It's Dangerous to Go Alone

In the first two posts in the sequence, we started building a foundation of how to think about the task of healing, and conducted a basic survey of how all the various stats might impact your performance. As promised in the last post, this is going to be a whole piece focusing on how to make decisions concerning mana (and secondary resources if your class has them). It will also finally bring us back around to the issue that started me down this whole train of thought in Mists. Beyond Spirituality Everyone accepts what the […]

Recently, E.L. James gave an interview in which she brushed off concerns that 50 Shades of Grey glorifies abusive relationships, and implied that anyone who is concerned simply doesn’t understand BDSM. This part in particular has upset many readers: James says she “freaks out” when she hears people say that her book encourages domestic violence. “Nothing freaks me out more than people who say this is about domestic abuse,” she says. “Bringing up my book in this context trivializes the issues, doing women who actually go through it a huge disservice. It […]

My last post was a trip back to the fundamentals of healing, and claimed to be the beginning of a series where we build from that to more detailed analysis of the various healing classes. There’s still a little ways to go before we’re ready (both in terms of my math work on healing classes, and in terms of laying the foundation in posts) for very detailed cross-class comparison or balance discussion. But let’s get a little less abstract than the first time around, and look at some stats. Along the way […]

People make a big deal about the food in 50 Shades of Grey, but Ana doesn’t eat much of the gourmet food at all. Instead, she continually loses her appetite after Christian does something unpleasant or distracts her with sex. It’s repetitive to the point of being really uncomfortable to read about. I made a spreadsheet of all the food and drink references in the three books to make sure I wasn’t selectively reading negative passages and not viewing things clearly. Food and drink were put into three categories. Page […]

Update: There is now a continuation of this post here, which gets into some more detail and trickier topics. About a year ago I did a few posts in a series I called “Theorycraft 101″.  The basic point is to have post outlining basic computations/formulas I use in making spreadsheets and like, so other people who do these things don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  I think there’s often not a lot of communication across classes on these things, so I want to make non class-specific references for things that come […]

[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 […]

If you are looking to improve your character for Mists of Pandaria raids, going out and getting a stack of +300 food is generally not where to start. Yet in these early few weeks of the expansion, there is an irrational emphasis on cooking. Spending hours to acquire an extra +25 of a stat is the weakest way you can enhance your character–and it also takes the most amount of time. It’s the wrong set of priorities. However, players should be rewarded for choosing to farm top-end consumables, which I’ll […]

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 […]

1. “Show me how you died to the boss.” “What?” I frown. “Don’t be coy, Ana, show me,” he whispers. I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean.” 2. “I think we’ll do LFR later,” he says. “Let’s queue up for Tol Barad.” This is not a sentence I had ever expected to hear from Christian Grey, and only he can make it sound hot, really hot. 3. “Are you backpedalling deliberately?” he asks darkly. I blink up at him, gasping, strafing out of the fire. 4. I eye […]