Rage balancing in Cata

I think just about every other Feral blogger (and some not-so-Feral as well) posted about this yesterday while I was bemoaning what a horrible officer I am. I'm just going to call this being fashionably late and run with that.

I've also realized that for a Feral Druid blog, there is a disturbing low percentage of Feral Druid-centric posts here. I'm aiming to fix that.

Anyway, Rage changes coming in Cataclysm. What is this going to do to us big ol' bears?

Well, first we need the details. I'm going to summarize, but if you want the full set of details straight from the Orc's mouth, here you go.

1) Rage will no longer be generated from the amount of damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, an auto-attack will generate a certain amount of rage based on the un-hastened swing speed. Crits will generate 200% normal rage.

This is a very good starting point. There are too many variables that affect damage done, which makes balancing rage around it very tricky. This change (not taking into account other sources of rage) will make our Rage generation feel like our Energy regen when we're in Cat form. Every time we swing, we know we'll get X rage. It makes it a pretty liner regeneration pattern.

This is even more true for us (as opposed to our Warrior Rage-brethren) because our swing speed isn't based on our weapon. Instead it's a static 2.5 seconds. Since the rage generation is based on that base swing speed, haste will essentially speed up how fast we can generate rage (but still in a very predictable manner).

As a bonus, since we Agi stack like woah, we crit a lot. A fair number of our auto-attacks will be giving us the rage of two. This change likely heralds the death of Primal Fury as a bear talent.

2. Rage gains from damage taken will now be based on our health pool. It will be calculated based on the full force of the hit before any avoidance (dodge) or mitigation (armor, absorption) mechanics are applied.

At a glance, it appears that this will make it easier to maintain rage in content that we vastly outgear. Yes and no. While we'll still get "equal" rage from a hit that we take all of versus one that we dodge or shrug off 70% of because of our armor, our (presumably) higher stam pool will mean that hit would take away a smaller percent of our health. I assume this means it will generate less "actual" rage.

Still, it's a welcome change that I think will help stabilize our rage regardless of whether we're running heroic-mode raids or just leveling dungeons.

Similar to point 1 above, this change will probably mean a significant reworking of Natural Reaction is on the horizon.

3. We will be getting more ways to instantly generate rage and more ways to dump rage when we have excess.

Right now Enrage is the only Rage-generation ability we have, and it's not exactly optimal for use in combat because of the armor loss. Granted, in content where you're rage-starved and actually need to pop this in battle you can probably afford the armor loss. Sometimes, though, you go through that rage quick, especially if you aren't the primary focus of the attacks. Having more options open will be nice.

On the flip-side having more rage-dumps will be nice. Right now we have Maul and it's less of a Rage-dump than it is a necessary threat-generation ability. (We're pretty much balanced around being able to hit this the vast majority of the time.)

When I see a full rage bar, I'd like to be able to get giddy and prepare an uber-destructive attack, the same way I do when I'm playing Cat and get ready to unleash a Ferocious Bite with nearly full energy.

4) Maul will no longer replace your next auto-attack. (All "on next attack" abilities are going away.) Instead it will be an instant attack costing a base of 10 Rage but consuming all available rage up to 30 and doing more damage for more rage consumed.

So it's basically turning Maul into the Bear's version of Ferocious Bite. We'll actually have to consider when it is and isn't a good time to use this ability instead of mindless mashing the button. I'm all for this change. While I don't think our (or any other) tanking rotation should be on par with the complexity of a Cat's DPS rotation I definitely think we need a boost in the intellectual requirement department.

I'm also a huge fan of the general abolition of on-next-attack abilities. I've never enjoyed them on any class that has them.

I know there's a lot of trepidation about these changes. That's pretty much par for the course whenever anything comes along that vastly changes the mechanics of the way a class works. Maybe even moreso in this case because Blizz tried to rebalance rage mechanics in BC and kinda bombed it.

But I'm fairly excited for these changes and I'm actually looking forward to getting an opportunity to play around with them. I think they'll add a new (and very much needed) dimension to Bear tanking.

But what have you done for ME lately?

Last week as I was heading off to lunch one of the people I follow on Twitter posted a question. Kind of a poll. A couple hours later he posted another tweet bemoaning how he doesn't like Twitter because he asks a question and none of his 874 followers answered.

At first this may seem harsh. 874 followers and not a single reply?

Here's the thing. The guy built up a follow-list of about 2000 people. About 40% (including me) were silly enough to follow him back. (I'm allowing that 4% might be actual friends/acquaintances/people who care.) He then uses Twitter as a glorified ad platform. Nothing about him or anything like that. Just random tweets pimping his various products and projects.

So yeah. When you put out a general tweet (of the self-fellating how-much-time-will-you-spend-playing-with-my-product variety) to a list of people who don't have any personal investment because they don't know the first thing about you, you're probably not going to get a whole lot of response. Especially when the vast majority of those people are too nice to be honest and tweet back "zero."

So by now you're saying to yourself, "Self, that's an interesting story. Why is San sharing it in a WoW blog, though?"

Glad you asked.

WoW is a lot like Twitter. At its very core--at the foundation--it's a social tool. Unlike Twitter, it has a lot of things to do while you're being social and a very pretty interface with which to do those things. And yes, you can ignore the social component of the game and still get those other things out of it, but you're not likely to keep your wallet open playing as long as the player that does involve themselves in the social aspects.

Right now in our guild we're having raid attendance problems. We haven't been able to come close to fielding a full 25-man team since we cleared ToC 25 a little over a month ago (and we even had one substitute that night).

Some of this is expected. It's the end of an expansion cycle. These kind of drops happened at the end of Vanilla (I'm told) and BC. Plus the summer is fast approaching. Students are in that last rush for the school year. And with Daylight Savings in full swing, people are out more doing things.

Some of it, though...I can't help wondering if it's partially the fault of the officers. I think we've fallen into the same mindset as Twitter-guy. We advertise our guild and bring in members, then throw out raid invites and assume that's enough incentive for people to show up on time (or at all), ready to go, and run with us. We're not doing a very good job of getting them personally invested first.

Even though I'm typing "we," I mean "I." I speak for myself, first and foremost. My intention is not to state this as fact for all of my fellow officers; just my own actions and general overall perceptions. A lot of them read this blog, though, so I know they'll see this and I doubt too many of them will disagree.

We haven't been taking the time to make our new recruits feel like they're an actual part of the guild. We toss out an ginvite when we're asked for one, say "Welcome" in gchat and then...kinda leave it at that.

It's only when someone's proven themselves and earned a slot on the progression team (as either a primary or a backup), that we start to go out of our way to include that person. We normally use our 25-man runs to get an idea as to whether or not we should give someone a chance on a progression team. So if we're not filling the big runs, our smaller ones become stagnant as well (which has also been happening).

We say we're about having fun first and raiding second, but we've been acting exactly the opposite. In fact, we've been acting is if raiding is the fun and if you're not in on that, well... *shrug*

Granted, this is kinda true at the moment for me. Raiding and mount farming are about the only things holding my interest at this point. But that's kind of besides the point.

I think we (again, by which I mean "I," specifically) need to start remembering that even though life is busy and game time is short, we can't expect to be able to just log in, put our head down, and tunnel-vision through whatever we wanted to accomplish that night. If we want to do that, we need to step down as officers. Otherwise we need to go out of our way to be more open, more friendly, and more social to all the guild members. Newly invited and vets. The best and the rest, alike. We need to make other guild members feel like we care about them, that they're an important part of our guild, and that we want them there. Only when they have that sense of personal investment are they going to start responding readily to our raid invites.

Hopefully.

At the very least, it couldn't hurt.

Raid Quote of the Weekend

This was in Vent, so I have no screencap of it. But several of my guildies can vouch for the fact that I said this (yes, me) without realizing how bad it sounded until they all started snickering:

"There's a fish feast at the bottom of the bone pile."

The Great Noblegarden Blogger Egg Hunt!

Happy Noblegarden, and Welcome to the Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt!

The army of Noblegarden bunnies has been out and about overnight and hidden eggs all over the Blogosphere!

Click here for more details!

Good Friday

Here's what I accomplished yesterday:

#92


#93


#94


Yeah, it was a pretty good Friday for me. Only 6 to go...

The Banes of my Existence

I was going to write about something else today. I'd been purposely avoiding talking about the ICC raid buffs because it's kind of a "dead horse" topic at this point, but I had a really good experience with them a couple nights ago and I wanted to share it as an example of how it's more than a "pity buff."

Well, turns out the Noob beat me to it. Seriously. Almost word for word what I was planning to say.

Just as well. I've done it to him before. So now we're even.

Instead, I'm going to go a little bit ranty here and talk about some of the things that are on my personal WoW shitlist.

Hunters - We have 50 bajillion of them in our guild. I think every third person that joins and wants to raid with us is a hunter. Everyone else has an alt hunter. Here's the problem. They take my weapons. Seriously. There's only so many weapons in the game that are good for bear tanks. And they usually don't drop off the first couple bosses of an instance, which means some effort is required to get them.

I know it wasn't 4 days ago that I used Origin of Nightmares as an example of how awesome I am. But I mean...come on. I'm trying to tank the upper wings of ICC and I'm still using a weapon that I got from the second boss in Naxx's Abomb quarter. It's damn good for Bears, don't get me wrong. But in 3 tiers of raiding, I should have been able to pick up better.

On the rare occasion (and when I say rare, I mean rare) that I've seen a potential upgrade drop I've been outrolled by a hunter if I didn't outright pass on it because they were still using a blue-quality weapon or something.

Mongoose - On that note, how obnoxious is it that the best weapon Enchant in the game for Bears is one from BC? Every time I do get a new weapon (twice over the span of Wrath so far) I have to either dump a ton of money on the AH for items that there's a very very small supply for, or grab an enchanter and run around Kara for a few hours letting them DE everything that drops. This should not be the case!

Oracle Egg - According to my achievement history I hit Exalted with the Oracles on Jan 7, 2009, which means I probably got Revered (the rep that enables you to start buying the egg) sometime in mid-December 2008. Based on that, I've gone roughly 67 weeks without getting one of said eggs to hatch into a nice Green Proto-Drake. That's a lot of time, money, and disappointment.

And I really want the mount because I really want to finally be able to switch over and rep up with the infinitely-cooler puppy-men. Screw the big-tongues. Hate them, I do.

Old World Raids - Is there any good reason I can't enter these solo? Really? I'm level 80 and decked out in gear (mostly) from ToC and ICC. I'm am at least this tall. I can ride this ride alone! It's absolutely silly that when I want to go on one of my Midnight or ZA Tiger/Raptor farming runs that I have to ask my partner to log onto his level 15 bank alt so that I can form a raid group to go in. If he's not around or otherwise occupied, I have to bug guildies for the same. And if they're not around or otherwise occupied, I'm pretty much SoL.

The Armory - Don't get me wrong, the Armory (and the Armory App) are freakin' amazing and I love them. But do you know what I want infinitely more than the ability to see and pose my toon in 3D? I want to be able to fully manage raid invites. Not just accept or decline. I want to be able to create and delete them. Update invites. To set members to confirmed or out. Reschedule. Update descriptions. All that kind of fun stuff. Way more useful. I hate doing that stuff in-game. When I sit down and log in, I want to play.

Starting Over

Nope, no April Fool's shenanigans here. I lack the proper creativity. This is actually the BA Shared Topic of the week. It's kind of an interesting one, posted by Pieces of Blasting Away.

If you had the chance to start all over again in WoW, but your char is already level 80, or level 1 depending on if you like to level or not :>. What class would you pick? What race? What faction?
Why would you pick that class/race/faction?

