Dealing With Our Most Precious Resource: the Perils of Separate Lockouts

Once upon a time I lived in a world where I could raid as many nights a week as I wanted. Sometimes I would be online in WoW In some form, at some hour of the evening, up to six days a week. I had forsaken all other games despite being an avid gamer since the age of six. I embraced the raiding scene just like many others did at the time: full bore into the 40-man raid team content. I was 8 years younger than I am now and I had nary a care in the world with the only concern I really had was money. WoW offered me so much entertainment for so little money compared to going out and buying other $60 games.

Back then raiding was different of course. Not everyone could raid or could get into a 40 man team and it showed when folks in Orgrimmar or Ironforge would ogle your shiny purple epics and ask where you got them. There was a clear delineation between the haves and the have-nots which only become more apparent once AQ40 and Naxxramas rolled around. While I was fortunate, or unfortunate if you consider my raiding schedule and my girlfriend’s displeasure, to clear Naxx40 before the Burning Crusade patch the number of people who did experience any substantial portion of the instance is amazing small. The barrier to entry for raiding guilds was exceptionally high and there was no shortcut to gearing up through all of the instances in order.

I’m older now.

I have a wedding to plan, a house to fix up, a well-paying job that I like, people to see, and other games to play. While money will forever be a concern for me it is now one on another level. I’m not worrying that I can’t get all of the games that I’d like to get because I can afford the ones I want. I’m instead worrying about fixing the gutters, having the pool fixed, and creating an addition on the house. Life has shifted my priorities significantly and I’m sure this is the case for many WoW players.

The most precious commodity we have in our daily and weekly lives…is TIME.

Simply put there is not enough time in the day to do everything, see everyone, and be as productive as you’d like without making sacrifices. Those sacrifices are often forsaking recreational things like video games for an evening to enrich other aspects of your life. It is for this reason that I have staunchly stuck to my goal of never raiding any more than three nights a week. If a guild that I am in decides it needs a fourth night because a boss is close I may or may not be able to make it and it must be something I wouldn’t be held accountable for missing. My guild is important to me, but my life and my free time are more important to me. This is non-negotiable.

Mists of Pandaria is attacking my free time constantly with its rather endless stream of things to do. Some of these things I like such as Pet Battles (though I haven’t done any since I swapped servers), running old dungeons, killing alliance players, the tillers, and even some of the dailies. Overall though the vast amount of dailies available as well as LFR and working to cap VP with heroics as needed suck up a large amount of time. The blessing though is that each of these things is bite sized and can done piecemeal throughout a day or the week. Nothing fully intrudes on my ability to maintain my schedule. Worst case scenario is that I stay up a little bit after raid ends at 11 and I bang out my dailies before bed. I might run LFR in the morning or afternoon on the weekend and heroics happen whenever. Managing my time is the largest responsibility I have as a potential husband and gamer.

When I read people clamoring for the return of separate 10 and 25 man lockouts it confuses me greatly. While I agree that someone putting additional time into the game should gain additional benefits, those benefits should not be substantial enough to give them a massive leg up in the raiding environment (with the exception of people spending that extra time on their main raid, e.g. top guilds when content is released). Spending ten more hours than me doing non-main raid content in a week should net you reputation, rewards, extra gold etc. What it isn’t, is a reason to feel entitled to more loot and gear. World of Warcraft has become a lifestyle and as such needs to be planned according to their (Blizzard’s) views on a healthy raiding schedule. They cannot safely design a model that makes the average raider tack on an additional one or two nights during the week to raid a second raid size out of obligation to make their character the best It can be. They  use the word ‘optional’ a lot and while sometimes we all know it might not be, they are aware that separate lockouts with equal loot would NOT be optional for many.

I agree that 25 man raids need to be incentivized, however breaking the lockouts and increasing the gear level slightly is not the way to go. If the ilevel difference is only 8 say, you will still be forced to run the 10 man raid in organized guild runs to maximize chances at tier tokens and those highly contested items shared between classes. This added requirement caters far too much to the people who have unusually large amounts of free time on their hands. These people are the exception rather than the rule and while they may be extremely vocal on forums and boards, do not represent the majority of players out there. If you are that gamer that plays only WoW, or has lots of free time, or maybe you’re single, or maybe you live at home still who knows, please respect others that are just as serious about the game as you and are determined to stay just as relevant as you but have less free time. WoW is not about who can commit the most time to the game and never should be. WoW should be able who makes the best use of their time within the game to reach their desired goals.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the 10’s vs. 25’s thing because that has been discussed to death by people with much better ideas and solutions than I could think up. I’m more concerned with how flippant and callous some players have become about how the shared lockout ‘ruined the game’. Thankfully we have alts for a reason. Forcing too much raiding on one character will burn out players far too fast, especially those with familial commitments. All in all I’m content with how raiding works right now as far as its time commitment and structure. I worry that if things were changed to force me to start adding raid days to my schedule I would probably have to quit the game entirely.

 

Things to come:

I’m currently working on my primers for the first 8 heroic encounters that I have completed as well as an update to my guide that has languished at ’4.3′ for a while now. I also have a part two to my magic post as well. So much to write so little time.

Off Topic – My history of Magic: the Gathering part 1

I’m going to be going a bit off topic today because I’ve had this burning desire to talk about Magic: the gathering.

I’ve been playing the game for a very long time and because there are so many experiences and stories tied to it, it has become a rather important hobby throughout my life. I’ve met friends playing the game and I feel that, strangely enough, it has made me better at playing strategic games in general. Evolving as a magic player has meant learning some critical higher level concepts such as evaluating threat levels, tempo, timing, card advantage, and understanding gains in board position. I certainly haven’t mastered all of these things mind you, but simply trying to understand them all has altered my brain for the better I think. This story though is going to be largely anecdotal but hopefully enjoyable all the same.

