The orb whisperer

Yesterday the blue-gear only Undergeared went to ICC again. We had a very new warlock and a frost mage who haven't raided with us in 2 months (as usual, the people who was online). And 19 tries later:
What took so long? At first Kesseleth has some weird resist mechanic. I know that the empowered shadow bolt cannot be resisted, but the normal shadow bolt, and the nucleus damage is resistable. So I collected 630 buffed shadow res, expecting to have near-zero damage from them. Well, it didn't work. I usually resisted 300 out of the 900 nucleus damage. I resisted the fire orb damage better (with 320 FR). We couldn't figure out what's going on because on the first tries wiped in 10-20 secs. Only when we lived long enough to have enough data we saw that SR won't help us here. I switched back to normal DPS and Ulatekso started tanking Kesseleth because hunters have deterrence to "shield wall" one empowered shadow bolt, and he has much better situational awareness anyway. That included sending his pet to tank the kinetic orb. You can see it in his PoV and Maladroite's.

We lived longer. I mean 2-3 mins with tank healths usually in the 20% range. So we switched to 4 healers. We had some very successful tries when our tank had to log. Luckily we had a priest online to come in heal, while the paladin healer went to tank. Some more tries and the princes were on the ground and we get the "did not stand in the fire" achievement. According to WoWprogress, 68% of the guilds killed the princes. So 1/3 of the guilds in full farmed 4pT10 couldn't do what our 3300GS guild did. Think about that.


PS: since we definitely can't kill anything in ICC without gear, next week we try to do the opposite. We'll see how successful that will be.


Update: Anonymous pointed out that the warlock logged out in epic gear. It wouldn't be much of a problem (many do HCs in epics to avoid kick), but his feed has not shown any activity after the Blood Princes kill. Also, his chest item looks very similar to the one visible on the screenshot. Such gear is directly against the Undergeared rules.

However log inspection shows that his crit would be much higher in epic gear, and also his HP was in the blue range. Pictures from the videos show him in blue gear. It seems he equiped epic gear to look good on the screenshot which was a stupid move. However further efforts will be made, including an addon, manual inspects and a new rule to keep all epic gear in the bank during raids to avoid accidental equips.

Wintergrasp report

Another week, another WG report. Red is prime time (18-22 weekdays, 14-22 weekend) loss, green is prime time win, black is off-time result.

Saturday:
10:35 Assault won
13:15 Defense won
15:45 Defense won
18:10 Defense lost
21:10 Assault lost
23:15 Assault lost

Sunday:
11:30 Assault won
13:45 Defense lost
16:45 Assault lost
19:10 Skipped due to raid
21:45 Assault won

Monday:
17:30 Assault won
20:15 Defense won
22:45 Defense won

Tuesday:
13:35 Assault won
16:00 Defense lost
18:35 Assault won
21:15 Defense won
23:45 Defense won

Wednesday:
17:40 Assault won
20:15 Defense won
22:40 Defense lost

Thursday:
17:00 Assault won
19:40 Defense won
22:10 Defense won

Friday:
15:40 Assault won
18:05 Defense won
20:40 Defense won

Oops! Horde did not raid VoA prime time this lockout! Also, we saw a huge change: tenacity dropped from 10+ to 1-3, despite the alliance number have not increased significantly. Also, the hordies don't even seem to try nowadays. They do one zerg, after it fails they just try to get honorkills. We barely see sieges, some punks are running around with stupid catapults, but no serious attempts to win. Also, weeks ago after a win I logged to horde alt and asked them what happened? They cursed us for being "jerks" and cursed the horde n00bs for failing to win. On this friday I logged again and asked on trade. The sole response was: "we lost again". Their spirit is broken, they now queue up for honorkills and the losing mark. If you look at Archavon's log, you can see they are used to very different WG:

The only exception from our victory march is the weekend, when lot of casual players queue up and zerg with 10+ tenacity. But soon they will learn too that WG belongs to us.

We are recruiting more players, including lvl1 rerolls! Read the rules and come!

