Windows 7 RC 1

2009-05-05 at 17:59:02 | In World of Warcraft | Leave a Comment

So, these last few days I have been running RC 1, which seems more polished and stable than the beta (well, I guess that is the point of having a beta versus a release candidate :D )

What can I say? My WoW Problems are completely gone.

So now I am free to love Windows 7 as it deserves ;)

<3

My name is Legion, and we bring destruction and death!

2009-04-13 at 13:56:15 | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

“My name is Legion, for we are many spirits inside of one
To build a land of chaos, brought forth from the Abyss”

Legion, HammerFall

Farclip & Friends: Using CVars to tweak the WoW graphics engine!

2009-01-21 at 15:26:34 | In Guides, World of Warcraft | Leave a Comment
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WoW’s graphics engine can be tweaked by setting a multitude of Variables from inside WoW – some provide features you can not access using the standard interface, and some simply increase the range of what you can do in the standard interface.

The two main methods for changing the CVars are either simply typing something like “/console characterAmbient 1″ or adding a line “SET characterAmbient 1″ to your config.wtf (if you ever really screw something up, simply delete your config.wtf to reset everything to default).

For an overview of CVars have a look over at WoW Wiki

Below is a list of more (or less) interesting tweaks to your graphics engine:
Note: Every command listed below is tested by myself, both in what it does and what its limits are. However, I may be wrong :D (i.e. I might simply be to stupid to set the cameradistancemaxfactor to 3.4 as some people suggest – but I simply do not get any difference to setting it to 3.0)

characterambient 0 – 1: Toggles between giving extra lighting to characters. This is primarily personal preference.
extshadowquality 0 – 4: Changes the shadow detail. I like setting this to 0 simply because all those shadows really annoy me at times ;) .
skycloudlod 0 – 3: Changes the level of detail of the clouds. This is only really visible while travelling with a flying mount.

farclip 1 – ~1600: Extends your viewdistance, the hard cap seems to be slightly below 1600. At least for me there was no need to set farclipoverride to 1, although wowwiki suggests that this might make a difference.
horizonfarclip 1 – ~7000: Extends the distance in which prominent features are drawn (foggy hills mostly)

groundeffectdensity 16 – 256: Changes the amount of clutter on the ground (i.e. grass, little crystal fragments, whatevers). Having a high value here is really pretty ;)
groundeffectdist 0 – 140: The distance in which the clutter is drawn on the ground. 0 to disable (this improves visibility of herbs, gnomes, etc)

cameradistancemax 0 – 30: cameradistancemax * cameradistancemaxfactor is the maximum distance you can scroll out with the camera. The absolut maximum is therefore 30 * 3 = 90.
cameradistancemaxfactor 0 – 3: cameradistancemax * cameradistancemaxfactor is the maximum distance you can scroll out with the camera. The absolut maximum is therefore 30 * 3 = 90.

Personally, I have put everything of those on max, except for shadowquality which is at 0 – But then again I figure my PC is rather acceptable, so your mileage will vary ;)

World of Warcraft & Windows 7 Beta 1

2009-01-19 at 15:08:08 | In World of Warcraft | 5 Comments

Well I suppose it is quite obvious from the title already: I got my hands on the Windows 7 beta.
Yay.
Or something.

The “why” I would choose to actually run Windows 7 outside a VM are rather annoying, so let’s just skip over that…

The general impression with regards to World of Warcraft up to now actually is rather, well, disconcerting. Aside from a minor glitch with the funky all new (and otherwise really nice!) taskbar which shows itself by simply not reacting to right-clicks on the WoW icon and not stacking WoW with the button used to start it (for more information about the new taskbar google for it, it has been discussed in length already), there actually is just one more problem.

Does not sound to bad, right?

Well… Except that the other problem is… like… crashing the whole pc up to the point that you have to pull the plug.

Oops.

It seems WoW delves into some kernel function that never returns!

P.S.: You know IE 8 is part of Windows 7, right? Well, according to wordpress the compat mode seems to work rather well…

3.0: Spirit vs Int!

2008-12-12 at 11:27:04 | In Guides, World of Warcraft | 3 Comments
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Ok, first off: None of the pages above have been correctly updated for lvl 80 – yet!

