Lulz

Wait for it…

Perhaps I’d make a good goblin yet!

This is just too damn funny for words. Do these people even realize how easy it is to farm those things? Not that I’m going to tell them, oh no! 19 gold for about five seconds worth of effort is just so great. I guess I told you guys though. So there’s that.

Shout to ma peeps on Duskwood! Respect y’all! We be piling up da gold in diz hizzouse! What the hell does crunk even mean?

I Cannot Use Apostrophe’s

“It’s” means “it is”, whereas “its” signifies ownership. The apostrophe only shows ownership when it’s used with any word that isn’t it. It’s confusing sometimes, but it should be taught to students from a young age, so it shouldn’t be a problem, should it?

I, for one, struggle greatly with getting it’s/its correctly, and I have been corrected for it many times by helpful commenters. Seriously, I mean it. I type these blog posts up so fast and only proofread them maybe once or twice, of course mistakes are going to get through. It’s inevitable. Posting a comment like “you spelled dysfunction wrong” isn’t going to hurt my feelings or anything.

Point out mistakes, I’ll correct them. Or ignore it and leave it in it’s original state for laughs (oh meta humor). And besides, let us be honest here, somebody who actually gets offended or hurt from having a spelling mistake pointed out to them likely has a whole host of issues beyond typing too fast sometimes.

In regards to it’s/its, well… I have an excuse as to why I make that mistake more often than anything else!

See, I was originally taught way back in grade school that “it’s” is only used to mean “it is”. “Its” being strictly for showing possession.

However, in grades four and five, I was taught that “it’s” shows possession AND means “it is”, the word “its” not appearing anywhere in the english language. Apparently.

In grade six I was taught the correct way again, but then the wrong way, then the right way, then the wrong way…

Nearly every other year I was taught the complete opposite of the year before. Basically every time I got a new english (or language arts, remember LA? good times) teacher, they would teach me the exact opposite of the teacher before me, complete with spelling the “right” and “wrong” way to do it on the board in huge letters.

This is the reason why I screw up it’s/its all the time. My brain thinks that both of those words are wrong and correct every time I use them, which as you might imagine is extremely frustrating and confusing (hint: it is). I have to double check it’s/its every time I use them, sometimes I used them correctly and then “fix” them to be wrong, sometimes they were wrong and stay wrong, sometimes they’re wrong and I make them right, and on rare occasions they were right and stay right.

In all of those cases, whenever I use it’s/its, I have to stop every time and double check, just to make sure. It gets rather tedious after a while, considering how often those two words come up, but you kinda just get used to it, you know?

Of course, this does mean I probably have the stupidest language disability in the history of everything.

SPOILERS! Discussing the Lich King End Video

I will be discussing the overall arch of Wrath herein, including the end video of the Lich King encounter. If you have not seen it and do not wish to be spoiled, well, I’m not really going to be saying anything that would spoil it really. More than likely anything I mention you would have already guessed by now anyway.

Still.

Leaving some blank space so you don’t actually have to read anything if you don’t want to.

Mind the Gap

Ok, back to discussing gear gaps and PvP.

To my eyes, PvP and PvE are vastly different game modes. You need completely different gear, completely different specs, completely different skill sets and mind sets to succeed in each. There is little to no crossover between raiding and battlegrounds/arenas, in terms of tactics and strategy. Basic skills like being aware of your surroundings translate nicely, but things like using Death Grip as an interrupt don’t translate nearly as well.

And that’s the way it should be. I support splitting PvE and PvP as far apart as possible, and keeping them as far apart as possible. If the developers need to go so far that they have to flat-out ban PvE gear in PvP and vice versa or have spells and various abilities do completely different things in each part of the game, so be it. They’re already leaning hard in this direction, why not just go all the way?

I support such a split, and I think the PvP/PvE divide in WoW needs to be much bigger than it currently is. Not should be, needs to be.

A perfect PvP game would have everyone on exactly the same level, with the only deciding factor being skill. I am more than mature enough to realize this isn’t possible within the confines of an MMO, and indeed shouldn’t be.