Wednesday ganking event

In Europe, Wednesday is the server reset time, so people get the new weekly quests and old raid IDs expire. So they are up to rush to Ulduar to do kill Ignis, as he is the target of the weekly. Unfortunately this was not so successful for the hordies as they expected:

Of course in the meantime we killed Ignis ourselves, practically doing some fight in Ulduar, going out to the stone to gank, going back.

We also captured WG at 17:35 and defended it one more time around 20:00, so the horde couldn't raid in the first day of the week. And it wasn't just a "narrow win". Poor hordies were massacred in large numbers in the outer keep like lambs in the slaughterhouse:

Friday some hordies organized [for the horde] raid so we came in full strength. Unfortunately, not enough hordies signed up, so they decided to "have some fun" killing auctioneers and such in SW:After we cleaned up these punks, I relogged horde and asked one what happened:

If you want to participate in such ganking events, read the guild rules, transfer or roll new alt and whisper me for inv.

Can there be one magic skill?

In my previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) I claimed that there is one "magic" skill that can be learned and having it or not more or less means being successful or loser. Several commenters pointed out that it's a black and white thinking, therefore surely wrong. They also noticed that I blame one skill for success/failure which is obviously nonsense. I'd like to explain how can it be black&white and only, despite both are not true.

To talk about a "skill", it must have meaningful variance, so people differ in it significantly. For example "having functional liver" is necessary for success, if your liver fails, you die or linger in a hospital with tubes everywhere in you, hoping you get a donor. Yet no one in his right mind would claim that "I'm successful because my liver is OK", because having a good liver is considered normal. Practically everyone has a functional liver, the exceptions are not considered "losers", but "ill" or "accident victim". Among the population there is no meaningful variance in liver conditions.

Also, in the Western population, there is no meaningful variance in literacy. Practically everyone can read and write, so claiming that "literacy is the magic skill" is nonsense. However claiming the same in some middle Africa country can be completely true and you can easily find that the best predictor of success is literacy.

So when I claim "there is one skill that decides success/failure", I mean "there is one skill that affects success/failure and not obviously owned by everyone in our society". There are many-many other skills needed for success, but they are learned in early age by almost every members of our societies. Those who do not learn them are considered either mental patients or criminals and not "losers". This is a class-centric thinking, assuming our class standard as "obvious". By abbreviating my claim to "one skill", I'm at fault of being class-centric, but have the excuse that I can safely assume that all my readers are in the same class (as you have computer, internet and disposable income and time to play a video game).


Also, literacy is a perfect example to explain black&white thinking. There are several levels of literacy from perfectly formed sentences to "cud u plz giv me 1g m8". However they are all considered literate as they are written, and (with more or less annoyment) understandable to everyone. They are in huge contrast from illiteracy, the point when someone is unable to understand a written message or form even a simple one. So despite Shakespeare seems far away from "gogogogo", the difference between them is much smaller than the difference between "gogogogo" and an illiterate. Learning the skill of literacy, even on the most basic level is bigger jump than getting to the top level from the basic.

So when I claim this skill is black&white I do not mean that every "magic people" are equal, I mean that their difference is much smaller than the difference between them and the non-magics (scientifically speaking the inter-group variance is much larger than the intra-group). With graphical example: there are white, different shades of light gray and there is total black.

Irrelevant content

Ganking update: we did some serious ganking yesterday, post about it on Saturday.


A new kind of naysaying appeared on the Undergeared posts and forums discussing it. While "Festergut/BQL/Putricide is impossible" type naysaying became sporadic (maybe they afraid we kite them to Grok Scourgebane or something), they obviously not about to give up attacking the project.

The new kind of criticism claims that the content we do is "irrelevant" and by the time we kill the Lich King, he will be irrelevant too. I guess "irrelevant" means that clearing SWP would be quite easy for a 25-man 5K+ GS group and no one would accept this kill an "SWP clear".

However hard data exists to answer these claims. WoWprogress tracks raiding progress in the low-end too. The recent data:

• 52184 guilds downed Lord Marrowgar 10
• 47211 guilds downed Rotface. So there are already 5K guilds who were unable to do the content Undergeared did. The fact that there are guilds in ilvl 245+ gear (badge rain guarantees it) who performs worse than a blue geared group is shocking on it's own.
• Only 17645 guilds downed the Lich King. And 15K downed Marrowgar HC. So the WotLK normal content is not "complete" for majority of the raiders. We are not just doing some "old content", we are doing the same content what majority of the raiding guilds.
  

