Grimmtooth's Troops

Felicia Day and the mighty troops of The Guild are back to serenade us with a new music video, and it rocks, as you might expect from such a fine group of geeks.

Seriously, what’s not to like about a song with the phrase "ass-hat jocks" in the refrain?

Since Grimmtooth Actual’s system died, I haven’t set foot in a progression raid. Flora’s been working with the Bunnies on old content (about which you already know) but given how tight timing is with progression raiding¹, I declined to subject myself or my guildies to that brand of failsauce.

Now that the ol’ tronbucket’s back in action, I’ve been looking forward with two parts excitement and one part horror to my first progression raid in weeks. Just before the system died, I had upgraded some gear and gotten some advice on increasing my DPS, which I had not implemented yet.  Coming back, my advisor was nowhere to be found and I had to scramble to enchant and gem my gear.

We’ve gone with a new UI setup, based off of ElvUI. I chose it for simplicity and utility. For the most part it has worked out. 

I’ve also given WeakAuras another try, this time having a lot more success, and it’s actually helped a lot to keep me on my toes.  My DPS has improved somewhat, but is nowhere near where it should be for someone that’s got his T13 four-piece bonus already. More research into a respec is clearly needed.

When last I was in, we were still working on Blackhorn.  Coming back, the effers have downed him twice.  Fortunately, we were using the same strat as before, so after a few mis-steps I was able to get into it, just in time to be taken down by a lag spike in phase 2. But we downed him, and that’s all that matters.

The good news is that the GMs have been working hard on recruitment and brought in some new talent that appears to be working out nicely. Lots of new faces, it’ll take a while to get used to it.

Overall, though, it’s good to be back. Tomorrow we tackle Spine, and, Light willing, Madness.

1. I’m looking at you, Ultraxion [↩]

For close to a week now I’ve been limping along on a backup laptop, for my main system has died. Looks like the SSD¹ which served as my system drive has failed after seven hard months of service².

The backup laptop is nice enough, but it really can’t run WoW reliably enough to raid, so I haven’t bothered installing it.  Instead, I’ve been enjoying watching Civ V crash the system³ and replaying Railroad Tycoon 3⁴.

I finally got around to installing WoW last night so I can get about the business of installing my addons and cloning that over to a USB dongle when my replacement SSD arrives.

The good news is that OCZ is replacing the SSD like a boss. I’m awaiting an RMA number which they assure me is in the works. The bad news is that they have to to so in the first place.

So I’m taking a raiding vacation for a few weeks until we get this all sorted.  We still plan to work the AH and get that million golds done, cause, damn, y’all.

Regards to the Effers and Bunnies.

Oh, and Orv – you can totally drop me from the schedule for at least the next three weekends.  That’ll probably do it.

1. A solid-state hard drive, no moving parts, TOTES RELIABLE, YO! [↩]
2. As opposed to most hard drives that become obsolete in seven YEARS and still work reliably. [↩]
3. Shoulda kept the Civ IV CD, yo. [↩]
4. Anyone suggesting I purchase Rails! is going to get The Look. Or a crotchpunch if I know your S.O. Fairly warned be ye, says I. [↩]

Not too long ago I was pondering over how I find myself enmeshed so often in feminist causes.  I’m a dude, as has been noted, I started out that way and I plan on ending up that way, hope that’s all right with everyone. Yet I find myself very sympathetic to feminist causes.

Eventually I realized that usually what got me going was the topic of harassment, sexual or otherwise – but, obviously, in the context of feminism, sexual harassment is a huge issue.  Harassment is key here, and something I find common cause in, I realized. This all forms a huge layer cake of misery, in which the layers we’re looking at are sexual harassment, harassment in general, and bullying – which is where I came in.

Bullying has gotten a little bit of attention lately due to some deaths brought to light by the families of the victims and others. It’s interesting watching the reactions across various strata of society. It is generally agreed that the deaths are regrettable, even tragic, and wrongful. Less prevalent is whole-hearted support for the victims.  There almost seems to be a feeling from these people that the victims did something … wrong.

