New and Improved

So Initri has “died” and been resurrected as Kaayn 2.0.

I’m back to raiding on him, 10s and 25s in ICC.

Yep, 3 toons. I am a glutton for punishment.

Tir, the raid leader for SR, had me respec to Unholy from Blood and put me through my paces at the training dummy.

ZOMG, blood had such a smoother rotation to me.

I know that Tir vastly outgears me so I couldn’t hope to meet his numbers, but the numbers I was posting seemed really lackluster.

So that’s what you do all day?

I’m on a project at work which is sucking up huge parts of my time and what’s left of my soul.

But I do get a few moments here and there to try and keep on top of things.

Dark/Soth helps keep me sane (less insane?) by providing stimulating debate.

The following is taken from an email conversation we had the other day. I pulled out a name or two to protect the so-called innocent. (No, it’s no one that reads the blog. I think. But it’s definitely not you, Del, since you always seem to think I’m blaming you. Go read this post, your comment yesterday made me think of it again.)

What? I can’t hear you!

Vent was screwy as all hell last night.

And not just the one for my current guild, we hopped into the still running vent for our old guild and had the same problems.

The pally tank/priest could hear me and I could hear him. But no one else seemed to be able to hear him.

I think everyone but the shaman could hear the other priest.

One warrior could hear me, but his mic was broken.

It was absolutely crazy. And we raided like that, in near silence.

…

Started by getting pulled into a VoA.

We were supposed to start with ToC at 7 server, but a few people were on early enough to try and get through a 10 VoA while we had WG. They pugged in a couple to fill the holes and away we went.

Started with the new guy, Koralon the Flame Watcher.

This fight is horrendously complicated.

Pulling rabbits out of…

pastries?

It all starts with someone turning you into a bunny and the next thing you know you’re hopping all over Dalaran looking for odd places to put a rabbit. Looks like I left a suprise in the pie as well.

…

It seems that my little guild has fallen into an alliance with 2 other little guilds. They’ve been picking up members of my guild as PuGs for a week or two now and we’ve been formally invited to regularly participate with them in raids. I am the official representative of my guild and even get to chime in on loot distribution and such. Go me!

We can easily fill 10 mans and should be able to select the best of each to run 25s, maybe picking up 1-2 random people.

Our first official joint venture will be 10 man Ulduar on Tuesday. Eek!

…

What a weekend!

Started with a guild run of Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle on Friday. Needed to kill King Y with our orphans out for a Children’s Week achievement. The pally healer and I had run H UP with members of the guild alliance earlier in the week and learned some new tricks for dealing with Skadi that make the encounter easier and net you some extra achievements.

We were running with our pally tank so the pace was slow. Paint-dries-faster-than-we-clear-a-dungeon slow.

Just before we start Skadi, I get a whisper from the priest, they need a couple replacements for a 10 Naxx. Military and Plague are left, am I interested?

Hit or Miss

Well I asked for it.

The other day, I mentioned that the most-used search to get to my site had to do with the tiny colored eggs from the Noblegarden event. I closed the post demanding that people either search for useful things or watch rabbit porn.

Now people are searching for useful stuff and stumbling on to my site. My rabbit porn also got more hits.

So far I think the most useful thing I’ve provided has been a how-to for the Horde on getting the Westfall chicken.

But today, that will change!

I will provide something useful, just a couple days too late for the guy searching for it…

The query was “arcane mage hit cap for 25 man naxx.”

There is a lot of information out there on hit rating and whatnot and I’m sure there are plenty of sites that break it down for you. And here’s another.

So without further ado: something useful!

 

Arcane Hit Cap

Disclaimer: This information is only valid until it changes and only for level 80 characters. And I’m only talking PvE here. PvP has a different hit table. As of patch 3.1.something this *should* be accurate. If it isn’t, correct me. If there comes a major patch change that throws all this out the window, don’t correct me.

Your chance to hit a target is expressed as a percentage. To hit a mob of your level (80) you have a base chance of 96%, leaving a 4% miss chance. As the difference in level progresses, the miss percentage becomes astronomically huge.

Party Parity

…or the functional equality of the GCD in a group setting.

There is something wrong with me. Probably many things, but in particular I succumb to an odd compulsion – when I start reading a blog, I eventually go back and read the archives.

All of them.

From day 1.

I need help. Or more time in the day.

Blogs on tape? Read by Scott McNeil. Yummy. /tangent off

I’ve been perusing back copies of Megan’s Out of Mana and in some of the older posts the idea of parity comes up in relation to PvP. She makes wonderful equations out of priests battling each other and which ones make the better use of their GCD, the ones that break parity and come out on top.

The thought occurred to me, if you can break parity offensively in PvP, could you do so supportively in PvE? It’s really just a different way of looking at resource management at a group level.

What follows is probably common sense to you all and you’ll hopefully agree or flame me as appropriate.

Take a task that needs to be completed and two players of the same class have the option ability to perform the task.

Two mages and a curse to be removed, two hunters and a mob to be kited, two warlocks and an elemental to be banished. Apples to apples comparison.

Theorycrafting in Schools

I think it’s a great idea. Kids always complain about not seeing the real-world application of higher math, why not use video games as the learning platform?

OK, it’s a stretch to use WoW as a “real life” application for math, but have you seen some of the stuff people do in the name of theorycrafting?

Example that is full of outdated information: http://www.wowwiki.com/Mana_regeneration

I get all warm and fuzzy looking at the charts and formulas, so pretty…

Anyway, today’s post contains math; math which I cannot claim credit or blame for… which is really why I’m putting this out here. It kinda makes sense to me, but so does theorycrafting in schools so I should probably get some more opinions.

The other day I happened across this post on DPS and damage: http://occeletaaltaholic.blogspot.com/2009/04/dps-vs-damage.html, which creepily enough, came 2 days after I had a very similar conversation with our DK tank. Global consciousness at work. Get out of my head!

DPS Whores

The talk of damage and DPS and utility and such has filled my chats the last few days. In particular, this tidbit caught me from a friend that raids as both a mage and a DK:

thats the new trend with mages, no aoe, no raid contributions, just raw damage

We had been discussing the last OS25 +1 drake we had run the other day. I was undergeared looking at 3 of the 4 other mages in the group, I could see T7.5 sets and was overcome with much jealousy. Yea verily I did covet their gear for it is purple and shiny and better than mine. But I got over it.

Obsidian Sanctum can really be broken down into two parts – everything before Sarth and then Sarth.

Before Sarth, you kill the trash and the drakes not staying up for the Sarth fight. One type of trash casts a Curse of Mending that causes the cursed player to heal the mob with attacks instead of harming them. If your top DPS gets hit with this and it doesn’t get removed or they don’t stop attacking, it can make for some serious un-damage to overcome.

I get that as the lower-expected DPS member of the group, it makes perfect sense for me to take on the de-cursing. One of us has to sacrifice a GCD to remove the curse, the group loses less if the 2500 DPS mage does it instead of the 3500 mage. I’ve always felt that it should also not fall into the healer’s camp to remove curses; it’s only a few classes/specs that can do so, and again their GCDs are better spent keeping someone alive.