Paladin itemisation in Icecrown
Its crap.
While I could (and maybe should!) end this post here I’ll keep going cause damned if I will say 2 words when I can say 200.
The basis for all the problems with paladin itemisation (which has been terrible since we left Naxx for Ulduar) has been the differing views on crit. The developers, for reasons that I am not privy to, believe that crit is a throughput stat. They treat it like a throughput stat, always have. They were uncomfortable with Paladins in sp/crit/haste gear because, from their perspective, its all throughput. The fact that it also provided all necessary regen (which even then was far from true – int is the paladin regen stat and has been all expansion) in their eyes meant paladin healing was too strong.
They may have been right, though I don’t think so. Crit however is the worst throughput stat a healer can have. The reason for this is that healing is not dps.
Healing ebbs and flows, its not like dps where you have to do X damage over the course of the fight and then you win. Increasing the total healing done by a player is not the same as increasing the healing effectiveness of that player. Requiring a certain amount of crits over the course of a fight to meet a dps target is easy – as sample size increases, the sample mean approaches the actual mean (so your recount chart crit% approaches the number on your character sheet). Over the course of a boss fight you will cast hundreds of spells. You can fall behind the dps required by going through an unlucky patch of crits amd (statistically speaking) you’ll catch back up. Either you have the dps required or you don’t.
Healing is different. If you fall behind by more than the tanks health at any time, the fight is over. Which is why you can’t rely on crits. Sooner or later that unlucky patch means a dead tank.
Haste on the other hand is always useful, because it reduces the amount of time all your spells take to cast. Meaning that it is predictable and therefore reliable.
I am not saying that crit doesn’t increase healing done (because it does), I am saying that, because its not predictable, because healers can’t rely on it – its not a throughput stat in the proper sense of the word. Your throughput increases when you get more crit but you don’t stack crit for throughput. Again, healing isn’t dps, the number at the end of the fight is not the key thing, its the numbers in the middle – you always have to keep the tanks health about the amount that a boss swing would take off at a bare minimum. Its not a fucking average.
Yet paladin gear is choked with crit and mp5. My feelings on mp5 ought to be well known. Its not as useless as it was but its not far from it. As mana pool sizes increase and increase mp5 (because its a non-scaling stat) becomes less and less useful compared with a scaling stat (like int). Of course, paladins are not quite at the ulduar level of ignoring their mana pools but I see no reason to believe they won’t get there shortly into icecrown.
Anyway, this is all moot, Blizzard will itemise the gear however they want. I really wish that just once we’d get the right gear. T7 was itemised reasonably well, T8 was garbage until 3.2 nerfed us into it, T9 was itemised perfectly (if you assume the nerf didn’t happen) and T10 seems the worst yet. I don’t like taking shammy mail but I will if I have to. Its not like I haven’t done it before
Icecrown raid structure
Its interesting, I don’t think I have ever been part of the Blizzard target raid dynamic. I was a casual back before it was cool and became more hardcore at the same time that Blizzard went the other way. See this.
I tell you this though, I just don’t understand why I am not allowed to go and explore and have fun in the new instance the way I want to. I just don’t get it. There are some truly baffling (and a couple of genuinely offensive) decisions in that thread. In no particular order
Limited attempts
I do not like the limited attempt mechanic. I have never liked it, because (1) I raid from Australia which means that connections and lag play a big part in my raids and (2) it actively discourages people from taking undergeared, underexperienced or underskilled players. The idea that one person fucking up on Putricide takes away 20% of your attempts is ludicrous, especially on normal. 5 attempts is a stupidly small number, its like the pressure of tribute to insanity. Since I’ve cleared ToGC 10 without wipes, having a single wipe at any stage of the raid means a step backwards. I don’t have 50 attempts remaining, I have 1.
I don’t understand who this benefits? It forces people to spend time out of game researching and reviewing strats (which is completely against the current Blizzard thinking – see the Cataclysm stat changes for example). It actively punishes even the most casual raid team very heavily for even minor slip ups. It encourages serious raid guilds to run alt raids and otherwise try and “game” more attempts. In fact the only reason that I can see for it is to artificially extend the life of the content.
We recently killed Algalon, which we did on the second attempt of our 4th week of trying. I think we would have killed it in a single raid night had we been able to spend unlimited time on the fight, probably in about 2 and a half hours. The fight itself is easier than firefighter in my opinion (which took us a full raid night basically). However it took 4 weeks rather than a single day solely because of artificial time limitations.
