Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Sartharion completion: hard modes

I continue to hack away on my achievements project. I've got a really good dataset now: 90,000 or so characters who turned level 80 before May 2009. All their achievements, nicely cleaned of spurious data, etc. My first pass with the data was some one off reports (like Naxx/25 and heroic completion). Right now I'm building a simple webapp to generate reports for all achievements live from my MySQL database. That's not going to scale, though, so long term I'm looking to run things on Google AppEngine (much like Zardoz) which will require rethinking the datastore. Interesting work.

But to keep the tedium at bay, here's a quick report of completions for Sartharion/25.

• 69% Heroic: Besting the Black Dragonflight
• 32% Heroic: Twilight Assist
• 18% Heroic: Twilight Duo
• 8% Heroic: The Twilight Zone 

And here's some graphs of when people finish Sartharion for the first time with various numbers of drakes up.

Sorry for the multiple graphs; don't have multiple datasets on a single graph yet. Interesting how no one's doing Sartharion + 3 Drakes since Ulduar came out, no? Also interesting how spiky the harder achievements are, that's a day-of-week thing. If my timezone handling isn't entirely broken then Tuesday and Wednesday are the most popular day to have first gotten Sarth + 3D, Saturday is the least popular. (By contrast, Sunday's the most popular day to first finish Naxxramas).

Quitting WoW

I've decided to quit playing World of Warcraft. This blog has been pretty short on druid posts for awhile because of my lack of enthusiasm. The druid stuff will stop entirely now, but I do intend to keep hacking on my achievement mining project and may start using this blog for reporting on what I learn. Feel free to unsubscribe if I end up boring you, I won't be offended!

Why quit? The main reason is the same disenchantment with the game my buddy Karthis offered as his reason for quitting. The key thing is "I haven't logged on except to raid". I have no interest in playing alts, there's no solo or small group content in 3.1 that appeals to me, I don't even need to make gold anymore. Raiding is still fun for me; last night's raid was awesome. (Our first Freya kill with me cat DPS and a bit of offtanking, our first attempts on Thorim with me full on tanking, and then me on the top 3 of the DPS charts in Archavon). But without any other gameplay to balance raiding out it begins to feel a bit weird. Also while Ulduar is better than Naxxramas, it still feels a bit too much of the same old thing. And I share Karthis' feeling that hard modes won't be much more fun.

Also, part of my disenchantment is that WoW became too much like responsibility. I reluctantly became an officer in my guild a couple of months ago. Then our amazing guild founders and raid leader quit, our second raid leader got busy with life, and suddenly I was the raid lead. I think I did pretty well at it, but I'm not one of those people who really enjoys leading a guild. And even without the leadership the regular raid calendar means too many evenings were committed to playing Warcraft instead of seeing friends, reading a book, or simply hanging out. Combined with not enjoying the gameplay and it was time to quit.

Looking back on WoW, there's a few things that I really enjoyed. I'm glad that our guild finished off Illidan the week before the 3.0 patch nerfed all of the BC endgame content into irrelevance. And I'm proud that we got Sartharion down with all three drakes up. But what I enjoyed the most was the six or eight weeks of helping lead a group to figure out how to finish Zul'aman under the 45 minute timer. I think ZA is the best designed instance I've played: the creative and precise gameplay required from an intimate 10 man group was really fun. 

Blizzard has designed a uniquely good game; I've never played any other game for three years. There's a lot of depth, a lot of polish, and a lot of different kinds of gameplay. Warcraft will last a good time yet; it may lose a few players to Diablo 3 and probably a lot whenever Blizzard launches their new MMO that all the leading WoW designers have switched to. But it's hard to imagine any other company displacing Blizzard's games.

I'm looking forward to having more time to play other games. One of the pernicious things about Warcraft is how it leaves no time to play any other games. So now I'm seeking out other games that become less of a long term commitment. Team Fortress 2 was super fun this weekend. I'm going to revisit Alpha Centauri to discuss it with a smart critical group. And I may pick up an MMO to just casually play through the levelling content: Warhammer or Lord of the Rings, maybe.

PS: Total /played on my druid and my hunter alt is 158 days, which works out to 3.5 hours a day or about 60% of a full time job. 19 days at level 80 on Flyv in six months, or 2.5 hours a day. It's not all playing, of course, a lot of chat and afk. Still that's an awful lot of time.

Opportunity addon for jewelcrafters

I've released Opportunity, my addon for making it easier to make money cutting and selling jewels. It's on Curse. Try it out!

The Opportunity addon makes it easier for jewelcrafters to recognize market opportunities for cutting and selling gems. Opportunity creates awindow with a snapshot of the entire rare gem market, highlighting whichgems are worth cutting and selling for a profit. It does this by lookingat the current Auctioneer snapshot of the market, historical prices, andsales success history via Beancounter. I've used Opportunity for well overa year to great success.

Opportunity requires the Auctioneer Suite, including Beancounter.

This addon is being released *unsupported*. The author has no plans to improve or maintain the addon and any requests for support will be cheerfully ignored. I would be happy for someone to take the addon over and develop it themselves. The code is under MIT license so requires no permission from me, but drop me a note if you decide to take it over!

Usage:

1. Go to the auction house and complete an auction scan.

2. Open your Jewelcrafting spellbook

3. Type "/opp knock" at the console.

4. A window will pop up with a snapshot of the entire gem market.

The window contains the results from Opportunity. It has a lot of information, but once you learn to read it you can quickly pick out which gems are worth cutting.

For every raw uncut gem (such as Sky Sapphire), a line is displayed with the following information:

1. Raw gem name

2. Average gem price from Auctioneer

3. List of 5 cheapest auctions for the raw gem. Green is a bargain.

For every gem cut (such as Solid Sky Sapphire), a line is displayed with the following information:

1. Cut gem name. Coloured by status of the gem.

   Blue = profitable, White = not profitable, Red = been undercut.

2. Percentage of sales that were successful (from Beancounter)

3. Historical cut gem price (from Auctioneer)

4. Name of the seller for the cheapest gem.

5. Five cheapest auctions for the raw gem.

For a quick scan-and-cut, the simplest thing is to look at the window for gem names in blue. Then check their percentage sales success and if it's reasonable, cut a few. Much of the other market snapshot data is clutter you can probably ignore.

Ideas for future expansion: less cluttered display, automatic scanning of the live auction, clickable text so that gems can be cut right off the display window. I would be wary of expanding this addon to other professions, its simplicity is because of the one raw gem = one gem construction of Jewelcrafting.

Looking for a feral druid

Sadly my brother bear Karthis has decided to quit WoW. My guild Que sera sera is now recruiting more tanks. We could actually use a couple, including DKs and paladins. But nearest to my heart, we need a good feral druid. Interested?

Quick details: we're an Alliance guild on Garona/US. We're currently raiding 25 mans three nights a week, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday from 8pm to 11pm Eastern time. Members need to be able to attend 2/3 of our raids. We're currently entirely in Ulduar, most of us are done with Naxx and Sarth+3D and are focussed now on raid progression. In Ulduar we're into the Keepers section, have Hodir down and are working now on Mimiron and Freya. You can read more about my guild in my previous recruitment post.

We need a feral druid to tank. But I think it's equally important for a feral druid to be good at cat DPS, so we're looking for someone who enjoys both bear and cat roles. We're more interested in a player's attitude and skill than gear, but given that we're focussed on Ulduar now we need people who already have good gear at the Naxx/25 level. Stuff in Ulduar hits hard; I'm currently sitting at about 42,000 health when buffed for tanking and it's still not enough!

If you're interested, please fill out our recruitment form and mention you saw this ad on my blog.

Days to completing Naxx/25, popular heroics

Here's a teaser for a project I'm working on.. A statistical sampling of people's Warcraft achievements based on crawling Armory data for achievements. For example, how did people fare with completing 3.0's premier raiding content, Naxxramas/25? About 40% of level 80s have finished Naxx/25. It takes them on average 59 days after they hit level 80, but the distribution is interestingly bimodal.

 

And another view of PvE content consumption; what percentage of level 80s have completed each of the new 3.0 heroic 5 mans. Yup, turns out no one likes Oculus.

 83% The Violet Hold
 81% Utgarde Keep
 80% The Nexus
 73% Utgarde Pinnacle
 73% The Culling of Stratholme
 70% Gundrak
 68% Drak'Tharon Keep 
 67% Azjol-Nerub
 64% Halls of Lightning
 58% Halls of Stone
 51% Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom
 42% The Oculus 

Lots more to come. I'm heavily inspired by the amazing work Zardoz has been doing on his Armory Data Mining blog. Also indebted to him, he's been very generous in helping me get going on this project. I'm particularly impressed with his method for getting a sampling of characters. If you like this kind of data analysis check out his website, he's done some really great research on dual specs, battleground performance, level 19 twinks, etc.

I have a good dataset collected, but there's a lot of analysis work to do. I also need to decide where and how to publish the results. Also interested if anyone's seen work like this. Specifically: statistical samplings of achievement data. There's other statistical samples of Armory data like Talentchic or Armory Data Mining. There's also achievement analysis sites out there like Guild Ox and Wow-Achievements, but their self-selecting datasets don't allow for unbiased statistics. I'm trying to do a bit of both together.

Patch 3.1 review on WoWInsider

Alex Ziebart over at WoWInsider has a really great mini-review of patch 3.1 focussing on how disappointing the lack of storytelling is in the patch.

Patch 3.1 has lots of cool content, but it is utterly lifeless. In my opinion, Blizzard has set the bar for the story progressing within the game itself so high starting with patch 2.4 and through Wrath of the Lich King's initial release that they can't really afford to slip back into the days where the world was utterly stagnant. 

I'm not too much of a lore nerd, but I do regret the absence of any story or connection to what's happening inside Ulduar. The geometry is so beautiful and I know there's some back story to it that I should be interested in, but it's very poorly explained. I didn't even realize we weren't actually killing Hodir until we beat him, for instance.

