I don’t usually shill or endorse for any organizations, I figure you’re marginally less interested in reading that sort of stuff than, say, my warlock’s mogging choices. But sometimes I make an exception.
If you are not familiar with the charity Child’s Play, let me summarize. No. It is too much. Let me sum up. Child’s Play is a charity founded by the Penny Arcade gang for purposes of turning the rabid gaming masses into a source of comfort for sick children. I lost count, but last I looked the organization is responsible for over ten million dollars’ worth of toys and games going to children’s hospitals. Gamers are just awesome like that.
One of the WoW arms of this effort is Iron Man Mode, a comedy site that uses the "iron man" gaming method (i.e. if you die, even once, you’re done) to entertain you and obtain fundage for Child’s Play. Last year they raised over $1000, this year they’re aiming to double it.
So if you were looking for a way to enrich somebody’s life, and consider sick kids a worthy beneficiary, why not go through Iron Man’s site to do it, and make even more people happy?
Okay, end of sales pitch. I return you now to my epic series, "what my alt found in her belly button lint, and how it means that Blizzard is doomed."
You may not believe it, but addons are severely limited in what they can do. Mostly, they are driven off of "events" which they can react to, or they’re re-imaging of something that already exists.
Warning, technical bits
Addons that have a lot of animation or fast reacting indicators, such as cast bar replacements ala Quartz, usually trigger off of an event called "OnUpdate". It fires every time the current "frame" (i.e. your screen) updates, and it’s the only event of its kind. Thus, the higher your FPS ("Frames per Second"), the more often this guy fires. If you have low FPS, all animations tend to be choppy, including your addons.
Because it fires so often and is at the heart of your FPS, OnUpdate even "handlers", such as the code routine that updates your cast bar, are supposed to be kept small and focused. All the stuff that sets the texture, size, position, and other frippery associated with the cast bar, for example, will be done elsewhere. We try to restrict the OnUpdate handler, in this case, to calculating and drawing the cast bar, nothing else, and then handing off to the client so it can get about the business of rendering. If we put stuff here that takes a long time to do, it will drag the system FPS down.
What this means to you
There are a few conclusions you can draw with this knowledge.
Addons count
The addons you have loaded will affect your client’s performance. Furthermore, those with no OnUpdate handler will impact performance far less than those that use one. I don’t suggest you learn to read LUA source code as much as be familiar with what addons are high-impact with animations and critical indicators, such as Quartz or any unit frame addon. The more of these you have, the more delay there is in rendering each frame, until your FPS starts to decline.
You can’t eliminate this, but you can mitigate it.
The fewer, the better
The first principle is that the more active addons you have, the less responsive your client will be. So if you can eliminate addons that you don’t really need, that will help performance. Sometimes it’s a matter of disabling those that you only use from time to time, such as MogIt – which does have some real-time components, but nothing you need in the middle of a raid.
Quality Counts
Comparative testing of addons is a must, to eke out every bit of performance. The best approach is to get a little FPS addon (or just use CTL+R to turn on the built-in one), then find a quiet place to test your candidates. For example, all else being equal, try each HUD addon and look for dramatic drops in FPS. Any obvious outliers can be given the boot.
A good place to test your candidates is in the entrance of just about any instance. Avoid those with a lot going on – e.g. Violet Hold or ICC – and opt instead for those that have nice, quiet staging areas, like Karazhan.
Easy Upgrade
All other things being equal, if your client’s main issue is with framerate under load, a simple video card upgrade may do the trick. I’m running a Radeon 5000 series card which I purchased for under $100 over a year ago, and get on average 30 fps in cities. I have a lot of problems in 25- and 40- man raids, though. Purchasing another identical card and coupling it with the one I have already will improve matters a lot, and that will also improve the performance of all my high-impact addons.
Or, I could upgrade to the next tier of Radeon, a 6000 or 7000 series, whichever is available in my price range from my favorite vendor (I prefer Gigabyte solid cap boards because electrolytes are icky)1.
It isn’t just WoW that will improve, I’ve found. So many apps and games use similar mechanics for updating high-activity visual components that a nice video card upgrade.
So, protip – if you buy to last, you can stretch a PC’s life a long time with video card upgrades.
If you’re working on Tillers rep, then there will be a time you need Raw Crab Meat. Now, the conventional wisdom of WoWhead is that it drops best from Rockshell Snapclaw, hermit-crab-like humanoids found underwater on a shelf southwest of Soggy’s Bottom.
It’s underwater. If you don’t have a potion you have to surface to breathe from time to time. If you’ve already done a certain quest in the zone, you get your Sea Legs buff, but if you haven’t, you don’t. A bit of a pain, really.
Just northwest of there is another spot, The Briny Muck, in which turtles, crabs, some Sauroks, and some big elementals hang out. The crabs are of interest, as they have almost as high a drop rate as the previously mentioned Snapclaws, plus there’s a spot you can go to that has a nearly constant supply of them.
In one direction is a crab that spawns pretty much as fast as you kill it. Turn around 180 degrees, and there’s another one that does the same thing. So it’s kill, turn, kill, turn, loot, kill, turn etc.
One of the Sauroks will occasionally aggro on you, and there’s one group that will avoid you as long as you don’t pull them, but aside from that, it’s all gravy.
Here’s a couple of screen grabs to help you situate yourself, complete with piles of bodies to illustrate the incredible spawn rate.
In the “goblin” world, there are goblins, and there are those that write about goblins, and there are those of us that more or less peer in from the edges, bemused at how far one person will go to make a few gold pieces. I fancy myself in the latter, no illusions there, but I wonder where WpW Insider’s resident goblin journo places himself?
His topic of the day was something near to my heart, inscription as a money maker. As usual, he almost gets it right, or almost gets it wrong, but doesn’t really nail either.
Buy the Numbers
The first thing I want to tackle isn’t provably wrong – not yet, or at least not provable by me – but I want to shed some light on the statement that possibly was edited down for brevity.1
Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it’ll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool’s Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool’s Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that’s 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.
What’s he talking about, Fool’s Cap requiring fewer stacks? Well, basically, what he’s saying here is that Fool’s Cap yields up more Misty Pigment than other herbs do. If he got his numbers from WoWHead, I do question them – WoWHead does not appear to purge old data that often, so the numbers up there could possibly include Beta data. Hard to say, since they’ve become less transparent by the day.2
However, I wrote a little addon that has been tracking all milling I do in real time. So far, the yields look like this.3
So, everything hovers around the .25-pigments-per-mill level, except for Fool’s Cap, which has yielded around .60. Yes, that’s more than double, which is in excess of WoWHead’s numbers. I have no idea whether this will hold, but I’ll be monitoring it. Right now, I don’t have enough samples from all herb types to make me comfortable publishing a link to the database, but before too long I will.
The upshot is, yeah, right now it’s worth it to buy Fool’s Cap for purposes of making Darkmoon cards. But now that Euripides has let the cat out of the bag, I expect there to be at least a window in which it will be priced beyond reason. Keep your eyes on the prices.
Don’t Believe it
Glyphs are a whole other beast. I’ve said a few times that this market isn’t worth pursuing, and to some extent, this still holds true. The main reason I’d advise against trying your hand at the glyph market is that everyone else disagrees with me, and that the profit per hour in this market is purely driven by competitors’ willingness to spend more time cancelling and relisting.
This shows some old-fashioned thinking on Euripides’ part. The “work harder not smarter” attitude works, if you have no other interest in this game than to sell things and make gold. I’ve other things to do. This is and has been a side-project, in which I attempted to determine if one could make money on the AH in an intelligent way. I’ve succeeded – if you disagree, it can only be on the matter as to what degree I’ve succeeded. However, since I started this exercise in Wrath, I’ve accumulated over 1,000,000 gold, so I think I’m on solid ground here.
I published my methods here, so I won’t go into great detail now, but essentially these principles held, and still hold.
Treat the enterprise as you would a retail outlet.
Maintain a working inventory of glyphs.
Cultivate a reliable, inexpensive source of materials.
Rotate stuff out when its price drops too far (as opposed to a forced reset, which is too labor-intensive) and shelve stuff that doesn’t sell at all.
Don’t worry about Euripides and the goblins.
#5 is the part that flies in the face of what Euripides said. He maintains that you have to undercut like a fiend. I don’t. I sold 5000 GP worth of glyphs last night. Does that sound like a good turnaround for an hour’s work? It does to me. I post ONCE per day. I still sell stuff. There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason is that the stuff that sells, will sell. Some “goblin” may undercut me, but if the glyph is a seller, then his glyphs WILL be bought, then mine are right there for the next buyer.
Don’t take the advice of trolls
I like angry letters, so when I have time to troll my esteemed competitors, I’ll go and post a "glyph wall" of 3 of each glyph for triple the materials cost. This is just expensive enough that it’s not worth them buying me out, and cuts the high end of the market (the 300g glyphs that cost 15g to make) out from under them. This can be fun, not unlike popping bubble wrap. I still get undercut within an hour, but since this doesn’t really drive demand up that much, I don’t end up selling anything more than I would have at the high prices. That’s generally when they’ll mail me letting me know this.
In the end, though, I can’t spend all day trolling — they just wait for me to have better things to do and then go back to their old ways.
I encounter a number of idiots like this on my server4 and I always get the last laugh, because while they’re all wrapped up in this little game of theirs, I just keep posting and selling. They were thick as fleas on a camel when the expansion posted, but they’re gone now, and I an still making bank. Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.
If you’re going to disregard my advice and try to get into the glyph market, the best advice I have for you is to make sure you have the most efficient possible setup, and undercut really frequently.
If you want to make money making glyphs, and you don’t want it to be your life, then disregard this advice and reflect on the article I linked above. Exercise patience and intelligence5 and you’ll not want for gold in days to come.
Moving on
I’ve a couple more tweaks to make to see how far I can push this thing, but now that I’ve gotten my Million, it’s all become rather pointless. I’m not one of those one-percenters that digs the money just for being the money. My goal has been to provide a comfortable nest egg for ten toons on this server, and I’ve more than accomplished my goal. Anything else is just gravy.
Everybody knows how awesome Hunters are1. But nobody’s actually put it to song, as far as I know.
Until now.
The merry miscreants at Warcraft Hunters Union2 have come up with a little something. Consider it the hunter community’s Winter Veil present to you. Go forth and thank them.
This is why we keep telling people, to get the word out. It’s one of many services we provide. [↩]
I don’t usually link there because, you know, gold ads. But I had to make this exception. [↩]
I’m not one to get upset over spoilers1. In my opinion, a game, movie, book, or whatever that falls apart because of spoilers is a wretched thing to begin with, and is worth nobody’s time, not even the author’s.
Having said that, I’m always delighted when I am surprised by something in one of these mediums. The use of the word "brisance" to describe a rocket motor’s torque-like capacity; a non-verbal flash of humanity from an otherwise unpleasant character; the madman on the piano that is subtly masked (but not obscured) by the lead vocals; that hidden nook in a game in which nothing important can be found, but which is unique in your experience. And yes, even the classical "whoa I didn’t see that coming!" moment that takes place from time to time, plot-worthy or not.
When playing a game like WoW, your desire for surprises is often countered by your need to get to a certain goal by a certain time. For raiders, it’s sometimes important to avoid all the frippery of "plot" and focus on the mechanical aspects of reaching 90 and getting geared. It’s cold and unpleasant and quite frankly one of the worst things about this game. I understand how it comes to pass, but I don’t like it.
I’ve burned through content quickly in order to get to 90 so that we could start raiding on schedule – or at least, so I could be part of that ‘we’. Still working the gearing-up2, and that’s turned out to lead me to unexpected places, to my delight.
I dinged 90 while working Kun-Lai, but I hadn’t finished that zone. Turns out that probably the best faction to start grinding right now, for me, is the Klaxxi, which means I have to come back and finish Kun-Lai first, so I’ve been working there. Eventually, as you fly around this place, you’re drawn to the summit. I just had to check it out.
