Sacred Duty

MoP Block Calculations – Part 1

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Theck

There’s been some question about how the new block mechanics will affect our damage intake, and how the different stats (dodge, parry, matery, hit, expertise, and even haste) will compare for minimizing that metric. While damage intake isn’t always the most relevant metric, it is one that’s fairly easy to calculate and gives some basic information about the baseline effectiveness of different stats. In this series of posts, I will work through the full derivation and make some comparisons between the different secondary stats.

It’s also worth noting that our mechanics will be changing in the near future, according to a new forum post by Ghostcrawler. The previous version had us gaining 25% block value and one guaranteed block for 6 seconds. The new version will have us gaining 45% block value for the guaranteed block (total of 75%) and 20% block value (total of 50%) for the remainder of the buff duration. I’m modeling the new mechanics, though it’s fairly trivial to convert this derivation to the old mechanics if things change down the line.

The formula for time-averaged damage taken per second (DTPS) is

$D = D_0F_a(1-A)F_b$

$D$ is the net damage taken per second after all mitigation and avoidance effects
$D_0$ is DTPS before all mitigation and avoidance effects
$F_a$ is the armor mitigation factor, calculated the usual way
$A$ is your decimal avoidance from all sources, after diminishing returns
$F_b$ is the “block factor” which models blocking mitigation.

As I said in an earlier blog post, this differs from the old one-roll system because it converts a combined avoidance/block factor like $(1-A-B_vB_c)$ into two multiplicative factors $F_{\rm avoid}=(1-A)$ and $F_b$ . In that earlier post, I gave an explicit form for the block factor: $F_b=(1-B_vB_c)$ . If we ignored Shield of the Righteous (SotR), $B_v$ is just your block value (30%) and $B_c$ is your character sheet block chance. However, SotR throws a wrench into everything. We can still express it in a form similar to the one given above, but with more complicated expressions for the average block value $\tilde{B_v}$ and average block chance $\tilde{B_c}$ . And we’ll find that there’s no compelling reason to do so, as there’s a different form that gives more insight into what’s going on anyway.

To calculate $F_b$ , we start with the following expression:

$F_b = G(1-B_v'') + (1-G)\left [ B_c S (1-B_v')+ B_c(1-S)(1-B_v) + (1-B_c)\right ]$

Let’s go through this term by term. The first term is the chance that we are guaranteed a block by Shield of the Righteous ( $G$ ) times the amount of damage we take when that happens $(1-B_v'')$ , where $B_v''$ is our block value for the guaranteed block (75%). After distributing, the second term is $(1-G)B_c(1-S)(1-Bv')$ , which is the chance that we don’t get a guaranteed block $(1-G)$ multiplied by our block chance $B_c$ multiplied by the probability that the SotR buff is active $S$ multiplied by the damage taken during that buff $(1-B_v')$ , with $B_v'$ being our block value during the 6-second SotR buff (50%). In other words, this term represents the chance that we aren’t guaranteed a block, but block anyway during the 6-second duration of the SotR block value buff. There’s a subtlety here involving $S$ that complicates matters, but we’ll come back to that later.

The third term is $(1-G)B_c(1-S)(1-B_v)$ , which represents the chance that we aren’t guaranteed a block, but do so anyway without the SotR buff active. And the final term is $(1-G)(1-B_c)$ , which is the chance we don’t get a guaranteed block and that our natural block mechanism fails us, forcing us to take a full sized hit (damage taken = 1). Those are the four possible outcomes of the system, each weighted by their individual probabilities. And in fact, it’s easy to show that this expression is correct: let $B_v$ and $B_v'$ equal zero, and the expression sums to 1, just as one would expect for a sum of probabilities that spans the space of possible outcomes.

With a little bit of algebra, we can put this in one of two simpler forms:

$F_b = 1 - G B_v'' - (1-G)B_c(S B_v'+(1-S) B_v)$ (1)

or, equivalently

$F_b = 1 - G B_v'' - (1-G) B_c S B_v' - (1-G) B_c (1-S) B_v$ (2)

Each expression gives slightly different intuition. The first expression says your block mitigation factor is just one minus the mitigation from guaranteed blocks minus the mitigation from non-guaranteed blocks, with an average block value $\overline{B_v} = (1-S) B_v + S B_v'$ based on SotR uptime $S$ . In other words, it breaks it down by the type of block – guaranteed versus not guaranteed. The second expression breaks it down differently, by the amount of block value. In this case, the factor is one minus the mitigation from blocks of size $B_v''$ minus the mitigation from blocks of size $B_v'$ minus the mitigation of regular blocks ( $B_v$ ). The coefficients of each term are simply the probabilities for blocking each amount.

As I said earlier, we could put this in a form $F_b = 1 - \tilde{B_c}\tilde{B_v}$ by defining the overall chance of blocking $\tilde{B_c}=G+(1-G)B_c$ . With that definition, we get the following form for $\tilde{B_v}$ :

$\tilde{B_v} = \frac{G B_v'' + (1-G) B_c S B_v' + (1-G) B_c (1-S) B_v}{G + (1-G) B_c}$ .

But this version doesn’t do much for us – it’s no simpler an expression than (1) or (2), and it doesn’t give us any additional insight into the meaning of the terms. So for any of our calculations, we’ll start with one of the numbered equations.

We already know $B_v''$ , $B_v'$ , $B_v$ , and $B_c$ from the character sheet. All that remains is to calculate $G$ and $S$ and we have a complete analytical expression describing the new block mechanics. Let’s proceed to do that.

Calculating $G$ is fairly straightforward. The probability that any given attack will be a guaranteed block is simply

$G = R_{\rm SotR} / R_{\rm att}$

where $R_{\rm SotR}$ is your SotR cast rate, and $R_{\rm att}$ is the incoming blockable attack rate, or one over the time between blockable attacks $T_{\rm att}$ . Note that this is a little different from the boss’s attack rate because of avoidance. It’s actually $(1-A)/T^{(0)}_{\rm att}$ , where $T^{(0)}_{\rm att}$ is the boss’s “true” attack/swing timer. So we need to assume a boss attack speed to get useful results, which is annoying, but do-able. Since SotR is off-GCD, we can estimate the SotR cast rate pretty straightforwardly as your HP generation rate divided by three, or

$R_{\rm SotR} = R_{\rm HPG}/3$

However, $R_{\rm SotR}$ is complicated slightly if we want to include talents. Holy Avenger is actually fairly easy since it can be modeled as a simple increases to your average HPG rate. Divine purpose is more irritating, because it’s a 15% chance on every SotR to proc the effect. So it modifies the SotR cast rate as follows:

$R_{\rm SotR} = R_{\rm HPG}/3 + \alpha_{\rm DP} R_{\rm SotR}$

where I’ve let $\alpha_{\rm DP}$ be the DP proc rate in case it changes. Solving for SotR:

$R_{\rm SotR}= R_{\rm HPG}/3 (1-\alpha_{\rm DP})$

Luckily, $R_{\rm HPG}$ , is easily calculable (analytically or via simulation) for a given rotation and haste value. So we can get the information we need to calculate $G$ .

$S$ looks very tricky, but ends up being deceptively simple. My first attempts were pretty ugly, involving double-integrals of a comb function multiplied by a rect function. And they were correct, but I realized afterward that the resulting expression was something I could have guessed using geometry. So I’ll give you the easy version:

The duration of the SotR buff is $T_{\rm buff}$ . The uptime of the buff is $R_{\rm SotR}T_{\rm buff}$ , bounded by $[0, 1]$ (i.e. if the product ever goes above 1, it equals 1 because we cap out at 100% uptime). The number of boss attacks that occur during the buff is $R_{\rm SotR}T_{\rm buff}/T_{\rm att} = R_{\rm SotR}R_{\rm att}T_{\rm buff}$ , bounded by $[0, R_{\rm att}]$ . So far so good.

But $S$ isn’t the probability that the SotR block value buff is active (i.e., it’s not the uptime). In fact, it’s the probability that the buff is active for attacks that weren’t already guaranteed to be blocked due to the other SotR buff. So we need to account for the guaranteed blocks. The rate of guaranteed-blocked attacks is just $G R_{\rm att} = R_{\rm SotR}$ , bounded by $[0, R_{\rm att}]$ , and the rate of non-auto-blocked attacks is $(1-G) R_{\rm att} = R_{\rm att} - R_{\rm SotR}$ , bounded by $[0, R_{\rm att}]$ .

To calculate $S$ properly, we need to find

$\frac{\text{number of attacks during buff - number of attacks auto-blocked}}{\text{number of attacks not auto-blocked}}$

or their equivalent rates. Which is:

$S = \frac{R_{\rm SotR}R_{\rm att} T_{\rm buff} - R_{\rm SotR}}{R_{\rm att} - R_{SotR}}$

You might notice that this expression looks questionable, in particular the denominator. If $R_{\rm SotR} \rightarrow R_{\rm att}$ , it looks like $S \rightarrow \infty$ . In fact, it doesn’t, because the numerator goes to zero in that situation as well. This is why I was careful about specifying the bounds of each term earlier on – in the limit where $R_{\rm SotR} \rightarrow R_{\rm att}$ , the term $R_{\rm SotR}R_{\rm att} T_{\rm buff}$ approaches its upper bound of $R_{\rm att}$ , and the expression approaches 1. That’s good, because it’s what you’d logically expect – if you’re casting SotR as often as the boss is swinging, the buff should be up for every attack (though note that $G\rightarrow 1$ in this limit as well, making this a bit of a moot point).

This expression for $S$ is the last piece of the puzzle, because we have all of those values already. From this point it’s just a matter of doing some substitutions and taking some derivatives. In the next installment, I’ll make those substitutions and derive the expressions that will tell us how mastery stacks up to dodge, parry, hit, expertise, and haste.

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged Active Mitigation, blocking, tanking, theck, Theorycraft, theorycrafting, warcraft, WoW | 7 Comments

Dragon Soul Retrospective

Posted on April 9, 2012 by anafielle

Hello Monday morning. Time for some delicious QQ to start the week off right!

I really liked Cataclysm a great deal, and I cared deeply about having some compelling raid encounters to finish off what has become my favorite WOW expansion so far. I especially wanted to kill Deathwing dead considering he’s been making a big nuisance of himself for the last 18 months or so. I was ready for an epic finish! So I’m going to give you my thoughts, one by one, on each of the bosses of Dragon Soul and T13. We’ll all be staring at these encounters until Mists of Pandaria, after all, so let’s chat.

H Morchok

You know, I realize that the devs know a lot more than I do about the psychology of gaming and what gamers find fun, what makes us start playing and keep playing once we’re hooked on this crack of a game. I have to imagine that encounters along the line of Morchok (and Shannox in Firelands, and half of ICC H) are part of this decision making process. They’re easy for a reason. The devs probably think, “The first encounter in the zone needs to be easy. That way once a guild starts in on heroic modes, they get that gratifying boss-dead feeling right away. Even if that guild proceeds to get stuck on the next one, at least they’ll get one dead, and feel good.”

That’s not my fun. I think it’s kind of insulting when the first heroic boss is much easier than the final normal encounter. But I’m not the target audience for Morchok. It kind of sucks to write off a boss every tier though.

H Yorsahj & Zonozz

To be honest, they were two of my favorite fights that I’ve ever worked on. They had all the things that I like in a fight. They had moving parts. They had strategies that could differ from guild to guild depending on how you chose to do them. They both had add phases that required off-boss time combined with an enrage timer that guilds were likely to see while they worked on the fight. They each had positioning checks and failure checks that would wipe you when you fucked them up. The only thing I didn’t like about these fights is that Moshne always marks me for Zonozz and sometimes stealth marks me after the fight has begun, which makes it really embarrassing when I lose count of how many black phases we’ve been through and go off and kill adds like a retard.

Some of my fondest memories of this tier involved our work on both these bosses. The early work on Yorsahj, talking through as a raid which ooze to kill on every combination, and then changing our minds as the fight got cleaner and we decided to focus more DPS on the boss. Sitting in melee chat on Zonozz talking through interrupts on the eye stalks or discussing how many adds to kill that week. Knowing that I had to move efficiently, DPS efficiently, use cooldowns smartly and use personal survivability cooldowns too. I know these were early fights, which was a shame, but I thought they were both pretty cool.

H Hagara

I actually got a sneak peak at Hagara before it went into Dragon Soul, and I was very impressed at all the moving parts that had been put into this fight. I thought it looked so very cool, and so promising on heroic! Different phases, positioning requirements that changed based on phase and a great deal of organization required before going in… it looked like a lot of fun. I thought of it as the flagship encounter for the tier, and of all the fights we would see I was most looking forward to seeing it. But it ended up being, surprise, the second easiest fight on 25. It was the Staghelm of DS. Why? Tuning. All the interesting mechanics in the world won’t save a fight when they don’t matter.

Those Hagara mechanics were a joke. They could be fucked up, healed through, cheated, and otherwise ignored even in last tier’s gear. What if the whole raid actually had to DO ice phase? What if tombs or Ice Lance really had to be handled perfectly? What if she had come with a harsh enrage timer so you had to be damn precise about how quickly each phase went? None of these things were true. She took messy and imprecise play and rewarded it after about 50% effort with a kill. She was my least favorite encounter in DS, and that’s a shame, because I thought she looked so very impressive. Instead, the best that can be said about Hagara is that she has annoying mechanics. Not hard. Annoying. And what irks me so much about Hagara is that that didn’t have to be true.

H Ultraxion

I loved this encounter. I’m not going to lie. I thought it was amazing. Sometimes there is something really compelling about a rock bottom simple encounter with one serious performance check: the enrage timer. Ultraxion was just super fun. Maybe it’s because I was DPS for the first time this tier and I loved the challenge of just being a DPS. Maybe it’s because there were little things that were not difficult, Fading Light, but that rewarded you more and more for being as precise as you could be. Maybe it’s because ret paladins were just OP here. Well, I thought it was awesome. I don’t want all my encounters to be simple but it’s really nice to always have one. And there were some moving parts on Ultrax; fading light meant you had to pay attention, and it rewarded you more and more for being more precise (and immediately punished you with death and embarrassment if you cut it too close). I even got to be in a cooldown rotation, too. I just liked it from start to finish. But I’m a DPS, and more than that, a ret paladin; Ultrax was our fight. It was our house, and we weren’t sharing with anyone but the fire mages. Blizz hadn’t nerfed Gurth yet, either. Geez, no wonder I liked it.

H Blackhorn

I remember doing this fight and immediately thinking of it as The Redemption of Gunship. I liked this fight. Which is funny, because this fight was the least melee friendly fight we did. It was very annoying to get in melee range of everything I needed to deeps, especially those drakes, and also to soak puddles. If I wasn’t extremely careful I might find myself spending half of the time in phase 1 just running around like an idiot from add to add, or standing out of range. But I respected it for that same reason. Ret had a couple really friendly fights; it’s totally ok to have a couple that aren’t so good for us. Any idiot ret can faceroll out 75% of Simcrafted dps on Ultraxion and feel like a superstar because they’re still on the top of their meter. But you actually need to have some care and precision to do well on Blackhorn as melee, precision in movement and in really paying attention to where you are. In some ways that’s almost more fun. I didn’t always succeed, but I always felt challenged. Anyways, I liked it a ton, I thought it was a pretty fun fight to do.

The bad part about Blackhorn was that it was the first of three buggy encounters. Fake fire all over the place. Invisible boss romping around killing your raid if you wiped and someone feign-deathed. Ugh.

H Spine

You can’t talk about H Spine without talking about The Nerf, so let’s discuss it. I don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand, I HATE seeing fights nerfed before we see them. I bitched and moaned so much when it was nerfed, and nerfed so hard. On the other hand, this fight was broken. The 18 second tendon burn mechanic is one of the stupidest mechanics that Blizzard has ever seen fit to place into an encounter. Blizzard doesn’t balance DPS classes around 18 second burns, they just don’t, and then they toss a fight in there that requires six burns for success? So incredibly dumb.

For the record, our kill was February 10th, the second week post nerf. We had to work hard for it, very hard but it’s almost pathetic how little work we had to put into it compared to the guilds that had slaved for hundreds of wipes before us.

We fall into a strange category because of the fact that we are hardcore in attitude yet in some ways aggressively casual about limiting the time that we pump into the game. That’s the point of raiding three nights a week– and there are other guilds like us. If you sort 3 night guilds on WOW Progress, you’ll find that not a single 3 night guild killed Spine pre-nerf. Several were close. Three of those guilds killed it immediately, on their first raid night post nerf. But no one had it before. We put three weeks of work into it, and we were the sixth US 3 night guild to take it down.

I have to wonder… Could we have done it pre nerf, without altering our roster, without alts? We raid with 4 mages, 2 rets, 3 rogues, 2 shadow priests. I think we’re all strong players who would have been precise, who would have come to put out 95%-100% of what was effectively possible. Maybe we could have done it. Maybe not.

We will never know, because Blizzard gutted the fight when they nerfed tendons by 15% and the whole thing 5% at the same time. It became doable without alt stacking at all. Basically Blizzard turned a 400 pull fight into a two-to-three week fight for a normal, reasonably serious raiding guild.

“Fixed?” “Gutted?” I’ve heard both adjectives applied to it. I’ve fought the argument on both sides. I think both are true.

Regardless of what you thought of The Nerf, I think we can all agree that Spine was a shitty fucking encounter. It was a glorified trash gauntlet with a brief, stupid, broken burn mechanic. That does not an interesting fight make. I don’t think it’s the worst encounter in DS, but it’s certainly not very compelling.

I’ll admit that I, personally, enjoy doing that fight. I get a job to do, and I generally love fights where I have a special task, and I get to kill bloods and count them and pay attention to where they are, and adjust my cleave carefully – and I can wipe the raid if I cleave retardedly, and I get to bitch and moan at anyone doing any more cleave than me. So I like it. But that doesn’t make the fight not suck.

H Madness

Frankly I don’t remember a whole lot about this encounter. Some might say that’s not a surprise because there was nothing really all that memorable about it (they’d be right, it was pretty boring). Others might remind me that our Madness kill video features yours truly running into an explosion in true Retardadin form, and then Lay On Handsing herself back to full in panic mode. I don’t know what those people are talking about. That totally never happened. I have blocked it out of my memory.

I remember one thing about Madness: Thrall dropping people. Over and over and over. That was, by far, the hardest mechanic.

We spent more time theorycrafting how precisely to jump from platform to platform to avoid losing someone on the jump than we did working on any other mechanic in this boring encounter.

Opinions varied. My raid leader was adamant that stopping (to reset your position), and then strafing was the way to go, but he admitted to us that that was just his guess. We also experimented with jumping in the middle of the platform, or jumping in specific places. We made sure we didn’t use any abilities that gave us speed boosts, supposedly those contributed to the problem. In the end, we never really came up with a system that effectively put everyone on their desired platform without inexplicably falling to their deaths. Geez, it’s too bad Blizzard didn’t put a backup plan in there, like “if the game can’t figure out where you are, default to your old platform,” eh?

As for the rest, it was pretty boring. Platforms 1, 2, and 3 were yawn. I hate encounters that are boring for 10 minutes. Why does Blizz do this? So an encounter that starts off boring is compelling design? Is that supposed to make the fight feel epic? Whatever. Platform 4 at least had a couple different failure points where you could fairly effectively wipe the raid with a mistake, and then a DPS check on the end that was there to ensure that everyone was alive. That was about it. The joke is that once you’ve killed Spine, grats on your Madness kill.

It wasn’t really the way I wanted to remember the end of my raiding experience in Cataclysm.

Conclusion: A big dragon does not an epic encounter make.

Looking back on the last 18 months of World of Warcraft, I suppose I really was looking forward to the end. The big bad boss. The final encounter. Deathwing had killed us all over Azeroth and I was ready to kill his ass dead. I was definitely, definitely ready to cap off an expansion with my favorite group of people. And to have that epic encounter consist of Spine and Madness was simply disappointing in the extreme.

Even if I liked some of the encounters in DS – even if I enjoyed doing about half of it – those last two fights were just… depressing. Even if you count them together as one long encounter in two parts, they suck. There are no redeeming features about them. They were designed as boring fights – on paper, they’re just not that interesting. I can’t understand how Madness in particular made it past the design phase. They’re just long and repetitive. The execution was incredibly poor, too – the broken nature of Spine, the bugs that continue to plague Madness. To have these fights represent what we were working towards since Deathwing split the world wide open was just plain sad.

Recently I was reading a Wow-Insider DS Retrospective and couldn’t believe how heavily I disagreed with it. I honestly didn’t think we were raiding the same instance.

I challenge you to find one heroic mode raider who can tell you with a straight face that they thought Spine and Madness were epic. Go ahead on down to the comments and disagree if you are one of these people – I’d love to hear that someone else was less disappointed than I was. In the end, they sucked.

So the grade I’d give DS as a whole is: Mediocre.

Just mediocre. Not very memorable, with an extremely disappointing finish.

Now tell me what you thought.Did you like any of the fights in DS? Did you find that the whole thing was a disappointment like I did? What did you think?

Posted in Design, Encounters, From Ana's Inbox | 22 Comments

Why I Went Retribution

Posted on April 2, 2012 by anafielle

I get this question a lot.

I’m pretty sure I know what everyone expects me to say, especially following Meloree’s really moving post last week on the demise of tanking. It would be pretty easy to say that I stopped tanking because Blizzard has made it boring, and that’s generally the commentary I get. Tank friends tell me things like, “I’m jealous you’ve switched to DPS,” or “I totally understand why you switched to DPS.” But that’s not why I switched. At least, I don’t think it was. I think I just found the spec I’d always wanted to play.

History

I have always tanked. Always. I have been prot spec since I started playing my paladin, from leveling to 5 mans to raids. Going ret never even crossed my mind. In late Wrath, I eventually picked up some offspec gear for one tank fights, and I hated it. Ret back in Wrath went like this: you had five abilities, and you pushed whatever was off cooldown that did the most damage. That was it. There was no buff management. There were no procs. There was nothing else interesting about it. It was boring. Now, tank-wise, 96969 was boring too, but in comparison, tanking was 100 times as fun: I got to move mobs around and position and cooldown either on schedule or in response to damage, and stress about getting the job right, because my mistake would mean a raid wipe. I loved the difficulty and the responsibility of being a tank. It was so much more engaging than DPS ever looked. DPS had the easy job, and I enjoyed my hard job.

I was a prot paladin. That’s who I was! It was my identity!

In T11, I joined Something Wicked and became one of three tanks.

Obviously if there were three of us, I wouldn’t just be tanking all the time. When I joined, I told Moshne I had never been ret, but I would learn if I had to. He told me that he wasn’t going to require me to have a ret spec. However, it was probably in my best interest, because I would sure be a lot less likely to sit if I had one. So I sat down to build one and eventually began to discover Cataclysm ret for the first time.

I didn’t use it much, because I tanked almost everything in T11. A three-tank roster worked really well back then. On the rare occasion that I wasn’t tanking, as promised, I rarely got sat, so I did get some offspec time. Which was good, because new-style ret was very complicated! I had a lot to learn.

The hardest fight I saw as ret was Heroic Ascendant Council. I talk about this fight a lot as being the most difficult fight in T11 for us. We decided to kill it before we killed Cho’gall or Sinestra, and it was a real pain in the ass. That fight will live in my memory as the biggest learning experience for me. It was the first time I’d encountered the particular kind of frustrating difficulty unique to fights like AC, the type of frustration that makes you want to throw your headphones at the wall because the same old shit happens over and over. I had moments where I was fucking retarded. I had a moment or two of glory. But there were just so many wipes… there is not too much more to say about that fight; anyone who did it, hated it. I hated it even more since I was offspec.

I rarely sat at all; I was there the whole time. It had nothing to do with how good I was, because I was still pretty terrible, and ret was also pretty trash DPS in T11 anyways. But we run a pretty small roster, and we had a couple of weeks of tight attendance when we struggled to throw 25 bodies at raids. Well, that is why people have offspecs. I had to step it up! I still sucked by the end of it, but damn, I learned a lot from being ret on that boss.

I don’t remember being ret much otherwise in T11. T11 was a really great tier for tanks, and I was happy. I was still a tank, just one with an offspec.

T12 and Blizzcon: Things change for tanks.

T12′s seven fights were such a disappointment after how much fun T11 had been. Several are one-tank on normal, and one is still single-tank on heroic. We three tanks still shared out the jobs pretty evenly and tried to make things fair while also picking the right people for the right jobs, but it was rough. I quietly claimed for myself the two tanking jobs I really wanted, which were Alysrazor and Baleroc. They and Beth are the only fights I end up tanking. Three is not a lot of fights. Not at all.

Blizzcon 2011 occurred in the middle of T12, and I got to talk to a lot of devs while I was there. After I was done berating them for Rhyolith (WORST FIGHT EVER), I had to ask them: what the hell are you doing with your tank design? I’m in a three tank guild, and Firelands sucks after T11. How many tanks are we expected to run? They gave me a pretty straight answer as blues go; it’s obviously not a huge secret. T12 is the intended design in terms of raid composition. The one to two tank fight design is here to stay.

Well, I wasn’t sure what that meant for our tanking corps. Firelands was really depressing. I know a lot of people hated DS more, but I honestly disliked Firelands the most this expansion. It felt to me, especially some weeks when we were in the middle of progression and I ended up tanking just two (or even one) fight that week, that I wasn’t doing much tanking at all.

But increasingly I didn’t really have a problem with that… because I wasn’t sitting, so I was ret, and that meant more and more time to get to know this increasingly interesting spec. Ret got more and more fun as I started to understand it better and play around with what I understood.

The breaking point was H Rag. I was retribution, and once again, I was there the whole time. Unlike AC, Rag was a 400 pull boss, and also unlike AC, I was there on Rag because (I think) I had to be there. I was enough of an asset to the raid as ret that my presence was generally a good thing. That meant I was ret for the vast, vast majority of what I remember in Firelands…. and that was fine with me.

Why I love Retribution (the Cataclysm flavor) –

It’s a lot of fun. First of all you have two resource systems, and if you play ret like I do, you actually have to watch your mana so you do have to manage them both. Secondly, you have to maintain Inquisition. Holy Power can seem a little random, but once you’ve played ret enough you end up getting a feel for the heartbeat of the rotation– this is especially important when Judge generates it too, because the HP is a bit delayed. You get two wonderful procs with different results to spice up the rotation, and a gap closer attached to a core ability, and several fun cooldowns. All sorts of toys!

Ret on a target dummy is pretty interesting, but Ret in the real world so much more fun. I end up ignoring CLCret’s recommendations on a fairly regular basis. I use Consecration and Divine Plea at my own discretion. I try to time my Judgement for a movement boost, or time my movement with a Judgement boost, every time I have to go anywhere. Inquisition refreshes are something I think a lot about, too. What am I doing in the next half minute? When am I next using my cooldowns? Has anything procced right here? Do I want to hit one more button for one more holy power? Smart inquisition refreshes can make life either easier or much more annoying. Then there’s the obvious situations like building up resources for any burn moment. The list goes on. Ret is one of those specs that really rewards a lot of thinking about the entire course of the fight.

And I haven’t even talked about my favorite part: cooldowns. Back when I was really learning how to not suck at ret during H Rag, cooldown management was pretty much the most important part about being ret. That’s the whole point of being a ret – stack your cooldowns and BURN! We had five different cooldowns to time at five different times as well as a rotation change due to Heroism. I loved it. I loved it so much.

I also just generally found myself very much enjoying the role of a DPS. It’s a lot more difficult than it looks from the boss crotch, at least on heroic mode fights. Gone were the days when I was a tank and looked at the DPS core and thought, “heh, they have the easy job.” They don’t. I was more often thinking, “thank god I don’t have to do that.” Or, “I’m so glad I get to be DPS here.” DPS also die much, much more quickly than tanks when they make a mistake. I guess that happens when you don’t have a team of dedicated healers! And there is the constant pressure of the enrage timer. It was such a challenging role, and it was challenging in a unique way every GCD that I was a DPS. And unlike tanking, it remains interesting throughout farm.

I rather enjoyed it. I looked back at Firelands and it was clear to me that I’d enjoyed my time as a DPS a lot more than my time tanking. And so I began to think…

Should I maybe ask about going mainspec DPS next tier?

But I’ve always been a tank. This was a weird thought. It took me a while to get around to it. First of all, I didn’t know if I was good enough to handle it. I had justified a ton of mistakes to myself, and have throughout this blog post, as “It’s only my offspec” or when I did well, “That’s pretty good for my offspec.” Could I handle it without the cushion of offspec to give me a convenient excuse for messing up? So I first went to our mainspec ret Warden, someone you paladins have probably seen on Maintankadin– a friend whose judgement I trust completely. He was all in support once I asked his opinion, and so I was quite excited. I still had more to learn, but doesn’t everyone?

Then I went to the other tanks. I was aware that if I switched to mainspec DPS, they would be most heavily affected because I’d be removing any opportunity for them to sit back and be offspec. Our warrior, Omegal, assured me he was fine with always tanking, and I believed him. I was more concerned about our DK Shiramune. Apparently before he became Something Wicked’s unkillable beast of a DK main tank, he had a previous life in Wrath as an ass kickingly parsing DPS. Since I often heard about what a great DPS he had been, and since I knew he quietly parse chased as tank spec, I certainly wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking any opportunities away. I probably asked him on about 100 different occasions, just to make sure he was telling me the truth instead of being nice. He pretty much reassured me that he really enjoys tanking and has no desire to do anything else. I eventually believed him. DK tanks appear to have the most fun after all.

Reassured that my fellow tank chat bretheren would not be unhappy if I took all the DPS opportunities for myself, I next went to my raid leader. Moshne is rarely shy with his opinion. Considering he is the person who has to put the raid together each evening, I was certain he’d tell me if the option was on the table at all, and if so, whether it would be more effective (or very stupid) to run either 3 tanks or 2 rets next tier.

Unfortunately for my peace of mind, he refused to make a call. I had a lot of conversations with him and in a pretty impressive feat of topic avoidance, he managed to never tell me what he would prefer I did once. He did talk to me at great length about what I personally wanted, which was very useful coming from a friend, a raid leader, and another hybrid with two raiding specs. But he refused to give me anything resembling a leader-like opinion on what I should do next tier. I straight out asked him what would be better for the raid and guild, several times, and he just countered it with, “Well, what do you want to do?”

Very unhelpful. What I wanted to do was not make the decision.

So I was left alone. I put it off for as long as I could. Change is scary for me. But in the end, I had to make the decision and I chose to go ret for real. No one had given me a reason not to, and I could handle it. I might as well be true to what I thought I wanted to do.

I switched for Dragon Soul.

I was immediately nervous in my first raid as a mainspec DPS, but that faded away in about five minutes. Being ret felt exactly the same as Firelands, minus the switching specs all the time and someone bitching about auras or buffs being missing, plus faster gear.

Then the most lovely thing happened. RNG smiled upon me and lo, it was good. I managed to pick up 4pc tier paladin gear, Gurth, and the trinket in the very first week or two of raids. Wow. And let me tell you, Ret got some buffs… it got some pretty damn amazing buffs. With all that gear so very early, and everyone else still sitting in Firelands gear, well, I wasn’t holding back the raid’s DPS at all and that was a very nice feeling. Everyone else soon scaled up there as they got their hands on some gear too, but those first few weeks were a lot of fun and I definitely gained a lot of confidence. And with ret parsing quite well in those early days as well as being pretty optimal for several fights, it has suddenly become a lot more reasonable to keep two on the roster. One day fairly recently while we were working on Spine, someone told me that our roster was naturally stacked because we ran two rets – because, who does that? I laughed for a while…

A couple weeks in, Moshne says in vent, “I’m glad you went ret. That’s what I wanted you to do all along.” and went on to give exactly the reasons I’d asked him about before, like, how dumb it would have been to divide tank gear up among 3 people, and how much more effective it was to have 2 tanks, etc.

