently you have to make heartbreaking decisions about who to leave to die because there's more than one flare-up. Also this is the one instance where I would diverge from my usual dictum that it's ok to be a healer stranded guarding a node. Because you are *it* for your team, you can't do that. Better (in this case only!) to leave the node undefended. Seconds you spend not healing watching the node are seconds where people are dying from no healing backup. Remember that healers are a force-multiplier in battlegrounds!

Still, there is a plus-side: you get to take sole credit for winning. SOLE. CREDIT. Because if you won with only one healer, you deserve props. And I give you full permission to be an egotistical glory-hog for pulling that out against bad odds. But be a fun egotistical glory-hog, mmkay?

How To Heal a BG, Part 2

2009-12-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

Time for part two of this series on how to heal a BG -- if you missed part one, you can find it here. Then, we talked about managing yourself, your addons, and your spells. Today we're talking about something more finicky and unreliable : managing group interactions with your friendly teammates. I am going to center this around a concept I call Battleground Inertia. Basically what that boils down to is: people are sheep. People follow whatever the prevailing mood, strategy, chat settings appears to be. If you are a dominant, take-charge person, you win what Richard Nixon I believe famously labeled the Silent Majority. It's important to remember that it was NIXON who coined this phrase because we all know Nixon was a crook, protestations to the contrary, and I think when he coined this particular phrase he was referencing the fact that he could pursue whatever policy he wanted and then claim that the people who opposed him were just a vocal minority and really, most people supported what he was doing. You shape opinion, by making an opinion. With that in mind, onwards!

Rule #4 : Setting the mood in chat

Conscious of the lack of promised pictures in the last post, I have endeavoured to make up that gap somewhat here, using an EotS match I did this morning. Step One is figuring out who your other healers are in the BG. I try to do something like this at the start of any BG I go into:

Sometimes this helps, and sometimes you get asinine comments like "I can bandage". So you have to be more proactive, for the people who are (remember!) sheep. Take a quick look at the people you have with you in the BG. In the case of my EotS match that went like this:

Now, this is where it becomes important that you have downloaded some kind of unit frames addon like I suggested (nay, ordered, even) you do in part one. Identify possible healers. Disregarding the straight-DPS classes, we have in this BG besides me (I heal, but presumably I knew that already) two pallies, a priest, and a shammy, all of whom could be potential healers. Pallies are easy: look at the mana bar. I don't have mana bars on my raid-frame, but when they're targeted they do. Each of those pallies had between 5-7k mana. That screams RET. Very rarely, they could be tanks, but you don't take tanks into BGs except maybe AV, and in any case, whichever it is, it's not a healer. A pally with 15k mana, on the other hand, definitely is. Similarly, a shaman with 10-12k mana is enhancement, not resto. Unfortunately they have a caster-dps spec (ditto that problem with boomkin druids and s-priests) and so you have no choice but to inspect them. This does not take long. Right-click, inspect, click talents. You don't even have to page through the different trees; the dominant one will come out on top. The shammy I was pretty sure was a healer, from

but I inspected anyway to make sure. Sure enough, he was. The priest, tenfour, also. If you look at my chat pic, you can see that by that point I had figured out who the healers were and had proceeded to

STEP TWO: Direct. Direct with a soft touch. People do not respond well to being ordered. I could have said, "tenfour, go MT -> FRR" but I don't find that works very well. Hence I just asked, with the intention that I would go somewhere else. There's a bizarre law of gravity that Cassandri over at Hots & Dots observed, that healers tend to clump up. It's not intentional, I don't think, but our mass causes some kind of gravitic interaction that sucks us together if you don't take strenuous efforts to avoid it. I regret to say that in this instance, tenfour did not tell me where he was going, leaving me to guess. But most people will respond to a direct inquiry with their name involved. I could have whispered him, I suppose, but I ran out of time here. Whispering is fine, it builds a sense of cameraderie.

Now you might ask : why ask who the healers are, when you can just inspect and find out yourself? This goes back to Battleground Inertia, and serves a secondary purpose beyond gaining knowledge. If you are in a BG where there is no bg chat, nobody will start it. If you're in a BG where there is angry bg chat with people blaming each other and telling everyone else how much they suck, then that will breed more of the same. What you are doing is hijacking the bg chat to serve your own ends. The end in mind here is "use BG chat to win the BG", which theoretically should be everyone's end, but frequently isn't. Set the tone right off: we are going to be helpful, we are going to coordinate. Also it helps reassure the dps, who tend to have bad self-esteem about things like this, that there are in fact healers here who are trying to keep them alive.

Rule #5 : Master the "Charge of Hesitancy"

Dilemma: How do you physically lead, without leading? I am firmly of the opinion that healers must be leaders in battlegrounds, for the simple reason that you stay alive longer than dps (generally) and so you tend to have a better overall view of the battlefield then someone who goes to point A, dies in four seconds, gets popped back over to point B to rez, and then wanders off to point C because point A now holds painful memories for him.

Given that, it is often your responsibility to lead the cavalry in a charge on another node (in AB/EotS/IoC), getting the flag back (WSG), or re-capping defensive towers (AV). However, as a healer, it is not good for you to be in the front because, well, we all know that the first one in is the first one targeted.

So how do you both? *Inertia*. People will rarely leave you to run off to a node by yourself, I find, and particularly at the beginning of one of those node-style games people tend to follow the ones who dash out the gate looking like they have a Serious Plan (even if they don't). So be the lead, charge forward. Here's the key part of this plan: when you start getting close to the node (crossing the bridge to the BS, or halfway across a bridge in EOTS, for example), take your finger off the forward key. Then charge again. Do this repeatedly, in quick, spasmodic stops. What this does is gradually put you towards the back, where all good healers should be, while gradually passing the lead torch to a DPS who, because of inertia, held down his forward key and doesn't know how to change directions or momentum. The point is that you STARTED the charge, and once the ball is rolling the other people will just roll with it even after you are no longer leading it. Like rolling a big rock down a mountain.

Rule #6 : Save someone's life

I generally do not advocate pocket-healing; it's too focused on one person at the expense of the overall picture. I do do it on occasion, as a fun change of pace and because I like people to hero-worship me *cough*, but overall, not recommended. Generally you can get the puppy-DPS to follow you with a short, sustained effort at the beginning. What you are trying to do is raise their awareness of you. To do this, an excellent tactic is to save someone's life, in a dramatic fashion. Standard healing here is not what you're looking for; people notice being healed from 70-100%; they will die for someone who just ostentatiously blew all their cds to bring them fom 1-60-100 (or whatever it is you do). Your healing of them can be subpar after that, or back to regular, but investing a burst of super-effort on someone once in a while goes a long way to making friends. And more importantly, encouraging cooperation. I had a pair of rogues in this game who basically circled me wherever I went like watchful puppies because I had heroically sacrificed myself to save them a few times. It also pays off more if you pull this stunt on classes who have NO SELF-HEALING whatsoever...they tend to notice it more.

Rule #7 : Be Situationally Aware

Use the M key. Seriously. Use it often, and know what you're looking at. Familiarize yourself with the maps, if you're new to BGs entirely. If you know the maps already, the next step is to build a connection between your map, and your raid frames. Particularly, try to keep tabs on where the other healers are, and try not to be there. Another good thing to do is to look for strategic places on the map that are poorly defended. Not that you have to go there immediately to defend it -- maybe it's poorly defended because it's in the back and doesn't need to be heavily guarded -- but mouse over the node on your map and see who exactly is there. Then close your map. Hunt on your raidframes for where that person (or persons) is. Try to keep an eye on that raid frame's health. If they start getting hurt, the node is under attack, even if they didn't call it in BG chat. Run over there and heal them up and protect the node. Call that it's under attack, obviously, since the original defence failed to do that. In this EotS game I was able to stave off an attack on two different occasions doing this. On another occasion I noticed that DR was being guarded by only the resto shammy. Since I knew he was a resto shammy from the beginning, I knew it wasn't smart to leave thim there so I politely asked in /bg for a dps to go back him up, even though he was not under immediate attack. He was attacked shortly thereafter, though I don't take credit for magically foreseeing that happening. The point is you are trying to keep control of the BG and see trouble spots before they develop. If you are not in a vent premade, reaction times go way down because you don't have that instant communication, so PREVENTATIVE action becomes more important, as well as anything you can do to speed up your (and others') reactions.

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That's it for this section. Next time, how to fight the bad men!

An Interesting Blog

2009-12-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

I found an interesting blog today I wanted to share:

BG PvPer

There was a nice post most of the way down the page about how Hardcore Arena players are not the shizit they think they are and can actually be a liability in a wider-scale confrontaion. Blogrolled!

Complex Thinking

2009-12-08T09:32:00.001-08:00

A break from our regularly scheduled "How to Heal a BG" to tell a story. A story about strategic thinking. Like a baby opening its eyes and seeing the world for the first time, I have recently realized that you can introduce a whole lot of strategy into your game, and gain rewards for so doing. I recall reading an article a while back about eliminating the holy trinity tank-dps-heal mentality, and while that was off-topic from today's discussion, they did mention things about positioning that I found intriguing. Now, you just throw the tank at the bad man, and the rest of us stay at range and heal or dps or whatever, moving out of the bad goo on the floor. That article (and damn, that I can't find it now) suggested the scope of possible changes if they got rid of tanks would include positional formations -- putting the plate-clad guys on the outside, and the squishy ones inside. Etc.

Now most importantly, this strategic thinking is something I've noticed on my 2s team recently. When I first started doing arena, the gates would open, and we would blast away at the other team until someone died. Recently, we've been employing more complicated maneuvers. Attack the dps until the healer gets tunnel-vision, and then pull an abrupt swap and kill the healer. Attack the healer until he gets so pressured that he runs away, and then pull a swap and kill his dps when he's out of range. Or the same result by rooting/cycloning the healer and luring the dps out of range himself. Are these standard arena tactics in the not-bottom brackets? Almost certainly. But you never see that kind of complicated maneuvering outside of arena, and me and my partner certainly could not have pulled that kind of stuff off when we first started. It's a nice indication of how far we've progressed.