There’s really not a lot special about this; anyone at level 90 with a flying mount can get here. Heck, there’s a path you can walk up.
But it’s a brilliant peaceful moment in the hustle of the day, and I’m better for it.
Little surprises like this make the game more interesting. There are no arrows, quests, or NPCs to get you to them. There is no achievement spam. You just find it, or you don’t. And if you want a memento of the moment, you take a screenshot – just like it is in that thing they call "the real world".
I’m positive there’s a guide for Klaxxi grinding somewhere that would get me out of Kun-Lai sooner. Most likely, this place isn’t anywhere in that guide. That’s one reason I don’t use those guides, but prefer to only resort to online research when I have to. First, you find things like this. Second, there is a good feeling to the more organic process that you don’t get when you’re marching to the beat of some mechanical, methodical guide.
Yes, sure, sure, I would be using that guide "if I was really serious."
But I’m willing to take a few hits against efficiency for a little bit of inner peace and enjoyment.
Those that are – enough with the yelling. Not helping. [↩]
Oh, no doubt the "pro" guilds would have bounced my ass by now. Good for them. [↩]
The all-consuming concern of the week is, in case you were asleep, the Fall of Theramore scenario. I didn’t participate in it on Monday when it came out1 but last night I got to take Jasra in Disco form.
Having not healed much in the last two-ish years, she’s still getting the hang of the Smite/Heal process, so the scenario was a good place to practice that, since the other two members of our squad didn’t need much healing.
So, things break down into two areas of concern: A) the scenario itself, and 2) the lore.
Running the Scenario
It starts with a cinematic as a goblin drops a mana bomb on Theramore2 and blows the place up. How Jaina managed to survive while everyone else did not is not adequately explained here. I think it has something to do with Rhonin’s selfless act, but I’m not certain3.
As you zone in, you’re on the (presumably) last surviving Alliance ship, and from there you’re given a series of tasks to accomplish. First, survive a couple of waves of attackers, then kill three ship captains, torch their ships, and slaughter all Horde in sight. From there, you charge to Jaina’s side, carry out a couple of tasks for her, and then cover her while she extracts the Focusing Iris from the bomb4.
The mechanics of the fight were fairly clear5. Objectives were easy to determine, the mini map was used well, and, as far as scripted events go, it worked well. I liked how the quest tracker area was repurposed to display objectives clearly. Nice touch.
So, mechanically, at least, I call it a win. If future scenarios work the same way mechanically, this is a new feature that deserves a permanent place at the table.
One final thought here: the Embersilk drops were insane. Jas came out of there with at least six full stacks, and the other tailor in the group got as at least that much. I’ve run entire raids without seeing that much cloth drop, and with two tailors in the group, it’s even more impressive! Hooray for murderating your fellow humanoids, I suppose?
The Elephant in the Room
Hoo boy.
Let us preamble this with the observation that the story leading up to this event, and the event itself, is told in the book Tides of War. This is a continuation of the now-traditional shunting of lore-heavy events into books. I must admit that the excerpt that was dropped a few weeks ago really put me off wanting to read this book – I’m sure that wasn’t what they had in mind, but the attempts at romance were cringe-worthy. There is no amount of lore, no amount of badassery, that will suffice to get me to suffer through that again. I suffered Asimov. I suffered Jordon6. No more, I say!
I digress.
Based on Alas’ comments about "Emo Jaina", I feared we’d get more of what we had in Icecrown. I was actually pleasantly surprised when I found that "Emo Jaina" in this case was "Angry Jaina". She talked some seriously good smack. More, please, plus some actually smacking, in the future, one hopes. I cannot emphasize this enough: Blizz has got to get away from writing strong female leads only as Dark and Sinister. Righteous fury has its place. Or, whoa, just for the hell of it, write a strong female lead that doesn’t have to be angry all the time7.
At any rate, everything about this scenario seems to be hell-bent on disrespecting the lore surrounding the characters, factions, and places involved. And that’s what’s got people fired up.
Saxy @ I Like Pancakes summarizes bestofall how badly this scenario and its alleged lore clash with previously established lore. Some questions she asks, such as how Garrosh seems to be acting without thought for consequences, appear to be rhetorical, since we already know that he’s under foul influences and not acting rationally, even for Garrosh. But she also brings up more macro issues around all this. The Horde just crapped in its own bed, and the world should be rightfully turned against it now.
What about supposedly neutral factions? Do you really think the Argent Crusade will want to have anything to do with the Horde after they’ve done this? The Cenarion Expedition? The Earthen Ring? The Scryers (who know a thing or two about mana bombs)? The Aldor (who know a thing or two about cities being leveled)?
And then there’s Dalaran. Why does Sunreaver’s Sanctuary still exist? Why is any horde player not killed on sight upon entering Dalaran? Are you seriously suggesting, Blizzard, that the Kirin Tor is going to allow anyone even loosely associated with the Horde anywhere near Dalaran?
And now the Dragonflights. Why are the Horde allowed near any Caverns of Time instance? Why are they welcome at Wyrmrest Temple? Why would any member of any Dragonflight trust any member of the Horde with any task?
Now, I’m sure she knows as we know that those are all points from elsewhere in the time stream, but ALSO she’s correctly pointing out that actions have consequences, and we should see them, but we won’t, and that’s disappointing from a lore fan’s perspective.
Sidebar. (RP-ish)
It’s interesting that, after all these years, my little alts Orlee and Yarlee have found a sympathetic voice.
Orlee is one of two orphaned Draenai that I took in when the portal opened. Her brother, Kutath, was able to stay centered and cope, but Orlee became bent on revenge. To her, the only good orc is a dead orc, Horde in general would be better off without them, and her entire reason for staying on Azeroth in the first place was to find more orcs to kill. It’s all perfectly logical to her. It’s quite simple. We kill the Orcs.
Yarley was one of the many Night Elves unhomed by the Warsong in Ashenvale. She had started out as a warrior, as many of her gender do in Night Elf society, but her outrage at the way the Horde violated the land motivated her to learn the way of the Druid. She’s routinely offended by what she sees of the Horde’s treatment of Azeroth, and figures that if they’re not put down, they’ll destroy the entire planet and leave it as they left Draenor – a pile of filth at best, shattered and drifting in the Nether at worst.
Sidebar conclusion: when I read Saxy’s angry screed above, Orlee and Yarley were in the back of my head yelling, See? See? We told you. Would you listen? NOOOOOoooo! So they get some perverse satisfaction in the fact that eyes are opening around the world right now.
To be honest, the lore violations would have been more palatable had they been couched in some sort of bread crumb quests and so forth, and Saxy has yet another good screed on that topic.
[...] this was the Wrathgate sequence. It was without question the most epic questline in Wrath, involving plot, new mechanics, real interaction with heroes, betrayal, etc. Anyone who did this questline will tell you that Blizzard did an excellent job of not just telling the story, but letting you feel like you were living through it. That you were an integral part.
Wrathgate was the sort of thing that, after I had experienced it, I went out and told people that it was something they would want to play the game for.
There aren’t many opportunities for a Wrathgate event. I believe that the fall of Theramore was one.
A minor quibble here is that Wrathgate was a mid-game event, and Theramore is either an end-of-game or start-of-game event, depending on how you want to view it. But otherwise, I totally agree: Blizz had a chance to shine, and they blew it.
First of all, if you thought the lore issues were merely because of poor execution on the part of the development team, think again. Golden’s book is full of the same sort of thing, and it rankles. I’m not going to blame Golden for the plot points. She got handed an agenda and had to write a story that fulfilled its requirements.
Unfortunately, those requirements pretty much had no respect for the lore surrounding the people in the story.
The one that sticks out the most here is how Thrall – excuse me, Go’el – has become hippie-orc and is fully aware of the mess that Garrosh has made of things, but doesn’t seem to care. This is not the "honorable" Orc we’ve had preached to us for years. It’s like a few tokes and getting some sexy tiemz with Aggra has somehow removed his integrity. John says it best.
