LFD

How do you find yours?

Since the 4.1 Patch hit, and before, there’s been a lot of consternation in the blogging community about LFD.  Has the new reward system made any difference to the queue? has the quality of tanking gone down as a result? are groups failing more?  As it’s been done to death by the rest of the community, I’m not going to even talk about the Call to Arms reward system, instead I’m going to take a look at group makeups a little more generally since ZG and ZA hit.

I’ve got two characters of the required level for the new dungeons, my priest and my mage, I’ve been concentrating on running these two primarily, but I’ve done a couple of the ‘old’ heroics on my DK and druid.  Lets take the new heroics first, the first thing I noticed is that players, on the whole, seem to be far better geared; yes I know the ilvl requirement is higher, but actually a lot of the players I see in the new heroics are wearing primarily 10-man epics, where as your average LFD player pre 4.1 would be somewhere between the basic 328 and being kitted out in blues with the occasional rep and / or valour point item.  I guess this is because the raider types were either bored of the old 5 man heroics, or were running less well geared alts through them; the new instances are new content and they’re there either purely to experience it, or to top the occasional bit of gear up that they haven’t gained from raiding.  Secondly, and probably as a result of seeing more raider types, I’ve noticed the skill level has gone up significantly, players on the whole, and in the face of new unfamiliar content, perform far better than I’ve seen over the past three months in LFD.  Take for example a guild tank who came along to a ZA run with me this week, he’d never even set foot in the instance before, let alone tanked it.  We were able to clear it, almost managing a timed run, just by giving him a quick run down of what each bosses abilities were over vent.  I’ve absolutely no doubt that a lesser skilled player would have had all sorts of trouble tanking ZA in such a scenario.  On the negative side, I’ve noticed people are far less forgiving in the new instances, probably as a result of being used to higher performance in raids, the most pertinent example I’ve seen being “5k DPS in here? REALLY?” kick…. (to be fair the guy was abysmal, but I’d usually expect to see him asked why his DPS was so poor and have suggested he needed to improve it before being kicked).  Chatting to people both from guild and randoms, I’ve seen a few comments along the lines of, “if you don’t know the strategies in here by now, you deserve to be kicked” which is a little elitist for my liking.

The old heroics are a complete different kettle of fish to what they used to be, I’ve been running a couple of specific dungeons on my DK to get the items I need to unlock ZA & ZG, one of which being Stonecore, on the first three trash packs, where a little crowd control and DPS focus is essential for all but the best geared groups, I’ve seen DPS pulling before the tanks ready or in one case before the healer was even in the instance!  The impatience of players that you typically see in the low end instances to level up and get ma gearz is creeping into the heroics where you really can’t afford to be so gung-ho.  Added to this, the queue’s do seem to be shorter, so I’ve seen a lot of people simply leaving the group if the random instance turns out not to be one of their liking, or one pull doesn’t quite go to plan. 

Come on people! do it right first time, take a little bit of time to do stuff, with some consideration for the other four in your group, and you’ll get it done quicker in the long run and you might even have a bit of fun (ya know, the reason you play the game) in the process.

Is bigger always better?

How to maximise your mining and herbing returns in a troll-eat-troll world

Collecting herb and ore has seen thousands of wow players over the years spending countless hours stooped over their computer into the long hours of the night filling their bags full of crap hard earned bounty.  Whether you’re a hardcore raider, serious casual player or just like dabbling with trade skills, collection of these consumables is vital.  there is an argument to say you could do anything which makes money and then use that money to buy these consumables, or the end products they’re used to craft from the AH, but where's the fun in that? (not apart from the fact that all professions offer their own unique soulbound items or buffs only to the characters which pursue them.    

This post takes a look at the finer art of collecting and I’ve gone to great lengths to research it, further than in any other post, and spent a whopping great eight hours compiling information for it, that’s more than a days work!  why have I done this I hear you ask?  Well firstly, I needed ore to level blacksmithing (just because, ok) and I needed to stock up on herbs to feed my alchemy and inscription habits.  My regular reader will know about my druid herber / miner toon, created solely to pull up weeds and smash lumps of rock (ok, so I’ve since found I quite like healing with her too).

So Why a (Tauren) druid?  well firstly I got hacked off collecting herbs on my mage and being constantly beaten to the weed by some git druid who doesn’t have to dismount / remount to pick the herb, which also allows you to avoid a lot of time consuming combat with local mobs.  Secondly the speed at which Taurens can pick herbs; considerably faster than other races.  Thirdly the instant flight form shape shift, gives a considerable performance improvement (especially when you’re competing with other miners for the same veins who have to mount up). Fourthly, the feral abilities mean you can slap down any inconsiderate mob(s) who happen to pick a fight when you’re mining.

