Kitty McPounceALot

Travel

2008-02-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

Off for a business trip for a week out of country. Not sure if I'll be able to post.

Alt update

2008-02-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

Level 29.

6 levels away from Heart of the Wild.
11 away from Leader of the Pack.
21 painful levels away from Mangle.

But what I'm missing most right now, believe it or not, is Ferocious Bite. Rip is absolutely terrible as a finishing move whilst soloing. You've got basically two choices - rip at 2 or 3 combo points so that it ticks a decent number of times for insignificant damage, or rip at 4-5 combo points with better (but still rather insignificant damage) for very few ticks.

3 more levels until Ferocious bite. I expect a significant increase in DPS, and much more efficient utilization of combo points when I get this.

Special note: discovered a level 28-30 mob in the game that gives double XP. It's a bug. In my opinion, not worth exploiting due the relatively few number of such mobs and the increased quest XP from the 2.3 patch, but it was nice to discover that while doing a quest over the weekend. Bonus points to anyone if they can guess which mob it is.

Arena gear 4 piece set bonus changes

2008-02-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

From mmo-champion, the latest change to the 2.4 PTR:

Druid

4-piece bonus on Restoration-spec Arena and PvP sets has been changed to "The casting time on your Healing Touch spell is reduced by 0.25 sec." (Was a 15% increase to the outdoor movement speed before)
4-piece bonus on Balance-spec Arena and PvP sets has been changed to "Your Wrath casts have a chance to reduce the cast time on your next Starfire by 1.5 sec." (Was a 15% increase to the outdoor movement speed before)

My take on this: Huge nerf to Resto, buff buff to Balance.

The movement speed buff is of enormous benefit to resto druids in 2v2, good benefit in 3v3 and largely useless in 5v5. A 2.75 second cast Healing Touch? Useless everywhere. Seriously, this is a mind boggling stupid change. If Blizzard wants to nerf the movement speed bonus due to the perceived advantage it gives druids in 2v2's, then at least replace it with something mildly useful - say +x healing to lifebloom. Maybe take the dodge rating bonus to rejuvenation from the Moonglade set. There's so much better Blizzard can do here.

The balance change, on the other hand, is a nice buff. The +15% move speed bonus was largely useless to moonkins. An occasional 1.5 sec cast Starfire is a nice bonus, especially considering any PVP specced moonkin is going to have the 15% chance to stun on Starfire. It's a good change.

Whoa! Dreamstate rocks!

2008-02-14T11:00:00.000-08:00

I respecced last night to the 37/0/24 Dreamstate build, and I've gotta say that I'm extremely pleased with it - at least when it comes to battlegrounds. Haven't tried arenas with it yet.

I'm wearing healing gear, so I only have about ~500 spell damage (~1500 healing). My survivability went way up, and my dps wasn't bad either - Moonfire hitting for ~500 (~1000 crits), wrath hitting for ~750 (~1500 crits) and starfire hitting for ~1200 (~2400 crits).

In one AV, I had 16 killing blows and 123 HK's to my 1 death - and we lost that AV.

Let's talk about healing - my lifebloom ticks went from around 170 to 159. My rejuv ticks went from around 710 to 680. Regrowth crit for much less, but healed for approximately the same.

Let's talk about mana - whoa! Running out, even while spamming wrath/moonfire/insect swarm and/or healing was never a problem. Amazing.

So let's summarize: much better survivability, much better dps, much better mana regen and slightly lower healing.

I'm a huge fan.

Dreamstate FTW?

2008-02-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

Our 5v5 team has had a couple of good weeks - going from a 1430 rating (328 points) to a 1605 rating (471 points!). We've all managed to get some better gear, learned to play better and learned to coordinate better.

I've been going with the standard 8/11/42 resto build for these matches, but I'm thinking of changing it up to a Dreamstate build like this one (37/0/24).

I find that my role in 5v5 is to keep someone perpetually cycloned. I'll hit 1 person up for 9 seconds (6 seconds initial, 3 seconds 2nd cast). I'll switch targets for another 9 seconds of CC, then usually back to the first target. In between cyclone casts, I'm either throwing a hot or two on whatever people on our team may need some spot healing. Often, no healing is necessary (because our disc/holy priest has everything under control), and I'm not doing anything.