Where it all began

I started playing magic with some friends around or just before the revised base set came out while in 8^th grade I believe. I had some cards from the unlimited set before that however we at school honestly didn’t know what was good and what was bad which has me kicking myself to this day! Innocently enough, like most other kids my age, it began with a “hey, what’s that game you are playing it looks like fun”. Oh if I had only knew what I was getting into then! I dabble in it a little bit at the time and made some very, very crude decks where the only goal was to make giant monsters and attack my opponent. I had no concept of mana ramp up or casting cost balance in my games. If I could plop Force of Nature down onto the table I was a happy camper. There was a great sense of wonder surrounding the game that drew me in much like multiplayer online games do. I had a small community to play with and we bonded over a new and thrilling hobby.

My closest friends had independently all been starting to play at their respective schools which turned out to be pretty awesome. Over the next few months, with The Dark and Fallen Empires already released, we started playing together. We all had completely different concepts of what a good deck meant and I found it fascinating. This card game that had one unified rule set could foster a myriad of play styles, decks, and card value systems and within each of those permutations you had infinite variations beyond that!

I gravitated towards blue/X control and made it my business to acquire the rarer cards such as Vesuvian Doppleganger, Wrath of God, Skull of Orm, Maze of Ith, Control Magic, Clone, and Dance of Many and put together a clone and control deck. Another friend gravitated towards the chaos that was Red/Blue and managed to get Shivan Dragons, Rock Hydras, Granite Gargoyles, Seasingers, and such. Our other group members went Black/Blue and Green/Black respectively. We had some of the most epic and political games of magic ever for kids that age…at least to us they were. It was always up in the air who would win and we enjoyed the randomness.

We continued to play throughout the next couple of years in high school picking up more and more cards as the sets rolled out (we bought the heck out of Ice Age, Alliances, Mirage, Visions etc). Each of us created new concoctions that expanded our areas of expertise. I made more aggressive decks, the aggressive players made some control decks, and we even had our fair share of combo and land destruction. None of our theory was ever right and sadly multiplayer doesn’t prepare you for a real duel. At the time I honestly didn’t even know there was anything more out there! Our Magic playing tailed off before my senior year and we ended up preferring less insular activities but I never forgot about it.

College

Day 1 freshman year of college during orientation changed EVERYTHING. I was sitting down in a circle with a bunch of other engineers in my group and I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me (who is now a good friend). Somehow we ended up talking about magic because he, a seasoned tournament goer, frequented a little place called Your Move Games. For those that aren’t aware YMG was a pretty big force in the magic community at the time and was frequented by some rather iconic players such as Darwin Kastle, Rob Dougherty, Chad Ellis, David Humphreys, Michelle Bush, Zvi Mowshewitz among many others. This card shop was also literally a stone’s throw from my university. Holy crap!

I was encouraged to take a trip down there and play some sealed deck in order to get back into things. Urza’s Block was the current thing and man was it completely different than I was used to. The power level felt higher (bear in mind I didn’t do old school tournaments which were no joke) and I was trying my best to put up a good fight. (This was also the first time I needed to get a DCI number which completely confused me. My friend’s number was only 4 digits long which shows just how long he had been in the scene.)  After playing a few local tournaments and getting my butt handed to be by excellent players I started to learn quite a bit. I wasn’t making the same mistakes twice and my sealed deck building was improving albeit slowly.

One day my friend asked me to come help him playtest some decks for a tournament that he was interested in going to. I asked “what do you mean playtest?” Again…there are so many dangerous questions I asked back then that I had no idea the significance of! He explained to me that it was common for people to mock up decks, especially ones with expensive cards, in order to test them out against each other. Often times the match ups would be played over and over to understand win percentages and value of adding or subtracting cards. This seemed like a really fun idea to me as it meant I would play lots of games of magic with decks that I had never thought to, or could afford, to build.

That’s when he busted out Tolarian Academy.

For those that don’t know this degenerate competitive deck, that forced restrictions and bans, used cards such as: Tolarian Academy, Windfall, Mind Over Matter, Lotus Petal, Stroke of Genius,

and many other nasty blue cards to create a combo capable of going off on turn one. The problem was…it was the longest most cerebral turn ever. At one point I went and took a power nap on the couch in the dorm’s common area while he worked through it. Needless to say that I wasn’t having a ton of fun but the delivery we got tasted great.

I mostly did casual magic and limited through the next block (Mercadian Masques) which I didn’t find to be all that great but the people were good and I was learning more and more.

Invasion Block

A big turning point for me was probably Invasion Block. The cards in this set really appealed to me and it sucked me in further than I thought I ever would be. The power level, color interaction, and themes present made for some of the most exciting limited play I had done to date. I liked being able to play 5 color green in limited, or bust out some rather deadly three color guild deck that had tricks up every sleeve. For some reason G/B/R or U/B/W appealed to me but I was certainly not limited to them.

Invasion/Masques standard was the first format I started playing constructed. I cobbled together a mediocre rebels deck while my friend played the dominant deck of the format Fires of Yavimaya. Fires was your iconic R/G beatdown deck that had three all-star cards in it: Blastoderm Blastoderm, Fires of Yavimaya, and Saproling Burst’.

Saproling Burst was particularly mean because on the turn it was played, with Fires present, represented 12 points of creature power with haste. The deck was about as straightforward as you can get but it was deadly.

A favorite moment of the Masques/Invasion tournaments was my friend playing Fires against a Mono-blue deck with creature counters, control, and bounce, and it killed by way of  Ankh of Mishra and Parallax Tide. Fires won game one and he strung out game two to make sure that the blue player had no win condition other than Ankh and Tide but still lost. He knew with the sideboard present there wasn’t any way Fires was going to win this matchup against the rogue deck. So what does he do? He mulligans down to zero cards in hand, says go, and never drops a land. Not one. His opponent was livid and crying over to the judge. He couldn’t win and would certainly be decked eventually as he took a full hand to start. Game, set, and match.

One of the first times I experienced the rock paper scissors aspect of magic was playtesting with him at the tail end of this standard rotation. There was a rumbling through the circuit that people were playing a blue/white control deck using Blinding Angel and Mageta the Lion to create a lockdown control deck. I mocked up the deck, shuffled it and went at him in duels. I won every, single, game. It wasn’t even close. He was a better player than I was and I had NO familiarity with the deck what so ever. It was almost as if the deck played itself. Eerie as it was it just kept spitting up cards to counter everything he did and rarely did it break a sweat. We then modified his sideboard to deal with this deck because any match-up with an auto loss game 1 needed some attention and fast.

Invasion onward

I continued to play casually while at college but I couldn’t go over to YMG as often as I’d like. The people there were still awesome and I continued to have a great time and got in quite a few memorable games. One of my worst limited losses ever was to one Darwin Kastle who proceeded to drop Sapphire Leech  turn two and Sleeper’s Robe  turn three. I never recovered from the card advantage despite throwing up a flier as he poured out a perfect creature curve. After Invasion, Odyssey block came and went for me with little fanfare. Classes were tough and time limited.

Regionals!

When Onslaught block came out I found myself back in the thick of it. We were playing a lot more and I was loving the flavor and of the set. I was so excited that I played in my first Regionals tournament.

A quick moment of clarification: On top of the tournaments that are held for players to gain access to the Pro Tour circuit and local games, there are public tournaments that are held to funnel players into their country’s world teams. These are Regionals, Nationals, and ultimately Worlds.

I had fallen in love with Astral Slide  and Lightning Rift . These cards played on my familiarity with the old Urza Block cycling ability which I enjoyed. The deck was fairly straight forward and the decklist was basically a giant list of mostly 4 ofs…many that were affordable for me which was important. I’m pretty sure my list was something like:

4 Lay Waste
4 Wrath of God
4 Exalted Angel
3 Slice and Dice
4 Astral Slide
4 Renewed Faith
3 Teroh’s Faithful
4 Lightning Rift
3 Starstorm
4 Secluded Steppe
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
10 Plains

The deck absolutely destroyed creatures. It killed em and it killed them good. The problem was that this deck was in a format with three other very strong control decks: Psychatog, Mirari’s Wake, and Mono Black Control. All of these posed a significant threat if their defenses get built up.

What I did, and I was proud of it at the time (though I discovered later I was far from the only one) was create a unique transitional sideboard that combatted those decks specifically. It was:

2 Boil  3 Earth Rift   4 Pillage  4 Stone Rain  2 Wild Fire

This gave me 19 land destruction spells when you add in the 4 main deck Lay Waste (cycle fodder) which brought control decks to their knees if they didn’t have a strong counter spell heavy opening hand. I piloted this deck through 11 grueling rounds (over 11 hours for reference) and ended up in the top 32 which made me quite happy. My friend who was running Black/Green oversold cemetery ended up making top 8 and Nationals.

As the Onslaught block unfolded and we gained access to Eternal Dragon  and Decree of Justice  the deck went from obscure to very popular in a fairly short period of time. I kept on playing it at local tournaments but when the next regionals rolled around with Mirrodin in the mix I opted for something different.

* Tooth and Nail *

I have a long standing love for this card for some odd reason. I liked the tool box nature of it and what it can do when resolved. For 9 mana though it should be pretty amazing though right? The deck was bounced around from pro to pro each taking their own spin on it when writing up articles. The core of the deck revolved around using land fetching spells that could get you anything you wanted Sylvan Scrying  and Reap and Sow to put together the Urza Lands. Once you did this you would cast absurdly powerful spells such as Mindslaver, Oblivion Stone , and Fireball as well as the titular spell of the deck.  I loved the simplicity of the deck though: Cast Tooth and Nail, place two Darksteel Colossus  in play or one of your many toolbox creatures that live in your deck or sideboard, Profit! While I did rather well with the deck, and loved every minute of it, I never top 8’d anything. The biggest problem that existed at the time was Skull Clamp . A degenerate card that shaped the metagame and I was stubborn in not making a deck that used it while it was legal.

After Kamigawa was released I opted to play a rogue deck in the next regionals because at the time I didn’t want to just net deck. There were so many interesting deck options at the time so I felt like it was as good a time as any other to try. The deck I was obsessed at running was a variation on a theme originally created by Chad Ellis over at Your Move Games. We were talking about doing goofy and ultimately crazy things using Auriok Salvagers to generate a control deck. Now if you flash forward to today everyone knows how good that card is with Lion’s Eye Diamond and Black Lotus earning itself a spot in a handful of notable combo decks. At the time though it was less powerful but just as fun. Pairing him up with Trinket Mage

The Spellbombs Aether Necrogen Pyrite Sunbeam and Engineered Explosives  . The fun kick in the pants combo that the deck could sneak in very easily was flipping Erayo . The deck basically worked on the backbone of Auriok Salvagers using countermagic, sensei’s divining top, hand destruction, and board sweeping to stay afloat. I came up shy of the top 8 but I ended up faring very well with it

Non-major tournaments

While I have cited some of my more enjoyable tournament decks I was also frequenting FNM at YMG as well as the occasional PTQ and GP. I was trying to earn my chops or at least have fun trying. What I liked about FNM though was that I could pilot odd creations and rogue decks just for the ever loving heck of it!

My favorite rogue deck that I played was, and you’ll probably laugh, the Beacon of Immortality   False Cure  deck. The deck was one of the most basic things you’d ever imagine. It’s goal was to drop Wayfarer’s Bauble turn one in the hopes of ramping to Solemn Similacrum and Wrath of God or Akroma’s Vengeance if creatures were the problem, or Duress and Persecute if they weren’t. As soon as I hit 8 mana the two card combo would straight up kill them regardless of life total. Yes it was bad, and yes it was janky, but the sheer rogue-ishness of the deck allowed me to win the first FNM I played it at.

I dabbled in Mirrodin Block constructed playing both Affinity and Red/Green artifact hating stompy. Both of which were fun but I didn’t get enough experience with the format to excel.

Drafting!

I was around the Mirrodin block going into Kamigawa block that I really came into my own drafting (though I did draft Onslaught quite a bit). While I’m sure I’ve lost all my skill at it, I thoroughly enjoyed getting my hands dirty playing at Your Move Games. Yup I was still going there though the crowd had shifted somewhat. Rob, Chad, and Darwin still came by and I got to play test Darwin’s games a few times but my interactions were more with the other folks. There were a lot of people there that shaped my further game development, one of which is the now well-known Jackie Lee.