Sound familiar?

A lot of the people that can’t somehow find a way to fully support the victims (now and future) perhaps are bothered by the past, maybe they are ashamed of being victims in the past. Or maybe the regret implicit support of the bullies, by just going along with it. Just letting it happen. Watching that poor kid open his mouth in protest just one more time and getting floored for having the temerity. And doing nothing, because it’s the highest blade that gets trimmed first.

Harassment, then, and especially sexual harassment, are nothing more than bullying.  I was lucky. I was bullied for years, and it was often submitted that I was the problem for not submitting to whatever demands the authorities thought I was rebelling against.  I’m not sure what demands I was to submit to when I tried to go home and six burly rednecks blocked the school gate and dared me to try to push through.

One day I left home and started choosing who I kept company with.  I was able to get myself out of that bad situation, and, eventually, return back home without fear.  But not everyone is so fortunate as I.  If I had not been able to help myself as I did, I shudder to think what my life would have been like.  I may have well surrendered to despair, as well, like those poor kids on the news.

And that right there is my point of solidarity with the feminist cause, because one key is to create a world where women can stand proudly in the world without fear of being targeted, harassed, and bullied just for being female, any more than I was for being short and nearsighted.

A long time ago (relatively), I named the blog Empowered Fire as one of the best-named blogs in recent times; a blog centered on feminism and magery, an excellent combination.  That blog fell silent.  I didn’t find out until later that one of the two bloggers there was undergoing a serious bout of sexual harassment from a former friend in WoW, and that in the end the bully won a small victory and shut them down indirectly. It could have easily turned out far, far, worse, and almost nobody would have known.

I am thrilled and gratified that the blogger now known as Apple Cider decided to pick back up and rejoin the WoW blogosphere, to blog on the same topics. She is brave and wonderful and fights the good fight.

Harassment in-game or out is serious business. It gives us all a black eye if we let it happen around us, for fear of reprisal or just out of a desire not to rock the boat. We are diminished every time we lose someone to the bullies. Friends will find other things to do if they feel uncomfortable around our fabled halls.

If you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem¹.

1. Or the precipitate. [↩]

While I haven’t really been inclined to get my wookie on and swing a lightsaber, I do follow some aspects of STWOR if for no other reason to have some inkling about what people are getting uptight about.  Usually I end up nodding and saying something like "Some things never change."

One recent controversy did raise my eyebrows, though. There was rumblings about enrage timers, but then a more interesting twist emerged: no damage meters, no combat log.  As so many experience DPSers will tell you, this is pretty stupid.  Here’s one now:

So I’ll come down in favor of DPS races and enrage timers, but only if there are combat logs (and the subsequent parsers and DPS meters) so you can actually FIX the problem if you’re not beating the content. The problem generally isn’t with DPS meters themselves, anyway; it’s with the way some players choose to use them to exclude their "inferiors" from participating in content, and the fact that they often broaden the definition of "inferior" well beyond the needs of the content.

If you think I’m shallow enough to link to this to say I-told-you-so, you’d be completely accurate.

The DPS role is dependent on its numbers, whether you take them subjectively or absolutely is irrelevant.  But of the two, an absolute reference is much better than a relative one. Numbers are absolute. You can feed them into spreadsheets, save them off, compare them to each other. You can make multiple passes and chart your progress or lack thereof. Your damage meter is your friend. If you were doing 20K last week on a particular boss, and only 18K this week, you have something to look in to before you’re the cause of an enrage-timer wipe in the future.

Smug mode: engage.

I’m sure Bioware or whoever will address this to everyone’s satisfaction at some point.  I’m not sure if WoW came with a working addon API out of the box, but given how late it was announced for STROW I’d venture that it was an afterthought and still has some work to go.  I’d advise patience, but that’s not particularly the hallmark of your average STWOR player¹. So, good luck with that, I guess.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

That’s not actually what this article is about. Well, peripherally, it is, but only in that damage meters and combat logs are involved and it deals with DPS.  Namely, mine.

