I would be in favor of this change myself, despite the valid concerns outed during the show.

Priests, for example, have spells such as ‘lesser heal’ and ‘heal’ which are abandoned down the leveling path as they are replaced by flash heal and greater heal. While both are ‘okay’ spells this change could reintroduce lesser heal and heal which could cover up for our lack of downranking. While I wouldn’t blame it entirely on our lack of downranking, the removal of this mechanic is one of the major reasons holy priests lost so much ground as tankhealers.

Furthermore, while leveling, the whole rank-thing reveals oddities. For example some spells are our “less efficient but faster heal” (ie: flash heal). However the new rank of FHeal you just learned after a ding could outperform the ’slow but powerfull and effective’ (Greater) Heal. Looking at the different ranks of the spells, they all seem to scale in a more or less comparable way and it is only these jumps in performance as a result from the ranks that gives some less intuitive intermediate behavior.
By making them scale with each level they eliminate this odd behavior which should yield a more intuitive learning system while leveling. Your experience with spell X at lvl 40 is probably going to help you still at lvl 80.
Also, it removes the concept of ranks which could simplify some stuff. No downranking penalty, no ‘rank feature’, no rank bug on dual specs. From personal experience by writing my own spell performance calculator, the rank concept really makes it a lot more complex. Removing this could actually factor out a lot of code that could ease the maintenance.

The hunters and priests shows just came together from people we’ve heard of in the community and their input. By all means, if there’s enough support for a class we’ll create one. We just don’t want to make a “round table” that’s just us and a few uninformed guildies. It doesn’t benefit anyone really.

So yeah, if there’s one you’d like to see made, forward suggestions to RAIDWARNINGPODCAST@GMAIL.COM and let us know the class and maybe a few key members of the community we can contact.

F*** MAGES!!!

I really think it’s too bad you are disappointed on the Shadow part. I enjoyed the part and I feel I learned from it. But I’ll admit that is ‘coming from a healer’ as Shadow was little more than vacation trip for me. I don’t think the podcast was detaied in exact math terms per se, but that is hardly the goal of a podcast IMO. If I need the exact numbers, I can go to EJ or Shadowpriest.com, knowing both were mentioned. Podcasts are capable of letting people speak and get their vision across far better than a blogpost can but it does risk trailing into a debate that may be considered ‘less crucial’ to the listeners.
I’m very pleased that Raidwarning has asked them questions regarding their view on things because it is, perhaps, the single one thing I find hard to obtain on the net. Numbers are far easier to get across on a post than such things and to have this open discussion from such a cast… just wow!

Ah well! I’ll just sip another beer and listen to it again when drunk. Knowing this crew, I’m bound to find deeper meanings and messages sent to the drunken mind.

You can make a theoretical argument too where having 8000 spellpower and 0 crit and haste would be better, but it’d never happen in game; and since everyone has easy access to 245+ gear now, pretty much everyone will have a decent balance. The talk of “haste cap,” which would never happen on a spriest (during bloodlust and other haste buffs that’d cap Mind Blast you go to pure Mind Flay), and the talk of latency, really have no place in the discussion. The “sliding scale” will never tip in the direction of crit with any “real” gear set. It’s overcomplicating things and planting weird ideas in the heads of the kind of newbie shadow priest who might benefit from listening to the podcast.

As a side note on my second listen, the talk of Mind Sear being a “trash padder” is nonsense. It’s an absolutely amazing tool for a number of bosses. Glyph of Dispersion gets a little lip service but the spell itself is disparaged multiple times in the podcast when the fact is skilled usage of it on bosses like Festergut, Sindrigosa, and Lich King can lead to sizable DPS increases, to say nothing of the additional defensive allotments.

If I check the crew’s answer on that question at 7:20 – “General numbers from Shadowpriest.com and EJ read that Spellpower pretty much equals Haste although it slightly depends on how much haste and spellpower you have, so it’s very possible that is has more benefits than crit”. Then I can’t help feeling it’s in line with your numbers: “derived from Simcraft, currently approximate crit as worth .88 spellpower and haste as about .98 spellpower per point of rating”

What part am I missing? I’m no pro on Shadow so if I’m not seeing it.. it’s probably because I’m missing something (apart from common sense, but that’s off topic ). You seem to know this stuff quite well!

shadowpriest.com and elitistjerks.com’s scaling factors, derived from Simcraft, currently approximate crit as worth .88 spellpower and haste as about .98 spellpower per point of rating for an “average” priest. The most recent version of Simcraft shows for my priest, who is geared in majority 264 with a couple 277s and 251s, haste as .89 and crit at .78 spellpower. You can of course upload your own profile in and get personalized numbers. The point is, on average, haste is approximately 10-15% better than crit, point for point, mathematically. Formulas are available if you wish to research them.

