Recently in Gaming Category

Sadly, I have to get rid of some of my books. If you're just reading my blog, you can skip this article. This is just here for friends I'm offering books to.

(this is a World of Warcraft post)

Yesterday, I was in a heroic as my paladin healer with a hunter who will remain nameless. Now, hunters get a bad rap, but I have a hunter alt and I was quickly able to tell that this hunter was pretty good at their job. A little arrogant at times, but that comes with pugging heroics, I presume. We got through VH and moved on to AN. That's where the wipes began. The problem is that our tank is not only a fresh 80, just recently having become uncritable, but new to the game circa November, and I'm not quite a fresh 80, but close enough to count. That first boss in AN was quite simply too much for our gear. No amount of clever play was going to make up for the fact that I couldn't keep our tank healed.

So, our hunter decides to explain to me how it is that I should be playing my class. Some context, here. I've been tanking and healing instances with my local group of friends for just about a year. I've leveled through old-world, Outland and Wrath with them and we've done just about every 5-man instance there is at least once (including AN, though last time I was playing my hunter). He specifically is railing on about Beacon of Light, one of the most powerful tools in a Holy Paladin's arsenal, when used correctly. And yet, he's insisting that I'm simply out of touch and can't believe that I've even read the spell text. Eventually his ranting reached a tone that I couldn't take anymore, and I put him on ignore, but it made me think: how many Paladins out there have thought about how to use this wonderful spell? I'm going to go over three of the ways I use it (including the way that the Hunter in question thought it should only be used, which to be fair, is exactly how it should be used in most raiding environments, but we'll get to that later).

WOW Insider currently has a nice article about potential upcoming hero classes, and it got me thinking. There is a lot of buzz about shadow hunters or arch druids, but I really think people are just putting existing WoW classes in a blender and coming up with mashups. Instead, I'd like to explore some hero classes that I really think would add to the depth of the game.

Ghostcrawler, a designer for World of Warcraft, today discussed possible future development on the Battleground concept for Player vs Player (PvP) play in World of Warcraft. Specifically, he's saying that the team wants to find "a brilliant way to measure skill (which is frankly something we would very much like to do)," in order to rate battleground players and reward skilled participation.

I've suggested ways to measure these metrics and implement battleground progression before, but Ghostcrawler specifically mentioned the need to not force players to just sit in BGs all week, grinding out points. I think my first suggestion would accomplish that (scoring each player in each BG and then developing a rating based on average score per BG over time in order to progress through ranks), but the second suggestion (using achievements on a per-kill, per-win, and per-damage/healing done basis) would not.

It's an interesting problem, though. Obviously if BGs are to remain viable they need to either provide easy epics or a way to dole out good gear to the most accomplished players.

A long time ago, I wrote a World of Warcraft article titled, "Typical Hunter Specs." Since then, a lot has changed, but that article is still the number one Google hit for "hunter specs." This got me to thinking it was time to update the page with what I've learned playing a hunter in Wrath of the Lich King, and there was quite a lot!

In the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, there are some really wonderful events called "rings". These are area-style chain fights where your group faces successively harder challengers, each of which is like a dungeon mini-boss, leading up to a fight that's on-par with an appropriately leveled dungeon boss.

These events suggest 3-5 players, but 3 well-geared players of appropriate level can accomplish all of them, assuming that you have a tank and a healer.

Today (Dec 23, 2008) Blizzard took their World of Warcraft servers down for maintenance at 3AM PST and scheduled them to come back online at 11AM PST. That's an 8 hour downtime window. This is not unusual for Blizzard, whose weekly Tuesday maintenance windows are legend among their users.

This time, however is different. First off, in a disturbing trend, Blizzard has been extending their downtime windows later in the day. Today, they've announced an extra 2 hours of downtime. The other problem with this is best summed up by Tazmik of the Executus server, who points out:

Could this be the worst possible Tuesday of the year for extended maintenance? Let's take a look:

• Snowy weather: Check.
• Stores are flooded with people, avoid at all costs? Check.
• "Yes Man" the best movie to come out in the last several weeks? Check.
• 2 days before Christmas? Check.
• No work and/or school? Check.

Congratulations Blizzard, you have officially taken all realms down for maintenance on the worst Tuesday of the year, and then extended it. Apparently no amount of foresight could have seen this coming and, I don't know, scheduled maintenance around it?

Blizzard's response? They've deleted this and hundreds of posts like it from their forums, today.

As it is, Blizzard maintains one of the worst records for uptime in the Internet services business, but to schedule 10 hours of downtime from 6AM to 4PM (Eastern time) on a day when next to no one is at work or school, and much of the country is snow-bound... it brings into question just how much Blizzard has let their 10+ million user user-base go to their heads. Will uptime be the killer feature on which World of Warcraft's successor bases its assault? Could be...

I just found simulationcraft  which looks like a really interesting tool. It's a World of Warcraft raid dps modeling tool which lets you determine gear and class selection for raiding. Here's their description:

"Increasing class synergy and the prevalence of proc-based combat modifiers have eroded the accuracy of traditional calculators that rely upon closed-form approximations to model very complex mechanics. The goal of this simulator is to close the accuracy gap while maintaining a performance level high enough to calculate relative stat weights to aid gear selection."

That makes even my head spin, but the basic idea seems really interesting. I'll try to write it up more once I have  a chance to play with it.

The WoW Armory (wowarmory.com) can be hard to read when it comes to defense, a key tanking stat. Here's how you read it:

When you open your armory page or your character sheet in-game, you see two pull-down menus, below the middle of the page, like this:

Last night, my hunter dropped enchanting and switched to skinning in order to help level his leatherworking through Wrath of the Lich King. I figured I'd just do some of the skinning required and then get back to it later in the week, but it was so fast that I finished it all in two hours. Here's how I did it.