Category Archives: Around Azeroth

How to Kill Raid Bosses and Get Stuff Changed

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Making the news today in the World of Warcraft is a level 80 protection paladin going into Mogu’shan Vaults (a level 90 raid!) and single-handedly defeating encounters that require (at least) 10 players that are (also, at least!) 10 levels above him.  Apparently, he managed to take care of Stone Guard, Feng the Accursed and Elegon before Blizzard caught wind of it.  The video below shows his Elegon kill:

Of course, since I play a protection paladin myself, this interested me quite a bit (in terms of “wait… WHAT?!?!”).

Key to this involves a bug with our Shield of the Righteous ability (our primary damage reduction ability), and how it interacts with Vengeance (a passive ability that increases our attack power based on unmitigated damage received).  We’ve known about this for a while over on Maintankadin (and I’m guessing that Blizzard knew about it as well, but just never fixed it) — you can click on the link for all the details, but to summarise: due to a quirk of the Vengeance calculation and server/client latency, timing Shield of the Righteous with a melee swing from the boss could result in the Vengeance calculation grossly overestimating  how much unmitigated damage we received, resulting in a massive spike of Vengeance, and hence attack power, and hence damage we do.  Not only that, but many of our self-heals and absorbs also scale with attack power (Sacred Shield, I’m looking at you here — also Light’s Hammer and Execution Sentence, but since we only get those abilities at level 90, they’re not really applicable here), and one can see how our level 80 guy was not only able to deal enough damage, but also keep himself alive.

But that’s only part of the story.  Matt Walsh over on WoW Insider has filled us on the rest: there is some bind-on-equip rare gear found in the levelling zones of Mists of Pandaria (intended for players levelling from 85 to 90) that can, strangely enough, be equipped by a level 80 player.  (Here’s an example.)  By equipping those, our level 80 paladin managed to gain amounts of secondary stats (dodge/parry/mastery/haste/etc.) that were not originally intended for a level 80 player (when gear item levels were in the high 200s, not the low 400s in the case of the gear he had equipped).  More importantly, because he was level 80, he was cleverly avoiding the combat rating drop-offs that occur at levels 81 and 86 (those levels coincide with players encountering Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria content for the first time respectively).  This resulted in absolutely crazy character stats: Matt mentions that our level 80 paladin had 95% haste and 88% mastery, which one simply wouldn’t see on a level 90 character.

All of this came together to ensure our level 80 paladin could survive the raid bosses.  The haste and attack power from Vengeance meant that Seal of Insight was regularly overhealing him, and Sacred Shield was fully absorbing his attacks (not only that, but the insane haste percentage meant that it was constantly refreshing as well).  Plus, all of that mastery meant a damage reduction boost with Shield of the Righteous.

In a nutshell, all of this was simply our player using Blizzard’s design choices, and creating unintended consequences out of them.

Blizzard’s reaction to all of this has been to hotfix Vengeance so that it caps at a player’s maximum health (until a more elegant solution can be found); Vengeance previously had no maximum limit.  While I recognise that this is a temporary fix, I don’t believe it to be ideal: different tanking classes (protection paladins, protection warriors, blood death knights, guardian druids and brewmaster monks) are not created equally with regards to maximum health.  It remains to be seen how this will affect encounters that have the strategy relying on the tank having higher than usual Vengeance (10-player Wind Lord Mel’jarak coming to mind straight away); I’ll have to see what difference this makes in tonight’s raid.  (Although I may not notice much difference, since my personal gearing strategy seeks to maximise my health pool while still keeping an acceptable amount of secondary stats.)

I’ll end by throwing in this image, because it’s strangely relevant:

history-first-reported-critical-hit

The Divine Bell: The Horde Story

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Note to the reader: this post is entirely about World of Warcraft lore.  If this doesn’t interest you, then there isn’t anything else for you to see here.

The recent patch (5.1) to World of Warcraft introduced a new faction in the form of the Dominance Offensive (for us Horde players; Operation: Shieldwall is the Alliance equivalent).  As you grind out reputation with them, you receive once-off quests that advance the plot and lore of the Mists of Pandaria expansion.  As Anne Stickney pointed out, it’s brilliantly done.

Not to be content with that alone, Sagara over on Maintankadin has written the Horde story out from the perspective of his role-playing paladin.  As this is even more brilliantly done, I’ve decided to reproduce it here for posterity (with just some minor spelling and grammar errors corrected).

This does contain spoilers for content that some folks may not have seen yet, so I’m putting it behind the break.

Continue reading →

Real life questing

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With a public holiday yesterday, and with an old friend from Durban finally coming down to visit, I decided to take some people on a tour through the Winelands.  Also joining me were my two future housemates, and a new friend of mine: a visiting master’s student from Canada (being the only non-nerd in the group).

