The Changer of Ways is as good as a rest

Not written anything for a while, as I've been pretty busy. I've also not been playing my Sorc much over the last couple of weeks

Instead, I was tootling about on my baby Witch Elf (rr37). I was mainly playing this because I got irritated with my sorc. However after a week or so of playing it (including a be/bb run which I've not done in a while - incredibly getting two drops I could use) I'm quite happy to be back and melting faces

Did a couple of city siege's in Shus's warband on Sunday morning with the sorc and netted just over 100k renown, typically though my loot roles sucked donkey balls and I walked away with a sum total of...... Nothing Useful (except a few crests), which is irritating as I still need 1 pc of sovereign to complete the set

And last night I joined in with Kill Frenzy's oRvR warband for an hour or so (taking my number of respecs for yesterday alone to 3 - respec to bomb for the city, respec to ST after the city, and respec back to bomb for oRvR) which was good fun with some nice fights

Also installed a bundle of new addons and had a little fight with my UI, the latest iteration of which is here, think I'm finally nearly settled with it, and can't see me doing any more major changes, just little tweaks every now and then

And finally, nearly completed the Keg End event, after spending half an hour getting lost in IC trying to find the last few drinks I now just need to find a giant (still not seen one) and launch a few more fireworks from BOs/Keeps

Oh speaking of the event... Sticking kegs down in keep doorways is really really really irritating. Please stop it :P

All I want for Christmas is..........

This list of stuff please.

Lokax over at Mmmmm Gud has posted a wish list of what he'd like to see happen in Warhammer in the future. And hell, its a good idea, so I'm stealing it... erm, borrowing it

While Lokax tried to be un-selfish with his list, I'm not that altruistic so there will no doubt be some things in my list that I want (and stuff everyone else)

1. Lower respec costs - I'm close to having to pimp out my sorc to be a Black Orcs play thing in order to be able to pay for the amount of respeccing I have to do, I have one spec for scenarios and solo/small group roaming  (ST dot based), another for Cities/oRvR warband action (Bomb) and a final one for PvE dungeons (high agony for max doombolt)

2. Lower costs for Invader/Warlord gear - OK so they did lower it a bit, but its still too expensive. Due to the RP gain buff, 60-70 can be rocketed through and the chance of having enough medallions at the end of it for the warlord gear is slim (I still haven't bought WL helm or Belt), sure they added invader/warlord gear to keeps, but with the amount of people involved at every keep siege, the chance of getting the required bag is slim

3. Less Bugs - OK, who doesn't want this? ToVL has been out for well over a year now (maybe close to two?) and its still buggy as hell. I understand that its an MMO, and bugs are inevitable, but massive bugs that affect everyone really should be looked at asap

4. More/Different Scenarios  -they're not linked to the campaign now so mix them up a little. What I think would be nice would be to stick all of the scenarios in a pool and then hvae 4 or 5 live scenarios at a time and they just rotate on a first in first out basis per week, this would give a good 4-5 weeks of every scenario. There are some great ones that we just haven't seen at all (Grovod for example) and some that are restricted to lower tiers that could be fun in T4 (Tor Anroc?). Also, adding some new ones would be nice, more 6v6, maybe even an 18v18?

5. Make PvE equipment easier to obtain - Even something as simple as ensuring that the set items that drop are usable by someone in the instance would make a hell of a difference. Stick the items in gold bags and make it a PQ, convert the items to repairable by archetypes/races (a la tovl)

1.4 is here!

And my evening kind of went like this...

got online around 8ish, specced my sorc, sorted renown points out, went to get mail from packs, no mail, got the hell out of IC, mail!, saw enemy wasn't working since the patch (along with a few other non-essential addons), installed squared again, found out there was an update to enemy hidden away (http://netload.in/dateiH2mAWll9uc/Enemy.rar.htm) so installed that and removed squared again, reconfigured my unit frames with enemy, flew to DW, server maintenance in 15 mins, bash head against table, go play a bit of Dragonquest IX on the DS and then watch Castle

on the plus side, I'm probably not going to be online till the weekend now, so maybe people will have a clue about wtf is going on in oRvR...

If, for example, everyone that was in DW RvR zone suddenly got ported to Ellyrion's RvR zone, most of the chickens would be headless

Some good news then...

Rancid's Career Builder is finished!!! http://wardrobe.war4scrubs.com/

This is fast becoming my favourite site for WAR related stuff, I tend to respec weekly, so being without a builder for so long was agony for me and Rancid's put a hell of a lot of work into this bad boy

There's also a renown builder available at WARStats.net (another one of my fave sites, I just wish searching was a bit easier) http://warstats.net/rbuilder?lang=usa

Bring on Tomorrow!!!

Yeah baby!

I'm 50k away from 70 and we get to play with new toys

I'm quite looking forwards to trying out the new oRvR and seeing how things work, hell, I might even give a packmaster a try if the opportunity arises

on a side note, had an evening of scenarios/IC defence as dirty bomb spec the other day

Quite fun, but I'm pretty certain that ST is more effective for SCs than bomb spec now, in a warband, its a different story

Additional testing complete!

