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    Michael Bay


    2010 - 11.23

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, Raiding for fun (profit be damned), Things I'm learning | 4 Comments »

    Time for some silliness.

    We have this thing in guild that we like to call the “Michael Bay” strategy. Yes, after the film director. It references his subtle interplay of interlocking dialogue, careful blocking and delicate camerawork that mesmerises the player into …

    Let’s start again. The Michael Bay technique. Blow it up, kill it with fire, no subtlety, no finesse, just BIGGER EXPLOSIONS. That’s the MB technique. Hmmm, MB? Michael Bay? Mysterious Buttons? Co-incidence…?

    Anyway, we’ve been adapting and “refining” (har-har) the Michael Bay technique for some time.

    Our first Michael Bay encounter was Deathbringer Saurfang in ICC. Wee typically run with a melee-heavy group — three or sometimes four melee in 10man– and the blood beasts could be a bit of a pain. Why didn’t we just tank them? That way instead of faffing about with crowd control (stop laughing at the back) and having the ranged kiting the marauding beasts, we could hold them in melee and blow them up.

    It worked beautifully.

    Next up, the Michael Bay heroic 5 man. After a raid, there’d invariably be a couple of heroic dungeon runs for people to get their daily frost badgers. We’d often still be raid buffed. Why not abandon tanking? So we took four melee DPS and a druid healer, and set all the controls to “mince”. Simple strategy — k,ill everything before it has a chance to hurt you. Enormous fun.

    We’ve gradually added to our Michael Bay repetoire.

    Sindragosa, MB-style: one tank, two healers, seven dps. Zoom zoom1

    Festergut, MB-style: Innoculations? Bah, why bother. BIGGER EXPLOSIONS PLX. Actually, the true FesterBay hasn’t happened yet — that’s the one tank, two heals, seven DPS no spores version. We did try it on our last run, but didn’t quite make it — we were short handed and so had nine people total, and were running with three healers as we have a shiny new druid member who was experiencing (and hopefully enjoying) her first raid.

    Valithria Baywalker: Does two healing it with 8 or nine people in the raid count? I think it does.

    I’m also tempted to include BQL (who needs a third bite target?) and possibly even the time we accidentally pulled Deathwhisper while we were clearing trash, but tonight we added a new one:

    The Lich King, MB-style: One tank. Three heals (although if we’d had a disc priest, I think we might even have tried for two-healing). Heroism on the pull (more or less), push Arthas into the transition before a second Shambler spawns. Lose our warlock to a Valkyr (wtb more burst-on-demand for fire spec). Press on. Kill the raging spirits, boom. *This time*, have your fire mage remember to take care of the frost orbs during transitions. Silly Arthas picks an arcane mage to slurp into Frostmourne. Whoopsie. Shadow priest drops form to cover healing at the end and…

    Centrella the Kingslayer

    Centrella the Kingslayer

    –

    For some time now, I’ve really wanted to take Cent on an all-guild run. Sure, she’s done a fair bit in random pugs. She even did raid tactics for a very nice group and shared first kills of Valithria, Blood Princes and BQL with them. But pugs are nothing compared to running with your guild. Last Thursday we cleared as far as the blood wing, leaving Valithria, Sindy and LK himself alive. Tonight we wandered in, cleared Val and Sindy straightforwardly, then marched on to Arthas, where the Michael Bay strategy for the Lich King encounter was revealed.

    There was a pause.

    Then there was much whooping and cheering. Why not give it a go?

    And it worked! Ok, our first attempt failed when  a certain mage *cough* whose responsibility during the transitions was to use a mana-free scorch to take care of the frost orbs got distracted and, well, didn’t. Attempt number two, though… Brilliant!

    Frostmourne's nearly the right size now!

    Frostmourne's nearly the right size now!2

    In celebration we opted to do the weekly. In the Michael Bay spirit of the evening, we decided to see what happens if you just go straight for Sarth (answer: the trash murdalises you). Then we did it again, but cleared trash first, and Cent picked up her second title of the evening. And the goody bag of cash and JPs. And the dragonhide bag, before she remembered she already had it. She did generously allow someone else to pick up the drake though — in deference to the all-guild run, I guess.

    So. Probably our last raiding night before the Shattering, and Cent grabs her KS title in a guild group.

    Nice.

