Introduction

In response to the fact that Tol Barad has turned out to be clearly imbalanced in favor of the defender, Blizzard implemented the following change: winning as the attacker rewards 1800 Honor Points (and winning as the defender still rewards 180). For purposes of this analysis, the only thing you need to know about Tol Barad is that the winner of any match will be the defender in the next match.

I'm going to do some brief game-theoretic analysis to show...

• Hamlet

This is a brief explication of an issue that's been coming up more and more as we near Cataclysm, which is that people need to change their intuitive understanding of how to think about the hit cap and gear around it. The major change is the addition of Reforging.

The main focus of this post how you go about your quick mental evaluation of gear. Obviously if you're using a computational gear optimizer, it will spit out the right result regardless of how well you understand these...

• Hamlet

(Prelim: as usual with my WoWmath posts, I'll try to summarize the results at the end for people who don't care about the mathematical arguments. Skip to "Conclusions" if you don't want to read the whole thing.).

[top]Introduction

As most of people have noticed by now, the requirements for the Chaotic meta gem (+3% to crit bonus) on Cataclysm beta is now "more blue gems than red gems." This is awkward to say the least, especially given the new Cataclysm stat...

• Hamlet

This is in honor of my guildmate Vosk ( The World of Warcraft Armory - Vosk @ Mal'Ganis - Achievements ), who recently completed the achievement A Mask for All Occasions, becoming one of a handful of people worldwide to complete all of the achievements in WoW. The luck involved in this achievement prompts a lot of discussion, particularly in Vosk's case, since he would have been the first player in the world to complete all achievements if he'd been luckier with masks last year. It's not too difficult...

• Hamlet

The value of Glyph of Starsurge is a common topic of discussion among Druids lately. Since its DPS contribution is nontrivial to estimate, I'll give a quick walkthrough of the basic calculation. For actual results and final DPS comparison, as always, look at my spreadsheet, but this post explains the way the spreadsheet models Glyph of Starsurge, and contains some general mathematical points that are useful for theorycrafting.

First, we need to know the frequency of Starsurge casts....

• Hamlet