So, plugged away at a keep door this morning in TM using my usual rotation (instead of CQ DB spam)

Frozen touch only ever procced off Arctic Blast, Gloomburst, Impending Doom and Hand of Ruin (any tick)

Guess SoG is looking more and more promising

Been running it for scenarios the last few days, overall, damage hasn't increased by any great shakes, but I did notice that those players who were surviving a rotation with a sliver of health now arent :)

Still going to continue playing with it for a bit longer and see how it goes

on a side note, dinged 69 the other day, one more rr to reach my target of 70 before 1.4

Swell of Gloom - Worth it or Not?

Been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd land back with a bump and have a look at one of the tactics that I've been looking at recently and wondering whether its worth it or not

So, my base spec is:

Agony: 11 points spent including picking up Echo of Power and Impending Doom
Calamity: 17 Points spent, including picking up Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Hand of Ruin

and my tactic loadout is Endless Knowledge, Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Frozen Fury

My new spec (as of last night) is

Agony: 14 points spent including picking up Echo of Power and Impending Doom and Swell of Gloom
Calamity: 14 Points spent, including picking up Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Hand of Ruin

and tactics are the same except FF has been dropped in favour of Swell of Gloom

So, ultimately, I lose a small amount of WoP/VoT/HoR/CW damage and boost AB/FB/DB/ID/EoP by a touch, so these pretty much cancel out

which only leaves the difference between SoG and FF

Ignoring the backlash component of SoG (as in group play its pretty irrelevant anyway) its a guaranteed 628 damage (according to my tooltip) every rotation (additional burst!)

Whereas FF boosts the proc chance of frozen touch to 75% from 25%

some simple mathhammering now...

I'm only concerned about the damage during the burst window, during which time these spells will land on an opponent...

CW (one tick)
VoT
WoP
AB
GB
ID
HoR (one tick)

Assuming FT can proc off dot spells (not sure, will test) then with FF slotted (75% chance) you get 5.25 procs at around 200 damage per proc for 1050 damage total

If it doesn't proc off dot spells, then its only going to proc 3 times for around 600 damage total

So, with SoG slotted instead of FF,

Assuming FT procs off dot spells, its going to proc 1.75 times for around around 220 damage per proc (additional points in agnony boosting the damage slightly) for a total of 385 damage

If it doesn't proc off dot spells, then it will only proc once, for 220 damage total

And to this needs adding the 628 damage from SoG itself

In summary...

	FF Procs of Dots	FF doesn't proc off dots
FF slotted	1050 total damage	600 total damage
SoG Slotted	1013 total damage	848 total damage

So, for pure damage numbers, FF performs slightly higher if it procs off dots but if it doesn't then SoG massively outperforms it

However, even with the slight damage boost for FF if it procs off dots, I think the additional burst potential from SoG would make it worthwhile

Anyway, I'll play with this spec for a week or two and start checking my combat logs to see exactly what FT can proc off

New Renown Abilities

EDIT AGAIN: Stupid Google Docs playing silly buggers. Have uploaded both of the files to 4shared.com and they're accessable via this link: http://www.4shared.com/dir/4RZObJMV/WAR.html, have changed the file names to make it obvious which is macro enabled and which isn't

EDIT: The links are pretty difficult to spot on the posts using this theme I've found, so I've also added links to the two calculators to the 'screenies and stuff' page, the link to this is at the top of the bar

So I had a bit of time spare at the weekend and knocked this little excel sheet up so I could look at what kind of spec I could go for with the new renown abilities. For those of us who are security conscious (and why wouldn't you be in this day and age) the sheet is macro enabled and has one button which is simply used to clear all of the checkboxes, I you really truly dont want to download something with a macro in, I created a version that is competely macro free (you'll just have to manually uncheck things). You can download either or both of these versions from here. Once these changes have gone live and are confirmed I might do a nice swishy web-based version

So anyway, my thoughts on the changes (full details of the new realm abilities can be found here)...

Changes:

• Wounds now worth taking as they increase at the same rate as the other stats (unlike previously)


• No armour buff anymore (considering this was bugged and only rank I worked, not a major deal)


• Criticals... 15 more points for 2% more crit than previously... Ouch


• Resolute Defence, rank I now costs 10 points, this is painful

New Stuff

• take less damage, deal less damage - hmm interesting, though for pvp I dont think its much use, might be good for tanks in pve though


• +18% dodge/disrupt, thats pretty impressive, probably better things to take first though


• +18% parry, pretty impressive also, could be useful for those classes with parry reactionals, especially with the likely nerf to undefendable talismans


• Reduce chance to be crit by 24%, wait... what??? really??? almost cancels a bw/sorc's full comb/DM


• Reduce crit damage by 50%, cancels bw/sorc's full comb/DM bonus


• +AP pool... doubt anyone will spec this


• +health regen... those tanks in full def sov might enjoy this


• chance to boost movement speed... what is the point of this? odjira in boots proces enough and you're losing 24 wounds for that, or you could spend 10 rps for a lower chance of a lower boost. Considering those 10 rps could be spent to give +38 wounds


• improved flee... really? run out of ideas?