A couple of patches ago, we got changes to the Beast Master Hunter spec that promised near-parity with other specs. Then the guild got gutted of over half its overall raiding roster and it became more difficult to judge my performance against those of my fellows. Then there were more adjustments in the last patch, including some buffs to both SV and BM. Then we started inviting some people from another guild to raid with us regularly, which included a SV spec hunter.

I saw that BM wasn’t doing that great at all. He was topping the meters, I was bringing up the rear. My best choice at that point was to focus on utility. I’ve had to do this before, many times, as far back as Kara. Hoping that being useful (rather than deadly) would keep me in the rotation.

Or, I could change specs. Give it a go.

Looking at gear and gems and reforges and enchants, I realized I only had to change one enchant – agi to mastery – to optimize my armor for SV.  Stat-wise, there was virtually no difference.  So, I left myself geared for BM and greased into SV mode.

After looking at the meters, after looking at the combat logs, in all respects, my performance improved. On average, a 3K difference in output, and I’m not really used to the rotation yet.

So here we are at the end of the expansion and I’m having deja vu all over again.  Because this is exactly where I ended up as I started crawling the passageways of Icecrown in the final patch of WotLK. Survival.   BM was the red-headed stepchild of the team; people like me ran it if we had to, but otherwise we used one of the other specs because they delivered what our class is expected to: ranged damage, and lots of it.

So that’s the upshot of my weekend: I guess I’m shifting to SV and swapping my BM pets for a stock of SV. Alas. BM is, by far, my favorite hunter spec, because it’s so darned fun. But sometimes you gotta give up some funsies to get that boss down. And that’s a sad thing. Of all the issues about talents and specs, that is the greatest one of all – that one cannot just play the spec that one enjoys the most and still expect to perform the same as others.  Maybe you get lucky and it works out. Maybe you don’t.

In my case, not so much.

1. i.e. "Blizzard doesn’t add content fast enough" impatient. [↩]

"I realise there is a portion of the gaming fraternity for whom getting online and talking racist, sexist, homophobic smack talk is part of the fun, but they are not my community and I’m not interested in any websites which actively engage with them. I’m also not interested in playing any games with them. LTM (learn to moderate)."

– Spinks

That in a nutshell will do for me, as well. Well said, succinctly put, madam Spinks.

Pontificator In Chief what’s no longer doing MMO blogging Tobold went back to the well to pontificate, yet again, how DPS R Bad Peepuls, yawl¹.

If by the tone of my opening paragraph you conclude that I stand in direct opposition to his conclusion, one would be right in supporting your impression, for I certainly do.

In Tobold’s world, everything lives in a theoretical vacuum, a world in which the likes of Gevlon can be as correct as he, for neither of them really engage in what I would consider practical theory crafting.  Gevlon’s world is one in which everyone is a total rat bastard on toast, out to get you and deflower your mum.  Tobold’s word differs slightly in that everyone involved is somehow a robot following preprogrammed pathways that have no dependence on those around them.

When isolated in such a way from reality, conclusions such as "healers and tanks are the only responsible gamers" can be fully formed and realized without spending any amount of time reflecting on the premise that the problem is not the group dynamic, but, in reality, the LACK of group dynamic.

First of all, I wish to lay out some bona fides here.  I prefer the DPS life because I like making things go boom, whether it’s a gun or a fireball. I have, however, also ran a toon through an entire expansion as a healer, two-healing my way through all the Wrath raids (which kinda explains the eventual burnout, but hey – BONA FIDES!). So I am INTIMATELY familiar with two of the three roles in this game.  I’m not so certain about mister Tobold.