I was pretty mad. “I WANTED YOU TO TELL ME THAT THE WHOLE TIME!! WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!”

“Of course I didn’t tell you… If I told you what I wanted you to do, you would have just done that.” He was very proud of himself for carefully not revealing to me what he actually wanted me to do. Or he was just trolling me… sometimes I just can’t tell.

But I loved it. It was so the right decision. I actually had no desire to tank anymore at all, once I switched – I have gotten over it since then, and I’m back to being a useful hybrid, but for a month or two I was so very, very happy to be mainspec DPS that I didn’t even want to look at my tank set. I am pretty glad that everyone else was patient with me, especially our other ret paladin who (gasp) had to use his tank set once or twice and helped me be selfish and not-tank.

I wonder about why I switched sometimes.

In some ways I got really lucky. I was lucky that neither of my other fellow tanks really had a burning desire to DPS. I was lucky that they also didn’t want me to be tank to take some of the stress off (I live in fear of one of them missing a raid). I was lucky that nothing in DS really required a paladin tank, or sucked with a DK or a warrior. I was lucky that, thank god, ret got the buffs it needed to be a competitive spec, competitive enough to run two. I was lucky to be in a raid with a ret paladin who carefully taught me how to be a good ret for a year, because I absolutely needed the company and the help. I’m pretty happy all those things ended up being true so I could play the spec I wanted to play.

It was definitely the right call, no question about that. But sometimes I wonder– was it because Ret was the spec I’d always meant to play? Or have the changes to tanking had more of an impact than I think they have? It’s no coincidence that I was half-and-half in Firelands and got to compare DPS and tank.

I’m not sure. I am only sure of one thing: I’m a ret paladin now, and I love it!

Posted in Blogging, From Ana's Inbox, Raiding | 19 Comments

I was a 25H Progression Tank

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Meloree

I don’t play World of Warcraft anymore, and I haven’t in a couple of months. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and I really don’t want to turn this into a QQ post, because I’d actually like to come back and enjoy the game again. One of the biggest reasons that I burnt out on the game is that my chosen role in WoW seems to have become a deprecated position. I haven’t played the game in a couple of months, but looking back it feels like I haven’t done any tanking in almost a year.

Between mechanical changes to tanks and what seems like a change in encounter design philosophy, the role of a tank in a raid right now feels like the least interesting and least responsible in a raid – the role least able to contribute to raid success.

Early in Firelands progression, there was the great threat nerf – tanks were told that we already had enough to do, it felt unnecessary for us to have to also run a clean rotation in order to succeed. No matter what way you look at it, the bar was lowered for tanks. Perhaps in another era, that might have been a valid argument, but I’m not sure what other tasks Blizzard thought tanks might be performing in Firelands. Barring Alysrazor – the fight where the threat nerf changed nothing, where you were encouraged to run a clean rotation anyway – Firelands was the least demanding instance to tank since I started playing the game. Naxx 25 included. ICC included.

We were left with a tier where tanks had very little movement to do, very little position to worry about, no threat rotation to be concerned about – our job was largely to show up and stand in front of a boss. Showing up was essentially the entire bar to success as a tank, there was no opportunity to fail. And without an opportunity to fail, there’s no way to succeed or excel.

Looking at Dragon Soul, we saw a very similar philosophy in encounter design. While some of the fights were interesting and new overall, for the tanks there was nothing. Very little movement or kiting or positioning – nothing to make a fight feel dynamic or interesting for the tank – in short, nothing unpredictable to react to. Sure, you hit your cooldowns on cue – but that isn’t a compelling game mechanic on it’s own. We’ve been hitting cooldowns on cue for years, just like we’ve been running a threat rotation for years. In the absence of dynamic elements, it’s just autopilot. We already have the simplest rotations in game, mechanically – as tanks in the current era we also have the simplest job in encounters.

I miss fights like Firefighter – where as the tank you were expected to maneuver the boss – not just in such a way as to keep out of fire, but in such a way as to keep Raid DPS high – by keeping everyone in range, by moving the boss such that people could stay on target fulltime. Your decision-making and movements were critical to raid success, and were based on raid positioning and environmental effects – frost orbs, doomfires. Awareness was critical.

I miss Freya3, where I got to tank the boss, and an add or two – where wave by wave I had a different job to worry about – whether it was handling an add, or standing under a mushroom, or kiting away from seed explosions. The fight was generally in motion, it was your job as a tank to keep raid movements as small as possible, based on whatever environmental effects were forcing you to move.

I miss Thorim, where good clean pulling techniques made the difference between triggering hardmode or not. I miss Hodir, where running a good threat rotation (and being quick on the taunt if someone was having a very good night) made or broke the fight. There wasn’t that much more to either of those fights beyond that, really, but at least I could feel like I was contributing to the raid – my failure had consequences.

I think the point is pretty clear – and I didn’t even have to leave Ulduar to make it – that there are ways to make encounters that are exciting and vibrant and interesting to tank which are also challenging and interesting for the rest of the raid. Encounters where all three roles have an important part to play.

Not every encounter needs to have much of a role for the tank. Insisting on kiting and positioning in every fight leads to too much encounter design constraint – and fair enough. But I think the opposite applies as well: Not every encounter should be static. I could have written off Tier 12 as a one-off mistake, but Dragon Soul makes it look like an intentional design direction choice to deprecate the role of tanking.

I don’t like it. I might be alone in that, but I don’t like the current direction. I don’t think it’s fun for experienced tanks to suddenly have the challenge and responsibility removed from their role. I don’t even really see a reason for it – I think it’s insulting to new tanks to suggest that they can’t handle it, and I hope that’s not the reason. Was the tank too important to a progression raid group? Was the position too responsible? If so, it’s gone too far in the other direction.

In heroic raiding DPS have an extremely important job, in general – maximizing their output. Every GCD counts when you’re fighting a hard enrage timer. Most fights will force DPS to make movements, or force some subset to perform another task, and there’s always an optimization problem there. Despite the individual performance focus, it’s a very teamwork oriented role – one player doesn’t beat enrage timers on their own. In addition, many fights have dynamic elements for DPS that simply don’t apply to tanks in the current design. Showing up and autoattacking just won’t cut it for them.

Healers, similarly, have to manage their GCDs and spell selection, they have to keep the raid alive. They have to find ways to pick up the slack when other people fail, and when they blow a GCD it’s very likely that someone dies. Often, that’s a wipe. Their role is responsible, and important – it’s dynamic and requires awareness. And I’m jealous of that.

With what we’ve seen so far of Active Mitigation – the promised panacea to cure all tanking ills, I can’t imagine it comes anywhere close to solving the problems. It doesn’t really address the issue at all – that there’s nothing dynamic involved in tanking anymore.

I miss being a tank. I miss tanking. I’d really love to hear that it’s making a comeback sometime. Sometime “Soon.”

Posted in Design, Encounters, Mel's Random Musings, QQ, Raiding, Tanking | Tagged raiding, tanking, WoW | 22 Comments

WeakAuras Strings – Protection Paladins

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Theck

A good UI is a key to mastering any class. I’ve talked about my UI once before, so I’m not going to go into great detail about how I organize things in this post. However, about 3 or 4 months ago I switched from PowerAuras to WeakAuras. It took some getting used to, and was actually a little more complicated to set up, but I have to admit that the final result is quite a bit nicer.

