~chron

Today Blizzard posted the rogue Q&A. They’ve all been pretty marginal since the shaman one, I suppose because shaman are getting a lot of interesting changes this patch so there was more immediate stuff to talk about. Rogues are in a good place for both PvE and PvP, so a lot of the answers were along the lines of “yep it’s fine bro, no we’re not changing that”. Also, are people really still complaining about “stunlocks”?

Anyway, yeah, it’s all pretty bland. The only thing I couldn’t believe was that it seems like they’re happy with 90% cloak:

Q. Cloak of Shadows is an incredible ability; it helps rogues avoid most incoming spell damage and effects. However, how do we feel this ability stacks up versus classes that possess both melee and spell damaging abilities? Do we still feel the 90% avoidance is sufficient to aid Rogues in PvP encounters against spell casters and hybrids?

A: It’s meant as a tool that’s part of a toolkit, not an I-win button. It’s sufficient, and extending it to 100% would make rogues largely immune to interesting PvE effects they shouldn’t be (e.g. Mimiron’s Shock Blast).

It’s not supposed to be an I WIN button except that 94% (or whatever) of the time it is, and 6% of the time it randomly fails and you die. I’m usually fighting to maintain some level of RNG to keep things interesting, but this is just too stupid. I have faith they’ll eventually come around like they did with heartbeat sap resists and other stupid crap.

It’s a shitty answer to the question anyway, which explicitly mentions PvP and hybrid damage.

STILL LOOKING FORWARD TO AXES THOUGH GUYS.

PS. Let me cloak scourge strikes if you’re not going to let me mitigate their damage!

EDIT: Now with extra linebreaks so you can actually read it in my awful layout.

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.

Oh, hey. It’s been a while!

I always seem to neglect the blog when I’m on holiday, there’s too many other fascinating things to occupy me, such as bear-style hibernation and re-released Lucasarts adventure games.

Arena-land has been busy as always. We’re deep into season six now, and Azuba and I are gradually climbing the ladder in an attempt to de-throne our realm’s current #1, a cleverly named horde-side DK/Druid team. I think they might be sitting on their rating at the moment, since they haven’t moved from 2527 in quite some time. At least we’ve built up a lead over our closest alliance competitors, Dues’ holy/unholy team.

I’ve been tempted to start writing a rogue/shaman strategy guide since over the last few weeks there have been a phenomenal number of “how do I shot it” posts on AJ about the comp. I’m no expert by any means, but it’s a very underplayed comp, and the dearth of reference material is unfortunate to say the least. A lot of the (primarly PvE-focused) rogue blogs I follow have also mentioned arena in some capacity, and It’d be nice to have something introductory to be able to point people to. Having played close to a thousand 2s games this season, we’ve picked up a few leet tricks too.

Actually nah, I’m pretty bad, but I couldn’t think of a better excuse for linking that picture.

We’ve also been playing RLS a bit, up to about 2330. Partly because Azuba was interested in playing elemental more seriously (it’s been his PvE mainspec for some time) and partly because our warlock only logs on about 10% of the time, we started a second team with a discipline priest to play “lightning RMP“¹, with some success. We were using a second charter for it at the beginning, just in case it turned out to be an awful comp, we didn’t want to tank the rating too much. Besides that, we also thought it would be quite amusing to fill up the Eldre’Thalas 3v3 ladder with team names of the form “Azuba is %s”, hopefully getting sillier and more elaborate each time like a kind of space goat Chuck Norris.

ANYWAY. The comp is actually really fun, and plays a fair bit like RMP does. Although a shaman doesn’t have the control of a frost mage (they do have some), they bring a lot of other defensive options to the table like shocks, grounds, and off-heals. Their DPS isn’t as reliant on freeze effects either, which gives you an edge killing hard-to-snare classes like druids or paladins. And you can’t forget lolthunderstorm off BEM!

And just like with a destruction warlock, you can get some fantastic 100-0 gibs if the shaman is left alone to freecast.

Eventually we got bored of switching teams twice a week and losing our PR (turns out a 2400 3s team is worth a lot of points) so we have merged the two teams into the latest charter, and we’re currently working on grinding Inamorata’s PR up on that team.

My gear is almost done now; just gloves next week and then throwing weapons the week after, then I’ll finally be able to start saving for some combat weapons. Possibly even axes, depending on when the season-end announcement happens.

Apart from that: I’ve been duelling a lot of rogues (Garotte is not as good an opener as you think, Splakken), accumulating fans, and fighting with people on the realm forums about whether PvE is harder than PvP. My priest is still 74, but I did grind inscription at least!

¹ There’s probably a better name for disc/rogue/elemental. Depending on how fixed you consider the ordering rules, you can abbreviate it as RPS!

Blizzard EU has a page up about the regionals, complete with videos (I think they’re adding more over time) and an image gallery. Even though it’s an EU page it seems to have NA vids as well.

If you didn’t catch the games at MLG Columbus they also have a VOD section uploaded now with all the games included.

Also I just noticed this Q&A from the faction change thread:

Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A. No. Players will only be able to switch to a race of the opposite faction.

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

Q. Will I be able to switch back to my original faction but a different race?
A. No. You will only be able to switch back to your originally chosen race.

Sigh. So unless everyone wants to mass-reroll horde with me I guess I’m stuck with a Night Elf for now.

Did a Reckoning 2s graph again today, figured I’d share: