pwnwear

My information structure for EJ DK Tank OP

Gravity — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:45:37 +0000

I have posted the below on Elitist Jerks, which is the final version of the information structure I have been sharing for input (page 3).

I’ve worked out what I’d like to put into the new EJ OP for DK tanks, and what I will exclude. I’m happy to take suggestions.
I’ll start the new tank thread when the Beta changes have settled to a point where we can fruitfully write about raid tanking, which should be when we’re close to 3.9 release.

The information structure I plan to use is documented in this mindmap image.

I do not intend to do all the theorycrafting myself, of course. I will maintain a tidy and organised OP. I believe for many EJ visitors, it’s the only part of the thread they read. I’ll rely on the tank community to reach conclusions on topics like the value of mastery stat vs stamina, how to best use Outbreak, and all the other various issues for us to research for Cataclysm. I’ll then editorialise that into the OP.

The map above shows what information I think should be in the EJ OP, based on its focus on endgame raiding.
As you know, I maintain pwnwear.com, within which I’ll continue to write off-topic or out-of-scope posts, plus writing for newbie tanks (I like to help new tanks get their head the role).
Where there is a content overlap between EJ and my site, such as endgame raiding, I’ll maintain it in both locations. You will not need to contribute at pwnwear to affect the EJ OP. I had to think about how to manage the information spread between the two communities, because I’ll have responsibilities to both, thus combined it into a single mindmap.

In deciding what I think should be at EJ, I looked at other OPs, such as Unholy DPS, Ele shaman and Resto druid. I don’t intend to match their depth, but do want to have similar content headings.

I’m happy to take input.

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Paladin tanking in Cataclysm

Gravity — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:34:16 +0000

Yesterday I posted a guest article on World of Raids about the Paladin tanking experience for someone, like me, returning to the class after a long absence. It included a new youtube video.

Regulars would have seen most of my written commentary already, which I’d mentioned in the blog ten days’ ago and written into this forum post.

What’s new is this video with commentary, of me tanking BRC as a Pally.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiKhgYXlWgA

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GC provides some answers on DK in beta

Gravity — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:06:30 +0000

I wonder how Ghostcrawler chooses which threads to respond to. Random I guess.

We’ve had a nicely-formatted post in the beta forums with all the consolidated feedback, including tanking, which Naha put together, and kept it updated, and yet he replies to Consider’s post in the public USA forums which was more about DPS, of course. I’m happy to have a reply there, but why didn’t he answer any of the other threads we’ve had for a few months?

At least he’s given us some information, and from that we can hope for fixes to outstanding tanking issues.

Here’s what the lead systems designer had to say:

There are a lot of questions in this thread, and I can’t answer them all, but I can hit a few.

Is 2H Frost viability still intended? — yes.
Is DW Unholy viability intended? — no.

Pestilence has been nerfed too much — Pestilence was always intended as a convenient way to spread diseases in anticipation for things like Blood Boil. It was not ever supposed to be the way DKs AE, and in fact that is the job of abilities like Blood Boil. If there was a way to make Pestilence cause no damage, we’d probably do it.

Sorry. Typed too quickly.

Pestilence was designed back in the day when DKs had to use Blood Boil as their AE taunt (a truly brilliant design direction in retrospect). DKs needed a way to get diseases on many targets quickly without tab targeting Plague Strike on everyone. So Pestilence was invented to spread diseases, but based on that initial PS/IT so that it would not replace them.

However, because disease damage ended up being pretty beefy, especially for Unholy DKs, Pestilence became a quite powerful AE attack. Even worse, if was very hard for us to shackle it. It wasn’t affected by the “half damage from AE” auras we put on some trash that we wanted to be more powerful, since Pestilence wasn’t a real AE.

In short, we don’t want Pestilence to be an AE at all. We want Blood Boil and Howling Blast and similar spells to be your primary source of AE damage. I’m not saying we’ll change Pestilence at this stage because it would be pretty tricky to implement a design that let it spread diseases that did no damage (or something equally goofy). I’m just saying that our intent is not for Pestilence to be a huge chunk of your damage. It’s ultimately a utility ability.

There are too many passive damage talents — yes, we’d agree with that. It’s still something we’re working on. There will still be a few, especially high in the trees, but DKs are also slightly exempt (if such a thing exists) from our making sure that early talents are easy to understand for level 10 players.

DKs being GCD locked — this is not something we see for DKs above level 80. We do see it for DKs who are converted at level 80 in Icecrown gear to the Cataclysm rules, for one simple reason — a lot of your stats got converted to haste and you have no mastery. The equivalent would be a level 85 DK who decides to eschew all mastery on gear and stack haste to a ridiculous degree. Sure it might GCD lock you, but it’s such a dps loss, why would you ever do that? This is actually a problem with many specs and skews feedback quite a bit. Be very careful in your feedback to distinguish between whether the character you are testing is wearing Lich King gear or Cataclysm gear. If we had to do it all again, maybe we would have converted some existing gear to mastery, just to avoid the situation we’re in now where players are missing one of the big secondary stats.

It’s okay — intended even — for Frost to use ranged attack. The original “Shadowfrost” was an abomination that cherry picked select talents to boost Icy Touch to a ridiculous degree. If a Frost DK can be competitive without ever being in melee, then that crosses the line. If they are attacking at range before they close, or nuking a fleeing target, or at a second target while engaged with a first target, that’s fine.

Also, in reply to a clarification from Anaroth here at pwnwear about DKs being GCD capped, GC said:

The DK GCD lock you are describing does not happen to level 83-85 characters as far as we can tell. It does happen to players who copy over their level 80 characters and find themselves with very large amounts of haste as a result of the stat conversion. Think about it. Your character (through no actual decision you made) has only haste and crit instead of haste, crit and mastery as you will when you’re higher level. Similar mechanics affect other specs. Feral druids at level 80 have insane crit levels because all of that armor pen became crit.

If you’re in greens in Deepholm at 83 and can’t spend your GCDs fast enough (for any class), please let us know.

I’m pretty sure we beta testers can help here. I think I’m GCD locked when I test with mostly Cataclysm blues/greens, and certainly the maths on paper say I’d be close to it. One tester gave some results already, showing how dangerously close to locked she was in Cataclysm gear at L83.

A sample of the issues DK tanks have at the moment, which his post doesn’t address, and are outlined in Naha’s consolidated thread:

blood boil causing the scarlet fever, and the talent investment in that mechanism
the competition for blood rune and unholy runes between tanking cooldowns, death strike and other attacks
secondary benefit of improved blood presence.

Discuss

In this forum thread, sorry, don’t want two conversations on this one.

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Oceanic guilds: contest to get beta

Gravity — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:54:35 +0000

In case you missed it, a competition for Oceanic guilds (A/NZ, Asia) to get 10 beta keys:

We’re proud to announce a brand new contest open exclusively to residents of Australia and New Zealand. We’re looking for some tightly knit guilds who are ready to rumble their way into our World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test.

We want you to share screenshots of your guild’s greatest triumphs and proudest achievements with us. Whether you and your mates just took down the Twilight Destroyer or you’ve crushed Kel’thuzad for the first time, we want to witness the milestones of your success. Each guild master who submits a winning screenshot will win 10 invitations to the World of Warcraft Cataclysm beta test for their guild. The contest will be on for five weeks and each guild is limited to just one submission. We’ll pick five winners each week for a total of 25 winning submissions from eligible participants, starting August 27, 2010.

Before entering the contest, be sure to read the full contest rules for details and eligibility. Source.

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The waiting game for DKs in beta

Gravity — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:50:25 +0000

Death Knights are waiting, and hoping, for some affirmative feedback and changes from Blizzard. This is a little emotional. I wrote a short post about this phenomena in the forums, on player participation in game design, and that our relationship with Blizzard requires they communicate with us. I drew some parallels to a Tale in the Desert (which Tobold is blogging on), Eve Online (whose council required CCP disclose more information on their efforts to reduce lag), and a game I used to play Achaea.

By the way, GC just posted asking for input on which talent trees we like the most. For all classes, all trees, in general forums, not beta-only.

Consider has written a good Q&A on DK mostly from DPS perspective, but with a few good mentions of the tank issues.

Naha’s consolidated thread is still the best place for us. It’s well-organised, and I’ve made sure it covers all the key tanking concerns.

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Report on other games, from Gamescom 2010

Gravity — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:20:44 +0000

Our Zao, who also moderates at MMO-C and I think hangs out at pwnwear to maintain his sanity, recently attended Gamescon for the full three days, including the long two or more hour queues to get onto playing the newest games.