    Centrella the Kingslayer

    --
    1. although it’s pretty terrifying when the tank spots an opportunity to clear his stacks of mystic buffet while you’re clearing an iceblock, and you raise your eyes to look straight up the nostrils of an angry dragon [↩]
    2. The character in the background is Kingslayer #4 for that particular guildie. All gained in guild groups. Yeah, she's pretty handy to have around! [↩]

    On “fit”: part one


    2010 - 11.02

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in General purpose whinging, The Question-asker, Things I'm learning | 10 Comments »

    We had a guildie quit recently because we thought we were casual but really we were hardcore1 which left me foaming a little, mostly because I particularly hate the terms “casual” and “hardcore”. But it did get  me thinking about the notion of fit and guild culture, particularly as we also recently asked a trial member to move on. Not because they weren’t capable, but because in some way they didn’t “fit”.

    So now I’m going to vent *all over* this blog on and around the subject. It’s going to be messy2 but I’ll feel better afterward. Much like vomiting I suppose.


    Casual? Hardcore? I don’t know what those words mean.
    Hell, take them out of the game and into the real world; they’re pretty vague there, never mind within WoW.

    Casual clothes. What are casual clothes? I’ve no idea. Sweatpants and a vest? Slacks and a polo shirt? Jeans and tshirt? And don’t get me started on the dreaded “business casual” — ye gods do I hate seeing that on itineraries. Being the creative mind that I am, I’ve solved the problem by wearing pretty much the same clothes all the time whether I’m at work, in the pub, travelling, whatever. Are the clothes I wear “casual”? Hell if I know. I’m pretty casual3 about ironing them, I can tell you that

    Hardcore? Well, it’s a construction substrate. Or it’s generically used to describe someone who is keen. About… anything. I’m pretty hardcore about mustard, personally. I like it. I’m pretty hardcore4 about Bryn, my ‘levelling partner’. I like her too. I don’t like mustard in the same way I like Bryn though. It’s quite a different feeling. And I don’t recommend snogging a mustard jar at all5.

    The problem with the words “casual” and “hardcore” is that they are arbitrary. There’s no standardised definition. There’s no benchmark, no agreed “if you do *this* you are *that*”. What does one have to do to be hardcore? Who knows?6


    What about fit?
    Hardcore and casual seem to be starting point for many guild mission statements, in one way or another. Some guilds shy away from the labels, or actively declaim them. Some embrace them wholeheartedly. I wonder how many choose to define them (not a research project I’m keen to take on). Once you get past the hardcore/casual divide though, what next?

    I suspect a lot of guilds start with “don’t be an arse” as a maxim. Which is fine as far as it goes, but there’s a lot more to being comfortable in a guild than not being an arse — although it is an important first step, for our guild at least (YMMV). Particularly for smaller guilds, you’ve got find people who “fit”, and that’s a bit more subtle.

    Fit is hard to get right. It’s why you have “triallist” or “recruit” ranks in your guild roster. It’s why you go to job interviews, rather than just submitting your resume. Fit is why good teams will often beat a collection of better individuals. Fit is why companies spend huge sums of money on specialist recruiters. Fit isn’t about being a hive mind, it’s about being compatible, and having shared values as well as shared goals.

    Getting it wrong is, I suspect, a handy shortcut to guild drama, and can have a significant effect on the people in your guild. More specifics in part two…

    --
    1. not a quote, but a reasonable paraphrase IMO [↩]
    2. and possibly a bit dull [↩]
    3. in this instance, “casual” means “I do not ever” [↩]
    4. Drag your mind from the gutter please. [↩]
    5. I don’t recommend you snogging Bryn either [↩]
    6. And does spending 250 words discussing the definitions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ make me hardcore? Argh! [↩]

    New things to do


    2010 - 10.29

    Tags: , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, Things I'm learning | 7 Comments »

    So I’ve found some new fun stuff to do, but you’ll probably think it’s an odd time to do it.

    My autophobic banker-DK, Tremble (pictured there before he found himself a decent tailor) has carefully ironed and bagged his fine daywear and picked up his old sword, and is now learning all about threat, tanking in Outland. I haven’t ever made it past 60 on a DK before, so at 62 Tremble is entering rarified air. I’m still not sure about the DK playstyle, either. I’m hoping at some point the management of runes and runic power, and the costs of the various abilities will just *make sense* but at the moment I’m largely clueless.

    Which I guess means that I could very well be one of *those* DK tanks who run about sans clue. It’s actually quite hard for me to tell at the moment — the game feels very undertuned at the levels I have access to. I’ve done four or five runs of Ramps and … er … the other easy one and there have been no wipes or major embarrassments.

