Mooonfire!

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…)

Geez. Sorry for the alarm, folks, your local druid needs to remember to check his talent points when they might, say, have gotten reset during the patch. Appropriate strikeouts are in place below.

You know what I hate right now?

A number.

The number is this: 0.4.0.7958.

It’s the patch number for the current version of Patch 2.4 currently under testing on the test realms. My hatred for this number currently comes because of one line in the Public Test Realm Patch Notes.

Let’s talk Lifebloom.

I’ll warn you now, this post is going to get long, it’s a wall of text because there were no relevant images, and it makes no assumptions about how familiar you are with the game’s mechanics or the math that goes into them. If you want the short version, please, press CTRL+F or your browser’s equivalent and search for the text “Self? This isn’t going to make sense for a lot of people.”

You’re familiar with the spell Lifebloom, I’m sure, if you group with (or are) a restoration-specced druid.

• It deals a small amount of healing every second for up to seven seconds, then delivers a ‘bloom’ of healing at the end of the spell.
• If it’s dispelled, the ‘bloom’ goes off instantly.
• It’s instant-cast and fairly mana-cheap.
• It can be stacked on a single target up to three times, and re-casting it refreshes its duration (as well as adding a stack if it’s not already fully stacked).
• I have remarked before on how it’s a passive form of mind control.
• It’s the major staple of druid healers.

So, now that we’re on the same page, why is this post about Lifebloom? Well, I’m not the only one who’s talking about this, but here’s the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty details.

In Warcraft, there are two statistics intimately known by all casters, healer or otherwise: Bonus damage and bonus healing. They’re commonly abbreviated +healing and +damage, and are seen on caster items. What do they do, and why are they useful? Well, just as noted in their description, they improve healing and damage spells by ‘up to’ the amount listed. Some spells get more advantage than others, generally (but not always) based on the cast time. Once you get to level 66, give or take, a caster can increase their efficiency by garnering large amounts of these stats. Clearly, one cast of, say, Fireball does X damage. Now, in order to do 5X damage, you can do one of two things:

• Stack enough Intellect and/or mana regen gear that you can do 5 Fireballs. Of course, you’ve just spent five times as much mana, and taken five times as long, not to mention provided five times as many resist chances.

OR

• Stack enough spell damage to make your Fireball, say, 2.5 times as powerful. Then you only need twice the mana and time of a single Fireball, but do five times the damage.

Let’s translate this to healing. Let’s pretend I’ve totally lost my mind and am using Healing Touch. Let’s further pretend that I have some mystical magical rank of Healing Touch that does exactly 1000 health.

We’re going to keep pretending- it takes 1000 mana, and 3 seconds to cast. This means that I can spent 1000 mana and restore 1000 health, every 3 seconds.

Okay. Now I put on gear that has exactly +500 to healing. Further, assume that Healing Touch gets 100% of my +healing effects (it actually does!). Now I can restore 1500 health every 3 seconds for 1000 mana. My health per second- important in heroics and raiding- has gone up significantly. My mana efficiency (also important) has also gone up significantly. Before, 3000 points of damage would take me 9 seconds and 3000 mana; now those figures are 6 seconds and 2000 mana. Note the (major!) improvements.

So how does all this relate to Lifebloom? Well, Lifebloom as a basic spell is: 39 health restored to the target per second, per stack, and a 600-point bloom.

With my gear (armory link to the right, or click here) as it stands now, I do about 175 healing per sec/stack. That’s the result of not quite 1400 +healing on my gear. Yes, I’m epicced out. The trick of it is, the only way to improve Lifebloom is, basically, with +healing. ‘Spamming’ it won’t help- because there’s no direct heal until the over-time effect wears off, and because every time it hits the target that effect is refreshed, Lifebloom cannot be used to rapidly increase a target’s health. In tree form, your only option for spamming is Regrowth- which has a drawback. Even assuming it crits (not an unhealthy assumption, when you’ve got +50% crit chance on that spell from talents), you’re talking about a 3000 point heal.

The drawback? It sucks away a lot of your mana pool. It’s not a spell you can really afford to spam. Plus, spamming it ‘eats’ a long HoT that you probably wouldn’t mind having on your tank.

Swiftmend can be used, of course, but at once per 15 seconds, it’s not spammable either.

So what does all this verbiage boil down to? Druids are not really meant for healing large chunks of damage fast for long fights. Priests do that. Paladins do that. Shaman do that. They do it (honestly!) better than we do. Our job, as druids, is to give a nice buffer with our healing-over-time spells that keeps the tank from ever needing big heals, if we can. We can, of course, do the nice spike heals at need, but our skills aren’t balanced around that; we go out of mana relatively fast doing that sort of thing. By and large, druids are designed to even out spikes, to make a ’spam’ healer’s job easier. Healing in that way, with a priest, paladin or shaman partnering with us, as a team we can endure long, long fights.

So… why this post?

Well, I was on the Public Test Realms over lunchtime. I’d heard about Lifebloom getting some changes, so Lanion went and threw himself into the air in Shattrath, then dropped onto the ground. (Incidentally, I want to know, really, who, took the name Llanion on the US PTR? Before I started the character I made absolutely certain there was no active Lv10+ character in the game with that name… but I digress.)

When Lanion landed, his Lifebloom spell did this:

128, 127, 128… 1173

160, 160, 160…

Then I switched back over to the Live realms, on Arathor, and had Llanion throw himself off a tower.

I got this: 172, 172, 172… 1269.

In both cases, I was doing this with no neckpiece on (that’s the one piece of my gear that’s changed since I made the PTR clone).

So I thought to myself: “Self? This isn’t going to make sense for a lot of people. Can you break it down at all?”

Edit: This experiment will be re-conducted this evening when I have a moment on the Live realms.

I started pulling pieces of gear off, on the Live side, to see what it would take to reduce my Lifebloom to the proposed 2.4 levels.

First I took off [my weapon]. Then [one ring]. Then [the other ring].

That’s right. In order to get 127/128 lifebloom ticks, the level I will have fully geared after 2.4 hits, I am required to entirely remove Light’s Justice, which is the best pre-25-man one-handed healer mace in the game, the Revered-level Violet Signet and the Keeper’s Ring of Piety.

Ladies, gentlemen, please go post on the Test Realm forum. Please. I am not kidding when I say that this is going to make taking a Restoration druid on your raids far, far and away less fruitful than another paladin for an extra blessing, or another shaman for totems, or another priest for, heck, Prayer of Mending or a second Renew stack or something funky.

These changes, if they go through, essentially set me back to the level my Lifebloom was at several weeks and epics ago. before I started Karazhan. It will mean my staple healing spell is at the level of instance blues, and I don’t mean heroics, despite the fact that I am now outfitted in 90% epics with a T5-equivalent helmet. Blizzard seems to think this will ‘fix’ the 2v2 prevalence of Druids. It won’t. In Arenas, I am reliably informed, Druids don’t rely on the ticks from Lifebloom, they rely on the final Bloom (which is actually stronger in 2.4 than Live). This change really only affects PVE.

Test Realm forums. Protest. Represent. Something. Anything.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is absolute and utter bullshit. Sorry for the language, but it’s true, and it has me tasting bile.

Edit to add: No, it is not as skull-crushingly hideous as I thought. Is it still bad? Yes. At early raiding gear and in early raiding situations, you’ll be losing ~20 hp/sec/stack/tank. Translated, 120 HP over two tanks assuming a full stack on each.

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.

So here it is, after two weeks. The initial and somewhat primitive version of the first Spellcheck:

Fill in the values and press the ‘Calculate’ button.

Rank: