Mooonfire!

The place is a mess, there are posts that need fixing, the various lists on the sidebar are extremely old and you have no idea what I’m up to in-game these days. Also, I have a developing rant about what makes raiding fun.

You do not, however, get any of these things right now, because my first post back after a long, long hiatus, is about my current spec, what makes it fun, and what I might change.

You can find it by examining me on the armory, and it’s something of an odd spec- A variation of the Dreamstate healer (itself uncommon) without the classic support talent Brambles. It takes the DPS-enhancing talents intead.

So why do I like this build? Versatility.

We were in Karazhan last night. We had zero warrior tanks. Nada. We had only two healers (both druids, neither me). Majinbill, a paladin, was our main tank. Maj and I have this understanding, and we’ve now tanked, as a team, all of Karazhan (and upper Kara twice).

We started out fine. No priests, so no real CC against undead. One of the DPS face-pulled a second pull during the stables. We didn’t even notice until after the pull was down. Midnight/Attumen were cake and, coincidentally, dropped the scope schematic I’d been hoping for for a very, very long time.

Moroes? No CC. Shadow priestess, holy priestess, prot warrior, ret paladin. No real trouble. Maj held Moroes/Ret and I held Moroes/Crispin until the priests were down. Fury warriors went to work on Ret. Crispin was my buddy for the remainder of the evening. I died due to healer inattention, but then we were running with two healers where our guild traditionally takes three.

Maiden? Maj and I both put on our healing sets. He cleansed and did spot heals, I healed, one of the fury warriors tanked her (We had already determined that I could in fact hold aggro on her just fine with only my instants, but two healers was insufficient for the damage flying around).

Opera? Romulo and Julianne. What’s the problem here?

No dispel.

Lots of interrupts- no dispel. We tried it with me tanking Julianne and Maj tanking Romulo. Problem? Not enough healing. Okay, I put on the healing gear and strap one of the fury warriors back into their tanking gear, away we go.

Curator? Cake. I have a partial arcane resist set, so I soaked up bolts and pretended to be DPS while Maj took the big guy.

Aran? Double cake. I just pretended I was DPS (and took out two of the water elementals on my own).

Prince? Triple cake. Drop into the healer set and let Mr. Pally have all the fun. Once we hit phase 3 the healing requirements slackened off, but we needed DPS, so… wrath away!

So why this post? We were talking it over in the raid, and realized just how useful it is to have a raid member who can, at need, be any of the three roles.

I love my spec. It makes me all happy.

(It’s pure gravy that neither our prot paladins nor our prot warriors can hold threat against me if I decide to take the mobs away- something we used to our advantage in Karazhan last night. “Llanion, you take skull, I’ll hold the others. Burn skull, then grab one off me and keep going.”)

Is there anything I’d change? Honestly, yes- I’d like a point or three in Subtlety. My aggro is still sufficient to match a Warrior, and I would have a higher cap on my DPS in raids when I’m filling the DPS role. I’m still thinking about it.
Hopefully my next post won’t have such a long gap. Peace!

~Ll

Mad Cow Chronicles: Heroes of Underbog from Llanion on Vimeo.

Today’s entry is the first in what will (hopefully) be a series called “Mechanics With a Rubber Wrench”. The theme is to break down, into simple concepts and ideas, the not-so-horribly-simple and occasionally viciously-complex mechanics of World of Warcraft.

In this way, you can learn to be a better [player|raider|PVPer|Artisan Chef] without having to do the math. This is helpful if you’re not mathematically inclined, if the whole idea of ‘defense rating’ is confusing, or if you’re just lazy.

Today’s topic: The Hit Table.

If you, or someone you know, has abnormally low DPS in fights, don’t despair! You may not be an utter noob! It’s not necessarily that your weapon sucks, that your skill rotations are terrible or that your pet spent half the instance trying to do unspeakable things with the tank’s leg!

It could just come down to Hit Rating!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have an example of The Hit Table. Now here’s how attacks work in game, as far as anyone’s been able to piece together from research and Blizzardian tidbits.

When you swing your weapon or fire your bow, a /roll 10000 takes place on the server. Your attack is placed somewhere on this table based on what you rolled. Let’s assume 0 is at the top of the table and 10000 is at the bottom (though it doesn’t really matter- we just need an arbitrary method of placing a roll on the table).

Clearly, you want your htis to land on Critical Strike or Hit, and definitely do NOT want them landing on Block, Glancing Blow, Parry, Dodge or, heaven forfend, Miss. But how to ensure that this happens?

