An Eh Way. Here’s what interested us during the week. Your mileage may vary.

• Tamarind find out that blogging and being in a guild is a difficult situation, and takes the nuclear option. Fortunately for us, he’s still blogging. Unfortunately for him, being in a guild may be an incompatible goal.   Later on, Larisa riffs on the subject in more detail.
• What do you want to bet that either Curse or WoWInterface use this opportunity to talk more trash about WoWMatrix?  Cheap shots, we haz them.
• Now that we’ve sorted out how to control gravatar images for the various characters, Meta has started replying to some blog posts in-character.  This can only end in tears…
• Eyonix lays it on us with regards to how our stats are going to change in Cataclysm. There were a few surprises (Weapons skills going away completely – ORLY?) and some tantalizing hints (Reforging).  Possibly the most annoying side effect of this was that wow.com ran a full article for every variation of “Stat and System Changes for $SPEC_AND_VARIATION $CLASS.  I think they even ran one for pipe-smoking lesbian Nelf priests, specifically.
• Last week, Baron Soosdon’s Youtube account was suspended, and that, as he said, was that – end of the road, no more WoW machinama for him. But then, this morning, a miracle – the account restored, so therefore …. meh, he’s probably still calling it quits. Way to be a tease there, fella.  And, nevertheless, thanks for all the great stuff. I will miss it.
• A good laugh every now and then is essential to the soul. No Stock UI highlights one tool that can be used towards this end – Comix.
• Digressing from lore-restricted issues for a moment, Greyseer explains why he isn’t a big Knaak fan. He also demonstrates exactly why he’d make a great warlock.  He has his inner Palpatine charged up.  Later in the week, a review of Knaak’s latest work.  The reasons for Grayseer’s frustration are really obvious when you get a look at this thing.  I really can’t disagree on any point.
• Kaelynn at Azure Shadows provides some great non-specific tips for putting together your UI – design decisions, usability, that sort of thing. I can’t say I live up to all that – my UI is SERIOUSLY functional, meeting the feedback criteria quite well, but esthetically it could peel paint off a ‘79 Volvo wagon from fifty paces.  I’ll work on it, K, I promise!
• Gnomageddon ruminates about the departures from the blogosphere that we’ve seen recently – and ends with reassurances that he’ll be sticking around for some time to come. Yay!  Also: one of the commenters raises the question: what about Empowered Fire? They’ve been quiet!  Hours later – an answer!
• Part 2 in a series: Frost Mage PvP: 102 is posted by Spicytuna. \o/
• Sweet baby titans! Wow.com has apparently cobbled together the basic script for the upcoming Gnomeregan event from the updated sound files in the PTR client’s latest update. Spoiler-rific!  Apparently there’s one for the Echo Isles, too, but I haven’t got much invested in that. Aw, hell, WHO WANTS PIE?
• Tamarind @Righteous Orbs and Miss Medicina @ … Miss Medicina are colluding on a new project, the creation of a bloggish guild on Argent Dawn.  Tam has organized <Single Abstract Noun> on AD/EU, and Miss Medicina has organized <Single Abstract Noun> on AD/US.  We plan to be there in some form, just haven’t figured out what to roll, or if I’m going to transfer Grimm Jr or the belf flower picker warlock.  You’ll see it here, first, when  we decide!

Oh, well, I’m going to file it under “Great minds think alike” and move along.  Here are, in no particular order (even chronologically is pushing it), a number of things that I liked this week.

• Amber gets philosophical on Cliques at I Like Bubbles.  I’ve been through a situation where cliques – MY clique -  was instrumental in Great Drama. I hate drama. It interrupts my favorite things.

• I discovered Pike late in the game, so I have less attachment than others. That being said, it’s sad to see a fellow traveler go away / go on hiatus. The final pic is perfect¹. Hurry back, Pike, if you can. And if you just can’t get enough, say hello to her at her new linux/geeky blog, Clockwork Hare.

