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Friday, December 21, 2007
Why do large raids suck?
It's quite simple, really. Here's the formula:ir = (pe ^ 2) / 2 + (pe-1)*3
where
ir = Chance of irritation
pe = Number of people
This is graphically illustrated to the right.
You can see that the chances of significant irritation in a 5 man are rather low (20%), much higher in a 10 man (67.5%) and are guaranteed to hit 100% long before you hit the 25 man cap.
Why? The more people you're grouped with, the greater the chance there's some idiot doing something stupid ("ooops, I accidently pulled that next group"). Or inconsiderate ("gotta go for a smoke"). Or both ("ooops, I forgot to repair").
That's why I don't do raids with more than 10 people these days. Waste of good gaming time.
Arena makeups
So my experience as a feral druid in arenas has not been good. You can see it; 1432 3v3 rating as of this posting - and that's after the 8-3 run we had last night (which I'm going to talk about).
As a feral, if you're doing dps, you lose 2 very powerful CC spells (cyclone & roots). If you're casting those spells, you're not doing dps and therefore, not really behaving according to your strengths. That's pretty much why (in my opinion), you don't see many feral druids in arenas.
We've tried me (feral druid), Stalwart (holy Pally) and Shleepee (BM hunter). Didn't work; other teams would go after Shleepee and nuke him down quick (typically cc'ing Stalwart).
We've tried me, Lanmalkeri (resto druid) and Kneegasher (arms warrior). Didn't really work. It should work in theory, but in practice - other teams would see Lan and kill him in short order, or they'd nuke KG down before Lan got in place. Personally, I think we may have done better if Lan casted more HoTs than Healing Touches, but whatever.
We've tried me, Lan's mage and Stalwart. No go; Lan's mage would typically get nuked down in short order.
We brings us to last night; we sign up with me, Napsac (Shleepee's rogue) and Stalwart. Except Stalwart says in the first match "oh crap, I need to respec after we lose this match". He'd been screwing around with a protection build (he has gear for it), but meant to spec back to holy for the arena matches. Well, we play the game and win. So we try again, and win. And again, win. So why mess with what seems to be working? We end up 8-3 for the night, much to everyone's surprise.
So why did a prot pally, mutilate rogue and feral druid do so well? I think there's a number of reasons:
1) Teams in our lowly bracket aren't that good.
2) Better gear. My feral gear has improved a fair bit lately (S3 pants!) and so has Napsac's.
3) Reaction of the other team:
Let's examine this 3rd one; you see a pally and nothing else. You have to assume rogue(s) and druid(s). In all likely hood, the pally is the healer. Many teams go straight for the healer, generally a reasonable strategy. Either kill the healer, or disable him.
So without any other targets, the opposing teams went for our healer. Except our healer was protection specced and could take a nice beating and still survive. Meantime, Napsac went to town on their healer, and I went to town on one of their dps.
Typically what would happen is they'd do a fair bit of damage on Stalwart while both Napsac and I did a fair bit of damage to our targets. Then Stalwart would bubble, and they'd go looking for new targets. Most times, it would be me. I'd shift out to bear, and since I was wearing a mix of bear and cat gear - I'd still have 18-20K armor and 35+% dodge, so I could take one hell of a beating. By this time, Napsac had killed the healer and the game was for all intents and purposes, over.
Surprising results for an unconventional team makeup. I'm curious to see if we can keep this up.
Note to self: the decision to wear a mix of bear and cat gear was an excellent one. I sacrificed some crit and AP, but picked up a metric ton of survivability. A very good trade-off.
As a feral, if you're doing dps, you lose 2 very powerful CC spells (cyclone & roots). If you're casting those spells, you're not doing dps and therefore, not really behaving according to your strengths. That's pretty much why (in my opinion), you don't see many feral druids in arenas.
We've tried me (feral druid), Stalwart (holy Pally) and Shleepee (BM hunter). Didn't work; other teams would go after Shleepee and nuke him down quick (typically cc'ing Stalwart).
We've tried me, Lanmalkeri (resto druid) and Kneegasher (arms warrior). Didn't really work. It should work in theory, but in practice - other teams would see Lan and kill him in short order, or they'd nuke KG down before Lan got in place. Personally, I think we may have done better if Lan casted more HoTs than Healing Touches, but whatever.
We've tried me, Lan's mage and Stalwart. No go; Lan's mage would typically get nuked down in short order.
We brings us to last night; we sign up with me, Napsac (Shleepee's rogue) and Stalwart. Except Stalwart says in the first match "oh crap, I need to respec after we lose this match". He'd been screwing around with a protection build (he has gear for it), but meant to spec back to holy for the arena matches. Well, we play the game and win. So we try again, and win. And again, win. So why mess with what seems to be working? We end up 8-3 for the night, much to everyone's surprise.
So why did a prot pally, mutilate rogue and feral druid do so well? I think there's a number of reasons:
1) Teams in our lowly bracket aren't that good.
2) Better gear. My feral gear has improved a fair bit lately (S3 pants!) and so has Napsac's.
3) Reaction of the other team:
Let's examine this 3rd one; you see a pally and nothing else. You have to assume rogue(s) and druid(s). In all likely hood, the pally is the healer. Many teams go straight for the healer, generally a reasonable strategy. Either kill the healer, or disable him.
So without any other targets, the opposing teams went for our healer. Except our healer was protection specced and could take a nice beating and still survive. Meantime, Napsac went to town on their healer, and I went to town on one of their dps.
Typically what would happen is they'd do a fair bit of damage on Stalwart while both Napsac and I did a fair bit of damage to our targets. Then Stalwart would bubble, and they'd go looking for new targets. Most times, it would be me. I'd shift out to bear, and since I was wearing a mix of bear and cat gear - I'd still have 18-20K armor and 35+% dodge, so I could take one hell of a beating. By this time, Napsac had killed the healer and the game was for all intents and purposes, over.
Surprising results for an unconventional team makeup. I'm curious to see if we can keep this up.
Note to self: the decision to wear a mix of bear and cat gear was an excellent one. I sacrificed some crit and AP, but picked up a metric ton of survivability. A very good trade-off.
Intro
I play a feral druid. I play other characters too, but mostly I'm playing my druid. This blog is going to be about pvp, tanking and crazy silly kitty dps.
I've been playing since, oh, a couple months after WoW's release. Started with a female dwarf rogue with pigtails. Hilarious. Wasn't until much later did I come to realize that
a) dwarfs are a poor choice for rogues
b) everyone else knew that, since I was the only dwarf rogue as far as I could tell
c) rogues are booooring to play
My rogue still sits neglected at 60.
Next up was my adorable green hair 2 foot tall gnome warlock. The cutest pot of evil you've ever seen, in my humble opinion. She sits at 70 today, specced for pvp.
At some point, and I don't remember when, I decided to roll a druid - to give me the flexibility of either tanking or healing. I've done both, and enjoyed both. I definitely prefer feral vs. resto though. At least with feral, you're not completely gimped in your solo play.
Turns out there's generally a greater need for tanks than healers, so I've been feral specced for quite some time now. There's a lot to be said for a class that can take a beating, switch forms and then deal a beating.
Whimsy - 70 feral druid (Perenolde).
I've been playing since, oh, a couple months after WoW's release. Started with a female dwarf rogue with pigtails. Hilarious. Wasn't until much later did I come to realize that
a) dwarfs are a poor choice for rogues
b) everyone else knew that, since I was the only dwarf rogue as far as I could tell
c) rogues are booooring to play
My rogue still sits neglected at 60.
Next up was my adorable green hair 2 foot tall gnome warlock. The cutest pot of evil you've ever seen, in my humble opinion. She sits at 70 today, specced for pvp.
At some point, and I don't remember when, I decided to roll a druid - to give me the flexibility of either tanking or healing. I've done both, and enjoyed both. I definitely prefer feral vs. resto though. At least with feral, you're not completely gimped in your solo play.
Turns out there's generally a greater need for tanks than healers, so I've been feral specced for quite some time now. There's a lot to be said for a class that can take a beating, switch forms and then deal a beating.
Whimsy - 70 feral druid (Perenolde).
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