So after playing Torchlight and Torchlight 2 over the last couple of weeks, and enjoying both of them, I've also been thinking about what a debacle Diablo 3 has apparently been. My younger brother, who bought and played both D3 and TL2, has described TL2 as being, "everything that Diablo 3 should have been, but wasn't."
In addition to this, IncGamers had an interview with David Breivik, one of the founders of Blizzard North, back in August. In said interview, he was extremely diplomatic, but underneath all of the couching and corporatese, the message basically confirmed the opinion of most gamers I've seen, exemplified by such forum posts as this; namely, that Diablo 3 sucks rocks the size of Gibraltar.
World of Warcraft is also still taking on water, and by all accounts, at an accelerating pace. WoW lost two million subscribers last year, and has apparently lost close to another million this year. From what I've read, the official claim is 10.2 million subs, while unofficial estimates are at 9 million+ and falling. I've always believed that WoW's real playerbase peaked at around 7 million, in around August of 2007, six months after the release of TBC. The majority of the other 5 million players are directly attributable to the Arena, and being the wrong demographic, for the sake of the long term health of the game, never should have been there at all.
This has made me think long and hard about the future of Blizzard Entertainment as a brand. Truthfully, I think long term, at this point the company is in very serious trouble.
I will be brutally honest. I've always thought of Blizzard North, exclusively, as the "real," Blizzard. They are where all of the company's best known games came from; and although I know next to nothing about the company's real structure, the material which they put out, and what little I was able to read, gave me a particular impression. Namely that of something similar to a rock band; a relatively small, intimate, passionate, and highly intelligent and creative group of people, who seemed to be utterly devoted, in an uncompromising manner, to their art.
As an analogy, I often think of the central characters from the science fiction series, Stargate SG-1. Blizzard North were the company's A-team, and I feel deserve to be regarded alongside the likes of id Software, and Maxis prior to that company's assimilation, by the demonic organisation known as Electronic Arts.
There is an equally strong sense, from the quality of Torchlight 2, that Runic Games represents a case of the proverbial band having got back together, (at least to an extent) and that that is where they ended up. The level of polish is reminiscent of what we grew to expect from Blizzard North; and although the devs are clearly a little more concerned with balance this time around than they were with the original game, there is also a sense that they are actually passionate about the game they've produced. Torchlight 2 does not convey the deeply insulting, pervasive feeling that I had towards the end of my time with WoW, of a sterile game produced by soulless, club tailed, bean counting suits, with the exclusive intent of making money, and also the belief that irrespective of how bad a product it was, the playerbase should simply pay for it, play it, and shut up.
Apparently, with the automatic talent point allocation, Blizzard have carried that same approach over to Diablo 3. The same insufferable corporate arrogance is also on display with the fact that the game is server based, despite not being an MMORPG.
Allow me to offer you a clue, Blizzard. Yes, we, the gaming population used to find WoW's routine maintenance and other server problems annoying and frustrating; and truthfully, we would not have tolerated them from anyone else, under any other circumstances. We tolerated them from you, and the reason why, is that prior to patch 2.4 at least, with WoW, you gave us a superb, utterly peerless game. You don't need me to tell you that World of Warcraft, at one point at least, was the greatest computer game of all time, out of virtually any genre, to the point where I am still largely obsessed with it myself five years later, to a degree where other people once regularly accused me of mental illness. Your own prior numbers and feedback would have confirmed that by themselves.
I put up with routine maintenance. I put up with the Warden. I put up with the TOS. I put up with the gutting of the addon system in 2.0, despite it being a move which I considered blatantly fascist. I put up with Blizzard having a God complex in general terms. However, here's the point.
You only get to dictate terms in that manner, when you are producing a game of that level of quality.
You will not be permitted to do so, when you are selling us corporate-produced crap, purely on the basis of other people's past positive efforts, and then expect us to simply accept it and shut up. We are not under any obligation to do so, and we are not going to. Give us quality of WoW's original standard, and yes, you'll get some latitude. Give us rubbish, which is obviously designed primarily to fill a box and make money, and you won't.
I've already written extensively about what I believe has caused the systemic demise of World of Warcraft, primarily here, so I'm not going to repeat myself; other than to say that at the time the linked blog post was written, Cataclysm had not yet been released, and when it was released, its' only real effect was to make the situation worse, as predicted.
You've got two choices here, Blizzard. You can either remain arrogant and unrepentant, and maintain the attitude that you know best, and that you are simply going to keep listening to your bean counting corporate overlords at Activision, and producing sterile crap that is purely focused on the economic bottom line, and to Hell with your actual playerbase. That road will lead to further erosion of the Blizzard brand, more disillusioned gamers who feel that they have been betrayed, and eventually, the irrelevance of the company.
Or, you can swallow your pride, acknowledge that you've got a problem, listen to the criticism that is being given you by myself and other people, and start doing what it is going to take, to get you back on top.
That means, first and foremost, re-establishing a vague semblance of creative and artistic integrity, as you had in the past. You perhaps do not understand this, but as it has most graphically been recently illustrated with Christopher Nolan and his Batman film franchise, there is a paradox where money and creativity are concerned.
Namely, that in order to make money, you actually have to completely relinquish money as a focus, and concentrate solely on exercising creative passion, and on the quality of your product. If you have an uncompromising determination to make an outstanding product, then you need have no fear whatsoever of the market. You will make money, and you will do so beyond your wildest anticipation.
This has been proven, time and time again. Stop being fearful. Stop listening to the suits. Stop designing character skill trees and other mechanics in corporate board meetings. That is not the place to do it. The old way, the way that works, is for developers themselves to act as playtesters, and for game mechanics to actually be updated incrementally, while the developers themselves are playing.
It's your move.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, October 1, 2012
Thursday, March 17, 2011
XP for old quests?
I'm not at 85 yet. I went through Vashj'r, and to be honest considered the experience very much a mixed bag. Some of it was really gratifying and enjoyable; but to be honest, some of it was so tedious that I found it difficult to remain motivated to keep playing at all.
As mentioned before, I've never been much of a raider, and that is not likely to change with Cataclysm. The two overall objectives I still have in this game, which I've had since BC, are to get a nether drake, and to finish getting the Conqueror PvP title. Another, more minor goal, is to completely finish all of the quests in Nagrand in particular, which was probably my favourite zone in the game. Once I've got those, I'll probably quit.
Anyway, to the point of this post; once I finished Vashj'r, I went back to Shadowmoon Valley to keep doing the Netherwing Ledge rep quests. I became very surprised, however, when I discovered that at level 82, I'm apparently now getting the full amount of XP from said quests, as well as getting 200+ XP per node when mining.
My initial thought was that this was fantastic, because it means that I can get to 85, while still doing purely what I wanted to do anywayz; which I'm assuming was Blizzard's intention. Then, however, I stopped and thought about it a bit more.
One of the things that I've been worried about since probably WoTLK, is that WoW seems to have become a game where the only thing that 90%+ of the playerbase care about doing, is getting to the level cap. For some reason, the prevailing opinion seems to be that the endgame contains the only content worth doing; and that means that for people like me, who actually tend to prefer doing pre-cap stuff, (mainly because I've noticed how much people's attitudes change, for the worse, at the cap) it's much more difficult to find people willing to do pre-cap instances etc, or if they are willing to do them, to see them as anything other than something to be got through as quickly as possible, on their way to the cap.
This may, of course, have the opposite effect, because now that getting Loremaster would apparently assist people in getting to the cap as well, I might actually see more people in the levelling zones. I will mention that I actually did see one other person doing the Skyshatter flying quests at the same time I was; and that gave me cause for optimism. I guess we'll see.
As mentioned before, I've never been much of a raider, and that is not likely to change with Cataclysm. The two overall objectives I still have in this game, which I've had since BC, are to get a nether drake, and to finish getting the Conqueror PvP title. Another, more minor goal, is to completely finish all of the quests in Nagrand in particular, which was probably my favourite zone in the game. Once I've got those, I'll probably quit.
Anyway, to the point of this post; once I finished Vashj'r, I went back to Shadowmoon Valley to keep doing the Netherwing Ledge rep quests. I became very surprised, however, when I discovered that at level 82, I'm apparently now getting the full amount of XP from said quests, as well as getting 200+ XP per node when mining.
My initial thought was that this was fantastic, because it means that I can get to 85, while still doing purely what I wanted to do anywayz; which I'm assuming was Blizzard's intention. Then, however, I stopped and thought about it a bit more.
One of the things that I've been worried about since probably WoTLK, is that WoW seems to have become a game where the only thing that 90%+ of the playerbase care about doing, is getting to the level cap. For some reason, the prevailing opinion seems to be that the endgame contains the only content worth doing; and that means that for people like me, who actually tend to prefer doing pre-cap stuff, (mainly because I've noticed how much people's attitudes change, for the worse, at the cap) it's much more difficult to find people willing to do pre-cap instances etc, or if they are willing to do them, to see them as anything other than something to be got through as quickly as possible, on their way to the cap.
This may, of course, have the opposite effect, because now that getting Loremaster would apparently assist people in getting to the cap as well, I might actually see more people in the levelling zones. I will mention that I actually did see one other person doing the Skyshatter flying quests at the same time I was; and that gave me cause for optimism. I guess we'll see.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
World of Warcraft:- An autopsy.
My main is still deleted, but a cousin of mine arrived today, and is currently staying with me for ten days, before he goes overseas, possibly for several years. He is someone who I have traditionally played Blizzard's games with, and so I have relented to reinstall the game, and temporarily resubscribe in order to play with him.
It is still, however, highly questionable as to whether I will remain after he leaves. This post, and a deluge of other similar ones, which are showing up on the forums on a daily basis at this point, more or less echo my current feelings about the state of the game. There was one other fairly insightful one the other night, which I might have to try and track down; it goes into more depth.
Although I know that none of these will happen, much less even be listened to by Blizzard, for the sake of argument I will outline the changes which would need to occur, to genuinely reignite my enthusiasm as a player of World of Warcraft.
Brigwyn said in the comments of my last post, that he missed having people around who were willing to speak the truth about WoW. Brig, this post is for you, because a lot of truth (at least from my perspective) that I've been sitting on for more than 12 months now, is about to get spoken.
1. Class balance would need to be reverted to the state of around patch 2.1, and ideally, most of the restrictions that were added to the addon/macro system in 2.0 would be removed. Hell, an easier way of doing this would probably be to simply revoke/invalidate WoTLK entirely. I truthfully don't know anyone who doesn't think that this expansion has been largely a mess. The only part of it that has really been good from my perspective, was the questing. The 5 mans were bad, and I've hardly been able to raid at all, thanks to GearScore.
Let BM be our main damage tree again. I only had a problem with that because of how some BM hunters treated people socially, but in game, there was literally nothing better than having a BM Hunter in the same 5 man group with me as Survival. I trapped, they did damage; which freed both of us to do only that which we were specialised for, and allowed the other person to take care of the other half of our class.
If the Steady Shot nerf was repealed, it would be much easier to make Marksmanship sufficiently competitive to make Rilgon happy, as well.
2. The comic would need to be cancelled. It has trashed the game's lore. I would want it out of print. I would want Thrall reaffirmed as Warchief of the Horde, with Garrosh maybe as his second, but with him behaving. I would want Jaina as leader of the Alliance, with Varian Wrynn retconned out entirely. Have him fall through a crack in the universe somewhere; I don't care. He is a mistake, and he should not exist.
3. The Arena would need to be removed from the game entirely. This probably wouldn't stop the flood of FPS/console gamers, but it would probably help somewhat.
4. Character name change and faction/sex/race change options would need to be removed. These have done possibly irreperable social damage to the game. These days, reputation among players no longer means anything, so it is possible to behave like a profane, sociopathic, entirely anonymous FPS gamer, and then if necessary change your character's name the next day, with zero personal consequences.
5. Heirlooms would need to be removed. These have destroyed the levelling game entirely. As an alt Rogue in Razorfen Krawl a few days ago, I was generating 60 DPS without heirlooms, and a Hunter was generating 80 with them. That's almost another 25% overall damage, and the original 5 mans were not designed for those numbers.
6. The Death Knight would need to become a single target, rather than AoE class. Over-reliance on AoE has killed any requirement for tactical co-ordination within instances.
7. The Paladin's class role would be repealed back to that of the defensive hybrid, per the original design, and its' abilities (in terms of the bubble, etc) would likewise be returned to their previous state. Some of the improvements that have allowed Protection to be made viable as a tanking spec would be kept, albeit with a fairly substantial nerf to damage, and corresponding buff to threat generation if need be. The Retribution tree would be heavily nerfed, and it would be stipulated as a DPS tree for levelling/soloing only.
8. The horrific scenario with stat inflation and the destruction of the colour coding system would need to be repaired/reversed. Gear/stat scaling would need to be made much more conservative, and given sane, conservative rates, made on the basis of analysing the numbers of the original (pre-expansion) game, and extrapolating on that basis.
There would also, correspondingly, need to be a massive reduction in the number of available, epic quality items. The colour coding system only meant something when it was applied judiciously and with genuine care. 85-90% of the items available even to level cap players should be blue; the epic item class should be reserved for genuinely top end raid gear ONLY. The vast majority of the current epics should be made blue.
This change wouldn't just benefit raiders; it would make everyone happier, because it would re-introduce the feeling that everyone's gear was actually worth something.
As a corrolary of this, gear needs to stop being seen, both by players, and by developers, as an end in itself. Gear is not an end reward in itself. All it is for, is to allow you to get past the next level of content. If there is no next level of content, gear is worthless.
The purpose of gear is not to be able to idly stand around capital cities on your mount, seeking to have people stare at you in awe, as a source of narcissistic supply. Anyone who views this game in this manner, needs to seek urgent professional psychiatric help.
9. Blizzard need to stop mindlessly, shamelessly pandering to the lowest common denominator, in the name of myopic corporate greed. In response to a thread made in the DPS forum by someone quitting not long ago, Ghostcrawler implicitly made his priorities clear, by talking about population numbers and how well WoTLK was still selling.
Caring purely about short term player population growth above all else, while entirely neglecting the quality of individual player experience, class balance, and virtually every other element of the game, is not a good recipe for the game's long term wellbeing. World of Warcraft is being hideously mismanaged, in all of the ways listed above.
Ghostcrawler and the developer team are also now fairly clearly allowing their direction to be dictated by the chronically mentally ill 5% of the playerbase, that inhabit the forums. The single main reason why this is so disastrous, is because the forum's most vocal inhabitants (who are also among the smallest minorities in the playerbase) are dedicated Arena players.
In particular, the train wreck that is the philosophy of, "bring the player, not the class," must be abandoned if this game is to survive. Needing to bring individual classes, is the very defining essence of a Role Playing game. Virtually all of the individuality between classes has been stripped, and whenever he is asked about this, Ghostcrawler invariably responds that this is by conscious design. As has been commented on by other players, the fact that Blizzard wanted to remove the class forums, and replace them with three class role forums, only underscores the point.
There are only really the three roles now; tank, healer, DPS. There is no really appreciable difference between the classes in these three roles. Crowd control is dead. If you have either a Paladin or Death Knight in a group, any form of tactical co-ordination or execution order are redundant, as well.
This isn't a true roleplaying game; most implementations of Team Fortress have greater differentiation between class roles. WoW used to have an extreme level of diversity and asymmetry between classes. The level is rapidly declining, and again, whenever Ghostcrawler is notified of this, his response is to almost sound proud of it.
The game has degenerated into a mindless grind for gear. Other than raid hard modes, there is no challenge whatsoever, and any difficulty left from the pre-TBC game is ruthlessly nerfed by the developers as soon as it is found. It really is not a sarcastic exaggeration to compare WoW with Hello Kitty Island Adventure any more.
Socially, the game has collapsed. The addition of the battlegroup LFD tool, and all of the paid transfer and race/sex/name changes etc mean, as described above, that you are now entirely anonymous and invisible. There is no need for anyone to moderate their behaviour for the sake of social reputation at all, and so as a result, people's treatment of each other, outside pre-existing guilds, is utterly abominable.
Guild formation has been made much more difficult, because of the fact that it is possible to level characters entirely within the random LFD tool now, without needing to ever set foot in the non-instanced environment, after level 15. There thus isn't a scenario where you initially meet people any more while questing. Even if you make friends with people during LFD sessions, they're on a different server, so you'll never see them again after the current instance ends.
My problems with this game, as you can hopefully see from the above, are not minor, and are not due to any one single, isolated element. World of Warcraft is, at this point, showing very real signs of a large scale systemic collapse. The new expansion being named Cataclysm is deeply appropriate; but in the end, the cataclysm is going much deeper than simply the non-instanced terrain of Azeroth, and it isn't being caused by Deathwing.
Ultimately, it's being caused by Activision themselves. If I posted this in the DPS forum, I would expect Ghostcrawler's sarcastic response to be, "I assume you think you could perform my job better."
At the moment, my reply, quite seriously, would be, "You're damn right I do."
It is still, however, highly questionable as to whether I will remain after he leaves. This post, and a deluge of other similar ones, which are showing up on the forums on a daily basis at this point, more or less echo my current feelings about the state of the game. There was one other fairly insightful one the other night, which I might have to try and track down; it goes into more depth.
Although I know that none of these will happen, much less even be listened to by Blizzard, for the sake of argument I will outline the changes which would need to occur, to genuinely reignite my enthusiasm as a player of World of Warcraft.
Brigwyn said in the comments of my last post, that he missed having people around who were willing to speak the truth about WoW. Brig, this post is for you, because a lot of truth (at least from my perspective) that I've been sitting on for more than 12 months now, is about to get spoken.
1. Class balance would need to be reverted to the state of around patch 2.1, and ideally, most of the restrictions that were added to the addon/macro system in 2.0 would be removed. Hell, an easier way of doing this would probably be to simply revoke/invalidate WoTLK entirely. I truthfully don't know anyone who doesn't think that this expansion has been largely a mess. The only part of it that has really been good from my perspective, was the questing. The 5 mans were bad, and I've hardly been able to raid at all, thanks to GearScore.
Let BM be our main damage tree again. I only had a problem with that because of how some BM hunters treated people socially, but in game, there was literally nothing better than having a BM Hunter in the same 5 man group with me as Survival. I trapped, they did damage; which freed both of us to do only that which we were specialised for, and allowed the other person to take care of the other half of our class.
If the Steady Shot nerf was repealed, it would be much easier to make Marksmanship sufficiently competitive to make Rilgon happy, as well.
2. The comic would need to be cancelled. It has trashed the game's lore. I would want it out of print. I would want Thrall reaffirmed as Warchief of the Horde, with Garrosh maybe as his second, but with him behaving. I would want Jaina as leader of the Alliance, with Varian Wrynn retconned out entirely. Have him fall through a crack in the universe somewhere; I don't care. He is a mistake, and he should not exist.
3. The Arena would need to be removed from the game entirely. This probably wouldn't stop the flood of FPS/console gamers, but it would probably help somewhat.
4. Character name change and faction/sex/race change options would need to be removed. These have done possibly irreperable social damage to the game. These days, reputation among players no longer means anything, so it is possible to behave like a profane, sociopathic, entirely anonymous FPS gamer, and then if necessary change your character's name the next day, with zero personal consequences.
5. Heirlooms would need to be removed. These have destroyed the levelling game entirely. As an alt Rogue in Razorfen Krawl a few days ago, I was generating 60 DPS without heirlooms, and a Hunter was generating 80 with them. That's almost another 25% overall damage, and the original 5 mans were not designed for those numbers.
6. The Death Knight would need to become a single target, rather than AoE class. Over-reliance on AoE has killed any requirement for tactical co-ordination within instances.
7. The Paladin's class role would be repealed back to that of the defensive hybrid, per the original design, and its' abilities (in terms of the bubble, etc) would likewise be returned to their previous state. Some of the improvements that have allowed Protection to be made viable as a tanking spec would be kept, albeit with a fairly substantial nerf to damage, and corresponding buff to threat generation if need be. The Retribution tree would be heavily nerfed, and it would be stipulated as a DPS tree for levelling/soloing only.
8. The horrific scenario with stat inflation and the destruction of the colour coding system would need to be repaired/reversed. Gear/stat scaling would need to be made much more conservative, and given sane, conservative rates, made on the basis of analysing the numbers of the original (pre-expansion) game, and extrapolating on that basis.
There would also, correspondingly, need to be a massive reduction in the number of available, epic quality items. The colour coding system only meant something when it was applied judiciously and with genuine care. 85-90% of the items available even to level cap players should be blue; the epic item class should be reserved for genuinely top end raid gear ONLY. The vast majority of the current epics should be made blue.
This change wouldn't just benefit raiders; it would make everyone happier, because it would re-introduce the feeling that everyone's gear was actually worth something.
As a corrolary of this, gear needs to stop being seen, both by players, and by developers, as an end in itself. Gear is not an end reward in itself. All it is for, is to allow you to get past the next level of content. If there is no next level of content, gear is worthless.
The purpose of gear is not to be able to idly stand around capital cities on your mount, seeking to have people stare at you in awe, as a source of narcissistic supply. Anyone who views this game in this manner, needs to seek urgent professional psychiatric help.
9. Blizzard need to stop mindlessly, shamelessly pandering to the lowest common denominator, in the name of myopic corporate greed. In response to a thread made in the DPS forum by someone quitting not long ago, Ghostcrawler implicitly made his priorities clear, by talking about population numbers and how well WoTLK was still selling.
Caring purely about short term player population growth above all else, while entirely neglecting the quality of individual player experience, class balance, and virtually every other element of the game, is not a good recipe for the game's long term wellbeing. World of Warcraft is being hideously mismanaged, in all of the ways listed above.
Ghostcrawler and the developer team are also now fairly clearly allowing their direction to be dictated by the chronically mentally ill 5% of the playerbase, that inhabit the forums. The single main reason why this is so disastrous, is because the forum's most vocal inhabitants (who are also among the smallest minorities in the playerbase) are dedicated Arena players.
In particular, the train wreck that is the philosophy of, "bring the player, not the class," must be abandoned if this game is to survive. Needing to bring individual classes, is the very defining essence of a Role Playing game. Virtually all of the individuality between classes has been stripped, and whenever he is asked about this, Ghostcrawler invariably responds that this is by conscious design. As has been commented on by other players, the fact that Blizzard wanted to remove the class forums, and replace them with three class role forums, only underscores the point.
There are only really the three roles now; tank, healer, DPS. There is no really appreciable difference between the classes in these three roles. Crowd control is dead. If you have either a Paladin or Death Knight in a group, any form of tactical co-ordination or execution order are redundant, as well.
This isn't a true roleplaying game; most implementations of Team Fortress have greater differentiation between class roles. WoW used to have an extreme level of diversity and asymmetry between classes. The level is rapidly declining, and again, whenever Ghostcrawler is notified of this, his response is to almost sound proud of it.
The game has degenerated into a mindless grind for gear. Other than raid hard modes, there is no challenge whatsoever, and any difficulty left from the pre-TBC game is ruthlessly nerfed by the developers as soon as it is found. It really is not a sarcastic exaggeration to compare WoW with Hello Kitty Island Adventure any more.
Socially, the game has collapsed. The addition of the battlegroup LFD tool, and all of the paid transfer and race/sex/name changes etc mean, as described above, that you are now entirely anonymous and invisible. There is no need for anyone to moderate their behaviour for the sake of social reputation at all, and so as a result, people's treatment of each other, outside pre-existing guilds, is utterly abominable.
Guild formation has been made much more difficult, because of the fact that it is possible to level characters entirely within the random LFD tool now, without needing to ever set foot in the non-instanced environment, after level 15. There thus isn't a scenario where you initially meet people any more while questing. Even if you make friends with people during LFD sessions, they're on a different server, so you'll never see them again after the current instance ends.
My problems with this game, as you can hopefully see from the above, are not minor, and are not due to any one single, isolated element. World of Warcraft is, at this point, showing very real signs of a large scale systemic collapse. The new expansion being named Cataclysm is deeply appropriate; but in the end, the cataclysm is going much deeper than simply the non-instanced terrain of Azeroth, and it isn't being caused by Deathwing.
Ultimately, it's being caused by Activision themselves. If I posted this in the DPS forum, I would expect Ghostcrawler's sarcastic response to be, "I assume you think you could perform my job better."
At the moment, my reply, quite seriously, would be, "You're damn right I do."
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
What's Survival's Rhythm?
This is in response to Pike's most recent post, Don't Panic.
In that post, she mentions temporarily respeccing Survival and not being able to identify the rhythm of Surv's shot rotation.
In answering this, I'm going to confess to having done something recently which many will consider objectionable. Before you panic, however, understand that I'm not advocating doing this for raiding, but that it is going to be relevant to my answer to Pike, even where raiding is concerned, and I will explain why.
I don't raid at all at the moment, or even run Heroics much, but for soloing my dailies (and other farming as I continue to work towards saving for epic flight) I recently respecced out of Explosive Shot and Lock and Load.
The reason why is that Explosive Shot, in its' current state, is overpowered for soloing as Survival. There were a couple of times while doing the dailies at Onslaught Harbour where, when using ES, unless I exclusively used a Gorilla, I would die if I ended up with a group of 4-5 adds, because it made my threat completely uncontrollable with either a Ferocity or Tenacity pet, and mobs were on me constantly.
So now I'm back to the tactics I was using during TBC, where I lean very heavily on Serpent Sting, Immolation Trap, and pure autoshot after that, and sometimes Frost Trap for groups.
With groups, after putting Frost Trap down, if I keep Mend Pet up and micromanage Growl on each target, I can go through half a dozen mobs at once, or a dozen single targets in sequence, without drinking or using Viper.
My point, Pike, is that even with ES in a raid/Heroic, Survival's rhythm isn't about a set sequence of around half a dozen different movements, but rather about individual sets of stimulus-response pairs. My emphasis isn't on proactively attacking a target in the same sense as Beast Mastery's is, but rather on reactively making use of rapid instinct/intuition to respond either to the target's attacks, or spell-related events.
I don't know if you've ever done sed scripting in Linux, Pike, or dynamic raw Internet protocol transactions, (mail, http, or ftp, where you're not using a preprogrammed client, but rather a pure telnet/socket connection and the commands straight from the RFC/protocol description) but a very similar principle is involved. We have to use intuition in order to be able to react very rapidly on our feet, to conditions as they occur. That is also why the meditative state helps; when you go into it, from your perspective, your reaction time isn't actually fast at all. It's very slow.
Serpent Sting wears off, I put it back up. L&L procs, I change my rotation to fire ES 3 times. My traps come off CD, I use Freezing Arrow to give me another L&L proc on a target in an instance. Think of a pair of metronome ticks.
Watch this video on YouTube, for the classic example of what I'm talking about here. You will notice that Neo is depicted as being in a detached/meditative state, and a couple of times when speaking to Rakan, (another Survival Hunter) he also spoke of entering this state when playing Surv as well, particularly while in the Arena. Alumatine was very good at entering the flow state as well.
Notice also that with one exception, Neo's tactics are exclusively defensive in nature. Pike in particular has heard me compare Survival with the Soresu lightsaber form from Star Wars, as well.
For instancing or raiding, that means getting into intuitive sync with each of your procs on an individual basis, and responding to them as they occur. I don't ideally focus on the damage meter with Surv in Heroics. My focus instead is shared between my procs, my threat meter, sometimes my trap cooldowns, and whether our healer or anyone else has adds. As Mynithrosil once said, Survival ideally leaves damage to the DPS classes. ;P
For soloing, it means we use our higher hit points, and the fact that our lower damage (without ES at least) will not cause our threat to become uncontrollable. I can keep four mobs at once on my boar, and kill them sequentially, one by one if I'm not excessively hasty about spamming damage.
When I'm really playing the way I enjoy, Survival is a form of relaxation for me. I go to Onslaught Harbour, or sometimes the Sunken Temple, and (semi)meditate.
It is also, when used in that manner, application of force in exactly the way that the Tao Te Ching describes. Very gentle, very slow...and utterly invincible.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Friends don't let Death Knights tank
This post is a response to a recent post of Pike's.
I don't do a lot of group instances these days, as I've probably mentioned. However, in between trying to eventually farm for my flying mount, I have been attempting to get in at least one Heroic per day.
Blizzard tells us that the Death Knight is a tanking class. However, my experience with Heroics in WoTLK so far, has consistently told me that DK tanking is an example of the truth of the statement that, "just because you can do something, does not mean that you should."
I ran two Heroics this evening; Utgarde Keep, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They were the first Heroics I have ever done with a Death Knight tank where the group did not wipe a minimum of four times. In fact, these two Heroics proceeded extremely smoothly. However, they still illustrated another complaint that I have with the Death Knight class; one which Pike brought up.
The Death Knight encourages rushing. The Death Knight encourages recklessness. The Death Knight encourages a lack of crowd control, consequent stress on healers, and, to be blunt, overall lack of attention to form.
After launching into a tirade on Trade the other day about how unhappy this class had made me in instances, I was offered a trip to Utgarde Keep with, believe it or not, four other Death Knights. We tore through the place as though it wasn't there at all. I should have enjoyed the experience, but yet...
The Death Knight does not belong, in my opinion, in World of Warcraft. There is something about the class's mechanics that feels fundamentally wrong. Simply calling it overpowered does not go anywhere near sufficiently describing the problem, either.
There should not be a scenario where people can simply AoE bulldoze through an instance on autopilot, and the other problem is how fragile their ability to do this really is. If even the slightest thing goes wrong, they inevitably lose aggro, the healer dies, and the group wipes. This, for me, has actually been far more common an occurrence than the scenario of being able to burn through an instance quickly.
My favourite tanking class, when I think about it, is the bear Druid. I see this class as being the best compromise between single target and AoE tanking. A bear has a couple of abilities which it can use to handle multiple targets when needed, but it does not have AoE abilities as an overpowered and gratuitous primary focus.
I also understand the rationale behind the "AoE lol," approach. The Death Knight as a class is, in general terms, designed from the ground up to get through all of the content in the game as rapidly as possible; both in terms of starting at level 55, and in terms of the AoE mechanics. Arena players in particular, and those who want to get through an instance as quickly as possible, love it. That leads me, however, to another point.
If your only focus, in running an instance, is to get through it as quickly as possible, you might want to rethink your overall motivation for playing World of Warcraft, since wanting to get through content as quickly as you can does not imply that you actually enjoy the game itself, at all.
I don't do a lot of group instances these days, as I've probably mentioned. However, in between trying to eventually farm for my flying mount, I have been attempting to get in at least one Heroic per day.
Blizzard tells us that the Death Knight is a tanking class. However, my experience with Heroics in WoTLK so far, has consistently told me that DK tanking is an example of the truth of the statement that, "just because you can do something, does not mean that you should."
I ran two Heroics this evening; Utgarde Keep, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They were the first Heroics I have ever done with a Death Knight tank where the group did not wipe a minimum of four times. In fact, these two Heroics proceeded extremely smoothly. However, they still illustrated another complaint that I have with the Death Knight class; one which Pike brought up.
The Death Knight encourages rushing. The Death Knight encourages recklessness. The Death Knight encourages a lack of crowd control, consequent stress on healers, and, to be blunt, overall lack of attention to form.
After launching into a tirade on Trade the other day about how unhappy this class had made me in instances, I was offered a trip to Utgarde Keep with, believe it or not, four other Death Knights. We tore through the place as though it wasn't there at all. I should have enjoyed the experience, but yet...
The Death Knight does not belong, in my opinion, in World of Warcraft. There is something about the class's mechanics that feels fundamentally wrong. Simply calling it overpowered does not go anywhere near sufficiently describing the problem, either.
There should not be a scenario where people can simply AoE bulldoze through an instance on autopilot, and the other problem is how fragile their ability to do this really is. If even the slightest thing goes wrong, they inevitably lose aggro, the healer dies, and the group wipes. This, for me, has actually been far more common an occurrence than the scenario of being able to burn through an instance quickly.
My favourite tanking class, when I think about it, is the bear Druid. I see this class as being the best compromise between single target and AoE tanking. A bear has a couple of abilities which it can use to handle multiple targets when needed, but it does not have AoE abilities as an overpowered and gratuitous primary focus.
I also understand the rationale behind the "AoE lol," approach. The Death Knight as a class is, in general terms, designed from the ground up to get through all of the content in the game as rapidly as possible; both in terms of starting at level 55, and in terms of the AoE mechanics. Arena players in particular, and those who want to get through an instance as quickly as possible, love it. That leads me, however, to another point.
If your only focus, in running an instance, is to get through it as quickly as possible, you might want to rethink your overall motivation for playing World of Warcraft, since wanting to get through content as quickly as you can does not imply that you actually enjoy the game itself, at all.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Being true to yourself isn't always simple
There's been some debate in the comments in an earlier post of mine, about BRK migrating to Survival.
Some say they think he is being true to himself; others say he isn't. While I will say that the decision, ultimately, is nobody's but his own to make, I will offer some observations.
For as long as I have read his writing, BRK has emphasised a consistent belief that the Hunter, first, last, and everything in between, is a DPS class. BRK has stated that he feels that our class's only real role in a group is to provide as much raw damage as possible, and up until the last patch, for several years, Beast Mastery as a tree was certainly the most effective means for him to practically implement this belief.
So on the surface, it could appear as though, now that Survival generates more raw damage, in switching to it, BRK is following his convictions about providing his groups or raids with as much damage as he can.
However, in a recent post of his, "Locked and Loaded," where he relates a conversation with himself, he offers a very important clue about his current, true internal state.
"Are you going to keep using 'we' even though your pet is a sad, pathetic thing compared to Beastmastery-spec?"
"We are. For in our heart, we remain BM." (Emphasis mine)
As I said at the top of this post, BRK, like all of us, has to do what he has to do. Ultimately the only person any of us must satisfy is the one we see when we look into a mirror.
However, I will say this.
In the near three years that I've been Survival, I haven't raided all that much. I have some, and yeah, occasionally it's even been fun, in a superficial, transitory kind of way.
I don't have a readership the size of BRK's, either. I'm not diplomatic enough, for that. I've said a lot of things which have offended a lot of people, and BRK himself is one of them. I know he won't read this post.
I have my 100. I know many of you by name, or at least the character names which you are willing to share with me on here. You're good people; many of you restore my faith in my species on a daily basis. If I go into the forums, or the game itself, or even into the offline world, there are times when I really need that.
The point is, that being true to myself hasn't got me accolades. It sure as hell doesn't get me raid slots, a lot of the time. It doesn't get my name in lights, or me in the global top 5/10/whatever guilds.
Pike, you've gone back to being BM. That is the choice you've made, and for you, it's been the right one.
However, because of that, you're about to enter my world in another way as well. You won't get into a lot of Heroics. You probably won't get into a lot of raids, either.
There will probably be days when a lot of the other people you used to know, who used to be BM, have jumped on the "new Survival" bandwagon, and looking in the Guild window, you'll see that they're all in Naxx, while you're maybe in the Borean Tundra, Zul'Drak, or somewhere else, farming.
Alone.
Here's another quote for you.
"I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with Champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops.
Oh, no! It's a choice, on the contrary and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
No Champagne. No friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner's box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others' judgment.
At the end of all, freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody."
-- Albert Camus
If being true to yourself, then, is so terrible, why would anyone do it? If seemingly all of the possible rewards are for compromising, for selling out, for going with the crowd, for being transitory...what is the point?
The point is simply this. If your outer surroundings are a barren desert, and you are true to yourself, you will know greater joy than if your external surroundings were the most opulent palace you could imagine, while you were not.
You could be in the top rated guild on the planet. You could play WoW for a living. You could be a billionaire. You could lead the most charmed life, in corporeal terms, that you can think of. Yet lie to yourself, and it will all be worth nothing. Surround yourself with money, and in total silence, you will hear yourself weep.
BRK, I know you won't read this post, so it almost certainly doesn't really matter. If you were going to read it hypothetically, however, I'd invite you to listen to a particular song by Michael Jackson; "Man in the Mirror."
Then go and find a mirror. Stand in front of it, and without thinking about what will get you into raids or satisfy anyone else, ask the guy looking back at you...really ask him...what spec he wants to be.
You might still make the same decision.
You might not.
Some say they think he is being true to himself; others say he isn't. While I will say that the decision, ultimately, is nobody's but his own to make, I will offer some observations.
For as long as I have read his writing, BRK has emphasised a consistent belief that the Hunter, first, last, and everything in between, is a DPS class. BRK has stated that he feels that our class's only real role in a group is to provide as much raw damage as possible, and up until the last patch, for several years, Beast Mastery as a tree was certainly the most effective means for him to practically implement this belief.
So on the surface, it could appear as though, now that Survival generates more raw damage, in switching to it, BRK is following his convictions about providing his groups or raids with as much damage as he can.
However, in a recent post of his, "Locked and Loaded," where he relates a conversation with himself, he offers a very important clue about his current, true internal state.
"Are you going to keep using 'we' even though your pet is a sad, pathetic thing compared to Beastmastery-spec?"
"We are. For in our heart, we remain BM." (Emphasis mine)
As I said at the top of this post, BRK, like all of us, has to do what he has to do. Ultimately the only person any of us must satisfy is the one we see when we look into a mirror.
However, I will say this.
In the near three years that I've been Survival, I haven't raided all that much. I have some, and yeah, occasionally it's even been fun, in a superficial, transitory kind of way.
I don't have a readership the size of BRK's, either. I'm not diplomatic enough, for that. I've said a lot of things which have offended a lot of people, and BRK himself is one of them. I know he won't read this post.
I have my 100. I know many of you by name, or at least the character names which you are willing to share with me on here. You're good people; many of you restore my faith in my species on a daily basis. If I go into the forums, or the game itself, or even into the offline world, there are times when I really need that.
The point is, that being true to myself hasn't got me accolades. It sure as hell doesn't get me raid slots, a lot of the time. It doesn't get my name in lights, or me in the global top 5/10/whatever guilds.
Pike, you've gone back to being BM. That is the choice you've made, and for you, it's been the right one.
However, because of that, you're about to enter my world in another way as well. You won't get into a lot of Heroics. You probably won't get into a lot of raids, either.
There will probably be days when a lot of the other people you used to know, who used to be BM, have jumped on the "new Survival" bandwagon, and looking in the Guild window, you'll see that they're all in Naxx, while you're maybe in the Borean Tundra, Zul'Drak, or somewhere else, farming.
Alone.
Here's another quote for you.
"I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with Champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops.
Oh, no! It's a choice, on the contrary and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
No Champagne. No friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner's box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others' judgment.
At the end of all, freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody."
-- Albert Camus
If being true to yourself, then, is so terrible, why would anyone do it? If seemingly all of the possible rewards are for compromising, for selling out, for going with the crowd, for being transitory...what is the point?
The point is simply this. If your outer surroundings are a barren desert, and you are true to yourself, you will know greater joy than if your external surroundings were the most opulent palace you could imagine, while you were not.
You could be in the top rated guild on the planet. You could play WoW for a living. You could be a billionaire. You could lead the most charmed life, in corporeal terms, that you can think of. Yet lie to yourself, and it will all be worth nothing. Surround yourself with money, and in total silence, you will hear yourself weep.
BRK, I know you won't read this post, so it almost certainly doesn't really matter. If you were going to read it hypothetically, however, I'd invite you to listen to a particular song by Michael Jackson; "Man in the Mirror."
Then go and find a mirror. Stand in front of it, and without thinking about what will get you into raids or satisfy anyone else, ask the guy looking back at you...really ask him...what spec he wants to be.
You might still make the same decision.
You might not.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The sickness within World of Warcraft
I just read Kruger's comments on my last post, and was depressed by what he described having happened to him.
"Well the inevitable happened to me today.
Was in LFG looking for a 'roic CoT:Strat group and a group was looking for dps, so I whisper "I'll come dps" and then I get what I'm going to be seeing alot of "If your BM we dont want you"......*expletive*
About 10 mins later I got another group "LF DPS", I whisper "I'll come, 80 hunter" and I get "What's your spec?" I of course being BM tell them and I get back "Oh you dont do enough dps"
So if this trend continues I guess I'll be running less and less and having to find stuff to do solo.
Anyways good post, I enjoy reading the SV side of things."
The above attitude, that these people expressed towards Kruger, is based on nothing objective or logical, whatsoever. It is pure, elitist bile. Pike mentioned being able to generate at least 1.7k DPS unbuffed with Beast Mastery, which is perfectly fine for a Heroic.
The necessary minimum to avoid a wipe with Patchwerk is 2k DPS, and the necessary minimum for Heroics is 1.5. Anyone who refuses to take a member of a class and spec which is capable of hitting those numbers is not acting from a position of anything other than vindictive, entirely subjective elitism. They are taking advantage both of the fact that online anonymity allows them to be casually hateful and avoid the usual consequences of doing so, and of the game's (and this planet's) currently overpopulated state, in order to have the attitude that anyone who does not match their preferences can simply be summarily replaced.
This attitude is dehumanising. It is unnecessary. It is utterly sociopathic, and devoid of empathy. Most of all, it is wrong. If for no other reason, it is wrong because the person doing the rejecting refuses to empathise with the person being rejected. Elitists rely on the idea that they will always be in a position of rejecting others; they do not try to imagine how it would feel if they were in a position where others were rejecting them.
This goes to the very heart of the reason why, for the most part, I refuse to raid. I refuse to raid because I refuse to be a party and an accessory to a moral crime which is committed against thousands, probably millions, of individuals within this game on a daily basis. As Martin Luther King said, passive acceptance towards evil is the same, on a moral level, as active participation.
I do not advocate people raiding if they are unable to reach, in purely mathematical terms, the DPS prerequisites to avoid wipes in raids. However, I will now also give you a demonstration of what I consider to be objective.
According to WoWWiki, Patchwerk has a total in a 10 man raid of 4,320,000 hit points. WoWWiki does not mention how long his Enrage timer is, but does mention that the total raid DPS necessary to kill him before he Enrages is 12,000. Dividing 4,320,000 by 12,000 gives us 360 seconds, or 6 minutes.
The minimum requirement for killing Patchwerk before his Enrage, and thus avoiding a group wipe, is for the 6 DPS classes in a 10 man raid (2 tanks, 2 healers) to maintain 2,000 DPS each (12,000 / 6) over that period of 6 minutes. This coefficient remains the same for the 25 man version, as well.
There is no DPS class or spec within this game, pure or hybrid, which is not capable of this goal, given sufficient gear. There is also no justifiable reason for excluding any individual from a raid, if they are capable of meeting this goal.
Survival was capable of it, pre-patch. I refuse to believe that Beast Mastery has been rendered incapable of it now. Marksmanship has always been capable of it. I am capable of it, unbuffed, in my current gear. It is not an excessively unreachable goal.
The reality is, I've come to realise, that a large number of the people who play World of Warcraft are fairly simply, emotionally and spiritually dead. There is a Chinese proverb which states that if you wish to learn the true nature of a person, to put them in an evironment where there are no constraints whatsoever on their behaviour, and then watch how they act.
People playing this game want to be exclusionary, and they will accept virtually any excuse or justification for it that they can find, whatsoever. The desire for elitism and exclusivity doesn't have anything to do with what is objectively or legitimately needed to progress at all. 2k DPS is not a difficult goal to reach.
Because of this, guilds and individuals who crave elitism actually raise the bar to a subjective, and entirely unnecessary level. Suddenly they're claiming that the needed minimum is 3k. That isn't the needed minimum for actually killing Patchwerk; it's the needed minimum for an individual to be accepted by them.
My own sense of moral outrage is triggered on a daily basis by the relentlessly hateful, genuinely inhuman attitudes of many of the people who play this game. Gundersson, writing to me through Gmail, only the other night asked me what had happened, for humanity as a species to get to the point that we routinely observe in World of Warcraft.
My answer is a deeper, more genuinely serious analysis of John Gabriel's "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory." As the above-quoted Chinese proverb states, what Gabriel fails to take into account is that the "fuckwad," transformation only occurs online because that level of ugliness is, in fact, the true internal state of the majority of human beings. It is therefore not so much a true transformation, as it is a simple unmasking of the genuine nature of the person in question.
For an example of the opposite (positive, friendly, inclusive) type of behavior on a consistent basis, look at Pike. She is, to quote Gabriel, a normal person, with both anonymity and an audience. Yet, for her, the transformation to the fuckwad state never occurs. The reason is because that is not who Pike truly is, internally.
It isn't always safe to be a fuckwad offline. Doing so can have a wide variety of consequences, from being afflicted with physical violence, to being arrested, depending on the severity of the aberrant behaviour in question.
Online, however, there are far less restrictions. Sure, WoW might have guidelines about acceptable behaviour, but these get violated literally on a minute by minute basis. Even when they are enforced, the most serious potential consequence to an offender will be that they need to buy another WoW account.
Thus, offline, people are forced to act with restraint, but online, where the consequences of their actions are minimal to non-existent, the mask falls away, and the true, hideous nature of most members of our species reveals itself. Raid and Heroic elitism and exclusion are only one way for this nature to express itself, and it is one of the most common in this game, because it is seen as the most justifiable, through the use of superficial, and flawed logic.
I'm not claiming to be anywhere near perfect, myself. I've alienated a lot of people associated with this game; some of them permanently. I also was once exposed as having said some truly terrible things on MSN, when speaking in anger. And even though my highest ideal when playing WoW is to try and have a positive effect on those I interact with, my volatile nature means that I fail to reach that objective probably more than 90% of the time.
The one thing I'm not going to do, however, is exclude anyone from a group I'm in, if in mathematical terms, they truly are able to perform sufficiently well that we can get through an encounter. Even if they aren't, human beings are not disposable. The appropriate response is to assist them in improving, in a manner which allows them to maintain their own dignity; and you generally find that that process causes you to improve as well.
I know; you want to progress, to see all the content, to get gear, and to have your epeen stroked. If you're any sort of conscious, feeling human being at all, however, ask yourself this:-
Is that really what's most important?
"Well the inevitable happened to me today.
Was in LFG looking for a 'roic CoT:Strat group and a group was looking for dps, so I whisper "I'll come dps" and then I get what I'm going to be seeing alot of "If your BM we dont want you"......*expletive*
About 10 mins later I got another group "LF DPS", I whisper "I'll come, 80 hunter" and I get "What's your spec?" I of course being BM tell them and I get back "Oh you dont do enough dps"
So if this trend continues I guess I'll be running less and less and having to find stuff to do solo.
Anyways good post, I enjoy reading the SV side of things."
The above attitude, that these people expressed towards Kruger, is based on nothing objective or logical, whatsoever. It is pure, elitist bile. Pike mentioned being able to generate at least 1.7k DPS unbuffed with Beast Mastery, which is perfectly fine for a Heroic.
The necessary minimum to avoid a wipe with Patchwerk is 2k DPS, and the necessary minimum for Heroics is 1.5. Anyone who refuses to take a member of a class and spec which is capable of hitting those numbers is not acting from a position of anything other than vindictive, entirely subjective elitism. They are taking advantage both of the fact that online anonymity allows them to be casually hateful and avoid the usual consequences of doing so, and of the game's (and this planet's) currently overpopulated state, in order to have the attitude that anyone who does not match their preferences can simply be summarily replaced.
This attitude is dehumanising. It is unnecessary. It is utterly sociopathic, and devoid of empathy. Most of all, it is wrong. If for no other reason, it is wrong because the person doing the rejecting refuses to empathise with the person being rejected. Elitists rely on the idea that they will always be in a position of rejecting others; they do not try to imagine how it would feel if they were in a position where others were rejecting them.
This goes to the very heart of the reason why, for the most part, I refuse to raid. I refuse to raid because I refuse to be a party and an accessory to a moral crime which is committed against thousands, probably millions, of individuals within this game on a daily basis. As Martin Luther King said, passive acceptance towards evil is the same, on a moral level, as active participation.
I do not advocate people raiding if they are unable to reach, in purely mathematical terms, the DPS prerequisites to avoid wipes in raids. However, I will now also give you a demonstration of what I consider to be objective.
According to WoWWiki, Patchwerk has a total in a 10 man raid of 4,320,000 hit points. WoWWiki does not mention how long his Enrage timer is, but does mention that the total raid DPS necessary to kill him before he Enrages is 12,000. Dividing 4,320,000 by 12,000 gives us 360 seconds, or 6 minutes.
The minimum requirement for killing Patchwerk before his Enrage, and thus avoiding a group wipe, is for the 6 DPS classes in a 10 man raid (2 tanks, 2 healers) to maintain 2,000 DPS each (12,000 / 6) over that period of 6 minutes. This coefficient remains the same for the 25 man version, as well.
There is no DPS class or spec within this game, pure or hybrid, which is not capable of this goal, given sufficient gear. There is also no justifiable reason for excluding any individual from a raid, if they are capable of meeting this goal.
Survival was capable of it, pre-patch. I refuse to believe that Beast Mastery has been rendered incapable of it now. Marksmanship has always been capable of it. I am capable of it, unbuffed, in my current gear. It is not an excessively unreachable goal.
The reality is, I've come to realise, that a large number of the people who play World of Warcraft are fairly simply, emotionally and spiritually dead. There is a Chinese proverb which states that if you wish to learn the true nature of a person, to put them in an evironment where there are no constraints whatsoever on their behaviour, and then watch how they act.
People playing this game want to be exclusionary, and they will accept virtually any excuse or justification for it that they can find, whatsoever. The desire for elitism and exclusivity doesn't have anything to do with what is objectively or legitimately needed to progress at all. 2k DPS is not a difficult goal to reach.
Because of this, guilds and individuals who crave elitism actually raise the bar to a subjective, and entirely unnecessary level. Suddenly they're claiming that the needed minimum is 3k. That isn't the needed minimum for actually killing Patchwerk; it's the needed minimum for an individual to be accepted by them.
My own sense of moral outrage is triggered on a daily basis by the relentlessly hateful, genuinely inhuman attitudes of many of the people who play this game. Gundersson, writing to me through Gmail, only the other night asked me what had happened, for humanity as a species to get to the point that we routinely observe in World of Warcraft.
My answer is a deeper, more genuinely serious analysis of John Gabriel's "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory." As the above-quoted Chinese proverb states, what Gabriel fails to take into account is that the "fuckwad," transformation only occurs online because that level of ugliness is, in fact, the true internal state of the majority of human beings. It is therefore not so much a true transformation, as it is a simple unmasking of the genuine nature of the person in question.
For an example of the opposite (positive, friendly, inclusive) type of behavior on a consistent basis, look at Pike. She is, to quote Gabriel, a normal person, with both anonymity and an audience. Yet, for her, the transformation to the fuckwad state never occurs. The reason is because that is not who Pike truly is, internally.
It isn't always safe to be a fuckwad offline. Doing so can have a wide variety of consequences, from being afflicted with physical violence, to being arrested, depending on the severity of the aberrant behaviour in question.
Online, however, there are far less restrictions. Sure, WoW might have guidelines about acceptable behaviour, but these get violated literally on a minute by minute basis. Even when they are enforced, the most serious potential consequence to an offender will be that they need to buy another WoW account.
Thus, offline, people are forced to act with restraint, but online, where the consequences of their actions are minimal to non-existent, the mask falls away, and the true, hideous nature of most members of our species reveals itself. Raid and Heroic elitism and exclusion are only one way for this nature to express itself, and it is one of the most common in this game, because it is seen as the most justifiable, through the use of superficial, and flawed logic.
I'm not claiming to be anywhere near perfect, myself. I've alienated a lot of people associated with this game; some of them permanently. I also was once exposed as having said some truly terrible things on MSN, when speaking in anger. And even though my highest ideal when playing WoW is to try and have a positive effect on those I interact with, my volatile nature means that I fail to reach that objective probably more than 90% of the time.
The one thing I'm not going to do, however, is exclude anyone from a group I'm in, if in mathematical terms, they truly are able to perform sufficiently well that we can get through an encounter. Even if they aren't, human beings are not disposable. The appropriate response is to assist them in improving, in a manner which allows them to maintain their own dignity; and you generally find that that process causes you to improve as well.
I know; you want to progress, to see all the content, to get gear, and to have your epeen stroked. If you're any sort of conscious, feeling human being at all, however, ask yourself this:-
Is that really what's most important?
Saturday, December 6, 2008
The Surv mindset
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=98661929&sid=1
This is something I found buried in the archives of the Hunter forum yesterday. It's written by Yurch of Anatheron, a man who has mentioned being a real life Survivalist, in addition to playing a Survival Hunter in WoW.
As opposed to just playing with Surv as a talent tree, if you want a window into the underlying mentality, this thread is something I'd suggest reading. It's intended as humour, but as Shakespeare said, comedy is usually the container of the greatest truth.
This is something I found buried in the archives of the Hunter forum yesterday. It's written by Yurch of Anatheron, a man who has mentioned being a real life Survivalist, in addition to playing a Survival Hunter in WoW.
As opposed to just playing with Surv as a talent tree, if you want a window into the underlying mentality, this thread is something I'd suggest reading. It's intended as humour, but as Shakespeare said, comedy is usually the container of the greatest truth.
Monday, November 17, 2008
72, pets, and spec schizophrenia
It's 7:57 am here, and I just dinged level 72 a few minutes ago. I started somewhere between 12:30 and 1 am this morning, and I wasn't very far into level 71 at the time, which means going from 71 and 72 has taken me probably close to nine hours in total, although there was a trip to Dalaran to restock ammunition, and back to Orgrimmar to respec and train Kill Shot.
I don't like Dalaran as much as I liked Shattrath, I've decided. Stormwind is probably my least favourite city in this game, and my distaste for Dalaran exists for more or less the same reasons. Both cities feel extremely small, cramped, and inorganic. I ended up very fond of Shattrath, by comparison, and the reason why is because it was exactly the opposite.
Good urban design in my own mind calls for both intelligent use of the z axis, and a lot of plants, and any city which is all stone or concrete and no greenery at all, generally isn't one that I'm going to be very happy in. It probably goes without saying that Thunder Bluff is a place that I very much enjoy spending time in, although Blizz could possibly improve it with a bit more shrubbery here and there.
As for the other half of this post's title, it's due to me having gone back to 0/10/51, although that's now 0/11/52 considering that I've leveled twice. Given the amount of abuse I've hurled at this spec, you'd be entirely justified in wondering why I would do that.
I will still be using the hybrid for battleground pvp, but for levelling or farming, the main thing is, I realised that Furnurgler was right. I went with the hybrid spec because I thought it would be more DPS, (which it is, marginally) and I was also putting pressure on myself for a while to level up faster, in order to proverbially keep up with the Joneses.
I'm realising now that that was stupid. As long as I trap in place, trapping is actually faster for levelling for the simple reason that trapping means I actually want to play the game at all; with a more dps oriented spec, per-kill levelling might have been faster, but it was boring me and affecting my level of motivation. Now instead of finding killing mobs boring, it's actually partially addictive for me.
I'm not sure I will ever stop wrestling with this entirely, but the one thing I need to learn more than anything else, is to ignore the expectations and preconceptions of other people, and simply follow my own instincts. Once I do that, I enjoy the game. When I stop doing it and cave in to the pressure temporarily, I again find it difficult to stay motivated about playing, because I'm not being true to myself.
For another thing, the difference in DPS between 0/10/51 and 0/30/31 is around 40, (550 while trapping, as opposed to 590ish with a 1:1.5 rotation with Aimed and Serpent with 0/30/31, although by the time I finished this morning, Recount was showing me having peaked at around 640) and the other thing is, I have vastly better mana efficiency and endurance.
With the hybrid spec I have to drink probably every four mobs, and given how densely packed most mobs are in Northrend, I can get half a dozen adds almost without thinking about it. If I'm going to survive that, I need all the mana efficiency I can get. I was dying a few times with the hybrid whereas I don't now, simply because I'd go oom and not be able to finish off all of the adds I was getting because of it.
I know the answer to this from most people will be to get a Gorilla and spam Volley, however there are two reasons why I haven't (and most likely won't) ended up doing that.
The first reason is that simply spamming a single spell (or close to) isn't a playstyle that I enjoy, and was the main reason why I found the 1:1 rotation so unbearable during TBC. If I'm going to avoid getting bored to the point where it is literally physically painful, I need to be able to think about things a bit more than that.
The second reason is that the Gorilla is nerf bait. As much as I hate to say it, I have a very powerful hunch that a Thunderstomp nerf is soon going to be coming to a Gorilla near you. Every time the community has previously decided that there is One Pet To Rule Them All, Blizz have nerfed it, presumably to enforce a greater degree of diversity among chosen pets.
The first victim of the nerf bat was Lightning Breath, after it was found to scale so well. Then came the discovery and subsequent nerfing of both Scorpid Poison, and my own dearly beloved Boar Charge.
These are three powerful precedents, and given how upset I was with the Charge nerf, I've decided I don't want to become attached to and dependent on Thunderstomp, only to have Blizzard take that away from me as well.
As much as Hortus swore until he was blue in the face that Charge's threat generation was bugged, I never believed him. My experience has proven me right; a boar with full Tenacity spec now has nowhere near the aggro holding capacity of a cat, and Ferocity is not a tanking tree.
Boars had (and still have) a 10% penalty to damage, to balance their +10% bonus to health. Given that, unless their means of threat generation is genuinely astronomical, they have no chance of being able to cope whatsoever.
I sincerely hope that I'm wrong about this, because I know there are a lot of Hunters who love their Gorilla, but I have an uncomfortable and persistent feeling that I won't be. The scenario with Thunderstomp is too similar to the previous ones.
The other major point about Explosive Shot is that I quite simply didn't previously know how to use it. ES's primary hit damage (of under 300) is not the point. The point is the additional DoT, which stacks with both Serpent Sting and Immolation Trap.
In that sense, Survival is like the Shaman, whose damage doesn't come from a single source, but comes from totems, the enhancement weapon enchant, shocks/lightning, and melee damage. In Surv's own case, it's Serpent Sting, Immolation Trap, Arcane, Explosive, Kill Shot, and Autoshot, with the occasional raptor strike/wing clip combo while kiting.
Survival's damage is only really primarily crit based inside an instance, where I have a human tank in front of me who has vastly more ability at re-acquiring threat than my pet does if I screw up.
When I'm soloing, however, particularly against groups, critting high gets me killed, because it pulls all of the mobs onto me, and keeps them within melee range, so I can't get them off me, and I can't do enough damage to kill them before they kill me. I want crits, yes; but I primarily want them for proccing things. In damage terms during solo PvE, that is what my dots are for.
So my new rotation is, drop a frost trap and jump back from it slightly, use either Serpent Sting or a dagger for pulling, (the dagger is for very low threat pulls, where I'm worried about adds) and send my cat when the mob hits the trap. I then turn and jump out to 20-25 yards, turn back, apply Serpent if I haven't already, and then use Explosive, Arcane, Explosive due to the Lock and Load proc. The reason why I allow an Arcane in between Explosives is to give the DoT time to do its' work before re-applying it.
I haven't encountered a non-elite mob of my own level yet, that won't be dead by that point. Multiple mobs are a bit harder, but not much. I simply have my cat Growl at each one before opening fire, kite around the edge of the frost slick, and also try and time using my Lock and Load procs for just before Feign Death is back up.
It's a very kinetic, acrobatic playstyle, (almost as much as the Mage, but not quite) and with the addition of Lock and Load, I find that quite aside from being slow, I actually have to move fairly quickly in order to take advantage of, and string together, my various procs. Although I'm still primarily ranged, I'm also finding that I'm a more or less equal partner in tanking with the pet, and have been going through more food than water. Aspect of the Dragonhawk is going to be a real Godsend for me.
The benefit, however, is that I can tank close to half a dozen adds if need be, maintain sufficient mana to deal with all of them, and also, if I'm careful with my threat, survive situations which I am initially sure will kill me. I hardly ever have to drink, either, so my downtime is minimal, although as mentioned, I can spend a fair amount of time eating after a reasonably big pull.
I also know, however, that I don't have the money to keep respeccing, so this is the spec I'm going to stick with, at least until 80. Given how much fun I had this morning though, I don't think that is going to be an issue.
I don't like Dalaran as much as I liked Shattrath, I've decided. Stormwind is probably my least favourite city in this game, and my distaste for Dalaran exists for more or less the same reasons. Both cities feel extremely small, cramped, and inorganic. I ended up very fond of Shattrath, by comparison, and the reason why is because it was exactly the opposite.
Good urban design in my own mind calls for both intelligent use of the z axis, and a lot of plants, and any city which is all stone or concrete and no greenery at all, generally isn't one that I'm going to be very happy in. It probably goes without saying that Thunder Bluff is a place that I very much enjoy spending time in, although Blizz could possibly improve it with a bit more shrubbery here and there.
As for the other half of this post's title, it's due to me having gone back to 0/10/51, although that's now 0/11/52 considering that I've leveled twice. Given the amount of abuse I've hurled at this spec, you'd be entirely justified in wondering why I would do that.
I will still be using the hybrid for battleground pvp, but for levelling or farming, the main thing is, I realised that Furnurgler was right. I went with the hybrid spec because I thought it would be more DPS, (which it is, marginally) and I was also putting pressure on myself for a while to level up faster, in order to proverbially keep up with the Joneses.
I'm realising now that that was stupid. As long as I trap in place, trapping is actually faster for levelling for the simple reason that trapping means I actually want to play the game at all; with a more dps oriented spec, per-kill levelling might have been faster, but it was boring me and affecting my level of motivation. Now instead of finding killing mobs boring, it's actually partially addictive for me.
I'm not sure I will ever stop wrestling with this entirely, but the one thing I need to learn more than anything else, is to ignore the expectations and preconceptions of other people, and simply follow my own instincts. Once I do that, I enjoy the game. When I stop doing it and cave in to the pressure temporarily, I again find it difficult to stay motivated about playing, because I'm not being true to myself.
For another thing, the difference in DPS between 0/10/51 and 0/30/31 is around 40, (550 while trapping, as opposed to 590ish with a 1:1.5 rotation with Aimed and Serpent with 0/30/31, although by the time I finished this morning, Recount was showing me having peaked at around 640) and the other thing is, I have vastly better mana efficiency and endurance.
With the hybrid spec I have to drink probably every four mobs, and given how densely packed most mobs are in Northrend, I can get half a dozen adds almost without thinking about it. If I'm going to survive that, I need all the mana efficiency I can get. I was dying a few times with the hybrid whereas I don't now, simply because I'd go oom and not be able to finish off all of the adds I was getting because of it.
I know the answer to this from most people will be to get a Gorilla and spam Volley, however there are two reasons why I haven't (and most likely won't) ended up doing that.
The first reason is that simply spamming a single spell (or close to) isn't a playstyle that I enjoy, and was the main reason why I found the 1:1 rotation so unbearable during TBC. If I'm going to avoid getting bored to the point where it is literally physically painful, I need to be able to think about things a bit more than that.
The second reason is that the Gorilla is nerf bait. As much as I hate to say it, I have a very powerful hunch that a Thunderstomp nerf is soon going to be coming to a Gorilla near you. Every time the community has previously decided that there is One Pet To Rule Them All, Blizz have nerfed it, presumably to enforce a greater degree of diversity among chosen pets.
The first victim of the nerf bat was Lightning Breath, after it was found to scale so well. Then came the discovery and subsequent nerfing of both Scorpid Poison, and my own dearly beloved Boar Charge.
These are three powerful precedents, and given how upset I was with the Charge nerf, I've decided I don't want to become attached to and dependent on Thunderstomp, only to have Blizzard take that away from me as well.
As much as Hortus swore until he was blue in the face that Charge's threat generation was bugged, I never believed him. My experience has proven me right; a boar with full Tenacity spec now has nowhere near the aggro holding capacity of a cat, and Ferocity is not a tanking tree.
Boars had (and still have) a 10% penalty to damage, to balance their +10% bonus to health. Given that, unless their means of threat generation is genuinely astronomical, they have no chance of being able to cope whatsoever.
I sincerely hope that I'm wrong about this, because I know there are a lot of Hunters who love their Gorilla, but I have an uncomfortable and persistent feeling that I won't be. The scenario with Thunderstomp is too similar to the previous ones.
The other major point about Explosive Shot is that I quite simply didn't previously know how to use it. ES's primary hit damage (of under 300) is not the point. The point is the additional DoT, which stacks with both Serpent Sting and Immolation Trap.
In that sense, Survival is like the Shaman, whose damage doesn't come from a single source, but comes from totems, the enhancement weapon enchant, shocks/lightning, and melee damage. In Surv's own case, it's Serpent Sting, Immolation Trap, Arcane, Explosive, Kill Shot, and Autoshot, with the occasional raptor strike/wing clip combo while kiting.
Survival's damage is only really primarily crit based inside an instance, where I have a human tank in front of me who has vastly more ability at re-acquiring threat than my pet does if I screw up.
When I'm soloing, however, particularly against groups, critting high gets me killed, because it pulls all of the mobs onto me, and keeps them within melee range, so I can't get them off me, and I can't do enough damage to kill them before they kill me. I want crits, yes; but I primarily want them for proccing things. In damage terms during solo PvE, that is what my dots are for.
So my new rotation is, drop a frost trap and jump back from it slightly, use either Serpent Sting or a dagger for pulling, (the dagger is for very low threat pulls, where I'm worried about adds) and send my cat when the mob hits the trap. I then turn and jump out to 20-25 yards, turn back, apply Serpent if I haven't already, and then use Explosive, Arcane, Explosive due to the Lock and Load proc. The reason why I allow an Arcane in between Explosives is to give the DoT time to do its' work before re-applying it.
I haven't encountered a non-elite mob of my own level yet, that won't be dead by that point. Multiple mobs are a bit harder, but not much. I simply have my cat Growl at each one before opening fire, kite around the edge of the frost slick, and also try and time using my Lock and Load procs for just before Feign Death is back up.
It's a very kinetic, acrobatic playstyle, (almost as much as the Mage, but not quite) and with the addition of Lock and Load, I find that quite aside from being slow, I actually have to move fairly quickly in order to take advantage of, and string together, my various procs. Although I'm still primarily ranged, I'm also finding that I'm a more or less equal partner in tanking with the pet, and have been going through more food than water. Aspect of the Dragonhawk is going to be a real Godsend for me.
The benefit, however, is that I can tank close to half a dozen adds if need be, maintain sufficient mana to deal with all of them, and also, if I'm careful with my threat, survive situations which I am initially sure will kill me. I hardly ever have to drink, either, so my downtime is minimal, although as mentioned, I can spend a fair amount of time eating after a reasonably big pull.
I also know, however, that I don't have the money to keep respeccing, so this is the spec I'm going to stick with, at least until 80. Given how much fun I had this morning though, I don't think that is going to be an issue.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
A confession
I'm not entirely sure when I'm going to hit 80. I'm not 72 yet, and as I said to Kordwar in my comments, I honestly don't know why, but I'm possibly the slowest leveller on the face of the Earth. Maybe I genuinely do just suck; it upsets me at times.
Although I will say one thing; I'm enjoying myself. The Howling Fjord quests I did this morning were an absolute blast, and although they weren't quite as much fun, the Borean Tundra quests before that were good, too.
I heard about some people destroying everything within three days, and I had mixed feelings. To begin with, I'll admit it; I'm jealous, and feel woefully inadequate, comparitively speaking. I also don't understand why I'm so slow, and other people can be so fast. I try to have as little epeen as possible, but what very little I have got, feels like it got run over by a truck. ;-)
On the other hand, I read an analogy for what Nihilum did which I thought fit perfectly. A Rogue philosopher on the forums compared it with, "being given a delicious chocolate fudge cake, but having it pumped directly into your stomach with a tube."
I agree with the above analogy, because, when I first arrived at Warsong Hold, there was a mixture of awe and curiosity. I ran around it looking at things, and was also doing that in the quarry and the other environments as well. The Fjord quests, as I said, are also awesome; I'm enjoying them immensely as well.
I think that's my real problem, in terms of why I'm so slow with WoW's content. To keep using the food analogy, raiders might want to tear through to the dessert phase, but I unavoidably enjoy Blizzard's main course that much that I tend to go back for a fifth (or more) serve of that.
It does make me consider, though; I largely missed dessert at the TBC party. If I can make it to the dessert end of the buffet table before the end of the WoTLK one, maybe I'll actually try and grab some ice cream this time. ;-)
Although I will say one thing; I'm enjoying myself. The Howling Fjord quests I did this morning were an absolute blast, and although they weren't quite as much fun, the Borean Tundra quests before that were good, too.
I heard about some people destroying everything within three days, and I had mixed feelings. To begin with, I'll admit it; I'm jealous, and feel woefully inadequate, comparitively speaking. I also don't understand why I'm so slow, and other people can be so fast. I try to have as little epeen as possible, but what very little I have got, feels like it got run over by a truck. ;-)
On the other hand, I read an analogy for what Nihilum did which I thought fit perfectly. A Rogue philosopher on the forums compared it with, "being given a delicious chocolate fudge cake, but having it pumped directly into your stomach with a tube."
I agree with the above analogy, because, when I first arrived at Warsong Hold, there was a mixture of awe and curiosity. I ran around it looking at things, and was also doing that in the quarry and the other environments as well. The Fjord quests, as I said, are also awesome; I'm enjoying them immensely as well.
I think that's my real problem, in terms of why I'm so slow with WoW's content. To keep using the food analogy, raiders might want to tear through to the dessert phase, but I unavoidably enjoy Blizzard's main course that much that I tend to go back for a fifth (or more) serve of that.
It does make me consider, though; I largely missed dessert at the TBC party. If I can make it to the dessert end of the buffet table before the end of the WoTLK one, maybe I'll actually try and grab some ice cream this time. ;-)
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
On Survival pet synergy
On looking at a recent entry from Mama Druid a few minutes ago, I noticed she mentions respeccing her Hunter to Beast Mastery, because she felt there wasn't enough synergy with her pet. Pike also made a post about that issue earlier, as well.
I want to talk a bit about this, because I suspect that a rather unfortunate perception has arisen about Survival being (at least potentially) a no-pet-required tree. This topic is also going to go into my rationale for using Survival, more or less in general, since for me, a pet is still very much at the core of the class.
I've written before (at fairly great length, admittedly) about how I feel that Beast Mastery is an offensive spec, whereas Survival is primarily defensive. While that has changed to a degree with WoTLK, (due to Lock and Load, Explosive Shot, and Hunter VS Wild) Blizzard fortunately hasn't ripped the tree completely apart to the degree that I initially feared that they would, and aside from the change to EW, the fundamentals are still there.
That means that a Beast Master's focus is going to be, as Big Red Kitty has often stated, primarily on overwhelming damage. BM was the greatest of our three trees for that before WoTLK, and the word on the forum is that it's still no slouch on the damage meter these days, either. Because of that, a Beast Master is going to want a pet with a high damage output, (a Cat, a Ravager, a Raptor, or possibly still a Wind Serpent) to augment and maximise their own high base damage output.
Something else I also need to mention here is that for Beast Masters, threat isn't quite as much of an issue, I suspect, as it is for me. The reason for this, is that Beast Mastery does so much more damage, that even if they do pull threat, the mob will die more or less a split second after it leaves their pet anyway.
Because of this focus on high damage, Beast Mastery is very good for rapidly killing single (or smaller numbers of multiple) targets. Beast Mastery is also substantially more effective than Survival against caster classes, specifically, in PvP.
On the other hand, Survival's focus, as I said, is on defense. I get +10% Stamina from the Survivalist talent, and I also now get the equivalent of 30% of my Stamina as Attack Power, which, although that translates into damage, gives me an additional incentive to get items with more Stamina on them. With EW nerfed, Surv is also back to having the lowest direct damage output of any of the three trees, even with Hunter Vs Wild. If I spec for Explosive Shot and work very hard, I might just be able to scrape even with Marks, but I'd really have to work for it.
For the last several months, since the Charge nerf, I've had a Wind Serpent as a pet for general use. However, he's a DPS pet, so as Survival, I really don't feel the synergy with him, either. It's because his focus and intent is on DPS primarily, and mine isn't.
My focus isn't on being able to kill single targets as fast as possible, at the expense of threat, like Beast Mastery's is. My focus is on being able to survive an unplanned attack of 4-5 mobs, and kill each one sequentially, while not generating too much threat, so I don't get swamped by all of them at once.
Because of that, I'm a bit less like a Hunter in the exact same sense that Beast Mastery is, and a little more like a Paladin. I'm not an actual Paladin, no, and I wouldn't want to be entirely, (although I do have a Paladin alt, and I love that class as well) but a useful analogy might be to think of a Beast Mastery Hunter as also having some things in common with a Demonology Warlock, (because of the pet) whereas I have more in common with a Ret Paladin. (Remember my Dark Knight post?)
In order to avoid building up threat against a group like that, I have to perform a very delicate balancing act. I need enough damage to sequentially kill mobs reasonably quickly, before they kill the pet, because if the pet dies, I will follow, maybe 2-3 seconds after.
I can't do too much damage however, because if I do, I will pull more threat than the pet, to the point where even Feign Death won't work, and I will get swamped and die. I also need to make sure that my individual attacks don't cost too much mana to use, because if they do, I will run out of mana before the last mob is dead, and being out of mana will kill me before being out of health does; I can't kill a mob quickly with only autoshot.
In that sense, again, Survival is like Retribution. A Ret Paladin without mana is dead, and for me it is exactly the same. I have a lot more health than I do mana, but every ability I use relies on mana, and I have even less mana than a BM Hunter, because I need item space for Agility rather than Intellect. An empty mana pool means no ranged or melee specials; auto attack only. Even more importantly for me, it means no traps, Feign Death, or Mend Pet. I die far more often from running out of mana than I do from running directly out of health.
Paladins have things which I, as a Hunter, don't. They have plate armor, and they also have the (limited) ability to heal themselves. Hence, if Survival is going to be able to handle even small (4-5) groups of mobs, I'm going to need more health and armor than what I alone have. That's why I need a pet. I need a pet to boost my defensive capability, (health and armor) and to juggle threat with, to the exact same degree that a Beast Master needs a pet for damage. If I don't have my pet, against groups, I will die just as quickly as a Beast Master would.
DPS pets also generally have less health and armor as well, in exchange for their high DPS, so that causes me to feel that synergy even less.
Hence, for what I do, I don't want a pet that does a lot of damage, at the expense of less health and armor. I need a pet that is going to be able to take on a lot of mobs, one after the other, and stay alive (while I keep Mend Pet up, of course) for as long as possible.
So I need a pet that:-
a) Has a lot of health and armor.
b) Generates a lot of threat.
c) Preferably has an ability which allows them to get to a mob quickly, so it can begin attacking a mob the instant the mob hits my trap. This positioning is even more important in places where I don't have a lot of room, possibly because of other mobs. Sometimes I need to make sure a mob stays exactly where I want them, because if they're allowed to move around too much, or run away, I can get adds, which depending on the situation, (if it's more than half a dozen) can cause me to die.
If my pet does some damage, that's a bonus, but I'm not looking at it from the point of view of it being bonus damage, but bonus threat, which helps the pet keep the mob away from me.
That's the single most important thing to understand about my approach, in comparison to Pike's, and that of other Beast Masters.
Beast Mastery sees the world in terms of DPS, and wanting to maximise it. I, on the other hand, see the world in terms of threat, and wanting to minimise it, while still doing just enough damage to be able to kill mobs. Damage is actually a secondary priority, because of the fact that I understand that if I'm applying damage in the correct way, (burst for low armor, dots for high) the amount I need on a per-mob basis is generally minimal anyway.
Take a look at the image at the top of the page. ;-) My boar is in that picture, and I still have him. I'm going to spec into Tenacity with him and try it out, and now that we have more stable slots, I'm going to possibly get a Carrion Bird for AoE as well.
Boars, like me, get +10% to their health. Boars also have very high base armor. Boars also still get Charge in the Tenacity tree, (for holding a mob in place over the trap, even when Entrapment or TNT doesn't proc) and they also have another talent called Guard Dog which increases their threat, Blood of the Rhino, and Pet Barding, which add even more to their stamina and armor, respectively.
So in closing, I still do absolutely need pets. Beast Mastery uses a pet as an extension of its' role, which is damage output, and I use a pet as an extension of my role, which is defense. Granted, it might add a bit more direct synergy if Blizz were to add +5% or so directly to pet Stamina as part of the Survivalist talent, but I'm not too bothered if they don't.
I want to talk a bit about this, because I suspect that a rather unfortunate perception has arisen about Survival being (at least potentially) a no-pet-required tree. This topic is also going to go into my rationale for using Survival, more or less in general, since for me, a pet is still very much at the core of the class.
I've written before (at fairly great length, admittedly) about how I feel that Beast Mastery is an offensive spec, whereas Survival is primarily defensive. While that has changed to a degree with WoTLK, (due to Lock and Load, Explosive Shot, and Hunter VS Wild) Blizzard fortunately hasn't ripped the tree completely apart to the degree that I initially feared that they would, and aside from the change to EW, the fundamentals are still there.
That means that a Beast Master's focus is going to be, as Big Red Kitty has often stated, primarily on overwhelming damage. BM was the greatest of our three trees for that before WoTLK, and the word on the forum is that it's still no slouch on the damage meter these days, either. Because of that, a Beast Master is going to want a pet with a high damage output, (a Cat, a Ravager, a Raptor, or possibly still a Wind Serpent) to augment and maximise their own high base damage output.
Something else I also need to mention here is that for Beast Masters, threat isn't quite as much of an issue, I suspect, as it is for me. The reason for this, is that Beast Mastery does so much more damage, that even if they do pull threat, the mob will die more or less a split second after it leaves their pet anyway.
Because of this focus on high damage, Beast Mastery is very good for rapidly killing single (or smaller numbers of multiple) targets. Beast Mastery is also substantially more effective than Survival against caster classes, specifically, in PvP.
On the other hand, Survival's focus, as I said, is on defense. I get +10% Stamina from the Survivalist talent, and I also now get the equivalent of 30% of my Stamina as Attack Power, which, although that translates into damage, gives me an additional incentive to get items with more Stamina on them. With EW nerfed, Surv is also back to having the lowest direct damage output of any of the three trees, even with Hunter Vs Wild. If I spec for Explosive Shot and work very hard, I might just be able to scrape even with Marks, but I'd really have to work for it.
For the last several months, since the Charge nerf, I've had a Wind Serpent as a pet for general use. However, he's a DPS pet, so as Survival, I really don't feel the synergy with him, either. It's because his focus and intent is on DPS primarily, and mine isn't.
My focus isn't on being able to kill single targets as fast as possible, at the expense of threat, like Beast Mastery's is. My focus is on being able to survive an unplanned attack of 4-5 mobs, and kill each one sequentially, while not generating too much threat, so I don't get swamped by all of them at once.
Because of that, I'm a bit less like a Hunter in the exact same sense that Beast Mastery is, and a little more like a Paladin. I'm not an actual Paladin, no, and I wouldn't want to be entirely, (although I do have a Paladin alt, and I love that class as well) but a useful analogy might be to think of a Beast Mastery Hunter as also having some things in common with a Demonology Warlock, (because of the pet) whereas I have more in common with a Ret Paladin. (Remember my Dark Knight post?)
In order to avoid building up threat against a group like that, I have to perform a very delicate balancing act. I need enough damage to sequentially kill mobs reasonably quickly, before they kill the pet, because if the pet dies, I will follow, maybe 2-3 seconds after.
I can't do too much damage however, because if I do, I will pull more threat than the pet, to the point where even Feign Death won't work, and I will get swamped and die. I also need to make sure that my individual attacks don't cost too much mana to use, because if they do, I will run out of mana before the last mob is dead, and being out of mana will kill me before being out of health does; I can't kill a mob quickly with only autoshot.
In that sense, again, Survival is like Retribution. A Ret Paladin without mana is dead, and for me it is exactly the same. I have a lot more health than I do mana, but every ability I use relies on mana, and I have even less mana than a BM Hunter, because I need item space for Agility rather than Intellect. An empty mana pool means no ranged or melee specials; auto attack only. Even more importantly for me, it means no traps, Feign Death, or Mend Pet. I die far more often from running out of mana than I do from running directly out of health.
Paladins have things which I, as a Hunter, don't. They have plate armor, and they also have the (limited) ability to heal themselves. Hence, if Survival is going to be able to handle even small (4-5) groups of mobs, I'm going to need more health and armor than what I alone have. That's why I need a pet. I need a pet to boost my defensive capability, (health and armor) and to juggle threat with, to the exact same degree that a Beast Master needs a pet for damage. If I don't have my pet, against groups, I will die just as quickly as a Beast Master would.
DPS pets also generally have less health and armor as well, in exchange for their high DPS, so that causes me to feel that synergy even less.
Hence, for what I do, I don't want a pet that does a lot of damage, at the expense of less health and armor. I need a pet that is going to be able to take on a lot of mobs, one after the other, and stay alive (while I keep Mend Pet up, of course) for as long as possible.
So I need a pet that:-
a) Has a lot of health and armor.
b) Generates a lot of threat.
c) Preferably has an ability which allows them to get to a mob quickly, so it can begin attacking a mob the instant the mob hits my trap. This positioning is even more important in places where I don't have a lot of room, possibly because of other mobs. Sometimes I need to make sure a mob stays exactly where I want them, because if they're allowed to move around too much, or run away, I can get adds, which depending on the situation, (if it's more than half a dozen) can cause me to die.
If my pet does some damage, that's a bonus, but I'm not looking at it from the point of view of it being bonus damage, but bonus threat, which helps the pet keep the mob away from me.
That's the single most important thing to understand about my approach, in comparison to Pike's, and that of other Beast Masters.
Beast Mastery sees the world in terms of DPS, and wanting to maximise it. I, on the other hand, see the world in terms of threat, and wanting to minimise it, while still doing just enough damage to be able to kill mobs. Damage is actually a secondary priority, because of the fact that I understand that if I'm applying damage in the correct way, (burst for low armor, dots for high) the amount I need on a per-mob basis is generally minimal anyway.
Take a look at the image at the top of the page. ;-) My boar is in that picture, and I still have him. I'm going to spec into Tenacity with him and try it out, and now that we have more stable slots, I'm going to possibly get a Carrion Bird for AoE as well.
Boars, like me, get +10% to their health. Boars also have very high base armor. Boars also still get Charge in the Tenacity tree, (for holding a mob in place over the trap, even when Entrapment or TNT doesn't proc) and they also have another talent called Guard Dog which increases their threat, Blood of the Rhino, and Pet Barding, which add even more to their stamina and armor, respectively.
So in closing, I still do absolutely need pets. Beast Mastery uses a pet as an extension of its' role, which is damage output, and I use a pet as an extension of my role, which is defense. Granted, it might add a bit more direct synergy if Blizz were to add +5% or so directly to pet Stamina as part of the Survivalist talent, but I'm not too bothered if they don't.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Why low threat matters.
I mentioned in my last post, how, despite being a lovely weapon, my shiny new S2 crossbow was generating too much threat for me to be able to solo Gargolmar and his adds in Ramparts successfully. I've also actually started to have more threat problems while farming in Quel'Danas since trading in Valanos' Longbow, as well.
However, last night while trying to come up with a solution, I'm pretty sure I came up with an answer. I haven't been able to test this too extensively yet this morning, but my initial results are encouraging; and I'm going to play with some numbers in a moment to try and bear it out.
It may initially seem like a bit of a crazy thing to do, but this morning, since I had the honour and marks spare, I went and picked up the High Warlord's Recurve in Orgrimmar. Why would I do this, I hear you ask? I'll explain.
For this example, I'm going to use a mob we're no doubt all intimately familiar with, the Wretched Fiend of Quel'Danas.
Premise 1:- This adorable creature has 5,400 hit points.
Premise 2:- Each Immolation Trap I cast, lasts 15 seconds, which is the same duration as Serpent Sting.
Premise 3:- Dividing 5,400 by 15, to give us the total amount of DPS needed to kill this mob within 15 seconds, gives us 360. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here, and assume that this fact is the specific reason why Blizzard chose to give this mob precisely this amount of health.
Premise 4:- Serpent Sting rank 10 does 660 + 1714 (my RAP) * 0.1 = 831. Immolation Trap Rank 6 does 1156 damage without Clever Traps, or 1329 damage with. Adding these two together, we get 2160. 2160 / 14 gives us 154, which is the effective DPS of these two spells combined. Without Clever Traps, (for anyone non-Survival) that's 1987 / 14 = 141 DPS.
Premise 5:- My Wind Serpent's base DPS is 116. This isn't going to include numbers for Lightning Breath, since I'd need to go back into the game to get my pet's AP, and for the sake of what I'm trying to show here, it doesn't really matter too much anywayz. 360 (our base DPS needed to kill this mob in 15 seconds) - 141 (our non-Clever Traps dot number) = 219. 219 - 116 (my pet's base non-cit DPS) = 103. For Clever Traps, 360 - 154 = 206. 206 - 116 = 90.
These two numbers, 103 without Clever Traps, or 90 with, represent the total personal DPS that as a Hunter, we need to do to kill a Wretched Fiend in 15 seconds, (our dot duration) when taking the above two damage sources into account. To really put that into perspective, 90 personal DPS should be well within a Hunter's grasp at level 40-45!
Here's why this matters. A Wind Serpent at 70 with Rank 8 Growl, can generate 250 TPS. (Source here) If after trapping and pet damage, the most personal DPS we need to kill non-elite mobs in 15 seconds is on the order of 90-100, that effectively means that our pets can hold aggro equivalent to more than twice the total DPS needed to kill the mob. Yet raiders still cry that pets don't generate enough threat.
My paperdoll DPS with the High Warlord's Recurve, while using my usual Warden's Arrows, is 247.6. As you can see, my base, non-crit DPS, even with a weapon with a pre-requisite of level 60, is nearly three times that needed, barring armor, to kill a Wretched Fiend in 15 seconds. Hence, I could use a level 45 weapon and still do enough damage with the other two sources to kill these mobs within the alloted time.
"But Mirsh," I can hear you saying. "I can just blast these with my (random purple raiding bazooka of doom) and they die in two seconds flat. Who cares?"
Here's why I care. Ever had 4-5 of these things on you at once? I have, and I'm telling you, even at near 10k health, it ain't a picnic. I've died because of it on occasion. However, with Readiness and a Carrion Bird, (if you're good, you'll still be able to do it with a Wind Serpent) if I'm not doing more than 250 personal DPS, here's what I can do if I get 4-5 of these things on me at once.
1) Drop a Frost Trap under the crowd.
2) Put Mend Pet up. (keep it up at all times)
3) Hit the dirt with Feign Death.
4) Hit Readiness.
5) Drop an Immolation Trap at the feet of one mob.
6) Jump back once, and apply Serpent Sting.
7) Use Auto Shot to quickly but calmly kill the first mob.
8) Drink a health pot if need be, rinse, and repeat.
Given how long the trap cooldown is, I might not be able to drop a trap for each mob. If I can't, I'll keep Serpent up anyway, and do a slow, measured 1:1 rotation, while keeping an eye firmly on my damage meter, and applying Disengage if needed, or Feign again when it's back up.
Here's the single main point of this post; if you don't get anything else from it, get this. It isn't that pets don't build enough threat, when soloing. It's that Hunters are generating too much.
Raiders are used to the idea of their encounters being a DPS race. In such an encounter, you want every last bit of DPS that you can get, right? Sure. However, in such a scenario, you've not only got a human tank in front of you with a potentially much higher max TPS, but you've also hopefully MDed onto him in order to give yourself a higher ceiling. You can still MD onto a pet, sure; but if you get a group of mobs on you, you're not going to be able to MD for every one.
In other words, when you're soloing and you get hit by a group, you actually want the opposite to the raid scenario. You want to dot, and hug the 15 second personal DPS requirement after your pet and trapping, as closely as possible. I guarantee you that, if you study this for non-elite mobs, you will always calculate it at below 255, which means you will still have a threshold between the amount of damage you need, and your pet's max TPS, so it will be able to keep up.
TL;DR version:- For farming or dailies, if you want to be able to fend off packs, and also avoid needing to kite, (which boosts your overall speed) get an old weapon, (between level 45-60) and use it. DoT mobs, lean on your pet's damage as well, (which you already likely do as BM anywayz) and stay below 250 personal DPS. You will never need more than 400 overall to kill a non-elite mob.
This is vitally important, because against groups while soloing, it is the secret of how we are able to survive. By staying below 250 personal DPS, we can keep mobs on the pet even when we're standing just outside melee range. Thus, they don't swamp us, and we survive.
The other fun part of this is that doing the above, even without Resourcefulness, you generally won't use more than 10-12% mana per mob, either. I normally use around 8%.
However, last night while trying to come up with a solution, I'm pretty sure I came up with an answer. I haven't been able to test this too extensively yet this morning, but my initial results are encouraging; and I'm going to play with some numbers in a moment to try and bear it out.
It may initially seem like a bit of a crazy thing to do, but this morning, since I had the honour and marks spare, I went and picked up the High Warlord's Recurve in Orgrimmar. Why would I do this, I hear you ask? I'll explain.
For this example, I'm going to use a mob we're no doubt all intimately familiar with, the Wretched Fiend of Quel'Danas.
Premise 1:- This adorable creature has 5,400 hit points.
Premise 2:- Each Immolation Trap I cast, lasts 15 seconds, which is the same duration as Serpent Sting.
Premise 3:- Dividing 5,400 by 15, to give us the total amount of DPS needed to kill this mob within 15 seconds, gives us 360. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here, and assume that this fact is the specific reason why Blizzard chose to give this mob precisely this amount of health.
Premise 4:- Serpent Sting rank 10 does 660 + 1714 (my RAP) * 0.1 = 831. Immolation Trap Rank 6 does 1156 damage without Clever Traps, or 1329 damage with. Adding these two together, we get 2160. 2160 / 14 gives us 154, which is the effective DPS of these two spells combined. Without Clever Traps, (for anyone non-Survival) that's 1987 / 14 = 141 DPS.
Premise 5:- My Wind Serpent's base DPS is 116. This isn't going to include numbers for Lightning Breath, since I'd need to go back into the game to get my pet's AP, and for the sake of what I'm trying to show here, it doesn't really matter too much anywayz. 360 (our base DPS needed to kill this mob in 15 seconds) - 141 (our non-Clever Traps dot number) = 219. 219 - 116 (my pet's base non-cit DPS) = 103. For Clever Traps, 360 - 154 = 206. 206 - 116 = 90.
These two numbers, 103 without Clever Traps, or 90 with, represent the total personal DPS that as a Hunter, we need to do to kill a Wretched Fiend in 15 seconds, (our dot duration) when taking the above two damage sources into account. To really put that into perspective, 90 personal DPS should be well within a Hunter's grasp at level 40-45!
Here's why this matters. A Wind Serpent at 70 with Rank 8 Growl, can generate 250 TPS. (Source here) If after trapping and pet damage, the most personal DPS we need to kill non-elite mobs in 15 seconds is on the order of 90-100, that effectively means that our pets can hold aggro equivalent to more than twice the total DPS needed to kill the mob. Yet raiders still cry that pets don't generate enough threat.
My paperdoll DPS with the High Warlord's Recurve, while using my usual Warden's Arrows, is 247.6. As you can see, my base, non-crit DPS, even with a weapon with a pre-requisite of level 60, is nearly three times that needed, barring armor, to kill a Wretched Fiend in 15 seconds. Hence, I could use a level 45 weapon and still do enough damage with the other two sources to kill these mobs within the alloted time.
"But Mirsh," I can hear you saying. "I can just blast these with my (random purple raiding bazooka of doom) and they die in two seconds flat. Who cares?"
Here's why I care. Ever had 4-5 of these things on you at once? I have, and I'm telling you, even at near 10k health, it ain't a picnic. I've died because of it on occasion. However, with Readiness and a Carrion Bird, (if you're good, you'll still be able to do it with a Wind Serpent) if I'm not doing more than 250 personal DPS, here's what I can do if I get 4-5 of these things on me at once.
1) Drop a Frost Trap under the crowd.
2) Put Mend Pet up. (keep it up at all times)
3) Hit the dirt with Feign Death.
4) Hit Readiness.
5) Drop an Immolation Trap at the feet of one mob.
6) Jump back once, and apply Serpent Sting.
7) Use Auto Shot to quickly but calmly kill the first mob.
8) Drink a health pot if need be, rinse, and repeat.
Given how long the trap cooldown is, I might not be able to drop a trap for each mob. If I can't, I'll keep Serpent up anyway, and do a slow, measured 1:1 rotation, while keeping an eye firmly on my damage meter, and applying Disengage if needed, or Feign again when it's back up.
Here's the single main point of this post; if you don't get anything else from it, get this. It isn't that pets don't build enough threat, when soloing. It's that Hunters are generating too much.
Raiders are used to the idea of their encounters being a DPS race. In such an encounter, you want every last bit of DPS that you can get, right? Sure. However, in such a scenario, you've not only got a human tank in front of you with a potentially much higher max TPS, but you've also hopefully MDed onto him in order to give yourself a higher ceiling. You can still MD onto a pet, sure; but if you get a group of mobs on you, you're not going to be able to MD for every one.
In other words, when you're soloing and you get hit by a group, you actually want the opposite to the raid scenario. You want to dot, and hug the 15 second personal DPS requirement after your pet and trapping, as closely as possible. I guarantee you that, if you study this for non-elite mobs, you will always calculate it at below 255, which means you will still have a threshold between the amount of damage you need, and your pet's max TPS, so it will be able to keep up.
TL;DR version:- For farming or dailies, if you want to be able to fend off packs, and also avoid needing to kite, (which boosts your overall speed) get an old weapon, (between level 45-60) and use it. DoT mobs, lean on your pet's damage as well, (which you already likely do as BM anywayz) and stay below 250 personal DPS. You will never need more than 400 overall to kill a non-elite mob.
This is vitally important, because against groups while soloing, it is the secret of how we are able to survive. By staying below 250 personal DPS, we can keep mobs on the pet even when we're standing just outside melee range. Thus, they don't swamp us, and we survive.
The other fun part of this is that doing the above, even without Resourcefulness, you generally won't use more than 10-12% mana per mob, either. I normally use around 8%.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
A temporary cease fire
While doing dailies last night, I found myself reverting briefly to my own Care Bear roots in terms of my dealings with the Alliance.
There was a Gnome Rogue who was in danger of being killed by three Dawnblade Blood Elves in Dawnstar Village at one point; I helped kill them, /waved, (without targetting the gnome, lest accidents happen) and got a /hug in return. Later, during the Dawnblade Reinforcements quest, a Night Elf Druid was similarly in danger of being killed when I saved him, getting a /cheer in response.
The interesting thing was, on both occasions, I'd started to do it even before I'd actually thought about it, and didn't think about it until afterwards. Normally I don't do such things where the Alliance are concerned; opting instead to simply avoid them if they do not attack me. I can only remember perhaps one other occasion where I've actually tried to help one of them.
I think what that proved to me was that Rilgon was right when he said he couldn't see me as primarily PvP. I had to roll on a PvP server initially because my offline friends were there, and later had to adapt to PvP out of necessity. My first character, a Mage, was designed for pure PvE; until they began to consistently attack me, I hadn't had any plans to attack Alliance players myself at all.
Although I do enjoy the battlegrounds, my reasons for attempting to adapt to the Arena are purely gear based; s3 Arena gear is the apparent equivalent of t6, certainly in terms of armour pen at least, if nothing else, and given that my chances of progressing to the Black Temple in raid terms are basically non-existent, if I want to move forward in the game at all, it's pretty much the Arena or bust.
Hence, while I enjoy the battlegrounds recreationally, and the Arena is basically a gear grind, in terms of the non-instanced game world, truthfully I'd much rather have peace with the opposite faction. It means I can do what I need to, and they can do the same; it's a much more certain means for us to both ultimately get what we need, than is fighting each other.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Why do people hate Hunters?
This was a question I just saw asked by a new Hunter in the forum.
"Okay so I finaly made a hunter and just recently got to 60 (YAY!!!! GO ME) and the whole way up lvling things went well 5-mans and all that jazz good fun generally little dying but never any complaints. I have good knowleged of CC, DPS, "Save the healer", and "take a death" : (. But at this point is seems that populairty for hunters has gone down.
My pet dies often in instances (prolly cuz my gear sucks right now) but still have to admit the scaling isn't the greatest right now anyway...
Group chemistry sucks @** i get blamed for nearly every CC break we have whether that's my job on the pull or not... "it was the huntard..." : (
What's up with that? I lay my life down to save ppls and get called a huntard? to hell with that!!!
What else.....idk that's just a few things anyone else got anything? answers? other issues?"
(Emphasis mine)
Aside from DPS, The Hunter, Survival in particular, is the proverbial Dark Knight role. Sure, you might die while selflessly protecting healers all the time, and prevent wipes; but unlike the tanking classes, a lot of the time we do it in a very transparent and low key way, so you'll never ever be given credit for it. You will do things that will enable a group to finish an instance where they probably would not have otherwise, yet that will not be recognised, and you will still be reviled and shat on as a "huntard," while people call us easy mode and continue to scream for the deletion of our class.
In The Dark Knight, we get probably the single most rationalistic depiction of Batman we've ever seen. Under the cape, this is a very human individual; he gets mauled by dogs and is shown stitching himself up. He also experiences massive self doubt and regret at times.
In WoW, there's something similar. A Hunter can be the Paladin in much more rationalist/realistic terms; without the Superman element. We don't have the bubble or plate armour; we can't heal, we can't cleanse, and we don't have the blessings. We're very, very mortal. So when we save a group, we do it in the dark. When we use CC to allow our team to win an Arena match, we're still not doing what people logically think is the right thing.
No cheering. No Light spells. No glory, other than what we feel ourselves.
If you see the film again at some point soon, watch for the scene in particular where Batman uses the Tumbler to shield the truck Harvey Dent is in, from a rocket being fired by the Joker, and remember how, as a Hunter, you've probably had to do something similar countless times for a Priest in an instance, only to have nobody pay it any mind whatsoever. Also try listening to the tracks, "I'm Not A Hero," "Like a Dog Chasing Cars," and "A Dark Knight," from the DK soundtrack sometime while playing your Hunter in a Heroic.
"See, to them, you're just a freak..."
Friday, April 11, 2008
Why I'm not having bug blues
(This post is likely to get me flamed. The methods I'm talking about using here aren't necessarily going to be for everyone; I'm not like the robots in the forums who suggest that if you don't do everything their way, you're a fundamental failure as a human being. What I am saying though is, try it...you might like it. ;-))
There have been a lot of threads posted on the forums recently about mana regeneration issues, reduction of threat generation from pets, and also autoshot getting frozen when using Kill Command.
I admit, I haven't really been affected by any of these issues. I can explain why.
The first thing is, I generally don't use Kill Command outside groups. I certainly wouldn't use it for farming, since I tend to want the mana for other things. So the bug associated with it hasn't affected me.
For the threat and mana issues, I will outline my usual rotation/attack sequence when soloing/farming.
For Single Targets:-
1. Apply Hunter's Mark.
2. Drop an Immolation Trap at roughly 15 yards from the target, if you can measure it. The addon Nudge is invaluable for this. This also becomes partly intuitive with experience.
3. Use Arcane Shot (Rank 1) as an initial low threat pull shot.
4. Apply Mend Pet pre-emptively if necessary, so it is active while the pet engages the target.
5. Time sending the pet so that it reaches the mob when the mob reaches the Immolation Trap. Ideally this macro can be used to combine both Applying Hunter's Mark and sending the pet at once.
6. Move backwards to re-establish maximum range.
7. Apply Serpent Sting.
8. Commence fire with Auto Shot until the target is dead.
This was tested recently by Efri while levelling his new Hunter on my server. He reported substantially greater mana efficiency than when he was using Serpent Sting and Arcane Shot without trapping.
The other benefit of this attack sequence is that for some reason, I have noticed that even if Omen records me as having the same level of threat with a mob as my pet, the mob will still stay with my pet in many cases if I am only using Auto Shot, whereas firing Arcane Shot will pull it instantly. There can sometimes (not always) be an initial burst of threat due to Serpent and Immolation Trap initially ticking simultaneously, but if that happens, Feign and auto shot afterwards will ensure the mob stays with your pet.
Also, you can put Disengage back on your action bars somewhere. Disengage does not clear threat to the degree that Feign does, but it will reduce your threat; and there are times where if Auto Shot is what you're using, that is enough.
There's a particular quote that is worth mentioning here;
"Match the weapon to the target."
What that means in this context is this; if you're in a raid scenario with 24-39 other people and fighting a boss who's a DPS race, then sure, by all means, spec BM and go nuts.
If however, you're farming or against single mobs, alone, you will find that it will serve you better to adopt a very different strategy. Here, you're not pressed for time, and you want to apply sufficient damage to the mob in order to kill it, without engaging in overkill.
Overkill is bad for two reasons:-
a) It wastes mana. If you get adds after the current mob that you're on, and you've gone nuts with a full 1:1.5 rotation, you've wasted mana on the current mob that could otherwise keep you alive with the adds.
b) It raises not only threat with the current mob, but also ambient threat. Ambient threat is a very real thing, but it isn't measured by meters. (Or at least not accurately)
What that means is that if you want to kill crowds of 3-4 mobs, (although more will kill you) you keep Mend Pet up, cycle Growl on the first two targets, drop a Snake Trap, and use Serpent + Auto to kill each one. Yes, it's tricky. Yes, you have to balance your aggro, your health, the pet's health, and that of the mobs. It is, however, doable. I've done it in the Scholomance.
The single most important thing to remember in such a scenario however is actually to have the discipline not to panic and use Arcane Shot to try and kill the mobs more quickly. That will actually make it far more likely that you will die, because it will pull one and possibly more of them from the boar onto you, resulting in your very rapid death.
As I said to Brigwyn on MSN, there have been two occasions recently where I successfully finished a five mob fight in the Scholomance with less than 400 health and mana. To the naked eye my bars were empty; I had to actually mouse over them to see what the values were. It's a technique I've started calling air walking; because in a way, that's what it is.
The recent threat/mana nerfs are actually going to mean, more than anything else, that more Hunters might have to learn to do something that I've already been doing for a while, now.
You'll have to start riding the rapids.
There have been a lot of threads posted on the forums recently about mana regeneration issues, reduction of threat generation from pets, and also autoshot getting frozen when using Kill Command.
I admit, I haven't really been affected by any of these issues. I can explain why.
The first thing is, I generally don't use Kill Command outside groups. I certainly wouldn't use it for farming, since I tend to want the mana for other things. So the bug associated with it hasn't affected me.
For the threat and mana issues, I will outline my usual rotation/attack sequence when soloing/farming.
For Single Targets:-
1. Apply Hunter's Mark.
2. Drop an Immolation Trap at roughly 15 yards from the target, if you can measure it. The addon Nudge is invaluable for this. This also becomes partly intuitive with experience.
3. Use Arcane Shot (Rank 1) as an initial low threat pull shot.
4. Apply Mend Pet pre-emptively if necessary, so it is active while the pet engages the target.
5. Time sending the pet so that it reaches the mob when the mob reaches the Immolation Trap. Ideally this macro can be used to combine both Applying Hunter's Mark and sending the pet at once.
6. Move backwards to re-establish maximum range.
7. Apply Serpent Sting.
8. Commence fire with Auto Shot until the target is dead.
This was tested recently by Efri while levelling his new Hunter on my server. He reported substantially greater mana efficiency than when he was using Serpent Sting and Arcane Shot without trapping.
The other benefit of this attack sequence is that for some reason, I have noticed that even if Omen records me as having the same level of threat with a mob as my pet, the mob will still stay with my pet in many cases if I am only using Auto Shot, whereas firing Arcane Shot will pull it instantly. There can sometimes (not always) be an initial burst of threat due to Serpent and Immolation Trap initially ticking simultaneously, but if that happens, Feign and auto shot afterwards will ensure the mob stays with your pet.
Also, you can put Disengage back on your action bars somewhere. Disengage does not clear threat to the degree that Feign does, but it will reduce your threat; and there are times where if Auto Shot is what you're using, that is enough.
There's a particular quote that is worth mentioning here;
"Match the weapon to the target."
What that means in this context is this; if you're in a raid scenario with 24-39 other people and fighting a boss who's a DPS race, then sure, by all means, spec BM and go nuts.
If however, you're farming or against single mobs, alone, you will find that it will serve you better to adopt a very different strategy. Here, you're not pressed for time, and you want to apply sufficient damage to the mob in order to kill it, without engaging in overkill.
Overkill is bad for two reasons:-
a) It wastes mana. If you get adds after the current mob that you're on, and you've gone nuts with a full 1:1.5 rotation, you've wasted mana on the current mob that could otherwise keep you alive with the adds.
b) It raises not only threat with the current mob, but also ambient threat. Ambient threat is a very real thing, but it isn't measured by meters. (Or at least not accurately)
What that means is that if you want to kill crowds of 3-4 mobs, (although more will kill you) you keep Mend Pet up, cycle Growl on the first two targets, drop a Snake Trap, and use Serpent + Auto to kill each one. Yes, it's tricky. Yes, you have to balance your aggro, your health, the pet's health, and that of the mobs. It is, however, doable. I've done it in the Scholomance.
The single most important thing to remember in such a scenario however is actually to have the discipline not to panic and use Arcane Shot to try and kill the mobs more quickly. That will actually make it far more likely that you will die, because it will pull one and possibly more of them from the boar onto you, resulting in your very rapid death.
As I said to Brigwyn on MSN, there have been two occasions recently where I successfully finished a five mob fight in the Scholomance with less than 400 health and mana. To the naked eye my bars were empty; I had to actually mouse over them to see what the values were. It's a technique I've started calling air walking; because in a way, that's what it is.
The recent threat/mana nerfs are actually going to mean, more than anything else, that more Hunters might have to learn to do something that I've already been doing for a while, now.
You'll have to start riding the rapids.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Linguistic integrity
I want to write about why I seemed to care so much about the filter Blizzard put on the forum, to the point where I got banned for it.
I don't point these things out because my intent is to be negative or hateful. In all honesty and seriousness, my intent is exactly the opposite. Sometimes however what I talk about can appear dark on the outside, when the intent is light internally; the Kali element again. ;-)
Some of you reading this (a few, at least) might have read a book by a man called George Orwell. The book was called 1984. He wrote it during the mid 1940s, and it was set in a hypothetical future, in the year 1984, where the planet was ruled by only around three or four different totalitarian governments.
At one point, the book details that one of the key ways in which the local totalitarian government maintained power was by the gradual erradication of language. The vocabulary was shrunk down to such an extent that certain concepts (such as freedom, for example) could not be spoken about at all, literally because there were no words with which to describe or express them.
Blizzard's filter, whether they were intending it to or not, actually made a very powerful point. Namely, that over use of acronyms (and especially, the corruption even of said acronyms to produce terms like lawl) can end up causing written language to become almost entirely unreadable.
I'm not trying to say that I never use acronyms or corrupted terms myself; when you're typing, the temptation to do so can be very difficult to resist, especially if you need to get something written quickly. However, the over use of such terms as LOL at times does genuinely bother me.
If you try reading some of the lines in either the Looking For Group or Trade channels within World of Warcraft, next time you do so, ask yourself how likely it is that you would be able to understand the strings of acronyms you see there, if you had never seen them before. Also stop and think; when you were new to the game yourself, were you able to understand intuitively what these acronyms meant, or did you need someone else to deliberately explain them to you?
Acronyms in that sense are very much like profanity. When used in moderation and in context, they're fine. However, there is a tendency with both of them, for them to be excessively relied on by people whose personal vocabularies are that small that they may not know how to express themselves in any other way.
I'm not one of the people who believes that computer games necessarily lead to real-world physical violence. However, one problem caused by computer games (that I feel legitimately does exist) is the gradual errosion and corruption of language that is engaged in, and apparently even encouraged, by the subcultures associated with said games.
Excessive use of LOL and other acronyms is never engaged in with any kind of introspection or analysis. It's all a big joke, something to be laughed at in itself. Anyone who does look at it seriously in any way receives the type of reception that I got; first reproach and claims that I "don't have a life," and then silencing.
I encourage anyone here who hasn't read it, to read 1984, and to especially look at the parts of the book describing the language Newspeak, and how it is used in the novel. The book is in the public domain, so you can read it here.
When you have read it, think about what it says regarding the subjects of language and memory. Then possibly think about the use of compacted language within games and other places, and lastly possibly about the current political situation within America in particular.
See what you come up with.
I don't point these things out because my intent is to be negative or hateful. In all honesty and seriousness, my intent is exactly the opposite. Sometimes however what I talk about can appear dark on the outside, when the intent is light internally; the Kali element again. ;-)
Some of you reading this (a few, at least) might have read a book by a man called George Orwell. The book was called 1984. He wrote it during the mid 1940s, and it was set in a hypothetical future, in the year 1984, where the planet was ruled by only around three or four different totalitarian governments.
At one point, the book details that one of the key ways in which the local totalitarian government maintained power was by the gradual erradication of language. The vocabulary was shrunk down to such an extent that certain concepts (such as freedom, for example) could not be spoken about at all, literally because there were no words with which to describe or express them.
Blizzard's filter, whether they were intending it to or not, actually made a very powerful point. Namely, that over use of acronyms (and especially, the corruption even of said acronyms to produce terms like lawl) can end up causing written language to become almost entirely unreadable.
I'm not trying to say that I never use acronyms or corrupted terms myself; when you're typing, the temptation to do so can be very difficult to resist, especially if you need to get something written quickly. However, the over use of such terms as LOL at times does genuinely bother me.
If you try reading some of the lines in either the Looking For Group or Trade channels within World of Warcraft, next time you do so, ask yourself how likely it is that you would be able to understand the strings of acronyms you see there, if you had never seen them before. Also stop and think; when you were new to the game yourself, were you able to understand intuitively what these acronyms meant, or did you need someone else to deliberately explain them to you?
Acronyms in that sense are very much like profanity. When used in moderation and in context, they're fine. However, there is a tendency with both of them, for them to be excessively relied on by people whose personal vocabularies are that small that they may not know how to express themselves in any other way.
I'm not one of the people who believes that computer games necessarily lead to real-world physical violence. However, one problem caused by computer games (that I feel legitimately does exist) is the gradual errosion and corruption of language that is engaged in, and apparently even encouraged, by the subcultures associated with said games.
Excessive use of LOL and other acronyms is never engaged in with any kind of introspection or analysis. It's all a big joke, something to be laughed at in itself. Anyone who does look at it seriously in any way receives the type of reception that I got; first reproach and claims that I "don't have a life," and then silencing.
I encourage anyone here who hasn't read it, to read 1984, and to especially look at the parts of the book describing the language Newspeak, and how it is used in the novel. The book is in the public domain, so you can read it here.
When you have read it, think about what it says regarding the subjects of language and memory. Then possibly think about the use of compacted language within games and other places, and lastly possibly about the current political situation within America in particular.
See what you come up with.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The concept of delayed gratification
In a recent post, Lienna talks about a recent Molten Core raid she tried to assemble. She relates how out of 10 people who it turned out were not attuned, 6 left the raid rather than go through the process, as well as how on wiping in front of the third boss, everyone in the raid suddenly and mysteriously had pressing reasons to leave.
I admit, this is probably the single main reason why I'm starting to be put off even five man content, let alone trying to raid. People have apparently become completely intolerant to undertaking any kind of challenge in the game if the difficulty is more than trivial, and the gratification involved for doing so is anything other than immediate. I've been able to get maybe a single five man group in the last two months which wasn't aborted before completion, and some of said abortions were in low level instances.
The excuses offered in refutation to this, I know, will be many. "Mirsh, Molten Core is old and obsolete. They were scrubs for wanting to do it anywayz!" or "All of the content in this game is old and boring now. People can't be bothered wiping through it simply due to the presence of a couple of scrubs in the group!"
I guess I'm just weird. I've done every five man in the game at least once, and I can honestly say that I'm not bored with any of them, other than the odd blatant, genuine scrub trap such as the Mana Tombs.
Is this seriously the reason why people feel like this now, though? Or could it be that the people who've referred to the Arena reward system as "welfare," are actually right, in the sense that it's apparently rendered people averse to doing anything that takes more than a minimal amount of time?
