Month: June 2010

The Pre-Raid Credit Check

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a rash of this going on in the Trade channel on almost every single server I know of. You’ve probably seen it yourself – the type of person that asks for ridiculously high requirements purely in order to join a raid. It’s either that or they ask a laundry list of questions that they expect you to know the answer to. Just as an example, here’s a screencap of one that came up the other day, along with my reply.

In this example, it’s as if the raid leader is screaming out “I have no brain! Feed me an arbitrary set of numbers and I’ll only invite you if they’re big enough!” There’s absolutely no guarantee that the numbers you get will be any indication of a raid member’s performance. Hell, I’ve even seen PuGs of players fully decked out in tier 10 wipe repeatedly on Marrowgar. But in case it still feels like it’s plausible let me break it down for you.

First up, a lot of people have two specs. Apart from getting an achievement from it, there’s also the huge versatility benefit it gives hybrids. On the flipside, there are classes (rogues, mages, hunters and warlocks as an example) that can do nothing but DPS. What do you want from me, bandage spec? Isn’t it better to say what you need rather than ask superfluous questions?

Secondly, Gearscore. You probably know that I think Gearscore is crap, and for a fair reason. I can be wearing PVP gear and get a high Gearscore. I could be wearing +MP5 healer gear and get a high Gearscore. I could be holding a tanking one-hander and get a high Gearscore. Get the idea? It’s no indication that the gear I’ve chosen is right for my class or spec, doesn’t take into account any gems or enchants (or even if those gems/enchants are the right choices) and can generally be fooled. Putting your faith in an arbitrary number in this way is stupid, and if someone takes advantage of you as a result then quite frankly you deserve it.

Thirdly there’s the issue around single target DPS. The trouble is, it’s not a finite value for some classes due to the heavy influence of random number generation. It means that rather than having a fixed value that you can reliably put out, your DPS will hover around a point. Over the number of attempts you make, the distribution of your DPS will form a bell curve.

I could give you any figure on that bell curve and it’d be a valid answer because you weren’t specific. The real joke is that you only get this smooth curve after doing thousands of attempts against the same target in the same gear. Imagine doing a thousand target dummy tests – you’d be there all week! The spread of the curve can be about 1.6k DPS, which is a huge margin between top and bottom. Tachyon’s been doing some heavy maths on this, so it’s worth looking at his figures.

Finally, here’s my most important point out of all of this. It’s Vault of Archavon for crying out loud! You know, the one with the easy loot piñatas! You walk in there, you roflstomp, you walk out again! No challenge, no difficulty, ten minutes and you’re done! Why the hell you need all this information to form a raid for the easiest dungeon going is beyond me. If it were ICC then maybe I could understand.. ish. For VoA, it’s waaay over the top.

Of course, I wouldn’t be little Gnomey Smarty-pants if I didn’t have a better way of doing it. It requires a little bit of brain power and a little bit of understanding other classes gear requirements, but it means you can be a lot more flexible about who you invite. It also means that you can help eachother out a bit – understand gear choices and maybe learn a little about other classes.

Starting a group to VoA 25-man. I need a few healers and some DPS. Meet me by the central Dalaran fountain for a quick gear check.

That way you actually meet people, you get to look at their gear choices properly and you can make informed decisions about who to have in your raid. Get away from the reliance on arbitrary numbers and take a look at the characters you’re going to be bringing with you.

Review – Warcraft: MAGE

Posted on by Gazimoff

Expanding on an initial series of manga exploring some of the stories and myths  in the Warcraft universe, Blizzard have moved on to produce a series of books focusing on the ten in-game classes. Published by the popular Manga form Tokyopop, the volumes are created by a mix of story writers and artists.

The second in the series to be printed, Warcraft: Mage was written by Richard A. Knaak and drawn by Ryo Kawakami. It runs at nearly 200 pages and can be picked up for about £8 or 10 euros from your local bookseller, although places like Amazon have it listed for less.

It’s probably worth pointing out that I bought my own copy, mainly because I was interested in seeing how the Mage storyline would develop. I’d heard various rumours about how Knaak treats both Mages and Dragons, but used this as my first dip into the stories he created.