    Now obviously I could chalk that up to being a natural tank, gifted, spacially aware, with armour that howitzer shells bounce off and so much threat it’d take a tactical nuke to remove those mobs, but… I’m not. I’m fumbling around, occasionally regularly hitting the wrong buttons. My favourite least-favourite thing to do is to fumble my rotation so that I accidentally press the button assigned to death grip midway through a fight, dragging a mob an impressive two inches closer to me. That typically happens mere moments before the party mage or warlock crits and attracts the attention an axe-wielding manic.  That said, it’s still actually quite hard to tell whether I’m actively bad, or just a bit clumsy. More-or-less everything seems to die in just a couple of GCDs, and given the scarcity of tanks, I suspect most groups will tolerate anyone who isn’t actively working against them. I’ve never been that keen on the “hey guys, how’s my tanking?” conversational gambit in random groups (it feels rather a lot like a passive-aggressive “tell me I’m great”) so I’m a bit stuck — I don’t have any guildies in the level range to inflict my noobosity on.

    I do have to feel for poor Tremble, though. Having spent the past six months or so comfortably ensconced in Stormwind, finely dressed and troubled only by his ghoulish minions’ poor dress sense and tendency to leap on unsuspecting passers-by, he’s now quite the most mismatched looking DK around. In the absence of decent plate heirlooms in my cupboards (and because I’m actually rather keen for him to get to 80), he’s been landed with some mail items. Some *caster* mail items. The coat rack-and-chestpiece formerly worn by my little spacegoat shaman Nepo, in fact, who is waiting hopefully for Bryn’s gnome mage to level up a bit so they can quest together. I’m so cheap.

    –

    I’m *also* levelling Grammy, who when last mentioned was a teenage geriatric warlock. She’s now shot through the seasons and is nudging hard at 38 42 (what a difference a day makes).

    I know, I know, it makes absolutely NO SENSE to level a lowbie just a few short weeks from the complete revamp of the 1-60 experience. The thing is… well, the thing is, she’s just too much fun to play. Not so much in dungeons, where (unless I’m doing it completely wrong) the ramp-up time on her dots means that every mob is dead before any real damage is done (in fact, the last couple of dungeons I ran, I spent the bulk of my time spamming Rain of Fire and feeling fairly foolish) Now that she’s hit 40, I’ve picked up a destro offspec for her which seems to fare better in dungeons; with most of the groups I’ve run, Rain of Fire is still the go-to spell, but should our tank ever only have two or three mobs, immolate, conflagrate and shadowburn usually do the trick. Even though that *is* good fun, it’s not my main focus. Amazingly enough, I’m having a *blast* questing and grinding as an affliction lock. I watched one of Cynwise‘s videos a little while back, the one on drain tanking, and I thought “that looks like fun”. So I respecced to affliction, and gave it a go.

    Oh *boy* is it fun. Particularly post-patch, Grammy makes mincemeat of any “kill 20 <poor unfortunates>” or “collect 8 <organs> from <organ-free mammals>”. She’s currently hanging out in Stranglethorn, doing the Nesingwary quests; the biggest problem is depleting the available creatures too quickly. I’ve opted to stick with Konnie (her voidwalker) as the sacrifical bubble is very handy if things do start looking dicey but for the most part it’s just not necessary. Seriously, if you’ve never ‘locked before, check out that video. I challenge you to not find it appealing.

    –

    Oh yes. With Tremble out in the field, I needed a new banker. Enter Tannin, businessdwarf, bon viveur (he prefers a glass of decent wine to a mug of ale) and hunter. The fabulous thing about hunters in the 4.01+ world is that they *start* with a pet. In the case of dwarven hunters, each is provided a friendly bear, free of charge. How lovely!

    But I was weak. Soooo weak. Or perhaps Tannin’s love for bad puns will grow ever more evident. In any case, should you be wandering the cavernous halls of Ironforge, decide the time is right for some commerce and make your way to the auction house, you might encounter a purple-suited dwarf with a fetching hat and a glowing axe. He’ll undoubtedly be friendly, but he’ll almost certainly introduce you to his bear, Behind1.

    Try not to be offended, it’s not what you think. That comma *is* important.

