Aerodynamic Sleigh Bird

E-mails

I am getting your e-mails. I receive lots of them, read them, then sigh in deep regret because I can’t just dash of a quick couple sentences to them. Nearly every e-mail I receive would require time, effort and a lengthy response to adequately respond to. Yes, I could reply to a question about frost mages in arena with a quick bulleted list, but that doesn’t really answer the question, just addresses it.

I’m sure you see the difference.

I may only be in first year University, but I am taking second year level history courses. I went into the IB (International Baccalaureate) program in high school, which can be best labeled as the “International program for students who think they’re smarter than everyone else and want to prove it.” Oh do I have stories about IB… anyway, it means I get treated as if I have already done the first year course of whatever classes I took in IB and did great in.

University is hard, blah blah, not really, it just eats up a lot of time. Especially the history courses.

So in answer to all those people who’ve e-mailed me your excellent questions, consider this your public acknowledgment. Keith, Dan, Theodore, Ripples the Pengiun (I’m not kidding either), I got it. Your e-mail is safe in my inbox with a little frowny face tag.

I’ll get to them… hopefully…

My last final is Monday, I should have a LOT of free time after that to get out proper answers to them.

Twisted Nether

I was invited to participate in the Twisted Nether round table, but sadly the recording time fell directly onto my raiding schedule.

I would have gone anyway had we been doing farm content like Sarth 3D or the first half of Ulduar’s hard modes. But heroic ToC was on the schedule, and I can’t exactly properly participate in a round table discussion of the past, present and future whilst doing hard mode 10man content. Sure, I could have gone anyway, but I can’t split my attention between a talk show and Anub’arak hard mode and still be competent at both.

It was one or the other, and super apologies to Nibuca, Fim, and ALL MY ADORING FANS <3 <3 <3 but heroic Anub’arak came calling and I had to answer.

We one shot Beasts, Jaraxxus, Faction Champs, two shot twin valks (guild first kill!), then wiped like ten times to Anub’arak. I think our best attempt had him at nearly 50%. MONTHS BEHIND again… but we’re saving the lockout and we’re gonna get the damn thing down sooner or later.

Videos

I’ve been asked several times if I’m ever going to do my own podcast (a la Big Red Kitty featuring brief but manic mage QQ sessions) or videos of me running around in battlegrounds.

The answer to the podcast one is “maybe.” Making a podcast type thingy, even a brief one, takes a fair amount of work. I’ll look into it, and we’ll see. It can’t be that hard… right? I already have a computer and a mic, I’m halfway there!

The videos thing… I actually did try to make PvP style videos before. But… well, the computer I play WoW on isn’t exactly top of the line. The newest part of my computer is an Nvidia 6600 graphics card that’s over six years old. The computer itself features not one, but TWO processing cores, an entire gigabyte of RAM, and a wopping 140 gigabytes of memory.

Trying to record video with Fraps was… disastrous.

So unless somebody out there wants to send me a check for three thousand dollars, I’m afraid the whole “video” thing is going to have to wait. Possibly for a long time, considering University. Though… if I stopped eating in January, I could get some money together…

Occulus

This place has been nerfed so hard. Old Kingdom is, by far, the most difficult heroic in the game now. Honestly Culling of Stratholme is more difficult than Occulus. You can get the 20 minute achievement without even trying.

Mages stacking crit wtf

Krizzlybear mentioned that, all of a sudden, the mages in his guild are stacking crit, and he’s giving that a big ol’ “WTF”.

And to that I say… wait what? Stacking crit? What the hell is wrong with those mages?

For arcane and frost, crit is almost bottom of the barrel statwise in their worth. Relative to fire, they both have low crit modifiers, though arcane has the lowest. They also receive a very large amount of passive crit from talents. Arcane gets an extra 30% whenever clearcast procs, frost gets an extra 50% whenever fingers of frost procs. Thus, having crit as an actual stat on gear isn’t that great.

I’m struggling to understand where the whole desire for crit suddenly came from, and I think I have an idea.

Haste, as you know, makes you cast faster. The more haste you have, the faster you can cast. You can also drink a potion of speed or pop icy veins to go even faster, and a shaman can pop Bloodlust and that speed reaches ridiculous levels. We all know this.

For purposes of WoW, you are already familiar with the meaning of the term “cap”, or “capped”. When you have 17% spell hit chance, you are considered “hit capped”.

Things like the spell hit cap is a “hard cap”. Stacking that stat beyond the hard cap provides you with absolutely nothing. Naturally, there is also such a thing as a “soft cap”. When something reaches it’s soft cap, it provides less for you than it did before. For example, armor and defense rating for tanks work this way. The more armor you have, the less each point of armor gives you, and once tanks hit their defense cap, additional defense rating is still useful to them, just nowhere near as useful as before they reached the soft cap.

Haste works the same way for mages.

Basically, once you’ve hit the point where your global cooldown has reached one second, and your ABlast cast time has also reached one second, additional haste will provide you with nothing. Thus we have the idea of soft caps.

For example, if you have Bloodlust, Icy Veins, and a potion of speed all cooking at once, you only need 804 haste on your gear to reach one second GCDs and ABlast cast times. Thus you can consider 804 a soft cap for haste under that exact situation, which amounts to about 15 seconds of a given fight.

You can, if you were an idiot, consider 804 haste rating a hard cap, and value any haste beyond that as totally worthless. Thus you would conceivably get your haste to 804, then start filling in your other pieces with crit as it is now more valuable. If you also have 2pT10 and Black Magic, that can also give you some insane haste values, lowering the soft cap even more.

I can understand where this viewpoint comes from (and now that I’ve gone looking for it, I find it everywhere. wtf?), but it’s wrong. Yes, under those conditions, the point of haste that brought you from 111 haste to 112 haste gives you more benefit than the point of haste that brought you from 900 to 901.

At no point does haste hit hard cap. HASTE IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN CRIT.

Sure, you could stop yourself at 804 haste, but then what do you do when Bloodlust isn’t up? When IV is on cooldown? When your potion wears off?

Here’s a better idea. Ignore the half-baked idea of haste hardcaps, and stop thinking of the idea of a soft cap as something to actually stop at. Keep stacking haste rating as high as you can make it go, nothing has changed. Instead, when Bloodlust goes up, stagger your haste cooldowns. Pop your speed potion. Wait for Black Magic to proc, then as soon as it ends, hit Icy Veins.

Blowing everything all at once then saying crit is better than haste? Speccing arcane then gemming for crit or actively seeking crit in any way, shape or form?

Don’t make me link to the scrubs wrong video again.