In case anyone else is considering making the switch in anticipation of MoP, I figured I’d offer up the WA setup I use on Theck to help with my rotation, cooldowns, etc. All you should need to do to get this setup is to install WeakAuras and import the configuration string given below:

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8AbbT1tdigr6MGqiBZwoBOs3b6KiLqj(5cFtCIsduqPLtuA1aLMnBksUmPPEfWRfe0wVCya6z1lBQBtG1Sxe8ao(BPGg1TjWIPmGqcAuhya0sFqVpY5NrrfTPb)kazIkAZ9gqmoh90aIrKUjieY2SLZg62eytdigr6MGg1TjWAP4sJ6wkWaOLE3wEDcBwEtwEyoqVWMaNkDmN(Wc5uxf6ZWCfpH42Po1AUd41ccPqAPZdWlELqC7upalSNUDya6ycpvLqC3qBDoCAe7oE1jysQtgi0j8(iNFgvJ6byH90Tddqht4P6oqNePekXpx4BItuAGckTCIsRgO0SztrYLjn1PwZDaVwqifsl9zyUINqC7uVc41ccARxoma9S6Ln1TjWA2lcEah)TuqJ62eyXugqib1whya0sFqVpY5NrrfTPb)kazIkAZ9gqmohDcBwEtwEyoqVWMaNUnb20aIrKUjOrDlfya0sVBlVUnbwlfxAupnGyePBccHSnB5SHkDmN(Wc5uxfOI2GdPJPmGqcAuNPOtIucLqA2qNhGx8kH42PULwb8AbbT1tdigr6MGqiBZwoBOsp67CARBtGLi2ZuJ6bFe0w30glS2QuPBtGLcmGGARBtGnnacnQNgaH26jMUIGqCRs3MalH3SDV0OorSNP26jMUIG(uYNN8HgarLkvcXDlT1DGojsjucXLwnCQxb8AbbT1TjWIPmGqcAuhya0sFqVpY5NrrfTPb)kazIkAZ9gqmoh90aIrKUjiKjOqwDBcSPbeJiDtqJ62eyTuCPrDlfya0sVBlVoTBcP2cPL(7ebGdv0gYwouPtyZYBYYdZb6f2e4uPBe8RaK50aqGtSNkKg68a8Ixje3n0J(oN262eyjI9m1OEWhbT1nTXcRTkv62eyPadiO262eytdGqJ6PbqOTEIPRiie3Q0jI9m1wpX0ve0Ns(8Kp0aiQuPtYtRJjZdcPvdDoCAe7oE1jysQtgm0dWc7PBhgGoMWt1j8(iNFgvT1ZQtWKCqpT6yQjqlD0h(9hyixRZu0jrkHs8Zf(4BsdNtqXTB(AnzczrHprYLj8PJ50FNiaCOI2q2YH(mmxXtiUBOBPvaVwqqB90aIrKUjiKjOqwv6uR5oGxliKcPLEwDcMKt9yAPpI(EJozuLqC7wBDsEADmzEqiTAOZHtJy3XRobtsDYGHE0350w3MalrSNPg1d(iOTUPnwyTvPs3Malfyab1w3MaBAaeAupnacT1tmDfbH4wLorSNP26jMUIG(uYNN8HgarLkDhOtIucLqCPvdN6byH90Tddqht4P6yo9bOKjloXf2trfTHSHEH9u9S6emjh0tRoMAc0sh9HF)bgY16vaVwqqBDBcSykdiKGg1bgaT0h07JC(zuurBAWVcqMOI2CVbeJZr3MaBAaXis3e0OoTBcP2cPL(auYKfN4c7PQ0TuGbql9UT862eyTuCPr90aIrKUjiKjOqwDcBwEtwEyoqVWMaNk9zyUINqC3q3i4xbiZPbGaNypvin0PwZDaVwqifslDMIojsjucXf(CQZdWlELqC3q3sRaETGG26PbeJiDtqitqHSQ0ZQtWKCQhtl9r03B0jJQeIBM1wNPOtIucLqCPvJg6rFNtBDBcSeXEMAup4JG26M2yH1wLkDBcSuGbeuBDBcSPbqOr90ai0wpX0veeIBv62eyj8MT7Lg1jI9m1wpX0ve0Ns(8Kp0aiQuP7aDsKsOeIlTA1q3sRaETGG26PbeJiDtqiK1zt(ywLEfWRfe0w3MaBam7ykMUuB90aIrKUjieY6SjFmRBtGftzaHe0OoWaOL(GEFKZpJIkAtd(vaYev0M7nGyCo62eyTuCPrDBcSPbeJiDtqJ6wkWaOLE3wEDA3esTfsl9bOKjloXf2tvPxoma9S6Ln1jSz5nz5H5a9cBcCQ0ZQtWKCqpT6yQjqlD0h(9hyixRJ50D1(ahQO5jHkAdlrFWH(mmxXtiUDQBe8RaK50aqGtSNkKg6uR5oGxliKcPLopaV4vcXTt9aSWE62HbOJj8u9S6emjN6X0sFe99gDYOkH4EI26mfDsKsOeIlTA0qpRobtYPEmT0hrFVrNmQhGf2t3omaDmHNQ7aDsKsOeIlK1Po1AUd41ccPqAPJ50jNbqxy6cv0C1HEXtpRobtYb90QJPMaT0rF43FGHCTEfWRfe0wVCya6z1lBQtyZYBYYdZb6f2e40TjWIPmGqcAuhya0sFqVpY5NrrfTPb)kazIkAZ9gqmohDBcSbWSJPy6sT1TjWMgqmI0nbnQt7MqQTqAPpaLmzXjUWEQkDlfya0sVBlVUnbwlfxAupnGyePBccH5wKLStuPpdZv8eIBN6gb)kazonae4e7PcPHopaV4vcXTtDlTc41ccARNgqmI0nbHWClYs2jQ0J(oN262eyjI9m1OEWhbT1nTXcRTkv62eyPadiO262eytdGqJ62eyj8MT7Lg1tdGqB9etxrqiUvPte7zQTEIPRiOpL85jFObquPsLqC7uBDhOtIucLqCPvRg6vaVwqqB9YHbONvVSPoHnlVjlpmhOxytGt3MalMYacjO26adGw6d69ro)mkQOnn4xbiturBU3aIX5OBtGnaMDmftxQTUnb20aIrKUjOrDA3esTfsl9bOKjloXf2tvPBPadGw6DB51TjWAP4sJ6PbeJiDtqiK1zt(ywLUrWVcqMtdaboXEQqAOZdWlELqC7up67CARBtGLi2ZuJ6bFe0w30glS2QuPBtGLcmGGARBtGnnacnQNgaH26jMUIGqCRs3MalH3SDV0OorSNP26jMUIG(uYNN8HgarLk9aSWE62HbOJj8u9S6emjN6X0sFqxJSDn)1XC6UAFGdv08KqfTHLOp4av0gCi9zyUINqC7uNPOtIucLqCPvJg6wAfWRfe0wpnGyePBccHSoBYhZQ0XugqibnQtTM7aETGqkKw6eEFKZpJQr9cyAnOp6dAle3cPHqyw8JSt4JpMBoPrJjtA6UvRwIKlo5tLkv6mesRjnAOsc

Now, what does this do? Well, it does this:

This is an arrangement of my abilities in rough priority order, from left to right. The first (and biggest) icon is for Holy Power abilities. It’ll show HotR if I’m below 3 HP, and SotR or Inquisition if I’m at 3 HP depending on the state of Sacred Duty and Inquisition buffs. I demonstrate that in the video at around 0:12 by letting SD drop off, at which point it swaps from SotR to Inq. Individual icons for Inq and Sacred Duty buffs are shown below the HotR box.

From left to right after HotR are smaller icons for J, AS, Cons, and HW. They light up when off cooldown, and show a spiral cooldown timer when they’re not available. In addition, Cons is hidden when I’m below a certain mana threshold.

Below those are indicators for my major cooldowns: Holy Shield, Divine Protection, Ardent Defender, and Guardian of Ancient Kings. Again, these show the icon when available and a cooldown spiral when they aren’t available.

There’s also small indicators to the left of HotR that shows whether Avenging Wrath and WoG are available. I don’t have a spiral timer for AW, since I don’t generally look at that as much – I often save it for specific parts of fights, and when it isn’t being saved it generally won’t make much difference if it takes me a few seconds to notice it’s up.