Of course, in true nerd style (much to our non-nerd’s bemusement), we did this in the style of a World of Warcraft quest chain:

  1. Assemble a party of fellow questers.  Your fellow party members may be found in Mowbray, Sunningdale and Gordon’s Bay.
  2. Journey to the Boschendal Wine Estate and acquire 1 Bottle of Fine Red Wine.  Completing this quest requires 50 gold.
  3. Journey to Fairview and acquire 2 Cheese Platters and 1 Loaf of Freshly-Baked Bread.  Completing this quest requires 100 gold.
  4. Prepare a Banquet of the Winelands to feed your party.  A Banquet of the Winelands may only be prepared at the Afrikaanse Taalmonument.  Party members that spend at least 10 minutes eating and drinking will be Well Fed and will receive the buff “Scribble Big Bang Theory Quotes on Ron’s Car” for 6 hours. (My fault for not washing it!)

I also took everyone to Nederburg and through the Huguenot Tunnel afterwards before the group disbanded.  Muchness of fun.

I’m still around!

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I haven’t posted anything lately.  Here’s why:

  • The intensity at work went up several notches.
  • Getting my World of Warcraft raid team sorted with the new expansion — in fact, getting the guild as a whole sorted.
  • Helping Little Annoying Sister out with final wedding preparations (the big day is early next month).
  • The big one: I’m moving out of my current flat at the end of the year.    Goodbye Rondebosch (and all your drunk students), hello West Coast!

And a few minor reasons as well that I can’t think of right now.

So now you have it.

Overcoming challenges, the virtual way

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Currently, my World of Warcraft raid team is taking on Yor’sahj the Unsleeping on heroic (read: insanely difficult) difficulty.  Now, I understand that many of you don’t play World of Warcraft, so I’ll explain the boss encounter briefly: every now and then, he summons four differently coloured slimes on the edge of the room that slowly creep towards him, and that give him some rather potent abilities when they reach him.  Only one can be killed (the rest become immune), which means that, as raid leader, the encounter is a test of my leadership abilities — I need to see which slimes have spawned, direct the rest of the raid to kill the one which I believe will result in certain death, and then give the raid the correct strategy for surviving the effects of the other three.

In my case, I have a unique problem: the fact that I’m pretty much totally colourblind.  I’ve found my own unique ways of dealing with this over the years, the main example being traffic lights.  I determine what to do based on position: top light tells me to stop, bottom light tells me to go, middle light tells me I’d better stop sometime soon (although any self-respecting South African driver will tell you that it really means “go faster”, particularly the ones on the other side of the Vaal River).  Of course, this is a lot harder at night; however, I’ve worked out that the “green” light is considerably brighter than the other two (I’m also extremely light sensitive, which in this specific case is actually a Good Thing).

However, the Yor’sahj fight, when we first attempted it (on normal mode) presented a unique challenge for me — the game tells me which combination of slimes has spawned, but then I need to run over to it and start whacking it hard, which is a bit difficult when you’re uncertain if you’ve run over to the right one.  An example would be when Yor’sahj spawns the purple and blue slimes, with purple being the kill target.  Those two slimes spawn next to each other, and I’ve often called out “kill purple” and then run over to blue instead.  And don’t get me started on the case when Yor’sahj sadistically decides to spawn red, green and yellow (it’s the traffic light thing again).

My solution: the other nine pairs of eyes.  The rest of the team knows full well that I really struggle with this, and so help me find my way to the correct slime that I had just called out.  I may be the one directing the strategy, but at the end of the day, we’re a team working together towards our end goal (that next boss kill on heroic difficulty).  My condition provides a unique challenge for this encounter, but working together, we’re able to compensate for that.

This actually touches on another interesting point.  People say that computer gaming is childish, breeds violence, and so forth; that World of Warcraft is an addiction as bad as illegal drugs… at least, those are the opinions that mass media would like us to have.  And yet, while I jump into the game to escape from reality for a while, there are plenty of real-world skills if one only takes the time to dig a little deeper.  Leading the raid allows me to refine my organisational, leadership and diplomatic skills, while raiding itself is a great way to learn how to work as a team (which is pretty much essential in the workplace in this day and age).  It’s through this teamwork that I’m able to overcome elements that impede me as an individual.

Indeed, this has been touched on by people far more qualified than I am.  Mark Chen, a self-professed gaming researcher who holds a doctorate in educational technology and learning sciences recently published his dissertation-turned-book Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft.  (The book is available on Amazon if you’re interested, but unless you’re familiar with psychology, it’s rather heavy reading.)  His experiences were from the Molten Core raid in the game’s earliest days (when the raid size was 40 players: definitely far more challenging from several points of view).  The following quote sums up my thoughts perfectly:

I would hesitate to call it “addiction” from the media effects standpoint: It is not a sinister, time-sinking, life-destroying activity. Instead, the knowledge is so much a part of me now… I long for it; it sustains me. It has become a part of who I am. My identity depends on this cultural knowing of what it feels like to be raiding in Molten Core. But rather than taking away from my life, it enriches my life…. Through gaming, I know nostalgia and melancholy, joy and triumph, success and failure, sadness and anger…. Gravitating towards these activities is only addiction in the sense that people are compelled to engage in the activities that define who they are…

We’re only getting Yor’sahj down to ~50% right now before someone makes a small mistake that wipes the raid (heroic difficulty is extremely unforgiving).  But that kill is coming, and it will be an especially sweet victory for me when we get him down.