He’s written up a report on all the different games, which I’m posting here for your reading pleasure. To ask questions or comment, you can reply here or in the forums. He also got a very disturbing photo of a Zelda fan, which I put at the end so you can possibly avoid to save yourself psychological therapy. If you find a good one, Zao’s looking for help. I think he’s still in shock, since he hasn’t uploaded the other photos yet.

Okay, now that I slept a bit, I can tell you what I saw.
GC was awesome. although it had very little surprises.
The only real surprise for me was, that neither games for iPhone, iPad & co, nor social games were to be seen.
I simply assumed that the former didn’t have big enough producers to really have a booth there, while the latter also has a different target group. Well…actually there was one. Age of Empire Online. it sucked. Bad graphics, lagging as hell, and that god awful Browsergame playstyle.

Back to Gamescom: What also saddned me was the lack of innovation on the software side.
The first thing that struck me was the huge amount of MMORPGS. Frogster alone (Publisher of Runes of Magic) had 2 new games + an addon for RoM. All ofthose games looked pretty much identical, although they had different gameplay. All of them are Korean ports to my knowledge.

What also saddned me was the lack of innovation on the software side.
The first thing that struck me was the huge amount of MMORPGS. Frogster alone (Publisher of Runes of Magic) had 2 new games + an addon for RoM. All of those games looked pretty much identical, although they had different gameplay. All of them are Korean ports to my knowledge.

Then there were loads of smaller ones, like Rift (which I have a spare Beta key for if someone’s interested) and of course the big players: Cataclysm, ToR and LotRO.

but enough rambling for now, I’ve been quite busy, but I wasn’t able to check out all the games I wanted, due to having 2+ hours waiting times for the most interesting games.

First game I watched was
The Old Republic: After a rather underwhelming trailer show, where they also showed some (very) old footage, I was able to ask a few questions to the guy, his answer to my question on how they planned to break the trinity was:
There are smaller quests, which you’ll be able to do without a healer, but for bigger quests and “raids (he specifically used the words “raids”) you’ll need a healer
The second question was if there would be disadvantages for refusing certain quests, he simply said that there wouldn’t be on the reward side, but that a path once choosen couldn’t be reversed.

Now after the Q&A session we actually got some hands on time! I settled for the smuggler, because I wanted to check out the coversystem.
The hands on was fun, while the first 3 quests I did in the 15 min gameplay we had, were the usual “kill 10 of those, disable 3 of those”, the dialog system made it very enjoyable, and probably make rerolling a lot more interesting.

The actual gameplay however, was very similar to WoW, even witht he cover-system. Now that may be because it’s still an early stage, and I only did the beginning quests.
Basically I went into combat by shooting someone with my blaster. Afterwards I selected a cover, and ducked behind it (took me a few minutes to get used to) per hotkey. After that it was simply pressing my two special abilities and waiting for the mob to die. So pretty much the same as in every other MMO. Even more so for the Jedi classes, which basically played the same like a warrior from what I could see.
All in all: If you’re bored from MMOs in general, ToR won’t change that. The only thing really setting it apart currently is the dialog and choice system, which for me is a big enough reason to buy it, and the “half” announces stuff like housing with spaceships.

Guild Wars 2
I didn’t play it’s predecessor, so I can’t tell what has changed.
What I can tell you is that ti’s a fast paced game with good looking graphics. The guys standing around sadly only gave me some promotion speeches for my questions, which basically contained nothing but the stuff already said in the trailer.

Dragon Age 2:
For me the best game of the whole Gamescom.
I loved Dragon Age: Origins, and the second one seems to be the same in terms of the feeling.
The only real difference I could make out in the first 2 minutes was that it felt more hack & slash-y, but according to the CM standing there for questions that was because it’s not tuned correctly. The story sounds really interesting, although I’m sad that we’re not playing the character from DA:O, but at least this one has a voice <.<

Fable III
I liked this one. While Dragon Age gained tempo, Fable lost some. Fable II was a pure button mash fest, with a far too easy difficulty.
Fable III now has a bit more tactic requirement, since you need to block and can execute a few (cool looking) finishing moves with the right timing.

Warhammer 40k MMO:
Sadly only gave us a trailer, but I could gather that the Adeptus Mechanicus, Space Marines and Imperial guard are flagged as “Imperium”, so they won’t be different “factions”

Lego Universe
You just laugh. This game was actually pretty fun. I’d never buy it, but if you liked playing Little Big Planet you’ll certainly enjoy this one.