Here's another way in which I'm weird; running 5 mans for me used to be about having fun with the people I was with, experiencing the actual content, and maybe helping people out. Apparently gear is the sole reason why most other people play this game, however; and if said gear isn't forthcoming within maybe 15-30 minutes, tops, then they're no longer interested.
I also used to take pride in how effectively a group I was in was able to move through an instance; not necessarily quickly, but successfully and safely.
I've recently been reminded by a few people on the forum that I don't raid or play in the Arena, (which are apparently the only two legitimate activities for someone to engage in, in this game) that I shouldn't try and make myself out to be some kind of authority on the Hunter class, (which I have no recollection of ever having done anywayz) and that I apparently know absolutely nothing whatsoever about either this class, or the game in general.
Granted, that might indeed be true. I guess said ignorance on my part is the reason why I used to care about trying to get through an instance without contributing to other people's repair bills; someone who truly knows how to play the game can probably do that to the point where it's automatic, and so isn't even an issue at all. I envy such people; that degree of competence would be great. I guess that comes with actually knowing something about the class or the game.
That's part of the reason why I'm still stuck soloing the EPL/WPL instances and other places when people call me a scrub for doing so; I don't care so much about gear, but I do want challenge, and I do want to get to explore interesting places. Those activities take time; actually quite a lot of it.
Trackhoof mentioned hitting a dilemma of his skill surpassing his gear; there are now a lot of people playing this game who apparently believe that if you aren't completely covered in purple, you're a complete failure as a human being, both within WoW and out of it. Several of the aborted instances I've run recently were with people who spoke of having multiple geared 70s; yet somehow, in the scenarios we were in, they just couldn't help wiping. They've got lots of purples though, and we all know that that's the only thing that really matters.
While we're also on the subject of my faults, one of my most grievous ones has been a tendency to leave just about everything in life half-finished. I'd go halfway through something, get bored, and leave it. I've done that with pretty much everything else in my life so far; school, higher education, my last relationship. However, ironically enough, WoW has been possibly the first thing I've ever done (or more specifically, this Hunter) where I haven't done that.
Before Blizzard recently sold out and became purely about the lowest common denominator, WoW actually taught me in very graphic terms about the value of the concept of delayed gratification.
You go through an instance. Some of the mobs in it are difficult to kill. It takes a long time, and involves you having to try and work as a group and pay attention for longer than might be comfortable. At the end of it though, you've got several new items you can use in several cases, and you come away with a feeling of having accomplished something, (even if it's only killing monsters in a video game) and maybe having helped a few other people out.
I used to value having those sorts of experiences, but like I said, I'm weird like that.
"Caring about what yourself or other people do in a video game? Geez, Mirsh, you need some perspective. Get a life. Learn to play this freaking game while you're at it. You're still half covered in blues and greens. Stupid scrub."
Monday, March 10, 2008
My very own General forum thread.
Someone made a General forum thread called @Mirshalak, and then didn't come back after I answered, so I'll repost my answer here.
So, i gotta ask - what the hell is up with your spec?
I mean, i'm not one to judge by peoples gear or rating. Some people dont like to PvP or raid, some people just dinged 70, some people are casuale. Its cool. Also some people like to exprimant with thier specs, and i get that too.
But, your spec is all over the place. You're 41 points in survival, but you skipped master tactician. You also skipped both detarrence and counterattack for 5/5 survivaliest, which means you dont want to gain range, but you wear leather so it doesn't seem to me like you are a melee hunter. You are also 20 points into marksmanship, but you couldn't spare one point in survival [where you didn't hit the 41 points talent] to grab scattershot? Its a life saver on a 30 sec CD, and again, you aren't a melee hunter
It just doesn't make sense. Please expline where are you going with this spec and what the hell is it good for?
It's a farming spec. I use it for soloing the Scholomance. And yes, I define the word casual at the moment. I'm farming gold for crafted lewts because I'm a scrub, don't want to deal with guild politics, and prolly don't have the skillz necessary to enter a raiding guild anywayz. ;-)
However, more seriously...I've got Resourcefulness for the trap bonus. For instance/primal farming, I actually like to try and minimise my threat, and rely on talented traps/stings to do the work. I've still got 5/5 MS because when respeccing last time I didn't go the whole hog due to people in groups tending to cry profusely if you don't have MS, and I still want to be able to do instances occasionally.
I do fight at range also...but my health is at 6.8 to barely 7k even with Survivalist...so I need it. I'm geared pretty much for pure ag.
Buffed I've been a bit over 900 ag...I recently broke 1k dps in the mana tombs not long ago, and 850 dps on Murmur. It's not all that special by raiding standards perhaps, but I was quite happy with it, and I did it with this crazy mixed up spec as well, no less.
Most of the leet Black Temple type Hunters I read on the Hunter forum (hi, Alu! ;-)) are generally of the opinion that MT ain't all that great; the proc is too unsteady.
More specifically though, as I've said, when I'm farming I actually want to minimise my crit talent wise to a degree, not maximise it...since with my ag the way it is I'm critting often enough anywayz. If I go too crit crazy, mobs go from the pet to me, and I don't like that at all.
There are better talents than Counterattack too, truth be told. I used to get a fair amount of mileage out of it in Warsong Gulch back in the day, but those days are long behind me, more's the pity. I've been more or less straight PvE since I hit the cap; Resilience does horrible, horrible things to Survival. :(
I wear leather because as it's written by the Elitist Jerks, leather's where the stats are at for Survival, at least to a large degree. I don't like that much, because it makes me a lot more squishy...but I do love ag...more than anything else. So what can ya do? ;-)
I know Bandet talks about how Scatter's the shizzle, and I believe her, but I've always been a Wyvern man myself...and what with both ToTH and Resourcefulness for what I'm currently doing...sadly I only have so many points.
It's a hybrid five man/farming spec. Truthfully if I'd gone fully the farming route, I'd have 5/5 Imp Stings (extra dam from Serpent) and Readiness as well. It's what I've been using for low threat goodness in the Scholomance.
I was getting my rear end booted in all different directions by Rattlegore and his adds in particular, so I had to remember some lessons from my levelling days with Surv.
By lowering my crit a tad and relying on Serpent, maybe 1-2 steadies and my traps for the damage, threat is generated per tick, rather than per crit spike, so my boar can keep up...especially if I juggle threat with Snake Trap, as to some extent with Rattlegore's adds I still needed to do. The mana efficiency is also good to the point of probably being nerfed when Blizz find out, too. ;-)
It's low damage, yes...but high damage has IMHO never been the point of Survival for soloing. The point is keeping my threat low. I pull carefully, do single targets when I can, and keep my ambient threat as close to rock bottom as possible. If I do that, there's a good chance Feign and Disengage will still work for me, since I was finding if I went all out with a 1:1.5, they didn't, irrespective of what KTH or Omen said.
It lets me solo things though that would get off the boar and kill me otherwise...cos I was being killed by them. If I go with a particular spec, it will generally only be because I've tested it myself and found out that it works for me...irrespective of conventional opinion. ;-)
BTW, I appreciate not having received a virtual barrage of rotten vegetables from my brother Hunters over my gear in this thread, either. ;-)
So, i gotta ask - what the hell is up with your spec?
I mean, i'm not one to judge by peoples gear or rating. Some people dont like to PvP or raid, some people just dinged 70, some people are casuale. Its cool. Also some people like to exprimant with thier specs, and i get that too.
But, your spec is all over the place. You're 41 points in survival, but you skipped master tactician. You also skipped both detarrence and counterattack for 5/5 survivaliest, which means you dont want to gain range, but you wear leather so it doesn't seem to me like you are a melee hunter. You are also 20 points into marksmanship, but you couldn't spare one point in survival [where you didn't hit the 41 points talent] to grab scattershot? Its a life saver on a 30 sec CD, and again, you aren't a melee hunter
It just doesn't make sense. Please expline where are you going with this spec and what the hell is it good for?
It's a farming spec. I use it for soloing the Scholomance. And yes, I define the word casual at the moment. I'm farming gold for crafted lewts because I'm a scrub, don't want to deal with guild politics, and prolly don't have the skillz necessary to enter a raiding guild anywayz. ;-)
However, more seriously...I've got Resourcefulness for the trap bonus. For instance/primal farming, I actually like to try and minimise my threat, and rely on talented traps/stings to do the work. I've still got 5/5 MS because when respeccing last time I didn't go the whole hog due to people in groups tending to cry profusely if you don't have MS, and I still want to be able to do instances occasionally.
I do fight at range also...but my health is at 6.8 to barely 7k even with Survivalist...so I need it. I'm geared pretty much for pure ag.
Buffed I've been a bit over 900 ag...I recently broke 1k dps in the mana tombs not long ago, and 850 dps on Murmur. It's not all that special by raiding standards perhaps, but I was quite happy with it, and I did it with this crazy mixed up spec as well, no less.
Most of the leet Black Temple type Hunters I read on the Hunter forum (hi, Alu! ;-)) are generally of the opinion that MT ain't all that great; the proc is too unsteady.
More specifically though, as I've said, when I'm farming I actually want to minimise my crit talent wise to a degree, not maximise it...since with my ag the way it is I'm critting often enough anywayz. If I go too crit crazy, mobs go from the pet to me, and I don't like that at all.
There are better talents than Counterattack too, truth be told. I used to get a fair amount of mileage out of it in Warsong Gulch back in the day, but those days are long behind me, more's the pity. I've been more or less straight PvE since I hit the cap; Resilience does horrible, horrible things to Survival. :(
I wear leather because as it's written by the Elitist Jerks, leather's where the stats are at for Survival, at least to a large degree. I don't like that much, because it makes me a lot more squishy...but I do love ag...more than anything else. So what can ya do? ;-)
I know Bandet talks about how Scatter's the shizzle, and I believe her, but I've always been a Wyvern man myself...and what with both ToTH and Resourcefulness for what I'm currently doing...sadly I only have so many points.
It's a hybrid five man/farming spec. Truthfully if I'd gone fully the farming route, I'd have 5/5 Imp Stings (extra dam from Serpent) and Readiness as well. It's what I've been using for low threat goodness in the Scholomance.
I was getting my rear end booted in all different directions by Rattlegore and his adds in particular, so I had to remember some lessons from my levelling days with Surv.
By lowering my crit a tad and relying on Serpent, maybe 1-2 steadies and my traps for the damage, threat is generated per tick, rather than per crit spike, so my boar can keep up...especially if I juggle threat with Snake Trap, as to some extent with Rattlegore's adds I still needed to do. The mana efficiency is also good to the point of probably being nerfed when Blizz find out, too. ;-)
It's low damage, yes...but high damage has IMHO never been the point of Survival for soloing. The point is keeping my threat low. I pull carefully, do single targets when I can, and keep my ambient threat as close to rock bottom as possible. If I do that, there's a good chance Feign and Disengage will still work for me, since I was finding if I went all out with a 1:1.5, they didn't, irrespective of what KTH or Omen said.
It lets me solo things though that would get off the boar and kill me otherwise...cos I was being killed by them. If I go with a particular spec, it will generally only be because I've tested it myself and found out that it works for me...irrespective of conventional opinion. ;-)
BTW, I appreciate not having received a virtual barrage of rotten vegetables from my brother Hunters over my gear in this thread, either. ;-)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
A reminder about Hunter melee
This was something I just wrote on the forum in response to a level 34 Hunter expressing sadness at people telling him he couldn't main tank instances.
--
Linix, I used to tank at your level as well. I loved doing it, too.
Then I got to Outland, and I tried doing it in Hellfire Ramparts. I died on the first pull, and so did my group. Very rapidly, and very messily.
Hunters on our forum who tell us not to tank are doing so for a reason. I couldn't be told, and I had to learn what that reason was for myself...but I did learn.
I've never liked dying, and so that's why, ever since coming to Outland, I haven't tried it.
Azeroth was designed with being a lot more Hunter friendly in general, and Survival friendly specifically, in mind.
I love my spec, and so I've tried to learn as much as I can about it, including its' history. During the beta of this game, Survival was originally intended to be the melee tree for Hunters.
Back then we had both melee weapon specialization talents and dual wield talents which buffed our offhand when dual wielding. We would have been like the Assassin's traps tree in Diablo 2.
I don't know entirely why, but those talents got removed before the game was commercially released, and so now we're the only class in the game with dual wield melee, who also don't get any buff to the offhand. We were also never given any buff to our damage mitigation from armor other than Thick Hide, which we would need if we were going to be a serious option for tanking.
Because some of those parts of Azeroth were already in the game during the beta, and also I think because up until TBC at least, most of the same people were still designing the game, most of the instances in Azeroth genuinely are Hunter tank friendly. It's still something that takes some doing, and you need a good healer and good dps backing you up, but it is doable...I know because I've done it.
However sadly, that is not true in Outland. Believe me when I say that there is nobody more unhappy about this than me; the trapping Assassin was my favourite class and spec in Diablo 2, and I very much would have liked to play that class in this game...but for whatever reason, Blizzard decided that it was not to be.
Fortunately I've been able to adapt, which I was forced, extremely reluctantly, to do at around level 62, and I still find range and limited melee enjoyable. Survival never was quite the tree I wanted it to be, but it's still good.
You might not be able to adapt to more pure range once you hit Outland though, and if that is true, I urge you to spare yourself some pain and reroll early. We are very short on Protection spec Warriors, now more than ever. I have an alt Prot Warrior that I love to play, and he is far more adequately suited to tanking than Survival could hope to be; and the best part is, Warriors stay able to tank in Outland as well.
Survival can play a critical role behind a dedicated main tank when it comes to keeping a party alive; I've always believed that and I still do. However, we need the Warrior and can benefit from his presence just as much as he can benefit from ours.
As much as it saddens me to admit it, I have had to learn myself that the Hunter is not a true tanking class. It was not intended for that.
--
Linix, I used to tank at your level as well. I loved doing it, too.
Then I got to Outland, and I tried doing it in Hellfire Ramparts. I died on the first pull, and so did my group. Very rapidly, and very messily.
Hunters on our forum who tell us not to tank are doing so for a reason. I couldn't be told, and I had to learn what that reason was for myself...but I did learn.
I've never liked dying, and so that's why, ever since coming to Outland, I haven't tried it.
Azeroth was designed with being a lot more Hunter friendly in general, and Survival friendly specifically, in mind.
I love my spec, and so I've tried to learn as much as I can about it, including its' history. During the beta of this game, Survival was originally intended to be the melee tree for Hunters.
Back then we had both melee weapon specialization talents and dual wield talents which buffed our offhand when dual wielding. We would have been like the Assassin's traps tree in Diablo 2.
I don't know entirely why, but those talents got removed before the game was commercially released, and so now we're the only class in the game with dual wield melee, who also don't get any buff to the offhand. We were also never given any buff to our damage mitigation from armor other than Thick Hide, which we would need if we were going to be a serious option for tanking.
Because some of those parts of Azeroth were already in the game during the beta, and also I think because up until TBC at least, most of the same people were still designing the game, most of the instances in Azeroth genuinely are Hunter tank friendly. It's still something that takes some doing, and you need a good healer and good dps backing you up, but it is doable...I know because I've done it.
However sadly, that is not true in Outland. Believe me when I say that there is nobody more unhappy about this than me; the trapping Assassin was my favourite class and spec in Diablo 2, and I very much would have liked to play that class in this game...but for whatever reason, Blizzard decided that it was not to be.
Fortunately I've been able to adapt, which I was forced, extremely reluctantly, to do at around level 62, and I still find range and limited melee enjoyable. Survival never was quite the tree I wanted it to be, but it's still good.
You might not be able to adapt to more pure range once you hit Outland though, and if that is true, I urge you to spare yourself some pain and reroll early. We are very short on Protection spec Warriors, now more than ever. I have an alt Prot Warrior that I love to play, and he is far more adequately suited to tanking than Survival could hope to be; and the best part is, Warriors stay able to tank in Outland as well.
Survival can play a critical role behind a dedicated main tank when it comes to keeping a party alive; I've always believed that and I still do. However, we need the Warrior and can benefit from his presence just as much as he can benefit from ours.
As much as it saddens me to admit it, I have had to learn myself that the Hunter is not a true tanking class. It was not intended for that.
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