And most of all what would you plan to do with it? Raid, PvP or just hang out in Dalaran?

There's a lot of wiggle room in that question. It's very vague. For instance, to what extent am I starting over? Afterall, starting over is a very possible thing for a lot of people. Just roll a new char and go. You've started over. If I wanted to be an AH player or Arena Junkie instead of a Raider, that just requires a shift in play-style, not a do-over. This isn't Final Fantasy or Mass Effect. I'm not on a guided path.

But let's play the time travel game and assume I am starting over. Do I have the same knowledge of the game I have now? Am I starting over in patch 3.3.3(.3.3.3), or all the way back in 1.11(.111.1111) when I originally started playing? Do I still have the friends I play with now, or have I not met them yet?

It's a complex question and one with a lot of variables. Plus, if we assume I'm starting over clean-slate, then obviously I'd do things the same since I wouldn't know what I know now.

But I don't think that's what Pieces was trying to ask. I think she just meant if you could pick a new Race/Class combo without the accompanying time investment (even though you can already do the Race component), what would you pick?

The truth is, I wouldn't change a thing. Not because I'm not curious or I would mind spending some significant raid time with a whole new and different set of buttons to press. I just can't seem to find it in me to do that. Hell, I kinda want to eventually race-change San to Worgen when the option becomes available, but I'm having a hard time even justifying that to myself.

See, a funny thing happens when you play a game with a single primary character over a span of 4 years, especially in a game with as heavy of a social component as WoW. Somewhere along the line, the distinction between the toon and the player starts to blur a little. No longer is San just an avatar on the screen. He's an extension of me. Not in a creepy, disconnect-from-reality way. Just in a way that he is how I'm known to many of my friends and, recently, my blog readers. There's a lot of history there. A lot of laughs, frustrations, smiles, late nights, songs, and jokes. There's the time I spent leveling with my partner, who got me into the game. Or our grinds through the battlegrounds every weekend for months before we found a guild to raid with. There's my first raid. Our guild-first kill of Magtheridon a mere two weeks before patch 3.0 and our forays deep in to SSC, MH and BT in the weeks after. There's all the experience of Northrend and its dungeons and raids. All of it represented by a dude with blue skin, glowing eyes, and a ever-changing, but permanently mismatched wardrobe.

I couldn't just start that over even if I wanted to. It just wouldn't be the same.

I know it sounds silly. Even typing it, I'm thinking "Dear God, I'm such a dork." But, really.

Let me give a similar example. Back in September I played in a 3-day hockey tournament. It was a rag-tag team put together by a small handful of friends and then filled with "free-agents" (people who registered for the tourney without a team) to give us enough people to at least play.

My family made a trip up to watch one of the games. They certainly didn't have to, but it was a nice gesture. I've been playing for the better part of 5 years now, and they've never really gotten to see it.

During that game I scored a goal (incidentally my only one of the tourney, though I did have a few assists). This will become important in a moment.

The night after the tourney we all got together and went out to dinner. Before we left, my dad handed me a hockey puck with the tournament's logo stamped on it. Turns out he went out of his way to get the puck I scored the goal with and gave it to me.

I'm nearly 30 years old now, y'all. And this was one of the coolest single gestures, ever. The puck is now displayed here in my office, right next to my monitors with my player badge from the tourney right under it. There are a multitude of things this little piece of galvanized rubber represent. The fun time I had at the tourney. The goal I scored. How awesome my dad is and just about every great thing he's ever done for me.

If I lost the puck, could I replace it? Probably. There's even a chance I could find one with the exact same logo stamped on it. And I'd probably still think of those same things when I looked at it.

But would it ever really be the same?

No.

San is just like that. He is a representation of too many awesome things. Even if the awesome things didn't go away with San, they wouldn't be the same.

And now this post has definitely gotten a little to sentimental and (let's be honest) weird.

So in conclusion (thank you 3rd grade English for teaching me proper closers!), if I were given the opportunity to start over, I'd make like a D.A.R.E. kid and just say "no."