As my powertech, I reached level 25 on Balmorra by the time I finished the quests there. I still had to go through Nar Shadda and Tattooine before I would even begin to see monsters my level. I decided to try not doing any planetary storylines, and focus instead solely on class storylines. Additionally, I shoved all of my fancy gear into the cargo hold and dropped down to green quality items, and whites where I had no greens.

From there, I was going to just do class quests, and grind for exp and items. Obviously I quickly caught up to my level in mobs, but surprisingly, once I did get to that point, it wasn't horrible to continue. Obviously it was more of a chore than questing, but it gave a pretty different feel to the game.

• My ability to kill higher level monsters is important now. Previously everything was trivial, but now being able to take on monsters a few levels higher than me means I can hang out in a higher exp-granting area, and complete higher level quests, letting me level more quickly.
   
• Item drops become exciting. I look forward to seeing a green beam on a corpse, because my only item acquisition path is through mob drops now. Not only are the drops potentially upgrades because I'm fighting at my own level and don't have a bunch of blues and oranges from commendations and quests, they also factor in to my ability to progress. Better items mean I kill faster, which means I level faster, since leveling is tied almost solely to my combat effectiveness.
   
• I learn my class intimately. Playing my overleveled shield tech powertech, I just did whatever. If it was a group I would use death from above, but otherwise it was just whatever. I'd often cycle between rapid shots and flame burst, maybe I'd use unload, I would rocket punch if I was in melee. Things would die and I would move on.
  Playing against challenging opponents my rotation tightened up a LOT. Death from Above is great, but reserved for packs where I can get 3 opponents to stay in it's area for duration, otherwise I keep explosive probe on cooldown and use Flame Thrower if I can hit at least 2 targets with it. For individual mobs or when the AoE is on cooldown, Rocket Punch is top priority since it hits hard, crits often, and always triggers ion gas cylinder, and I'm very tuned in to the sound that is played when I shield an attack to be ready to switch to it again since the shielding resets it's cooldown. After rocket punch, I use Rail Shot, just because rail shot is marginally better than flame burst and has a chance to trigger ion gas cylinder. Additional cooldowns are spent using rapid shots if I am higher than 15 heat, and flame burst otherwise. If a fight is close, I will use flame burst instead of rapid shots as long as I end the fight before I overheat. The particulars of my rotation are unimportant, but the fact is I've spent time refining it because it's helped me play better, while playing in a standard fashion it was totally irrelevant for the most part.
   
• Credits are actually pretty meaningful. Avoiding death is important because repair bills are a burden. Getting my speeder and paying for skills is tricky. You learn things like elite monsters are really credit pinatas. All of this is marginalized when you are playing properly because while elites might give good money, missions give way more. At my level, a regular mob pack of 3 mobs might give 100 credits worth of grey drops, probably closer to 60 on average. An elite is going to give a guaranteed 250-350 straight credits, plus a grey or something maybe. A class quest will often give me 2000+ credits.
   
• Stims, medpacks, companion choice is also quite meaningful. This is just because I'm up against challenging content rather than trivial content so any edge is a useful edge. Remembering to buff myself and maybe use a fortitude stim will give me an additional 11% health. If I'm against something that's a close fight otherwise, that will turn it into a sure win.

There's obviously some failings to playing this way though since the game wasn't designed to be played like this.

• Pacing is wrong. There are some multi-level jumps between class quests whose gap needs to be filled, and grinding exp with no rested pool for more than about 2 levels gets a bit stale, even for someone as odd as I am.
   
• Drops are too rare. It's funny, playing "normally" I felt green drops were almost too frequent because they kept filling up my inventory, but that's because I never actually wanted them, and just kept them around in my inventory. I was also conflating greens from quests and greens from drops. My inventory was probably filled with greens from quests that I didn't yet sell, but when I got it from a drop I just kind of attributed all the greens in my inventory from drops. Ultimately I probably only have been getting 1-2 useful green drops per level.
   
• You miss out on story. This is obvious, but sometimes it would be nice to break up the monotony, however, as soon as I start doing quests again, I'll start getting gear that makes drops less interesting, I'll start getting enough cash to not be struggling to avoid repairs. I could just do one here or there and that would probably be fine, but when do you stop? I made a decision to just do class quests because that's the bare minimum. Maybe later I will try class quests and main planetary storyline but no sidequests.

My conclusion is that there's fun in the leveling game that gets eclipsed over by over abundant and over rewarding mission content. I understand that most players don't like grinding and would consider it strictly a failure if it were necessary to level. But I think the balance has shifted too far away from monster killing to questing.

• It's too easy to overpower content through general mission experience. This is a pacing failure just like skipping all missions is. I think the balance lives between the two points. I don't know how to fix it really though, lowering mission exp would be a naive way to do it, but a lot of the exp from a mission also comes from mob kills. The honest issue is that you end up doing a lot of grinding in your missions to start with. The difference between missions and strict grinding is that you're incentivized to stick around and finish missions in a trivial area, while when grinding you're incentivized to move to the most challenging area you can ASAP. You feel like you've missed something when you don't complete all the missions in an area, you don't feel the same way when you've only killed 500 sand people.
   
  I think a better solution would be to far more harshly drop off experience for green quests. The game feels like it plays best when a monster is +/- 2 levels of you. It gets challenging when it's more than 2 levels ahead of you. If you greatly discounted experience, (Like probably drop it to 1/5th, I think right now it's about 1/2 or 2/3) when something was lower than 2 levels below you, and even better I think if you granted bonus when a monster or mission is more than 2 levels ahead of you (maybe x2) you would push people to attempt to do content that's challenging (making them more invested in understanding the game).
   
  Ultimately what that would do would be that players who just want to play the game normally (kind of lazy questing, normal shit) would not notice much difference. Players who are OCD about doing all the quests would be able to, but would not end up way over the target level for the next area when they move on. Players who are interested can try and level as fast as possible by doing +3 missions. This would also give some value to shit like the inheritance and birthright items, because having a great weapon for a few levels might mean you can do some overleveled content and get a nice leveling speed boost, as opposed to just doing all the same missions at all the same rate with all the same travel time.
   
• Items are boring. More specifically, you get too much perfect shit from missions. Too many class-relevant (though only green quality) items come from missions that dropped items are uninteresting. I think the best solution here is to take a more diablo style loot system for the leveling game. Missions can give credits, random roll boxes, or companion gear, but shouldn't give items that directly compete with dropped items except in rare circumstances.

Finally, the reason that I'm suggesting crazy shit like this is that I think that leveling can be made into the game a little bit. They already give incentives for leveling up every class and every race through the legacy system. If they made the process of leveling into a fun game I think they could extend the longevity of the game. I think there's enough of a framework there already to do it. Right now the leveling period is more of a story than a game, and the unique parts of the story are few and far between. Creating end game story content is iffy because it will get consumed quickly. Massaging the leveling game to the point where it's maybe interesting to repeat means that a lot of content gets reused, (including any properly crafted end-game content). Basically, give me a rakghoul invasion, and you've got my attention for a week. Give me a leveling experience where I'm challenging myself to defeat tough content to level as fast as I can, and you'll probably get my attention for months. If done well it could also make the early game appeal to players who might have not enjoyed it otherwise, without really impacting the players who like the way it currently is.

It's not particularly radical change, it's just pacing and balance. Make it so that doing missions doesn't overlevel you, reward you for doing higher level missions, and make item drops more interesting by stopping the flood of specially tailored mission rewards.

New patch is out. Let's look at the new stuff in detail:

Tier 1: Plague Leech, Roiling Blood, Unholy Blight Outbreak, Veteran of the Third War, Glyph of Outbreak

Glyph of Outbreak: Your Outbreak spell no longer has a cooldown, but now costs 40 Runic Power. Replaces Glyph of Blood Boil (+5 yards on BB)
Veteran of the Third War does not reduce Outbreak's CD anymore.

I have no idea what the reasoning here was because we just got our 30 second Outbreak back only recently because having to keep up vital tanking debuffs with the same resources we use for Death Strike was acknowledged as being a stupid choice (maybe not in these words, but GC made a blog about it). And yet, we are back in this situation and most likely the new glyph and new tier 1 talent is to blame for this.

I am also extremely baffled that Glyph of Outbreak replaced one of the few useful glyphs we had, too. Is it really so hard to let DKs have more than like 5 Major Glyphs that you felt the need to remove a glyph that was useful for kiting just to add another? You couldn't have added it as extra glyph? Was there really something wrong with letting Blood kite more easily with Roiling Blood?

With Outbreak back on a 60 sec CD, Roiling Blood loses value because Unholy Blight can be used to apply diseases for free. It would already be bad enough if it stopped there, but no, they added a new talent with Plague Leech (Plague Leech - Spell - World of Warcraft) which let's you consume your diseases in return for gaining a Death Rune. Yes, that's right. A throughput talent in the tier that was all about spreading diseases. This talent just has no reason to exist like this. You cannot simply put a talent that directly increases how many Death Strikes/Scourge Strikes/whatever you can do and pretend you still give us a choice.

So now as Blood I went from having 2 viable choices in Unholy Blight and Roiling Blood into being railroaded into picking not only Plague Leech but also picking up Glyph of Outbreak.
We will just have to apply the first set of diseases with IT/PS since we start at 0 RP but after that we will just trade 40 RP for a Death Rune every 25 seconds (Sound familar? It should, because this what tier 5 is about - not tier 1!)

This is not a fun addition to our rotation either. I have a feeling this was supposed to emulate Cata BT but it sucks. Simple as that. If you want to give us back BT with flavor, don't do it through the talents because it makes it mandatory. And certainly don't do it if you need both a glyph AND a talent to make it work. It goes against everything MoP was set out to do.
Remove this talent if you want Blood to have a choice in tier 1 AND not make Glyph of Outbreak mandatory. Give us back 30 second Outbreak or have Scarlet Fever proc from Blood Boil once more - if this, too, sounds familiar, it is because THIS IS HOW IT WORKS FOR EVERY OTHER TANK! (Thrash, Keg Smash, Thunder Clap, Hammer of the Righteous all apply Weakened Blows; all are AoE and neither cuts into their active mitigation.)

I really have no idea what happened here. How could we go from zero mandatory talents and zero mandatory glyphs to this? Was the whole points of the new talents and glyphs not to give us a choice? Seriously, what happened?


I'll offer a compromise though: If you make Plague Leech baseline and bring back 30 second Outbreak for Blood it would work. But it's still not a fun addition to our rotation (and it still doesn't the issue for DPS specs).

Tier 2: Anti-Magic Zone, Purgatory

Anti-Magic Zone's absorb scaling got significantly nerfed for Blood. It now scales from 4*STR instead of 2*AP which effectively takes Vengeance out of the picture. This is not a bad thing at all because it roughly equalizes absorb values for all 3 specs. It also gained a 106k base absorb before even accounting for the extra absorb amount from the STR scaling so that's pretty sweet.

Icy Grip got replaced Purgatory because apparently even DKs are softies at heart and really needed such a priestly themed ability name. In addition, the 10 second Death Grip reduction got baked into the baseline which is just awesome.
This is basically Cauterize (Cauterize - Spell - World of Warcraft) with a twist. The twist being that it can be better or worse depending on how much overkill damage you took since Cauterize always resets you to the same health % and you will always require the same healing to get back to full health (in MoP, Cauterize will not kill you even if you don't receive a single heal). What this means in practice: (DPS) DKs will still not be able to cheese mechanics like Shadow Priests or Mages can like taking Shadow Orbs on Zon solo or even surviving Impales on H Madness if you use a 1 tank strat.
That said, it will still have some uses and here is what I can think of (keep in mind the ability is still NYI):

- The talent sort of gives you more EH whenever it is not on CD. If we ever run into a boss like Baleroc again who could 2 shot DK tanks due to our low EH it might gives us 1 or 2 more seconds to get in that vital Death Strike and receive some healing without dying. That said, if bosses start hitting that hard again we'll have more pressing matters than to find out which Tier 2 talent would provide the best band-aid until the next patch. :P

- The low maintainance version of speccing it and forgetting about it. It gives your healers another 3 seconds to heal you up before you die from abilities that do not one-shot but can still kill you over time (i.e. Deathwing's AoE aura). In this scenario speccing into LB and AMZ would still have been better because it allowed you to avoid "dying" altogether but as I said, this is the low maintanance version I can imagine some people going for if they just don't want to deal with AMZ or LB (this way is certainly not ideal but from a developer's PoV I can see the merit of a passive talent that is less powerful than the activated abilities). This is also one of the few scenarios where it is better than the Cata Cauterize because your overkill amount will generally be lower.

- I think everyone remembers sub 1% wipes. Purgatory could buy you up to 3 more seconds of DPS time even if you have no chance to survive the debuff at all (I am thinking of something like Chimaeron who had little use for LB/AMZ because the hard part was P2 where DPS mattered and healing didn't work at all; alternatively, you can take another hit from the boss that went into his berserk). I know this might be stretching a bit but the talent is new so I just want to list anything that could possibly be useful.

- You use it as a ghetto damage reduction CD* in conjunction with your other CDs to avoid abilities that hit hard but only once, like Hour of Twilight. For example an ability that hits for 400k magical damage post-CDs and AMS will only absorb 100k damage because you have 200k health. In this case you would survive the burst and require 100k more healing within 3 seconds to survive. Ideally you saved up Runes for a Death Strike to help out with this because Lichborne, the ability that would have synergized very nicely with this method of using Purgatory, is on the same tier and hence not available. That said, Purgatory still synergizes quite nicely with Death Pact since anything under a 50% max health overkill gets negated by comboing both talents.
*it doesn't reduce your damage taken per se, but it allows you to survive abilities that would otherwise kill you

While I could see Purgatory being used in this way for specific situations, it still has the huge drawback of sharing the tier with Lichborne and AMZ. In the scenario above AMZ would probably have been enough to save you and anyone else sharing it with you (if the cap is below 100k at level 90 (it currently is much higher but numbers can change etc) something is seriously wrong with the scaling since a single Death Coil under LB will heal for that much; yeah, AMZ is damage prevention and AoE but still.)
So let's take AMZ out of the picture by assuming the spike damage is completely physical and not affected by armor (still 100k overkill). In that case it would make sense to use it ut this is a pretty contrived scenario to begin with. You might argue that Impale on Madness would fit but chances are we will have enough tank CDs and/or externals to deal with it (and that's ignoring how useful AMZ would be there).

All this said, we still don't even know how exactly Purgatory would work (NYI and all that). Basically, there are three ways I could imagine being implemented:

1) You have 200k health, take 300k damage and now are at 1 health with a 99 999 heal absorb debuff. The next melee swing or AoE aura tick is likely to kill you unless there is a grace period of no damage taken (some bosses do stop attacking you after a special ability/cast but not all)
2) You have 200k health, take 300k damage now are at 200k health with a 300k heal absorb debuff. This protects you from getting killed on the next swing but makes it harder on your healers because they now need to do 300k healing within 3 seconds or you die anyway.
3) You have 200k health, take 300k damage and now are at 100k health with a 200k heal absorb debuff. This is basically the compromise between 1) and 2) and I could see Purgatory just resetting your health to a fixed % like Cauterize does (in this example: 50%).

Personally, I would prefer 3). Also, giving Purgatory a damage reduction on proc like Cheat Death has would increase it's value as well (have it last for 3 seconds or something). You could argue we already have WotN but I am not sure a 25% damage reduction is going to enough to let you survive another swing in most cases.


In summary, Purgatory is not a bad talent by itself. The real problem is that it shares the tier with 2 other really good CDs, one of which is a raid CD. The fact that we cannot bring a raid CD if we skip on AMZ makes picking Purgatory (and to a lesser extent Lichborne) much harder. Baseline AMZ would somewhat solve the issue though *wink wink nudge nudge*.
Either way, this tier is much, much better now that Icy Grip is gone because every talent actually now fits thematically, too.

Tier 3: Death's Advance

Now gives full immunity to snares. As a tank this doesn't change much since it doesn't change the fact it's situational (not saying I will never spec DA but the change "only" made DA better at what it was already doing so it remains as situational as before).

Tier 4: Death Siphon

DSi got it's AP coefficient nerfed which is a damn shame. I get that it it's not supposed to outdamage our primary strikes but it was a fun addition to our rotation when you could replace HS with DSi while healing yourself and still adding more damage. The AP change may or may not have been too hasty since we don't know how much our strikes scale at 90 with the new weapons either.

Tier 5: Blood Tap

It now allows you to stack up to 12 charges which is a step in the right direction because we are now down from 5 RSes to 4 RSes inbetween a second Death Strike. This, however, is still not enough to make BT worth picking over the other choices (see http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/5379-t...nic_Corruption for a more in-depth explanation).
Runic Empowerment didn't see any change either which is disappointing.


Tier 7: Gorefiend's Grasp, Remorseless Winter, Desecrated Ground

All of these talents got their damage component removed. This is a good change because you will now pick these talents based on their utility and not about how much damage they do. That said, I am going to miss Relentless Winter's AoE damage because I was looking forward to using it to pick up new mobs but oh well (Curse you, DPS DKs! :P).
Desecrated Ground also now removes the debuffs it protects you from when initially used but it still doesn't remove snares (which might be unnecessary with the new Death's Advance) which is a shame because snares are much more common in PvE which would have given DGr atleast some PvE use.

You know what's ironic though? These talents got their damage component removed because people would spec them according to what offered the highest DPS and not about which flavor/utility they brought. Now if you go look back at the new addition in Tier 1, do you notice something? Spoiler: It's like all Tier 1 abilities doing different amounts of damage with one being much superior than the rest except replace "damage" with "Death Strikes". I just don't understand how the same people who fixed Tier 7 gave us Plague Leech. I really, really don't.


Misc

Necrotic Strike now increases casting time by 50% in PvE and still only lasts 10 seconds. I am quite worried about this because it become now even more powerful on encounters where it works while still being a pain to keep up as DK. I would really love to see a glyph that increases the debuff at the cost of removing the healing absorb so we can keep up the debuff if necessary in PvE.

Death and Decay damage is still really low (damage got cut in half basically). I know damage isn't tuned and all that but DnD damage is very important for Blood AoE threat. We are still the only tanks that sacrifice mitigation for AoE threat if we have to Blood Boil more than once every 8 seconds. We could usually live with that because DnD made AoE threat a non-issue. However if DnD fails to hold threat on it's own, we will be at a disadvantage compared to the other tanks here. It's not a pressing matter because we aren't level 90 yet but I'd rather we avoid this whole mess outright by fixing it before it becomes a problem.

Death Pact, BS, Raise Ally, Strangulate still on GCD

Please, for the love of consistency, fix this.

Beta time is always a good time to crash to desktop due to #132 errors post some feedback on where our class is headed. This will be a long post because I want to include every single bit I can think of that applies from everything I have seen in Cata and the current patch (which is 15589). I might do follow up posts once new patches are released and only comment on the changes so this post should work as a good baseline.

 

Contents

1 The new stuff! 1.1 Ability changes 1.2 Talents 1.2.1 Tier 1 - Roiling Blood, Vile Spew, Unholy Blight 1.2.2 Tier 2 - Lichborne, Anti-Magic Zone, Icy Grip 1.2.3 Tier 3 - Death's Advance, Chilblains, Asphyxiate 1.2.4 Tier 4 - Death Pact, Death Siphon, Conversion 1.2.5 Tier 5 - Blood Tap, Runic Empowerment, Runic Corruption 1.2.6 Tier 6 - Gorefiend's Grasp, Remorseless Winter, Desecrated Ground 1.2.7 Talent Synergies 1.2.8 Summary 1.3 Glyphs 1.3.1 Majors 1.3.2 Minors 2 Blood gameplay in MoP 2.1 The Good Stuff (tm) 2.2 Easy to learn, hard to master? 2.3 Tanks and Hit/Exp requirements 2.4 Damage balance: Death Strike vs Heart Strike vs Death Siphon vs Soul Reaper vs Super Long Title 2.4.1 Rune Order consumption 2.5 Raid utility 2.6 Symbiosis 2.7 Misc 2.7.1 Runeforges 2.7.2 1 second GCD baseline 3 Final Words 3.1.1.2.3.5.7.2.1.5.2.5.2.2.1.3.6 WHY DOES HE KEEP MAKING SO MANY SUBINDECES?!

[top] The new stuff!

[top] Ability changes

Imagine Mists of Pandaria released tomorrow and you just logged on. What did you gain and what did you lose? Here is the list (I'll comment on some of these abilities later in detail but I want to keep it as concise as possible here):

Baseline abilities:
- Death Strike is back to it's pre 4.3 incarnation where it does not heal or trigger Blood Shield unless it connects. Fortunately, it now cannot be parried. It also deals less damage than one Heart Strike now.*
- Heart Strike is pretty much unchanged. The only thing of note is that it deals more damage than Death Strike even on a 1:1 basis.
- Rune Strike now works in all Presences at any time. Damagewise it still is our lowest hitting ability but it's not much less than Death Strike.
- Veteran of the Third War does not grant any bonus Expertise anymore.
- Bone Shield does not cost any Runes anymore. Unfortunately it is still on the GCD.
- Blood Tap has been removed. There is a new talent with that name but it only resembles our old BT remotely. More on that later.
- Death Pact has been removed and is now available as a talent.
- Obliterate and Festering Strike are now Frost and Unholy only respectively. Blood Rites has been adjusted accordingly and now only works with Death Strike.
- Blood Presence now reduces all damage by 10% (crit immunity and +20% Rune speed have been baked in even if the tooltip doesn't show it). (Do not fixate too much on the numbers since I expect they will change, just do note that we got a small compensation because Blade Barrier is gone.)
- Death Coil scaling has been improved, making Lichborne self-healing more effective and powerful.
- Control Undead is new. It works on anything you would expect it to work on (i.e. mobs that are generally flagged to be CCable) and gives you a pet bar with mob specific abilities. Using this ability prevents you from using Raise Dead. Death Pact does not work with this undead mob, either. Vile Spew, however, does work.
- Necrotic Strike now costs a Death Rune instead of an Unholy Rune. Not a huge change for Blood.
- Horn of Winter now increases AP by 10% and lasts for 5 minutes. Abomination's Might has been removed.
- Raise Ally got it's RP cost reduced to 30 and now resurrects the target with more health and mana which is welcome change considering we cannot glyph it to provide 100% health as Druids can.
- Soul Reaper is our new execute ability. It costs 1 Death Rune, has a 6 second CD and hits pretty hard.
- On a Pale Horse is now available to all DKs baseline. Pretty nifty (and who wouldn't want to be on a horse? Yeah, I thought so.)
- Mind Freeze now has a 15 second CD but in return does not cost any RP anymore.
- Symbiosis : Blood gains another tanking cooldown. Currently, it is another Vampiric Blood. Again, don't worry much about the specifics, just note that all tanks gain a tank CD from Symbiosis at (usually) half strength. But more on this later.
- Frost Presence now has Runic Power Mastery baked in (every other Presence is now stuck at 100 RP) and now doubles your RP generation. You can resurrect people out of combat with a DnD+HoW combo now if you use this presence so that is nice.
- Scent of Blood has been reworked. It now gives you 10 RP per white attack that successfully connects and increases your next Death Strike heal by 15%, stacking up to 5 times. Note that you have to use a 2h weapon for this to proc with a 100% chance; anything faster and the proc chance goes down because it uses a PPM system. So no, Dual Wielding is still not any more viable than it is now. Note that SoB is not affected by either Frost Presence nor Conversion and keeps giving you 10 RP per white hit either way.
- Frost Fever and Blood Plague last 30 seconds baseline. FF is not a tanking debuff anymore since the 20% increased attack speed debuff has been removed for all tanks. Scarlet Fever, however, is still around and works with Blood Plague as before.
- Dancing Rune Weapon now copies your abilities without damage penalty - which is awesome. It cannot cast any of new the MoP spells or talents and it's AI is still stupid as hell. The former is likely to get changed as MoP progresses, the latter probably not - which is not awesome. And yes, it is still on the GCD. :/
- Runic Empowerment is now a talent and not baseline anymore. More details below.
- Anti-Magic Shell now generates RP if it absorbs any damage (physical and magical alike).

*When I mention things like "this ability does more/less damage" it's important to note that I do not look at the weapon damage values too closely because they are still changing. What does matter is how much damage our various abilities do relative to each other because that might chance our rotation/priorities.

[top] Talents

I'll go into more detail here since the talents are (mostly) new. Review this if you aren't clear on what the abilities do. I will mention things that are not clear from just reading the talents, as well.

[top] Tier 1 - Roiling Blood, Vile Spew, Unholy Blight

Thematically, this is Disease Application Tier, or in short: DAT TIER. As Blood, we once again have a 30 sec CD Outbreak so we have no problem keeping debuffs up in single target scenarios (such as bosses). So what we want from this tier is the AoE application benefit (especially for streaming adds) and/or another alternative to apply diseases if Outbreak is on CD without spending Runes (relevant once we can pull sufficiently fast). If we want to kite mobs, this is also going to influence our choices here (but more on this in Tier 3).

While all of the talents fulfill the AoE criteria, Vile Spew is nigh unusable for anyone but Unholy due to the pet requirement and the horribly steep RP cost (the damage the ability does is also really, really low but that is more of a bonus anyway; if they wanted DKs to have an RP based AoE it would not come through a talent). If Bloodworms could trigger VS or if you are in a dungeon with undead mobs that you can enslave through Control Undead and the RP cost goes down, it might become a viable option for speed runs. But as of right now, I do not recommending speccing this.

Unholy Blight has a nice animation (hey, that stuff is important) and a reasonable CD at 90 seconds. It is great for applying diseases, especially on streaming adds because it costs no RP nor Runes. Additionally, if you spec Chilblains it will snare mobs so that even if they run past you to munch on your healer because you had no resources available to get threat on them, or maybe because the sun was in your eyes while your cat was dancing on keyboard (while it was eating your homework) and you were busy extinguishing the fire in your house, they will not get very far and you will be able to get them back pretty easily. For speed runs, if you time it right, you can use this just as you move to the next pack while your DPS finishes off the now snared pack and you pull another pack that is now freshly diseased. Epic stories will be written about you and your mighty ingenuity and healers will worship the ground you walk on. Or so I heard.
Overall, this is a very good talent and the one I would recommend you to spec 100% of the time if it wasn't for the fact that

Roiling Blood is also very good (See what I did there? Totally awesome lead-in). This talent pretty much frees up the Pestilence keybind but RB is more than just a Pestilence copy that deals damage. Remember, glyphed Blood Boil has a 15 yard range which is very, very convenient to apply diseases with even on stragglers and, more importantly, for kiting purposes in conjunction with Chilblains. RB also allows you to IT one mob and PS another mob instead of having to put both diseases on the same mob so you can Pestilence effectively. Unfortunately you will need to BB twice for both diseases to apply to the whole group because each BB picks a single target to spread diseases from. Additionally the BB damage is applied before the diseases are spread which is a shame; I can live with it of course, but this talent would be even better if damage calculations were done post-Pestilence portion for the bonus damage.
Do note that if you spec this, I advise you to move a tiny bit after a BB because one of the mobs never gets it's diseases refreshed otherwise (if you played a Warrior back when Thunder Clap had a target limit this will sound familiar because you had to move as well to make sure TC would hit different mobs).
Now with the drawbacks out of the way, let's focus on the real strength of this talent: Sustained kiting. Unlike UB, you can kite with RB pretty much indefinitely if you do it right and at the reasonably safe distance of 15 yards if you glyph BB. It should look something like this.

In summary, this tier has two great choices with RB and UB. Unfortunately, VS just isn't there yet to be useful for Blood. Except maybe if you want to humiliate people in duels by having your ghoul vomit in their faces and win. Not that I would ever condone talents to be used in such frivolous manner (if you want to do it, teabag their corpse with the ghoul first, then vomit on them; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with ~style~). Also, someone should really campaign to get the name changed to Ghoul Vomit.

[top] Tier 2 - Lichborne, Anti-Magic Zone, Icy Grip

Meet my good friends: Lichborne, AMZ... and Icy Grip.

Thematically, this is the Cooldown... and Icy Grip Tier.

Lichborne has remained unchanged from the Cata version but the fact RP generation (see: Scent of Blood and AMS, above) and Death Coil healing (see: Math, in class) has gone up made this talent go up in power relatively regardless. I probably don't need to say more since everyone who tanked in (early) Cata knows how useful this talent is. This is a great pick if you require another tank CD, moreso because healer mana is supposed to matter again.

Anti-Magic Zone received a small buff due to the fact that it does not cost a Rune to cast anymore and a bigger buff because you can now place AMZ anywhere within 30 yards. Apart from that, you still want to use it for magical damage that comes in big bursts (think Hour of Twilight or Elementium Bolt impact) instead of staggered damage that comes with multiple hits that do relatively small damage. The reason is that the absorb cap on AMZ is still pretty low but you can still reduce any form of damage by 75% regardless of the damage cap if it comes in a single big burst.
Don't forget that nothing is stopping you from using it just on yourself, either. (Preferably on a cleaving boss just so melee is tempted to run in and get themselves killed because HEY SHINY.)

Icy Grip is... well, simply not good. Not only does it not fit the theme of the tier but it doesn't even do the thing it does well (which is snare and mob movement). The most it does is save you one Frost Rune because there is absolutely nothing stopping from just comboing Death Grip with Chains of Ice yourself since DG is off the GCD. Even ignoring this, here is the problem: For IG to be a viable choice the encounter will have to fulfill 3 criteria:
1) You will not want another self-healing CD because the boss is apparently too shy to hit (on) you hard enough for you to be in any kind of danger.
2) There will be very little to no raid damage so AMZ is useless as well because the boss is apparently already hard-pressed enough to gently admonish the tank with fluffy pillows that it just cannot spare any nerve to hit anyone else. Fair enough, not every boss has the confidence of a Kael'thas WHO JUST DID NOT STOP TALKING.
(2b) You don't want to look at the AMZ bubble even though it looks absolutely awesome. You monster.)
3) There is one add which spawns every 25-34 seconds that needs to be snared and gripped back. You will also somehow have no way to save a Frost Rune for it because a guildie dared you to "spam Path of Frost as much as you can, you wuss" (guild dare are serious business, in case you were wondering).

Frankly, there was literally only one encounter in recent memory where Icy Grip could have been useful: Sappers on Warmaster. But since saving a Frost Rune is not hard and the fact that both AMZ and LB are of more use there, it wouldn't get specced there either.
Icy Grip needs to do something we cannot already do anyway (or be ridiculously good at what it does) or it will not be specced. The reason LB is so awesome is because it heals for a ton now and can be combo'd with AMS to be even more powerful. The reason AMZ is so awesome is because we do not have any other raid CD available so being able to actually get one is kind of a big deal. Right now IG is the closest thing to a talent that let's you do something you can already do, except slightly better; just like those "Ability X does +5% more damage" ones that got removed for exactly this reason, if you get my point.

I have no idea what to do with Icy Grip either. I figured maybe it could let you sprint so it would be useful for things like resetting your bleed stacks on Riplimb without the use of a trap/Body and Soul. But really that's for Blizzard to decide.
Either way, I am not terribly heartbroken about it because as Blood I already have 2 great abilities I can pick from which is good enough for me. I just like picking on it so much. :v:

[top] Tier 3 - Death's Advance, Chilblains, Asphyxiate

This is one of my favorite tiers. Thematically, this is the CC/Snare Tier. But to me it is the OH-MY-GOD-ARE-THEY-REALLY-GIVING-ME-CHILBLAINS-QUESTIONMARK-EXCLAMATIONMARK tier.

Death's Advance is not a bad talent by itself. I have a feeling this is more of a PvP talent because PvE encounters where you get snared enough for this to be of any use are rare. But I am not willing to discount this just yet because all 3 talents are very situational so if they give us encounters with stunnable and/or snareable adds, who is to say they won't make one where DA would be good? Maybe Blizz should hand out more of those talents that give you a passive benefit when off cooldown and a bigger benefit when used since they look like fun. So in this case, you could add a Sprint mechanic to DA or something.
And to be honest, if I specced this in the current tier I would probably just stand in Hagara's Water Bubble to make use out of it. And if a guildie asked, I'd just say "Because Death's Advance, duh!". Well, atleast until one of the Priest healers snaps and grips me into an Ice Wave just to make a point. Or atleast that would happen if they were able to think of it themselves. Their loss. :V

I addressed this a bit in the Tier 1 commentary but Chilblains just works so well with our other abilities. Having a renewable AoE snare is really good for anything with adds - be it dungeons or raid adds. Is it situational? Yes, it is. But so is every other talent in this tier and all these talents only compete with each other after all. Do not mistake this just for a snare either since the root is very powerful as well. A rooted melee mob cannot hit you after all and this allows us to use CoI as a ghetto stun. If you remember Heroic LK with the (temporarily) enraging Shambler mobs that could dish out the pain then you will probably realize how good this can be. And if you don't remember, you will just have to take my word for it. What could possibly go wrong by doing that, right?
(Just be careful not to root a mob out of range of yourself if someone else is in melee range or they will get whacked instead. Can also be used to troll melee you dislike.)

Asphyxiate is another good talent. It gives us a real stun on 1 min CD and, easy to overlook, removes the Rune cost on Asphyxiate/Strangulate so it's useful even if mobs are not stunnable but interruptable. The only way to improve this talent is to take it off the GCD (*wink wink nudge nudge*). Oh, and maybe make it easier to type. <_<

In summary, another tier with 2 strong choices with Chilblains and Asphyxiate and the 3rd one being a maaaaaaaaaaaybe. It's too early to discount it because all 3 are niche enough to work at some point or another. And there are probably PvP dudes who really like DA, anyway.

[top] Tier 4 - Death Pact, Death Siphon, Conversion

Another good tier.
Thematically a Self Healing Tier* which is very much iconic for Blood DKs. Or in short: The "Suck it, DPS specs!" tier.
*yes, I realize you can read that in a very specific, nonflattering way; go away. :V

Death Pact has been significantly improved and made worth a talent point, IMO. At 50% max health every 2 mins this is really good. It doesn't kill your ghoul either and with the reduced Raise Ally CD it can now be up every time you need it. There is just one tiny problem: It is still on the GCD. If this were off the GCD, it would pretty much be perfect. Is being on the GCD going to stop it from being viable? Of course not, but as a defensive CD it really ought to be off the GCD and a new expansion is a good time to do so.

Ah, Death Siphon, I actually like this spell as well. I especially like the bit where it costs Death Runes because it a) allows the spell to be more powerful than if it used a regular Rune and b) as Blood we can plan for it and fit it into our rotation.
I have read many posts where people say that a Blood DK will never use this because the heal would have to outheal half Death Strike and Blood Shield. This is not true and makes the mistake of assuming we use all our Death Runes for survival all the time (the same people usually want to get rid of Blood Rites as well for the same reason). There are scenarios where we can afford to and want to add damage to the boss because not having the boss enrage is more important than not dying. Naturally, if the boss hits very hard then you won't use DSi and spec Death Pact instead. But not every boss is Warmaster or Zon'ozz at his highest stacks. Even they have ramping up damage and windows that allow you to use DSi. (Scent of Blood helps a little with using Death Runes on non-Death Strike abilities, too, but more on this later.)
Anyway, this skill hits pretty hard now (to put this in perspective: it currently hits harder than Heart Strike, our hardest hitting ability) and has a 40 yard range. You really have to play with it to appreciate what a 40 yard range ability can do in terms of pulling speed and ease of picking up mobs. Apart from some raid fights that can make use of the range (Oozes on Yor for example) and allow you to weave DSi's into your rotation, this spell is going to be quite phenomal in speed runs for challenge modes because of the damage/range combo. If there are mobs that take increased damage, even better.

According to MMO's database the healing portion cannot crit (the damage you do on mobs can crit though) and is not flagged for not doing any threat (like Death Strike for example) so this should be great for directing new mobs your way if you still needed convincing.
(It also says it can be cast while dead but the only thing that happened is that it made me feel stupider for even trying this. Just look at that smug treant face. :v:)

This leaves us with Death Conversion. This was a good talent before they butchered the RP generation rate you could have with Conversion up (the problem being here that Frost Presence increases all RP gain by 100% and 2h Frost gaining 30 RP per swing in FP which allowed them to sustain Conversion 24/7 so Blizzard ended up nerfing Conversion instead of adjusting FP and/or 2h Frost). Before that, Conversion already had a huge drawback because the RP you lose through Conversion cannot be converted into Runes through Rune Strike --> RC/BT/RE. So this is a pretty hefty DPS loss and survivability loss (less Death Strikes) for a skill I was primarily using for soloing packs of mobs so I could Heart Strike instead of Death Strike for the added damage/cleave. But right now there is no point in doing so; the other two talents are simply better in every way. Maybe (and this a big maybe) if you skipped on Lichborne and have no use for AMS so you could use it for the RP gain it would be OK - but still, huge DPS loss and requires you to use AMS on top.

Yet another tier with 2 good choices (it's like there is a pattern or something <_<) with Death Pact and Death Siphon. The former is great for hard hitting bosses because of the massive amount of burst healing it can do while the latter is good for added damage while not sacrificing survivability by as much as only using Heart Strike would do.
Conversion unfortunately got overnerfed so I don't think it's worth speccing anymore.

[top] Tier 5 - Blood Tap, Runic Empowerment, Runic Corruption

Our Rune Regen Tier. Unlike DPS specs, we will care less about which version gives 2% more Runes/min so I feel we are getting the best deal out of it since we can actually pick the talent we are more comfortable with/enjoy the most (in theory anyway). Obviously there are limits to it, but the proc rates are close enough for it that the deciding factor is actually something else entirely. Anyway, moving on:

Runic Corruption is the same talent Unholy currently has. It is the simplest of the 3 talents and easiest to use properly: All you need is one pair of FU/DD Runes on a 6+ CD before you Rune Strike to get full use out of a proc. On top of things, RC procs stack and increase the +100% Rune regen buff instead of overwriting each other and you can put your Blood Runes on CD with no ill effect: On the contrary, this talent actually looks like the tier that can give us the highest DPS because it speeds up Blood Runes as well.

Runic Empowerment is, if forums are to believed, the devil itself. I don't think I have seen people hate something more since the ending of Mass Effect 3 (if I reopened some wounds, this will cheer you up; ME2/3 spoilers!)
Personally, I am loving this talent on live. It rewards gaming your Runes with more Death Runes but even if you don't game it you can get Death Runes out of it - just less. That is pretty good design. So what is the problem? It doesn't work as well without the Cataclysm version of Blood Tap. RE gives you Runes back one by one which desyncs them very often. While RE is roughly providing you with slightly more Death Strikes as RC does if you care to game it, you have to get 2 procs first to get a single DS out of it. RC simply does not have this problem because the 2 Runes needed for DS come off CD together. Even if over a given time RE and RC pull even (or RE is even slightly better), RC gets to DS more consistently. To give you an example: Even a single RC proc let's you Death Strike 3 seconds earlier than if you had gotten no proc (over a 3 second window, your Runes regen as if 6 seconds passed). A single RE proc will do nothing for you until you get the second proc.
This really should not be the status quo here because RE should be better than RC for the simple reason that it is harder to use. You need to set up your Runes before you can Rune Strike and you already sacrifice some DPS because of the lower Blood Rune regen. There is also a risk of overpooling RP or proccing a Blood Rune by accident so there should be an appropriate reward to go with it. Right now this is not the case.
My suggestion is to either bring back old Blood Tap or have RE turn one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune if you talent it. This way you would still have to game your D/B Runes appropriately so the Death Rune is preferably always off CD when you proc a corresponding Rune with RE. This also helps with the desynced Runes since you got an uneven number of D/F/U Runes so a proc every 8.33 seconds is still salvagable but more frequent procs becomes less useful (because you have to wait for the pair to recharge) so RE doesn't pull miles ahead.

Blood Tap (now the actual MoP talent) has a similar problem that RE does. For the sake of argument, I will differentiate between 2 versions of utilizing BT: First the normal way and second the way to "game" it since this will inevitably happen:

Normal way:
You cannot use it for a Death Strike unless you get all 10 charges. Currently it takes 5 Rune Strikes to do so. While you could technically proc a Death Rune every 5 charges there is no point in doing this because the desynced Rune is not usable for Death Strike and would just sit there unused.
When I imagined this talent, I was quite excited of the possibilities because I had hoped you could save charges during lulls in damage and unload when the damage ramps up. Once again Zon'ozz is a good example here: You can store charges when he doesn't have the damage/haste buff and use them when he does. But here is the problem: it only works once per phase. You will not be able to get in another 5 Rune Strikes and get another BT'd Death Strike because this would take too long.
While in the long term you have a 40% proc chance (which is really not far off of RE for example), in the short term you are highly suspectible to burst once you used your charges on a single Death Strike. This is not good.

The gaming way:
1) Get 6 charges, convert B --> D. You would have to make sure that both your B Runes are on CD but one full FU pair is not (this is the trickiest part to pull off because it requires you to not Death Strike for atleast 8 seconds). Right now this Death Rune stays as long as you do not use it. (3 Rune Strikes used, 1 charge remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
2) Rune Strike four more times to get 9 charges, wait for the burst. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 9 charges remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
3) Wait for all FU pairs to be on CD, use BT once (consume 5 charges). You can now Death Strike with the D Rune from step 1) that you sat on for god know's how long and whichever D Rune proc'd from the FU pairs. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 4 charges remaining, 2 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
4) Rune Strike three more times, get 10 charges, use them. (3+4+3 Rune Strikes used, 0 charges remaining, 4 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
5) You are now at 0 charges and you need to a full 5 Rune Strikes to get another DS or another 3+4+3 RSes to pull this off again. During this step you are the most suspectible to burst.

So both methods of BT have the same problem in the end: Once all charges are used, you need to wait another 5 Rune Strikes to get them back up again. If you game BT, you reduce the amount of RSes needed to 3 for the first time only before you need to set up the whole shebang again. Either way, this only delays the inevitable drought where you wait for 5 Rune Strikes to land and hope nothing happens to you because you are very suspectible to getting bursted down during that phase.
Also, go take a look at the steps again required to game it. Does the effort required look reasonable for the payoff? The answer is no. Too much effort and difficulty to set it up for too little gain. Here is what I meant by comparing it with RE earlier; it shares the completely skewed effort:reward ratio RE has compared to RC while having the same drawback of desynced Runes not doing anything, having a lower overall proc rate than RC to boot AND a a more stringent requirement to use your RP without wasting it (Want to use RS between step 3 and 4? Tough luck, charges are capped!)

If you agree with rewarding difficulty, then I hope you would also agree in this order of effectiveness for the talents: BT (gamed)> RE (gamed) > RC. I would even go as far as putting BT without gaming in front of RC as well because it requires manual input even if not gamed and is still harder to play than RC but I'd like to hear some opinions on this. Do keep in mind that RC also still offers the best DPS potential for Blood.

So, now that this is out of the way, how do we fix BT? One easy way is to make one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune again to cut down the worst case scenario of going without procs to 3 Rune Strikes (5 charges + the D Rune you kept off CD). This would work for both versions of BT (gaming it and normal way).
It would also allow you to skip 1) of the setup to game BT. (Though you are still free to turn in the second B Rune into a temporary D Rune and gain 6 Death Runes. This may look impressive but is nothing we cannot already do with the old Blood Tap and our 2 set tier bonus.)
The other method is to up the amount of stored charges from 10 to 14. Would cut the amount of RSes need to get another DS to 3 as well (14 --> 4 --> 10 charges).

Unless the RE and BT changes happen, RC is most likely going to be my recommended choice for every single possible encounter. It is simply that good. Sustained but even damage? RC. Ramping up damage? RC and plan to use CDs (a single guaranteed DS from BT would not change this). Need more DPS? RC. Standing in Stormwind, looking all Death Knighty? RC.
(It would also help to know who BT was intended for; people who want consistency at the cost of throughput? For people who want a more challenging rotation which in turn is more rewarding? Because right now, it's not doing either very well.)

Anyway, enough about this tier already. :P

[top] Tier 6 - Gorefiend's Grasp, Remorseless Winter, Desecrated Ground

An astute follower of the Beta news may have noticed that noone could playtest these changes yet. But never fear, having good imagination is one of my strengths so I'll tell you all you need to know about our
HAPPY FUN OP TIER. :v:

(I will happily ignore the damage values because they are not the reasons we will pick what we pick anyway as tanks and/or fellow griefers.)

Gorefiend's Grasp has a pretty short CD and functions as AoE pull. The fact that it's usable on both hostile and friendly target gives it great versatility. The most obvious use would be to make a mouseover macro and cast it on yourself whenever mobs get away from you. But you can also use it for fun things such as: moving the mobs over to help your co-tank, gripping the mobs to your healer and scaring the shit out of him (if it's a Priest, make sure you refer to this GRAFF I made; not that I am bitter for all the Life Grips I had to endure or anything <_<), interrupting spell casts by moving the mobs mid-casts (i.e. GG the closest mob so the casters in the back get forced into melee), delay mobs reaching you by pulling them back to the furthest mob if applicable so you can perform a tactical retreat. And so on. Combine this with a glyphed DnD that snares and you can put quite some distance between the mobs and yourself.

Remorseless Winter is another Lich King themed spell that can be used as both snare and stun. There really isn't much else to say here because this talent is pretty straightforward but nonetheless very good. A 6 second AoE stun is great, especially since you can avoid getting hit if you really want to while it ticks down through Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight + Chilblains kiting. For that reason alone I expect this to be a good choice for encounters that require kiting.

Desecrated Ground is the obligatory PvP talent... is what I would have said if I wasn't aware of how useful my human racial is even in PvE. Aside from dungeons and raid trash where it is more likely to get stunned, disoriented etc it has been consistently useful in every raiding tier in Cataclysm so far (some examples: Halfus knockdown/stun, snare dispels from MC on Cho'gall/Nefarian, Conclave frost snare, Majordomo's cyclone, Bethilac's snare, Hagara's snare (works as dispel if your healer is asleep/dead/running away from GGed mobs - and yes, that has got to be the best acronym ever)).
Now I do realize that DGr does not include the "Removes all movement impairing effects" bit that PvP trinkets and human racial have which somewhat limits it's usefulness but I do hope this will get added later.

In either case, this looks like the first tier with 3 actual, viable choices. DGr is admittedly niche but I hope that once the snare removal is added in, it will be slightly less niche. And that is only from a PvE PoV anyway. I am sure the PvPers are very happy as it is. :P

[top] Talent Synergies

As noted previously, there is some nice kiting synergies in the talents right now with Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight in Tier 1, Chilblains in Tier 3, Gorefiend's Grap and Remorseless Winter in Tier 6 and possibly even Conversion (See how Conversion does not get bolded? That's totally deliberate because Conversion is bad and should feel bad.) to heal up while you kite since you can't use RP on anything but Death Coil at range (however, Conversion is still the weakest link here).

I also considered adding Conversion and non-LB specs as having a form of synergy because they didn't pick the only other talent that can convert RP into health with Lichborne. However, LB still has a vastly superior conversion rate than, well, Conversion and it doesn't cut into your RP generation. The fact that the other choices in Tier 5 are so much better than Conversion is making a build that doesn't have LB but does have Conversion very unlikely anyway.

[top] Summary

Overall, I'd say DK talents are in a pretty good place. Most talents are useful and will see play in PvE. It is probably easier just to list the ones I am not too happy with: Vile Spew in Tier 1, Icy Grip in Tier 2, Conversion in Tier 4, Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment in Tier 5. Of these talents only Icy Grip has pretty much no chance of getting better just by improving on what it does. That said, except for Tier 5 all tiers have atleast 2 viable choices for Blood so overall I am quite happy with how things worked out.

[top] Glyphs

[top] Majors

Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.
I'll just focus on the ones that are useful or have a chance to be useful for Blood if tweaked a little (some glyphs like VB and BS also remain unchanged so there is no need to comment on them either):

Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon has the right idea but it's not there yet. Trading damage (or even Parry as it was last patch) for another bonus is good - unless said bonus happens to completely useless, such as increased threat. There are a few ways to make it work (here is just a sample but the intent should be obvious):

1a) -x% parry, +y seconds DRW uptime?
1b) +x% parry, -y seconds DRW uptime?
2) -x% parry, +y damage dealt while DRW is up?
3) -20% parry, +y magic damage reduction?
4) -% parry chance, +increase rune regen (maybe even instantly refreshing some Runes when cast, say 2 Death Runes?)?
5) removing the RP cost, adding a rune cost of 2-3 and reducing the CD to 45 secs (the trade off here would be a Death Strike vs DRW)?

Glyph of Death Coil is interesting but I feel it is currently too costly for the effect. 40 RP is not cheap for something that shields for so little. The glyph currently uses the offensive DC values to calculate for how much it shields; to put things in perspective, a DC heal is roughly 3.5 times the amount of that (~21k damage/shielding at 42k AP, 75k if used on self with Lichborne).
But just to stress the fact: The idea is great, especially since Blood DKs do not bring much of defensive raid utility except potentially AMZ (which, admittedly, is good) so anything that allows us to actually contribute just a bit helps but the DC shield already cannot be used on ourselves or stack so I feel upping the value wouldn't be amiss.

Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell is situational so I'd say this is good. On some fights you want to absorb a single big hit, one some others you want it to last the full 5 seconds to immune debuffs and soak as much RP for as long as possible. Needs to be decided on a case by case basis which is an ideal all glyphs should strive for.

Glyph of Blood Boil, Glyph of Death and Decay and Glyph of Pestilence are pretty much the glyphs you want for kiting duty. It should be obvious as to why.

Glyph of Dark Succor: Not exactly a tanking glyph but I still felt like commenting on the change. It doesn't cost Runes to use anymore and I would suggest making this baseline since it's nothing more than a Victory Rush copy by now. (I imagine it would already be baseline if DKs didn't have so few useful glyphs as it is.)
Also, it doesn't proc if you are in Blood Presence anyway so it's not like it would affect tank balance one way or another.

Glyph of Icy Touch gives us an offensive dispel. This is pretty good since (AFAIK) all dispels are getting a CD in MoP so being able to help out your dispellers is a good option.

Glyph of Presences would indicate a need to swap Presences, presumably to Frost Presence to stack up on RP and back to Blood/Unholy but I don't see this being used in practice (for PvE anyway). Since the RP you retain is not absolute but % based, quick swaps are just not worth it and neither should we encourage it to be.
I would rather see this glyph being redone and adding various Presence benefits, mainly the Runic Power Mastery part that we lost in MoP. Blood is already generating RP faster than on live where you can spec for 130 max RP so it is somewhat backwards to remove it when you need it more, not less. (Just to clarify: the RP carry over from changing Presences would be removed as well if they give us RPM back.)

I also wouldn't mind seeing a Glyph of Necrotic Strike that removes the absorb/damage at the cost of increasing the duration of Slowed Casting in PvE in case you run without a Rogue or Warlock in the raid.

And finally, how about a Glyph of Raise Ally that resurrects the target at full health like the Druid glyph does?

[top] Minors

Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.

Most of these glyphs are cosmetic in nature but that's part of their charm. :)

Glyph of Path of Frost is still my favorite glyph and I'm glad it is still around because I tend to fall from cliffs a lot for no reason at all. Seriously, who would even need this? *cough*

One glyph I'd really like to see again Glyph of Crimson Blood Boil that reverts the Blood Boil animation to the Cata Beta one. It looked really good then and I still don't know why it was taken out. Since it's a personal taste thing, it makes a lot sense to make it a minor glyph. (I wanted to show a screenshot but apparently I don't have one with the old BB animation (because normally people don't just stop to make a screenshot mid-BB unless, I guess <_<) so this video will have to suffice to show the the animation I was referring to.)

I also like Glyph of Geist quite a bit and I hope we either get more choices for Undead minions or a glyph that randomizes your ghoul's model every time you raise him (why yes, I do want my Buckethead Ghoul).

[top] Blood gameplay in MoP

[top] The Good Stuff (tm)

The following part of the post will look like there is a lot to improve with Blood because it tends to focus only on the things that don't quite work yet, so I'll take a moment to review what works really well (and there is quite a few things Blood does extremely well):

Many things work just the same as they do in Cataclysm and to be frank, I was quite scared Blizz would revamp DK tanking again and change everything I fell in love with. But luckily, this did not happen.
Death Strike still works the same, Blood Shield is still improved through Mastery and one big absorb shield so timing it remains crucial (because Death Strike is not just active, but reactive and proactive at the same time; it's a great combo provided bosses don't start 2 shotting us again :P).
We kept our multitude of CDs which is, as GC put it in a recent post, part of the charm of being a Blood DK. Hell, we even got the Rune cost on Bone Shield and who knows, maybe next expansion it will actually be off the GCD. :v:
Either way, assume I am quite happy with whatever I am not mentioning and let's move on:

[top] Easy to learn, hard to master?

One of the biggest draws Blood had for me was that it was easy to learn but hard to master. I realize people like to think that of every class they play, even Hunters in full cloth gear like to think they are just misunderstood and we just need to give them "another chance, man!", but for me this was key. Sure, you could randomly Death Strike but that would generally open you up to burst damage while you were tapped out of Runes if you did it on anything that hit hard. And sure, you could let Blade Barrier fall off but you would take more damage. And so on.
Generally, when I die, the first thing I do is at how I timed my CDs and Death Strikes and if there is a way to improve on that (and there usually is always a way to do better); only after that was done would I commence casually mentioning how the solar lights happened to coincide with my point of vision.
I am actually quite happy for the other tanks that also got redesigned with Active Mitigation in mind because it widens the gap between good and bad tanks which gives the good tanks a nice way to differentiate themselves from other tanks of their own class.

That said, is it true that DKs still have a high skill cap in MoP? Yes, they do because CD and DS timing is still there, but unfortunately that is very much it.

This is a picture from 4.2:

I had a tracker for Blade Barrier, Blood Tap and Blood Shield and obviously having to keep the Runes in a specific state to game RE.
But going into MoP we lost Blade Barrier (we lost that one in 4.3 actually but you get my point) which is was another thing to track and help us be better than someone who could not track it. We are also losing Rune gaming as well, what with Runic Corruption looking like the best choice and the Cata version of Blood Tap being removed. I really hope something changes here (like making RE/BT good again) to help with raising the skill cap again.

The introduction of Scent of Blood has made me mildly optimistic because it seems that Blizzard is aware we lack something right now (well, that and SoB is an excellent way to make accuracy stats matter; more on that below). While SoB is on the right track, it is not quite there yet because it does not change how we play one bit.

The only thing that dictates when we Death Strike is the amount of damage we have taken in the last 5 seconds. Generally, DSing after 3 consecutive hits is best (there are some caveats but this is the gist). SoB does not change this because the healing it adds does not interact with the amount of damage we take - which, as mentioned above, is the only thing affecting Death Strike usage (it gives you a slightly higher DS, yes, but the damage we took has a bigger impact on the DS size than the SoB bonus). SoB right now only rewards us for gearing for hit/exp and for being lucky with avoidance RNG: If you avoid enough hits you don't have to DS so your SoB keeps stacking up. But again, this is nothing we can actually influence ourselves.
What SoB needs to make it worth tracking is if you could actually influence the amount of stacks yourself through a mechanic to help it stack or even prevent it from falling off. One way to do this is to make the healing portion of SoB* stack from Heart Strike and/or Rune Strikes but cap it low enough that you want to hold off from HS/RSing too much until you can clear your stacks with a DS. Doing something like this would be engaging and active and would fit right into theme of "easy to learn, hard to master".
(SoB is also a mitigating factor between the two spectrums of high and low DS/min usage since people who achieve less DS/min will be compensated with slightly higher SoB stacks for when they do DS.)

*and only the healing portion; please keep the 10 RP gain to white attacks since that works well as it is.

I just want to stress again that this isn't just me being against making the class easier to pick up for new people. On the contrary, this is a good thing. My problem is that the difficulty at the higher end seems to have gone down instead of remaining where it was in Cata or even going up (hence the whole "hard to master" cliche line :P). I also realize that people may have a different opinion but they can write their own post (preferably with some of this and that. :v:)

[top] Tanks and Hit/Exp requirements

First off, read this in case you missed the Exp/Hit rating changes in MoP. If you still want to read stuff that isn't this post (I'M NOT JUDGING), go read this as well. I'll wait. Figuratively speaking, I mean. I am not actually going to wait because this post is already here. Anyway, moving on. <_<

In MoP, all tanks will supposedly require accuracy stats to improve their survivability. Warriors and Druids will need to hit the mob to generate rage (I read that they still get rage on dodge/parry which I assume is a bug) which directly influences how often they can use their active mitigation abilities. Monks and Paladins do not generate Chi and Holy Power respectively if they fail to connect their respective resource generating abilities either so they, too, can hit their active mitigation buttons less often.

As DKs we have Scent of Blood which increases RP gain and average DS size proportionally to how much accuracy stats we have; the more we have, the more RP we gain which directly improves how often we can Death Strike through our RP --> Rune conversion methods (BT, RE or RC). In addition, SoB also affects DS size and while it's not a deciding factor for when we DS it still adds up on average over the course of the fight. Lastly, we also have Outbreak which is on the spell hit table and an Outbreak miss means we lose atleast half a Death Strike (unless you have someone else available to keep up your debuffs).
But most importantly, Death Strike can still miss or be dodged. While the change to make it unparryable was necessary and very much welcome, we still don't want DS to miss if we want to time it with any form of consistency.

With all this in mind, I am expecting most DKs to gear for atleast the hit and exp dodge cap. Personally, I am quite happy to do so because I never liked seeing a quarter of my attacks not land due to inflated boss avoidance values (and to be fair, I would have vastly prefered bosses to lose their bonus parry chance instead but you know what they say about these kind of things).

[top] Damage balance: Death Strike vs Heart Strike vs Death Siphon vs Soul Reaper vs Super Long Title

Currently all tanks but Paladins have two rotations:
1) The offensive rotation that includes spending resources on abilities that do not increase survivability but do damage instead (i.e. Heart Strike with Death Runes, Maul/Heroic Strike with Rage, ThathingwheretheMonkhitsthemobhardbutwhosenameIforgot with Chi)
2) The more traditional defensive rotation that uses resources on survival only (i.e. Death Strike with Death Runes).

I think this is a good thing for the game as well if balanced correctly. The danger here is that you need to balance every tanks' rotation properly or you might end up with something where Tank 1 using his defensive rotation is doing the same (or even more) damage than Tank 2 who is doing his offensive rotation. And Tank 1 is doing this while being more survivable, to boot. Now imagine if Tank 1 decided to shift to his offensive rotation and he would totally blow Tank 2 out of the water.

On live, the difference between a DK using 1 DS vs 2 HS is technically there but the damage gap between both is not big enough so I can understand why HS damage went up while DS damage went down on Beta. However I think this went a little too far; 1 HS outdamaging 1 DS feels wrong. It also widens the gap between the offensive rotation and defensive rotation too much (and remember, both rotations need to be balanced for all tanks, see above). And to be frank, I do miss having a 2 Rune strike that sacrificed long term damage for short term burst capabilities (I could break Rageface's stun in emergencies with Death Strike for example).

And since I haven't mentioned Scent of Blood for atleast 4 paragraphs now: SoB does help us shift into a more offensive rotation because if you cut out a Death Strike or two for more Heart Strikes the subsequent Death Strike will heal for more.


All this said, I am quite excited to dish out some extra damage with our new spells Death Siphon (if specced) and Soul Reaper. To give you some damage numbers:

- Death Strike hits for 21k with 42k AP.
- Heart Strike hits for 24k, also with 42k AP.
- Death Siphon is hitting for 33k damage with 42k AP
- Soul Reaper hits for 6k damage on it's physical portion and 94k shadow damage with the execute portion at 44k AP
(all this was done with a 2000 DPS weapon)

With these numbers, our highest DPS rotation would look like this:
Soul Reaper sub 35% > Heart Strike (2+ targets) > Death Siphon > Heart Strike (single target) > Death Strike

Again, I realize some numbers might change so we shouldn't fixate on them too much but it's not like Death Strike is going to ever outdamage Soul Reaper for example. Or even Death Siphon because of it's unique Death Rune cost.

[top] Rune Order consumption

(That's BFU on top and BFU on bottom)

Since this is related to dealing damage, I might as well mention it here: The order in which the game uses your Runes for single rune abilities is atrocious. While a human player would try to get one pair of Runes on CD so they all cool down together the game consumes them all in a fixed and non-optimal order. Look at the picture above and imagine all Death Runes and Blood Runes have cooled down. If you were to do 6xHeart Strike the game would use both Blood Runes first (which is ok) then both Frost Runes and then finally both Unholy Runes which wastes potential regen time on the bottom FU pair. A human would have picked the 2 Blood Runes, then 1 Frost and 1 Unholy Rune, then another Frost and the final Unholy Rune.

It's time this gets fixed since we have been plagued with this issue since Cata Alpha when our whole runes system got revamped.

[top] Raid utility

I am very happy that we will be able to spec into AMZ and possibly even utilize Glyph of Death Coil to provide the raid with some defensive utility. I think these things combined with Raise Ally put us in a very good position.

My only gripe is with the raid buffs/debuffs we bring. Right now Blood only brings the 10% AP buff with Horn of Winter. Wouldn't it be possible to bring something else like the physical vulnerability debuff? It would fit thematically and would also allow you to give DPS DKs the magical vulnerability debuff on top of things. Would make sense for something that is closest to being a "Magic Knight".

[top] Symbiosis

Check out the currently known Symbiosis spells here

All tanks receive an additional tanking CD through Symbiosis (it doesn't even matter who gets what; just that it is a tanking CD). Now you are probably wondering how giving tanks more of the stuff that makes them more... tanky-ish-stuff is a bad thing, right? There are two reasons why the current implementation is not a good thing:

1) You should not rely on Symbiosis to give you another tanking CD and directly influence how well you do for any given encounter. Remember Dark Intent? And how it got removed for MoP because of this exact problem? Symbiosis should not encourage class stacking.

2) This is a boring cop-out. There, I said it. Giving me stuff I already have is not interesting and we already have Icy Grip in case I feel like I want something like that. Symbiosis should give everyone something that is situational enough so it's not always a no-brainer to give it a specific class. There is a reason Symbiosis does not give DPS or healers additional throughput abilities so why are tanks special snowflakes? There are so many abilities you could give tanks without breaking the whole balance that I am rather confused as to why this hasn't happened yet. Dash for a tank? Sure, why not? Intervene/Charge for non-Warriors? Also sure, why not? Death Grip for Bears? Again, yes.
(Hell, I'd take Faerie Fire as well because that way it would actually get applied faster. <_<)

Or my favorite non-tank Symbiosis skill: Growl for Rogues. It allows them to off tank and then go back to DPSing (this is not meant as emergency tanking in this case but as pre-planned role so you can cut out the OT for a given boss encounter where they only tank something for a few seconds like Halfus' adds). Basically the job Cats can do now, Rogues can do in MoP. If you have the choice of a Cat or Resto/Balance Druid giving the Rogue Symbiosis, make sure you make the Cat do it just to rub it in.

Not pictured: The Rogue licking off the Cat's tears for being able to do something Blizz deliberately broke in MoP. Irony is fuuuuuuuuuuun. :v:

[top] Misc

Just various stuff I could think of:

Dancing Rune Weapon
Dancing Rune Weapon still has a stupid AI. Most of the time DRW does not stick to the mob I cast it on and decides to walk back to me and "assist" me when that is the last thing I want from it. I would very much prefer if it actually stayed on the mob I cast it on because it allows you to do fun things like Strangulate/Mind Freeze two different mobs or even build ranged threat on a caster.
And the one thing that baffles me the most is that this was actually how things worked in early Cata Beta. DRW would place a debuff on the mob it was casted on and stick on it until the mob died. So why was this changed?

Global crit immunity
Why is this still tied to our Presence when every other tank gets it innately? This talent has bugged out so ridiculously often that this should be reason alone to change it. I would also like the option of swapping to Unholy Presence for the speed buff without risking a crit (you already give up a whole bunch of defenses for swapping) so why can't we get a global -6% crit reduction for speccing Blood?

Strangulate, Bone Shield, Death Pact/Raise Dead and DRW are still on the GCD.
Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Traditionally, all interrupts, survival (and DPS) CDs are off the GCD. And most of ours already are, so why are some excluded at random?

Why are Diseases not ticking the moment they get applied like Rend?
Simple question. Why not? The only drawback is that you can't charge some RP pre-pull on critters by spamming CoI but I'd rather give this up and get instantly ticking diseases in return for some snap AoE threat/damage. I can honestly not think of any reason against this. Can someone else?

Increase Disease durations to 33 seconds
So we do not have to Outbreak exactly every 30 seconds. Sometimes you need to the GCD for something else so having that 3 sec window to reapply diseases is pretty nice.

[top] Runeforges

We were promised new Runeforges in the first Q&A in Cata and I am still hoping this happens. The ones we currently have are mostly bland and boring. Out of all the Runeforges, I'd say Fallen Crusader is best because it is a proc, heals you and increases your Strength. For all intents and purposes the enchant could be a flat +15% Str buff if Blizz wanted to go the boring route - but they didn't. Which is why the existence of Stoneskin Gargoyle, Swordshattering etc. are even more baffling (and that's not counting outliers like this which have no place in the game).

In my opinion, Runeforges should be more than just simple passive stats. Our rune weapons were meant to be something special after all.
So here some sample suggestions:

Spellshattering now increases your duration and absorb cap of your AMS instead of giving you 4% more magical DR. The silence reduction can remain in place.
Swordshattering reduces the CD and increases the duration of your DRW. Disarm reduction stays in place.
Stoneskin Gargoyle increases all healing done and taken by x%. Reduces the CD on IBF or something.

Even if you don't like the examples, the point remains: stuff like +4% parry is boring.

[top] 1 second GCD baseline

This is actually something I keep reading on the Beta forums quite a bit and frankly this intrigues me. As Blood we are resource constrained so a 1 sec GCD would be pretty fun to play around with. Would also make timing DS slightly easier with the lowered GCD and there is the also the fact that DKs are the only ones who got their mitigation tool on the GCD at all (ShotR for example is actually off the GCD).

I don't feel too strongly either way but I would love to test this in the Beta for sure.

[top] Final Words

No WoW related post is truly complete without various buzzwords that are there to give the reader the impression that the author knows his stuff. Here they are: Clunky, Bad Design, Archaic, Creepy Sunflower.

[top].1.2.3.5.7.2.1.5.2.5.2.2.1.3.6 WHY DOES HE KEEP MAKING SO MANY SUBINDECES?!

Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm just saying what everyone else was thinking it. :v:

Johnson “Tyvi” McJohnson is absolutely not related to the World of Warcraft developers. He wishes he could design UIs for them though, because he is really good at making them.

Here is some feedback I wrote. As usual, posting here so people can comment as well:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,
Been a little while, but I've been having fun poking around Balance on the beta. Overall it seems to be in pretty good shape as far the rotation and cleaning it up a bit since WLK. Here are some comments though.

1) Incarnation. Putting this one first even though I'm pretty sure you've already heard about it from other people. It's not just the that damage is weak at the moment (that could actually change a lot if there are other subtle changes to DoT's or Eclipse). Even putting that aside, it feels really mushy for DPS cooldown. You hit it and you get a slightly improved DoT load on the target for ~40 seconds and no other strong benefit. Especially since it's supposed to be the "cooldown" option as opposed to Soul of the Forest's "constant bonus" option, it probably has to be a lot punchier. +X% damage for 30s would be kind of boring but at least pretty functional and something that works if nothing else falls into place.

2) That reminds me, we have Soul of the Forest for constant bonus and Incarnation for a spec-specific cooldown, but it's not totally clear what Force of Nature is meant to be for. Honestly I think a lot of people will be kind of happy to just do away with those Treants, but still, right now it just seems like another 3m cooldown that crashes with Incarnation. And if Incarnation is well-made for each spec, it's probably going to be a lot more fun than the Treants.

3) Starfall feels like a bit of a problem spell. It was to some extent in Cataclysm too, ever since it lost the splash from WLK. The new mechanic where you get to hit it each Lunar eliminates a lot of awkwardness with trying to time that, but makes the spell really kind of pointless (combined with huge damage reduction on current beta). There's little to no decision of when to use it and it doesn't do impressive damage. I feel like it would really worth finding some way to work the splash back in, to make it AoE effect again. It would nicely balance out the Solar-buffed Wild Mushroom on the list of AE spells too. If I'd had to pick a spell to scrap right now though I would have gone with Starfall over Insect Swarm.

4) It might be too late for this, but I think a lot of people would be happier with at least two out of the six talent tiers, rather than one, carrying potential DPS benefits. Right now, with only the one tier of talents and 0 DPS-improving Glyphs, the entire choice of character setup for DPS basically comes down to "Soul of the Forest or Incarnation"? Glyphs is probably the wrong place for this since you need 4-5 of them before there's a choice. Given the unease right now with the Level 90 talent tier and what's it's trying to do, some more DPS options might give some more meat to talent choice. There are still 4 tiers and the entire Glyph system for minor utility choices.

-----

It's not that I'm really down on utility choices (all in all it's a good direction) but here's the worry. At most raid encounters, maybe 1-2 utility things are useful--there might be something to stun, or something to root, or somthing to interrupt etc., but rarely all of the above in one encounter. So on a given fight, I might say "I need Typhoon here to knock adds back in phase X and and Glyph of Hurricane to to snare things in phase Y, but beyond that I just want to DPS." And so for the remaining tiers and glyph slots, your choice for that fight is basically "whatever." DPS is at least something you do in every fight. Right now the L60 tier is something to think about every fight: do I want the constant bonus here or the timer? It's basically always a meaningful choice. But on a fight where I don't have a plan to do much healing, what am I going to do with the L30 or L90 tiers? Once in 10 fights there might be waves of small adds and I can look at the L45 tier and go "which is more effective, a root, or a knockback"? But on the other 9 fights I shrug and leave in whatever talent I had active since it doesn't matter.

So trying to tie this all together, my comments on talents come to three points:
A) To the extent that 4-5 tiers are all utility, I think they need to be rearranged. Instead of one tier of healing options, one tier of snare/cc options, one tier of mobility, one tier of hybridity etc., you want to do precisely the opposite: jumble it up. Instead of having a tier that only matters on the fight where I throw offspec heals and another tier that really matters on the fight where I CC adds, each tier is more likely to be relevant. When I want to toss heals I can pick multiple talents to focus on that, or when I want to be mobile I can pick multiple talents to focus on that.
B) As outlined above, one more tier with DPS-boosting options because it's something that's always guaranteed to be relevant.
C) I just don't see these Level 90 talents coming together for their seeming purpose of serving multiple roles within a single encounter. Dream of Cenarius is closer since it specifically works in the "just throwing out an odd heal occasionally" context. But Heart of the Wild--let's even say you make it strong enough to allow serious offspec healing: doesn't that just cause potential raid composition problems? If hybrids could use cooldowns like this to power you through a dangerous phase of an encounter, you'd stack them to extent necessary to survive while keeping the DPS count in your raid up.

Probably more to follow as I play more,
Jay

Beta is upon us, giving us our first big-picture look at the rogue changes planned for the next expansion. Previously, we’ve seen talent calculators, ability lists and other fragments of information, but we also had to rely on a certain amount of guesswork to fill in the gaps. Now, we can observe and test everything Blizzard has planned - and hopefully convince them to change it. There are serious flaws with the current implementation.

As a simple example, the changes to Feint are likely to cripple its utility. To understand why, we must first consider how it is currently used - starting with the fact that some rogues don’t use it at all. Feint is purely optional. As many classes lack a comparable survivability tool, no fight can require its use; hence, you can completely ignore it and still win. Clearly it is suboptimal to do so, but it’s important to remember that Feint is not mandatory like some of our abilities and mechanics are.

In reality, though, most people do make at least some use of Feint. Judging by applicants to my guild, top parses from other guilds, and parses sent to me by readers (remember that?), the most common usage pattern is to Feint primarily to mitigate large bursts of incoming damage, such as Electrocute on Nef. This is certainly an improvement over not using it at all, although it still does not utilize the full potential of the ability. It’s a usage pattern dating back to when Feint cost energy, so there was a real tradeoff to be made between damage done and damage taken - while it was there if you needed it, you only wanted to hit it if you really *did* need it, and most of the time you didn’t. Such players often glyph Feint to lose less damage in those circumstances where they find it worth using, but they miss (or at least, do not significantly adjust their usage in response to) the key realization:

Glyph of Feint doesn’t just make Feint cheaper. It makes it free.

There is no reason to reserve Feint for “only when you need it” if you have the glyph. You can hit it to mitigate big chunks of damage. You can hit it to mitigate small amounts of damage. You can hit it as a precaution when there’s even the slightest chance you might take damage. You can even hit it just for fun. It’s free. On most fights there’s little stopping you from hitting it on cooldown all fight long - and you’ll take (on average) 30% less AoE damage by doing so. Given that AoE damage is by far the leading source of damage that rogues take, that’s a significant reduction, and absolutely worth doing.

Of course, while on some fights, such as H:Ultraxion, Feinting on cooldown is as good as you can do, there are others - such as Zon’ozz and Ragnaros - where you can do significantly better. Feinting on cooldown is unlikely to catch all bounces on Zon’ozz, but if you keep an eye on where the shadow orb is you can easily mitigate them all. By paying attention to fight mechanics and learning the patterns of incoming attacks, you can optimize your Feint usage to significantly reduce your damage taken on most fights in modern raid content. The more attention you put into your Feint usage, the larger benefits you reap.

Hence: Feint is one of very few rogue mechanics that scales well with player skill - exactly the sort of mechanic that you want to see in games. It provides meaningful benefits to those players with the skill and interest to optimize its usage, without excessively punishing those who don’t (or can’t) use it at all. In practice, you can often tell more about how much attention a rogue is paying to optimizing their performance by looking at their damage taken instead of their damage done - purely because of the influence of Feint. It’s almost certainly the best ability PvE rogues gained in Cataclysm.

...Which is interesting, given that it’s not a new ability in Cataclysm. Feint as a damage reduction cooldown has existed since Wrath; what changed in Cataclysm is only our ability to take the Glyph that makes it free. Feint, when we had to pay for it with damage, was an occasionally useful button we hit in emergencies; Feint, once free, became a dynamic and interesting mechanic for good players to optimize. And this is exactly what is being lost - in the Mists beta, Feint costs 10 energy.

When Blizzard updated the talent trees in Cataclysm, a major theme was the realization that when you give a DPS class a choice between damage and utility, or damage and defensive abilities, it’s not really a choice at all - DPS wins. Yet this is exactly what they’re trying to do with Feint. Energy spent is damage lost, so any energy cost on Feint will put it in direct competition with damage done. We might still use it for Electrocute on Nef and similar raid-burst-damage situations; but for most fights, it simply won’t be worth the cost.

Moreover, there’s no cooldown, so you never have to worry about whether to use it now or save it for later - if there are two attacks that are both worth mitigating, you will always be able to mitigate both attacks. In combination, these changes take an ability that rogues can use extensively to optimize their performance in many interesting ways and turn it into one that we’ll use rarely and mindlessly - if at all. The current Mists implementation wrecks everything that was good about Feint in Cataclysm.

So why are they doing it? Why would they take an ability that, for the first time since vanilla, is seeing good and interesting usage patterns, and revert its mechanics to an era where it was barely used at all? I can only assume they worry it is too powerful in its current form. Certainly, being able to take 30% less average damage and 50% off bursts is a significant (if oft-overlooked) advantage; I can easily see Blizzard wanting to rein this in to some extent. But there are far better ways of doing so. They could easily make it weaker but still interesting and worth using by doing something like the following:

Feint: Free. 10 second cooldown. 5 second duration. Reduces AoE damage taken by 30%.
Glyph of Feint: Increases Feint mitigation to 40%, but reduces duration to 3 seconds.

It would still be an interesting ability (and still worth using) despite being half as powerful as it is at present. Moreover, there would be an interesting glyph decision to make as well - you can choose to have better average mitigation for fights like Ultraxion, or better peak mitigation for fights like Nef. But instead, they’ve made the one change that risks killing the ability entirely - and that would be a shame. I can only hope that they change their mind.

I picked up FF1 again, and decided to write a review (or maybe post-mortem?). It's a great game, not just because of nostalgia, but because it offered some pretty compelling problems despite (or rather because of) a lot of the problems that it had.

Prologue:
I first played Final Fantasy when it was first released. I was about 9. I don't remember much except hanging out at my friend's basement, we killed a lot of ogres. I think my party was something like fighter, red mage, white mage, black mage. I finished the game. I obviously don't remember many of the specifics because it was like 20 some years ago. I remember my friend trying to convince me that TMPR was a good spell. I remember KARY being a bitch. And I remember dying a lot on Chaos. Whatever the case, I did play it, and I did complete it.


Intro:
The game starts out giving you no relevant information. I don't remember the manual, but I'm sure if it said anything about the game it was probably wrong to start with. Somehow as a kid I'd learned that white mages cast healing spells, black mages cast damage spells, and red mages were awesome because they wore a fedora, used the same swords as fighters and could cast both damage spells and healing spells.

But still, no helicopter parent game developers hanging around you saying "HINT: WALK NORTH TO CONERIA. TIP: You can Equip weapons and armor!". You name your characters and you're placed on the world map. Walking north to the city you likely figure out how to equip some weapons and head out into the world.

In my playthrough, I choose the following party setup: Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage. Heading straight to the first dungeon is simple enough. On the way you meet IMP, GrIMP, WOLF and MADPONY. These are all encounters I'd list as "standard" encounters. Your guys probably have like 30 health at this point, and nothing really runs the risk of killing you. Standard encounters are mostly boring. Getting to the Temple of Fiends however tells a different story. My typical RPG sense tells me to explore everything. Doing that here is simply frustration. You run into packs of zombies, surprising spiders and high damage bones. These monster packs I consider "Attrition" packs. Individually, they don't pose a huge risk to a low level party, but fighting them depletes your resources pretty quickly. Garland himself is a pretty trivial fight, and traveling around inside the temple for any length of time will probably wear you out.

Unmentioned were another type of encounter here which is the Out-of-depth encounter. There are Creeps and packs of GrImp and WrWOLF packs in the temple of fiends, Creeps and Werewolves are really higher level monsters. OOD monsters aren't really statistically that special, they just appear sooner than you should expect them. In the temple of fiends, these encounters are more rare that the more common "Attrition" style packs.

Kill Garland, save princess, get a lute. (What's a lute asks my 9 year old self? Who the fuck knows. Maybe they misspelled flute, it seems they use creative spelling everywhere else) Build a bridge, cross the bridge.

End of Intro. "PROGRAMMED BY N A S I R" (I hate you Nasir!)

Chapter 1: Pirate Ship.
This is a short chapter, so I'll touch back on something from the Intro: spells.

Spells in Coneria are LIT/FIRE/LOCK/SLEP and RUSE/CURE/HARM/FOG. Without the Internet, most people will choose CURE and FIRE and/or LIT. LOCK, SLEP, HARM, FOG, RUSE aren't really well described. LOCK is supposed to make a target easier to hit (It does nothing). RUSE is supposed to make you harder to hit (It can make you pretty much untouchable).

Exploring again gets you destroyed by Ogres with Creep backup. Dealing with OOD monsters smartly is either to run or to accept death. (Alternatively you can grind until they're no longer a threat, which is the strategy my 9 year old self employed). You head to Pravoka and go to the Inn to save. You kill the pirates (A "boss" fight, but realistically it's another trivial encounter) and get the ship.

Chapter 2: The Crown.
Driving the boat to Elf Land brings standard encounters. Some of them might be tough given your level, but none really count as being OOD or particularly draining. Kyzoku may represent the first "Treasure" encounter group you run into, this kind of encounter is particularly rewarding without causing a lot of damage or taking a long time to kill. Kyzoku drop a lot of money. You aren't going to go hunting for them because the OddEye/Sahag packs are annoying, but you will be pleased to kill them instead of the other options.

Now I'll recap the story, but I'm sure nobody, not even my 9 year old self who talked to every NPC in every village cared about it. You appear out of nowhere with some orbs, and people say you must be the light warriors and you need to save the princess. You save the princess and she gives you a Lute. Wandering around the Castle you learn that the KEY locks the treasury and it was given to the Elf King. You might meet Matoya, but she's guarded by ogres and creeps so you probably don't. Matoya complains that she's blind. You go to Pravoka, because why the hell not? There's a pirate captain whose crew you massacre, and he gives you his ship. You take the ship to Elf Land because you want to get the KEY from the elf king. The elf king is asleep and needs HERB to wake up. You learn that Matoya has the herb, but she's still complaining that she's blind. You might (if you care) wander around and learn that Astos stole a crystal that can let the blind see from Matoya. If you find Astos's castle, you will find out he wont talk to you unless you have a CROWN. You learn that there's a crown in the Cave of Marsh. You might have also learned that the Dwarfs want TNT which is locked in the castle (if you weren't already motivated to plunder the treasure). If you are more like my current self, you'll ignore all that shit and recognize that there's 1 dungeon you can get to, so whatever you have to do is probably done there, and you'll enter the Cave of Marsh.

On the way to the cave of marsh you'll run into another style of encounter. Asps. This is another attrition style encounter, but with a twist because you need some special cure to recover from the poison instead of the more general recovery methods from the typical attrition encounters. Likewise, if you run from a normal attrition encounter you're pretty much fine, but if you run from a Status type encounter and get poisoned, you're still going to have to burn a PURE.

You'll also learn to appreciate the ogres, especially when unaccompanied by creeps as Treasure encounters.

Later, as you get to the marsh, you'll meet an example of the last style of encounter. A pack of Geists. This is what I like to call the "Fuck you" kind of encounter. This is the kind of encounter that reminds you that reloading the game is acceptable behavior. It's also the kind of encounter that elicits the most powerful emotional response. Basically, a Geist can (and really likely will) paralyze you with their attack. You can run into packs of 4 geists. They have enough health that they don't die in one hit, and they are generally just assholes. An encounter can start and if they decide to all attack first, and all attack different targets, you can have your whole party stunned for the entire encounter, while they pick you apart a few hit points at a time.

Inside the Cave is typically Attrition and Status style encounters. Scums, Arachnids Werewolves, Scorpions are all Status type fights, Mucks and Crawls are Attrition style, and everything else is kind of Normal. Nothing particularly juicy here. The boss is Wizards which ironically don't cast any spells but hit like trucks for their level. Really not too bad if you brought enough shit to heal yourself up before you get to them. What I tend to do is run from any Status or Attrition style encounters unless fighting them is going to use up less resources.

Get crown, give it to Astos, get Crystal give it to Matoya, Get herb give it to King, get Key, get all the crap that the key unlocks, get TNT give it to dwarf, get back on ship and head to Melmond. Oh and pick up a silver sword for anyone who can use it but doesn't have one from treasure.

Chapter 3: The Earth Orb.

This will be shorter. The earth cave is a good one in the top levels. There's a large number of Treasure style encounters. Giants, Trolls, and to a lesser extent Earths (though they probably hit hard enough to put them out of the category) Also, they decide to give you a hallway of giants to farm. It's level 4 though that will be the pain in the ass. Again you run into a "Fuck You" encounter, which is cockatrices. You can't drink SOFT potions in combat, and you can get up to 6 cockatrices in an encounter. If you even have a white mage that can cast soft, he can very likely get turned to stone before he can do anything. If a few cockatrices attack and turn some people to stone, you're just done. You get to the vampire, kill him, run back through the cockatrices, give the ruby to the titan, get the rod, go back to the earth cave, and run back through the cockatrices, and then down to the bottom level where you kill the lich. The Lich is an straightforward enough boss. Make sure you come into the fight with full health, use your best damage abilities and use your shitty characters like my low level thief and black belt to throw heal potions on everyone.

Chapter 4: The Fire Orb.

Go to crescent lake and get your canoe for lighting the Earth orb. Travel to the volcano. The rivers are full of treasure and standard encounters. Hydras are great Exp and Gold, Ochos will poison you but they're rare enough and typically solo that it's not a problem. Caribes are just annoying and pointless. The volcano is chock full of fuck you encounters. R.Goyles have a high chance of spawning and you can get up to 5 of them that will very likely all spam FIR2 on you before you can attack. This will kill many parties. Kary is at the bottom and is a super-bitch: she does massive melee damage with 6 attacks and tons of FIR2 damage. But she's a bit of a gimmick fight. She's weak to status effects, and so SLOW and MUTE make her a wimp.

Chapter 5: The Floater.

If you talked to a guy earlier at crescent lake, he said "... zzz" This means "Talk to me again later after you've lit the fire orb" You talk to him again and he tells you that the floater is in the ice cave to the north. Go north to the ice cave. The ice cave is even more full of fuck you monsters than the fire cave, but at least it's short. Mages will cast rub on you, Sorcerers will randomly kill you on attack, and you find packs of up to 6 cockatrices. The Eye boss is easy, but like many other things in the dungeon has the chance to randomly kill you. Getting in and killing the Eye and getting out is a bit of a dice roll, but otherwise pretty easy. Get the air ship from south of Crescent Lake.

Chapter 6: The Tail.

At this point the game stops trying to guide you at all. You need to go to Cardia (a hole in an island) and talk to a dragon who tells you to get a rat tail from a dungeon. There's a few people who might guide you to him, but honestly they're harder to find than he is. The trip to the Castle of Ordeal is annoying, but uninteresting. The Castle of Ordeal is not too bad but has random transporters. A couple of fuck-you encounters in MANCATS and R.GOYLES, but it's not really a long enough dungeon to stress out over them. Just recognize sometimes you die before your characters can act and reload the game. Go back and upgrade (or downgrade if you're a blackbelt).

Chapter 7: The Water Orb + Tablet.

This is simple enough, somehow you talk to someone who tells you where the caravan is. You go and get the fairy, drop it off at gaia, they give you the oxyale, you bring it back to Onrac, you get in the submarine and go to the sunken shrine. The shrine is simple. There's ghosts who will kill you can can't be run from, but here you get items which (if you know about them, since the game doesn't guide you that you can use their abilities) can be used to kill them, primarily light axe and mage staff. Kraken is simple enough, especially if he uses ink. At this point your knight is probably pretty strong. In my game it took 2 rounds to kill him, ninja and red mage use fast on knight and black belt, knight and black belt attack, kraken inks. Round 2, everyone attacks, and he dies after hitting once.

Chapter 8: Mirage Tower and Floating Castle.

Get the tablet, go to Unne, get the Chimes, go to the Mirage tower. The tower is again pretty much full of attrition enemies. It's pretty short, and has some treasure in it. There you find out that the cube is "West" apparently that means go to the waterfall. You might have already explored it because it had a flashing dot on the map. The waterfall is pretty trivial, everything can be run from there. Coming back to the mirage tower and to the floating castle: The floating castle is filled with Attrition style monsters, most can be run from. However, there's a few very prominent Fuck You packs. In particular, there's an encounter with 1-2 golems and up to 6 sorcerers. Sorcerers have a pretty reasonable chance to outright kill you on attack and their secondary effect is to paralyze your entire party, and nothing you can do, not even a ProRing or Ribbon, can stop that. My first venture up to Tiamat's room saw one of these encounters. They paralyzed my Red Mage, death touched everyone else, and then death touched him next round. The next run through I picked up the Adamant and went and forged Xcalibur and saved before trying again as to waste less time. Tiamat, like Kraken, is a bit of a joke. You get Xcalibur, you fast your big damage, you hit him, he dies. Damage scaling is funny in the game, so a Knight with Xcalibur and a Master, both with FAST will deal quite a lot of damage, especially if they can crit. I think my first round had my Master do 400 damage with fast and a crit. The boss has 1000 health. If you have trouble there's also a bane sword in the early floors which you could give to one of your weaker characters to instantly kill him.

Chapter 9: Temple of Fiends Past.
This is just a brutal attrition test. You can't leave the castle without WARP or EXIT, and there's simply a lot of encounters. For me, this just means if my RDM dies, I need to reload. You get a ton of gold, which is totally useless, and a few interesting items (Katana, Masamune, Ribbon). There's some super annoying Fuck You encounters. On Lich's floor you encounter 2-4 Gas Dragons, which aren't really quite as bad, but have the ability to use poison breath which can kill anyone without a ribbon pretty handily, and a death isn't something you can afford. On Tiamat's floor you can encounter groups of 4-7 sorcerers, which is gigantically annoying. Lich is a bit harder, since he will ZAP at the start, which is really just an attrition style move. He's pretty squishy and will die in a couple of rounds. Kary poses no real threat, she's not weak to status any more, but a few fasts and attacks and she's down. She can RUB but with ribbons and prorings you're OK. I solod her with my knight when I was checking out chests after some of my other characters had died. Kraken is a bit of a RNG asshole, he'll either INK and LIT2 a bunch in which case he's a pushover, or he'll attack your LIFE caster and fuck you over. You can do things to try and protect yourself like FOG2 or RUSE/INVS which might help, but there's always a chance he'll hit before you have that chance; I think the best strategy is again FAST on your heavy hitters and go to town. You should have a Katana, so in my party I'd Fast knight and black belt round one, fast ninja in round 2 and then attack all out. Tiamat is not bad, it will cast BANE which you should be immune to giving you a free round, and it will waste time with LIT2, ultimately probably easier than the normal Tiamat, the real challenge is getting to Tiamat (or the masmune) without running into a large group of Sorcerers.

Chaos is a jerk. He's basically the Fuck You boss of the game. Most other bosses have been easy, Chaos isn't. Now, he still does only have 2000 health, but he's got the ability to heal it back. He's also going to do a lot of damage. The real problem about Chaos is that when he decides to fuck you, you need to start the temple again.

Ultimately the trick to the Temple is to save potions and time by running from everything that can be run from. By knowing what can't be run from and killing it, and by just sucking it up and starting over if you die to sorcerers. The bosses are pretty easy with a couple of damage dealers, but they can be lucky. My party ends up as a Knight with Xcalibur, a Ninja with Katana, a Master with fists and a Red Wizard with Masmune. I exit and save after I get Masmune, because fuck that hallway and its sorcerers.


Final Analysis:

Items:
Heal potions - Interesting naive mechanic. Only one level of heal potions, and there's an annoyance factor to buying them, since you have to do it one at a time. This leads to a decreased desire to rely on them later in the game, even though late in the game they're the most important, since you run into a lot of sources of unresistable damage, and your mage can't blow through all his spell points healing in a challenging dungeon. 99 heal potions can heal you for 2970 damage, which is easy to blow through in the temple.

Pure potions - Well done mechanic. When you first encounter poison monsters, it's by the Swamp Cave. At that point in the game there's tension for gold use. You want the Silver Sword, which is great for everyone who uses it. You also need PUREs though if you want to progress the game, and even just hunting to gather gold will run you into snakes who will poison you. After the swamp cave, poison is used sparingly. It's used enough that you want to keep an inventory of a few pure potions at all times, but don't really have to worry about the effect. There's also the spell, but that's got a price tag on it too, and uses a spell slot, and still has limited charges.

SOFT potions - Fine, not as good as poison. Most encounters that can stone you have a high chance of wiping you outright. A very few encounters are going to leave you alive with a statue in your party. If that's the case, you can use the SOFT, and be fine. You can't drink SOFT in combat, which I think is a big problem. If you could, I think the potion would be better, because it would mean you might have a better chance of surviving those petrifying encounters, and thus consuming more SOFT potions. As it stands though, it's often that you either wipe to petrification, or you escape/win without anyone getting petrified. I do think the game is a bit better because of them though. If stone faded after combat for instance, it would just be something less to worry about, which is probably a bad thing for a game.

Tent/Cabin - I underused these when I was 9. Saving at the entrance to a dungeon is pretty key, especially when there's encounters that will just wipe you. Houses are useful too, and by the time you want them you have a bazillion gold.

Activatable Items - Interesting mechanic. You get the majority of these late in the game. They make a lot of the multi-monster fights palatable. They start appearing at the same time as black magic starts getting a bit weaker. They aren't well described, and I think that's fine for the era, because it made you feel smart when you discovered their powers. Modern players will know about them from the Internet.


Spells:
Black:

Elemental damage: OK, but lackluster. These spells make black mages useful on bosses, and make clearing large packs bearable, but honestly they kind of suck. Spell slots mean you can't cast freely, so your black mage will be useless a lot of the time on trivial encounters.

Status effect spells: They're broken or terrible. An individual breakdown is pointless. If you bought these spells, you wasted your money. LOK2 actually buffs your enemies. The exception is:

SLOW: Slow is a good spell, well, for KARY. Past that, anything you might want to cast it on is reasonably resistant to it.

Instant Death spells: BANE is a bit useful because of its low level and high accuracy, but ZAP!, QAKE, XXXX and RUB are pretty much useless.

WARP: Useful on a black mage to leave the temple of fiends when your white/red mage is dead.

White:

Ruse: This is a good spell. 80 Evade is about 30% chance to evade. Unfortunately, white mages are likely going to be in the back and only getting hit 13% of the time, plus you probably have other things you might be wanting to cast. On the other hand, on a Knight it's a great spell, or even a Red Wizard. The unfortunate thing about it still is that a lot of encounters you would want it on have threatening magic abilities, and it's probably better to simply try to kill them ASAP than spend time casting self-buffs on your hardest hitter. Useful on Chaos though if you're worried you wont kill him before he can CUR4.

CUREs: Reasonable spells. The amounts they heal are moderate, but it can save you heal potions.

FAST: Probably the best spell in the game. Doubles your attacks or cures slow.

Other single target spells: Not worth their time.

FOG2: Very useful spell on multi-hitting monsters. It stacks with itself, and adds 12 absorb to all party members. A few casts of this can make even Chaos's hits somewhat manageable.

INV2: Like fog, but for evade. 40 evasion, so half a RUSE (about 15% evade chance), you can cast it multiple times. You can also use a white robe to cast this for free, so for stacking it quickly you can have 2 people cast it even if you only have one who can use white magic.

HRM2: Useful for ghosts in the water temple, but that's about it. You get a light axe there, so you can use it for free.

AICE/AFIR/ALIT: These spells are reasonable on a white mage, but not on a red mage. Primarily because they can be used to protect against spells you know are coming when you have nothing better to cast. The damage they reduce is pretty significant, but if you can shave a round off the boss by casting FAST first it's probably a good idea.

MUTE: Good for KARY.

LIFE/LIFE2: Obviously good. There are no items that allow you to raise dead characters.

EXIT: Useful in general for surviving with experience after a near death encounter. Also good for exiting the temple to save. In a few situations it can save a run back, which is pretty key.

WALL: Is actually crappy. By the time you care about multi-element resistance is when you're at Chaos, and 3/4 party members should have ribbons. You can use it to supplement your 4th party member's resistance, but there may be other spells to cast that are better in that situation like INV2 or FOG2 to make melee attacks more survivable, or even RUSE.


Weapons:

Weapons are funny. Silver Sword is the best item in the game for a very long time, you collect a bunch of items that are strictly worse, and occasionally conditionally better. Your number of attacks is based on your hit/32 and the silver sword has both high damage and a large hit modifier.

Elemental weapons just don't do anything special against what they're supposed to be strong against. There's a lot of them. They often have lower damage than the silver sword so this makes them pointless. Some can be used by a thief though, so those ones at least have a use.

Armor: Armor's not very interesting. There's some weird tension early with a black belt with whether he should be wearing wooden armor or not, but that's about it. You get too much armor and the way the inventory works that leads to space issues. That might be interesting if there were real questions about what to carry, but there's only a few activatable items and they're not particularly impressive. Ultimately you need to have ribbons on everyone you can, ProRings on everyone and maybe a zeus gauntlet. Armor does give elemental protections, but you don't really have much choice on how to use it.

Encounters:
Standard - These are just annoying. I run from them sometimes, but if they're small I'll kill them. They drain my time more than anything.
Attrition - These are resource drains. I run from them every chance I get. They're a drain both on time and HEAL potions.
Status - These are special resource drains, and primarily poisoners. Really these exist mostly in and around the swamp cave. I will run from them generally, unless I can finish the poisoners off in fewer than 3 rounds. Stoning creatures work the same way I guess, but if they're large enough to run from I'd put them in the Fuck You group.
Treasure - These I hunt out. I'll typically fight these battles, and run from everything else if I have my way. They're normally big units that take up 1.5 tiles squared. Ogres near elf land, Giants in the Earth Cave, Hydras near crescent lake, T-Rexes and Ankylos near mirage tower. They give huge exp, generally die quickly, and while they may hit hard, they are quick and profitable.
Fuck You - These guys just suck. I try and run when running is possible. If there's an encounter that is iffy, but I might survive if I kill a couple I will maybe attack, like 4 paralyzing undead I'll probably attack, but 8 paralyzing undead I'll run from. I may leave my thief to attempt to run but attack with others if it's really iffy. Things like Sorcerers or Mages I just run from. A successful run means no deaths, getting an attack off instead of running, and then just losing a player and having everyone else stunned is no good.


Conclusion:
The game is oddly compelling still, even after 20 years. I think a few reasons for that is:

1) Discovery. A lot of the spells are hit and miss. Coming in to playing the game, I knew little about the specifics of it. I had an image of a black mage in my head, which turned out to be very contrary to the actual reality of the black mage. A large part of this was simply because the spells didn't work correctly. Ultimately it was because black magic just sucked. Other things that were interesting to me to learn were things like the way that running worked, (which is something I can only really learn today, by the Internet). However, while some things I can learn via the Internet today, there are some things I can not discover through the game because they've been spoiled by the Internet already (like spell use).

2) Fuck Ups. I fucked up my game. I accidentally bought WARP for my red wizard instead of EXIT. That filled my spell slots and I was unable to buy LIFE. Since a red wizard can't buy LIF2, and I don't have anyone else to cast LIFE, I can't recover from a death. This doesn't end the game, but it elicits an emotional response.

3) Frustration: See fuck ups. Again, one of the big things I felt about the game was the frustration of watching my 4 characters die slowly to hundreds of 5 points hits from geists that keep me permastunned. After a while you get used to the fact that sometimes your party will just die, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still piss you off. One of the things about Nintendo games from back there in general was just how much rage they could generate. Most games try to remove that, but I think that's a useful tool. When I'm angry about the fucking RNG screwing me over, maybe yeah, I throw the controller at the NES and stomp around. But when I do finally finish that dungeon, I'm smug and satisfied. I tell my friend it wasn't that hard. He's still shouting about the stupid cockatrices stoning his party or whatever. I give sage advice about how to calm down and accept the deaths.

4) Imbalance: Some shit's just not balanced. Fighters are far and away the strongest characters. The only purpose anything else serves is to cover specific roles that the fighter doesn't. This means a few things, first of all, it makes me ache to try a different party setup to see if I can do it with, say, no fighter. Party challenges or single character challenges are common there. It means that as you learn about the game, you might decide, fuck this, this game is hard, but my fighter is strong, I'm going to add more fighters and try again. Maybe you do better, maybe you realize you don't have enough good weapons if you do that. Whatever the case is though, with the imbalance you can make decisions that greatly impact your gameplay. Playing 4 thieves or 4 blackmages, or 2 thieves/2 black mages would be a pretty difficult challenge. If all the classes were balanced, it would not be so much a challenge as just a different perspective.

5) Annoyance: Not quite frustration, but tedium. Some of the game's mechanics are metered by tedium. For instance, HEAL potions are cheap enough that you can buy 99 of them reasonably early in the game. However, you rarely stay at 99 HEALS all the time simply because of how annoying it is to buy them. Likewise, it's quite annoying to USE them because of the way the menu works. What this annoyance does is it guides a player to only use the HEAL potions when it's actually necessary. With later FF games, you could buy quantities of HEAL by pushing left and right to increase quantities by 10, and there were multiple levels of heal potions. The cursor would remember its position too, so you could drink multiple potions easily. In FF1 however, this is quite a bother. I find in my own play that I would tend to avoid potion use altogether except in a case where I was about to hit a boss, or if a character dipped below a threshold where they would die in the next combat. I'd also stay topped up if I was progressing through a particularly hard dungeon. In later FF games I would be full health all the time, since it was so simple to just drink potions, and MP was generally pretty available for cures.

6) Progression: My 9 year old self was a fan of this. There's a tradeoff between annoyance and power. The more encounters you beat, the stronger you get. The stronger you get, the less annoying the encounters get. My 30 year old self is less interested in it, but I still got enjoyment from it. The first point in the game where progression was a real question was the Swamp Cave, and later the Earth Cave. I came into the game deciding I wouldn't grind like I remember doing as a kid, I was just going to go straight through shit. On getting to the swamp cave, I found that I just didn't have the power to dominate it. So what ends up happening is I head towards the swamp cave, I get damaged to the point where it's risky to not turn back, I turn back, get to Elf Land, and maybe buy some more PUREs, some more HEALS, and venture forth again, maybe this time I get a little further, but need to turn back, do it again. Eventually, I get to the Swamp and the Swamp Cave. I use a tent, head into the cave, go explore the north fork, get some of the treasure, but get weakened again to the point where it would be stupid to continue. I head back to town, and by this point I can afford a silver sword for my fighter. I head back to the cave, tent again, delve again, this time going down a different path. Collect some treasure, run into wizards, die. Go back down, collect some treasure, exit, save, run to town, run back, save, go back down... etc. Eventually bit by bit I get the crown and clear the treasure out. Occasionally I die, and occasionally I get fucked by geists on the way back, but I did get stronger each time I set out, if only by a little bit, or if only because I was able to afford more potions on the next excursion. As a 9 year old, I would accomplish the same goal but by different means. I'd wander around elf land looking for Ogres, and killing everything. I'd get gold and level up, I'd get all of the best items I could from the town, then I'd try the cave. If I died, I'd go back to Elf Town and fight until I got a couple more levels, and I'd try it again.

Both strategies were successful. As my 30 year old self, I'm more tolerant of deaths, and more confident about turning back and getting back to town to heal without dying. I was more interested in trying to complete the area as early as possible. As my 9 year old self, I was more tolerant of tedium, so I made the choice to just get stronger, to get that new weapon, to get that next level, and then try and hopefully crush everything on my path. I think that being able to make that decision is a great thing about the game.

In the Earth cave there was a similar scenario, but in the Earth Cave there was the possibility of just outright dying. There was a progression of knowledge there, in that sometimes I would go through the cave, and open chests, and maybe I'd just get petrified and die, but then later I would know whether it was worthwhile to get those chests or not. I could optimize the route next time. Again, as a 9 year old, I just had the opportunity to kill a lot of Giants, which I did. The chance for cockatrices to petrify you decreases as you level up so it made the rest of it a bit more palatable.


Honestly I think that none of these things were actually designed. And I think that because of that, a lot of them actually work better. Funny things like non-working spells, I think in the context of this game, actually add to it rather than detract. It makes me think about things like Mind Soothe and Swirly Ball and Sentry Totem, and other marginalized spells in WoW that were removed. If I were to just say that removing sentry totem was a mistake, I'm sure the reaction would just be "You're a retard", but I think that sort of "noise" in a game can provide some good. Some things about the game are straight bad. The fact that I fucked up and can't get LIFE was fine, but the fact that LIFE is the only res that my party can use, and the only way to get a res is to restart the game is less fine. If I had an option to get a fenix down or something, or even if I could kill a boss to unlearn a spell or something, that would be OK, but the temple gets much more annoying when one death means you need to restart. I suppose there's always the chance that you could lose your mage, and that's just as devastating. But it's pretty annoying to lose my Ninja and have my red mage just shrug shoulders, and Exit out.

A Games of Thrones: The Card Game is a relatively new thing for me. For those unfamiliar with the game it's very much like other CCGs (Magic, Pokemon, etc). One of the big differences though is that it is an LCG instead of a CCG. The principle difference is that LCG card packs have fixed predictable content. Meaning that if there is a card you'd like to include in a deck you know exactly what pack to buy. In addition packs include three copies of every card included in the pack (which is the limit of the number of one specific card you can have in a deck).

Like all other CCGs, GoT: LCG requires players to build decks in order to be competitive. One of the things about GoT that I like the most is the Plot deck. Each player builds a plot deck along with the "regular" deck. The plot deck serves several purposes for a player. It determines initiative/turn order, gold income, and claim. In addition to that each plot has some effect in the game. These are wide and varied. I won't go into the machinations of the rules since that's too much to discuss here; suffice it to say though structuring the plot deck is fundamental to the success of a GoT deck overall.

So what makes for a successful deck? Perhaps we should first clarify what's considered to be a successful deck. In my view, a successful deck is one that consistently performs well. Note that I make no mention of win/lose ratio in that. Outcomes are highly dependent on what cards are drawn and the decisions your opponents make so expecting to win 100% or even 75% of the time is unreasonable. What matters is that your deck is often able to threaten a win. Losing by two or three power is still a success (though not a victory, of course) because it's very possible that had your or your opponent made one decision differently you would have come out on top. So, if your deck manages to win and be competitive most of the time by coming in a close second or third then I would argue that you have a successful deck.

Now that we've defined what a successful deck is let's move on to making one...

Choose a House / Develop a Concept / Follow a Theme

The absolute first decision that you need to make when building a deck is choosing the house you wish to play. Note that Fantasy Flight has developed this game so that each house as a "skill set" or sorts as well as major and minor themes for each. What's important is to understand what each house is good at and working within that framework. For example: House Stark is the strongest when it comes to military challenges. They have strong military characters and events that play of winning military challenges. Conversely they are very weak when it comes to intrigue challenges; having just enough characters to handle some intrigue defense but no more than that. Don't try to be clever and figure out some way to make an intrigue strong Stark deck. You'll be going against how Fantasy Fight developed the game, not to mention the theme of the house in the story, and you'll just look silly. There are plenty of ways to make a successful military deck with Stark. If you want to innovate, innovate where the house has strength.

All the houses have a few sub-themes to them. Do a little research to see what the strengths and weaknesses are of each house and build a deck around a house and theme that sounds interesting to you. Try and choose a "main" and "minor" theme to your decks as well. If your deck is to "monotone" it risks being easily countered especially if a crucial combo gets broken. Try and build a deck with characters that are double duty and can work in alternate combos if your main combos don't work or are unavailable.

Proportions

A GoT: LCG has be a minimum of 60 cards (not counting the plot deck which is a fixed size of 7). In the deck you can have characters, events, locations, and attachments.

The current meta-game rule of thumb is to construct your deck to have approximately 30 characters and 30 of everything else. I'm pretty much in agreement with this. Only characters can participate in challenges and winning challenges is key to winning a game. Additionally, I find that keeping your deck as small as possible is advantageous. In many cases less is more. Resist as much as possible stuffing your deck with too many events, characters, or locations. The larger your deck gets the slower it will be.

Proportioning how many locations, attachments, and events you will need is a bit more difficult. In my view, you should have a minimum of 10-12 locations that provide either income or some sort of cost reduction. Balancing that is also a challenge in of itself. If you have events/characters that call for the use of gold you'll want to load up on +gold cards. If you don't then cost reduction is probably the better way to go. Depending on the nature of the deck you are building you'll probably have to toss in a few other lands for special effects to build combos. Attachments and events are also highly variable. When it comes to both take only what you absolutely need in order to make your combos work or keep them safe (save and cancel events for example).

Uniques vs. Non-Uniques

Now is probably a good time to discuss how unique characters fit into the design of a deck. Unique characters, locations, and attachments have the benefit of duplicates in order to protect them from kills and discards. In my view, duplicates are the easiest and most reliable mechanism in the game to protect your key characters. In addition to the ability to have duplicates unique characters are usually immune to some of the more annoying events in game (Seductive Promise for example). As characters go roughly 15-20 of your characters cards should be uniques. In the count should be 2-3 characters where you have all three copies of their card. Most decks rely on a build where two or three (sometimes more) characters are fundamental to the success of the deck. The same goes for your unique attachments and locations. If there is one that is particularly important to the theme and build of your deck put in multiple copies. It allows you get the card out faster as well as protect it with duplicates once in play.

Don't Plan for Every Contingency

Avoid the trap of trying to build your deck to account for every contingency that might occur in the game. Doing so will lead to un-disciplined deck building. Stick to developing your core combos and finding ways to sustain them and keep them in play. In other words...

KISS (Keep it simple stupid). This sage advice applies universally. For example, if you are doing a Baratheon power rush deck you more than likely would want Robert Baratheon, Ser Courtnay Penrose, and Ser Axel Florent in your deck. Those three characters alone will allow you to make two strong power challenges every turn. Right there you have a simple functioning combo. Toss in a few Heart of the Stags and you expand on it more. Build simple combos that are easily replicated and easy to execute. Powerful combos that are dependent on high amounts of resources and (even worse) certain reactions from your opponents are unreliable and dangerous. In the Baratheon power rush example, even if Robert were to be killed so long as you retain other strong power challenge characters and have events like Superior Claim to capitalize on power challenge wins the deck can still be successful and victorious.

The Plot Thickens

The plot deck is the trickest deck to build and I usually build the plot deck last. Some houses or deck concepts have plots that are "must haves" (Martell and To the Spears! is a good example). I found this aspect of deck building is the part that is the most subject to experimentation though there is a breakdown I believe that will work for most decks. Let's call it the 2-3-2 rule.

First, two "setup" plot cards. Summoning Season and Building Season are perfect examples of what I mean. They have a fair amount of gold and allow your to pluck out a key card from your deck so you can start building your combos. Other good "setup" plots would be high gold plots with effects that either protect you from challenges or otherwise provide you space to recovery from a previously bad turn. The newly released Across the Summer Sea is another excellent "setup" plot.

You'll then want three "action" plots. These plots could be almost anything. Usually you'll want them to be a plot that opens up an opportunity to make some challenges. Examples here can be Game of Thrones or the previously mentioned To The Spears! The options are very broad here so keep in mind the type of deck you have made and how the combos work.

Finally, I feel that most plot decks should have two plots with a claim value of two (or more). High claim plots are good for when you are making an attempt to zero in on a win. They also all you to wear down an opponent who is too far ahead. High claim value plots tend to have a downside (usually low gold and initiative) so keep that in mind when making your choices.

A quick word about The Power of Blood...

Resist putting this plot into every deck you make. Initially it looks like a great plot to put into any deck heavy with noble characters (especially when the noble character is critical to a combo). There are several problems though. First, it will only protect your character for one turn. What happens on the next turn? How will you keep the character alive then? Second, it shifts kills to other characters you want to keep. Keep in mind that Power of Blood also prevents noble characters from being the target of military claim and any kill effect. If by chance you have many duplicates on your noble or some attachment that would save him you could have used him/her to soak the kill, keep them alive, and not shift kill effects to important secondary characters. The Power of Blood takes away that ability by forcing you to choose a character that is eligible for a kill. Finally, The Power of Blood extends protection to all noble characters in play. You might be doing an opponent a favor by playing it. Even worse you maybe protecting their combos while they have a plot that allows them to be more aggressive.

The Power of Blood is a powerful and useful plot card but make sure it's necessary for your deck and remember the consequences when playing it.

Emptyrepublic's Tips for Strong Deck Building

So here's my short list for a building a GoT: LCG deck...

• Develop a concept and a theme for your deck and think out how it's executed. Don't try and be clever and work outside of a house's strengths.
• Stay disciplined and keep your deck size as close to 60 cards (not counting the plot deck) as much as possible. If you can make it 60 and keep it there, all the better.
• Follow the current meta-game and stick with an overall ratio of 30 characters to 30 of everything else.
• Among your 30 characters make half to two-thirds of them uniques with plenty of copies to protect the important ones.
• For the rest of the deck make sure to have enough income and cost reduction locations so you can get cards out quickly. Don't go crazy with events.
• Make sure that the combos you are building to support the theme are easily replicated over the course of the game with more than one character or event.
• When building your plot deck remember the 2-3-2 rule.

A Simple Simulation

Now testing a deck before you play a game with someone is a bit hard. I use a simple system to "simulate" how a deck performs. I use this system for both joust and melee decks. This is far from a perfect system. Simulating like this misses a lot that can happen during a game, but it's a simple way to experiment and have a sense if your combos can "hold up" to typical punishment. So here's the rules for the simulation.

1. Start with the usual setup rules.
2. Regardless if the deck is for joust or melee do not assume any benefits from titles (namely the +2 gold title or the +1 draw title).
3. Begin playing a "full turn". Pick a plot, reveal it, draw two cards always (unless you meet the requirements for an agenda), and then marshal.
4. When you are done with marshaling then pretend you suffer one kill effect on any character (this could be from military claim or some sort of targeted kill) and one discard effect (from intrigue claim or some discard effect).
5. If you have the ability to save a character or prevent discard from step 4 then do so (if you want). The intent of the simulation is to see how your deck handles punishment. If you can't save/cancel then kill the character and/or randomly discard your card. Stand your characters, and then tax yourself.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 three more times (so you simulate 4 total turns). Don't bother going past 4 turns of simulation. That far in any attempts to simulate an actual game become very inaccurate.

In each of the turn of the simulation never assume you win a challenge. Never collect power to "guess" if you won on that turn or not. The purpose of the simulation is to see how well your deck performs to "typical" punishment in an average game and get a sense of its "staying power". This simple system allows you to see how quickly you can pull out combos, how easily you can save against minimal loses, and how the deck endures. If you are having trouble getting cards out or keeping them in play under these conditions you'll then know it's time to go back to the drawing board and reconsider how you have structured your deck.

Finally, Remember Your Clausewitz / Moltke

German General Helmuth Graf von Moltke (a student of Carl von Clausewitz) is famous for once having said... "No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy". No matter how well thought out and designed your deck might be you need to remember that once a game begins your opponent will likely do something you did not anticipate and your grand plan for victory will be undone. Always find ways to adapt, alternate paths to victory. The map you lay out with your deck is not likely the one that will always take you to victory. You will make a mistake, your opponent will make mistakes. The nature of the game will shift, and no two games are ever the same. Play, watch, and learn.

So many projects to do. I wonder why I'm still procrastinating.

One of the major announcements at Blizzcon was the revelation that the talent trees are being revamped (again) in Mists - and much more thoroughly than they were for Cataclysm. Instead of having a single talent tree comprising both “essential” and “utility” talents, they’ve split these into two different systems. Then, since the “essential” stuff is, well, essential, they simply give it all to you (at appropriate levels) just for choosing your spec, and all character customization beyond class and spec is done through selection of utility talents. And from a conceptual perspective, this makes a lot of sense - if you have a lot of abilities that everyone is going to take anyway, there’s little point in making them do talent selection to get them. And this all sounds great in theory, but in practice there are significant flaws with system - in a number of key respects, I’m not sure its any better than what we have now.

First, it doesn’t really make it any easier to create balanced talents. Cookie-cutter specs exist not because of any inherent property of how you choose them, but the simple fact that some of the available options are a lot better than others; for the most part, the only choice we get is between options that are equally useless - and a choice between abilities you’re never going to use anyway isn’t that meaningful. And the new system does little to change that - in order to allow meaningful customization and end cookie-cutter specs they will need to do something that they’ve been failing at for years: design equally useful but clearly distinct talent choices. If they’re balanced to the same standard as the filler in the existing trees, it will still be a collection of meaningless and obvious choices.

Second, the new system lacks any ability to separate PvP choices from PvE ones. One of the great challenges of balance is that different types of content have very different priorities, so its almost impossible to create choices that are meaningful for all players at the same time. The current system handles this elegantly - there are enough points to spend that you can always afford to take the talents that are essential for the content you’re doing. By the time you get down to the 31st-best talent in the tree, you’re picking between things that are (hopefully) useful but (always) nonessential, regardless of what your priorities happen to be. So while a raiding Assassination rogue might be deciding between Deadly Brew and Deadened Nerves for that last point, and that decision might be obvious for a PvP rogue... it doesn’t matter, because a PvP Assassination rogue will by choosing between completely different talents in some other part of the tree.

The new system doesn’t have this flexibility. All rogues, regardless of spec or content type, are picking between the same options - and it simply will not be possible to make those choices meaningful for all rogues at the same time. I they want to give PvE rogues interesting choices, they will inevitably create some decisions that are obvious or meaningless for PvP rogues, and vice versa. Options that are balanced for one spec may not be balanced for all of them. So when it comes time to make decisions about how to pick talents for a particular spec and content type, you won’t have 6 meaningful choices to make - you’ll have perhaps 2, as the rest will have been balanced with other types of content in mind. You’ll have, in other words, about the same amount of choice you have now.

Blizzard said a major goal of the new system was to spell an end to cookie-cutter specs, to help you feel different than the rogue standing next to you in town. And as far as I can tell, that’s only true to the extent that it feels better to differ by 2 talents out of 6 instead of 2 out of 41. If you’re a raiding rogue, and you’re standing next to another raiding rogue, you’re still going to have mostly the same abilities. And while you’ll probably have more than 2 talents different when comparing to a PvP rogue, that’s true of the current system as well. In terms of spec differentiation, I don’t know that the new system is any better than the current one.

Which is not to say, mind you, that the changes are pointless - its just that the gains are not in choice, but in usability. At current, the average casual raider has little chance of figuring out what the “right” spec is on their own - he sheer number of options can be intimidating, and the benefits of some talents can be quite subtle and hard to compare. Hence, the expectation right now is that if you’re in any way serious about your performance as a rogue, you do some research online - at EJ or one of the other sites where such things are discussed - and read up on what the consensus choices by the community are. Blizzard has indicated dissatisfaction with this state of events - they’d rather the choices were simple and clear enough for the average player to be able to come up with a strong, viable spec without relying on extensive external guidance. And while the new system might not fully realize that goal, it certainly is closer than the current one. What they’ve done, then, is create a system that provides about as much choice as the current one, but is hopefully much simpler and easier to use. This might not be a meaningful improvement for more serious players (which probably includes the entire audience of this blog), but its hard to argue that “simpler and about as good” isn’t a reasonable step forward for the system as a whole.

Of course, to even do that much relies on the talents being well balanced, and currently, they’re... not. Lets take a quick look through the tree from a PvE perspective:

Level 15: Stealth
Nightstalker is a cool toy that lets you move around more quickly in noncombat situations. Subterfuge lets you launch a couple of extra stealthed attacks following a Vanish, which mostly means extra ambushes for Subtlety. And Shadow Focus makes Vanish into a DPS cooldown, or improves it if already was one. Hence there’s no actual choice here - everyone will just take whichever option gives them the most damage - usually Shadow Focus, but possible Subterfuge for Sub rogues.

Also note that (as I’ve previously discussed) I think having vanish be a DPS cooldown is a mistake, and while I’m sort of okay with the notion of it remaining one for Sub, we absolutely don’t need a talent that guarantees it will be for all specs. Shadow Focus is just a bad idea, and needs to be replaced.

Level 30: Damage Reduction... and Deadly Throw
Combat Readiness and Deadly Throw are both already available to us, and I don’t believe I’ve used either of them in a raid setting since the launch of Cataclysm. Nor do I see any reason to believe that will change. Nerve Strike might be a little better, but its still nothing we’re going to use on anything close to a regular basis. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the fact that this tree offers little to interest the raiding rogue - PvP rogues deserve interesting choices too - but it does put us 0 for 2 in the “interesting choices for PvE” department.

I’d also note that Deadly Throw’s inclusion in this tier is a little bit odd - the other two talents deal pretty specifically with increasing survivability, and Deadly Throw... doesn’t. At least not directly. So the obvious approach to fixing this tier is replacing it with something that better fits the theme. The problem being: either said replacement will be good in PvE, in which case it will be the obvious choice; or it will be equally useless in PvE, which still leaves us with no interesting choices.

Level 45: Self-Healing
Its almost comical how poorly balanced Improved Recuperate and Leeching Poison are for PvE. In current content I have roughly 150k HP and do 35k DPS; hence Improved Recuperate increases my healing by 500 HPS (but only while I have Recuperate up) and Leeching Poison heals me for seven times that. And Improved Recuperate costs me damage to put up, while Leeching Poison doesn’t. And while its true that Improved Recuperate also gives 6% damage reduction, that will only make up a defecit of 3k HPS if I’m taking more than 50k DPS - which should basically never happen. This might be an interesting choice in PvP, where your utility poison is more valuable, Recuperate is more likely to be up, and your damage is quite a bit lower; but from a PvE perspective Leeching Poison is the runaway winner between these two.

Fortunately, the decision between Cheat Death and Leeching Poison is rather more interesting. In general you’d expect Cheat Death to be better than passive healing - the safety net it provides, in terms of surviving mistakes and negating mechanics - is quite powerful, and passive healing tends to be more about saving healer mana than about saving your life. But Leeching Poison is healing on a completely different magnitude than previous options - its literally all the healing you need on most fights in Firelands, including H:Rag. On fights where healing is tight - for instance, if you’re stacking DPS to beat a berserk timer - the ability to be completely self-sufficient in terms of healing needed could be very valuable. So while I suspect Cheat Death will be the more popular choice, it is very much a choice - some rogues will prefer Leeching Poison, and I can’t say they’re wrong to do so.

Level 60: Movement
I can’t help but feel that Burst of Speed is too expensive to see much use in PvE. I don’t know that it can realistically be made cheaper, but 60 energy is a lot to spend unless you’re out of range of your target for a pretty significant amount of time - enough that you were going to energy cap anyway, basically. And in most fights, that sort of situation is rare enough that you can cover it with Sprint, so there’s little need to have Burst of Speed as well. I can imagine using it on P4 Rag on Deluge duty, but in the vast majority of circumstances you’d rather have Shadowstep, which both costs less and gets you where you’re going faster. Admittedly it only helps with running out and not running in, but usually those are paired so I don’t know to what extent the distinction matters.

I’m not even going to bother assessing how either option stacks up to Preparation, because, frankly, Preparation has no business being a talent. The whole point of this talent refactor is to not make you spend talent points on essential abilities, and Preparation in PvP is about as close to essential as it gets. It either needs to be a trained ability - for all rogues or selected trees - or it needs to be removed entirely. There’s absolutely no point in wasting a tier of the talent tree with an ability that’s going to be virtually impossible to balance, and doesn’t really fit the theme defined by the other two abilities anyway. There are a number of interesting talents they could put here - Deadly Throw and a passive run speed bonus a la Quickening or the new Feral Swiftness are the first two options that come to mind - but Preparation isn’t one of them.

Tier 75: Immobilization
Much like Tier 30, this is all useless in PvE. Deadly Brew we use about once an expansion, Paralytic Poison would be lucky to get used even that much, and Dirty Tricks pretty much only matters when you’re the only person attacking your target which is... rare, in raids. I’m fine with writing this off as “balanced for PvP” - I don’t see that there’s much other choice - but I do feel obligated to note that we’re at one tier out of five with a remotely interesting decision to make.

Tier 90: Cooldowns
The first thing to notice is that which one to use is going to be purely a function of which one gives you the most damage. And while that answer might change somewhat from fight to fight, my expectation is that we’re going to run some numbers, conclude that one of them gives an extra half a percent DPS, and use that on 95% of fights. Its sort of the inherent problem with DPS abilities in talents - one of them will always be best, unless they’re explicitly made highly circumstantial.

It should also be noted that all of the options here are deeply flawed. Shadow Dance is pretty much only of interest to Sub rogues - no PvE rogue will ever take it as any other spec. Vendetta’s contribution to our regular single-target damage is just as boring as ever, and while it theoretically gives us some amount of viability from range, the current incarnation of the ability... doesn’t. Combo point generating strikes are all well and good, but without autoattacks and finishers we’re going to do maybe 20% of our total damage output to a target at range. Killing Spree is still completely capable of killing us in unrecoverable fashion, and while the combo point generating aspect of it is interesting I can’t help but feel that the free finishers would be more interesting without the teleporting mechanic. It feels like two potentially interesting cooldowns kludged together, resulting in an ability that isn’t as fun or interesting as either.

In short: about half the talents in tree are in need of significant revision for the tree to wind up in any way interesting for PvE rogues. And there’s plenty of time for that to happen - Blizzard was quite clear that this is primarily and early preview, and there’s lots of balancing yet to be done. But I do hope they’re serious about fixing them, as the current incarnation would be a significant step back in terms of interesting and balanced gameplay for rogues.

Blizzcon has come and gone, and among many other announcements, a new class has been announced: the monk. And my initial impression of it is that it has a lot in common with the rogue. Obviously we can’t tank (or heal) like monks can... but it is an Agility leather class, and its resource system has obvious parallels to ours. We spend energy to get combo points, and then spend combo points to do higher-damage moves; Monks are much the same, except they have two flavors of combo points and spend them more incrementally rather than all at once. Hence, their rotation is likely to feel very similar to that of a rogue, even if the details are somewhat different. Hence, I think there’s some interesting conclusions to be drawn through comparisons between Monks and Rogues.

The absence of autoattack
Monks, unlike all other melee classes, do not have autoattack. And at first this seems surprising, as its been a staple of melee classes for many years; on the other hand, autoattack is a fairly minor damage contribution for a number of current melee classes - DKs get less than 15% of their damage from it - and casters have been doing reasonably balanced DPS without autoattack for years. Hence, there’s no reason to believe that the lack of autoattack will have major implications on Monk gameplay - and indeed, when you play a monk (at least, for the first 5 levels or so that they had available), you barely notice the lack.

What it does do is give you direct control of a larger portion of your damage. One of the longstanding issues with rogues is that the difference between a good rogue and a bad rogue - in terms of damage done - simply isn’t very large; and part of that is that so much of our damage comes from passive sources - like autoattack. By giving you direct responsibility for all of your damage instead of only two thirds of it, the effect of differences in skill will be that much larger as well - and that’s a good thing.

One thing that they will need to be careful of is the implications in terms of balancing dual wielding; a major part of the balance of 2H weapons versus DW setups is the increased miss chance on DW autoattacks, and the Monk’s system will bypass that entirely. If you perform a strike that does full MH damage and half OH damage, and compare it to the damage a 2H strike does at equal ilvl and AP, one finds that the DW strike hits about 10% harder; hence, other mechanics will need to be added to ensure balance between the two weapon types.

Its also worth noting that it means Monks have no penalties for target switching at the resource level. Not only do Light and Dark Force accumulate on the Monk rather than on the target (like combo points do), but you don’t even lose damage from being out of melee range for short periods of time. As long as your energy doesn’t cap, you lose no damage to being out of range - this makes them the first class in the game that loses nothing by being out of range or having to swap targets. All other melee classes lose autoattack damage if nothing else, and all ranged classes (and a number of melee classes, to boot) lose GCDs; but a Monk can run out of range for a couple of seconds and do exactly the same amount of damage that they would have had they been in range the full time. That’s a little bit strange, and says to me that they’re going to need to add talents and abilities that make you care about target switches and time on target, or else monks will have monstrous advantage relative to other melee in that department.

The oddities of spending Chi
If I were going to pick two (and only two) ways to allow a primary resource to be expended, I don’t know that I’d pick Jab and Roll. Jab, continuing our rogue analogy, is basically Sinister Strike - its your primary (by which I mean, only) Combo Point builder. Roll is basically Blink - it throws you forward about twenty yards, and while it takes a bit longer to get you there than Blink does, it has the advantage of not being thwarted by negligible bumps in the terrain. I imagine in theory its designed to force you to trade off between damage and mobility, but in practice the decision will always be obvious. If you’re running moderately long distances without a mount (before level 20, or while indoors), you’ll obviously want to roll as often as Chi allows. If you’re in a raid, you’ll want to use Jab almost exclusively, as Roll costs you significant amounts of damage and (as just discussed) taking a little longer to get to your target generally doesn’t. Also note that diving 20 yards forward isn’t the most useful means of movement when your goal is (usually) to wind up within melee range of your target. Hence, the current ability selection seems to relegate Roll to an ability that purely makes you faster running across country than any other class and will rarely be used otherwise, which seems like an odd design choice.

Rotational Complexity
The resource system as written doesn’t seem to lead to particularly complicated rotations. As we’ve seen with Rogues, there’s generally an optimal move to spend combo points on; with Monks there may need to be two (one that spends more Dark than Light, and one that does the reverse), but fundamentally it points toward a rotation where you do three moves in whatever order is necessary to keep any of your three bars from capping out. With the moves available at level 5, your single target rotation would simply by Jab, Jab, Tiger Palm, Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, repeat. And I suspect that would get rather boring in a hurry; hence, they are going to need to add additional mechanics to ensure the rotation stays interesting. There’s a couple of obvious ways of doing this.

First, you could put cooldowns on the “best” moves - if you can’t hit Kick of Awesome Darkness every time you have 4 Dark Force, you’ll have to spend resources on other, lesser moves in the meantime; thus, your rotation would need to focus on having the right amount of Forces for your best moves as each comes off cooldown without wasting them in between. The problem with this approach is that the 4 and 6 second cooldowns you see on most other classes don’t really work here - for expensive moves you could easily need cooldowns of 20 seconds or more to appreciably affect the rotation, which means that in the short term your rotation is still somewhat repetitive.

Second, the could have a significant portion of Monk damage come from DoTs, self-buffs, or debuffs - much as rogues need to spend combo points maintaining Slice and Dice and Rupture rather than using them all for Eviscerate or Envenom. For Rogues this isn’t an ideal solution, as we already have a high reliance on passive sources of damage (autoattack and poisons), but for Monks - who, as noted before, appear to have no passive damage at all - its a far more viable approach. I don’t know how well it fits with the martial arts theme of the class, though.

Another approach would be to add additional Chi moves. While you wouldn’t want to add too many - there’s something appealing about having simple Chi moves with the fancier stuff coming from Force expenditure - I think there’s room to add a few more options - say, Uppercut and Kick. If you had to think about which move was the right one to do rather than blindly mashing Jab every time your Chi started getting high, the rotation would wind up more interesting as a result. The trick, of course, is how to set this up such that one move isn’t “best” in all circumstances - but I think there are tradeoffs you can make in terms of damage done vs Force generation that could be interesting for burst situations, and the ability to generate Light and Dark force asymetically also has the potential to be interesting. Consider, for instance, if Kick did 50% more damage than Jab, generated 50% more Force - 1 Dark, 1 Light, and 1 random - but cost less than 50% more than Jab (say, 55 energy). Usually this would be better than Jab; but if you were at 3 Dark (or Light) Force, it might well be better to use Jab to ensure you got full benefit from the Force generation (similar to how rogues use Revealing Strike). I don’t think this is a full solution by itself, but having multiple options with different Force generation properties seems like it could be an interesting supplement to the other approaches.

There are certainly other approaches that could be adopted as well, such as moves that depend on (but don't consume) resources - for instance, a strike that uses Dark Force but does bonus damage based on your current Light Force or Chi levels - but the fundamental point is that there needs to be *something*. If Monks just have simple strikes that directly damage their target, the rotation that results will be neither fun nor interesting.

A quick thought on Pandas
One of the racial benefits of Pandaren, Epicurean, provides a larger damage benefit than any existing racial - not to mention the stamina it provides. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the new race being the best, I do worry about the continued escalation of racial power - the gap between a Pandaren Rogue and an Undead one is now larger than the profession benefits, and exceeds what you get from upgrading a piece of gear in most cases as well. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t give Pandaren cool toys of this nature, but if they’re going to keep introducing powerful new racial bonuses they badly need to revisit the older races as well - flippy jump and an extra 3 racial agility just doesn’t compete with what a Worgen gets, much less a Panda; so if they want the older races to remain viable - and they should - they need to give them DPS benefits that are at least somewhat competitive in ways that they currently aren't.

A final thought
As my guild is recruiting rogues, I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately looking at parses from many different rogues lately, and there are some curious trends I’ve noticed among them; hence, I’d like to do an informal study to examine the scope of these trends. If you feel you’re a good rogue, and have a parse where you feel you did well - preferably most or all of a Firelands clear - please send me a link. Don’t worry - I won’t call you out by name or even link your parse publicly without permission - I’m just looking at some general trends and need more parses to determine how widespread they are. Thanks.

You just hit a deer, got promoted at work, won the lottery or are going through a mid-life crisis. Guess what? Time to buy a new car. Right?

I live in Mid-Missouri and work for a large, new age, high tech and successful automotive group....our website is okay too. Corwin Jefferson City, MO Auto Dealer Group

A little about me:
This is a quick guide, based off my experiences as someone who has been in customer service for 15 years, a nerdy consumer and lived in a family that's owned 4 car dealerships for 40 years. I went to college for Health (and Environmental Science), didn't get a job. Got an MBA, didn't get a job and was presenting for a young professional group for my job growing up and got asked if I were interested in selling cars. I know tons of people from playing sports growing up, bartending and having my fair share of large parties growing up. So I thought to myself, I know lots of people age 16-30, they are moving, growing, having babies and their families will be expanding. Sounds like a million dollars all around me.....right? So I took the job, and haven't looked back.

Tips, thoughts and game plan:
1. Have a plan.

2. Do some research, don't over analyze. I have customers come in all the time with price guides, reviews, pictures, binders, and all sorts of jazz. They get so confused because they've looked at 15 cars that ultimately they burn themselves out, get pissed off or just give up. (I think it's funny)

3. Get internet pricing, Zag, Trucar, USAA, Hartford Total Loss, Car Soup, American Express, etc. Many dealerships (from what I have seen) do not honor all pricing. USAA I believe is the best. From my end of the desk and the "pencil" it's is great to get an internet lead, because that's the price. There's really no haggling. You either take the car or you don't. Most internet prices take all the fun stuff (mark up) out. Which means....

4. Your trade is worth it's weight in metal.....just kidding. Be realistic with your trade (if you have one). There are no tricks for getting more for your trade, it doesn't really matter in the inside is immaculate. Trade allowance, it will happen: Someone will mark a vehicle up....and make you think your trade is worth more by showing you more. Don't go in thinking that you're going to get excellent condition from Kelly Blue Book. You won't. Sadly your 2004 Ford Focus isn't worth the 17k you paid for it 6 years ago. Kelly Blue Book does not have a Print Check Button. We go by ACV (Actual cash value), auction pricing and go from there. Coming in with a rock bottom internet lead from step 3, will probably mean you'll get less than what you think your awesome 140,000 mile Camry is worth.

5. Shop banks, rates and incentives always change. But it doesn't always hurt to look around. Credit unions are usually pretty aggressive, however many new car manufacturers have pretty good rates. If you have bank loyalty and in some cases want to pay more money, you can do that too.

6. Have a budget, be realistic. Rule of thumb is for every $1000 financed/borrowed is around $20 a month for 60 months. So a $20,000 car (with no trade or no money down) = $400 a month, a $10,000 car is $200 a month. Most people will pay more for something they love. Always start cheaper. If you want to spend $15,000, start at $13,000. Unlike what Dave Ramsey says, paying cash won't get you a "better deal" but you will probably pay a little less money. If someone offers me $20,000 cash for a $24,000 car, we will say no 99% of the time, but if they finance it we will take it. Obviously you will pay more than $20,000 but you'll get a new car.

7. Check a couple dealerships. Don't be a tool about it and shop vs. 10 dealerships. Don't be scared to buy local unless you've had a bad experience. They all own the cars for the same money (new). But many dealerships have a few close big competitors that can be an advantage.

8. Drive the car, if you don't drive it or don't like it price isn't important. Calling in and asking for their "bottom dollar" is pretty wild west of you, but drive the vehicle first, then worry about the price. You don't buy shoes without trying them on. You're stupid if you buy a car without driving it. However, I have sold a few cars to people who don't care how it drives, just the way it looks or the price....really weird.

9. Be patient, follow your budget, don't fall for large vehicle market adjustments, most dealerships have documentations fees, some states govern them. You can make a scene and act like you won't pay it but you will, somehow. If it's more than $100, ask if they'll wave it.

10. 0% usually isn't a good thing. Many times people come and ask to barter or for a discount and get 0%, usually 0% has to be bought down and that costs money. That's why it's usually 0% or a discount.

I hope this helps. Feel free to post any questions or comments!

When Blizzard redid the talent trees for Cataclysm, a major part of the design was the notion of filler points - that is, a max level rogue, in filling out any of the three trees, will spend most of their points on obviously essential talents, but have a few leftover to spend according to personal preference. From a PvE perspective, this usually means that there are a handful of talents that do not increase personal DPS, but provide a variety of survivability or utility tools. And its a good idea - allowing meaningful customization of one’s spec certainly seems like an appealing notion. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked. Thus the question: what went wrong, and how do we fix it?

Fundamentally, the problem is that “filler” is not a binary characterization. While the DPS/not DPS distinction seems reasonable at first glance, it really doesn’t capture the whole story - some talents straddle the gap. Quickening, for instance, is not a DPS talent in the conventional sense - it provides no benefit on a tank and spank fight. But run speed is quite useful on many other fights - both in terms of DPS and survivability - which means in practice pretty much all Assassination rogues take it. It may not be a DPS talent, but it does border on mandatory. More generally, DPS talents range from the very strong (Relentless Strikes) to the very weak (Initiative) and utility talents range from the nigh-essential (Quickening) to the nearly useless (Blackjack). We draw a line somewhere around the divide between weak DPS talents and strong utility talents and declare that everything on one side is a utility talent, but in reality the distinction between mandatory and optional is simply a question of relative strength and available points. If we had 3 more filler points in Assassination, most PvE rogues would be 3/3 Deadened Nerves and 1/2 Deadly Brew - not because they’re amazingly strong talents, but because they’re the best thing available. “Filler” is not a question of talents of a particular strength; its simply what exists on the boundary between “I have points to take this” and “I do not”. The idea that filler provides choice only works if everything is of roughly equal quality in that range. The problem, then, is creating a selection of talents of comparable quality to choose between without making them all equally useless, as has happened to Combat in the current incarnation of the trees.

The obvious away to address this is to have different things be better under different circumstances - this is, for instance, how Assassination’s utility talents are currently balanced. If you need an AoE snare, Deadly Brew is excellent; if you have to keep up Expose Armor for whatever reason, Improved EA is the clear winner; and if you don’t need either of those, you take Deadened Nerves, as while the benefit is much smaller it applies on (almost) all fights. So you can imagine loading up our “utility” talents with options like the following:

Impale: Your Backstabs and Mutilates also strike a second target within 5 yards.
Collateral Damage: While feint is active, all AoE damage you take is also applied to your target.

On a fight like Domo, Impale is clearly better; you take no damage and need to cleave a lot, so an ability that grants a cleave would be very useful. On Beth’tilac, on the other hand, the cleave does very little for you, but the ability to redirect some of the AoE damage you take back onto your target could be a fairly healthy damage boost. With an assortment of such options available, you can easily imagine building a set of talents, all of which were useful but none of which were clearly dominant across a full tier of raiding.

The problem with this is that its a recipe for having to respec multiple times a night while clearing an instance. In practice, we wouldn’t pick one of the circumstantial talents and just accept the fact that we were going to be good on Domo and Rhyolith and not so good on the other fights; we’d respec between every fight if we needed to so as to have the exact right combination of talents for each fight. And this, I submit, would get annoying in a hurry; talents should be something you can spec at the beginning of the instance and be pretty much fine for whatever comes along. There will always be some small benefits to be gained by more frequent respecs, but if you make the talents involved good enough that you actually want them - as in the example above - it risks becoming mandatory, and I don’t think any of us want that. Hence, the goal cannot be powerful talents that eclipse each other based on the circumstances of individual fights. There can be a few of those - if we’re choosing between Impale and Deadened Nerves we’ll probably all pick Impale and just run it all instance, even if Deadened Nerves is better on a couple of fights - but for the most part utility talents need to be often useful but rarely essential lest we be forced to respec multiple times per night.

We have a few such abilities already - Deadened Nerves, Cheat Death, and Enveloping Shadows are all the sort of thing that will help to some extent on almost any fight. They’re not without their own set of problems - Deadened Nerves in particular annoys me in that its completely passive (and thus somewhat boring) as well as seeming somewhat thematically inappropriate for a rogue. But in general “improved survivability” is the sort of thing that benefits us on many fights, so a certain number of such talents - hopefully trending more towards the “Cheat Death” end of the spectrum - are reasonable options for inclusion amongst our utility talents.

“Mobility” is another such category - Quickening and Shadowstep are both sorts of abilities that we’d benefit from having on most fights, though they’re rarely truly essential. The only concern is that they tend to be very strong; as staying in melee range is critical for maximizing DPS, anything that helps you do so tends to be highly desirable; hence options for improved mobility must be apportioned out carefully lest they dominate other available options. Still, mobility, like survivability, can certainly be a portion of our filler talents. But we will need other options as well.

As a final note before I get to specific suggestions, I will note that we needn’t (and probably shouldn’t) replace *all* our current utility talents, as there are things that are very valuable and interesting for PvP rogues even if they’re largely useless in PvE. For instance, while Deadly Brew might not survive on its own merits as a PvE talent (as its fairly situational and in most cases Frost DKs with Chilblains do a better job), my understanding is that its valuable enough in PvP that it probably makes sense to keep it around. Each talent tree currently has something in excess of a dozen talent points that provide no PvE DPS benefits, and we only need about half that to have reasonable choices from a PvE perspective; choosing where to spend 3-4 points amongst 6-8 reasonable options would be a completely reasonable amount of customization (and a vast improvement over the status quo) and leave plenty of room for the PvP-specialized talents that also need to exist.

And to be clear: I don’t have anywhere near that many proposals. But here’s a few ideas:

A. Glyph of Feint gets some competition
In a lot of ways, Glyph of Feint is one of the great success stories of this expansion. It converted feint from an ability used rarely if at all to one that we use dozens or hundreds of times per night; its gone from an occasionally useful gimmick to a powerful tool allowing good rogues to distinguish themselves by lowering their damage taken to levels that other classes can only dream of.

The problem is that its too good - all PvE rogues, of all specs take it in all circumstances - there’s no choice anymore. One solution would be to reduce the power of the glyph - make Feint free by default and have the glyph improve it in some other way. But realistically there are a few other utility benefits that fall under the same category - the run speed increase of Quickening, for instance, is something that most rogues would like to have if possible, and probably would be a viable competitor for Glyph of Feint - if forced to choose between them, I don’t think there’s an obvious “wrong” answer for the raiding rogue.

However, making them competing utility talents has a few problems - first, it flirts dangerously close to the “respec every fight” issue mentioned above - Feint is probably better on Rag, but Quickening is better on Domo and neither does anything on Baleroc. Second, coming up with enough such things - 3 or 4 per tree, so 10-12 total - is actually pretty hard.

But if we instead make these things into Major Glyphs, these problems vanish. While it shouldn’t be mandatory to switch for every fight - the above philosophy of “often useful, rarely essential” still very much applies - for those players that choose to, swapping out Glyphs is certainly much easier than changing talents. Additionally, as Glyphs are equally accessible to all specs, we don’t need to create a dozen of them - if we have 5 or 6 good and competitive Major Glyphs of which users can pick 3, that would be a big step forward on the customizability of our spec.

Hence, rather than nerfing or removing Glyph of Feint, I’d like to see a handful of new Major Glyphs that are good enough to legitimately compete with it. The run speed bonus of Quickening strikes me as one such option; reducing positional dependence of specs might be another (though would need to be done carefully to avoid issues with PvP balance). I’m sure there are others as well, though I admittedly haven’t come up with any yet.

B. Make existing tools better
Rogues already have a lot of utility - its one of our major distinguishing features as a class. We have stuns and interrupts to control mobs, and cooldowns to mitigate incoming damage (or avoid it entirely). While many classes can produce DPS similar to ours, we can do it while requiring less healing, clearing some of our own debuffs, and managing our own threat (though admittedly that last one is less relevant of late). Its this sort of self-sufficiency that made us the go-to class for the shadow realm on V+T, as well as being a strong option for kiting on Atramedes and for DPS in general on Al’akir. Boosts to existing abilities - be it in duration (Enveloping Shadows, Glyph of Evasion), cooldown (Elusiveness), or intensity (Glyph of Sprint) are thus prime candidates for broadly useful utility talents. Glyph of Sprint in particular is probably no longer strong enough to be a Major Glyph in light of the previous change, but would make a perfectly reasonable utility talent.

Of course, these sorts of talents do tend to be rather boring, so should be used sparingly - but having one or two per tree seems totally within the realm of reason.

C. Share the Wealth
While we’re long on personal utility, we’re a bit lacking in the raid utility department - not just in the sense of covering buffs and debuffs (though we’re pretty weak at that as well), but in terms of utility tools that benefits the raid as a whole and not just ourselves. Warriors have Rallying Cry, Druids have Stampeding Roar, and DKs have Death Grip - and all these facts are relevant on a weekly basis. Whereas we have Tricks, which, in a world where threat is largely trivialized, is mostly a means for part of our DPS to be dealt by someone else (and shouldn’t even be that). And while admittedly casting major whole-raid buffs isn’t exactly the rogue’s style, I think there is room for some interesting utility talents by allowing us to share our wealth of personal utility with others.

The simplest example of such a thing would be a talent that allowed Feint to also benefit an ally within 5 yards, so not only do we take significantly reduced damage, we can help the whole melee pack (or anyone else that has particular need of it) take less damage - and that’s useful. Theoretically you could extend this to our other cooldowns, but I think Feint is probably the strongest choice in general as its the one least likely to result in us standing next to the tank popping cooldowns to keep them alive (Evasion and Combat Readiness being the most obviously problematic in that respect, but even Cloak could have some pretty profound effects on tank survivability). However, options here extend beyond simply adding targets to our cooldowns; for instance, back when threat was still relevant, a means of transferring a portion of a fury warrior’s threat onto ourselves (as we can dump it with Vanish and they can’t) would be potentially quite useful. In general, this feels like another area where some interesting utility talents could be found.

D. Lower Opportunity Costs
What makes Glyph of Feint a success is that by itself, the ability is too costly to use regularly; but with the glyph, the opportunity cost of using it is low enough that we can use it freely. The same principal could be applied to other abilities that we currently choose not to use do to having better options available. For instance: giving up a full Eviscerate to Recuperate is only rarely worth it; but if Recuperate allowed you to keep the combo points (much like Imp EA does) it would be far more reasonable to use. It still costs energy, so you wouldn’t run it all the time for no reason; but at times when you were taking significant incoming damage, you could afford to help the healers out without massively disrupting your cycle or otherwise gimping your damage. Hence, a talent that allowed such things might make for an interesting filler talent.

E. Vigor
While the effect has been rolled into Assassin’s Resolve, I think it was better as a utility talent. Vigor (for those that don’t remember) increased maximum energy by 10, and it was always the sort of thing I wished I could take but never quite had room for - and that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d like to see as utility talents. As a 2 point talent raising max energy by 10 per point, it’d be a welcome addition to Assassination’s filler options.

F. Range
Currently, melee range is 5 yards. What it we had a talent that raised it to (say) 8 yards? I can’t think of too many PvP encounters where this would be truly essential; but it would speed up target switches and give us a bit more flexibility with positioning, and thus could be an interesting option. There are obvious implications in terms of PvP balance that I’m not entirely sure how to solve, but if a way to do so could be found this might prove to be an interesting option.

This has been cross posted on my blog at wordpress.com.

Some people might call this post a troll, but I mean it very seriously. I think by most objective measures World of Warcraft: Cataclysm can be classified as a failure. Not because production value was poor (in fact it was excellent). Not because there was insufficient content. It failed simply because Blizzard has fallen into the trap of trying to please everyone and as a consequence is pleasing almost no one. Since the release of Cataclysm, World of Warcraft has seen its subscription base drop by nearly 1 million users. This is important to note because since its launch in 2004 Warcraft has never seen a net drop of subscriptions until this year. I'll be covering territory that's already been covered in previous posts of mine. However, this time I'm going to drill down to what I think the core of the problem is: Blizzard has unintentionally caused a sort of "class warfare" between Warcraft players and as a result of trying to appease both groups neither is content.

To better explain my point I want to reference a two year old blog entry from Blessing of Kings (On Difficulty and Guilds). The essence of the post is that the population (at the guild level) of Warcraft is stratified into five groups with the top most guilds being a very small number of super elites able to clear the hardest content quickly and the bottom being casuals who very rarely, if ever, raid. This stratification has existed pretty much from the beginning and while some people were probably not happy with this system it seemed to largely work for pre-Burning Crusade Warcraft. A creeping problem began to occur though. Even though in the game the most elite player had status (and possibly some fame) in the context of Warcraft, outside the game that player is equal to even the most casual of Warcraft players because both of them pay the same $14.99 every month to play. Casual players make up a much larger percentage of revenue for Blizzard than the core elite players, and early on many casual players have resented the more elite players who have seen end game content and have the gear, titles, mounts, and achievements to prove it. A risk that I think Blizzard saw early was the need to keep revenue coming in and the game growing; thus I believe they felt it was necessary to do something to prevent a possible exodus of casual players.

Before I get to the "something" let me return briefly to the Blessing of Kings post. Rohan breaks down the hierarchy into 5 groups. The granularity of the structure was good at the time though at this point I think it's possible to flatten that stack and simply say there are two groups: casuals and elites. It's very easy to delineate between these two groups...

• Casuals either complain to Blizzard or demand Blizzard to make changes to the game or its mechanics in order to satisfy the "value" problem. The value problem being that they aren't able to see all the content despite the fact they are paying for it because the casual player is unable to pass the current raid threshold (be it lack of skill, lack of guild, lack of time, etc).
  
• Elites desire the opposite of casuals. They maintain that current end game content needs to remain challenging in order to validate the effort and skill of those who are able to clear it. They do not want content "dumbed down" in order to satisfy the desires of casuals. Such a dumbing down, in their minds, reduces the value of the rewards from the content and risks an entitlement attitude when new content rolls in.

At this point I'm going to become biased and fall on the side with the elites. The prime reason being that the "value" argument is a weak argument. On the surface one might quickly agree and say that of course you should be able to see all the content because you paid for it! The problem is though the same argument can be applied to any other video game that ever was. Warcraft is no different than any other game. You must take the time and effort in order to unlock all that is available to you. The difference with Warcraft is that since it's a "living" game players know that developers can make changes and adjust the fundamentals of the game world. In Warcraft parlance, patches are not just bug fixes (like they are in the rest of the computing world) they also add content and restructure the game in ways that the developers feel are appropriate. All other non-MMO games are essentially fixed; the world that are you are given will be the same forever and you must contend with it if you desire to get ahead in the game.

The "something" that Blizzard has done has been a series of increasing actions in an attempt to bridge the "class" difference between elites and casuals. Arguably the badge system introduced in Burning Crusade could be considered the first step. Some might argue the restructuring of raids in to the 10-man/25-man model would be another though I'm not sure if I agree with that. Nonetheless, the badge system opened the door to epics for all. The process continued with Wrath of the Litch King. In this expansion though Blizzard went to far. Dungeon and raid difficulties were not on par with Burning Crusade and not long after its launch heroic dungeons and most raids became nothing more than an AoE (area of effect) grind fest. Acquisition of gear was very easy with the exception of only a very few items. Raid difficulty was tuned to allow even the most novice of players to clear end game content. Blizzard had set the bar very low. Unfortunately they only seem to truly realize this at the end of Litch King. The problem is after two years and massive growth the player base was used to this particular paradigm and when Blizzard tried to put the cat back in the bag there was significant push back.

Blizzard realized their mistake too late though. Attempts to raise the bar back to pre-WotLK levels of difficulty was met with a lot of resistance and Blizzard for weeks after Cataclysm released had to explain and calm many Warcraft players who did not like the changes. This did not last though. It's not clear to me what changed Blizzard's thinking, but what is clear is that they have once again caved in and nerfed content severely in order to appease the base of players who were not satisfied with the "value" they were getting in the game. Given the recent nerfs to Firelands content it appears that the changes are a response to the speed at which players are leaving the game. I, obviously, do not have access to Blizzard's numbers directly, but the nearly 1 million drop in subscriptions are perhaps only the tip of the iceberg. Those 1 million are people who actively stopped paying. I suspect there is an equally large group of players who have stopped playing but keep paying. I think that changes Blizzard is making is an attempt to keep those people who are "on the fence" at least marginally interested in the game and paying for it. Unfortunately this seems to be only exasperating the problem between casuals and elites.

I call the conflict between elites and casuals "class warfare" because it's a paradigm that is not too dissimilar from real world ones. In almost all of written history societies have always had a small prosperous class and a larger poor one, the differences being relative. The poor aspire to move up and become wealthier. What has generally been understood though is that one must earn their way up the social ladder. In very few cases is it possible to move up with little or no effort. Most individuals then must learn to be content that they can only aspire to something that they might never attain. This real world paradigm applies to Warcraft as well. The difference though is that in Warcraft individuals can choose to opt-out by not paying to participate. Blizzard understands this and in a noble attempt to bridge the divide began re-shaping the game to make it more equitable. The result is a disaffected elite who no longer see the value of their efforts and casuals who clamor for more but never seem satisfied.

The one last point I want to make is that I sympathize with Blizzard. I've been particularly harsh in how I have characterized some of their decisions but I understand that they are balancing two very difficult things. The first is making a fun, compelling, and long lasting game that appeals to a broad audience. The second is making a profit. Without players there is no revenue, but without a good game there are no players. So despite my criticism I do acknowledge that managers and game designers at Blizzard do not have it easy. They need to make decisions that are unpopular but at the same time insure that the company remains solvent and makes money. What I've been trying to do in this post is explain events from my understanding of them with the information that is available to me. I feel pretty strongly that I've grasped the larger issues.

So in summary, Cataclysm is a failure because Blizzard attempted reverse course on core game design decisions they've been making for the past several years and they found that in reality the direction they chose was really a one way street. The fallout of this is that Cataclysm is now the expansion that marks the point of Warcraft's decline as the powerhouse MMO of the past decade.

Today I’d like to discuss rogue AoE. Its sort of a tricky subject, as its not that our AoE at current is precisely bad - in fact, Combat has quite possibly the strongest cleave in the game, and Assassination sustained AoE on large packs is quite strong as well. However, despite these clear strengths, our AoE as a whole is poorly designed and needs significant reworking.

The first problem is the large discrepancy between specs. Assassination is quite respectable at (some times of) large-group AoE, and Combat is fantastic at killing two adjacent targets... but Combat is useless at large groups, Assassination is weak at small groups, and Subtlety stinks at both. Its fine to have some differentiation between the specs - most melee classes have gaps in their AoE capabilities - but it seems like the discrepancies are a little too large. A gap of 20 or 30% between specs seems reasonable in the name of differentiation, but when one spec is the best in the game at a given role and another has absolutely no ability to contribute at all, that seems like a problem. Hence, in general, I’d like to see Blade Flurry brought more in line with the cleave abilities of other classes, and at least some degree of cleave functionality provided to Assassination (and Subtlety); and similarly, FoK should have some value beyond spreading poisons for an Assassination rogue, such that even if a Combat rogue isn’t a “good” AoEer, its at least worth hitting the button.

Second, the fact that FoKs damage scales strongly with our ranged weapon is rather bizarre. The fact that our melee weapons - the tools with which we do the majority of our damage - are reduced to mere stat sticks - and, if you believe current theories, might even want to be replaced with vastly inferior weapons purely on account of speed in some situations - while our damage primarily scales with a slot that’s normally itself a stat stick is sort of odd. It would be as if hunter AoE were determined primarily by their melee weapon, or caster AoE primarily determined by their wand. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that our AoE would be more sensible and balanced if it primarily depended on our melee weapons, just like the rest of our damage - good daggers for Mutilating should also be good daggers for AoEing, and right now, that’s really not true.

The other problem with our AoE arises from our resource system. If you look at the average DPS per target a Firelands-geared Assassination rogue does in a sustained AoE situation, its in the neighborhood of 6-7k DPS. And if you look at what comparably geared casters do, its in the same ballpark. Now, FoK costs 35 energy and in a sustained AoE situation you cast one every 3 seconds or so; hence, if all damage is being done by the FoK directly, each cast would want to do around 20k damage - simple math. But this is a problem, as it means that if you start with a full energy bar and cast FoK on 4 or 5 consecutive GCDs, you can create burst AoE on the order of 20k DPS per target, which is well beyond the capabilities of any other class. Hence, one of the following three things must be true:
a) Rogue burst AoE is overpowered.
b) Rogue sustained AoE is weak.
c) Rogue AoE has some manner of significant ramp-up mechanism.

For instance: if instead of all DPS coming from DoT casts, half of your damage comes from rolling DP on all targets, and you get (say) 3500 DPS from that, each FoK only needs to do 10k damage. Your initial spike is thus a far more reasonable 10k DPS without significantly reducing the sustained throughput. This is more or less what Assassination would be doing right now, were it not for poison stacking; the problem with the current system is that in addition to needing a ticking DoT to achieve full damage potential, each individual FoK does less damage during the stacking process, resulting in us doing markedly inferior damage for the first 5-10 seconds of AoE.

The problems with Blade Flurry are a bit more straightforward; in addition to being arguably too good, its more or less completely passive. You toggle it on and then do your normal rotation exactly the way you always do, and you get rewarded with significantly more damage. In addition to doing less damage, it would be more interesting if it required a more active adjustment of one’s play to switch from single-target to multi-target DPS. And, of course, its unique to Combat; ideally, Mutilate and Subtlety would have some ability to do increased damage on small numbers of targets, which, currently, they don’t.

So with that in mind, lets talk solutions; these ideas are, as with my last entry, somewhat speculative, as what changes are needed to fix AoE depend in some part on what changes are made to the base cycle; without definitive answers to the questions posed last time, its impossible to get either the balance or the feel of the AoE rotations correct.

I. Fan of Knives reverts to Wrath mechanics
FoK damage being tied to thrown weapons is a failure no matter how you look at it - it wreaks havoc with proper scaling, and simply doesn’t do enough damage. Performing a single MH strike and a single OH strike with each weapon made far more sense. Depending on the overall balance of the class it might be necessary to adjust the energy cost to get sustained damage in the right place - but its not far off. A single hit from our MH weapon doesn’t do that much more damage than our thrown weapons, and an OH hit does rather less; hence, this would less than double the damage per FoK. Given the low current damage of FoK for Combat and Subtelty, doubling the damage per cast doesn’t seem too unreasonable, and when coupled with the DP changes I proposed in an earlier entry, I think Assassination winds up in close to the right place as well.

The only hitch, of course, is that Assassination’s “competitive damage” will be because of rolling DP, which the other specs don’t have, so while all of them will have reasonable initial burst only Assassination will be able to sustain competitive DPS past the first 10 seconds of AoE. But given that most AoE doesn’t last much longer than that (Maloriak slimes excepted), I don’t know that that’s really a big deal. Between the three specs we’ll have both competitive burst AoE and competitive sustained AoE, and really, I think that’s all we can ask for.

II. Thrown Weapons have more stats than Bows and Guns of the same ilvl
It was always sort of a nuisance that BIS for rogue ranged slots overlapped BIS for Hunters. They attempted to fix this in Cataclysm by making our Thrown weapons more than just stat sticks, but it failed miserably; not just because of the unfortunate implications on FoK scaling, but also because we don’t need to AoE on most fights, and when we do we can weapon-swap. Hence, I’m of the opinion that a different solution should be considered, namely: if Thrown Weapons are just stat sticks, make them better at being stat sticks. If a thrown weapon had the stats of a bow 2 tiers higher, we’d no longer be competing with hunters for bows - problem solved.

III. Blade Flurry Fixed
Now, this one is nebulous, as it depends a lot on how Combat ends up working. If, for instance, the Eclipse-inspired model of Bandit’s Guile I proposed last time were implemented, Blade Flurry might not need any changes at all; simply make it apply only to physical damage, and the problem solves itself. As “normally” you’d be doing a lot of your damage with Shadow Strike, the amount of damage you transfer via Blade Flurry would be markedly reduced (bringing it closer to balance), and you could adjust the amount of damage you do to each target by pushing your cycle more or less towards physical damage (under the assumption that doing more physical damage means doing less total damage). If, however, an alternative approach to fixing the Combat cycle is adopted, the changes needed might be more dramatic, but without knowing what that is...

One thing I will say, though, is that I generally favor reducing the power of Blade Flurry but allowing it to keep high uptime over any reversion to the previous design, where it was every bit as powerful as it is now but had low uptime. On most fights, the ability to help out consistently on each wave of adds is more important than the ability to burst the crap out of something every once in a while, so I do favor solutions that lower Blade Flurry damage over ones that simply make it usable less of the time.

IV. Cleave for Assassination
There are probably a lot of ways to do this, but it seems to me that the natural way to do it - given the theme of the tree - is by duplicating our poison damage onto multiple targets. Depending on how you define Poison (i.e., whether you count Venomous Wounds and Envenom or not), its somewhere between 30 and 60% of our damage, which is a reasonable amount to be transferring to extra targets in a cleave-type situation. There are probably many ways to do this, but here’s one that I like: assume we have an ability that costs, say, 20 energy, and for the next 10 seconds, all poison damage you do is also dealt to that target. No cooldown, and can be put on more than one target at once.

Now, obviously the energy cost and duration would need some tweaking; it would be easy to make an ability like this too strong. But I like the fact that it allows you do transfer a reasonable amount of damage to additional targets, and each additional target you deal damage to lowers your damage on the initial target. It gives you a nice amount of control over how much stuff you want to cleave, versus how much damage you want to keep doing to your primary target.

Also interesting is the question of range, both for casting and for the transfer of damage. If you make both short-range (say, 10 yards), it will function much like a cleave; but if you allow it to extend to, say, 30 yards, it will function a lot more like a caster multi-DoTing; when doing V+T, you could do most of your regular damage to the dragon on the ground and “cleave” the one in the air by copying your poison onto it. It can be debated whether multi-DoTs are good for the game or not, but given that many casters already have the ability, there’s something appealing about the notion of lessening the melee/ranged disparity by allowing melee some similar capabilities, and this seems like an intriguing way to do it. It certainly seems worth considering.

The problem, of course, is how that interacts with FoK. Putting this poison mark on a target and then FoKing a large pack of stuff is probably a recipe for some fairly ridiculous single-target DPS numbers, sort of like the old FoK/Blade Flurry shenanigans, but easier to pull off. Having Rhyolith consist of rogues marking both legs and then FoKing all the random adds down and thereby doing more damage to the legs than they could any other way would be a little bit odd. It seems like this should be limited, or fixed somehow. One solution might be to make it more of a "link" ability - i.e., you mark any number of targets, and any poison damage applied to one member of the link is applied to all. This still has problems, though - on a small pack the possibility of linking it all together and then FoKing it down results in some troublesome scaling issues - so I'm hoping there's a better solution out there somewhere. I just don't know what it is.

V. Cleave for Subtlety
And here, I run out of ideas. Given Sub’s general emphasis on bleeds and armor penetration it seems like it would be interesting to do something with one or both of those; but its not entirely clear to me how to do so in a fun and interesting way. If you have any ideas, let me know.

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I’ve provided fairly concrete suggestions for changes that should be made - specific changes to specific abilities that address specific problems that the class is having. And I have a fairly good-sized list of such proposals remaining; I could go several more weeks posting that sort of thing, and at the end of it the class would probably be better off than it is now. But having thought about it for a few weeks, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. There are some major underlying issues that I haven’t fully solved, and its important to get the big picture right before dwelling too much on the details. So today I’d like to explain these problems and provide some rough ideas for addressing them. Not all of these ideas are necessarily good; but I figure the easiest way to figure out which are and which aren’t is to throw them out there, and see what people have to say.

The most fundamental goal of a rebalance such as this is to wind up with specs that are different and fun to play - once you have that right, everything else is at some level just tweaking the numbers to make things work. If the overall concept is sound, you can just pile damage multipliers on to get the balance right, as has been done with Combat (Vitality, Bandit’s Guile, etc.). Ideally the underlying concept should be strong enough that you don’t need too many of these - I think the fact that Combat gets about a third of its damage from such boosts is a sign that the underlying cycle is poorly designed - but so long as your underlying cycle concept is fun and interesting and at least in the right ballpark of power, getting the details of balance correct is easy by comparison.

“Fun” is, of course, relative; some people find Subtlety annoyingly elaborate and would rather play Assassination; others find Assassination boring and would rather play Sub. Clearly, we’re never going to be able to build specs that are all things to all people; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think a major part of this is getting the cycle right - complex enough to allow good players to distinguish themselves, without being unmanageably complicated or containing a lot of pointless busywork. Historically, rogue cycles have been sort of bad at this - it wasn’t until Wrath that you needed more than Sinister Strike and Slice and Dice to do 90%+ of the damage potential of the class. In more recent expansions they’ve tried to add some complexity to the cycles, but we’re still among the easier classes to play, and our cycles still aren’t really that interesting. So what went wrong?

The key, I think, is that rogue cycles are fundamentally repetitive in ways that most class’s aren’t. If you look at most other classes, when listing what moves to do when, they more often speak in terms of “priority lists” rather than “cycles”; at any given time you have some set of moves available to you, and you pick the best one based on what’s off cooldown, what procs you have active, and so forth. Because such rotations are based on the interplay of cooldowns of various lengths - coupled, perhaps, with random procs - the exact sequence of moves performed does not repeat on any meaningful timescale. Rogues, on the other hand, tend to perform the exact same sequence of moves with only minor variations many times within a fight. Ignoring finishers with a duration (SnD, Rupture, etc.) for a moment, in general there is a best finisher to do, and an ideal number of combo points to do it at, and an ideal way to get that number of combo points. Assassination rogues Mutilate to 4+, and then Envenom. Combat rogues SS to 4+, RvS if necessary to get 5, and Eviscerate. Some degree of complexity can be added by adding additional steps to this rotation, but fundamentally: these steps get repeated hundreds of times per raid, and there are only so many different ways to count to 5. Even if you had a different strike to use at each number of combo points and could remove combo points as well as adding them, I suspect you’d quickly wind up with a cycle where the hardest part of doing it is remembering what you’re supposed to do - and to me, that doesn’t sound like much fun.

To fix this, we need mechanics that change what is optimal over time, such that every time I’m at 3 CP I don’t necessarily do the same thing. The simplest way to do this is to introduce abilities with durations, so sometimes I build combo points for an Eviscerate in whatever the optimal fashion is, but sometimes I need to build combo points for a Rupture or a Slice and Dice instead. What move I do next is no longer purely a function of how many combo points I have; its also a function of how much time is left on my various timers, and as my energy and combo point generation is somewhat variable, the circumstances will be a little different every time. However, this is not without its own set of problems, foremost of which is that sort of by definition, such abilities provide their benefit over the next 15 or 20 seconds, thus exacerbating our existing burst problem. And, of course, if all specs rely simply on juggling DoTs for cycle complexity, the specs will not be well differentiated. Hence, while we can use timer juggling for some trees, we don’t want to do it for all three; and I think the natural choice for finding “something else” is Combat, simply because it has a harder time solving the burst issue than the other specs.

Rogues, in general, cannot solve the question of burst like other classes do. We have no notion of long-term efficiency, so we can’t trade efficiency for short-term burst like an Arcane Mage; and the need to build up for finishers means we can’t reorder moves to line up our hardest-hitting moves together like a Frost DK. Hence, the easiest way to get burst is by adjusting the spacing between our moves - we don’t have the energy to do moves in quick succession all the time, but we can save up a bar of energy and do 3 or 4 in quick succession, which for something like shields on Conclave, is all you need. However, this burst will only be meaningful if our energy regen and move cost is such that we normally have significant gaps between our moves, such that removing them gives a significant short term benefit. To make this work, you need relatively low energy regen and a fairly expensive combo point generator. However, low energy regen and an expensive combo point generator means low combo point generation, which is not ideal. Hence, this approach requires either a) a combo point generator that gives more than one point per cast or b) some external means of bonus combo point production. Or, as these solutions are more commonly known, “Mutilate” and “Honor Among Thieves”. Hence Assassination and Subtlety are in a good position to get a working DoT/self-buff based cycle - the numbers certainly need some tweaking, but the underlying mechanics are mostly there. Combat, on the other hand, is not well set up for DoT juggling. SS is cheap, energy regen is high, SnD is extremely long, and Rupture is a marginal DPS gain at best; none of this works for an interesting DoT based cycle. And since we want at least one spec doing something different, Combat seems like a natural choice.

Now, Bandit’s Guile is clearly an attempt to do this - its a periodic buff that works off a different timer than the regular combo point cycle. However, the fact that its completely uncontrollable and affects all damage equally means it doesn’t change our cycle in any meaningful way; what’s optimal at Shallow Insight is (generally) still optimal at Deep Insight. Hence, while its not a bad idea in theory, the implementation is a complete failure - we need to find something different, and better.

With these problems in mind, lets take a look at some potential solutions.

I. Finisher Size needs to matter more.
This one is almost a no-brainer - the only reason its in this article of speculative solutions is because while the *what* is easy, the *how* remains elusive. Right now, the benefit provided from a finisher scales linearly - if that - with the amount of damage it does. If you look at the actual damage done by the finisher, a 5pt finisher almost always comes out behind doing a 3pt finisher and a 2pt finisher - the only advantage it has is that it costs less energy. And as Blizzard’s stated goal is that we build up potential to unleash powerful finishers, not build up potential to do damage in a slightly more energy efficient way, it seems like this should change - particularly since it would also make timer juggling more interesting. Right now we can get away with refreshing with whatever combo points we have on hand - the loss of efficiency is small enough that is not worth worrying about. The solution to this is to make larger finishers do more than proportional damage relative to smaller ones. While Envenom right now does n/2n/3n/4n/5n damage based on the number of combo points you have, it should instead do (say) n/2n/3n/5n/8n damage, so that it’s more important to build up to the higher levels. And while such adjustments are fairly straightforward for Eviscerate and Envenom, its a little less clear for some of the others; should SnD merely get more than proportionately longer, or should it also give more attack speed at higher levels? Is it sufficient for Rupture to do extra damage per tick, or should its duration also increase more than proportionately?

II. Garrote can be used out of stealth

• Glyph of Garrote changed to: Prime Glyph. Garrote can be used outside of stealth, but no longer silences the target.
• Venomous Wounds proc reduced to 6 energy.
• New 1pt talent which allows Garrote to be used even when not behind the target.

Something needs to be done with Garrote for Assassination. As discussed in my last post, Vanish should not be a DPS cooldown, and while removing Overkill solves most of the problem, as things stand one would still Vanish for Garrotes. One solution would be to simply remove Garrote from Venomous Wounds; but I think a more interesting solution is to allow it to be used out of stealth, such that it becomes a regular part of - and source of complexity in - our rotation. To prevent giving rogues a second, spammable interrupt, we then need to remove the silence from it, which more or less requires the involvement of a Glyph. We also need to cut the energy given by Venomous Wounds to keep overall regen under control, and providing a way of reducing the positional dependence seems like a good idea, and makes a nice utility talent. All in all, there’s a lot I like about this idea.

However, its not without its problems, either. In addition to the burst issues, is also further reduces the value of Expertise - coupled with other forthcoming changes, Expertise would become our dump stat, which isn’t necessarily ideal. It also seems odd to gain an essential part of your cycle through a Glyph, and the Glyph winds up being significantly more powerful than all other options - its fine if its clearly the best, but being better than the next 3 options put together seems excessive. And finally, its not at all clear to me that this alone injects enough life into the cycle to keep it interesting; would the existing cycle with Garrotes woven in every 18 seconds be sufficiently more interesting than the current setup, or do we need to find something better?

III. Subtlety drops Slice and Dice.
I’ve always felt it would be interesting to try to mix up which finishers each spec uses a little more, and Subtlety strikes me as a very natural candidate for breaking the SnD monopoly - removing it from the Subtlety mastery, coupled with a much-needed global nerf of SnD probably gets you most of the way there, given the large amount of damage dealt by Sub’s other finishers. The problem is, this turns the Sub finisher rotation into an exact clone of what Assassination currently does - you have one duration-based finisher you hard cast every so often to get bonus energy regen, and a second one that you cast once at the start of the fight and refresh thereafter with your direct damage finisher. This is kind of dull. So to make this work, we should really nerf the rupture refresh mechanism. If, say, each Eviscerate extended the duration of your current Rupture by 2 extra ticks instead of giving a full refresh, you’d still have an interesting and beneficial talent, but you’d need to pay more attention to Rupture - which strikes me as a good thing. I think this is an idea with some interesting aspects to it, but would it actually improve the spec? You tell me.

IV. Rethink HAT
I admit I’m not a huge fan of HAT in general - call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days where combo points only came from hitting buttons. But, as noted above, it is an elegant solution to keep combo point generation high, as well as allowing raid DPS to be competitive without impact small-group PvP, where the spec is already strong - hence, its probably worth keeping around. The only problem is: the combo point generation is too regular. In any raid scenario, you gain a combo point pretty much *exactly* every 2 seconds, and that regularity and reliability means the cycle isn’t as interesting as it could be. If your bonus combo points came a bit more randomly, with droughts and floods that you had to react to, it seems to me that the spec would wind up more interesting as a result, even if the average combo points gained in practice was about the same. So how do we do this, while keeping the nice scaling properties of a larger benefit in a larger group, without reverting to the broken HAT of days of yore?

...I haven’t the faintest idea. But I still think its worth thinking about. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

V. Rework Bandit’s Guile to be more like Eclipse
As noted above, one of the major problems with Bandit’s Guile is that it boosts all your damage equally. What if it didn’t? What if, say, it only boosted your magic damage, but not your physical damage? And, further, what if we also had a move - lets call it Shadow Strike - that is similar to Sinister Strike, except it does Shadow damage instead of physical? Assuming proper balance, we could wind up with a situation where at low stacks of Bandit’s Guile, you use Sinister Strike, and at high stacks, you use Shadow Strike. It could even be balanced to make you switch between Eviscerate and Envenom as well. This would clearly be a bit more varied than what we currently do, and it’d definitely be a step in the right direction. But we can do better still by addressing the other major problem with Bandit’s Guile - its uncontrollability. This is where the Eclipse comparison kicks in.

Eclipse, to give an oversimplified summary for those of you that aren’t familiar with Balance druid mechanics, is a mechanism where performing Nature spells makes your Arcane spells better, and performing Arcane spells makes your Nature spells better. While its a bit more complicated than that in practice, I think we can adapt this general principal to spice things up for rogues. Instead of Insight being purely something that stacks up and drops, lets make it stacks of a (de)buff that gives, say, +3% physical damage, -3% magic damage (or the reverse). As we do more Shadow Strikes, we gain stacks that increase our physical damage at the expense of our magic damage; as we do more Sinister Strikes, we lose those stacks and gain ones that increase our magic damage at the expense of our physical damage. And lets further make Shadow Strike always give 1 combo point, as opposed to Sinister Strike which has a chance to give 2.

Now, it seems to me that it should be possible to balance this in such a way that its “normally” optimal to keep your stack somewhat balanced - say, to keep your +physical buff between +3 and +12%. You’d use about the same number of physical and magical attacks to keep your buff in this range, while also exploiting their different combo point returns to minimize the number of combo points you waste (sort of like you use RvS at current). You wouldn’t purely alternate the two moves - you’d need to response to Glyph of Sinister Strike procs and do a few more or a few less Shadow Strikes to make things work out. Furthermore, you’d gain the ability to sacrifice some damage in the short term in exchange for long term benefit by stacking your buff all the way up to its maximum (whatever that happens to be) in order to get a significant string of highly buffed Sinister Strikes in a row - thus giving you significantly more control over when you do more or less damage than is currently possible - that is, burst.

Now, I’m sure there are many problems with this idea as well, as well as a lot of picky details necessary to get the balance right. I make no claims that this is the ideal solution - or even a good one. But I do think its an interesting solution, and thus worth consideration - it is going to take something of this magnitude to fully fix Combat’s broken mechanics. So feel free to tell me what you like, what you don’t like, or what you think should be done instead; as until we get the big picture sorted out, the details don’t matter.

Continuing my series of posts in which I lay out basic theorycraft topics (see more here: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/1152-hamlet/tc101/ ), here's one on mana regen and throughput.

This is a bit different from the previous entries; I'm not laying out much in the way of game mechanics, just describing a technique I often see mishandled in healer discussions. There's no general formula here since applications will be class-specific, but the principle applies generally. As before, I'll work a simple example with Druids.

 

Contents

1Introduction 2The Method 3Example: Druids 4Analysis 5Conclusion

[top]Introduction

The discussion as it often goes, in forum/blog post:

1) Introduction: this is a debate between Talent A (regen) and Talent B (throughput).
2) The bulk of the post is mathematical analysis of varying amount of detail in order to attach regen/throughput values to the talents.
3) Conclusion in which the poster makes some judgment about how much regen they feel like they need.

This is sort of a workable start, but it tends to ignore some very important factors and spend undue time on details that are often unnecessary to reach a useful result. In particular, the link between 2 and 3 is usually tenuous at best.

The piece that is usually missing is context. Specifically, the context of how the regen/throughput tradeoff in question compares to other regen/throughput tradeoffs that are being made or even that could be made. Without any information on what regen/throughput exchanges you currently make and which ones you refuse, you have no basis with which to process any information you get on the talents/stats you're looking at. Also, once you have a feel for what's a reasonable exchange, you can often make good decisions with only a quick estimate of the value of a particular talent.

[top]The Method

The basic algorithm for setting up the comparison is as follows:
0) Start with a hypothetical character setup that favors pure throughput.
1) For each regen/throughput exchange you want to consider, estimate the regen you can gain and the throughput you would lose.
2) In each case, divide the regen gained by the throughput lost.
3) Rank your possible regen sources in decreasing order using the ratio from 2.
4) Use the regen options from the top of the list, working downwards, until you have sufficient regen for the purpose of whatever encounters you're doing. Don't use a lower-ranked choice if a higher-ranked one is still available.

The point here is that is it very silly (with rare exception) to take one regen-for-throughput tradeoff while passing up a more efficient one. If you do that you're simply leaving healing potential on the table. You want to find your necessary regen by taking only the least throughput-costing options available, and no others.

As I said, this is all very general--any particular application is class-specific and depends on how you detailed you want to be. But below will be some examples showing I can use this to make some decisions about setting up a Resto Druid.

[top]Example: Druids

Starting from a hypothetical max-throughput Druid, let's consider some ways I can convert throughput to regen:
1) Regem Int to Spirit.
2) Reforge mastery to Spirit.
3) Take Furor over Genesis.
4) Use Ember meta instead of Revitalizing.
5) Use a mana trinket (Jar of Ancient Remedies) over a mana/throughput trinket (Fall of Mortality). I chose options of equal ilvl here.
6) Enchant Darkglow over Lightweave.
7) Enchant Heartsong over Power Torrent.
8) Cast less Rejuvenation and more Nourish.