Thrall walks on into the new throne room, sees Garrosh standing there with the Blackrock Orc, wanders around listening to some of the news about guards and the Blackrock smacking around anyone that voices dissent, hears about how some vanish in the dark, gives a quick chat to Baine and Vol’jin..
Are you seriously telling me that he couldn’t stop it?
With two sentences he could have shut the whole thing down.
“You are a disgrace to the memory of Grom Hellscream and an enemy of the Horde. Get out of my sight or I will kill you where you stand.”
He’s Thrall. He forged an Orc nation from nothing and brought his people out of despair, forged an empire and saved the world. Fuck an Orc that grew up in some pussy place like Draenor, where there are so many animals to kill and eat nobody has to farm in Nagrand.
Seriously. Thrall. Disappointing, man. That shit is weaksauce.
Maybe they feel like it’s time to put the ol’ fella out to pasture. No, sorry, you don’t get to do that. Heroes don’t go off and sit in drum circles until they die in their sleep from food poisoning or something. No, they go out in a blaze of glory. That’s just the way it is in Heroic fiction. Nothing else will do.
So, character-wise, and lore-wise, Thra — ‘scuse me, Go’el — is completely inconsistent with the story of Thrall / Kal-el that Blizzard has given us so far.
Cleaning up the broken glass
The community has been pretty vocal about this, and it’s good to hear that maybe Blizz is taking it to heart. From a recent Q&A, Dave "Fargo" Kosak has this to say.
I’ve been watching the Theramore feedback closely, and this comment seems pretty universal. We tried to keep everything all in the scenario, to make it really self-contained, but not burden it with lots of story that you have to slog through every time you played the scenario. It’s pretty clear from the feedback that people wanted more story. We should’ve surrounded the scenarios with more quests or explanations to help round out the story for the people who wanted to know what exactly was happening. Lesson learned!
Compare this to the Old Stratholme instance in Wrath, where there was that long RP-ish event that people got TIIIIRED of after a dozen times. Somewhere in between these two extremes there is a sweet spot.
Let me say this: I don’t think that Scenarios were ever planned to be lore-establishing events with lots of RP-ish elements like Wrathgate. But Wrathgate points the way to doing it right. We don’t need to stick a ton of cinematics and RP in a Scenario or Instance. Preface them with individual quest chains in which each person will get to experience any cinematics and story elements once, and at their own pace, and then you don’t have to worry about RP-ish elements in Scenarios.
The Fall of Theramore scenario didn’t receive any beta testing. There are those that say that it didn’t make it to beta because it was savaged badly by internal testers and there was no time to fix it. That they know it was crap and didn’t need to hear more about that. This does not jibe with something that Ghostcrawler said in the Reddit AMA:
A. We weren’t happy with the way Abyssal Maw was shaping up. It managed to take on a life of its own in players’ minds, but believe me, if it had been an awesome raid, we would have shipped it. One of the hardest parts of this job is killing a feature you’re excited about because it doesn’t meet our quality bar. I suspect you’d see far more complaints if we had shipped a bad raid than not shipping one at all. We took the resources and put them back into Firelands and got a couple of extra bosses out of it.
The conspiracy theorists imply that it was withheld from beta because they already knew it sucked and were unable to do anything about it. One of the lead developers tells us, with a specific example, that if something sucks, it won’t ship. I’m going to go out on a limb and believe Ghostcrawler, but make up your own mind on the merits.
That does beg the question, though. Are the internal testers that disconnected, that naïve? I don’t know, but I cannot envision a scenario8 in which somebody didn’t raise a red flag and say "guys, this doesn’t jibe" or "Hey, people are going to be confused!" I can’t envision a world in which this sort of thing gets past what I see as a very rigorous internal QA team9.
The overall take-away for me is a sense of ennui. I can only carry water for Blizz for so long before I start to see logic in the arguments of those that claim that Blizz has lost its touch, or its soul, or its ethics – or all of the above.
I get the sense that MoP is going to be the expansion that makes or breaks this franchise. If they do well, get their footing back, then this game will continue to flourish with a varied and informed playerbase for years to come. If they don’t do well? There are MMOs aplenty out there that represent the true End Times.