What I DO know is that Tobold’s over-simplistic view of the DPS role is as shallow as a Las Vegas lounge lizard, and only half as agreeable.  His view is that the typical DPS player is the kind of person that sits around the periphery space-bar-jumping over and over and pausing occasionally to go "hurr de hurr durr" in between the occasional frostbolt and side trip to the nearest burning patch of fire on the floor.

What he described was the average BAD DPSer.

If you’ve spent any time being any good as a DPSer over the past three expansions, you’ll have noticed something.  You’ve got a LOT of responsibility going on.  Soaking crystals. Pulling down drakes. Banging gongs. AoEing parasites. Run into the portal. DPS the brain, but not too much. Burn down the Sons. Hell, I don’t think many of the bosses in this last expansion ever allowed a DPSer to sit around and pew pew pew, though Ultraxion comes close. But you have to DIG to find something from Kara on forward that didn’t offer new challenges to the DPS team.  Challenges that the healers were usually excused from.

So, you want to talk responsibility, Mister Tobold Sir, you go right ahead.  All it’s really doing is making it look like you never set foot in Firelands, for starters.

There is a group dynamic in raiding and instancing that changes depending on the people you are with. LFD and LFR represent the worst-case scenario. You get the utter dregs from there.  You can’t really judge the game in its intended form by those examples.

But if you take a group of repeat raiders and repeat dungeoneers, you get a different reality.  In that reality, bad DPSers don’t come back if they don’t improve. In that reality, people talk about the instances and communicate who’s job is what. In that reality – the one in which people are people rather than asshatty robots – responsibility for failure is shared by the whole team, DPS, healer, and tank. It is, in reality, a team, and functions in a team dynamic.

Tolbold, apparently, has not instanced with anyone but total strangers, been required to carry the entire instance on his frail shoulders, and has never once been able to get DPSers to do anything but stand around and scratch their belfy butts. I’d be bitter in that scenario, as well.  But I’d reach a far different conclusion, because I read more than my own blog and those like it.  Every day I read about yet another group of my friends getting through another tough fight, in which everyone worked to get the job done and nobody was getting off on blaming one or the other particular role in the group.

The choice is yours, of course, but if you’re inclined to listen to this guy, I gotta tell you he’s about as wrong as a whistling fish. You can do better than he as a source of information when it comes to MMOs.  Especially since, yaknow, he doesn’t blog about MMOs now.

1. I feel dirty linking back, but fair’s fair. [↩]

One first-world problem associated with blogging is keeping up with current events. Well, we’re a couple of months into the Transmorgapocolypse and I’m just now getting around to saying the first thing about it.  Mostly, because, well, I really didn’t think that making it a thing was going to be a thing. But it is, so there you are.

It’s funny the subtle distaste that some people show for using this new feature. I’m not sure really why it’s a big deal to draw a line and step to one side or the other of it, but you will find staunch proponents of each.

But seriously, to have the choice in how your characters appear  is a glorious, fun thing for some, and as long as they don’t force fashion-forward sensibilities upon one’s withered soul, why should one complain?  The game world has become filled with color-coordinated mages and bat-winged warlocks, toons actually have some individuality, and people wanna complain?

Maybe it would be better if I discussed my Wookie Jedi Techno-dance-fight master instead¹.

Maybe not.

All I know is that the haters are out there, and they’re gonna hate.  I’m going to point and laugh, because, well, it’s low-hanging fruit².

If you were to look at me on the armory, the first thing you’d conclude is that I’m one of the haters, since I’m pretty much up there in my T12/T13 underoos for all the world to see. There’s a reason for that.

It’s true, I’m a hater. But I’m a hater with a difference.

I’m a hater of almost everything there is about the gear sets they’ve made for Hunters.  Oh, I kinda liked the eyeball shoulder pieces, but that’s not much of a foundation to work from.

