Author Archives: Logtar

Why Does My DPS Suck? – Cool Downs

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The “Why Does My DPS suck?” is a post series written for the person starting to raid. While a raider might learn a thing or two, it is written more for the WoW Rookie than for the WoW Pro.

Why Does My DPS Suck?

- Add Ons
- Computer

If you have ever listened on a raid, you might have heard the Raid Leader say, “pop your cooldowns!” sounds like fun doesn’t. If you want to get into raiding one of the first things you should do is ask if you can listen in on a raid. You will start to get a sense of what is said during the fight. You might be lost at first, but if you que up the videos of the bosses the raid team is attempting you might get a good visual of what they are facing.

Cooldown management is something a lot of new DPS have trouble with. Healers learn quickly that you have to use mana regen abilities to keep their mana pool going, but some DPS don’t know how much DPS they are leaving on the table by not using their cooldowns correctly.

Cooldowns are abilities that give you a boost but have a reset timer. Think of them as the “nitro” boost you see on some racing games. They come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but they accomplish the same thing, they give you more DPS.

Your trinkets might have something called a “proc” which means you don’t have to worry about them, but if they are an “on use” trinket, that means that you have to click it to get the boost. The simplest way to start experimenting with this cooldown is just to drag the trinket to your bar and use it on click. Another way is probably to macro it to an ability that you already use. The best way is to know exactly when to use it and be smart about it.

Like your trinkets, most classes have abilities that allows them to do a lot more DPS for a short time. You might have heard the term “burst damage” being used. Some classes have lots of it, meaning they pack a punch when they use all their cooldowns. At one point some classes used to be able to line up several and the fabled “one shot macros” were all the rage on PvP. That does not happen all that much anymore, but you can still pack a lot of DPS in a short period of time.

The fight against Deathwing calls for it a lot. This is where saving your cooldowns for that moment it is needed is critical.

If you have played with a Demo Warlock you have probably noticed that they go on demon form. That is one of their DPS cooldowns. You might have also seen a mage get turned into a human icicle, that is a defensive cooldown. You might be thinking that you don’t care about defensive cooldowns, but they are just as important… a dead DPS does ZERO DPS.

As important as finding out what your cooldowns are, it is when to use them. Every boss is different, and also every raid team lines them up a little different.

There are also cooldowns that affect the whole raid like Heroism/Lust. You have to learn when to use your cooldowns and how they are affected by other cooldowns. If your cooldown gives you more strenght, then it is prime for using during the Heroism/Lust phase; however if you cooldown gives you haste, it might not help that much since Heroism/Lust is already giving you that stat and probably will simply be a wasted cooldown.

So your homework is to investigate what your cooldowns are and make sure that they are available in your arsenal. Play around with them and see how they affect your numbers. Are they things you want to use every time they are up? or are they ones that can be saved for burn down phases? Its all part of the fun of the game.

Happy Hunting.

Profanity and PvP

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I learned a lot of my spoken English from Beavis and Butthead. It was an easy show to understand for someone that did not know English. Not a lot of words, very repetitive. So bun-hole is not something new to my vocabulary.

Our vent (voice chat communication program) is pretty tame. There are a couple of people that will swear here and there for the “shock” value of a swear word here and there. I personally don’t like it because there are kids around the vent sometimes that could directly or indirectly hear the language. I am more comfortable with innuendos and humor than straight F-bombs non-stop.

PvP is full of profanities. While some people think that LFR is trolls R US, it really does not hold a candle to a WSG where you are already 2 caps behind. That does not even account for the people that are not typing their discontent. The people in vent that got killed by the same rogue, yet again will eventually deal with their anger somehow.

I completely understand the need to vent some frustration when something is really going south. I just don’t see the need to share a stream of profanity with others.

I know for our raid nights, plenty of people have strong words after a bad wipe. It is normal practice not to ever push the button. With PvP it seems that the opposite happens and the expletives drown the person calling out things. Running a BG is harder and more chaotic than a raid, but somehow people feel that they have to announcer that the f*%$^$%^ rogue killed me again.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a RL is when someone announces they died. I can see you died, the healers can see you died and the DPS will eventually see if you are a DPS yourself. It seems, at least right now that we are not used to doing BGs because the chatter is all over the place.

It might be a growing pain of getting into a new thing, but my fear is that PvP and profanity go hand in hand. I am not ok with that though.

I think a lot of our members right now see PvP as a “fun” activity, but we have a new person that wants to get us to the next level of PvP and I want them to be able to do that. Some of it will come with credibility and when we are geared and actually doing it, but I think some of it is tone as well.

