September 2 News

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To start things off on the right foot, a couple of friends decided to see just how in shape their toons were, and try to run everywhere like their toons do. The result? The realization that our toons are in really good shape.

Zarhym delivers a massive post detailing how raid buffing, debuffing and stacking is going to go. Changes to what will stack with what, what buff overrides others, and how they all apply to each other. Huge changes here.

For anyone interested in the ins and outs of online leadership, WoWInsider's "Officers' Quarters" column often has some good advice in it. In the most recent one, the author talked about some previous columns, and replies to replies generated by them. A lot of good basic info this one.

Folks like ingame titles...and now Blizzard delivers with a slew of "Server First" style titles for folks to win. First of a class to 80. First of a race. First to get a profession to 450, etc. Tons of new titles abound.

We were talking in Guild the other day about a topic I want more thoughts on. What would WoW be like today, if PvP and PvE had 100% separated, dedicated servers? If the only way to pvp in WoW was on a server like the Arena Tournament server? What are some buffs or nerfs that wouldn't have likely happened due to being able to have essentially 2 games that didn't overlap? We came up with a pretty impressive list. What do you think would be different?

I read about another Achievement, 100,000 lifetime HKs on the battlegrounds, but don't remember the source. I am gathering HKs now because the reward should be good (someone told me it was a chestplate) and not many will bother to get it.

mmo-champion has a list of every enabled Achievement in the game. There is a 100k HK achievement, but it does not reward a chestplate. At present, it rewards nothing.

The design intent is for Achievements to reward nothing but fluff, like titles and tabards. Don't expect that a real, substantive piece of equipment reward is forthcoming.

I didn't check that list, I'm assuming they did some data mining because not all achievements show up in the achievement panel, some are "hidden" until you get another achievement done or until you just happen to do it then it shows up. So unless they data mined it's possible beta testers haven't actually done all the enabled ones to see them.

Yes, the entire list is datamined.

I just found the entire list so far:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?tab=0&page=777

No rewards are mentioned aside from APs (Achievement Points, my guess).

I will continue farming HKs, and persue the Admiral's Hat, a rep Achievement.

Cool, figured it would have to be.

After doing the booterang quest for the first time today (yes that's right I've never really cared about netherwing rep it's the only TBC rep that I don't have someone exalted with) I think I have to suggest a new achievement to Blizzard.

Australian Idiot - Get 20 booterangs to follow you around.

So when do we start on the Admiral's Hat?

And does Roquefort, my mage, get extra credit for having two pandas? I suspect very few gnomes have more than one.

My warrior has two zerglings.

September 3 News

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Blizzard has added Training Dummies. They are statted out like normal and boss mobs at 80, so you can test cycles and damage output without going back to Dr.Boom and hassling that poor goblin. This is a great addition.

Gamnin releases wave two of the Rogue changes, and there are a lot of them.

Yes, but is your warrior a gnome?

No. My warrior is a cow. Why the hell would I want to be a gnome?

Because you secretly like being punted by Taurens.

QFT!

As someone who just went through this grind on Stormrage due to the upcoming achievement, I can offer a few tips:

The most important thing is to get a group of 5 people willing to do it. With 5 people, the grind of killing Booty Bay bruisers at 25 rep a piece solo for 30-40 hours turns into a fun evening of laying waste to the town of Booty Bay for 3-3.5 hours. Bring a healer and some AoE. Tank is not necessary, although it will speed things up to have a Druid or Paladin tank. If you had a group of the ideal composition (healer, Pally tank, Mage, Warlock, Mage) the whole grind could be done in about 2 hours, I'd bet.

Why 5 people? Because the rep gains start to take a hit with more than 5. By the time you get to 10 people, you're only getting 1-5 rep per bruiser kill.

If you just want to get the hat and then get your rep back with the goblins, it's a pretty quick process. Of course, you'll thrash your rep you just got with the Bloodsails, but oh well. Buy/farm a whole ton of linen and turn them in outside of Ratchet and you'll be able to buy Noggenfoggers again in no time.

The best spawn points for bruisers are the bank, the general area outside of the inn where the fishing extravaganza npcs appear on Sundays (and you can't attack them, boooo), the merchant row, and Baron Revilgaz. With AoE pulls, you can easily plow through 15-20 bruisers at once and really rack up rep ultra-fast.

As MongoJerry put it in his fabulous Yarr! article so many years ago, the hardest kill is the first one, as you ask yourself "do I really want to do this?" After that, it's easy.

The most fun about the whole process is people's reaction to it. You'll have crowds watching you, and some will even follow you around. The whispers are great fun, as people ask "why are you doing this" and you can come up with inventive responses. Sometimes it really feels like you're at war with the town, when you pull dozens of bruisers...and look for the occasional member of the opposite faction who tries to take potshots at your group so you can slaughter them too for fun.

It's so worth it for the pirate outfit.

-Bolty

How to Quit a Guild

As a GM I don't negotiate with Terrorists. >.>

Bah, I can't look at photobucket images at work.

Some people take this game way, way too seriously.

Maybe they should start running World of Warcraft Anonymous in major cities. "Hi, my name is Legolassxxlol, and I am an addict."

If you don't mind taking your time with it, you can AE the pirates in Tanaris or near Ratchet; they give rep with Ratchet and Gadgetzan respectively, but there's spillover to the entire Steamwheedle Cartel.

It'll take a lot of kills, though...

I understand that the hat quest now requires hated rep with booty bay, so you'd have to slaughter these guys after repairing your steamwheedle rep

September 9 News

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Boat crews have returned, for the time being. Hopefully, I want them to stick around this time. I always thought that they added a nice touch to the game. I don't care if they can or can't sell anything, but more that they are there.

In what I think is a good move, Blizzard has removed all their previous "Realm First" titles. Considering before the great pains Blizzard has gone to, to ensure that folks go through their content at their desired pace, giving an award for blowing through it as fast as possible seems counter-productive.

Some folks favorite whipping post, Racials, are also going to see some major changes come WotLK.

In an interesting change, the chance to miss at all is being removed. This is going to make some theorycrafters quite happy.

While Mages in the beta are currently quite happy (and who can blame them) I can't help but feel that this is going to be getting a wee visit from the nerfbat.

What you mean is that the minimum chance to miss is being removed. You still need +hit gear. It's just that now, you can assure yourself of hitting all the time with enough of it. I don't see why it should make theorycrafters happier than anyone else, though.

Also, I don't know what mages on beta you've been talking to, but the class as a whole is a mess on beta right now and Mirror Image's shoddy implementation doesn't help. It randomly teleports you between the images to make it hard to figure out who you are (good!) but this teleportation interrupts whatever spell you're casting (bad!). Not only that, it doesn't scale at all with gear, so what this means is that our effectiveness will slowly decay with better gear since this spell has to be balanced at some gear level, which we won't always be at. It's godawful for raid DPS and way too bursty for balanced PvP. Lastly, the mana pools and spell costs are implemented so badly that the images run out of mana and melee for pathetic amounts near the end of the spell duration.

Looks like orcs are finally getting beaten with the nerfbat. I think 15% is a little low, though; 15% off of a seven second stun (five point Kidney Shot) is only 1.05 seconds... hardly worth it. Maybe increase it to at least 30% and prevent similar effects from stacking? Dunno, just seems like they're going a little overboard with the nerf to Hardiness, though I agree that the move to duration-reduction instead of resistance is a good one overall, especially considering how much the PvP game is based on crowd control.

It's about time they removed the 1% chance to miss for casters, I never understood why physical DPS could reach a state where they couldn't miss, yet casters always had a 1% miss chance no matter how much hit they had. It's a good change IMO.

Because spells can't be dodged, parried or blocked, maybe? They're two different systems.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy the minimum resist chance is going, but I can see why it'd be there.

Yeah, I used to assume that spells had the 1% chance to miss no matter what because there used to be nothing that melee could do about dodge (you could do stuff about parry and block, don't attack from behind, tanks excluded of course). But then that never explained hunters who could get enough hit to never miss, but then, most people know I've pretty much always felt that hunters were overpowered (and yes I have more time logged on hunters than any other classs). So I was OK with it.