Basically, it comes down to mail. I’m not a big fan of mail. Woodsy ranger-type archetypes are generally more leather-y than we get depicted in WoW past level 40. Something I’ve never understood is how a woodsy ranger-type is supposed to function properly as a woodsman in all that clanky metal crap. And don’t get me started on the T13 shoulders … I’m wider than I am tall with those on!  I’m supposed to slip between trees like this? Truly? I’m not an Orc, I expect my wardrobe to make some sort of sense!

Truth is, forest leathers and a camo cloak are the one right look for a Hunter, which IS available, but NOT to mail-wearers. And, unfortunately, one cannot mog mail to look like leather.

There is, also, a sad footnote for my favorite axe. You may recall that I had doubts that Legacy even existed, when it dropped for me in the twilight of Karazhan raiding. I’ve kept it all these years as a memento of past exploits and a reminder that patience may indeed be rewarded. When mogging came about, I was eager to mog my current staff³ to resemble my treasured axe.  And, well, you guessed it. Can’t mog a staff into an axe. And there ARE no suitable two-hander axes in Cata endgame.

So, aside from my goggles⁴ and my cloak⁵, I haven’t sussed a look yet.

We’ve managed to get Jas and Illume gussied up, at least, and Fai’s choice was pretty much a done deal as soon as they made the DK starter gear available for purchase. Not gonna lie, though, Flora’s swinging towards frumpy, but we’re still looking at options. Her opinion that it all looks good when lit by the burning bodies of one’s enemies may well be true, but keeping up appearances is sometimes important. I guess we’ll come back to that.  I don’t like the look in her eyes right now, nor how she’s swinging around that red-hot poker that passes for a dagger.

But here’s some armory links in case you’re curious about where the mog templates came from: Floramel, Illume, Jasra, Faiella.  I’d include WoWHead links (for the 3D aspect), but that part of WoWHead is down.

1. This needs to be a thing. [↩]
2. And if there’s one thing that Dwarves are good at, it’s swinging at low-hanging things. [↩]
3. Really, why on earth did Hunters get staves in the first place? Does Blizzard even READ fantasy novels? [↩]
4. Engineering pride, yo! [↩]
5. Ironforge, REPRESENT, yo! [↩]

Update: First post of this had two pictures not show, and that’s probably what made it into the feed, so if you normally read via a feed reader, you missed a couple of pics.  I had to manually edit a few things. /le sigh

Saxsy of I Like Pancakes has tagged me as part of some “666″ meme that goes a little bit like this.

• Go into your image folder
• Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
• Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
• Challenge six new bloggers.
• Link to them.

Alrighty then.

As many bloggers thus tagged have found out, the originator of this meme was unually well-organized, and the whole sub-folder thing often falls apart.  Or maybe s/he had a Mac. Who knows? the upshot is, we often have to interpret a bit, and I’m no different.

For example, I keep my WoW screenshots folder fairly clean, rarely accumulating more than 20 or so screenshots that don’t get dealt with.  Right now, the sixth image is this.

When I went to the End Time, I just had to get a screenie of Deathwing’s smoking corpse.  Possibly one of the most iconic images of the whole expansion.

My “Blog headers” directory is full of the images that you see appear at the top of this blog. They are an accumulation of screenies and art that I have come across over the years. The sixth image from that directory is this.

This is Jasra, with our guildies, preparing to attack Ignis in Ulduar. I will not deny, she’s voguing for the camera in this shot.  If I remember, we took him down on this attempt.

But I do have a folder where all the blogging stuff goes, and it has many subfolders, so let’s have a gander.

Ah, yes, Fanny Thundermar. This folder is where I collect “incidentals”, images that I use to illustrate whatever point it is I’m illustrating. It’s a real swamp in there, so I’m glad it was something as good as this fiery young lady, slayer of ogres using nothing but an iron skillet (hey, it worked for Sam!), and originator of the phrase, “arse like an anvil”.

And finally, for giggles, here is the image for the “My Pictures” directory.

Obviously from a Dwarf Humor website.