Maybe Murozond was right.
I don’t do first-day for this sort of thing. It’s always gonna be bugged. [↩]
I’ve often used WoWHead and other similar sites to compare stats on items as I gather them, but most if not all have a couple of flaws.
They often don’t include all viable stats, just the major ones, in their comparisons – or at least not that I can see.
It’s usually impossible to compare 2H to DW or 1H+OH ratings; for example, a staff compared to a wand and an orb. But that’s what you need to know when comparing staves to wands and so forth.
Coincidentally, Rating Buster is losing its mind, so this is somewhat timely.
What it does and how to use it
In the blue box on the right of the sheet, select your toon’s class + spec.
In the left hand column entitled Equipped / MH, put the stats for the item you are currently using.
For any stat that doesn’t have a weighting value (Column I), you don’t need to populate it, because it will not count.
In the column entitled Of Interest / MH put the stats for the item you are considering.
If you’re comparing dual-wield stats or MH + OH stats, you’ll want to fill in the offhand value as well, especially if comparing 2H (say, a staff) against a one-hand with offhand (say, wand + orb).
If any of the items have gem slots and/or bonus stats, you will need to populate the bonuscolumn appropriately.
No, I haven’t pre-loaded those with common values for gems and other bonuses. Read your tooltips.
In the little yellow box at the lower right, you will be informed if it’s an upgrade or not.
I realize this isn’t optimal like WoWHead or something like that, but it’s better than a lot of the available tools right now, and it does things I like that they don’t, or they do something silly like say that a wand by itself is an upgrade over a staff, even though the wand + orb combo doesn’t even come close to the same stats when put together1.
This worksheet is protected against modification; you will have to make your own copy to use, since this is an interactive device. If you don’t have a google account – which is all you really need – why not? Drop me an email and I’ll float you an invite.
I still haven’t figured out a way to mass-import the stat weights yet (right now I’m doing like everybody else and looking at Mr. Robot). What this means is that until I do, I’ll just be doing one major update per patch unless I see reason to do otherwise.
The version number will reflect the patch level that the gizmo coincides with. As you can see, right now we’re still not up with 5.0.5. In a couple of days, Light willing.
Technical Notes
You can add specs to this yourself. You will need to add the name of the spec to the list entitled “Specs” which is on the “Classes” tab, and you will need to come up with a little mnemonic for it. For example, “Rogue, Assassination” becomes “RoA”. Then you will need to create a spec weight table as a named list, this time with the name being the mnemonic. You will find all these on the “Weights” tab, but there is nothing that says it has to be. In fact, if you create your own tab for your own stuff, you won’t have to worry about it getting overwritten whenever the main sheet is updated.
In summary:
Create a name for your spec and insert it into the “Specs” named list.
Create a mnemonic for that spec and include it on the same sheet, next to your spec’s name (row B).
Create a named list and name it after your mnemonic. Populate it with the stat weights you want, in the same order as seen on the “Weights” tab.
???
Profit!
If all of that made no sense to you, custom weights are not something you should attempt. WoWHead or Rawr is probably your best bet.
Hope you enjoy using this tool! And if not, I’ll refund your complete purchase price provided it is purchased directly through the Grimmlabs Swag and Incidental Crap store.
When Navi came over to say hi, I was working on my transmog "set", if "set" it be. I had replaced the shoulder pieces, but the rest of my outfit was all Tier-thirteeny. It wasn’t pretty, but I did appreciate having the ability to look to the right and left once again. Those T13 shoulders should really come with mirrors or something.
My snark on the T13 shoulders is indicative of what I think about Hunter armor appearance in general. I don’t even GET the concept of mail-wearing Hunters. Forest leathers are a much more appropriate outfit for us outdoorsy types, but game mechanics (i.e. Mail Specialization) require mail, and you can’t mog mail to look like leather. It might confuse the PvPers1.
Well, a couple of weeks after Navi’s visit, after much Lore-mastering, I’ve assembled what is almost the final product2.