As a story, Warcraft:Mage is a simple enough affair. Aodhan Falamar is a reckless boy who comes from a long line of warriors and paladins. Turning his back on family tradition and against his father’s wishes, he instead chooses to follow in the footsteps of his recently slain cousin Crevan and become a Mage of Dalaran.

During his training, the city of Dalaran is attacked by the Blue Dragonflight. As the attack progresses, Aodhan must make difficult choices between family, power and loyalty, with the entire floating city hanging in the balance.

The difficulty with the story lies in it’s predictability. It’s clear from the outset which path the tale will take, and sure enough there’s nothing surprising on the way. And although the shortness of the tale can be forgiven somewhat, the shallowness can’t. The formulaic cliché of family betrayal feels tired and worn out, with the characters feeling bland and lacklustre.

In fact, the characters are one of the major drawbacks of the book. There is a certain blandness and lack of emotion displayed by the central characters, causing the central theme of the story to feel somewhat fake. It’s hard to feel sympathetic towards Aodhan’s situation largely because he didn’t seem to be that bothered by it himself. None of the inner conflict you’d normally expect was visible.

As a book about mages, the magecraft feels relevant and passable. The old Presence of Mind-Pyroblast routine was described, making the book feel immediately dated. That said, existing mage spells were used to convey action instead of relying too much on the Jania Proudmoore method of just creating whatever effect you need.

The art style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it was clear that variety of references had been used in order to give the settings a reasonably authentic feel. There are however some glaring omissions that aren’t immediately obvious, the first being the lack of anything other than human Mages in Dalaran. Bearing in mind that this is supposed to be when the city is in-flight to Northrend, the absence of even Gnomes from the pages seems very odd.

The second problem is more of a knock-on issue – because Dalaran felt like an almost exclusively human city, it didn’t have that cosmopolitan feel that I’d normally associate with it. If anything it had more in common with a flying Hogwarts University than a multicultural hub.

Ultimately, I can’t find much to recommend Warcraft: Mage. There’s no real expansion of Mage lore, nor is there anything in it’s covers that we didn’t know already. More fundamentally it’s not even an entertaining read. The cliché-ridden storyline and lacklustre characters are coupled with a portrayal of the Warcraft universe that simply didn’t resonate.

I may be asking for too much from a 200-page manga, but I doubt it.

Scorched Fingers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier on in the week I put up an article about going back to my old fire spec on my mage. It was basically a brain dump – this is what I’m doing, this is how it works, this is what I remember. Unfortunately, mid dumpage I got something wrong.

To be fair, it isn’t just me that has trouble with how Improved Scorch works – there seems to be a whole rash of confusion out there. Luckily though, there are some great resources as well to help put people on the Right Path.

Now, I can imagine that some of you are thinking “But Gaz, how can you get something like this wrong? You’ve been playing the class for five years, surely you should know something as basic as this?”. And it’d be a fair criticism. I’m just glad to have readers who will point out when I get something wrong so that I can go back and correct it.

Getting back to Improved Scorch, the devil is in the detail. The tooltip is as follows:

Increases your chance to critically hit with Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt by an additional 3% and your damaging Scorch spells have a 100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5% and lasts 30 sec.

Wait, what?

Let’s break it down. The first part of Improved Scorch is a passive bonus that you get to your Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt spells. For fire mages, this means that your Fireball has an extra 3% chance to crit, making Hot Streak more likely. Worth having.

The second part of Improved Scorch is the vulnerability debuff that you apply on targets when you cast Scorch. This debuff makes spells 5% more likely to crit against them. This debuff acts independently of the passive bonus and benefits the entire raid.

That’s not the end of it though. The Scorch debuff doesn’t stack with Winter’s Chill, so if you’re raiding with a frost mage it can lead to complications where one debuff prevents the other from being applied. It also doesn’t stack with Improved Shadow Bolt, although crucially this debuff will overwrite Improved Scorch.I think that the difference in behaviour is due to it being hotfixed rather than implemented by design.

It’s managing this 5% spell crit chance debuff that’s the biggest difficulty with this spell, especially once you scale up to 25-man raiding. It’s also the source of a lot of confusion which isn’t helped by having an unclear tooltip, as well as different behaviours for resolving debuff conflicts.

Historically you’d resolve all this by having discussions within your raidgroup, but with so much raid content being tackled by Pug groups these days a slicker solution is needed. As a kind of stop-gap I’m having a look at what addons like Power Auras can do to help. Longer term, I can’t help but feel that this is somethign Blizzard need to fix.

Maybe Cataclysm will hold the answers? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait long to find out.

The Flaming Boomerang

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever since patch 3.3.3 was released I’ve been thinking of switching back to my Fire spec. It made me  feel nostalgic about the early days of Warcraft, where I originally levelled as a fire mage. I only deviated from this spec for parts of both Molten Core and Naxxramas, sticking with fire throughout Burning Crusade. When I started raiding in Wrath I only went to Arcane due to the hitcap benefits. The spec then received an almighty buff, propelling it to become the must-have raiding spec for nearly all mages. I’d been stuck as Arcane ever since.

As a result my fire spec has been largely abandoned until earlier this week when I decided that I had to change. There’s only so much I can take of going through the same instances as the same character casting the same spells until something snaps inside. Not wanting to go all medieval on my keyboard, I dusted off my old fire spec and went down to the target dummies to practice.

The first challenge to face is gearing – even though +hit gear is thrown at you so that you can comfortably make the Arcane hitcap, it’s not quite sufficient to reach the 446 that a fire mage needs. Luckily I’d kept back Dying Curse for just such an occasion. Couple that with the fact that I usually raid with a Draenei for Heroic Presence plus either a shadow priest for Misery or a balance druid for Improved Faerie Fire, and all I have to reach is a manageable 342 hitrating.

The next trick to master is keeping up a solid set of debuffs. The fire spec is slightly more complex than an arcane one in that Living Bomb always needs to be on the target. Each fire mage needs to cast their own Living Bomb, making debuff watching that little bit trickier if you’re not the only one in the party. Once you’ve got that down, you can happily Fireball away at the target until Hot Streak procs. When Hot Streak goes off, cast your instant-cast Pyroblast then go back to Fireballing. Just make sure that Living Bomb is constantly on the target.

The complication sets in when working out Improved Scorch. Even if you’ve got other effects in your group to provide the critical strike chance by 5%, you’ll still want to apply it for the 3% crit chance buff to your Fireballs. This one works slightly differently though in that one mage can apply the debuff for all the others in the group. This means that you need to coordinate with others about who will apply the debuff. Luckily the chance of encountering another fire mage in a raid is fairly rare, so you can usually apply anyway. Again, like with Living Bomb, this always needs to be applied on the target.

UPDATE: The above paragraph is wrong. Have a look at this article for an update on Improved Scorch

There are various tricks you can use to alert yourself to various spell procs as well as tracking when debuffs need to be applied, and I’ll be talking about some related addons in the near future.

Things can get even more complicated when you start looking at converting gear from an Arcane spec focus to a Fire spec focus. The reason being that haste benefits Arcane mages tremendously – the more haste they have, the more spells they can cast. For a fire mage with Burnout and Hot Streak, crit strike rating has more of a part to play. Not only do you deal more damage from your spell critical strikes, but you have an increased chance to trigger Hot Streak as your chance to crit increases. For me it’s not currently clear if haste is the better stat to go for above crit for fire mages, but it’s something I’m looking at closely.

At the end of the day though it doesn’t matter to me as long as I’m having fun, and going back to Fire is something that’s hitting all the right nostalgia buttons for me. I’ve also been able to “prove” it’s a viable raiding spec after managing to pull aggro during phase 2 of Lady Deathwhisper and topping the damage and DPS meters on Saurfang. These are inconsequential though, as long as I can cackle like a maniac while smacking my buttons.

Half-Baked

Posted on by Gazimoff

Every so often I come up with this idea that seems really amazing in theory, but incredibly dorky in practice. Like the Gnomish Mage’s Mana Pie.

This image by me is free for you to reuse under CC-BY-SA 3.0

Yes, I know, I need professional help…

Under the Hood

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler alert: In-depth discussion of the planned changes to Cataclysm, primarily focusing on mechanics and core engine changes, leveling experience and endgame experience. All information here is public knowledge unless specified.

Over the weekend an avalanche of news came out about how development on Cataclysm is progressing. In an interesting change the majority of information was shared through a series of interviews rather than through blue posts on the official Blizzard forums (although there are some follow-ups). The removal of Path of the Titans and Guild talent trees are the two big items, along with the changes to Inscription and Archaeology.

What’s interesting is the overhaul the core game engine is receiving in order to make the overall experience better. One of the Ghostcrawler interviews mentions that the game was only expected to last for two or three years. Now they’re not just looking at the capability they need for Cataclysm but also for future expansions and development. In another interview he mentions that the revised game engine will have a number of hooks that can be adjusted, allowing for individual spells and abilities to be fine-tuned much more precisely.

What does this mean? Hopefully it’ll get classes to the stage where individual talent trees will be on an even level, so for example Fire, Frost and Arcane mages should be very close together. You’ll probably still get an “optimal” spec, but the differences between the three should be much smaller. It should also mean there’s less reliance on random-number-generation – something that the Fire tree suffers from immensely.

The problem with building a game engine is that it takes a lot of time and careful planning to pull it all together – especially something as complex as Warcraft. It’s also a problem that doesn’t scale well as you throw additional resources at it – as you scale up a programming team you can easily lose focus on the goal unless you have very tight project management. Having to put a large amount of your coding and design effort into bringing an old, creaking engine up to date is also going to pull them away from generating new content for the expansion.

The end result though is that most of the hard work won’t be visible to the player, at least not initially. It’s like changing stuff under the hood of a car, replacing the engine and upgrading the shock absorbers. It’s still the same car and works in the same way, it just remains unseen unless you flip the lid open and take a look inside.

It should however creep into the game through subtle ways, one of which being the revamped glyph system. In essence, being able to provide additional hooks into the spellcasting (or perform ability) process means that you have greater control over how they can be adjusted. Part of the change to glyphs includes providing a “middle tier” between powerful spell changes and basic cosmetic or remove reagent requirement ones. This middle tier is going to rely on the additional hooks to perform the subtle tweaks to abilities, so that the situational stuff can truly be situational and not incredibly overpowered or ridiculously weak.

There’s also scope for more interesting racial abilities, item bonuses and so on. You might find that items have properties that would work like a glyph, providing unique interactions with the spell casting pipeline in ways we haven’t seen before. It also means that we could get to the stage where an item does different things depending on the class or spec of the character using it.

Of course this additional complexity is going to be a nightmare for one team of people – the theorycrafters. As spells become tweakable in more ways, so the models used to predict their behaviour become more complex. if you think the guys with their spreadsheets and simulators have it bad now, imagine how bad things could get for them in the expansion?

In essence though it feels that in order to get at all the expansion’s content, you’re going to need to roll alts. Both Cory Stockton and Tom Chilton have commented on the amount of new quests that are being sunk into the game in order to sort out the level kinks. Improved crafting profession itemisation should also help, particularly around Inscription. If you’ve ever leveled a mage you’ll understand the frustrations around getting offhand items, rings and trinkets at the lower levels.

What does all this mean for me as a player? Larisa says that all she wants from Cataclysm is good raiding and a good guild, and I can appreciate that. But a hangover from my single-player days is that I want stuff to do in the game – zones to explore, quests to complete and characters to progress. I currently don’t feel that I’ll get that on my main character, and will have to roll an alt if I’m going to truly explore all the changes that have been brought in. Whether it’s a Worgen Mage or a Gnome Priest, I feel it’s going to be restarting that gets me the most out of this impending expansion.

Coming Back To Haunt Me

Posted on by Gazimoff

So, where to begin with this one. About three years ago I agreed to build a realm website for Earthen Ring, the roleplay realm I was on at the time. It was one of those things where I put it together, handed it over and pretty much left people to it. Needless to say the forum didn’t get maintained, the software didn’t get updated and it’s now a sprawling mess.

About a month ago, I was asked to give it a bit of a kick-start again. After taking backups and performing checks, I’ve moved everything over to a new architecture. And while Earthenring.EU currently looks fugly as hell, at least it has a solid foundation now on which I can build things. I’m currently tinkering with a number of things here and there in order to get things working right, but I’m learning a lot as I go so it’s a slow process.

This means that I’ve been getting cross and frustrated with web software, while Curio (my mage on the server) sits on the Cathedral steps and responds to questions in whispers etc. It also means that some of the blogposts I’ve got queueing up are having to wait a little until I can finish them off. I just hope you can be patient with me while I’m working on other things.

Luckily there have been several things to make me smile as I’ve been working away. So here’s a little link love to those great people who have helped make this whole thing slightly more bearable.

Enjoy!

A Matter Of Time

Posted on by Gazimoff

You’ve probably heard that Lord of the Rings Online is following in the footsteps of Dungeons and Dragons Online by becoming Free to Play. That’s right, there’ll no longer be a subscription fee to get your foot in the door. Instead you’ll be expected to pay real money for all sorts of in-game items, some of which may provide in-game benefits. Now I’ve never been a fan of the Free to Play/Item Store model, basically because it means that those with the nicest gear are also usually those with the deepest wallets.

But let’s take a different tack – say that there was an MMO set in the near future that was also free to play? Some kind of cyberpunk tech utopia kind of thing. It’d be perfectly conceivable to place advertising in the game environment – TV commercials, billboards etc that advertise products but give them a futuristic feel. pretty much just like Coca-Cola in Blade Runner. Would I still play it? Probably not.

It feels that as MMOs become increasingly popular, the subscription cost is going to either hold steady or head south. But that’s not the issue – I’m guessing that for a large chunk of players the subscription cost is only a small part of the equation. The biggest issue I face is getting the time to play the game in the first place. I work an 8 hour day, I spend an hour commuting either side and about 6 hours a night sleeping. That leaves me with about four hours a night – if I’m lucky – to spend on entertainment. carve that up between blogging, podcasting and other stuff and it’s a wonder I have any time for Warcraft, let alone any other game.

I think that anything new has to be something that doesn’t take a huge investment to get into. Something that will allow me to feel progression in 30-minute segments is what they need to be aiming for, so that I can build it around whatever else I happen to be doing. Making use of my “dead-time” also rocks, something that WeRule does very well. It maybe a Farmville Clone with a few extra bits thrown in, but because I can play it on the way to work means that it gets some playtime.

I don’t think that the MMOs will be battling over our wallets in the years to come. Quite simply, it’ll be all a matter of time. It’s the one thing there’s only ever a fixed amount of, no matter how rich or poor we are.

Choose Your Weapons

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I mentioned that I had four different weapon sets on my mage and was having trouble choosing which one was the best. Theorycrafting wasn’t really helping me much, with no clear winner emerging. In the end I decided that the best way to test them was to go out, do some target dummy tests and run a few heroics with them. It means that I can test them against my own playstyle as well as getting a feel for each of them.

Unsurprisingly, both Nibelung and Sister Svalna’s Aether Staff came out at around the same for single targets, with Nibelung really coming into it’s own for those AoE sessions in heroics. Abracadaver was only slightly behind, which surprised me as I was expecting a much bigger boost from the haste. I only have 450 haste normally so I’m nowhere near the softcap, although I do get the tier 10 2-piece set bonus most of the time.

The Frost Needle and Scourgelord’s Baton came in last place, and so will be banked. I can’t risk disenchanting them though – if a substantial one-hander or off-hander drop then I’ll need the other one to sit alongside it.

As I was doing all this testing I gradually became frustrated – it didn’t really make sense to me why I could end up with four sets of weapons, all from the same instance and all similar in quality to each other. It wasn’t as if I could say that there was a clear upgrade path, or if there was a clear best-in-slot that I could work towards. Instead, the approach was to offer similar weapons that do similar things, but work in slightly different ways.

  • A sword and off-hand combo
  • A staff with an “on use” ability
  • Another staff with a low procrate ability
  • A third staff with just high base stats and nothing unusual

Frustratingly for me, I couldn’t even decide what I like more as a player. Do I like to be able to just compare raw numbers – if the numbers are bigger on the new item, it’s an upgrade? Do I like to go for things that are a little unusual? I know I don’t like on-use items as I always forget to use them (trinkets being a perfect example), but that’s more preference and playstyle than throwing away good quality gear.

Anyhow, just as I was beginning to settle on which items to keep and which to put into cold storage, along comes this blog post from Tachyon. If you’re not aware of his work, Tachyon is a mage blogger who is heavily into theorycrafting. His best achievements are developing simulators that calculate DPS for a given gear selection and spell rotation. The information he generates is fantastic in terms of working out stat priority and so on.

His latest post on DPS volatility is a real eye-opener – it shows why ten tests or samples are unreliable for calculating DPS, and that you need something like a thousand in order to build up even a rough picture of DPS. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m unlikely to run the same instance with the same gear a thousand times just to test if it’s a marginal improvement.

But more fundamentally though, I’d probably never be able to tell which was the better or worse weapon for me because they’re all so close to each other. That and Lady RNG adds her own influence, distorting whatever results I get. I might end up feeling that the mathematically worst choice gives me the best result just because it’s “lucky”.

It also makes me wonder if any of this will get better in Cataclysm? I mean, I love choice, but I’d rather not have to be a mathemagician just to be able to pick and choose between the huge range of loot on offer to me. It might be that with the Spirit mage changes there will be a clearer choice for us – if it’s got intellect and stamina but no spirit then it’s a mage weapon. I like to have plenty of upgrade chances and I do appreciate the idea of moving away from identikit gear choices as well, but I’d really like it to be easier for me to work out if something is an upgrade or not.

I’m also reminded of the times when I first started raiding. Everything seemed so much clearer – it was an upgrade or it wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be as much choice – Molten Core only really had the Staff of Dominance or the Azuresong Mageblade to choose from. There also seemed to be much more competition for loot, with about nine other players also keen to get their hands on the same gear. I’m not saying that an abundance of choice is a bad thing, but it just seems to take that epic edge off things.

I guess I’m looking forward to Cataclysm all the more as a result – the raid dungeon changes mean that loot will be the same for both 10 and 25-man. This in turn makes itemisation easier, which should make upgrade paths clearer. I’m aware that the expansion isn’t a panacea or cure-all, but I can live in hope.

Gazimoff the Librarian

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’d scarcely believe it myself, but Mana Obscura is now three months old. It’s come a long way in such a time and is an incredible amount of fun to do, but it’s starting to groan at the seams a little now. It needs a careful eye cast over it, a little tweak and clean here and there, a little bit of spit and polish. It also needs a bit of work under the hood.

First things first, I’ve changed the name slightly, dropping the pretentious “the” and just sticking with Mana Obscura. I’ve also procured manaobscura.com as an address on the interwebs, and ManaObscura as a pigeonhole on Twitter. This particular Twitter feed will only contain stuff related to the site and the occasional retweet of good content created by others, so if you’re tired of GamerGaz filling up your tweetstream, here’s an alternative for you. Of course, while you can update your bookmarks there’s no rush – the old one will work just as well for the time being. If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you should be changed over automatically.

I’ve also started seeking out mage strategies and guides from across the interwebs for inclusion in the Mage Resources Guide. There are a ton of really good mage bloggers and writers out there pumping out some really good content, but it never sees the light of day or gets shared around. Rather than trying to rewrite everything, I’m just trying to catalogue and archive links to it, to try and point people in the right direction.  If you see something that you think would help mages or if you’ve written something you’d like to share, drop me note and I’ll add it to the guide.

In fact, the guide is part of the reason why I’m doing a spot of tinkering. There’s some features that I’d like to add to the site, but none of them seem to be sitting smoothly. As a result I’m going to be working away in my underground lair, trying to work out better ways of sharing everything here. It’s possibly going to mean fewer blogposts while I’m breaking and fixing things in my test chamber, but I hope the results will be worth it.

Talking about site work, I’ve been asked to take a look at rebuilding an old realm website and get it fit for Cataclysm. This is a much larger job that’s going to have me working for several weeks, rebuilding a forum, wiki, gallery and other fun stuff for people to use. It’s going to be complicated as the software hasn’t been updated for yonks, but it’s hopefully going to be worth it for them.

So there you have it. A little bit of librarian work, a little bit of tinkering. Still, it’s enough to keep me busy for a few weeks at least. Don’t worry though, I’ll keep you posted on how things progress. And if things seem a little quiet, don’t worry. I’m probably just working inside a machine somewhere, swapping around a few cogs and gears.