• Second only to BRK’s tales of kiting the Fel Reaver into Shatt², Spicytuna blogged a new kind of dirty trick.  Yes, it’s griefing of a sort, I admit it. But it’s griefing with style.  Next day, Frost Mage PVP: 101 picks up a subject that I have peripheral interest in from time to time.
• Aw, say it ain’t so!  Jong, leaving us, again? What of Megs? Quick, somebody set her up a guest post traveling gig or something. Or better yet, maybe Jong will change his mind!  I have learned so much from them both.
• And Rhii, too?  What is going on? Well, not quitting, but when my GF started talking like that, I started making sure I had all my stuff where I could find it.  At the same time, Aurdon’s giving his guild a well-deserved mid digit. You had me at “racist /g chat”.
• Leafshine links to some incredible WoW numbers. 20,000 servers? That’s some serious heat!
• WoW.com’s Addon Spotlight uncovers something I might be interested in: Automaton.

• Flora has been pointing excitedly at this article at WoW.com since it popped up in her reader. Finally, a kindred soul that believes that achiements should be hard. Werd.

• Look, he’s crawling up my wall / Black and hairy, very small / Now he’s up above my head / Hanging by a little thread / Boris the spider – I’m perversely cheered that somebody else remembers that obscure little ditty.
• Amber strikes again with the most awesome Friday Flowchart evar! ³
• Hatch and Larisa⁴ make cromulent observations about the matter of a group photo, a forum post, and the doin’s thereof. See Also: Gabriel’s Greater  Internet Dickwad Theory.  But, truly? The most shocking aspect is that somebody expected better of forum posters. A hive of scum and villainy, mark my words.
• Ghostcrawler Promised me a Moose! – WoW.com spreads the word.
• WHU shows that the BM changes in 3.3.3 aren’t really all that. On the other hand, if I can get 8.7K dps, I won’t care.

• Apparently there was a Blizzard dev chat on Twitter, but I was feeling poorly and missed it.  Fortunately, it’s up on the forums. I may, at some point, go have a read, though the last time I did that sort of analysis, “I” was Flora.

1. Look at the header.
2. Well, not exactly.
3. Illume denies this is at all how it plays ou — FLOWER!
4. Sorry, Larisa, those special un-dots confuse me, so you get moar dots instead. I fail.

Still, we try to make it flow as if there were a team of distinct individuals living and blogging here. It’s a little game, of sorts, that may or may not have some intrinsic value, at least to me.

The one thing that kills this suspension of disbelief – for me, anyway – is posting an entry as, say, Flora, getting comments, and then seeing my mustachioed countenance looking back from her comment box. Well, that’s my gravatar, what am I to do?

Gravatars are cool, but they’re tied to email addresses, and I’m not that thrilled by obtaining and maintaining twelve (at current count) email addresses.

GMail, however, for whatever reason, has an answer.

If you look at the most recent post, you’ll notice that Jasra’s responded to one comment, and she has her own gravatar. If you had admin access, like I do, you’d see that she has an unusual email address: grimmtooth+jasra at gmail. This is my email – grimmtooth at gmail – with her name added with a plus sign.

Turns out you can do that with any name, and most email-keyed services do indeed see these different email addresses as unique to each other. Thus, Flora and Jas both currently have gravatars, and more will be added as needed. They could even have their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts if I really wanted to get silly.

There are other benefits, too. For example, I can filter emails to my toons based on the t0-address, and then sort them accordingly.

Naturally, this assumes you use gmail. If not, you’re on your own.

I hope this proves useful to some of the other bloggish-rp-ish beings out there. Happy blogging!

So, for the past few nights, we have been working on Marrowgar-10. To “real” raiders, we fail, right there. To “casual” types, maybe there’s a small reason for respect. And of course there is a whole spectrum in between. Hello.

It seems like forever that we have been fighting this boss. And this week seemed like any other. Two or three bone storms, and we’re all dead on the floor. Same as always.

Last night, our esteemed MT¹ spoke up about the need for DPS to hold off until the tanks had achieved aggroage. This is pretty basic, and a good sign as to what sort of challenges our tanks face every day. That being said, once the obvious was pointed out and emphasized, we started to make real progress. Last night, we left the place with Marrowgar 39K away from downage. It was heartbreak, for sure, but also the best we had ever done, and we were as a group energized to try again the next night.

That being tonight.

OCV's first ever Marrowgar downage

There were two key pieces to success:

1. Let the tank tank.
2. During bone storm, you’re on your own. Don’t stand in stuff, and don’t worry so much about the flurry².

That’s it.