Paxton’s Belt and the Talonrend Stompers contrast the blue-silver theme for a couple of reasons. First of all, belts and boots are generally made of leather. Second of all, even though they’re mail, they look like nice, sensible leather accessories. Third of all, although there are boots that match the armor, I’d run the risk of looking like this:
I asked a kind GM about this – Trelladon, who also offered conciliatory waffles – if it had been dropped from the game, and s/he indicated that there is a bug report in about this very thing, so at the moment there just isn’t any clear idea in Customer Support if the schematic is supposed to drop or not.
Well, once the black market is live, maybe one or the other will drop. But for now, this will have to do.
The main thing that drew me was the feathers. I know it’s silly, but that’s such a Wildhammer-ish thing.
So there you go. My look, going into MoP, unless they come out with something new in MoP that I like the looks of better7.
Sorry, Blizz, I know your artists have feelings. But a certain segment of your players can’t get past the complete and utter impracticality, garishness, busy-ness, and plain old ugly that some of the sets out there represent, and Hunter gear especially. We’ll talk when they start making armor they’d be willing to wear on a bus on the way to work. Meanwhile I submit that a recolor of old armor sets is not art, it is what we should be doing with armor dyes, and a potential for payroll reductions, if you ask me. [↩]
How odd that they’d have two different models otherwise. [↩]
It’s probable that there will be some changes between now and the 28th, but we’re close enough that we can consider the numbers we have now to be fairly stable. So let’s consider the stats and what they mean for you.
Note: I am not linking to any of the items on WoWHead because after a very short time, those links will be invalid when the MoP database becomes the real database. Obviously I can’t link to the real database for items are going to change. Sorry.
First and foremost: Blackfallow Ink is not your friend. On the 28th, it will not be usable to buy other inks. It will only be good to make glyphs. And there is only one glyph that you can make with it. So, before the turn of 5.0.4, you need to convert Blackfallow Ink into anything that’s useful.
Topic the First: what’s useful.
First of all, at the end of this article will be a chart showing all glyphs that are active in MoP. In case you want to skip the brilliant analysis.
So what inks are useful? This chart shows the distribution of ink utilization in MoP. Obviously, you can’t buy Ink of Dreams, but everything else is fair game.
As you can see, Ink of the Sea is by far the most useful. Basically, 30% of your ink-exchanging should be for this glyph, followed by Ethereal1 at roughly half that. Blackfallow is that little sliver.
This chart confirms Blackfallow as officially the most useless ink in the game. You can make one glyph with it, the market is going to be flooded by people skilling up, and you can’t buy anything else with it. Useless. Unless you directly need to use Blackfallow ink for some sort of skilling up activity, don’t bother grinding Cata herbs. Sell them to alkys.
One thing to take into account: all this chart does is show the utilization of inks. It does not show how well the glyphs that are made will sell. We won’t know that until we start rolling those glyphs out on the 28th.
Surprisingly, utilization of Ink of the Sea increases in MoP. This is despite moving several glyphs to different inks from what they used in Cata. It bewilders me that they didn’t bring Blackfallow up even with at least Ink of Dreams. This has always been a thing that confuses me. It seems that a glyph’s ink should be on par with the glyph’s level, and the glyph’s level should be on par with the level of the skill that it is modifying. But none of the glyphs learned between 80 and 85 use Blackfallow Ink except for Colossus Smash.
Within a few percentage points, glyph distribution in MoP is pretty even. DK seems to be hurting the most. Compared to Cataclysm’s distro, it looks like this:
First of all, note that there were close to fifty (50) glyphs added between Cata and MoP. Of those, Monk accounts for around 35.
Big winners were Warrior, Priest, and Paladin. Hunter did well, while everyone else held even or lost one or two spots. Which is bad news for mages, as roughly 1/2 of their glyphs are now variations on Polymorph2.
Following is a full list (as of today, 8/17/2012) those glyphs3 that will be supported as of 8/28/2012. Enjoy!
Note: this table defaults to 25 entries, but has over 400. Please use the drop-down at the top of the table for navigation. There are little pagination buttons at the bottom, too.
Entries (RSS)