Well, imagine that there’s an endless supply of Hit ‘below’ the chart, constantly welling upwards- that is to say, any empty space on the chart will be immediately filled, because all the fields move up to fill the empty space, and the Hit segment expands as needed to make sure there’s no gaps left.

I won’t go into the math here, but the various sizes of the segments of the chart are based on many things:

• Your Level
• The mob’s level
• Your weapon skill
• Whether you are fighting from range
• Whether you are in front of or behind the mob
• Whether you are single or dual-wielding
• Your gear’s statistics (expertise, critical hit rating, agility, and hit rating)
• Whether or not the Balance-talented spell “Improved Faerie Fire” is present on the mob
• Whether you’ve eaten Spicy Hot Talbuk recently
• Probably more that I’ve missed…

Assumptions I’m going to be making include:

You are level 70; The mob is a raid boss (level 73, which the game shows as a skull); You are NOT dual-wielding; you have your weapon skill at 350; you are either fighting at range (guns, bows, crossbows or thrown) or are standing in the mob’s rear arc.

With those assumptions made, I can tell you, definitively, the following things:

1: Without some boost to your abilities, you are going to miss 9% of your attacks. Sucks to be you.

2: You will not ever get parried or dodged; those two things require a frontal-arc melee attack.

Okay, so missing 9% of your attacks… well, that’s bad! But wait a minute- let’s assume for a second that my chance to land a critical hit can be boosted insanely high- to 100%- then you’ll never miss and always crit, right?

Wrong. Critical Strike is second from the bottom and can’t expand upwards until other things “get out of the way”. (It can, however, expand downwards, meaning that you no longer land normal hits but instead all criticals. This is referred to as ‘pushing off the table’, as in ‘My crit rating is so high I’ve pushed normal hits off the table.’)

So… how to get these other things out of the way?

Eliminating Dodge and Parry:

Stand away from the mob and fight at range; or; attack from behind. Attacks from behind cannot be dodged nor parried. Similarly, ranged attacks cannot be dodged or parried. Those two chances will be reduced to 0; those entries can be entirely taken out of the table (not pushed off, but actually removed completely). The second way of doing this is with Expertise Rating, which I am not going to go into in-depth today; Let it suffice to say that with sufficient Expertise Rating, you can attack from in front and still allow zero chance to be parried or dodged.

Eliminating Glancing Blows:

Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t do this, and though I hate to agree with conventional wisdom I’ve yet to see a scrap of proof that says there’s a way to reduce the chance of these things happening. Sorry.

Eliminating Blocks:

See above, ‘Glancing Blows’.

Eliminating Missed Attacks:

Here we come to the meat of the subject. It is not only possible but actually simple to reduce the chance that you will miss to zero.

Attain a hit rating of at least 142 points.

Hit ‘rating’ and hit ‘chance’ are not, of course, the same thing. And again, there’s lots of complex math but, take it from me, the 9% miss chance vs. a level-Skull mob is removed with 142 hit rating. This is referred to as ‘the hit cap’ for hunters and melee classes that single-wield (anyone using the classic ’sword-and-board’ combo, anyone using a two-handed weapon and, of course, feral druids). At this level of hit rating, you will never actually miss.

There are of course ways to lower that number- various classes have talents that increase chance to hit (generally by 3%, reducing their hit cap by 47); a draenei Paladin, Warrior or Hunter’s racial aura reduces the hit cap of their party by 15.77 by their mere presence (1% chance to hit) and, of course, a druid tagging the mob with a three-point Improved Faerie Fire allows another 3% (47-point) reduction for anyone attacking that mob physically.

But How?

As noted above- be Draenei of the appropriate class, talent for it, beg a Balance druid to come along. There’s also hit rating on gear; ranged users (almost always hunters) can pick up ranged-only hit rating via the [Biznick’s] (but good luck finding an engineer who has the schematic, these days). Finally there are gems, a [glyph], the Surefooted enchant and even [food] that can be used to top yourself out. (Hunters can also get an improving leg or head armor kit via Zul’Gurub, but that place is rarely run these days).

Now you know how the hit table (theoretically, anyway) works! This should allow you (and your raidmates, feel free to point them here) to up their DPS much faster than simply stacking crit chance or attack power. It also makes for more predictable damage, which makes your tanks very, very happy.

Go forth and conquer! (and, seriously, if your raidmates keep complaining about their miss numbers, send them here…)

I figure it’s important to put something up here so you know I’m not dead (beyond “I’ll do a real post later, I promise”).

So here you are.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing! I’ve been working on the stuff referred to in the video, either in-game or out.