The major issue around gear is in its implementation. As it stands now, you are at a massive disadvantage if you don’t raid. It doesn’t matter if you just hit 80 or rock a 5s team at 2200 rating. No matter what category you fall into, you are automatically at a gear disadvantage to your raiding brethren.

This, to me, is wrong.

What I’d like to see is gearing up for PvP by actually doing PvP, and gearing up for PvE by actually doing PvE, with absolutely no crossover or compatibility between the two. We’ve been slowly moving in this direction for several years now, I think the process needs to be sped up.

If that means totally separate gear grinds? Fine by me. If that means you go from 264 epics in raid gear to 200 blues in PvP gear? Sounds perfectly fine to me. If you can’t use Shadowmourne in BGs? Sounds fair.

I don’t expect people to agree with that.

Cataclysm comes around…….. your in full wrathful arena gear for lvling to 85, cant do any 5mans though cause when you zone in your naked!

That’d just be silly.

~ Shunyata, Suramar.

I don’t see it that way. By allowing the gear to translate effectively from one area to another, there are all sorts of issues created.

Last expansion, it forced raiders to do PvP in order to get reasonable gear. This was unacceptable to many people, rightfully so. This expansion, hardcore PvPers are forced to raid seriously in order to get reasonable gear. This should be unacceptable to many people.

Obviously the gear doesn’t translate perfectly. Using PvP gear for raiding is an unattractive proposition, as PvP gear is, you know, designed for PvP. Resilience offers nothing for raiders, and all PvP gear lacks the offensive stats of their equal iLevel PvE brethren.

Likewise, PvE gear is unattractive for PvP, or rather is supposed to be.

The reality is far different.

PvP gear isn’t that great for PvE, to the point where, say, a 226 PvE epic can replace a 245 PvP epic. This part is a success.

However, PvE gear is still extremely attractive for PvPers of any caliber, mostly DPS classes. Consider the human mages that used dual Reign of the Dead (yes, the heroic and non-heroic versions stack). Consider the warriors who simply stacked PvE gear with armor pen on them.

I never said I was against gear grinds. I never said I wanted top end arena gear to be handed out like skittles at a parade.

What I advocate is creating a fairer environment. I want a world where gearing for PvP by doing PvP is a viable option, for every slot. I want a world where raiders don’t have an advantage over their fellow players by sheer merit that they raid.

Imagine it like this, if you will.

As a fresh 80, you come equipped with 200 blues in every single slot. You have a 2 minute PvP trinket with some resilience, a full set of resilience gear head to toe, and even a blue quality weapon with resilience. This is all gained by any method really, though my personal favorite are quests. There are a ton of “PvP” quests in Northrend, why don’t they award PvP gear?

Picture that polearm Onyxia drops. You know how you can click it to get a second polearm with completely different stats? Imagine if you could do the same to the blue quality gear you get from quests. Sure, the quest awards blue bracers designed to get you started on the road of PvE, but with a simple click it becomes a starter PvP piece instead.

Then, you have a series of quests you can do to score 213 PvP epics. Picture a quest like this:

• Take a flag in Arath Basin, then be victorious in that Arathi Basin. Awards Deadly Gladiator’s Thing of Something

A quest you can complete in ten to twenty minutes. Figuring in queue time, it’s very near to the same amount of time running a heroic would take to get the same level of reward. The quest not completing if you lose, then, would reflect wipes and bad PuGs, and even, to a lesser extent, RNG.

The whole time you’re doing that, you’re collecting honor that you can then spend on your 232 main pieces and 245/264 offpieces. This is what we currently have. It could take you hours to get a single piece, but if you’re willing to wait, simply doing WG and its quests can get you a lot of honor quite easily.

Once you’re kitted there, you move into the arenas. At low end arena ratings, you earn points, you pick up 251 main pieces and some 264 offpieces. You get some gear as early as 700 rating, then gear up and progress through the ranks. Once you start hovering around in roughly the 1400-1600 area, you can start getting the 264 main pieces and finish collecting the 264 offpieces.

This would be for every slot, however, not just some slots. It should be entirely possible to gear for PvP without having to do any PvE just to be on equal footing.