And the best part: It will also play a cash register sound when I reach 3 Holy Power. Cha-ching!

I use a few of those indicators for Ret as well, but it’s not a complete set because I use clcret to handle the Ret rotation. I also have setups for most of my alts that follow the same pattern – big icon for the most important ability, smaller icons in order of priority to the right of it. So far I think I have setups for my Warrior (Prot and Fury), Hunter (Marks, Survival, and an out-of-date BM version), Rogue (Combat and Subtlety), Mage (Fire, I think – maybe Arcane too?), and Druid (Feral tank, Moonkin). I also have settings for my Warlock, but they’re just cooldown indicators as I mostly play Affliction and use NeedToKnow for most of my DoT tracking.

If someone would find these useful, I don’t mind posting up the configurations for any of those characters as well, though they’re not all as finely tuned as the ones for Theck. And most of them will probably have to change significantly for MoP anyway. But at the very least, they might be a good starting configuration for a new alt.

Posted in Design, Raiding, Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, UI | Tagged interface, raiding, rotations, tanking, theck, ui, warcraft, WoW | 6 Comments

I have the Annual Pass. Where’s my Beta Invite?

Posted on March 23, 2012 by anafielle

Oh man, it’s Friday evening. Crap! I am contractually obligated to rage about one (1) thing per week on Sacred Duty and I completely forgot to rage this week. How fortunate that I have such a great topic today. I have an annual pass, and I didn’t get a MOP beta invite yesterday. Time to rage, right?!

No. I am not in the beta yet — and unlike about half the Blizz official forums, I totally understand why.

Well, first of all, I was a little late on my Annual Pass subscription…

When I heard about the annual pass, I was in the audience at Blizzcon hanging out with some of my favorite people and friends: my guild. We were watching the announcement of Annual Pass together. I looked around at my friends and thought, yep, I will play video games with these people for a year easily. So I figured I would sign up for Annual Pass right there, in the audience. I pulled out my phone and started navigating to Battle.net.

I was so close to signing up right there.

Well, if you were at Blizzcon or watching, you know what came next. They announced the new expansion. That video. I actually enjoyed it. I thought Blizz was playing a pretty sweet joke on us– I giggled at a whole lot of it. April fool’s come… six months early? I waited for the punchline. And waited. And waited. And then it hit me: they weren’t trolling at all. They were serious.

PANDAS. WOW. REALLY?

I sat there with my jaw on the floor. PANDAS. PANDAS. WHAT. I do not think I have ever nerdraged about anything as badly as I nerdraged about the MOP announcement. I was pretty much furious. Fortunately a couple of my friends were raging right along with me although others (NOT NAMING ANY NAMES HERE) were obnoxiously and gleefully excited about becoming a panda shaman with beer keg totems. Blegh. You can take your beer keg totems and shove ‘em. So I raged and raged, Annual Pass plans completely forgotten.

A month or two later, I thought about it, and sighed. Time to have an honesty moment. Pandas are pretty much irrelevant. WOW could have Expansion 10: Hello Kitty Island and as long as there are raids and my guild is raiding, I will be online ready to go 3 nights a week. I like raiding and I will continue to raid. No quitting for me. Might as well. So I signed up.

Fastforward to March 2012 when I heard the beta had been released.

Here’s the story. I was at work. I heard beta was out. Oh boy!Now, I still despise pandas, but there is something I despise more: poorly tested content. I am a raider and you better be damn sure that I think raiders should be testing their raid and dungeon content. So I very much want to be in the beta to test that stuff. Also, betas are cool and fun and I want to be there.

So, like millions of others, I checked my Battle.net account. I didn’t have access. I was sad, but I wasn’t too surprised. Ah well. I’ll be in some other beta wave, that is nice to know, I’ll see it sometime. I wonder when they’ll invite me? I was about a month late signing up for Annual Pass. My wow account dates back to (late) vanilla, but I’ve only been consistently subscribed since 2009. I do not fall into the category of Beta Wave 1. I wonder what wave I’ll be in? Ah well. I sadly went back to work.

Yeah, that was it.

Wait, Ana. Why aren’t you raging?

I’m disappointed, but whatever. There are more waves!

However, apparently there is a brand of people who are so very disappointed in their lack of beta access that they have gone back and convinced themselves that they were promised DAY 1 IMMEDIATE ACCESS.

All I have to say is…. What?

It’s a beta. A beta. You don’t all get in at once. That is not how a beta works! Have any of these people ever seen a beta? Do we realize that the point of a beta is to beta test? Did anyone honestly think we were going to get into the beta all on the same date? If Blizz sent out one million invites on the same day, that would be a pretty fucking shitty beta. That would be worthless. I cannot understand how anyone wanted them to do this, and I cannot understand how anyone is angry that they didn’t do it.

But oh boy, are they loud. Go read Wow Insider’s post on it or go read one of the 400 forum posts. A bunch of super expert people who are jealous they’re not in beta have picked apart Blizzards wording at great length and found vague quote #2958 / vague advertisement from last year / something scratched on the wall in the bathroom at Blizz HQ where someone who words there vaguely said the word “release” or “live” and so we were all promised 100% of beta from day 1.

I am sure there is tons of proof and I’m advised that there is actual legal proof of it somewhere in fine print. Way to go, loophole experts. You win? And common sense loses.

Every argument that quotes the Terms of Service or features photos of random advertisements or argues to me about the meaning of the word “live” just makes me facepalm harder.

Here is what I thought I was promised with my own annual pass. Betas happen in waves. What I was promised (along with diablo 3 and my mount) was that knowledge that when the Beta goes live and the waves start happening, in one of those waves, my name would be included and I would become a beta tester.

And to people who are arguing that Blizz promised day 1 access: Well… I’m sorry you are so jealous but let’s have a bit of patience here. We’ll all get into the beta eventually.

Oh my god Ana, stop telling me I don’t have the right to be mad.

Oh, feel free to be mad right now.

I am a little mad. Even though I hated on MOP, I still want to see the beta of the game that I play so much. After all, beta access will allow me to precision target my hatred. We annual pass subbers who don’t have access, we are jealous. We are jealous beyond belief. I want to stab my (beloved awesome) guildmate Omega (who is a good friend) in the face every time he talks to me about his beta access (which is quite often). I love you Omega but it’s true, you talk about it all the time. And I am jealous beyond comprehension. That goes for the rest of my twitter feed too and all you damn MVPs and news sites with access. (It’s OK Omega, and the rest of my twitter feed, keep telling me about beta…)

So yeah, I’m jealous. Let’s all be jealous together.

But let’s agree to stop doing something retarded. Let’s all agree to stop complaining that Blizz was legally obligated to give us access on Day 1. I know how you feel. I’m jealous too. I’m raging too. But I’m not trying to convince the world that I was promised something that common sense would dictate would never in a million years happen.

Just as an aside, I really like that Blizzard promised us Annual Pass.

I love it. It was both a great marketing decision and a very intelligent game testing decision. Annual passers are exactly the people I want in the beta. We represent a wide variety of players whose common attribute is that we are hooked into to the Blizzard I.V. of MMO Crack for 12 months. We are the rabid fans. We are often very vocal in our respective communities, and we love WOW enough to commit for a year. We are pretty much exactly the crop of people who I want to be in the beta.

So they stuck it on there. “You’ll have beta access!” YES! Awesome. We ate it up.And now it’s a customer service nightmare because jealous forum trolls are raging hardcore. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is exactly why.

Well. I like it when Blizzard tacks beta access onto a package that already included a mount and a free game. Regardless of what their very ill conceived wording was. I like it when Blizzard makes decisions like “Who makes good beta testers? Annual Pass subscribers! PERFECT!” I like it when Blizz gives me a guarantee that I’ll eventually be in a beta wave… I know I’ll see it and that’s what I was promised.And yeah, I think we have a right to watch closely how long it takes Blizz to send out those waves, and I welcome people to rage about whether or not they’re in beta. I support rage. I am an expert rager.

