Ah, Mal’ganis, where the internet goes to the bathroom. :rolleyes:
A final question that’s on my mind: is there a reliable metric for estimating the level of DPS I ought to be putting out relative to my gearscore? I mean, aside from running enhsim and figuring out my theoretical DPS from there.
Asked another way: I want to be able to look at my gear/stats, and get an idea of what a skilled player can crank out with said gear/stats, so that I know how much time I need to spend at ye olde training dummy getting my rotation and macros nailed down.
That one is nice - but I think my favorites are the room with the Aboms + Ghouls in DTK or maybe pulling the entire gauntlet at CoS (although my hate for the instance overrides the fun of the AoE-fest at the end).
The only thing I can think of would be finding a comparably geared shaman and seeing what they can pull. I basically evaluate myself off of World of Logs parses by comparing myself to the other hunters on the run with me, considering what attacks I’m using, buff/debuff up-time, etc.
gearscore + 1500 -latency on a training dummy.
<liberal arts major YMMV:D
Oh, and I forgot to mention–I got the Mail boots off Halion (no worries, I didn’t take them over a Mail-user). It feels really creepy to be wearing something with +Int, but they were still a huge upgrade over my previous shitty DPS boots–I picked up something like 3.3% crit. (The Heroic version of them is actually BiS for Fury Warriors without Shadowmourne.)
ETA: And Heroic Bryntroll. Which I still feel a little guilty about, but it literally would have been DE’d if I hadn’t taken it.
Check Elitist Jerks and see if you can find a spreadsheet/emulator for your class/tree.
But in the larger sense of what I’m saying, you’re rarely really “on your own” in a game like this. My issue with the “it’s just a game until it negatively affects me” double-standard goes beyond just combat and numbers, and is a large part of the reason I’ve been spending more and more time on my RP server instead of my regular PvE servers. For example, I’ve been dismissed with the “it’s just a game” argument any number of times when I’ve griped about things like people who can’t be bothered to come up with a proper name for their characters or who can’t be bothered to get off their drake when talking to questgivers.
Do these things impede my ability to play the game effectively? Not necessarily. But the former completely ruins the immersion experience for me, and players like me who value that kind of thing (after all, in 27 years of my Real Life occupation, I have yet to work with anybody named “Fourstarchef” or “Flirtywaitress” or “Iscrubspoons”). The latter is simply inconsiderate behavior. Why shouldn’t “you’re in a group” apply to situations where your character is simply moving amongst the general population, and imply a certain level of good manners? I had a situation just last night where I was confused as hell because I thought a questgiver had vanished on me just as I was about to click on him. What had actually happened was I approached this NPC on foot, and the NPC happened to be in a rather dimly-lit area, and a shadow priest in shadow form, still mounted on a drake, sped past me and covered up the questgiver. The dim lighting, the general purpleness of Netherstorm, and my zoom-level at the time made the other player essentially invisible, and it honestly appeared to me that the questgiver had simply disappeared.
Granted, that was a bizarre, one-off scenario, but one that could have been avoided if everybody was simply in the habit of dismounting to talk to questgivers. Having to constantly wait for people to get their mounts off the questgivers is only marginally less annoying than people parking mammoths on mailboxes back before Blizz installed more mailboxes. (Though I find it somewhat ironic that the dead-body-gold-spammers have actually provided something that I think justifies summoning mammoths inside a city 
) Is there anything I can do about this stuff? No. But it would be nice to be able to simply blow off steam about it without getting a lecture about how people can play any way they want. Immersion and verisimilitude is just as important to me as dungeons/raids are to other people, and it just gets tiresome getting slapped down every time I gripe about people “ruining” my favorite part of the game.