However, due to my first raiding adventures at 80 (yeah, naxx is a joke…) I began to wonder how intellect w/ all the shiny new buffs compares to intellect, espacially as my intellect value was still comparatively low.

The first hurdle is just finding out, what the formula is at 80. However, Ratingbuster has been updated long since (thanks Whitetooth!), so after a bit of browsing through their files, the formula becomes obvious:
(0.001 + spi * 0.005575 * sqrt(int))*5
Since we are not interested in modularity or other levels than 80, we can simplify this with a clear conscience:
0.005 + spi * 0.027875 * sqrt(int)
Another simplification we can make is dropping the leading 0.005, since we really do not care about the total value, but just the increase one point of either spirit or intellect will give us.
spi * 0.027875 * sqrt(int)
This is just about one tenth of what we need though, since especially intellect gains most of its value through correlated effects like replenishment or critical strikes that trigger serendipity or holy conc. Continue reading 3.0: Spirit vs Int!…

Glyph of Spirit of Redemption

2008-09-20 at 21:26:11 | In World of Warcraft | 5 Comments
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Ok, while looking up how inscription might perform as a raiding profession (seems rather swell currently) I ran over the following glyph:

Glyph of Spirit of Redemption – All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 20 sec.

Do not understand me wrong, I expect this to either get nerfed or already have been nerfed / removed from the game, etc. by the time you are reading this.

However, let us just assume this glyph makes it into the game… What do you think about the following tactic:

“Ok, Priest runs in, dies, then Boss X gets MDed by our pretty hunter to the MT…”

There is a very simple assumption in this: After the first time (you only got 15 sec) you simply need to cast an expected 5 casts per 20 seconds to keep the spirit up forever. Since the spirit never runs OOM or dies in an AE, quite an interesting idea, huh?

However, these kind of statistics can have a problem: The thing simply might not want to procc… So, assuming no special cooldown or anything like it, let us simply calculate the chance that we are going down casting flash heals.

Currently a flash heal takes Dionadar 1.27 seconds (haste ftw!) – this is not totally overblown, since there would be no need to look at mana efficiency.

During the first 15 seconds, I will therefore be able to get 11.81 casts on the go. However, due to lag/etc I will only assume 10 casts. Since each cast has a 1 – 0.2 = 0.8 chance to not procc the gem, there is a 1 – 0.8^10 = 0.8926 (almost 90%) chance that the 20 seconds will proc. (If the 11th cast also gets squeezed out, the chance would be 91.41%, so this does not even make a big difference)

Now, the chance that somebody makes a stupid mistake ruining everything is surely a lot higher on a progression night than 10%, so this is pretty acceptable!

If you managed to take that initial 15 second hurdle, there is always at least 20 seconds time left to get the next procc of. (Funny enough, you can expect a lot higher time, since it says “increases duration”, so if it proccs 3 times in a row right in the beginning, you already got the buff to more than a whole minute…) The amount of flash heals – or CoHs – you could get of with the speed up that currently is about 281 haste, is now 15.75:

Chance to procc another 20 seconds with
14 casts: 95.60%
15 casts: 96.48%

Soooo, in conclusion: The chance that you will be able to keep this up for almost 10 minutes is at least:
slow casting variant: 0.8926 * 0.9560 ^ 29 = 24.22%
fast casting variant: 0.9141 * 0.9648 ^ 29 = 32.35%

Since we can assume you brought at least one warlock or one druid and since the GCD is pushed down to 1.27 seconds as well – There is a pretty damn good chance you will keep spamming the new and shiny intelligent CoH on 6 targets through the whole damn fight!!

Interesting Observation

2008-09-19 at 08:13:14 | In World of Warcraft | Leave a Comment
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While playing around on the PTR, I noticed something quite interesting:

My GHeals were hitting harder than they do on live!

Now, since I was wearing the exact same gear (heck, where should I have gotten any different from?!) me doing 6k hits using only elixirs & a gold fish got me thinking… (Well, first it got me doublechecking what I can do on live ^^) And yes, obviously I was doing about 100-200 points more than I should be.

I can already hear people moaning “Oh, 150 healing, BIG DEAL….” – but first, 150 plusheal IS a big deal and second, there is a very interesting reason for it:

Spiritual Guidance.

