Archive for January, 2010
New Armory is Pretty Ballin’
I blame GotFrag.com for the title.
But I am easily seduced by new shinies and Wednesday night, Blizzard dropped a redesigned WoW Armory on us. Our raid almost ground to a halt as everyone rushed off to go check it out. There’s definitely some criticism out there of it but I for one am more intrigued by the possibilities it can bring. Let’s review, shall we?
1.) Design and Organization Is Clearer
From a design standpoint, the old armory was basically a rehash of the in-game character panel that you would look at for the most part. Even with the subsequent revisions to how dual-specs and achievement panels were displayed, they were crammed into the small space inside the gear panel. Now you have all the relevant stats and other chunks of data about the player in useful spaces around the page allowing ease of use and ability to read it in a concise fashion. First off, it has a giant splash bar that displays their faction, name, guild, server/battlegroup and achievement points. So half the reason people are looking at the armory in the first place have all that information right at the top. Then down below, it basically takes a lot of utility from certain mods (like the gear aura based on its rarity) and uses it for maximum visual impact. I know instantly how many blues/purples someone is wearing just by looking, and then I can mouseover for the details of which pieces they are. I can scroll through their stats (the stats that are predominant to the spec are also displayed first) and I can see their dual-specs quite easily now.
2.) Recent Activity is Detailed, Useful
This is easily going to cause the most contention amongst our readers or WoW players in general. The addition of the “Recent Activity” list to the Armory has caused outcry – people are saying the Blizzard is keeping up the Facebooks and Twitters of this world and no one needs that much data, replete with RSS feed capacity. I’m not as paranoid as some, even though I have had my bouts with stalkers. The Recent Activity is going to give us some huge parses of data that we already had but in a form that gives people an easier time of understanding it or using. The statistics panel on your Armory and in-game had all this information before but you would have had to pay attention to the original values of things such as boss kills to make any sense of it. I like that I can see that I completed parts of achievements I wasn’t tracking. It gives me a sum total of things I’m doing in-game. This is where people feel threatened – they don’t want people to know that they completed a quest, got a piece of loot. But it doesn’t update in real time (It updates on log-out instead.) It also doesn’t show anything that someone couldn’t find out if they really want to. My feeling about the fear is that the armory is going to provide us with information for a lot more positive uses than negative ones. I understand the controversy, but I’m surprised that Blizzard hasn’t made a way to set certain values or the entire list private except for trusted friends.
3.) The Modelviewer/Pose Feature
Proving once again that Blizzard knows what is popular amongst the constituents, they included a way to accurately view and display a person’s actual character instead of having to use Modelviewer or see the person in-game. I personally like this for nerdy reasons because I do a lot of WoW Model Viewer pictures of my guildmates and having accurate hair/skin/face data is really useful as I cannot remember all of these people. Night elves have five faces that all look the same, really. Again, people might get upset that people can visually identify their character now, but the pros outweigh the cons in this case. Also it is fun to see or display to other people your character’s “personality” via the pose feature. If you noticed the article’s header, you can see how sassy my gnome is. I think it is a really nice touch of flavor that Blizzard allowed people to show off their character’s personality and nice gear to anyone who happens to look them up rather than just dropping straight stats and activity as part of it. Now people can be a dancing undead or a lowbie saluting all those who wander across their page. You can also link your character’s pose to show others and view in full-screen in a variety of backdrops, which is cute.
4.) Armory Now Handles Account Data/Characters
Logging into the Armory used to only give you access to your in-game calendar or guild info but now it has access to the whole of your account, in terms of character data. Using Armory now allows you to “quick access” up to three of your characters at once via the little yellow person icon up by your name. It is useful for those people who have more than one well-geared main/alt, even if some of us have slightly more than three. I find this is really handy if I need to link my alts who are gearing up to someone to look over their gear.
5.) Bookmarking
Because you can never have too many armories saved when you need to see the specs/gear of mages who are better than you players you are interested in on a regular basis. I think this feature will be pretty well-used amongst those people who constantly compare gear of peers or friends in order to figure out what they are doing. I know I will be. I haven’t figured out what it maxes out at yet, but maybe all of you can find out and get back to me.
6.) Fun Anyone?
Try out a pygmy oil or Iron Dwarf boot flask, log out and wait 15 minutes or so. Instant gender change on the Armory for you!
All in all, I like that Blizzard is putting in the time and effort to create a huge bank of data that is not only useful, visually appealing and fun but gets people more interested in using it – I’d use the Armory for checking out recruits to our raid but I would imagine most casual players would never go to the Armory or log in. Now since you can customize how you look and get feedback about your in-game adventures, I forsee the Armory being more of a go-to in the future. I also invite all of you to use my Armory as one of your bookmarks and follow my ridiculous adventures across Azeroth (if you weren’t sick of me already). There’s also a Twitter site that Kadomi of Tank Like A Girl uses if you wanted to dump that into Twitter but I doubt you really need that spammed on your lists. Anyways, play with the Armory and drop us a comment showing off your mage!
Hey, frost mages!
