Ordinarily I don't make posts to restate well-established rules of mechanics. May as well take the chance for a reminder in fact: the point of this blog is not really as a general source of Druid information. There are many blogs that reliably relay all current information and announcements. This is just a place for me to put original work or analysis that I do whenever I happen to do it--basically EJ-type forum posts that don't really belong on any particular thread.

Anyway, someone...

• Hamlet

It's funny how things work. I started hearing good things about Fallout: New Vegas, which reminded me of issues that I had with Fallout 3, and general dislike of the Gamebryo engine. This in turn reminded me about Oblivion, which was a game that I played only a bit before shelving. (A bit being probably 80 hours haha.) A number of the issues I had with Oblivion had to do more with the improvements that it had, like fast travel making the world feel disjoint and skills feeling confusing, and...

• zeidrich

Last post I mentioned that hit rating was around the same value as haste or weaker, but that I wasn't totally sure where it lay. I looked into that a bit more.

Going through WrathCalcs to see where I'd been lazy and forgotten to take into account miss chance, the only important one I saw that I needed to account for the fact that misses don't generate Eclipse energy. Doing that did actually bump up the value of hit quite a bit. Not enough to change the things I've been saying the...

• Hamlet

This is a follow-up to my last post, to try to focus on what I think is a rather important point. I want to start establishing an idea that I think will eventually spread through the Balance community as people start to better understand Cataclysm gearing (and how it's different from WLK). That idea is that, as the title indicates, the hit cap is no longer important.

What do I mean by this? Basically that gear-selection decisions will almost always be made without the hit cap in...

• Hamlet

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

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

• Hamlet