Yup, that kind-of-crappy spirit booster from times, where spirit was absolutely useless. On live it grants you up to 25% of your total spirit in “spell damage and healing”. On the PTR (and in the beta, I assume) it does the same, but grants spell power.

Where is the difference you might ask?
Doing damage, there is none. But while healing spell power is granted a 1.88 coefficient over the old plusheal.

Ergo Spiritual Guidance accidentially got buffed by 88%!

And yeah, suuuuuuuuuure disc priests are going to be the best single target healers….

WotLK: Build 8926 – Wait, did they actually look at priests?

2008-09-12 at 13:44:20 | In World of Warcraft | Leave a Comment
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Oookay, we actually did get interesting changes this time!

HOLY

Improved Holy Concencentration
Nerfbat hits for 7% mana and 30% spell haste.
Well, who did not see that one coming…
The new version now says:

Improved Holy Concentration now increases the chance you’ll enter Holy Concentration by 1/2/3% (down from 4/7/10%) and also increases your spell haste by 10/20/30% (down from 20/40/60%) on your next (down from “three next”) Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Binding Heal spells after you gain Holy Concentration. Lasts 20 sec.

Test of Faith
Nerfbat hits for 9% healing and 4% crit
Whatever, Test of Faith was never that great anyway:

Test of Faith now increases healing by 2/4/6% (down from 5/10/15%) and spell critical effect chance by 2/4/6 (down from 4/7/10%) on friendly targets at or below 50% health

Serendipity
Serendipity actually got a buff – albeit a really small and hidden one. The talent is now similar to the 2 pieces tier 5 set bonus, which I really like on live.

Serendipity now refunds 8/17/25% (Down from 20/40/60%) of mana cost on overheal. It doesn’t require you to overheal the target for more than 50% anymore

Empowered healing
This change is actually quite irritating, considering that Disc is supposed to be the single-HPS tree… But whatever, I’ll take the gifts I get…

Empowered healing changed to – Your Greater Heal spell gains an additional 8/16/24/32% (up from 2/4/6/8%) and your Flash Heal and Binding Heal gain an additional 4/8/12/16% (up from 1/2/3/4%) of your bonus healing effects.

DISC

Twin Disciplines
Nerfbat hits for 5% Healing.
Yeah, they actually changed Twin Disciplines to work on instant casts only… This is just… I do not know… irritating?
It will probably really depend upon how much use CoH gets in Wrath (they DO want to reduce the amount of raid damage, remember? Thats why everyone got new AoE heals – because it is not supposed to matter at all… or something…) if this talent retains any kind of usefulness.

Twin Disciplines now only affects instant spells.

CONCLUSION

It seems the LHC did not destroy the world, but maybe a miniature black hole appeared on a blizzard conference table and sucked up all the coke there was, thus leaving the class designers caffeine starved, which in turn created such a great idea as to proclaim the discipline tree the single target HPS tree and yet improve Holys HPS way beyond what a disc priest can ever hope to achieve…

Whatever happened, Holy Priests got to trade Mana Regen (a lot) against Plus Healing (also a lot), so in the end, we just have to be even more biased towards spirit/mp5 instead of +spell power, so there should not be such a big problem.

Scaling however just killed our pretty Disc Raiders – Currently, there is NO WAY they can hope to match the 40% Empowered Healing.

None.

WotLK: Shiny new toy!

2008-09-10 at 22:11:20 | In World of Warcraft | 2 Comments
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There you have it!

Mind Flay is getting an upgraded beam graphic!

Lonely Dwarf Priest Searching for Love…

2008-08-25 at 09:36:13 | In World of Warcraft | Leave a Comment
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… from Blizzard that is, of course ;)

Now, it is not as if the priest currently is, or probably will be a class that needs love insofar as that we are underpowered – heck no!

My little problem is pretty simple: All other healing classes are getting a lot more versatile and capable of filling other classes roles (which is something that blizzard has stated is being done intentionally), which also means they are getting a lot of cool, shiny, new toys. Priests however, already are capable of filling any role more or less easily – meaning, we get nothing.

Yeah, there is Divine Hymn and the Guardian Angel – but heck, Pallys actually get an AE Heal! We get Improved Death v. 2…

BUT!
Lightwell gets another pass!

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