I was less interested in the main draft event. I much preferred the independent team drafts that started towards the tail end of the Thursday evening and went into the wee hours of the morning (1 to 4 AM). As you can probably gather I was between jobs and working odds and ends stuff at the time. The team drafts were usually 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 events where the strategy was obviously quite different. Everyone at the table was not your enemy and you had to be aware that the one opponent next to you that you have been feeding all the good cards to has to play every one of your teammates. The winning team took home all the cards so it was also, in some way, like gambling but much, much, more fun. I think I can safely say that I won games much more often than I lost them and my card collection benefited greatly.

This drafting went all the way through Kamigawa block and Ravnica block with the culmination of it, and most fun I’ve had, occurring in Ravnica. While I am sad that I don’t play with them (though I have been meaning to try to sneak over and draft with people in Cambridge sometime) I’ll always remember the times I had there and the wealth of knowledge present. Now people there at the time weren’t all well-known but I can at least say that I got my share of wins…and losses…against Jackie Lee and a few other major players who I’ve come to respect greatly. We were all just kids messing around back then though. A different time for sure.

Since then

Not long after that I started work at my current company and I have been with them since. Time constraints, and ultimately world of warcraft, prevented me from partaking in magic more since then. In fact I think I can safely say that raiding is what killed my time with Magic: the gathering. Without anything to keep me current I drifted farther and farther away from the game and almost lost touch with it entirely. Then something crazy happened.

My childhood friends all came back together and said that they missed playing Magic. We saw it as an opportunity to all spend time together just the guys and socialize all while playing a game that we love. In that sense it was one of the best things that ever happened. Sure I had traded in my competitive one on one edge for a more multiplayer one but it has provided us so much entertainment it was worth it. The hardest thing though was getting my multiplayer deck building chops back up. I started reading The Ferret’s Serious Fun articles on Magicthegathering.com and expanding my horizons. I’ll have more to come in my post about multiplayer and the decks I roll with in my next post!

Lunchtime Napkin Math – How much mana do we really have?

In a world where we have a fixed mana supply we need to think about how much mana we have available and how much we’d like to have available. This is purely napkin math though so please don’t take it as canon. I just like to think about resources in a more analytical sense. First let us try to approximate some stats for our theoretical druid. I’ll leave the equations out so you can certainly modify them to suit your needs.

The numbers:

Spirit Regen:

Let us assume we have a modestly geared raiding druid who currently has 14,750 intellect (with HotW) and 9,000 spirit baseline. There are other factors that will increase regeneration and we will add those in in a moment.

Spirit regeneration = (.001+Spirit*(sqrt(Int))*Base_Regen)*5

Using some known character sheets and crunching some basic math I’ve come up with a value of .00374 for Base_Regen which means this druid’s spirit based regeneration is 20,440 mp/5. With the 50% in combat tax we get 10,220 mp/5. Given that we only really care about in combat regen we can apply the 50% penalty to the Base_Regen value reducing it to .000187

With the addition of mark of the wild and spirit flask/food (which are taboo to some I know) the druids stats change gaining 700 intellect and 1250 spirit. He now has 15,450 intellect and 10,250 spirit. These changes change our regeneration to 11,912 mp/5.

There is of course more spirit based regeneration to take into account. Let us assume this druid is using the Darkmoon Faire trinket and Shado-Pan Valor Point rep trinket. I’m going to, at least for now, set the Relic of Chi Ji at 1,250 average spirit, and the Scroll of Revered Ancestors at 899 average spirit. This 2,149 additional spirit for this druid when raid buffed yields 2,497 mp/5.

The last thing I’d like to add is mana tide totem. Not everyone has the benefit of having one of these available should you raid in a 10 man but it is worthwhile noting what it grants you. Let’s assume that the shaman has 10,000 spirit (I know it is probably low) spirit raid buffed when activating the totem. This grants you 20,000 spirit for 16 seconds every three minutes. With a 9% uptime this gives you an average spirit bonus of 1,800 or 2,091 mp/5.

Additional class/common sources of regen:

Innervate is our class’ primary source of mana regeneration outside of spirit. For right now there are two scenarios I will entertain. I am going to assume a fight that lasts roughly 7 to 7.5 minutes during which there is at least a short period of ramp-up in the beginning. During this fight if it is less taxing you will more than likely use two innervates. If the fight is heroic and it hits the ground running you might use 3 (30 second mark, 3:30 mark, and 6:30 mark). Let’s opt for two innervates for the moment and we could always average it up to 2.5 if you so desire. Two innervates yield 120,000 mana. Divide this out over a 7 minute encounter and you have 1,429 mp/5.

Mana potions are not terribly significant but they are generally useful as they can offer you some mana in a lump sum at a key point between innervates if stuff is going wrong. I don’t remember the exact amount but if you are using the channeling potion that returns 40,000 or so mana back you’ll be giving yourself another 476 mp/5.

I am not including the priest hymn or Omen of Clarity because I don’t have the exact math to back it up. Given that Omen casts, while mana saving, are free they don’t really factor into fight longevity anyways. They are still, of course, awesome.

Total:

What we are left with us the following: 11,912 + 2,497 + 2,091 + 1,427 + 476 = 18,403 mp/5

Constant Spells

There are certain spells that you are going to cast whether you like it or not. These spells are: Lifebloom, Wild Growth, and Swiftmend. These spells are good enough and potent enough that they will be used on cooldown and must be utilized to their fullest over the length of an encounter. As such you can almost think of them as constant sources of mana drain. Whatever is left over after that is fair game for…well the one other bread and butter spell we have really. Yes Tree of Life changes the math entirely but as that is technically an option I’m going to forgo the math on that at least for now.

Lifebloom will be recast approximately 3 times every minute. I am assuming there will be some amount of target swapping. This produces a negative 885 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Swiftmend will be cast approximately 4 times every minute. I am assuming aggressive use of this spell as it provides significant benefit to multiple targets or it can provide supplemental healing to your tank as required. This equates to a negative 1,700 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Wild Growth is generally good enough to be cast on cooldown however I know that not all fights require it to be cast ALL the time especially right off the bat. White you can technically cast the spell 6 times per minute let us assume that based on fight mechanics it only averages out to 5 (though it might be lower if the fight is less AoE taxing). At 5 casts per minute this equates to a negative 5,725 mp/5 drain on your mana.

If you think about your mana as a budget then these abilities constitute your rent, insurance, student loans, food etc. They add up to a total of 8,310 mp/5 drain.

What’s left

If our napkin math is holding up we can figure out roughly what we have remaining. Our regen provided us with 18,403 mp/5 and we remove 8,310 mp/5 from it leaving us with 10,093 mp/5. Our simulation here is extremely crude mind you but we can approximate, using this, just how much we have to spend on rejuvenation and regrowth as required.

Assuming the 7 minute encounter that I hypothesized above, this regen provides you with 847,812 mana in addition to your base 300,000 mana for a total of 1,147,810 mana.

Every non-clearcast regrowth consumes 17,820 mana or 1.55% of your complete remaining mana supply, every rejuvenation consumes .9% of your compete remaining mana supply, and every tranquility consumes 1.4% of your remaining mana supply.

An example of what you *might* end up using is:

2x Tranquility = 2.8%

15x Regrowth = 23.25%

80x Rejuvenation = 72%

Leaving you ~2% mana for wiggle room and casting additional spells as needed

I do understand that regrowth usage is entirely subjective and is fight dependent. You might find yourself using way more of it depending on burst requirements for both tank and raid members.

Character Growth

As the player develops his gear he or she will acquire additional intellect and spirit on their pieces in approximately a 1:2 ratio purely by way of item level. He or she may also opt for sidegrades (or gem) that grant additional spirit at the expense of other secondary stats and maintain a constant intellect level. The amount of mp/5 required to gain 1 additional rejuvenation over the course of the 7 minute battle is 114 mp/5. To achieve this they must add either 98 spirit, or 85 spirit and 42 intellect.

Note: As the fight gets longer than 7 minutes the above complete mana pool numbers will shift significantly however the amount of spirit needed to add rejuvenations also drops (though each rejuvenation added is a smaller % of your overall healing done). If the fight lasts for say, 10 minutes, then the amount of regen needed to add one more rejuvenation becomes 80 mp/5. This means only 70 spirit (or 60 spirit and 30 intellect) is required to grant you an additional cast.

Napkin Math – What can Soul of the Forest do for you?

Soul of the Forest is a rather interesting talent in that it offers us a multitude of options ranging from throughput to mana savings all packaged within one nice talent. There is a lot of math regarding this talent that is accessible out on the internet but I thought I’d offer some napkin math to you if you’d prefer something a bit more simplified.

How it works

SotF grants you a 50% cast speed buff after casting swiftmend. In and of itself this sounds fairly underwhelming but once applied to a Wild Growth you are granted 4 extra ticks per person with the buff applied. This increases the throughput of Wild Growth by approximately 50%. The counter is that Swiftmend has a 15 second cooldown and Wild Growth, when glyphed, has a 10 second cooldown. This has the benefit of us casting wild growth less often, if glyphed, for a greater effect. This increases short duration healing and can add a mana saving effect.

Soul of the Forest as a mana conservator – glyphed Wild Growth used on cooldown

If a one minute interval of a fight is so demanding that you are actively casting wild growth when available you could do so six times over that time frame. Each wild growth would heal 6 people for the standard amount (For the sake of this article I’ll do a smidge of algebra and call “Wg” the amount wild growth would normally heal) totaling 36 x Wg.

With SotF if you want to time your Wild Growths with Swiftmend you are now casting four Wild Growth’s over the course of the minute. Each of these casts will heal 6 people for 1.5 x Wg for a total throughput of 36 x Wg. There is no drop in wild growth though you are much more limited in when you can cast it. The advantage, as mentioned before, is that the healing is more concentrated.

In the ‘on cooldown’ situation, casting 4 Wild Growths versus 6 costs you 33% less mana. Over one minute you will save 27,480 mana or gain 2,290 mp/5.

Soul of the Forest as a throughput gain and mana conservator – time glyphed Wild Growth

In any fight where wild Growth is not used on cooldown and can be timed to line up with encounter damage then soul of the forest is purely a throughput gain. It may not always be an entire fight but you will find some boss encounters where there is an ability every 30 seconds or so (epicenter for example) that you benefit greatly from timing both your swiftmend and wild growth up with.

Soul of Forest as a throughput gain – unglyphed Wild Growth under heavy strain

Please note that in any encounter that strongly does not support unglyphed Wild Growth, you will be at a throughput loss. The glyph’s downside only comes into play when it is needed on cooldown.

When you unglyph Wild Growth things change quite a bit but at the cost of a LOT more mana. This is only advisable on a fight where a.) you can sustain the throughput with lots and lots of mana and b.) you absolutely need all of the wild growths you can. Without the glyph wild growth’s cooldown drops to 8 seconds. As you can imagine two 8 second cooldowns line up pretty well with a 15 second swiftmend cooldown. This changes the math pretty drastically.

As mentioned above, over the course of one minute casting SM and WG on cooldown gives you four casts of wild growth for an output of 36 x Wg (factoring in the bonus for SotF).

Without the glyph you can cast wild growth seven times over the course of the minute. Of these seven, four of them will be buffed by Soul of the Forest. What you get is the following:

4 casts x 5 people each x 1.5 = ~30    for 27 x Wg output

3 casts x 5 people each = 15   for 15 x Wg output

Total = 45 x Wg

Compared to the glyphed scenario you generate 25% more healing via Wild Growth. The downside is that you were forced to cast it 3 more times spending 43% MORE mana. This equates to -41,220 mp/minute or -3,435 mp/5.

Tree of Life

The caveat to what I’ve written is that you are giving up Tree of Life. Hamlet made a good point that looking at Soul of the Forest in a bubble is unwise. While Soul of the Forest breaks even under heavy duress and produces a large throughput gain when timing SM and WG is possible, it all comes at the cost of Incarnation.