I feel that my 8/11/42 build is suboptimal for 5v5 - it's really more geared to 2v2's and to a lesser extent, 3v3's. In 5v5's, mobility is almost unimportant - you can get away and hide from 2 people, maybe 3. You're not hiding from 5, and you can't get away when you're the target of focus fire from 3-4 people.

So let's take a look at pros vs. cons to the Dreamstate build over 8/11/42

Pros:
- Insect swarm - 2% hit reduction and a dot? Yes please.
- Nature's reach - 20% extra range on cyclone? Yes please.
- Improved DPS through focused starlight, improved moonfire, vengeance, celestial focus.
- Improved healing and DPS through lunar guidance.
- Higher survivability through moonkin form (+400% armor) and balance of power.
- Great MP5 through dreamstate.

Cons:
- No feral charge. Not a big loss for 5v5.
- No swiftmend. A significant loss, but not so important in 5v5.
- No natural perfection. Ouch - but does 400% bonus armor make up for this?
- No empowered rejuvenation. Ouch - but does lunar guidance make up for this?
- No improved regrowth. Significant, but less so for 5v5.

Seems like almost a no brainer. Anyone had any experience with this build?

2.4 on the PTR

2008-02-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

As usual, hit up mmo-champion.com for all the latest updates.

Here's the druid changes:

Empowered Rejuvenation: This talent now properly affects the final heal from Lifebloom.

Gift of Nature: This talent now properly affects the healing from Tranquility.

Insect Swarm: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.

Lacerate: This ability now deals additional damage based on the attack power of the Druid.

Mangle (Bear) now properly triggers a 1.5 second global cooldown, increased from 1.0.

Natural Perfection: This ability will no longer be triggered by taking critical strikes while sitting. In addition, it is now affected by the Subtlety talent.

When a Druid in cat form casts Pounce it will now properly animate.

Yawn. All those changes are good, although unexciting and really pretty minor. For those of us hoping for a feral arena buff, continue waiting. I suspect we won't see anything until Wrath of the Lich King is release (my bet is August for that).

Level 20 and loving it

2008-02-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

Made it to level 20 and picked up cat form. The difference in how fast you can take down a mob is breathtaking. I would estimate that I kill mobs perhaps 3 times faster, and finish with much much higher health and mana.

And that's without any kind of opener. No Pounce (level 36) or Ravage (level 32). When I trained cat form, I tripled checked my spell book looking for either of those two spells. I had forgotten it's not until much later that you get them. At level 20, there is literally no combat reason to use your newly acquired stealth (prowl) skill. Only at level 22 when you learn Shred does Prowl become useful in a poor man's version of Ravage.

Speaking of cat form... Why does the Horde cat form look so horrible? The run animation looks (at best) weird and ungainly. The mane and horns look tacky. A night elf cat looks like a svelte killing machine. A horde cat looks like a freakshow animal escaped from the circus.

Here's some suggestions Blizzard:
- Make different female and male versions of both cat and bear forms. Perhaps make the female versions a bit slender and lose the mane for the horde version.
- Improve the run animation. I've seen excellent move animations in the game, I know they can do this. Less circus freakshow, more lithe killing machine please.

kthxbye.

More gear for lower levels

2008-02-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Up to level 20, rings and amulets are hard to come by.

Correction: prior to TBC, they were hard to come by. With the Jewel crafting profession, lots of people create lots of low level rings just to level up. You can find these on the AH for very cheap.

Check out a handy list here. The Bronze Band of Force, is pretty sweet. You should be able to pick one up for a couple of gold. Sure, that's a ton of money for that character level - but it's nothing for an alt. Plenty of green rings for 20-75s too. Here's a good list for amulets.

My update: level 18. So close to cat form, yet so far away....

Absolutely Fake Patch Notes

2008-02-07T09:26:00.001-08:00

2.4 is coming. Everyone knows it; Blue has been parceling out tidbits of information over the forums. With an impending patch comes fake patch notes! The latest I've seen are posted here at mmo-champion.com.