You are welcome as usual to also rage at me in the comments section about how wrong I am to insult you for your Day 1 Beta belief.

But I still think you are silly — and trolling. And I will happily tell you so.

And if you disagree? If you bought Annual Pass for the beta? For DAY ONE 100% OF THE BETA access? If you think Blizz cheated you out of your moneys? Well, you can call Blizzard and complain and I’ll bet you’ll be able to cancel your Annual Pass if you feel that you were not provided with something that you paid for. And frankly: good riddance. If you are mad enough about Beta Day 1 to post novels on the forums screaming at Blizzard, then you are the troll that I do not want on my Blizz forums. I not so respectfully submit that I hope the door does not hit your ass on the way out.

The rest of us will get our access to the beta. In a beta wave. Like how betas have always worked.

Which is exactly what we were promised.

(I hope it’s soon because wow, I want to be in the beta.)

(Also, GC… still waiting on that pony.)

Posted in Blogging, From Ana's Inbox, Raiding | 34 Comments

Loot, Damned Loot, and Statistics

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Theck

There really wasn’t much paladin-specific information provided in the MoP media event – at least, not the sort of crunchy, math-y sort of information I usually blog about. However, there was a lot of talk about the new LFR loot system they’re going to put in place, and a lot of controversy/outcry/confusion on the part of the players. I worked out a little bit of the math during an e-mail conversation with Anafielle, and we decided it was interesting enough to turn into a blog post after all.

I think the system is good, it just wasn’t explained very well at first. And there’s still some confusion, even on Blizzard’s part it seems, about whether your roll is truly independent of other players or not. But for the moment, let’s assume it is (either system works, really – I’ll touch on that again at the end).

The most common complaint I’ve seen in the past few days is that players feel like they’ll have less control over what they win. “But if item X drops,” they say, “I only have to roll against the other people that need it, and not the people who don’t need it.” The flaw in this logic is that “if item X drops” encapsulates a whole bunch of RNG that isn’t in their favor. That statement self-selects a small subset of the possible scenarios (e.g., that item X has dropped) and compares that subset to the entirety of the new system, which isn’t a fair comparison.

In other words, you don’t have control in LFR, you have the illusion of control. If it were a guild run, and you could guarantee that “next time item X drops, it’s my turn,” then you’d have control. If you’re alone in an LFR, the expectation is that all 24 other people in the raid are after gear, and all of them that can roll on your item will. Unless you’re participating in trading cabals, you don’t have any more control over what drops and whether or not you win it than you do in a completely random system.

To show this, let’s compare the systems. The correct way to do that is as follows:

Current system:

chance_to_win_X = (chance_X_drops) / (num_players_rolling_on_X)

Consider that most items have a ~15-35% drop rate, so let’s use 25% as a baseline for item X to drop from the boss. Note that this is after all of the combinatorics involved in the drop happening (i.e., did it drop once, did multiples drop, etc.). Let’s say that 4 other players in the raid are rolling on the item as well. That means you’ll have a one in five chance (20%) of winning the item if it does drop.

Your net chance of winning a specific item in the current system is (0.25)/5 = 0.05 = 5%. And it gets worse – far worse – if more people roll. Have 8 people roll and you’re down to around 3%. Have a Vanquisher token (10 rollers in an average 25-man group) and it’s down to 2.5%.

Your net chance of winning any item (i.e. not just item X, but item Y or Z from the same boss as well) is a lot more complicated, because it depends on several details about the boss’s loot table. How many items does he drop? How many of those items can you actually use? What is the individual probability of each drop (i.e. on a tier table, Vanquisher is 40% but Conqueror/Protector are each 30%)? And it’s complicated further by the fact that the loot table is usually split in two to prevent 4 of the same item from dropping. So for example, if the boss drops 4 items, 2 are from one loot table and 2 are from another. Bosses that drop tier generally have one table for the 3 tier tokens, and one table for non-tier drops.

So let’s make some assumptions. We’ll say the boss can only drop 2 different items you can use, which seems reasonable for DS after quickly browsing a few drop tables on wowhead. Let’s also assume those two items are on separate tables – maybe one is a tier token, and the other is an off-set item like a ring, bracers, etc. That makes the two item rolls independent, which means your chance of winning either or both of the two items is (1-(1-0.05)^2) = 0.0975 = 9.75%.

That might look confusing, but it’s actually quite simple. You have a 5% chance to win one drop, and a 95% (1-0.05=0.95) chance to not win that one drop. The chance of winning one, the other, or both drops is just 100% minus the chance that you lose both drops (because there are only four possible outcomes: win+win, win+lose, lose+win, and lose+lose). The chance that you lose both drops is 0.95^2, so the chance that you win anything is 1-0.95^2 = 0.0975 = 9.75%.

New LFR system:

chance_to_win_X = (chance_you_roll_high_enough) / (num_usable_drops)

Let’s say the boss drops 2 items you can use, and assume they’re equally probable. Let’s also say that Blizzard sets the roll threshold at 90 (i.e., you have to roll 91 or higher to win an item – a 10% chance to win). You have a (0.1)/2 = 0.05 = 5% chance of winning the exact item you want. But you have a 10% chance of winning at least one item that you need.

I’ve simplified things a bit here by assuming all items are equally probable – in other words, if there are 3 usable items the boss drops, each has a 33.3% chance (repeating, of course) to be the one you get. That isn’t necessarily the case. They could have some items be more common than others by weighting things differently (i.e. tier token is 40% chance, each of two off-set items is 30%). But that doesn’t really change much, apart from making specific items more or less likely. It doesn’t change the average.

Also note that we’ve made up a lot of these numbers – they could make it a 15% chance to get any item (increasing your odds for both overall and for single items), and they could distribute loot such that there’s 3 or more items you’ll want off of a given boss (decreasing your odds for a single item – but this becomes less likely in a tier with more bosses, it was much worse in Firelands and Dragon Soul than it was in T11 or will be in T14).

Declaration of Independence

I said in the beginning that it doesn’t matter whether your roll is truly independent of other players. Here’s why:

In the new system, your chance of winning is the chance you roll high enough divided by the number of useful items that boss drops for your class. Now, they could set “chance_of_rolling_high_enough” to an arbitrary value, like 10%. That’s what I did in my example. Then you’re truly independent of other players, because you could all win one item, or nobody could, or anything in-between.

What happens if instead, the system performs a /roll for each player and just awards items to the top 4? Well, it means that instead of rolling to beat a certain arbitrary threshold, you’re rolling to beat 21 other players. In other words, you need to be in the top 4 out of 25, or in the top 4/25 = 0.16 = 16%. It doesn’t matter who those players are, either, because they’re all rolling automatically. So if they did implement that system, it would be no different on a personal level than just setting the bar arbitrarily at 84 in the independent system. You’re not really competing against the other players for anything, because statistically it will always work out such that you’ll have a 4 in 25 chance to win once you average over many boss kills. The only difference is that the variance in the number of items awarded goes to zero. In other words, there’s always 4 items awarded rather than randomly fluctuating between 0 and 25 with an average of 4.

Conclusions

Until we know the percentages, we won’t know for sure which system truly gives you faster loot accrual. But it’s far more likely that your chance of winning items will increase with the new system. And more importantly, it will be much more consistent, because it won’t be as subject to group composition. No more zoning into LFR and groaning because there are 5 DPS DKS, 3 Ret paladins, and 4 Warriors all trying to get a two-hander.

The “extra bonus roll” stuff looks interesting too – it’s basically a way to weight the dice in your favor for a particular boss, which has some neat strategic implications. If you’re really after item X, you can load your dice for that particular item. Sort of nifty.

Given that the new system streamlines the looting process, eliminates loot drama from LFR, and adds the ability to use loaded dice on certain bosses (something that would be abysmal to implement in the old system), I’m on-board. Especially since the only cost is the illusion of control.

Posted in Design, QQ, Raiding, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged Efficient Raiding, LFR, lookingforraid, theck, Theorycraft, theorycrafting, warcraft, WoW | 18 Comments

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Loot, Damned Loot, and Statistics

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