Tree of Life gives you a 20% throughput boost with 17% uptime. Which averages out to 3.4% throughput but concentrated on when you need it. ToL also offers mana savings and versatility with its improved WG (12 x Wg per 3 minutes)

Conclusion

This is all extremely simplified napkin math but I hope that it illustrates how Soul of the Forest can be used in multiple situations. The extreme throughput scenario with unglyphed Wild Growth will only be sustainable at much higher gear levels. The question will be at that point, does Incarnation (or maybe even a fixed force of nature?) math out better. What must be carefully monitored is the glyphed WG and SotF combination. At that much higher gear level, how relevant is that 2+K mp/5 we get compared to what our high spirit levels can sustain.

I do highly recommend that you give Soul of the Forest a try. You might find it helps your output by way of raw numbers and mana conservation more than Tree of Life. It was difficult for me to try a load out that didn’t have our iconic ability and I’ve come to enjoy both options quite a bit. I will more than likely return to Tree of Life though, as I prefer what it has to offer but you need to decide what is better for you.

(If there are any math errors in here and you spot them please let me know. The intent was to keep it simple and not use any of my math applications but that always brings risk of error)

Wild Mushroom: Bloom – My shortest Post Ever

NOPE.

(This post brought to you by level 90 heroic dungeon experience)

Tips For Applying to a Guild As We Move Towards MoP

This is a repost with some slight tweaks (if something still references WotLK use your imagination!).  I think it still very much applies so if this is helpful to you please take a look!

With a new expansion rolling around a lot of players out there are looking for new homes and putting in applications to new guilds in order to make a new start for themselves. As a guild we are also in a situation where the end of expansion burnout has claimed whomever it may, and we have strong plans (and a good core) to move forward. These two situations work well for each other because it creates this perfectly symbiotic relationship where we need each other.

Having read a number of applications over the past 8 years and having seen quite a variety when it comes to the detail level within said applications I feel like there’s a few things that need to be covered. I’m not going to sit here and be a preachy arse because I’m not that elitist, I’d rather focus on constructive thoughts and talk about what we (and many others) look for in an application.

Before we even get into content let’s talk about the basics.

Spelling – I’m not going to say that typos will get your application denied up front because we all make them and not all of them are caught with a spell checker (believe me I know this first hand from my blog). Keeping your application mostly clean means you took the time to write your response in software that has a spell checker and double/triple checked your work. Avoid using any net speak or childish abbreviations like “ur” (your) or “healz” (heals).

Links – Most applications will request some form of Armory link, UI screenshot and if available a World of Logs parse. Please double check the link supplied so there is no unnecessary confusion. I have seen youtube links where a character armory link was supposed to be and while I thought it was amusing at first it didn’t help the application any.

Format – Keep things clean and organized and while I’m very bad at this myself, add paragraph structure. Some questions require a lengthy answer with multiple sections (past guild history, raid experience, and class familiarity for starters) and need some structure to keep them readable.

Re-Read Every Question – Please read the questions carefully and make sure that you are giving the answer intended by the application. If a question asks you “Is there anyone on the server we can speak to that can vouch for your play abilities and character?” Don’t just answer that with “Yes”. Similarly don’t answer a question with “I don’t know what you’re referring to here”.

Now that we have the basics covered let’s move on to the technical questions.

Computer Specifications – I am the first to admit that I do not understand the difference at a glance between motherboards and CPU’s though I have a grasp on the relative strength of graphics card setups. What I do know is where to get this information, which is important for both supplying this information of a WoW guild app as well as any form of technical trouble shooting on your PC should the need arise. Become familiar with your System and Device Manager windows if you haven’t already.

Ventrilo/Microphone – These two requirements are self explanatory however I would recommend that if you have a microphone please be willing to use it. I know some people are shy about your voice and you may even sound like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but raiding requires communication and you need to be able to acknowledge on Vent or make calls as needed. What a microphone is not a license to do is be a blabbermouth (trust me, been there done that and its not a good idea).

UI Screenshot – If your UI is a giant cluster of poop that only you would know how to navigate with a map and compass then you will probably want to clean it up and turn off some addons before submitting a screenshot. People are going to be judgmental, it’s how it goes, so if it looks like you play in a mess of numbers and superfluous information then some might think a little less of you.

Keybinds/Keyboard Turning/Clicking – I’m not trying to sound like a WoW PSA but if you Keyboard Turn, DON’T. Or…at least don’t ever admit that you do it on an application. The same thing goes for being a clicker. You might very well be a savant and be able to click/KBT fast enough to hang with the big dogs but I guarantee you that to some players it makes you look like a special child on a short bus. I’m not trying to sound mean…its just that a lot of veteran PC gamers come from a long lineage of high intensity FPS twitch games and the thought of anything suboptimal for control will grind their gears. For that reason some applications WILL require you to clearly show your keybinds in your UI screenshot. You don’t have to be that player that keybinds every spell you will ever use in raiding, just have your core spells that you use often and anything emergency related. A red flag would be a mage who has all of their combat spells keybound but Iceblock is way over on the right action bar out of the way. I would recommend that you at least look into utilizing the following keys (not necessarily all of them): 1-5, Shift or Control + 1-5, Shift or Control + Left Mouse button, Mouse Buttons 4,5,6 if yours supports them, Q, E, R, Z, and X. I’m not saying I have all of these utilized at the moment but these are some solid examples of what you can map actions to.

Let’s talk about having a little Class! No not class mechanics but actual class.

Many applications will ask you a couple of straight forward personal background questions and give you some opportunities to express yourself as well. These questions include but are not limited to topics such as “Past Guild Experience” “Reason for leaving past guilds” “Prior PvE experience” “References” “What do you want from us as a guild?” “What do you bring to the table” “Tell us a little about yourself” and “Why did you choose us as a guild”

This is a category that I have no clear cut advice for and a lot of the onus is on the applicant. As far as guild history goes I know not everyone is an angel or perhaps you are a reformed player who had some rough patches in the past. If you did leave guilds in the past on poor terms just try to be honest about it or perhaps just list this grievance in a very formal and nondescript manner. Your application is all about putting your best foot forward and that best foot might very well be a promise of reform. While not necessary references are extremely useful so please pick and choose them carefully. While it hasn’t happened recently there have been times where someone uses a reference who was less than ideal and actually gave a bad recommendation. The more open ended questions that have to do with what you’re looking for and a self description serve multiple purposes. Generally a guild is looking at whether or not you’re a troublemaker, lootwhore, or entitled casual as well as using it as a literacy and English language check. If English isn’t your first language (and I know it isn’t for many WoW players on American servers) please have your proficiency at a level where you can interact with your guild (should English be their primary language) on all levels, be it boss strategy, calling out information on Vent, or written discourse without someone having to translate for you.

