Joel's Scattered Thoughts

I joined in on a Blackwing Lair raid for fun last night. We went through the instance, got some lower level toons some pretty purples, and got the achievement for a bunch of people. It reminded me of my first raiding toons and why I became a raid leader.

I was sure I had highlighted this earlier, but WoW.com had a video guide to faster raiding. What takes time in raids is not the fights, but the dead time. It’s the time you spend waiting for people to find their way to the instance, waiting for someone to regain that last tenth of a percent of mana, or debating who gets the latest shiny object that kills your momentum and leads to people wandering away to take a nap. I had gotten sick of slow runs, which is one of the reasons I became a raid leader. As a tank, I had the bonus ability of pull whenever I felt ready.

The current heroics are a great way to get practice for speed runs. If you’re the tank, just keep pulling if your healer has over 50% mana. As a healer, let the tank know you’re fine with chain pulls. As DPS … play well so that the healer doesn’t waste mana on you, I guess?

This description of tank roulette made me laugh:

I’ve heard all about “Tank Roulette”: a game in which the tank stands at the edge of Krasus’s Landing, queues using the Dungeon Finder as a Tank, jumps off the edge and either:

* (a) ends up safely in a dungeon before they die a horrible death from falling.

* (b) or – there’s a small chance – that they might hit the ground before they are matched with a party.

via Hots and Dots Absolute Power.

I’ve had a lot of fun running PUGs as a tank.  Unfortunately I got tired of it just as my death knight got his Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement.  I still haven’t run Pit of Saron with him.

Insanely enough, I’ve been running the regular Northrend dungeons on my shaman as a healer.  I do NOT sign up as party lead with him.  All I care about is making the green bars go right.  If I feel enthusiastic, I may occasionally throw in a flame shock or a fire elemental.  It’s an interesting change from tanking and I look forward to getting him ready for heroics.

photo by Zach Klein

Larísa at The Pink Pigtail Inn wrote that  The activity feed in Armory should be optional.   As Gevlon posted in her comments, really this was all available before it was just much harder to get.  Simply stalk the toon you want to know about, check their achievements at every opportunity and you can collect all this information in game.  (There’s probably an addon out there that does that.)

What bugs me is having the equivalent of a permanent record hanging over my head.  For example, when I decided to twink my rogue, I screwed up in buying the heirloom weapons. (I bought sword/dagger instead of sword/mace or at least dagger/dagger.)  Not a major mistake, but if I wanted to get into raiding with him on one of the better guilds having this type of mistake in my history could get me branded as a noob.

“…if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.” Bruce Schneier’s Answer to Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Privacy

It’s enough of a troublesome issue in real life, do we have to drag it into games as well?

This comment by Enkylanos on Azure Shadows’ We Didn’t Start the Fire post sums up the added difficulty of tanking / healing for me.

It’s *often* the case that a single mistake by a healer or tank can wipe the raid. It’s *rarely* the case that a single mistake by a DPS can wipe a raid (though the DPS may die, or his or her damage done may be poor that fight).

I know that when I play DPS in groups I make stupid mistakes but there is that margin for error.  I can over-aggro, blink into an un-aggroed mob, knock my keyboard onto the floor and most likely the group will be just fine.  My toon may be on the ground dead whilst I die of embarrassment but nine times out of ten I get rezzed and the run goes on.  If I forget to hit the right cooldown  or stand in the wrong place or let my attention wander a little, the result is often a refreshing run back from the nearest graveyard for everyone.

To make things complicated, it’s also harder to objectively measure your performance as a tank / healer.  As DPS you get a nice simple number and as long as your DPS keeps going up and you’re not pulling aggro you’re doing fine.  As a tank or healer I’m always wondering if I’m doing a good job, or if the tank/healer/DPS is carrying me.  There isn’t a nice simple number to look at – without a deep theorycrafting analysis the best you can say is “Nobody died, so I think I did okay.”

photo by 3d Dan

This is the kind of thing I enjoy: Time-to-Emblem Ratios – Cold Comfort « Cold Comfort.  I love seeing math applied to situations where it probably will never actually be used.  (Maybe I should study economics.)

Anyhow, this is a calculation of how many emblems you can expect from a typical run of a heroic dungeon versus how much time it takes to run that dungeon.  Thus, your best bet if you are collecting emblems is to chain-run Gundrak (at 2.8 minutes per emblem) and stay away from Pit of Saron (at 6 minutes per emblem).

An interesting point to note is how many of the instances have a minute per emblem number very close to 3.  This indicates that Blizzard did a good job of balancing the time to reward ratio (emblem-wise) across instances. Realistically, run any dungeon and you’ll get roughly the same emblem rewards in the same amount of time.

(via Wow.com)

“Gogogogogogogogogogogogogo”:

- If you want your tank to accidentally let you die, use gogogogo.

This actually enrages basically every tank, it’s pushing and annoying, and could easily be repaced by: “I’m ready ” or “Pull when you are ready”.

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Guide: Don’t spank the Tank !

(via Achtung Panzercow)

My death knight is 3 instances short of Northrend Dungeon Hero and I can’t bring myself to finish it off because of annoying PUGs.  I plan to resume random dungeons as soon as the bad PUG debuff wears off.

If you have a death knight, have them pop Army of the Dead in stage two of the Black Knight fight in the Trial of the Champion. Sit back and watch the armies of zombies tear each other to bits.

photo by joelf