Diablo 3:
Can’t say too much about it. Instead I use the expression Benzaie from TGWTG used: It felt “consoly”. I can’t find any better expression that that. It felt like a hack&slay game for a console.
I’m also afraid the concept doesn’t quite hold up. D2 was an awesome game for it’s time and many games struggled to reach it’s height. D3 felt like one of those clones.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
I really regret not having played this, but I simply didn’t have enough time. But other have said it would simply be awesome, and since I’ll buy anything with “Zelda” written on it anyway, I’ll stick with it.

Homefront:
I actually only watched this because it came after the Warhammer trailer. The gameplay footing had a lot of atmosphere, kind of like the first 30 minutes of HL2. This could become a very big game.

The Witcher 2:
There wasn’t any footage in the public area, but I was lucky enough to get a hold on a reporter from a german magazine, and asked him about it. He didn’t really say much except that Role Players will be very happy during the next 6 months.

To discuss

Either reply in Zao’s forum thread or comment here.

Want to be a blogger about other MMOs and games? I’m thinking about broadening pwnwear, providing free hosting like gw2.pwnwear.com or dao2.pwnwear.com, for example. Let me know over in this thread, which started when I’d had a few too many ales, but is otherwise very serious!

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Some technical problems on forums (resolved)

Gravity — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:50:41 +0000

Site is back up now. I stuffed it up and then cascading complications led to outage.

History:

Hiya, I’m working on the problems on the forums which give 404 errors all over the place. Sorry for the hassle.

I know what I changed that broke it (installing eaccelerator) but it doesn’t make much sense to have had this consequence.

It’s 9am EST, nearly 11pm in Sydney; getting a bit late here and I haven’t been able to fix the forums, sorry. Likely I’ll have to work on it again in the morning after a sleep. Very annoying.

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Consolidated DK feedback, Beta

Gravity — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 06:16:48 +0000

Brilliant!

A day after I spoke to Consider about writing up our concerns, having been frustrated by the latest Beta patch, Naha on the official beta forums has done exactly what we intended. Awesome, saves me a lot of time. Also shows how Consider and I were wanting to express a wider view shared amongst other DK testers.

If you are in beta, please cross-check your own problems with the DK current state against Naha’s post and provide your input.

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Tanking as a Paladin, Cataclysm Beta

Gravity — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:11:08 +0000

Back in the old days, I had a Paladin called Hammerjudge. Creative name, eh. Actually, I had two.

First one was in Australia, then when I knew I was moving to the UK, I bought an EU kit (whilst in Australia, from shatteredcrystal), then levelled a Dranei on EU. I healed for a while whilst earning a slot in my awesome guild the Dottagers, then tanked, then WotLK was announced and I was sold on a DK, who was to become Gravity.

Anyhow, I hadn’t played a Paladin tank since L70.

I have now, on Cataclysm, and felt it would be interesting for a former serious theorycrafter maintankadin to play my old beloved class. It was fun! Pallys tanks are more refined on Beta than the DK.

I have written up my thoughts and some analysis over here the forums.

Sorry to redirect you if you’re on an RSS, it’s just a lot easier for me to write there and have you click-through.

You can use Tapatalk for our forums on mobile devices, btw.

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Geek review: LiquidWeb server hosting, fully managed

Gravity — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:38:34 +0000

This article is a review of LiquidWeb as a hosting company, with whom I had a dedicated server for five months, and am now using one of their cloud servers. Today I’m covering how awesome Liquidweb are, detailed proof on how I can say that honestly, why I recommend a fully managed service if you’re not a Linux geek and some advice on CPU issues on shared hosts.

This is a detailed review, based on personal experience, and includes specific examples of the benefits I gained from having a fully managed server, rather than self-managed. I have screenshots of the server management interface. LiquidWeb also provide shared hosting — which you’d use for a smaller site than pwnwear — so if you’re looking at a website for yourself the information on their foundation services will be helpful. They own their own datacentres, instead of being a co-located host in some else’s facility, which in turn means they do not have outages as a result of other tenants. This helps a shared host equally to a VPS.

I cover these details on their web hosting:

Server choices: dedicated, cloud or VPS
SLAs and terms of service
What it means to have a fully-managed server
What this means in the real-world
Foundation services
Storm on Demand cloud computing
Plus, since I also blog, how to minimise your WordPress CPU usage.

Read the full review here.

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