Meters vs. Not Sucking. Which wins?

Yep, you guessed it. Still on the bus but at least the snow is done. So let's move down the list. By the way, if you want to add something you'd like me to talk about to my list just e-mail me at Kreeoni at gmail dot com or send me a tweet on twitter.

Topping meters versus paying attention. First off, what are meters? Damage meters are those add-ons people use to measure their performance. I'm sure I've mentioned them in previous posts.

Meters can be a good thing when used properly and when read right. By properly I mean ignore them. If all you are doing is focusing in on an add-on then you will miss the important stuff. The important part of raiding is not how well you are doing on a meter but how well you perform overall.

For instance, take a priest who stacks only +healing but ignores the usefulness of everything else. Then he looks that the meters and sees his overall healing the highest. but this priest never cleanses and on a long or healing intensive fight runs out of mana.

how about a hunter who maximizes her DPS so she is always top on the meters, but never moves out of the reign of fire or won't kite because she thinks a no armor, low hp mage should do it instead.

Sure on the meters these people are the best but their usefulness is extremely limited. Winning boss fights requires each and everyone performing well. Performance is the sum of all the parts, not just the parts.

Ok, I'm tired, enough "tales from the late bus."

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WoW Blizzcon News - Day 1

Some of you may have been there, some may have been keeping up with the news by friends(like I was), some maybe even got the DirectTV broadcast(which from what I hear cut out a lot), and yet some of you may not know anything about the goings on of Blizzcon.

For all you noobs out there Blizzcon is the annual Blizzard Convention held in California(because they are too cheap to do it on the east coast). Usually at this even there is much hype of the brand new games or expansions that Blizzard is coming out with. Normally there is some major announcement that they wait until this day to tell people. Oh and of course there is always lots and lots of lines to get your swag or to play that new hyped expansion or game. And you get to watch people as they walk around dressed up as their favorite World of Warcraft or Diablo or Indiana Jones(oh wait he wasn't created by Blizzard?) characters.

Unlike past year this year's announcements were pretty bleh. I am happy that I didn't care to want to go to Blizzcon this year(not much of a convention guy to tell you the truth, maybe if it were say in New England). The ultra major news they released at their opening ceremonies was that the Wizard class would be playable for Diablo 3. /yawn I personally have never gotten into Diablo myself but even people who did play it thought that wasn't a good enough announcement.

For us WoW fans though we did get some announcements in the form of the Class Panel discussion held later in the day with Tom "Kalgan" Chilton and Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street("There is a rumour on the forums that I'm a hot chick. You know it's true!"). I'm not going to talk about specific class changes, if you want info on that then visit WoW Insider's live-blog or the shortened version at MMO Champion.

I just want to hone in on the things that will effect us for raiding. The largest announcement for us in this session was the announcement of the ability to dual spec. Now not all details were given out at this so don't get too too excited just yet but the announcement is well received by us anyways.

What is Dual Spec? Well from the discussion today it's the ability to hold two separate specs and interchange them when needed. This will let people change their spec at whim without physically going back to the trainer. There was no mention as to how this will be implemented or if it will cost more gold. This will not be able to be used in the middle of arena matches though so no "OMG it's a Ret pally, spec ferlol!" moments, sorry. Dual specs will not mean just one set of gear although it will still mean certain classes will be able to do it without carrying more gear(IE - shadow priest to holy priest).

So how does this help us? Well the obvious. The "I need 3 tanks to kill all this trash to BigBossDude but he is a one tank fight", the "o crap, master healman has dc'd but we are on fast trash timers here", the "man you suck as resto, go boomkin and be useful" moments come to mind. Now you can have everyone come prepared for two specs and never have to cancel a raid because you are missing something but have a plethora of another. This is great news for the single player as well as the raid leaders!

Oh but there is more, the panel also has brung to light the reason why they are making all these class spec changes. "Bring the player, not the class" is their new motto. They don't want to make ability's so overpowered that you need to cancel the raid and they don't want it so that only one class has it. One example to this is that feral druids and warriors now have a viable aoe tanking ability. They want to make skill and gear worth more than buffs("Jimmy can't come ->No Wind Fury -> Cancel the raid")or potions(Potion lockouts, drum lockouts, etc). Buffs will not stack anymore but aura's and most buffs are raid wide. There will be multiple ways to get the same benefit which means you will have more room to bring who you want, rather than who you need. They want us to bring good players, not have to suffer with sitting out the good ones while the ones that need to learn are inside.. learning.

Lastly(I know you have already reached the TL;DR phase), they are making the game have less emphasis on threat. They rather have fights have emphasis on moving around and healing, not halting all dps cause the tank has not enough aggro. No more staring at aggro and waiting 5 minutes while your Pally builds up enough threat for you to cast 3 frostbolts and wait again. Now you wait a few seconds and unleash hell!

Some of this stuff is coming out with the new patch, some we will have to wait for a while, but all of it spells some great changes for us to look forward to. Raiding with these new changes is going to be exciting and it will really lend opportunity to some interesting fights for them to come up with rather than the same old stuff with a new model(not that it wont happen anyways).

Thanks for sticking with me through this long one. If tomorrow brings more pertinent info from Blizzcon I will try to keep updated. Until then, back to your regular scheduled blog.

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WoW Target Dummies

Last few nights I have been with on the PTR testing out specs and getting a feel for how raiding might be once this patch hits. Mainly we've been running Kara and just doing whatever it takes to push our limits. So far we've 3 manned Attumen and 5 manned the rest of Kara and that's with us trying to overdo ourselves with chain pulling non-stop and pulling extra groups at a time and just overall doing stupid things that sometimes cause us to wipe.

Aside from me having threat issues when swipe tanking everything is definitely looking to be a huge improvement for us in the near future.

Halfway through Kara tonight, my DPS warrior(who is too OP with his new tilt-a-whirl ability IMO) was like you know you can test your dps on the new target dummies, right? I'm like target dummies? What target dummies?(ok so maybe slightly less valley girlish but hey). So after we stopped our long heroic for the night at Curator, three of us who weren't tired went and beat on these target dummies until late in the evening. It was great.

Why didn't Blizzard think of this beforehand?! I mean you have all these NPC's in Theramore and other places beating on them, you would think that it would be useful for us to. Previously the only real way to test ranged DPS was Dr. Boom in Netherstorm or random elites with someone tanking and healing for melee.

These guys, however, you can do almost anything with.. They can be rooted, frost nova'd, almost anything. They don't fight back, take full debuffs and bleeds, act like normal mobs with parry and dodge, and etc. The only drawback is that for tanks they don't let you test things because you are constantly rage starved.

There is a set of them in any major city(none in Shatt that I could find), and they have level 60,70,80 and the skull heroic ones. Personally I think the Heroic ones are level 80 raid bosses because I was hitting for crap on them but maybe it's because they didn't have any raid debuffs on them.

Why does a guild leader care about these?

Well besides the obvious of telling your guild members about them so they know they have something to beat on for hours it's a great way to test new(or old) members to see where they fall in line. Without the craziness of the raid to concentrate on or the raid damage killing people you can sit down and feasibly look at people and how they are playing their classes. Are they doing a normal rotation? Using their cooldowns wisely?

Once you test them you can give them real feedback as to how well they are doing in relation to others and what they can change besides the obvious gear/enchant/gem choices.

This is a superb guild leaders tool and I plan on using it often once this patch hits. My bet is that I am going to increase the performance of at least a few guild members, and that could make the difference between winning and losing our quest to Illidan before WOTLK.

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WoW Addons #2 - Class Addons

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to talk a little baout class specific addons. There of course a million addons out there and umpteen amount of them are class addons so I'm not going to delve into all of them. Being as I don't even play every class in the game I can't give a great representation of all the addons out there from personal experience. But from research and personal experience combined I'll put up a few that people might find useful. I'll also group up some class types at the end of the post so I'm not putting up the same addon for like specs(IE - tanks and healers). I'm making an attempt to only put up addons which will help with raiding, not addons like CritLine which aren't that useful in raiding respects.

