9 August 2008
From the beta: shadow priest glyphs
Judging by the amount of attention most other classes are getting in Wrath, you'd be forgive for thinking Blizzard had forgotten shadow priests exist. Not so: we haz glyphs. I'm not going to waste energy repeating Wow Insider though. They cover it all beautifully, and besides, these things don't deserve the effort. Glyphs schmyphs.
7 August 2008
J'accuse shadowfiend
In the Burning Crusade, priests were given an active form of mana regeneration in the shape of the shadowfiend. But who's bright idea was it to make it a pet? It's crabby, temperamental and downright unreliable. Of all the possible ways Blizzard could have conceived for priests to regain mana in combat, the shadowfiend is probably the clumsiest.
When you cast the spell the fiend pops up and start slapping your target. You gain in mana 2.5 times what it does in damage. It does melee in the form of shadow damage and will generally fit in 10 or 11 swings before it belches out an emphysemic wheeze and gives up the ghost.
A base hit will do about 100 damage. It can crit, it scales quite nicely with spell damage, and it benefits from debuffs on the target including misery and shadow weaving.
But it can also miss, be dodged, parried and partially resisted. Not to mention it can be squashed or burned, peel off and break nearby crowd control or else just sit there right next to you and wave its tentacles harmlessly in the air. And the scaling of shadowfiend is, in itself, an idiotic design directive that disadvantages lesser geared players.
To be fair, you just need to know when to use it. Get that right and you can probably hope to get a good chunk of your mana back in an average use, even though the variables involved make it an unpredictable spell in the best of circumstances.
My issue is more with the shadowfiend's... well... concept, for want of a better word. Why conceive it a pet? While shaman elementals last two minutes, a frost mage's water elemental lasts 45 seconds and a balance druid's treants last 30 seconds, our pet lasts only 15 seconds. It's not really much of a pet anyway. It can't be controlled and it's not around long enough to really have any presence or personality. It doesn't add to our dps like other pets, and can't tank anything.
And no wonder it doesn't compare favourably to other pets in the game — because it's not really a pet at all, it's a mana regen spell dressed up like a pet.
I'm sure somebody someone thought it would be 'fun' to make it a pet, instead of a bog-standard spell. But it would work so much better as another dot. Consider, as a parallel, the druid spell insect swarm — this too conceptually, conjures other creatures, but they don't exist as pets. Their damage can't be avoided in the conventional melee ways and the effect is at the complete control of the druid. A similar shadow effect could have easily been used to draw mana from the victim without the clumsiness of summoning a pet.
In fact, something along the lines of the Wrath beta 51-point talent dispersion would have been the obvious solution — a priest's equivalent of evocation that returns a flat percentage. Instead, we ended up with a supremely unreliable spell that can return anywhere from little or no mana, to upwards of 6000.
The question is: will we come to rely more on the shadowfiend in Wrath or less? If current beta changes carry through into live, mana regeneration will certainly be a very different creature. Chain potting will be off the table and vampiric touch will return a tear-jerking 60% less mana. But a whole host of other options will open up to us, including new talents and new best friends — go creep up to your ret paladins and survival hunters now. Even the duration of the humble shadowfiend could be extended, and it may well benefit from the caster's spell hit.
So who knows, we may come to rely less on the fiend in Northrend. It's still stoopid though.
When you cast the spell the fiend pops up and start slapping your target. You gain in mana 2.5 times what it does in damage. It does melee in the form of shadow damage and will generally fit in 10 or 11 swings before it belches out an emphysemic wheeze and gives up the ghost.
A base hit will do about 100 damage. It can crit, it scales quite nicely with spell damage, and it benefits from debuffs on the target including misery and shadow weaving.
But it can also miss, be dodged, parried and partially resisted. Not to mention it can be squashed or burned, peel off and break nearby crowd control or else just sit there right next to you and wave its tentacles harmlessly in the air. And the scaling of shadowfiend is, in itself, an idiotic design directive that disadvantages lesser geared players.