But the really shocking data is the "Lord Marrowgar (10): 52184 (92.66%)". What is 100%? 56318 guilds! Since Wowprogress covers Europe and the US, about 4M players are in it. Even if we assume 15 man for every 10-man raid (sit-outs, replacements), we get only 850K players as "100%". Where are the other 3.2M?

Don't say that WoWprogress is inaccurate, our guild is mentioned, just like all the "friendly socials guilds" I know in Arathor. Hey, even the ganking guild is up!

Out of 4M players, only 850K are capable to do any kind of raiding. The rest are in "fun" guilds where they farm gear for nothing. Or they are non-raiding "friends and family" in raiding guilds. Killing only Marrowgar gets you in the top 25%! Undergeared is in top 20%. Is this irrelevant?

People in the top 1% often believe that the whole community is equal to their visible competitors. A 11/12HM raider thinks that everyone downed LK normal, and the "n00bs" are the people who can't do Saurfang HM. No, if you downed the LK normal you are already in top 7%. This is a serious mistake and lead to the failure of many attempts to "fix the society". They try to apply some "cure" that made them top1% out of the top10%. However the line is not between top 1% and top10%. The line is between those who are in the competition and those who are not. Undergeared is in. We, simply by our pure existence and the fact that we downed something in ICC are among the competitors, among those who do current content.

The line is not between 7 figures CEOs and 30K blue collars. The line is between the 15K blue collars and the welfare leech.


This is also the answer why I do Undergeared instead of hard modes in normal gear. Because - exactly due to its rarity - the hard mode raiding is not relevant for the "average player". Their exploits are rejected on the basis of "no lifers farming 6 days a week". If you want to affect the people in general, you can't just withdraw to some ivory tower. I (exactly because I belong to the top 20%) know that the HM raiders are not no lifers and their results are mostly because of superior skill. But the "common people", the non-raiding masses of WoW who demand 5.5K for Sartharion weekly and votekick a tank from UP HC for having "only" 35K unbuffed do not, and will never. To have an effect, you have to beat them in their own playground.

Cheers for the cata raid lockouts!

You might heard the raid and loot system in Cataclysm. While you can raid in 10 or 25 man, normal or heroic mode, you can kill one boss once a week. Also, the 25 man (despite being obviously harder to organize) gives the very same quality of loot, just bigger quantity.

Most people curse this system. They also curse the new badge system where you can farm badges from 2-mannable 5-mans to buy almost-top level gear. They say this system allows the "noobs" to get the same "rewards" as the "l33t".

The idea that "top loot" is not for everyone is completely unnatural. In the real world, you can buy a Ferrari from your 7 figure CEO salary, or from simply grinding for 30 years. I'm serious. Half of the homeowners in the USA and Europe (average guys) could buy a Ferrari by selling their homes. Of course it would need a retard to become homeless just for a car, but one could do it.

The skill in real world does not affect the quality of available rewards, it affects the quantity/time ratio. The 7 figures manager can buy a Ferrari in few months, the $40K guy have to save 10K/year (with 7% interest) for 20 years.

So the Cata system seems natural to me and completely OK. Players will get the very same gear. But skilled ones will get it with 3-4 time less /played. This system is already in effect in ICC. An ICC10 boss gives 2 pieces of gear, so 0.2/person. Also gives one badge/person. A boss can be killed with his trash in less than 30 mins. Since gear is sold for 60-95 badges, let's take 80 as average price, making a gear piece equal to 80 badges. So:

• Killing a boss in ICC: 0.2*80+2 badges / 30 min = 36 badge/hour
• Doing the daily HC: 2 badges/15 min = 8 badge/hour
• Killing just 10 bosses in ICC and doing the weekly raid quest: (0.2*80+2)*10+5 = 185 badge/week
• Doing the daily HC all days of the week: 2*7 = 14 badges/week.
  