So the question goes out to those people that PvP. Is profanity just a normal thing in PvP? do rated BG voice chats are just like FPS voice channels?

Lets to about Nerfs BABY!

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Excuse me while I sound kind of Gran Torino like. I love, love, love to read a “kid” that is just coming out of college talk about software development and how they understand how Blizzard works. Granted, there are some exceptions to this rule where the young person has been coding in large teams since high school developing free software in Sourceforge (I actually know a couple.) But trust me, when it comes to software development your VB, C++ classes or 3D animation do NOT equal to you knowing about SDLC. Let alone any idea on how Blizzard development works.

I laugh at conversations like this all the time. Partly because I have been connected to software development for more than 10 years now. I know how different approaches are applied to very different end result. Every software shot is a little different and the more moving parts the worse it is. I have often wanted to just interject on some of the conversations and pull out my (e-peen) but until today I kept it in my pants.

One of the arguments I have heard recently about how the “nerfs” do this or that, or how Blizzard should do this or that is very, very short sighted. Unless the code is existing, you have to rewrite code. The WoW code base is not a small one either. Just think of how much we have in our computers and that is just the client side, it does not include the server side information and calculations that happen. While most people think like amateur hacker wannabes (codemonkeys and script kiddies), I laugh at the “isn’t that some config file that I switch”.

What makes it more amusing some times is that it is not dumb people making these ridiculous claims, but people that are actually are better at math than I am. Figuring out the calculations and numbers of theory-crafting takes brain power, so how that they be so short sighted?

I don’t know anything about encounter design, and I try not to break it down in my head or I would probably stop enjoying the game. “Tuning” a boss, encounter, a simple mob takes coding time, testing, etc. It takes a lot to implement. The time spent by the people “tuning” or fixing “broke”n encounters is time that those same people are not spending on new content.

Blizzard has come short of actually spelling it out for everyone. They have their culture, they have the way they do things and their developers and artists are not just gears in a machine that are easy to replace, or buy more of. Having gradual nerfs was something that they had to plan for and code for. It is probably freeing up a lot of development time for building encounters for MoP.

So just think about what you are saying or asking from “the” company. Nerfing the whole instance is not easy, they had to plan for it and were smart at developing it. They are also smart about how and when they are doing it. You personally might not like the timing, but it is a lot better than having to waste resources tuning encounters already released.

Gear Inflation

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I don’t think it is a secret anymore, the people at the top 100 guild raiding level believe that “Raiding is for ONLY the RAIDERS!” They are really not interested in anyone else joining them. The more people that become better and become “raiders” the less “special” they feel.

The question really is, who are truly the raiders?

WoW has an issue with labels. Raider is probably the one that most people want to use for themselves but nobody really understands anymore. Raider is a catch all term for anyone that goes into an instance that requires more than 5 players. However there is a big gap from a person that killed Kelthuzad when Naxx was a 40 man and someone that killed Deathwing in LFR.

Time put into the game aside, there are plenty of BC and Wrath babies out there that are now raiding, there are huge factors that change how you look at those people.

The raider code is kind of an attempt at further defining that, but in reality a raider has been and will be defined by their gear.

If your gear says heroic and your ilvl is maxed out, you are at the top of your game. You might not be a hardcore raider, you might have been carried… but in the end the prestige of that gear is there.

Some of those people are now really troubled by the fact that anyone can now have a 4 set.

That used to separate people that could do progression vs people that could not. Now that 4 set capability is available to not just LFR babies, but normal mode teams.

Before the LFR our raid team had maybe 2/3 people with 4 set per tier if we were lucky. Now we have about 15 toons with 4 sets. That makes a huge difference. Something that was pretty unattainable for us before because of luck (some tokens seemed to never want to drop.) or just lack of progression, is now there.

The agility trinket that would have taken us probably months for our 2 hunters to get, I think they both have now. I remember deathbringers will almost broke up our raid team before. Once piece of gear… and so much drama. Can paladin’s really benefit? Why is that hunter getting it if so already got it… oh no we pug one DPS and he wins the roll for the trinket I waited 4 months for! I do not miss those days.

Now in our normal raid everyone passes on gear if they have the LFR version. I don’t even have to use loot council or points anymore to track gear. We know we can fill the gaps later. Same thing when I pug, I give loot to their toons because I am raiding on an alt with LFR gear… it does not hurt me, it helps other raid teams. (I prefer to pug normal with other guild teams rather than full trade chat pug.)

So from my point of view this is all unicorn and rainbows, but Raiders of the hardcore flavor are starting to say that “bads” don’t deserve 4 set. The same people that don’t understand that LFR is really not tuned or targeted at them, now feel that others don’t deserve the 4 set.

Is this whole prestige thing really that important to people?

I simply don’t get it, and not because I cannot attain it either… I am sure if I put enough effort into it I could probably be in a guild raiding more competitively, but I like raiding with my friends and our wives.

So I don’t think making it easy to gear right now and 4 set available to everyone is a bad thing for the game or for raiding. How do you feel about it? Seriously… is someone like me not worthy of a 4 set? Should we go back to a place where only a couple of people are able to attain it on a normal mode raiding guild?

The Raider Code

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Thinking about how to differentiate raiders I remembered the Geek Code and looked to see if there was one for raiders and could not find one so I figured I could come up with my own. It might simplify things for people recruiting to take a quick glance at the type of raiders the person is looking at.

Here is the Raid Code.

-N+/-H+ Difficulty Mode
-N Looking to just see some fights
N Don’t have to complete Normal but would like to try
N+ Looking to complete normal Mode
-H some hardmodes
H most hardmodes
H+ have to complete

-A+ Achievements
-A Not interested
A Don’t mind doing some
A+ Want the mount

10w-500w Wipe threshold
How many times are you willing to wipe before a boss dies

Dr Dk Pa Pr Rg Wr Wl Ma Sm Hn Wl Wr – Class you raid with (HTD) Roles willing/competent at a raid level – Spec if not obvious

1h-10h
Hours willing/able to raid a day

1d-7d
Days willing/able to raid a week

Brag – Latest Raid completed achieved while current content

My Raidercode
-H A 100w Pr(H)D Wr(T) 4h 2d DS-8/8N

Karma and Player Reputation

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With MoP in the horizon and Dungeon Challenge Mode coming, my brain has started to think of what player reputation could be really like.

Ever since I started playing WoW, players would gain notoriety because of their armor. If you had purples you were obviously raiding or PvPing at a high level. Mounts also made it so that people could recognize what you had accomplished in the game. Another form of reputation that many take seriously is your guild tag. Even though we left an old underpopulated server, I never wanted our old guild name to be used by anyone. I always felt we had a pretty good reputation as a guild and that mattered to me.

Today’s WoW is a lot more anonymous. Your DPS/Healing numbers can do some of the talking for you, but overall there is really no chance, or a low chance that you will see the people on the LFR or LFG ever gain. Even now that it tries to pair you with people from your server, you say hi and that is about it.

You still get to know people in pug raids in the server and can make a name for yourself as a good player, but it is rare that you can do it on your main if you are raiding with your guild already.

I think WoW is seriously missing a player reputation system that can be affected by each other. While this opens up a whole can of worms and tons of opportunities to be misused, hear me out.

What do we value as a community when playing with others?

Some might say that ultimate skill and completing content as quickly as possible is the mark of a good player. So the new challenge mode will go a long way towards that.

What about people that are willing to go slow, help others and maybe give some advice? Shouldn’t that be sought after or compensated in some way. Not by blizzard, but by the community.

What if besides the bag you get for tanking you could check a flag that says, will help new players. Sure the dungeon guide is kind of supposed to do that, but it seems like people don’t use the flag for that. I know that even as a tank I sometimes have a hard time setting up the pace. Even when I try to slow down an LFR because someone said they had never been there it is met with LOL – look at the LFR-RL trying to Lead.

I think player reputation, even if just positive reputation, could go a long way. If perks came with it, even better. An implementation where you could build your reputation as a helpful player in randoms could get you faster ques, or more rewards. You would get something back for giving back to the community.

I know it might be a crazy idea, but I think it has some merit. We need to counterbalance the go-go-go mentality if we ever want to bridge the gap between the “noob” and the “elite.”

Would you give positive karma points to a good player? or to a player that went the pace of the group?

The second part of making the LFG feature better would be to also pick the speed that you are willing to go at. I know I have mentioned it before, but that is really lacking right now.

Yesterday a guildie and I thought about going for a ZA mount run. Before we qued we asked the guild, but it was just him and I. When we came in we asked the group if they were up for a mount run. One player said sure and the other two never replied. We proceeded to basically 3 man that instance. We never made the timer, but at the end of the run the spam of achievements told us that the other two players had never been there. They never even said a word.