To be fair, you just need to know when to use it. Get that right and you can probably hope to get a good chunk of your mana back in an average use, even though the variables involved make it an unpredictable spell in the best of circumstances.
My issue is more with the shadowfiend's... well... concept, for want of a better word. Why conceive it a pet? While shaman elementals last two minutes, a frost mage's water elemental lasts 45 seconds and a balance druid's treants last 30 seconds, our pet lasts only 15 seconds. It's not really much of a pet anyway. It can't be controlled and it's not around long enough to really have any presence or personality. It doesn't add to our dps like other pets, and can't tank anything.
And no wonder it doesn't compare favourably to other pets in the game — because it's not really a pet at all, it's a mana regen spell dressed up like a pet.
I'm sure somebody someone thought it would be 'fun' to make it a pet, instead of a bog-standard spell. But it would work so much better as another dot. Consider, as a parallel, the druid spell insect swarm — this too conceptually, conjures other creatures, but they don't exist as pets. Their damage can't be avoided in the conventional melee ways and the effect is at the complete control of the druid. A similar shadow effect could have easily been used to draw mana from the victim without the clumsiness of summoning a pet.
In fact, something along the lines of the Wrath beta 51-point talent dispersion would have been the obvious solution — a priest's equivalent of evocation that returns a flat percentage. Instead, we ended up with a supremely unreliable spell that can return anywhere from little or no mana, to upwards of 6000.
The question is: will we come to rely more on the shadowfiend in Wrath or less? If current beta changes carry through into live, mana regeneration will certainly be a very different creature. Chain potting will be off the table and vampiric touch will return a tear-jerking 60% less mana. But a whole host of other options will open up to us, including new talents and new best friends — go creep up to your ret paladins and survival hunters now. Even the duration of the humble shadowfiend could be extended, and it may well benefit from the caster's spell hit.
So who knows, we may come to rely less on the fiend in Northrend. It's still stoopid though.
5 August 2008
Bore bored bored
What do you do when the server closes early for maintenance? Well in my case, you play around with a new banner then you go do the washing up. I'm not sure it turned out quite how it looks in my head. What do you think?
I don't know how to do half the things I want to in this blogger template. The rounded corners give me a headache and the colour scheme is a mess. I'm not sure how to change the background colour, and even if I did I couldn't because the rounded corners are made by tiny images in the same colour. And why did nobody tell me the tag cloud is MASSIVE in Firefox!?
I'm going to have to do some serious research. In the meantime, if you have any tips for customising a blogging template please let me know.
I don't know how to do half the things I want to in this blogger template. The rounded corners give me a headache and the colour scheme is a mess. I'm not sure how to change the background colour, and even if I did I couldn't because the rounded corners are made by tiny images in the same colour. And why did nobody tell me the tag cloud is MASSIVE in Firefox!?
I'm going to have to do some serious research. In the meantime, if you have any tips for customising a blogging template please let me know.
4 August 2008
Weathering the storm
About two weeks ago I quit my guild in a huff of indignation without much of a clue what I would do next. And since then, I've been putting off writing about why.Actually, I've been putting off thinking about why, because I don't want to corrupt my memories of a very happy time with the guild. It's tricky gauging how much to say about what went on. Skullcrackers is a real guild with a lot of great players. I was very happy there for the best part of a year and have no wish to turn on them now.
If I tried to catalogue the problems in Skullcrackers, you would doubtless recognise many of them from your own experiences. Guilds the world over face the same issues — how do you balance the conflicting wishes of 'casual' and 'hardcore' players, how do you recruit tanks and healers, how do you ensure enough players are online at the same time to raid, how do you keep experienced players interested while newer players gear up, how do you make that jump from Kara to Gruul's?
But what defines a guild isn't the problems it experiences but how it responds to them. The guild that faces up to its problems will go on to prosper; the ones that ignore them will wither and fade away.