My other complaint with 3.1 is it added nothing new that was fun to do other than Ulduar itself. The Argent Tournament is a fiasco, in my opinion. (Dear Blizzard: stop doing vehicles. Thanks.) The fishing dailies are dull. I don't know much about PvP but it seems the arena game is still pretty unbalanced. Battlegrounds are still boring, and Wintergrasp is unplayable.

Fortunately Ulduar is very good, and that's enough to keep me occupied for a couple of months at least.

Tanking Hodir

Hodir has been the most fun fight for me to tank so far in Ulduar. It's chaotic, takes a lot of movement, and is a real threat challenge. I'm only going to talk here about tanking, there's plenty of other good strat guides out there. Tankspot is a good place to start.

Hodir is a single tank fight. The tank needs frost resist: when Hodir gets the Frozen Blows buff he does less melee damage but hits the tank for 40,000 in frost damage every 2.5 seconds. I went ahead and tanked it in a full 3 piece polar set, along with a +20 frost head enchant and a Flask of Chromatic Wonder. Adding a paladin aura the 480 frost resist is probably overkill, but you want well over 200 to mitigate the giant frost hits. Druid tanks seem to be the best choice for this fight, mostly because it's easier to build a resist set if you don't need defence.

For the most part the tank needs to do the same things the rest of the raid is doing. Constantly move (or jump) to avoid Biting Cold stacking up. Stay out of falling icicles. Jump in a snowbank for Flash Freeze. The only real tank crisis moment is Frozen Blows. Not only are you taking monster 40,000 frost hits, but the entire raid is getting nuked hard and your healers are stressed. Help them out with a glyphed Frenzied Regeneration, Barkskin, etc.

The key challenge for the tank in this fight is maintaining threat. It's a mobile fight, and generating threat while moving is not always easy. And the NPCs give a bunch of important DPS buffs to the raid; if all the buffs are used then the casters have 100% haste, double crit damage, and Hodir is taking an extra 50% in spell damage. For short bursts the casters are generating about 5x their usual threat. To keep up the tank needs to take advantage of the NPC buffs, too. In particular the Storm Power crit buff from friendly raid members and the Starlight haste buff are very helpful. Unfortunately bears can't take much advantage of the spell damage debuff on Hodir; a Paladin or DK tank might have an easier time with threat.

I found that with a bit of luck I could get all the buffs on me and then let loose with a Berserk. Once I got that off I was way ahead on threat and no one could catch me. But until that all comes together use every other threat trick you can. Misdirects and Tricks of the Trade help. Even so I was really working to generate enough threat, I even finally worked in Faerie Fire every six seconds as a threat building move (not just a theoretical possibility!) Also keep a close eye on Omen and tell the Hunters, Mages, etc to drop aggro as they can.

Despite what all the guides and DBM say, Hodir enraged on us at exactly 8 minutes in 25 man. Which wiped us at 5%, we'd lost a lot of DPS early. Once your DPS figures out how to avoid most of the damage and the healers can keep everyone alive during Frozen Blows, the fight's in the bag. Don't be afraid to battle rez a key person while tanking, by the way, you get a few seconds during Flash Freeze when it's safe.

The trash on the way to Hodir is fun too. Just to thumb their nose at all us players who whined about AoEing Naxx trash some of the mobs have a special buff on them that protects them against AoE damage. Oh yeah, but the mobs do a nice Blizzard on your party. As my colleague Karthis said

In Soviet Ulduar trash AoEs you!

Cross-faction Argent pets

Someone on my server is making a boatload of money. Every day on the Alliance auction house a couple of new Horde Argent Tournament pets show up, being sold for 4000-9000 gold each. And the Horde side seems to have a few Alliance pets, too. Very clever to cross-realm import like that. If you farm the pets yourself it's just about five hours of playtime, or about 1000g / hour. Or maybe you just buy them for 2000g on the same faction AH, then flip it for 5000g cross-faction. Either way, it's a lot of scratch.

I'm a pretty serious pet collector, I've got 83 pets now out of about 103 that I can get. I've bought five of the new pets so far; the Mulgore Hatchling is my favourite, although the Elwynn Lamb is probably the cleverest. All told I think I've spent about 50,000 gold on BoE pets on the auction house. That's a lot of jewelcrafting profits. But hey, it's a game!

3.1.2 Innervate: nerf? buff?

Something caught my eye in the 3.1.2 PTR notes today

Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid's base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.

Compare the original

Increases the target's Spirit based mana regeneration by 400% and allows full mana regeneration while casting.  Lasts 20 sec.

The mana given by Innervate is based now on the caster's stats, not the recipient's. Many a healer has been grateful that their feral friends can give them a free innervate. Fortunately even if our mana pool is tiny (mine's about 5000), the 4.5x multiplier will give healers about 22,000 mana. Or enough to about top them off. And given all the nerfs to spirit based mana regen in 3.1, this may end up actually being an overall buff.

(PS: as noted by a comment below, this is a huge buff if you cast innervate on yourself.)