So the difference between skilled and M&S is not rewards, but rewards/hour or /week, the very same way as it's with gold: the goblin gets 2-3K/hour with the AH, the M&S gets 0.2-0.3K/hour grinding monsters or doing daily quests. I can just welcome the change.

Two more suggestions to Blizzard if anyone reads this blog (actually I have 50 visitors from Irvine and 70 from East Irvine):

• Make the heroic raids give the same loot/badges as normal ones. Just twice as many. It would also stop the "they can do content because they have 277" nonsense.
• Create 3 difficulty levels for 5-mans: leveling (like normal Nexus for lvl 72), "max level" (like "HC" Nexus) and heroic, that should have "unnerfed Magister's terrace in Kara gear" difficulty, giving equal loot and badges as the "max level" dungeon, just 2 times more of everything, and if someone have not done the daily "max level" dungeon, his first heroic gives double emblems as loot. Heroic dungeons could be buffed with every tier change, to maintain difficulty with gear.

Bone storm and you

I got lot of comments on the magical skill posts (1, 2, 3) guessing lot of "skills" being the "magical" one. Some of the suggestions:

• Always trying again
• Trusting in ourselves
• Believing that we are in control of our life
• Leadership
• Rational evaluation of our own performance
• Proper usage of social skills

And I kept answering: "these skills are products of the magical one". I think I have to clarify this statement. Imagine that someone would claim that the skills needed to be a good WoW raider are:

• Switching to Snobolds
• Bringing paralytic poison to burning bile
  
• Switching light/dark according to our target color
• Running out of bone storm
• Killing empowered fanatic first
• Jumping over to enemy ship when cannons frozen
• Killing blood beasts fast while not being hit
• Bringing oozes to big ooze
• ...

No doubt that every good raider have these "skills". It's also without doubt that bad raiders don't have (many of) them. However, imagine that Kungen would write a book: "Bone storm and you, how to be successful in WoW raiding", where he would show several cases when people stayed in bone storm and died, his own early memories about bone storm and the the truth that you have to run away. Then he would bring detailed explanation to all skill/spec how to do it properly (like mages can blink, druids can cat-dash). All this on 2-300 pages.

Of course Kungen would never be so stupid to do it. So you can't read this book. But you can read a very similar one: Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people. Or Kiyosaki's Rich dad, poor dad.

We can agree that the "bone storm and you" would be a 99% useless book. It would be useless despite every word in it is true and every raider who read it would say "yes I do it like that" or even "this book helped me increase my DPS on Marrowgar by 2% Thank you!" Why the "bone storm and you" has not been written?

Because it's obvious to every raider that the mentioned "skills" are just products of the real skill: "read up the fight, watch the video and follow the instructions". Anyone who has this skill automatically runs out of bone storm. It's true that a good raider could further improve by reading the book but a complete failure would not, simply because after reading and learning all the "skills" from the "bone storm and you" he would ignore the spike, nuke standing in coldflame, got cleaved by the boss and would know nothing about other bosses.

When you see proliferation of "skills" you can be sure that they are just products or representations of a real skill. They are appearances of the same thing expressed in the actual conditions. One who learns the product-skill may excel in those conditions but will fail in all others. Failing in the product-skill is not the lack of the product-skill, it's the lack of the real skill. If someone stands in the bone storm happily nuking is a "noob staying in the bad" and not "a noob who doesn't know bone storm". Bone storm is just one type of bad and any sensible raider would recognize it, even when he sees it first time.

Also the product-skill alone is not intuitive and learning it is hard (melee should stay on the boss, not run away). If someone has the real skill, all the product-skills spawning from it are "natural" and obvious, he magically gets them. A good raider who knew nothing about bone storm before his first ICC raid, "magically" got this "skill" just before the raid, when he read the wowwiki article.


Summary: while successful people have product-skills and losers do not, teaching these product-skills have little-to-none impact, since they have narrow scope and are also hard to learn. The underlying real skill give them to the people "magically" to the outside observer, while feeling natural from the inside.


PS: of course to be best among good you have to improve the narrow-scope skills. Carnegie's book can turn a $100K manager into a $200 middle manager, just like perfect handling of bone storm can turn a good raider into someone who is accepted to world top 10 guilds. But it won't turn any losers into winners.