True. But it’s a mindset that had nearly 30 years to burn itself in before WoW came along and isn’t easily set aside (yah, I was playing Pac-Man when it was brand new). I can also compare it to my being a musician. When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I got better at the guitar and bass by playing the records over and over and over as I tried to figure out how to play my favorite songs. I learned hundreds of songs that way. I had to learn them that way because there was no commercially-available, accurate sheet music for the songs I wanted to learn (heavy metal and progressive rock tend to be largely ignored by the sheet music publishers). Then in my 30s the Internet came along and I discovered all sorts of sources for accurate transcriptions of the songs I wanted to play, and I happily availed myself of those. I discovered all kinds of things I’d been playing wrong, and I was also finally able to learn songs that I hadn’t been able to figure out by ear. Inevitably, though, I started wanting to learn other songs for which I couldn’t find transcriptions, either because the songs weren’t popular enough for anybody to bother, or they were so new that nobody had gotten to it yet. No problem, I’ll do it the old-school way and figure it out on my own, by ear. And that’s when I discovered I had pretty much lost that ability, and it was going to take a ton of time and effort to regain the ability - time I no longer have unless I choose to sacrifice the time I now devote to other interests (like WoW).
In any case, I was playing devil’s advocate when I brought up people not knowing about third-party resources. I haven’t made any secret about my own willingness to use those resources (though I admit I never looked up any “minimum DPS requirements” for heroics - my long-time reluctance to run instances meant I had plenty of time to gear my pally via the AH, and by the time I finally decided to jump into heroics she was already geared enough that DPS wasn’t an issue). At the same time, I enjoy the problem-solving aspects of the game, and I try to avoid looking stuff up until I’ve made a considerable effort to figure something out for myself.
Heh. I cry when I see my mage’s DPS in places like Forge of Souls. She spends more time running away from untankable ghosties and crap on the ground than she does casting spells. There’s also that one boss fight in Gundrak (I think) where the boss keeps switching between “big stone construct” form and “purple liquid elemental” form — she can hardly get off a spell on that fight because of the purple puddles that appear under her feet every time she starts casting.
OTOH, she’s never been kicked from a group for underperfoming, and the only criticism I’ve ever gotten was after that one Ahune run when somebody went off on me because I was attacking the spawns instead of focusing all my attacks on Ahune (I didn’t know any better, and in her previous 6-7 runs nobody had said a thing to me about it).
1.) Naming conventions are a legitimate concern on RP servers. On non-RP servers, sorry, you’re not entitled to force your personal naming preferences on other people, any more than I can complain about their terrible spec and gear choices.
2.) Anyone who excuses parking a mount on top of an NPC with “it’s just a game” is an asshole, period.
Now *that *is just a ridiculous requirement. Unless someone is actively trying to block an NPC (which is a form of griefing and can and should be reported), it’s almost impossible for them to do it completely. Just wave your pointer around the general area of the NPC and you’ll quickly find somewhere you can click to interact with it.
My first Ahune run on my Mage, I didn’t realize he was *completely *immune to Frost damage. (I mean, seriously, what kind of retarded-ass mechanic is that to keep around, given the current paradigm?) So there I am, on my *Frost *Mage, seeing “Immune Immune Immune” scrolling by on my combat text. :smack: Thank goodness for FFB.
I can’t remember which boss/mob it was, but there was some time I (as a shadow priest) was up against some enemy that was completely immune to shadow damage. I felt so helpless. That’s when an “lolsmite” build would have come in handy.
Back when I noticed the Ahune thing, someone mentioned a raid (I can’t remember if it was vanilla or TBC) where there was one boss who was immune to Arcane and another immune to Fire. So no matter which spec a Mage picked,* they’d be screwed on at least one fight.
*This being back when Frost was only viable for PvP.
Enhsim is the only way really. If you want to know how much you can improve on your rotation you can try simming with only selfbuffs and compare that with your target dummy dps.
The frost DKs were rather put out as well on Ahune.
Plus, isn’t there an optional boss in AQ that’s immune to most everything except frost attacks which freeze it so people can shatter it? We didn’t know this and only had one DK and one shaman. Let’s just say that it took a LOOOONG time. :smack:
Well…fuck. If ya’d explained that, I wouldn’t have bitched at ya for two and a half pages. I thought you were saying people had to show at least 1500 on the meter for the entire dungeon to start heroics.
I note with some amusement that it might be said I am more liberal than you are on the subject as a general rule. Ya could scare lots of non-gamer dopers if ya told them I was more liberal on much of anything…
Hmmmm…I haven’t hit a dummy yet. Maybe I’ll try it and see. By that formula, with 1500 as my average latency, I oughta be able to hit 5100 dps. I suspect I won’t be able to get there, but maybe I can reach the same zip code. I put up 4100+ on Infinite Corrupter last night as my current career best boss fight…
Miscommunication fights are the best fights, don’t you agree?
That formula, AFAIK, was a joke pulled completely out of his ass. The maximum GS currently attainable is somewhere in the 6k range, while 8k DPS (6500 + 1500) would be considered unacceptably low for the highest levels of content.
Any formula that goes straight from gearscore is going to be useless - it’s trivial to build an all ilvl 264 set with a 6000 gs that would probably underpeform a 3000gs-ilvl 187 set. The best way to get your theoretical maximum dps based on your gear is to use a spreadsheet or theorycrafting program. Which to use will depend on your class. For a mage, Rawr (rawr.codeplex.com) is probably your best bet. You can load in your talents and gear straight from the armory, and check off buffs you have in your group (or none and go solo) and see what your theoretical best dps is. It also will suggest your best rotations, but the format is so esoteric that it’s not a big help.
ETA: Rawr also has an optimizer which will suggest the best gems and enchants for your current gear, and can suggest the best gear to upgrade to next.
Perhaps I should have included a disclaimer.
“Formula only works with properly itemized gear, without raid buffs (no lust, even as a shaman) on a SINGLE 83 training dummy”
It’s not exact and your mileage may vary depending on class, but it’s as good as you’re going to get without a spreadsheet (which was a requirement made by the op).
Who’s “forcing”? I merely complain about it because it annoys me, while realizing there’s nothing to be done about it. And I’m already addressing it by playing more on an RP server lately rather than lecturing other people in-game. As to why it annoys me so much, it’s just because, to me, it reduces “characters” to “loot-gathering tools”. It’s the same basic complaint I have with my company referring to me as an “asset” or a “human resource” instead of an “employee” or “personnel”; it reduces me from a person to an object. My Dungeon Master back when I played D&D annoyed me because he couldn’t be bothered to actually learn the player characters’ names and just addressed everybody by their class. “Wizard, what do you do? Rogue, roll.”
A middle-aged man has a right to wear black dress socks with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Do I not also have the right to mock his fashion sense?
Again, I’m not “requiring” anything by wishing people would simply be more courteous. And it’s not always just a matter of them slowing me down by keeping me from clicking on the NPC. There are certain cases where that behavior is actually detrimental. For example, the tauren who rides his kodo up to talk to Marcia Chase at the Dalaran Fountain and stops crosswise, completely blocking the four people who are trying to fish up coins — some of whom may have a timer counting down on the gold coin they tossed in the fountain. Good luck waving your mouse around hoping to find your bobber when you can’t even see the water. If you click, you’re just going to click on the kodo, anyway. Congratulations, Mr. Tauren, you’ve stolen several seconds of a “buff” somebody might not see again for the remainder of their fishing session. If he happened to ride up right before somebody’s bobber bounced, he hasn’t just “stolen” the couple seconds he was parked there, he’s “stolen” the entire 10-15 seconds the bobber was in the water because the person was unable to click at the moment of payoff. And in places like the Dalaran Fountain, there’s not even the “I didn’t see you there” excuse like there might legitimately be when it’s just a single character standing directly in front of an NPC.
… to Wolkie (Human Alliance Warrior)? For that matter, how important is critical anything? I have seen potions (elixirs?) that have that as an ingredient, but I’m not sure what it means/does?
Thanks
Q
A “critical” hit does much more damage than a “regular” hit. Think of it like this:
“Regular” Hit: You swing your sword and slash your enemy’s chest.
“Critical” Hit: You swing your sword and slice open his jugular vein.
Both hits are going to make the enemy bleed, but the “critical” hit is going to make him bleed a lot faster, and so it’s represented in the game as “more damage”.
By increasing your “critical strike rating”, you increase the chance that your hits will be “critical” hits. More critical hits is a good thing 