Shared Topic: Awareness

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 22nd: 'Being aware of your surroundings during raids' as proposed by Lissanna] [src]

As a raid healer, a common thing these days is trying to balance keeping everyone in your raid alive, while still being able to move when you need to (ie. having the right amount of situational awareness to your surroundings during raids).

I thought it would be neat to see how all the classes (even tanks and DPS) handle the multi-tasking that is required during raids. Do tanks and DPS sometimes have tunnel vision and forget to watch for the AOE effects or whatever they need to move out of? How do other healers deal with avoiding the tunnel vision problem?

Interesting topic as usual, and I'll be giving my view as a rogue, but I'll also try to give some bear tank flavor to it to spice things up.

User Interface (UI)

Replying a bit later to this topic than usual I've had the chance to read up on some other replies to it (check the end of this post for links) and it seems everyone so far agrees that a good UI is important. The problem with this is of course that the concept 'good UI' is up to the player. Some people swear by the default UI, others change their UI mostly for the visual customization, others for the increased functionality, but often a mix of those.

Take for example my screenshot from the XT-002 fight. You can't really see the scrolling combat text that much (it's only showing a rupture tick after my death) but other that than it shows the most important stuff. You can see DBM warning me of Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb in the middle, with bars that stay into place to remind me of who has them, and you can see the Tantrum emote and the enemy cast bar (which is the Quartz mod) also warning me of that.

As you can see, the middle isn't all that cluttered and I have a pretty good view on the battle field (also note the effect of the camera distance macro allowing me to zoom out further - with thanks to Karthis of Of Teeth And Claws for sharing it back in the day). Granted, the scrolling combat text obstructs the sideview a little, but when tanking on my bear I set up a filter on my outgoing hits to only show stuff that didn't hit (e.g. a dodged Mangle or something).

DPS and 'the zone'

As Kahleena from Fel Deeds Awake! notes, DPS isn't always the facerolling people think it is. When you have a priority system to keep up your debuffs and DoTs and the boss, and there's a lot of stuff happening because the boss is trying to kill you, you need to multi-task and do both DPS and avoid damage.
The zone, then, is that matrix-like situation in which the world moves in slow motion (I'm not talking lag here, people) but you do everything at normal speed. You anticipate slice and dice is about to fall off. You feel the cooldown on Fear is almost over and you run away from doomfires before you are feared into them. You see that the timer on Light Bomb is almost over, and you get ready to cloak out of it should you get the next. The zone is the ultimate DPS state of mind.

As a tank, it works in the same way, but you have this predictive feeling where you can almost see the path adds are going to take. As a main tank, you're kind of limited even when in the zone, because you can't do much with a boss in your face.

DPS and tunnel vision

Often mistaken for 'the zone', tunnel vision is when you are paying so much attention to your skill priority ("oh god, slice and dice AND hunger for blood are about to fall off!") that you fail to notice your surroundings (your feet are on fire and you're not wearing the summer festival sandals) and you're taking damage that could easily be prevented. In the best case scenario, you're still causing healers to divert their attention to you when they could be doing something more useful. In the worst case scenario, they spend a lot of mana to try and save your behind and you still die.

As a tank, it's where you think you picked up all adds, but half of them are actually preparing healer soup with little bits of DPS.

Training awareness

The good news is you can train on getting in the zone. Just by practicing a lot on instances you can get better, of course, and the more you see a boss fight, the more you'll learn to predict scripted abilities etc.
For training your reaction to random abilities, PvP might prove to be interesting. Because the opponent is also controlled by human players, a lot of things are totally random. For example, a rogue can train in cloaking things by lurking around a group of opponents, killing one and getting away safely. This usually requires a fast combination of some form of CC (blind, gouge, KS ... you won't use these in PvE a lot but it's often necessary in PvP to have a chance in getting away) and a few things to get you into safety (cloak of shadows, vanish, sprint, not necessarily in that order).

Other bloggers on this topic

Lissanna @ Restokin
Shopshopshop @ Runeforge Gossip
The Renaissance Man @ The Children of Wrath
Almaster @ Lux Legis
Kahleene @ Fel Deeds Awake!

Reader question(s)

So what about you? What does your UI look like? Are you often in the zone, or more often in the tunnel vision state? If you play multiple classes, do you lose focus easier on some classes than on the other ones?

