A couple of nights ago, I dragged my undergeared Dwarven butt through a  number of instances, Heroic and otherwise, specced out as BM, and while I can’t claim to have output to rival our first-tier raiders, my output was consistent enough to warrant a comment from the GM. A month ago, I was struggling to maintain 2K dps. This weekend, 3K was consistent and I peaked at 4K at one point.

So what’s the deal? What am I doing differently?

In essence, I’m playing this true to what I love.  Rather than struggle with SV, I’ve fallen back into the warm and familiar embrace of Beast Mastery, and as a result, I’m getting numbers that are at least satisfactory enough for me to be happy.

Now, I will say up front that I have conducted objective tests on this, and SV is still a higher damage bringer than BM, but the margin is slim. I could widen that margin quite a bit by regemming and so forth, as right now I am emphasizing RAP, as is right for a BM hunter. Survival depends more on Agility to give its numbers a boost.  So let’s get that out of the way right now: I am not claiming that BM is better than SV.  I’m saying it is better for me.

This is where that “being true to yourself” part comes in.

I started out as an MM hunter, and Fai for a while was SV (pre WotLK).   But when BM became a viable build in BC, and I gave it a try, I knew I had something special. I’m comfortable here. I know the nuances, the tricks, how to move around and keep it delivering, how to get more from my pet than just have it chewing on the boss’ ass, and so forth. It all just clicks in a way that neither of the other specs did.

SV and MM may give higher numbers, but only if played right. I can technically play both “right”, but it’s always been a struggle to stay in the groove with those two builds. They feel haphazard, strung together out of odd parts that don’t quite fit together well, but at a distance give the illusion of being integral.

The other thing that I think affects this is my playstyle. I can be a little more mobile as BM, it seems, without losing as much output as I would with MM or SV¹. The rotations are longer and more involved, for example. After each move, there’s always a brief period where you have to evaluate whether your stings need refreshed, and so on. There’s more of that going on with SV and MM than there is with BM.

Yes, I am saying that BM’s rotation is simpler. Only an idiot would say otherwise. But that does bring some advantages with it other than appealing to the Alfred E. Neuman crowd, as someone has hinted without coming right out and saying it.  Simplicity has its benefits, and I don’t care if someone feels the need to look down on me for liking it. Complexity isn’t better unless it brings solid benefits. I think the benefits are somewhat less than are hinted at, though the numbers won’t back me up on it.

A long time ago I mentioned our MM part-time raider’s propensity for pulling aggro at the drop of a hat, his ineffective trapping technique, and so forth. Well, this isn’t BC anymore, and trapping is something that’s fallen by the wayside, but the kernal of the statement remains true; a good BM hunter brings more to the table than just damage. Damage without pulling aggro, for example. The ability to peel the beast off the boss and onto something chewing the healer’s face, without stopping DPS. The ability to break things up a little with one or two well-placed traps².

So, the bottom line for this long and windy spiel is that sometimes, you gotta say screw the stats, I’m going with what fits me best. For, while there may be a 20% gap between SV and BM damage statistically, that will never be the case, once again, for me.

I think that’s true of many people for many specs. Maybe you’ve always fancied Affliction as the most fun spec for your warlock.  Maybe you prefer Frost for the mage, and always have.   If the gap isn’t that huge, and your raid isn’t marginal, what’s the harm?  So it takes just a little longer to down the boss … but the boss, it is downed.

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The consequences of this choice are immediately obvious to me. I had a blast, a really good time bounding around with the stompasaurus, following my heart.  No, not so much as to want to change my mind on raiding – that’s gone too sour for me – but if I were called, at least I’d be more enthusiastic ³.

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Trinkets!  One thing I am sorely lacking is trinkets!  I am toting a blue and a green around, and I haven’t replaced them in forever because there are no trinkets out there with RAP.  I was very excited when I saw that Scattered Shots was covering this topic, but then I was sad when I saw the conclusion that there just wasn’t anything up there with RAP. But at least now I know that I should give up on that and find some suitable compromise.

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Last night, I obtained my first real holiday achievement; Call me Elder Grimm if you must, for that title is mine. I was hoping to complete the Love is in the Air achivement, as well, but I encountered a problem with the rocket achievement that required me to retry it four times before I got it. That was sixty tokens out the window, which set me back on the other components.  Well, maybe next year.

