About: Hamlet

[4/8/13: Six months later and I see this post getting quite a lot of attention on various forums. While I’m glad of that, I do want to make sure people finding their way to it just now also see the follow-up posts in the Healing Theory sequence. The first is here, and the third is particularly relevant to this discussion. Those posts are further developments of the ideas that first came to me while writing this one. While I still stand by the main ideas of this post, it was more of a reaction […]

WoW developers have recently been frequently indicating an interest in community feedback/discussion on the issue of 10 and 25-man raids (some examples).  In particular, they are trying to find ways to once again incentivize players to run 25-mans, but the Cataclysm approach of making the two raid types interchangeable in terms of rewards and achievements has made it very difficult to do that.  I think what I’m going to do is copy some feedback I already wrote about this, and then add a few notes underneath it. One of the big […]

Introduction In preparation for Hero Academy coming out on PC, I’m collecting and filling out the mechanics guides I used to post on the forum. If you’re 100% brand new to HA, you don’t need to read this first, just use the in-game tutorial and play a few turns to get a sense of what’s going on. But as you start playing, you’ll encounter units/mechanics/races that you haven’t seen before, and sometimes you just want to check what they do without having to use trial and error in the middle […]

“That bauble around your neck—was it bought with gold or iron?” Hardcore mode. Sounds intimidating. It’s for “hardcore players,” which as any erstwhile WoW forum reader knows, is the opposite of “casual players.” Which is what, statistically speaking, you probably are. This post is about why, name notwithstanding, Hardcore mode is for you. Paradoxically, it can be not only the most intense way to play, but also the most casual way to play. My goal in writing this is for you (whoever you are) to try it. Nothing more. Next […]

In my last post, I mentioned that I might go more in-depth on some Diablo III theorycraft topics. Here’s the first. I’ll review the math surrounding mitigation in Diablo III and discuss what I think is the most helpful way of keeping track of it for everyday purposes. I also made a simple tool for doing any of the computations discussed here for any stat values; it’s linked below but I’ll also put it here so it’s easy to find: D3-mitigation. The Mitigation Formula Armor in D3 reduces all incoming damage by […]

Now that I understand D3 theorycraft a bit better, I’m going to try to boil down a few useful things that players might want to know to have a sense of how things work. This is a basic summary that should get most people going on picking sensible gear; anyone who wants more detailed info or formulas can ask me or look them up in various places. Really short version Use the weapon with the highest listed DPS (big number in the tooltip). Value other items for offensive power simply […]

Spoiler Alert – This post is going to be discussing various aspects Cataclysm using information gleaned from the beta and PTR. If you’re okay reading about what’s coming down the pipe soon, continue. Credit goes to the fantastic blog Righteous Orbs for the first portion of my blog title. Despite the announcement this week from MMO-Champion that the release date for Cataclysm is now going to be in mid-December, it continues to lumber towards us, tantalizing many of us with the promise that someday soon, we’ll all get a chance soon to experience an apocalypse […]