There are a few other classes which I recon would be decent for collecting, mages for their blink & disappear abilities, rogues for vanish, hunters for fein death etc. but the instant cast flight form and not having to shape shift (i.e. dismount) for herbing sold it for me.
I’ve also made a point of learning both collection (discounting skinning and enchanting as they're more killing and collecting), I’ve had individual miners and herbers for a long period, and it always struck me how much time i was wasting doing one at a time, so I bit the bullet and reorganised my professions between alts to accommodate this, and wow has it paid off!

So you’ve got your collector toon up to level 85, and you’re about to set out on your first run, where should you go? good question, there are quite a few questions you need to ask yourself – firstly what is your priority item? are you collecting stuff to sell on the AH? are you looking to feed a fabricating profession (like blacksmithing or alchemy) habit? or are you looking to just collect raw materials for for of the ‘destructive’ professions like inscription or gem crafting where you don't care what the raw material is, you just want to mill or prospect it.

If you don’t care about the type of material you’re collecting, you might be surprised at which areas may be the most profitable for you to use (by profitable I mean in terms of both AH value and item yield), more of that in a moment.  If you’re looking to use specific items, such as Elementium or Pyrite, you’ll be restricted to specific zones.  Items like Twilight Jasmine only grow in one zone, so if you must have that item for a specific potion you must go to the Twilight Highlands. You need to consider both the number of available ‘nodes’ in the zone, and the comparable difficulty (i.e. time) in getting between them, for example, Zone A might have 100 nodes, but be massive, Zone B having 80 nodes but being half the size of A would generally mean that the average distance between nodes is closer, thus you’ll get more reward for your time.

Pick your primary aim(s), and head to the zone which offers the best reward for them, lets say for the sake of argument, my priorities are Obsidium and Cinderbloom, I’ve got a choice between Mount Hyjal and Deepholm, as both zones offer both in abundance.  Ore tends to be harder to come by, in my experience, so I pick myself a route which takes my through the most populous areas for ore, stopping off for any herbs I see, one exception for this is whiptail in Uldum, which only really grows on river banks where there are few ore nodes, so I make a detour on my route to encompass the rivers.  Use gatherer to plan your route, I always also have a secondary screen up with a map of the locations of my primary item type from wowhead.

The last thing to look at is competition, the time of day you collect is key.  If possible look to collect at off peak times when there are few others around to compete with, i tend to do a /who ‘zone name’ before heading out just to check how many other level 85s there are there (or if there are any other names which I recognise as being miners or herbers, or both, from previous outings).  There are two ways to dealing with competition; passively - you either give up and wait till later or go somewhere else.  Or you go on the offensive and beat your opponent forcing them to either give up themselves or accept a reduced reward.  Both will generally lead to a reduced reward for yourself, it depends on how confident you are.  If you are confident you can beat them, stay and fight, if not spend your time elsewhere.

So you’re off collecting, is there anything more you can do to to aid collection?  well yes, of course there is, or I wouldn’t of mentioned it would I? silly.  If you’re a seasoned collector, you may notice that the little yellow dots sometimes appear on the mini map after you’ve passed them with alarming frequency, this isn’t due to you being the luckiest soul alive and seeing multiple node re-spawns, I’m pretty sure this is down to server lag (i.e. you’re moving so fast the map hasn’t updated from the server to your screen in time).  I tend to fly in a slight zig zag, nothing to severe, this has both the effect of slowing your ‘map movement’ down a touch in order to give the nodes time to appear, and it means that you cover more ground in the candidate areas; veins tend to spawn on staggered ridges, simply flying straight along the edge of one of these will generally put you out of range of some of the spawns.  Make sure you use your downtime wisely, you have a couple of seconds when you’re hitting a vein or picking a herb, use this to your advantage and plan your next move, take a look at your map and spin round to face the direction of your next move, you can do this without interrupting the collection.  This is especially important when you can see several yellow dots, you want to get to them as soon as possible else someone else might beat you to them.

If you do see multiple dots on the minimap, I tend to go for the herbs first if I’m not worried about competition, pick the herbs quickly, and then shape shift for the ore.  If there is competition in the area, hit the high value ore targets first, if you have to lose something it should be the less valuable stuff, and from experience there tends to be more miners out there than herbers.  If you do encounter competition, and you decide to ‘stay and fight’ make sure you know your route well, and make sure you know any little short cuts which you might be able to sacrifice in order to get in front of your opponent, who is more than likely on a similar route to you.

So what about this extensive research? Well here it is! basically I spent a couple of days over the bank holiday, when I should have been drinking, but illness had other ideas, running different zones and recording the results to see which would actually be the best.  I did a quick straw poll of my guild:

“where’s the best place to mine?”

“where’s the best place to herb?”