Now I have to estimate the regen/throughput effects of each one. For this you can use whatever theorycraft tool exists for your class. Here I'm simply going to pull values from TreeCalcs ( http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t110354-...2_a/#TreeCalcs ). This post isn't so much about how to get the numbers but about what to do with them once you find them (I might do a later post on how to estimate things when you don't have a full calculation handy). You may also want to see my earlier post about how to compute your mana regen.

1) Regem Int to Spirit. A point of Int gives me 3.2 HPS (in the default TreeCalcs spell usage) and 0.92 MP5, including the mana pool increase averaged over a 5 minute encounter. A point of Spirit gives 0.7 MP5. Here, the Spirit gives me less mana than the Int. So my regen-for-throughput "benefit" is actually negative--I'm never going to choose Spirit over an equal amount of Int.
2) Reforge mastery to Spirit. A point of mastery gives me 2.2 HPS overall. A point of Spirit gives 0.7 MP5. Trading mastery for Spirit would give me about 0.7/2.2 = 0.32 MP5 per HPS lost.
3) Take Furor over Genesis. A point of Furor gives me about 220 MP5 (again, including the mana pool increase averaged over 5 minutes). A point of Genesis gives me about 470 HPS (even without something like TreeCalcs, it would be easy to get a good estimate just by checking how much of my healing is from HoT's). Moving points of Genesis to Furor gives me about 0.47 MP5/HPS (quite a lot better than the prior option).
4) Ember meta over Revitalizing would gain 44 MP5 for 324 HPS, a ratio of 0.14. Once again, a straightforward estimate of Revitalizing could be made just by looking at your overall crit rate.
5) Heroic Jar over Heroic Fall would pull in 88 more MP5 for 226 HPS lost, a ratio of 0.4.
6) Darkglow vs. Lightweave at first looks to be the same as Int vs. Spirit. But, temporary Int effects like Lightweave aren't quite as good as normal Int since they don't improve your starting mana. Without that, the MP5 value of Int goes down to 0.58. Also, after a recent stealth nerf, Lightweave as a longer ICD than Darkglow (60s vs. 45s), so I'll bump up the value of Spirit by 1/3 to compensate, making it 0.93. So swapping Lightweave to Darkglow gives 0.35 MP5 for each 3.2 HPS lost, a ratio of 0.11.
7) Heartsong vs. Power Torrent. Similar to the prior Int. vs. Spirit. But PT is up for 12s out of every ~50, and Heartsong for 15s out of every ~28. Since Heartsong has about twice the uptime of PT, I'll just give the Spirit a x2 boost, for 1.4 MP5. Heartsong would give 0.48 MP5 for each 3.2 HPS lost, a ratio of 0.15.
8) Spend more time casting Nourish. This isn't a really a setup choice and it's not exact by any means, but when doing all this it's helpful to have a ballpark estimate of what extra mana means for us in practice. Looking at spells, I see that Rejuv spam burns around 17000 MP5 to Nourish's 4600. But it does 34300 HPS to Nourish's 7000. So any time shifted from Rejuv to Nourish gains 12400 MP5 for 27300 HPS lost, a ratio of 0.45. This is a useful figure to have--if we imagine that our WG, Swiftmend, and Lifebloom casts are largely fixed and independent of mana concerns (we tend to use them on cooldown), what's affected by mana tends to by our choice of "filler" casts.

Resorting our options in order of MP5-given to HPS-lost ratio:
--Furor (0.47)
--Less Rejuv (0.45)
--Jar (0.4)
--Reforge Spirit (0.32)
--Heartsong (0.15)
--Ember meta (0.14)
--Darkglow (0.11)
--Gem Spirit (negative)

[top]Analysis

What do I learn from this? Firstly, I really should have taken another look the Revitalizing meta after the healing crit change in 4.2. I'll probably be changing that in my guide ( http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t110354-...taclysm_4_2_a/ ), given the apparent weakness of the Ember meta. But more generally:
We can see that if anyone is feeling limited by mana, the first thing you want to do shore up regen is to have Furor in your spec instead of Genesis. Beyond that, reforging Spirit or equipping a good mana trinket (ignoring for now Shard of Woe, which well-known to be overpowered on the regen front) are also reasonably solid if you need more mana. Finally we have a bunch of much less favorable options (Heartsong, Darkglow, Ember). You can theoretically go all the way down to these if you're really desperate for mana, but the "Less Rejuv" estimate might indicate that this is a poor idea, as I'll explain in the next paragraph.

The "Less Rejuv" is, once again, a rough estimate of how much mana I can save by trying to be more economical about Rejuv. This is important because, in the end, the whole point of getting extra mana as a Druid is more or less to be able to use Rejuv more often. So if we make regen tradeoffs in other areas that are significantly inferior to what we can obtain by adjusting our casting a little, we can expect healing to suffer as a result. Now this isn't hard and fast--sometimes you might simply need to be able to use Rejuv a lot even at the cost of overall strength on all your spells. But attaching some numbers to these things helps us see that we're very unlikely to ever use e.g. Darkglow, because for each added Rejuv it gets us, we're giving up around 4 times that amount of healing on other spells.

I'm going to leave more detailed discussion to Druid-specific forums, but hopefully this is a good demonstration of how I approached the whole problem.

[top]Conclusion

This may look like a lot of work--I'm basically saying you can't look at a regen option for a healing character without looking at all of them at once. But that's only half true. Once you have some context built up of what's a good tradeoff and what isn't, then each time you're facing a new choice you already have a proper background against which to evaluate it. And even that first time, you don't have to do it all yourself; this analysis should really be a subject for each healing class forum to address. Even though the numbers will slightly change on a per-character basis, the basic scale of what's a good tradeoff and what isn't can be easily be set out on a general basis.

Which brings me to another major point here: for most evaluations of possible regen options, you need loose estimates at best. If I can value a regen/throughput tradeoff to even one significant digit, I have a good enough number for everyday use. A napkin calculation can easily tell me if a regen tradeoff is giving me MP5/HPS to the tune of 0.5 or 0.1. This is why say that many analyses I see of (for example) Furor vs. Genesis tend to miss the point. Instead of pages of math to try to evaluate the precise benefit of each talent, spending half the effort simply building the context of how much mana regen is worth to your character will give a much more meaningful result.

As I said at the beginning, this post is about a general principle that anyone analyzing a healer regen question needs to find the best way to apply to their own situation. So it doesn't come down to some final equation like my prior posts, but hopefully it provides some good direction on what to do with the numbers that you do obtain when trying to analyze your class.

This is a minor update to my prior post on haste breakpoints, with a revision to the rounding formula that results in a slight change to a small set of breakpoints.

The previous post is here. You should familiarize yourself with the basic results if you haven't yet:
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/1152-h...ints_rounding/

There I gave this description of how the rounding works:

• After haste is applied to the tick time, that tick time is rounded to the nearest millisecond (0.001 seconds) before the total number of ticks is computed.
• If the number of ticks before rounding is an exact half-integer, the game rounds down instead of up.

The first conclusion still holds, but the latter wound up being problematic. Warlocks found that if they geared their haste such that their Corruption tick time was exactly 2.400 seconds (corresponding to 7.5 ticks of the 18-second DoT), the game gives them 8 ticks instead of 7. See a comment by Erdluf about this in the prior post. We wound up talking about this a bit more, and his first guess was that the game uses "bankers' rounding"--when a number lies exactly on a half-integer, it is rounded toward whichever number is even.* We checked a couple more examples and they all fit with this. So I wouldn't say this is totally confirmed, but it seems likely so far.

Result

In the prior post I gave this formula for exact breakpoints with rounding accounted for:
,
where the half-brackets are a ceiling operator that rounds up to the nearest 0.001 seconds.

That formula should still be used when k is odd. When k is even, however, use this instead:

The only difference is that the ceiling has changed to a floor function, and the - after it became a +.

In the vast majority of cases, these will produce exactly the same result. The only time there's any difference at all is when

is an integral number of milliseconds (i.e. expressed in seconds, it has no more than 3 decimal places).

----

*Aside: rounding halves towards the even integer is not all that unusual. It's often considered good practice among e.g. scientists because rounding always-up or always-down introduces a slight overall upwards or downwards bias in the data. I'm assuming this is also where the label "bankers' rounding" comes from--accountants probably do this to make sure that when the deal with long lists of amounts, the total doesn't get biased up or down. It's not surprising to find this behavior in the game either, as this is the default rounding behavior in floating-point frameworks that are compliant with IEEE 754.

So following a twitter conversation with Hamlet following this series of tweets

Using some already created spreadsheets for looking at haste with Flame Shock, I went to work.

The observed values for Moonfire to get a 13th tick is 1929 and Corruption gets one at 1993. Looking at these with un-rounded tick times, Corruption has 2.400511774 at 1992 and 2.400349563 at 1993, while Moonfire has 1.4395752165 at 1928 and 1.4394775169 at 1929. From the looks of this, the tick time is truncated to 4dp, and then rounded up to 3dp to give the actual tick time, but I can't get everything to get exactly right.

Spell	Rating	Tick	Truncated	Rounded
Corruption	1992	2.400511774	2.4005	2.401
Corruption	1993	2.400349563	2.4003	2.400
Moonfire	1928	1.4395752165	1.4395	1.440
Moonfire	1929	1.4394475169	1.4394	1.395

I was curious who had the best chance at winning GSL August, so I wrote a little script to simulate the entire tournament, using the approach described here: Dreamhack [E-Sports Prospectus] (Basically: take each player's ELO and ELO vs. appropriate races from TLPD - SC2 Korea - Player Index and simulate groups, then the various RoX through to the finals).

After 10,000,000 simulations, here's the group stage (the numbers are % likelihood of obtaining that position):


And here's the tournament:


I've posted the source here:
https://github.com/alcaras/sc2pe/blob/master/sc2pe.py

This is a collection of notes on the Starcraft 2 speedrun I recently posted on Youtube:

Starcraft 2 Speedrun - YouTube

 

Contents

1Description 2Mission Order 3Upgrades and Research 4Individual Mission Notes

[top]Description

This is a run of the full campaign on Normal difficulty. The total mission time is 2:35:21. Of that time, around 1:14 is on timed missions of fixed length (3 of the 19 missions end on a timer, but they're all quite long). I sped up the videos for these missions quite a bit so that the total amount of video for the run much shorter. The run was played at normal game speed (which is the default for Normal difficulty, and I didn't actually know you could change it until I was a little ways in). If I ever do a revised run, it probably be at Faster game speed. For now though, I'm going to take little break from this project and see what ideas for further optimization come from people watching the video.

Many of the strategies I used here initially came from the forums at speeddemosarchive.com. In particular, Fragmaster01's run was a starting point for me on many of the missions.

[top]Mission Order

You have to do at least 19 missions to complete the SC2 campaign. Once you've done 14 missions including The Moebius Factor, you can do the final series of 5 missions (Supernova, Maw of the Void, and the 3 Char missions). I choose Shatter The Sky for the second-last mission, since it's much faster than Belly of the Beast. The main intermediate goal of the campaign will be to be reach The Dig (to unlock the Protoss missions, which are short and give a lot of Protoss research), and to obtain Ghosts (which I choose over Spectres only because Ghost of a Chance is a shorter mission than Breakout).

Ghost of a Chance and The Dig can both be done as your ninth mission at the earliest. Since Ghosts are very useful for finishing The Dig quickly, we'll do Ghost of a Chance ninth and The Dig tenth. That puts the first 3 Protoss missions as 11-13 (obviously skipping In Utter Darkness), leaving Moebius Factor for the fourteenth. All that's left is to figure out mission 4-8. Ghost of a Chance unlocks 2 missions after to finish Welcome to the Jungle, so I have to do Welcome to the Jungle sixth (which is earliest it can be done), which in turn requires the Devil's Playground fifth. For the remaining missions (4, 7, and 8) one has to be Smash and Grab, which is required for The Dig.

The remaining two missions can either be the first two Ariel Hanson missions (Evacuation and Outbreak) or the first two Matt Horner missions (The Great Train Robbery and Cutthroat). Evacuation and Train Robbery are both very long mission based on timed elements that can't be shortened (unfortunately, we have to do one of them). But Cutthroat is much shorter than Outbreak, so I go with the Horner missions. Also Cutthroat gives Protoss research, and if you add up all the Protoss research points available in the missions listed so far, Cutthroat will give me exactly 25 before Maw of the Void, which we'll see below is important. So Raynor is going to have to leave Dr. Hanson alone this time around.

Final mission order:
1. Liberation Day, 2:12
2. The Outlaws, 2:53
3. Zero Hour, 20:08 (fixed time mission)
4. Smash and Grab, 5:32
5. The Devil's Playground, 4:10
6. Welcome to the Jungle, 3:57
7. The Great Train Robbery, 23:48 (fixed time mission)
8. Cutthroat, 5:43
9. Ghost of a Chance, 5:37
10. The Dig, 16:48
11. Whispers of Doom, 7:18
12. A Sinister Turn, 5:11
13. Echoes of the Future, 2:51
14. The Moebius Factor, 3:34
15. Supernova, 4:31
16. Maw of the Void, 2:36
17. The Gates of Hell, 5:34.
18. Shatter the Sky, 2:53.
19. All In, 30:05 (fixed time mission).

Total 2:35:21

[top]Upgrades and Research

As noted above, the mission can give 25 Protoss research as early as Maw of the Void. Since the Orbital Strike research is very helpful all the missions after that point, I make sure to pick all 25 of the Protoss research on all missions through Supernova. There's no mission where getting the Protoss research takes too much extra time. This also gives the +25% gas research pretty early, and Auto-Refinery. Auto-Refinery is chosen over CC Reactor because of the extremely fast times it enables on Maw of the Void and Shatter the Sky. CC Reactor would have shortened The Gates of Hell, but only by 60-90 seconds or so. The tier 1 weapon upgrade never winds up being used for much aside from a few seconds on Supernova, and tier 4 (Raven/Science Vessel) is never used at all.

Zerg research is never important. In the run I get the optional 3 Zerg research from killing the Brutalisk in the The Devil's Playground, because that let me unlock the Hercules for The Moebius Factor, which I thought would speed it up. I wound up going with a strategy that doesn't use it though. I went back and tried to redo Playground without bothering to kill the Brutalisk, but it didn't save any appreciable amount of time. I use Shrike Turret on a few levels but it's never important, and Zerg tiers 2-3 are never used for anything.

As far as cash upgrades, I have a lot of spare credits at the end of the run (380,000). I picked up pretty much every upgrade on the way that I could come up with a way to use to shorten any mission. So any suggestions for further upgrades that could help on any mission would be welcome. The ones I wind up getting are:
--Marine Stim and Combat Shield. I use Marines pretty often and making them more effective helps. Shield isn't strictly necessary for anything, but since we had money to spare, it's a convenience.
--Medic Heal. Same as above. I don't think I make a Medic at any point in the run, but your starting units often include a Medic or two and this is pretty nice upgrade.
--Concussive Shell. Again, not strictly necessary, but makes it easier to defend with minimal forces at The Dig.
--Ghost Vision and Cloak. Finally an upgrade that really matters. We're going to nuke spam our way through The Dig and need permanently cloaked Ghosts. The vision upgrade lets a Ghost see Photon Cannons from outside detection range. Cloaking also makes the Maw of the Void and Shatter the Sky routes smoother.
--SCV Repair and Multi-build. Multi-build speeds up Maw of the Void. Repair saves a tiny amount of time on Supernova.
--Orbital Command. The mineral speedup makes the Shatter the Sky strategies work, and makes bunch of other levels a bit more convenient. It also lets us grab the 4th research at Supernova.
--Medivac Fast Unload. Saves a small amount of time on Supernova.
--Goliath Range and Dual-fire. In the end I didn't use Goliaths on any of the levels I thought I would, so these were unnecessary (the dual-fire causes Goliaths to shoot at some irrelevant things on Cutthroat and Moebius Factor). So I guess I really have 510,000 credits to spare in this run.

[top]Individual Mission Notes

1. Liberation Day 2:12. SC2 Speedrun, Part 1/8: Liberation Day, The Outlaws, Zero Hour - YouTube
Nothing special here. I try to run Raynor straight ahead to trigger the cutscenes while using the Marines to fight.

2. The Outlaws 2:53. SC2 Speedrun, Part 1/8: Liberation Day, The Outlaws, Zero Hour - YouTube
There's no point mining minerals because there's not enough time to do anything with them. The SCV's help soak damage from the Hellions and Bunker so you don't lose Marines. Time can be improved with better micro.

3. Zero Hour 20:08. SC2 Speedrun, Part 1/8: Liberation Day, The Outlaws, Zero Hour - YouTube
Fixed time mission. Unlike some others, even killing all the Zerg doesn't end this one early. I kill all the Zerg anyway since I need something to do while waiting. Note the outhouse easter egg in the north with the Tauren Marine in it. Also, amusingly, if you wipe out the Zerg you can take out the Nydus Worms that spawn during the final attack script and prevent that final assault on your base from even happening.

4. Smash and Grab 5:32. SC2 Speedrun, Part 2/8: Smash and Grab, The Devil's Playground, Welcome to the Jungle - YouTube
The key to this one is two Stalkers that hang out near the goal area. They're scripted to destroy anything that enter the goal area prematurely. You have to fly the Barracks into the north part of the goal, causing the Stalkers to path all the way around the map in an attempt to reach it. As soon as you aggro the Stalkers with your ground army along the way, you can land the Barracks and proceed. This is why I clear a bit to the east with my ground army while flying the Barracks over. So the time-limiting steps on the mission are:
--Get the Barracks into the goal area to aggro the Stalkers as quickly as possible.
--Intercept the Stalkers with ground army.
--Land Barracks and start making units.
--Start final event just before 3rd Marauder pops (if you start it any earlier, the Stone Guardians being tanked by the Barracks will kill that Marauder when it comes out).

5. The Devil's Playground 4:10. SC2 Speedrun, Part 2/8: Smash and Grab, The Devil's Playground, Welcome to the Jungle - YouTube
The Reaper path around the map picks up basically all the easily accessible mineral pickups. There are some more in the northeast base, but that one's pretty well defended. The timing works out pretty well, where right as I finish getting all the mineral pickups, the bases have mined enough to reach 8000. This is part of why leaving the Brutalisk alive wouldn't save much time--I need to get his 4 mineral pickups anyway, which requires spending time to kite him a bit in the first place. And even if I execute the Reaper path faster, I would just get into that northeast base with minimal rewards at the end. All in all, a little time could be saved that way though.

6. Welcome to the Jungle 3:57. SC2 Speedrun, Part 2/8: Smash and Grab, The Devil's Playground, Welcome to the Jungle - YouTube
This one is quite an intricate puzzle to speedrun. I have a very small army (2 Marines and 3 Goliaths, +1 Goliath I make at the beginning), that I have to use for a bunch of encounters. I could make more units, but note that resources are very tight all the way through, and I also have to fly both my production buildings around to accomplish various things. Also, if I make a second Goliath, I'd have 0 gas and wouldn't be able to repair my Goliaths unless I made a Refinery.
In the first skirmish, defending against 3 total Stalkers and 4 Scouts while collecting the first 4 Terrazene, the Bunker tanks (note how great Salvage is here--the Bunker is just a free HP soak). While clearing up the right side, I can repair my Goliaths while setting up more buildings (Factory and Turrets) to tank in the final skirmish. Note that I don't have to actually win in the final battle, just survive long enough to sneak that SCV away before everything else nearby gets blown up. Taking down Void Rays helps stall for time. Also, 2 full-HP Goliaths have to be sacrificed to grab the nearby research.

7. The Great Train Robbery 23:48. SC2 Speedrun, Part 3/8: The Great Train Robbery, Cutthroat - YouTube
Not much to be said here. The 8th train comes out of the center gate at 23:40. The only thing I can do end the mission more quickly is to blow up that base and cram a whole bunch of units up against the door to blow up the train the instant it spawns.

8. Cutthroat 5:43. SC2 Speedrun, Part 3/8: The Great Train Robbery, Cutthroat - YouTube
Once you buy Mira's aid, her starting forces can immediately walk over and win the mission. The only goal of the first half of the mission is to get to 6000. I start making SCV's immediately until the Vultures arrive and I get supply capped (at that point it wouldn't be worth it to make more). The only unit I add to my starting forces of 5 Marines is a Diamondback. The starting Marines can take out some enemy Marines near the beginning, but they can't deal with the Firebat/Medic easily, and would take a long time to kill the CC anyway. One Diamondback can tank for the low-HP Marines while they finish off that base (some micro required here). On the Vulture side, a few mines deal with a scripted Marine attack without taking damage.

9. Ghost of a Chance 5:37. SC2 Speedrun Part 4.mov - YouTube
General note, I killed Spectres because at this point I didn't realize money would be so unnecessary later on, and they all take virtually no extra time (just the 1s or so Nova takes to Snipe them). There's that one in part 2 that has to be killed with a Raven, but even takes no extra time if you have good multitasking, since the Raven isn't too useful for anything at that point.
Part 1: Once you reach the part with the Tank, Nova can solo the rest easily. The Marines are pretty much just there to aggro things so Nova can run by without getting snared by a Marauder.
Part 2: The big open area where you Dominate a Siege Tank is tricky. There are too many units there for Nova to run by until the Tank takes out that Turret. I have to keep my Tanks alive as well, since they have to cover Nova while she steals the nuke. As soon as possible, Nova runs up on the left ledge to the nuke silo to sight for the Tanks. In this run, the nearly Spectre didn't nuke--that sometimes happens but I didn't quite figure out why. It saves a few seconds when it happens.
Part 3: At the end, the Thor takes out the Turret ASAP, and Nova runs in a little peninsula of detection-free space while the Thor tanks for the Banshees. I didn't wind up needing to take out the Raven.

10. The Dig 16:48. SC2 Speedrun Part 4.mov - YouTube
Ah, The Dig. One of the must fun and most annoying levels in the whole run. Fun because, when else are you going to make use of constant nuke production from 6 silos? Annoying because it's the only mission in the game with a "destroy all enemy buildings" win condition, and so it becomes a 17-minute long spamfest with nukes and the Laser Drill. Also it's surprisingly easy to lose either a Ghost in the west or the Barracks in the east unless you're constantly vigilant. For reference, completing The Dig the normal way (drilling through the door) takes almost 28 minutes.
Start: at the beginning I just accumulate resources. I'm never going to spend gas on anything except nukes/silos/Ghosts (exception for one Marauder so that I have two total--the Marauder and Tank on each ramp mean I can basically ignore Protoss attacks). The goal is to have enough minerals for 4 Ghosts and 4 nukes, then I move into the west base. 4 Ghosts is a good number since you often want to nuke in pairs to blow up groups of buildings (the center of a nuke blast does 500 damage to a building).
West base: with 4 nukes ready, I use one to take out the Observer that hovers above the rally point (if you ever see me briefly zoom my camera in and out, it's a trick to help spot Observers--also useful in multiplayer). I then wait ~35 seconds, and use 3 more nukes to take all the Cannon guarding the ramp. You can see the Ghosts take just a few shots as they run into the center of the base--that's the replacement Observer passing overhead (which is why I delayed a little bit), but after that they're home free. I use the Laser Drill on a bunch of buildings at the beginning, but once that's occupied with the east base, it's just nukes. The safest way to deal with Cannons is to spot them, back up, and then nuke slightly in front of them. If you remain in vision range of them to sight for the Laser Drill or nuke right on top of them, it's easy to accidentally be detected.
East base: one Barracks can take care of the whole base if you keep an eye on it. The biggest threat is Scouts, which is why I take out the Starports quickly. Once they're down, you just have to watch for the occasional Archon. Once you get into the middle of the base, you don't have to worry about Cannons, since you can usually unpower them before reaching them.
All in all, I keep pretty decent uptime on the Laser Drill (if not for a slight error at the ver end, would have finished before the temple door reached 70,000 HP), and do use my gas pretty effectively in the form of nukes, but a faster player would be able to do all of it at once more quickly. I'm sure a good amount of time could be saved here just through faster play.

11. Whispers of Doom 7:18. SC2 Speedrun, Part 6/8: Whispers of Doom, A Sinister Turn&#x202c;&rlm; - YouTube
Mostly pretty straightforward. I skip the Zerg research because it's not needed for anything (also, 3 more would get me from 16 to 19 total during the run, which is worthless). You can basically run by a lot of encounters. The main issue for planning is the cooldown on Zeratul's spells--sometimes you have to save them for important moments. I don't even think losing a Stalker or two near the end would slow anything down much, so you might able to charge though even faster and just let them soak hits.

12. A Sinister Turn 5:11. SC2 Speedrun, Part 6/8: Whispers of Doom, A Sinister Turn - YouTube
This one's kind of interesting. The goal is to sneak DT's into the goal area as soon as Maar leaves it for the first time. Important fact: Maar's script triggers when you have mined a certain number of total minerals. So I make extra Probes at the beginning, and never mine gas. I get two DT's and an Immortal for free, and can make one more DT with my starting gas. That's not quite enough to charge through the final base with all 3 DT's alive (at least not easily) so I throw in a Zealot with the Immortal as further cannon fodder, which gets the DT's through easily. While waiting for Maar, there's ample time to clear a path and grab the 3rd research point.

13. Echoes of the Future 2:51. SC2 Speedrun Part 7.mov - YouTube
This basic strategy for doing this level has been known for a while. The only complication is getting the research points, but the two starting Colossi can clear the way for Probes to get to those easily. The only issue is doing it all smoothly. I did miss a Blink near the end because the Observer was out of position, but on retrying the level I couldn't get a better time. Something to do with the dialogue triggers, I think, meant I had to wait anyway. Maybe if I made sure to get the Pylons up more quickly the level would end sooner though.

14. The Moebius Factor 3:34. SC2 Speedrun Part 7.mov - YouTube
Everything is basically evident in the video. Better micro could probably save time once again.

15. Supernova 4:31. SC2 Speedrun Part 7.mov - YouTube
This took a lot of tries. There are a number of danger points where if I lose either a Banshee or the Medivac I have to restart.
--Passing south of the first Protoss base: there's often another Stalker that aggros here from the south. Also, the one I'm shooting from the high ground often paths around and shows up while I'm dealing with the Archons, but this time it never reappeared.
--Dealing with the Archons: I'm not sure why they sometimes aggro on the Medivac instead of the nearer SCV's, like you see here, but it helps get free damage in. I might have been to fly over even more aggressively, but finishing this portion with full HP on all the ships probably made the end a bit faster anyway.
--Flying between the two final bases: I uncloak here since I'm going to be detection range for a while anyway, and I need the energy for the end. Getting to that final clearing is a bit tricky--if a ship flies around the east side of that big obelisk, it often dies to the Cannon on that side. But if you go too far west of it, you aggro the Scout visible at the edge of the screen, which is fatal. Have to manage to keep the ships reasonably clumped right at that moment.
--Taking out the Cannons: the first one is easy, just get it down fast while repairing. For the second one, if the Banshees are any further south the come in range of the next Cannon as well. This is sort of sweet spot where I can get a little more repairing in. For the third, I move as far away as possible so the Phoenix has extra travel time. One more shot from that Phoenix and I have to restart. I cloak as the Cannon is going down, which aggros the Phoenix onto the Medivac, who can lead it away while the Banshees take out the Pylon and unpower the final Cannon (they're visible while doing this).
--Way back at the beginning of the level I had resources that I wasn't using for anything so I threw down an Armory and researched +1 for the Banshees. It finishes 22 seconds before the mission ends, so it probably saved around 2 seconds. This is the only time in the entire campaign (outside of fixed-time levels) that I got an upgrade.

16. Maw of the Void 2:36. SC2 Speedrun Part 7.mov - YouTube
Boy, things get a lot more fun now that we have Orbital Strike. Note that killing the objective with 2 Ghosts and 2 nukes is tricky--it has 1200 HP and 2 nukes only do 1000. The key is to get its shield down so it started taking Rip-field damage, and to keep the first Ghost plinking at it long enough that the shields don't regenerate while the second nuke is casting. There winds up being just enough ancillary damage to bring it down right after the second nuke lands. Really, once you get the Tech Lab and the silos building, the level is mostly self-working. The only tricky part is getting the first Ghost cloaked as soon as he lands, since it triggers two cutscenes. In this run he takes no damage from anything besides Rip-fields, so he probably did as much damage as is possible to the Vault before dying.

17. The Gates of Hell 5:34. SC2 Speedrun Part 8.mov - YouTube
Have to get to 100 supply ASAP (note that supply of units under construction doesn't help here). The cheapest supply is Vultures--2 supply for 75 minerals and no gas. As an added bonus, they build in only 25s and can be Reactored, so I only need one Factory. So I basically pump minerals into SCV's/Vultures, while getting 4 nukes ready and making 4 Ghosts. There's an instant bump of 10 supply at the 5 minute mark, 6 from the rescuing the NPC Vultures, and 4 from summoning Marine mercenaries. In my runs, this is always what got me over 100 supply. I may have been able to do it slightly earlier with a perfect build order, but probably not by much since minerals are limited (the Command Center Reactor research would save a lot of time here, but it's not best for the run overall). In this run my only unit loss is when I accidentally shot my own Vulture, but it doesn't wind up mattering since I jump from 94 to 100 supply instantly anyway.
At the end, there is a way to launch nukes before the Warfield cutscene so that they land the moment after the cutscene ends (has to be timed perfectly or it doesn't work). The problem is, if you destroy all 3 Nydus Worms that way, it breaks the objective and you can't win the mission. So you'd have to leave one Worm at partial HP and kill it some other way. A Spectre could immediately use Lash to finish it off, but Ghosts don't have anything like that. You might be able to drop some Marauders/Reapers in as well and come up with a solution that's a bit faster than nuking after the cutscene like I do here.

18. Shatter the Sky 2:53. SC2 Speedrun Part 8.mov - YouTube
This one's fun. We have 4 objectives to take out simultaneously with different groups of units. Ultimately they're all pretty easy. The center one is trivial to reach with your starting units. The west objective can be sniped with your starting Battlecruiser/Banshees by flying in from the right angle. The east one can be taken out by two Marines since there's a spot where they can land without aggroing anything. The only tricky one is south. There's no completely detection-free spot in range of the objective. In fact, when they nuke the objective here, they're in detection range of the Spore Crawler just under the ledge. Rather than using a whole extra nuke to take out that Spore though, I just drive all the nearby Mutalisks away before starting to nuke (putting the first Ghost on Hold Position when it lands works well for this). One Mutalisk does drift back, but not in time to do anything. Other issues:
The Leviathan spawns when two platforms have blown up. It spawns in the south and is a detector, so that can't be allowed to happen. This means that I have to blow all 4 objectives at roughly the same time. Also, if an explosion cutscene occurs while nukes are flying, the nukes will vanish. This is why I make Marine-Techlab-Marine out of the Barracks at the beginning--it delays the destruction of east platform slightly to make sure the cutscene doesn't occur before the level ends.
In general this one probably can't be done much faster with this route. The Barracks makes 2 Marines, a Tech Lab, and 2 Ghosts, which all takes 149 seconds. The second Ghost takes 2 seconds to land in his drop pod, and then it takes about 1 second to select him, cloak him, walk both Ghosts forward, and nuke. 20 seconds for the nuke to land means I can't see the level ending before 172 seconds (I get 173 in this run).

19. All In 30:05. SC2 Speedrun, Part 8/8: The Gates of Hell, Shatter the Sky, All In - YouTube
It's really anticlimactic for a speedrun to end on a fixed-time mission. At least Shatter the Sky was neat. Since All In on Normal difficulty is really easy I try to come up with something at least slightly entertaining. Here I buy no additional upgrades beyond what I already had, make no units besides Marines and Medics, and never use the Artifact. I don't wind up playing it that well--you can see me lose a bunch of units to Kerrigan when I'm not paying attention. But I was pretty worn out after recording all this, so I let it go.

Trying another one of these since I think the mana regen one turned out pretty well. This one is going to be slightly different. Many people have written descriptions of how these work, since it was a clear and interesting new topic. So I'm going to give a pretty terse summary of the basic computation, and then outline one further detail which is missed by most popular write-ups: the exact way the rounding works in-game. With that knowledge, you can compute breakpoints that are exact to a single point of rating.

 

Contents

1Introduction 2Variables 3Review of basic computation 4Rounding 5Example

[top]Introduction

In Cataclysm, all DoT/HoT effects have their tick rate increased by haste. Since this causes the DoT duration to not be an integral number of ticks, the game rounds the duration to the closest whole number of ticks. Haste breakpoints are those amounts of haste at which you get a whole tick added on.

Breakpoints are important for gearing because the haste contribution to your DPS and healing jumps up at certain points. For some classes (Resto Druids are the best example), it is worth it to modify your gear setup quite significantly to obtain a whole extra tick on a spell that you use often.

[top]Variables

Throughout this post:

• D is the default duration of the HoT or DoT in question.
• n is the default number of ticks.
• t is the default tick time (equal to D/n)
• k is the number of the tick we're trying to add (i.e. if we're computing the haste needed for the 5th tick of Rejuvenation, k=5).
• H is your combined haste from %-based haste buffs (so if you have both Moonkin Aura and Dark Intent, H would be 1.05*1.03=1.0815).
• s is your haste rating.
• R is the "haste constant", equal to 12,805.7.

[top]Review of basic computation

To determine the number of ticks a DoT will have, the game does the following:

• Apply your total haste to the default tick rate to determine the final tick rate.
• Divide the default duration by the final tick rate to find the (fractional) number of ticks.
• Round that number up or down to the nearest integer to determine the final number of ticks (and adjust duration up or down to accommodate).

Mathematically:
Your total haste factor is:


Therefore, buffed tick time of the DoT is:


Number of ticks before rounding is:


In order for the DoT to achieve k ticks, that number must be high enough to be rounded up to k. In other words, it must be at least (k - 1/2). Therefore the breakpoint occurs at:

Solving for s:

(Note that D and t have nicely dropped out--only the default number of ticks n is needed)

This is the derivation for the formula that I have in this post a while back:
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/1152-h...e_breakpoints/

[top]Rounding

For a while class, theorycrafters used the above equation or something identical to it to predict their breakpoints. Problem is, it didn't work out exactly in-game. You'd gain the extra tick somewhere close to the predicted amount (within 5 rating usually), but not exactly at it. It was clear that the game was rounding something at some step of the way.

This was hard to test since it was necessary to keep adjusting haste by very small amounts near various breakpoints (since different guesses at how the rounding worked only changed the results to the tune of a few points of rating). I was looking into it, as were people on other EJ class forums like Warlocks. Eventually a hypothesis came out which predicted all breakpoints exactly, which is the following:

• After haste is applied to the tick time, that tick time is rounded to the nearest millisecond (0.001 seconds) before the total number of ticks is computed.
• If the number of ticks before rounding is an exact half-integer, the game rounds down instead of up (EDIT: this has been revised slightly--read update here: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/1152-h...points_update/ ).

So the resulting calculation is modified as follows.
Tick time before rounding was:


Tick time after rounding to the nearest millisecond is:
.
(The half-brackets are the floor operator--I'm using them here to mean "round down to the nearest 0.001 seconds." I'm expressing the rounding by adding half a millisecond and then rounding down, because it simplifies a later computation).

The number of ticks before rounding is:

Sadly, due to the rounding, the D/t doesn't nicely drop out anymore. Different duration DoTs can have different breakpoints even if they have the same number of ticks.

To find the final tick value, round that expression to the nearest integer, with the above proviso that exact half-integers are rounded down.

What we really want to do though is solve for s as we did before to find the breakpoint. Once again, the pre-rounding number of ticks must be greater than (k - 1/2).


Juggling the algebra here is a bit more of a pain due to the ceiling operator, but it goes like so:

What happens here is a bit tricky. Remember that the right side of the equation is an integral number of milliseconds, and the left side is the maximum tick time that will allow for the kth tick to occur. If you think about this for a minute, we can say that the number of milliseconds we need to "reach" is the ceiling of the expression on the left:

From here, solving for s is simple algebra:





The expression on the right is our haste breakpoint (again, the ceiling operator rounds the internal expression up to the nearest thousandth of a second, or 0.001 seconds).

This is an Excel expression that will give the needed amount of rating:
Simply fill in the appropriate cells in your spreadsheet for D, T, K, H, and R.

(EDIT: Once more, find a slight update to this here: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/1152-h...points_update/ , which will change the result slightly in a small number of cases)

[top]Example

Once again, an example. As a Resto Druid, my only haste buff is the raid's Moonkin aura (H = 1.05), and I want to know how much haste rating is needed to reach the 13th tick of Lifebloom (a 10 second, 10 tick HoT by default). Variables:

• D = 10
• t = 1
• k = 13
• H = 1.05
• R = 12,805.7.

0.800 second is an integral number of milliseconds (800 milliseconds), so the ceiling of it is still 0.800.

The final expression is then:

12805.7*(1/ (1.05*(0.800 - 0.0005)) -1) = 2448.715.

And that gives us the exact amount needed to get that 13th tick: 2449 haste rating.

Note that if you used the earlier formula, without rounding, you would have gotten 2440 as your breakpoint, potentially causing you to miss the extra tick if you tried to gem to exactly 2440.

It's just a network
Yes, the N in SAN stands for network. Ethernet networks are not loseless. In a Fabric Channel capable network, you can't loose packets. You just lost data. And when a server thinks the disk has lost data, bad complex things happen. Packet loss in an ethernet network is expected. In a FC SAN, it's bad.

Queue Depth
Queue Depth is a term any knowledgable SAN/Storage administrator knows, but surprisingly often has no idea how the value actually works. Queue Depth is a simple concept, it's basically how many I/O's the HBA will throw onto a SAN before queuing. People often times think (and somewhat logically) that if you increase the depth of your queue then more things will queue, but the truth is this:

The larger your queue depth the more I/O's that go to the SAN before being queued on the server.

Thus HBA queue depth is one of the main parameters you can tune when dealing with storage performance issues on a server attached to a SAN

Finding the correct setting usually requires a bit of testing, sometimes a little luck, and a lot of dependance on your vendor:

HP: Here's a white paper
HDS: Here's a formula
EMC: Here's a quote
Oracle: OMG YOU USE A SAN AND THE EVIL RAID 5....BURN THE HERETIC BURN THE HERETIC
NetApp: Please ignore the effects of WAFL on reads after everything becomes a random write

All kidding aside, each vendor has best practices and ways of analyzing what queue depths you can push to.

Mulitpathing
Let's take a further step into the server. The I/O's have to get to the HBAs, and sitting in that I/O stack is some multipathing software that helps keep all of the HBAs busy

I'm going to stick to three major types of multipathing software:

• Full featured
• Queue Depth Monitoring
• Round Robin

Full featured multipathing is the software that really, honestly, knows how badly you designed your SAN. It knows that you skimped on the cable for that link between those switches. If it's the same vendor as your storage, it also probably knows a little about how the host ports on the storage array are doing. In other words, this is the software that gets huge performance gains because in all likelihood, it's smarter than you. You are going to pay for this intelligence, and it's probably not going to be cheap. But if you have a lot of servers or have some ones that require high performance, this may save you from reoccurring issues.

Look at your server as a city with four highways that all lead to the beach. At all times, the city knows which highways are busiest and will dynamically adjust as the four highways become faster and slower.

Queue Depth Monitoring is multipath software which understands that if one of it's paths is slow, that the HBA is queueing up and that it should use that path less. It has some of the benefits of a full featured multipath solution in that it does respond positively in cases where there is congestion, but that response will always be slower. The more capable OS based multipath solutions include this.

Think of that city again. If one highway clogs up then eventually the highway will stop getting used for some period of time, allowing it to clear.

Round Robin is the final multipath software I will discuss. I include this because if you use Red Hat native or VMWare* esx/esxi, then you at best have round robin multipathing. Basically, each path is used in order before moving to the next path, then repeating from start. Congestion is completely ignored, except of course in the error log where the server complains the storage is too slow (0x2 for you VM folks)

*A special note for you VMWare folks, by default VMWare's round robing sends an almost criminal number of I/Os down a path before using additional paths, leading to a situation where round robin is basically active/passive.

Backups
Did you buy a whole lot of fancy deduplicating VTLs that are emulating Storagetek Tape Library's and you stuck them all on the same Fabric that is shared with your production data?

You just put a mismatch of data on one half of your redundant SAN.

Ok, so what?
Well, your Red Hat engineer who insisted that you use native Red Hat MPIO because to use third party mulitpathing you have to do kernel recompiles for upgrades has now placed into service on your SAN servers that will not understand that yes, half your fabric is congested. It's going to happilly continue to throw data down that path, possibly find enough congestion to timeout and then, because Red Hat protects itself by making the volume read only, have a unusable system/application.

If you want a redundant SAN environment, round robin multipathing does not cut it
This is the issue. People design their SAN to be redundant. They put multiple HBAs in each server. The two fabrics in the SAN are there so you can break one. But the moment you use round robing multipathing you have killed your redundancy with regards to things such as congestion, packet loss, bad cables, and other ways that make paths not ideal. The only way round robin stops using a path is if it goes down. When you choose round robin, you are choosing to ignore all the engineering that went into designing your SAN.

I've always been meaning to do a series of posts where I spell out of basics of theorycrafting. Basically, I see a lot of people who want to help with the analysis of their class mechanics on sites like EJ, but lack the foundation of knowledge of WoW mechanics to be able to easily do so. People often spend time rehashing already done calculations, or trying to figure out exactly how various in-game quantities are derived, before they can get to working on anything meaningful. I want to lay out some basic outlines of various topics that people can use to avoid wasting time when they want to begin understanding these aspects of WoW. These are not intended to be class-specific.

The one I'm going to try first is mana regen. Healers very often want to understand how much regen they get from various buffs or talents, but the way your final regen is computed can be confusing. I constantly see people trying to work it out from scratch when trying to compare talents and becoming very confused. It's actually not that obvious how that in-combat mana regen on your character sheet is derived from Spirit and Int. I'll try to clarify that and other topics here.

Everything in this post applies only to characters at level 85.

Preliminary -- Buffs

I just want to address one point of confusion before we get started. Int, Spirit, and total mana pool can all be affected by various %-based buffs (although this is rare in the case of Spirit; it's basically only the Human racial). All calculations below make use of buffed values. In general, you don't need to do any elaborate calculation to find your total buffed Int/Spirit/mana--just check your character sheet in your raid configuration.

But we can't completely ignore the fact that %-based buffs contribute to stats, because oftentimes you're going to want to consider scaling: how much do I get from one added point of a particular stat? And when doing so, you have to remember that adding one point of, for example, Int on your gear really gives you more than one Int due to buffs. For example, as a Resto Druid I get 5% Int from Mark of the Wild, 5% from Leather Specialization, and 6% from Heart of the Wild. So 1 point of Int "really" gives me 1.05*1.05*1.06 = 1.16865 Int, and I have to take that into account when figuring out what I gain from a point of Int.

Variable Names

Throughout this post:

• B is your class's base mana.
• I is your buffed Int.
• S is your buffed Spirit.
• N is your combined %-based Int buffs (for example, the 1.16865 in the last paragraph).
• M is your combined %-based increases to total mana pool (for example, 1.02 from an Ember meta).
• O is your combined %-based increases to Spirit (simply 1 for most characters, 1.03 for Humans).
• C is the in-combat regen factor: 0.8 for Holy Priests, 0.5 for other healers, and 0 for all other classes.
• R is the "mana regen constant," equal to 0.016725.

1. Mana Pool Size.

The first order of business: how is your total mana pool determined? Most people know that they have some amount of "base mana" and that a point of Int gives 15 mana before talents, but even then it can be difficult to work out exactly what's going on, and backsolving your base mana from your total mana pool is very easy to get wrong.

So first, here is base mana for all healing classes:

• Drd 18635
• Pal 23422
• Pst 20590
• Shm 23430

Base mana is important because it's used to determine spell costs and other things (such as 2T12 set bonuses). As we'll see below, it also affects regen.

Now you would think that your total mana before talents and buffs is:
Base Mana + Int*15.
But, it is actually:
Base Mana + Int*15 - 280.
Don't ask me why this is.

Result: total mana pool is given by

(see above for variable definitions)
Remember that Int and mana buffs combine multiplicatively.

As an important corollary, note that the actual amount of total mana you get per point of Int is:

For example, if your only Int/mana buffs are MotW (5%), Armor spec (5%), and Ember meta (2%), a point of Int gives 15*1.05*1.05*1.02 = 16.86825 mana. Class-specific talents will increase this further.


2. Character sheet MP5

First of all, each class has some base regen before even Spirit and Int are taken into account. This regen is equal to 5% of your base mana every 5 seconds. For example, a Druid has 18635 base mana, and therefore has 931.75 MP5 in base regen. This amount is not affected by the in-combat regen penalty; it is constant at all times.

The other part of the MP5 seen on your character sheet is Spirit regen. Spirit regen, expressed as MP5, is given by:
0.016725*Spi*sqrt(Int).
This is your Spirit regen when out of combat. When in combat, healing specs get 50% of this regen (80% for Priests with 2/2 Holy Concentration).

Result: the amount of in-combat regen displayed on your character sheet is:
.

Corollary: we can take derivatives to find the MP5 value of an added point of Spi or Int. Added in-combat MP5 from one point of Spi:

(Remember, O will just be 1 unless you have some % Spirit increase, and I is your total buffed Int).

Added in-combat MP5 from one point of Int:



Example: Right now as a Resto Druid I have 6479 Int and 2854 Spirit raid buffed. My Int buffs are Mark (5%), Leather (5%), and Heart of the Wild (6%), so N = 1.05*1.05*1.06 = 1.6865. I have no %-based Spirit increases.
My in-combat regen is:

0.05*18635 + 0.5*0.016725*2854*SQRT(6479) = 2852.8 MP5.

1 additional point of Spirit gives me:

0.5*0.016725*1*SQRT(6479) = 0.673 MP5.

1 additional point of Int gives me:

0.5*0.016725*2854*1.16865 / (2*SQRT(6479)) = 0.173 MP5.


3. Other Sources of Regen
It's hard to say much generally about other sources of regen since they all work differently, but there are a few helpful tips. Most are either based off of base mana or total mana pool. Base mana is easy to work with since it's completely constant for your class. For regen based on total mana (Replenishment, Innervate), you have to take into account the total mana pool increase from one point of Int, discussed above.

I'll use Replenishment as an example, since it affects everyone. Replenishment gives you 0.5% of your total mana every 5 seconds. As discussed above, the total mana pool increase from one point of Int is

Therefore, 1 additional point of Int increases your Replenishment MP5 by


Example: as a Resto Druid right now, my Int buffs are Mark (5%), Leather (5%), and Heart of the Wild (6%). My mana pool buffs are Ember (2%) and 2/3 Furor (10%). So the MP5 increase to my Replenishment from one point of Int is:
0.075*1.05*1.05*1.06*1.02*1.1 = 0.09834 MP5.

Other sources of mana that depend on the size of your total mana pool will function similarly.

Complete Example - Int vs. Spi for a Resto Druid

To see how this all works out in practice, I'll compare the benefits of Int and Spi for me as a Resto Druid. As noted above, for my setup:

• B = 19635
• I = 6479
• S = 2854
• N = 1.16865
• M = 1.122
• O =1
• C = 0.5
• R = 0.016725.

In the examples above we've already found that that a point of Spi gives me 0.673 MP5, and a point of Int gives me 0.173 MP5 through increased Spirit regen. In addition, Int gives 0.098 MP5 from increased Replenishment.

I also Innervate myself every 3 minutes, for 20% of my mana pool. So on average, every 5 seconds, I get back 20% * 5/180 = 0.556% of my mana pool (aside: note that this is around the same as Replenishment regen). So the value of an added point of Int is:

0.00556*15*1.16865*1.122 = 0.109 MP5.

Finally, I get regen from Revitalize. Revitalize returns 2% of my total mana, and as a good estimate, procs every 13.5 seconds. So every 5 seconds I get 2% *5/13.5 = 0.741% of my total mana. The value of added Int is:

0.00741*15*1.16865*1.122 = 0.146 MP5.

So in total:
A point of Spirit gives me 0.673 MP5.
A point of Int gives me 0.173 + 0.0983 + 0.109 + 0.146 = 0.526 MP5, and also gives me 19.67 starting mana.

On any fight less than 19.67*5/(0.673-0.526) = 669 seconds long, the Int will contribute more overall mana.

Final note: you may have noticed that working through all this arithmetic was somewhat tedious. If you're at all interested in doing these sorts of things, you really want to learn the basics of how to use a spreadsheet, because it vastly speeds up these sorts of calculations. Don't spend lots of time crunching out the arithmetic by hand, especially since all the numbers change as soon as you tweak any of your stats. I can work out all the above in just a few seconds in my Resto spreadsheet, even though it took me much longer to type it all up for this one example (the sheet also accounts for various details like procs which are a pain to add in by hand).

Conclusion
I hope this has been helpful to get you started on figuring out how these mechanics work. Again, the point of this post wasn't to reach some particular conclusion regarding my class or any other, but rather to provide a resource for people who are attempting to do similar things on their own. Please give any feedback on whether you found it helpful, in particular on whether the level of mathematical detail was too high or too low, as I may do more of these soon.

The next problem I'd like to address is that of cooldowns - long an iconic part of our class. In vanilla we were defined - particularly in PvP - by our access to many powerful cooldowns, and we've gained more across the patches and expansions since then. Yet in the modern PvE game, they have become as much burden as benefit, and today I'd like to discuss why that is, and how to fix it.

Let us begin with our utility cooldowns, as the problem with them is easier to identify. We have some that are powerful tools in our arsenal, led by Cloak but also including Sprint, Evasion, and Redirect. These are valuable tools, because we use them in response to specific needs that arise during a fight. We Cloak when we need to shed a debuff, and Sprint when we need to get somewhere faster, and Evasion when we have aggro and Redirect to get a sharper target switch. Compare this to Tricks or (for Assassination and Subtlety) Vanish, which we hit because... its off cooldown.

The key point here is that some of our cooldowns have ceased being things that we hit because we need the benefit they provide to respond to a specific event within the fight - thus requiring a decision to be made about when they are most needed - and started being things that we hit every 30 or 60 or 180 seconds, with little regard to timing within the fight. This robs them of their role as powerful tools to use as needed, and turns them into just another part of our rotation - and I think that's boring. What's the point in having cooldowns (rather than passive benefit) if there's no meaningful decision to be made about when and how to use them? Fortunately, though, the solution is easy - simply remove the DPS component to the abilities, and the problem goes away. There's just no good reason to turn vanish into a (ghetto) DPS cooldown.
For DPS cooldowns, the problem is harder, as by definition, the more times you use a DPS cooldown in a given fight, the more damage you will do. But I think we can do better than we currently are by making them short, intense, and infrequent:

• Infrequent - Consider for a moment how Heroism is used; you pick the one time during the fight when you need it most, and you use it then - because you can only use it once every 10 minutes, and few fights last that long. This is different than, say, Adrenaline Rush or Vendetta, which you spam on cooldown all fight long. It you make the cooldowns longer - 3 minutes, or even 5 - you'll get fewer uses per fight, and thereby more temporal flexibility in when you use them. In a 7 minute fight, a 2 minute cooldown can only be delayed 15 seconds per usage (on average) to get the maximal number of usages in, while a 5 minute cooldown can be delayed by a minute (on average) and still get both usages in.
• Short - Cooldowns provide too large a portion of our DPS - Vendetta 5%, and Adrenaline Rush almost 10%. If the DPS benefit were smaller, we could afford to take more chances - gambling with 1% of the total damage you'll do for the fight is far more reasonable than gambling with 3%. One of the two ways to do this is to make the duration shorter.
• Intense - The other way, of course, is to make them less powerful when active, but I don't see that that's necessarily a good solution; it risks the Cold Blood problem of it not really mattering that much whether you hit it or not. Thus, we make sure the benefit provided is significant and meaningful, and reduce the total damage expectation only via duration.

To illustrate this point: if Vendetta were a 90% damage increase for 10 seconds every 3 minutes, it would give the same average damage increase that it does now, but would be obviously vastly more powerful (and quite possibly overpowered). Even at +40% for 10 seconds every 3 minutes it would be a much more valuable tool - particularly once our baseline DPS was buffed to compensate for the loss of cooldown damage.

With these goals in mind, let us now look at solutions for our Combat cooldowns (I'll deal with Assassination and Subtlety in future installments):

2. Tricks is not a DPS cooldown

• Tricks no longer gives the target a DPS benefit.
• Replace the T10 and T12 set bonuses with non Tricks-linked abilities.
• Glyph of Tricks still removes energy cost but increases cooldown to 45 seconds instead of reducing damage bonus.

I've gone through the full logic of this previously, so I will refer you to that explanation rather than repeating the whole thing here. To summarize: Tricks should be only a threat transfer, and we use it when someone needs more or less threat - not just because its been 30 seconds since we last hit it.

3. Restless Blades removed
When Restless Blades first came out, I liked it - I thought it was a good fit with our usual cooldown-centric style of play. However, upon contemplation, I've changed my mind; as we've discussed, cooldowns that become available too frequently can be detrimental to their quality, and that's all Restless Blades does. Moroever, it doesn't contribute to decision-making in any way; its not like you're going to do more or less damaging finishers based on a desire to control when things come off cooldown; your optimal cycle already involves doing as many as is possible, so Restless Blades is effectively a passive benefit for doing something you were already going to do anyway. If we must have something that reduces cooldowns, it should be tied to something that we wouldn't necessarily already always do. For instance, were it tied to Revealing Strike, we'd get some normal baseline level of cooldown reduction - but if you needed your cooldown sooner for some reason, you could sacrifice short term DPS by spamming RvS in order to get your cooldown back faster. Would it always be worth using? Not if balanced correctly. But the fact that you *could* do it if necessary would add richness and depth to the class.

That said: such an implementation is not without its own problems, and I'm not advocating that as a replacement (yet); but given that the current implementation isn't much different than "your KSp cooldown is reduced by 20/40 seconds and your AR cooldown by 30/60" - and as we've discussed, short cooldowns isn't really a good thing - I do feel confident in saying that Restless Blades does need to be replaced with *something* else.

4. Killing Spree only kills bad guys

• Killing Spree always returns you to the exact point in space you left from

If we look at KSp in the context of our DPS cooldown goals, its actually pretty good. Its short; it provides meaningful DPS boost when active; it only provides about 2.5% of our total DPS, and following the removal of Restless Blades it has a reasonable cooldown. Its a good talent - except for the fact that it kills you.

Now, I've said this before, and I'll say it again: it doesn't really bother me that KSp can't be used on cooldown on all fights. It doesn't even bother me that much that there's the occasional fight where you can't use it at all. The entire point of this post has been that you should have to pay attention to when you hit cooldowns and not just do so whenever they become available, and having to figure out whether its safe to use or not strikes me as wholly consistent with that goal - provided our DPS is not balanced with the assumption that we'll be able to use it the instant it comes off cooldown for the entire duration of every fight.

That said: I think its a little *too* punitive in its current form - very few abilities can kill you irrevokably if mistimed by only a second or two. So to avoid the issues of getting dumped into lava behind bosses and sucked off to strange locations by chaining off adds, lets simply always return to where we started from - you may ping pong all over the place for 2.5 seconds, but at the end of it you're back where you started. Of course, the boss may have dropped a flame puddle or a Shadow Trap or whatever on the location you left from, but that's why you have to be careful; in the age of boss timers there's simply no reason not to know when the next patch of bad will be appearing. It'll still be a cooldown that must be used with caution, but at least now you're in control of your own fate.

5. Nerf AR. A lot.

• Haste buff removed from AR; it again only increases regen.
• Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
• Glyph of Adrenaline Rush removed.

AR is currently almost 10% of a combat rogue's damage; the removal of Restless Blades drops this to 6%; cutting it to half its current (glyphed) duration drops that to 3%, and dropping the (rather unnecessary) haste that was tacked on to the ability in Cataclysm gets us down around 2%. Which is a far more reasonable place for it to be. Its still a significant boost while active, and is still absolutely worth using, but you have far more flexibility in saving it for the moment it matters most.

As usual, some feedback I wrote up on recent Moonkin changes.

----

Now that I've had some chances to play with it in raids, comments on how Moonkin is doing:

1) Lunar Shower.
This was the big 4.2 change. It accomplished the main goal of cutting out infinite Sunfire spam, but left a few awkward issues.
--The idea of just dropping the Lunar Shower talent from raid specs has become pretty popular. It first this seemed like a problem, but thinking about it more, it might be acceptable. It's not really a circumvention of the new energy drawback, as the player doesn't get the best of both worlds, but rather has to choose whether damage/efficiency benefits of the talent are worth the energy cost. Even if the player abandons the talent, it's not a return to the 4.1 situation, since untalented Sunfire spam is generally too weak to use in that way.
--It leaves us in the position where Lunar Shower is a pretty weak talent though. Before 4.2, its powerful uses for effective AoE and for Eclipse delaying obscured the fact that its intended use--providing added DPS while moving--is actually not that great. Ranged DPS work pretty hard to minimize movement in raid encounters, and most of the time, you spend too little time moving for the small DPS benefit from Lunar Shower to be worth the talent points. A big part of this is that it takes 3 GCD's to charge up, so it gives almost no benefit unless you move for 4-5 continuous seconds, which is rare.

There's one significant issue with the talent that makes it a lot less palatable than it would otherwise be. For one-fourth of the Eclipse cycle, specifically the pre-Lunar phase (the time when you're not in Eclipse and arrow is pointing towards Lunar), the Lunar Shower talent provides no energy. This is due to an oversight in the way the energy gain is given: the talent specifies that Moonfire gives Solar energy and Sunfire gives Lunar energy. But for one portion of the cycle, the spell is Moonfire while the relevant energy direction is still Lunar. So the way the talent winds up functioning is biased against the player: in Eclipse, Moonfire/Sunfire repeat casting always drains your energy, but outside Eclipse, it doesn't always provide energy. There's no reason for Lunar Shower to operate inconsistently in this way; the concept of the 4.2 change is for Moonfire spam to move the energy bar, and it should do so regardless of the current Eclipse state.

Summary: The current state is fine if you're okay with Lunar Shower now being a weak PvE talent instead of a strong one. In any case, the aforementioned asymmetry should be changed, to see if the talent becomes more usable once it's working consistently. But in order to be a strong PvE talent again, it would need to provide something more than its current very minor damage increase over the course of most typical encounters.

2) AoE.
The removal of our pre-4.2 "AoE" technique--constant DoT's while staying in Solar indefinitely--has revealed some problems with our AoE toolset. Specially, both of our AoE spells require Solar Eclipse to be effective. Even though remaining in permanent Solar Eclipse incurs much more of a penalty than it used to, players can still feel compelled to do so on encounters with a frequent need to AoE. I think it's pretty clear that, at least as a start, there needs to be some AoE option that benefits from Lunar Eclipse. Exactly how to do it is hard to say though. Right now, Wild Mushroom is a strong AoE spell and Hurricane is a mediocre one. So even if, for example, Hurricane were moved to Lunar Eclipse, it's not clear by how much the situation would improve.

Even a weaker AoE spell like Hurricane being affected by Lunar would be a start though. Right now, the player has to avoid exiting Solar Eclipse if there's an AoE need coming anytime in the next 30-40 seconds (the time needed to get back to the next Solar). Being able to stop in Lunar to AoE reasonably well would generally allow the player to keep using the Eclipse cycle at all times.

Another option would be to increase the base damage of Wild Mushroom and Hurricane and then remove them from Eclipse altogether. This would remove much of the need for Eclipse planning across the duration of an encounter, which you may see as a good or bad thing depending on your current view of the complexity of the class.

Summary: AoE'ing in any state other than Solar Eclipse is heavily suboptimal, and players go to great lengths to avoid it. This conflicts with the idea that the player wants to continuously progress through Eclipse states while DPSing.