While we had endless chats in Skullcrackers about how we could recruit more tanks and healers, how we could ensure reliable raid attendance, how we could actually make some progress through ZA while gearing up enough players for 25-man raiding, we never took any significant action to tackle them. When even the guild master is an hour late to raids without apology, while the guild is haemorrhaging its best raid-level players, you begin to see how cheap words are.
It would be easy to blame the GM for the fate of the guild, but that would be unfair. As an officer, I have to accept part responsibility for the fact that Skullcrackers struggled to address any of these problems in a meaningful way. But when I stop beating myself up and consider what I could have done better, or differently, I draw a blank. I genuinely tried to drive change and force the guild to adapt for many months; resistance or apathy simply beat me down.
That's not to say I am blameless for the problems the guild had; simply that it was the right time to leave, and leaving was the best thing for both me and Skullcrackers.
So now I join several other ex-Skullcrackers in Freak on a Leash, hoping we don't fall prey to the same flaws. We have the benefit of knowing where Skullcrackers went wrong, and vowing not to make the same mistakes. But knowing and doing are two different things. Just like Skullcrackers, we are having to recruit fresh level 70s and help them gear up through Kara and heroics just to move forward.
At the back of our heads, I think we are all aware that the time for raid progression could well have passed. With the expansion looming, if we can't build a balanced roster of active, like-minded players soon, we may have to accept that the future of Freak lies in the 10-man raids of Northrend. There's no doubt that the development of more 10-man content will make it much easier for guilds like Freak and Skullcrackers to prosper, we just have to hope that we can all make it there in tact.
1 August 2008
Dots for dummies
I'm an idiot.
Ho Ho's comment to my post on haste raised a question in my mind about how dots work. I have, for some time now, and without any apparent empirical evidence to support my view, been operating under the assumption that the first tick of a dot happened instantly.
If you are nodding encouragingly at this point and waiting for me to get to the punchline, you too are an idiot.
What Ho Ho knows, and what every self-respecting shadow priest should know (especially the ones who blog about it) is that the first tick of damage occurs only three seconds after application. This is true of shadow word: pain, vampiric touch and devouring plague. All three spells go on to tick every three seconds till they expire, the final damage occurring at the exact moment of expiry.
Even mind flay, which ticks every second, takes a full second to kick in.
If I'd stopped to think about it, I might have worked it out. But of course, I didn't: I'm an idiot.
What this means is that I have to completely re-evaluate my approach to overlapping spells.
When I talk about overlapping, I don't mean spamming the spells every time you get the chance. The issue is about how accurately we can maintain 100% uptime of our dots. In an ideal scenario, your shadow word: pain would tick every three seconds for the entire duration of a fight. But there are so many variables that make this difficult, if not impossible. Lag, movement, pushback, resists and the sheer mind-boggling complexity of juggling spells all contribute to an imperfect spell rotation. Sometimes, you're faced with a choice between reapplying a dot just before it finishes, thereby 'clipping' the end of the existing dot, or taking a different action and allowing a short period of down time.
Take a look at this first chart. This, in my ignorance, is what I thought happened when you clipped. The pink line is the first dot, the green is the second. Each vertical line is a tick, and the black bit is what's clipped.
Omg, what a tit. You see what happens there? Without realising it, I had created a fantasy world in which clipping actually improved dps — if a dot ticked instantly on application, you could manufacture shorter tick times every application at the expense of a little mana (more casting over time).
If I had ever stopped to think about this, I would have realised how unlikely it was.
So, as you probably know, this is what really happens:
Just as Ho Ho said, you could go five seconds without a tick, instead of three.
The consequences are horrendous. I've even done some maths to prove it. For shadow word: pain first, over a five minute fight, if you consistently clipped one second off the spell, you would loose eight ticks or 8% of damage.
Vampiric touch is worse, as it needs casting more often, potentially resulting in more clipped dots. In the same fight, once again consistently clipping one second off the spell, you would loose 14 ticks or 14% damage.
Perversely, if you're gonna clip at all, it's better to clip more time than less (up to just under three seconds), as this results in a smaller gap between ticks. But this would use up more mana and it still eats into your dps.
The conclusion, if you haven't reached it already, is to be perfect. And if you can't manage that, it's preferable to let your dots expire than overlap. I'm going to have to go back and edit my haste post, (although I don't see how this affects my overall scepticism of haste for shadow priests).
There's promise of some relief from this situation in Wrath. A tier 9 talent, pain and suffering, currently enables mind flay to refresh the duration of shadow word: pain. Notice it says refresh, not reapply, so we would no longer need to worry about timings. Mind flay would simply ensure the spell kept ticking along nicely and indefinitely. With one less dot to worry about, spell rotations could get a whole lot more manageable. We'll have to wait and see.
Huge thanks to Ho Ho for putting me straight on this.
Ho Ho's comment to my post on haste raised a question in my mind about how dots work. I have, for some time now, and without any apparent empirical evidence to support my view, been operating under the assumption that the first tick of a dot happened instantly.
If you are nodding encouragingly at this point and waiting for me to get to the punchline, you too are an idiot.
What Ho Ho knows, and what every self-respecting shadow priest should know (especially the ones who blog about it) is that the first tick of damage occurs only three seconds after application. This is true of shadow word: pain, vampiric touch and devouring plague. All three spells go on to tick every three seconds till they expire, the final damage occurring at the exact moment of expiry.
Even mind flay, which ticks every second, takes a full second to kick in.
If I'd stopped to think about it, I might have worked it out. But of course, I didn't: I'm an idiot.
What this means is that I have to completely re-evaluate my approach to overlapping spells.
When I talk about overlapping, I don't mean spamming the spells every time you get the chance. The issue is about how accurately we can maintain 100% uptime of our dots. In an ideal scenario, your shadow word: pain would tick every three seconds for the entire duration of a fight. But there are so many variables that make this difficult, if not impossible. Lag, movement, pushback, resists and the sheer mind-boggling complexity of juggling spells all contribute to an imperfect spell rotation. Sometimes, you're faced with a choice between reapplying a dot just before it finishes, thereby 'clipping' the end of the existing dot, or taking a different action and allowing a short period of down time.
Take a look at this first chart. This, in my ignorance, is what I thought happened when you clipped. The pink line is the first dot, the green is the second. Each vertical line is a tick, and the black bit is what's clipped.
Omg, what a tit. You see what happens there? Without realising it, I had created a fantasy world in which clipping actually improved dps — if a dot ticked instantly on application, you could manufacture shorter tick times every application at the expense of a little mana (more casting over time).
If I had ever stopped to think about this, I would have realised how unlikely it was.
So, as you probably know, this is what really happens:
Just as Ho Ho said, you could go five seconds without a tick, instead of three.
The consequences are horrendous. I've even done some maths to prove it. For shadow word: pain first, over a five minute fight, if you consistently clipped one second off the spell, you would loose eight ticks or 8% of damage.
Vampiric touch is worse, as it needs casting more often, potentially resulting in more clipped dots. In the same fight, once again consistently clipping one second off the spell, you would loose 14 ticks or 14% damage.
Perversely, if you're gonna clip at all, it's better to clip more time than less (up to just under three seconds), as this results in a smaller gap between ticks. But this would use up more mana and it still eats into your dps.
The conclusion, if you haven't reached it already, is to be perfect. And if you can't manage that, it's preferable to let your dots expire than overlap. I'm going to have to go back and edit my haste post, (although I don't see how this affects my overall scepticism of haste for shadow priests).
There's promise of some relief from this situation in Wrath. A tier 9 talent, pain and suffering, currently enables mind flay to refresh the duration of shadow word: pain. Notice it says refresh, not reapply, so we would no longer need to worry about timings. Mind flay would simply ensure the spell kept ticking along nicely and indefinitely. With one less dot to worry about, spell rotations could get a whole lot more manageable. We'll have to wait and see.
Huge thanks to Ho Ho for putting me straight on this.
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