I didn’t qualify either of the questions intentionally, I just wanted to see what peoples initial reaction was, unsurprisingly that Uldum and Deepholm came out on top, and Mount Hyjal got absolutely no votes.  Looking at wowhead, I compiled this table of the number of nodes in each zone:


From this table you can see that Uldum has the most herbs, Deepholm the most ore, and Deepholm again for a combined total.  So it’s simple right? never leave these two zones for mining and herbing right? wrong.  These numbers, expose the problems with statistics, on the face of it they’re best, but these raw figures don’t take into consideration the size of the zone (i.e. the average distance between nodes) or the competition (I'm assuming respawn times are the same from zone to zone as I have no means of gathering evidence to the contrary).

So how do we tell which is the best zone then?  here’s what I did:  I ‘sampled’ each zone, for a few runs of between 15 and 45 minutes and took the average yields of each, I also recorded the population of the zone from a /who before and after each run (this wont take into account alliance toons in the zone, so should be used as an indication only but given the ratio of characters from your server you can take an educated guess (or create a toon on the other faction and do a /who there too, I’m just not that anal… ok, I am, but I’ve only just thought of it). I recorded the contents of my bags at the end of each run, and also made notes of the number of nodes I lost to competition, and the number of times I was forced to kill aggrod mobs when mining.  I actually abandoned an Uldum run after four or five minutes having seen three other miners and two herbers in that time, in hindsight I with I’d carried on to get some figures of how bad it can actually be with sustained competition, but I didn’t, so tough luck…


This is actually a cut down version for display as the full list is too wide to fit on a web page and still be able to read without something in the Hubble range of magnification, a full break down can be found in the spread sheet here.

As you can see from the (full spread sheet) table, my best run was in Deepholm with a massive 13.27 ore & herbs per minute, but surprisingly the next best, and probably most consistently good (if looking at total yield) was Mount Hyjal! this is due in my view, to lack of competition from other collectors who assume its rubbish, the relative small size of the collecting areas, and the ease at which mobs can be dispatched or avoided due to their lower level.  When you dig a little deeper (pun intended) due to the amount of Elementium and Pyrite available, Uldum would seem to be the best, if your primary aim is profit from the AH or Black Smithing. 
So which is actually the best then? well I’m afraid there isn’t an answer any more concrete than ‘it depends’.  It depends on what you’re aiming to achieve, and the competition you’re facing.  For pure blacksmithing, due to the pyrite content, I’d say it's got to be Uldum, if you’re focus is ore for prospecting, then Deepholm has to shade it because you get both Elementium and Obsidium.  If you’re collecting herbs simply to mill (and thus you don’t care what they are) then Deepholm is also the place for you.  If you’re looking to use the herbs for potions, then you need to target the zones which have the best yield of the brand of herb you need, clearly Whiptail and Twilight Jasmine only grow in Uldum and Twilight Highlands respectively, so you’re pretty restricted.  the only zone I’d not bother with is Vashir, the swimming around is too slow, and, although it’s relatively small with absolutely no competition, the nodes are too sparse.  My real top tip, is consider Mount Hyjal, my own assumptions and my quick straw poll completely overlooked it, but the lack of competition means it is actually pretty good.  As a collector who is after stuff for Blacksmithing, Prospecting, Inscription and Alchemy, my general hunting grounds will be Uldum, Deepholm and Mount Hyjal, with an occasional forray into the Twilight Highlands when I need to stock up on Jasmine.  If you’re collecting purely for profit and sticking everything on the AH, then it’s even more dependant on your servers economy, you need to have a look at what’s going for the best prices on the auction house and tailor your runs accordingly.

One thing to note, I think I’ve probably done Uldum a little bit of a disservice on the herbing front, my feeling is that there are far more herbs, but I was primarily following a mining route with occasional trips down the river for whiptail, I pretty much ignored the other herb locations.
Finally, my tips for more effective collecting

• roll a Tauren Druid
  
• have both mining and herbing professions on the same character
  
• invest in the fastest flying skill available
  
• bind your shape shift to flight form to an easily accessibly key (I use the middle mouse button)
  
• avoid combat wherever possible, it slows you down
  
• install gatherer
  
• plan your zones / rough route in advance
  
• do a quick /who to check a zones population and for ‘usual suspects’ who are regular competitors
  
• decide your tactics on competition, stay and compete, or give up / move to another zone
  
• try and collect in off peak times if possible
  
• when you’re actually collecting an item, quickly flick to the map to reorient yourself and plan your next hop
  
• don’t dwell on the occasional nodes which you can’t get to or appear / disappear as you move, there are a few bugged nodes about due to clipping or phasing issues
  
• make sure you have plenty of room in your bags
  
• don’t be afraid to utilise the AH, if you need Cinderbloom and its 20s whilst Elementium is 20g, spend your time collecting Elementium, sell it and buy Cinderbloom

One last note, the ‘druid’ pictured at the top was an Eagle which swooped past my face in the centre of London as I was mid way through writing this post,  I can only assume he was trying to beat me to a node in the centre of Trafalgar Square and sat there mocking me as I walked away empty handed…
It’s also worth noting that the time I’ve spent doing the ‘research’ is by no means statistically significant, do do a proper statistical study I’d probably need to make my own addon and get lots of people to use it over a period of time.