With that simple approach, we were able to gel on the strategy around the 3rd or 4th try tonight, and kill that four-headed freak with no casualties on our side.

Well done, vorpal bunnies!

Naturally, what’s-her-face pwned us. But that’s par for the course on a brand new boss. As with all progression raids, the challenge is in the next boss, not the one you just downed.

Later.

1. Have I mentioned how fortunate we were to find him when we did? Not only has he been a boon to our guild, but he brought another tank, a great DPS shammi, and a few other assorted players with him as well.
2. Consider this to be a grown-up version of Heigan, with actual damage during the dance.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Thought the first:

I am Beeesmastar! I don’t mind being dependent on my pet!

“We don’t want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet.“

You guys (Blizz) spent the better part of all of BC convincing us that that was, indeed, the intent, design, and raison d’etre of the entire Beastmaster spec! Now is hardly the time to say that you didn’t really mean it.  Fer Mog’s sake, ya gave us Exotic pets on top of everything else!  This screams out dependent on the pet, don’t you think?

Yes! Yes, I do want to be dependent on my pet, a thousand and one times yes.  It’s what sets us apart from MM and SV¹.  I think I’m safe speaking for the Demon warlocks that they, too, are just dandy with the idea of coupling their DPS to the demon².

Listen, I want to improve my DPS contribution as much as the next huntard. But I don’t want to do it if that means being the same thing as MM or SV with just a different shot rotation. That’s boring.

BM I am, and BM I be, and I don’t care if I don’t see the inside of another raid dungeon because of it.  BM is the heart and soul of the class. It deserves to be treated at least equally with the others, and on its terms, not theirs³.

Thing the Second:

Patch 3.3.3:

• I dunno, sounds almost like I could toss AuctionLite completely.
• Regarding hunter changes: not much to say, but they didn’t have much to say, either.
• I wonder if the multilevel instance map thing will work for old instances. Five gold says it won’t.
• I have nothing to say about the BG changes, though I suspect the hardcore PvPers do.

1. Aside from the disparity in the contribution to any raid we may wish to attend
2. Heck, the whole talent tree was shaken up drastically in 3.0 for that very reason – e.g. the oddity of a DEMON warlock sacrificing his or her demon to get moar DPS. Remember that? Wasn’t that odd? Didn’t it make sense to couple the Demonology warlock’s abilities more tightly to the idea of having a pet that was alive?
3. Come to think of it, why is SV more or less a clone of MM with a different rotation? I tried SV prior to 3.0 and it was a blast, but with a very distinct and fun playstyle. It’s my alternate spec, now, and I have to say that I’m not impressed with the play-style, numbers be damned.

Picked up over at Warcraft Hunter’s Union, here’s an awesome video done as a response to the Discovery Channel’s “Boom de yada” video, starring Azeroth and a cast of dozens.  The production is topnotch, the acting clever, and the visuals are just stunning – would that the real WoW looked like that.

Keep your eyes peeled for some familiar faces, if you’re a fan of WoW Machinama.

Embedded here for your convenience, but please do click through for the high-res version, you’ll be glad you did.

Geared as I am, however (including – dear me! – one green trinket!) I’m hitting close to 3K nowadays. I am as surprised as most at that turn of events, it wasn’t that long ago that 2K was hard to sustain.

Laser Kitty still isn’t cutting it for the big numbers, though. I am sad at this.

On a related front, I am going to rename my stompasaurus from “Reaganomics” to “RawrRawrRawr”, I swear. Everyone that gets it, has gotten it, and the ones that don’t, aren’t going to.

Flora can keep her evil jello mold. I found something a lot nicer laying around old Strat.

Slowly, the truth rears its ugly head.

I’m a mount whore.

What this fight does is highlight what someone else was saying elsewhere; Blizz is making it hard on our pets, and for those of us for which pets are significant (hello, BM Hunters and Demon Warlocks!), this causes a major drop in our usefulness to the team.

So much for “Avoidance is the answer”.

Moving on.

I’d like to introduce you to Squicky, isn’t he the cutest lil thing? His hobbies include eating rats, moles, mice, small cats, and beagles when he’s really hungry (and really big).  I like hanging out in the tram station with him just to watch him chase the rats.

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.

-=-=-=-=-=-

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.

-=-=-=-=-=-

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.

-=-=-=-=-=-

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.