• Cleansing wind... purge, nice. expensive though, and I think i prefer resolute defence


• efficiency, not too fussed about this either


• last stand.. interesting but probably not worth it

Scenarios/Altdorf 07.10.10

Had some nice scenarios last night. Apart from starting off playing like an idiot it was pretty much all good.

Our group:

Disarm - rr4x Blorc
Squitch - rr66 Zeal
Gwaragh - rr41 Sham
Merilees - rr66 Sorc
Mykael - rr70 Chop
Finnark - rr74 Mara

We all use Enemy as standard and run a single target assist train. If you're in a pre-made group and you're not running Enemy (or something similar), quite simply, you're doing it wrong, the same goes for voice comms.

I simply love having an rDPS in the assist train (though I may be ever-so-slightly biased) it just adds so many tactical options is amazing...

randomstealther pops on healers - they shout, rdps turns round, disarms and kills or roots and everyone moves away. mdps trains would have to reach them first in which time the healer can be dead
an enemy healer or rdps over extends to position on flank away from main fighting, rdps breaks from main assist and kills (sorc is amazing at this)

and more things to boot

on the subject of breaking from the assist train, quite often a bright wizzy or healer will break from their pack to gain advantageous positioning. With a sorc's rotation (cw, wop, vot, ab, gb, id, hor), quite often players don't realise that they're being targetted until its too late. If you think about it, until arctic blast lands (which due to flight time is around the same time that gloomburst lands) the only damaging ability you've got on them is chillwind, both word of pain and vision of torment just sit there doing nothing until their timer is up and they explode. Once gloombusrt has landed, the next two spells are instant cast as well (and land instantly) so there's pretty much no escape.

Assuming full dark magic, you're going to get a lot of crits with these spells and can easily hit a stupid amount of damage. As everything is hitting around the same time, you need healers that are really on the ball to stop it. On the rare occaision that something survives, they can be easily finished off with either a stricken voices (insta aoe silence + dmg - which also stops them self healing) or frostbite (1s cast disarm + dmg)

We also went to Altdorf in an alliance warband... pretty good fun with some nice fights, and I even respecced to bomb for it... and while I was pretty near the top damage and db chart (didnt get championed so the sorc that did ballooned his score) after playing ST since the last patch, it just didnt feel right and it wasn't as much fun as single target (which is a massive u-turn for me as I used to be a massive advocate for face-roll bomb spec)

Current Sorc Spec (Single Target)

So, this is my current spec, and it works wonders in PvP and has the added bonus that I don't really need to respec for PvE (unlike when I ran bomb spec and spent a fortune respeccing every week)

Some thoughts on abilties I've taken and skipped;

Agony:
Recover Energy - useless
Echo of Power - Brilliant skill, crits for around 1500, can destroy Witch Hunters that use Shroud of Magnus if you get the chance to use it
Tapping the Dark - I actually quite like this skill, but I find it more useful to have more killy power and let the healers worry about keeping people alive. Also, with the other tactics I have, the only one really suitable for removal is Frozen Fury, without which, this tactic is next to useless
Impending Doom - high damage, instant cast, builds 40 dark magic - what's not to like?
Swell of Gloom - relatively poor damage, can't crit, doesn't get contribution from stats (I think) and guaranteed to backlash... Just not enough benefit over frozen fury
Shades of Death - just garbage, waste of a GCD

Calamity:
Vision of Domination - practically doubles WoP damage and reduces the timer on it, brilliant
Gloom of Night - This is a bone of contention for me, sometimes I spec for it, sometimes I don't. It certainly has its place. However, with my current rotation it just doesn't fit it. Add to that the fact that it will break staggers willy and indeed nilly and I just can't bring myself to spec for it
Shadow of Disaster - Spirit debuff, awesomesauce. My only regret is that Doombolt isn't spirit damage, but hey ho, you can't have everything
Hand of Ruin - Kinda hits like two Impending Dooms if you leave it running for the second tick (2 secs), but you can use it on the run just as effectively. Love this spell
Chilling Gusts - Can be quite effective, but Frozen touch with frozen fury slotted foes comparable damage and doesn't cost a spec point
Absorb Vit - now they fixed it, its pretty much worthless

Tactic Choices:
Endless Knowledge - capped Int with this tactic
VoD & SoD - see above
Frozen Fury - added dps

Morale Choices:
Misdirection - use this when fighting lots of bright wizzies. if soloing, this is swapped for mage bolt
Focused Mind - 1.5s doombolt spam
Scintillating Energy - nice stagger, generally used on a random healer in group vs group, but most of the time, M2 gets used anyway

Rotation:
Well, the standard rotation is - Chillwind, Word of Pain, Vision of Torment, Arctic Blast, Gloomburst, Impending Doom, Hand of Ruin (2 ticks maximum)

And assuming its a non-tank and isn't guarded the burst is high enough to pretty much kill any player due to the ridiculously high burst potential in a very short space of time

 

So you can see that WoP is the first major damaging spell to land, and 3 seconds after that everything else has landed on the target as well. Arctic Blast is a 2 second cast, but has travel time which I've assumed (for the sake of argument) is 1 second