WOW, Remote access

to your auctions, guild chat and more!
I recently talked about the potential for WOW to be played on a mobile device, I referenced the WOW remote auction house application which was available for both iPhone and Android devices.  Recently Blizzard have rebranded the application to WOW mobile and upgraded it’s functionality.  I’m quite surprised, and delighted, to say that it was made available to Android at the same time as iPhone.

The move towards a more generic ‘mobile’ name is well deserved, no longer is it just a method of viewing (or listing items for the premium version) on the auction house, you can now view your characters in a similar view to what you’ll be used to in the armoury, you can view your guild, and information on each of the members, but most impressively you can participate in guild chat and whispers with other online members.  For the moment, all of the features, barring the ability to list new auctions and collect money is free.  The Blizzard page seems to indicate that the chat functionality is only free for the moment.  I’m not sure I’d pay £2.49 for the pleasure of doing this, but for the moment while its free, it’s pretty good.

There are a few bugs, you’re required to select which of your characters you want to log in as, in order to view their auctions, the app sometimes gets a little confused as to who you are and whether you’re authorised to do things.  I’m currently getting errors trying to connect to guild chat, which would seem to be a server issue rather than an app fault, and occasionally I’ve had messages not send properly which has lead to a few ‘disjointed’ conversations as my comments arrive at the other end out of order.
On the up side, I’ve been happily abusing conversing with my fellow guildies for a couple of days using both wifi and 3G connections with pretty good success, and, in a stroke of genius, if you;re logged on playing the game, you can log in as an alt and have a conversation with yourself; finally I have an intellectual equal to talk to!…

All in all a good effort by Blizzard, a useful app for those of us who find themselves with time to spare while travelling or not sat in front of their gaming PC.  There are a few issues with the battery use, my HTC Desire lasted about 90 minutes with Spotify and WOW mobile running on the train yesterday, it would normally last me the full day with 3-4 hours of music listening and normal calls etc.
Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, and I'll be able to perform rudimentary profession actions such as milling or crafting, perhaps even the odd daily quest; something like the jewel crafting quests which simply require you to craft and hand over three gems would be good.  I’d really like the ability to interact with some addons or other game features, like reforging, wardrobes and even loot lists from instances, all stuff that given 10 minutes to spare on the train you’d happily do, but sat in front of your PC you’d rather be playing the game.

I’d also love to see web access to the features of this app, I generally always have internet access, but am unable to play WOW itself (stupid work…) having IRC like access to guild chat would be brilliant, the API hooks are obviously there so adding a standard HTTP interface should be easy.  This would also enable players to link their WOW activities to more ‘internetty’ stuff, especially pushing the social aspects of the game, you could have a Facebook of sorts for trolls, linking profiles to social networking features.  Enabling this might further enable web apps to do other ‘stuff’ in a similar vein to what you see with the crappy games on Facebook.  Blizzard could develop whole mini games to support their main WOW application to further engage their subscribers.

This is clearly a move by Blizzard to further monetise their product, for my money the £2.50 a month on top of the WOW subscription is too much, that’s 30% on top of a monthly subscription cost.  This for me puts the premium app in a niche of people who have both money, are addicted to WOW and a life style which means they can’t play that much, I’m not sure the latter two go hand in hand in most cases.  If I were blizzard, I’d aim lower, sub £1 per month perhaps, or even as a subscription ‘sweetner’, i.e. subscribe for 6 months (rather than your usual 1 month) and get free premium access to the app – Blizzard wins because they get 6 months money up front, the subscriber wins because they get ‘free’ access to an app that they’d otherwise have to shell out for, everyone's a winner

3D gaming, is there a WOW factor?

3D is one of the buzz words around the media industry, lead by the film industry, the big broadcasters are slowly starting to come on board as 3D TV sets become more affordable.  In the UK Sky is regularly showing live sports events in 3D and has recently followed that with movies, entertainment and documentaries all in 3D.  I’ve worked, until recently, leading a research team who’s remit was the ‘connected home’ focussing mainly on media & entertainment provision to the home.  Clearly 3D is one of the topics on the agenda here so I’d like to hope I can claim to know a little about it.

3D works, very basically, by tricking your brain into thinking a projection has got depth to it.  In years gone by this was done through those hideous red and green tinted glasses.  Unsurprisingly these never really took off.  Fast forward a decade or two and you have two prominent types of 3D viewing sets available to consumers, those using passive techniques, using inexpensive ‘passive’ polarised lenses which is the one your probably more familiar with from cinemas, or the active alternative which utilises battery operated  shutters in the lenses which fire faster than the eye can detect (and cost a fortune).  It is possible to get a 3D viewing experience without glasses, I’ve seen and used a TV set which gives you 3D but these give no where near the depth of the alternatives which use glasses and there are a few oddities caused by the technology which mean at certain angles you can’t see a picture.

