Saturday, February 2, 2008

Sunwell PTR and Content Testing

I propose the creation of a couple of 'Elite' realms in which character copies are restricted to guilds that have oh say, 50 or more pieces of T6 across all players. This would allow for real content testing instead of the congestion of multiple players copying over so they can see how '1337' the spell haste changes are.

I feel like the PTR really doesn't hold true to it's name for the most part because of the glut of players that copy over to just idle in IF. I'm all for helping Blizzard test content (it's pretty clear now that instances with heavy PTR testing like Naxxramas and Black Temple have been stellar places to raid) and it would be great if real time could be spent on this instead of battling queues and senseless congestion so people can /dance in their premade T6 items.

Feel free to bump my post on the suggestion forums.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

The Bear Necessities...



Bear Mount Legit. Sup Aetherial.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Monday, January 14, 2008

Ready, Steady, Go!



Got to 70 on my hunter alt a few days ago, and have already started raiding. Hitting heroics hard can get a player out of quest greens and into really high quality epics extremely fast, and it's been a lot of fun.

Here's a DPS chart from my guild's progression Magtheridon kill!

Your sign of the Apocalypse: When the tank tells you to turn Growl off because the pet is pulling aggro, and you look down and realize growl has been off the entire time. GG pug tanks.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Seal of the Crusader Theorycrafting

"maybe I should make a dumb blog about paladins, like Cates, except about ret" ~Jarrok

I respecced from the traditional 49/12 last week for some testing of Seal of the Crusader. I dropped some points in defense rating and moved them to the Improved Talent. The debuff adds 3% spell and melee critical chance to any raid member attacking that target. Here is some of the math I was working out.

Looking through a WWS of Teron Gorefiend about a month ago, the top DPS classes hovered anywhere from 1000-1300 DPS on average. If you crit at 200% critical damage (or something close to that, +190% Ignite, +180% Mortal Shots whatever) then you could expect a 36 DPS increase assuming an average output of 1200 DPS.

36 DPS increase over 16 dealers means the raid gained 576 DPS from the 3% crit Judgement alone. Obviously not every damage class does 1200 DPS on Teron Gorefiend, but even if you were to round down significantly a gain of 400+ raidwide DPS would be realized. This seems pretty significant to me, and it provides me some extra raid utility when I'm not tanking something.

Going from one week without the judgement to a week with it, the top 5 DPS on Teron Gorefiend looks like this.
Before:
After:

As you can see the first raid's top 5 did 8897 collective DPS, averaging 1779 DPS a piece. Adding Seal of the Crusader, the top 5 produced 9474 DPS, averaging 1894 DPS. Now obviously a lot of factors come into play when looking at top DPS. Were the targets threat capped? Did they consumable this week and not the last? Obviously more parses with and without the judgement would be needed, but the fact that 3 of the top 5 were the same from week to week adds legitimacy to the debuff slot. More on this later.

Benefits of a Bulwark


It does afford a certain measure of privacy..even in crowded cities.

Monday, December 31, 2007

WTS T6, PST


Invictus has started selling BoP items from SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT now, and it's stirred up the WoW community quite a bit. Most long-time raiders have seen this practice already, and it's nothing new for most. My old raid guild Oh Snap of Moonrunner did Lootapalooza for BWL items, and this is just a reincarnation of something that's been happening for years.

Good luck to all prospective buyers, and good luck to WoWInsider on hiring new writing staff!

RnD Post
WoWInsider Post