To recap, the gearing process would look something like this:

• 200 blues – ridiculously easy quests in Icecrown/Stormpeaks, etc.
• 213 epics – easy battleground quests, for example “capture a graveyard in AV!”
• 232 epics – large amounts of honor.
• 251 epics – low end arena.
• 264 epics – high end arena.

The last post on this subject garnered a lot of harsh criticism in addition to support.

The primary criticism was “it’s already easy enough to gear up! Suck it up princess.”

Let me be very, very clear here.

I am not suffering from poor gear, nor am I advocating that current PvP gear be any easier to obtain.

Before season 8 even started, I had two characters decked in furious and relentless gear. Both of these characters sported raid gear where PvP gear was not an option, both characters were wielding iLevel 251 weapons.

Accusing me of simply wanting easy epics is pointless, as I had either best in slot or second best in slot for nearly every piece of gear across two characters.

Now, of course, I can almost guarantee that I’m going to be accused of supporting welfare epics, despite my protestations to the contrary.

Arena season 8 has introduced a strange new paradigm for Blizzard, this expansion at least. Have you noticed how many items are locked behind arena rating? Nearly nothing is. Wrathful Gladiator main pieces are, as is the wrathful belt and boots.

But everything else is rating free, simply requiring honor and arena points to get. That’s it. Even relentless gladiator main pieces don’t come with an arena requirement attached, and there are finally Battlemaster trinkets available for honor.

It isn’t the system I’d like to see. Current gear should require some participation in high end PvP, putting at least some barriers on it. Then again, have you seen the honor prices for this so called welfare gear? I don’t think we’ve ever had to work so hard to get welfare gear.

Godspeed if you have more than one character to gear up.

I see the reasoning behind such a change, though. More gear available to more people means more people are going to be participating in PvP, and it levels the playing field pretty significantly. I concede that it’s a good move, but I still disagree with it.

Curiously, there are some gaping flaws in Blizzard’s new gearing ideas. Weapons below the level of the new Wrathful stuff are still missing, meaning players are going to have to run the new heroics as often as they can and pray for a Quel’Delar drop, or go raid.

There’s also the ever present problem that raiders can bring their stupid powerful raiding trinkets and weapons with them into arenas and battlegrounds. Faced an armor pen capped warrior with Bryntroll and Deathbringer’s Will yet? No? Well, just wait a few weeks, you’ll get to fight an armor pen capped warrior with the heroic version of both of those things soon enough.

A Sad Story for Monday

So here I was riding the bus home. There’s an African (as in born and raised in Africa, having immigrated to Canadia) woman at the front of the bus with her two kids, a young girl in a stroller and a young boy not in the stroller. Both are incredibly young, the older boy being kindergarten age at absolute maximum.

The two kids were yattering back and forth about I don’t know what, whatever the primitive minds of tiny children feel is important to their day to day activities. I paid them no heed, finding it more productive to stare out the window and mentally run over marksman PvP builds (YES I DO THIS SHUT UP).

Then the darndest thing happened! They got louder! Well, not so much louder as more intense and saying the same thing over and over again.

The little girl says: “Your are the daddy!”

The little boy says: “No I’m not!”

“Yes, your are the daddy!”

“No! No I’m not!”

“Yourrr arrre the daddy!”

“No, I’m not the daddy!”

“Yes, yourrrr arrrre the daddy!”

“NO! I’M! NOT! The daddy!”

This continued, each participant of this highly odd argument increasing in volume with every exchange. Other passengers on the boss were grinning, tittering, giving each other looks with smiles attached. Oh those darn kids!

Eventually the mother interrupts by asking “Why don’t you want to be the daddy?”

A good ten seconds go by. Finally, the boy turns to his mother, a mask of utter anguish and rage on his face, tears tracing paths down a face that shouldn’t even be capable of expressing sorrow yet.

“Because daddy leave and make mommy cry!” the boy finally spat back.

Dead silence was the only sound heard for the remainder of the bus trip.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Do you have an ego? If so, keep reading! Would you like an ego? If so, keep reading!

This post is dedicated to us, the thinking, educated people. Pats on the back for everyone, we are all the best humans on earth. Go us.