1. I know, that makes absolutely no sense at all considering that the three big guns for SV are insta-shots [↩]
2. Did you know that if you MD on the tank, and then put an explosive trap at his feet, that the trap damage all MDs to him? True story! [↩]
3. Yeah, there’s some behind the scenes politics I’m not talking about here. It just is, and that’s that, and blogging it just isn’t appropriate. [↩]

Over the past 48 or so hours, there has been much trash-talking about the Ensidia world-first kill of Arthas (and subsequent fallout).  People are weighing in on both sides.

One prevailing viewpoint of the pro-Ensidia crowd is that Blizzard failed to test the software “properly” and thus, somehow and ergo, Ensidia is blameless in this situation.

What utter, profound crap.

Let me essplain.  No – it is too much. Let me summarize.

There is a rule of thumb in the software testing world, which boils down to this:  “to attack the software properly, you have to think like a criminal” – such as , for example, when dealing with things like credit card processing – the storage of account numbers and so forth, especially. The designer will tell you how it’s supposed to work under normal conditions. You get to figure out what he didn’t think of, the cracks in the shell that you can exploit.

So; this rule of thumb helps one find good testers, but it begs the question as to how to “catch a thief”! Until you’ve sat in the seat of an interviewer, you really don’t know how difficult it is to find a mediocre tester, much less a world-class game buster.  To “catch a thief” to work on your team, you kinda have to think like one, too.

So that’s one issue.

Another issue is what I like to summarize as “the view is really good from the cheap seats”. Really, until you’ve actually been put in the place of finding bugs as your bread and butter, you really have no idea what you’re talking about when you criticize the work done by the testers in this situation. You really, really, don’t. You have no idea what kind of guidelines they were given. You have no idea what level of knowledge they were given about how the encounter was supposed to progress, nor how complete the testing environment was. You have no idea, at all, how this was tested, or even if it was testable.

So sure, go ahead and talk trash all you want, but those of us that work in the industry know exactly how hollow and foolish your critiques are.

Walk a mile in my shoes, and we have common ground to talk.  You can make real critiques at that point, not a bunch of generalities that mean absolutely nothing.

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Regarding Ensidia; Grimm said this elsewhere, but I will reiterate now.  You don’t play this game for five years, earn a seat in one of the premier raiding guilds in the world, and somehow not know that this was an exploit. Saronite bombs are to be thrown at the enemy, not collapsed portions of a platform, and the enemy was not standing on collapsed parts of the platform. No, this was deliberate. And anyone that’s been playing that long would know it.

To whine that they’re victims of faulty QA is disingenuous at best. That QA team didn’t make them toss bombs off where they would (theoretically) do no good.  That QA team didn’t force them to take the achievement. That QA team didn’t keep them from reporting the issue.The QA team didn’t make them crow at their achievement.

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An analogy, and then I will shut up on this topic.

You are walking through a mall. Ahead of you, a woman’s purse has a broken strap, and the wallet has fallen out. When it hits the ground, a bunch of $50 bills spill out on the ground. She continues on, unaware of the incident.

If you take the money and toss her wallet, who’s in the wrong?  Sure, she should have fixed the purse, secured the wallet. But does that in any way excuse theft? I don’t think so.

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Ensidia, I’m sorry that you didn’t get a nice set of steak knives, but maybe next time you will use your heads and not risk your reputation on something so obvious. Or if you do (and I suspect you will), I hope you can at least own up to your stupidity next time.

Oh, and gratz to Paragon, that did it without exploits.

I was a bit surprised to the the senior staff log in tonight considering that raiding has been suspended for the week. I was quickly asked to come to the daily (HoS); I was quite happy to. Grimmy needs a new hat.  So off we went.

I found that the goal was also to get a couple of achievements; we failed at the final one because we failed to understand the difference between the two kinds of slimes.  But I got a few.

After that it was decided to storm Gundrak and go for more achievements.  Unfortunately, we were only able to get the one.

Finally, we went for CoS. We planned a timed run, but the tank had never run it before and started the Malgannis fight instead.  I franticaly changed out to the bear which got rofloneshotted.