As soon as they put expertise in the game so that you could get rid of dodge, the 1% chance to miss should have gone away. At least for the PvE game. Resist, which penetration could get rid of, could have been the dodge mechanic. I've been actively checking in beta to see if they were going to make that a more useful PvE stat. Give more mobs some level of spell resist and make spell penetration a bit more common.

That runs into scaling issues though. Since item level pretty much ups the DPS of a weapon, but doesn't give you as rapid of returns on spell damage for casters. As mentioned they are different systems.

Of course there are systems out there that would allow the DPS of a weapon to affect spell casting power, Mythos actually did that pretty well even though it was more a Diablo style game, but it doesn't look like Blizzard wants to deal with that which is fine.

Stand behind the mob, no parry, no dodge, no block.

edit: You also forget that mobs can have resistance, some higher than CoE removes.

Eh? Mobs have dodged attacks made to their flanks and rear as long as I've been playing.

~Frag

Indeed. This would be why melee DPS value expertise at all. Further, the number of bosses with magic resistance worth mentioning is super small - probably even less than the number of bosses out there with high armor values, which is another factor melee DPS has to factor into their theoretical DPS output which casters can ignore.

Anyway, for caster DPS being able to overcome that extra 1% resist chance is nifty, but not a big deal. DPS levels of casters in raids will be tuned to the same target level, theoretically, if the 1% is there or if its not.

It will be kind of nice, though, for mages to be able to cap out and spellsteal-tank with 100% accuracy on fights like Illidari Council, I suppose =)

AFAIK, hunters can't get 100% hit. There is always that 1% chance to miss. For a PvE, raiding hunter, you are looking for 144HR. Which will take you as close to "can't miss" as you can get. But you can still miss. It's a once in a blue moon chance, but it's still there. I am hit capped, and have seen the occasional miss.

If you take a PvE geared hunter into PvP, they won't miss (other than the chance that you can't get rid of) because they have a lot higher HR than your average pvp geared hunter. Of course, they are going to run into a lot of other problems.

I've got over 100,000 shots at 142+ hit rating in PvE content without a miss, sure it's possible to get that with a 1% miss rate, but very unlikely. You can get rid of the miss chance. So can melee toons. MS warriors using a 2 hander at 142 hit rating+ will never miss (they may see dodges). Dual wielders need more than that but it can be reached (it's generally not worth it, but you can).

I have experienced lag/server issues that have cause a "failed" shot that some damage meters and for a while WWS would report as a miss. But you can hit cap. You could hit cap pre-TBC as well.

If there were really a 1% miss rate you would see it more than once in a blue moon. What you see as once in a blue moon are what I'm pretty sure are communication bugs.

It has been verified many times that miss chance does not have a minimum value; you can eliminate misses completely.

While mobs do have actual resistances, there's been a stat called 'Spell Penetration' designed to counteract this specifically for a very long time; Expertise only got implemented with patch 2.3.0. As has already been said, mobs can dodge attacks made from behind them. (Players, however, cannot.)


In other news...
PvE-to-PvP transfers are now allowed.

From www.worldofwarcraft.com:

There is a 1% miss for spells no matter how much spell hit you have. This is a known fact. You can achieve 100% hit with physical DPS, the best spell casters can reach is 99% no matter how much spell hit they stack.

I am not sure what your point is. That's exactly what I said.

Spell "misses" are not called "misses", they're called "resists", even when it is the mechanic Spell Hit affects. Spell Penetration affects increased resistance. I specifically said that misses can be eliminated.

Regardless, prior to 2.3.0, you could not achieve 100% hit on raid bosses due to the dodge mechanic. As Gnollguy said, this is probably the reason why spells had a minimum 1% resist chance (and it is probably also why spells had a base miss chance of 17% on bosses).

