It's Dangerous to Go Alone

Italicized quotations throughout are from my old raid leader Sebudai, well-known for his efforts to teach his raiders to be better at playing WoW. I’ve written many WoW guides over the past years, largely covering the details of min/maxing a particular class, but I always knew I was addressing a narrow slice of what makes a good raider. While there are reasons that players who know the nuances of perfectly optimizing their class’s output and ability use are prized, even they are no substitute for a raider who excels at the […]

I’m finally getting around to writing down my initial reaction to the various things that were announced in WoW panels on Friday and Saturday at Blizzcon. I haven’t even caught up on everyone’s discussions since then due to travelling (…travelling and XCOM expansion being released), but it seems to good to get these down first anyway. Basically my first impressions of everything in no particular order. The biggest part will be on raid changes since those are most interesting for me (well, and there are no detailed class changes yet). […]

One of the most fascinating things about Hearthstone is that despite the usual terminology, it is not actually a “trading card game,” in that you cannot trade. Trading is functionally replaced by a crafting system that allows you to inefficiently transform cards into any other cards whenever you like. There are advantages and disadvantages to this from a player’s perspective. The obvious disadvantage is that you can’t shape your collection without destroying value. The advantage lies primarily in not exposing players to the vagaries of a secondary market as a […]

Blizzard’s pattern of trying to make more interesting raid trinkets in MoP has provided a lot of interesting theorycraft material. As in past Theorycraft 101 posts, the goal is here both to give theorycrafters some useful conclusions and equations to save them the trouble of reinventing them independently, and to give everyone some general information that helps them evaluate these new bonuses when selecting items. Item Budgets In general, the amount of any stats budgeted to a certain slot scales like: V is the budget value controlling how many stats that item […]

The Monty Hall Problem A certain probability puzzle is well-known in math circles for its unusual ability to cause people to refuse to believe the answer when it is explained to them. It’s usually known as the “Monty Hall problem” (after the host of Let’s Make a Deal): Monty Hall has given you a choice of three identical doors. Behind one is a car and behind the other two are goats. You choose a door, but before it’s opened to reveal your prize, Monty adds a twist. He opens one of […]

Previous posts in this series can be found here. In particular, the Haste section of Part 2 might be useful background. Haste is the most complex of the healing stats, and often appears to be the least well understood. Its effect is a combination of added throughput, increased mana consumption, and increased HoT healing due to those “haste breakpoints” that are so easy to look up online but so hard to evaluate in importance. Part 2 in this series, linked above, gave some high-level comments on the behavior of haste, and generally concluded that based […]

Transmog has been a hit since it launched in Patch 4.3, and it seemed inevitable that armor would eventually find its way to the Blizzard Store, as it finally did last week. My opinions have gone back and forth on the store helms over the past week. Initially I thought that adding more transmog flexibility was a great idea, then I balked at the prices announced on Tuesday. However, after seeing so many users enthusiastically upload detailed screenshots to Wowhead, I’m thinking that the items have a targeted niche, and I’m […]

A collaborative essay by Hamlet and Perculia. Tuesday night. Like many others, you queued for LFR because you were Looking For a Raid. The question we want to explore here is, is what you found actually a raid? We know what you’re after when you queue up. It’s not so much a raid, per se, that’s on the forefront of your mind. It’s that you’ll win an epic. Yes, the odds are low (you’re not even totally sure what they are), but maybe this will be the week. Maybe your item is from […]

This is a continuation of my Theorycraft 101 post that introduced trinket uptimes and RPPM. I’m going to assume here that you read that post. The main audience for this post is people trying to any theorycraft work, whether making a full-blown spreadsheet or simply doing a standalone calculation about some trinket. You should be able to find the equation you need here without needing to redo a lot of work. A bit of terminology from last time: PPM is the proc’s built-in PPM constant. H is your haste factor (1 + […]

Last week, a Kickstarter campaign called “9 Year Old Building an RPG to Prove Her Brothers Wrong!” launched, and so far has raised over $20,000 using the marketing strategy that a child’s brothers mocked her plans to go to an RPG-building camp. Therefore, she needs Kickstarter to give her $800 to attend the camp. Rewards for donating $10,000 were added soon after, in which the brothers would apologize for being mean to their sister. No details have been given as to their mean behavior, and it may have been even […]