Once everyone died, we still had time; however, our druid died on the wipe and didn’t take the rez in time to get credit for the kill or a chance to roll on the drake. She was quite cross, and actually left the group in a snit once we downed Mal. Him and Jas should get together and drink. A lot.

I didn’t get the drake, but I got credit of a sort.

I wasn’t aware of it but I had been stacking up Timear quests all along, and this put me over the top.

Overall, my DPS was around 2250. Not bad for an undergeared BM huntard.

So, I’ve had a meltdown. And yet, all other things aside, we’re still headed back into Naxx to finish it up.

So, what to do?

When you get thrown from a horse, the sooner you get back on, the faster your recovery. Or so I’ve heard.

So. I logged in. Did my dailies.

Parked at the flightpoint … and waited to see if the GM (who I did apologize directly to) would risk asking me back into a raid.

She did, I went. We had Plague wing and KT left.

And we steamrolled them. We even got an achievement out of it.

There was one amusing moment, when we started Noth. Or I should say, THEY started Noth. I was in the doorway, apparently just a bit on the outside of the line, and when somebody pulled¹, the curtains came down and I found myself on the outside. Worst, they were tanking him in the far corner (as per normal) so I couldn’t even help.  Two adds DID come for me, but I guess I evadebugged on them and they left.

So, at least for some value of ’success’, I succeeded in raiding.  I won’t be on Oprah documenting that any time soon.

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Let’s talk about our run. Every boss was a record for us. This raid is no longer a serious challenge to the experienced ones, so we need to look at how to change that up.  I have a couple of thoughts.

1. Move this to Saturday as a solid block, and then move Ulduar to two or three nights in the week.
2. Swap out some alts.
3. Go for the 8-man achievement with the mains.

I’d also like to see us go for EoE soon. I guess I need to practice that stupid quest in Coldarra.

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Regarding TotC, I really want to walk away from it and never return. It’s not that it’s hard. It’s that we (a) have most of Ulduar still to do, (b) Ulduar is interesting, (c) TotC is not.

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Due to personal matters in RL, much of the guild leadership will be unavailable for raiding this week. I don’t really want to be in the middle of such things, but I know one or three people interested in VoA and that sort of thing, so I probably will help organize them. I’d rather take the week off myself, but being selfish is not the hallmark of a good officer. Bleah.

1. I have no idea if it was on purpose or not – I wasn’t in Vent. That was one thing that helped keep me sane, not having the chattering in my ear. [↩]

Epic drops occur in the oddest places.

Mine occured in the checkout line of Target.

I am sad that this is not Bind on Account, and the code given can only be used once.

Still.

Evil super chicken mount.

Booyah.

A lot of people get bent out of shape if they can’t get all the achievements for all the holidays and thus get what Flora calls “their big purple strap-on.”   (Don’t look at me!) It really does take the fun out of the holidays, but some of those are pretty gruesome, too, forcing one to do unseemly things, such as PvP.

Here at casa de Grimmtooth we prefer less stress (Meta has to watch his blood pressure) so we set our sights on more achievable goals to start with.  For example, the Green Proto-Drake is a rare “hatch” from the egg you buy from the Oracles for two gold and change.  Now, I’ve been buying that egg every time I could since January, for I would guess around 250 gold total. But it paid off. Oh, yes.

Isn’t she a beauty?¹

Jasra and Flora are still working on theirs, but at last I can finally finish off the Oracle line and start working on the Frenzyheart.

Jas’ Naxx raid finished off last night by clearing two and a half wings plus Sapph plus KT. She got her tier shoulders and a new mace. We’re still not sure if it’s in total an upgrade, but probably so.  Each of the fights took longer, though, than they used to. Partly because they had three healers rather than two. On the plus side, healing was easy peasy. On the minus side … slow. Close to enrage timer on a couple of them.

So I’m wondering if Jas or the Shammi healer should step out and let a DPS step in. :: polishes gun ::

Oh, and to any curious visitors from Tam’s .. hi! Don’t forget to set out a new keg if you empty the one that’s out. And don’t mind the snow tiger, he’s harmless as long as you don’t try to pinch the silverware.

1. Well, might be a he. You have to lift the tail to find out, and that’s one big tail! [↩]