The story I want to tell takes place in Tarren Mill. Me and four 80 buddies (a surprising turnout for my guild, for pvp) were slaughtering the denizens of this Horde town in a desperate attempt to make them get their mains. Times like this that make me both miss my original realm (a PvP realm), and at the same time kind of alleviates that feeling of loss. Eventually, an 80 dk showed up, but, being sensible, decided not to flag himself with 5 alliance 80s in the area. He was joined by a mage and a pally, but they still would not engage. Goading them is not working so I come up with a plan. Our resident mage makes a portal to SW, very obviously right in the middle of Tarren Mill, then invizzes right as he comes up to the portal and hides. Me and the boomkin go kitty and stealth right as we "go through" the portal. Thus we have split our force, half "porting" to SW, and the poor DK and warrior sitting there. Sure enough, horde takes advantage of our exit to try and gank the tailing end of our escape. Then the druids reappeared, the mage came out of hiding, and we destroyed the now-flagged horde. What followed was a glorious running battle back and forth between Tarren Mill and Southshore; occasionally we had the upper hand, and occasionally they did, but even when we were losing it was lovely fun.

It's not always blasting away at a bad man in front of you. Use the ol' brainbox first, strategic thinking has more of a place in WoW than many people are willing to credit!

How to Heal a BG, Part 1

2009-12-04T21:24:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me when I was thinking about the last several blogs that I've enjoyed reading:

cynwise on Wintergrasp
phaelia on Grid
cassandri on Alterac Valley
mortigan on Rules for Raiding

that there's a unifying theme here. Can you guess what it is? That's right, they're all helpful well-written guides. And, with the exception of grid, posts on something I already consider myself fairly well-informed in. So the key is this, apparently. Friends like to read about crazy things you're up to. Experienced players like getting alternative viewpoints, even on something they already know. And new players like to be told how to do things they don't know how to do. And yet, when I go hunting for guides on BG healing I see a collection of bad editing and/or forum flaming without a whole lot of help. Niche window? In one of Ihra's trademark phrases, POUNCE LIKE TIGER!

It is my humble opinion that success in a battleground is all about managing relationships. -- awkward silence, while you all say to yourselves, “But nobody uses /bg chat except to use Rule 69...” --. Bear with me, mmkay, while I walk through three different relationships in these posts: yourself, your friends, and your enemies. Up today, yourself!

Rule #1 : Managing your screen environment

All da lovey pvp stuff, in its own area

Addons. Know them, love them. I don't even care what you use, so long as it is not the original blizzard UI. Just as in PVE healing, you want people's health bars front and center, and – d'oh! -- blizzard puts them off to the side, instead prioritizing your action bars. I hope by the time you're hitting battlegrounds you know which keys do which things for you (or no keys at all, if you've got one of those more-buttons-than-Lolth-ever-intended-mice). Also, Blizzard's unit frames do not identify CLASSES, which means that besides rogues, warriors, and death knights, you have to guess at everything; or RANGE. A raid frame addon is one of the most important things you can do to help yourself out here. I adore pitbull; my wife (who, admittedly, raids and does litle pvp) likes xperl. I've heard some people razzle-dazzling about VuhDo but I've never used it. I would disqualify IceHUD, because it's primarily a soloing addon which is not very group-friendly, and Healbot. I'm a little sketchy on Grid as well but without a lot of experience with that latter, I'm not in a position to comment exclusively on it. I dislike healbot because of the click-casting approach; I find there are too many other things I need to be doing in a PvP-oriented fight for me to spare the mouse-move-click. YMMV, depending how you have things set up or are used to casting.

You do not need raid-centric addons like Omen. DeadlyBossMods, I am told can do some things for you in a BG relating to timers (on towers in AV, or win-timers in EotS/AB) so may be of limited use.

Rule #1b: Managing your spells

If you are just dipping your armor-clad toes into the Bgs, you should know one thing : you have spells you didn't know you had. Seriously, go look into your spellbook, I guarantee you'll find something you'd totally forgotten about. Blizzard has spells that are specifically PvP-oriented, and as a result you tend to mostly-ignore them while levelling, and near-completely-ignore them when healing a 5-man or a pve raid. As a tree, I'm going to pull out these examples : cyclone, and nature's grasp. Both of them are crowd control spells, which is not your role in an instance. I mean, it's not really anybody's role since blizzard gave up on TBC-era 7-pulls (sigh), but if it were anybody's role it wouldn't be the resto druid's. Both of those spells are critical to me in arena, and in BGs as well (though I tend to forget more in the latter), though I wouldn't dream of putting them on a cast bar in PvE. Since I've got an action bar addon (the incomparable bartender), I put all my PvP stuff on a separate little action bar...but if you've opted not to use a mod of that type, seriously consider changing what's on your bars before you go into a battleground. And not just those newly-discovered shinies either – you'll probably find yourself using the spells you already have with a different priority than in PvE. Take my mage, for example:

PvE : arcane blast x 4 (2.5s), missile barrage if it procced (0.5s), or else arcane barrage (instant).
PvP : arcane barrage (ins), slow (ins), arcane barrage (ins), frost nova (ins), arcane barrage (ins)...you get the idea.

Everything is faster in PvP...a LOT faster. Priority tends to go towards faster spells, or instant ones if you have them, even if they do less healing, or less efficient healing. This is because you're either getting beaten on, resulting in a longer time for you to reach the end of a cast, or because of the likelihood of being interrupted by a fearsome array of potential lockouts (listing just the rogue ones would take a page of itself). If you ever go OOM in a BG, celebrate. That means you just performed an incredible feat of endurance, or helped someone else do so...it is very rare that you will run out before you are killed, and that's another reason not to worry about faster, less-efficient heals.

Rule #2: Protect Thyself First

If you die, the heals die. So long as you're alive, the heals keep coming, and everyone stays alive longer. Perhaps it's self-evident and I'm just a selflessly sacrificing nobody, but I have many times gone into situations and heroically tried to save someone at the expense of protecting or healing myself. I believe that is an error; invariably whoever I saved will die a few seconds afterwards, and how much did those extra seconds REALLY buy? Not much, I don't think.

More importantly, and again I mention this because it's something I tend to fall into and I think many other healers probably do too, remember your OFFENSIVE skills. Here I am referring primarily to methods of crowd control. It is a hard-won recognition from my 2s team, that it is almost always better to lock out a dps, then to try to control the damage they're pouring out. I have, let's say, ulduar-level gear; I can heal maybe 2500 hps if I'm straining myself. Let's even improve that gear level and say I could somehow pull 3k. DPS in comparable gear will put out 4k+. Four is greater than three. Now, that's an oversimplification, obviously. Usually, if you're fighting an Enemy DPS, you have a Friendly DPS helping you by, you know, *killing* said Enemy DPS. Or interrupting them, or silencing them, or whatever else DPS does. I'm just a healer. But I know they do something useful for me because the above logic would indicate that people I'm healing should have health bars steadily heading down to zero (though maybe slower than their opponent[s]), and many times that is manifestly not the case.

Look at this another way, then. Say you have a 4k dps. For me as a druid, the cost of cyclone is 1.5s, and it locks them for 6s (at first, subject to diminishing returns). I believe the math equivalent there is 16,0000 healing per second, in terms of damage prevented, which nobody could possibly manage in terms of healing DONE. Yes, idiot pally in my guild who insists he can do that, I'm looking at you when I say it's impossible.

Rule #3: You CAN be Autonomous!

I am here going to rebut Cassandri's argument that healers are not independent and are reduced to being pocket healers for people like pallies or dks, Lolth bless them (or curse them). I think this stems from a flawed perspective about healers being a primarily defensive role. Not that that means you must always remain on the defensive, obviously, because a good healer backing up a roving death squad in AB or EotS can really dominate a match, but we are the counterpoint to dps who kill things: we stop things from dying. What this boils down to, in my mind, is this: DPS takes nodes, healers hold them.

Cass makes the point that a DPS by themselves can run around and cap nodes, and healers, by and large, can't. The missing flip side to this coin is that a healer can sit on a node by themselves and protect it much better than a solo DPS can. Frequently in AB or EotS, when a dedicated attack comes in at a node, your team is not going to hold it with what you have on-site. It's a simple reason -- you don't have a mole on the opposing team so you have to defend everything, whereas they can concentrate their attack. Therefore, successful defence of a node consists not of beating off the attack, but in buying time for people to react from other (quiet) nodes you're defending and send reinforcements. And who can stall longer than a healer? I would argue, the answer is nobody. Cheating death is our entire point in life. So long as you can throw an insta-cast spell every now and then to interrupt attempts at capping, you can stall an assault long enough for a well-coordinated team to come to your defence. If you're on a badly-coordinated team, well, nothing was going to save you from a loss anyway. We're discussing theoreticals in this paragraph, and theoretically there may be some BG pug out there somewhere that knows how to communicate ;-).

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Fin, part one. Next time, working with your friends!

With Busy Apologies

2009-12-04T10:27:00.001-08:00

For leaving the one-reading community in a lurch last month. I was much preoccupied with :

Finally, after five years of trying...success! Anyways, all that writing does tend to make other writing get...well...put to the side. Bit of a burnout, doncha know. Also I just dinged my rogue to 80 and getting massacred in arenas in my crafted pvp gear does tend to distract the eye. Note to self : how come I can't wipe people out like rogues are always doing to me? What's the deal with that?

But I promise I shall make it up to you : over the next couple of days, a ginormous, pictorially-delicious, three-part post on BG healing. Part 1 to follow immediately after this post.

Rules for Raiding

2009-10-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

I don't raid much, leaving that category of stress to my wife, but having finally downed KT yesterday (in a pug, of course, not my guild...*loving eyeroll*) I feel in the mood to link you to Simple Rules for Raiding put up by a bloggy newcomer. And a lock, to boot...why does it keep turning out that all my blog-reads are locks when I don't even play one? *sigh*.

Redheaded Warsong Stepchild

2009-10-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, to nobody's great surprise, WSG bottoms the list of Holiday places to visit :

Winning : 54.9
Losing : 28.87
Overall : 41.33
Mark Honor : 22.49

TOTAL BG HONOR : 63.83

This is a terrible number, consider that on a NON-holiday I could go to AB and pull out numbers in the mid-80s, and that's comparable across other non-holiday BGs (with the exception, of course, of WSG, which on a non-holiday is pulling about 60 at the moment). WSG is NOT the place to go, not even close.

For a better idea, look at the updated holiday chart -- WSG is pulling less than half of what AV does on a holiday. That ain't right, yo.

This got me thinking, what can blizzard do to increase honor in this BG to a comparable level? There's two things, I think -- they could increase honor for flag caps, or they could give us honor for returning flags. I've started tracking how many returns go in on a BG and it's coming to about 3.5 a game. On a holiday weekend, capping the flag gives you 124 honor; if you were awarded similar honor for returning a flag, there'd be an extra...what...434 honor every game, divided over the 21.6 minute average, giving about an extra 20.09 HPM for the BG. Then the total HPM chart (holiday) would read more like:

AB: 79.19
WSG: 83.92
IOC: 86.44
EOTS: 88.56
SOTA: 97.59
AV: 146.42

which is a much closer grouping (the beast that is AV excepted, of course) and I think more in line with what Blizzard is probably aiming for; I doubt it was their intention to make any one BG wildly better, or worse, than the others. NOTE TO BLIZ: PLEASE DON'T NERF AV BECAUSE I SAID THAT.

But let's not put too much faith in blizzard...this is the company that in attempting to make WSG shorter, made it longer. But this isn't the time to reopen that complaint, I suppose :-).

Updated Holiday HPM

2009-10-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

ETA 4/2/10 : With the drastic revamp of 3.3.3 the old data is wildly outdated (except as relative values one to the other)! I have started a new chart, but kept the old one below it as a relic of bygone days :-)

The new, 3.3.3 Values:

Holiday Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM	Overall Percentages
Alterac Valley	530.83	123.2	357.37	100%
Arathi Basin	241.39	87.86	171.28	48%
Eye of the Storm	283.92	126.32	204.76	57%
Strand of the Ancients	262.84	106.55	170.76	48%
Warsong Gulch	205.65	92.41	138.84	39%

The old, 3.3.2 Values:

Holiday Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM	Overall Percentages
Alterac Valley	110.78	63.94	120.37	100%
Arathi Basin	60.5	43.64	81.67	68%
Eye of the Storm	78.22	33.68	88.56	73%
Strand of the Ancients	86.86	39.84	97.59	79%
Isle of Conquest	63.37	43.99	86.44	72%
Warsong Gulch	54.9	28.87	63.83	51%

Last Edited : 7/20/2010

AV : The Smell of Win

2009-10-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

Like wow, is Alterac Valley my friend on holiday weekend. I've done 12 games so far, and will update tomorrow with more b/c with numbers like this I'm certainly not stopping. I went 7-5, not quite a good representation as our battlegroup runs 48% win, and the numbers came out :

Winning HPM : 100.17 / 132.86*
Losing HPM : 95.41
Overall HPM : 97.69 / 113.36*
Mark Honor : 33.06

TOTAL BG HONOR, AV-HOLIDAY : 130.75 / 146.42*

A word of explanation is in order. The first number, in the places above where two are listed, is an unadjusted number using my standard mathematics elucidated elsewhere. However, two of my seven wins were turtles, which SHAFTED the honor per minute rate (down to around 40, even when we won). However, those were the only two games overall that went that way. Because I have a comparatively small sample size here (as yet) I modified my winning numbers by multiplying the non-turtle wins by 80% and the turtle ones by 20% to reduce the, IMO, overly prejudicial impact those numbers were having. Outstandingly noticeable out of this run, five out of my seven wins (the non-turtle ones) and two of the losses (!) gave in excess of 120 HPM, which is a ridiculously lovely number when you consider that other BGs on holiday you're happy to get 85.

My theory is that the way in which holidays give you extra honor is based on attaining different BG objectives (capping a flag in WSG is the easy example here), and b/c AV is so big that it has so many different objectives, there's lots of room to rack up tons of bonus honor. OTOH, to take one win that I did that was a scant 50 seconds from Stormpike Perfection, one of the turtle wins, we only did about 90 hpm despite keeping all our towers and burning all of theirs, keeping balinda, etc. So maybe I'm just full of crap.

I'll post a chart tomorrow after I update my sheet for the end of the holiday, but these quick percentage numbers should convey the magnitude of awesomeness that AV on holiday is :

Total numbers, bg + marks:

AV : 100%
SOTA : 67%
EOTS : 60%
IOC : 59%
AB : 54%

Only Warsong Gulch left and I can make a comprehensive post on holiday weekends...next weekend FTW, especially since my Sox just got swept out of the ALDS and aren't going to be starting the ALCS then :-\.

All Wintergrasp, all the time

2009-10-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

Cynwise has put up a very nice, easy to follow guide to Wintergrasp over at her blog. Complete with pictures and diagrams for those of you who, like me, are sometimes too lazy to actually read something.

Of particular interest to me :

"waves of siege should be sent against the walls with the intent of punching through and creating multiple breaches for the defenders to have to deal with. Generally, if the offense can split the defense inside the keep, any one wave should be enough to overwhelm one wall and courtyard."

but the whole thing is worth a read!

Holiday HPM Chart

2009-10-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

I promised, and I deliver :

Holiday Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM (inc. marks)	Overall Percentages
Arathi Basin	59.48	49.27	77.83	80%
Eye of the Storm	78.22	33.68	88.56	91%
Strand of the Ancients	86.86	39.84	97.59	100%
Isle of Conquest	63.37	43.99	86.44	89%

AB holiday HPM / arena

2009-09-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Ihra pushed his rating to a 900 today, scoring some very pretty pants. Resilience over 800, pvp spellpower over 2k, and my partner got her 100 ranked arena match achievement on the same one. So a nice nexus of win all around :-).

Calculated out AB Holiday hpm over the weekend, came up with interesting numbers --

Winning HPM : 59.48
Losing HPM : 42.97

Overall : 51.68 (53% win ratio)

I'll repost the updated holiday chart tomorrow, because I'm tired, but for the moment suffice to make this observation on NON-holiday hpm :

Winning : 57.9
Losing : 37.32

Overall : 48.18

So the HPM is only a tiny bit better on holiday weekends than otherwise. Why is that? The answer *seems* to be, time investment. Now, it IS true that the database is in its infancy, so to speak, but the non-holiday AB takes 14 minutes on average, and the holiday is 19.5. My theory : that on the holiday you see a higher percentage of smart / serious PvPers in the BG so the matches tend to be more strategic and therefore longer? The average honor on holiday/non-holiday for a match is 1064 / 695, respectively, so you ARE getting a lot more honor on the weekend for a game...but your games are also taking, what, 33% longer? So the gain is not very big, at least for this particular BG. *shrug*.

Something's rotten

2009-09-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

...in the state of Isle of Conquest. Before getting to the meat of holiday HPM here in this BG, I gathered data on people's win/played ratios in my battlegroup, both by virtue of asking in the BG for people to whisper me stats (which I later double-checked) and by checking stats on high-ranking arena teams on our cyclone battlegroup. And they all tell the same story, to wit when added together :

Games played : 220
Games won : 81

In other words, alliance has a 37% win ratio here, which is drastically less than all the others. I'm used to losing slightly more (anywhere from 45-49 win, usually) but this is abnormal enough to raise an eyebrow. My initial response is the default one, to claim that alliance sucks, because that's usually as good a fallback reason as any...except I can't see why they would suck so much MORE in this bg than the other ones. It's the same people playing. And it's not like IoC has any "new" concepts -- it's recycled different things from AV, AB, and SotA, all of which alliance does significantly better in. So what gives here?

I do not have an answer, only a shaky theory. The map has rotational symmetry, much like AB, but not translational(?might be the wrong word) symmetry; ie, you can rotate it 180 degrees and it's the same, but if you flip it across the x or y axis, it's not. The docks, which in most of my games uniformly went to the horde, are not symmetrically placed, they're on the west side. Both keeps have a "vulnerable" side because there's a dropoff to the beach that impedes the ability to shoot down siege vehicles. Alliance weak side is on the left (west), horde weak side is on the right (east). So horde controlling the docks, feeds straight into the vulnerable point on the alliance keep, in a way that alliance controlling the hangar fails to do for the vulnerable horde east side. Therefore I postulate that, while maintaining my view that you should not rush one node and instead try to get 2/3, docks may be more important than the others, one to one. Not because alliance derives any additional benefit from holding it, but because it's important to deny it to the horde.

What I'm not sure on is, is this really an "unfair" map design? Or is it, as I suspect, a combination of luck (after the failure of the "blitz hangar" strategy, the new one favored horde so they keep doing it and succes is reinforcing them?) and idiocy (alliance may have a similar advantage in controlling hangar, but they're just not capitalising on it as well as horde are on theirs)?

The only games that I won this weekend were when me and a few other people grabbed hangar and held it, resisting the temptation to jump on the ship and leave the flag defenseless, in order to give our allies a chance to para-jump and try to beat the horde racing from docks to gate to keep to kill. Le shrug.

In any event the data here :

HOLIDAY ISLE OF CONQUEST (Cyclone)
------------------------
Winning HPM : 63.3
Losing HPM : 43.99
Overall HPM : 51.12

Total BG Honor (HPM + mark turnin HPM) : 86.44

How does this compare to the current leaderboard?

Winning HPM : 73% of SotA (current leader for winning)
Losing HPM : 100%. If you're going to lose, best to lose here.
Overall HPM : 81% of SotA.

Total for IoC (HPM + Marks) : 89% of SotA, still the overall holiday lead.

I am hesitant to apply this number only because the win/loss ratio is so different from the other BGs I've looked at. In other words, take a careful look at your battlegroup's track record in IoC before taking this at face value!

In other news, me and my frost mage partner Kitykat managed to push our 2s rating to 800, thus netting my first ever rating-restricted piece of gear (gloves, and aren't they delicious!)

SotA Holiday HPM

2009-09-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

I don't generally care much for strand of the ancients...but as it WAS the holiday weekend, and I didn't want to have to wait 6 weeks to gather the data to post here, I intrepidly charged forward and did my ten games for stats. They went 7-3, which was better than average - horde has a slight winning edge here (51-49) as just about everywhere on my battlegroup. In any event the numbers I come up with for the holiday are :

SotA Winning HPM, holiday: 86.86
SotA Losing HPM, holiday: 39.84
SotA Overall HPM, holiday, my BG: 62.8

This compares favorably to the other holiday weekend I've picked up so far, Eye of the Storm, which to refresh your memory came out with:

EotS Winning HPM, holiday: 78.22
EotS Losing HPM, holiday: 33.68
EotS Overall HPM, holiday, my BG: 55.41

I'm not sure that you could conclusively say "Strand > EotS" because I know they award holiday honor on a kill-equivalency based on the BG ("capping a flag in WSG on the holiday nets you the equivalent of 4 HKs extra honor") and so the holiday honor may be worth different amounts to those BGs than the regular one is. Still, it's a narrow lead and one that makes me cry b/c I love Eye of the Storm most of all.

The other interesting thing that I found going on here was that I have to hand it to Horde people complaining about how the Alliance always used to go first. I had initially passed that off as QQing, except for maybe a small psychological advantage, but the numbers do not indicate that to be true. I think this is significantly because Strand awards you bonus honor the more gates you have intact at the end of a defensive battle (or, for that matter, destroy in an offensive one), so if you go first and can make a good race to the relic, the next team to go has much less time to destroy gates. By way of comparison, on two of my winning strand battles where we speed-capped the relic (about 3 minutes) our HPM rate was well over 100 (120 and 163). But when I had similarly awesome teams who capped in three minutes, but were forced to go on the defensive first, the HPM dropped significantly. Even though I tended to have a *lot* more honorable kills (because we outclassed the horde so badly), our HPM floated instead around the 75 marker. So kudos to blizzard on implementing a coin-flip over that one; for once the complainers look to have had a legitimate grievance.

Thoughts on WG Zerging

2009-09-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

So as I've been trying to record numbers for Wintergrasp I've begun noticing a trend. Simple, deadly trend. It goes something like this:

When we attack in two places, we win.
When we try to keep forcing through one path to the keep, we lose.

I think that there's a certain merit in the One Path, One Win mentality, in that it groups up your force for maximum effort in the smallest space. I think it's also worth considering that WG changed a while back with the addition of the southern towers actually meaning something, and that the corresponding point to our maximum effort in one spot, is that it makes it really easy for the horde to figure out where to put *their* maximum effort. Almost every offensive game I've been in recently, even the ones we won, resulted in the loss of our southern towers, to the point where I think you can almost say that it's axiomatic that you have 20 minutes, not 30, to capture the keep. And whereas before you could overcome horde defenses by hard-pushing through two walls and getting to the keep, I am not sure that that remains a viable alternative. Time favors the defense.

But if you mount a secondary attack, even if that's only a diversion, you force the horde to split their defenses -- and if you THEN mount a concerted effort on one side, you may be able to break through before they can switch people back over off the diversionary side.

It's interesting that that seems to be at such a complete contradiction to strand of the ancients, the BG most like WG, where you *do* want to mass everyone at one place. I think that may be b/c the map is smaller on SOTA, and so it's easier for the defense to switch from one side to the next and cover a split-attack. I find that a good way to win strand against a split attack is to pile your defense on one side and wipe out the tanks there; you'll lose the other front-gate, but with only two tanks (and damaged ones at that) you can regroup and stop them at the second gate (or lolth forbid, the yellow gate) and the loss of momentum is often irretrievable.

Thoughts to think on *shrug*

All of which means what?

2009-09-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

So now there are two battlegrounds to compare, Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. Comparatively, and hoping my table-making skills are up to par :

Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM
Warsong Gulch	47.8	22.73	34.05
Arathi Basin	57.9	37.32	49.67

Now that is, as previously mentioned, specific to my battlegroup, and further, to resto druids on the alliance side, and we could throw tons and tons of caveats into that if we wanted to. My solution is to reduce this to a percentage; I am the same across all battlegrounds I do, and presumably you are as well. So I think if we put this in ratios that should be serviceable for anybody, at least for winning & losing. Your overall HPM will vary, because different battlegroups have different win/loss percentages. In any event,

Battleground	Winning HPM (%)	Losing HPM (%)	Overall HPM
Warsong Gulch	83	61	69
Arathi Basin	100	100	100

So the current Leader then is Arathi Basin...ie that it is better in Arathi Basin than Warsong Gulch for HPM; I suspected that might be the case, not least because there are more people in AB and therefore more potentials for killing. One might also observe that in overall HPM (which category is specific to my battlegroup, at pains to remind) WSG is about 2/3 of AB. Conveniently, say, the ratio of 10:15, the number of players. I may be leaping to conclusions here, with only two things to judge off of. Just an interesting hypothesis, for now...we'll see if that holds up on further study.

Arathi Basin HPM

2009-09-09T16:08:00.001-07:00

I'm about as sick of cut and pasting as you are of reading it, so we're shortcutting this week. For references on the math that I use to come up with these numbers, please see my earlier post, Warsong HPM.

My ten games for AB came out 6-4, which fits since AB is a game that my battlegroup is apparently decently good at, though I am somewhat skeptical of the numbers. I had three five-caps in my six wins, which I suspect may skew the numbers. At any rate I do keep the spreadsheets updated so hopefully over time that will even out any potential irregularities.

The nuts and bolts:

Winning HPM : 57.9
Losing HPM : 37.32
Overall HPM, accounting for my BG's win percentage (54%) : 48.46

Adding the mark turn-in honor (36.91) nets a total honor for AB of 85.37.

Happy Season 7!

2009-09-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

And what a delicious season it is too. I got three new pieces straight off the bat, including an IDOL, which I didn't even know was an option, and which pretty much doubles the effect of my old idol. Hmmm lifebloom spellpower by 125...or 246...think think. These are the hard decisions, folks.

Spent most of the day trying to herd my stray cats of arena partner(s!) into play, but once I did my 2s went 5-2 to start the season, and I actually managed to find a 3s team, with a survival hunter and a frost DK that went 1-1...but the loss was a bogus lag loss where we couldn't get past the loading screen until we were dead. Frankly I'm just happy to HAVE a threes team, which I don't think I've ever had before.

And capitalising on the enthusiasm, I scheduled two days of battleground premade within my guild...and actually had people *sign up*! Hopefully those will go well, reports to follow.

A very good day yesterday, though like cyn I was unimpressed by the style of the outfits. I was very pro-druid-pvp outfits when they first came out but they're starting to wear on me how only the shoulders change and the rest of them just recolor the same thing (and sometimes just the little gem on it, not even the whole piece). Ihra wants something new!

Warsong HPM & Observations

2009-08-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ta-da, time to calculate HPM for Warsong Gulch. Nothing to compare to as yet, since the EotS stuff was for the holiday weekend.

My numbers for WSG from the 10-game sample came out 4-6 which is again a close approximation to my battlegroup's statistics (47/53). Two very interesting observations came out of these ten games. One was that in nine out of ten games, the first flag cap won, which seems to bear out popular wisdom post-time-limiting this battleground. The other interesting thing is that 4 of these 10 matches were decided by the time expiry conditions, which indicates that Blizzard's plan to shorten the BG is actually backfiring. People's tendency to hunker down and turtle (and turtle well) may result in a cap on maximum time, but the *average time* has increased. Before there was a time limit, the average WSG was 17.56 minutes, but with my ten games here sampled the average is 18.6, a full minute longer. I mean I guess it's nice to not have epic hour-long WSG matches anymore, but those were a lot fewer and farther between than people seem to think -- understandably really, given the psychological impact of being locked in a brutal close game for an hour -- since the pre-limiting average time was more or less on par with the other BGs and this was a possible overreaction by Blizzard.

You'll notice some similarity b/c I'm cut-and-pasting and replacing numbers ;-), but he numbers here in straight honor for a non-holiday WSG, came out as:

Losing Honor per Minute (HPM) : 22.73
Winning HPM : 47.8

So as a formula here to apply on your own battlegroup, you could look in your statistics pane on the achievement and come up with

Total WSG HPM (F) = (X/Y)*(47.8) + ((Y-X)/Y)*(22.73)

where
X = "number of WSG wins" and
Y = "Number of WSG games played"

On my server, x = 28 and Y = 59, X/Y = 0.47 like I mentioned above, so that comes out to be

Total WSG HPM = (0.47)*(47.8) + (0.53)*(22.73) = 34.62

------------------------------------------------------------------

To calculate the Mark Turn-in honor,

Average Marks WSG (W) = (X/Y)*3 + ((Y-X)/Y)

In my case,

Average Marks WSG = 3 * 0.47 + 0.53 = 1.95 (b/c we lose very slightly more than we win on my battlegroup).

Every turn-in of marks is going to net you 1489 honor at level 80. Every BG you do is netting you some percentage of that honor, to wit:

Average Turn-in HPM for WSG = (1489*W) / (6*S)

where S = average time of a match. On my battlegroup it's 18.6 minutes, and I suspect you could probably use that as a non-variable b/c it's probably close to the same across all battlegroups unless your W/L percentage is dramatically different from 50/50 for whatever reason.

Again using my battlegroup:

Turn-in HPM (T) = (1489*1.95) / (6*18.6) = 26.01.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

So the total you're getting here is going to be the turn-in HPM plus the HPM you got just for fighting there :

Total HPM = T + F

For me:

Total HPM = 26.01 + 34.62 = 60.63.

The TL;DR version:

The winning coefficient for WSG is 47.8 HPM, and the losing coefficient is 22.73. This should be standard across all battlegroups, by which I mean that if I transferred to a different battlegroup I would have a similar result. Other classes / roles may have varying numbers (rogues for example tend to have easily double my HKs in a BG), so the importance of these numbers are in comparatives rather than absolutes. In other words...YMMV. But I've got the formulas here you can plug in your battlegroup stats to and at least get comparative numbers once I have the other ones up.

Grouping Up (or, "The Hangar Blitz, Revisited")

2009-08-28T14:56:00.001-07:00

So it seems I may not honor cap myself after all, given my recent preoccupation with a) trying to bear-tank, b) levelling a horde alt to 20, and c) frantically dispensing arena advice to several guildies and pseudo-arena partners about what they should be doing with their week off (short answer: spend arena points if you have them. Otherwise DON'T BUY *ANYTHING*).

I have to admit I have not played the new BG as much as I thought I would, despite how fun I find it. Part of that's just lackadaisicalness...others, my desperate pursuit of the EotS meta-achievement which keeps driving me back into the maelstrom. But on both of my two most-recent forays into(onto?) the Isle I ran into an unpleasant retread of Cynwise's Hangar Blitz -- only now, we're calling for Everyone to the Docks and We Will Win Fer SURE. I would venture to guess this is the product of small minds who, after an initial euphoric rush of success with the HB, suddenly started running into the wall once the chaos settled down and people realised how to block it. Hence they now move to a different zerg target, while maintaining the same mentality that caused the problem in the first place. It seems to me that the 3 middle nodes all give you a way into the keep, and to zerg one is to lose the other two, putting you at a serious keep disadvantage. The only thing I ever found viable about the Alterac Blitz was that it was basically a race and if the other team went for it as well then it it was a fairly even run for both sides at who could kill the general first. In IoC that is not the case, and if you "zerg" one then you're allowing the other team to "zerg" the other two and it is no longer a Fair race with even chances to win it. That's applicable to any of those three middle nodes.

But I think the problem with the strategy goes deeper than that, and crosses several battlegrounds, with the notable exception of the two battlegrounds where grouping everyone together makes a halfway amount of sense. Deep down, people just don't like to be alone. There's a mentality about group-running everywhere that sacrifices space for mass. And that's a serious problem in places like AB & EotS -- which depend totally on space control -- and a lesser but still dangerous problem in AV/Isle where you need a mix of a strong strike team and control of strategic points.

In WSG and Strand, it makes sense to group up. Splitting the tanks in SotA will lead to defeat a lot more often than grouping them at the beginning. If you exclude complicated twink-WSG strategies that involve 3-4 different groups around the field, I find that the best success comes in grouping everyone on O at the beginning, and then killing the enemy FC on your way back across the field. And yet, paradoxically, it's in these two BGs that you most often find people scattering -- solo or two-man attacks on the EFC after he's made it back to their side of the map, or random, sputtering tank assaults on different gates without waiting for another tank to come up in support from a farther-behind spawn point.

I have a suspicion that the group mentality may stem from BC where there were no (or next to no) BG healers and so grouping up was your only way to increase your survivability. Nowadays, though that's not so much of a problem, people are still locked in their no-healers-I-must-rely-on-myself mindset. The solution to this I think is the same one that would solve almost all BG PvP problems:

COMMUNICATION

I tend to take the lead on this because I am myself a healer but if nobody steps up then try to do it yourself. Phaelia over at resto4life had a post many moons ago about her brief foray into PvP and how it helped her in PvE. Borrowing a note from that most esteemed tree, I might suggest in reverse that there's an aspect of PvE that helps in PvP and that is

Make Healing Assignments

Do a quick scroll through your raid-mates in a battleground. Determine who is a healer. Politely whisper them and ask where they are planning on going. Wherever that is, go the other way. In EotS when they tell me they are going to MT, I go to DR, to make sure that there is going to be some healing everywhere instead of a boom/bust cycle where we're all clumped up everywhere.

Instill Confidence by Being Visible

Make sure the healing is visible and commented upon in /bg so that people know there are healers. And I mean that on both sides of the coin -- if you're DPS and some healer just kept you up for several minutes while the two of you fought off 7 people trying to take your node, comment on that in /bg. If you're a healer and some dps stopped what they were doing to come peel all the tree-haters off of you, make that comment in /bg as well, with subtle allusions to how much that helps the team. Ie, "Thanks for that; I heal everyone so much better when I don't have to be scrambling to protect myself."

Will it change attitudes over night? Probably not. But making sure that everyone knows there are healers present and working in a BG will in the long run, hopefully give people back some of that confidence which is so evidently lacking in persons who won't attack a node unless 2/3 of the team goes with them.

Oops!

2009-08-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Well there's an unpleasant surprise --

I thought we were still going to get another two weeks out of this season and it seems like this got kind of dropped out of the blue. Does anyone else remember "first week of September"? Or am I just hallucinating that?

Anyway I had been pushing my honor to buy some stuff for the end-of-season ratings push but now I question the wisdom. Clearly the wiser course would be to just save the honor for s7 but I'm only 20k away from cap and those 1000 arena points are getting converted to honor since I have the 5-set. My machiavellian plan is to save 5 of those arena commendations for next season but then what? Should I buy-and-use five? or just let the 500-points or so die away? I don't know what happens at cap but I would venture to guess that going into a BG would net me no honor, thus screwing up my stats. Or would it just give me the listing of honor I *would've* received but then not actually do it? Until I resolve this question I'm leery of getting too close to the cap :-\.

Stats & Titles

2009-08-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

First of all, RATED BGS AND PVP TITLES. WOOHOO! I always thought it was a bit corny and elitist that those who got titles in vanilla wow could rub it in our faces without us every having a chance to get them. As long as they're still competitive to get (and not, as someone said in the wow.com comments section, "ghostcrawler wants everyone to experience everything so all titles will be super easy") I'm delighted with this change. I'm a little sketchy too over how they're describing the rated BGs but Blizzard generally gets their feet solidly on the ground before they release things so I remain faithful that despite my initial skepticism it will probably be good when it sees release.

Anyway on to my favorite love, calculating stats for BGs. I was just getting my list started when 3.2 came along and messed everything up, stats-wise, for 3/5 of the battlegrounds, necessitating a wipe and restart. My first question I wondered was, it's holiday weekend. Am I better off zerging the holiday BG, which won't get any marks turn-ins, or rotating around like I usually do for the turn-in? After I asked this question, I realised that if I zerged the holiday BG every weekend then every 6th weekend I'd have a massive amount of turn-ins anyway, assuming I was willing to play the long-ball, and then I'd get the best of both worlds. So I reduced my question to, what kind of honor are you looking at, assuming you play intelligently enough to eventually be able to do turnins?

I am here collating the Holiday Weekend for Eye of the Storm, which was this past weekend. I sampled 10 games, which went 5-5 and I guess that's a reasonable approximation based on the server. Each game lasted an average of 14.4 minutes, which is interesting b/c according to my BC spreadsheet (where it was still 2000 points to win) the games lasted 16.45 minutes which means that cutting the points to 75% of their original did not have a similar effect on the game time. I mean yes, some shortening is occurring but it's more like 88% of the time. An interesting side note, anyway.

The numbers here in straight honor, on the holiday weekend, came out as:

Losing Honor per Minute (HPM) : 33.68
Winning HPM : 59.04

So as a formula here to apply on your own battlegroup, you could look in your statistics pane on the achievement and come up with

Total H.EotS HPM (F) = (X/Y)*(59.04) + ((Y-X)/Y)*(33.68)

where
X = "number of EotS wins" and
Y = "Number of EotS games played"

On my server, x = 61 and Y = 125, X/Y = so that comes out to be

Total H.EotS HPM = (0.49)*(59.04) + (0.51)*(33.68) = 55.41

------------------------------------------------------------------

That's your baseline for the holiday. But you do, as I mentioned earlier, also get marks. How many marks you get should probably be close to 2 on average, since you get 3 for a win and 1 for a loss and most BGs I've found split 50-50 despite people's skewed perceptions (including my own). If you wanted to be nitty gritty about it, you would use something like

Average Marks EotS (W) = (X/Y)*3 + ((Y-X)/Y)

In my case,

Average Marks EotS = 3 * 0.49 + 0.51 = 1.98 (b/c we lose very slightly more than we win on my battlegroup).

Every turn-in of marks is going to net you 1489 honor at level 80. Every BG you do is netting you some percentage of that honor, to wit:

Average Turn-in HPM for EotS = (1489*W) / (6*S)

where S = average time of a match. On my battlegroup it is 14.4 minutes, and I suspect you could probably use that as a non-variable b/c it's probably close to the same across all battlegroups unless your W/L percentage is dramatically different from 50/50 for whatever reason.

Again using my battlegroup:

Turn-in HPM (T) = (1489*1.98) / (6*14.4) = 34.05.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

So the total you're getting here on the holiday weekend is going to be the turn-in HPM plus the HPM you got just for fighting there :

Total HPM = T + F

For me:

Total HPM = 34.05 + 55.41 = 89.46.

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Someday, it is my dearest wish to take all my data and code a mod for it that will pull the data out of your stats pane and calculate it for you in a pretty in-game window. In the meantime...I'll be doing this for other BGs as well, so stay tuned :-).

How Not To Get Healed

2009-08-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

Excuse, rant/request following.

Had a lovely time losing Strand just now and thought I would share this snippet of conversation:

FYI, this is how you do not get healed in a battleground.

1) You do not have a personal special attention healer dedicated to your every little owie. I'm not even sure we would want that b/c then there's only like...7 dps in a sota battle. I can't watch everything and everyone, and um...fyi, it's a bg? Everyone's getting hurt? And I'm in the middle of it with people usually trying to pound on me too. I have to save me before I can save you ya know?

2) Also, real pro to insult me and then quickly put me on ignore so I can't respond to you. He was a boomkin too which upsets me on behalf of the whole class. Mind you he topped the damage charts so I'm sure he knows what he's doing dps wise but...dude. I'm doing what I can and I'm sorry that that didn't make you immortal and keep you from dying that time.

And in case you were wondering:

I was second and not by a large margin on heals...I am not a slacker. You are not a healer. Show some appreciation and remember back in burning crusade when you frequently didn't even have ONE healer in a bg...you should be happy you had three this time and leave it at that.

*sigh*

Be the team

2009-08-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

So...there was a patch last week. And you're probably thinking that I'm going to talk about it at length. But you'd be wrong, because I know that if you're the type of person who hunts down blogs to reead about your class, then you've probably already had your fill of talk about 3.2 and are getting kind of sick of it. I know I am. So, I'll mention briefly in passing:

1) Resilience. I covered this already in a previous post but I haven't noticed a huge difference in battlegrounds. Arena I'm sure I'll see something but as my arena partner insists on not waiting for me and instead running with his idiot pally friend and going 7-12, well, I can't comment on that as yet.

2) LB had it's final bloom nerfed by something like 20%. This I noticed but not as much as I would have thought. Yes, it's less effective as an anti-rogue tool (crap, stunlocked! oh wait, LB keeps ticking and when it blooms it will save me!) but I usually let it bloom for the mana return more than the health anyway.

3) New BG. Very fun, a nice artful mix of several different BGs that takes the best of many worlds. I still prefer EotS but only barely. Also, boo to the 1600 nerf on time for eots / ab...games are way too short now. If you blow the opening your chances of recovery are much less than they used to be. I was in an eots this morning where we started shorthanded and even though we made a comeback late, there just wasn't enough time to finish the job and ended up losing for no reason we could control.

4) I didn't post last week and for this I apologise if anyone got knocked out of rhythm. Though I'm sure they won't be judging from the number of comments at this point (0).

---

Today's topic is about how to make a team. How many of you have seen the following advertisement in trade chat "LF3m [insert instance] -- need tank/healer" and mocked them in your head ("so a guy and his death knight buddy got together...")? Did that contribute to you rolling a healer? Let's face it : we're half the team, the tank is the other half, and the DPS is like the extra people that tag along but don't really know how to take care of themselves. Well it's better in a battleground : now instead of being half the team, you ARE the team, b/c nobody takes tanks into BGs.

There's a synergy in pvp between heals/dps which is similar to heals/tank in pve -- if you keep them alive, they will keep you alive. I'm sure we can agree that's more balanced than a pve situation which says "we keep them alive, and they...kill the boss so we don't run out of mana by having an epic forty-five minute heigan fight with just the tank and my occasional pathetic starfire for dps". Not that I'm saying that's ever happened to me. No sir! In PvP people will kill you, they will thirst for your sap, they will join in hate clubs whose sole purpose is to make your life a living hell. Fortunately, unlike our squishy priest friends, we have barkskin, natural perfection, and the improved armor in ToL form, which means we can effectively be the "tank" that everyone's pounding on while your DPS buddies pewpew on said hate club, at least for a good fifteen seconds which is a lot longer than it sounds like in the hectic environment of a battleground. Those 15s can be key in holding on to a node, or capping one, or allowing time for reinforcements to get to you (or to rez at a node you're defending).

So, you accept your role as a punching bag. What else do tanks do? They usually get given lead and marks and all that other important stuff. Guess what...now you get to be leader too. But since you took the initiative to roll a healer in the first place, I hope that taking initiative is something that comes reasonably natural to you. And that's my main point here : you have to be willing to take charge of a battleground, especially b/c you carry the "i can stop you from dying" ace that almost everyone will subconsciously follow. Which do you think gets better results:

Choice A: "Everyone rush FRR!"
Choice B: "I will heal an attack on FRR" / "I heal; Give me some dps backup and we can take FRR"

If you're still thinking about it, let me tell you the answer is unqualifiably B. Battlegrounds are not safe places. People die violent deaths, and they do so with a fair amount of frequency. I'm a healer and I die every 3-4 minutes on average, think what a tough time our dps compadres go through. If you give them the illusion of a safe haven, most players will jump at the chance to extend that mediocre life span.

There is a widespread belief that people check their intelligence at the door when they go into BGs, which is why there are so many idiot n00bs all the time. With the possible exception of non-pvpers trying Isle of Conquest just b/c it's new content, it's important to realise that this is not generally true. People check their *caring* at the door. People who go into battlegrounds are not stupid, they are LAZY. They do not want to come up with a plan. If you come up with a plan *for* them, they will by and large try to follow it, at least at first.

A secondary point to this : if you can get a premade together, it is not difficult to dominate a battleground. 5-7 people is more than enough for the 15-man ones, and I would venture to say that as low as 4 could make a significant impact in WSG. The reason for this is that you have NON-LAZY people in a BG filled with mostly lazy people and that cannot compete with people who have a plan. I have absolute confidence that I could win an Alterac Valley match if I could get four dps to follow me in a U-turn around the field of strife to recap defensive bunkers while everyone else mindlessly rushed drek. I was in my first attempt at a premade on my new server yesterday, and it fell apart b/c the leader couldn't get 30 people interested and wasn't willing to run with the 10 we had, which would have been more than sufficient to cause a serious impact on any BG we had attempted.

So when you go into a battleground, realise that your role is not just to keep people alive. It is implicit both because of that ability, and b/c of the psychological advantages you can employ, that you need to be willing to take a leadership role.

PvP Threat

2009-07-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

I defer anti-melee class arguments that were promised last week to a more general topic: how to lower your pvp threat. I know what you're saying; you're saying, Ihra, that's ridiculous and it's why you don't see prot warriors in battlegrounds. I argue differently. The definition of threat is, I believe, "the likelihood of a monster attacking you", and that definition is just as true in pvp as it is in pve content. The problem in pvp is that it's more dynamic and not set on some arbitrary set of numbers in Amount of Damage/Healing Done. What makes you threatening in pvp?

1) Anything huge and flashy. MC as an s-priest for example, as my wife observes, is going to get you targeted in a hurry as soon as that wears off. But in terms of being a tree, anything like Tranquility (or Hurricane, if you're thinking of doing some dps for some bizarre reason) that lights up the screen and draws attention to you. If you're multi-healing in a BG stick with spamming wild growth as soon as the cd is up.

2) That which draws attention to you as a healer. I don't know what that signifies to other classes, but for a tree it is very simple : being a tree. People see the tree, they know you're healing and they will jump you. Which is not to say, "don't be a tree", b/c there are fairly significant armor bonuses associated with that, but our mana efficiency from ToL form, as of some patch a while ago that I didn't even notice till it was pointed out to me, no longer actually requires you to be IN tree form. Just have the talent. Basically, if you're not a target, stay out of tree form. If you think you're going to become one (or if you are already), pop that tree like nobody's business. How do you not be a target to begin with? --

3) Keep your distance. I in particular have struggled with this b/c I like to RUN STRAIGHT INTO THE HOT ZONE. Lag behind in a fight, and stay behind. Many people in bgs (and to a lesser extent in arena) will stick on their first target, so just make sure that that target isn't you. Also,

4) Use natural obstacles to your advantage! Ever notice all those bushes in AB & WSG? Those are not for show. I know it seems corny, but hide in the bushes and you're going to be targeted a lot less. Some of those, especially in AB, are very close to nodes which means you're not going to be able to observe #3, but if you're in the middle of a fight you should probably be popping tree anyway...which here has an added bonus b/c what blends into a shrub better than another plant?

---

In other news, I had to ditch my arena partner b/c something went screwy with his account, but I hooked up with a warrior and we went 9-1, also giving me the [Hot Streak] achievement which was, well, hot. There's a hump here b/c his original team went 2-21 or something terribad like that so the System now thinks his team has a matchmaking rating of like 600. Lamesauce. Oh well, we'll pull it up eventually.

Rogues can't kill me!

2009-07-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two notes of interest --

1) A couple teams apparently hit 3k ratings last week, which is supposed to be impossible, but isn't. Response: some would claim the arena system is broken. Other more rational beings, and I would tend to agree with them, interpret this as meaning that in fact it's not just the players who don't understand the system. The designers also have changed and tweaked everything so much over the course of S6 that they too have no idea what's really going on.

2) I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that DK/tree is one of the best 2s comps ever, which is great news b/c that happens to be what I'm running right now. And World of Ming just confirmed it as one of the best ways to get to 2350! I guess that explains going 9-1 last week, but it doesn't really explain the 2-13 the week before unless you want to call that learning jitters from a new comp and a new battlegroup :-p.

EDIT: I remember now. It was in the course of checking up on those 3k teams, and one of them was a DK/tree combination :-).

Anyway, main course. Many people ask me, "WTF do you do about rogues?". Ha, I try to make myself sound more popular. Actually, one person asked me that b/c they were spamming dalaran general chat for resto pvp advice and I happened to be around so I answered his questions, thus feeling like a rock star while at the same time feeding him what I sincerely hope were good tips. I generally laugh at rogues, unless they're paired with good dps who ALSO simultaneously jump me, and even then it's not so much the rogue as the combination of the two. Three tips:

1) If you think you might be facing a rogue, or if it's been confirmed b/c they opened on your partner, PRE-HOT yourself. I read somewhere, from the rogue side of things, that a good rogue team will be watching to catch you with your pants down to do a quick switch onto you and bam-o. I sometimes pre-order Abolish Poison as well but it depends on how much of my attention is being absorbed at the time. At any event, don't give them the window they're looking for. Remember that HoTs are largely preventative in any case; we don't have a big heal for spiky rogue bursty damage so if they're hitting on you you better already be countering it, which leads to

2) for the love of all eight-legged deities, do not cast anything with a cast time. Yes, sometimes it's unavoidable, but as someone who has a rogue and their six billion stuns, you do not want to be locked out of your nature spells for six seconds. Do you. If you have the pre-hots rolling, you have a swiftmend available. If things get really, really dicey then you can do a NS+HT, though it's best to save that if you can for your partner. Obviously if you're gonna die though, you don't have much choice. Without you your partner is dead. My warrior partner over on ED once snapped at me after a match to watch my own health first and the rest would take care of itself. Exaggerated from his stress at losing, but the general point I think is valid.

3) Do. Not. Panic. Recognise your mortality, or immortality as the case may be. Remember the cardinal rule of most rogues (combat may be an exception but I don't think you see many of them in arena): opening burst. Again speaking from my (sub) rogue's perspective, you do not want to be anwhere near me the first six seconds after I come out of stealth, but if the mob's still alive after that then trouble ensues b/c my dps goes to hell and gone, at least relative to those first seconds. A lot of people get jumped by a rogue and freeze up / panic. If you must panic, save it for later, b/c doing it at the get-go you're feeding right into a rogue's strongest points. If you can keep your cool during a rogue's opener on you and react appropriately, you'll be much better off once he's blown his opening burst. I have found a wide discrepancy in rogue damage to me, so when he jumps me my first move is to watch how fast my health bar is going down. If it's dropping fast enough to be worrisome, remember that Barkskin is your best friend. If not, keep the hots (because you put them up preventatively...right?) rolling and use Abolish Poison where you would have popped BS.

4) Save the trinket. If you're hotted up a rogue should not kill you in the 4 seconds of CS stun. But he might if he goes straight from that into a 4-5 point KS; use the trinket then.

Next week, barring something more exciting coming up, counters to DKs/Warriors...

3.2 Resilience And You

2009-07-11T20:41:00.000-07:00

Today's topic: 3.2 Resilience changes and what that means for you. To quote the latest PTR patch note changes: "Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%." A buff, and a nerf, in other words. Which comes ahead? I borrow heavily from wowwiki's formulas here, but currently as stands, the average damage that you take from a spell is as follows:

Average damage = [(Hit*[1.0-(C-res)]) + (Hit*(1.0+B)*(C-res)*(1-2*res))]

where
C = the critical strike rating of the guy wailing on you,
B = the bonus damage that they get on their crits,
res = your resilience,

all as decimal percentages.

I input an 800 resilience person facing some kind of caster doing 2000 on a normal hit and a 30% crit rate. 100% bonus damage, which is usual for melee, and most casters have talents that will bring their usual offensive spells to that level as well.

Avg damage on a 0 resil person = 2600
Avg damage on an 800 resil person = 2231

which nets to (2600-2231)/(2231) = a 16.54% damage reduction. All well and good. But with 3.2 we have to make two changes to this formula:

1) a resilience nerf. You need 15% more in order to get the same result, which means your 800 resilience is really going to act like 800 * (100/115) = 695.6, or 8.48% instead of 9.76%. Psh.

2) a resilience buff. Now ALL damage, not just crit damage, is reduced. I am unclear on where exactly this is applied, but I can see 2 different scenarios:
2a) It's across *all* damage, applying doubly to crit damage which is already currently reduced. IE, 1% resilience reduces non-crit damage by 1%, and crit damage by 3.2%
2b) It extends only in it's 1% form to the non-crits, leaving the crits alone with its 2.2% current damage reduction.

First considering 2a), the formula reads, if my math is correct,

Inc. damage = ([Hit*(1.0-(c-res))] + [Hit*(1.0+b)*(c-res)(1-2.2*res)]) * (1-res)

Using that formula in my excel sheet, with the new effective resilience, means an average incoming damage of 2077.15, or a 25.17% damage reduction. An extra 8.64% damage saved over the current model, so clearly you're being buffed here.