In short, the Dunning-Kruger effect is thus: a cognitive bias in which “people who are unskilled… reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

Effectively, this is a strange behaviour where the incompetent do not realize their own incompetence, due to their incompetence. They never recognize they’re doing anything wrong, indeed they outright lack the ability to even reach such a conclusion. Thus, they think they’re doing fine, nay, fantastic, and as such develop a hugely inflated opinion of themselves.

The inverse of this is also true.

The competent do not realize their own competence, because they are competent. They see greater skill in others, recognize their own failures and mistakes, and thus try to improve. Inevitably they do improve, becoming much, much better than where they used to be.

But the competent (usually) never realize it. They get better, yes, but they still think themselves the abject incompetent failure they used to be. They still make mistakes, they still see others better than they.

The incompetent unskilled develop massively inflated opinions of their own ability, whereas the competent skilled vastly and consistently underestimate themselves.

Just read the wikipedia page already.

How many of you are nodding “that is so true”? I know I am.

How else do you explain the absolute failtastic cock buckets pulling 2k DPS in 245 gear espousing their supreme uberness?

How else do you explain how Tamarind who quite obviously is a fantastic healer continues to think himself largely incapable of healing a blade of grass through a light breeze?

Consider. Let’s say you wipe. Everyone is dead, the boss is not. Where does the blame get shifted?

Incompetent people will blame others. It’s not them defending themselves, or trying to shirk the blame, trying to deflect blame so their failure isn’t revealed in front of their peers. In actuality, they are incapable of even seeing their own failure. They can’t. They flat out cannot comprehend themselves failing in any way. It must be someone else who screwed up, because they didn’t make any mistakes.

These guys do not improve, because they don’t see that there is anything that needs to be improved.

Competent people will blame themselves. It’s not self loathing, or a martyr syndrome of any sort, they are simply capable of recognizing their own short comings. They know perfectly well they can fail, have failed, and will fail in the future. They second guess everything they’ve done, analyze their own performance and say “if only I did that, if only I did this.” They “logically” come to the conclusion that it was their own fault, that they failed and single handedly caused the wipe.

These guys stop, think and talk it over, try new strategies, do research online, doing everything within their power to improve.

To all of us competent players… cheers. We rule. Now if only we could get past that crippling self doubt thing, we’d be good to go.

I tell you, right here right now, that you are awesome. You are a skilled player capable of great things. “But I-” NO! SILENCE! You are awesome! “But there was that one time where I-” OF COURSE there was! You think skilled players never make mistakes? You think skilled means flawless? NO!  Skilled players make mistakes, always have and always will. What makes a skilled player skilled is that they learn from those mistakes, that they can even realize a mistake was even made.

WARNING: Critical levels of happy detected. Dumping joy to disc, loading QQ. Please stand by.

Fire Mage PvP: Problems and Solutions

Disclaimer: the solutions I offer were all thought of by me in the past few days. I do not claim any of them to be original ideas. Maybe I invented them, maybe I read a suggestion on some forum somewhere a year ago, maybe I just borrowed a mechanic from another class.

Problem: unpredictable and unreliable burst damage.

Generally speaking, when a class wishes to burst, they push a couple buttons which massively increases the damage they are capable of pumping out. A warrior pushes Bladestorm, a frost mage pushes icy veins, arcane mages push arcane power.

Fire does not have such an option. Fire has Combustion, which essentially creates guaranteed crits that crit harder than normal. This is going to become a common theme in the rest of the post here, the core problem here is too much RNG.

When a warrior pushes Bladestorm, he is dealing tons of damage immediately, possibly to multiple targets. When a frost mage pushes Ivy Veins, he is casting much faster, resulting in a huge increase to effective damage output. He can also use Deep Freeze and shatter combos. This is all immediate, on demand burst damage.

It Is Three AM and I Need to go to Bed so Here is This

My level 74 marksman hunter averages 1300 DPS on a target dummy in quest greens and with aspect of the viper active easily 60% of the time.

I have a guildie who’s warrior alt in absolute shit gear (and even the Bind to Account sword from WG) pulls 2200 DPS on heroic dungeon bosses.

I healed a HHoS once, starring a rogue in iLevel 200 epics (his offhand was a 187 blue) and he was drunkenly stumbling about with around 900 DPS. After killing the rock guy, there was a comment made about being stoned, and this fail rogue said “i’m stoned irl”.

So I said “That explains a lot”. He said “lol…”

Then his DPS immediately spiked to 2300 and stayed there for the rest of the instance.

-=-

The closest we’ve come to downing Anub’arak hard mode is 10%. We’ve wiped at that number repeatedly. It hurts so much, to come so close and yet still be so far. Oh well, soon we will have our T10 gear and steamroll over the poor guy. Probably for the best, to be perfectly honest. After a night of heroic Anub’arak, our poor healers are rendered catatonic on the floor, blood seeping from their ears as the infinite abyss of sub 30% health bars claw at their fragile hearts.

I can almost hear them weeping over the sound of my keyboard. A thousand lamentations of a thousand inadequate renews.

-=-

I got my 2piece for T10 finally. Took me long enough.

The effect from the 2piece bonus is called “Pushing the Limit”. An appropriate name, for I get to cast 1.5 second ABlasts with its effect up. Needless to say, it is an extremely good set piece. Shall I compare it to a woman?

She is a long lost lover, a lover I had been rudely separated from many many centuries ago. As fate would decree it, I was lost. Abandoned. An infinite sadness settled upon me, never had I felt such devastating loss. But I would not tire. I could not tire.

For her love, it burned brighter than four hundred billion suns, a beacon reaching out to me across the murky depths of the world, across the sea of black that calls itself the universe. For eons, I searched the world, searching endlessly for my lost love, in the desperate hope that one day… one day we would be reunited.

That day has come, and oh what a glorious dawn it is. See how the sun rises, its gentle light sweetly caressing her face. Tears stream down our faces, as we embrace for the first time in thousands of millenia. Part of me cannot believe that my search is over, that she is real.

This tiny, niggling seed of doubt is swiftly quashed by the warmth of her arms, the silkiness of her skin, the faint scent of cinnamon in her hair. Never have I felt such all encompassing joy. I am home, at last, after so long.

She softly whispers in my ear, her voice the most beautiful music I have heard since the dawn of time itself. She says…

“I have a sister, you know. And she’s open to the idea of a threesome.”

The siren call of 4piece T10 calls to me.

Fire Questions Answered

In regards to the frag belt, as opposed to simply building the individual bombs.

If you want to use the cobalt bombs every minute instead of the belt every six, go right ahead. The belt is far cheaper in the long run, which is the only reason I consider it superior to using individual bombs.

I have not run into any situation where the six minute cooldown on the belt has hurt me. I simply do not use it more often than that. I have some individual cobalt frag bombs sitting in my engineering bag, but they have never been used. The belt has proven to be enough.

It’s also worth noting that the belt and grenades only partially share cooldowns. If you use a grenade, this puts both the grenade and belt on cooldown for one minute. If you use the belt, the belt is on cooldown for six minutes, but the grenades are only on cooldown for one minute.

I say, use both. Default to the belt if it’s up, if not, then use an individual frag. Best of both worlds and it will save you some cash.

Dear Mr. Gnomeaggedon, Sir

I’ve had several pleas from the various far flung corners of the internet for help, regarding fire PvP. So without further ado, I will try my best to answer those questions.

First, gearing questions.

• Ignore haste, crit and spellpower all the way

Haste is the best friend of frost and arcane PvP specs. Not so for fire! As a fire mage, the only spells with a cast time you will ever be casting are Polymorph and Scorch. Literally every other spell you ever use will be instant cast; you simply do not need to use haste for anything.

Instead, gear for crit. Your base PvP set has all crit, aim to get crit on every single piece you use. Buy the crit necklace, the crit cape, the crit rings, and so forth. If you end up with some haste from, say, your raiding weapons, that’s fine, just make sure your actual PvP gear is haste free.

Gem for spellpower and spell penetration. It might be tempting to gem for, say, crit, but don’t give in! Primarily you’ll want to gem Mysterious Dreadstones, and you’ll want to end up with around 120 spell penetration. This should nullify most of the resistances you meet in general PvP. Naturally, once you have enough spell penetration, fill everything else up with raw spellpower.