Class is the hardest metric to evaluate and different guilds have varying thresholds they are willing to tolerate. My guild for example tries to put class as an exceptionally high priority. We try not to allow anyone in that trolls in any fashion or has been known to cause unnecessary friction in public groups/events (if we can help it of course). I know we are not alone in this mentality though as many other guilds out there feel the same way. If you are horrendously foul mouthed, sexist, and love to troll and make others in WoW feel awkward or insecure then some guilds will not be for you. Be aware of the mentality of the guild you are applying to and make sure your sense of humor is going to work. If you have had a sordid history of trade chat trolling (or other grievances) of the Nth degree and plan on reforming your ways I highly recommend that you say so lest it be held against you further.

Knowing your role.

Provided you pass all of the other hurdles and answer each question correctly, ultimately you will be heavily judged on the class familiarity questions which tell the guild a lot about how you play. These questions vary from guild to guild but often you will be asked some if not all of them so lets run down a checklist of sorts.

Please describe your rotation(s) and when they are applicable – You are expected to know if your class has a unique play style or rotation for multiple scenarios. You should be able to clearly outline what you do, when you do it, and most importantly why you do it. For DPS this could be as straight forward as “This is my single target boss rotation” and “This is my multitarget or trash rotation”. For healers this is a much more weighted question and it delves into your awareness-level and how you adjust your healing to suit the encounter. As a healer be prepared to talk about your spell choices at a very detailed level. There is no metric to evaluate a healer as healing meters are largely irrelevant, as such guilds will rely on your spell choices and logic to understand your inner workings.

How do you keep up to date on the mechanics of your class? – Again this is a weighted question. There are two pitfall answers in my opinion, the first being “I read up on MMO-Champion” and the second is “I read the EJ Forums”. While there is a massive amount of theory on the EJ forums and it is indeed a fantastic think tank it should not be the be all and end all of your class understanding. There are so many resources out there and fantastic blogs/community sites that offer very real and very useful information and should not be ignored. Show that you have a desire to really get into the meat and potatoes of your class and pull your research from multiple sources.

What do you feel you bring to the raid as your class/spec? – This is more of a flavor question than anything else. Understand the strengths of your class and in what situations you shine the most. On a fundamental level you should also know what raid buffs you bring and what classes that they double up with. As a balance druid for example you might want to talk about your understanding of how to incorporate Typhoon into raid encounters such as Saurfang or Lich King as well as the strategic use of Cyclone in raid encounters. Perhaps you might discuss the usefulness of Starfall at grabbing some initial snap aggro on multiple add spawns such as Vile spirits. These are just some very quick examples and I think you’d probably want to think about it more yourself but always make sure your answer is intelligent and to the point. This paragraph is outdated but it bears truth nonetheless. 

Why did you choose your spec? Why did you talent the way you did? – Be willing to discuss what types of encounters you’d use different abilities in each of the tiers of 3 options. If you made some outside of the box decisions as to what you consider the baseline set of abilities be willing to discuss those (maybe you REALLY like Displacer Beast for tier 1 druid abilities). Talk about the usefulness of each major decision that you made and in what aspect of the game they will help you. A completely fictitious example would be something akin to “I chose to take this talent over this other one because it helps in these types of fights” etc. Often times this question is just checking that your mentality suits the class/spec that you chose and that you have a cogent reason for preferring certain talents.  Including something akin to “Well, my old guild needed a healer so I re-rolled and I’ve been stuck that way ever since” doesn’t scream “I love healing and I will be a kick-ass healer for you!”.

In the end…

A guild application doesn’t need to be as serious business as a job application. We are all gamers and we all are just looking to have a good time. Look at your application as a way to introduce yourself and tell the guild about you. You want to come off as someone who is familiar with the game, intelligent, coherent, literate, and fun to hang out with. In the end it is a social experience that is guided by how well you get along with your peers and how successful you are at taking on content. Be reasonable with yourself about your level of play and expectations. If you are applying to a hardcore top 100 raiding guild make sure you can handle the stress and the schedule. Every player needs to find a guild that really suits their play style as ultimately that is what you are looking for.

So, good luck and stay classy! *wink*

Over-thinking! Learning to enjoy the finer points of The Secret World

Overthinking a situation can often be a cardinal sin when it comes to problem solving. If one approaches a situation with a technical mindset you can often overlook the minutia within or perhaps miss vital bits of information that you could otherwise have gotten with a more open mind. As an engineer I find myself falling into this pit trap fairly often. While at work I am required to come up with complex solutions to problems, sometimes the small work problems or day to day life problems have far simpler solutions than I anticipate. It is easy to spend far too long agonizing over factors that really don’t apply to the situation at hand.

There’s an amusing story that I’d like to mention that exemplifies this way of thinking

Back in college we found ourselves working as a collective in different dorm rooms depending on who was hosting that night. A group of us engineers were sitting in a female engineering classmate’s room working on a breadboard doing some introductory assembly language programming. Things were going pretty smoothly, as we had a firm grasp of the  assignment, though it was time consuming and we went late into the evening. It was late when one of the classmates was showing the girl whose room it was how to do something she didn’t quite get using her pen as a pointer. Recklessly he flipped the pen and it fell down into the air vent along the base of the wall near her computer. She became quite unhappy as that pen was her favorite one and we all decided we needed to get it back for her.

So naturally we started brainstorming. We thought about using a sticky substance on the end of some paperclips to snag the pen and carefully pull it up through the bars. We tried creating a primitive gripping device to reach down and pull up the pen. We ran through a handful of ideas and implemented a few of them with little success. We were getting quite frustrated as we failed to pull the pen out.