What if we could have signed up for a “gold” run, where only people that had already earned that badge could sign up. I guess the argument at that point would be that why would you ever go bellow your highest speed… and that is when I say, to build karma points :)

I hate Douchewing

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He has spent an entire expansion frying me like only goblins should be fried (I wonder if they taste like frog legs… I have never had froglegs btw.)

Well in reality, I have summoned more people to their death than I should be comfortable with. Only in our game do we get excited about someone getting an achievement that involved walking into a wall of fire to get a “Charred and Crispy” achievement.

Killing Ragnaros with new acquaintances in a new server felt really weird. I was used to only killing stuff with guildies. Sure in WoTLK I did a lot of Naxx, Ulduar and ToC with pugs… but after getting Kingslayers I thought it would always be a guild affair to down a new boss.

So I said to myself, lets make sure we kill Douchewing together… however Mr Frotobaggins had other plans. Elune bless him… he can pug like no other.

I knew he had been close to killing Douchewing before, with 3% wipes that seemed to be hunting him and the pug group that seemed to clean up the place after we were done with our attempts on the ship.

I was about to log off last night, and I recognized the person spamming in tradechat as possibly one of the people Froto was in Dragon Soul with. They needed a Disc Priest… I asked Froto, how are the attempts going… and he said, we need a disc priest. I cursed a little under my breath and told the pug RL that I will be right back on my priest.

3 attempts later and we had the shinny new “Destroyers End” title.

I should be happy right, I killed Douchewing before the OMG NERF! and sure, I am in some level. I know that what Froto and I did will help our future raids quite a bit. We now know what it takes to down that humongous dragon.

We could have never done that in our last server. This server has a lot of great pug raids… it seems like the quality of people is about our speed. No it is not a “everyone is awesome realm” more of a “everyone seems to be a decent person.”

There was excitement in vent after the kill. It was a first kill for everyone in the group. Besides my guild mate, it looked like it was a combination of groups of 2 from some guilds I recognized and some I had never heard of before.

The Douchewing fight is not too bad (madness that is) it just required lots of DPS and very frantic healing during some of the fight.

I was assigned the very daunting task of healing the tank as the last elementium bolt tried to just decimate us. The last burn phase with the adds is just as frantic and we ended up with only 3 people alive when he finally gave us the shinnies… none for me or froto because his /roll skills sucked.

The fight is actually very similar to the LFR, but just a lot more damage.

Most groups in the LFR go Left – Left – Right/Right/Right, but I guess the normal version goes Left/Left – Right – Right/Right. Other than that it seemed to be the same, just requiring tons more numbers… I think everyone was 40K plus on DPS… and I contributed about 10K worth of smite healing.

Without coordinating the healing cooldowns I think it went pretty well. The group seemed somewhat DPS centric with lots of big numbers just killing things quickly rather than tank or healing centric. It made me realize how different each group is. Our tanks do ridiculous damage… that should help this fight a bit when we get to it as a guild… who knows, that might even be tonight.

Reloaded is Recruiting

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<Reloaded> is a casual guild that raids 10-man content. Our main raid team works on current content on Tuesday and Wednesday starting at 8:30 CST. We are looking to start our second team, and also have enough to run T11 and T12 25 mans. We love collecting pretty drakes and achievements.

We have a group of capable players and a friendly atmosphere. Most of us are adults with full- time jobs and we raid with our spouses, so couples are welcome as long as there is flexibility when only one of you is needed. Our goal is to rescue the princess while the content is relevant, but people, real life and relationships mean more than us than loot. While we want you to be able to perform as a raider, it is more important to us that you are a nice person.

We will love some tanks and healers, but all classes are welcome. We like our tanks and healers to love those jobs. It is our experience that when someone is pushed to do something they don’t enjoy, they will not take it as seriously or excel at it. Even if you are just starting out on those roles, we will help you take it to the next level!

Apart from being competent at playing your main spec, we expect the following of all members:

- You keep up with your class changes and see them as a challenge, not a reason to gripe.
- While we encourage alts, you should keep your main raid-ready and make that character your priority.
- Always be willing to look up fights or alternative strats prior to the raid time.
- Always show up repaired, enchanted and gemmed.
- Value people over gear. If you are looking to just gear up to start hardmodes with another guild, this is not the place for you.

What we provide

- Level 25 guild with repairs for all our members.
- Consumables for raids including flasks and feasts.
- Enchants and gems at no cost to our guild members with materials
(sometimes provided if available.) We already have 2/3 of the epic gem
patterns.
- A relaxed raiding atmosphere where we help each other and you will be treated like an adult.
- Frotobaggins always looking to raid every single minute he is online. If you love to raid any type of content he will go with you!