Druid:

Outfitter - This addon is a must for those of us who choose a class which requires a million gear changes all the time. You can save different sets for whatever reason you might have and interchange those with a click of a button. You can also set it to automatically do that but a lot of the times that screws you up more than it helps as you get stuck in the wrong gear for the wrong occasion often.

Druidbar - I just found this one and I'm not sure why i never looked before. It shows your mana while in cat/bear form. Really useful for powershifters or tanks like me who pull with moonfire and find with chain pulling and no good mana regen that I can pull and be stuck in caster form by accident.

Hunters:

Personally I don't use any addons for my hunter that are hunter specific but a good one that is useful is Zhuntermod. Helps with organization and such. I'm sure a more seasoned hunter has specific mods but mine is only used for farming.

Sorren's Easy Rotations - Helps you with your hot rotations to get that extra edge (and makes it so you don't just have to spam 1).

SimpleMD - This one requires the other hunters to have the addon but it lets the hunters know when the hunter Misdirect cooldowns are up so there is no failures on overlapping.

Mage:

Dagassist - While useful for others, sorta, it's greatly useful for a mage. It gives you a dropdown where you can cast your ports and open your tradeskills and such. Cleans up those hotbars like a pro!

Cryolysis - Give syou a circle thing that you can use to do about everything.. I personally didn't find this addon that useful but I know mages who swear by it.

Paladin:

PallyPower - I've already harped on this last post but it is such a great addon that I had to include it.

Priest:
Not much a shadow priest needs specifically that I could find. I don't own a priest alt.

Prayer of Mending Tracker - Tracks your Prayer of Mending, duh!

Rogue:

I'm sure there are some that some rogues use but don't they just turn on auto attack and kill things?

Shaman:

TotemTimers - Keeps tracks of your totems timers and lets you put them down when they are about to expire.

Shaman Friend - Gives you a lot of Shaman related dohickeys. (Can you tell I don't play a shaman?)

Warlock:

The ones I knew about seem to be out of date so I don't want to give out ones that don't work anymore. There are some out there though.

Warrior:

StanceSets - Helps you switch Mainhand, offhand, and ranged based on your stance so you can quickly switch from dps to tanking or etc.

Tanks:

Damnation - This one is great because it automatically removes Salvation from you when you get into bear form, defensive stance, etc(or if you are already in those forms/stances). That way if there is a reason you need to be in bear form you are going to be able to get that threat much faster without having to thumb around looking for the salv that was cast on you.

TankPoints - To let you compare gear to make sure you are staying above the needed caps for encounters.

Healers:

Healbot Sucks. The top healers in No Vacancy use X-perl + Clique for their healing. I've heard others use Grid instead of X-perl.

DPS:

Quartz - Helps with maximizing your dps. For casters is lets you know when you can cast again based off of your connection speed. For melee it gives you your swing/shot timer so you can time your yellow damage and not lose too much of your white.

Most Everyone:

SmartBuff/SmartDebuff - They can be downloaded seperately for those classes that can buff but cant debuff or vice versa. This lets you buff your party members by rolling the mouse wheel backwards, it can also be setup for other various things. It gives you a warning when buffs on other peopel are going to wear out so you can stay on top of it too. SmartDebuff gives you a small frame where you can right or left click those who have the debuff and it will remove it.

Decursive - Does the same thing as SmartDebuff. I've just used SDB for a long time so I never used this one but I know most of the debuffers in the guild use this one so had to include it.

ControlFreak - Makes crowd controlling cake. Puts a movable box on your screen where you can set the sheep/banish/etc target and keep it CC'd while you dps on your current target. Shows a countdown of when it will wear off and makes a noise at you when it breaks.

DurabilityStatus - Very small window that lets you know where you armor is at and if you hover over it you will know how much your repairs will cost.

MinimapButtonBag - Takes all of these addons that I'm giving you and puts the minimap buttons that you have accrued into one single button.


Tommorrow I will finish up my addon section by chatting about External "addons".

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