    --
    1. I know this is terrible. But once I’d thought of it I could think of NO other name. So I gave in [↩]

    Link: The transition to cataclysm


    2010 - 10.22

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in Raiding for fun (profit be damned), Things I'm learning | 1 Comment »

    A great post over at Do not try this at home about the transition from Wrath, to 4.01, to Cataclysm:

    …the inevitable point of a vertical expansion is to take the “very powerful” characters from the previous stage and turn them into “kinda rather weak” characters in the next stage, so the cycle of power gain can be repeated. A good preparation for the venture from “easy” to “hard” would be “a bit harder”, right? Well, instead of making the game “a bit harder”, instead of requiring a little bit of crowd control, a little bit of AoE conscience, a little bit of mana awareness … instead, 4.0.1 basically punched out the bottom of the easy-barrel.

    It’s a bloody good point. We’ve been beaten over the head with how Cataclysm is going to be hard, how CC will be necessary, AoE a rarity, triage a requirement, threat a luxury. To prepare us for that difficult transition we … become Godzilla? Our raid (with, admittedly, a couple of new DPS, but still) did >20k more raid DPS on Monday’s Festergut fight than any of the previous encounters with him I could find still visible in our World of Logs entries.

    If Cataclysm really is the new challenge we I’ve somehow decided to expect, we I could be in for a rude awakening. I’m thinking I’ll be steering well clear of the forums and disabling trade chat if it is — I don’t know if it’s possible to drown in QQ, and I’ve not desire to find out.

    Go read the full post.

    The intermittent paladin


    2010 - 10.20

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, General purpose whinging, Raiding for fun (profit be damned), Things I'm learning | 5 Comments »

    Urgh. This post has turned into a monster. In this I’m talking about why I’m not playing quite as much at the moment, and a bit about retribution paladin DPS.

    Since the 4.01 patch hit, I’ve been a fairly infrequent visitor to the World of Warcraft. Partly that’s down to being busy with other things; busy at work, busy socially, other fun things to do. I must admit though, I’ve generally had a limited tolerance for the game when I *have* logged in. That’s not because of the changes to how retribution paladins play (I’ll talk about that in a bit), but more to do with the boring technical parts of the game, and with a current absence of in-game goals.

    Technical?
    Firstly, there’s the technical1 stuff, which is closely connected to how and why I play. For example: I believe I’d be right in saying that most raiding players have fairly heavily customised interfaces. Obviously the degree varies, and there are plenty of players who are hugely successful raiding with the stock UI, but anecdotally, interface customisation seems prevalent. Addons are pretty important, and their effect on gameplay ranges from the inconsequential-but-convenient (SellJunk, ChefsHat) to the OMG-it’s-not-working-what-should-I-do (Raid/healing frames, action bar/unitframe replacements).

    I hate dealing with that stuff. For the longest time, the only addons I ran were the peripheral sort, which required little configuration and could live without being integrated into the interface. Omen and recount were the only significant presences onscreen, and they were just… well, positioned as best I could to keep them out of the way. I did *try* some deeper customisation, but took one look at the resulting mess on first login and … just no.

    EDIT: missing sentence here, clearly. Which should read “Eventually I decided I needed to do it, and spent some time fiddling and configuring a new interface”.

    So: having to redo all of that, with addons that are continually updating, breaking, not-quite-working or plain not-yet ready? Hell. I hate it. Particularly interface layout — I spend all day doing layout, and whilst I love my job, when I log into Warcraft (or embark on any hobby) I’m doing so because I want to do something else. If I wanted to do more layout, well… I could continue working, or a could maybe make this site (or one of the other sites I’m supposedly working on) look a little less rubbish. But I don’t want to, because that’s work, and I’m here to play (insert XT voice sample here). Multiply that by however many characters on however many servers, and that’s a big pile of ‘no, ta.’

    Plus there’s the fact that miscellaneous things don’t work at all, randomly stop working, or are buggy. I don’t have any major gripe about this: I’m happy to accept that in a release of this size, there are going to be bugs which don’t get caught or which aren’t deemed severe enough to be fixed before release. I’m happy to accept that addons are free, therefore having any expectation of them at all is unreasonable, and totally grateful to the developers of the various addons I use for not only creating and releasing them, but for their alacrity in responding to changes to the game client.

    I don’t have to enjoy living with a buggy gameworld or buggy interface. I certainly don’t have to play whilst it’s not working properly. So there! *stamps foot*

    What would you like to do today?
    Hmm, dunno. I mean, I posted a list of things I wouldn’t mind doing on our guild forums a week or two ago. A few achievements in the WotLK heroics to get a drake. Outland dungeons/heroics I still haven’t seen. Take Centrella on her first all-guild raid (and, having seen the OPness of our raid group post-patch, I’m adding “get Kingslayer” to that).  See the Algalon fight. Not much of it is feeling particularly pressing though.