A little about us

is a casual guild in Whisperwind-US (PvE, CST). We recently opened our doors in Whisperwind, but the guild is level 25 and some of us have played together for over 3 years. We like to do old content and help each other get achievements. We like to see content and take raiding seriously, but don’t want to be server first or care if our gear is heroic. We see gear as a tool, not as a goal. Most of us are adults and our median age is 30, but we have people from their mid 20s to 50s in our ranks. We are starting Dragon Soul, but will still like to go to Firelands and complete achievements and hard-modes,
we are looking forward to completing a couple of legendaries for our warlock and mage.

We are a no-drama clique and we want you to become a part of it. We value the social aspect of WoW and like to have a sense of community. We are looking for long-term members who will stick around and continue to
make our guild great to be a part of. We know each other outside the game, and had a chance to meet each other at Blizzcon.

The values our guild adheres to are simple:

Respect “To each other, our server and the WoW community”
Integrity “we do what we say, and do what is right”
Openness “Zero drama and gossip, you have an issue discuss it and move on”
Teamwork “We kill bosses together, but also wipe together”

If you like what you have read here and are thinking of applying or you have further questions, contact Logtar in game (alts: Hollogos – Gatoso). Add me to your real ID (logtar at gmail dot com)

Why Does My DPS suck? – Add Ons

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I have a love/hate relationship with addons. Some are extremely helpful, some clutter the screen, some make life convenient until a patch breaks them. I think the important thing to remember about addons is that they are not required for you to play WoW.

This topic can turn into a monster, but lets look at it from the starting DPS point of view.

The first thing you need to do is to know why your DPS sucks. While a friend linking you (or that Pug that topped the charts) the meter for the last fight will give you some idea, it will not give you the real picture. Enter recount.

Recount is an addon that can provide a lot of information. Before the tooltips on the character sheet were updated to display a little more information about what the numbers meant, recount was the place I would look to see if I was missing with my abilities.

So step one is to download an addon that tells you where you stand DPS wise.

I think the following numbers will stay true until the end of Cata. These are the numbers you should be hitting to be on par with that content.

7K-9K – Dungeons – Greens and blues
10-12K – Herioc – Entry level – All blues
13-15K – Troll Heroics – T11 – Mostly Purples
16-18K – Firelands – HoT Heroics – T12 – iLvL 360+
19-22K – LFR – 1st half of Normal DS – iLvL 372+
23-28K – Normal DS – iLvL 380+
30-35K – Heroic DS – iLvL 390+

I am sure some people will think that those numbers are in the low side. I have seen people hit ridiculous numbers on greens and blues, and vice-versa, seen purpled out people not do more than 12K. I think the above are realistic numbers to look at.

Keep in mind that those are not dummy – static numbers, but sustained DPS. What that means is the DPS that you can sustain during a fight including moving and repositioning. A mage can hit 30K in the beginning of a fight blowing all his cooldowns, that does not mean that they are a 30K mage. A good way to look at meters is to look at Damage Done and see where your DPS stacks compared to other classes. So look at the numbers and compare them with the chart above but not as a high water mark, more of as an average.

If your numbers don’t seem to hit the above or even be close to it, there are also addons that can help you out.

One of the biggest problems with DPSers that are starting out is that they don’t know about uptime of dots and debuffs. Most classes have a debuff they need to keep up, some have several. Finding an addon that will display it for you will give you a constant reminder while in combat of keeping that debuff up. For a warrior for example, their shouts and rend are very necessary for the DPS to stay up. Druids with their Fairy Fire, DKs Diseases, etc. I use Power Auras for displaying what I need to keep up, and the cool think about it is that you can import auras from people that already built them. There are other addons like Tell Me When that might be a little easier to set up for a beginner. The WoW UI will display them for you, and it is now a little more configurable as well.

Keeping track of your Dots and Debuffs (as well as buffs) will affect your DPS greatly. Just keeping battle shout up is about 2K DPS for a warrior.

When starting out with addons a little way to cheat is to download an addon pack. The downside to going this route is that there might be too much going on, or it might be too different than the regular WoW UI. You also have to keep in mind that your computer has to be able to handle the added workload that more addons will put on it. I say to start out with just keep it simple and work with a couple of addons at a time.

All of this is not required to play the game, but if you want to raid and don’t use the tools you will certainly be at a disadvantage. While Blizzard has gone a lot further down the path of making things more configurable, addons are still a part of the raiding game.