Unmercey 7 and other rogue videos

I watched Unmercey 7, which Rogue-Rogue linked to in their latest blog entry.

The subtitle of the video (Unmercey 7: Hana) confused me at first. I figured it referred to the flower in the description image, because 'hana' is 'flower' in Japanese. The problem with this is that Unmercey is a Chinese player, not Japanese, so it didn't make sense - it should have been 'huā' (I have no idea what tone it is in Modern Chinese - I just know it is this one in archaic Chinese .. go figure). Turns out it was reference to the last song in the movie, which was a JPop song. Ah well.

Anyway. The video featured some refreshing Shadow Dance spec footage. Assuming the players he duels have a decent amount of resilience, he is still getting 5K ambushes off, which I found fairly suprising. With the (justified) nerf to Overkill and our burst as Muti/Prep, perhaps the more burst-biased people might spec Shadow Dance.

This Sub spec also has shadowstep for increased mobility (though I do wonder if it weighs up against Fleetfooted). I must admit I preferred some of Unmercey's earlier videos: Unmercey 5 & 6 both showcased some very creative moves like FoK-Vanish-Sap to flush out stealthers.

This movie didn't showcase that many new moves, but it did prove that a subtlety build can be just as viable in the right hands (and with the right amount of keybinding, no doubt).

There's some other good rogue movies out there as well. Akrios from Rogue-rogue has some neat ones (though I think the only up to date ones are a few random arena footage ones) and Krymu is also a popular name in the rogue movie scene.

Meanwhile I am still stuck with exams. I passed my archaic Chinese exam yesterday, and the next one is friday: business economics. I'm doing some 'when I get back' planning for WoW, but I'm running out of ideas since my armory isn't up-to-date and I can't remember my PvE gear that well anymore (especially enchanting and gem choices are foggy)

Shared Topic: Healers

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 8th: Non-healers views of healers as proposed by Nigiri] [src]

I would love to read blogger's thoughts on who they like to have heal them. Would you prefer a Holy priest of a Disc priest? A Holy pally or a Resto druid. Shammy maybe?

This depends on some things in my opinion. I don't think I really have a particular choice.
The role
I find I'm not that aware of my healers anymore since my transition from tanking to DPS (as you know I played a druid tank in TBC). When I was tanking, I had a good idea of who was keeping me up. You know when there's a lifebloom rolling on you because of that constant green stream in scrolling combat text, and the bigger heals from the other classes stand out because of that.
As melee DPS much of the damage done to me can be avoided by paying attention. A heal will come sooner or later, but if I can help it I might not need one right away.
I guess I depend less on the healers as a DPS.

The place
In five mans, you usually take one healer only. Here is where you will really feel if your healer is paying attention to you. It's very fun as a tank to chainpull and test yourself and the healer. However, I have found out that DPS casualties are sometimes a result of this hehe. In 25 mans there is usually a healer for 'raid healing', so you will probably get a heal thrown your way.
The particular boss fight is also an important factor: if a healer or two is enough to keep up the main tank, than the rest can concentrate more on keeping DPS alive.

The healers
From a tank point of view, if you group with your healers a lot you know what they are capable of healing you through (sometimes they can pull off amazing things) and they know what you can take if you have your cooldowns.
From a DPS point of view you can't really expect them to keep track of all your cooldowns (I very much doubt if a healer knows if I used CloS recently or not).

As a bear tank, if I would really have to choose a class to keep me up I would say paladins. It's kind of hard to explain why -it doesn't help that it's been a while since I've tanked- but I suppose in my opinion, the flash of light stream of heals fit the dodged/non-dodged style of incoming attacks for a bear.

As a DPS, I think it's really nice to have a tree druid on raid healing duty. A HoT feels very secure for some reason - like you are safe for the time being, as long as that HoT is rolling. The fact that they can also use Swiftmend to turn that HoT into an instant heal when needed just adds extra security.

The tanks
Say what? Yes. A good tank should be able to safeguard the DPS from a lot of damage (think picking up adds quickly and such). With a bad tank your healers will have to work harder. With a good tank (and we have those, I hope you do too) you are safe to DPS to your hearth's content, and an occasional heal will keep you up.