    Running heroics to build up a supply of justice points for some nebulous future purpose holds little interest for me. Neither does the idea of cheesing ICC heroic modes for achievements or marginal gear upgrades. I was considering the idea of lerning2PVP but by the sounds of things, balance is a bit of an issue right now, so it’s probably not a great time to start.

    So: I don’t have much in the way of goals to drive me to log in every night and tolerate the bugginess etc. Anyway, that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about paladining.

    Retribution in 4.01
    As you might have guessed, I don’t have extensive experience. I spent perhaps 30 mins over the past week whacking test dummies in Stormwind, to get a feel for the new paladin rotation/priority system. Then on Monday, we took a trip into ICC. It was very interesting, but my thoughts can probably best summarised as a bulleted list:

    • Retribution DPS on single targets appears to be just fine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. On the stand-there-and-hit-him fights, where I could forget about movement and concentrate on pressing the buttons at the right time (that’s Saurfang using the Michael Bay strategy, and Festergut), I was doing over 12k — a little more than I’d typically have done in the past and just enough to plonk me at the top of the DPS chart for those fights.
    • On fights where there was lots of movement, my DPS ranged from pretty good all the way down to pretty terrible. This doesn’t especially worry me though, as there are number of contributing factors, all of which I can fix over time.
      • Firstly and most importantly, I simply need more practice at hitting the right buttons at the right time. Having to think about what to press next means it all goes to hell if I have other things to consider. The order of precedence for abilities has changed significantly, and seems much more situational; my muscle memory needs retraining!
      • To support that, I probably need to change my keybinds a little, as I need instant access to a larger number of abilities and the bodge-layout I set up for Monday left me reaching all over the keyboard.
      • I also need to clean up my various proc alerts to simplify the display and actually show what I’m interested in — currently it’s a MESS for me. I don’t much fancy working on this until the bugginess/addon compatibility problems are a little less rife.
      • I probably attempted to get a bit too clever a bit too quickly, trying to “strategically” use abilities and cooldowns that I don’t fully understand yet, which generally had the effect of competely borking my output whenever I tried it. Stupid paladin is stupid — I guess somethings don’t change (in before the DiscoPriest :) )
    • Retribution DPS for trash/AOE seems woeful. Well, perhaps not woeful, but on trash fights where I’d typically have expected to shine (or at least share the glory) I was generally well down. This could, of course, be part of the same pressing-the-wrong-buttons problem that I had on movements fights, but I got the feeling that even getting it exactly right, I’d still be weak. On the pre-Sindragosa trash (the buggy little dragonettes), our newest rogue did a majestic 30k. I did 10, ish *sadface*. More investigation needed, of course.

    I am encouraged, though. Whilst I do miss the slightly frantic PRESS A BUTTON NOW2 nature of the ret paladin in Wrath, the new abilities and priorities are not without merit, and once I have my proc alerts working correctly I think it will be fun to play. One of the things I really enjoyed about retadin-ing was the way procs rewrote what you did next on the fly (especially with 2pc t10 resetting Divine Storm’s cooldown). The next buttonpress was heavily dependent on what had procced, and I like that. I’ll take Berserking over Massacre, not because it’s higher DPS (although it is), but because I like the oop-here’s-all-my-procs-at-once-hold-onto-your-aggro moments that can crop up. I’ve no idea how much mastery will be available as we level and get Cataclysm gear, but if there’s a reasonable amount then I could be a very happy paladin.

    The little bit of theorycrafting I have read seems to suggest that paladins now have a third stat to “cap” — in addition to the hit cap, and the expertise cap, thanks to haste’s interaction with crusader strike, there are now haste targets to aim for which allow more rapid use of CS and therefore a faster build up of holy power. The tradeoff between haste and other stats (including mastery) will be interesting.

    Conclusion
    Do I have a conclusion? Not really. But “will be interesting” doesn’t seem like much of an ending to me. Instead I’ll end by congratulating Aidan, Tanka and Dain, all of whom picked up Kingslayer titles last night in a LK oneshot (which I wasn’t present for). Aidan is the rogue mentioned above doing stupid DPS on trash, and Tanka is Anka, grabbing Kingslayer for a second hunter. Confused? Me too…

    --
    1. Okay, it’s not really technical, but I can’t think of the right word [↩]
    2. NB: that’s press A button now, not press ANY button now. Facerolling might have provided acceptable DPS, but who the hell wants to do “acceptable” DPS? Not me. [↩]
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