After we had all but given up her roommate ended up coming home from the library and found the host particularly upset. Once we explained to the roommate what had happened and what we were trying to do she looked at us rather oddly. She walked over to the vent, reached down, and simply lifted up the metal vent cover that wasn’t fastened down allowing someone to simply reach in and pull the pen out.

We had missed the most obvious and simple solution out of all of them. Why did we assume the vent cover was fastened down…because we wanted more of a challenge? It is entirely unclear.

What is the point you might ask

Recently I have been playing a game called The Secret World. It is the most recent MMORPG released by Funcom the company that made Anarchy Online and Conan. It is subscription based and not free to play so I understand the barrier to entry for most people seems a bit high. Having played the game during the beta and growing to really like it we decided to take the plunge.

The “WE” bit in that last paragraph is fairly significant. My fiancé doesn’t have a PC fast enough to run higher end games and she doesn’t really like playing online with strangers which I 100% understand. We really loved the modern day mythos feel the game had when we saw it at PAX (hence the beta key) and decided we would try playing it side by side to experience the story beats and voice acting. This is a big deal. She never had any intention of sitting with me during WoW or SW:ToR playing so wanting to see an MMO from a spectator seat is quite different. It also says something that the game is enjoyable enough story wise that it can support this kind of play together.

The kicker is that while I have not avoided it entirely, I am not really getting into the nuts and bolts of this game. I normally like to be a powergamer, min/maxer, munchkin (whatever term your gaming group uses) when it comes to these types of games in order to give myself the best chance to succeed. With The Secret World we’re just playing the game. We’re not going crazy looking up strats and tweaking out our character. IF we ever need to look something up the game offers an in game browser window which is super handy for when you get stuck on a quest and absolutely need some guidance.

Taking a step back, knowing that I have no intention of pushing hard into the endgame of Secret World has allowed me to appreciate the game for its main elements. The quests are enjoyable and while there is some of the kill X or get Y items in there, there’s often enough flavor and dialogue that it feels like a real mini-story. I can’t do it justice describing it but I find it far and away more enjoyable than other MMO’s with its questing system. The rest of the game is fun but certainly far from perfect. There are some bugs and very clunky mechanics. To coin the term used by Jeff Cannata the game is probably “More Fun Than It Is Good”.

While the game itself includes many of the core tenets set into motion by WoW such as the holy trinity of Tank/Healer/DPS the lines get fairly blurred with the complete lack of levels or classes. Don’t be misled though, until you finish your ability deck you’re clearly on a track when it comes to AP points (used to buy spells and abilities from the power wheel) and that, along with gear, pretty much determines your level. The fact that you can eventually train multiple roles on the same character and completely customize your character growth allow you to have that flexibility they promise with this system.

So you’re probably confused with “Deck” and “AP” so I should elaborate. The game’s power wheel is broken up into 9 weapon schools each one have multiple disciplines within them. Some are pure DPS, some are split healing/DPS and some Tank/DPS. They are: Pistols, Shotguns, Assault Rifles, Blood Magic, Elemental Magic, Chaos Magic, Claw/Fist weapons, Hammers/Axes, and Swords. Within each weapon there are 8 clusters of abilities. Each cluster is roughly 7 abilities that must be purchased sequentially. Of the eight, two of them are core and must be purchased completely before moving to the outer rim where the other 6 clusters lie. As you complete quests you earn AP points which are used as the currency to purchase these abilities. AP points are earned at a fixed rate and you can theoretically continue to run repeatable quests over the life of a character to fill out a sizeable chunk of the ability wheel (allowing you to have even greater flexibility swapping up your active abilities). Your Deck is a list of 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities that you currently have at the ready. These decks can be customized, saved to a preset, and loaded at will.

Since you level up two weapons, one for each hand, you have access to two sets of weapon abilities and can capitalize on synergies between them. While many abilities debuff opponents, the debuffs are kept under fairly broad categories. Abilities can also have descriptors but they are also kept fairly vague to facilitate cross weapon interaction. Imagine, if you are familiar with WoW terminology, that your talent tree had every spec in the game in it. Imagine that you could pull an ability from class A that caused a bleed effect and class F has an ability that triggers on bleeding targets. Class F though has a little bit of a hard time bleeding targets so now you’ve created a cross “class” synergy. In secret world this applies to weakened, impaired, afflicted, and bleeding targets just to name a few.

It sounds complicated right? The beauty of it though is the game has suggested decks for different weapon combinations and it points you in the direction of the abilities on the wheel that you need to complete it. You even get rewarded for buying all of the abilities with a cool deck specific outfit. You could further refine the deck of course but it offers something that is perfectly viable for those people who want to progress soundly through the game but not need to pause and spend hours staring at the ability wheel going “Ok…what’s the best synergy for this?”. Right now I’m going Hammers/Chaos using a build that capitalizes on weakened and impaired targets and it has an execute range damage increase sub 35% target HP. In the end we’re slowly working through the Illusionist deck while experiencing all of the awesome story there is to be had in The Secret World.

Story! The story so far has been absolutely delightful. The first area, Solomon island is straight  out of Lovecraft horror. The town of Kingsmouth (Innsmouth) is a peaceful New England town overrun by horrific creatures, nightmares, ancient magic, zombies, and other forms of the world is coming to a terrible end and congratulations you’re right in the middle of it kind of way. You as a player are part of one of the three more active global conspiracy organizations: The Templar, Illuminati, and Dragon. There are other sizeable “in on it” secret organizations but those serve more as story beats and enemies since they are not playable. There are elements of the US government and military which are clearly in the know when it comes to supernatural events but for the most part the secret societies are in charge of stopping the bad stuff from going down. As a member of the Illuminati I have thoroughly enjoyed the technobabble and witty dialogue I have had with my superior officers. Listening to them comment on the atrocities of Solomon Island has been pretty hilarious at times.

I am not a game reviewer so I honestly can’t do the game the justice it deserves but I highly recommend the game to anyone looking for something fun to do (that isn’t currently playing Orcs must Die 2…which also rocks). Sure it might take a back seat once Mists of Pandaria comes online but it certainly fun. Take a look, do some reading, and decide if it is something that you would enjoy!