I firmly believe that 3D has a place in entertainment, but until it’s without glasses, it’ll remain pretty niche, this will happen, but it’ll clearly take time.  I can however see certain specialist areas taking advantage of 3D technology, gaming being one of those areas.  Before I go into gaming specifically, I think it’s help to make a few observations about 3D technology, and point out a few pet hates.

Firstly, I’m sceptical that the ‘customer’ is currently at the heart of the drive behind 3D, think of the one thing which terrifies the movie industry…. have you got it yet?… that's right, piracy.  Now next time you go watch a 3D film, take the glasses off and take a look, blurry isn’t it? So anyone stood there with a conventional camcorder will get the same.  Even if you get a physical disc with a 3D film on, you’d have a hard time copying it (and finding anyone with a 3D TV to watch it); this will become easier over time, but currently it’s a great way of foiling the pirates.

My second complaint is the seemingly mandatory requirement for all films to be in 3D regardless of whether it adds anything to the experience (and the additional 3D ‘tax’ added to the already extortionate price of a cinema ticket).  Yes there are some great 3D films, Avatar and, ahem, Piranha 3D…. ok, so perhaps just Avatar, but there are also some absolutely pointless 3D additions where 3D has been added as an afterthought for the simple reason of adding 20% extra to the entry fee.  Clash of the Titans is one such film, there’s literally one 3D effect, a coin toss, in the whole film, which is completely and utterly pointless.  Similarly with football (soccer to all you American types), I’m lucky enough to have a local boozer (bar to you American types..) which has a 3D TV and regularly shows 3D footy, this TV happens to be situated in between two normal TV’s so, purely by luck, the viewer gets a stark comparison of the ‘normal’ versus the 3D coverage, and I’ve got to say the 2D version is far better!  More often than not, when you’re getting a replay of a crucial piece of gameplay, or some insightful analysis of the game on the 2D broadcast, the 3D TV is showing some non-descript tackle which happened by the corner flag for the sixth time because it ‘looks good’ in 3D; the coverage has lost the whole point of why people watch football or films – the entertainment of the subject matter, not the 3D experience, yes 3D can compliment that experience, but it shouldn’t be the focal point; until the media industry ‘grows up’ and realise this 3D is destined to be niche.  This is really exemplified by the number of punters in my local who ditch the 3D glasses after a game or two and revert to watching the 2D broadcast (and I realise my American reader’s head has probably now exploded with the amount of colloquialisms I’ve used in this last paragraph).


So, “what's this got to do with WOW then?” I hear you say…. well just this; is WOW something which is suited to 3D? on balance, I think it could be, you’re view of the world is centred around a focal point (your character) with players, monsters and all of the other ‘stuff’ spanning spanning out from there.  Giving a depth to instances, for example, could really enhance gameplay.  That is providing its used to enhance gameplay, and not replace it; we’ve already seen ‘uber’ graphics replace most of the actual gameplay time and time again as gaming power has improved over the years.  I’d almost be excited about the prospect of 3D in WOW if the cynic inside me didn’t keep telling me that it would lead to a subscription hike (well 3D is more difficult you know, so cost more! yadda yadda yadda) and that because it’s more difficult to develop would almost certainly lead to less content.

The thing about 3D which, in my experience, has really got the design geeks going isn’t the content at all, it’s the possibilities it exposes in the user interface design.  Any of you who’ve ever seen Top Gun will know what a heads up display or HUD is, imagine the possibilities for your UI if you had multiple layers unfolding before your eyes in the same manor a fighter pilot has with their HUD.  Even better if you’re able to interact with that display on a 3D level (clearly that's a long way off).

Recently I posted about the possibility of truly mobile gaming, one of the barriers to using a mobile for WOW which I identified was the screen space available.  If you suddenly have the ability to layer your UI in 3D it suddenly opens up a whole host of possibilities.

Clearly there's a long way to go before 3D gaming comes to the masses, the Nintendo DS already manages it (kind of) by making use of it’s dual display, so there’s clearly already some development going on in the area.  But how soon before we get a 3D WOW experience? your guess is as good as mine, I’d wager it’ll be later rather than sooner.

Dispelling

I’ve been having a look back over my posts over the last few weeks and it struck me I’ve not mentioned my primary topic; priests, nothing, nada, not a drop.  Possibly something to do with priestly ways being done to death by the blogsphere until the next patch drops, and possibly something to do with me playing alts more, and being generally slack…. so in an attempt to redress the balance a little, here we go, a post on dispelling for Shadow (and any other) Priests.

Dispelling (and decursing or curing poison etc. I’ve decided I’m going to use dispel from now on to cover every generic kind of ‘remove something’ simply for my sanity, don’t come whining to me ok… deal with it) like interrupts have made a bit of a resurgence since Cata, yes they were used in previous versions of WOW, but I can’t ever remember an occasion when they were needed so heavily.  Yes, back in the days of Molten Core and Lucifron as a mage(which I was at the time) you’d find yourself decursing 40 people.  Back when decursive was ‘legal’ you simply mashed the button 40 times and carried on.  Then it was outlawed and there was uproar; dispelling classes would have to do more than just mash keys, oh the pain!! to placate people (I assume, or perhapse they realised that, actually, selectively dispelling tens of people was quite hard, and actually VERY dull).  Blizzard introduced mass descurse/spell/poison Prior to Cata there was the occasional boss fight which required this, but it was occasional, and it was generally restricted to raids, not 5 mans, and you’d generally have a designated mass dispeller who did nothing but dispel.  In Cata, as a healing priest, I constantly find myself dispelling nasty crap, even on trash, to mitigate healing needs, there’s some quite nasty stuff which gets thrown about.  In Grim Batol, Throngus really needs to be dispelled, the end boss, Asaad, in Vortex Pinacle is one example who requires the use of mass dispel, and a whole host of others.

Gone are the days when dispelling was the sole responsibility of one unfortunate in a raid, and gone are the days when only the healers are responsible for dispelling.  I still occasionally see the ‘we always used to do it that way’ from the DPS, but I’ve found more and more that when I’m shadow, I need to dispel to help my healer out.  It’s quite polarising actually, the good DPS players tend to be those ones who know how to use their classes secondary abilities like interrupt, dispel, and to some extent crowd control (though most classes have had some form of crowd control for years so are generally quite comfortable with it).

I use healbot when I’m healing, binding my most used healing spells to direct mouse clicks, my lesser used spells with a shift-click and my dispel abilities an alt-click.  I replicate this across my alts, so on my druid my most usual heal is the left click, my ‘panic’ heal is shift right click, my dispel mechanic is alt-click and so on, this really helps (I find) with the muscle memory.  I used to disable healbot when I was playing DPS to give me more screen space, but recently I’ve kept it active so I can see when people need dispelling; if the healer is doing it (and not struggling) I’ll ignore them and melt away.  If we’re having problems then theres an easy indication both because the debuffs are highlighted and I can see peoples health bars more clearly. 
I’ve actually since re-skinned healbot so it’s not so big when I’m playing DPS, I still have all of the same keys bound so I can not only dispel, but also drop out of shadow form and start healing if I’m needed.
More generally, I’m not a big fan of mass dispel (in heroics) there’s for the bosses like Asad in Vortex Pinnacle where several classes can get out themselves, and anyone with any nouse is able to jump to avoid the debuff in the first place so dispel is simply used to pick up the stragglers.  In most other scenarios its simply a case of knowing the debufs that mobs dish out on knowing whether they’re worth getting rid of; for instance a melee speed debuf on a caster can be left.  This has got me wondering if there's any intelligence built in to healbot (or any other mod) or any other add to tell you if you really need to dispel someone.  I’ll have to break Google out when I get home.  Clearly in raids it’s a different story, its a case of choosing the most efficient method, be it mass or point dispelling. 

I think my point is, as a class who can dispel, you should always look to dispel, if possible, (and beneficial) whether you’re the healer or DPS; don’t assume someone else will do it, they’re probably assuming you will.  Know your debuffs too! know what might be coming, and be ready to deal with it.  Oh and when some muppet spams the DPS meter at you, spam the interrupt / dispel count back at them.

Can Warcraft go Nomadic?

38 years ago today (well possibly yesterday, or the day before, depending on when I get round to finishing this post), the first ever public mobile phone call was made.  A guy called Martin Cooper wandered the streets of New York with what is akin to a brick with an antenna sticking out of the top held to his ear.  Unsurprisingly this caused a bit of a stir, people quite literally stopped in their tracks and pointed.  Fast forward 38 years and you’d be hard pushed to find a single person walking the streets of New York, or any other city in the developed world, who isn’t carrying a mobile.  They’re not just mobile phones now either, they’re cameras, GPS, web browsers, email clients, MP3 players, games platforms, RSS readers and much, much more.  Even the plain old SMS, the text message, hadn’t even been conceived back 38 years ago, in 2010 6 trillion were sent globally.

How people use mobiles has changed drastically over the years, those of you who had one of the earlier mobiles may have been lucky enough to have the ability to send texts, if you were like me, you could only store three at any time on the phone, and could only send to other phones on the same operators network.  Mobiles have entered into almost every aspect of modern life.  The advent of the smartphone has only increased this influence, roughly half of the phones sold in the UK is what I’d term a smartphone, this is only going to increase as users demand more and more functionality.

So will you ever be sat on the train playing WOW on your phone?  In a nutshell, I think the answer is ‘yes’ but with some caveats.  Firstly lets have a look at how mobiles are already influence how you play the game.  firstly, logging on to the game, the thing you do at least once every time you play WOW, most people (or at least those with any sense) use an authenticator; these come in two flavours; a specific hardware dongle which you can buy from Blizzard, or a mobile application.  A pretty minimal influence on the face of it, but actually, I don’t want another RSA security dongle, its a to carry around, adding the ability to have the authentication done on my mobile makes me far more likely to use it. 