It behooves me (ahahaha!) to learn that I should never make predictions about upcoming posts, either in particulars regarding date, substance, category or number. It seems that saying I’m going to post, no matter in what way or how nebulous the reference, leads to my being compelled to spend at least one week not-blogging.

In theory, I have now learned this. In practice, I suspect, not so much.

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I respecced recently. I went from 17/0/44 “Angry Tree” Heal/Solo/Utility build to a 37/0/24 “Raid Support” Heal/Solo/Utility build. I am finding many things about this.

1. Dreamstate + Intensity = Mana Regen, whoa.
2. Nature’s Grace is my friend. Suddenly there’s a point to getting crits on spells.
3. I need to run a heroic to see how this changes my healing style. I do have a couple ideas involving spamming downranked spells to force crits.
4. I miss Swiftmend.
5. My raidmates love me; Improved Faerie Fire means that the hunters, rogues, enhancment shamans, tanks and fury warriors can pretty much slice 47 hit rating out of their gear without injury to their DPS. They’re all happy now about how they can put more gear, gems, and other enhancements towards straight-up damage stats. (In some cases, this means they can use buff foods they want instead of Spicy Hot Talbuk.)
6. Just the fact that Faerie Fire will be on the mobs means the damage happens faster and harder. If only Imp FF gave the same bonus to spells…
7. Insect Swarm. 2% chance to miss makes for happier healers. Just the fact that I can put this up during fights now makes for shorter fights, which also makes for happier healers.
8. Healing Touch can weasel its way back into my healing rota. In fact, I have this neat theory about a downranked Healing Touch- I can’t say too much here, lest the curse strikes again.
9. I can see my gear again. I’ll be frank, I don’t like looking like a wilted piece of broccoli, and I really don’t like the 80% movement snare. If Andriges’ skins (thanks to Phaelia for showcasing these on Resto4Life) were in the game, this would be a different matter, but they aren’t.
10. I have Moonkin form for the first time in my druiding career. It’s rather tasty, though I must admit I keep forgetting to use it. On the other hand, now that there’s no pressing reason for me to be glommed in with the tank group, I can be in the caster group, which means that there are some evil things happening on, say, trash pulls… or during Curator’s Evocates… or on Shade if he’s not hitting us hard enough…
11. I have found that I much prefer Control of Nature 3/3 to Nature’s Grasp+2 points of Impr. NG.
12. If I want to group and they already have a healer… I’m actually useful now. I don’t have to just mumble about raking my leaves and rustle off to sit in a corner. I can DPS in five-mans.
13. Spirit is now on-par, in my personal item-budgeting thoughts, with Intellect (Int takes the place of Spirit as regards the 25% bonus to +healing… though now it gives +damage as well. And even when not in tree form). This is great, because, uh, there are a lot of sources for +int. Including the [Flask of Distilled Wisdom]. An actual flask that has a point for healing now! It’s great. (Well, okay, so 16 +dmg/heal and 6.5 MP5 isn’t exactly gamebreaking. It’s more advantage than I got from that flask in my old build, and better than yet more mana regen).
14. MmmmmmmOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONFIRE!

I know, I know, no new posts in almost two weeks.

That’s because it’s flu season! I spent most of last week flat on my back. But!

After five (six? four?) downs, the Curator finally released my shoulderpads.

And tonight, for the first time, KMM/Timeless downed The Prince of Karazhan. Prince Malchezaar met his sticky end at our hands, and relinquished Light’s Justice, which was given to me.

I am thrilled.

I was working my way towards my next upgrade- an upgraded mace, since the bosses we’re downing are generous with all the healing gear except weaponry- in Eye of the Storm recently, when I came to an interesting conclusion.

It works sort of like this:

No, really. I started to notice that the people I was healing were, well, actually sticking with me. I even got a couple comments in /s: “Nice heals!”
“good healing”
“you worthless [profane statement regarding gender, romantic preference, and/or hereditary legitimacy]ers, I’m not going to cap the flag unless you get three towers”

I let that last guy die.

My by-now-decently-sized group moved, at my whim, towards the less-heavily-defended of the Alliance towers. They did not fight to control the center, they did not ‘attack, die/win, run away regardless’. We fought until the tower went down, and since I didn’t move, we stayed until it was solidly Horde-aligned.

Then we started making captures, moving two at a time, me paired with some swifter-moving DPSery type.

I guess the point of this post is to explain that healers really do seem to have a good amount of deciding power in determining the flow of a battleground. I haven’t noticed the effect so much in AV, possibly because it’s so spread out, but I think the phenomenon is worth researching.

And if I get to punt gnomes in the name of research, well, it’s a good day to be me.

What do you think? Are we destined to see a wave of Healers-Generale, or am I just a deluded cow in a tuxedo?

(Got 49 on Monday, the last one Tuesday- Tux’d the whole way. No other gear but a riding crop and a Frostwolf Howler.)

After managing to totally harf up the combat log recording in the early part of yesterday’s Kara run, I recorded our final attack on the Maiden of Virtue with WoW Web Stats.

There are some neat things you can isolate from the report (found here, for the curious).

For example, Maliata’s pet Ikktan has a total of 809 damage dealt to foes. Why? He died less than a full minute into the fight- shown by his ‘Present from-to’ stat at the top of his page. If we needed more confirmation, he only managed to hit Maiden fourteen times- over three minutes, that’s abnormally low, so we can conclude he died early. How? Well, he’s got In: Fire damage. He must’ve eaten an early Holy Fire for us. Poor, noble Scorpid.

What else can we derive? Well, Capnmurphy looks like he’s not performing up to spec, but a look at his total more detailed breakdown tells the true story. He needs better hit gear- 27% glancing and 22% misses means he just couldn’t catch the Maiden enough. He also used First Aid and his Healthstone intelligently- good work!

Unfortunately the Combat Log attributes lifebloom healing from the final ‘bloom’ to their recipient, not their caster; it’s easy enough to see, however, that I dropped Lifebloom on Cap’n a total of five times during the fight (blooming off for 1218 each time).

Third, you can see that I did some major healing in this fight; of the three healers, I outdistance the other two put together (moreso when you add up the roughly 35k+ in ‘uncredited’ bloom-explosions across the other players). Why am I so far ahead on the meters? Am I really that amazing?

No, not really. Sorry. Here’s the true story, though it takes a little digging.

Look at Asundar’s profile. He’s got physical damage on his damage in chart and an 88% uptime. That means he was for some reason not healing for 12% of the fight, and something was dealing him Normal damage. If you examine the fact that all his Normal damage appears to be coming from a friendly target… you can conclude that he had Blessing of Sacrifice on Beta. Was he awake the whole fight?

Well, yes. So why the 12% not-healing?

Examine Asundar’s Miscellaneous Applied: 10 Cleanses. That’s right, Asundar was in charge of removing Holy Fire.

So Asundar had 12% downtime (I think, but cannot prove yet, that WWS considers ‘downtime’ to be ‘time more than 1.5 seconds since you last healed someone’), and had his own work to do keeping people cleansed. Fair enough!

Why is Weedbull matching him?

Easy, check his uptime: 62%. Poor fella didn’t have a blessing of sacrifice to snap him out of Repentance, and did as well as he could, considering. Plus Earth Shield, like Lifebloom’s final ‘pop’, is logged to the recipient, not the caster- Beta has 14k+ of healing that was actually Weedbull’s fault.

So why am I so far ahead?

Look first at my detailed breakdown. I have a HPS time of 100%- there is not so much as two seconds during that entire 3-minute fight when I don’t have a heal blazing away somewhere. Those of you familiar with the Maiden fight will know what that means: I was never asleep longer than the duration of one of my HoTs. (in fact, I was never asleep longer than two seconds, but WWS doesn’t parse that information).

How could I pull that off? Look at my Damage In. I was not fighting at range- between the Repentances Her Maidenosity got off, I managed to take an additional 40 hits of holy damage. And yet I’m not completely crazy- Beta took almost 120 Holy hits that weren’t Repentance. Even if he took some hits from Holy Wrath (Maiden did manage to toss several of those!) I was taking far less holy damage than he was.

One can conclude (correctly!) that I flame-danced, waiting until I suspected another Repentance would come up before dashing into the Holy Ground for an early wake-up call. Risky? Maybe. Did it pay off?

Well yeah. We got her down. See? She’s got one death listed.

(Another contributing factor to my huge total healing: Check out the ‘lifebloom scatter’. I was tossing those things left, right and center. Some people got several, almost everybody got at least one).

So is there a point to this?

Yes. Learn how to log your combat. Learn from your fights! WoW Web Stats makes it easy to filter into pretty charts, but there are other ways of examining your combat log too. Read it. Learn from it. Adapt to what it tells you.

And props to Spizzle for never needing the attention of a healer. Well done, dude.

There are two goals in this battleground. Goal number one: Take towers (including the corollary- HOLD the towers).

Goal number two: Capture the flag.

A word on #2: The flag? It respawns. Refusing to capture it for five minutes when we have two towers and control center field is not just tactically unsound, but it’s stupid. And it makes me hate you.

I have filed this under Groups, for that is what it pertains to.

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