Ignoratio Elenchi

The Wrath of the Lich King PR extravaganza is in full swing. Tentonhammer and WoWinsider have a good run down of all the information currently out there. Its good to finally get an idea of what the hell is going to be in the next expansion, and it is amusing to see people’s reactions to some of the announced changes.

Everyone seems happy with the announced changes to dungeons and raiding. 5 Mans will be designed to take just an hour and the heroic version will have a different loot table from the normal version. Every raid will be 10 man AND 25 man, with the 25 man version having a tier higher of loot. I wonder if this means you can use that to skip a tier?

They also dropped a ton of info about the DK, but does that matter? Everyone is going to try them out. So let’s move on.

I think to me the coolest announced change is this: “They’re planning a new item type that will bind to your account, specifically for twinking. You might get it in a dungeon, and you can mail it to your alts, but you can’t sell it on the AH or anything.”

But then there is this: Arthas will not be in the game from the beginning, but will be patched in.

That is HILARIOUS. They wanted to make Arthas a huge part of the entire experience in northrend and now he won’t even ship with it? I hope they just mean raid version of Arthas won’t be in the game. Otherwise the game just lost a selling point for me.

This is the worst idea I have ever heard. I don’t mean its a bad idea. I mean that some game company will actually try to do it, and that would be very bad. It does make a certain sense from where he is approaching it, but the execution of the idea would never work. When it comes to a game beta, they just punish you by banning you from the game (if they can even prove it it was you), and that’s it. Now there is the option for sueing someone for damages by breaking the NDA, but you would be hard pressed to get a court to decide to hear the case because the person did not have direct access to the code, just to the game itself.

Now let’s say game company X has decided to do this. In order to play the game you have to sign and NDA, and you can’t talk about the game unless you are using the official forums. If they just boot you from the game if you talk about it somewhere else or share information, then no one will buy it (Unless it is a huge franchise or a blizzard game, even then few people will buy it.).

He also mentions that they could use that as a way to prevent game guides from being sold. Guess what, unless they sue gamefaqs and all of the other gamesites out there, the guides will still exist. And as long as the information they get is anonymous any site could post the information because the information is not a trade secret or copyright-able.  This would be the same problem with the NDA idea if they tried to sue a user over revealing information, the information is not a trade secret and is available to anyone. Because anyone can buy the game and get access.

Anything that has this in its patch notes deserves love:

Hey man, check out my IM conversation with the Balrog yesterday. He’s such a windbag. :)

[16:47] Balrog: wth
[16:47] Me: Hey Rog, what’s up?
[16:48] Balrog: hav u seen teh patch notes?
[16:48] Me: Not yet. Why?
[16:48] Balrog: more nerfs. this is bs
[16:48] Me: What’d they nerf?
[16:48] Balrog: me, i’m totaly unplayable now
[16:49] Me: I don’t know, man. You’re pretty bad-***… how bad could it be?
[16:49] Balrog: u no that sweet attack i had that could almost 1shot that stupid elf? yeah, they dropped the crit multipliar down by 50%. how the hell am I suppose to 2shot her now?
[16:49] Balrog: completly unplayable
[16:49] Me: Well… that *was* pretty cheap of you.
[16:49] Balrog: pfft, whatever. ur just pissed u didnt roll a balrog instead of that pansy champion
[16:53] Balrog: man, they better fire the dev that did this
[16:53] Me: Is that likely to happen, though?
[16:53] Balrog: u just wait. i’m going to start a petition on the forums. once turbine sees how many monsters will be quitting over this theyll fix it
[16:54] Me: *sigh*
The Straight Dope: The Balrog’s attacks have been adjusted so as to not two-shot kill Glathlirel.

I guess this means I am going back into LOTRO. With my new card this should be fun.

Say something Stupid and Inflammatory about World of Warcraft +Be a game developer = free publicity.

“There are 800 million teens in the world. That’s not a success.” A success, he thinks, would be to target an attract at least 10% of that 800 million population.

This is really starting to annoy me. I understand that casual MMOs do make money and a ‘lot’ of people play them, but come on. Can any of them really come close to having 2.5 million people paying 15.00 a month to play their game? Do people pay 30.00+ just to play the game at all? This is a joke. He is just trolling to get free publicity for his free game. That’s all.

Don’t play WoW while half asleep again. Otherwise you might disenchant ANOTHER piece of armor you want to hang on to.
Christ, I feel stupid.

Tobold (well a reader of his) asks a good question: Should world (server) firsts be rewarded and if so, how.

I say yes, make raiding overall a slight bit easier, but give those who world first (on their servers) extra rewards for finishing. I say give them things like titles, armor dyes, special weapon enchants (that add glows or sparkles) , special tabards (like the Argent Dawn one you could get when BC launched.). Basically flashy things that do cool things but that do not impact combat at all. And I say don’t give them out for just the first group that kills them, have a timer start once the first world kill happens, and other guild/raids have until the timer expires.