Now I am confused. (Actually I am frequently confused, but now more so than normal.) I looked up miss chance on wowwiki. Unfortunately for some reason I can't insert the link, but the URL is:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Miss

According to the article: "Player/Mob vs Player When a player or mob attacks a player, the base miss rate is 5%. For each point of the defender's defense skill over the attacker's attack rating, the base miss rate increases by 0.04%. For each point of the attacker's attack rating over the defender's defense skill, the base miss rate decreases by 0.02%."

If the information is correct as well as my math, then assuming a defender's defense skill of 350, the attacker (using a single weapon) would need an attack rating of 700 to never miss: 350 + (5/0.02). How do hit rating and/or expertise or anything else affect attack rating?

No they can not with casting. There is always a chance to miss with a spell. Yes it's called resist, but neither CoE nor Penetration will do anything to make it so you will hit 100% of the time with a spell.

You are confusing weapon skill with hit rating. Both affect your chance to hit. In this case, it's Defense skill 350 vs. the attacker's weapon skill, usually also 350. Since the skills are equal, the chance to miss is still 5%, which is counteracted by hit rating, since there are no longer ways to raise weaponskill.

To summarize what's been said, but has sometimes not always been clear:

Spells (currently) have a minimum 1% "miss" rate, which comes up as a "resist". Nothing you can do about this.

Melee can eliminate "miss" completely, but they will still see dodge.

Hunters can eliminate "miss" completely (this was where the discussion originally started).

So, since melee can always see a dodge, the argument was that 1% miss for casters was the equivalent. So, why can hunters guarantee 100% hit rate?

Pre 2.3 the only classes that could make all hits actually land in PvE content was a hunter if they got to 142+ hit rating (pre TBC it was 9% hit as well but hit rating wasn't around). Melee could cap hit rating but would still have to deal with dodge/parry/block, it took 142+ hit rating to make sure special attacks never missed and for white hits for someone using a 2 hander or a 1H + shield. For DW toons you needed to overcome an additional 15% miss rate (you are 9% at 142 hit rating, but DW has a 24% miss rate for white attacks you you needed to get to 24% which is 15% more than 9%) You could remove block/parry by being on the back 180 degree arc of the mob.

Of course the mob would still dodge you, raid bosses at around 8%. 2.3 introduced expertise (or was it 2.2 and 2.3 just put in enough gear so you could get enough of the stat, anyway...). Since expertise reduces a mobs chance to dodge or parry you getting enough of that (I don't remember how much rating, just whatever it takes to get to 8% though I understand some mobs dodge better than others but most are 8%). So in 2.3 melee toons could also make all hits land if they had enough expertise to remove dodge and were attacking from behind. If they had enough to remove parries (16.5% I think) they could attack from the front but they would still have to deal with blocks.

Casters have always had a 1% base miss chance. They can get to 99% hit and they can remove resist via curse of shadow/elements (now rolled into one curse but it used to be two for the various schools) or spell penetration on the handful of mobs that have more resist than what the curses remove. So casters always had 1% chance to see "resist" pop up no matter what. Just like pre 2.3 melee had an 8% chance to see "dodge" pop up on an attack. As mentioned only hunters could see a damage number 100% of the time, though the pet would have the same miss/dodge issues so I guess if you count pets as part of the hunter they couldn't do it either, of course if you count the pet, this change to remove the 1% base miss means that hunters will become the only class that can't do it now. The pet will share the hunters hit chance but from what I can tell they do not share expertise from the hunter so dodges will still happen for the pet.

Spell misses count as misses in the last beta build now, FYI. There was a time pre TBC where they showed up different from an actual resist in the combat log as well. That was a while ago though. So we are back to casters being able to see if it was a miss or a resist again.



What you quoted was for Player vs Player or a Mob attacking a player. The rest of the thread has been talking about a player vs a mob, which follows slightly different rules than player vs player (actually it doesn't but some of the numbers are fixed whereas PvP or MvP you have more variables). Basically it's saying it's a 5% vs even level (which is the same for melee vs an even level mob) and that various skills change that. But a 350 weapon skill vs a 350 defense is 5% miss. You'll need enough hit rating to get to 5%. Attack rating in that article refers to weapon skill. Unless something else changed or I misread.

