Badges of Justice... OR Conspiracy Theory???

This is another fun meta post. I was thinking about this a little last night. Bremagorn accumulated enough badges to have over 100 and visit the badge vendor on the island. I purposefully left his badges in his bank and avoid an impulse purchase.

After annoying my guildmates way too much about which to choose -- pants or chest, I think I've finally decided on the chest piece. I would save for the crossbow, but it doesn't seem that much better than mine, I have a skill of 1, AND I thin the crossbow is ugly.

So, then I actually got thinking about why we're using badges now. There seems a very simple answer. Blizzard has introduced a hard to acquire, soulbound object as currency to combat gold farming and account hacking. Gold is a very liquid currency. It can be moved easily, transferred by trade or mail, and is used for a great many things in game. Liquid currencies are easy to move and hide. And it's very easy to hack accounts to get at it.

Soulbound items can't be traded or sold (on the AH). Instead of charging 10,000 G for the new gear, the price was set instead at a number of badges.

However, what would be happening in game? Why on earth would vendors like the new smith WANT all these badges of justice? Is she hording them for some purpose. And if they're truly soul bound how can she even accept them (yes, I know she's an NPC. It's just a thought experiment). Or perhaps she is working both sides. Perhaps, she's SELLING the Badges that we turn in to bosses in raids and heroic dungeons. Perhaps the raid bosses are also doing their dailies to open a new vendor so they can gear up! Sort of makes ME wonder...

Exalted - Five Factions

I've made some fairly heady posts the past two days, and I thought I'd make a "hooray me" post today that's light and fluffy. I ran Karazhan last night filling a DPS slot in my old guild and was able to hit exalted. That's my fifth exalted faction on (what I used to consider) my alt.

The other factions I'm exalted with are: Scryers, Sha'Tar, Cenarion Expedition, and Sha'tari Skyguard. I'm pretty happy with it.

There are six more factions that I'm Revered with and working towards exalted:

• Honor Hold (20613/21000)
• Ogri'la (15745/21000)
• Consortium (3957/21000)
• Lower City (8337/21000)
• Shattered Sun Offensive (17327/21000)
• Keepers of Time (3961/21000)

I guess, both the Shattered Sun and Honor Hold are laughable. One run of any of the Hellfire instances in Heroic (or a normal Shattered Halls) should get me over the top. And I'm pretty sure the Shattered Sun can be done in a couple days of dailys. Maybe I'm just lazy.

Raiding as a Caster - Spell Hit and DPS

Today we're talking only to the offensive casters in the raid group. So listen up mages, warlocks, shadow priests, elemental shamans, and boomkin. This post is for you. Hunters, rogues, warriors, elemental shamans and healers can have the day off.

In the world of raiding, you're going to have a set of "goal" numbers to get into Karazhan which is probably about +600 spell damage, 9000 Mana, 7500 Health. These benchmarks are set up this way because it's what you need to succeed at Karazhan. Luckily, as you are busy succeeding, you're getting gear drops. Each of those drops is hopefully making you a little better at turning mana into dead bosses.

At some point, you'll be heading off to the 25 man content. Your raid leader now may expect some things out of you that you're unused to dealing with. I think most raid leaders want to see consistent DPS out from all damage dealers at around 800-850 DPS. Damage meters will run and data will be collected. If for some reason you don't measure up, you'll have to work out why. Here is a list of potential pit-falls arranged in the order of easiest to hardest to correct.

1. Did I do everything in my power to self-buff? Did you eat your +spell damage food? Did you have one flask or two elixirs? Did you put Wizard Oil on your weapon? Is everything enchanted with suitable enchants? Did I ensure I had all buffs? (The number of Paladin buffs you have should be equal to the number of paladins in your raid. Unless you are running in some bizarro world with 15 paladins.) Did I use my self-only buffs as needed? These questions all address one 0f the best ways to get yourself ready for a raid. Eat appropriate food, use appropriate elixirs or flasks, and ensure you have buffs. However, after doing just that you may still be falling short of your goals.
   
2. Was I in the appropriate raid group? This is completely beyond your control. However, being in a group with a Draenei caster is always appropriate. Their racial increases your spell hit rating by 1%. While it's nice to have healers in groups with elemental shamans, it's often more appropriate to split them up amongst your casting groups. Totem of Wrath gives a +3% spell hit to group members. Alliance really lucks out here in that all of elemental shamans give +4% (racial + totem) to their groups. Warlocks may lose out here in that their imps often provide stamina buff to primarily tank/melee groups. If so, try to make sure those warlocks are affliction locks. (See Question #3)
3. Is my spec built for end-game raiding? We all like to do some grinding, daily questing and PVPing. However, depending on your class there are some talents you must absolutely have to avoid misses.
   • Druids - Balance of Power (Balance Tier 6) increases spell hit by 4%
   • Mages - Elemental Precision (tier 1 Frost) increases fire and frost spell hit by 3%. Arcane Focus (tier 1 Arcane) increases arcane spell hit by 10%.
   • Priests - Shadow Focus (tier 2 Shadow) increases shadow spell hit by 10%. There is also a talent buried deep in the discipline tree that affects spell hit for some spells. I haven't listed it because I don't think there is a reliable spec that hits both of these. If there is, I'm sure an astute reader will find it.
   • Shamans - Three separate talents increase spell hit:
   • Elemental Precision (Elemental Tier 6) Increases spell hit by 6%.
   • Nature's Guidance (Restoration Tier 3) Increases spell hit by 3%
   • Totem of Wrath (Restoration Tier 9) increases entire party spell hit by 3%.
   • Warlocks - Suppression (Affliction Tier 1) increases affliction spells only by 10%.
   It is definitely worth a respec to check it out and see if you can't up your DPS just by not missing.
4. Do I need spell hit gear? While your gear may have been perfectly fine for Karazhan, if you're missing on spells, you're sacrificing DPS. There is some very nice spell hit gear for casters in Karazhan. Also, consider giving up a spell damage enchant (you do have one of those, don't you) on your gloves for Spell Strike for the +15 spell hit rating. The amount of gear with +spell hit you need can be as much as 202 (for no talent/no buffs). Consider also Great Dawnstone (yellow) or Veiled Noble Topaz (yellow/red) to give yourself a +spell hit rating buff.

After you've worked your way through this list of items, you should be seeing a significant boost to the DPS you're doing as a caster. Don't get complacent though, you still need to keep your +spell damage as high as possible, keep enough stamina to not die to environmental effects, manage your threat and do everything else you've learned.

As we progress WoW becomes more and more of a thinking person's game. I hope you brought your thinking cap.

How Not to Spec

Every time I look at someone's spec and see 0/0/61 (or 0/61/0 or 61/0/0) I cringe. I'm just afraid that by putting the whole kit and kaboodle into a tree, you're really gimping yourself elsewhere. As I started the research for this topic, I found out that not all classes have the same number of talent points to work with. In fact, let's look at a picture.


This graph shows the total number of choices for the 61 skill points available to you (at level 70). It's pretty easy to see that rogues far outweigh other classes with a startling 208 possible talent point allocations. Coming in last place on the total number of choices are druids and warlocks with just over 180 points each.

I'd like to tell you how many possible rogue specs there are but the mathematics deals with absolutely HUGE numbers and the non-equal distribution of the trees makes this non-trivial. Let's just say there are a lot.

Something else that I didn't know is that for some class-tree combinations, it is not possible to have all 61 points into one tree. Let's look at another graph that shows the number of talents (per tree) for the various classes.

It's pretty clear that the following class-tree combinations can never spend all 61 points in that tree because there are fewer than 61 total points in the tree:

• Balance Druids
• Beastmastery Hunters
• Affliction Warlocks
• Feral Druids

The rest of you however CAN spend all points in one tree, but why would you? I can think of very few examples of when skills in low tiers of other trees would not affect your performance as your chosen spec.

I don't believe there are any true "winners" in the low tiers of either the balance or feral tree for retoration druids. So, if you're a 0/0/61 restoration druid, you can ignore this article. For the rest of you, look at the numbers, look at the trees. Take a good hard look at the tier 1 and 2 talents outside your chosen spec. Is there something in those tiers that could take the place of one of the less effective talents in your chosen tree?

Of my five 70s, I've spent 61 points in one tree on exactly none of them. My priest is discipline/holy, my hunter is beastmaster/marksman, my warlock is affliction/demonology, my rogue is subtlety/combat. Even my tank warrior doesn't have all points in protection. There are skills in the first two tiers of the other trees that are just too good.

With respec costs low (considering the cash flow available at 70) it might not hurt to try out a slightly different spec. I know I've spent plenty of gold on moving one or two (or five) points around until I found the exact spec I wanted. Take a look and see if you can't get some slightly better performance as well.

I need a new gaming computer

While this image is not my real gaming computer, that's sometimes what it feels like. The good news is with the IRS about to deposit my refund into my bank account, I'm going to be buying a new machine. If anyone who reads has some advice, I'd love to entertain it. I will not be spending $5K or anything like that but am looking at something in the $2500 range. If you have advice, feel free to leave me links in the comments. Also, I'm working on a longish post and have been ignoring new material in favor of finishing this post up.

Don't worry, my pet won't bite

A hunter in my guild sent me a question the other night about why his new pet bat (on an alt of his) wouldn't or couldn't learn bite. I asked a few questions and tried to answer his questions, but in the end couldn't come up with the right set of questions to ask as I was waiting to begin Karazhan. I promised to address his question here when I had more time to think of it.

Just for the record, the vast majority of my data and research for this article comes from Petopia. This is an awesome resource for hunters and if you'd don't use it, well, up yours.

Getting a pet to learn skill takes a couple of things. First, you as the hunter must have trained a pet that has the skill you want to teach. That is, if you've never had a pet that comes with a skill, like bite, you can't train it. Petopia will give you a list of pet families that can learn each skill and particular animals that are tamed aleady knowing a skill. The second thing you must have is enough training points to teach the skill. Rank 1 of most skills is 1 point. However, pets that have recently been trained may be too rebellious to have a positive total of points.

I have no evidence to support this, however, I recall training new pets and having them have negative points upon training. It takes them gaining loyalty to increase the points.

I suspect that this hunter is having the problem of knowing the skill, but the bat being too rowdy to actually be able to learn it. This is a problem with loyalty, not inability.

So, what's the best way to gain loyalty? Keep them happy! And the way to a pet's heart is through the stomach. Don't let the mood go to yellow or red, it must be green. In fact to keep happiness maximized, I feed the pet. Once they are no longer gaining happiness from that, I feed them again. The red/yellow/green indicator is really only ranges on the continuum of happiness levels.

Pulling numbers from thin air, say happiness can have numeric values from 1 to 1000. Dividing that up into three segments would mean that from happiness 1 to 333, the pet's mood is red. From 334-667 the mood is yellow; 668-1000 is a green mood.

The moment your pet's happiness goes above 667, the mood will be green. However, there is still a full range of happiness there to exploit. Keep feeding the pet until it stops gaining happiness at all (it'll show up in your combat log).

Then go engage mobs. Your pet should start working its way through the various loyalty levels from Rebellious (loyalty 1) to Best Friend (loyalty 6). Mania, who runs Petopia, discovered the chart for pet loyalty. It's avaialable on WowWiki.

So, unnamed hunter alt in my guild, I hope this helps. If not, hit me up in game and we'll consult the big guns.

Glyph of the Outcast VERSUS Glyph of Ferocity

I routinely look at what searches are generating hits for my blog. One thing that routinely shows up is the Glyph of the Outcast and the Glyph of Ferocity. As far as I know, I only mentioned this in one place, when talking about enhancements for the helmet.

Also, apparently, I'm one of the only places on the whole wide internet that has written anything about these two glyphs. Otherwise, I shouldn't be getting so many hits on those things. So let's review.

The Glyph of the Outcast (Revered with Lower City) gives the following:

• +17 STR
• +16 INT

The Glyph of Ferocity (Revered with Cenarion Expedition) gives the following:

• +34 AP
• +16 Hit Rating

Of all the classes for which Hit Rating (and not Spell Hit Rating) is the important statistic, two of them do not use mana at all. Thus the importance of intellect on the Outcast Glyph becomes zero and the Glyph of Ferocity is clearly the "better" choice. Congratulations DPS Warriors and Rogues. Your choice is simple. (I don't include Protection Warriors as there are better glyphs for tanking).

This leaves Retribution Paladins, Enhancement Shaman, Hunters and Druids (non-tank). Of these 4, the Attack Power formula for three of them has each point of Strength contribute two points of AP. For the hunter, each point of Strength adds one AP. Hunters, don't use the Outcast Glyph. The Ferocity is better.

Since for the remaining three classes 17 STR = 34 AP, we have only to look at the remaining stats to make the decision. 16 Intellect is equal to 240 Mana. Not insignificant, but not earth-shaking. The important thing is Hit Rating. There is a WowWiki page that talks about hit rating caps. It appears that the only class who cannot reap much greater benefit from hit rating is dual wielding windfury special attack shaman, who are hit rating capped from talents alone.

For all other classes, I'm going out on a limb here and say that the Ferocity glyph is substantially better. This is of course, just my (not-so) humble opinion. I could be wrong. I've not checked with Elitist Jerks.

I hope this clears up the Ferocity/Outcast glyph questions. And I suppose this may generate even MORE search hits in my page. But I can rest easy, knowing that the Outcast/Ferocity question has truly been answered.