More recent releases from Blizzard have seen the armoury made available on your mobile, you can view do pretty much everything you can on the web based armoury from viewing your calendar to playing with your talent build.  Going even further, the auction house application allows you to browse the AH, look at your bids, and if you buy the ‘premium’ version you can even create auctions, buy stuff and collect your mail.  It all boils down to what your definition of ‘playing’ the game is, interaction with the auction house is something that you could only previously do in-game, there's no question that this is an integral part of the playing experience.  Going forward there's potential for a similar application for trade skills, and any other ‘windowed’ type interface in your normal WOW UI.

But what about really playing, I don’t mean messing around with the AH, I mean doing things like running around and hitting things, doing quests, and herbing.  This is quite difficult to do on a mobile phone for a number of reasons, firstly raw processing power; mobile chips aren’t the same as your standard desktop machines processor, they are optimised to give a balance between power, battery usage, heat and cost.  They are not generally intended for use in rendering graphics (nor are standard processors, hence why you’ve shelled out a small fortune for your graphics card).   Screen size is an issue, I struggle for space on a 17 inch widescreen, on a 3 inch mobile screen you’re really going to suffer.  The restrictions of the mobile network is also an issue, both bandwidth and latency, we’re already starting to see broadband providers limit gaming traffic, I talked about it here, this happens widely in mobile contracts too, most mobile providers have realised that they’ve previously given away more data capacity than they can supply (if fully used by each customer) so have started limiting mobile contracts to 1Gb of data a month.  Latency is the real killer however, even if you have a bank balance the size of the GDP of a small African country, and can afford the mobile data, with latency figures sometimes in the seconds for mobile data the game play experience will be abysmal when you’re needing something sub 100ms for optimum playing experience.

Wifi could be he answer to this, most, if not all, smart phones have wifi built in, most come with free hotspot wifi access with the contract.  So if you happen to be sat near a wifi hotspot you could be onto a winner.  However, even if you have a super-duper mobile with a massive processor, graphics card and a decent wifi hotspot in your location (is anyone else remembering the brick sized original mobile?).  Even given all of that, you’re still stuck with a 3 inch screen, no keyboard, and no mouse;  I don’t know about you, but I have all my number buttons bound, plus a few other specials, plus movement keys, AND for healing I use a combination of alt, shift, ctrl and mouse clicks to cast particular spells.  On a mobile, this simply isn’t going to happen.  There may be a niche of gaming specific mobile phones, the Sony Xperia already aims to do that with PlayStation games, but for this to be included in mobiles as standard is a long way off.  There’s potential for the use of accelerometers and other innovative control and UI developments to aid this, but the implications for user interaction will always put you at a disadvantage to players sat at a standard desktop.  If you don;t believe me, imagine trying to play something like Counter Strike on an Xbox against someone using a keyboard and mouse; you wouldn’t stand a chance.  There's no possibility of having mobile only realms, this removes the attraction of being able to do stuff with your main characters while on the move.  There’s potential for the development in 3D screen technology to solve some of the UI, I’ve got a post in the pipelines around this, as it’s such a big topic, which will be coming along in due course.

Even assuming someone can solve all of the above, any iPhone or Android user will still point out, that unless you’re less than 1m away from a power socket, you’re still screwed.  This kind of defeats the object; unless you fancy carrying a car battery around on your back, you’re not going to last more than 20 minutes before your phone dies, I barely get 45 minutes of hardcore Angry Birding out of my phone as it is, and that’s relatively non-existent on the graphics load front compared to WOW.

You can actually ‘play’ WOW now if you install a remote desktop app on your desktop which basically screen scrapes the desktop display and punts it to your mobile, but this is very clunky and adds even more latency to the link. I’m convinced gaming, and specifically WOW has a future on mobile, it almost certainly wont be the same experience as playing via your PC, things like pvp, raiding or instances strike me as being very difficult, but why not offer the ability to herb, mine, fish, possibly one or two quest zones aimed at mobile usage (i.e. areas which aren’t going to tax the processing load, or require every spell or ability in your kitbag.  I’d certainly like to spend my train journeys collecting herbs or mining, it’d save you guys having to read this drivel…

Levelling trade skills: pure, pure tedium.

I’m sat here, sad as I am, trying to level blacksmithing from zero.  It’s gash, I mean really gash, I’d derive more enjoyment from continually inserting hot needles into my left eye for three hours than the mindless grind it’s taken to level from zero to 250 in blacksmithing.


Ok, rant over, on a serious note, why? WOW is supposed to be a fun game, the endgame is slanted towards various trade skills to maximise tanking / dps / healing output and the ;best’ trade skill for particular roles or classes tends to change now and then as new releases are a made which forces the more hardcore players to drop one skill and level another.  should this really take the best part of 10 hours to do? (if you ignore the time spent gathering the materials).

EDIT: I wrote this post almost a week ago but have been sitting on it as I published the GM interviews, in the mean time the gits insigtful people over at wow insider posted a similar article here which covers some similar topics, I didn't steal their ideas.... honest, I wrote my blog post first... :-)


Added to the fact that with blacksmithing it takes roughly 8 seconds to create and item, you also need to smelt the ore, AND Blizzard in their wisdom removed the ability for addons such as the Advanced Trade Skill Window to queue multiple items (you now have to manually click ‘process queue’ to move to the next item type), so you cant even go away and make a cup of coffee, or do something slightly more interesting like admire the growth rate of your garden while your toon hammers his head against the anvil repeatedly.  Whether it’s blacksmithing, or any other trade skill, the story is pretty much the same.

Is there not an easier way? I think so. First up, I’d like to state that I don’t think trade skills should be given to players on a plate, there should be some effort involved in levelling a skill, but the top level has gotten so far beyond that of the original level that it’s just another tedious grind.  Levelling to the top level in any profession takes an enormous amount of materials see here for blacksmithing as an example; its fair to say that people levelling trade skills support the WOW economy in a number of ways, in increasing demand from purchasing materials from the auction house, in reducing supply, from not offering those materials they have collected for sale on the auction house (or making the herb and mining nodes more sparse).  Now I’ve levelled two characters recently, both of which have been miners and herbalists, and I’ve banked everything I’ve collected for just such levelling as I’m trying to do with blacksmithing; even with all this banked ore, I still found myself buying stacks of the stuff from the auction house, or heading out to low level zones to collect the stuff.  Now I’m not the type of player who can see a yellow dot on my screen and not go collect it, this would indicate the materials requirement is far over and above the amount a single character would collect in the course of levelling, even with the occasional trip out to grind metal veins or herbs.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing, and may be by design; it keeps the the effort required to level a trade skill, and it keeps the older content useful (although barely in my opinion).  However when you consider trade skills were meant to be levelled in the main part with characters, for those of you who started a character back in vanilla WOW who levelled their trades with their character it was a straight forward task of making stuff as you got the material; your trade level stayed roughly in check with your characters, with a little bit of extra effort here and there, and the final 50 points or so taking the additional effort once you hit 60.  The trouble is, this final 50 points or so existed at the end of each expansion, so platos have developed at the headline skill level from each new release which are a complete pain, rather than just the end game final 20% of levels which should be difficult.  Here are a few suggestions for Blizzard on what I’d like to see to improve things:

Re-evaluate the amount of raw material required to level certain trade skills: blacksmithing seems far more difficult than alchemy for instance.

Reinstate the ability to queue trade skill activities with addons such as the advanced trade skill window, I understand the reasoning for removing it, but it simply doesn’t do what it’s intended to, it just makes the task of levelling more arduous.

Add the ability to queue multiple ‘breaking’ activities; disenchanting, milling and prospecting are even worse than crafting skills, at the very least let me mill by stack rather than per 5, but preferably add the ability to queue multiple stacks of material.  I acknowledge this might be dangerous with disenchanting, so how about only allowing it for greens.

Remove the levelling, platos which exist in the last 20% or so where, in previous releases, they where the top end of the trade skill level.

Add more lower level ‘multiple level’ items; most of the crap which is made is simply vendored anyway, why not add more items which cost 5 times more to make, and add 5 levels.  Or even better, taking into account my suggestion above, just up the level boost of a few items and leave the material requirement the same.

Look at the possibility of buffing players ability to level trades from other tradeskills, how about an enchanted blacksmithing hammer which adds an x% chance to double the level gained, a potion of superior tailoring reducing the amount of cloth required to make a bolt for the next hour, or a scroll of mass disenchant which allows you to disenchant every green item in your inventory. etc. etc.

Add the ability to ‘pay’ for bulk levelling at a trainer; rather than going away and self teaching the first (say) 300 levels in a crafting skill, why not turn up on the doorstep of your profession trainer with a set amount of materials, or a bag full of gold equivalent to the value of those materials which it would have taken you 6 hours to churn through and just exchange it for a level boost.  This would still require the materials, or currency value of those materials, so wouldn’t harm the economy (and done right could be used to boost it).  I’m not suggesting that this replace the whole levelling process, just a percentage of it – perhaps only available to accounts who have one character with a trade skill at it’s maximum level?  This is exactly what happens in real world industry today, you can go to a library, read about stuff and practice yourself, you can learn on the job as an apprentice, or you can get a ‘boost’ by going on an intensive training course – the training course accelerates the learning curve for the easier, apprentice level stuff, but the artisan level skills only come with practice.

Whatever is done, do something to make trade skills less tedious and more desirable, WOW is a game, it’s about entertainment, much of the recent development of WOW has been to make the game more accessible to the mass market, take the same principles and apply them to trade skills!