I'm well aware there's a minimum resist chance (and that it's getting removed in WotLK). What I was talking about was that there's no minimum miss chance, which is why I clarified that I was talking about misses and not resists.

GG, 2.3 introduced Expertise, 2.4 introduced enough Expertise to remove Parry from the attack table for tanks (and the cap there is 13.75% according to reports from EJ).

It is still a miss. It is not a resist. Blizzard has very specifically stated this on its page about how spells work that there is always a 1% miss, even Blizzard does not call it a resist. At one time, the game listed two types of resist for spells, white and yellow. White was a miss, but was labelled as resist. Yellow was an actual resist roll that the mob made and truely resisted the spell. Just because it doesn't say miss, doesn't mean it's not a miss.

Here's links about how spell casting works:

Spell Hit

Yes I was asking about PvP specifically, where I thought weapon skill did not apply. So I am still confused, and still wondering why the wowwiki miss formula did not include a factor for the attacker's +hit.

As far as I'm aware, weapon skill doesn't affect PvP at all, nor does Defense (though avoidance gains through Defense skill do affect PvP.) But then, I always go pound on some hapless Servant in Blasted Lands if I'm not at 350 anyway.

Blizzard DOES call it a resist. There's no 'miss' on spells in-game. For whatever reason, they decided to call it 'resist' rather than 'miss'. Yes, for all intents and purposes, it's the same as a miss for a physical attack (with the exception that you can't get below 1% with spells). It is still not CALLED miss.
Why you insist on repeating this ad nauseam I do not understand. This will be my last post on this subject.


I believe weapon skill actually does play a part in PvP -- something to do with lowering your crit chance, I think? I haven't researched it, I simply stumbled across an article on it a few months back.

In the beta, spell resists are now called misses.



Which mobs could do even with 0% resistance, due to the presence of partial resists (The caster equivalent of glancing blows).

September 16 News

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Blizzard has announced Wrath of the Lich King's release date! It's going to be Nov 13, 2008. You still have a bit of time to get whatever preparations you are planning out of the way, though!

For those not in the beta, you can get a taste of it as Patch 3.0.2 is live on the PTR's!

There is a ton of data out there, pretty much everywhere you go is inundated with news from the Beta, or Patch 3.0.2 being on the PTR's. Due to the kindess of one of our fellow Lurkers, a Beta Key did arrive in my email box! So I've been wandering around the Death Knight starting area, getting a feel for the Phasing technology I mentioned a few news posts back. I won't go too much into it, but it is really making me feel like I'm a useful, integral part of the storyline that is the DK starting zone. Since I'm very, veyr fond of lore, this is a fantastic step, I feel.I'd highly recommend everyone start up a Death Knight and play through the starting zone at some point, for some amazing storyline.

September 23 News

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Groups of Words starts us out today with some thoughts on things that are often close to Lurkers hearts, but tend to be a rarity in Blizzard's ranks. A CM who likes to talk about the reasoning behind the developing that's going on. GhostCrawler is pretty much any theorycrafter's best friend, and she's often got a lot to say. Sadly, what she has to say is often lost in the drek of the official fora, but her posts by themselves are good reads.

I've occasionally thought about a marathon raid day, and have even led a few marathon raids pre-TBC myself. This crew breaks it down though, as to how long it'd take to go from Kara to victory over Kil'Jaeden. They end up with a back end estimate of 25 hours. The folks in the comments point out that it'd actually be done faster than that, as a group that can clear Sunwell (especially in a 1 shot of the bosses) isn't going to need an hour for Gruul.

While it started out as my announcement post on the release date of Wrath of the Lich King,it has turned into a discussion on the future of WoW, and where it's heading. What kind of gas it's got left in the tank, who's left to fight, that sort of thing.

Ghostcrawler is a 'she', actually.

Hm, that's what I get for doing this really, really late at night.

New beta patch being loaded right now.

Tigole listed some tidbits on it here, but mostly vague.

The awesomeness of his tidbits was this one:


What a great patch note =)