Which concerns me, because after the debache (pronounced dee-bar-shay) of ToC, ICC and raiding in general needs to regain some credibility. It concerns me that Blizzard has so little confidence in the life of this instance that they need to artificially extend it.
Heroic and normal sharing attempts and lockouts
So if I want to kill the Lich King that week I need to back off heroics before I run out of attempts or I am locked out of the top end of the instance? Are you fucking serious?? What is it that people are supposed to do??
We raid three days a week (including both 10 and 25 man content). At the moment we barely have enough content for that period of time. If not for the struggles we have had in ToGC the last few weeks we’d have a full empty raid day. Now I cannot for the life of me imagine ANYONE volunteering to spend more time in normal ToC so come 3.3 (which is 2 weeks away at most) our raid schedule will have about 11 bosses on it. Algalon (maybe), Yogg +1 (again maybe), ToGC and the first four bosses in ICC. I say maybe because I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for full clearing Ulduar just for those bosses every week, even if it is pretty quick these days.
We have a fair bit of 258 gear at the moment, which makes me think that ICC will be the faceroll that normal ToC was, so its going to take an hour a week for the first month. After which we get a second wing and probably drop ToGC. Until heroic modes unlock in 2 months there will not be more than 2 days raid content. We aren’t a top guild by any stretch of the imagination either, we’re ranked about 500 in the US.
“a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace”
What is this bullshit? Someone on mmo-champion compared this to fat kids with cake (an analogy that people liked), with all due respect, I am not interested in this paternalistic nonsense. I think, as an adult male, I am more than capable of determining for myself what I find reasonable and enjoyable without Blizzards help.
Of course some people are in favour of this. There are some people in favour of everything. The most vocal supporters are the minority of vocal, jealous casuals. I say jealous because, despite their bluster that they don’t care about the likes of Ensidia and that they can enjoy the game anyway they like, the truth is they actually want to be able to clear content like them and are pissed they can’t. The whole casual vs hard core thing has gotten out of hand. In both cases they are saying the same thing – that the other group doesn’t deserve to play the game the way they like. Everyone has to play the game the way *I* do because if you played it exactly how I do, I’d be better than you and that makes you a shit person – basically.
I don’t care at all if Ensidia clears the whole instance in a single day. I do care that I’m probably going to be held back from the hard mode experience for 2 months because the developers seem to think that it matters how long the world first guilds take.
This takes some of the shine off ICC, I quite enjoyed Ulduar for a long time and no-one I’ve spoken to liked ToC – yet they are following the ToC model and not the Ulduar one.
Whats my main?
Yeah so my last post was a bit emo. One the great things about a semi-anonymous blog that very few people read is that I can be a bit self-indulgent from time to time. We all got flaws so sue me 🙂
Even if I don’t post, even if I don’t play I usually read the blogs that I keep track of every few days. I love insight, even if I don’t get it all the time, even if its about something meaningless ultimately. Insight like roxors!
Which brings me to this – B3 is a fantastic blogger who I don’t actually read that often. If this proves anything, its that you don’t need to be downing H Anub to understand things.
The reason I bring this up is partly because I realised the fact again today that most raiders have a class / spec / role that they are noticeably better than others at. I could get clever and link this to my stance on hybrids. How do these things even fit together? Its because in a crisis you automatically revert back to “type“. You will never perform as good on your alt as you do on your main – even if they have the same job – because as Big Bear Butt so succinctly puts it, some classes just click.
I noticed this because I raided tonight on my mage, for the first time in quite some time. I realised that at some point I had crossed the line and was no longer THE mage. I was just a mage, pretty good for my gear level, but it wasn’t as instinctive as it used to be.
I remember clearly what it used to be like – the best example I can think of is that we were 4 manning mana tombs or some other heroic back at 70. One of the mobs would fear / mc / something the tank and the rest of the buggers would immediately drop threat and chase the healer. Anyway the tank gets feared and the mobs just all rush at our priest, knowing that he is just toast. I blinked forward, dragon’s breathed the mobs and went back to the skull target in the time it took them to halfway cross the room. Priest lives, pack dies and we move on. I don’t pretend that this is particularly heroic (like that pun?) it was purely instinctive. Therein lies the point, those instincts are gone. I can still meet out damage but the higher level of skills aren’t there. They are with my pally now.
Bad raid weeks
Heading is reasonably informative. Its been a bad raid week thus far. We got tribute to insanity on 10s. With a badly undergeared alt healer no less. That run was far from being without incident but that is truly another story. Aside from that I have *not* had a good time in Azeroth these past 3 days.
I think I’ve mentioned before about bad days as a healer, the days were the second you take your eyes off your target he dies. This wasn’t even like that. It was the RNG gods tearing me a new asshole over and over again. At least 6 – 10 times a tank took 50k+ damage inside of a second. Maybe there is nothing that can be done about that but its exceptionally demoralising to wipe over and over again because of it. Last week we reached Anub with almost a full set of attempts remaining. This week we are yet to kill Faction Champs and we almost down to half.
I wasn’t the only one who was having a bad week.
I wouldn’t have thought much more of it but for last night. Last night I went into a friend’s 10 man run. Aside from me, there was a player with the legendary mace, two other starcallers and a death’s demise. It was a brutal night of wipes the likes of which I hadn’t seen in months. Plus bickering and complaining the whole way. I was so dispirited when I logged off. I had hoped for a night of quick, easy clearing to recharge my raiding batteries, not so much. I actively avoided logging on today, knowing that my old guild raided tonight and simply not being able to face it.
Maybe its just a couple of off days strung together, and I did get insanity this week. I am a little concerned for my new guild. I am not so sure that they are stable, there are more applicants than raiders at the moment – fuelled by a continual influx of new raiders, mostly looking to skip the progression hurdle and get into hard modes. Most aren’t ready.
I think I am a really good healer mostly because I have a lot of confidence in my abilities. I’ve never met or raided with anyone I thought was better than me. As good sure, but better? not once. And maybe I was wrong…
Old guilds and guildies
Anyone who has read my previous posts (and there must be some people lol) will know that I recently changed guilds twice.
It feels strange logging onto what was “my” vent, hearing the familiar voices excited about new kills or new fights or just ragging mercilessly on someone and not be a part of that any more. Perhaps the most startling thing is how far past there I have gone so quickly. Not merely in terms of progression (we’re working on H Anub and will almost certainly get Algalon 25 next week), but simply level of play and expectation.
I had an opportunity to raid with these guys again on some off content and, as I habitually do, I ran a log. The distance between my healing and second was a little startling. The difference between the execution that I have become used to in just these few short weeks and what used to be the norm is astounding. For all that though the bosses died and the raid progressed. I think I am beginning to see what attracted these guilds to me. Some of the things that we did in my old guild ARE impressive. 2 healing heroic 10 man beasts (not having even cleared Faction Champs on 25 normal), clearing Freya basically without any 226 gear – these things are not exactly unheard of but they aren’t the norm. Its just that the general standard is far too low. Which is why my old guild progressed reasonably well at 10 mans and not at 25s. Individual brilliance (if you could call it that) makes much more of a difference the smaller the raid.
The guild I joined that recently fell apart? Its funny, I’ve basically forgotten a lot of the people there. Some however I have maintained a connection with. They are exceptional players and fun to be around. I feel a little bad that basically I can no longer do relevant content with these guys without pissing off my new guild. Some of the people who I had a great deal of respect for their abilities have basically disappeared. Quite a few have server transferred. I don’t miss the guild nearly as much – which stands to reason since I wasn’t there that long.
As for the new guys, there feels like a lot of turn over. Their current rate of turnover is in fact unsustainable, but for other guilds on the server falling apart. The great news is that they are unwilling to tolerate poor behaviour. The less great news is that the raids recently have been well sloppy. The group can turn it on when it needs to but far too much time is wasted. For example on Monday it was over an hour between raid start and the first boss attempt and we only killed 1 trash mob.
At this point however they are a serious threat for server firsts come Icecrown, assuming that everything holds up that long. My personal feedback has been very positive, which is quite gratifying though in all honestly my results have been pretty good (though my general play hasn’t been fantastic). For now at least, its fun to be a part of such a successful (relatively at least) group.
Quickie – lay on hands
Just a short top-of-the-mind post on the proposed changes to lay on hands. Basically, LoH now gives the target forbearance – and consequently can’t be used when you have forbearance.
Be aware, I cannot see this going live the way its proposed – but then I said that about beacon too.
Its only slightly less ridiculous than the previous idea (can’t cast it on yourself). Ironically it won’t effect holy pallies really at all because they already use beacon to “double” LoH. Its just a straight needless nerf to a very situational ability to prot pallies. However, it will make progression tanking harder with prot pally tanks because your healers shouldn’t be able to lock tank cooldowns out. Prot pallies being able to buy a few seconds is a massive bonus in some progression fights (Anub especially).
I simply don’t understand why this ability is a problem. I understand (but don’t agree with) the constant stream of nerfs for arena but nerfing prot pallies because of low level pvp? Are you fucking serious??
Enchanting – you cheap, cheap bastards
God I am lazy. I was pissed about this just the other day and now not so much. Maybe that makes for better articles, but motivation is always lower. Perhaps that why I seem to be complaining alot. I only really have the motivation to post about shit that pisses me off.
Anyway, my main is not an enchanter. My previous main IS an enchanter. The tl:dr version? People who aren’t enchanters are generally cheap bastards.
I levelled enchanting on my then main because it was (and arguably still is) THE premiere profession. Jewelcrafting has come close, by and large these days the right gems are as important as the right enchants. Having your gear enchanted, with the right enchants (the best enchants) was what separated raiders from the mouth-breathers.
Even then it was expected that enchanters would donate their skills to the group, free of charge. I remember levelling my enchanting early in wrath. Each point cost 600g in mats from about 415 to 440. I did it because our guild needed an enchanter to raid. People used to ask how I was so poor when we started raiding (because levelling generated thousands of gold) it was solely because of enchanting. No other profession cost anything like as much as that.
No other profession is expected to give the fruits of their labour free. No other profession actually DOES it either. How many leatherworkers use drums in their heroics? How many engineers drop bots at the start and end of each instance? Alchemists who give out pots for everyone or even just use them for themselves? Some do for sure but most don’t. Gatherers have said for as long as I can remember two things
- If not for the other people in the run, the shards wouldn’t exist so they shouldn’t just be the enchanters (the group effort argument)
- The herbs / ore / skins would be worthless without the gatherer therefore there is no reason to split them, unlike the blues and epics, which have a value (the intrinsic value argument)
Lets ignore, just for a second, the contradiction implicit in those two arguments (you can’t get the fucking herbs by yourself either) and deal with the math.
Scenario 1 – no enchanter, 5 man group
Assumptions
- Shards are worth 20g (blue) and 40g (epic)
- Blues vendor for 10g and epics 15g
- 4 bosses drop a blue and 1 drops a blue and an epic
Epected value from each boss (non-epic) = 1/5 * 10g – (represents an equal chance for each group member to get a blue item that vendors for 10g)
Epected additional value from last boss = 1/5 * 15g
Total value 4*(1/5*10g) + 1/5*15 + 1/5*10 = 13g
Scenario 2 – same group with enchanter
Epected value from each boss (non-epic) = 1/5 * 20g – (represents an equal chance for each group member to get a blue shard)
Epected additional value from last boss = 1/5 * 40g
Total value 4*(1/5*20) + 1/5*40 + 1/5*20 = 28g
Which means the enchanter more than doubled the groups expected value! Apparently that is worth 0g however.
I remember when abyss crystals were selling for 150g- 200g. Still worth nothing.
The fact is that it is unquestionably cheap not to give enchanters something for this. If you freely contribute your professions consumables to the run then you’ve earnt the shards. If you don’t then you should do something to earn them.
Now I am aware that this is not the norm. I’ve never been tipped for d/e’ing during dungeons or raids. I’ve always done it and never asked for anything. I don’t even really mind, despite it being unfair, because it no longer costs me anything. What pisses me off is fucking dual gatherers pretending not only is it fair that enchanters alone donate services free but they are somehow expected to do so free and not complain ever.
People have getting this for nothing for so long that it no longer has value. You know what? How about you shut up about how enchanters owe it to you to d/e your shit and occasionally fucking thank them for contributing gold to you for nothing. Better still fucking donate some of that ore – or at least acknowledge that there is no real difference in an enchanter turning your 2g into 6g (via d/e’ing) or you turning 0g into 4g (via mining).
WoW - Silk's Blog 