They list the probability that the patch notes are real at 50%. I put the probability at 0.00%.

Let's look at a couple of the best druid notes:

Nurturing Instinct: Increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 25/50% of your Attack Power.
Force of Nature: Treants now have a 15% chance to proc Entangling Roots on the target.

Nurturing Instinct: It sucks right now, even for hybrid builds with hybrid gear - but this change would be so overpowered that there's no chance it's real. A bear tank with KZ/ZA gear and perhaps a bit of Gruul gear can approach 2000 AP. That would give the bear tanks' healers an effective +1000 healing to each and every one of them. Ha! Why would you even consider bringing a prot warrior or prot pally to a raid when it's so incredibly easy to heal a bear tank? 3 healers; +3000 effective healing on the bear! So overpowered, it defies comprehension. How about a little credibility in my fake patch notes please? A bit of plausibility? Come on, try harder people.

Force of Nature: How often have you heard balance druids complaining about how much Treants suck? Oh right. Never. Well maybe you have, but I haven't. I don't know what the attack speed of the treants is, but let's say it's 2.0. 3 treats x 0.15% chance to proc Entangling Roots x 2.0 attack speed = roughly a 22.5% chance to be rooted every second. Double that for a 1.0 attack speed. I really don't see this as plausible.

Other druid notes pretty much nerf resto druids. A bit more plausible, but unlikely in my opinion.

Life as an Alt

2008-02-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

WTB Cat Form. Will pay hefty price. PST.

Levels 1-19 suck - when you know what you're missing. Sure, they go by pretty fast - but wrath, wrath, wrath (maybe), moonfire, whack on target with large stick for a while is not my idea of fun.

After flying around with swift flight form, walking around everywhere is pure pain. Arrrrrgggghhhh. Why, oh why, can't I play Blizzard $25 for a premade level 60 character once I've hit 70 with a normal character? It's a win for everyone, and it would not be that hard to develop.

I'm pretty much playing my horde druid now, unless a ZA or KZ run is happening, or some short queue arenas.

To Reroll or Not to Reroll, that is the question

2008-02-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

The friends & coworkers I play with are convinced that rerolling Horde is the way to go. They're probably right - but - with so much time invested in my current Alliance characters (that I continue to enjoy playing), I'm finding it unappealing to reroll and level 1-70 all over again.

I could level my 46 Shaman and save myself 46 levels. But Shaman suck. I find them boring to play, so screw that. I've played long enough with enough alts to realize that I enjoy druids and warlocks; the rest of the classes don't appeal to me.

Well, I decided to create a horde druid and see if I can stomache the leveling process all over again. Whimzy, currently level 11, let's see if you hold my interest.

Notes so far: I enjoy a NE character model over a Cow. Shocking, I know.

2.4 Patch Notes.... Sorta

2008-02-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

Blue forum posters have been posting bits of info on upcoming 2.4 changes today. I'm not going to bother listing all of them; just go to mmo-champion for the latest and greatest.

However, he's two of my favorite upcoming changes:

- We've reached a point where we're now confident that applying diminishing returns to honor is no longer necessary, and we're currently planning to remove it with the 2.4 patch.
- What the removal of diminishing returns means for you is that as soon as you defeat an opponent that rewards you honor, you will receive that honor, and you will be able to spend it right then.

Good stuff. I really hated the difference between the "estimated honor" and what you actually got. Seemed to be that you received anywhere from 10-20% less than what was estimated, likely due to the diminishing returns on honor kills.

dgks

2008-02-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

dG Killshot Notifier - It was Dusky the other night who said over Ventrillo, "If I had to have only one addon, this would be it".

There's no other addon that I've found that adds so much fun to the game.

I'm at a loss for words on how awesome it is. It's really, really simple. For everyone who runs the addon, you get a voice notification and big text notification whenever someone gets a killing blow. The Unreal Tournament sounds are used.

It adds so much fun to any premade group as you hear "Killing spree!", "Unstoppable!", "Double kill!" and "GODLIKE!" amongst others. While as a healer, you rarely get killing blows yourself, it's still fun hearing others in your group get the kills.

BUT WAIT! There's more!!!! If you act now...

I've found that besides being fun, the mod actually helps me in arenas (especially 5v5), by increasing my situational awareness. I'm running around trying to keep opponents cycloned, rooted and teammates healed. I'm paying little, if any, attention to enemy health bars. When I hear the killshot notification go off, I get an update on how we're progressing, I get a heads up that DPS is looking for a new target. It's surprisingly useful.

You can get different voice packs here. I recommend sticking with the original voicepack.

5v5 FTW?

2008-01-31T09:44:00.000-08:00

New 5v5 team makeup: warrior x 2 (arms - no mace spec), elemental shammy, disc/holy priest and myself.

Wow, what a change. We went 8-2 for the night before it got too late and we stopped.

What worked:
- The priest main healed; this freed me up to always keep someone cycloned, helping spot heal between cyclone casts.
- The other team focused fire on the Shammy (~350 resilience, tons of armor w/ shield) or on the Priest (~350 resilience, pain suppression, fear). Those two can taking quite a bit of a beating.

What could be better:
- Mace spec! Mace spec! Two warriors and no mace spec, WTF? Those mace spec stuns, are in the words of the dgks mod, GODLIKE! (note to self: write post on DGKS). It's really because neither of them has a halfway decent mace or the honor points or arena points to buy one.
- Roots! I should cast roots in addition to cyclone. More CC ftw.

Monday night blues

2008-01-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

I posted a few days ago, pondering if Arena queue times are fixed. They're not.

Note to self: get at least 10 arena games in BEFORE Monday night.

13 minute 2v2 queues. 4 minute 5v5 queues.

However, if you're stuck trying to squeeze some games in on Monday night to earn some points, see if you can wait until 11pm Pacific Time. 5v5 queue times dropped from 4 minutes down to 1 minute in pretty short order. I'm sure 2v2 times were still north of 5 minutes at that time, but I was fortunate this last Monday to get 4 others for 5v5 action.

Druid healing in 5v5's

2008-01-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

Last night, I tried my hand at 5v5 as the only healer with 4 dps (warrior x 2, mage, hunter).

It did not work out well - 3 wins, 7 losses and about a 1450 rating.

A druid healer's strengths in 2v2 (and to a little bit lesser extent, 3v3) do not work well in 5v5. You can't play the LOS game in 5v5 - there's too many people, and you need to be constantly healing someone - especially if you're the only healer. HOTs take time to ramp up - 6 seconds for Rejuv + 3 x Lifebloom, plus another 2 seconds for Regrowth. Your healing target is long since dead by that point. Sure, you could skip a couple of lifeblooms and go straight for the Regrowth - but either way you're not going to outheal the combined DPS of 3 or 4 opponents.

I admit I did not play well in a number of the matches. I got caught out in the open and killed in seconds (even with 256 resilience & 9K HP). I did not cyclone nearly as much as I should have.

Our wins came when we adopted the following strategy:
- All DPS charges in, and tries to nuke the holy living hell out of a single target (preferably a healer)
- Mage attempts to sheep a DPS (then goes to nuking)
- I attempt to Cyclone a DPS, stay out of sight, and heal + cyclone.

I learned a lot on what NOT to do in 5v5's. That being said, I don't think that particular team makeup is sustainable beyond perhaps a 1600 rating. I'd prefer to swap out a DPS for a disc/holy priest. The priest could main heal, I could support heal and do a better job of keeping someone constantly cycloned.

Epic WSG

2008-01-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

I really wish I'd remembered to take a screenshot of the final score card.

Backing up a bit, we managed to scrape up 10 people for a premade WSG group for this WSG bonus weekend. We pretty much steamrolled through our first 2 games in short order. Our 3rd game turned into an epic 33 minute non-stop combat marathon. The first cap took 27 minutes. The 2nd and 3rd cap rapidly followed as the 1st cap broke the other team's morale.

Unfortunately, it was our morale that was broken.

When I say non-stop combat marathon, I'm not kidding. We grabbed their flag, they grabbed ours. We defended our flag in our flag room (for the most part) with about 6 people as the other 4 went off to try and grab their flag back. They mounted a 25 minute non-stop attack on us in a stalemate until our priest gave up.

We had 4 healers. Good thing too, because they had a warrior in 3/5 Season 3 gear (plus Season 3 2H mace) and 2/5 Season 2 gear. He put out over 800,000 damage over the course of the game (I think it was 830,000). The next closest (also Horde) put out over 400,000. Our top damage dealer came in about 350,000.

We had the top 4 healers, each over 350,000 healing - and that doesn't count final lifebloom blooms or prayer of mending heals etc.

Nuts. It really sucked to lose that one.

Edit: Just for kicks I did the math - 830K damage over 33 minutes is 419dps for every single second of the match. Of course, he wasn't in combat every single second, so his actual dps was much much higher.

Don't do this at home. Or anywhere else. Really.

2008-01-25T09:43:00.000-08:00

So... you're feral. You've run 5 mans, Kara and done some PVP. You've picked up a few healing pieces or hybrid pieces over time because no one else wanted them. You think, what the hell, I'll switch to resto for some crazy silly PVP success.

You think, how about a hybrid build that picks up Nurturing Instinct in the feral tree to better maximize the gear I've got? After all, with some pieces of Moonglade and Gladiator's Dragonhide, that's a lot of strength that's getting converted into +healing.

Word of advice: Don't do it. Don't, for the love of all that is holy, go with some variation of a x/23/x build.

Even if you have the best hybrid gear in the game, Nurturing Instinct still sucks (~+150 healing) and you lose way to much from either the balance or resto trees to make it worthwhile. By all means, go deep enough to pick up feral charge in the feral tree. Don't go any further. Having tried this build myself, I speak from experience. Your talent points are much better spent elsewhere.

Preform AV Enabler

2008-01-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

Download your Alliance enabled copy here. Note: use at your own risk. I've been using that copy of the mod for a number of days without any problems, but your mileage may vary.

And that obfuscation? Simple ASCII character set encoding. To be fair, there's really not much the guy could do. Since there's no compilation to a machine language binary (or, hell, even a machine agnostic intermediate language), the source code is wide open. Any competent programmer can reverse engineer the obfuscation without much difficulty, or even knowledge of Lua.

Arena queues fixed?

2008-01-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

< 1 minute 2v2 queues last night.
< 1 minute 2v2 queues 2 hours ago.

Is it too good to be true? Has Blizzard finally fixed it?

A bitter add on programmer

2008-01-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

Preform AV enabler - probably the best add on I've used to coordinate a group all joining the same AV. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but this particular add on is the easiest to use that I've seen along with the best feature set.

What's hilarious is that the author deliberately coded the add on for the Horde only. He obfuscated the code to discourage anyone from modifying it to work for Alliance players as well. That's one bitter, bitter programmer.

Here's a sample of his obfuscation methodology:
\41\53\43\49\49\20\65\6E\63\6F\64\69\6E\67\20\69
\73\20\73\75\70\65\72\20\68\61\72\64\20\74\6F\20
\63\72\61\63\6B

Wow. That's tough to figure out. However, I'm sure it's enough to discourage 99% of potential (Alliance) users not to use it - so I guess he gets what he wants.

Queues Suck

2008-01-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

More specifically, long queues suck. My experience on various queue times:

Eye: < 1 minute
AV: 2-4 minutes
5v5 Arenas: < 1 minute
3v3 Arenas: < 1 minute
2v2 Arenas: 5-15 minutes

Personally, I think 2v2 Arenas are the most fun, with 3v3 close behind. 5v5 is just too much chaos, and relies more on tight team coordination than individual skill.

The big problem with 2v2 queues are that you're waiting in line longer than you're actually playing (typically). It's ridiculous. I simply won't do it anymore until Blizzard brings the queue times down to something reasonable (< 2 minutes, ideally < 1 minute). This sucks, because I can't do the one thing I most want to. The queues are long enough to negate the fun derived from the activity.

With 2007 profits in excess of $500 million (US), Blizzard has simply no excuse to fix this. Immediately.

Arenas are very popular, obviously. $500 million buys you a hell of a lot of servers.

More comprehensive Battlegrounds records

2008-01-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

Since I started tracking my win/loss rate in battlegrounds, I've overall been losing in Eye (43% win rate) and winning in AV (57% - despite the Horde map advantage). I haven't played either AB or WSG.

Obviously my personal stats are statistically meaningless. Well, they're quite meaningful to me but they're bloody useless in assessing Alliance/Horde battlegrounds balance.

Only Blizzard holds the full stats and they're not releasing them. However, the chaps over at Warcraftrealms.com probably have the 2nd biggest data set here.

Here's the summary for US / Level 70:

	Eye	AB	AV	WSG	Overall
Wins	1,953	2,463	8,165	2,046	14,627
Losses	2,961	3,676	8,095	2,569	17,301
Win %	39.7%	40.1%	50.2%	44.4%	45.8%

So, overall the Horde do seem better than Alliance at Battlegrounds. However, the difference is not as large as I thought, and AV seems almost perfectly matched.

Medallion of Nagging Dissatisfaction

2008-01-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

Read any blog / forum post / guide / whatever on gearing up for PVP and the first item they will all tell you to obtain is the Medallion of the Alliance. There is no doubt that this trinket is invaluable to PVP; getting out of CC once every 2 minutes can be a game changing outcome. The 20 resilience doesn't hurt either.

So why did I have a nagging sense of dissatisfaction when I spent my 16,985 honor points on this?

I think it comes down to these factors:
1) There's no visceral impact. There's no emotional appeal. You don't see your heals ticking for any extra X amount. You don't see your hits hitting harder by Z amount. You don't see damage coming in to be Y less. You get to click a button on your actionbar about twice as frequently (maybe). The resilience effect is defined by what doesn't happen. You're not going to get crit as often by a small percentage (0.51%). But you don't see a message saying "Resilience just prevented a crit!", so the effect harder to notice. Intellectually, I know I need this trinket. Emotionally, this trinket fails to deliver.
2) The cost seems to be disproportionate to other items that can be purchased for about the same honor. The PVP epic boots and PVP epic belt cost less than 1,000 additional honor points, yet are 31 item levels above the medallion (146 vs. 115) and are epic quality vs. superior (blue) quality.

In game items in a MMO have an emotional appeal (or at least, they should have if you want to keep your customers). This item needs help.

My suggestions: throw on a small measurable, visible on equip effect. +healing for whomever wants it, +crit % for melee, +spell dmg, whatever. Make the trinket epic. I'm a sucker for purple items, and I know most others are too.

AV Map imbalance

2008-01-17T09:39:00.001-08:00

I'm not particularly a big fan of WoW Insider, but there's a very well written article on the current AV Map imbalance here.

The article describes how the introduction of reinforcements into AV (a change I welcomed) has dramatically changed the AV landscape.

Essentially it gives the Horde a choice: race to the general for a 50/50 chance at a win in a short amount of time - or - turn the game into a slow turtle where they will inevitably win after 20-30 minutes.

My experiences in AV pretty much exactly match the article. Highly recommend reading.

Crazy Silly Upgrades!

2008-01-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

By sheer coincidence, I manage to accumulate 18,000 honor points and 1200 arena points on the same day. Time to go shopping!

First up, honor points. -17,850 points, and I've got a new pair of [Vindicators Kodohide Boots]! Just for reference, my PVP "healing" boots were my tanking boots - [Footwraps of Wild Encroachment]. That gives me +24 stamina, +11 intellect, +26 resilience, +75 healing and +9 mp5. Huge, huge upgrade. Topped with a Boar's Speed enchantment, and I'm all set for boots.

Next up, arena points. -1,125 points, and I've got a new pair of [Vengeful Gladiator's Kodohide Gloves] - a significant upgrade of my PVE [Mitts of the Treemender]. Based on how I gemmed the Mitts, this gives me -8 stamina, +12 intellect, +21 resilience, +50 healing (with +35 enchant), +8mp5 and -14 spirit.

Net result: +16 stamina, +23 intellect, +47 resilience (wow!), +125 healing (wow!!), +17 mp5, -14 spirit. I've neglected to factor armor (lost a bit on the boots, gained some on the gloves), agility, strength etc. and other stats not important my current role.

Drinkypoo's Theory of Battleground Healing

2008-01-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

A guildmate, Drinkypoo, has a theory on battleground healing: Inspect all the warriors in the starting area, pick the best geared one and follow him/her around and heal him/her.

It's probably not a novel idea, but since I first heard it from him, that's whom I'll attribute it to.

A well geared arms/fury warrior can wreck havoc in battlegrounds. A well geared arms/fury warrior backed up by healing is a serious force to be reckoned with. I've seen that particular combo determine the outcome of PUG battleground matches. Assuming incompetent opponents (a reasonable assumption in a PUG), they'll focus on the first target they see (the warrior). He'll get more rage than he knows what to do with. Mortal strikes, whirlwinds, executes galore.

While not having played a lot of matches since I heard this theory, I've played a couple following fellow guildmate Kneegasher around. I'd have to say that so far, it's very effective.

AFK in Battlegrounds

2008-01-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

Blizzard introduced the "Report player as AFK" feature in 2.2. When enough players report someone as AFK, the reported player gets a debuff that prevents honor gain unless some action is taken.

While I think this is definitely a step in the right direction, there's several problems:
1) If you're busy playing, you're not watching for people taking no action.
2) If you're watching for people going AFK, then you're probably not doing your best even if you are concurrently playing.

Enter the Turing Test AFK Reporter mod. This mod will use some reasonable, lenient heuristics to calculate if a player is AFK, and then automatically report them for you. For example, if a player has no healing done or damage done, and is not defending a strategically important place - then that player is likely AFK and will get reported.

I've installed this mod, and I love it. I encourage everyone to install it. It's configurable, you can publish AFK results to the battleground chat and even put out an advert for the mod itself. My theory is that if I run the advert (/ttlm-advert) at the start of any battleground, it will discourage AFK behavior even if I wasn't actually running the mod.

Sidebar: This is a problem that should be solved server side. Additionally, the design of the battlegrounds and the associated reward system should not in any way encourage AFK behavior. I don't have a proposal right now on how to fix the battleground / reward system, but that's something I'll think about.

Alliance sucks in BG's, Redux

2008-01-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

I've previously made the claim that Alliance sucks in Battlegrounds, based purely on anecdotal evidence. But is that really the case? I think people tend to remember the losses and forget the wins.

So, I'm going to track every battleground I do and see whether or not Alliance really does suck (at least from my perspective anyway). You'll notice a new "Battlegrounds Record" sidebar on my blog which I will keep updated.

As of this writing, I'm even on Eye of the Storm games and positive on AV games.

You probably won't see many WSG games. I hate with a passion WSG with PUGs. The games last approximately 14 hours each, as each team grabs the others' flag but neither is coordinated enough to grab it back. At least with Eye, AB and AV, you know the game will finish one way or another within 30-45 minutes at the worst. A WSG game, as with diamonds, lasts bloody well forever.

McRaidNoMore Part Duex

2008-01-12T10:18:00.000-08:00

Realistically, I'm done with raiding - I still like it but real life schedules don't quite allow for it. I have epic mounts for my 2 lvl 70's. I'm done with leveling alts (all 7 of them).

I enjoy PVP, and I especially enjoy Arena PVP. There's nothing else in the game that forces you to think so fast on your feet. Every encounter is different. There's only one thing that gets my adrenaline going in this game, and it's Arena matches. As an added bonus, PVP can be done almost anytime without need for scheduling. You don't need 10 to 25 people to coordinate their real life schedules to accomplish what you want to do in the game.

I love being feral spec. Being able to switch between crazy silly kitty dps and crazy silly bear survivability is fantastic. As a feral, you can solo so much content that theoretically is small group content. There's so much you can do, and so much you can contribute to groups and raids.

I've already mentioned how well resto druids do in 2v2 and 3v3 arenas. My guild isn't raiding, so they don't need a feral tank. I'm biting the bullet. I'm going resto to try out the vaunted arena spec (8/11/42). Uninterruptible cyclone, feral charge and lots of buffed Hots.

McRaidNoMore

2008-01-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

My guild, consisting mostly of friends, coworkers and friends and family of coworkers is very small. Nonetheless, we've been able to run completely through Kara more than enough times for me to hit exalted twice over (yet despite this, no StrangleStaff, Longboots, Great-Ring, Treads or T4 Gloves!). I call Shenanigans.

We've cleared 3 bosses in ZA (bear, eagle and wolf - at least I think he's a wolf).

However, over the holidays, key people in our runs have lost interest in raiding, and I have no interest whatsoever in finding a(nother) guild that does only 10 mans on a late night schedule (10pm+ server). You can see from my earlier post here why.

So what does that leave? PVP! Arena's and battlegrounds. Doesn't matter what spec you are for battlegrounds, but it sure does for Arenas - and by general wisdom - feral druid is not a competitive spec. What am I to do? Respec resto, I guess. More on that later.

1 + 1 = 0.2

2008-01-04T09:48:00.000-08:00

1 feral druid + 1 arms / prot warrior = 20% 2v2 win rate.

Well, it did anyway for Kneegasher and myself (1-4). Anecdotal results that support the statistics in my last post.

Typically the other team would focus dps on me. I'd shift to bear, and soak up the damage. Problem was, I could not shift out to heal myself and the other team could heal through the damage that KG and myself could put out on their dps player. Shifting out of bear to attempt to heal resulted in my prompt death. Feral hots + leather < bear.

The two warlock team was just a disaster. They feared both of us, dot'ed us up and we died very rapidly.

Wrong arena spec FTL

2008-01-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

Some chap at sk-gaming.com scoured the Armory for the top ranked (>2000 rating) teams, and computed the popular team setups and the popular class talent specs.

For 2v2 teams, the most popular setup by a large margin (22.6% to 11.4%) was warrior/druid.

For the druids on the 2v2 teams, the most popular build by an enormous margin is uninterruptible cyclone/feral charge/resto (8/11/42). Variations on 8/11/42 added at least another 18%. Only one feral build made the top 5, and it was at 2.7%.

The implication is that if you're a druid playing 2v2 arenas, if you're not resto, you don't stand much of a chance at achieving a high rating. Feral does not appear to be a viable 2v2 spec.

Molten WTF

2008-01-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

Mages learn a new spell, Molten Armor, at level 62. It causes 75 damage to attackers, increases the mages chance to crit by 3% and reduces chance to be crit by 5%.

I have ~2500 AP in the gear I typically use in battlegrounds, and druids have a 1.0 attack speed. At 14 AP per 1 DPS, this means I should be putting out about 178 dps against a target with no armor. This ignores crits and special (yellow) attacks.

How do these statements correlate?

When I attack a mage, I'll be hitting him every second for roughly 170 damage. And in return, he's hitting me back for 75+ damage. That's a whopping 44% of the damage I deal, he's dealing right back at me without doing a single bloody thing. WTF?

Of course, that percentage is much lower in reality due to crits and yellow attacks, but it's still a very sizable number. I don't like it one bit.

Why does Alliance suck in battlegrounds?

2008-01-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

No, I don't have the answer. Others have speculated.

Yesterday it took 8 games (7 losses) for me to win an AB game and meet the requirements for the pvp daily quest (sidebar: why no arena daily quest?). Only 1 of those 8 games did the horde appear to have a premade group (10-2000 points!).

This is not an atypical experience.

Better communication? Better gear? More mature players? Less AFK players? I have no idea, but it sucks.

Pants or a dress?

2007-12-21T15:55:00.001-08:00

What do you prefer?

Season 3 Legs	Skulker's Greaves

Why do large raids suck?

2007-12-21T13:15:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Intro

2007-12-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

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).