I don’t see any real problem with this at all. It would give hardcore raiders a reason to raid, and it would allow them to take the edge of some of the harder content.

It is amusing that once more the first comment on the post is an anonymous one that calls the idea the worst idea ever. Does someone really troll all of tobold’s blog posts?

One of things least understood when it comes to mages (priest and locks too) is what do all the pluses to spell stats mean. There are currently five spell stats in the game (and a sixth only on a few items): Spell Hit, Spell Haste Rating, Spell Critical, Spell Damage, Spell Penetration, and the sixth is spell pushback/interrupt resistance.

Spell Damage speaks for itself. The more you have, the more damage you do. Mages need 500+ spell damage to raid. its not so important in PVP due to resilience lowering all incoming damages and criticals.

Spell hit is the most obvious. All it does is increase your chance to hit the target with your spells, which means it lowers the number of full resists you see. The base chance to resist at even level is 96%, but all raid bosses are set at 73, meaning your chance is at 83%. At level 70 12.6 spell hit adds 1% of chance to hit. You can see why this stat is so important. You need around 200 to cap out your to hit at 70. This stat is important in PVP because it effects your chance to hit no matter what.

Spell Critical increases the chance to critical. The base chance to crit is a complicated formula for each mana class, so I will let Wowwiki explain:

• Every class except Warlocks uses: (Intellect/80) + (Spell Critical Strike Rating/22.08) + Class Specific Constant
• Warlocks use : (Intellect/82) + (Spell Critical Strike Rating/22.08) + Class Specific Constant
• Class Specific Constants:
  • Druid - 1.85
  • Hunter - 3.6
  • Mage - .91
  • Paladin - 3.336
  • Priest - 1.24
  • Shaman - 2.2
  • Warlock - 1.701

Now this might seem like a more important stat than spell hit at first, since crit == more damage, but its not, until you get the cap you want to go for to hit.  But not for everyone. Since I am a frost mage, I get the same benefit from both, due to my crits doing double damage.

Spell Penetration lowers your targets effective resistance to your spells, which increases your chance to hit them. It is a useful stat, but it does not put a target into negative resistance, meaning it usefulness is limited. It is almost only a PVP stat, very few bosses have real resistances to anything. Even as a pvper you really enough to lower a target’s resistance by 70 to knock most people down to 0 resist.

Spell Pushback/interrupt is an interesting thing. First we have to talk about interrupts. Interrupts/pushbacks (they are the same thing) is what happens when you are cast/channeling a spell and you get hit. As far as I know there is nothing in the game that increase push back and besides talents there are few items that increase resistance to it.

Spell Haste Rating is the new hotness thanks to changes in recent patches. You need 12.5 points to get 1% spell haste bonus. Before 2.4 this meant you could cast fast enough to get hit by the global countdown of 1.5 seconds, but since the patch you can now lower the global cooldown to 1.0 seconds. And it now decrease how long you need to fully channel a spell. That is why I suggest everyone get around 200 spell rating after they max to hit. Especially pvpers.

PvP should focus on Spell hit and Spell haste with minor attention to crit and penetration, and very little in damage. Raiders should do damage, hit, crit haste then penetration. Farmers should go all hit and damage.

That should about cover it.

I am at a loss for words. In the past year I’ve made many jokes about how terrible countdown is. Everyone has. But with these last two issues I just can’t do it anymore. At someone point it goes from being funny to just being sad and I think Countdown has actually reached that point. The past two issues was from the point of view of one character and only had his narration boxes. No one else spoke. Who was this person that obviously must be so damned important? Buddy Blanks.

How many of you knew who that was without googling it?  (hint:OMAC)

Two of the last issues of a year long series were devoted to a revamp of a character that been pretty much never mentioned? (Yes I know he has shown up in a few previous issue, but I couldn’t recall him until I looked up the plot for countdown.) And the issues resolved the whole “great disaster plot” by having it be a setup for Kamandi. Morticoccus turns out to be a airborne version of rabies. Oh and some of the major characters of Countdown are just shuffled off stage and killed during this whole process.

So yes, countdown has moved from being funny to being sad. At this point you wish they would just stop before they hurt themselves more.

“We’ve secretly replaced Jeff Lindsey with 1980s coked out Stephen King. Let’s See if anyone notices!”

That is the only explanation I can give for the swift and brutal shift in tone and setting of the novel. Jesus. I hope the Television Series does not use this at all.

After saying they would challenge many delegates at the Texas County Conventions, Hillary’s campaign does just that. At what point will people key into the fact that they are stealing whole chapters from the republican’s election play book?

From the dairist, we learn that the Clinton campaign was taking the shotgun approach to challenging delegates, by issuing challenges to as many delegate’s credentials as possible in the hopes that a few would fail. None of the people who were challenge received any kind of word on why they were challenged, just that they were challenged. And I have yet to receive a report of any clinton delegates being challenged. Surprise there.

What’s next Hil? Phone jamming the Obama campaign’s attempt to call voters?