Flux

Which stat is the best? What should you be stacking?  There is a bewildering mass of over thirty five of them. And if that isn’t confusing enough their value depends on talent spec, unseen milestones/caps, and even each other. Without a degree from Gnomeregan your mechanical chicken mount has a better chance to scratch out an answer.

We have compiled a monolithic table of cliffnotes so you can skip Gnomer.

(more…)

Updated Wordpress to 2.5.1

Rearranged and added a forum for those playing Age of Conan.

Updated Getting Around, Fast to include the two new mage locations, Theramore and Stonard, from patch 2.4.2.

One of the more popular debates that surfaces on WoW forums like an unkillable multi-headed troll is, are hybrids better?

What’s a hybrid?  Blizzard designed the game with specialists and hybrids. The specialty classes are supposed to be the best at something, like ranged damage, while the hybrids do more than one thing like healing and melee damage, but not as well. In the first stage of the game this works very much as advertised. However in the last stage of the game, raiding or arena, it’s murkier because changing between roles requires a talent respec which is hardly something you can do quickly while off killing trolls.

During the first stage of the game there isn’t much debate which is better.  This is because it doesn’t matter.  You spend most of your time soloing.  And leveling up is not difficult, only time consuming.  But the debate burns with feverish passion in the end game when players start discussing nerfs, class balance, and raiding.

(more…)

Updated Must Have - Goblin Jumper Cables to remove trinket references since 2.4.2.

Most of you have been in this situation.  Someone in your group goes afk, brb, bio, gets a drink, has a computer problem, phone call, spouse aggro, inc kids, didn’t show up on time, forgot a quest item, forgot the daily quest, didn’t bring food, flasks, elixirs, needs to repair, is pvp flagged, or gets everyone killed when they didn’t pay attention before or during a fight.  They just wasted everyone’s time.

This is especially a problem in pugs when you aren’t there to socialize or in raids when the goal is to get to a certain point. How much of a problem is this really?  Let’s take a look.  A typical brb lasts around 2 mins, an afk can go on for 5 mins, a computer reboot can take 3 mins, on pve servers deciding to flag up or down or dealing with the split buffs can take 2 mins, running back to the bank for what you forget is 5 mins, and so on.  If you multiple that by how many people are in the group (minus the person who did it) you get a feel for how much total time was wasted for everyone.  Players tend to think, “Hey I was only gone for a couple minutes”.  But when there are many people waiting, this is more time than they think.  In a 5 player group you only wasted about 8 mins.  But in a 25 player raid you just wasted 48 minutes of other peoples time.  If you have a five minute bio or repair in a 25 player raid, you just wasted a whoping two hours.
(more…)

Completed the Targeting article with focus, monitor, tab, and a ‘handcrafted’ image which is only slightly worse than certain online images.

Updated Targeting with Hover and Macro targeting.

As you may have noticed not much was publish for almost two whole weeks.  A combination of travel, a family wedding, and others far less interesting events nibbled away at time until crumbs were left.  However things are closer to normal this week.

I am trying an experiment, an article in two or three parts on targeting.  In the past I have held off publishing a long topic until it was a complete candy shell surrounding the entire nugget of knowledge.  This meant that there were sometimes long pauses before these more time consuming delicacies posted.  We have had repeating topics such as ‘hidden bosses’.  And we have posted in updates like the still unfinished unit frame review.  So in keeping with ‘write early and often’ I am going to give this a try for other longer articles.

I’ll update the original article from yesterday with new sections as they are written and post about it.  This way future readers will still get their shell covered nuggest and I can avoid managing several cross linked articles in a series.  This is mostly because I am lazy.