Special mention: PvP
It's always awesome when a player decides to heal in PvP. Here, there is that tank-and-healer-like connection between you and your healer, because often, you are the one 'tanking' the opponent regardless of your class. This is also a nice opportunity to see how a healer performs under extreme pressure: bosses do not make intelligent decisions. A boss will never try to lock down a healer while luring the tank out of line of sight of that healer. A boss will not alternate an immunity CC (like cyclone) between you and your healer so you cannot be healed.

Shared Topic: Favorite Quest

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 1st: Deconstruct your favourite quest/zone as proposed by Spinks] [src]

The first part was deciding what quest or zone. I decided I'd go for a quest, because there is not really a particular zone I like, though there are some I have fond memories of (for example, Netherwing dailies in Shadowmoon Valley).

In the end I managed to choose to pick one that has stuck to me for several reasons which I will explain below. The chain in question is the famed Cipher of Damnation questchain in Shadowmoon Valley, which also happens to be the start for the attunement process for Serpentshrine Cavern. Do not read this if you haven't done this questline, because it contains heavy spoilers.

The start
The chain starts off when a member of the Earthern Ring redirects you to Earthmender Torlok in Shadowmoon Valley. Nature in this zone doesn't look too well (it's all dead and there's green lava and such) and you are sent on three quests to commune with the spirits. Anyway, having done that, you learn about a spell that may have caused the current look of Shadowmoon Valley, and you are sent to seek out Oronok Torn-heart, a scruffy looking orc hermit.

Oronok and his sons
Oronok puts you to the test by having you kill some things in the neighborhood of his place, and then he reveals you his story. He tells you:

"They [the words of the spell - red.] are know as the Cipher of Damnation: The words uttered by Gul'dan himself to shatter this land. The very spell that severed the last remaining tie the orcs had with the elements of Draenor."

He then asks you to go search for his sons around Shadowmoon Valley. All three of them have some chores for you, and all three will eventually (after a quest or three each) give you a fragment of the cipher of damnation.

The grand finale
With the cipher recovered, you head back to Oronok and are asked to go summon an elite you have to kill with a group. The place of summoning is an altar in memory of Gul'dan, at the base of the volcano known as the Hand of Gul'dan. The spirit of Gul'dan can be found here, as well as some other shaman spirits. When you read the spell aloud (you may recognize it from the Black Temple trailer) your screen shakes heavily, and the lava in front of you starts to develop smoke.

In the smoke, Cyrukh the Firelord spawns, with one of my favorite game quotes I might add:

Little creature made of flesh, your wish has been granted. Death comes for you!

And as you can see, he's one big, mean chunk of rock. I have very fond memories of this guy, because on my druid, I have tried every role on him. I originally did him as a balance druid. I have screens of this, and two of the randomly PuGed people would later end up in the same guild as me.
Later in my WoW career I would come back to help guildies and throw some heals, and even later I would be helping out by tanking him.

The reward is a nice blue item and a fire resistance necklace, but the special effects, including all sons and Oronok flying in to help out, and the effect of 'casting' the cipher, make this a very cool quest IMO.

Honorable mention: Dragonmaw Races
I should point out that I really liked the Dragonmaw races you can do for Netherwing rep. While I never beat Captain Skyshatter, I did defeat Mulverick and it was a fun and fresh concept. Learning the path he races and then trying to stay either ahead of him or right behind him made a very adrenaline-packed type of quest. Anyone remember that sharp dive on the north-eastern edge of the Netherwing Ledge ? He dives behind a ledge there and then 'pulls up' so you're right in his line of fire if you don't watch out.

As a sidenote I'd really appreciate some input on the layout. I got tired of the pitch-black feeling of the previous one, so I adjusted one of the basic blogger templates a bit so it matched my new header.

EU PvP forums up in arms

There was a fairly important announcement last week for us EU PvPers: the long-awaited cross-language battlegroups were being implemented.

For those who are unaware of this feature, it basicly means that for example a group of Alliance consisting of French servers may be pitted against a group of Horde players from Spanish servers. A common misconception is that players from these servers with an other language will be mixed with the English servers, which is not the case.

Anyway, the goal of course is to decrease queues. There may not be enough English-speaking Alliance out there for you to smash, but perhaps there's a whole bunch of French Alliance queueing. So yeah, nice find.

Except not all battlegroups are being merged.

Battlegroups that will not be merged
English – Blackout, Misery and Vindication
German - Blutdurst
Russian - Шквал (Flurry) and Вихрь (Whirlwind)

In a suprising twist, six battlegroups are not being merged, for unknown reasons.
Blackout, Misery and Blutdurst are all big battlegroups. Vindication and the two Russian ones aren't.