To cover your non-mathematical points:
–Mind Blast has a reduced benefit from haste but that is factored into calculations. In addition, at high enough gear levels and with 4pt10, you drop Mind Blast from your rotation entirely. I no longer use it at all unless Replenishment is needed. Shadow Word Pain is one of our lowest damage spells and so while it doesn’t benefit from haste, it only has so much effect on the calculations.
–Haste does increase mana spent, but mana is very, very far from an issue for a shadow priest in almost every fight in the game; every priest should have Imp Spirit Tap and 3 minute shadowfiend which should be enough anyway, but then you can also spec Focused Mind if you still run low, and you can disperse on phase changes and other such forced DPS stop times. If you’re running oom as a spriest you’re simply doing something wrong.
–Glyph of Shadow should always be active anyway because you still have plenty of crit on your gear. In addition, even with lower crit %, getting more spells off will affect Glyph of Shadow uptime anyway. It’s a wash and not worth discussing.
–The effect of additional spellcasting, especially with 4pt10, and how it interacts with latency, player skill, etc is pretty much the only issue worth bringing up. My argument is this: in an extreme situation of haste stacking compared to crit stacking, the difference in your cast times will range between .25 seconds to .5 seconds between all of your spells. This isn’t a huge change and shouldn’t dramatically affect your innate skill, and I seriously doubt it ever would affect it enough to outweigh the mathematical superiority of haste.

I would really like to hear a Resto Shaman round table sometime if you guys plan on doing this again in the future

AFAIK SW:P does not benefit from Haste though the other DoT’s do. Crit, however, has a 100% damage bonus to all spells that shadow uses. Now.. Haste is a strong throughput stat in mathematical terms because:
– 1% Haste = 1% throughput, mathematically speaking
– Haste requires less rating than crit.

However, such maths often neglect other factors:
– Mind Blast has a cooldown and thus there is a reduced benefit of haste for that spell.
– Haste increases manacost, the most eagerly neglected factor of haste. I think BobTurkey once added this factor into his calculations and it dragged down the value of Haste completely.
– It relies on additional spellcasting which is subject to many other factors like lag, fps, fight mechanics and player skill. Of course, we could just diss players who don’t use it properly, but even the elite players may find it hard measure that aspect of themselves.
– The benefit of the glyph of Shadow is often neglected or undervalued.

Never the less, maths comprising most factors will probably yield an optimal balance between crit and haste for various gear levels. That behavior is unescapable.
I’ll make a wild guess that those 2 ratio’s are less than 10% apart from eachother. If so, it is likely that a player will end up gearing for more haste since there is so much crit available from other sources like talents, enchants, intellect and raid buffs. The haste acquired from raidbuffs will impact less factors, because of its multiplicative nature (though the diminishing return from haste and the reduced effectiveness on MB should still be in effect).

So, considering those factors, I have reason to doubt one stat can be canonized as superior. If maths and theories exist that go deeper than my own and manage to prove me wrong, then I would be very interested in them!

Everyone remember to do a itunes review of Raidwarning on itunes!

I’d really love to do a healcast or something, once a month, but ugh, I wish I had the resources and the knowledge to do so.

http://www.raidwarning.net/2009/11/raid-warning-episode-22/

raidwarningpodcast@gmail.com

Meerkat Jesus Ninjas!!!!…

Matt from The Outlandish Podcast (www.outlandishpodcast.com) joins us this week to talk about the latest news in World of Warcraft. He also manages to make it through two of Seven’s horrible pop quizzes….

I think you hit on something you didn’t intend to. That mix of t8 and greens shows that you can’t be decked out in all your gear just by doing heroics, you have to raid to fill in certain slots. There’s also a math problem with saying a player can just farm heroics every day and easily be in the best gear.

Assuming just the (realistically) PUGgable Triumph Emblems you can get
2 Daily Heroic = 14 emblems + 4 in VoA 10/25 + 3 in Onyxia 10 = 21 Triumph Emblems a week. Assuming you don’t get saved to a bad group.

A single piece of Triumph Tier gear is 75 Emblems. That’s 3 weeks of work. That’s a long time for one piece of gear, and if someone has the time to do the daily every day, 2 VoAs, and an Onyxia PUG every week, why aren’t they raiding? It’s the same time investment and much more enjoyable to raid with a guild.

It is much easier to get the Conquest Emblems, but old gear is old. The hardcore raiders have already cleared Ulduar, and they’ve moved on to the shinier gear. Not to mention the new status symbols, fast mounts and titles.

Where do new raiders come from if the only thing available is heroic blues and purples? Is it fun to have to run people through every old raid to get gear in order for them to be able to fill in a current raid spot? Without the badge system we’d be right back to the 40 man dungeon days. The only people who could raid would be people who already raid because it’s impossible to catch up if you didn’t start at the beginning. That doesn’t make for a fun game once you hit max.

It would make the game more interesting to play all around, because it would add a more dynamic aspect to the game, as opposed to the same thing over and over again.