Don’t say we never did nothin’ for ya. Lhivera has done some interesting testing based on information about (gasp!) warlock pets. It turns out that warlocks do more damage if they force their imps to cast by macroing the imp’s spell with their main nuke. Lhivera wondered if this would work for frost mages and the answer is yes: he noticed a 27% increase in his own pet’s DPS, which he estimates could boost his raid DPS by 3.8-5.5%. Not too shabby!
To take advantage of it, you’ll need to change your frostbolt to this following macro:
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt
Unlike /petattack, this command will not cause your pet to stopcasting and start over with every keypress (something I personally discovered doing Vezax hard mode, heh). So macro up, frost mages, and make Splashy work for you.
(And don’t tell Ais I helped you out. Getting punched by a gnome isn’t fun.)
Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets!
Haven’t been posting much — as Ais said, the holidays and some real-life issues have interfered. (All good things, though!) But it’s a new year and we’ve got some questions to field. All of these are about the piece of gear that frustrates me the most: trinkets.
I’m an arcane mage currently running with Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Abyssal Rune. Should I replace one of them with the Talisman of Resurgence?
The short answer to this is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Nearly every single arcane mage should have Talisman of Resurgence: the only exceptions are if you have some combination of Reign of the Dead/Unliving (heroic or regular – you can use both), Dislodged Foreign Object (ew), Muradin’s Spyglass, or Flare of the Heavens. You can use Rawr to figure out what would be the best combination for you, but for the majority of arcane mages, we’re gonna have Talisman of Resurgence in one of those spots. Getting the badges is easy: if you don’t have one yet, farm heroics until you have the 50 Triumph needed to pick it up. In this case, Abyssal + Talisman of Resurgence is the best combo of those three. Keep in mind that Abyssal Rune is a random spellpower proc, which means it could go off as you’re moving out of fire or right before you need to kite Anub’s spikes. I still think that even with inopportune procs it’s a better choice, simply because the passive haste is so good for arcane. Good news is, Abyssal Rune is pretty easy to get: it drops from regular ToC5.
How does the Talisman of Resurgence compare to the stacking haste from Talisman of Volatile Power?
Well… the Talisman of Volatile Power is a concentrated piece of crap. Let’s just assume you’re an arcane mage. The passive bonus on the trinket is critical strike rating, which is the worst caster stat available to arcane mages right now (aside from int and spirit — and even then it’s only about a .3 DPS scaling difference between crit and int). At first glance, the haste bonus looks nice: it increases your rating by 57 each cast, which is 1.7% casting speed increase. (Casting speed is not the same as cast time, mind.) Not too shabby! Where it falls apart is the 20 second duration of the effect. Let’s assume that you have 600 haste rating and are specced for Netherwind Presence. Your AB cast time is 2.01 seconds. You pop your trinket; the next cast is 1.98, then 1.95, then 1.93. As a player, you’re not going to notice the two to three hundreths of a second cast difference, but even tiny differences do add up. But the effect only lasts 20 seconds: it’ll take you over 15 to stack it to eight (assuming perfect execution and no lag). You’ll get maybe two to three casts with the full effect. The DPS increase from this trinket is just so teeny, even stacking it with other cooldowns.
It’s … it’s just not very good. Sundial of the Exiled is much better, even for an arcane mage. Forge Ember, a blue trinket from HoS, is better. I’ll say it again: if you don’t have Talisman of Resurgence, grind the badges and get it.
But, Meta, why is Muradin’s Spyglass good if it has all that crit?
Yeah, yeah, crit isn’t very good for arcane casters. However, the secondary effect of that trinket is a stacking spellpower buff. You can’t charge it up before combat (mages with Illustration could cast a couple of spells (Slow Fall or AE) before the fight began), but you’ll be running with 180 spellpower for the majority of the fight. Fire mages will especially delight in this trinket, as the ticks from Living Bomb will maintain the stack.
Unlike Reign of the Dead/Unliving, the heroic and non-heroic versions of this trinket (and Dislodged Foreign Object) cannot be used together. (This is per the 3.3 patch notes: “Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.”)
How do I weigh a proc versus a static bonus?
The short answer is that the average player doesn’t do this: you let someone else do the math and tell you whether an item is good or not. If, say, Nibelung drops and you have never seen the item before, you’re probably not going to be able to tell if the item is an upgrade for you. Even items with their proc spelled out, like Dislodged Foreign Object, are confusing: most players can tell it’s good, but they can’t tell you how good. Is it better than Reign? Is it better than heroic Reign? (The answer: I believe so.) And so the average player must do research before fights to find out what drops from what boss and then cross-reference those pieces of gear with math from trusted sources to see if it’s an improvement. Tools like Rawr help, but it takes a while for the procs to be accurately calculated and added in: Dislodged Foreign Object has yet to be modeled in the 2.3.5 release of Rawr. Blizzard seems to recognize the difficulty in eyeballing gear: we have multiple stats to juggle, procs that require a chunk of math to evaluate, and then just mind-bogglingly big numbers (think: a single weapon from Icecrown has more spellpower on it than my mage did total when I was doing Black Temple). Until Cataclysm fixes it (heh), most of us are left relying on others to do the mathy stuff for us.
That’s it for now, but if you have any mage questions, please feel free to ask either in comments, via Twitter (@empoweredfire), or shoot us an e-mail at empoweredfire AT gmail DOT com.
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