It’s been ages since I’ve done any codegolf, so when I stumbled across Gizzmo’s blog post about the Wowhead talent calculator URL algorithm, I figured it might be fun to dust off the old “text editor” and see how it goes.

So, the proposal: given a variable c which contains a World of Warcraft class name (in lower case) and a variable i which contains the talent string in blizzard format, print the wowhead-ified URL to standard output. Note that while you can simply use the blizzard calculator strings directly on Wowhead, that wouldn’t be very interesting code ;]

Mine’s ruby, as usual. Here’s what I’ve came up with so far:

i='30530310500210252210320100000500000000000000000000000005320232030002120000000000000'
c='rogue'

t=0xa031812e3becf8e6cadb9.to_s(7).split(//).map{|v|v.to_i+25}
k='0zMcmVokRsaqbdrfwihuGINALpTjnyxtgevElBCDFHJKOPQSUWXYZ123456789'
d=%w(id er ge in st ue an ck or ht).index(c[-2,2])*3
r=k[d,1]+t[d,3].map{|e|i.slice!(0,e)}.map{|x|x.gsub(/0+$/,'').scan(/(.)(.)?/
).map{|a,b|k[a.to_i*6+b.to_i,1]}*''+(x[/0+$/]?'Z':'')}.join.gsub(/Z+$/,'')
puts'http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#'+r

The r and t variables aren’t strictly necessary (they are only used once each) but that line was getting long enough already, I’d give my editor an aneurism. In case it isn’t obvious, the t= line represents the sizes of the talent trees (since classes have different numbers of talents), the d= line represents the class indices (by the last two characters of each class name since if you do it from the front you need 4 to be unique, I blame warlocks) and the k= line is wowhead’s crazy encoding constant.

So the 3.2 patch notes are massive and crazy and I’m not going to do a whole list of everything exciting because there’s way too much good stuff and half of it will probably change between now and the PTR anyway.

Interesting times though!

Mostly it’s just minor stat buffs. The weirdest change is alchemy which is losing its arena-usable healing or mana potion and gaining an arena-usable 1 hour flask (hopefully the mats are easy) which only works for alchemists and increases your spellpower, ap, or strength. Yay farming?

EDIT: Nevermind, the new flask is not consumable, I’m bad.

Also the availability of new heirloom chests from the Argent Tournament means I guess I’ll have to start doing those awful dailies on at least one character. Yay farming?

Sidenote: if you’ve been selling your JC tokens now is probably a good time to start saving, since they’re going to be used to buy the new patterns. They haven’t said how many you’ll need but I’m guessing it’ll be at least as many as the current meta patterns. Yay farming?

(and they’re buffing pyro rocket damage, wheee)

Notice the huge spike of games which ended after 20k damage (roughly a single health bar for each of us) where presumably some serious CC chain happened right off the bat or (more likely) the rogue got opened on out of LOS and died in two globals. Quite a lot of the games Azuba dies in are games like this, most often from hard-to-peel cleave teams like rogue/dk/healer that blow cooldowns to get a kill at the start.

Protip: don’t ask Ina about that one game where he took 220000 damage or you’re liable to be death coiled. Yes, it was double melee.

Here’s the same thing for wins instead of losses:

Note that we win a huge amount of games in which our warlock is left alone. I don’t think that will surprise anybody! Note also that there are games where our warlock gets ridiculously trained and we still win, like this – Same cleave as before, check the ret’s damage! Apparently we can also win games where I get crapped on all match, like this double caster priest on RoV.

You can’t see it from the graph, but there’s also wins where nobody takes any damage, usually when some 2k cleave champion warrior charges behind a Nagrand pillar, trinkets KS and dies in a dismantle duration to tricks conflag lava burst.

Thinking about it, though, the number of respecs doesn’t tell you enough by itself. It’s a function of how rich you are, how much you raid, how long you’ve been playing, and whether or not you have dual spec, as well as how much you like experimenting (which I guess is what I really wanted to measure). Still, it’s more interesting than the “emblems of conquest looted vs 3v3 rating” graph I did along with it.

My rogue is at 71 respecs currently.

There’s coverage of the various days all over the place including Gameriot (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), Gotfrag (Saturday, Sunday) and WowInsider (Saturday). As usual, Radikal has some entertaining opinions.

I’m not sure you can take anything meaningful from the results regarding class balance since it’s a really tiny sample size. Still: buff paladins. Payce is a total beast and their team did do pretty well, but I don’t want to have to play some horrible PHD team to be successful. It’s worse than cleave, really.

Unrelated: is Paladin/DK supposed to beat Shaman/Ret? That matchup makes me rage more than Rogue/Shaman vs Warrior/Druid.

¹ I’ve decided my favourite RLS mirror strat is go on the rogue, because then instead of the game being decided based on which rogue can kill a warlock faster, it’s mostly decided by how well your shaman can lock down (see what I did there) an opposing warlock and avoid CC as well as how quick your bloodlusted warlock can backdraft chaos bolt somebody into oblivion. And my shaman/warlock will crap all over yours :]

Our match history is a total rollercoaster of 18 minute ret/druid games and queueing into hard counters six games in a row. Still, we persisted, and these glowing pieces of (virtual) pointy metal represent the fruits of our labor:

That wasn’t the only milestone we hit last night, either. Inamorata took some time out of his busy schedule crushing rets in trade chat to carry our RLS to 2216, currently realm #1. It’s also already worth way more points per week than our 2v2 is, whee rating curve rebalancing.

Massive thanks to Azuba for being an absolutely fantastic teammate and rising above his troubled class and our somewhat questionable comp by basically outplaying the shit out of everybody. If this was a Steam game there’d be a series of achievements for HoJs grounded and you’d have all of them! <3

I don’t have a 5s at the moment, but Arena Master is looking more doable by the day. Fifty (oblig) whole nerd points, that’s hard to pass up.

PS: No, I’m not going to stop calling it BoP.

• Two Bads Make a Good, Holy/Prot Paladin + Unholy DK
• The Fact of Life, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue
• Azuba is Uber, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue + Destruction Warlock

Note the subtle omission of my paladin’s 3s, keep grindin’ that gear Milkduds. Anyway.

Some general comments:

• RoL is officially my worst map, though I’m certainly still not fond of RoV, especially with aggressive priests¹.
• My rogue does ~80% of the damage of a death knight these days, and isn’t too far off with rets and warriors either.
• Fact’s mage ratio is low because mages only ever play in double dps and double dps is horrible. Mostly because of glaring rogue and shaman survivability issues ;)
• The counter for shaman is apparently better shaman. Hi2u grounding fakecast metagame?
• Druids are the most annoying healer for all three teams, RoV mana burn notwithstanding.
• Warriors are the most difficult melee to peel in 3s.
• Our RLS is 80% win versus RMP. Some of those were probably at low ratings, I guess.
• 16k Chaos Bolts through Pain Suppression are balanced.

It’s harder to get a good sample size for 3s because of the enormous variety of compositions. And by variety, I mean “which healer would you like with your two melee?” Still, you can see some interesting trends.

If you’re an E’T armory stalker like me you might also enjoy reports for Stanso’s Rogue/Priest, Endarl’s Rogue/Priest (oh look, 70% win ratio on RoV), and Balandil’s Rogue/DK (not even kidding).

¹ Which is exactly all of them these days, thanks for nothing Hydra 5.

There once was a death knight called Andy
Whose cleave team was going just dandy
and Inamorata
the warlock pinata
was quite clearly filled up with candy!

As a bonus, since we’re talking about warlocks:

The self-proclaimed warlock from hell
once tried to escape with a spell
but his portal was still
on a very steep hill
and so; cursing loudly, he fel.

Don’t get me wrong, RLS is ridiculously good fun. Just not as fun as limericks :]