Secondly looking at 2b), which I think is more likely but you never know, the formula then would read:

Inc. damage = [Hit*(1.0-(c-res))*(1-res)] + [Hit*(1.0+b)*(c-res)(1-2.2*res)]

In our proposed example, that turns into incoming damage of 2136.53, or a 21.69% damage reduction. This is still a buff, 5.16% extra damage is not coming your way, though (obviously) not as much as if the crits against you are getting double-nerfed.

So : YES, you are getting buffed, and fairly massively. If you believe the folks over at World of Ming, and I have no particular reason as yet not to, 2A may actually be the more likely scenario. So hooray for that, now my tree is even MORE indestructible than before.

To bring you back down to the ground: apparently the final bloom on Lifebloom has been reduced by 20%. That's gonna mess with my anti-rogue plans but every buff's got a companion nerf, I suppose.

PvP Boomkin Builds

2008-12-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

So I was looking yesterday, and noticed that wowwiki has finally got around to doing some basic boomkin builds that should "get you started" on the pvp front. I'm not really particularly happy with either one of them, though I recognise the need to spec partially into the resto tree to get Omen of Clarity at least, and not go 71 points into balance like I'm currently doing (hey, I like to explore my tree fully). Anyway:

Firstly, the more "serious" pvp build, I like this one less than the other but it has its benefits. I really dislike that this tree tosses both insect swarm, the most mana-efficient dot in the game, and eclipse which I find to be a dps boost. Begin controversy arguing now. I agree with the elimination of starfall, I have that currently and I can count on 0 hands the number of times that I've cast it and not had it get me into exponentially more trouble with the huge range on it. I understand you could put a major glyph into it but I'm already packing the SF & Wrath ones, with the third already slotted to MF after I calculated it would give me a 300-point damage boost (lose 600 from the initial, gain 900 in the dot part). I could toss the wrath glyph I suppose but it's not that worthwhile a talent to me. I'm eh on the elimination of IFF and BoP -- both dropping your chance to hit. I particularly like that IFF when talented gives you an extra 3% crit chance on the target, and it brings you to a 99% hit chance which is pretty damned good. I could probably spare BoP with the hit dagger from the Kirin Tor, at least till I pick up some Arena weapons which probably won't have any hit rating on them. Gale Winds I think is not a particularly useful talent, the added cyclone range is nice but I don't think it's going to be that useful in arena where you close gaps too quickly for any range to really be important.

Second build, allegedly a mixmash if you need more pve viability, I like more. I like this stuff we're getting out of the resto tree, I hadn't realised they added boomkin benefits to some of those talents so it's good to spec into both furor and master shapeshifter. Intensity's a must, obviously, so I would keep this resto side of the tree how it is. Many of the same complaints apply to this build though at least they kept insect swarm. Dreamstate I'm not sure is that important, I don't have OOM issues in Arenas or BGs, deaths are too quick, and you already have Intensity so...

I think I'm going to try this one when I hit 80. Yes I did throw some stuff into Dreamstate after all, but only b/c I had nowhere else to put the last couple talents (same rationale on Owlkin frenzy). Keep my eclipse and the hit chance at 100% (I guess you never know when that extra 1% might be important...).

I wish I knew more about Nature's Splendor -- it increases the length of your periodic spells...does it also increase the damage/healing so that you have the same amount per tick? Or is it the same amount just spread over a longer time, ie, you get less per tick? Nobody seems to have any definitive comments on it one way or the other.

drool PvP gear!

2008-12-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

PvP gear is out as of Tuesday, and with it my flirtation with 10-man raiding. Back to what I know and love, Boomkin pvp! I think that I'll restrict my PvE gear to drops off heroics, especially as that lets me continue my exclusivity viz a viz not grouping with death knights.

There seems to be a slightly skewed requirement here with regard to arena ratings, to wit --

No Rating Moderate Rating Uber Rating

Gear Savage Hateful Deadly

Accessories Hateful Deadly n/a?

And of course there are currently no weapons available besides the Deadly ones which is ridiculous as they have a 2030 rating requirement on them.

If you take the simple route to getting savage gear, ie., mixing with arena points instead of trying to do straight up honor which is much more expensive, you should be able to get full gear & accessories after the trifling total of 347,200 honor and 1625 arena points. Which is not terribly bad considering that you could get I think around 5000 honor every four matches, and you could pick up a piece of gear every week assuming you did the arena matches. 278 matches later, you have a full gear set! To say nothing of what you start with, which for me right now equates to approximately 25k honor. It's really nice I think that they dropped the mark requirement on any pvp pieces, reducing marks to the sole point of turn-ins for yet more honor. I admire what they did before which seemed like an incentive to get you to do certain bgs, but I don't think you really lose that here since you'd still need to do all the bgs about equally (except AV, praise Lolth that was the one they dropped in exchange for strand of the ancients) in order to have an even turn-in rate.

Gear, no choice on -- obviously it's the savage wyrmhide all the way. WRT to accessories though there's a little bit of choice, at least on some of the gear. Do you want hit, crit, haste, or mp5? Hit is *just* about worthless I think, as you'd expect with a primarily pve stat. There's a 96% hit chance against an equivalent level, which all the BGs are at 80, so you only need 4% more and boomkin have an automatic 4% from talents, and bumped to 7 if you bother (or have time) to cast IFF on your target. Ditto the worthlessness of mp5 or spirit on gear -- you die so fast in a BG there's no way you run through your entire mana pool...I don't think it's happened more than a handful of times in all the BGs I've done, though on occasion it has occurred in longer-running arena matches. So...crit / haste / spellpower? Spellpower trumps on importance I think, but between the other two what do you do? I'm inclined to give a slight edge to haste here, if only because people are stacking serious resilience nowadays which somewhat lowers the effectiveness of crit; but on the other hand it's an extremely useful pve stat and much as I might like to, I don't spend 100% of my time in BGs so :-).

The savage gear nets --

blue xxx
red xxx
yellow xx
meta x

There is also a prismatic one that you could add to your belt slot with a belt buckle...at least I assume any serious person would do so.

For the meta I'm tossed between the Ember Skyflare (25 sp, 2% int) and the Enigmatic Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced snare/root). I think the ember is probably better for overall usage, especially with druids slipping out of roots through shifting and the medallion of the alliance for getting out of fear. If I start running into a ton of locks in arena though I'll probably switch out for the Impassive Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced fear).

As per usual I think we're shooting for blue-int, red-spellpower, yellow-crit. The yellow I'm figuring on Perfect Smooth Sun Crystal (+14 crit), for red Runed Scarlet Ruby (+19 spellpower), and blue...as usual blue provides trouble, tending to be more PvE-useful than PvP, tons of spirit and mp5-based gems, and little to choose from pvp-wise. There is of course the old fallback to straight stam boosts a la Solid Star of Elune...but I'm more inclined I think to go with something like Forceful Forest Emerald (8 haste, 12 stam) or Jagged Forest Emerald (8 crit, 12 stam) so I'm at least getting something caster-useful out of it.

My guild recently had a Vent Meeting where I was yet again reassured that This Time things will be, you know, different, and we're going to be Super Serial about PvP / arenas, etc. My confidence in such promises dwindles every time it comes up and goes unfulfilled. But the beauty of arenas, of course, is that I don't *need* my guild to do them. Where it suffers is trying to do BG premades, a chimeric dream that I have that the few of us pvpers in the guild have never been able to convince the rest of the folks to come along for. I rather suspect that I'm going to have to go with my fallback on this one, trying to do premades with Meridius, though the chat channel they allegedly created for that purpose seems to have died as I haven't heard anything on it for a long-o time.

Time to hit 80 already so I can start implementing this :-)

Other shouts --

2008-12-12T11:05:00.001-08:00

I found a nice blog the other day so if I may point other boomkin in the general direction of Gray Matter, I'm sure he'd appreciate the visits!

Also, on the Traumatic Shift front, I changed my mind and went for daggers instead on the vague and possibly unfounded idea that I'd be able to find more crit on a dagger than a mace. And also the fellow above seems to think the dagger from the Kirin Tor rep reward is pretty much one of the best pre-raiding one-handed weapons ever so that played a factor too. I got a nice off-hand to replace my AH junk yesterday by getting into a group for nexus and getting the Tome of ... something I don't remember the name of, off of Anomalus. Thanks to Telk, Sylene, Aldimere, and guildmate Xirlok for putting up with my anti-DK policy.

Strange but true story: had a conversation with Telk while I was looking for a group (difficult as a dps anyway, more so with said policy) which was actually fairly civil about why I refuse to group with DKs. So I noted that in an attempt to wrap up the conversation, something like "thank you for being so courteous, it's above the flak I usually get" and his response was all, "I guess you can be a bigest against dks...my is racist against trolls". Huwah? Reply to courtesy is to descend into calling me a bigot? Anyway I thought that was a write-off until Aldimere who was the leader of the group invited me in and look, there was Telk in the group. Weirdness. It almost makes me wonder if I could just shortcut the tiresome attempts of people to "convert" me to DKs by saying I'm a bigot. Hard to argue with that, right? The wife thinks otherwise, that it would intensify argument. I have not yet seen a good enough argument to convert me, the most cogent being "well so you're against warlocks too?". I think there's a fundamental difference between calling in demons from another plane and enslaving them to your will, and forcibly reanimating dead corpses and desecrating their post-death experience. Other people apparently would lump that in the same group. I split that on two reasons: one, I think there's a difference between enslaving an evil demon, and enslaving a good person. Fine line, yes, but wouldn't you feel better about making Hitler your personal slave and Mother Theresa, even if you hated slavery across the board? And two, from a practical standpoint I have to draw a line somewhere or I'd never be able to play. Excluding one class is tough but doable, even though it probably virtually excludes me from anything over a 5-man run, but excluding two would be impossible, I'd be reduced to solo play all the time. And that would suck as I've been making a slight priority shift in Ihra with the expansion so that I want him to have some good PvE gear as well as PvP gear. Prior to wrath, I walked around in a full set of PvP gear all the time with I think 2 rings and a set of bracers to switch out for PvE.

Also a shoutout to Carbonite, a lovely add-on. I downloaded it on the recommendation of some guildies who said it was better than Quest Helper, in order to power-level my mage Forol on my wife's server. I have been generally satisfied with it, even though the map supercedes Cartographer's and doesn't tell me instance levels anymore. But two days ago it came in amazingly handy. I was farming caribou meat in BT and I passed a 71 DK. In direct violation of my policy I allowed him to live because hey, he was 3 levels under me and I felt an odd stirring which was probably pity though I can't tell for certain. His response: to wait for 5-10 minutes until I was heavily engaged with two other mobs, and then jump me and kill me. I rezzed, and Carbonite via its interesting "friends list for gankers" told me where he was on the map, which was way far away and I'd've never found him by myself. I was able to hunt him down and murder him like a dog. For the record he was mounted and not engaged in any fighting at all so it was a much fairer fight than he gave me.