Now, being from Vindication myself, I was quite suprised with this. The view I have of the battlegroup is a fairly low activity battlegroup, with an overrepresentation of Horde. I have instant queues, but I bet the Horde doesn't - from what I hear they can vary between 30 mins - an hour and a half.

A possible explanation for not merging the Russian battlegroups could be due to cyrillic characters posing a problem. Perhaps they don't want English/French/German/Spanish players to have to try and pronounce a Russian player's name over Vent, or something. Still sounds like a bit of a dumb excuse.

Others are bringing up technical limits due to the physical location of the battlegroup servers, but I don't buy that, and I hope we will get a proper answer soon.

Random collection of awesomeness.

Now that I got my raid report out of the way for today .. time for something completely different.

The naming blog meme
Found on Sideshow&Syrana who found it on Killing 'em Slowly: a meme in which you tag three other bloggers and they have to tell how they chose their names.

I haven't been tagged yet so I'll take the liberty of tagging myself for the sake of this post. My druid's name, Azretha, is from the spell Archimonde uses to destroy Dalaran. Using my own idea of transcribing the Eredun used in this spell .. when he raises his hand in the air to drop the sand and create a replica of Dalaran, he says (or how I would transcribe it anyway) 'Belar sumares az'retha rakass ib'na' And that's where Azretha came from, though I changed the 'e' to sound like 'ay' so you pronounce it as-ray-tah.

Aeltyrs name is a lot easier. It's just an anagram of Tyrael, the archangel from Diablo II. You know him from the minipet, too.

Then as a final one, my warriors name, Kaguzuchi, comes from an anime influence. More specificly, it comes from an attack by Shishio from Rurouni Kenshin called Tsui no hiken: Kaguzuchi (Third Secret Sword: Kaguzuchi), and the kaguzuchi is reference to a fire god if I remember correctly.

I would hereby like to tag the following three bloggers for this meme !
Zaltu from One Rogue's Journey
Dinaer from Forever a Noob
Eskel from Gone Rogue
Tell us where you got your names !

RP event: The Silithid War
I would just like to shed some light on this as well. I attended the start of this RP event, a march to Silithus, and I had a lot of fun. You can find some screenies by me and my guildies here.


Epic flying mount
As a closing paragraph a small note on my monetary status here. Despite buying a Mongoose enchant for my Greed and respeccing, I have managed to sell enough junk and I hit 4000 gold. If I could now force myself to do enough dailies I should finally be able to fly my bronze drake by the end of the week.

A week of PvP

Aeltyr casts Blind.
Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there!

I recently said to myself: self, we don't want to grind money. We don't have the time to look for instance groups. Let's do something fun. Let's respec and do some PvP.

And since you can't argue with yourself (try it - you're always right) that's exactly what I did. I respecced Mut-Prep, got me some nice PvP oriented glyphs for a relatively cheap price, put on my super awesome Eviscerator's gear and hit the BGs.

And I'm doing well. I bought the Titan-forged Boots with Wintergrasp Marks (though no enchants or gems yet .. on any of my PvP gear) and after a few evenings of battleground switching I also bought the Hateful Gladiator's Belt.

I got some more achievements. Arathi Basin Perfection (not bad for PuGing), Storm Glory (again, not bad for a PuG), Damage Control (it didn't bug out for once), Stormy Assassin (rough and long game so I got to switch around a lot) and Take a Chill Pill (didn't even notice he was berserked)

But most of all, I had fun. I spent money and I'm thus further away from my epic flying mount again, but it was worth it. I'm gonna keep PvPing, perhaps until I can buy another Hateful piece, or until I get bored of that.

On another note, I will be guest-posting on Big Hit Box relatively soon. Like, when I can think of a subject to write on.
Big Hit Box is a melee blog, a source of information for those of us who like to be in the face of mobs (or .. in the backside actually. Don't DPS from the front.). So ret pallies, rogues, warriors, druids, shamans, melee hunters .. err perhaps not melee hunters.

So suggestions on topics other than melee hunters are always welcome - what would you like to hear about ?

Aeltyr casts Preparation.
Aeltyr casts Blind.

Banners, Economics, and Ninjas

No, there is absolutely no link between those topics, except that I will put them all in this post, of course.

Banners
Admittedly, even I couldn't watch my screenshot banner, so I took an old screenshot of mine and some rogue pics, and made a little more effort in a header image.

Still, I'm not quite happy with how my character is depicted here. This is an old screenshot, because it is the only decent frontal screenshot. Aeltyr has a red ponytail in-game, and no beard. He's semi-naked in this picture, but there's a perfectly logical explanation for that: it is a shot from a beach party RP event, where he is sided with two Blood Elf babes.

Economics
I've asked Jessica over at WoWconomics for her opinion on a profession combo. When I get back to the game I will be starting my Forsaken rogue, and rolling a Death Knight as his banking alt. Since a lv 60 Death Knight can basicly learn Grand Master profession ranks, I thought it would be an idea to use him as a mule too. But I'm not very good at profession choices like this, so I asked Jessica what she would deem the best four-profession-combo.
Check her site later today for the answer, and check back some other time here for the concrete benefits this will mean for me.

On a non-WoW related note, I have an exam of Marketing Management coming up next week, so I'm in a real life economic mood as well.

Ninjas

Okay, let's face it. Many people roll rogues for that ninja-feeling. Sneaking, assassinating, daggers, ... gotta be a ninja right?
Well, in fact, ninjas used a far larger range of weapons. They frequently used claw-like weapons much like the fist weapons you can find in the game, or a sickle with a weighted chain attached to it, or a simple club even. There's also a 'fun' weapon called a chigiri-gi, a "breastcutter" which is a staff with two spikes around the middle of the staff, and a chain with a claw attached to it. The spikes are used to trap and break swords, and the claw, well .. to rip you apart. Other than that, smaller things like poisoned caltrops, or less stealthy things like bombs (after the Dutch brought gunpowder to Japan), were also amongst the arsenal of things you can kill people with.
I'll do a post on "Are rogues ninjas ?" some other time to compare more similarities and differences between the two. I'll leave you with a shot of myself, so you have at least a visual image of the nutcase behind this blog.

The female ninja in this blog post is Yù Jiāolóng from the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Over at Blog Azeroth, the current Shared Topic of the month was started by Jaramon from DeathCoil.org

In his post, he asks himself and the readers: how do you define a good player? This calls for a very subjective answer.

The Good
One can interpret 'good' as 'good' in a moral sense, in which case a good player is, in my opinion, one that is not loot-greedy when raiding, not spiteful when killing or being killed in PvP, and not attention-seeking in RP (and preferably all of these together). A good player in the moral sense is someone you'd want to hang out with, someone you'd want in your guild. A social, friendly and helpful player.

The Bad
Sadly, one can see 'good' as 'good for', a utility. For example, recruiting someone who is clearly very annoying, but because you need his specific role, you recruit him, because he's 'good for tanking' or 'a useful arena healer'. You don't really like the guy, but he's useful, so you call him a 'good' player. This isn't really the kind of relationship you want to have with other players, you just need to make friends with enjoyable people that also happen to be of the class/role you want. After all, what's more fun than just rounding up a bunch of friends and having a great time?

The Ugly
The final interpretation of 'good' is 'good at'. This involves skill and expertise (in [role]playing your character). This is very subjective of course, but in my opinion a 'good' player is one that is aware of what is happening around him (fire/goo on the ground, an enemy player bandaging under the bridge, a healer about to get squished), that knows what he's doing, and can anticipate things, like refreshing Slice and Dice right before you run out of an AoE of which you know it will come, or throwing on some HoTs right before a raid-wide silence.


This is also the most controversial definition of 'good'; because while you may think you are good at something, others may not agree (proof of this can be found daily on the official WoW forums). While a group of semi-casual players clearing 10-man Naxx after a few times may think they are good, a semi-hardcore group clearing 25-man Sartharion with 3 drakes may argue they still have a lot to learn.

As a closing statement, I would like to add that I found a lot of this reflects my guilds philosophy:

[...]but because in the end, this game is about people and about having fun. Our main policy has always been 'People over classes/players'. Playing skill can be learned, and the character you play as your main can be changed, but being a good person - that's not something we can teach you, but rather an important part of finding a home with the Athanatoi. We expect maturity and good behavior from our members[...]

Speaking of which .. happy second anniversary, guys!

Aeltyr slips his letter in the mail, steals a small slice of birthday cake and quietly sneaks away.