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

Hey! I'm glad you want to find out what the heck is going on in Cataclysm. Well, here's what I've figured out:

First, healers have been 'nerfed' immensely. The heal per second relative to the size of the health pools in Cataclysm is at best a third of what it was during season eight. The mana efficiency and number of times you could top someone off with a given mana bar are equally nerfed, and so are the mana regeneration abilities (except, of course, for paladins, who now use combo...

Yes

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

[top]Introduction

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

• Hamlet

As I've mentioned before, occasionally I sent feedback via e-mail to devs at Blizzard. I'd been a bit quiet on WoW issues for a few weeks, but I finally put together a full summary of my current thoughts on Resto. Here's what I wrote today:

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Finally got to do some raiding on the beta since the last Resto changes. In brief I'd say things are bit better than I thought, but the main issue I outlined in the last email (Rejuv and mechanics that rely on it...

• Hamlet

NetApp has quietly released their newest Arrays. Quietly. For some reason, they're not especially loud about it. Go to their homepage. Let me know if you see something about new hardware.

Why are they so quiet?

They don't have that much to say. They've checked off a box with SSD support (Holy crap finally, but from Samsung, not exactly the leader in Enterprise SSD). Hopefully now they can accelerate more than just read I/O. They finally updated their Processors...

Zeln