Oh, so now I have to challenge and link some new ones. Here are my choices.

• Ratshag (no, not THAT folder!)
• The Artist Formerly Known As Alas
• Courtney Doodles – seriously, an artist might have a few interewsting images here and there
• Nymphy and Orv (Gimli says that only counts as one!)
• Liala (allegedly still with us!)
• Imraith dos Santos (because I love saying that name almost as much as I love saying “guava!” Say it with me. GUAVA! GWWWAVA!)

In every MMO I’ve played in, we eventually see the game population divide up into populations of unusual – some might say freakish – creatures.  The exact nature of these sub-populations varies, but the point is, they exist, and they’re downright weird.

Let’s take raiders, as an example. Once we hit level cap, it’s all about the raiding.  Everything we do is bent towards improving our performance in raiding. We practice on target dummies, grind for cash for enchants and gems and potions, hone our trade skills to feed those needs, farm mats for consumables, do dailies for tokens and cash, fish for buff food, and so forth.  If any of us manages to get off and do something that is the least bit enjoyable – but not related to raiding – we feel guilty about it.

And look at that gear. Min/maxing is hardly adequate to describe what we do to our gear, and what sort of gear we look for. It’s like you took a battleship, and shrank everything down to the size of a destroyer – except the gun, which swelled to five times its normal size. That’s a typical DPSer in a nutshell. A typical tank is a brick with legs. A healer is best represented as either a giant bandaid, or a giant ball of cotton (Disco priests, yo!).

I mean, Hunters wear mail. And mail with higher armor values is – by any measure of common sense – better. Except for raiders.  If it doesn’t make our gun bigger, we’re not interested.

Don’t get me started on PvPers.  I mean, they have entire separate gear tiers from everybody else in the universe. I’ve seen periods of time where priests have been the terror of the battlefield. Arenas give rise to such perverted stat mixes that even the developers can’t sort out what they’re doing.  Hey, Johnnie found a +50 to pillar-humping sword!

My point here is that the endgame, be it PvP or PvE, warps perceptions of whatever game you’re playing. Somebody spent a lot of time and effort putting together a game world that has NOTHING to do with either of those things, and most normal people actually get out there and enjoy them.  While we’re QQing about cooldowns and OP rogues, the larger population is taking its time and enjoying the game they paid good money for.

It’s true – Blizz kind of stacked the deck against itself with the inexplicably high XP rates during leveling (Most zones, you can’t even complete all the quests before they go gray). But outside of that, there are a number of interesting and compelling stories out there that the power-leveling supa-raider has never seen. I wonder how many people right now are scratching their heads over the entire "Fangs of the Father" questline, wondering where this black dragon came from.

The "normal" people out there know.

Right now I’m seeing a bumper crop of this syndrome from STWOR players. "I’m level 50, now what?"  The usual answer is "grind, dailies, raid."  Right now, a lot of people are finding out they paid sixty clams only to do the same thing all over again. All the work that Bioware put into other parts of the game, totally unappreciated and likely unsampled.  As much as they wanted to break the mold, they simply failed to take the herd mentality of your average raider/pvper into consideration.

I have to give kudos to Blizzard on this. The average bored raider has no idea what to do outside of get ready for more raiding.  So Blizz has provided a means to measure one’s progress in, for example, experiencing the stories told in each of the zones – i.e. the various Loremaster achievements.

Within the Raider / PvP / Roleplaying echochaimers, our plaintive bleats are loud and distinct.  But from outside, all people care about is what is that annoying buzz and how do I stop it? It isn’t any wonder that you often experience resentment from those outside of your special little tribe. They’re enjoying all the new content while some group of shmoes have already beaten the end boss and are crying about how the game’s all over for them.

The ongoing challenge for MMO creators is to create content for all the normal people and all the mutants like us. We haven’t seen it yet, and nothing looks to have a solution forthcoming, so we’ll keep watching and hoping.