PvP notes on that fight: I again continue to hate how you have to kill unholy(? I think?) dks twice, first as themselves and then again as a ghoul. That's not cool, they're hard enough to kill anyway and then to give them an extra life adds to the unfairness. I'm still not sure what happened in dragonblight a few weeks ago where I had to kill a ganking DK three separate times before she died for good; wife came up with the theory that she had a soulstone on her maybe. I don't know but that needs some serious nerfing. Also I started the fight by rooting, which has generally been my answer to dk's having insane melee dps, stay as far away from that as possible. And he death-gripped me thus nullifying the roots. I understand that's on a 30-second cooldown so if i had to do that again I guess I would root, expect to be death-gripped, and shift to travel to get the distance back while my trees pounded on him.

Traumatic Switches

2008-12-11T12:45:00.000-08:00

First of all, a shoutout to this quest, the first in a very long time that actually gave some caster leather; no good for me as still under my level but I'm getting MIGHTY SICK of seeing quests with the reward choice of caster cloth, feral leather, something mail that I don't look at too closely, and something plate that I also don't look at too closely. Show me some love, yo.

In other news, Ihra needs to L2READ his talents that, put into Improved Moonkin Form, mean that I get additional spellpower equal to 15% of my Spirit. So who knew, that has some value after all. I did a search yesterday for caster leather in dungeon drops, which isn't too terribly good but --

70 pants out of Utgarde, off of Ingvar
71 belt out of the Nexus, off of Telastra
72 shoulders AND staff out of Azjol-Nerub, off of Hadronox
73 gloves out of Ahn'Kahet, off of Elder Nadox
74 helm and necklace out of Drak'Tharon Keep, off of Trollgore and Novos, respectively
75 pants and necklace out of Violet Hold, off of Erekem and Zuramat, respectively
78 cloak and ring out of Gundrak, off of Gal'darah and Moorabi.

With a slight revision here because after 74 levels of staves, Ihra is making a wrenching switch to mace & offhand. I take a dps hit, a slight sp boost, and loose big on hit and crit...for the moment because I'm using AH goods instead of good drops which could make up for that. To wit, there's a nice offhand from Anomalus in the Nexus, and a good 76 mace off of Moorabi in Gundrak, could I but get there.

On the other hand, daggers might be a good choice also, with the Kirin Tor giving an excellent revered dagger, and who doesn't love rep rewards?

Could be difficult though as my rigid anti-DK policy kept me out of no less than three separate instance groups yesterday.

I continue to whine about four key recipes not being in-game from Bliz, thus preventing me from getting my Hail to the Chef achievement. GRUMBLE.

2008-09-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Was checking out my resilience options today and the disheartening conclusion here is that I seem only able to hit about 455 without gemming specifically for it...I am loathe to do so because I don't really think it's that worth it *shrug*. I was galvanised by discovering that my former twos partner and stilll-current Partner in the Long-Suffering For Instance PVP Minority apparently hit 495 which is just about the cap (497.5). Of course he has the benefit of a shield as well as a weapon which gives him an extra 30 or so. Oh well. I have a lot less time than I thought to grab my arena gear before Wrath comes out middle of November so eek.

In other news though I'm close to exalted with the Stormpike Guard (the easy one) and that's a third of the way to the Justicar title I want. And speaking of Wrath, you can get a "The Argent Champion" title if you're exalted with both the Argent Dawn and the Argent Crusade. I knew all that grinding for AD rep was going to pay off eventually :-).

And today with the assistance of trusty Sherpa guide Filby I went mountaineering and climbed WOWverest:

0X00: Me and Filby survey the peak with trepidation, yet determined that we shall ascend the summit. Filby expresses an optimistic hope that we will encounter some Blood Elves along the way, that he may sate his bloodlust and fill his little vials with blood.

0Y00: We have reached base camp. To Filby's great distress, no Blood Elves yet sighted. We replenish our packs from the gnomes, who engage in a mindlessly repetitive "throw stick into fire" action. We try to get some information about the weather, assuming they must have attempted the ascent earlier, but they are unresponsive.

0Z37: I have arrived at the summit! I try not to be unsettled by the skeleton next to the posted flag. Filby, despite my fervent entreaties that the top is "RIGHT over THERE!", thinks he sees a Blood Elf when we are not fifty feet from the summit and instead of making history, runs off to investigate this phantasm. Therefore I keep the glory for myself.

Balance Patch Notes

2008-07-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Took a little bit of digging but it seems Wow Insider DOES have some commentary on the WotLK beta patch notes for balance druids here.

Main thing: Entangling roots INDOORS now. Increased treant damage which means my 3 points invested in brambles becomes even more awesome. And let's not forget, more aoe, and hurricane apparently has no CD now (!?). Makes us more mage-y I guess but I've always felt inferior only having one aoe so to now have 3 makes me happy.

I'm still unsure how I feel about this new spellpower gig they've got going on, but since all my stuff is X + dam, X + healing right now anyway I'm kind of thinking I might not see too much impact.

The main complaint in the commentary (and the comments on the commentary) seems to be that it's more difficult to pick a general spec, now you kind of have to pick a spec geared to PVP *or* PVE instead of having a more utilitarian one. I'd noticed a little of that anyway, but I guess it's more exacerbated now? I'm not sure I see it, but if that's true then my answer is that you should stop whining. Just how you have to get different gear sets if you want to be truly successful PVP *and* PVE, that may be the case here too now with specs. However I'm not sure it's as big a stress deal as people are making it -- I've read some things that said blizz was trying to get those two fields closer together, for example by putting some high-quality resil gear in raids, or the well-known statistic that walking into your first raid your weapon should probably be a PVP reward. So I'm not sure how much credence should be assigned to somethign that on first glance looks like blizzard doing an about face and heading back in the opposite direction. Guess we'll see more about that as things develop.

Here we go again :

2008-07-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

Another day, another blog. But since I love WoW so much, maybe I'll do better at regular updates for this one.

It's Friday, and I suppose that's as good a time as any to be posting a blog. My guild's running Kara as they usually do, and as usual I am left in the cold because of my work schedule, le sigh. I was going to pursue one of two alternate plans tonight: 1) Do the maximum 25 dailies, which I've never done before, or 2) Get some peeps to help run me through Durnholde, Slave Pens, or Underbog, which I need to clear out the last two quests in my log and finally achieve my long-awaited 70 present to myself, a completely clean log. Yes, some of you are saying, couldn't you just abandon all the quests and do it that way? I could...but that feels unethical somehow. Anyway that plan fell through because my connection is fritzing *again* and I don't have the work ethic to go downstairs and reset the router again.

Since I actually got into a 5s team this week for arena (gasp!) I was more free to play around with my 2s. My usual partner's been suspiciously AFK and I think he's found new and better friends to play 2s with until I am better geared. True that; still, my resilence is at 304 right now which is certainly not negligible, and the spell dam is at something like +760 since I went exalted with scryer's and got a pretty ring for my trouble. That is also the cause behind goal #1 -- I bought like 550 signets to push to exalted, and the ring was another 63, so I basically splurged like 600g and am therefore down to around 500 and in what you might call the "70 poorhouse".

But back to the subject at hand -- with the freedom to play on my twos, I borrowed my RL friend Melvant, a frost mage, and headed over to the arenas. That went up and down, we tended to get smashed on the non-rated skirmishes, mainly because I think there's no rating match-up on that one so you can get wildly disparate groups. So we tried a couple rated matches and tended to get clobbered for our trouble, coming out I think about 1-4 and splashing our (slash, my) team rating down to about 1275. Our one win came against a warrior/pally combo that we faced a couple times but other than the first time couldn't seem to beat. I find I'm usually very happy when I face warriors because they can be rooted and then they're a stationary target I can back away from and destroy at my leisure. The problem is that Melvant, while pretty well-geared for Kara, seems to be moving away from PVP. When I initially showed him the S1 gear he could get just for BG-ing (the so-called "welfare epics", though I don't approve of the term as it still requires a lot of work to get), he was thrilled and all gung-ho. I think that's worn off though, and his only PVP gear remains his s1 pants, and the s2 staff. Now he seems to be shifting back towards PVE again which I think was always his first love and that may mean trouble. Anyway his resilience is if I remember correctly a truly pathetic 59, on top of being a mage and therefore incredibly squishy. People quickly learned to just smoke him first and then I'd be left in a 2-1 gang-up situation.

What frustrates me is that I've heard boomkin / frost mage is an excellent 2s arrangement with serious potential. Unlike, say, boomkin / resto shammy which is the one I'm running with right now. I mean at some level, it's a moot point. I don't seek to be the best of the best, and the fact that there's likely to be a ceiling to my current 2s team doesn't really bother me because the ceiling is probably around 1800 or so and that's enough to get me tricked out with Brutal Gladiator's gear anyway. The only benefit to pushing past that rating is getting a pretty title on my name at the end of the season ('Duelist Ihrayeep'! Woot...not) and that doesn't matter to me so much.

(Finished on Saturday morning:)

Also my shammy's eye has been wandering over to a better 2s team where they actually win, unlike ours. Thinks I should join them, only then it seems to me there's four people on a 2s team which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially since it was originally 2 teams of 2 anyway. Why not just go back to that? The only sense I can see in it is the desire to mooch off of a team that does better, thus getting us a better ranking and therefore better gear. Call me a naive idealist but I have this loyalty concept about "let's just stick with one team and make it as good as it can be", instead of shopping around for the best combo. I mean, yes, that sounds bad and it is, I am admitting it's a fault, not a bonus; really you should get the best combo you can *first*, and *then* make it the best it can be. So anyone who reads that as a slight on my current partner, be aware that it's not. He's probably thinking about this better than I am. *shrug*.

And if that's true, maybe the best way to arrange this is to not claw tightly to him like someone who sticks with a bad marriage because they have nowhere better to go. Maybe I should just let him go and be happy over there, and just start advertising for a new partner more in line with what complements me -- because to be honest I was just happy to *have* a partner, without having done a whole lot of research on what the best choices for me were. And now I'm in a better place as far as arena familiarity is concerned, plus with 300 resilience I probably wouldn't be laughed out of general channel when I went looking.

In other, brief aside kind of news -- somewhere somehow our appeal was granted by the Blizzard gods and we got our original guild name back. So...HA. I thumb my feathered boomkin nose at whatever RP jerk decided we were wrecking the experience for him. *Thumb*. Cheers to "Kakegijo's Guild", may it never return as our guild name ever again.